Systems
Stop Asking Whether Someone Is Good. Ask Which Direction They’re Moving.
Quality arguments go in circles because everybody is arguing a verdict. The trend is already sitting in your release history, and it costs about an afternoon to pull.
Pull your last twenty releases. Mark each one as either clean or came back broken, then put them in date order. That’s an afternoon of digging, and what you’re holding at the end of it is a slope.
I’d start there any time two people are arguing about quality, because they can argue about it for a year without either one being wrong. Leadership says quality is bad. Engineering says it needs more people. Both sides are arguing a verdict, and a verdict about a person or a team doesn’t have an answer in it. You can’t win that argument. All you can do is repeat it louder next quarter, which is what most orgs end up doing.
There’s a different question that does have an answer, and it’s already sitting in your release history: which way is the work moving?
The slope tells you what to do, which the verdict never did. If it’s flat, the process is the problem, and hiring won’t touch it. If it’s rising, somebody’s learning, so give them runway and get out of the way. If it’s falling, that’s the only shape that’s actually about the person. And sometimes twenty releases is just noise. In that case you don’t know yet, and you should say so out loud instead of picking a side.
I learned this one the embarrassing way. Somebody once asked me for more headcount, and I turned them down because they had no data to justify it. Later I found myself asking for more headcount, and I didn’t have the data either. I’d judged where that person stood on the day they asked, and never looked at which way they were heading. And I’d held them to a stricter standard than I held myself.
So why doesn’t anybody pull the history? I think it’s because the verdict is free and the trend costs an afternoon. Everyone in the room already has an opinion that cost them nothing, and the evidence is in a repo nobody wants to spend a Tuesday in. My opinion of that headcount request cost me nothing too.
The trouble with an opinion about a person is that it tends to harden. A slope keeps updating every time you ship.