Time is the only real currency we have
Unfortunately, in essentially all big corporations, the incentives encourage developers to waste as much time as possible - Mostly by focusing their attention on creating elaborate and ever-changing development processes and constantly adding unnecessary software complexity at the same time. This doesn&#x27;t work well at all when you also allow individuals to detach themselves from any responsibility over the code that they produce.<p>The culture of wasting time is so pervasive that the vast majority of developers who practice it don&#x27;t even realize that they&#x27;re doing it - Ironically, they&#x27;re often the same people who write long articles about how to be productive and who brag about how organized and full their schedule is and how they&#x27;re using all the latest productivity tools and how high their test coverage % is and how good their workflow and CI pipeline is... I call BS on all this.<p>People who spend most of their time explicitly thinking about processes are bureaucrats. Truly productive people don&#x27;t need to think about processes, they evolve naturally through sweat and tears; good processes are the byproduct (emphasis on the word &#x27;byproduct&#x27;) of a focused mindset of desperately wanting to achieve specific goals, not the mindset of ticking-off boxes from a static checklist where you don&#x27;t even understand the underlying purpose of the work.<p>You cannot be productive without a clear sense of purpose and goals. Unfortunately most software jobs today lack purpose - In this case it makes no sense to even talk about productivity. How can you know how productive (how fast you&#x27;re moving towards your goal) you are if you don&#x27;t even know what the end goal is. Finishing something is not a goal, it&#x27;s a task. A goal is about a deeper purpose.<p>Also if your goal is to help your company earn more money, this is only a worthy goal if you have a way to check your personal progress towards that goal. Usually this is not possible to do in a big company because there are too many people working towards different goals within the same company (sometimes even conflicting goals); the reality is that your work probably doesn&#x27;t matter so there is no such thing as productivity in a corporate environment because it&#x27;s not possible to measure the impact of your work in relation to achieving a real company goal... However, if your goal is to maximize your personal ranking or salary within the company, this is a goal against which it is easy to measure progress; that&#x27;s why personal goals trump company goals every time.<p>KPIs are a ridiculous, completely futile attempt to fix this problem.