But you must admit, this is not the common case. If a developer regularly takes 3 months to fix every bug, then those all better be nasty heisenbeasts, because it's more likely that the developer is just slow.
The issue is the assumption that managers can assess productivity if is it is captured by a number; but would otherwise be aware, they'd be hopeless at it in a conversation. ie., theyre reducing it to a number to hide the fact they cannot do it.
It's strange that we havent figured out how to trust technical leadership to assess these things for management.
In many ways, the answer is obvious: give technical leaders economic incentives for team productivity. They will then use their expertise to actually assess relevant teams.
I think the problem is that in order to evaluate something you need to have equal understanding of it as the person that made it. This is a problem in every field, everywhere. In fact it’s the reason pure democracy isn’t the optimal strategy for governance - the masses aren’t really qualified to make decisions.
Slow or has bad debugging abilities. This article is noteworthy because of the length of time taken and allowed for a bug fix. I can imagine almost any manager saying this isnt high priority enough for this time investment after week 2 or month 1.
