Ok so, somehow I ended up being a manager at work. Mostly I just don’t bother anyone and protect them from the bosses when I can. However, I’m a software dev and they had me make a bunch of scripts and such to measure productivity. I didn’t really want to because fuck that, but as I was working on it I realized none of the bosses will ever look at this code or question the output.
I ended up padding the stats quite a bit in “honest” ways by doing things like excluding weekends and holidays. I also round everything up to the nearest whole number. But then I decided to just add extra values here and there as well. Instead of starting the count at 0, I start at 1.
The bosses asked for a monthly report, so I give them 28 days (and don’t count the weekends). I drop the lowest count days if there are more than 28 days in the month and present all of the stats as monthly.
Anyway, just remember there are lots of ways to help your coworkers and you don’t actually have to do any managing if everyone understands what’s up. Just be really careful and try to always give yourself plausible deniability. LLMs are a great excuse to shift blame right now even if you aren’t using one
Anyone else have ideas or things they’ve done?
Yeah, as soon as they put me in charge of it I started doing this. We have me and another dev who has been around a while go through and put points on everything now. We don’t do it as a group anymore because everyone hates that process and we’re in 4 diff time zones so timing is rough. I’m enforcing scope so hard they’re starting to get mad at me, but it’s for their own good.
I’m kind of having fun unleashing my autism on this ancient fucking app. I get to decide so much shit now and almost everything I’m doing is to make it easier for devs to produce so we can work less. This team doesn’t have any support, no UI/UX or devops or anything beyond bullshit managers and devs doing 3 jobs at a time