I’ve helped build out or steer these sorts of systems a number of times and usually management behaves themselves during the adoption and honeymoon phases but then erode the trust later on by trying to use the system to determine PIP or promotion.

Devs who have seen this behavior before tend to push back hard on adoption, and then invest the absolute minimum effort in using these tools. The tools tend to be built wrong often enough to encourage that slide into toxicity. There’s an amount of using a tool where it improves your work experience, and then an additional amount that improves the team experience, and then beyond that it’s doing your manager’s job for them and self-reporting/narcing.

I’m trying to build a tool at the moment that has had three focuses due to different sources of inspiration. First it was going to be Trac (a project management tool and wiki that is so simple it shouldn’t work, but somehow does) with bits of Jenkins. Bamboo has thousands of features and integrations where it should have hundreds. All those integrations make reproducing a failed build locally difficult or impossible. The bones of a build process should be in the build scripts and dependencies, so you can run them locally. The build tool should schedule builds, report status changes, collect some release notes data, and track trends with grafana charts and that’s about it. I also want something running in each dev’s machine to boost system performance and do some of the teamcity features for trunk based dev like push-on-green-build. I just miss how distilled Trac was, but it had some problems with plugins and git support.

That sat on the Some Day Shelf behind two other projects until I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work, and then Slow Productivity. Then it became more user oriented. Atlassian has about three per-user dashboards that I’m responsible for juggling all day, and that is tragicomically stupid. I’m terrible with this sort of juggling but have coworkers who don’t check the PR list ever - you have to pester them to look at PRs, week in and week out. If I’m doing deep work I don’t want preemptions except in specific circumstances (like I broke trunk). But when I come up for air I need a cheap gestalt of what I’ve missed and what people are expecting from me. Show me all the PRs, and my red builds and open tasks in a single view. Allow some low priority alerts through. And that can be facilitated by building a pomodoro straight into the dashboard and information hiding during deep focus moments.

I have some family that was recently diagnosed as neurodivergent, and the thing about YouTube is that your suggested videos get influenced by what other people in the house are watching (particularly if you’re not logged in on a device). ND people of all types have a lot of coping mechanisms to function within other people’s expectations (eg work and responsibilities) and to mask. They get both barrels when it comes to being judged poorly by toxic management tools because their variability is so high. Best performer one day, second worst the next. And this is nowhere more true than with ADHD. And the worst of it is that almost nobody will go harder and farther than an ADHD person during a crisis. They can hyperfocus during rare moments but most reliably due to an emergency (self created, like a paper due tomorrow, or externally driven, like servers on fire). They also innovate by drawing connections nobody else sees between different disciplines.

But they’re the first on the block when toxic metrics kick in. And the productivity tools they objectively need more than anyone else on the team seals their fates, and thus they either don’t use them or use their own, which are similarly poorly integrated, which leads to more plate spinning which they are terrible at.

So what finally got me ass-in-chair in front of a keyboard was realizing that if this is two tools instead of one, you can keep some of the productivity data on the employee’s machine where it can help them with time management and self-improvement but not self-incrimination. Then you can cherry pick and clean up the narrative of your day or week before you self report. Have private tasks on your machine that may look embarrassing to others (like remember to drink fluids, eat lunch, call the dentist, tasks you’re skunkworking).