How Perfomon idea appeared

For the past 13 years being a manager I went through several stories when a software engineer bullsh*ted me with deliverables. Surely, I don't know about the other 99% of cases because they succeeded 😂, but I would like to share one with you.

5 years ago I managed an e-commerce project consisting of iOS, web, and backend parts. I hired a mature engineer roughly my age, so I was biased towards "he is like me, business ethics must be on my level". (Sorry, young people, I love you, but yes, I'm biased 😘)

I never went into details of his coding work, he delivered features from time to time, and our QA people verified them, it seems OK, we paid him.

During one milestone, I expected one important feature for my customer. And I was eager to test it personally as soon as the code was in the source code repository. The feature was estimated 30 working hours, the developer started on Monday, so on Friday I checked the source code repository and found out that there have been no code pushes since last week. The source code was missing. 🤔

I went to check Tempo (our time-tracking tool) and all working days were logged into this feature, so it was proof that the developer worked on the feature (no sick leaves, no day-offs, no other urgent issues).

So this combination: of all work-logs present, and no code in the source code repository already was a red flag for me. 🚩

I've called the developer:

— Hey, how are you, how is it going? I'd like to test the feature as soon as possible, please submit the codes today.

— Oh, Vladimir, I've found one critical issue in my work, the feature is not testable yet, I'd like to fix it ASAP and submit it on Monday.

Yes, sometimes underestimates happen, and corner cases happen. So I decided to wait for Monday.

And I got a text on Monday.

But not from the iOS developer, but from the backend developer:

— Hi, Vladimir, what's going on: the iOS developer called me on the weekend, asking me to walk him through our backend API, how it works, show a demo, etc. Why are you forcing people to work on weekends?

Indeed, we promote a working culture, not overtime (health is more important than deadlines). And it was a second red flag for me. 🚩

I waited patiently till evening and by the end of the day, I've seen the code push from the iOS developer.

I've scrolled through the diff section of his pull request. The volume of code changes was roughly less than 8 hours to implement. It was a third red flag for me. 🚩

I've scheduled a one-on-one on Tuesday morning, and put out all three red flags (basically, facts) before him: 🚩🚩🚩

1. No daily progress.
2. Doing team work on weekends overtime, not during regular business hours Mon-Fri.
3. Delivering an 8-hour job and logging 48 hours for that.

And I said:

— You hadn't worked the last week at all, but logged all that 5*8=40 hours, and you expecting me to pay for that?

He confessed: that he worked that week for another company.

I fired him at that day.

Conclusions

1. I felt myself very bad, used.

2. I've lost time. I explained the situation to my customer, he said: "Oh, boy, I have tons of such stories", we laughed and he said: move milestones further, let's find out trusted developers.

3. I need some tools to monitor developers' performance.

And I got one.

If you've been in similar situations — please comment "yes" or DM me, and I'll share with you some hints and solutions for that.