Illustration of two stick figures having a conversation. The manager is smiling and has straight shoulder length hair. The employee looks confused and has short curly hair.

manager: can you get metrics on X’s speed?
me: why? That won’t help us get the code done!

They might be asking for metrics because: - they’re hearing complaints about X being slow (that you might not be hearing!) - without metrics, it’s hard for them to have an informed conversation about those complaints (& defend you if X is actually fast!)

Having regular conversations about their priorities for the team is SO USEFUL and means that I’m surprised less often. (illustration of two smiley faces)

Illustration of the same two stick figures as above, but now they’re both smiling.

manager: performance / speed is getting more important recently!
me: good to know, should I work on speeding up X?