Managment using bad metrics.

I have always thought that I'm one of the lucky ones that is not measured with Lines Of Code or something similarly bad metric on my day job as a software developer. Managers has always tried to measure the productivity of a developer, and some of the metrics are notoriously bad. Like Lines Of Code(LOC). LOC counts are really bad at measuring productivity when it comes to comparing developer A who does nice concise well designed code and developer B that is a notorious copy paste programmer without even considering design. With LOC measuring developer B is more productive. Most of the software industry has realized that developers B are bad for you, without things like design and forethought when developing software is bad for the end result. But the message has not gone through to various marketing, sales and PR people out there.

As it turns out marketing/sales at development shops has their own metric. I'll call it "Ass Heat Index". This is the metric where you as a developer is measured by the time spent with your ass in the office chair and warming it up. It seems that they have a covert sensor sensing the heat that your ass i radiating to the office chair and plots graphs accordingly. The more heat over a longer period your ass is giving away to the chair means that you are more productive than the guy sitting shorter time in his chair.

The funny thing is that we wasted over an hour in an meeting with our PR director learning about this index and thus lowering all the Ass-Heat-Indexes for our developers.

Seriously if your schedule is slipping, do something else about than complain to your developers that they aren't spending enough time in their chairs.