Essays by Ry Walker

No single number captures developer performance. The honest answer is a portfolio of imperfect signals, used to develop people rather than rank them.

Any developer performance metric can be gamed. AI tools just give us new things to measure — and new ways to get it wrong.

The interesting use of AI coding tool data isn't ranking. It's understanding how your best engineers actually work — and helping the rest of the team catch up.

AI assistants are generating a granular log of every prompt, accept, reject, and iteration. That's new data — and a new way to measure the wrong thing.

Sales has revenue. Engineering has hand-waving. The asymmetry in how we measure go-to-market versus R&D is a real problem, not a feature.