Having to set objectives for developers, even though objectives don’t work [closed]

what approach has worked best for you?

Only one objective: pass a code inspection/peer review, with me as the reviewer, without me finding any bugs or having any other criticism, that has me asking you to redo something.

Notes:

  • I wasn’t measuring new hires’ ability to finish quickly, and didn’t encourage them to: I wanted people to learn how to finish well (because if it’s not finished well, then it’s not finished)
  • People learned what I looked for in a code review: so it’s a learning opportunity and a quality control measure, and not just a management objective
  • My comments would have two categories:
    1. This is a bug: you must fix this before you check in
    2. As a suggestion, I would have done such-and-such
  • After a while, my reviews of a person’s code would stop finding any “must fix” items (at which point I wouldn’t need to review their work any more).

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