Developing Measurements with Cat Hicks

About this episode

Dr. Cat Hicks discusses a holistic approach to understanding engineer productivity measurements.

SoCal Linux Expo - discount "FAFOF" -https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/ Kubecon EU Amsterdam - https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/ Linuxfest North West - https://linuxfestnorthwest.org/ Newsletter - https://sub.fafo.fm/ Dr. Cat Hicks takes a different approach to traditional engineer productivity measurements. Instead of turning engineers into velocity numbers she takes a holistic approach to understanding why a person or team might be over or under performing. This episode talks about lots of factors and gives you some ideas to understand what's actually going on. You probably want to check out Cat's upcoming book The Psychology of Software Teams or her recent whitepaper No Silver Bullets: Why Understanding Software Cycle Time is Messy, Not Magic .

People in this episode

Hosts: Justin Garrison, Autumn Nash

Guest: Dr. Cat Hicks

Topics covered

• engineer productivity
• software teams
• performance measurement
• psychology
• holistic approaches

Keywords

• engineer productivity
• performance measurement
• software teams
• psychology
• Kubecon
• Linuxfest

Sponsors

SoCal Linux Expo

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: SoCal Linux Expo, Kubecon EU Amsterdam, Linuxfest North West

Books & works: The Psychology of Software Teams, No Silver Bullets: Why Understanding Software Cycle Time is Messy, Not Magic

More episodes of Fork Around And Find Out

• Suing The Government with Cindy Cohn · June 10, 2026 · 56 min
• Taking Down Prod with Eve · May 14, 2026 · 59 min
• Laying the Foundation with Joe Beda · April 24, 2026 · 1h 12m
• Training The Future with Mark Russinovich · March 20, 2026 · 1h 5m
• Embracing the Journey with Cassidy Williams · January 27, 2026 · 1h 1m
• Objecting to storage · December 15, 2025 · 35 min