DevSecOps Engineer, Author, and Mentor

The Productivity Cost Nobody Wants to Measure

In the first part of this series, I focused on the human cost of collaboration models that become continuous managed availability. I wrote about chronic vigilance, neurological load, public diminishment, flattened expertise, and the quiet way a process can force a person's body and mind to serve the machinery of visible participation.

That would be enough reason to question the model.

Many leaders, though, will want to move quickly to a different set of questions. Does it actually reduce output? Does it hurt delivery? Does it increase cost? Does it affect the team's profitability?

Those are fair questions. They deserve a serious answer.

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Public Diminishment

For a genuinely senior engineer, the damage in a system of continuous availability is not limited to inconvenience.

A person can have decades of experience, published work, and deep mastery in one domain, then be placed into a public workflow built around unfamiliar tools, alien rhythms, and expectations. In that setting, the engineer's real strengths may become nearly invisible while every unfamiliarity is exposed in rotation.

That was part of what made this particular environment so painful. I wanted to be productive. I wanted to collaborate. I wanted to be a team player. The problem was not unwillingness. The problem was that participation in this model became cost-prohibitive. The environment demanded a form of visible contribution so poorly matched to my actual strengths that the effort required simply to remain legible inside the process began to crowd out the value I had been brought there to provide.

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MegaLinter is an excellent piece of software that ships with support for more than 130 linters, scanners, formatters, style checkers, and policy enforcement tools. Even with all of this functionality, there can be times when you need something that's just not available out of the box. Fortunately, drafting a plugin often involves creating a single YAML file.

MegaLinter Plugins

A MegaLinter plugin -- actually, any tool included with MegaLinter -- is a single YAML file. The YAML file describes how to install and configure the required tooling, run the tool, and how to interpret the results.

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