Aiven is a very strange company. There is tons of potential and there are some really great people but many of the engineering practices are fundamentally flawed. I believe this comes from the top of the company but it is also a problem with the software engineering managers. Software engineers are measured by the number of lines of code, number of commits and their position in the company's top committers. This is a focus of the probationary period but it also applies to employees that have been there for a long time. The drive towards these metrics creates the wrong incentives by adding bloat and reducing team work. Any work that was done to design or plan features was not considered in the metrics. I had countless meetings with my manager about the task I was working on and how it probably wouldn’t produce enough code for the metrics. This often led to being moved to another task (regardless of the importance to the business). Sometimes when I couldn’t find a task that produced enough code it was suggested that I look for work in the backlog for another team. This is completely backwards and proves that the metrics are not measuring the job you are there to do. It doesn’t measure the team’s tasks or output. It measures something different and to succeed you need to game the system. It is to your personal advantage to block your colleagues' code and bloat your own changes.
