The quiet economics of an engineering org that ships.

Headcount is the oldest lagging indicator in engineering, and still the most over-discussed. An executive who measures an organization by the number of people in it will always hire too late and trim too late, because by the time a headcount change is warranted, the underlying cause has been present for two quarters.

The measurements I keep closer to hand are humbler. Cycle time from merged commit to production. Oncall minutes per engineer per week. The ratio of planned to unplanned work. How many weeks pass between a new hire's first commit and a meaningful shipment. None of these is exotic. All of them are quiet.

The value of a quiet metric is that it resists being negotiated. You cannot gerrymander a cycle-time number into looking good, in the way a team can be re-labelled on an org chart to appear larger or smaller. Either the code moves or it does not. Either the week is spent planned, or the pager rules it.

Three years into Matador, I find the same short list on the whiteboard. A younger version of me would have added more. I have since learned that an additional metric mostly creates an additional argument, and we are not, by temperament or trade, short on those.