“If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to…
I just want to say to you and the others in this thread, excellent discussion, comments, thoughts, and references.
Further reading: The Gervais Principle https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... My friend and I have internally renamed the roles "producers", "regulators", and "harvesters" in an attempt to remove the negative connotations. Feel free to use that in your own discussions also.
What do you hope to achieve by removing the negative connotations? Getting people to buy into the negative ideas without realizing they are negative?
The ideas can be negative, yet still exaggeratedly negative due to a negative name.. Renaming to a less aggressive phrasing will make them easier to buy into and does not require attempting to distort reality.
If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability. Absolutely, could not agree more. This is the only way to beat gamification of metrics in my opinion. There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. I fun…
But that whole strategy is based on hiring "good people," and by what metric do you determine that? It seems that it's just pushing the measurements to another location, one that's less visible and transparent (the hiring process). Or maybe you don't think that there should be a firm set of metrics at all, but having metrics that are too loose ends up meaning the decisions tend to be arbitrary and based on the whims…
I think a metric is an objective, formally and specifically defined measurement. So get people to do their research and use subjective measurements, i.e. personal judgement. It may be a bad option but it is an option, and we don't know whether it'll be bad or not until we test it.