91–100 of 154 posts
This reminds me of Ted Talks about the original thinkers by Adam Grant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxbCHn6gE3U Just because these people are not behaving or contributing the same way like others, it doesn't mean they are worthless. If company design the work "game" like such, people will try to cheat the game like automatically producing whole bunch of crap on daily basis - is that productive? Then, they will ha…
"You received this email because my big data team analyzed your activities in Jira, Confluence, Gmail, chats, documents, dashboards and tagged you as unengaged and unproductive employees. In other words, you were not always present at the workplace when you worked remotely." Sweet. Maybe we are hitting the day when all of your code commits, all communication, location in the building, telecommute meetings, etc. etc.…
My employer went this route. Gamified all the developers' output. I quit on the spot and I was not alone. We will see how it turns out but I still believe that gamifying everything is a bad idea. There's no way to align the incentives with company profits using stupid metrics.
It is a real problem! People are just bunking off and not working!
I also saw this when people were in office, however. Eventually, some people just stop doing work completely and coast until they are noticed or find a new org to be a parasite of, a surprisingly rare occurrence.
And I say this as an extremely lazy employee who often checks out at 4pm. It gets BAD with some people.
Reminds me of a story I heard from a friend. Some consulting firm came in to the company and decided, based on number of commits (or some such metric), that one particular engineer was the lowest performing engineer on the team. So, management fired them. Turns out that engineer was the one who everyone side-channeled with to get help when blocked. They were the one who knew the system best and were enabling everyone…
The experienced technicians would leave the base stations though as they took a long time to troubleshoot and repair, so customers would get upset that the turnaround was slow. But these repairs were also profitable because extra labour and parts margin. So I would take them on - win/win I thought - happy customers and billing the expensive jobs, heck someone has to do these jobs. The problem was that you couldn’t complete more than about 1.5 of these jobs per day on average.
Anyway, new lab manager comes in, crunches numbers and they decide my work rate is too low and I’m no longer required…
I still wonder to this day if it had an impact on turnaround of those devices.. I would like to think they realised what they did. I also learnt not to get too far from the herd even if you have the best of intentions.
> we will help you find a good place, where you will earn more and work even less Wow you're really selling it for us. PR nightmare.
It sounds great, honestly. Sounds like his employees are working more for less pay. I know he's insulting his employees but still pretty awesome if he actually found a better position for his people. Who doesn't want to make more and work less? I wish I could make money while doing nothing.
Reminds me of a story I heard from a friend. Some consulting firm came in to the company and decided, based on number of commits (or some such metric), that one particular engineer was the lowest performing engineer on the team. So, management fired them. Turns out that engineer was the one who everyone side-channeled with to get help when blocked. They were the one who knew the system best and were enabling everyone…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If getting a promotion really is as easy as committing lots of lines of code, and you are THE ONLY one to figure it out, then you deserve a promotion
Not only that, but other engineers apparently pointed out the gaming and management didn’t care.
This naturally ended up a disaster because A) those people weren't updating their skills in the tool because they were high demand rock stars and B) they had deep customer relationships, to the point where many customers threatened to (and I'm some cases did) cancel their contracts and stop doing business with us. My understanding is somewhere between 1\3 and 1\2 of everyone let go was hired back at higher pay after keeping all their secerence pay, and many of the rest just refused to do so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect this will be an unpopular opinion here, but I think that if you set the thresholds conservatively enough, a tool like this could be useful in identifying people who are not contributing. Where I work there are searchable tool invocation logs and there have been cases where someone is only compiling code one or twice a month, who not too long after I discovered this made an exit. If you're enough sigmas belo…
The problem with any metric is that old quote about “when a metric becomes a measurement it’s useless.” How do you recognize someone who commits the same “amount” of code but which is consistently shitty and has to be reworked later from someone who commits a lesser “amount” but guides the project overall to a better place? Or someone who is spinning gears all the time: compiling code, spinning up VMs, in meetings al…
For what it's worth I do think it is very silly to announce you are using metrics like this. Ideally you'd not want people to know what tipped you off that they were just cashing checks. You would fire them gradually over several weeks or months, and explain it some way that doesn't easily point back to the filter metrics. This approach of announcing it is like exposing pathogens to a sub-curative dose of medicine.
Anyway, I don't get the sense from the other commenters that the main concern is for the wellbeing of the company -- that they might be at risk of being gamed. I don't think an employee should have an expectation of privacy in at least several of the spaces used in the article as a signal, if any.