[ameister14]

Ah, but didn't you say it was impossible to measure quality of work? You could only measure the time spent in the seat, right?

Now you're saying people should be judged on their outputs. Interesting change of pace.

In reality he's unlikely to draw 2x the salary for 2x the output, though, because he's operating from a deficit of information and again, the manager/hr person's main goal isn't actually efficiency.

If they're smart, though, they'll give him a performance bonus based on productivity over a minimum marker, maybe staged as productivity goes up without a quality drop to squeeze out as much as possible. At a certain point, though, money becomes less of a driver for most people so that's not the only thing they'll do. They will also tie his performance to the team as a whole, create opportunities for building 'team unity' and maybe put together artificial competition so he actually cares about team performance. Then his colleagues will push him to perform better.

[varjag]

You made a ton of implicit assumptions with your widget factory at home, it's not really like you caught me on anything here. I just brought in a bit of realism into your model.

Point is you expected to do an honest day of work for your pay with a good effort. That's the social contract which may well be changed in the future, but so far it isn't.

[ameister14]

You say time in the seat is the only thing you can measure objectively. I don't agree, then give a simple example that shows you can measure productivity and you immediately switch to measuring productivity. I don't think you introduced any realism at all, you were just wrong at the start.

By the way, I've never seen someone be rewarded 2x the pay for being 2x as productive without a commission model.

And if they are on commission, nobody cares how much time is spent in the office.

>Point is you expected to do an honest day of work for your pay with a good effort. That's the social contract which may well be changed in the future, but so far it isn't.

I don't think that's true. I've worked construction jobs and you're expected to do what you're expected to get done in a day of work, not work hard necessarily. Sometimes you work hard, sometimes you don't. A lot of time is spent uselessly. I found the same thing in corporate environments.

An honest day's work for an honest day's pay would actually be pretty unusual, especially given that for it to be honest the workers would have to understand the labor market implicitly, what they could get at competing companies and what their labor was actually worth to the company employing them. Most of the time none of that happens.