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I'd take it a step further and ask if we really want such an extreme in utilitarian ideals guiding such fundamental human needs like employment and its associated income that serves as a generic resource pool for food, housing, healthcare? I don't know about most people but objectivity can fly out the window when it comes to my essential needs. I want another group of humans involved who have similar needs and may consider things an objective metric likely won't. Some mixture of a utilitarian performance metric balanced with some empathy, morale, and ethical reasoning seems like a better blend to me. Either extreme leads to undesired outcomes in my opinion. With pure human involvement you can have extremely biased no justifiable firings based on emotion, hatred, racism, sexism, ageism, whatever and in those cases, a metric is your friend. It can potentially show that undesired bias for what it is to others. On the other hand, that bias may be a good bias. Perhaps your manager is a reasonable human being, they know data the algorithm doesn't like how many additional hours you put in unclocked or that you helped your coworker through a rough problem a few months back, perhaps that you saved the company at a critical junction. They also know your performance recently dropped because there's a pandemic and subequent emotional distress might be effecting you. Perhaps they also notice your performance dropped just like the metric identified, but they know the cause of this is because you just became a parent and have had to divert focus and time towards your family. Your manager has the ability here to step in and override the metric because they know better, have empathy, and understand the world isn't about constantly working at maximal efficiency. This is, to me, a desirable bias. If we keep chasing and supporting utilitarianism pushed by corporations full-steam, we're going to create quite the hellscape that no one wants to live in. |