[Aeolun]

You don’t think “do they get the job done” is a more valuable indicator of whether you want to continue paying them?

“Were they in the office” seems a much lower quality signal.

[jasonlfunk]

Sure, but "were they in the office" is /much/ easier to measure at scale. And I'm sure you'd throw a pretty big fit if your pay was docked because the company didn't think you did a good enough job, even though you were in the office.

[richardfey]

Let's start measuring keys typed per hour next! It correlates, thus will work even better at scale.

[NBJack]

You joke, but many companies are already measuring code velocity for developers as part of performance.

[richardfey]

Let them be, I'll stay in the industry as long as there's choice

[postalrat]

Yea but only for keyboards that can't be removed from the office.

[TrickardRixx]

Isn't this literally how employment works? If I'm sitting in the office not doing my job, I get fired. (Pay docked to zero, in a way.)

[skywhopper]

Alas, “this metric doesn’t track what we care about, BUT it’s easier to collect, so let’s use it” explains a lot of really bad policies and practices in our world.

[mensetmanusman]

You don’t need to measure at scale, you just ask each supervisor to measure at micro-scale and provide more relevant feedback than a binary reader.

[jjk166]

You "just" need thousands of employees to do additional labor. And then you need to process all of that data, including adjusting for the variability in how supervisors measure performance.

[mensetmanusman]

“How is your team doing on a scale from 1-10?” might be more valuable than adding up the number of minutes people are breathing the office air.

[jjk166]

So if I said 8, what does that mean? What actions should be taken as a result? What value has been generated in collecting that data?

Attendance might not be a perfect proxy, but this is way worse.

[mensetmanusman]

8 means, ‘great, everyone is performing above expectations’

[jjk166]

They're not mutually exclusive, tracking attendance doesn't mean you are forced to ignore work quality.

Also outside of 80s cop dramas the line "but dammit I get results" does not overrule all other employer concerns. If instead of disregarding an attendance requirement an employee instead decided to disregard a safety requirement, would you give them a pass because they got the job done? How about if they mishandled private customer data? Made unauthorized purchases with the company credit card? Made a bigoted comment about another employee? Someone can be a high performer and still be a bad employee that an employer ought to let go.

[throwaway22032]

If the job description involves being present in the office, then being present in the office is the highest quality signal of being present in the office.