Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jasonlfunk 990 days ago
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.
4 comments

Let's start measuring keys typed per hour next! It correlates, thus will work even better at scale.
You joke, but many companies are already measuring code velocity for developers as part of performance.
Let them be, I'll stay in the industry as long as there's choice
Yea but only for keyboards that can't be removed from the office.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.

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