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Comment by throw2016 | Hacker News Reader

throw2016

This is a bit of a straw man. You don't need surveillance technology for this.

If a worker is expected to make 10 pieces of an item per hour its easy for managers to verify this. For a knowledge or creative worker it's similarly easy to verify expected performance.

This is not new, workers have been measured for performance everywhere since manufacturing and corporate jobs began.

If we ignore that for a moment, the point you are making applies to management too, yet this tech is guaranteed to not be used for management where things and outcomes are left 'more fuzzy'. Why?

How about we apply it to governance with complete transparency to the electorate. Nope, not going to happen. Because its exploitative and intrusive and will only be applied to the powerless lowest who have no choice.

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Anecdotally, I've seen plenty of managers subjected to their own set of metrics. They might be able to resist it longer, but the equity owners aren't going to just give them a pass. It's always a question of will the benefits be worth the cost, and as soon as it is, the axe will come down.

I don't agree that creative workers have similarly easy to verify metrics, even now. However, with the ability to broadly track information, what is now possible is to view the distributions of output so that over time, an individual loses the ability to provide excuses, because chances are if your constantly in the tail end, then it's probably worth it for the organization to be rid of you.

I would love it if could apply this transparency to our governance, but obviously those with power will oppose it, and those without will have to fight for it. It's just the nature of things. Obfuscation makes it easier to arbitrage (make excess profits, i.e. have more power than others), so it is to be expected that should continue.

> If we ignore that for a moment, the point you are making applies to management too, yet this tech is guaranteed to not be used for management where things and outcomes are left 'more fuzzy'.

I'm not convinced this is true. Management may have been given more leeway on 'soft' outcomes, but there's a longstanding trend of (messy, failed) attempts to quantify that role. Every attempt to incentivize cost-cutting, scale pay inverse to raises given, stack rank between teams, or otherwise measure staff outcomes is in effect a performance metric on management.

It's true that most of those have been immediately eaten by Goodhart's law, and we don't know how to quantify actual success like we do for "widgets per hour". But I wouldn't suggest that a lack of will to do it has been the problem.

(I do think this argument applies to the top of the executive level. I'm fairly convinced that most non-founding CEOs could be replaced at a discount with minimal harm, and only market distortions are preventing that.)

> For a knowledge or creative worker it's similarly easy to verify expected performance.

No it really isn't! Coding performance metrics are a wasteland of failed techniques.

ObDilbert: http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13

"I'm gonna write me a new minivan this afternoon!"

Hence, I think, the rise of judging programmers on business outcomes. Revenue increases aren't a great metric for programmers (no one has a damn clue how to quantify tech debt and futureproofing), but at least they aren't actively destructive. Similarly, "story point velocity" and the like aren't tied to anything intrinsic, but at least they can sometimes be used as a predictor of quality.

Meanwhile the history of the field is one of judging programmers on bugs fixed, lines written, commit frequency, or a hundred other standards that are only perverse incentives. Most aren't even Goodhart's law issues, because they weren't predictive before they became targets!

Funny how the simple truth summarizes issues like this.

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