Microsoft's Creepy New 'Productivity Score' Gamifies Workplace Surveillance
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
>> In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 5OK-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS 2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them - hey, if we have - a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less KLOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing.
There are many scientists who have very high standards for proof and evidence in their professional life, but accept other theories as truth without a shred of evidence in their personal lives.
I don't know much about Jobs, that's why I asked. From what I got, he was rather a charismatic leader with a good intuition, but I wouldn't call those attributes intelligence per se. Is there any evidence for a particular intelligence of his?
He is just not old enough for working in a time this was new.
The story goes, a Turkish company sells a software to a British client for a few hundreds thousands GBP and has to go though the bureaucracy for the accounting purposes.
Turns out, the clerk in the customs doesn't understand how software works and says he cannot certify the export of a few hundred grands worth of goods delivered by press of a button(the delivery was done through 28kbps modem connection). They bring him a disk but this is not good enough, there is no way this piece is worth that much he says and rejects the application.
They end up putting the software on a tape and declare that they've sold 2000 meters of fine Turkish software to the Brits. The clerk likes that, so the first software export from Turkey ends up being measured in Meters!
[0] The sources are in Turkish but the guy who was involved in this is Ali Akurgal.
Also the same story highlights the roots of the term "Tape Out".
Since the designs of ICs were stored in the tapes at the time, you write the final design to a tape and send it out to fab, hence you Tape out the design.
Cheers!
Turns out if you base the pay on that ... why create a function and call it repeatedly when you can just copy and paste the same code block over and over again
I’d rather have an employee that spent three days, optimizing a single 100 LoC method, than one that churned out 2,000 LoC that does the same thing, in two days, that will need to be maintained, forevermore.
I sometimes have to go back, and put code back in, to make it maintainable (often, by Yours Truly).
If you give a bug to a software developer to fix, the good software developer will probably rewrite some code and in the end the LOC count will be the same or less. The bad/lazy software developer will glue some fix on top of the bug and add additional LOCs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law
If you know a thing or two about evolution, it should be obvious how these shortcuts will play out.
And still, you hear about similar metrics being used all the time... All over the place.
I suspect, in most cases, it's actually bad metrics stacked and really the manager trying to putting a metric on their own "contribution". (Parasitic isn't even the word, but rather viral or prionic...)
In the end, truly and reproducibly recognizing individual contribution is probably beyond human comprehension for any non-trivial tasks. Maybe your product actually benefits a lot from that one guy, who is just very good at promoting a good spirit, being fun to work with, rather than being the most proliferative coder. And how do you measure how hard a problem is? Does is matter who perceives it as hard in your team?
I think, it's one of those things, where trying to be clever will most likely make things much worse because the manual labor and personal involvement of the past actually was already best fitted for the task, by utilizing the human brain where it excels. Humans doing human things with humans, without being willfully ignorant about the complexity at hand.
1. There is no objective measure of productivity that can be applied to software development.
2. Accurate estimation of development times is impossible (not difficult, actually theoretically impossible). All estimates of development times are wrong, some by more than an order of magnitude.
The second one is especially hard to grok for non-techies. I have to explain that if you insist on accurate estimates, you will get grossly padded estimates [0]. And the work will expand to fit the time available (sometimes resulting in the task exceeding even the massively padded estimates because the work expanded with the estimate). I've had many entertaining conversations attempting to explain this.
[0] Because every developer knows that an estimate will magically become a deadline.
Some are useful. The goal isn’t to be right in that there’s no award for perfect estimates, that would be stupid. But having an estimate, especially with relevance to multiple features is helpful.
At one time a team I worked on used “story point cards” and each person would estimate blindly and the discuss. It was interesting hearing people’s reasons behind their magnitudes.
Over time the story estimates got pretty good. But the number was completely useless objectively and made no sense when comparing teams or different projects.
The real pain is turning estimates into deadlines. "About this big" doesn't equate to "it'll be finished on Thursday".
“This story is 4D6, that one about a D20”
Sounds like Hofstadter's law.
"Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."
Personally now-a-days I care more about velocity. If the team can deliver the smallest value added to the system within a week, we are good. The more constant velocity the team has, the more Management trusts you to produce value and get their things done without the need to have massive estimation parties that almost always end up being wrong.
The sad thing is, once the velocity gets bogged up or waving (Org change, contantly changing directions,..) the estimation parties are here to stay and it's quite hard to get back to where the team was.
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.Per the article, what managers often actually want to know is "How do I detect when a developer is so unproductive that they should not be retained?".
What are some behaviors that developers have when they've "checked out"? Not showing up to work or logging in is an obvious example. Lines of code might be a poor metric, but maybe the bottom 1% of coders in that metric is a sufficient detection for poor performance?
...at least as a detection mechanism to highlight for further investigation?
For a manager there is no universal metric other than the hard work of understanding what your employees are actually doing.
But if the case is that the developer needs to be "managed out," you need to build the case as a manager. This is where those metrics help.
The problem is that this is a theoretical scenario which rarely comes up in reality. The developers operating at the skill and maturity level where tracking their individual productivity and quality can be done well, generally are not the developers who really need these types of measures, and they usually aren't left grinding on the same domain for the years required to have enough data to do anything useful with it.
It is kind of a catch 22. The situations where tracking and gaining insight from KLOCs would help (mature/skilled devs working on the same thing over and over for years...doesn't happen much), are not the situations where it is most needed (projects with hundreds of relatively inexperienced/immature developers and managers)
The result is it is applied to disastrous effect in situations where immature managers glom onto it as a silver bullet for managing the unmanageable.
That sounds like a nightmarish place to work.
Nice, I guess instead of talking to the person next to me and sorting something out in 2 minutes, we can use email, and do it in 30.
Also, let's see everyone just adding: 'oh, thanks' or whatever to group chats, just to increase the message count
@FalconSensei Want to get on Teams and collaborate to fix the spelling mistakes I accidentally-on-purpose left in all those Office docs?
@friend1 @friend2 @friend3 Don't forget beers on Friday.
Lol.
This is so stupid. You'll end up with 2 types of employees; those that work and those that work to game the metrics.
My mother's seen it first hand at a government job. Shared work queues and measuring productivity via naïve metrics is an ideal work environment for lazy people that do poor quality work. Why spend 30 minutes on a task when you can do a terrible job of it in 5 minutes and get the same score?
She was fired for low performance...
Thing is, in her department she was the only employee that took difficult cases and found the solution, and left the easy ones to her coworkers, her boss didn't want to fire her, but had to because the metrics said she had to go because a low total amount of cases...
Last she talked with her former coworkers, now they are struggling because the hard cases keep piling up endlessy and nobody knows how to do many of them, because they fired her without warning so she couldn't even teach others how to do what she did.
EDIT: oh yeah, remembered that IBM wasn't subtle about how much they needed her either, since she was the only one that could do what she did, when she worked at IBM I had lovely christmas and new year parties with her laptop on the table, because IBM back then threatened to fire her on the spot if she didn't work remotely on some important clients during those times, then her actual firing came some a short time later anyway during a seasonal lull of work.
I did this to show him how stupid his metrics are but he just said “great job, this is amazing.”
So I just made sure to min max stupid metrics and do what I thought was right as it was easier than trying to fix the metrics.
I definitely don’t think it’s worth being fired out of principle if I know I’m measured for case count.
Generally, I try to set up policies where these metrics are not allowed for performance, but are visible.
And then whenever someone tries to enact them I try to say “this is a really stupid idea and here’s why” in front of as many senior, fancy pants people as possible.
So I have seem approved MRs with 1 comment: 'lgtm' (looks good to me)
I have seen the exact same comment pasted in all instances of something, in the same MR. i.e: "don't use @autobind, remove." instead of 1 comment saying 'remove all @autobind from file'
Situation above, the person replying: 'fixed' on all comments, instead of 1 reply 'removed all @autobind'
Just....... why?
A truly bad measure would be something like measuring the volume of coffee in my cup to determine the health of the economy. If I make up fake numbers, or pour some coffee out to change the measurements, that doesn't make my measurements any more insightful in regard to the economy.
Nonetheless, it’s quite common to read comments about talk in the office as a focus annoyance, flow interruption, etc. I guess any form of notification is.
Yeah, this is why I mute notifications. Some people use 'send' as a period. So instead of 1 notification for whatever they need to say, you got 10
I do agree and disagree.
Sometimes it's very handy to just talk about stuff quickly, but for me, who unfortunely has a lot of context switching I love having stuff written in email, because I can always go back to it when I forget or when I need to reanalyze it
But the thing is: communicate in the way makes sense for the situation/environment. Not by forcing people to send everything in emails, and even, sending way more emails than necessary
Well, talking to the person next to you will disrupt their focus, and they might take hours to get into whatever they were doing (if they were programming / in the zone) at the time. So, yeah, better do it in 30 minutes.
Similarly, you can activate your webcam with a black tape on it, add/remove some spaces at the end of lines on shared documents…
I've been on both sides of both situations (in person better, online better). But what I always did was: ok, feel free to interrupt me if something urgent comes up, otherwise, send me a slack with the full details and I'll answer later.
As mentioned in other responses to this post, having the number of emails/slack messages as a target doesn't help make the work environment better (in both 'more pleasant' and 'more productive' ways)
Nobody is being forced to take these jobs; I think it's great that Microsoft is making MS shops into employee hellscapes.
MS tools have also huge, compounding advantages for larger companies who go all-in - they interoperate deeply. UX-wise, it's all quite not bad, and I could even bear it being proprietary; I just wish they didn't put all that telemetry crap into it - MS is ruining both their OS and their office suites by doing that.
We've seen how that ends for Amazon sharecroppers.
I'm also not 100% sure about your main claim regarding white collar jobs. There may be a majority of positions that use the MS ecosystem, but there are still very very many that don't, even if they are marketshare-wise only 10%.
Really, I think it's mostly just Excel, and maybe Sharepoint. You're absolutely right that there is no great Excel competitor.
I indeed was forced to adopt all of this intolerable MS crap overnight.
I guess I'm free to quit eh?
while [ true ] do;
mail -s"Quick Reminder" `cat userlist` <<EOF
`fortune -o`
EOF
sleep 10
done
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix).
Most commonly seen as part of login messages, as many Unix and Linux systems come or are configured to pipe a fortune message along with some other fixed text.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/36523/creating-a-fortunes-fi...
I have actually used fortune similar to the above script to randomly select inspirational messages as part of a weekly church newsletter.
That might help you from using the search engine that will not be named.
Maybe Denmark is just different, but even places like finances that still use a lot of excel, they also use dedicated stat tools, we use one called Targit, but PowerBI or whatever Microsoft’s version is called these days would be similar. Even people who do a lot of writing, like our communications staff, would only use word for drafts and maybe spell checking (if at all) before they move their writings into their specialised systems.
This is not to say that we don’t use a lot of office, we do, but it’s almost never a primary tool aside from collaborating, and while logging more camera hours may be desirable (for us anyway) sending a lot of emails isn’t necessarily a good thing, mostly it wouldn’t be.
On the flip side, and now that I’ve talked myself into it, I actually do know of managers who would value this sort of logging, shit managers but managers, so maybe Microsoft is just producing what their clients want? Anyway, if that’s the case, they probably shouldn’t add support for bad management practices. I know they have no real competition to office365 for non-tech enterprise, like at all, but who knows when that will change with Amazon around smelling all those billions.
That sounds like 90% of all companies I know, simply based on the fact they all use teams :/
It's also incredibly self-serving of MS. They have essentially defined "productivity" as how much time you spend using MS products.
I hope natural selection leads to the shuttering of all the companies which actually try to use this metric to optimize their organization.
I wish they displayed better because in my org they show as “Prepend, Prependson (ABCD/YTD/Foo/Bar) (Contractor/Non-Contractor Status)” so it’s stupid looking in the body.
I wonder what the real motive is, because surely no one who implemented this actually believes it measures productivity?
I can dream.
> Productivity Score identifies areas where you can offer people training to learn how to use the tools to their fullest capacity
In other words, it's a score that tells the Microsoft sales rep where to target their sales. If you score highly on everything, they'll give you a pat on the back to tell you that you're amongst their most "sophisticated" users.
This seems common in the enterprise sales world. Another example I've seen is Adobe, which holds an annual Symposium every year where they hand out awards to the most advanced users of their products. The "winners" get to feel like they've been recognized for their incredible digital marketing skills and the rest of their clients are shown how to increase the amount of vendor lock-in and dependence on Adobe. Everyone wins!
This reads to me as “identifies people that should be managed out”
That's a very pessimistic outlook I think.
I work as a consultant for a company with approx 100 employees. Average age of workers is somewhere around 45 and most aren't really that good with computers, decent at best.
I've handheld their digital security officer when he configures a Zoom webinar. So far, he hasn't been sure enough to do it all alone and still asks me to check the settings.
This company produces word documents as their core business and if their digital security representative is that bad with computers, you can probably guess the average skill of the rest of the company.
Nobody is getting fired though, they still get the job done and management invests in training. I'm currently helping build their entire IT ecosystem and one key aspect of the tools selected, is that it's simple enough to teach to their employees. I'm sure they'll love those metrics as they can actually see the biggest pain points and proactively do something about it.
I don't think this is a cynical or pessimist point of view. It is exactly what Microsoft is selling here.
Hey, but at least he cares about security and instead of doing it badly, he reaches the expert!
Yeah, there is definitely an incompetence problem here.
Lots of people are incompetent in things that aren’t important. Feynman famously said he was incompetent in administration [0] to stop people from assigning admin work.
Competence isn’t a universal trait where people are perfect in everything or stupid in everything. I don’t get mad at a wizard because he’s incompetent at full plate.
[0]
Tons of security conscious people use zoom, and use it appropriately. I assume any firm big enough to have a digital safety officer is going to have some large user base needing and using zoom.
No, it really doesn't. Zoom has had so many incidents at this point where the client would compromise endpoint security that the only reasonable approach is to consider any computer that has ever had the client installed to be infected.
Yes, there are precautions you can take to reduce the risk (burner VMs, and so on), but as a security professional you have a responsibility to lead by example. You yourself might be safe, but you're effectively telling everyone that Zoom is an acceptable platform to use, and that's just completely irresponsible.
Not that great for the employees though. As tools they are very meh. I'm surprised people are able to get anything done.
I don't believe I've ever worked in an organization where IT chose the tools and approved the sales. It is, in my experience, quite common to have to code around a lot of shitty tools who's purchasing decision began at some executive's golf outing.
There are statistics for what % of employees are using Slack, how many days in the month, % of messages being shared in public channels, private channels, direct messages, % of messages sent vs. % which actually get read, ...
What Microsoft is doing here seems like they’re trying to copy what Slack has done, to try and drive ROI and renewal conversations with their customers.
It isn't used as part of management or anything so it is just a fun little fact, but I was surprised to learn that such a number was readily available. It shouldn't have been surprising, but it was when it clicked in my head that Slack tracks you as much as any other app.
To me, it tells me "do not apply, we care about meaningless metrics"
In the context of the other "fun" stats, it makes sense.
If they said something like "We take slack VERY seriously, here's the numbers to prove it" I would agree.
I wonder who sees these and thinks anything other than “what kind of dipshits think this matters?” Although, I must think that a lot of the people I know of who are buying ML consultants would likely think that counting and displaying random metrics without context is data science. So maybe it works well.
I seem to remember this was justified for "auditing compliance" reasons.
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2020/1/24/21079275/s...
It literally doesn't. All the leadership from that time has retired, the revenue sources are different, and even the business models are different (subscription vs. upfront for many services).
> Don't be fooled: A Leopard cannot change its shorts.
Someone should tell this to all the large companies started by or tied to Nazis (Porsche, IBM, Volkswagen, Puma, Adidas, etc.)
Or they should tell Apple, which went from near-death as a desktop/laptop vendor to a company now making most of its money from services.
Companies change. They do a mixture of good and bad things. At this point, Microsoft is far, far from the company they were in the 80s and 90s, even if they still do bad things.
Nope, they still are a hardware company. 22% from services in the latest quarter .[0] It’s gaining, but still far away from majority services.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-re...
Apple's services have at least twice the margin of their hardware, as far as I've seen[1].
1. https://www.investopedia.com/apple-s-5-most-profitable-lines...
Hahahahaha. A comedian of that caliber should have a Netflix special. That's like the warning on the Q-Tip box that tells you not to stick them in your ears. Of course it's a monitoring tool. They just don't want to call it that because it'll damage the brand.
Have you used this tool from "admin" panel's side?
Workers are incentivised to maximise their use of Microsoft products, and in turn the high employee utilisation of Microsoft products ensures that Microsoft continues to sell licenses and subscriptions.
That's genius in all the wrong ways.
Hey Microsoft! Can I pay extra for fork of windows/o365/office/whatever that doesn't and will NEVER have this ridiculous feature? I am putting my marker down. I am willing to pay MORE money for LESS evil in my machine. The more evil ideas you come up with, the more I will be willing to pay to keep them away. That is the reality in which we live.
I don't know if that's the default for Europe, for everyone, or if Microsoft intend to enable it themselves later.
Enough naivety...
If people don't think that this has been going on for years, or that they actually announce Orwellian surveillance, I'm not sure what to tell you! We have been already living in a track and trace world - what is happening is that it is becoming overt. And there is nothing to be done about it. We all need the paycheck, right?
Even if there is a massive outcry about this - and I doubt there will be - they will just come back and do it another way. They claim it is a right for employers to get the 'metrics'.
What's kind of dark, twisted and funny, is that the people building the cages of today and tomorrow, are doing so with open eyes - technologists are some of the most surveilled people about, but - no problem! - we'll code tomorrow's hell for you!
However, for another company this metric is just a value of how well locked into the M$ stack they are. If it were my company, heavy users would be penalised as there are other, better, less expensive products to use. Sitting in Teams talking to people is not a good score. Firstly you're wasting 512MB of that company laptop on a single web page, secondly it is a slow communication tool and thirdly, if you were talking in IRC then the conversation would be logged for others to grep and find answers to similar issues.
Scoring high with M$ Word would also be a negative thing in my view, that shows that you're using a tool that locks the company into an upgrade cycle for future M$ Word versions. Did you not think to use Libre Office or perhaps MD?
Scoring high in Outlook is also negative, that's another tool that can't store .msg files in open way. Every time a .msg file is attached to something and exchanged, via another tool then the receiver needs something that can disassemble the .msg into a readable form.
(Or the helpful Cortana e-mailing you excerpts from your conversations, in which it highlighted what it interprets to be pending tasks. And because it comes as an e-mail, you know it's not being computed locally.)
I also write most of my docs in Pages and export to Word. Guess I'm not getting my full potential productivity score for not using MSFT.
I started doing this for the same reason but it resulted in another problem: meetings started getting double booked or even booked in triplicate.
So now I actually “Respond without comment” so the person at least knows I’m attending and presumably other people will know I’m in a meeting already at 1pm.
Yet people STILL seem to adamantly refuse to actually look at the scheduling assistant in Outlook.
One side effect of covid is that I’ve developed a very good skill of enforcing my availability to others who seem just fine trampling over the best laid plans without even TRYING to communicate about it.
Or when they do, it’s:
“Hey your calendar says you’re out on Friday, do you have 30m for a quick zoom Friday at 2?”
“My calendar says I’m out?”
“Yes”
“Then I guess I’m out”.
Too lazy to see what attendance score I'm skewing by not accepting mtgs.
But then I asked some people and they told me that most people’s calendars are not dependable and have all sorts of garbage. People have “auto accept” turned on and all sorts of weird behaviors.
I try to keep my calendar accurate and either accept or decline real stuff and ignore/leave tentative things I don’t care about.
My normal line is “schedule any time free on my calendar that’s convenient for you, ignore any tentative.”
That's bravery.
One person I met had auto accept turned on and only decided to attend on the day of the meeting.
It’s fascinating to me the world of personal disorganization.
...and good lord do I miss that right now.
Also, once it's known you do this, you will find yourself with people double+ booking you because they know your availability information is meaningless.
I don't mean this to sound hostile or presumptuous, but please reconsider whether this policy is foisting off a negative externality on your colleagues and/or actually saving you time.
> your availability information is meaningless.
Also the organizer of the original invitation never heard back from you so they don’t know wtf ur doing.
Accepting/rejecting may not be valuable to you, but it’s a courtesy and a time-saving tool for organizers.
No doubt, but there’s seemingly millions of organizers in my company that keep shuffling meetings about every 5 minutes.
There’s only one of me, and I absolutely have better things to do than reject or accept meetings all day long.
I have colleagues that permanently have their entire calendar booked, even if they attend only half of it. So either you send them an invitation regardless of their availability, call them to check, or leave them out of the loop entirely.
At least that’s how it works in our company, so if you’re invited you are expected to attend (and be unavailable) unless you explicitly reject the meeting (which I don’t think anyone but me ever does).
I’m not sure you are indicating that people or shouldn’t explicitly accept or decline invites, but I’m definitely in the “keep your calendar accurate” camp (although my orgs cultural expectation is that “tentative = free”)
Without an issue to you. Has it make work harder for your colleagues? I try to not assume that just because I can’t detect an issue doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.
Eventually we'll hit a critical mass; I am already thinking about how to (I love snails) confuse AI, pollute it with bad data and make it absolutely useless.
Maybe I'll send emails (hello to the AI!) that make no sense, tag random people and make the analytics as useless as possible.
We should all be uploading a few TB of random junk to Google photos, sending 1000's of pointless emails to random people and storing as much useless data as physically possible that they won't know whether to keep or purge.
At least if they're paying to store my 1PB of absolutely pointless data that they can't do anything with it'll make them think about whether it's worth the cost.
The most productive software guy, by any reasonable metric of quality and speed, was a guy who came in at 8.30 and left at 5 Pm on the dot every day. He avoided meetings if only could, replied to emails in batch at the end of the day etc. He would suck at these metrics, and yet he’s hands down the best SE I ever worked with.
Then I type stuff furiously. Verify it. Then publish it. Problem solved. Correctly too.
But still a poor “Productivity Score”. No bonus this year.
My expectation is that it's going to damage the productivity of the most productive but slightly increase productivity of the laziest quartile who should've be fired anyway. The biggest impact will be to drive engagement with Microsoft products which was the real endgame.
"What's Work Insights? Work Insights is a reporting tool for G Suite that gives you insights into the impact of your G Suite deployment. Using easy-to-read charts, you can see metrics on your organization's G Suite adoption, productivity, and collaboration."
So they are putting "productivity" there between "adoption" and "collaboration". This tells me that it is selling usage metrics which might be the same thing, but I don't see an aggregate score per employee named "productivity xxx" which is the big issue with MS product.
Also google's metrics are anonymous (see "Work Insights and user trust"). This seems to be a big difference.
Looking at metrics is fine. You need to know how the tools you are paying for are used. Grading employees according to those metrics is bad.
You need to understand. If you provide metrics like this, it will be turned into a work monitoring tool. That's how humans operate.
I kind of wish I was so certain about things in life. This was also a few years before Microsoft bought GitHub and they talked about how no one needed to use Git and that Visual Studio had built in version control that supported git, but no one liked it.
I kind of wonder what they’re up to now as Microsoft is shifting over to GitHub. That was part of my worry with the acquisition is whatever cult-like mindset from Microsoft will bleed over.
When do the microtransactions for workers to pay to win start?
And no question this has nothing to with productivity or an individuals impact on the company, but I think we here seriously underestimate ho slow some people are in using new available tools and I can see some value in that perspective.
My personal views on this are that this is a pretty invasive feature and I don't think that this feature is ethical. Maybe if it was really clear about what it was doing it would be ok, but even then I still don't like it.
Thanks for fucking everyone up kiddo.
One of my pet peeves is when someone takes a onedrive doc, downloads it, edits it, and sends the off cloud copy back by email. Office sucks at merging documents so this is more work for all the other “cloudies” or whatever you call people who know how to edit online.
I’ve found this is because some users just never used cloud document tools and don’t know how and there’s no easy culturural norm now that everyone is teleworking to teach them.
But this should be used to find zero or very low users and then thrown away. I think that trying to see the number or make a metric out of “number of opens” is so phenomenally dumb. It would be like comparing two git commit history grids and thinking one person is better than another.
For a place that did excellent productivity studies, they sure are hellbent on inflicting horrible policy on their workers.
Just before I left my last job a month or so ago, I checked my Github stats. Over the course of 8 years I added 124,000 LOC and removed 466,000 LOC. I can also assure you that my employer was sad to see me go.
I wonder if MS employees are sufficiently encouraged to game it.
Scroll down, headline, one sentence, nearly full phone display length ad. Scroll more, one paragraph another Nearly full length ad.
Sheesh!!
/rant
Because I don’t want to be installing more crap on my phone just to read the damn news.
Often opt to just outline.com-ing a page.
On the other hand it might be good if a company doesn’t suck and they use use this data to assess whether remote work is causing a decrease a work/life balance or causing people to spend too much time in too many meetings.
Data is just data. If a company is using data for nefarious purposes then they’re probably just a bad company to work for.
Some places give employee ratings based on number of bugs fixed, lines of code written, or commits made. This is stupid. This data is also available to basically all companies. The fix is NOT to block that commit or bug counts from being visible. The fix is to not over index on that data when making rating or promotion decisions.
Now re-read the post you replied to.
> Once everyone starts doing this there will be no where else for you to go.
No, you will not go anywhere where this practice is NOT done, because it will become widespread and you will have to be really lucky to find such a place where those practices are not done. That is, if they set a precedent and companies follow and people tolerate.
> probably just a bad company to work for.
Shit will happen when the majority of the companies will be bad companies to work for.
I press 'F' for doubt.
Lots of irrelevant data is already available. It has never been used against me. The presence of additional irrelevant data does not seem likely to change this.
Could be wrong! Feel free to ping me in 5 years and we’ll see if I regret everything. But I don’t anticipate significant grief over this.
Most of this information is already available. I don’t anticipate this actually being a problem. I could be wrong! But so far in my 14 year career I’ve not been held back by bad decisions based on bugs closed, lines of code written, or diffs landed. I do not anticipate a new set of even less relevant data changing this.
That seems extremely reasonable to me.
Bad/Good bosses. And companies with bad/less bad review and promotion systems.
It's another useless number that they can pretend to care about when negotiating salaries in order to keep down wages.
- "Weeeellll... I can se that your Productiiiivity score is just at 74.3%, the average in your team is 77.6% so I'm affraid that it's really impossible for me to increase your salary as things are looking out. I'm reaaaally sorry. Have a good one!"
With their own tool, they were measuring everything from my keystrokes to random web cam/screenshots in every ten minute interval. They've given nice names for them like "Focus" and "Intensity". "Focus" is a measure of how often I'm switching context and "intensity" is a measure of my keystrokes/mouse clicks/mouse scrolls per minute. The surprising thing is that they want to market this product to knowledge worker environments and there were already about 20 competitors for them, which says this has a future. In fact, every software engineer/marketeer/PM in this company were already being evaluated partly - mainly, when they want to bash you in a 1-1 - based on these metrics.
You're right. I only worked for this company because I needed to make a few bucks. I would never go back to work somewhere if they use a tool like this.