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Comment by tjpnz | Hacker News Reader

>These metrics include how often workers turn their cameras on during virtual meetings, how frequently they send emails (and how many contain @ mentions), whether they regularly contribute to shared documents or group chats, and the number of days they used Microsoft’s tools such as Word, Excel, Skype, Outlook, or Teams in the last month

That sounds like a nightmarish place to work.

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The worst part is that none of these are results-based metrics. These are precisely the kind of things you would measure if you want to create lots of extra meetings and redundant communication.

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.

Yeah, that's what I thought. This is a measure of "how well you're using Microsoft software" so that Microsoft itself can use it to market more software and services to you.

It's also worth mentioning the @ mentions in email are exchange-specific (afaik)

I really like @mentions in email. They help me find specific stuff relevant to me. And also makes it a second faster to include someone in the to line.

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’d hate that so much. People are already abusing CC and BCC in corporate email chains, having to simply @ someone to send them a notification or a copy of the email would make that problem even worse. MS always comes up with things that make working so much harder on the business/office/windows side.

Yeah I feel like it's also adding a redundant extension to email, which is a perfectly good and time-tested technology. It's just one more way to create a wedge feature to create an inferior experience for people not using the MS product without actually adding any value over what's already available from CC/BCC

It would be interesting to see if I include more people with this feature. I think that I use it only when I would have gone up and added them to the CC line, but I would have to try to call out what I want them to see in the email.

> how frequently they send emails

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?

My wife used to work at IBM.

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.

My first job was in tech support and we had similar metrics although nothing as drastic. I took really hard escalations and had a low case count. My manager pointed it out and so next period I also did 100 remote password changes in addition to my hard cases and had like 3x the next closest case count.

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.

This is why metrics should all be taken with a grain of salt and be subject to the opinion of ones manager. Nepotism at level certainly exists, but a good manager will always come to bat for you. Even if it sticks their neck out. That is why upper level bourgeoisie management that has no f'ing clue about the bottom rungs shouldnt touch what their not ready to unravel.

So frustrating to read that. Could no one even look at 'type' of cases? Tickets in a ticketing system typically have some sort of severity level associated. Taking 3 'critical' issues should be treated as at least important as taking 30 'low priority' issues.

I had similar experiences in the past with review comments. So, they measure how many merge requests you left a comment (for other people's MRs), how many comments total on other peoples' merge requests, how many on your own.

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?

Opposite anecdote - worked at a place where I was ... 6 feet from the main sysadmin guy. I would routinely email him, both as a bit of CYA, but also because his schedule didn't jive with mine. Owner would come out sometimes and get irate that we were emailing vs "just talk to each other - you're sitting right here!". But... I didn't want to interrupt the other guy. In fact, I got better results by emailing - more details, could follow up as needed, and he would respond with 'done' so there was an actual log of the interactions. When I'd just lean over and interrupt him, everything was slower and worse. The '2 minute' things rarely were 2 minutes, and would take away time from what he was doing. If we met in the lunchroom... yeah, I might say "hey, I'm going to need X"... and he'd say "email the details".

If that guy is anything like me, he probably treats emails as tasks. Each email is something that needs to get done. Now I may be doing something else so I need to prioritize that over your thing right now. Overall I think that's why it worked out so well for you guys.

I see your point and I agree with that, as long as it's not a metric, but the way you chose to communicate because it was best for the situation.

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)

#8 of: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

It’s also hard to cut and paste out of in person talking.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

What if it's a bad measure to begin with, ie. anticorrelated with quality? Does it become (technically) better by being gamed?

Isn't it essentially a good measure then, just accidentally flipped around? Just flip it around and it's good.

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.

>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.

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

I see your point and I agree. I hated being constantly interrupted on my previous job, and I got them to stop doing that and only interrupt me when something really needed immediate attention.

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

I turned off email notifications and check it only in the morning, or if I am specifically waiting on something like an access code. Oftentimes, something "urgent" that was sent at 13:30 ends up with a "never mind, I found it" response at 15:00 so I can just delete both emails.

If your manager gives importance to this, just send a hundred emails to yourself at the end of the month to pad your numbers.

Similarly, you can activate your webcam with a black tape on it, add/remove some spaces at the end of lines on shared documents…

You’re describing the consumer layer of Microsoft Office products that they sell to individual who work in enterprise Office environments.

Life replicates art: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)

>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.

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.

That requires several context switches on both ends. I'd rather have my focus interrupted once than having to either draw out an email conversation over several days or mentally switch to it every few minutes.

oh, thanks!

In what universe do you currently talk to the person next to you? In an office job that would be horrifically irresponsible. I agree with your broader point, this is just a poorly chosen example.

In an office with only two people, talking to the person next to you is no different from talking to your spouse.

"Currently" being emphasized I guess you are thinking about COVID and social distanciation?

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.

> 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

In New Zealand ;)

In Australia or New Zealand, for example.

I’m more wondering where it would be. I work in the public sector, so we almost literally employ people from every field imaginable aside from maybe academic research, and aside from the camera thing, I can’t think of a single one of those metrics that’s positive.

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.

The point really is to push workforces towards Office since that's how you would be measured. It's a BS marketing nudge.

  while [ true ] do;
    mail -s"Quick Reminder" `cat userlist` <<EOF
      `fortune -o`
    EOF
    sleep 10
  done

Job done, leave me to sleep. (Syntax likely off - I'm sh-rusty!)

Out of curiosity what does the fortune command do? DuckDuckGo failed me here and I don't want the trouble to use "G word".

Pulls a random, and usually but not always funny, quote from a list it comes with.

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.

Note that you can also create custom fortune messages:

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.

It displays a 'funny' random quote or login message.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix)

As the others have said. Also, the `-o` in particular includes the list of potentially offensive options.

There is also explainshell.com if you want a quick hint without reading the whole man page.

Whenever I want to know a Unix command (and I’m not at a terminal), I just DDG “man <command>” and it shows me the manual page for this command.

That might help you from using the search engine that will not be named.

You forgot to use cowsay.

Or banner ;)

Sounds like 10 minutes to setup some automation to win big bucks.

I need like, a hardware version of auto-hotkey

I imagine the software version will work just fine.

One could score very highly in these metrics without actually getting an ounce of work done. The inverse is also true. Scary. This is wholly bizarre because these are in no way productivity measures. These are measures of software usage, which is being (wrongly) used as an correlation for productivity.

I wonder what the real motive is, because surely no one who implemented this actually believes it measures productivity?

And it doesn't measure normal phone calls or on site support for customers. There is nothing better than having to run from one issue to the next and getting a mail saying I just enjoyed a week of peace and quiet.

Most places that demand staff live in Office and Outlook are.

Nobody is being forced to take these jobs; I think it's great that Microsoft is making MS shops into employee hellscapes.

There aren't that many jobs where white-collar workers aren't forced to use Office and Outlook, and that's not just because of lock-in, but because there's literally no other alternative that doesn't suck badly. And no, Google office suite doesn't count; it barely matured out of toy stage recently.

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.

Any business that may potentially compete with Microsoft (or Google) would be pretty foolish to use their non-e2e cloud services to go about doing so.

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.

Yeah, I meant primarily Excel and Sharepoint, and maybe MS Project (though that has commercial alternatives). But also that once a company commits to MS ecosystem - including Sharepoint, Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and the whole Office suite - all that software suddenly gains a lot of additional functionality thanks to deep interoperability.

You could pay for 365 yourself

The company I work for was sold to a larger company 19 years after I started.

I indeed was forced to adopt all of this intolerable MS crap overnight.

I guess I'm free to quit eh?

> That sounds like a nightmarish place to work.

That sounds like 90% of all companies I know, simply based on the fact they all use teams :/

It's possible that smart managers will prefer people who get their work done while minimising these metrics.

I can dream.

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