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Comment by pengwing | Hacker News Reader

Let me expand on that point: "Don't accidentally throw out good apples with the bad ones because you are looking at the wrong metrics."

What I mean is: Bad apples are real, but don't ever do time-tracking or fast response testing in an effort to identify them. There are some excellent apples who will get your 8h-day deliverables done in 2-4h. Don't ever establish any system to find them. If you have a problem with them, you are the problem.

Kick people based on repeatedly violating the deadline for deliverables.

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The thing is: Some of the worst remote workers are actually the best at appearing always online. They’ll go out of their way to remind everyone that they were “working” at 8PM or on a weekend because they need to compensate for the lack of actual work done.

One of the worst remote work offenders I ever dealt with had a routine of doing things every Saturday morning that would ping the team: Lots of Slack “@channel” questions. Lots of name tags in Slack to generate pings. Some e-mails with unnecessarily huge recipient lists. If someone had only measured time online or number of Slack messages sent, this guy would have been at the top of the list.

But it was all a show. It was all low-effort, high-volume content designed to give the impression of working hard, and it only came in short bursts. Anyone paying attention knew he wasn’t delivering much but he was generating huge fanfare over tiny things he did.

So yes, focusing too much on perceived hours worked or activity in Slack or e-mail is one of the worst ways to do performance management.

> Kick people based on repeatedly violating the deadline for deliverables.

This is the other game they play: Come sprint planning time, they’ll invest huge effort in exaggerating how long a task will take. Then they’ll go to great lengths to find ways to be “blocked and waiting on so and so” during the week. Eventually they’ll push their deadline back so far that hitting it is trivially easy.

Which is why it’s important to have managers who can spot these exaggerations and investigate the actual code and deliverables when they arrive. Engineers are good at spotting when someone has been lying about effort, but managers without engineering backgrounds can often (but not always) be fooled by charismatic remote workers.

> Engineers are good at spotting when someone has been lying about effort, but managers without engineering backgrounds can often (but not always) be fooled by charismatic remote workers.

Then hire better managers. Really, if a manager cannot spot remote slackers, then that manager is doing a poor job.

All of these things have in-office parallels that experienced workers have seen plenty of. Why is it that remote workers are especially suspect?

What exactly do people think here? That being able to look over a worker's shoulder at their computer screen a few times a day makes the difference between effective in-office management and remote slackerdom?

If that's all managers do, they can be replaced with spyware that measures how much time the worker is typing in VSCode each week. It'll be easy to game but will STILL work way better than the manager.

> Why is it that remote workers are especially suspect?

Because it's not difficult to get hired into two remote jobs.

It is, however, impossible to be in two physical offices at the same time.

Being in office is not a free pass to ignore performance management. Obviously if you're not paying attention to deliverables then your in-office employees could be doing nothing as well.

But remote jobs are a magnet for people trying to abuse the system (by riding the coattails of their actually productive coworkers).

> If that's all managers do, they can be replaced with spyware that measures how much time the worker is typing in VSCode each week.

I think you misunderstood my comment. I specifically said that measuring hours active at a keyboard or activity in Slack is the worst way to try to do performance management.

The amount of people holding two remote jobs for more than a few months without burning out approaches zero pretty quickly.

In person positions are a magnet for people abusing the system by not being productive. People will feel justified to chit-chat as long as everyone can see them, they will organize meetings or volunteer work hours put on bakeathons. They will meet people in higher positions in these social settings and leverage their relationship for better position often with more success than someone productive.

Productive workers are seen as resources. Non productive social climbers will always leap over the productive.

Non-productive socializers remote or in person will always be holding you back.

The remote double job close to being burned out with no time for socializing is the least of your concerns if they even exist.

> I think you misunderstood my comment. I specifically said that measuring hours active at a keyboard or activity in Slack is the worst way to try to do performance management.

You say that, but then you advocate for butts-in-chairs (BIC) as a critical performance management practice that can't be replicated in the remote model and therefore shows the weakness of the remote model.

If BIC is so critical to performance management, spyware will do a way better job.

Work is not all about deadlines. It also requires discipline to be present for meetings (no matter how much you hate them), be available to solve problems (sometimes immediately), collaborate with other team members and many other things. It is called "Team work" for a reason. Good developers can get away with a lot of things for sure especially if they produce code but as someone who runs teams, it is not enough. I would rather work with someone who cares about how their work impacts the overall team vs just them working in silo and happy enough coz they hit their deadlines.

Yes, it is about the deadlines. That's what keeps me getting a paycheck, which is the reason I'm working. What you describe as teamwork is just every day development activity. There is no discipline to attending a meeting when the meeting is mandatory.

I can always spot someone who 'runs teams' by the way they prioritize the company and piss on the workers in the name of the customer and 'teamwork.'

This is why you can't trust a manager. You can't seperate their nose from the company's ass.

"piss on the workers". I made no such remark anywhere in my comment. You can prioritize the company and still take care of the employees. It is not a zero sum game but hating on managers is obviously a cool thing to do.

I've never been at a company where deadlines are what keeps people getting a paycheck. Overall output is what kept the paychecks flowing. Deadlines are an artificial construct in most cases and in most of the remaining they're just a way to synchronize work. If a feature comes out today or in a week or a month has little difference in the vast majority of cases. If you get 1 or 5 or 10 features out this month has a difference.

As someone who is involved in both engineering and management - in my experience 8h days do not exist.

Are there just isn’t an environment allowing for eight hours of deep work without interruptions, emails, meetings, chats etc.

And even if eight hours of deep work were possible, the cognitive load the programming tends to lead to exhaustion within 4 to 6 hours max.

I don’t expect more from myself or others.

Deadlines are also the wrong metric to measure people with unless you're a contracting/consulting shop.

Seriously. This talk of "deadlines are everything" is such bullshit. In my company, I am looking for people who care about their work, first and foremost. They enjoy what they do. Sometimes, deadlines are needed, sure. But it is mostly about growing as an individual and learning how to work in collaboration. What good are deadlines if you churn out crap output ?

This actually makes sense. No need for the big survellance net.

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