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Comment by mruniverse | Hacker News Reader

I think the issue is that managers want to "see" their employees "working". And by "working" I mean being seen at their desk, in meetings, or at the whiteboard. It's harder for them to judge by the quality of work because they don't have that expertise.

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It's funny because I often wonder the same of CEOs. What exactly are we paying them for? How can we judge the quality of their work?

Well that's actually much easier. CEOs are paid, by shareholders, for the return on investment they generate for said shareholders. The quality of their work is judged by the return on investment generated every 3 months.

And why does the CEO get the credit for that?

1. because that's how we've decided businesses work.

2. because the buck stops with the CEO. They are (ostensibly) responsible for the output/productivity of the entire organisation. How they achieve that is mostly irrelevant, in the same way that our managers don't really understand what we do, so it goes for shareholders.

So maybe we can get rid of them and deliver even more value to shareholders?

Indeed. Might have been an alright a decade ago, but now we have all these services that you fill in every few weeks/months about performance, goals etc. so that managers can have an overview. There is nothing to hide behind anymore, managers have all the data, they need to learn what to do with. Butt-in-seat is not a satisfactory KPI.

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