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Comment by hmmSceptical | Hacker News Reader

> Bad businesses will continue to use draconian methods to try to squeeze productivity rather than foster it

What about jobs that aren't creative like coding or graphic design?

Some jobs are simply "sit in your chair and do work". The productivity metrics aren't speculative - they are measurable.

You may argue "these are jobs for AI" - but realistically alot of jobs are a way off from this.

Why shouldn't the "productivity" of these staff be measured? Because you don't like it?

If you work at "big shipping co" and "box" 1 item a day and your colleagues do 100, should you not be fired?

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The productivity metrics aren't speculative - they are measurable.

So measure the output, not the mouse, not the keyboard, not the chair, etc.

"output" only matters if your company is paid by "results" and isn't based on billable hours, otherwise ... "output" doesn't matter.

Law firms would love every case to be solved in 2 hours if they still got the same $ value from a case that dragged on for 6 months.

Keep moving those goalposts.

> Goalposts

You literally said "output" the most speculative / vague definition of "work" available.

I appreciate programmers / "creatives" "output" is much harder to measure, but there are alot of jobs where "mouse moving", "words per second" is a very reliable indicator of "output".

Such as? And more importantly, is there the slightest evidence that putting such monitoring in place actually helps increase output?

Almost no jobs are meaningfully measured in such a fashion because it penalizes thinking at the expense of spinning your wheels even when latter is far less or even negative in value if it wastes other employees time as well. It also fails to capture any relationship between input and output. If all you care about is butts in seats you can bill someone else for there productivity means nothing all you want is someone to take as long as possible to produce a level of output the client will pay for.

This already happens. You really think places bill at cost?

Their clients are not paying for lawyers to sit on their chairs and click their keyboards. Billable hours is still completed specific work (even though it might not lead anywhere and/or help winning the case/etc. directly)

>Why shouldn't the "productivity" of these staff be measured? Because you don't like it?

No one is arguing against this. Stop creating strawmen.

People are against draconian practices aimed at micromanaging people when data is already available, individuals are meeting targets or the targets aren't met due to something out of their control.

In the case of programming, if you have any decent system, you can query commit dates, opened bugs/features, closed bugs/features, time in meetings put on the public agenda, and more. None of this requires surveillance during the development process, only measuring inputs and outputs.

> In the case of programming...

A percentage > 90% of the world isn't programmers...

There simply isn't the same workflow to monitor "word" / "pdf" documents without an insane amount of effort / document control that most SMB's dont have.

The only option available to them, without hiring programmers, is often only the metrics that get offered built into these types of products.

I dont think that's a strawman argument.

Pretty sure the burden is on you to prove it is not just a method, but also the only method.

Most trivial things can be measured outside time. Many jobs measured on time, we already know why they are measured on time (low activity, presence-based jobs). Anything else, measuring based on behavior/time spent is management being lazy and not doing what they should be doing: comparing inputs and outputs, and measuring the impact of changes to them to improve productivity.

If a manager can't do something that basic, they shouldn't be looking for more bad proxies to hound people with. They should be doing the company a favor and quit.

They could still monitor actual output? Instead of the number of words in a word document (I mean software companies which rank their employees according to the number of closed tickets aren't the best places to be at either...)

All the things you mentioned are just a slight improvement over measuring key presses/mouse movement...

Metrics like opened bugs/features and time in meetings can be easily gamed and are only tangentially related to actual output unless the work done is extremely standardized and strictly defined.

Then measure the number of boxes done.

Of course you have to be very alert for quality of boxes, and for selection of boxes. A savvy employee will only choose the easiest tasks as all are ranked equally.

Exactly the same with ticket based jobs. Any measure you have can and will be gamed.

> If you work at "big shipping co" and "box" 1 item a day and your colleagues do 100, should you not be fired?

Those are results, and not measured by "is their ass in this chair for 8 hours?", same as monitoring keyboard and mouse usage.

> If you work at "university" and "prove" 1 conjecture a year and your colleagues do 100, should you not be fired?

No, because that isn't enough context.

Comparing a research role in mathematics vs "boxing a big shipping co" is not the same.

Its reasonable to expect a research mathematician to output 0-1 result a year, packing 1 box a year at "big shipping co" is not "reasonable".

You reframed my entire argument about low skilled / measurable "output" jobs back into the "creative" realm, which i've said isn't as easy to measure.

No, I am comparing it to software development. Software development is not further away from research mathematics than it is from shipping boxes.

> Comparing a research role in mathematics vs "boxing a big shipping co" is not the same.

But the equivalent of moving your mouse/clicking buttons would be the equivalent of moving your hands and not actual box packing. Why would you measure that instead of completed work, if as you say that work is easily measurable?

I think this software is mainly targeted at busy bee companies where nobody has a clue what the employees or any is supposed to be doing and therefore mouse activity is the only thing they can measure directly..

> If you work at "big shipping co" and "box" 1 item a day and your colleagues do 100, should you not be fired?

If each of those boxes earns >100 times the profit, the boss would be kinda dumb to fire me. At any rate measuring that doesn't require surveillance software.

> What about jobs that aren't creative like coding or graphic design?

I don't understand, those are creative?

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