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Comment by BlargMcLarg | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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> 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.

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