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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

You don’t think “do they get the job done” is a more valuable indicator of whether you want to continue paying them?

“Were they in the office” seems a much lower quality signal.

Sure, but "were they in the office" is /much/ easier to measure at scale. And I'm sure you'd throw a pretty big fit if your pay was docked because the company didn't think you did a good enough job, even though you were in the office.

Alas, “this metric doesn’t track what we care about, BUT it’s easier to collect, so let’s use it” explains a lot of really bad policies and practices in our world.

Let's start measuring keys typed per hour next! It correlates, thus will work even better at scale.

Yea but only for keyboards that can't be removed from the office.

You joke, but many companies are already measuring code velocity for developers as part of performance.

Let them be, I'll stay in the industry as long as there's choice

Isn't this literally how employment works? If I'm sitting in the office not doing my job, I get fired. (Pay docked to zero, in a way.)

You don’t need to measure at scale, you just ask each supervisor to measure at micro-scale and provide more relevant feedback than a binary reader.

You "just" need thousands of employees to do additional labor. And then you need to process all of that data, including adjusting for the variability in how supervisors measure performance.

“How is your team doing on a scale from 1-10?” might be more valuable than adding up the number of minutes people are breathing the office air.

So if I said 8, what does that mean? What actions should be taken as a result? What value has been generated in collecting that data?

Attendance might not be a perfect proxy, but this is way worse.

8 means, ‘great, everyone is performing above expectations’

They're not mutually exclusive, tracking attendance doesn't mean you are forced to ignore work quality.

Also outside of 80s cop dramas the line "but dammit I get results" does not overrule all other employer concerns. If instead of disregarding an attendance requirement an employee instead decided to disregard a safety requirement, would you give them a pass because they got the job done? How about if they mishandled private customer data? Made unauthorized purchases with the company credit card? Made a bigoted comment about another employee? Someone can be a high performer and still be a bad employee that an employer ought to let go.

If the job description involves being present in the office, then being present in the office is the highest quality signal of being present in the office.

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