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Comment by shireboy | Hacker News Reader

This is old, but my most pointless project: The CEO wanted a screen in every hall that showed the company "EnGUAGEment meter". Users would have to go to the app, choose from 10 or so canned messages like "Feeling productive", "Ready to conquer the day", and other such HR speak the CEO (or rather the HR committee he put on the important business of picking the list) felt was motivational. This would update a page that scrolled their photos and chosen message, and showed the "EnGUAGEment" as a percent of total employees responding on a car dashboard style guage. It hovered around 30-40% every day. On the CEO's birthday they'd drive that baby up to 70 to 80%

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Oh my god, it isn't the same product but I was the user of a similar thing at an old job I had for 2 years only it was a slider from 1-10. I always chose 1 no matter how productive, happy or driven I felt. I remember that HR called me in because of this and in a round-about way said I can't just keep doing that as it was bringing the whole purpose of the system down. If I didn't want to interact with the system then I should just select a higher value and a few months later, my manager said that I didn't need to use that system any more.

The funny thing is that in my current job, they use something called "Dailybot" or something integrated to google chat where you check-in and once a week, give an emoji between 1-5 about my productivity or something... Unhappy face for me.

What value is this supposed to provide? If you take part, it will be 8-9-10 regardless to "look good" and if you don't take part like me, it drags the entire team to an average of 4-5-6 which is the same as not having the system at all and yields the real outcome of average.

My boss said everything bellow 9 is a failure with a hard look. Our metrics happiness level rose to 9 the very next day. Boss got promoted because he was creating such happy teams. Sometimes I wish I didn’t live in a Dilbert strip.

I laughed out loud in my office reading the dilbert strip line. Thanks for the giggle, that’s a new one for me lol

This is how Russian democracy works. Like in your job, there's a scale of punishment for non-compliance, and the ultimate is being sent to the Gulags instead of getting fired.

Almost everybody knows its BS but nobody is able to mention it

The job is to provide 8-9-10 to put on spreadsheets and PowerPoints somewhere.

In other word pointless. The only time you can even halfheartedly trust the results is when the peoples surveyed are almost adversarial- like customers.

This is what happens when you invite HR to an OKR meeting.

Probably unpopular opinion: Silly excercises like this are a good way to see who bends the knee and who is a maverick, and projects only work when most people are docile enough to go with the flow and follow orders. Identifying people that make waves and evaluating if they're worth the hassle is an important part of running a successful business.

This is often sad and depressing, but sometimes it's just about doing your job, and getting some good food after work to counterbalance the bullshit.

You are probably correct but I hate what you wrote. I hate that humans are treated this way by businesses in order to eke out a few more measly percent profit.

Poorly run businesses need docile, dishonest employees who won't point out how badly the business is run, so that it can continue circling the toilet for as long as possible.

Lean, well-run businesses rely on people who are sharp and willing to search out problems in need of fixing. This is necessary for real innovation and competence.

You see this pattern not just in business, but it all kinds of situations. For example, governments that harshly suppress their populations' speech gradually turn into economic backwaters (requiring them to suppress even harder and harder to stay afloat), while governments that foster the exchange of ideas and roll with the punches become the world's economic and geopolitical kingpins.

Sadly, this way a company also gets rid of people who can speak uncomfortable truths when the need arises. Long-term only the desperate and the spittle lickers persist.

If management is unable to deal with people that rock the boat (as in firing should there be actual problems) then they seriously lack backbone and leadership qualities since spouting corporate propaganda and playing silly conformance games with employees is probably all they can do.

So you refused to participate in the data collection effort and then you question what value it is supposed to provide?

I understand if the data is not used or is used to falsely claim high employee satisfaction, but nothing you've said suggested these systems didn't start out as good faith efforts on the part of the company to track and improve employee job satisfaction.

I don't see how your behavior isn't just childish insubordination.

Every employee answering that would have been lying and faking their numbers, most of them to try not to get into trouble or get a black mark on their name. This person just made it clear that their answers were fake and called attention to how unreliable the whole thing was. That is admirable; bad metrics SHOULD to have attention called to them.

A couple of the places I have worked at they would hire an outside firm to conduct these type of surveys and they would anonymize the feedback. I saw the reports provided to some of the managers and the feedback in certain areas was clearly unvarnished. Now whether it lead to any meaningful change, that’s hard to quantify. I guess if you did them multiple times per year for several years you could start to establish a trend.

The beatings will continue until morale improves!

I once worked for a consultancy that had something similar, and tied those satisfaction metrics to quarterly bonuses, so they were guaranteed to be inflated.

I have a terrible urge to build an automated version of this with computer vision and give it the name "EnGuAgEmEnT MeTeR"

Please spell it correctly, though, as it's "engaugement".

put it on the blockchain

Pieces of FlairCoin

And AI-enable it.

Is "guage" some sort of joke that I don't get or just a misspelling?

It's a misspelling of "gauge", judging by "on a car dashboard style guage". Was pretty confused up to that point.

Maybe it’s some sort of in joke for the company. At least, that’s how I took it— alongside it being an obvious reference to a speedometer. My intuition was that maybe the company’s name was “gauge”, or better yet the CEO’s name was gauge. I really hope it was the latter. Makes me think of Hooli from Silicon Valley for some reason lol

The more experience I get working in corporate environments the more I hate the letters CEO and HR. Truly some of the wackest people in these positions.

This is the funniest thing I think I've read all day.

Thank you.

Bill Lumbergh approves of this!

Very much so. Also Michael Scott. This was a period of my life when I wanted to like The Office, but it was just too realistic for me.

Why watch office when life same.

This is a joke right?

For me, more money == more motivation, nothing else

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