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Comment by solumos | Hacker News Reader

Is it dystopian, or is it just real-time performance monitoring poorly marketed by inexperienced founders?

There are tools like this for tracking git commits and velocity (that I’ve been on the receiving end of). It probably makes less sense in that context, but if your job is a repetitive task, I don’t think it’s necessarily abuse or dystopian to track it.

Monitoring bottlenecks isn’t a bad thing. They probably could have chosen an example where the solution to the bottleneck didn’t involve berating a low performer (e.g. adjusting the line to add another station or similar)

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Perhaps real-time performance monitoring of people is wrong as well and marketing just made it sound less bad as it is?

If your management tracks your commits/velocity, look for a better job. The market easily allows you to do this. It doesn't make sense anyway and anyone with some technical know-how knows this.

This will escalate into something bad like publication metrics did to science. You end up with superfluous drivel that just pads real discovery. Although for code it is even more trivial.

Bottlenecks are something entirely different. If you have a critical-path, there need to be resources to tackle the task at hand. Real-time monitoring is entirely useless here as well.

> If your management tracks your commits/velocity, look for a better job.

Don't most version-control systems support/automate this?

It also tracks LOCs, but people learned that it is a bad metric. Velocity is basically the same, just with advanced stupidity.

But no, I have never used an environment where velocity is tracked. Of course my source control does provide data how often and what people do commit and you can use that data to create a meaningless number.

Some systems like Jira tracks something like Sprint velocity. Not much of a fan here either, but if used correctly, it is oriented towards a goal. That is the metric you should really track to see if you are still on course.

You mean if they marketed it differently, managers would magically stop using it exactly the way it was advertised?

Assuming that this comment is made in good faith — I doubt that they have much usage currently. Better marketing would show how managers could use this tool to better support their staff rather than scolding them.

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