Comment by stuxnet79 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stuxnet79 | Hacker News Reader

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> But no matter how much I think about it, I don't believe productivity is a solid, tangible thing, the way people talk about it as if it were

It's rooted in Taylorism / Management Science which is good at attaching metrics to the "factors of production" and correlating those to outputs.

But it doesn't have any easy numbers to attach to morale, motivation, loyalty or conscientiousness. These are all human factors that will have a real impact on your business.

Despite paying lip service to all these qualities corporations in the modern era either conveniently hide them under the rug or game them with lazy metrics that ultimately suffer a devastating collapse under Goodharts law.

Picking up a religious text will teach you more about dealing with people than these articles written by MBAs.

Thanks for the good keyword. I'd never heard of Taylorism before. I looked it up and it seems to be an approach that breaks everything down into measurable metrics. I didn't know the term, but I think I was somewhat familiar with the concept. Thanks for teaching me something I didn't know.

I think we've all had a lot of experiences like this. When people try to explain that 'good atmosphere' and 'friendly communities' lead to better output, and then try to force that into their own metrics, that's when all the problems start. That's what you mentioned and what I often call Goodhart's law.

And on top of that, there seems to be a desire for recognition and prestige. People want to be seen as the one who explained this concept.

Thanks for sharing

We seem to have this drive to abstract people and teams and processes, we call it Taylorism, Scientific Management, with an end result of being able to declare with scientific assurance this person, this group is not carrying their expected load. Now, this is a lot of work, and this is not really necessary if these groups actually had open and trusted communications. But we rare to never have trust, real trust between work teams and work peers. So, rather than expend the effort to create such trust and do the hard work of creating high functioning teams, we create a tracking surveillance environment where your hamster wheel must spin as fast as everyone else, or you are fired. And that is why so many companies have so much busy work while never really going anywhere.

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