6 ms·

The Measured Worker

42 points by luu 11y ago

JamesBarney 11y ago
The author forgets to mention that using genetic information for hiring decisions is illegal. It has been since 2008 when Bush signed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.
- LesZedCB 11y ago
  Gattaca[1] is a fun sci-fi movie depicting a world where gene selection is predominant and workforce selection is based on genetics. It's pretty entertaining, and not a half bad look at the problems of that society. [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    A very underrated film, whose central conceit serves equally as a metaphor for our own society even if you ignore the rapid advancements in genetics.
    - bro-stick 11y ago
      It is ominously-possible, in limited, but plausible, degrees. Our genomes will no doubt end up being used for indirect discrimination in dating, friendships, child care, school acceptance, certain military/clandestine work, frat/sororities, social clubs, exclusive event invitations, [insert activity here]. It's already used in healthcare and gamete donation.
      - anigbrowl 11y ago
        Quite, and think how for some people their criminal record already serves this purpose. There was a nauseating story on my local news last night about a 12 or 13 year old autistic kid who was placed under arrest by police officers who contract with the school district for the hideous crime of scraping his initials on the sidewalk concrete of his middle school campus with a handy stone: http://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/Thousands-of-Bay-Area-Students-Sent-to-Police-329858661.html http://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/Thousands-of-Bay-Ar... (sorry about the autoplay video, but there's a full text transcript at the link) The notion that a moment of juvenile whimsy is now a permanent part of a person's digital footprint and could turn up in background checks for the remainder of their life is hideously Orwellian; we are busily crafting the sociopolitical infrastructure of a totalitarian state at the same time as we have 'serious' candidates for the highest national political office expressing unbounded enthusiasm for running such an entity.
        bro-stick 11y ago
        Evil is not some spiritual or abstract concept, it's the banality and legitimization of common-place BS injustices, spanning the gamut of great to small.
pm90 11y ago
Great article. I don't think we will ever stop in finding ways of measuring productivity. In a sense, measurement is fundamental as it helps us determine the truth. Look at how important measurement is in the sciences and in engineering. But the prospect of an employer using previously collected data to make an employment decisions seems rather scary. People do a lot of things when they're young and immature and it seems paranoid to rely on that information when they would probably grow out of it. How accurately can past information predict future productivity? I feel like we can't (yet) measure the effects of external factors on human nature, such as new ideas, new habits, new relationships and so on.
- meatysnapper 11y ago
  Clearly you aren't a Calvinist.
- civilian 11y ago
  Yup. But as a competing future employer--- I'm okay with an employer making that kind of mistake. I'm tolerant of a variety of life circumstances that the curmudgeon employers might not be, and I'd be happy to have an easier time hiring those people. It would be a problem is 99.9% of employers used the same metrics for hiring, because it would just exclude whole groups of people.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > I don't think we will ever stop in finding ways of measuring productivity. In a sense, measurement is fundamental as it helps us determine the truth. Look at how important measurement is in the sciences and in engineering. Beware of cargo-cult :). I'm not saying it to you personally - but I can imagine some manager or marketer saying those words and meaning that "if measuring is so important in science and engineering then it must be good, therefore let's use measuring!". Measurements are only as good as the questions you want them to answer; ask about wrong things, and even the best data will lead you astray.
  - DannoHung 11y ago
    Measurements are also only as good as your experimental design, your data collection tools, your methodology, and your statistical analysis. Which is my way of saying, "Doing good science is actually pretty hard."
glup 11y ago
If we accept Cowen's premise regarding what constitutes value, Kant and Hegel were crappy authors because they had a small number of pageviews. We probably should have valued their contributions less; it's great we have such objective measures now, and we probably won't make that mistake again. From the article: Today a digital media company knows exactly how many people are reading which articles for how long, and also whether they click through to other links. The exactness and the transparency offered by information technology allow us to measure value fairly precisely. There are two different logics at play here, with incommensurate notions of value. The firm's primary goal is to make money; as such a story's value is largely a function of page views (or click-through on ads, etc.) However, we can also assess the value of some produce (article, etc.) at a longer-term societal level. In this case a good story is one that helps policymakers reconceptualize an issue or foment some sort of social change (e.g. a New Yorker article like this one [1]). Within the language of free-market economics these longer-term positive effects might be called "externalities" or "intangibles"; intuitively they are much harder to measure, especially with capital flows. But think about it— do we really want to incentivize firms, and by proxy employees, to maximize value as measured by immediate capital flows? More generally, there isn't a natural law that says that compensation should be proportional to output—quality of life may well be better even at the top if this relationship is somewhat dampened. The cognitive cost may be lower, for example, of not continually switching jobs based on market conditions (this is certainly true in the limit) or of reducing anxiety about losing the ability to produce (e.g. health and psychological wellbeing). These are issues we need to think about and discuss at length, not take as premises. [1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/06/revenge-killing http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/06/revenge-killing Edited to fix italics and to correct the spelling of Cowen's name.
- joe_the_user 11y ago
  More generally, there isn't a natural law that says that compensation should be proportional to output. There's just a natural tendency of a company to want it that way since this maximizes their profits. Once regulations and conventions held-in-check the tendency to profit from the exact measurement and control of workers. Those hindrances seem to have broken down and the advance of fluid financial capital and technology seems like a freight train with enough momentum to batter down any and all limits to their advancement regardless of our opinions on the subject. I don't see visible force standing in their way.
mbostleman 11y ago
I'm not sure I see much compelling here. First off, all he's saying is that technology provides more information about the market. But technology has been doing that forever. Second, he's chosen a very simple example that has a measurement that maps directly to a single person and their economic value (journalists and how often their material is read). Try to apply that to teams (like software teams) in which a productivity is created by a diversity of personalities and specialty skill sets that are focused collectively on a problem - things get muddy real fast when you're trying to measure individual productivity in that environment. And that environment is where to the truly high value work is being done the modern global economy.
- jfoutz 11y ago
  You won't believe these ten tips for being a more effective journalist, #6 will blow your mind. Doctors hate him! Learn this one weird metric busting trick. Yeah, i don't really know how people get stuff done. Metrics can be nice bumpers, to go see if someone needs help. But actual productivity is pretty nebulous. (to me anyway)
bcassedy 11y ago
This is an interesting article, yet I believe it largely misses the issues people have with income inequality. The article seems to focus on pay discrepancies between people with the same role, missing a lot of the big picture. Completely missing from the article are any references to differences between jobs with easily measurable output and those with difficult to measure value. Software engineers and management are two great examples of professions where value is very difficult to measure. In the opinion of many, software engineers tend to be underpaid compared to the value they produce. Managers on the other hand, tend to be viewed as overpaid or at least better compensated compared to the value the produce. I believe that managers do a better job of capturing their value primarily because they (or someone just like them a step up the chain) hold the purse strings. Back to what the article focuses on for a moment. Sure a superior producer might be able to capture more of their value than their low-producing counterpart. That's a drop in the bucket compared to C-level compensation vs salaryman pay. In summation, people aren't upset that the guy in the next cubicle makes 20% more money because he's more productive. They're upset that the CEO makes 100x more than they do even in bad times for the company.
- vtlynch 11y ago
  >software engineers tend to be underpaid compared to the value they produce I think comparing salary to the value produced is a slippery slope. Software engineers are certainly not paid below the average or median salary. Their "value" is just a function of the job, not a measure of its worth.
  - jstanley 11y ago
    > comparing salary to the value produced is a slippery slope Can you elaborate? Surely the efficient-market ideal is that everybody gets paid an amount equal to exactly the amount of value they produce.
    - InclinedPlane 11y ago
      I understand your point, but there's a glaring error in what you said. People need to get paid less than the value they produce, otherwise their employer would just be a passive participant gaining no advantage from their employment.
ScottBurson 11y ago
Dang, can we do something about the sexist title? I've already complained about it on their site; I have no idea if they'll do anything about it, but seems to me we could change it here to "The Measured Worker" with no loss of intelligibility.
- MajorLOL 11y ago
  Woah, sweet bro. you PC too bruh?
  - dang 11y ago
    Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- twcooper 11y ago
  They say you can measure a man by the size of his problems.
- dang 11y ago
  Ok, I don't have a problem with that. (The title struck me as a historical reference of some kind but obviously people read these things differently.) Btw it's better to email questions like this to hn@ycombinator.com. We only saw this one by accident.
  - ScottBurson 11y ago
    You're probably right that it's some kind of historical reference that I didn't catch, but I still think it's ill-considered. I will email in future. Thanks!
Hermel 11y ago
> As we get better at measuring who produces what, the pay gap between those who make more and those who make less grows. In other words: the incompetent are increasingly discriminated against. Maybe they should be protected by law? ;)
- mc32 11y ago
  You jest, but it's worth considering. I mean, if productivity is uneven among contributors and contributions ate now measurable and poor contributors are numerous and can be identified and taken out of the workforce, we could end up with perennially a jobless class of people. What do we do with them, do we distribute their load across employers (as we do now, for the most part) or do we allow discrimination but make up for this by allowing them income vouchers, knowing under this scenario they'd be hard pressed to hold a job, or do we fabricate work suitable for them?
ricksplat 11y ago
This guy is a professor of economics. Says it all really. He presents his utopian vision absent of any connection to reality. He completely ignores data protection legislation. Most of the KPIs he describe measure presentation, not productivity. There are so many instances here of selecting evidence (anecdotal, fanciful) to suit your hypothesis here he would make a first year social studies student blush. What was the hypothesis anyway? That inequality is linked to value production and that will be borne out by measurements gathered at some future time? Just goes to show, Economics is a field of study (not a science) where learning the "right" answers and courting of research grants trump cold hard empirical analysis.

42 points by luu 11y ago

The author forgets to mention that using genetic information for hiring decisions is illegal. It has been since 2008 when Bush signed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.

LesZedCB 11y ago
Gattaca[1] is a fun sci-fi movie depicting a world where gene selection is predominant and workforce selection is based on genetics. It's pretty entertaining, and not a half bad look at the problems of that society. [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  A very underrated film, whose central conceit serves equally as a metaphor for our own society even if you ignore the rapid advancements in genetics.
  - bro-stick 11y ago
    It is ominously-possible, in limited, but plausible, degrees. Our genomes will no doubt end up being used for indirect discrimination in dating, friendships, child care, school acceptance, certain military/clandestine work, frat/sororities, social clubs, exclusive event invitations, [insert activity here]. It's already used in healthcare and gamete donation.
    - anigbrowl 11y ago
      Quite, and think how for some people their criminal record already serves this purpose. There was a nauseating story on my local news last night about a 12 or 13 year old autistic kid who was placed under arrest by police officers who contract with the school district for the hideous crime of scraping his initials on the sidewalk concrete of his middle school campus with a handy stone: http://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/Thousands-of-Bay-Area-Students-Sent-to-Police-329858661.html http://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/Thousands-of-Bay-Ar... (sorry about the autoplay video, but there's a full text transcript at the link) The notion that a moment of juvenile whimsy is now a permanent part of a person's digital footprint and could turn up in background checks for the remainder of their life is hideously Orwellian; we are busily crafting the sociopolitical infrastructure of a totalitarian state at the same time as we have 'serious' candidates for the highest national political office expressing unbounded enthusiasm for running such an entity.
      - bro-stick 11y ago
        Evil is not some spiritual or abstract concept, it's the banality and legitimization of common-place BS injustices, spanning the gamut of great to small.

pm90 11y ago

Great article. I don't think we will ever stop in finding ways of measuring productivity. In a sense, measurement is fundamental as it helps us determine the truth. Look at how important measurement is in the sciences and in engineering. But the prospect of an employer using previously collected data to make an employment decisions seems rather scary. People do a lot of things when they're young and immature and it seems paranoid to rely on that information when they would probably grow out of it. How accurately can past information predict future productivity? I feel like we can't (yet) measure the effects of external factors on human nature, such as new ideas, new habits, new relationships and so on.

meatysnapper 11y ago
Clearly you aren't a Calvinist.
civilian 11y ago
Yup. But as a competing future employer--- I'm okay with an employer making that kind of mistake. I'm tolerant of a variety of life circumstances that the curmudgeon employers might not be, and I'd be happy to have an easier time hiring those people. It would be a problem is 99.9% of employers used the same metrics for hiring, because it would just exclude whole groups of people.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> I don't think we will ever stop in finding ways of measuring productivity. In a sense, measurement is fundamental as it helps us determine the truth. Look at how important measurement is in the sciences and in engineering. Beware of cargo-cult :). I'm not saying it to you personally - but I can imagine some manager or marketer saying those words and meaning that "if measuring is so important in science and engineering then it must be good, therefore let's use measuring!". Measurements are only as good as the questions you want them to answer; ask about wrong things, and even the best data will lead you astray.
- DannoHung 11y ago
  Measurements are also only as good as your experimental design, your data collection tools, your methodology, and your statistical analysis. Which is my way of saying, "Doing good science is actually pretty hard."

glup 11y ago

If we accept Cowen's premise regarding what constitutes value, Kant and Hegel were crappy authors because they had a small number of pageviews. We probably should have valued their contributions less; it's great we have such objective measures now, and we probably won't make that mistake again. From the article: Today a digital media company knows exactly how many people are reading which articles for how long, and also whether they click through to other links. The exactness and the transparency offered by information technology allow us to measure value fairly precisely. There are two different logics at play here, with incommensurate notions of value. The firm's primary goal is to make money; as such a story's value is largely a function of page views (or click-through on ads, etc.) However, we can also assess the value of some produce (article, etc.) at a longer-term societal level. In this case a good story is one that helps policymakers reconceptualize an issue or foment some sort of social change (e.g. a New Yorker article like this one [1]). Within the language of free-market economics these longer-term positive effects might be called "externalities" or "intangibles"; intuitively they are much harder to measure, especially with capital flows. But think about it— do we really want to incentivize firms, and by proxy employees, to maximize value as measured by immediate capital flows? More generally, there isn't a natural law that says that compensation should be proportional to output—quality of life may well be better even at the top if this relationship is somewhat dampened. The cognitive cost may be lower, for example, of not continually switching jobs based on market conditions (this is certainly true in the limit) or of reducing anxiety about losing the ability to produce (e.g. health and psychological wellbeing). These are issues we need to think about and discuss at length, not take as premises. [1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/06/revenge-killing http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/06/revenge-killing Edited to fix italics and to correct the spelling of Cowen's name.

joe_the_user 11y ago
More generally, there isn't a natural law that says that compensation should be proportional to output. There's just a natural tendency of a company to want it that way since this maximizes their profits. Once regulations and conventions held-in-check the tendency to profit from the exact measurement and control of workers. Those hindrances seem to have broken down and the advance of fluid financial capital and technology seems like a freight train with enough momentum to batter down any and all limits to their advancement regardless of our opinions on the subject. I don't see visible force standing in their way.

mbostleman 11y ago

I'm not sure I see much compelling here. First off, all he's saying is that technology provides more information about the market. But technology has been doing that forever. Second, he's chosen a very simple example that has a measurement that maps directly to a single person and their economic value (journalists and how often their material is read). Try to apply that to teams (like software teams) in which a productivity is created by a diversity of personalities and specialty skill sets that are focused collectively on a problem - things get muddy real fast when you're trying to measure individual productivity in that environment. And that environment is where to the truly high value work is being done the modern global economy.

jfoutz 11y ago
You won't believe these ten tips for being a more effective journalist, #6 will blow your mind. Doctors hate him! Learn this one weird metric busting trick. Yeah, i don't really know how people get stuff done. Metrics can be nice bumpers, to go see if someone needs help. But actual productivity is pretty nebulous. (to me anyway)

bcassedy 11y ago

This is an interesting article, yet I believe it largely misses the issues people have with income inequality. The article seems to focus on pay discrepancies between people with the same role, missing a lot of the big picture. Completely missing from the article are any references to differences between jobs with easily measurable output and those with difficult to measure value. Software engineers and management are two great examples of professions where value is very difficult to measure. In the opinion of many, software engineers tend to be underpaid compared to the value they produce. Managers on the other hand, tend to be viewed as overpaid or at least better compensated compared to the value the produce. I believe that managers do a better job of capturing their value primarily because they (or someone just like them a step up the chain) hold the purse strings. Back to what the article focuses on for a moment. Sure a superior producer might be able to capture more of their value than their low-producing counterpart. That's a drop in the bucket compared to C-level compensation vs salaryman pay. In summation, people aren't upset that the guy in the next cubicle makes 20% more money because he's more productive. They're upset that the CEO makes 100x more than they do even in bad times for the company.

vtlynch 11y ago
>software engineers tend to be underpaid compared to the value they produce I think comparing salary to the value produced is a slippery slope. Software engineers are certainly not paid below the average or median salary. Their "value" is just a function of the job, not a measure of its worth.
- jstanley 11y ago
  > comparing salary to the value produced is a slippery slope Can you elaborate? Surely the efficient-market ideal is that everybody gets paid an amount equal to exactly the amount of value they produce.
  - InclinedPlane 11y ago
    I understand your point, but there's a glaring error in what you said. People need to get paid less than the value they produce, otherwise their employer would just be a passive participant gaining no advantage from their employment.

ScottBurson 11y ago

Dang, can we do something about the sexist title? I've already complained about it on their site; I have no idea if they'll do anything about it, but seems to me we could change it here to "The Measured Worker" with no loss of intelligibility.

MajorLOL 11y ago
Woah, sweet bro. you PC too bruh?
- dang 11y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
twcooper 11y ago
They say you can measure a man by the size of his problems.
dang 11y ago
Ok, I don't have a problem with that. (The title struck me as a historical reference of some kind but obviously people read these things differently.) Btw it's better to email questions like this to hn@ycombinator.com. We only saw this one by accident.
- ScottBurson 11y ago
  You're probably right that it's some kind of historical reference that I didn't catch, but I still think it's ill-considered. I will email in future. Thanks!

Hermel 11y ago

> As we get better at measuring who produces what, the pay gap between those who make more and those who make less grows. In other words: the incompetent are increasingly discriminated against. Maybe they should be protected by law? ;)

mc32 11y ago
You jest, but it's worth considering. I mean, if productivity is uneven among contributors and contributions ate now measurable and poor contributors are numerous and can be identified and taken out of the workforce, we could end up with perennially a jobless class of people. What do we do with them, do we distribute their load across employers (as we do now, for the most part) or do we allow discrimination but make up for this by allowing them income vouchers, knowing under this scenario they'd be hard pressed to hold a job, or do we fabricate work suitable for them?

ricksplat 11y ago

This guy is a professor of economics. Says it all really. He presents his utopian vision absent of any connection to reality. He completely ignores data protection legislation. Most of the KPIs he describe measure presentation, not productivity. There are so many instances here of selecting evidence (anecdotal, fanciful) to suit your hypothesis here he would make a first year social studies student blush. What was the hypothesis anyway? That inequality is linked to value production and that will be borne out by measurements gathered at some future time? Just goes to show, Economics is a field of study (not a science) where learning the "right" answers and courting of research grants trump cold hard empirical analysis.