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Tyler Cowen has written a lot about this: "Individuals don’t in fact enjoy being evaluated all the time, especially when the results are not always stellar: fo

Tyler Cowen has written a lot about this: "Individuals don’t in fact enjoy being evaluated all the time, especially when the results are not always stellar: for most people, one piece of negative feedback outweighs five pieces of positive feedback. To the extent that measurement raises income inequality, perhaps it makes relations among the workers tenser and less friendly. Life under a meritocracy can be a little tough, unfriendly, and discouraging, especially for those whose morale is easily damaged. Privacy in this world will be harder to come by, and perhaps “second chances” will be more difficult to find, given the permanence of electronic data. We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types who were on the straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor those who rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more creative later on." http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/the-measured-working-man.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/the... Pervasive employee monitoring and feedback isn't costless. Some people will improve, others will get fired/quit find a new job, but there will be some who cannot take it at all. If losing a job wasn't so punishing economically and status-wise, it would take a lot of, but certainly not all, of the sting away.

devoply 10y ago
When you are treated like a robot, as in the case of pervasive monitoring, then merit has little wait. Merit is about how you contribute over-all to a corporation and its functioning. This sort of management, individual management ignores that... as they are running a factory where you are a machine. Not a person. Machines gets monitored this way. Corporations would look at a department as a profit center or a loss center and leave the decision making of who is performing well or not to your manager. Here you are a machine at the beck and call of Bozo, or Bezos as the case might be. Really this is just neo-taylorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management#Criticisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management#Criticis...
Spooky23 10y ago
Managers are cogs too. The way to work that kind of system is to identify and exploit the fears of the boss or his boss. I've seen this happen with employees under the thumb of micromanaging PMs in particular. They start spreading rumors, then undermine PM. My solution is to eliminate micro managers asap.
- dilemma 10y ago
  Interesting, never heard about this dynamic before. How does spreading rumors help them get out of being micromanaged? (sincere question)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - praptak 10y ago
    I don't believe that spreading rumors can magically transform a micromanaging boss. What it can do is keep them occupied, just as any other form of employee micro-sabotage. It also makes the workplace generally crappier.
    - intended 10y ago
      This stuff is so deeply frightening, to someone like me. I am color blind to a vast range of interpersonal interactions, the fact that people have a vocabulary/taxonomy of interactions which includes or can generate - "micro sabotage"... hints at a world too exhausting to imagine
      - arethuza 10y ago
        Have a read of this: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o... You probably won't thank me if you do read it - it changes the way you evaluate people...
        intended 10y ago
        Haha, I've read it, and It's great fun.
      - Bartweiss 10y ago
        For whatever it's worth, the amount of this in different workplaces seems to vary from "virtually none" to "run away screaming". At the best places, I assume this happens a bit, but it's pretty easy to ignore it completely and still do well by being a good employee. At the worst places, it's apparent even to someone unaware that something is up, because people will make comments that are totally nonsensical unless you're neck-deep in the politicking. It also shows when smart people make obviously awful decisions - they're probably getting something out of it other than the good of the company.
wyclif 10y ago
You bring up an important point: employee evaluation at big corps isn't that different than it was before the internet. It's evolved, but only slightly. The permanence of data should cause management to completely re-imagine and deploy feedback.
ex_amazon_sde 10y ago
A "little tough" for "those whose morale is easily damaged" sounds like an attempt to blame employees. Amazon is not as meritocratic as people imagine. People are often praised for building a shiny thing or stopping a fire. Rarely for preventing a fire, or a security issue, or doing the hard work it takes to keep an old system running. A lot can depend on being in the right team at the right time. On top of that, expectations can be arbitrarily high and are increased based on previous successful reviews. Essentially you end up competing against your previous self and your colleagues, but this is not discussed openly by management.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Ah, Goodhart's law. The conviction that measuring more produces more meritocracy, or even more accuracy, is a dangerous one. If you're not careful with what data you collect, you get exactly this - perverse incentives discouraging risk-taking and incident prevention in favor of success at limited, unnecessary tasks.
- YCode 10y ago
  > People are often praised for building a shiny thing or stopping a fire. Rarely for preventing a fire, or a security issue, or doing the hard work it takes to keep an old system running. A lot can depend on being in the right team at the right time. Seems like most organizations I've worked at. That and organizational volunteer work get you awards.
  - jonnathanson 10y ago
    Shiny things and organizational volunteer work seem to become incresingly important as companies grow in size, the volume of internal projects increases, and thus it becomes a lot harder to gain consistent internal visibility. So working on a "shiny" project becomes your best (if not only) shot at getting noticed. The truly Machiavellian will recognize this environment for what it is, and just pitch shiny new projects if none are immediately available -- the necessity of those projects usually being a secondary consideration. The problem often grows worse, not better, when you introduce concepts like top-down goal alignments and stack ranking. These can easily backfire by forcing savvy employees to scramble for maximum-impact projects and deprioritize all others. You end up with a handful of hero projects and a whole bunch of misfit toys that nobody wants to touch. I'm not sure any company has ever truly solved this problem at scale. Obviously some company cultures are better at it than others. (I've never worked at Amazon, so I can't speak honestly or credibly to its culture.)
77pt77 10y ago
> We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types who were on the straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor those who rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more creative later on." We'll keep on doing what we've been doing since the dawn of time: reward Machiavellian behavior. The guy that creates a controlled fire and puts it out will be praised. The guy that cleans the dead foliage to prevent future fires will be punished for being unproductive and a dead weight. Nothing will change. Edit: punctuation
- candiodari 10y ago
  Exactly. But you forget one: Any attempt at anything short of wildly positive feedback will be met with extremely aggressive reactions, because of the reaction from the organisation that will follow. Plenty of managers do that today of course.
  - 77pt77 10y ago
    > But you forget one Apart from that I forgot many more. Yes. The cult of optimism and positive thinking[1], because like someone else on this post implied, the way you think about things changes physical reality. At best it changes your perception which can be in your best interest or not. [1] http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/02/happiness-conspiracy-against-optimism-and-cult-positive-thinking http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/02/happiness-conspi...
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    People don't talk about this issue anywhere near enough. You can't just do internally ordered evaluations, because someone will eventually compare them to something else and harm everyone who got a harsh 'scale'. Hence the inability of lone professors or colleges to fight grade inflation; if your students are competing with inflated GPAs from another school (or an expectation that all GPAs are inflated), the incentive is entirely against you. I suppose this would be the upside of stack-rank if you did it right; a purely relative ranking system can't get poorly translated between groups. But of course, that also means it can't be used to properly distribute benefits between them.
ceejay 10y ago
I think people don't mind being judged / measured objectively. I think the problems / angst probably arise when you mix "managers" / subjectivity into the mix. I think objective measurement, that is truly useful, is hard to do in most cases.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kamaal 10y ago
>>We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types who were on the straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor those who rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more creative later on. The only problem is life is pretty much an accumulation of incremental experiences. Most people just can't wake up one day perform like a superstar at work for the same reason why a person can't just wake up and run a marathon without any practice. Like physical stamina, mental stamina too comes from a lot of practice done over years and "from their earliest years" performance matters. Plus rewards come to a lot of long time sloggers, because they've been around long and have been putting their heads down and doing a lot of work.

devoply 10y ago

When you are treated like a robot, as in the case of pervasive monitoring, then merit has little wait. Merit is about how you contribute over-all to a corporation and its functioning. This sort of management, individual management ignores that... as they are running a factory where you are a machine. Not a person. Machines gets monitored this way. Corporations would look at a department as a profit center or a loss center and leave the decision making of who is performing well or not to your manager. Here you are a machine at the beck and call of Bozo, or Bezos as the case might be. Really this is just neo-taylorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management#Criticisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management#Criticis...

Spooky23 10y ago

Managers are cogs too. The way to work that kind of system is to identify and exploit the fears of the boss or his boss. I've seen this happen with employees under the thumb of micromanaging PMs in particular. They start spreading rumors, then undermine PM. My solution is to eliminate micro managers asap.

dilemma 10y ago
Interesting, never heard about this dynamic before. How does spreading rumors help them get out of being micromanaged? (sincere question)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- praptak 10y ago
  I don't believe that spreading rumors can magically transform a micromanaging boss. What it can do is keep them occupied, just as any other form of employee micro-sabotage. It also makes the workplace generally crappier.
  - intended 10y ago
    This stuff is so deeply frightening, to someone like me. I am color blind to a vast range of interpersonal interactions, the fact that people have a vocabulary/taxonomy of interactions which includes or can generate - "micro sabotage"... hints at a world too exhausting to imagine
    - arethuza 10y ago
      Have a read of this: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o... You probably won't thank me if you do read it - it changes the way you evaluate people...
      - intended 10y ago
        Haha, I've read it, and It's great fun.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      For whatever it's worth, the amount of this in different workplaces seems to vary from "virtually none" to "run away screaming". At the best places, I assume this happens a bit, but it's pretty easy to ignore it completely and still do well by being a good employee. At the worst places, it's apparent even to someone unaware that something is up, because people will make comments that are totally nonsensical unless you're neck-deep in the politicking. It also shows when smart people make obviously awful decisions - they're probably getting something out of it other than the good of the company.

wyclif 10y ago

You bring up an important point: employee evaluation at big corps isn't that different than it was before the internet. It's evolved, but only slightly. The permanence of data should cause management to completely re-imagine and deploy feedback.

ex_amazon_sde 10y ago

A "little tough" for "those whose morale is easily damaged" sounds like an attempt to blame employees. Amazon is not as meritocratic as people imagine. People are often praised for building a shiny thing or stopping a fire. Rarely for preventing a fire, or a security issue, or doing the hard work it takes to keep an old system running. A lot can depend on being in the right team at the right time. On top of that, expectations can be arbitrarily high and are increased based on previous successful reviews. Essentially you end up competing against your previous self and your colleagues, but this is not discussed openly by management.

Bartweiss 10y ago
Ah, Goodhart's law. The conviction that measuring more produces more meritocracy, or even more accuracy, is a dangerous one. If you're not careful with what data you collect, you get exactly this - perverse incentives discouraging risk-taking and incident prevention in favor of success at limited, unnecessary tasks.
YCode 10y ago
> People are often praised for building a shiny thing or stopping a fire. Rarely for preventing a fire, or a security issue, or doing the hard work it takes to keep an old system running. A lot can depend on being in the right team at the right time. Seems like most organizations I've worked at. That and organizational volunteer work get you awards.
- jonnathanson 10y ago
  Shiny things and organizational volunteer work seem to become incresingly important as companies grow in size, the volume of internal projects increases, and thus it becomes a lot harder to gain consistent internal visibility. So working on a "shiny" project becomes your best (if not only) shot at getting noticed. The truly Machiavellian will recognize this environment for what it is, and just pitch shiny new projects if none are immediately available -- the necessity of those projects usually being a secondary consideration. The problem often grows worse, not better, when you introduce concepts like top-down goal alignments and stack ranking. These can easily backfire by forcing savvy employees to scramble for maximum-impact projects and deprioritize all others. You end up with a handful of hero projects and a whole bunch of misfit toys that nobody wants to touch. I'm not sure any company has ever truly solved this problem at scale. Obviously some company cultures are better at it than others. (I've never worked at Amazon, so I can't speak honestly or credibly to its culture.)

77pt77 10y ago

> We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types who were on the straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor those who rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more creative later on." We'll keep on doing what we've been doing since the dawn of time: reward Machiavellian behavior. The guy that creates a controlled fire and puts it out will be praised. The guy that cleans the dead foliage to prevent future fires will be punished for being unproductive and a dead weight. Nothing will change. Edit: punctuation

candiodari 10y ago
Exactly. But you forget one: Any attempt at anything short of wildly positive feedback will be met with extremely aggressive reactions, because of the reaction from the organisation that will follow. Plenty of managers do that today of course.
- 77pt77 10y ago
  > But you forget one Apart from that I forgot many more. Yes. The cult of optimism and positive thinking[1], because like someone else on this post implied, the way you think about things changes physical reality. At best it changes your perception which can be in your best interest or not. [1] http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/02/happiness-conspiracy-against-optimism-and-cult-positive-thinking http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/02/happiness-conspi...
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  People don't talk about this issue anywhere near enough. You can't just do internally ordered evaluations, because someone will eventually compare them to something else and harm everyone who got a harsh 'scale'. Hence the inability of lone professors or colleges to fight grade inflation; if your students are competing with inflated GPAs from another school (or an expectation that all GPAs are inflated), the incentive is entirely against you. I suppose this would be the upside of stack-rank if you did it right; a purely relative ranking system can't get poorly translated between groups. But of course, that also means it can't be used to properly distribute benefits between them.

ceejay 10y ago

I think people don't mind being judged / measured objectively. I think the problems / angst probably arise when you mix "managers" / subjectivity into the mix. I think objective measurement, that is truly useful, is hard to do in most cases.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

kamaal 10y ago

>>We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types who were on the straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor those who rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more creative later on. The only problem is life is pretty much an accumulation of incremental experiences. Most people just can't wake up one day perform like a superstar at work for the same reason why a person can't just wake up and run a marathon without any practice. Like physical stamina, mental stamina too comes from a lot of practice done over years and "from their earliest years" performance matters. Plus rewards come to a lot of long time sloggers, because they've been around long and have been putting their heads down and doing a lot of work.