13 ms·

If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job

• pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
  yeah, white men. you're all idiots.
• merpnderp 10y ago
  Seems like in IT the spread of different process systems is exactly this. To reduce each job to a set of functions that people with similar levels of training can do the job at the same level of output, interchangeably. So we're left with jobs that are 90% following inane process and 10% producing something useful. All to make sure if we quit, we can be replaced in a few days.
  • LanceH 10y ago
    Where do you sit? Let's go to lunch today.
  • colechristensen 10y ago
    Seems like if the tedious portion of the job reaches such a high proportion it's significant lack of automation.
  • wpietri 10y ago
    The folks at Toyota talk about two different kinds of process: controlling and supportive. Controlling is that sort of BS. And I had seen it so much early in my career that I thought that's all there was. Supportive process is bottom up, done to improve consistency and reliability. E.g., by my door I have checklists for going running and swimming, because I was tired of going out to exercise and realizing I had forgotten something. I say this because I think process can be amazingly helpful if it's done bottom up, if the workers are the ones who design and improve it. But that only happens if managers have another thing that Toyota talks a lot about: "respect for people" [1]. That's what I think is really missing in these metrics-driven, people-are-cogs schemes. [1] https://www.lean.org/womack/DisplayObject.cfm?o=755 https://www.lean.org/womack/DisplayObject.cfm?o=755
    • digi_owl 10y ago
      Another thing is that "workers in the decision loop" reeks of socialism. Toyota do not have that kind of response though, as being Japanese in origin the leadership have a bit of Giri left in their thinking. In some European nations after WW2 it was not uncommon to have enough worker representatives in the board room that they could affect a vote. These days its been stripped down to a token union man that has little to no chance of affecting the decisions.
      • jgmjgm 10y ago
        German corporations do quite well with workers represented on the boards by law. There are lots of ways to organize a capitalist system.
• sjg007 10y ago
  Agree but checklists have been shown to reduce error all around.
  • colechristensen 10y ago
    The target of the checklists is the problem. “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” The measure has to be concrete enough to not be manipulatable. For example, aircraft mechanical failures or hospital infections are very clear and obvious metrics. And besides outright lying and manipulation, the metrics speak for themselves and can't be corrupted. You can't, however, measure "education" or "intelligence". You can approximate it and the more you make depend on the results the worse the already bad metrics become.
    • jessriedel 10y ago
      > ... hospital infections are very clear and obvious metrics. Are you kidding? There are all sorts of ways for hospitals and doctors to manipulate this stuff, e.g., attract healthier patients (less compromised immune systems) or ones who are wealthier, younger, and more likely to follow instructions; give more prophylactic antibiotics; classify more patients as palliative http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-hospitals-may-be-manipulating-death-rates-new-study-suggests http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-hospitals-... ; slant cause-of-death classification when there is ambiguity.
      • jdmichal 10y ago
        I remember an article here about how hard it is to gather metrics on MSRA-related deaths precisely because they are often not mentioned in the cause-of-death reports. I think this was it: http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-uncounted-surveillance/ http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-uncou... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12443994#12445403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12443994#12445403
    • Fomite 10y ago
      I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist who specializes in hospital acquired infections. They are far from very clear and obvious.
• digi_owl 10y ago
  Its not a trend, it is how MBAs are trained to see the world. MBAs effectively look at any organization as if it is a pin factory.
• alphonsegaston 10y ago
  What people misunderstand about these metric-based systems in the US is that their purpose is not to reform systems or improve performance. It's to create a layer of interference that either channels control into a new managerial class or to wrest it back into the hands of higher-level administrator from whom it was somehow ceded. The purpose of business consultants is to make money for business consultants. Pushing for standardized testing regimes is to pursue political goals and profit (for-profit charters, low-quality online education, re-segregation of schools). It's the same in academia. The question is always, "cui bono?"
  • TheAdamAndChe 10y ago
    I'm fairly anti-capitalist, and even I can see this is a bit of a stretch. The way managers are taught is that you can't improve upon a process unless you know exactly what to improve. They look for something definite like metrics because a change in those can actually mean something and it's more definite than "they're doing good work." The drive to use metrics actually kind of revolutionized how we improve work. The problem now is that managers use it a bit too much and use the wrong metrics sometimes.
    • alphonsegaston 10y ago
      I don't disagree that in some contexts, metric-based management and reform can be well-intentioned/beneficial (many Japanese companies use these tools to good effect). But I don't think this true in the context of the modern US economy(why I qualified my statement as such). The political/economic situation is such that the efficacy of a given model is secondary to the viability of abstractions that make reference to it. How it performs in the meta-context of "salesmanship," re-inforcing acceptable political narratives, and social media, supercede its actual utility. The implosive (and false) model of finance, where the derivative of some object or system possesses more value than the thing which it references, has pervaded every aspect of our economy and culture.
    • naravara 10y ago
      There is a more subtle wrinkle to it. One of the reasons managerial culture in the US leans so heavily on 'objective' metrics is because we have a history of racial discrimination that rewards people from certain demographic backgrounds while punishing others. Charitably, metrics are supposed to be a way to introduce objectivity and minimize implicit/unacknowledged biases in decision making, especially where performance is concerned. Even less charitably, it gives companies and managers cover for discriminatory practices by giving them objective standards to point at as justification for their decisions. We'd all probably be much more comfortable with a less metric dependent world if we didn't also have the nagging feeling that it would lead to the same-old types of people scratching each others' backs.
• wpietri 10y ago
  > There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. That's a great way of summing up what I've heard called "managerialism". There's a theory behind, e.g., the MBA that a competent manager can manage anything. That what one manages makes no difference as long as you're a real manager. One of the corollaries of that theory is that all one has to do is find the right short-term metrics and make them go up and to the right. I don't think this theory makes much sense when you examine it. But it's excellent at justifying a caste system, one where all workers are controlled by wise managers, and where there's a stable hierarchy of executives above that. I note that the hierarchy established is basically equivalent to those of feudalism. It also has the handy property of justifying high compensation for managers and executives; since workers are cogs and higher-ups do the important thinking, all gains should flow upward. There are other ways of organizing things, of course. But this has become such the default that people have a hard time even imagining alternatives.
  • nickpinkston 10y ago
    I tend to find people with your view have never been an executive managing the managers, or even a manager. When you are (like myself) then you see that good managers / leadership (including tech team leads, etc.) really do make a massive difference in performance with the same people. Things like metrics, values, and re-orgs might seem like Dilbert-esque corporate speak (a view I used to share), but they're incredibly important once you're trying to get a bunch of people to do something with excellence and speed.
    • pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
      I tend to find people with your view have never been a cog, or even a worker. When you are (like myself) then you see that good managers / leadership (including tech team leads, etc.) really do nothing at all, and only worry about making a massive difference in performance with the executive managers. Things like metrics, values, and re-orgs might seem like Dilbert-esque corporate speak (a view I used to share), but they're incredibly important once you're trying to believe you're getting a bunch of people to do something with excellence and speed. you're all idiots.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• nickbauman 10y ago
  Bottom line: Taylorism only works well when applied to work that can be throughly quantified into time and motion studies. When you try to apply it to disciplines that require reflection and analysis or are by definition speculative in nature (can't think of anything more speculative than research or learning new things about the world that is academia), it's a catastrophe. Video: The surprising truth about what motivates us https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
• lr4444lr 10y ago
  There's another aspect you should also mention embedded in the final clause which is often glossed over in judging the merits of education: work quality should be measured in performance of the actor, not in the results of the acted upon. High quality pedagogy and quality scholarship are not necessarily correlated with who shows up to class or purchases books and journals. It's a separate part of the pipeline with different incentives.
• Chaebixi 10y ago
  > There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance And not just in academia. Technology has allowed the collection of metrics and data to a degree unheard of previously, and it takes wisdom and restraint to know when they do more harm than good. Unfortunately, I think the idea of collecting metrics and doing data-driven evaluation of people's performance has being one of those "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" things. It gets done unthinkingly because it's safe "conventional wisdom" regardless if it's the right call or not.
• stinkytaco 10y ago
  For the sake of discussion, do you feel measurement is a way of reducing politics and discrimination, not just creating cogs? So building to that argument: 1. Right now academia is both absurdly political and largely government funded. 2. Since you can't pay people tax money to do nothing, you need managers. 3. Academics in management roles also have their own reputations to defend or their own biases. 4. That leaves academia open for political manipulation and bias. This could have the result of limiting innovation (publish what you need to get tenure) or even limiting jobs for underrepresented groups (women in science and engineering, for example). I don't have the answer here, but it does occur to me that objective measures can be a good thing for many people.
• neuromantik8086 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure this was how Bell Labs operated. iirc, the only metric the management there expected was a written report at the end of the year detailing what you'd worked on over the course of an entire year.
• Chathamization 10y ago
  But that whole strategy is based on hiring "good people," and by what metric do you determine that? It seems that it's just pushing the measurements to another location, one that's less visible and transparent (the hiring process). Or maybe you don't think that there should be a firm set of metrics at all, but having metrics that are too loose ends up meaning the decisions tend to be arbitrary and based on the whims of whoever is currently making the decisions. I think most managers would enjoy hiring the best people and then having greatness occur. But the reason these things are in place is because you're not always going to be hiring the best people (or someone might be great in some categories, but terrible in others you didn't know). Saying "hire good people" isn't much of a solution.
  • technotony 10y ago
    There doesn't need to be a metric for that, it's the manager's job to use their judgement to assess that by building a relationship with the person, seeing how well they communicate their ideas (a sign someone understands things), that they finish what they said they would do etc etc.
    • nitwit005 10y ago
      That just makes the problem circular. How do you find these managers that are good at judging people? Also, you're clearly laying out metrics: communication ability and timeliness. They're just somewhat generic metrics.
      • darkmighty 10y ago
        It's not exactly circular, since there are many less managers than low level workers, and progressively less people as you go higher. Presumably the people at the top were once successful managers or successful workers. Basically, this promotes a system where metrics are given by how your peers and managers feel about you. Perhaps while our metrics aren't perfectly capable of predicting how good a worker will turn out or judging it's progress, we shouldn't rely too much on them in place of peer judgement. But indeed let's not fool ourselves that coworker judgement is perfect. It needlessly introduces a whole body of biases, unnecessary politics, and social engineering that can be as bad if not worse than a metric-only system, which at least are objective.
• compuder 10y ago
  >no amount of rules or metrics can turn a bad academic into a good one... I believe you've mistaken these systems as being for reform purposes, rather than existing as a way to weed out bad actors who want to enjoy the substantial benefits of tenure or a large salary without doing the work which justifies them. When you reject metrics, the insidious thing is that you lack tools to catch bad actors who, due to oft-present subjectives like better than average lying ability, being liked by their team despite being largely ineffective, and exploitation of people's desire to not create conflict, the organization will never hear about them until long after the damage is done, they've made off like bandits, and you can no longer fix what they've done, since you didn't know when it happened. Metrics cut through these specific subjectives and are therefore effectively necessary. You can be a dirty academic, but published paper number metrics mean fakers now need to be, minimum, good enough to fake doing the job of a real academic well enough to publish, which means at least theoretically they could reform. Code reviews, pull requests, and similar programming measures do the same, leaving a clear and auditable point at which failure can be caught and later reversed. They further make it necessary to be good enough at programming to not only survive the interview, but also fake a long-term progression of source code which means to cheat you at least need to know how to program well enough to get away with it, which is within spitting distance of actually coding something useful anyways. Admittedly, I don't think metrics create good incentives a lot of the time, but if you're thinking about the very long term and want to prevent your company's bottom from solely being a feudally structured nepotism contest, metrics are the only way to do so.
• dkarapetyan 10y ago
  In theory this is always the right thing to do no matter what industry you are in. Do you want to build a good software organization then hire smart people and get out of their way but in practice it is basically impossible. First to know what smart looks like you have to be smart yourself before you can hire more smart people. Second you have to be really cognizant to not hire more people like yourself because not all smart looks the same way. Third whatever position you're hiring for you need to understand well enough to recognize the same kind of skill in others but this kinda conflicts with the second point because expertise always introduces bias. Fourth you have to be ruthless when it comes to firing people because every so often you will make a mistake and hire a bozo that looked smart and people really don't like firing people. Basically all the cards are stacked against you and what I've observed in most software organizations is that you'll be lucky if you manage to make 10% of your workforce satisfy the "smart" metric.
• CountSessine 10y ago
  We have to calm down with the metrics, accreditations and regulations, and accept that some people are better than others at certain things, hire the right people and trust them to do a good job. Honest question - how do we know who is better at what if not by some measure/metric? How do we know who the right people are? Is it just a matter of 'expert opinion'? And if so, how do we prevent cliques and nepotism?
  • solidsnack9000 10y ago
    We know who is better the same way we know how to set the metric. There is no escaping "values" :) Metrics do complicate cliques and nepotism; but they can also be used to reinforce them. Rarely is performance as clear cut as speed in a race. Metrics that boil down to approval from coworkers -- how helpful was this person? how professional (1-5) was their communication? -- often do more to conceal bias than prevent it.
• WalterBright 10y ago
  The same thing goes on with government. Every time something goes wrong, there's a call for more regulation and more oversight by the government, often far out of proportion to what actually went wrong. People believe that sufficient regulation of minutia leads to utopia.
• gozur88 10y ago
  >There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. Heh. My company calls that "agile".
• toss1 10y ago
  YES, and here you have the MBA phenomenon striking again. Reducing things to over-simplified metrics, thereby ruining it all, or betting the entire economy on a theory that "manufacturing is low value and should be offshored to the lowest possible cost provider". In this case, driving down the effectiveness of teaching by adding metrics.