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When looking at an employee, measure their output.. not their input. I'm honestly not concerned about the amount of hours put in... it could be 4 hours hard wo

by Daviey 10y ago

When looking at an employee, measure their output.. not their input. I'm honestly not concerned about the amount of hours put in... it could be 4 hours hard work.. but if they deliver on targets, then i'm happy. I also want to know that they are obtainable during work hours, attentive in meetings and are available for brief interaction out-of-hours if needed. I'm less keen to pay people to keep the seats warm, and moving the mouse just enough to stop the screensaver kicking-in. I'm a non-smoker, but I do not mind people having smoking breaks... but some people get really upset by this. If we are doing physical or menial jobs, then productivity is reduced.. but for intellectual jobs, we should simply measure output. (Oh, and i guess /YOU/ are probably being paid by someone to read this comment.. instead of working) Worth reading: http://mentalfloss.com/article/74710/how-much-time-do-we-actually-spend-working-work http://mentalfloss.com/article/74710/how-much-time-do-we-act...

sigi45 10y ago
Yada yada. Heart that so many times and it is crap. Only because i work better than some avg and my output satisfies you, you pay me for working 8 hours and not for something else. I'm going home after 8 hours regardless if i'm done with a task i thought i will finish, why should i leave/slack after 4 hours for a task someone thought it would take 8 hours?
- bkkssnn 10y ago
  You are far above average if you can be in "the zone" for 8h a day. The rest of us will just have to "slack" while you do the hard work.
- zzalpha 10y ago
  you pay me for working 8 hours and not for something else. Actually, if you're a salaried employee and not being paid hourly, that's objectively false. A salaried employee is paid to ... Well, it's up to the employment contract to decide. Personally, if I hire someone on salary I expect them to estimate level of effort honestly to the best of their ability and complete work at a rate I consider acceptable. If I lowball that expectation that's really my problem. And the reality is most employees would be dissatisfied with that situation, because most people want to do meaningful and challenging work. So if someone completes their assignments early and ends up filling their time with side projects, it's because I've failed to give them work that challenges them. The only thing I expect from the employee is that they tell me when they're done so I know what's going on and can decide what I want to do about it (and that should mean working with them to give them more satisfying work so they don't leave out of boredom).
- WrtCdEvrydy 10y ago
  > I'm going home after 8 hours Because you don't have competent technical management. My team comes and goes as they see fit, we have the highest profitability margins of any of our departments so noone in HR bothers to tell me anything. Edit: However, with that comes 3AM phone calls where I expect them to act like adults and do what needs to be done, so I'm not perfect by any means.
knightofmars 10y ago
I don't know you but thank you for treating your employees as professionals by setting expectations and letting them deliver however they see fit. I've worked at places where they "treat everyone like a hammer" so to speak and if you are delivering but you're doing it like a screwdriver you're "not a team player". Simple way to describe it is a bizarre emphasis on culture fit over productivity.
- zzalpha 10y ago
  So long as, in being a screwdriver, you don't piss off and alienate all the other hammers. Speaking for myself, I'm done with primadonna developers who think they can shut the door and code alone while running roughshod over their colleagues, then after a couple of years take off and leave behind their mess for others to sort out. Development is a team sport. If you don't buy into that you won't be working at my company.
  - xylo 10y ago
    True but what if there's skill gap between team members.
    - 9point6 10y ago
      The employer should endeavour to close those gaps via training or even just advocating things like more pairing. It shouldn't be acceptable for a developer to silo themselves off from the rest of their team (except maybe a non-artificially-short-deadline or start-up type environment).
    - zzalpha 10y ago
      The skilled devs should be coaching the less skilled devs, including pairing on work, code reviews, etc, in order to spread the skills around. Meanwhile, management should provide opportunities for training and so forth to develop their talent.
      - infinite8s 10y ago
DougN7 10y ago
How do you measure what they should be getting done objectively? If you think a job should be done in a week and it's not, it seems they should then be fired because they're not "getting the job done".
- mason55 10y ago
  We have that discussion a lot. How do you communicate that in a constructive way? How do you provide ongoing feedback around it?
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
I think it odd that some companies that say they practice Agile/Scrum still track hours. If the each team member commits to a certain amount of work, it doesn't matter if they put in 60 hours or 16 hours doing it. Of course, there's meetings and fires, and so the dev should be available for that, but, in all, who cares about the number of hours?
- zzalpha 10y ago
  If the each team member commits to a certain amount of work, If you're committed to Agile, I don't understand why you're talking about individual commitments at all. The team commits to sprint scope. The team succeeds or fails in meeting that commitment as a group. Beyond that the team should be free to figure out how the commitment is met. We have one team that works 10:30 to 6:30. Another that works more traditional 9-5 hours. One is largely remote. Another is co-located. They all produce high quality work at a solid, and most importantly consistent, rate. If we tried to force some work pattern on them, I doubt they'd be as successful.
- bitexploder 10y ago
  Hours let you develop much better estimation models. Agile/Scrum isn't a silver bullet and it is valuable information for any development shop. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-scheduling https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...
- doublescoop 10y ago
  > certain amount of work This is the crux. How does the business decide what's a reasonable amount of work to get done in a sprint? If the dev in the OP has time to work on his own stuff, why shouldn't the business ask for a bigger commitment in the next sprint?
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    They can; that's why they track a team's velocity.
gdulli 10y ago
> it could be 4 hours hard work.. "Targets" are a pretty low end way to think of such an open ended job. You can think of your job as "They asked me to do X and I'm going to do X and after that the rest of my 40 hours don't matter." Or, "I'm going to do as much as I possibly can in 40 hours." From the start of my career I always thought of it as the latter. I don't understand the mindset of the former in a professional job. Maximize your value to your employer or you'll be the last one to get promoted and the first one to get laid off. There's always a backlog of defined tasks and there's always open-ended opportunity to make progress in ways you can think up yourself. Do you want to sit around waiting to be told what to do or engineer your own path?
- theparanoid 10y ago
  Most employees aren't capable of 40hrs/week of intellectual output.
  - gdulli 10y ago
    There might be some technical accuracy to that but it's a lame and self-defeating thing to rest on as the basis for your career strategy. I'm sitting here at work typing this reply to you. It's not about using every hour, it's about fundamentally seeing your output as malleable instead of fixed based on your manager's "targets" and seeing yourself as responsible for your level production. Most of my time (and much of my team's time) is spent on projects that were my idea. It wasn't that way at the start of my career but I've always works towards taking control.
    - metaphorm 10y ago
      what you just said is completely orthogonal to the comment you're replying to. self-directed vs. manager-directed is a separate concern from whether or not a programmer can be expected to put in 40 hours of high focus, high concentration technical work per week. in my experience getting 20-30 high focus hours in a week is a very good week. the rest of the time has to be used for things that are much less focused. like arguing about this shit on hacker news, for example. it's not even an either/or scenario. you need to do both. just like when breathing you have to both inhale and exhale.
jaredklewis 10y ago
How do you measure output and what do you compare it to? Measuring output sounds like an ideal way to evaluate employees, but also sounds pretty challenging in and of itself. To be clear, identifying a poor engineer seems simple enough. But how do you tell the difference between a bright engineer working on a hard problem and a bright engineer being lazy? How long a task "should" take is often totally unknown. After all, if a programming task is so routine and well defined that it can be accurately estimated, that is probably good indication that this task can be automated, so we shouldn't be regularly doing such a task.
nunez 10y ago
well if OP didn't have issues with his performance, then they wouldn't have asked the question. OP's running a dev team in a small startup, so my expectation would be "no free time during work until we stabilize"
lamontcg 10y ago
Yeah, most employees read reddit or HN in between doing work tasks in order to reset their minds a bit. If the employee is doing external coding instead of surfing reddit on their 'mental floss' time, then that's probably a good thing and its making them a better programmer. There's issues of course if they're making competing products, or using company proprietary IP, or making money on the side. But this may come down to the fact that the biggest issue is that you've got an open office plan, where all your employees are snooping on each other. And if this employee was doing this side-coding behind closed doors (or at home) that nobody would care as long as they were hitting their targets. And with that I'm off to grab some coffee and get back to work...
5555624 10y ago
>I'm a non-smoker, but I do not mind people having smoking breaks... but some people get really upset by this. I was in a group where the non-smokers "saved" their smoke breaks and we all went to breakfast on Friday mornings. We'd take about a 45-60 minute break and the smokers were not allowed to come.

by Daviey 10y ago

sigi45 10y ago

Yada yada. Heart that so many times and it is crap. Only because i work better than some avg and my output satisfies you, you pay me for working 8 hours and not for something else. I'm going home after 8 hours regardless if i'm done with a task i thought i will finish, why should i leave/slack after 4 hours for a task someone thought it would take 8 hours?

bkkssnn 10y ago
You are far above average if you can be in "the zone" for 8h a day. The rest of us will just have to "slack" while you do the hard work.
zzalpha 10y ago
you pay me for working 8 hours and not for something else. Actually, if you're a salaried employee and not being paid hourly, that's objectively false. A salaried employee is paid to ... Well, it's up to the employment contract to decide. Personally, if I hire someone on salary I expect them to estimate level of effort honestly to the best of their ability and complete work at a rate I consider acceptable. If I lowball that expectation that's really my problem. And the reality is most employees would be dissatisfied with that situation, because most people want to do meaningful and challenging work. So if someone completes their assignments early and ends up filling their time with side projects, it's because I've failed to give them work that challenges them. The only thing I expect from the employee is that they tell me when they're done so I know what's going on and can decide what I want to do about it (and that should mean working with them to give them more satisfying work so they don't leave out of boredom).
WrtCdEvrydy 10y ago
> I'm going home after 8 hours Because you don't have competent technical management. My team comes and goes as they see fit, we have the highest profitability margins of any of our departments so noone in HR bothers to tell me anything. Edit: However, with that comes 3AM phone calls where I expect them to act like adults and do what needs to be done, so I'm not perfect by any means.

knightofmars 10y ago

I don't know you but thank you for treating your employees as professionals by setting expectations and letting them deliver however they see fit. I've worked at places where they "treat everyone like a hammer" so to speak and if you are delivering but you're doing it like a screwdriver you're "not a team player". Simple way to describe it is a bizarre emphasis on culture fit over productivity.

zzalpha 10y ago
So long as, in being a screwdriver, you don't piss off and alienate all the other hammers. Speaking for myself, I'm done with primadonna developers who think they can shut the door and code alone while running roughshod over their colleagues, then after a couple of years take off and leave behind their mess for others to sort out. Development is a team sport. If you don't buy into that you won't be working at my company.
- xylo 10y ago
  True but what if there's skill gap between team members.
  - 9point6 10y ago
    The employer should endeavour to close those gaps via training or even just advocating things like more pairing. It shouldn't be acceptable for a developer to silo themselves off from the rest of their team (except maybe a non-artificially-short-deadline or start-up type environment).
  - zzalpha 10y ago
    The skilled devs should be coaching the less skilled devs, including pairing on work, code reviews, etc, in order to spread the skills around. Meanwhile, management should provide opportunities for training and so forth to develop their talent.
    - infinite8s 10y ago

DougN7 10y ago

How do you measure what they should be getting done objectively? If you think a job should be done in a week and it's not, it seems they should then be fired because they're not "getting the job done".

mason55 10y ago
We have that discussion a lot. How do you communicate that in a constructive way? How do you provide ongoing feedback around it?

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

I think it odd that some companies that say they practice Agile/Scrum still track hours. If the each team member commits to a certain amount of work, it doesn't matter if they put in 60 hours or 16 hours doing it. Of course, there's meetings and fires, and so the dev should be available for that, but, in all, who cares about the number of hours?

zzalpha 10y ago
If the each team member commits to a certain amount of work, If you're committed to Agile, I don't understand why you're talking about individual commitments at all. The team commits to sprint scope. The team succeeds or fails in meeting that commitment as a group. Beyond that the team should be free to figure out how the commitment is met. We have one team that works 10:30 to 6:30. Another that works more traditional 9-5 hours. One is largely remote. Another is co-located. They all produce high quality work at a solid, and most importantly consistent, rate. If we tried to force some work pattern on them, I doubt they'd be as successful.
bitexploder 10y ago
Hours let you develop much better estimation models. Agile/Scrum isn't a silver bullet and it is valuable information for any development shop. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-scheduling https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...
doublescoop 10y ago
> certain amount of work This is the crux. How does the business decide what's a reasonable amount of work to get done in a sprint? If the dev in the OP has time to work on his own stuff, why shouldn't the business ask for a bigger commitment in the next sprint?
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  They can; that's why they track a team's velocity.

gdulli 10y ago

> it could be 4 hours hard work.. "Targets" are a pretty low end way to think of such an open ended job. You can think of your job as "They asked me to do X and I'm going to do X and after that the rest of my 40 hours don't matter." Or, "I'm going to do as much as I possibly can in 40 hours." From the start of my career I always thought of it as the latter. I don't understand the mindset of the former in a professional job. Maximize your value to your employer or you'll be the last one to get promoted and the first one to get laid off. There's always a backlog of defined tasks and there's always open-ended opportunity to make progress in ways you can think up yourself. Do you want to sit around waiting to be told what to do or engineer your own path?

theparanoid 10y ago
Most employees aren't capable of 40hrs/week of intellectual output.
- gdulli 10y ago
  There might be some technical accuracy to that but it's a lame and self-defeating thing to rest on as the basis for your career strategy. I'm sitting here at work typing this reply to you. It's not about using every hour, it's about fundamentally seeing your output as malleable instead of fixed based on your manager's "targets" and seeing yourself as responsible for your level production. Most of my time (and much of my team's time) is spent on projects that were my idea. It wasn't that way at the start of my career but I've always works towards taking control.
  - metaphorm 10y ago
    what you just said is completely orthogonal to the comment you're replying to. self-directed vs. manager-directed is a separate concern from whether or not a programmer can be expected to put in 40 hours of high focus, high concentration technical work per week. in my experience getting 20-30 high focus hours in a week is a very good week. the rest of the time has to be used for things that are much less focused. like arguing about this shit on hacker news, for example. it's not even an either/or scenario. you need to do both. just like when breathing you have to both inhale and exhale.

jaredklewis 10y ago

How do you measure output and what do you compare it to? Measuring output sounds like an ideal way to evaluate employees, but also sounds pretty challenging in and of itself. To be clear, identifying a poor engineer seems simple enough. But how do you tell the difference between a bright engineer working on a hard problem and a bright engineer being lazy? How long a task "should" take is often totally unknown. After all, if a programming task is so routine and well defined that it can be accurately estimated, that is probably good indication that this task can be automated, so we shouldn't be regularly doing such a task.

nunez 10y ago

well if OP didn't have issues with his performance, then they wouldn't have asked the question. OP's running a dev team in a small startup, so my expectation would be "no free time during work until we stabilize"

lamontcg 10y ago

Yeah, most employees read reddit or HN in between doing work tasks in order to reset their minds a bit. If the employee is doing external coding instead of surfing reddit on their 'mental floss' time, then that's probably a good thing and its making them a better programmer. There's issues of course if they're making competing products, or using company proprietary IP, or making money on the side. But this may come down to the fact that the biggest issue is that you've got an open office plan, where all your employees are snooping on each other. And if this employee was doing this side-coding behind closed doors (or at home) that nobody would care as long as they were hitting their targets. And with that I'm off to grab some coffee and get back to work...

5555624 10y ago

>I'm a non-smoker, but I do not mind people having smoking breaks... but some people get really upset by this. I was in a group where the non-smokers "saved" their smoke breaks and we all went to breakfast on Friday mornings. We'd take about a 45-60 minute break and the smokers were not allowed to come.