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Microsoft's Creepy New 'Productivity Score' Gamifies Workplace Surveillance

519 points by ourmandave 6y ago

senojretep356 6y ago
Orwellian
tjpnz 6y ago
>These metrics include how often workers turn their cameras on during virtual meetings, how frequently they send emails (and how many contain @ mentions), whether they regularly contribute to shared documents or group chats, and the number of days they used Microsoft’s tools such as Word, Excel, Skype, Outlook, or Teams in the last month That sounds like a nightmarish place to work.
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  > how frequently they send emails Nice, I guess instead of talking to the person next to me and sorting something out in 2 minutes, we can use email, and do it in 30. Also, let's see everyone just adding: 'oh, thanks' or whatever to group chats, just to increase the message count
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - messo 6y ago
    Life replicates art: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)
  - donmcronald 6y ago
    +1 @FalconSensei Want to get on Teams and collaborate to fix the spelling mistakes I accidentally-on-purpose left in all those Office docs? @friend1 @friend2 @friend3 Don't forget beers on Friday. Lol. This is so stupid. You'll end up with 2 types of employees; those that work and those that work to game the metrics. My mother's seen it first hand at a government job. Shared work queues and measuring productivity via naïve metrics is an ideal work environment for lazy people that do poor quality work. Why spend 30 minutes on a task when you can do a terrible job of it in 5 minutes and get the same score?
    - speeder 6y ago
      My wife used to work at IBM. She was fired for low performance... Thing is, in her department she was the only employee that took difficult cases and found the solution, and left the easy ones to her coworkers, her boss didn't want to fire her, but had to because the metrics said she had to go because a low total amount of cases... Last she talked with her former coworkers, now they are struggling because the hard cases keep piling up endlessy and nobody knows how to do many of them, because they fired her without warning so she couldn't even teach others how to do what she did. EDIT: oh yeah, remembered that IBM wasn't subtle about how much they needed her either, since she was the only one that could do what she did, when she worked at IBM I had lovely christmas and new year parties with her laptop on the table, because IBM back then threatened to fire her on the spot if she didn't work remotely on some important clients during those times, then her actual firing came some a short time later anyway during a seasonal lull of work.
      - uCantCauseUCant 6y ago
        If we compare cooperations to intelligent beings, run by software written in processes and performed by humans, could we compare such destructive metrics to dementia?
      - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
        This is why metrics should all be taken with a grain of salt and be subject to the opinion of ones manager. Nepotism at level certainly exists, but a good manager will always come to bat for you. Even if it sticks their neck out. That is why upper level bourgeoisie management that has no f'ing clue about the bottom rungs shouldnt touch what their not ready to unravel.
      - mgkimsal 6y ago
        So frustrating to read that. Could no one even look at 'type' of cases? Tickets in a ticketing system typically have some sort of severity level associated. Taking 3 'critical' issues should be treated as at least important as taking 30 'low priority' issues.
      - prepend 6y ago
  - test1235 6y ago
    "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
    - FeepingCreature 6y ago
      What if it's a bad measure to begin with, ie. anticorrelated with quality? Does it become (technically) better by being gamed?
      - ptx 6y ago
        Isn't it essentially a good measure then, just accidentally flipped around? Just flip it around and it's good. A truly bad measure would be something like measuring the volume of coffee in my cup to determine the health of the economy. If I make up fake numbers, or pour some coffee out to change the measurements, that doesn't make my measurements any more insightful in regard to the economy.
  - jmnicolas 6y ago
    oh, thanks!
  - krageon 6y ago
    In what universe do you currently talk to the person next to you? In an office job that would be horrifically irresponsible. I agree with your broader point, this is just a poorly chosen example.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      In an office with only two people, talking to the person next to you is no different from talking to your spouse.
    - jeromenerf 6y ago
      "Currently" being emphasized I guess you are thinking about COVID and social distanciation? Nonetheless, it’s quite common to read comments about talk in the office as a focus annoyance, flow interruption, etc. I guess any form of notification is.
      - FalconSensei 6y ago
        > I guess any form of notification is Yeah, this is why I mute notifications. Some people use 'send' as a period. So instead of 1 notification for whatever they need to say, you got 10
    - EdwardDiego 6y ago
      In New Zealand ;)
    - joppy 6y ago
      In Australia or New Zealand, for example.
  - tester34 6y ago
    >Nice, I guess instead of talking to the person next to me and sorting something out in 2 minutes, we can use email, and do it in 30. I do agree and disagree. Sometimes it's very handy to just talk about stuff quickly, but for me, who unfortunely has a lot of context switching I love having stuff written in email, because I can always go back to it when I forget or when I need to reanalyze it
    - FalconSensei 6y ago
      I see your point and I agree. I hated being constantly interrupted on my previous job, and I got them to stop doing that and only interrupt me when something really needed immediate attention. But the thing is: communicate in the way makes sense for the situation/environment. Not by forcing people to send everything in emails, and even, sending way more emails than necessary
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >Nice, I guess instead of talking to the person next to me and sorting something out in 2 minutes, we can use email, and do it in 30. Well, talking to the person next to you will disrupt their focus, and they might take hours to get into whatever they were doing (if they were programming / in the zone) at the time. So, yeah, better do it in 30 minutes.
    - MauranKilom 6y ago
      That requires several context switches on both ends. I'd rather have my focus interrupted once than having to either draw out an email conversation over several days or mentally switch to it every few minutes.
  - benhurmarcel 6y ago
    If your manager gives importance to this, just send a hundred emails to yourself at the end of the month to pad your numbers. Similarly, you can activate your webcam with a black tape on it, add/remove some spaces at the end of lines on shared documents…
    - prepend 6y ago
      You’re describing the consumer layer of Microsoft Office products that they sell to individual who work in enterprise Office environments.
  - dkdbejwi383 6y ago
    I turned off email notifications and check it only in the morning, or if I am specifically waiting on something like an access code. Oftentimes, something "urgent" that was sent at 13:30 ends up with a "never mind, I found it" response at 15:00 so I can just delete both emails.
  - mgkimsal 6y ago
    Opposite anecdote - worked at a place where I was ... 6 feet from the main sysadmin guy. I would routinely email him, both as a bit of CYA, but also because his schedule didn't jive with mine. Owner would come out sometimes and get irate that we were emailing vs "just talk to each other - you're sitting right here!". But... I didn't want to interrupt the other guy. In fact, I got better results by emailing - more details, could follow up as needed, and he would respond with 'done' so there was an actual log of the interactions. When I'd just lean over and interrupt him, everything was slower and worse. The '2 minute' things rarely were 2 minutes, and would take away time from what he was doing. If we met in the lunchroom... yeah, I might say "hey, I'm going to need X"... and he'd say "email the details".
    - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
      If that guy is anything like me, he probably treats emails as tasks. Each email is something that needs to get done. Now I may be doing something else so I need to prioritize that over your thing right now. Overall I think that's why it worked out so well for you guys.
    - m463 6y ago
      #8 of: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
    - prepend 6y ago
      It’s also hard to cut and paste out of in person talking.
    - FalconSensei 6y ago
      I see your point and I agree with that, as long as it's not a metric, but the way you chose to communicate because it was best for the situation. I've been on both sides of both situations (in person better, online better). But what I always did was: ok, feel free to interrupt me if something urgent comes up, otherwise, send me a slack with the full details and I'll answer later. As mentioned in other responses to this post, having the number of emails/slack messages as a target doesn't help make the work environment better (in both 'more pleasant' and 'more productive' ways)
- scoot_718 6y ago
  Sounds like 10 minutes to setup some automation to win big bucks.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    I need like, a hardware version of auto-hotkey
    - csa 6y ago
      I imagine the software version will work just fine.
- sneak 6y ago
  Most places that demand staff live in Office and Outlook are. Nobody is being forced to take these jobs; I think it's great that Microsoft is making MS shops into employee hellscapes.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    There aren't that many jobs where white-collar workers aren't forced to use Office and Outlook, and that's not just because of lock-in, but because there's literally no other alternative that doesn't suck badly. And no, Google office suite doesn't count; it barely matured out of toy stage recently. MS tools have also huge, compounding advantages for larger companies who go all-in - they interoperate deeply. UX-wise, it's all quite not bad, and I could even bear it being proprietary; I just wish they didn't put all that telemetry crap into it - MS is ruining both their OS and their office suites by doing that.
    - geitir 6y ago
      You could pay for 365 yourself
    - sneak 6y ago
      Any business that may potentially compete with Microsoft (or Google) would be pretty foolish to use their non-e2e cloud services to go about doing so. We've seen how that ends for Amazon sharecroppers. I'm also not 100% sure about your main claim regarding white collar jobs. There may be a majority of positions that use the MS ecosystem, but there are still very very many that don't, even if they are marketshare-wise only 10%. Really, I think it's mostly just Excel, and maybe Sharepoint. You're absolutely right that there is no great Excel competitor.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Yeah, I meant primarily Excel and Sharepoint, and maybe MS Project (though that has commercial alternatives). But also that once a company commits to MS ecosystem - including Sharepoint, Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and the whole Office suite - all that software suddenly gains a lot of additional functionality thanks to deep interoperability.
- mikro2nd 6y ago
  while [ true ] do; mail -s"Quick Reminder" `cat userlist` <<EOF `fortune -o` EOF sleep 10 done Job done, leave me to sleep. (Syntax likely off - I'm sh-rusty!)
  - jmnicolas 6y ago
    Out of curiosity what does the fortune command do? DuckDuckGo failed me here and I don't want the trouble to use "G word".
    - dagw 6y ago
      It displays a 'funny' random quote or login message.
    - thih9 6y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix)
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Pulls a random, and usually but not always funny, quote from a list it comes with. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix). Most commonly seen as part of login messages, as many Unix and Linux systems come or are configured to pipe a fortune message along with some other fixed text.
      - thesuperbigfrog 6y ago
        Note that you can also create custom fortune messages: https://askubuntu.com/questions/36523/creating-a-fortunes-file https://askubuntu.com/questions/36523/creating-a-fortunes-fi... I have actually used fortune similar to the above script to randomly select inspirational messages as part of a weekly church newsletter.
    - deleted 6y ago
- moksly 6y ago
  I’m more wondering where it would be. I work in the public sector, so we almost literally employ people from every field imaginable aside from maybe academic research, and aside from the camera thing, I can’t think of a single one of those metrics that’s positive. Maybe Denmark is just different, but even places like finances that still use a lot of excel, they also use dedicated stat tools, we use one called Targit, but PowerBI or whatever Microsoft’s version is called these days would be similar. Even people who do a lot of writing, like our communications staff, would only use word for drafts and maybe spell checking (if at all) before they move their writings into their specialised systems. This is not to say that we don’t use a lot of office, we do, but it’s almost never a primary tool aside from collaborating, and while logging more camera hours may be desirable (for us anyway) sending a lot of emails isn’t necessarily a good thing, mostly it wouldn’t be. On the flip side, and now that I’ve talked myself into it, I actually do know of managers who would value this sort of logging, shit managers but managers, so maybe Microsoft is just producing what their clients want? Anyway, if that’s the case, they probably shouldn’t add support for bad management practices. I know they have no real competition to office365 for non-tech enterprise, like at all, but who knows when that will change with Amazon around smelling all those billions.
  - huron 6y ago
    The point really is to push workforces towards Office since that's how you would be measured. It's a BS marketing nudge.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Aeolun 6y ago
  > That sounds like a nightmarish place to work. That sounds like 90% of all companies I know, simply based on the fact they all use teams :/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- skohan 6y ago
  The worst part is that none of these are results-based metrics. These are precisely the kind of things you would measure if you want to create lots of extra meetings and redundant communication. It's also incredibly self-serving of MS. They have essentially defined "productivity" as how much time you spend using MS products. I hope natural selection leads to the shuttering of all the companies which actually try to use this metric to optimize their organization.
  - m463 6y ago
    It's also worth mentioning the @ mentions in email are exchange-specific (afaik)
    - prepend 6y ago
      I really like @mentions in email. They help me find specific stuff relevant to me. And also makes it a second faster to include someone in the to line. I wish they displayed better because in my org they show as “Prepend, Prependson (ABCD/YTD/Foo/Bar) (Contractor/Non-Contractor Status)” so it’s stupid looking in the body.
      - ornornor 6y ago
        I’d hate that so much. People are already abusing CC and BCC in corporate email chains, having to simply @ someone to send them a notification or a copy of the email would make that problem even worse. MS always comes up with things that make working so much harder on the business/office/windows side.
        prepend 6y ago
        It would be interesting to see if I include more people with this feature. I think that I use it only when I would have gone up and added them to the CC line, but I would have to try to call out what I want them to see in the email.
        skohan 6y ago
- nkrisc 6y ago
  One could score very highly in these metrics without actually getting an ounce of work done. The inverse is also true. Scary. This is wholly bizarre because these are in no way productivity measures. These are measures of software usage, which is being (wrongly) used as an correlation for productivity. I wonder what the real motive is, because surely no one who implemented this actually believes it measures productivity?
- buckminster 6y ago
  It's possible that smart managers will prefer people who get their work done while minimising these metrics. I can dream.
- josefx 6y ago
  And it doesn't measure normal phone calls or on site support for customers. There is nothing better than having to run from one issue to the next and getting a mail saying I just enjoyed a week of peace and quiet.
JamesBarney 6y ago
This feature seems to me to be a real mistake from Microsoft. From a PR standpoint it's terrible, and it's a tiny feature that I'm sure drives very few sales.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  What does microsoft care about sales? This isn't the sort of thing that would make someone used an MS product over an Apple or F/OSS product. Such decisions are generational, occurring only once or twice the life of a company. So at the end of the day this is a "feature" being added into a product that people are already using. Nobody really chooses to have it or not. It just becomes an option that will sit quietly in every office machine or remote access account just waiting for an evil manager to flick the switch. Hey Microsoft! Can I pay extra for fork of windows/o365/office/whatever that doesn't and will NEVER have this ridiculous feature? I am putting my marker down. I am willing to pay MORE money for LESS evil in my machine. The more evil ideas you come up with, the more I will be willing to pay to keep them away. That is the reality in which we live.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    Obviously you can turn off any feature you don't want, if you are the customer. If you are a user, talk to your admin.
    - mulmen 6y ago
      That is definitely not obvious. There's a lot of things on my iPhone and my Windows PC that I cannot turn off, even though I am the customer.
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    I checked (as MS365 admin) and it's not enabled for us. I don't know if that's the default for Europe, for everyone, or if Microsoft intend to enable it themselves later.
    - 6y ago
moonchild 6y ago
Are microsoft employees subjected to these?
- freeone3000 6y ago
  Of course not.
- slaymaker1907 6y ago
  AFAIK, no. Also, as a programmer, a lot of this stuff doesn't necessarily correlate very well with my actual productivity. My personal views on this are that this is a pretty invasive feature and I don't think that this feature is ethical. Maybe if it was really clear about what it was doing it would be ok, but even then I still don't like it.
  - tirpen 6y ago
    I don't think these stats correlate at with anyones productivity.
jsnell 6y ago
Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198713
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nixgeek 6y ago
Slack has been doing similar things via their Analytics for several years now and their Customer Success teams regularly meet to discuss “Deployment Maturity” with larger customers on Enterprise Grid. In these PowerPoints you get their take on where your organization is at in employees engaging with Slack, compared to some of their other bigger customers, and they drill into how many applications you’ve got deployed, how many custom ones you’ve created, whether you use features like Workflows, etc. There are statistics for what % of employees are using Slack, how many days in the month, % of messages being shared in public channels, private channels, direct messages, % of messages sent vs. % which actually get read, ... What Microsoft is doing here seems like they’re trying to copy what Slack has done, to try and drive ROI and renewal conversations with their customers.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  My company puts the Slack message count on the website. Scroll down to the bottom. https://www.altaml.com/team/ https://www.altaml.com/team/ It isn't used as part of management or anything so it is just a fun little fact, but I was surprised to learn that such a number was readily available. It shouldn't have been surprising, but it was when it clicked in my head that Slack tracks you as much as any other app.
  - SkyPuncher 6y ago
    I do not understand why any company would put that on their website. It's absolutely meaningless in a vacuum. To me, it tells me "do not apply, we care about meaningless metrics"
    - strombofulous 6y ago
      It's put next to "# of AltaMLers who think strawberry is the best Bubly flavour" and "% of AltaMLers who think pineapple is an acceptable pizza topping", I don't think it's supposed to be taken super seriously
      - SkyPuncher 6y ago
frogpelt 6y ago
I think if you're having to score employees this way they actually must not be responsible for producing anything.
- techfoolery 6y ago
  welcome to inside sales
kyriakos 6y ago
If my job doesn't involve using any Microsoft Office apps other than teams for communication then my productivity score should be zero? I should appear as sitting around all day and occasionally having meetings
- megablast 6y ago
  Yes. That is why they fire all the developers. No one ever thought about adjusting fur those who don’t use Microsoft products.
  - prepend 6y ago
    I talked with an internal dev group that used all Visual Studio dev stack. They thought that everyone on the 25k org should code their way. It was weird, I thought they were joking, but they were serious. They said with a straight face that no one should ever need to write in Ruby, JavaScript, or Python. When I pointed out that most major ML packages were in Python (they were into “AI” and whatnot) they said that PowerBI and Azure could do that for them. I kind of wish I was so certain about things in life. This was also a few years before Microsoft bought GitHub and they talked about how no one needed to use Git and that Visual Studio had built in version control that supported git, but no one liked it. I kind of wonder what they’re up to now as Microsoft is shifting over to GitHub. That was part of my worry with the acquisition is whatever cult-like mindset from Microsoft will bleed over.
- gruez 6y ago
  Sounds like a good way to pick up "loyal" users. If they weren't using your software suite before (eg. through educational licensing programs), they will have to switch to it now, if they want to look "productive".
brentis 6y ago
Other day my boss asked for me to ensure I'm accepting or declining meetings. As a PM with 20+ mtgs a week I default attend without accepting as constant rescheduling and re-accepting is not productive. I've done this for 2 yrs without issue... Now it's an issue. I also write most of my docs in Pages and export to Word. Guess I'm not getting my full potential productivity score for not using MSFT.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  I default attend without accepting as constant rescheduling and re-accepting is not productive I started doing this for the same reason but it resulted in another problem: meetings started getting double booked or even booked in triplicate. So now I actually “Respond without comment” so the person at least knows I’m attending and presumably other people will know I’m in a meeting already at 1pm. Yet people STILL seem to adamantly refuse to actually look at the scheduling assistant in Outlook. One side effect of covid is that I’ve developed a very good skill of enforcing my availability to others who seem just fine trampling over the best laid plans without even TRYING to communicate about it. Or when they do, it’s: “Hey your calendar says you’re out on Friday, do you have 30m for a quick zoom Friday at 2?” “My calendar says I’m out?” “Yes” “Then I guess I’m out”.
  - brentis 6y ago
    My biz is decent about not double-booking on top of existing tentative mts for some reason, so that isn't a problem. Too lazy to see what attendance score I'm skewing by not accepting mtgs.
  - prepend 6y ago
    This happens to me quite a bit and I used to wonder what was going through people’s minds. If my calendar shows I’m busy or out of office, then I can’t meet. But then I asked some people and they told me that most people’s calendars are not dependable and have all sorts of garbage. People have “auto accept” turned on and all sorts of weird behaviors. I try to keep my calendar accurate and either accept or decline real stuff and ignore/leave tentative things I don’t care about. My normal line is “schedule any time free on my calendar that’s convenient for you, ignore any tentative.”
libraryatnight 6y ago
Most of the time these days MS news is "cool." Open this, Linux that, check out our cool terminal. Nice to see a reminder they are still definitely not cool.
- 2fast4you 6y ago
  A clear violation of the first midnight amendment, “Be Cool!”
- pjmlp 6y ago
  From point of view of enterprise consultancy they are definitely cool, you should a look at the alternatives.
- mikro2nd 6y ago
  MS is certainly trying to play the new cool, but the DNA remains the same DNA from the '80s & '90s. Don't be fooled: A Leopard cannot change its shorts.
  - smt88 6y ago
    > DNA remains the same DNA from the '80s & '90s It literally doesn't. All the leadership from that time has retired, the revenue sources are different, and even the business models are different (subscription vs. upfront for many services). > Don't be fooled: A Leopard cannot change its shorts. Someone should tell this to all the large companies started by or tied to Nazis (Porsche, IBM, Volkswagen, Puma, Adidas, etc.) Or they should tell Apple, which went from near-death as a desktop/laptop vendor to a company now making most of its money from services. Companies change. They do a mixture of good and bad things. At this point, Microsoft is far, far from the company they were in the 80s and 90s, even if they still do bad things.
    - prepend 6y ago
      > company now making most of its money from services. Nope, they still are a hardware company. 22% from services in the latest quarter .[0] It’s gaining, but still far away from majority services. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-revenue-of-apple/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-re...
sriku 6y ago
Curious to hear what folks here think about Goodhart's law playing out when a company does something like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
forrestthewoods 6y ago
Maybe I’m weird but none of this really bothers me. If a company is shitty and micromanages and bases promotions off this crap then they’re a shitty company. And they’d be a shitty company whether tools give them extra data or not. On the other hand it might be good if a company doesn’t suck and they use use this data to assess whether remote work is causing a decrease a work/life balance or causing people to spend too much time in too many meetings. Data is just data. If a company is using data for nefarious purposes then they’re probably just a bad company to work for.
- trianglem 6y ago
  You’re not seeing the bigger picture. Once everyone starts doing this there will be no where else for you to go.
  - forrestthewoods 6y ago
    I can go to places that don’t use this type of data to make bad decisions. Some places give employee ratings based on number of bugs fixed, lines of code written, or commits made. This is stupid. This data is also available to basically all companies. The fix is NOT to block that commit or bug counts from being visible. The fix is to not over index on that data when making rating or promotion decisions.
    - johnisgood 6y ago
      > I can go to places that don’t use this type of data to make bad decisions. Now re-read the post you replied to. > Once everyone starts doing this there will be no where else for you to go. No, you will not go anywhere where this practice is NOT done, because it will become widespread and you will have to be really lucky to find such a place where those practices are not done. That is, if they set a precedent and companies follow and people tolerate. > probably just a bad company to work for. Shit will happen when the majority of the companies will be bad companies to work for.
      - 6y ago
whateveracct 6y ago
I can just hear the MS PM juicing these features now.
pdkl95 6y ago
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on useless performance metrics[1][2]: >> In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 5OK-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS 2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them - hey, if we have - a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less KLOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing. [1] https://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html https://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHI7RTKhlz0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHI7RTKhlz0
- blackrock 6y ago
  Ballmer was actually insightful and philosophical, when he isn’t throwing chairs around?
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    Having a temper doesn't prevent one from being intelligent. Gates and Jobs had famously bad tempers too.
    - 495636483 6y ago
      Was Jobs really that smart? Not sure that's the niche he filled successfully. More like Kinski, talented in some domain... but smart?! Jobs died pretty much by Dunning-Kruger effect, no?
      - nkrisc 6y ago
        People can be very intelligent on one area, and not as much in others. There are many scientists who have very high standards for proof and evidence in their professional life, but accept other theories as truth without a shred of evidence in their personal lives.
CarVac 6y ago
The first steps on the way to Manna... https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
scoot_718 6y ago
First the crappy ranking system, now a bad metric? For a place that did excellent productivity studies, they sure are hellbent on inflicting horrible policy on their workers.
- loopz 6y ago
  This is for everyone else.
dvtrn 6y ago
Can I break topic and complain how absolutey goddamn awful this is to read on mobile? Literally 100% of the screen before I’ve even seen the headline is an embedded ad banner, stacked on top of a video ad widget, with a hovering ad banner down below. Scroll down, headline, one sentence, nearly full phone display length ad. Scroll more, one paragraph another Nearly full length ad. https://imgur.com/dzID3T9 https://imgur.com/dzID3T9 Sheesh!! /rant
- sgerenser 6y ago
  If it bothers you that much why not install an ad blocker? I have AdGuard (free version) on iOS and I didn’t see any of that.
  - jcun4128 6y ago
    I saw that recently(AdGuard). I use both ABP and UBO for desktop. Often I'll promptly back out of a website due to the aggressive ads. Funny living without ads so long get triggered seeing them ha.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    I already know this isn’t going to be a popular answer but I don’t much care so here goes: Because I don’t want to be installing more crap on my phone just to read the damn news. Often opt to just outline.com-ing a page.
blackrock 6y ago
I must have a low productivity score. Half the time, I’m staring off into space. Then I type stuff furiously. Verify it. Then publish it. Problem solved. Correctly too. But still a poor “Productivity Score”. No bonus this year.
- hnracer 6y ago
  It's really sad. We already have an incentive to game other people's perceptions to get an easy promotion but this takes it to a whole new level, and seems to reward the trickster political over the people trying to just make an impact. My expectation is that it's going to damage the productivity of the most productive but slightly increase productivity of the laziest quartile who should've be fired anyway. The biggest impact will be to drive engagement with Microsoft products which was the real endgame.
mastrsushi 6y ago
This is creepy, that makes me uncomfortable. This triggers me, that gives me anxiety.
roboemployee 6y ago
I am actually building something even worse but in parallel I am thinking that the same skillset used to build monitoring could be used to build a tool to game these tools. Comment here if you are interested in building the roboemployee of the future to be used by employees rather than employers.
mtgx 6y ago
Welcome to the "New Microsoft"...worse than the old Microsoft.
quicklime 6y ago
Here's how Microsoft describes it: > Productivity Score identifies areas where you can offer people training to learn how to use the tools to their fullest capacity In other words, it's a score that tells the Microsoft sales rep where to target their sales. If you score highly on everything, they'll give you a pat on the back to tell you that you're amongst their most "sophisticated" users. This seems common in the enterprise sales world. Another example I've seen is Adobe, which holds an annual Symposium every year where they hand out awards to the most advanced users of their products. The "winners" get to feel like they've been recognized for their incredible digital marketing skills and the rest of their clients are shown how to increase the amount of vendor lock-in and dependence on Adobe. Everyone wins!
- enw 6y ago
  > Productivity Score identifies areas where you can offer people training This reads to me as “identifies people that should be managed out”
  - httpsterio 6y ago
    > This reads to me as “identifies people that should be managed out” That's a very pessimistic outlook I think. I work as a consultant for a company with approx 100 employees. Average age of workers is somewhere around 45 and most aren't really that good with computers, decent at best. I've handheld their digital security officer when he configures a Zoom webinar. So far, he hasn't been sure enough to do it all alone and still asks me to check the settings. This company produces word documents as their core business and if their digital security representative is that bad with computers, you can probably guess the average skill of the rest of the company. Nobody is getting fired though, they still get the job done and management invests in training. I'm currently helping build their entire IT ecosystem and one key aspect of the tools selected, is that it's simple enough to teach to their employees. I'm sure they'll love those metrics as they can actually see the biggest pain points and proactively do something about it.
    - sbergot 6y ago
politelemon 6y ago
>Let me be clear: Productivity Score is not a work monitoring tool. You need to understand. If you provide metrics like this, it will be turned into a work monitoring tool. That's how humans operate.
donmcronald 6y ago
> Microsoft 365's corporate VP Jared Spataro specified in a blog post that the feature, which debuted to little fanfare on Nov. 17, is “not a work monitoring tool” Hahahahaha. A comedian of that caliber should have a Netflix special. That's like the warning on the Q-Tip box that tells you not to stick them in your ears. Of course it's a monitoring tool. They just don't want to call it that because it'll damage the brand.
- tester34 6y ago
  What makes you think so? Have you used this tool from "admin" panel's side?
toomanybeersies 6y ago
> These metrics include ... whether they regularly contribute to shared documents or group chats, and the number of days they used Microsoft’s tools such as Word, Excel, Skype, Outlook, or Teams in the last month Workers are incentivised to maximise their use of Microsoft products, and in turn the high employee utilisation of Microsoft products ensures that Microsoft continues to sell licenses and subscriptions. That's genius in all the wrong ways.
globular-toast 6y ago
Have these metrics only just been rolled out to some places? I noticed I started to get them at my work in the UK about a year ago. I did think they were pretty weird. But why are they suddenly being talked about now?
dependsontheq 6y ago
It's a totally useless metric for productivity but I think the adoption thing is something that should be tracked and used. I big corporates you have a lot of holdouts that will send Emails instead of using a shared Doc for the next 10 years if you don't somehow tell them to not do that. And no question this has nothing to with productivity or an individuals impact on the company, but I think we here seriously underestimate ho slow some people are in using new available tools and I can see some value in that perspective.
rich_sasha 6y ago
I worked in a kind of work-hard-work-hard place (finance). People often making a point of how laate they worked etc. The most productive software guy, by any reasonable metric of quality and speed, was a guy who came in at 8.30 and left at 5 Pm on the dot every day. He avoided meetings if only could, replied to emails in batch at the end of the day etc. He would suck at these metrics, and yet he’s hands down the best SE I ever worked with.
- varispeed 6y ago
  For many people staying late is a coping mechanism - they want to escape their abusive partner or mounting chores waiting to suck last breath out of their miserable lives. How good employer could tackle it? At one place I worked, there was a hard 5pm cut off and regardless what was happening people had to leave the office. Any temptation to stay late was nipped in the bud. I can imagine people would still continue working until late from home anyway. If work is an escape, people will find a way. I learned one employee would take their laptop and go to a nearby pub and work in the secluded area of the premises. He said he could do either that or end it once and for all. Didn't want to hear about therapy.
Little_John 6y ago
I'm skimming these arts. and I absorbed the title as"grimm-i-fies "
Little_John 6y ago
I Skimmed this Leade line and absorbed the Verb as "Grim-ified". Stay alive hackers.
aitchnyu 6y ago
I've been receiving blank Cortana Briefings from my office for months. Where does the logic run and how is it enabled?
colechristensen 6y ago
Funny how Microsoft engagement is being sold as worker productivity. When do the microtransactions for workers to pay to win start?
brunoluiz 6y ago
Most likely, if companies start considering this as a real metric for raises or promotions, someone will come up with ways to fake data to increase stats. Besides, it doesn't seem prudent to gamify something so relative.
feralimal 6y ago
As bad as it is, isn't it great that they announce that they are spying on us? They wouldn't really need to - how would we know, if they didn't? Enough naivety... If people don't think that this has been going on for years, or that they actually announce Orwellian surveillance, I'm not sure what to tell you! We have been already living in a track and trace world - what is happening is that it is becoming overt. And there is nothing to be done about it. We all need the paycheck, right? Even if there is a massive outcry about this - and I doubt there will be - they will just come back and do it another way. They claim it is a right for employers to get the 'metrics'. What's kind of dark, twisted and funny, is that the people building the cages of today and tomorrow, are doing so with open eyes - technologists are some of the most surveilled people about, but - no problem! - we'll code tomorrow's hell for you!
- 6c696e7578 6y ago
  What bothers me is that this system probably works at M$, which means their managers are probably using it to monitor their staff, using their inhouse tools. That probably has a good ROI since finding issues with their products is helpful. However, for another company this metric is just a value of how well locked into the M$ stack they are. If it were my company, heavy users would be penalised as there are other, better, less expensive products to use. Sitting in Teams talking to people is not a good score. Firstly you're wasting 512MB of that company laptop on a single web page, secondly it is a slow communication tool and thirdly, if you were talking in IRC then the conversation would be logged for others to grep and find answers to similar issues. Scoring high with M$ Word would also be a negative thing in my view, that shows that you're using a tool that locks the company into an upgrade cycle for future M$ Word versions. Did you not think to use Libre Office or perhaps MD? Scoring high in Outlook is also negative, that's another tool that can't store .msg files in open way. Every time a .msg file is attached to something and exchanged, via another tool then the receiver needs something that can disassemble the .msg into a readable form.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  There's a difference between hearing that such things happen, and suddenly finding an "Insights" (or more recently, "Cortana") e-mail in your inbox, telling you how much time you've spent on meetings, and "collaborating via e-mail and Teams", over the past week, complete with a friendly question like "did you make good use of your focus time this week?". The latter can really make you viscerally aware of just how much you're being surveilled, and in concrete terms. (Or the helpful Cortana e-mailing you excerpts from your conversations, in which it highlighted what it interprets to be pending tasks. And because it comes as an e-mail, you know it's not being computed locally.)
aboringusername 6y ago
Personally, I think changes like this are good and necessary to educate users on exactly what's happening to their data. Eventually we'll hit a critical mass; I am already thinking about how to (I love snails) confuse AI, pollute it with bad data and make it absolutely useless. Maybe I'll send emails (hello to the AI!) that make no sense, tag random people and make the analytics as useless as possible. We should all be uploading a few TB of random junk to Google photos, sending 1000's of pointless emails to random people and storing as much useless data as physically possible that they won't know whether to keep or purge. At least if they're paying to store my 1PB of absolutely pointless data that they can't do anything with it'll make them think about whether it's worth the cost.
einarfd 6y ago
If you can drill down to identifiable users. Then I have a hard time seeing how this is not a blatant GDPR violation. The biggest GDPR fine so far has been over workplace monitoring. So brave of Microsoft to roll out something like this, this might end up being a costly move on their part.
adamsurak 6y ago
G Suite (Google Workspace) has a similar feature called Work Insights - https://support.google.com/workinsights https://support.google.com/workinsights
- sbergot 6y ago
  It might be the same, but it is way more subtle: "What's Work Insights? Work Insights is a reporting tool for G Suite that gives you insights into the impact of your G Suite deployment. Using easy-to-read charts, you can see metrics on your organization's G Suite adoption, productivity, and collaboration." So they are putting "productivity" there between "adoption" and "collaboration". This tells me that it is selling usage metrics which might be the same thing, but I don't see an aggregate score per employee named "productivity xxx" which is the big issue with MS product. Also google's metrics are anonymous (see "Work Insights and user trust"). This seems to be a big difference. Looking at metrics is fine. You need to know how the tools you are paying for are used. Grading employees according to those metrics is bad.
nix23 6y ago
I hope that Microsoft knows that using software or cameras exclusive for employee surveillance is illegal in Switzerland, but if they sell it, no one will do anything. Just that one data protection officer will get angry.
noisy_boy 6y ago
Considering I spend almost all my time between various development tools and almost exclusively use wiki for documentation, I'll probably fare terribly by these metrics. Few days per year spent in Visio being the only saving grace.
6510 6y ago
If you take good enough or enough separate measurements it gets challenging to game it. Its like a delivery guy gaming his route planner. I wonder if MS employees are sufficiently encouraged to game it.
dojitza1 6y ago
The topic of work productivity is interesting from a behaviour science point of view. One wonders how far we've come in what is effectively manipulating humans to work faster.
dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
It's been 3 years now and still when I see Gizmodo I think "the folks who published Damore's report while removing all references from it and without informing the public they did so".
neya 6y ago
Some stupid MBA with a bow-tie was probably pitching how this is going to be a "game changer" for the product. This is already thanksgiving, so probably he collected his nice bonus for "innovative contributions to the company" in reality it's just a disgusting weapon for management to bring it up as part of your 1:1s with your bosses or when you ask them for a raise. Thanks for fucking everyone up kiddo.
angarg12 6y ago
Why stop there? Why not define networks of employees and their relationship? Why not weight an employee productivity score by the productivity score of their contacts? The possibilities are endless! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
- Element_ 6y ago
  I worked for a startup that was deploying a system like this to a large fortune 100. It used "AI" to analyze employee relationships and determine which employees would form the best teams etc...
dusted 6y ago
You get what you measure, so, good luck with that.. When they've made the system perfect, the system can do the work all by itself, that's probably an even better biz.
mkl95 6y ago
Bloated code metastasizes bugs in badly architected codebases. If a project like this survives long enough, some developer will suffer the consequences. I had to deal with one of these projects recently and it's making me want to switch jobs.
prepend 6y ago
This sounds stupid, but some of this stuff seems useful to focus trainings. One of my pet peeves is when someone takes a onedrive doc, downloads it, edits it, and sends the off cloud copy back by email. Office sucks at merging documents so this is more work for all the other “cloudies” or whatever you call people who know how to edit online. I’ve found this is because some users just never used cloud document tools and don’t know how and there’s no easy culturural norm now that everyone is teleworking to teach them. But this should be used to find zero or very low users and then thrown away. I think that trying to see the number or make a metric out of “number of opens” is so phenomenally dumb. It would be like comparing two git commit history grids and thinking one person is better than another.
deleted 6y ago
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anonymfus 6y ago
I predict that Microsoft will rename that "Productivity Score" to something boring like "Product Feature Granular Usage Report" and do nothing else, and press will stop covering it.
mekkkkkk 6y ago
Was a while since I read it, but isn't this pretty much the plot of The Circle?
breakfastduck 6y ago
This is horrific, I would absolutely not want to work anywhere this information is actively being used.
thebrain 6y ago
LOC is a useless metric. Just before I left my last job a month or so ago, I checked my Github stats. Over the course of 8 years I added 124,000 LOC and removed 466,000 LOC. I can also assure you that my employer was sad to see me go.

519 points by ourmandave 6y ago

Orwellian

>These metrics include how often workers turn their cameras on during virtual meetings, how frequently they send emails (and how many contain @ mentions), whether they regularly contribute to shared documents or group chats, and the number of days they used Microsoft’s tools such as Word, Excel, Skype, Outlook, or Teams in the last month That sounds like a nightmarish place to work.

FalconSensei 6y ago
> how frequently they send emails Nice, I guess instead of talking to the person next to me and sorting something out in 2 minutes, we can use email, and do it in 30. Also, let's see everyone just adding: 'oh, thanks' or whatever to group chats, just to increase the message count
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- messo 6y ago
  Life replicates art: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)
- donmcronald 6y ago
  +1 @FalconSensei Want to get on Teams and collaborate to fix the spelling mistakes I accidentally-on-purpose left in all those Office docs? @friend1 @friend2 @friend3 Don't forget beers on Friday. Lol. This is so stupid. You'll end up with 2 types of employees; those that work and those that work to game the metrics. My mother's seen it first hand at a government job. Shared work queues and measuring productivity via naïve metrics is an ideal work environment for lazy people that do poor quality work. Why spend 30 minutes on a task when you can do a terrible job of it in 5 minutes and get the same score?
  - speeder 6y ago
    My wife used to work at IBM. She was fired for low performance... Thing is, in her department she was the only employee that took difficult cases and found the solution, and left the easy ones to her coworkers, her boss didn't want to fire her, but had to because the metrics said she had to go because a low total amount of cases... Last she talked with her former coworkers, now they are struggling because the hard cases keep piling up endlessy and nobody knows how to do many of them, because they fired her without warning so she couldn't even teach others how to do what she did. EDIT: oh yeah, remembered that IBM wasn't subtle about how much they needed her either, since she was the only one that could do what she did, when she worked at IBM I had lovely christmas and new year parties with her laptop on the table, because IBM back then threatened to fire her on the spot if she didn't work remotely on some important clients during those times, then her actual firing came some a short time later anyway during a seasonal lull of work.
    - uCantCauseUCant 6y ago
      If we compare cooperations to intelligent beings, run by software written in processes and performed by humans, could we compare such destructive metrics to dementia?
    - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
      This is why metrics should all be taken with a grain of salt and be subject to the opinion of ones manager. Nepotism at level certainly exists, but a good manager will always come to bat for you. Even if it sticks their neck out. That is why upper level bourgeoisie management that has no f'ing clue about the bottom rungs shouldnt touch what their not ready to unravel.
    - mgkimsal 6y ago
      So frustrating to read that. Could no one even look at 'type' of cases? Tickets in a ticketing system typically have some sort of severity level associated. Taking 3 'critical' issues should be treated as at least important as taking 30 'low priority' issues.
    - prepend 6y ago
- test1235 6y ago
  "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    What if it's a bad measure to begin with, ie. anticorrelated with quality? Does it become (technically) better by being gamed?
    - ptx 6y ago
      Isn't it essentially a good measure then, just accidentally flipped around? Just flip it around and it's good. A truly bad measure would be something like measuring the volume of coffee in my cup to determine the health of the economy. If I make up fake numbers, or pour some coffee out to change the measurements, that doesn't make my measurements any more insightful in regard to the economy.
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  oh, thanks!
- krageon 6y ago
  In what universe do you currently talk to the person next to you? In an office job that would be horrifically irresponsible. I agree with your broader point, this is just a poorly chosen example.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    In an office with only two people, talking to the person next to you is no different from talking to your spouse.
  - jeromenerf 6y ago
    "Currently" being emphasized I guess you are thinking about COVID and social distanciation? Nonetheless, it’s quite common to read comments about talk in the office as a focus annoyance, flow interruption, etc. I guess any form of notification is.
    - FalconSensei 6y ago
      > I guess any form of notification is Yeah, this is why I mute notifications. Some people use 'send' as a period. So instead of 1 notification for whatever they need to say, you got 10
  - EdwardDiego 6y ago
    In New Zealand ;)
  - joppy 6y ago
    In Australia or New Zealand, for example.
- tester34 6y ago
  >Nice, I guess instead of talking to the person next to me and sorting something out in 2 minutes, we can use email, and do it in 30. I do agree and disagree. Sometimes it's very handy to just talk about stuff quickly, but for me, who unfortunely has a lot of context switching I love having stuff written in email, because I can always go back to it when I forget or when I need to reanalyze it
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    I see your point and I agree. I hated being constantly interrupted on my previous job, and I got them to stop doing that and only interrupt me when something really needed immediate attention. But the thing is: communicate in the way makes sense for the situation/environment. Not by forcing people to send everything in emails, and even, sending way more emails than necessary
- coldtea 6y ago
  >Nice, I guess instead of talking to the person next to me and sorting something out in 2 minutes, we can use email, and do it in 30. Well, talking to the person next to you will disrupt their focus, and they might take hours to get into whatever they were doing (if they were programming / in the zone) at the time. So, yeah, better do it in 30 minutes.
  - MauranKilom 6y ago
    That requires several context switches on both ends. I'd rather have my focus interrupted once than having to either draw out an email conversation over several days or mentally switch to it every few minutes.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  If your manager gives importance to this, just send a hundred emails to yourself at the end of the month to pad your numbers. Similarly, you can activate your webcam with a black tape on it, add/remove some spaces at the end of lines on shared documents…
  - prepend 6y ago
    You’re describing the consumer layer of Microsoft Office products that they sell to individual who work in enterprise Office environments.
- dkdbejwi383 6y ago
  I turned off email notifications and check it only in the morning, or if I am specifically waiting on something like an access code. Oftentimes, something "urgent" that was sent at 13:30 ends up with a "never mind, I found it" response at 15:00 so I can just delete both emails.
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  Opposite anecdote - worked at a place where I was ... 6 feet from the main sysadmin guy. I would routinely email him, both as a bit of CYA, but also because his schedule didn't jive with mine. Owner would come out sometimes and get irate that we were emailing vs "just talk to each other - you're sitting right here!". But... I didn't want to interrupt the other guy. In fact, I got better results by emailing - more details, could follow up as needed, and he would respond with 'done' so there was an actual log of the interactions. When I'd just lean over and interrupt him, everything was slower and worse. The '2 minute' things rarely were 2 minutes, and would take away time from what he was doing. If we met in the lunchroom... yeah, I might say "hey, I'm going to need X"... and he'd say "email the details".
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
    If that guy is anything like me, he probably treats emails as tasks. Each email is something that needs to get done. Now I may be doing something else so I need to prioritize that over your thing right now. Overall I think that's why it worked out so well for you guys.
  - m463 6y ago
    #8 of: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
  - prepend 6y ago
    It’s also hard to cut and paste out of in person talking.
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    I see your point and I agree with that, as long as it's not a metric, but the way you chose to communicate because it was best for the situation. I've been on both sides of both situations (in person better, online better). But what I always did was: ok, feel free to interrupt me if something urgent comes up, otherwise, send me a slack with the full details and I'll answer later. As mentioned in other responses to this post, having the number of emails/slack messages as a target doesn't help make the work environment better (in both 'more pleasant' and 'more productive' ways)
scoot_718 6y ago
Sounds like 10 minutes to setup some automation to win big bucks.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  I need like, a hardware version of auto-hotkey
  - csa 6y ago
    I imagine the software version will work just fine.
sneak 6y ago
Most places that demand staff live in Office and Outlook are. Nobody is being forced to take these jobs; I think it's great that Microsoft is making MS shops into employee hellscapes.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  There aren't that many jobs where white-collar workers aren't forced to use Office and Outlook, and that's not just because of lock-in, but because there's literally no other alternative that doesn't suck badly. And no, Google office suite doesn't count; it barely matured out of toy stage recently. MS tools have also huge, compounding advantages for larger companies who go all-in - they interoperate deeply. UX-wise, it's all quite not bad, and I could even bear it being proprietary; I just wish they didn't put all that telemetry crap into it - MS is ruining both their OS and their office suites by doing that.
  - geitir 6y ago
    You could pay for 365 yourself
  - sneak 6y ago
    Any business that may potentially compete with Microsoft (or Google) would be pretty foolish to use their non-e2e cloud services to go about doing so. We've seen how that ends for Amazon sharecroppers. I'm also not 100% sure about your main claim regarding white collar jobs. There may be a majority of positions that use the MS ecosystem, but there are still very very many that don't, even if they are marketshare-wise only 10%. Really, I think it's mostly just Excel, and maybe Sharepoint. You're absolutely right that there is no great Excel competitor.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Yeah, I meant primarily Excel and Sharepoint, and maybe MS Project (though that has commercial alternatives). But also that once a company commits to MS ecosystem - including Sharepoint, Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and the whole Office suite - all that software suddenly gains a lot of additional functionality thanks to deep interoperability.
mikro2nd 6y ago
while [ true ] do; mail -s"Quick Reminder" `cat userlist` <<EOF `fortune -o` EOF sleep 10 done Job done, leave me to sleep. (Syntax likely off - I'm sh-rusty!)
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  Out of curiosity what does the fortune command do? DuckDuckGo failed me here and I don't want the trouble to use "G word".
  - dagw 6y ago
    It displays a 'funny' random quote or login message.
  - thih9 6y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Pulls a random, and usually but not always funny, quote from a list it comes with. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix). Most commonly seen as part of login messages, as many Unix and Linux systems come or are configured to pipe a fortune message along with some other fixed text.
    - thesuperbigfrog 6y ago
      Note that you can also create custom fortune messages: https://askubuntu.com/questions/36523/creating-a-fortunes-file https://askubuntu.com/questions/36523/creating-a-fortunes-fi... I have actually used fortune similar to the above script to randomly select inspirational messages as part of a weekly church newsletter.
  - deleted 6y ago
moksly 6y ago
I’m more wondering where it would be. I work in the public sector, so we almost literally employ people from every field imaginable aside from maybe academic research, and aside from the camera thing, I can’t think of a single one of those metrics that’s positive. Maybe Denmark is just different, but even places like finances that still use a lot of excel, they also use dedicated stat tools, we use one called Targit, but PowerBI or whatever Microsoft’s version is called these days would be similar. Even people who do a lot of writing, like our communications staff, would only use word for drafts and maybe spell checking (if at all) before they move their writings into their specialised systems. This is not to say that we don’t use a lot of office, we do, but it’s almost never a primary tool aside from collaborating, and while logging more camera hours may be desirable (for us anyway) sending a lot of emails isn’t necessarily a good thing, mostly it wouldn’t be. On the flip side, and now that I’ve talked myself into it, I actually do know of managers who would value this sort of logging, shit managers but managers, so maybe Microsoft is just producing what their clients want? Anyway, if that’s the case, they probably shouldn’t add support for bad management practices. I know they have no real competition to office365 for non-tech enterprise, like at all, but who knows when that will change with Amazon around smelling all those billions.
- huron 6y ago
  The point really is to push workforces towards Office since that's how you would be measured. It's a BS marketing nudge.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Aeolun 6y ago
> That sounds like a nightmarish place to work. That sounds like 90% of all companies I know, simply based on the fact they all use teams :/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
skohan 6y ago
The worst part is that none of these are results-based metrics. These are precisely the kind of things you would measure if you want to create lots of extra meetings and redundant communication. It's also incredibly self-serving of MS. They have essentially defined "productivity" as how much time you spend using MS products. I hope natural selection leads to the shuttering of all the companies which actually try to use this metric to optimize their organization.
- m463 6y ago
  It's also worth mentioning the @ mentions in email are exchange-specific (afaik)
  - prepend 6y ago
    I really like @mentions in email. They help me find specific stuff relevant to me. And also makes it a second faster to include someone in the to line. I wish they displayed better because in my org they show as “Prepend, Prependson (ABCD/YTD/Foo/Bar) (Contractor/Non-Contractor Status)” so it’s stupid looking in the body.
    - ornornor 6y ago
      I’d hate that so much. People are already abusing CC and BCC in corporate email chains, having to simply @ someone to send them a notification or a copy of the email would make that problem even worse. MS always comes up with things that make working so much harder on the business/office/windows side.
      - prepend 6y ago
        It would be interesting to see if I include more people with this feature. I think that I use it only when I would have gone up and added them to the CC line, but I would have to try to call out what I want them to see in the email.
      - skohan 6y ago
nkrisc 6y ago
One could score very highly in these metrics without actually getting an ounce of work done. The inverse is also true. Scary. This is wholly bizarre because these are in no way productivity measures. These are measures of software usage, which is being (wrongly) used as an correlation for productivity. I wonder what the real motive is, because surely no one who implemented this actually believes it measures productivity?
buckminster 6y ago
It's possible that smart managers will prefer people who get their work done while minimising these metrics. I can dream.
josefx 6y ago
And it doesn't measure normal phone calls or on site support for customers. There is nothing better than having to run from one issue to the next and getting a mail saying I just enjoyed a week of peace and quiet.

JamesBarney 6y ago

This feature seems to me to be a real mistake from Microsoft. From a PR standpoint it's terrible, and it's a tiny feature that I'm sure drives very few sales.

sandworm101 6y ago
What does microsoft care about sales? This isn't the sort of thing that would make someone used an MS product over an Apple or F/OSS product. Such decisions are generational, occurring only once or twice the life of a company. So at the end of the day this is a "feature" being added into a product that people are already using. Nobody really chooses to have it or not. It just becomes an option that will sit quietly in every office machine or remote access account just waiting for an evil manager to flick the switch. Hey Microsoft! Can I pay extra for fork of windows/o365/office/whatever that doesn't and will NEVER have this ridiculous feature? I am putting my marker down. I am willing to pay MORE money for LESS evil in my machine. The more evil ideas you come up with, the more I will be willing to pay to keep them away. That is the reality in which we live.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Obviously you can turn off any feature you don't want, if you are the customer. If you are a user, talk to your admin.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    That is definitely not obvious. There's a lot of things on my iPhone and my Windows PC that I cannot turn off, even though I am the customer.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  I checked (as MS365 admin) and it's not enabled for us. I don't know if that's the default for Europe, for everyone, or if Microsoft intend to enable it themselves later.
  - 6y ago

moonchild 6y ago

Are microsoft employees subjected to these?

freeone3000 6y ago
Of course not.
slaymaker1907 6y ago
AFAIK, no. Also, as a programmer, a lot of this stuff doesn't necessarily correlate very well with my actual productivity. My personal views on this are that this is a pretty invasive feature and I don't think that this feature is ethical. Maybe if it was really clear about what it was doing it would be ok, but even then I still don't like it.
- tirpen 6y ago
  I don't think these stats correlate at with anyones productivity.

jsnell 6y ago

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198713

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nixgeek 6y ago

Slack has been doing similar things via their Analytics for several years now and their Customer Success teams regularly meet to discuss “Deployment Maturity” with larger customers on Enterprise Grid. In these PowerPoints you get their take on where your organization is at in employees engaging with Slack, compared to some of their other bigger customers, and they drill into how many applications you’ve got deployed, how many custom ones you’ve created, whether you use features like Workflows, etc. There are statistics for what % of employees are using Slack, how many days in the month, % of messages being shared in public channels, private channels, direct messages, % of messages sent vs. % which actually get read, ... What Microsoft is doing here seems like they’re trying to copy what Slack has done, to try and drive ROI and renewal conversations with their customers.

MattGaiser 6y ago
My company puts the Slack message count on the website. Scroll down to the bottom. https://www.altaml.com/team/ https://www.altaml.com/team/ It isn't used as part of management or anything so it is just a fun little fact, but I was surprised to learn that such a number was readily available. It shouldn't have been surprising, but it was when it clicked in my head that Slack tracks you as much as any other app.
- SkyPuncher 6y ago
  I do not understand why any company would put that on their website. It's absolutely meaningless in a vacuum. To me, it tells me "do not apply, we care about meaningless metrics"
  - strombofulous 6y ago
    It's put next to "# of AltaMLers who think strawberry is the best Bubly flavour" and "% of AltaMLers who think pineapple is an acceptable pizza topping", I don't think it's supposed to be taken super seriously
    - SkyPuncher 6y ago

frogpelt 6y ago

I think if you're having to score employees this way they actually must not be responsible for producing anything.

techfoolery 6y ago
welcome to inside sales

kyriakos 6y ago

If my job doesn't involve using any Microsoft Office apps other than teams for communication then my productivity score should be zero? I should appear as sitting around all day and occasionally having meetings

megablast 6y ago
Yes. That is why they fire all the developers. No one ever thought about adjusting fur those who don’t use Microsoft products.
- prepend 6y ago
  I talked with an internal dev group that used all Visual Studio dev stack. They thought that everyone on the 25k org should code their way. It was weird, I thought they were joking, but they were serious. They said with a straight face that no one should ever need to write in Ruby, JavaScript, or Python. When I pointed out that most major ML packages were in Python (they were into “AI” and whatnot) they said that PowerBI and Azure could do that for them. I kind of wish I was so certain about things in life. This was also a few years before Microsoft bought GitHub and they talked about how no one needed to use Git and that Visual Studio had built in version control that supported git, but no one liked it. I kind of wonder what they’re up to now as Microsoft is shifting over to GitHub. That was part of my worry with the acquisition is whatever cult-like mindset from Microsoft will bleed over.
gruez 6y ago
Sounds like a good way to pick up "loyal" users. If they weren't using your software suite before (eg. through educational licensing programs), they will have to switch to it now, if they want to look "productive".

brentis 6y ago

Other day my boss asked for me to ensure I'm accepting or declining meetings. As a PM with 20+ mtgs a week I default attend without accepting as constant rescheduling and re-accepting is not productive. I've done this for 2 yrs without issue... Now it's an issue. I also write most of my docs in Pages and export to Word. Guess I'm not getting my full potential productivity score for not using MSFT.

dvtrn 6y ago
I default attend without accepting as constant rescheduling and re-accepting is not productive I started doing this for the same reason but it resulted in another problem: meetings started getting double booked or even booked in triplicate. So now I actually “Respond without comment” so the person at least knows I’m attending and presumably other people will know I’m in a meeting already at 1pm. Yet people STILL seem to adamantly refuse to actually look at the scheduling assistant in Outlook. One side effect of covid is that I’ve developed a very good skill of enforcing my availability to others who seem just fine trampling over the best laid plans without even TRYING to communicate about it. Or when they do, it’s: “Hey your calendar says you’re out on Friday, do you have 30m for a quick zoom Friday at 2?” “My calendar says I’m out?” “Yes” “Then I guess I’m out”.
- brentis 6y ago
  My biz is decent about not double-booking on top of existing tentative mts for some reason, so that isn't a problem. Too lazy to see what attendance score I'm skewing by not accepting mtgs.
- prepend 6y ago
  This happens to me quite a bit and I used to wonder what was going through people’s minds. If my calendar shows I’m busy or out of office, then I can’t meet. But then I asked some people and they told me that most people’s calendars are not dependable and have all sorts of garbage. People have “auto accept” turned on and all sorts of weird behaviors. I try to keep my calendar accurate and either accept or decline real stuff and ignore/leave tentative things I don’t care about. My normal line is “schedule any time free on my calendar that’s convenient for you, ignore any tentative.”

libraryatnight 6y ago

Most of the time these days MS news is "cool." Open this, Linux that, check out our cool terminal. Nice to see a reminder they are still definitely not cool.

2fast4you 6y ago
A clear violation of the first midnight amendment, “Be Cool!”
pjmlp 6y ago
From point of view of enterprise consultancy they are definitely cool, you should a look at the alternatives.
mikro2nd 6y ago
MS is certainly trying to play the new cool, but the DNA remains the same DNA from the '80s & '90s. Don't be fooled: A Leopard cannot change its shorts.
- smt88 6y ago
  > DNA remains the same DNA from the '80s & '90s It literally doesn't. All the leadership from that time has retired, the revenue sources are different, and even the business models are different (subscription vs. upfront for many services). > Don't be fooled: A Leopard cannot change its shorts. Someone should tell this to all the large companies started by or tied to Nazis (Porsche, IBM, Volkswagen, Puma, Adidas, etc.) Or they should tell Apple, which went from near-death as a desktop/laptop vendor to a company now making most of its money from services. Companies change. They do a mixture of good and bad things. At this point, Microsoft is far, far from the company they were in the 80s and 90s, even if they still do bad things.
  - prepend 6y ago
    > company now making most of its money from services. Nope, they still are a hardware company. 22% from services in the latest quarter .[0] It’s gaining, but still far away from majority services. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-revenue-of-apple/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-re...

sriku 6y ago

Curious to hear what folks here think about Goodhart's law playing out when a company does something like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

forrestthewoods 6y ago

Maybe I’m weird but none of this really bothers me. If a company is shitty and micromanages and bases promotions off this crap then they’re a shitty company. And they’d be a shitty company whether tools give them extra data or not. On the other hand it might be good if a company doesn’t suck and they use use this data to assess whether remote work is causing a decrease a work/life balance or causing people to spend too much time in too many meetings. Data is just data. If a company is using data for nefarious purposes then they’re probably just a bad company to work for.

trianglem 6y ago
You’re not seeing the bigger picture. Once everyone starts doing this there will be no where else for you to go.
- forrestthewoods 6y ago
  I can go to places that don’t use this type of data to make bad decisions. Some places give employee ratings based on number of bugs fixed, lines of code written, or commits made. This is stupid. This data is also available to basically all companies. The fix is NOT to block that commit or bug counts from being visible. The fix is to not over index on that data when making rating or promotion decisions.
  - johnisgood 6y ago
    > I can go to places that don’t use this type of data to make bad decisions. Now re-read the post you replied to. > Once everyone starts doing this there will be no where else for you to go. No, you will not go anywhere where this practice is NOT done, because it will become widespread and you will have to be really lucky to find such a place where those practices are not done. That is, if they set a precedent and companies follow and people tolerate. > probably just a bad company to work for. Shit will happen when the majority of the companies will be bad companies to work for.
    - 6y ago

whateveracct 6y ago

I can just hear the MS PM juicing these features now.

pdkl95 6y ago

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on useless performance metrics[1][2]: >> In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 5OK-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS 2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them - hey, if we have - a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less KLOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing. [1] https://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html https://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHI7RTKhlz0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHI7RTKhlz0

blackrock 6y ago
Ballmer was actually insightful and philosophical, when he isn’t throwing chairs around?
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Having a temper doesn't prevent one from being intelligent. Gates and Jobs had famously bad tempers too.
  - 495636483 6y ago
    Was Jobs really that smart? Not sure that's the niche he filled successfully. More like Kinski, talented in some domain... but smart?! Jobs died pretty much by Dunning-Kruger effect, no?
    - nkrisc 6y ago
      People can be very intelligent on one area, and not as much in others. There are many scientists who have very high standards for proof and evidence in their professional life, but accept other theories as truth without a shred of evidence in their personal lives.

CarVac 6y ago

The first steps on the way to Manna... https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

scoot_718 6y ago

First the crappy ranking system, now a bad metric? For a place that did excellent productivity studies, they sure are hellbent on inflicting horrible policy on their workers.

loopz 6y ago
This is for everyone else.

dvtrn 6y ago

Can I break topic and complain how absolutey goddamn awful this is to read on mobile? Literally 100% of the screen before I’ve even seen the headline is an embedded ad banner, stacked on top of a video ad widget, with a hovering ad banner down below. Scroll down, headline, one sentence, nearly full phone display length ad. Scroll more, one paragraph another Nearly full length ad. https://imgur.com/dzID3T9 https://imgur.com/dzID3T9 Sheesh!! /rant

sgerenser 6y ago
If it bothers you that much why not install an ad blocker? I have AdGuard (free version) on iOS and I didn’t see any of that.
- jcun4128 6y ago
  I saw that recently(AdGuard). I use both ABP and UBO for desktop. Often I'll promptly back out of a website due to the aggressive ads. Funny living without ads so long get triggered seeing them ha.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  I already know this isn’t going to be a popular answer but I don’t much care so here goes: Because I don’t want to be installing more crap on my phone just to read the damn news. Often opt to just outline.com-ing a page.

blackrock 6y ago

I must have a low productivity score. Half the time, I’m staring off into space. Then I type stuff furiously. Verify it. Then publish it. Problem solved. Correctly too. But still a poor “Productivity Score”. No bonus this year.

hnracer 6y ago
It's really sad. We already have an incentive to game other people's perceptions to get an easy promotion but this takes it to a whole new level, and seems to reward the trickster political over the people trying to just make an impact. My expectation is that it's going to damage the productivity of the most productive but slightly increase productivity of the laziest quartile who should've be fired anyway. The biggest impact will be to drive engagement with Microsoft products which was the real endgame.

mastrsushi 6y ago

This is creepy, that makes me uncomfortable. This triggers me, that gives me anxiety.

roboemployee 6y ago

I am actually building something even worse but in parallel I am thinking that the same skillset used to build monitoring could be used to build a tool to game these tools. Comment here if you are interested in building the roboemployee of the future to be used by employees rather than employers.

mtgx 6y ago

Welcome to the "New Microsoft"...worse than the old Microsoft.

quicklime 6y ago

Here's how Microsoft describes it: > Productivity Score identifies areas where you can offer people training to learn how to use the tools to their fullest capacity In other words, it's a score that tells the Microsoft sales rep where to target their sales. If you score highly on everything, they'll give you a pat on the back to tell you that you're amongst their most "sophisticated" users. This seems common in the enterprise sales world. Another example I've seen is Adobe, which holds an annual Symposium every year where they hand out awards to the most advanced users of their products. The "winners" get to feel like they've been recognized for their incredible digital marketing skills and the rest of their clients are shown how to increase the amount of vendor lock-in and dependence on Adobe. Everyone wins!

enw 6y ago
> Productivity Score identifies areas where you can offer people training This reads to me as “identifies people that should be managed out”
- httpsterio 6y ago
  > This reads to me as “identifies people that should be managed out” That's a very pessimistic outlook I think. I work as a consultant for a company with approx 100 employees. Average age of workers is somewhere around 45 and most aren't really that good with computers, decent at best. I've handheld their digital security officer when he configures a Zoom webinar. So far, he hasn't been sure enough to do it all alone and still asks me to check the settings. This company produces word documents as their core business and if their digital security representative is that bad with computers, you can probably guess the average skill of the rest of the company. Nobody is getting fired though, they still get the job done and management invests in training. I'm currently helping build their entire IT ecosystem and one key aspect of the tools selected, is that it's simple enough to teach to their employees. I'm sure they'll love those metrics as they can actually see the biggest pain points and proactively do something about it.
  - sbergot 6y ago

politelemon 6y ago

>Let me be clear: Productivity Score is not a work monitoring tool. You need to understand. If you provide metrics like this, it will be turned into a work monitoring tool. That's how humans operate.

donmcronald 6y ago

> Microsoft 365's corporate VP Jared Spataro specified in a blog post that the feature, which debuted to little fanfare on Nov. 17, is “not a work monitoring tool” Hahahahaha. A comedian of that caliber should have a Netflix special. That's like the warning on the Q-Tip box that tells you not to stick them in your ears. Of course it's a monitoring tool. They just don't want to call it that because it'll damage the brand.

tester34 6y ago
What makes you think so? Have you used this tool from "admin" panel's side?

toomanybeersies 6y ago

> These metrics include ... whether they regularly contribute to shared documents or group chats, and the number of days they used Microsoft’s tools such as Word, Excel, Skype, Outlook, or Teams in the last month Workers are incentivised to maximise their use of Microsoft products, and in turn the high employee utilisation of Microsoft products ensures that Microsoft continues to sell licenses and subscriptions. That's genius in all the wrong ways.

globular-toast 6y ago

Have these metrics only just been rolled out to some places? I noticed I started to get them at my work in the UK about a year ago. I did think they were pretty weird. But why are they suddenly being talked about now?

dependsontheq 6y ago

It's a totally useless metric for productivity but I think the adoption thing is something that should be tracked and used. I big corporates you have a lot of holdouts that will send Emails instead of using a shared Doc for the next 10 years if you don't somehow tell them to not do that. And no question this has nothing to with productivity or an individuals impact on the company, but I think we here seriously underestimate ho slow some people are in using new available tools and I can see some value in that perspective.

rich_sasha 6y ago

I worked in a kind of work-hard-work-hard place (finance). People often making a point of how laate they worked etc. The most productive software guy, by any reasonable metric of quality and speed, was a guy who came in at 8.30 and left at 5 Pm on the dot every day. He avoided meetings if only could, replied to emails in batch at the end of the day etc. He would suck at these metrics, and yet he’s hands down the best SE I ever worked with.

varispeed 6y ago
For many people staying late is a coping mechanism - they want to escape their abusive partner or mounting chores waiting to suck last breath out of their miserable lives. How good employer could tackle it? At one place I worked, there was a hard 5pm cut off and regardless what was happening people had to leave the office. Any temptation to stay late was nipped in the bud. I can imagine people would still continue working until late from home anyway. If work is an escape, people will find a way. I learned one employee would take their laptop and go to a nearby pub and work in the secluded area of the premises. He said he could do either that or end it once and for all. Didn't want to hear about therapy.

Little_John 6y ago

I'm skimming these arts. and I absorbed the title as"grimm-i-fies "

Little_John 6y ago

I Skimmed this Leade line and absorbed the Verb as "Grim-ified". Stay alive hackers.

aitchnyu 6y ago

I've been receiving blank Cortana Briefings from my office for months. Where does the logic run and how is it enabled?

colechristensen 6y ago

Funny how Microsoft engagement is being sold as worker productivity. When do the microtransactions for workers to pay to win start?

brunoluiz 6y ago

Most likely, if companies start considering this as a real metric for raises or promotions, someone will come up with ways to fake data to increase stats. Besides, it doesn't seem prudent to gamify something so relative.

feralimal 6y ago

As bad as it is, isn't it great that they announce that they are spying on us? They wouldn't really need to - how would we know, if they didn't? Enough naivety... If people don't think that this has been going on for years, or that they actually announce Orwellian surveillance, I'm not sure what to tell you! We have been already living in a track and trace world - what is happening is that it is becoming overt. And there is nothing to be done about it. We all need the paycheck, right? Even if there is a massive outcry about this - and I doubt there will be - they will just come back and do it another way. They claim it is a right for employers to get the 'metrics'. What's kind of dark, twisted and funny, is that the people building the cages of today and tomorrow, are doing so with open eyes - technologists are some of the most surveilled people about, but - no problem! - we'll code tomorrow's hell for you!

6c696e7578 6y ago
What bothers me is that this system probably works at M$, which means their managers are probably using it to monitor their staff, using their inhouse tools. That probably has a good ROI since finding issues with their products is helpful. However, for another company this metric is just a value of how well locked into the M$ stack they are. If it were my company, heavy users would be penalised as there are other, better, less expensive products to use. Sitting in Teams talking to people is not a good score. Firstly you're wasting 512MB of that company laptop on a single web page, secondly it is a slow communication tool and thirdly, if you were talking in IRC then the conversation would be logged for others to grep and find answers to similar issues. Scoring high with M$ Word would also be a negative thing in my view, that shows that you're using a tool that locks the company into an upgrade cycle for future M$ Word versions. Did you not think to use Libre Office or perhaps MD? Scoring high in Outlook is also negative, that's another tool that can't store .msg files in open way. Every time a .msg file is attached to something and exchanged, via another tool then the receiver needs something that can disassemble the .msg into a readable form.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
There's a difference between hearing that such things happen, and suddenly finding an "Insights" (or more recently, "Cortana") e-mail in your inbox, telling you how much time you've spent on meetings, and "collaborating via e-mail and Teams", over the past week, complete with a friendly question like "did you make good use of your focus time this week?". The latter can really make you viscerally aware of just how much you're being surveilled, and in concrete terms. (Or the helpful Cortana e-mailing you excerpts from your conversations, in which it highlighted what it interprets to be pending tasks. And because it comes as an e-mail, you know it's not being computed locally.)

aboringusername 6y ago

Personally, I think changes like this are good and necessary to educate users on exactly what's happening to their data. Eventually we'll hit a critical mass; I am already thinking about how to (I love snails) confuse AI, pollute it with bad data and make it absolutely useless. Maybe I'll send emails (hello to the AI!) that make no sense, tag random people and make the analytics as useless as possible. We should all be uploading a few TB of random junk to Google photos, sending 1000's of pointless emails to random people and storing as much useless data as physically possible that they won't know whether to keep or purge. At least if they're paying to store my 1PB of absolutely pointless data that they can't do anything with it'll make them think about whether it's worth the cost.

einarfd 6y ago

If you can drill down to identifiable users. Then I have a hard time seeing how this is not a blatant GDPR violation. The biggest GDPR fine so far has been over workplace monitoring. So brave of Microsoft to roll out something like this, this might end up being a costly move on their part.

adamsurak 6y ago

G Suite (Google Workspace) has a similar feature called Work Insights - https://support.google.com/workinsights https://support.google.com/workinsights

sbergot 6y ago
It might be the same, but it is way more subtle: "What's Work Insights? Work Insights is a reporting tool for G Suite that gives you insights into the impact of your G Suite deployment. Using easy-to-read charts, you can see metrics on your organization's G Suite adoption, productivity, and collaboration." So they are putting "productivity" there between "adoption" and "collaboration". This tells me that it is selling usage metrics which might be the same thing, but I don't see an aggregate score per employee named "productivity xxx" which is the big issue with MS product. Also google's metrics are anonymous (see "Work Insights and user trust"). This seems to be a big difference. Looking at metrics is fine. You need to know how the tools you are paying for are used. Grading employees according to those metrics is bad.

nix23 6y ago

I hope that Microsoft knows that using software or cameras exclusive for employee surveillance is illegal in Switzerland, but if they sell it, no one will do anything. Just that one data protection officer will get angry.

noisy_boy 6y ago

Considering I spend almost all my time between various development tools and almost exclusively use wiki for documentation, I'll probably fare terribly by these metrics. Few days per year spent in Visio being the only saving grace.

6510 6y ago

If you take good enough or enough separate measurements it gets challenging to game it. Its like a delivery guy gaming his route planner. I wonder if MS employees are sufficiently encouraged to game it.

dojitza1 6y ago

The topic of work productivity is interesting from a behaviour science point of view. One wonders how far we've come in what is effectively manipulating humans to work faster.

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago

It's been 3 years now and still when I see Gizmodo I think "the folks who published Damore's report while removing all references from it and without informing the public they did so".

neya 6y ago

Some stupid MBA with a bow-tie was probably pitching how this is going to be a "game changer" for the product. This is already thanksgiving, so probably he collected his nice bonus for "innovative contributions to the company" in reality it's just a disgusting weapon for management to bring it up as part of your 1:1s with your bosses or when you ask them for a raise. Thanks for fucking everyone up kiddo.

angarg12 6y ago

Why stop there? Why not define networks of employees and their relationship? Why not weight an employee productivity score by the productivity score of their contacts? The possibilities are endless! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

Element_ 6y ago
I worked for a startup that was deploying a system like this to a large fortune 100. It used "AI" to analyze employee relationships and determine which employees would form the best teams etc...

dusted 6y ago

You get what you measure, so, good luck with that.. When they've made the system perfect, the system can do the work all by itself, that's probably an even better biz.

mkl95 6y ago

Bloated code metastasizes bugs in badly architected codebases. If a project like this survives long enough, some developer will suffer the consequences. I had to deal with one of these projects recently and it's making me want to switch jobs.

prepend 6y ago

This sounds stupid, but some of this stuff seems useful to focus trainings. One of my pet peeves is when someone takes a onedrive doc, downloads it, edits it, and sends the off cloud copy back by email. Office sucks at merging documents so this is more work for all the other “cloudies” or whatever you call people who know how to edit online. I’ve found this is because some users just never used cloud document tools and don’t know how and there’s no easy culturural norm now that everyone is teleworking to teach them. But this should be used to find zero or very low users and then thrown away. I think that trying to see the number or make a metric out of “number of opens” is so phenomenally dumb. It would be like comparing two git commit history grids and thinking one person is better than another.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

anonymfus 6y ago

I predict that Microsoft will rename that "Productivity Score" to something boring like "Product Feature Granular Usage Report" and do nothing else, and press will stop covering it.

mekkkkkk 6y ago

Was a while since I read it, but isn't this pretty much the plot of The Circle?

breakfastduck 6y ago

This is horrific, I would absolutely not want to work anywhere this information is actively being used.

thebrain 6y ago

LOC is a useless metric. Just before I left my last job a month or so ago, I checked my Github stats. Over the course of 8 years I added 124,000 LOC and removed 466,000 LOC. I can also assure you that my employer was sad to see me go.