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>These metrics include how often workers turn their cameras on during virtual meetings, how frequently they send emails (and how many contain @ mentions), wheth
by 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 agoLife 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 agoMy 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 agoIf 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 agoThis 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 agoSo 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 agoWhat if it's a bad measure to begin with, ie. anticorrelated with quality? Does it become (technically) better by being gamed?
- ptx 6y agoIsn'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 agooh, thanks!
- krageon 6y agoIn 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 agoIn 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 agoIn New Zealand ;)
- joppy 6y agoIn 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 agoI 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 agoThat 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 agoIf 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 agoYou’re describing the consumer layer of Microsoft Office products that they sell to individual who work in enterprise Office environments.
- dkdbejwi383 6y agoI 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 agoOpposite 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 agoIf 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 agoIt’s also hard to cut and paste out of in person talking.
- FalconSensei 6y agoI 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 agoSounds like 10 minutes to setup some automation to win big bucks.
- Scoundreller 6y agoI need like, a hardware version of auto-hotkey
- csa 6y agoI imagine the software version will work just fine.
- sneak 6y agoMost 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 agoThere 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 agoYou could pay for 365 yourself
- sneak 6y agoAny 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 agoYeah, 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 agowhile [ 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 agoOut 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 agoIt displays a 'funny' random quote or login message.
- thih9 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TeMPOraL 6y agoPulls 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 agoNote 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 agoI’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 agoThe 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 agoThe 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 agoIt's also worth mentioning the @ mentions in email are exchange-specific (afaik)
- prepend 6y agoI 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 agoI’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.
- nkrisc 6y agoOne 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 agoIt's possible that smart managers will prefer people who get their work done while minimising these metrics. I can dream.
- josefx 6y agoAnd 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.