10 ms·

> 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

> 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
    My first job was in tech support and we had similar metrics although nothing as drastic. I took really hard escalations and had a low case count. My manager pointed it out and so next period I also did 100 remote password changes in addition to my hard cases and had like 3x the next closest case count. I did this to show him how stupid his metrics are but he just said “great job, this is amazing.” So I just made sure to min max stupid metrics and do what I thought was right as it was easier than trying to fix the metrics. I definitely don’t think it’s worth being fired out of principle if I know I’m measured for case count. Generally, I try to set up policies where these metrics are not allowed for performance, but are visible. And then whenever someone tries to enact them I try to say “this is a really stupid idea and here’s why” in front of as many senior, fancy pants people as possible.
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  I had similar experiences in the past with review comments. So, they measure how many merge requests you left a comment (for other people's MRs), how many comments total on other peoples' merge requests, how many on your own. So I have seem approved MRs with 1 comment: 'lgtm' (looks good to me) I have seen the exact same comment pasted in all instances of something, in the same MR. i.e: "don't use @autobind, remove." instead of 1 comment saying 'remove all @autobind from file' Situation above, the person replying: 'fixed' on all comments, instead of 1 reply 'removed all @autobind' Just....... why?
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)

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
  My first job was in tech support and we had similar metrics although nothing as drastic. I took really hard escalations and had a low case count. My manager pointed it out and so next period I also did 100 remote password changes in addition to my hard cases and had like 3x the next closest case count. I did this to show him how stupid his metrics are but he just said “great job, this is amazing.” So I just made sure to min max stupid metrics and do what I thought was right as it was easier than trying to fix the metrics. I definitely don’t think it’s worth being fired out of principle if I know I’m measured for case count. Generally, I try to set up policies where these metrics are not allowed for performance, but are visible. And then whenever someone tries to enact them I try to say “this is a really stupid idea and here’s why” in front of as many senior, fancy pants people as possible.
FalconSensei 6y ago
I had similar experiences in the past with review comments. So, they measure how many merge requests you left a comment (for other people's MRs), how many comments total on other peoples' merge requests, how many on your own. So I have seem approved MRs with 1 comment: 'lgtm' (looks good to me) I have seen the exact same comment pasted in all instances of something, in the same MR. i.e: "don't use @autobind, remove." instead of 1 comment saying 'remove all @autobind from file' Situation above, the person replying: 'fixed' on all comments, instead of 1 reply 'removed all @autobind' Just....... why?

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)