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This story is somehow even worse than the headline. The CEO wanted to create an elaborate system to rank employees based on their engagement in certain tools l

This story is somehow even worse than the headline. The CEO wanted to create an elaborate system to rank employees based on their engagement in certain tools like Jira, Confluence, and company chat. Don’t chat enough? Your ranking is low and you might get laid off. Should have chatted more, sorry. Even stranger, the CEO claims he wanted to let employees view their own engagement scores so they at least had a chance to pump up their numbers (time to spam more e-mails and refresh more Confluence pages so I don’t get fired!) but he went on record in another article blaming the development team for not releasing that feature: > The company also planned to implement the so-called “digital mirror,” so every employee could learn what AI thinks of their work and engagement. However, the development team wasn’t enthusiastic about this idea, so its rollout is pending. That’s right, the development team who works on the employee ranking tool “wasn’t enthusiastic” about letting other employees see their ranking or how it works, so they’re withholding it from the company supposedly against the wishes of the CEO. The CEO is then going on record, in public, blaming those developers for not letting these other people see their own scores before they get fired. This CEO sounds like the type of person who wants to be in charge but also wants to dodge as much responsibility as possible. Create an algorithm to fire people, then send them an impersonal e-mail letting them know the algorithm has chosen them for firing. Then explain that he wanted to let them see their score and have a chance to react, but those mean developers weren’t enthusiastic about the idea so, sorry, you can’t see it. I’m sure the developers of the secret employee ranking system have high scores for themselves, somehow.

daggersandscars 5y ago
If your firm is using Office 365 / Microsoft Azure products, your managers have similar capabilities available to them. This is one of the marketed uses of Office 365 and other Microsoft products - monitoring "productivity" via metrics such as Teams posts and responses, Azure DevOps activity, etc. I mention this because it doesn't require bringing together disparate systems to monitor your employees. This includes monitoring what files you opened on OneDrive, when you opened them, etc. If you are using Office 365 at work, I highly recommend going to delve.office.com and taking a look. Edited to clarify Office 365 + Microsoft Azure products
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Slack also has employee statistics tools that rank employees by number of messages sent. I worked at a company where the CEO once shared a slide with the top Slack users and praised them for being engaged. Suddenly, everyone started spamming Slack to get their Slack numbers up. My least favorite technique was the people who pressed enter every few words as an easy way to get more lines. After the CEO publicly praised the top Slack users, I started getting a lot of messages like this: > hey > you there > ?? > quick question > for you > I’ll keep it quick > :) I would some times leave for lunch and come back to over 100 Slack notifications that could have been replaced by a few e-mails, but that wouldn't have earned anyone Slack points. Slack basically became useless after that.
  - throwaway14356 5y ago
    you are now a progamer
- Tarsul 5y ago
  this function must be weakened where I work. At delve.office.com I only see a couple dozen office documents and how often they were opened. I'm not surprised that I don't see it all (as I work in Germany) but I'm surprised that there's basically nothing (of value) there. Well, I should be happy about that.
  - muttled 5y ago
    You have to enable the more intrusive metrics in the back-end.
Quickshooter 5y ago
Just to add to this - he went to Facebook and wrote a post about this that can be translated as: "Fucking work hard or get the fuck out"
lupire 5y ago
Yet he didn't fire the unengaged and unproductive metrics team.
snarf21 5y ago
Apparently he has never heard of Goodhart's Law.
michaelcampbell 5y ago
> This story is somehow even worse than the headline. These days, that's quite an accomplishment.

daggersandscars 5y ago

If your firm is using Office 365 / Microsoft Azure products, your managers have similar capabilities available to them. This is one of the marketed uses of Office 365 and other Microsoft products - monitoring "productivity" via metrics such as Teams posts and responses, Azure DevOps activity, etc. I mention this because it doesn't require bringing together disparate systems to monitor your employees. This includes monitoring what files you opened on OneDrive, when you opened them, etc. If you are using Office 365 at work, I highly recommend going to delve.office.com and taking a look. Edited to clarify Office 365 + Microsoft Azure products

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Slack also has employee statistics tools that rank employees by number of messages sent. I worked at a company where the CEO once shared a slide with the top Slack users and praised them for being engaged. Suddenly, everyone started spamming Slack to get their Slack numbers up. My least favorite technique was the people who pressed enter every few words as an easy way to get more lines. After the CEO publicly praised the top Slack users, I started getting a lot of messages like this: > hey > you there > ?? > quick question > for you > I’ll keep it quick > :) I would some times leave for lunch and come back to over 100 Slack notifications that could have been replaced by a few e-mails, but that wouldn't have earned anyone Slack points. Slack basically became useless after that.
- throwaway14356 5y ago
  you are now a progamer
Tarsul 5y ago
this function must be weakened where I work. At delve.office.com I only see a couple dozen office documents and how often they were opened. I'm not surprised that I don't see it all (as I work in Germany) but I'm surprised that there's basically nothing (of value) there. Well, I should be happy about that.
- muttled 5y ago
  You have to enable the more intrusive metrics in the back-end.

Quickshooter 5y ago

Just to add to this - he went to Facebook and wrote a post about this that can be translated as: "Fucking work hard or get the fuck out"

lupire 5y ago

Yet he didn't fire the unengaged and unproductive metrics team.

snarf21 5y ago

Apparently he has never heard of Goodhart's Law.

michaelcampbell 5y ago

> This story is somehow even worse than the headline. These days, that's quite an accomplishment.