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I worked as a VP in a company that tracked everyone in 10-minute intervals. Just having this tracking led to some managers inhumanely squeezing devs and almost

by bitL 4y ago

I worked as a VP in a company that tracked everyone in 10-minute intervals. Just having this tracking led to some managers inhumanely squeezing devs and almost all devs ended up burned out after a few years. They went to great lengths to reject any time slots where devs showed insufficient intensity on their keyboard/mouse or if they spotted anything non-work-related on dev desktop screenshots. However, when it came to manipulating metrics to look good (even down to a fraud where they lowered metrics of their devs they didn't like), it was all fine. This culture was enforced by the CEO/COO so there was not much I could do about it outside shielding my people and then leaving when my bosses went even more insane.

bagels 4y ago
How did anyone stay there when that was first implemented?
- bitL 4y ago
  Competitive salary and remote work.
ryandrake 4y ago
Wow, I've heard of ridiculous job performance metrics like "hours in chair" and "lines of code" but "sufficient keyboard/mouse intensity" is a new one to me! So I need to wiggle the mouse frantically and mash the keyboard all day and I'm "working"? Holy cow, that's wild!
- bitL 4y ago
  I almost had a team fired for "too many lines of code" when I was there :D A billionaire CEO went berserk and it took considerable amount of effort to cool him down.
  - Zancarius 4y ago
    Now THAT'S bizarre. Was that because the team was making others look bad by outperforming them via the LOC metric? lol...
    - bitL 4y ago
      No, that was because that team did a rewrite of an existing product and one of the "optimistic" reasons for the rewrite was to make the code smaller...