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> many of them genuinely have zero metric for gauging "how much is Aurornis working?" besides measuring the amount of time a butt is in a seat This is a legiti

> many of them genuinely have zero metric for gauging "how much is Aurornis working?" besides measuring the amount of time a butt is in a seat This is a legitimate problem though. Obviously making people do all their work from a centralized office location is a horribly inefficient solution, but it is a solution, and if there really is widespread slacking happening it might still be more efficient than doing nothing.

danaris 2y ago
But it's not a solution, that's the problem. I am currently at my desk, in my office. Am I working? For roughly two years during the pandemic, I was at home using my laptop. Was I working? Furthermore, for most office work, there is more to working than a binary "are you doing it or not?" Being at your desk working says nothing about the quality of your work, which any competent manager should absolutely be capable of assessing from the work itself. Finally, you're making a huge assumption: > if there really is widespread slacking happening Is there any evidence that this is happening? I guarantee you that the kind of manager who does this will not know, because they have no effective metrics. It's also precisely the kind of thing that toxic management culture says workers are always doing (or trying to do): It perpetuates the idea that Managers, who are perfect, pure beings with only the Might Company's best interests at heart, are always at odds with Workers, who are lazy good-for-nothings only ever interested in getting the most money possible for the least amount of work possible, and who must always be treated as if they are trying to steal their time from the Mighty Company.
rurp 2y ago
If a manager doesn't have any better way to judge if their employees are working than to check seat attendance then that manager is useless.
- joquarky 2y ago
  The pay for such a simple supervisory task that needs only attendance-taking skill should be near minimum wage.
consteval 2y ago
It's an unsolvable problem, because any sufficiently complex job will therefore be complex to measure. I mean, if you could measure it, then you could just do it, no? Why spend all this time measuring how good an engineer is? If you really want to know, you have to look at the code, sit in on the meetings, write the code and see the challenges with integrating with the existing system, submit a PR to see the pushback and... oh wait now you're just an engineer. If we hire two engineers to act as one then maybe, maybe, we could measure performance. At the cost of the largest inefficiency imaginable. It's not unlike using generative AI for coding. Writing code is the easy part! Making sure it works is another beast. Honestly, I'd much rather write code than read it. If it takes X time to write code and > X time to read it, which in my book it does, why bother with the reading?
- danaris 2y ago
  "Unsolvable" in the sense that there's no one magic algorithm you can use, sure. But every job has some ways to determine if the person in it is actually, y'know, doing it. And off the top of my head (and it's early, so YMMV), I'd say that remote jobs tend to have more easily-auditable products than many in-person-only jobs (particularly the type where the main purpose is direct interaction with the public). > If we hire two engineers to act as one then maybe, maybe, we could measure performance. At the cost of the largest inefficiency imaginable. And why should "efficiency" be our most important criterion? "Efficiency" is why we have lean staffing that forces the "bus factor"[0] of nearly every position to 1. "Efficiency" is why we have stretched, fragile supply chains that break down the moment any one supplier or middleman experiences a crisis. Efficiency is the enemy of resilience. The only people it really helps are shareholders. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
  - consteval 2y ago
    Efficiency is perhaps not the right word, but I was under the impression that attempting to measure performance is a cost saving tactic. I think you lose the cost saving if you just double your engineers while keeping the same amount of work.

danaris 2y ago

But it's not a solution, that's the problem. I am currently at my desk, in my office. Am I working? For roughly two years during the pandemic, I was at home using my laptop. Was I working? Furthermore, for most office work, there is more to working than a binary "are you doing it or not?" Being at your desk working says nothing about the quality of your work, which any competent manager should absolutely be capable of assessing from the work itself. Finally, you're making a huge assumption: > if there really is widespread slacking happening Is there any evidence that this is happening? I guarantee you that the kind of manager who does this will not know, because they have no effective metrics. It's also precisely the kind of thing that toxic management culture says workers are always doing (or trying to do): It perpetuates the idea that Managers, who are perfect, pure beings with only the Might Company's best interests at heart, are always at odds with Workers, who are lazy good-for-nothings only ever interested in getting the most money possible for the least amount of work possible, and who must always be treated as if they are trying to steal their time from the Mighty Company.

rurp 2y ago

If a manager doesn't have any better way to judge if their employees are working than to check seat attendance then that manager is useless.

joquarky 2y ago
The pay for such a simple supervisory task that needs only attendance-taking skill should be near minimum wage.

consteval 2y ago

It's an unsolvable problem, because any sufficiently complex job will therefore be complex to measure. I mean, if you could measure it, then you could just do it, no? Why spend all this time measuring how good an engineer is? If you really want to know, you have to look at the code, sit in on the meetings, write the code and see the challenges with integrating with the existing system, submit a PR to see the pushback and... oh wait now you're just an engineer. If we hire two engineers to act as one then maybe, maybe, we could measure performance. At the cost of the largest inefficiency imaginable. It's not unlike using generative AI for coding. Writing code is the easy part! Making sure it works is another beast. Honestly, I'd much rather write code than read it. If it takes X time to write code and > X time to read it, which in my book it does, why bother with the reading?

danaris 2y ago
"Unsolvable" in the sense that there's no one magic algorithm you can use, sure. But every job has some ways to determine if the person in it is actually, y'know, doing it. And off the top of my head (and it's early, so YMMV), I'd say that remote jobs tend to have more easily-auditable products than many in-person-only jobs (particularly the type where the main purpose is direct interaction with the public). > If we hire two engineers to act as one then maybe, maybe, we could measure performance. At the cost of the largest inefficiency imaginable. And why should "efficiency" be our most important criterion? "Efficiency" is why we have lean staffing that forces the "bus factor"[0] of nearly every position to 1. "Efficiency" is why we have stretched, fragile supply chains that break down the moment any one supplier or middleman experiences a crisis. Efficiency is the enemy of resilience. The only people it really helps are shareholders. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
- consteval 2y ago
  Efficiency is perhaps not the right word, but I was under the impression that attempting to measure performance is a cost saving tactic. I think you lose the cost saving if you just double your engineers while keeping the same amount of work.