Metrics are mostly bullshit because it’s not possible to measure productivity for most tech roles and its impossible to measure productivity for soft skills.
Metrics exist to justify manager decisions and convince their managers that things are working, regardless of what’s actually happening.
What metric do you use for a coder role? Sloc? Ok, make a bunch of garbage code. Tasks complete? Maybe, but there’s no quality metric so tech debt is invisible. Senior Engineers should be mentoring and influencing their team members. How do you measure that? How do you measure how well a TPM gets people to work together?
It’s bullshit used to justify the bullshit idea of “scientific management.”
Metrics are mostly bullshit because it’s not possible to measure productivity for most tech roles and its impossible to measure productivity for soft skills.
Where are you getting this? It’s completely wrong. I work in IT and I have a timesheet to fill out on each ticket I do, and document what was done. You can look at my weekly hours and see exactly what I’ve been doing and how my time is spent. They don’t care if I put “watched youtube for an hour” if there isn’t immediate work, it just needs to be filled out. That is a measurable metric, in fact we let a guy go last month because he could only account for about 15 hours a week that he was working and when asked about it, he had no answer on any of it.
So I don’t know how you think it’s “unmeasurable”. Of course I could make shit up and fill in fake hours, but it will catch up when the work isn’t done and they start asking questions or the client starts asking what’s going on with their project.
What metric do you use for a coder role? Sloc? Ok, make a bunch of garbage code. Tasks complete?
And then when they see that you can’t do the job… you’re gone. that’s measurable over time, very easily. They’re going to see that you can’t perform the job based on your results.
Senior Engineers should be mentoring and influencing their team members. How do you measure that? How do you measure how well a TPM gets people to work together?
You put it on your calendar/timesheet that you had training with X employees, or helped so and so work on a project. It’s not hard and is a requirement in many Tech places. This is a way to make sure the team isn’t overwhelmed, work is done in a timely manner, and how we’re communicating with the clients, as well as many other things. The guy was let go because he was taking over 2 hours to do a password reset. I remoted in, changed it, gave the new password to the client and it was done in about 8 minutes. He just wasn’t up to snuff to handle even the simplest things. Measurable actions. 10 minutes vs 120 minutes is a massive difference for simple tasks that we have documentation on how to do.
Whether you agree or not, that is a metric used to measure performance and see where employees stand with the workload. So your first comment is such a broad stroke it’s completely wrong.
I’ll let you in on a secret: they can’t tell. There’s absolutely no way to know how productive someone is. It’s a popularity contest with extra steps.
If your job can be accurately measured in all aspects, then it can also be scripted. If it can’t be scripted, there’s something that’s not possible to measure.
I used to drink that Kool aid too, before I spent a couple of years actually seeing what managers are doing.
Oh no! This will definitely negatively impact my CSAT! Lol, cool.
Edit: To be clear, I don’t actually think that you can be replaced with a small script (although, password reset is automated where I work). I think there are unquantifiable things, and I think you’re actually selling yourself short when you imagine your work can he represented with pure metrics.
Metrics are complete bullshit. They exist for the mananager to believe he’s doing things rationally. But in practice metrics only make your work worse.
You think they bother checking thousands of employees’ performances before laying them off? The only performance they check is who is better bud with management
Each manager probably have a few people in mind when their higher ups asks them to cut down head count in the department. Unless they decide to cut down the entire department of course. Then performance no longer matter.
From my experience, this is not the case. Layoffs in the US (especially those in tech) are quite secret and quite sudden, which means the decision of whom to lay off is typically done at a sufficiently high level where they’re generally clueless about individual performance.
Layoff season being thing should remind everyone why you should always do the minimum and why you should never have loyalty to an employer
Oh, then they might lay you off first because you’re underperforming compared to your peers.
I’ll let you in on a secret: they can’t tell. There’s absolutely no way to know how productive someone is. It’s a popularity contest with extra steps.
This is bullshit. There are dozens of ways to tell, even remote. Metrics exist for a reason.
Metrics are mostly bullshit because it’s not possible to measure productivity for most tech roles and its impossible to measure productivity for soft skills.
Metrics exist to justify manager decisions and convince their managers that things are working, regardless of what’s actually happening.
What metric do you use for a coder role? Sloc? Ok, make a bunch of garbage code. Tasks complete? Maybe, but there’s no quality metric so tech debt is invisible. Senior Engineers should be mentoring and influencing their team members. How do you measure that? How do you measure how well a TPM gets people to work together?
It’s bullshit used to justify the bullshit idea of “scientific management.”
Where are you getting this? It’s completely wrong. I work in IT and I have a timesheet to fill out on each ticket I do, and document what was done. You can look at my weekly hours and see exactly what I’ve been doing and how my time is spent. They don’t care if I put “watched youtube for an hour” if there isn’t immediate work, it just needs to be filled out. That is a measurable metric, in fact we let a guy go last month because he could only account for about 15 hours a week that he was working and when asked about it, he had no answer on any of it.
So I don’t know how you think it’s “unmeasurable”. Of course I could make shit up and fill in fake hours, but it will catch up when the work isn’t done and they start asking questions or the client starts asking what’s going on with their project.
And then when they see that you can’t do the job… you’re gone. that’s measurable over time, very easily. They’re going to see that you can’t perform the job based on your results.
You put it on your calendar/timesheet that you had training with X employees, or helped so and so work on a project. It’s not hard and is a requirement in many Tech places. This is a way to make sure the team isn’t overwhelmed, work is done in a timely manner, and how we’re communicating with the clients, as well as many other things. The guy was let go because he was taking over 2 hours to do a password reset. I remoted in, changed it, gave the new password to the client and it was done in about 8 minutes. He just wasn’t up to snuff to handle even the simplest things. Measurable actions. 10 minutes vs 120 minutes is a massive difference for simple tasks that we have documentation on how to do.
Whether you agree or not, that is a metric used to measure performance and see where employees stand with the workload. So your first comment is such a broad stroke it’s completely wrong.
This metric is not measuring how well you do your job, it measures how fast you do it.
It’s not meant to see if the team is overwhelmed, it’s meant to ensure the team is overwhelmed.
Bingo.
If your job can be accurately measured in all aspects, then it can also be scripted. If it can’t be scripted, there’s something that’s not possible to measure.
I used to drink that Kool aid too, before I spent a couple of years actually seeing what managers are doing.
Lol ok. I guess we’re done here
Oh no! This will definitely negatively impact my CSAT! Lol, cool.
Edit: To be clear, I don’t actually think that you can be replaced with a small script (although, password reset is automated where I work). I think there are unquantifiable things, and I think you’re actually selling yourself short when you imagine your work can he represented with pure metrics.
Metrics are complete bullshit. They exist for the mananager to believe he’s doing things rationally. But in practice metrics only make your work worse.
You think they bother checking thousands of employees’ performances before laying them off? The only performance they check is who is better bud with management
Each manager probably have a few people in mind when their higher ups asks them to cut down head count in the department. Unless they decide to cut down the entire department of course. Then performance no longer matter.
From my experience, this is not the case. Layoffs in the US (especially those in tech) are quite secret and quite sudden, which means the decision of whom to lay off is typically done at a sufficiently high level where they’re generally clueless about individual performance.