[lpd1]

"You received this email because my big data team analyzed your activities in Jira, Confluence, Gmail, chats, documents, dashboards and tagged you as unengaged and unproductive employees. In other words, you were not always present at the workplace when you worked remotely."

Sweet.

Maybe we are hitting the day when all of your code commits, all communication, location in the building, telecommute meetings, etc. etc. could be run through the Big Machine and give you a grade. All automated.

A parrot could be trained to fire people in a special HR chamber.

[derwiki]

> Everything about their employees is monitored and tracked, down to individual finger and eye movements, to prevent waste and track performance. All emails that are sent out include an estimate of how long they should take to read. Go to fast, you get scolded for not paying attention. Go too slow, you get scolded for inefficiency. Get it just right? You get scolded for being a smartass.

—- Snowcrash

[D-Coder]

Communist logic:

Three prisoners in communist East Germany were talking about their crimes.

1: "I always got to work five minutes early. They convicted me of spying."

2: "I always got to work five minutes late. They convicted me of sabotage."

3: "I always got to work exactly on time. They convicted me of owning a Western watch."

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

I suspect this will be an unpopular opinion here, but I think that if you set the thresholds conservatively enough, a tool like this could be useful in identifying people who are not contributing. Where I work there are searchable tool invocation logs and there have been cases where someone is only compiling code one or twice a month, who not too long after I discovered this made an exit.

If you're enough sigmas below the median, it might be worth a closer look at least. Human review would be necessary of course. There are a plethora of ways to contribute. But it doesn't seem controversial that there must be some signal to be extracted from logs like those described in TFA.

[uncomputation]

The problem with any metric is that old quote about “when a metric becomes a measurement it’s useless.” How do you recognize someone who commits the same “amount” of code but which is consistently shitty and has to be reworked later from someone who commits a lesser “amount” but guides the project overall to a better place? Or someone who is spinning gears all the time: compiling code, spinning up VMs, in meetings all the time, and yet whose absence would be unnoticed?

Even a system of assigning a certain number of tasks. Sounds reasonable enough, right? But in my experience if you need X tasks per Y, the tasks will soon begin to conform to the metric. “Oh I need 8 gold doubloons this week, let me assign all of those to fixing the white space in this file.”

[MattGaiser]

I think the problem is this can only work once before you set off a ton of system gaming.

[oh_sigh]

Funny, where I work, someone saying "I haven't 'prod accessed' in 3 weeks" is a humble-brag about being so important that they are only writing design docs and doing high level reviews.

[ncann]

Can't wait for that day, so that I can write some scripts to check JIRA every minute, scroll through my Gmail inbox at random interval and add likes to my boss's messages on Teams. I'll have the top score in no time.

Obligatory Dilbert https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13

[cratermoon]

I got someone to cover for me. https://youtu.be/R_rF4kcqLkI?t=174

[6nf]

My employer went this route. Gamified all the developers' output. I quit on the spot and I was not alone.

We will see how it turns out but I still believe that gamifying everything is a bad idea. There's no way to align the incentives with company profits using stupid metrics.

[planet-and-halo]

The problem with "gamifying" work is well-known to anyone who actually studies human motivation. Any exercise of control, and especially anything that makes people focus on their performance rather than the actual task they are doing, is bound to decrease motivation and quality. When kids worry about the test and their grade, they learn less. When professional athletes start worrying about the score instead of trusting their bodies, they do worse. This is a pretty basic feature of human psychology, but for some silly reason we think we can outwit it if we make our methods of control "fun" enough.

[combatentropy]

> Jira, Confluence, Gmail, chats, documents, dashboards

The top users of these pieces of software have all been canned, since they obviously were doing no real work.

[matheusmoreira]

Every single day the world gets closer to the cyberpunk dystopias of science fiction. It's eerie to watch this sort of thing happening in real life.

[jodrellblank]

We are already at that day: https://www.zdnet.com/article/i-looked-at-all-the-ways-micro... discussed on HN here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25816297 and the linked https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-365s-productivity-sc...