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Sunday, November 3, 2024

I've had a change of heart regarding employee metrics

I know that if you go back far enough in these posts of mine, you will find some real crap in there. Sometimes that's because I had a position on something that turned out to not be very useful, or in some cases, actively harmful. This sucks, but that's life: you encounter new information and you are given the opportunity to change your mind, and then sometimes you actually do exactly that.

Recently, I realized that my position on something else has changed over time. It started when someone reached out to me a few weeks ago because they wanted me to get involved with them on some "employee metrics" product. It's some bullshit thing that has stuff like "work output" listing how many commits they've done, or comments, or whatever else. I guess they wanted me to shill for something of theirs, because from my posts, clearly I was such a fan of making that kind of tool, right?

I mean, sure, way back in 2004-2006, I was making all kinds of tools to show who was actually doing work and who was just sitting there doing nothing. I've written about a number of those tools, with their goofy names and the "hard truths" they would expose, showing who's a "slacker" and all of this.

When this company reached out, I did some introspection and decided that what I had done previously was the wrong thing to do, and I should not recommend it any more.

Why? It's surprisingly simple. It's the job of a manager to know what their reports are up to, and whether they're doing a good job of it, and are generally effective. If they can't do that, then they themselves are ineffective, and *that* is the sort of thing that is the responsibility of THEIR manager, and so on up the line. They shouldn't need me (or anyone else) to tell them about what's going on with their damn direct reports!

In theory, at least, that's how it's supposed to work. That's their job: actually managing people!

So, my new position on that sort of thing is: fuck them. Don't help them. Don't write tools like that, don't run tests to see if your teammates will take care of basic "service hygiene" issues, and definitely don't say anything substantive in a performance review. None of it will "move the needle" in the way you think it will, and it will only make life worse for you overall. "Peer reviews actually improve things" is about the biggest crock of shit that people in tech still believe in.

Once again, if management is too stupid to notice what's going on, they deserve every single thing that will happen when it finally "hits the fan".

Make them do their own damn jobs. You have enough stuff to do as it is.

...

I feel like giving this a second spin right here in case I failed to reach some of the audience with the first approach. Here's a purely selfish way of looking at things, for those who are so inclined.

Those tools I wrote 20 years ago didn't really indicate who was slacking at working tickets or whatever. What they *actually indicated* was that the management at Rackspace, by and large, had no clue what was going on right under their noses. And, hey, while that was true, that can be a dangerous thing to say! You want enemies? That's a great way to get them.

So, why expose yourself? Suppress the urge to point out who's slacking. It will only come back on you.