Nice, I guess instead of talking to the person next to me and sorting something out in 2 minutes, we can use email, and do it in 30.
Also, let's see everyone just adding: 'oh, thanks' or whatever to group chats, just to increase the message count
@FalconSensei Want to get on Teams and collaborate to fix the spelling mistakes I accidentally-on-purpose left in all those Office docs?
@friend1 @friend2 @friend3 Don't forget beers on Friday.
Lol.
This is so stupid. You'll end up with 2 types of employees; those that work and those that work to game the metrics.
My mother's seen it first hand at a government job. Shared work queues and measuring productivity via naïve metrics is an ideal work environment for lazy people that do poor quality work. Why spend 30 minutes on a task when you can do a terrible job of it in 5 minutes and get the same score?
She was fired for low performance...
Thing is, in her department she was the only employee that took difficult cases and found the solution, and left the easy ones to her coworkers, her boss didn't want to fire her, but had to because the metrics said she had to go because a low total amount of cases...
Last she talked with her former coworkers, now they are struggling because the hard cases keep piling up endlessy and nobody knows how to do many of them, because they fired her without warning so she couldn't even teach others how to do what she did.
EDIT: oh yeah, remembered that IBM wasn't subtle about how much they needed her either, since she was the only one that could do what she did, when she worked at IBM I had lovely christmas and new year parties with her laptop on the table, because IBM back then threatened to fire her on the spot if she didn't work remotely on some important clients during those times, then her actual firing came some a short time later anyway during a seasonal lull of work.
I did this to show him how stupid his metrics are but he just said “great job, this is amazing.”
So I just made sure to min max stupid metrics and do what I thought was right as it was easier than trying to fix the metrics.
I definitely don’t think it’s worth being fired out of principle if I know I’m measured for case count.
Generally, I try to set up policies where these metrics are not allowed for performance, but are visible.
And then whenever someone tries to enact them I try to say “this is a really stupid idea and here’s why” in front of as many senior, fancy pants people as possible.
So I have seem approved MRs with 1 comment: 'lgtm' (looks good to me)
I have seen the exact same comment pasted in all instances of something, in the same MR. i.e: "don't use @autobind, remove." instead of 1 comment saying 'remove all @autobind from file'
Situation above, the person replying: 'fixed' on all comments, instead of 1 reply 'removed all @autobind'
Just....... why?
I've been on both sides of both situations (in person better, online better). But what I always did was: ok, feel free to interrupt me if something urgent comes up, otherwise, send me a slack with the full details and I'll answer later.
As mentioned in other responses to this post, having the number of emails/slack messages as a target doesn't help make the work environment better (in both 'more pleasant' and 'more productive' ways)
A truly bad measure would be something like measuring the volume of coffee in my cup to determine the health of the economy. If I make up fake numbers, or pour some coffee out to change the measurements, that doesn't make my measurements any more insightful in regard to the economy.
I do agree and disagree.
Sometimes it's very handy to just talk about stuff quickly, but for me, who unfortunely has a lot of context switching I love having stuff written in email, because I can always go back to it when I forget or when I need to reanalyze it
But the thing is: communicate in the way makes sense for the situation/environment. Not by forcing people to send everything in emails, and even, sending way more emails than necessary
Similarly, you can activate your webcam with a black tape on it, add/remove some spaces at the end of lines on shared documents…
Well, talking to the person next to you will disrupt their focus, and they might take hours to get into whatever they were doing (if they were programming / in the zone) at the time. So, yeah, better do it in 30 minutes.
Nonetheless, it’s quite common to read comments about talk in the office as a focus annoyance, flow interruption, etc. I guess any form of notification is.
Yeah, this is why I mute notifications. Some people use 'send' as a period. So instead of 1 notification for whatever they need to say, you got 10