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Comment by hmmSceptical | Hacker News Reader

"output" only matters if your company is paid by "results" and isn't based on billable hours, otherwise ... "output" doesn't matter.

Law firms would love every case to be solved in 2 hours if they still got the same $ value from a case that dragged on for 6 months.

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Keep moving those goalposts.

> Goalposts

You literally said "output" the most speculative / vague definition of "work" available.

I appreciate programmers / "creatives" "output" is much harder to measure, but there are alot of jobs where "mouse moving", "words per second" is a very reliable indicator of "output".

Such as? And more importantly, is there the slightest evidence that putting such monitoring in place actually helps increase output?

Almost no jobs are meaningfully measured in such a fashion because it penalizes thinking at the expense of spinning your wheels even when latter is far less or even negative in value if it wastes other employees time as well. It also fails to capture any relationship between input and output. If all you care about is butts in seats you can bill someone else for there productivity means nothing all you want is someone to take as long as possible to produce a level of output the client will pay for.

Their clients are not paying for lawyers to sit on their chairs and click their keyboards. Billable hours is still completed specific work (even though it might not lead anywhere and/or help winning the case/etc. directly)

This already happens. You really think places bill at cost?

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