Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

This sort of performance management is unfortunately necessary. The problem is that we need tools for it to be built by people who can empathise with those subjected to them, and who want to do the right thing, and not these sorts of folks who are too immature and inexperienced to get it right.

My previous company ran a warehouse and there was a clear bell curve of productivity. Most people were fine, some were excellent, but some were below the level that was realistically achievable. We did careful and considerate analysis and it helped improve productivity.

When done badly however you end up with management using productivity tracking as a lever to increase productivity across the curve. Amazon driver delivery quotas are a great example – people urinating in bottles is clearly a symptom of the quota being too high. Unfortunately software built naively to help bring up the bottom 10% can too easily be used to force up the productivity of the other 90%.

The video shows two people whose full-time job is watching an automated dashboard and who have failed to spot an issue for at least a month.

Quite apart from anything else, this isn't a good argument that this type of performance management is necessary, it's a great argument for firing all the managers in that factory.

We have a production line without individual performance tracking in a country with very high living standards and working costs.

If a line doesn't perform, you can solve it without it. Every single time.

Sure, there is not as much market pressure than in general logistics, but I still don't believe you would need these metrics at all.

Necessary according to who?

Colleagues, the business. The important things are that performance management is a) used to identify those performing far below what is possible, and b) that there is a good faith effort to support those people to perform better.

Both of these things are mis-handled by many companies, who will use it to encourage more performance out of those who are already as productive as practically possible, and that the tools are used in bad faith or with no intention of helping people, only as an excuse to fire them.

You don’t need constant monitoring to find the bottom 10% though. People performing that badly are easy to pick out with spot checks.

It’s the same with software. Your direct manager should know if their employee is in the bottom 10%. If they don’t, they aren’t doing their job or they have too many reports.

What constant automated monitoring allows is cutting back on the number of managers and like you said, pushing high performers even further.

That depends what you consider monitoring to be. Managers don't just know these things, they aren't walking the floor watching people, they're busy doing things. Their source of knowing these things is often looking at data for the number of things processed, or in some cases failure rates.

You're right that this doesn't need to be constant or even that automated though.

Investors.

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