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Comment by seper8 | Hacker News Reader

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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