The Dystopian World of Metrics Gone Wild

I had a flirtation with a potentially very lucrative opportunity in the last week or so. A good buddy of mine told me about a recruiter that’d been in touch and was hiring for a job that pays Big Money(TM) (as in multiples of what I make now — and I think I’m already pretty well compensated..). He’s not quite as much of a techie as I am, any more, said it didn’t seem like a good fit for him, but he said he’d connect me.

Even though I’m quite happy and just recently changed employers, this was like a life-changing amount of money, so I figured I’d at least entertain it and discuss it with said recruiter. So I got the email intro. I did the typical reply and thanks. And the first response I got from the recruiter was some kind of spam protection response from Boxbe — I had to click a link to show I was human or something, to get on her “Guest List.” Oh boy, that’s not a good sign, I thought… Strike One for treating people like individual human beings.

Four days later, I got a reply with a form email. Strike Two for treating people like individual human beings. It had a super brief description of the role, the amount of money (wow, a lot), that it’s remote, that it’s cash only (i.e., contract — no benefits), and an overview of their “Hiring Event,” which takes place “this Saturday, starting at 8am CDT.” The “event” would be a multi-hour engagement, consisting of different kinds of tests. As I later learned, they called this a “tournament.” I was invited to use Calendly to set up a time to discuss, if I was interested, which I did, though I was growing more skeptical moment by moment.

I finally got more info. This was a company called “Crossover for Work,” and it appears to be a global consultancy of some sort. After we talked briefly “to confirm my interest,” she sent me a link with more info, and an invitation to register for the “event.” Strike Three for treating people like individual human beings — just doing the minimal of human “touch” to herd people into their big “event.”

In the meantime, I looked them up on Glassdoor. 2.9 isn’t terrible, but it’s certainly not great. The average is 3.4. However, what got me more worried was reading through the cons. Over and over again, people mentioned the tracking software that they use. That link is their page talking it up, but read the reviews on Glassdoor for some insight into the darker side, not that it takes much imagination. And I mean, how many companies put out a video defending their bad reviews? (Wow, that video is just so bad it is laughable…)

And on one of the pages I was given by the recruiter, there was a link to this video from their CEO:

I have a low tolerance for what I think of as slimeballness. It’s doubtless my philosophy and software dev background that contributes to this sensitivity, but I’ll give him some credit. He seems more or less like a regular guy in the industry. He comes across like he really believes in what he’s saying, and that it’s a good direction for the highly skilled work. (But note the apologetic tone of the last couple minutes.)

Some good points, in my view:

• I 100% agree that remote work should become the norm, or at least much more prevalent than now, particularly for jobs like my own. There is pretty much no reason with all of our telepresence options for this not to become the case.
• I agree that compensation should not be locale-based. I know this flies in the face of the “whole point of outsourcing,” but from a basic fairness point of view, a company should decide what it thinks X job is worth, and pay everyone (based on experience, skills, talent, etc.) based on one scale. There’s no reason that the same person would be worth less just because they live in a lower COL area. I know it’s “the market” at work, so here’s hoping that as we get more remote-friendly, the market will level out. But for companies today, if you’re hiring in one locale and willing to pay $N for that job there, you ought to be willing to pay the same amount elsewhere.
• I agree that being remote friendly makes sense for companies, because you get access to a much larger talent pool that way. My experience shows that time zone differences matter more than anything when it comes to collaboration, so that’s the main barrier to remote work, in my view.

Interestingly, most of the “pros” in the Glassdoor reviews mention remote, even the critical ones.

But now onto the Bad Parts. If I could sum it up, the badness is the whole impersonal feel of their approach. They couch it in positive terms, but it’s just not good from a humanistic point of view.

Tournament Style Interviews

Just calling your hiring process a “tournament” is a bad idea. It sets the wrong tone. This goes back to the aforementioned treating people impersonally. “Take a number.” We don’t have time to treat you like a human. Join our webinar. Take our tests. Our computers will stack rank you against other applicants, and if “you’re the best,” you’ll get the job. Apparently, they didn’t get the memo that stack ranking people is a bad idea. It’s bad in performance reviews, and it’s bad in candidate evaluations.

I am not opposed to using standard evaluations during the interview process, at all. I’m not opposed to having some kind and amount of quantification like scorecards, but as human beings, we shouldn’t strip the human out of the picture. I prefer humans giving the scores, even if imperfect and subject to individual bias. There are just things that humans pick up on that can’t be coded into standardized tests — both good and bad. Working together is about relationships as much as it is about skillsets.

Big Brother Monitoring

There’s no way to sugarcoat it, no matter how hard they try. Relying on tracking software as your primary performance monitoring mechanism is just EVIL. I recently re-watched 1984 with my oldest, and it’s funny how easy it is to make bad ideas sound like they’re in your/society’s best interests. I’ll even admit that in many ways, communism is appealing — in much the same ways. It claims to want to even the playing field. It claims to want to treat people more equitably. It claims to be interested in the good of the whole, the good of the team-company-country. But the fundamental realities are that these theoretical good intentions are so very easily exploitable by base human nature.

This has been proven out by history on the global scale. It’s attested to in the criticisms on Glassdoor. People feeling they have to work much more than their billable hours because some part of the work they do is not “productive.” Feeling like your job is constantly under threat. Being reduced to numbers on a dashboard. And so on.

Even the common defenses you find in various commentaries is so wonky. It’s like being brainwashed. “We do this for you. So you get paid fairly for the work you do.” And, “if you need to use the bathroom, you just pause the software. It’s not monitoring you all the time.” LOL

NO! Humans are not made to function like machines. They are wibbly bundles of nerves, emotions, histories, and personalities. Most highly skilled work is best done not with a view to solid hours of productivity but in fits and starts, periods of focused effort and periods of apparently dilly-dallying and lallygagging. It is a very asymmetric thing, where one can “idle” or “coast” for some hours, then have an amazingly valuable insight and urge to pound out greatness.

But even just run of the mill stuff, humans do best when there is room to have fun, to “waste time” chatting with each other. Sometimes they’re anxious and need to talk things through, before they can properly focus on doing their “real work.” Some days they’re just having an off day — maybe they slept bad or had an argument with a loved one, or just got back from vacation and trying to get their heads screwed on straight. These are all normal aspects of human life, and an enlightened employer won’t get anxious about them.

In fact, I say an enlightened employer will encourage a sense of fun and relaxedness, especially in creative and problem-solving type professions (as are pretty much all disciplines in software development). If you hire for people with integrity. If you hire for people with innate passion and drive about their chosen profession. They will deliver, even while they can appear to “goof off.” They will often deliver 10x more and better than those who have an ax constantly being held over their heads to “keep working.”

Having monitoring software sends every kind of wrong message and encourages the absolute wrong mentality. It doesn’t create an environment for people to do their best work. At all. It provides a breeding ground for bad management thinking. (Many reviews mention how managers hold the derived metrics over employees heads.)

It drives a wrongheadedness with regards to what is important.

Bit of a Hippy, Me

I realize that I have less love for “metrics” than your average business person. Many companies live and die by them. I don’t actually have an inherent problem with metrics. Quite the contrary, I think they’re highly valuable when measuring the success of things — companies, products, features, interaction flows, experiments, and the list could go on.

What is bad are metrics for humans, particularly human relationships, including employer-employee relationships. And this is where I think a purely capitalistic mindset falls incredibly flat. We shouldn’t conceive of the relationship between employer and employee in strictly monetary terms because human beings are more than things to produce for a company. It is demeaning and a horrible way to live and to treat others.

Metrics for people — when their jobs/raises/advancement/bonuses are on the line — are so, so easy to abuse. They are so easy to get wrong. They are so easy to game, and they are so difficult to get right and to get aligned across individuals and groups. They often lead to infighting and unproductive conflicts — usually somewhat inexplicably, particularly when metrics are not transparent (and they rarely are). They often lead to undesirable behaviors in achieving company goals, and in treating each other well, both inside the company and outside when dealing with customers, as anyone who has dealt with your average customer support rep can tell you.

No Sir, It Ain’t All About the Money

Note how many times, in the apologetics for the Crossover approach, they dangle money out there. “But we pay top dollar!” That should be a red flag. Of course, there are hidden costs for the “employee” in their model, too — no benefits being chief among them. It’s true that if they really do pay enough, you can offset that, but to me it just emphasizes the binary relationship that they want to set up. You give us “productivity” and we give you lotsa cash. That’s it. You’re on your own for everything else.

What this fails to grasp is that fundamentally humans are motivated by the sense of doing something well, of expressing mastery, of being appreciated by other humans and enjoying the company of other humans. When all these things come together, it’s magic. We are basically never motivated by just DOING, just PRODUCING. It’s the feeling of accomplishment, of doing something meaningful that most motivates. That’s also why measuring “productivity” is wrong, because the only quantitive metrics you can create for productivity are about “just doing”: logging hours/minutes, commits, deliverables, cases closed, calls made, etc.

You can’t quantify a sense of a job well done. You can’t quantify enjoying working with your colleagues — a sense of camaraderie. You can’t quantify the thrill of solving hard problems. You can’t quantify the joy that comes from helping other humans.

Thankfully, it’s more and more the norm these days that companies focus on humanization of the workplace, particularly in the software industry. Sure, there’s a lot of silliness there with the superficial “benefits” like free drinks, catered food, scooters, and the like, but the more we try to focus on building a human-centric culture, the better off we’ll all be.

To make it happen, we have to redefine success in more than monetary terms — for companies as well. Not very stock-market-friendly? Perhaps, superficially. The thing is, when people are happy and intrinsically motivated, they will do their best and hardest, most valuable work. Humanistic goals actually contribute to market success — when people do their best work, they make things better, they serve people better, they improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, driving up repeat business and referrals and good press.

Any company that claims to be innovating in the way we work by making things more metrics based and less human-centric is setting us backwards, as an industry, as a culture, as humanity as a whole. Work is more than productivity and money. Success is more than productivity and money. The more we realize and embed humanistic values into our companies, the better we’ll all be.