There are no KPIs that can reveal the reason for the lack of output in many cases. The issue is when the KPIs are bad AND there is evidence that the employee is not putting in the effort to correct them.

We don’t know they are useless, that is just the suspicion. The nature of the work is that sometimes output can be impacted by forces outside of their control. If we wait long enough, the pattern will be obvious, but why pay someone to not do work when we can just install software on their computer that will almost immediately let us know that they aren’t even putting in full days?

I honestly don’t get the opposition to this kind of thing. You’re on your work computer, not your own device. Use the work computer for work and use your personal devices for personal stuff. If your contract says you work 40 hours per week, work 40 hours per week.

I’m probably about to get down voted. But as an IT guy, I install tracking software on a very small subset of systems of employees that are pretty much about to be fired for being useless. The reason we do that is basically to catch employees being dishonest. It’s quite possible that the nature of the work makes their productivity hard to gauge. Once we install the software we have some data we can use to push back against outright lies. If we see them spending 75% of their day planning their next vacation instead of getting their work done, they are gone. We don’t install the software unless you are already failing to do your job.

Disagree. The entire post is predicated on the false assertion that data is just a collection of arbitrary bits.

Yes, I think you were correct originally that this is ultimately a freedom of speech issue. I would have the same argument against free speech absolutism. It just ignores the cause and effect related to communicating information. That’s why we have laws against speech that incites violence. Sometimes the effect of speech can be equal to or greater (by orders of magnitude) than physical action.

Even ignoring the obvious issues with the child pornography stance, this blog post starts out on completely the wrong foot. The idea that data is just arbitrary bits is completely falacious and willfully ignorant. He’s asking us to ignore the fact that those bits represent information, which is more than an arbitrary set of bits. Or else we wouldn’t be sending them.

Not to mention his anthropomorphization of computers, which is also completely inaccurate. A computer “cares” more perhaps even more than us about the precise arrangement of the bits, because that is what allows them to convert those bits into specific actions. A single bit being off could in fact render the entire dataset illegible. Whereas a human who receives a typo-ridden call to arms, for example, may still be able to convert that particular set of bits into an actual act of violence.

I have problems even with the starting point for this ideology.

If I were him, I would be more concerned with my name being attached to this defense of child pornography: https://web.archive.org/web/20130116210225/http://bits.are.notabug.com/

Your articles suck. They are not useful to anyone. Try something else.

Phew. Sometimes I read things and think I’m going crazy. I work in ERP/accounting software and was sure the monetary data type I’ve been using was backed by integers, but the post you’re replying to had me second guessing myself…