Though I love good rants, I struggle to differentiate good rants from their tedious, far more common cousins, bad rants. It's all about staying power. It's been 18 years since I read [email protected]'s Usenet swearfest and I still remember it.

https://boingboing.net/2002/04/18/the-internet-was-mad.html

1/

This rant, by @mipsytipsy, is a good rant.

https://charity.wtf/2020/07/07/questionable-advice-can-engineering-productivity-be-measured/

Mipsytipsy is answering a reader who wrote in asking "Can Engineering Productivity Be Measured?"

2/

She begins by describing a time when she had a 100% remote gig as a sysadmin for a boss with weak technical judgment, who rated employees based on the number of tasks they closed in a work-day. This turns out to be very easy to game.

3/

"I became a ticket-closing machine. I’d snap up the quick and easy tasks within seconds. I’d pattern match and close in bulk when I found a solution for a group of tasks.

4/

"I dove deep into the list of stale tickets looking for ones I could close as 'did not respond' or 'waiting for response', especially once I realized there was no penalty for closing the same ticket over and over."

Punchline: "My boss worshiped me. I was bored as fuck."

5/

She restates the useful and important Goodhart's Law, "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."

AKA: "Any measurement becomes a target."

6/

Measuring the productivity of employees with targets doesn't work for jobs that involve "challenging and novel" tasks.

This is where the ranty bit starts.

7/

"Your execs should fucking well know this: how would THEY like to be evaluated based on, like, how many emails they send in a day? Do they believe that would be good for the business?

8/

"Or would they object that they are tasked with the holistic success of the org, and that their roles are too complex to reduce to a set of metrics without context?"

9/

She goes on to make a bunch of extremely sensible recommendations for assessing and improving the work of people whose jobs involve these "challenging and novel" tasks, but the rant is the part that stuck with me.

10/

It's a perfect gem of a rebuttal to neo-Taylorism and its high-tech sidekick, #Bossware, published in a moment of both record unemployment and record discontent among tech workers. The right message for the right moment!

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#bossware

eof/