(Over-)Measuring the Working Man

HughPickens.com writes: Tyler Cowen writes in MIT Technology Review that the improved measurement of worker performance through information technology is beginning to allow employers to measure value fairly precisely and as we get better at measuring who produces what, the pay gap between those who make more and those who make less grows. Insofar as workers type at a computer, everything they do is logged, recorded, and measured. Surveillance of workers continues to increase, and statistical analysis of large data sets makes it increasingly easy to evaluate individual productivity, even if the employer has a fairly noisy data set about what is going on in the workplace. Consider journalism. In the "good old days," no one knew how many people were reading an article, or an individual columnist. Today a digital media company knows exactly how many people are reading which articles for how long, and also whether they click through to other links. The result is that many journalists turn out to be not so valuable at all. Their wages fall or they lose their jobs, while the superstar journalists attract more Web traffic and become their own global brands.

According to Cowen, the upside is that measuring value tends to boost productivity, as has been the case since the very beginning of management science. We're simply able to do it much better now, and so employers can assign the most productive workers to the most suitable tasks. The downsides are several. Individuals don't in fact enjoy being evaluated all the time, especially when the results are not always stellar: for most people, one piece of negative feedback outweighs five pieces of positive feedback.

Comments

Re:Clickbait wins

[nbauman]

This metric would seem to be encouraging authors that write the clickbaitiest titles. Sounds wonderful.

Cowen's assumption is that the things that are easy to measure are also meaningful and contribute to the organizations' success. In journalism, that's not usually true.

I once worked for a weekly newspaper in Brooklyn. The publisher had more (family) money than brains. The paper was doing badly and he was getting desperate.

One week, we ran a British-style tabloid headline, "4-year-old girl raped, murdered." It had the highest newsstand circulation of any issue.

This was followed by a wave of angry subscription cancellations. One subscriber wrote, "I don't want this garbage coming into my house."

The paper continued on its downward trend and finally shut down.

The moral: following a meaningless metric can give you a boost in the short term, and harm the enterprise in the long term.

Like VW's emission test results....

Re:Who came up with that bullshit line?

[tbannist]

Not to mention the relentless gaming of any measurement system by all parties that erodes whatever value it might have.

I have an illustrative anecdote:

A company that I used to worked for, decided to have a bug fixing contest. They decided that they would pay a bonus to their software developers for every bug they fixed so they could lower the defect rate on their software. At first the project seemed to be a roaring success, the number of fixed bugs climbed quickly, however, the budget for the bonuses ran out only a few weeks after the contest started. An examination of the payouts quickly raised suspicion among some of the managers running it. The numbers showed that some of the testers were finding more than 10 times the number of bugs that they used to find, while others were finding the exact same number. It didn't make sense because they weren't paying any bonuses to the testers. A short investigation revealed that some of the developers were deliberately including bugs in the code before they released their work to testing, some went so far as to tell their selected tester what and where the bug was, and then splitting the bug bounty with the tester who sent the bug back to them to fix. Of course, the developers and testers who were caught collaborating were all fired. However, the fake bug fixing displaced real testing work, and fewer real bugs were fixed during the contest, and the company had to recruit new people to replace the people they fired, so the defect rate went up because normal testing was displaced, some of the deliberate bugs actually made it through testing, and the new developers and new testers who replaced the people fired were not as familiar with the product and more problems slipped through while they were settling in to their new duties.

The moral, is that when money is involved it will not take long for people to figure out how to game the system, and quite possibly achieve the exact opposite of what they were supposed to being doing.