New feature to calculate 'productivity scores' turns Microsoft 365 into an full-fledged workplace surveillance tool

Don't they hit a point where up or out starts to be relevant, though?
In the military, no. To get released you either have to be injured or have god himself come down and sign the recommendation.
 
In the military, no. To get released you either have to be injured or have god himself come down and sign the recommendation.
Hmm, I thought there was a point once you'd reached a certain rank you eventually had to get a promotion or be forced out, both for enlisted and officers.
 
Hmm, I thought there was a point once you'd reached a certain rank you eventually had to get a promotion or be forced out, both for enlisted and officers.

This is the Canadian military, I probably should have mentioned that.

There are people in at the second lowest rank their entire career .. 25 plus years.
 
I wonder if the Micro$oft workers who produced this quality product were, themselves, scored by it on their productivity during their work on it?

Asking for a friend...
 
This is the Canadian military, I probably should have mentioned that.

There are people in at the second lowest rank their entire career .. 25 plus years.

Thanks for the insight and its cool to chat with a military man. Thanks for what you do for our country

We have yearly evaluations and 1-5 performance scales and shit but it's different now. At my place I can clearly see people abusing the fact that they don't have a baby sitter. Pathetic and for me it's a reason to leave my Dept for something else. I welcome these metrics tbh
 
Thanks for the insight and its cool to chat with a military man. Thanks for what you do for our country

We have yearly evaluations and 1-5 performance scales and shit but it's different now. At my place I can clearly see people abusing the fact that they don't have a baby sitter. Pathetic and for me it's a reason to leave my Dept for something else. I welcome these metrics tbh

We have the usual abusers, but it was anticipated based on their previous years. Someone who is good with excuses is just loving this covid thing.
 
under-the-thumb.jpg


When you can't hover over the wage slaves you need to e-hover. How else will you gauge your own small penis power.
 
The ones that are rising up, do they complain about those that have seemingly disappeared?

I ask because I bitch to my boss about the few that really haven't contributed anything since we've started full time from home. He doesn't do anything about it. He continues to give them tasks they can't deliver and eventually won't deliver, while the rest break their backs. I've told him straight up that these guys were getting to the point of being a hinderance to many other key players and he basically shrugged it off saying we need better communication, coordination blah blah

Is it too early to start letting people go that can't work from home responsibly or should we do like my boss and do nothing ?
I think it depends on the company. I work at one of the big tech companies in silicon valley, in a product team that comprises many of our best and brightest, and it still took ~4 months to get to a WFH operating rhythm that works well and doesn't leave gaps that might cause otherwise strong employees to stumble. That was with the resources to develop whatever hardware or software tools we might need to be productive remotely, taken advantage of by a workforce among the most committed one could hope for. And even now we're still struggling with otherwise outstanding engineers shutdown for weeks at a moment's notice due to COVID shutting down a preschool unexpectedly and turning a productive engineer into a stay-home parent-teacher trying their level best to squeeze in work and meetings between crying toddlers and elementary school kids whose PCs are crashing in the middle of a Zoom class.

In general, workplace performance assessment was exactly that--performance as measured in a constrained workplace environment, explicitly separating out personal situations where appropriate so as to have a consistent way to assess. With work and home life so thoroughly commingled these days, it's not always easy to disentangle the employee who is struggling due to COVID related family situations vs. one who is simply regressing/not committing. At least in my environment, we're being damn patient so as to not rush to judgment and lose a world class talent. And for me, six months in, I'm just approaching the point of being able to form opinions about who doesn't have an excuse. By the time I'm at a point where I am confident to act on it, we may all be back in the office.

These are not easy times. It would not surprise me that some environments would need to lean on this kind of data to dissect the actual operating circumstances of their team(s). Again I don't like it, and I'm not personally receiving such metrics, but in certain environments I would understand if managers found value in it during WFH.
 
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I actually have logs (source control entries) that say I have worked 7 days a week for the last few months. I don't think the company will want to look at these. With that said each week I am forced to lie and say I only worked 37.5 hours on the other hand I have had the same job since May 19, 1997.
Why on gods green earth are you working for free?
This devalues your entire industry. If the job needs more manhours than are being hired then this increases your value. The only people who win(not lose/derp) when you work for free are the bean counters at your company.

To the OP this type of monitoring is a double edged sword. With good metrics and understanding of how to use metrics it can let you know when you need to hire more people or shift people around. With bad metric readers it turns idiot managers into micromangers who keep pumping the same stupid metric in absolute exclusion to anything else(including sanity).

/edit fixed derp
 
The line between government and corporations are pretty thin already.
The dark cyberpunk future needs to have its megacorps some how, and we totally need more compliance productivity through Microsoft products. :borg:
 
First time we were asked for user "Productivity" metrics was on mini mainframe in 3d CAD modeling env. there were 4 users per mini and they would set a model to Rotate and Lock it. the CPU would pin and generate oodles of productivity for them ...And the 3 other users could barely get anything done. Get used to being measured as the masters OTU want to monitor/control thought itself.
 
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