this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Summarized: micro managing remote workers is harder, and that's apparently a bad thing according to CEOs.
People will really do such incredible mental gymnastics to avoid actually learning how to quantify business value. If you don't know how to measure the value an employee has brought to your company, you don't deserve the title of CEO, as that's pretty much your job.
My job for years was building maintenance. From doing it on my own at small places to leading teams. One of the last places I worked at was a theme restaurant that had me and a part time person. The job started at 4am so I would be out of the way before they started serving guests. I had a great boss that was moved to another location, after 3 years, the new boss hated me he constantly asked me to prove my work, told me straight out that he couldn't quantify my labor cost. The first meeting we had he told me straight out that he didn't understand the position and didn't know why I was there. Needless to say I was fired after 4 months with him.
Fixing things before they break? What an alien concept
Where my wife works they don't fund the maintenance department, instead they put a maintenance expense in everyone else's budget and make facilities bill them like they are an outside contractor. Stupidest business model.
I bet he figured out what you were worth when the place was disgusting a week later lol
Or...I'm not sure what building maintenance is in this case and maybe no cleaning involved but whatever he'll know when it falls down.
Some cleaning, but mostly making sure the monkeys moved and the latex elephant went off on schedule, also the kitchen items like the fryers, pizza conveyor, and dishwasher were ready to go at all times.
I feel like the problem for maintenance is that it doesn't flow in steady units of output like production tasks. You don't have a maintenance team to keep them at 100% use, but to make sure that everything else is at 100% functioning.
You don't go buy a mop when you have a flood you keep one standing by. Maintenance is like keeping a rental mop on hand, sure you can use it for the little things while you wait for the big one and that's when they shine.
Nobody would qualify as CEO at any company I've worked for if those were the rules. I'd love to see someone try to estimate the exact value added by any single software developer working in a team
Thats literally what the job is. You can go get an entire degree on this topic and learn precisely how you assess the value someone brings to a team. It's an entire field of study.
I didnt say its easy, its actually incredibly difficult
But... thats why CEOs are supposed to be paid such a high salary, its supposed to be super hard
However, instead a lot of shitty CEOs just short circuit out to incredibly stupid metrics for value that have been proven time and time again that they are not accurate at all, because they are easy methods and the CEO is lazy.
An actual serious CEO who knows wtf they are doing and genuinely knows how to measure company value, can indeed measure how valuable an employee is, thats their job.
But it requires a lot of work and, turns out, a lot of CEOs are actually not qualified for their positions, and would rather just slap monitoring software on everyone's laptops and metric them by mouse wiggles per hour, lines of code per day, bugs solved per sprint, or any of the other usual "sounds good to stakeholders but is actually totally useless and destructive in practice" metrics.
I'd like to see someone assess the value against cost for some of the management I've left behind.
Many of them would be right-placed shortly after.