Re:Bosses panic-buy spy software to keep tabs on remote workers
by godelski on Monday March 30, 2020 @05:53PM
(#22732623)
I'll give you a potential corollary. Quality control.
In a perfect world, quality control twiddles their thumbs all day, does some tests, and collects a paycheck because everything is perfect the first time.
In practice, I know engineers who leave in tiny and easy to fix mistakes for QC to catch. They do this because if they turn in something with no errors QC finds something for them to add, frequently requiring larger changes and thus creating a crunch. QC does this because they have someone breathing down their neck who measures their effectiveness by how many errors they caught. I'll refer you to Goodhart's Law[0].
I'll also note that I see this as a common "tip" for paper submissions. But I'm not sure it is as strong of a correlation as when passing things through QC.
In a perfect world, quality control twiddles their thumbs all day, does some tests, and collects a paycheck because everything is perfect the first time.
In practice, I know engineers who leave in tiny and easy to fix mistakes for QC to catch. They do this because if they turn in something with no errors QC finds something for them to add, frequently requiring larger changes and thus creating a crunch. QC does this because they have someone breathing down their neck who measures their effectiveness by how many errors they caught. I'll refer you to Goodhart's Law[0].
I'll also note that I see this as a common "tip" for paper submissions. But I'm not sure it is as strong of a correlation as when passing things through QC.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law