Right, you can't directly measure productivity in many jobs, so proxies for productivity are used, and in low trust environments, those proxies are the sole source of truth, which makes gaming them more important than actually being productive.

> those proxies are the sole source of truth, which makes gaming them more important than actually being productive.

Reminds me of a short story I read, which I can't find now. The gist of it was about this person reading a memo or something at work on their computer, and the person wasn't actually reading it, they were just scrolling down the page and occasionally scrolling back up to pretend to re-read paragraphs because they knew the monitoring software flags such behavior as a positive indicator that the reader has increased comprehension of the memo.

It's not a short story, but maybe you're remembering a bit from "Snow Crash"?

> Y.T's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes... Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.

Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of. I didn't know it was part of a book, I think I originally read this paragraph on someone's blog. Thanks for sharing the original source!

It'll get harder when the computers add eye tracking and one has to fake looking at the text too :)

You may also be thinking of Snow Crash. Creepy stuff!

1984?

Excluding sole traders and cooperatives (and sometimes even including those, as the easiest way to lose friends is said to be to go into business together), it is entirely natural for the company and coworkers not to trust each other, not fully, as the goals and incentives of the company are not the same as goals and incentives of the employees. Your goal isn't likely to be to subordinate your life entirely to what the company wants, in a cult-like manner, with no regard for any other priorities like family, friends or personal growth - thus at the very least the kernel of mistrust always remains.

Some companies just manage to mask it better or tone it down to a level that if felt to be acceptable.

While true for many (the majority, even), it's not impossible for company-employee relationships to be symbiotic as well, not every company is like you describe.

I'm reading this article while waiting for one of the two people with write access to run my db migration, as developers don't get write access to the database in this company. Is this common?

The better way is for nobody to have direct write access to the database, but instead for automated tools to do things like that, using reviewed code and config and writing an audit log of actions taken. The trust thing is part of the reason this is a good idea, but it's mostly a good idea to avoid good-faith accidents. I think it is common for companies that haven't yet had time to build those automated tools to delegate their work to senior, very trusted, engineers. But that's not a good solution, it's just more expedient, and a bit better than the database being world-writable, which is a bad solution.

I'm in a small company in that position, what's also helped is wrapping UPDATE statements in a transaction with a verification SELECT statement to make sure everything worked ok, then committing the transaction.

Saved my bacon more than once!

Many companies do not provide read access to application databases either, without explicit consent via well-defined process. There are many compliance-related reasons why this is implemented, one of which may be the protection of your customers' financial performance data.

Yes, it's pretty common not to provide direct access to production data in general.

In my experience, migrations are usually part of the code base, evaluated as such with PR and whatnot, and run automatically when deploying.

It depends on the size and context of the company, but I would not necessarily see this as a lack of trust.

Anyone who removes the "you break it, you bought it" scenario by denying you access to production is actually doing you a huge favor.

Why is this not automated?