I don't get why this is viewed as beyond the pale? Sounds like your manager cared about how you all were doing, and wanted a way to observe trends in how you were doing in order to help you, which is the same exact thing a manager does implicitly every time she talks to you. Obviously this isn't reproduceable psychological science, but is there more to the story to explain why you found this to be objectionable?

I see you've never worked in a toxic organization (or at least not noticed).

My experience has been if you voice displeasure it will be reflected in your performance review.

I had a role on a team once, I was doing great, getting work done and all my coworkers enjoyed working with me. Got along well with the team lead etc. However I was grossly mislead as to what the role was. I finally decided to talk to my manager about my displeasure with the role, naively thinking they might be interested in helping improve things.

The next week I was brought into a room with my manager and it was made very clear that I was going to be pip'd in the next review cycle. I was suddenly presented with a laundry list of goals I had to meet in the next 4 weeks and told that this was the minimum acceptable way to even remotely get a passing review. These were goals I had never seen or heard of in the previous 5 months of the review cycle.

I think this is more summed up as in the joking expression "the beatings will continue until morale improves". In my experience this is more common than not.

My most recent gig was pretty toxic, which is why the framing of the OP (and some of the reactions) is so surprising -- most managers at our place wouldn't have noticed when the employers were spiraling into a funk, and certainly wouldn't have sat down with them individually and asked them how they were doing, as per OP. So to me, that sounds like someone giving a shit and trying to do something about it. If it's an evil manager situation, you can grind people into dust without the theatre of trying to help them. All that said, your example makes sense. I guess it depends on the particular pathology of the place and how it manifests.

I do find a lot of these HN threads pretty fatalist, though, where there is seemingly no room for a mgr to do what they're paid to do and also care and try to help in a realistic way without being seen as overbearing and evil. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

And if you manager had been regularly checking in with how you are feeling then this would have been... worse? I suspect that, given a manager with as poor people skills as yours has, your manager initiating the contact and asking you instead of you going to your manager may have instead made all the difference.

It doesn’t really matter. In a toxic work environment - any dissenters are immediately pushed out. This is because toxic work environments have no intention of changing and need everyone to be a yes man. If you are not a yes man - you are managed out or fired.

It’s a lot of gaslighting. This is why it’s a toxic work environment…

> I had a role on a team once, I was doing great, getting work done and all my coworkers enjoyed working with me. Got along well with the team lead etc. However I was grossly mislead as to what the role was.

Can you explain how you were doing great (presumably at the role) but was grossly misled as to what the role was?

Because you don't know how this information is going to be used and whether it's going to be used against you? Because it's weirdly reductionist: no longer happy or unhappy with or about anything, just a number in a vacuum?

^ This person gets it!

We'd already explained our complaints quite extensively in words. Asking for a number was an insult, and a way of brushing off all the words we'd already communicated. Especially as a substitute for acknowledging or doing anything about the words we'd already communicated.

> your manager cared about how you all were doing, and wanted a way to observe trends in how you were doing in order to help you.

I often find kpi is implemented with the messaging that it is to help managers understand the staff but once implemented this messaging is quickly replaced with the manager bitching that his staff have not met their happiness quota.

Ditto. We do this at my company today, but it's done as part of a culture of trust and openness. (Which culture – I might add – is one of the biggest reasons I'm still there.) And it doesn't displace 1:1s where my manager can talk in person about how I'm doing either. Why wouldn't my manager want to know if I'm happy at work? This seems like one of the most basic things your manager would want to know, and often enough to use a tool to automatically share this regularly.

a company I worked at tried this. it didn't work out for these reasons:

A) it's a strange request B) it's an imposition C) it implies a callous touch. why don't you care enough to check in directly? D) it wasn't clear what the data was actually used for. or if it was ever used.

Seems like a pretty easy way to do layoffs is just to sort by smiley face and get rid of the unhappy ones

I think the movie Office Space might offer an example of the type of workplace OP is talking about.

And the Apple TV series Severance.

(yes, I know, person upthread asking us not to analogize everything to TV shows, but that is how culture works and to a great extent what it's for)

It is absurd to reduce "happiness" to a single, one-dimensional value, as the sliders illustrate.

Edit: what would you do with this information as a manager, anyway? At best, you know your employees are unhappy but not why. So you still have to sit down and talk with them. Which you should have been doing in the first place instead of wasting everyone's time with this happiness index crap.

The same as with any data you'd collect about anything -- it's part of a larger ecosystem, and no reasonable person expects one number to be the ultimate fount of all wisdom.

I can recall situations where some of my reports were unhappy, which I knew about, but where the _magnitude_ of their unhappiness didn't come across, because for whatever reason, that's a thing people will often hide in conversation, at least for a while. Similarly, anybody who sees patients will admit to getting very different readings from different types of solicitations about their well-being. They become more useful in aggregate, and with experience.

Also, nothing prevents you from including a free text box to add context to a "happiness" rating.

I feel perfectly comfortable reducing my workplace happiness to a single value. I don't think I could even expand it to more than two axes if I tried.

I wouldn't feel perfectly comfortable about working in a one-dimensional workplace. The free hot cocoa and tea was very nice.

Because at the same time the Vice President was telling us to lie to our customers, which we were all extremely and openly unhappy about, and our direct manager and up already knew that quite well, so he didn't actually have to ask how numerically happy we were, since he already knew, because we'd made it quite clear and unambiguous to him and the VP already.

The way one colleague bluntly explained it to a VP (in the context of Sun's DeskSet productivity suite "MailTool", "CalandarTool", "ClockTool", "CommandTool", "DBXTool", "XBugTool", and of course "TATool", "PizzaTool", and "HappyTool", etc) was that he was currently working on "ResumeTool".

This is the same management that banned the discussion of and spending work time on PizzaTool! (Which I ignored.)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...

And who required us all to use the horrible XBugTool, which got extremely angry if you used it to file bug reports against itself:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/xbugto...

Instead of the standard way of killing the window system by typing "exit" to the first CommandTool console you brought up, I sarcastically suggested developing "ExitTool", an easy-to-use visual interface for exiting the OpenWindows X11/NeWS server, which would interoperate with "YesTool" and "NoTool", drag-and-drop user interfaces to the ever popular Unix "yes" utility:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/i39l.h...

>In other words, what are the problems people use xinit to solve, that make them need to use xinit instead of some other solution? I don't care so much about the particular solutions themselves. [Of course I'm not interested in anybody else's solution, because in my spare time, I'm developing ExitTool, a fully customizable point and click graphical user interface to exiting the window system, which has a special private interclient communication protocol to rendevous with other applications subscribing to compatible desktop metaphors, actually empowering the user to drag'n'drop from YesTool (a full featured graphical adaptation of the classic unix utility), and cut'n'paste from NoTool (actually implemented using trendy and powerful object oriented programming techniques as a subclass of YesTool!)]

(The whole "-Tool" naming scheme at Sun was such a sausage fest, from the early days when "SunView" was originally called "SunTools"!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunView

https://web.archive.org/web/20120216050221/http://toastytech...

It was obvious that this happyness index ploy was upper management's passive-aggressive way of rubbing our noses in the fact that they refused to acknowledge or do anything about what we had already made concretely crystal clear to them quite directly and verbally, without playing silly abstract numeric scoring games.

And it goes without saying that they didn't change what they were doing or try to make us happier after we reported our low numeric happiness scores, which were really just their way of figuring out who to fire first.

I can see how this went sideways at a toxic company, but as both a manager and an individual contributor, sharing this metadata with your team _can_ be a healthy outlet, as long as:

- the manager and team lead actually take low happiness scores as a call to action to dig into what's going on and try to help address whatever is bringing on stress or sorrow

- the score is authentic--people feel safe enough to share grievances

- the score is only shared with the core team: HR and higher-ups don't see these (Lord knows what they'd do with it)

During stand-ups I'd ask "where's your thumb?" -- people would then either do thumbs-down or thumbs-up, but people quickly switched to analog--pointing their thumb somewhere between 6:30 and 11:30.

If people showed a low score, they could discuss it in the standup with the team, or follow-up in their one-on-one meeting that week, in private.

(I've done this at four companies--if the criteria can be met, it can really help avoid disconnects, unneeded stress, and esprit de corps).

That's such a programmers story. "I was asked to do something and I hated it so much that I did it 150% out of spite and my manager loved it".

> cow-orkers

Not sure if its a typo, but sure fits the theme.

I always thought cow-orkers was a Dilbert thing but apparently it's older, from Usenet.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/cow-orker.html

OMG, incredible, never heard about this.

I'd love to read about this. Do you have anything I can read on the history of Solaris and its development?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20815603

Unfortunately Sun won the System-V vs BSD "Unix wars", and then uni(x)laterally capitulated to AT&T.

The Day SunOS Died

    "Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3!
    ATT System V has replaced BSD.
    You can cling to the standards of the industry
    But only if you pay the right fee -- 
    Only if you pay the right fee . . ."

http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00070.html

For context, the guy who wrote "The Worst Job in the World" email was Michael Tiemann, one of "open source's great explainers." ;) Now he's pranking IBM executives by installing RedHat Enterprise Linux on their mainframes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann

>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...

>I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351695

There was a Berkeley Unix software company called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards spelling.) "We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu

Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix:

"4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt...

https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/

I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642203

The unbundling of the free C compiler and the high price of the unbundled C compiler and AT&T's shitty bloated C++ compiler was emblematic of what was so bad about Sun abandoning their Berkeley BSD roots and getting into bed with AT&T System V with Solaris. And that provided an opportunity for Cygnus Solutions. [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006186

That was a lot later. Michael wrote that story in the early 90's, probably 90 or 91 while I was working there, during the transition from SunOS 4.1.3 to Solaris, when they forced all the engineers to "upgrade". He and Gumby and John Gilmore founded Cygnus Support ("We make free software affordable") in '89, and Michael was consulting at Sun, working on supporting gcc as an alternative to the shitty AT&T C++ compiler. Remember that Sun unbundled the C compiler from Solaris and started charging for it, and AT&T charged for their shitty C++ compiler too.

Maybe Gumby can provide some more context!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31665191

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641664

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/GCC-We-make-free-softw...

https://web.archive.org/web/20190212235450/http://www.toad.c...

Free Software Report, Volume 1, Number 1, 1992

https://web.archive.org/web/20170331165815/http://www.toad.c...

The Free Software Community Puts A Free Compiler Back In Solaris 2

Sun Microsystems, Inc. decided to unbundle the C compiler from their latest operating system, Solaris 2. Sun users were extremely upset to lose what they saw as an essential component of the system software. Faced with dramatic increases in licensing fees, early Solaris 2 users turned to free software for a reasonable alternative.

Spearheading the effort to port the Free Software Foundation’s GNU C compiler was Palo Alto based Cygnus Support, a company that specializes in providing commercial support for free software. To fund the development effort, Cygnus appealed to the early adopters of Solaris 2. They offered a year of technical support for up to 5 users, and a commitment that the compiler would ship with Solaris 2, in return for a prepaid fee of $2,000.

To insure wide distribution of the free compiler and debugger, Cygnus negotiated with SunSoft, Inc. to make the GNU C development tools available on CDware. CDware is a free CD-ROM available from Sun and shipped at no cost to over 90,000 Sun users.

Wow, crazy long comment. I'm gonna read through all of this now. Thank you!