So measure the output, not the mouse, not the keyboard, not the chair, etc.

Law firms would love every case to be solved in 2 hours if they still got the same $ value from a case that dragged on for 6 months.

You literally said "output" the most speculative / vague definition of "work" available.

I appreciate programmers / "creatives" "output" is much harder to measure, but there are alot of jobs where "mouse moving", "words per second" is a very reliable indicator of "output".

No one is arguing against this. Stop creating strawmen.

People are against draconian practices aimed at micromanaging people when data is already available, individuals are meeting targets or the targets aren't met due to something out of their control.

In the case of programming, if you have any decent system, you can query commit dates, opened bugs/features, closed bugs/features, time in meetings put on the public agenda, and more. None of this requires surveillance during the development process, only measuring inputs and outputs.

A percentage > 90% of the world isn't programmers...

There simply isn't the same workflow to monitor "word" / "pdf" documents without an insane amount of effort / document control that most SMB's dont have.

The only option available to them, without hiring programmers, is often only the metrics that get offered built into these types of products.

I dont think that's a strawman argument.

Most trivial things can be measured outside time. Many jobs measured on time, we already know why they are measured on time (low activity, presence-based jobs). Anything else, measuring based on behavior/time spent is management being lazy and not doing what they should be doing: comparing inputs and outputs, and measuring the impact of changes to them to improve productivity.

If a manager can't do something that basic, they shouldn't be looking for more bad proxies to hound people with. They should be doing the company a favor and quit.

Metrics like opened bugs/features and time in meetings can be easily gamed and are only tangentially related to actual output unless the work done is extremely standardized and strictly defined.

Those are results, and not measured by "is their ass in this chair for 8 hours?", same as monitoring keyboard and mouse usage.

Of course you have to be very alert for quality of boxes, and for selection of boxes. A savvy employee will only choose the easiest tasks as all are ranked equally.

Exactly the same with ticket based jobs. Any measure you have can and will be gamed.

No, because that isn't enough context.

Its reasonable to expect a research mathematician to output 0-1 result a year, packing 1 box a year at "big shipping co" is not "reasonable".

You reframed my entire argument about low skilled / measurable "output" jobs back into the "creative" realm, which i've said isn't as easy to measure.

But the equivalent of moving your mouse/clicking buttons would be the equivalent of moving your hands and not actual box packing. Why would you measure that instead of completed work, if as you say that work is easily measurable?

I think this software is mainly targeted at busy bee companies where nobody has a clue what the employees or any is supposed to be doing and therefore mouse activity is the only thing they can measure directly..

If each of those boxes earns >100 times the profit, the boss would be kinda dumb to fire me. At any rate measuring that doesn't require surveillance software.

I don't understand, those are creative?