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A comment on New York Times Tech Workers Go on Strike. Parent comment

Re:New York Times Tech Workers Go on Strike by ta1243 on Monday November 04, 2024 @12:43PM (#42044051)
Problem is that require the employer to define what an acceptable level of performance is, and that's notoriously difficult

So instead the choices tend to drift to "fire them on the manager's whim" or "practically impossible to get rid of short of murder"

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Re:New York Times Tech Workers Go on Strike by willsmith72 on Monday November 04, 2024 @12:55PM (#42044199)
Who says it's notoriously difficult? I've worked many places with clear processes for identifying and resolving poor performance issues (firing being one possible resolution).

That sounds like just your experience

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Re:New York Times Tech Workers Go on Strike by ta1243 on Monday November 04, 2024 @01:57PM (#42044877)
It's massively common, factors into the whole office/home debates that have been raging for 4 years

https://www.apqc.org/blog/better-measurement-knowledge-worke...

The crux of growth in knowledge workers is that our current norms of measurement and productivity were developed in a manufacturing or manual task-oriented mindset. According to Peter Drucker, productivity for knowledge workers needs a different set of considerations

https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-...

While in manual work the targets and outputs are usually clear, knowledge work and its results are less tangible, and therefore harder to define, measure and evaluate

https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/114586/palvalin...

Drucker (1999) has even stated that knowledge worker productivity is the biggest challenge for modern work life. Other researchers have also discovered that the performance of an individual knowledge worker is the most important factor for organisational success... The need for general performance measurement is great as the theme is still quite new and there are very few previous studies measuring the effectiveness of NewWoW practices. There is also a need for practical tools for analysing and managing the performance of knowledge work from the NewWoW perspective. Organisations are still planning and making NewWoW changes, without clear evidence of their benefits and without any measurement information

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Re:New York Times Tech Workers Go on Strike by randomdata on Monday November 04, 2024 @02:39PM (#42045281)
> Other researchers have also discovered that the performance of an individual knowledge worker is the most important factor for organisational success...

Great, which means we have a way to measure individual performance with respect to what matters (organizational success). So what's the problem?

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Re:New York Times Tech Workers Go on Strike by ta1243 on Monday November 04, 2024 @04:31PM (#42046187)
No it doesn't, it means we need a reliable way to do it

> Organisations are still planning and making NewWoW changes, without clear evidence of their benefits and without any measurement information

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Re:New York Times Tech Workers Go on Strike by randomdata on Monday November 04, 2024 @04:37PM (#42046243)
We have a reliable way to do it: The same way the researchers did when they showed that performance is the most important factor for organizational success. If your knowledge workers measure the same way the workers did in that research, you're golden.

Unless you question the validity of the research? But if that's the case, why did you mention it as being significant in the first place?

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Re:New York Times Tech Workers Go on Strike by didntcheck on Monday November 04, 2024 @03:19PM (#42045625)
> factors into the whole office/home debates that have been raging for 4 years

Can you expand on that?

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Re:New York Times Tech Workers Go on Strike by ta1243 on Monday November 04, 2024 @04:32PM (#42046195)
Some claim that people are just as effective, or more effective, working at home. Others claim the same but from the office.

Clearly if it was possible to measure effectiveness unambiguously this wouldn't be a debate.

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Re:New York Times Tech Workers Go on Strike by magneticnorth on Monday November 04, 2024 @12:55PM (#42044201)
If those are literally the only choices, then I vote for "practically impossible to get rid of."

But I think this is a bit of hyperbole - some kind of ongoing, documented low performance seems obviously better than just letting managers fire on a whim.

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Re:New York Times Tech Workers Go on Strike by ta1243 on Monday November 04, 2024 @01:47PM (#42044784)
I agree, that's the european approach.
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Re:New York Times Tech Workers Go on Strike by didntcheck on Monday November 04, 2024 @03:19PM (#42045619)
And how is Europe doing in tech?
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