I wonder how good people really are at measuring the latter. In some jobs such as sales, you can get a pretty good approximation - although it's still hard to measure which sales persons build lasting accounts vs. which ones overpromise and then dump the cost of unmet expectations onto technical support or account maintenance people. (Edit: obviously you can measure it in a lot of repetitive type jobs like facotry works etc., but that doesn't seem appropriate for this context.)
It's even trickier in environments like technology. Twitter's a huge company, but how do you measure the productivity of their employees? The stock price is down on what it IPOed for, user acquisition growth has slowed and the firm has never made a profit, so should we conclude that the average Twitter employee has negative productivity? Obviously not, that would be a highly misleading generalization - but it's no more foolish than some of the generalizations I've seen offered to justify executive compensation or equity allocation at some companies.
Economically we'd like to maximize the return on capital invested in hiring someone, but if we don't have a way to measure that objectively then 'performance' can end up as just a bullshit story to rationalize essentially arbitrary management hiring decisions of the staff who fall within 1 or 2 standard deviations of the norm (excluding the infrequent brilliant or burnout employees).
I wonder how good people really are at measuring the latter. In some jobs such as sales, you can get a pretty good approximation - although it's still hard to measure which sales persons build lasting accounts vs. which ones overpromise and then dump the cost of unmet expectations onto technical support or account maintenance people. (Edit: obviously you can measure it in a lot of repetitive type jobs like facotry works etc., but that doesn't seem appropriate for this context.)
It's even trickier in environments like technology. Twitter's a huge company, but how do you measure the productivity of their employees? The stock price is down on what it IPOed for, user acquisition growth has slowed and the firm has never made a profit, so should we conclude that the average Twitter employee has negative productivity? Obviously not, that would be a highly misleading generalization - but it's no more foolish than some of the generalizations I've seen offered to justify executive compensation or equity allocation at some companies.
Economically we'd like to maximize the return on capital invested in hiring someone, but if we don't have a way to measure that objectively then 'performance' can end up as just a bullshit story to rationalize essentially arbitrary management hiring decisions of the staff who fall within 1 or 2 standard deviations of the norm (excluding the infrequent brilliant or burnout employees).