

Peak - keep track of what everyone is working on - lukashed
http://www.usepeak.com/

======
zzzmarcus
If a company I worked at implemented this, and I knew about it, I'd quit.
Despite the tagline about nobody liking micromanaging (not to mention being
micromanaged), this is software that explicitly encourages micromanaging.

None of the metrics they track are directly tied to productivity, they're just
ways for managers who don't trust their employees to be Big Brother with fewer
uncomfortable personal interactions.

~~~
lbr
I agree. This product is mislabeled. It doesn't help you avoid micromanaging -
it allows you to do so efficiently.

I think we can agree that this would be useful in low skill jobs. But would be
perceived as insulting at most respectable companies who respect their
employees.

~~~
pallandt
Concurred. "William has been coming in early this week." (first tooltip/person
on homepage header), irrelevant and borderline creepy to actually log this
into some monitoring software that someone is supposed to frequently use. I
can almost hear Mr. Burns saying 'Excellent' while tenting his fingertips.

------
apike
There's a lot of backlash here against the idea that managers will use this to
micro-manage. That's possible, sure. Bad managers will be bad.

The reason I'm interested in Peak is that it may be a good tool to implement
the "trust, but verify" approach to management. I feel like I under-manage my
team (7 people) because I really dislike interrupting people. I generally
assume everybody is doing something productive, and understands the goals and
priorities of our products.

However, when a team member gets stuck or goes off into the weeds, they may
not realize it themselves. Before they've spent a days doing unnecessary work
or spinning their wheels, it would be great to have a non-interrupting way to
notice this and give them the support they need to get back on track.

Of course you need to take the numbers for what they are - if you directly
incentivize people to get their dropbox files changed numbers up, you're gonna
have a bad time. Still, I see this as a potential tool to help me understand
what might be going right and wrong with my team without bugging them, and
that's a good thing.

~~~
felipe
The key issue is what you just described in your last paragraph. Micro-
managing by metrics without thinking in side-effects is actually harmful to
the team. There is a reason measuring productivity by LOC is considered a bad
practice (which was actually very common in the past).

I completely see the need for metrics, but they are very easy to gather by
specialized tools for the job (software engineering, customer service,
etc...). It seems that Peak is just a glorified dashboard, and by assuming
that the product is actually "automatically tracking work" (referencing their
slogan) one would be damaging the team's productivity and morale, and not
increasing it.

------
btgeekboy
So if I spend an hour at my desk with a pen on paper while I sketch out a few
pages of notes, designing a new system before I implement it, I'm
unproductive?

No thanks.

~~~
swalling
So you take a picture of each sketch, and upload them to Dropbox, perhaps
automatically with that "upload photos from my phone to Dropbox by default"
feature.

It seems to me that one of things this app might enforce is the idea that your
work isn't really done until you've documented it and/or shared it. Pushing
for measurement of using tools like Dropbox, Gmail, Basecamp, Google Drive,
etc. might enforce this ethos. Yes, it's definitely not perfect: it's not
tracking that time when you lean over and ask the designer next to you for
feedback, and so on. But it seems worth an experimental try.

I know many very productive people who seem less productive than they are,
because they hate going to some project management tool and documenting what
they accomplished. If we could semi-automate documentation of work being done,
such as by hooking in to Github, that might make their progress more visible
with little to no effort.

~~~
felipe
> So you take a picture of each sketch, and upload them to Dropbox

You just created an incentive for programmers to draw useless diagrams on
paper and upload them on Dropbox just to "score one point".

Sure, we could go on and on suggesting metrics back and forth to minimize this
problem, but my point is that metrics must be carefully chosen due to the
unintended side-effects that they may cause. Maybe you can use the number of
pictures on Dropbox just to get a sense of overall quality, but if you are
going to hold individual people accountable using very exact metrics, then
they must be chosen very carefully. This tool certainly does not help on that
regard.

------
rglover
A lot of people are saying this would encourage micromanaging, but I think it
has a more valid purpose:

1.) A great way for a CEO of a growing company to check in and see the pulse
of their company. Someone who has a head on their shoulders would probably
just say "great, things are moving along." An idiot who's primary job is to
get in the way would probably do what people are talking about here.

2.) A deterrent for what they say on their site (and was even poked fun at in
a comic on the front page earlier today): shoulder tapping. This looks like a
great way to pacify the idiot mentioned above in #1 who's sole purpose is to
make sure the cog (you) is spinning.

In the right hands this looks like an incredible tool and a great way to keep
an eye on your business. In the wrong hands, well, yeah. If you work for a
company where someone would use this to incessantly nag you and your fellow
team members, it's probably time to pack up instead of saying the tool is bad.

~~~
colinbartlett
We shouldn't be encouraging idiot CEOs to do virtual shoulder-tapping. All the
CEO's I've reported never needed to ask "Hey, so... how's it going..." because
my team and I are delivering. Constantly. More than expected. Every single
time. Isn't this the way it should be?

~~~
rglover
I don't think whether or not people are "delivering" is the question. Consider
the context of the messaging they've built into the site/app:

"Rebecca brought in two new contracts."

As a CEO, this makes me say "oh, no shit, I should send Rebecca a thank you or
offer up a coffee for helping my business to grow."

Or another example:

"Luke is less active than usual."

If this popped up a handful of times, I'd probably want to make sure Luke was
taking enough time off for himself or wasn't coming down with a cold. For
example, "hey man, looks like you're dipping off a bit, want to take the week
off?"

Again, it all comes down to the individual and how they use it. It's great
that you're a powerhouse, but most people are not. Yes, it would be awesome if
everyone was at peak performance all day everyday, but it's not realistic.
Anyone who expects that is a bit crazy in my book.

I think what's presented here is confusing because it invites the opportunity
to be a human instead of a robotic airhead who's obsessed with productivity.
I'd say the majority of people out there today are too caught up in the game
of life to realize that "employee" is just another way to describe "person who
happens to work for/with me."

------
colinbartlett
Is this some kind of April Fools joke but very, very late?

What a horrible product. As a team leader, I've always sought to do the
opposite this product promotes: care not about what each person is doing but
rather the total of each individual's contributions and what the team as a
whole was producing.

------
airencracken
This is awful bordering on offensive. Not only does it assume that
"productivity" is an easy to quantify set of ticks on a scale, but it
completely ignores any other work besides that which can be tied into the
service.

What a horrid idea.

------
aelaguiz
This is evil but I predict massive success for this product. I actually wonder
if companies could start choosing other products they use (such as their CRM)
based on how well they integrate with peak.

I remember when I was CTO @ Zynga it was so hard to fire bad engineers. I wish
I could have come up with cold hard data to get rid of them. Instead the best
I could do was move them around. The company I worked for was broken but
perhaps I could have made the good engineers lives slightly easier if I could
have dropped the dead weight and filled their seats with other good
programmers.

I can see use cases that aren't evil. Of course it's a similar line of
reasoning that I'd use against government wiretaps. Even though it can be done
for good reasons the temptation to use it for evil is so high that it should
not be done.

~~~
kevinconroy
The danger with this hard data approach, though, is that you can end up with
good engineers who hate to play the numbers game and bad engineers who realize
they just need to hit average numbers to save their ass. And clueless HR
departments won't know the difference.

~~~
aelaguiz
Yeah, totally. Maybe there is no answer other than to fix the organization
that made it so hard to get rid of bad engineers in the first place ;) Or quit
(I chose quit).

------
deeteecee
Ugh... So suddenly I'm the least productive because I send out the least
e-mails and make the least number of modifications. Yeah, I don't like these
trackers.

------
spartango
This is a cute application that ties many services together and even looks
nice. Standing alone, it's almost like having a timeline for the tangible
things in your work; I'd actually love to have this summarized, but for no
particular reason.

And that's the problem. It's not clear at all what problem this fun
application solves. It clearly doesn't capture the flow of work in a team or
any individual, simply because it only captures the tangible/digital artifacts
of work. You can imagine adding self-reporting or something (ala Yammer), but
it's still an incomplete record.

And as other commenters point out, an incomplete dataset is prone to faulty
reasoning. An overzealous user might micromanage based only on these tangible
artifacts...

In any case, I'd encourage the developers here to think about what specific
problem is being solved, and whether this app communicates that well. The
information captured might be useful, but I'm unconvinced a timeline presents
it properly.

My gut says something about summaries and aggregation, looking not at what's
in-flight but what has been done so far.

------
andrewkreid
I want my company to use this just so I can write scripts to game the metrics.

For bonus points, can it integrate with WooBoard
([http://www.wooboard.com/](http://www.wooboard.com/)) so we can do ridiculous
tracking and ridiculous recognition in the same place?

~~~
vdaniuk
I get why this tracking system is ridiculous, but I think that this wooboard
thing can work in some context. Dont you think so?

~~~
andrewkreid
I think the danger is that you might displace intrinsic motivation (pride in
good work) with extrinsic motivation (doin' it for the Woos).

It's the same problem as with employee of the month awards, Dance Mom pyramids
etc.

Also:
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/09.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/09.html)

("doin' it for the Woos" T-Shirts available at CafePress soon :) )

------
volaski
Yes, micromanaging your team sucks. And this is the perfect tool for
micromanaging your team. Good job.

------
emhart
Haters gonna hate. I live in a work environment where I am micromanaged like
crazy. Drives me nuts, doesn't let me do long runs on single projects, etc.
This product seems like it would provide the information my bosses are looking
for without interrupting my work nearly as much.

If people are upset at the idea of micromanaging, fine. Unfortunately though,
it exists, and likely always will. If this lets the employee suffer less for
it, I'm a fan.

------
mstone2
Are the targeted customers managers or team members or? Why do they need to
know what others are working on? Why are they interrupting each other to know
what they are working on? Is Peak going to help reduce interruptions or create
more questions from people?

------
lbr
Interesting concept. Aesthetically pleasing. Certainly looks like this
information would get the attention of managers.

That said, this is comparable to creating a "tournament structure" within the
company. Where top and bottom performers are more visible.

There are some really interesting findings on this structure in labor
economics lit. One finding is that it leads to higher rates of sabotage and
cheating.

I would also worry that this structure could alienate those who work in...
Different ways. I worry that this would encourage people to work in ways that
helped their metrics.

Certainly a cool product. But I hope it's not used in an office I ever work
in.

------
ericclemmons
In the right hands (I'm thinking my ow or a PM's), this is great! In the wrong
hands (COO, other departments), this is dangerous.

I immediately signed up. There are a lot of one-off tasks that get done that I
like to know about so I can award upon the employee's next review, or handle
if they go office the weeds.

Disclosure: I have a barely similar project in the works for our PM that may
get released publicly, but it's less about the tracking (what most here hate)
and more about the scheduling (which I think we all see as valuable).

------
melvinmt
> Micromanaging your team sucks.

So, Peak makes micromanaging easier?

------
manuelflara
I see two parts to this product. The one everyone's complaining about (metrics
about "productivity"), which is really a bad idea because lines of code,
commits, hours "active", emails sent, etc are not a good indicative of
productivity.

But there's also this "feed" of work-related activity, which might not be bad,
but I'm not sure how helpful it can be. I see it as Basecamp's "Progress"
view, but for all your apps.

------
kennethkl
Brand already has a bad name. [http://www.businessinsider.com/dont-
micromanage-your-employe...](http://www.businessinsider.com/dont-micromanage-
your-employees-2013-3)

How to stop micromanaging:
[http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/218028](http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/218028)

------
dignick
The information you could gain from this tool could be used for good or bad
purposes. Personally I think it would give me an insight into what my team is
working on, rather than being a negative 'big brother' tool. If you use this
to track if your employees are working or not you already have the wrong
attitude.

------
borplk
Ugh It's making me puke.

The first day my employer starts using something like this I'll quit.

------
gms
This thread cracks me up. All the worker bees are outraged, while the managers
express interest.

~~~
nikatwork
I'm a manager and I think this product is wrongheaded. I don't care about bums
on seats, I care about hitting milestones.

If I was a worker bee, I would write a script (on company time) to dribble my
commits in automatically starting early in the morning and finishing late at
night. Because fuck 'em that's why.

------
te_chris
I thought this might be like iDoneThis, but nope, it's full on spying. That
can fuck right off. iDoneThis on the other hand is great, highly recommend
(no, I have nothing to do with the company, just used it on my last startup).

------
waylonrobert
I'm not sure this kind of information is really worth anything. Is it supposed
to help measure productivity? I think it lacks context.

------
not_that_noob
If any company is going to implement this, please please let me know. A few
shell scripts and I can be on HN all day. FTW!

------
dawson
I wouldn't want to use this to monitor other people, but I would love to use
it as a tool for quantified self.

------
michaelrhansen
So many ways to con this. If you don't know what you team is doing, then you
don't belong managing people.

