

Y Combinator Challenge #14 - Tools for Measurement - inglorian
http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/y-combinator-challenge-14-tools-for-measurement/

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jonmc12
Its not a bad idea, but I think it misses the potential that YC was
suggesting.

Read the book 'Making Things Talk' - think about the potential of measuring
things in the analog world, temperature, weight, flow, force, sound, etc, and
correlating these things with enterprise data.

Maybe you can start off by measuring things like heartrate, blood glucose
levels, physical mobility, dietary intake, etc. For instance, if someone is
stressed all day, this probably is going to correlate with productivity.

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kleneway
That books looks sweet, thanks for pointing it out. Reminds me of a good post
by Seth Godin I read the other day:
[http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/07/let-me-
see.h...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/07/let-me-see.html)

I started down this path, looking at things like: \- number of people who
Emailed an individual asking about a specific topic -percent of time spent in
Outlook vs Visual Studio vs WoW (RescueTime-esque stuff) \- number of IMs
initiated from someone at least one level higher than them

But at the end of the day, can that really tell you quantitatively that Bob is
better than Suzie? Even the example above about being stressed - I know people
who are super chill and excel at their job, and others who are stressed all
the time and also excel (and vice versa).

Maybe the answer is to pull in hundreds of these variables and run a neural
net against actual performance rankings to see if any statistically
significant correlations pop out?

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jonmc12
Hell yea its sweet! :) I initially was pointed there by this great
presentation: <http://www.tomtaylor.co.uk/talks/delighting-with-data>

I think you are right about pulling in hundreds of these variables to
correlate with both intuitive and quantitative tests that we have to define
'productive' employees. Then you can send an electric shock whenever someone's
theta waves get too low or something..

Seriously though, our first level of productivity is dictated by things
biological, and if you can create models to paint a strong enough picture of a
productive worker then it gives you a feedback loop. And don't forget, not
everyone is a knowledge worker like us, people still drive trucks for a
living, pick fruit, do construction, etc. That is a huge market.

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d0mine
This idea if implemented would measure niceness (political sleekness) but not
productivity.

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ericb
Not sure about that. There was a guy who knew his stuff and ran the build and
version control system at my last job. You had to kiss his butt to get things
done (=pay karma), but I wouldn't call him nice.

What it overemphasizes is jobs that benefit multiple people in visible ways.
At my last job, I wrote code used by the internal QA team of 50 people that
made their lives easier. I imagine that would earn a lot of karma. On the
other hand, when I worked on a bug for an external customer, only my manager
would care.

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zasz
I think his second assumption that people know who the high performers are is
wrong. Often, recognizing competence requires a great deal of competence.

Also, I think d0mine's right that kinder people who are easy to work with but
not necessarily great performers will get lots of points.

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alex_c
Well, being easy to work with is in itself a valuable trait in a co-worker.

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zasz
By "easy to work with" I mean qualities such as being amiable, outgoing,
funny, or good-looking. Those are valuable traits, but pointing out who's the
nicest guy in the room's not the problem here, and it's not even a difficult
problem to solve. Everyone always knows who the popular people are.

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alex_c
Right, but the proposed solution wouldn't involve asking people which of their
co-workers they like, it would be based on hopefully meaningful work-related
interactions (emails). Obviously, the model breaks down if people give the
thumbs up to forwarded joke emails or to mass "oh crap my review is coming up,
can you give me a thumbs up" emails.

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ericb
I think this implementation would work at least as well as state of the art
modern management techniques do. It's a decent idea.

I've daydreamed about something similar. Not sure whether it would be better
or worse, but my implementation would limit the amount each person can give,
per month. I also struggled with the idea of making it a token economy.
Thoughts?

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kleneway
I think the token economy thing is a good idea. You could also do a market
approach of rewarding people who pick the top performers, but that gets really
tricky.

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Alex3917
All the research on token economies shows they don't work, at least according
to Punished by Rewards.

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ericb
That's an interesting looking book. I'm familiar with the whole
intrinsic/extrinsic motivation arguments. I guess it depends on the definition
of "work". In this case the economy would be intended as a measurement tool
more than a motivational tool. However, I suppose you could still make a case
that it would become demotivational, which would be at cross purposes.

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swombat
This implementation would be utterly trivial to game.

Fail.

