> Since my first day in AWS, just over a year ago, I’ve been experimenting with keeping a CHANGELOG of everything I do, available for everyone at the company to see. I think you should too!
I think this is a great idea for CEOs and those overly eager juniors, but for everyone else who's not trying to speedrun work burnout any%, that's the stupidest idea ever. Seriously, what's the goal here? Suppose everyone in your company does this. The result is that employees get divided into three camps:
1. Those who don't give a fuck about their jobs and have exactly one entry per day. For them, their CHANGELOG (don't forget obligatory capitalization) is basically a document that their manager can pull and have them fired for low performance, even if the manager was satisfied with their performance before this metric was introduced.
2. Those who don't give a fuck either, but understand the point above and don't want to get fired: they'll start filling their day with useless tasks, just to look busy. There's no added performance, but management becomes more difficult, because employees are incentivized to lie to their managers, making communication murky. The majority of employees fall into this category.
3. A clique of employees turning their CHANGELOG (again, don't forget the obligatory capitalization of all letters of which the word consists) into a badge of honour and a competition. There will be one winner, the rest will feel bad about being bad employees and low performers, and having this pointed out.
It's basically a diet version of that software that takes a screenshot of your display every five minutes and sends it to HR. And turns that into a publicly available graph.
I think this is a great idea for CEOs and those overly eager juniors, but for everyone else who's not trying to speedrun work burnout any%, that's the stupidest idea ever. Seriously, what's the goal here? Suppose everyone in your company does this. The result is that employees get divided into three camps:
1. Those who don't give a fuck about their jobs and have exactly one entry per day. For them, their CHANGELOG (don't forget obligatory capitalization) is basically a document that their manager can pull and have them fired for low performance, even if the manager was satisfied with their performance before this metric was introduced.
2. Those who don't give a fuck either, but understand the point above and don't want to get fired: they'll start filling their day with useless tasks, just to look busy. There's no added performance, but management becomes more difficult, because employees are incentivized to lie to their managers, making communication murky. The majority of employees fall into this category.
3. A clique of employees turning their CHANGELOG (again, don't forget the obligatory capitalization of all letters of which the word consists) into a badge of honour and a competition. There will be one winner, the rest will feel bad about being bad employees and low performers, and having this pointed out.
It's basically a diet version of that software that takes a screenshot of your display every five minutes and sends it to HR. And turns that into a publicly available graph.