Joel on Software
Measurement
by Joel Spolsky Monday, July 15, 2002
"Thank you for calling Amazon.com, may I help you?" Then -- Click! You're cut off. That's annoying. You just waited 10 minutes to get through to a human and you mysteriously got disconnected right away.
“感谢致电亚马逊，有什么能帮您的么？“然后一瞬间，你就被切断了。实在是很讨厌，你等了大概十分钟才接通一个人工接线员，但是马上却神奇的掉线了。
Or is it mysterious? According to Mike Daisey, Amazon rated their customer service representatives based on the number of calls taken per hour. The best way to get your performance rating up was to hang up on customers, thus increasing the number of calls you can take every hour.
或者说这很神奇吗？根据麦克黛西亚马逊是根据他们他们的客户代表每分钟接听的电话数量来评价客户服务的。提升绩效评价的最佳方式就是挂断客户的电话。这样就能够提升你每小时接受的客户的电话数量。
An aberration, you say?
简单说明，你有什么要说的吗？
When Jeff Weitzen took over Gateway, he instituted a new policy to save money on customer service calls. "Reps who spent more than 13 minutes talking to a customer didn't get their monthly bonuses," writes Katrina Brooker (Business 2.0, April 2001). "As a result, workers began doing just about anything to get customers off the phone: pretending the line wasn't working, hanging up, or often--at great expense--sending them new parts or computers. Not surprisingly, Gateway's customer satisfaction rates, once the best in the industry, fell below average."
当JeffWeitzen接手Gateway的时候，他制定了一项新的策略来节省在客户服务方面的花费，凡是那些花了十三分钟以上跟客户交谈的客户代表都没有月度奖金。KatrinaBrooker在商业周刊2.0 2001年四月刊里面写道：结果，工人们开始想尽各种办法挂断客户的电话。假装线路不好，直接挂断，或者经常是以更大的代价，把客户转到了其他的代表或者计算机上。不出意料的，Gateway的客户满意率曾经一度是行业里面最好的，降到了平均以下。
It seems like any time you try to measure the performance of knowledge workers, things rapidly disintegrate, and you get what Robert D. Austin calls measurement dysfunction. His book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations is an excellent and thorough survey of the subject. Managers like to implement measurement systems, and they like to tie compensation to performance based on these measurement systems. But in the absence of 100% supervision, workers have an incentive to "work to the measurement," concerning themselves solely with the measurement and not with the actual value or quality of their work.
看起来不管你什么时候想要去衡量知识工人的效能，事情都会迅速瓦解。然后你就会遇到Robert.D.Austin称之为度量失效的现象。他的著作《组织效能度量和管理》是这个话题方面最棒最全面的综述。经理们总是喜欢实行一些效能度量系统。他们喜欢把员工的奖金跟基于这些度量系统得出的效能联系在一起。但是在缺乏100%监督的环境下，工人们总是会出现一种为度量工作的倾向，进而将他们自己完全与度量挂钩而不是与他们实际工作的质量挂钩。
Software organizations tend to reward programmers who (a) write lots of code and (b) fix lots of bugs. The best way to get ahead in an organization like this is to check in lots of buggy code and fix it all, rather than taking the extra time to get it right in the first place. When you try to fix this problem by penalizing programmers for creating bugs, you create a perverse incentive for them to hide their bugs or not tell the testers about new code they wrote in hopes that fewer bugs will be found. You can't win.
软件公司总是倾向于奖赏这些程序员:一。写了大量盗版程序员。二，修复了大量错误的程序员。在这种公司里面名列前茅的最佳方式就是提交一大堆有错误的代码，然后修正他们。而不是花上额外的时间，在一开始就把事情做对。而当你想尝试通过惩罚那些提交错误的程序员来修正这一问题的时候，却又创造了一种有悖于你初衷的现象，程序员们开始隐藏他们的错误代码，或者不告诉你测试人员他们新写的代码以期望发现更少的错误。总之，你赢不了。
Fortune 500 CEOs are usually compensated with base salary plus stock options. The stock options are often worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, which makes the base pay almost inconsequential. As a result CEOs do everything they can to inflate the price of the stock, even if it comes at the cost of bankrupting or ruining the company (as we're seeing again and again in the headlines this month.) They'll do this even if the stock only goes up temporarily, and then sell at the peak. Compensation committees are slow to respond, but their latest brilliant idea is to require the executive to hold the stock until they leave the company. Terrific. Now the incentive is to inflate the price of the stock temporarily and then quit. You can't win, again.
财富五百强的CEO通常是根据工资和股票期权来获得补偿的。股票期权通常会价值成百上千万美元。这就让公司的基本工资相形见绌，结果就是CEO们做任何事情来让股票价格上涨。哪怕冒着让公司倒闭或者毁掉公司的风险。（就像我们这个月在头条上一遍又一遍看到的那样） 这样做哪怕股票只是暂时性上涨。然后再在峰值的时候卖掉股票。补偿委员会响应很慢。但是他们最近聪明的想法就是：让这些执行董事。一直保持这些股票直到他们离开公司。太赞了，现在的动机就变成了让公司的股票价格短时间上扬，哪怕暂时上扬，然后离开公司。你还是应不了，再次的。
Don't take my word for it, read Austin's book and you'll understand why this measurement dysfunction is inevitable when you can't completely supervise workers (which is almost always).
别把我的话当真。读一读Austin的书你就会明白，为什么度量失效是难以避免的。当你没有办法完全的监督工人的时候，这几乎永远是这样的。
I've long claimed that incentive pay isn't such a hot idea, even if youcould measure who was doing a good job and who wasn't, but Austin reinforces this by showing that you can't even measure performance, so incentive pay is even less likely to work.
我早就声称绩效工资不是一个很好的主意。哪怕你真的能够衡量谁做的好谁做的不好。但是Austin通过证明你甚至没办法衡量绩效进一步加强了这一观点。所以绩效工资更不大可能奏效。