Note that supervision of complex knowledge work is _ALMOST_ as difficult in an office. There’re plenty of ways to slack off while physically present—watching netflix is out, but that’s not the risk. Reading Less Wrong all day looks like work, at first glance. And the solutions are the same. First,
the people who supervise the work are usually not programmers themselves
is simply a mistake. At least in the big tech companies I’ve looked at, managers were almost always engineers before they transitioned to the dark side. And there are 1-2 levels of management that bridge the evaluations from the line-level “able to evaluate daily work of programmers” to the senior management “able to evaluate a team’s business-impact output”.
Second, as long as you have SOME employees who are actively invested in the work, they’ll tell you who they want to work with and who they don’t, and why. This isn’t perfect, and some will lie or misinterpret things, but it’s enough of a pointer for managers to more actively look into.
Note that supervision of complex knowledge work is _ALMOST_ as difficult in an office. There’re plenty of ways to slack off while physically present—watching netflix is out, but that’s not the risk. Reading Less Wrong all day looks like work, at first glance. And the solutions are the same. First,
is simply a mistake. At least in the big tech companies I’ve looked at, managers were almost always engineers before they transitioned to the dark side. And there are 1-2 levels of management that bridge the evaluations from the line-level “able to evaluate daily work of programmers” to the senior management “able to evaluate a team’s business-impact output”.
Second, as long as you have SOME employees who are actively invested in the work, they’ll tell you who they want to work with and who they don’t, and why. This isn’t perfect, and some will lie or misinterpret things, but it’s enough of a pointer for managers to more actively look into.