I think it’s just corporate culture in some places. I’ve done a stint in management and I’ve had the “fun” of dealing with all these performance measurements. I personally think they are rather useless in any sort of office work where your employees have a high degree of independence and complex tasks. I also think they come with a huge risk of creating a working culture where employees game the system. If you clock time on the hour then you can be sure nobody is going to help each other, because how do you clock that half hour? If you sell software by ridiculously short estimates and reward your employees for meeting them, then how happy are your clients with all the post-release support they’ll have to pay for? If you have one employee who’s build internal tools that empower everyone else, but haven’t delivered on X, Y, Z and you’re personally getting judged on those metrics then how do you keep up over all productivity when you’re forced to let them go.

There are a million examples of why they are bad, and I can’t really think of any in which they are useful on their own. Which becomes the issue when decision makers advance in ranks and “I don’t dare make decisions without covering my ass” managers slip in. Or when HR gets too much political power and push their tools as the law. Often organisations simply grow into poor cultures because the systemic value of measurements is shit compared to individual management. This is of course helped along by bad managers, who when given too much freedom create an organisational culture which is far worse than the meritocracy of data driven management.

I think it’s a little rough to judge someone who may have grown up in these cultures as a bad manager from a couple of lines of text.