Performative Work

Workers have incentives to keep activity dashboards positive and avoid looking idle when systems reward continuous visible activity. Monitored developers may perform productivity by increasing visible activity rather than solving tasks effectively. Surveillance encourages employees to perform work instead of doing work. Performative work harms software teams by increasing noise, technical debt, review burden, and maintenance cost. Surveillance-heavy environments can discourage slower cognitive work that prevents costly mistakes. Knowledge work is especially harmed because valuable technical work may not produce continuous keystrokes. Performative productivity can include unnecessary commits, excess code, visible online presence, and artificial keyboard activity.