I used to work at Encarta, Microsoft's disc-based encyclopedia that was utterly destroyed by the advent of the Internet. For two years, I documented how to use a product that was excruciatingly easy to use. Worse than that, I worked for a manager, so two of us were being paid to document a product that's slightly less difficult to intuit than a kitchen faucet. For two years, I waited for them to discover the absurdity of this and fire us. Finally, I got bored and quit.
I shared an office with Dave, a content editor. That means he edited the actual encyclopedia content and worked with subject matter experts. Our jobs and friends didn't overlap, but proximity being the social elixir that it is, we bitched about our worlds to one another. And he had to put up with a ceaseless parade of programmers, testers and marketers coming into the office to keep me informed about something. And girls. Lots of girls. I was dating a lot, and I was fishing the company pier.
The content editors were barely compensated slaves, pressured into working unbilled hours. The chief mechanism of this coercion was the word-count chart posted in the hallway. You could see how many words people edited in a given month—and where they ranked relative to one another. People weren't allowed to work overtime, so naturally, some worked for free to buttress their numbers, which pretty much meant everyone had to work for free if they wanted to keep their jobs. But I digress.
About a month after I left that job, I started hearing howls of laughter from my former colleagues. The chart had just been posted. Dave's production hadn't doubled. Nor tripled. Nor even quintupled. As a result of my leaving, his productivity had shot up 1200%.
"Remember the Dave effect?" I was reminded last week, when I was blathering on about some girl and preventing Katrina from working.
Subtle.