14 ms·

Facebook forcing moderators to log every second of day

233 points by rahuldottech 7y ago

misiti3780 7y ago
It cant be that easy to get one of these jobs (facebook doesnt just hire anyone), so assuming they are educated and qualified, why dont they just go work somewhere where else?
- smabie 7y ago
  Because there’s a surplus of college educated people. Unless you went to a top school, the expected value of many degrees is deep in the red.
  - dlivingston 7y ago
    I would like to see a source on this. This is not completely accurate, in my estimation. And even if it were accurate, that still doesn't discount parent's point.
- dewey 7y ago
  Aren't they mostly hired in some contracting companies that FB outsources to?
- factsaresacred 7y ago
  Facebook isn't doing the hiring. They outsource these type of soul-destroying jobs to companies like Majorel (prev Arvato). Sifting through the dark side of humanity for hours upon end for minimum wage is pretty bleak stuff. Some glassdoor reviews[0]: > "You feel like a rat. They even measure your time spent in the toilet. If you have less than 98% accuracy, you get mistreated." > "Avoid in all means !!!! It will destroy you psychologically and you will not save much since the payment is very low" [0] https://www.glassdoor.co.in/Reviews/Majorel-Content-Moderator-Reviews-EI_IE2539446.0,7_KO8,25.htm https://www.glassdoor.co.in/Reviews/Majorel-Content-Moderato...
tareqak 7y ago
Maybe Facebook should buy Squatty Potties and dietary fibre for their employees [0]? I have a Squatty Potty and I recommend it to everyone. At the very least, I find their infomercial-style ads entertaining. [0] https://www.squattypotty.com/ https://www.squattypotty.com/ Afterthought: What is the dollar value benefit that these moderators offer Facebook such that their time has to be measured so precisely? I would assume that a CEO’s time is even more valuable both in terms of cost and expected benefit/impact. Why doesn’t Facebook’s board get Mark Zuckerburg to account for every millisecond of his time right down to how much time he spends in the bathroom? If all this time adds up for these moderators, then why not for a CEO?
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  Do people really sit straight-up on the toliet? I've always just leaned forward and rested my elbows on my thighs. Seems like it accomplishes the same thing.
- na85 7y ago
  >If all this time adds up for these moderators, then why not for a CEO? There are different sets of rules for members of different castes.
  - dlivingston 7y ago
    I've never heard of the caste system as applied to economic standing, but that's an interesting idea and perhaps worth exploring.
smabie 7y ago
While having this kind of monitoring sucks (I had to do a similar thing at my last job and it’s awful and demoralizing), what exactly is unsafe about the work environment. What is illegal about it (in Europe)? It seems to me that the shitty environment is mostly due to the nature of the job itself: viewing unpleasant content all day long. While watching this garbage might constitute as “unsafe” I suppose, until AI can fully take over, there’s not much you can do about it. Is it illegal to have a time monitoring system in Europe? Vice is a pretty terrible news site and never actually answers the real questions. Instead we get a clickbait title with very little actual facts. Not that I’m particularly surprised, though.
- itake 7y ago
  To add to this, I really want to know why they felt they need to do this? My guess is someone was abusing the existing system and they needed to set tighter controls?
  - Seenso 7y ago
    > To add to this, I really want to know why they felt they need to do this? My guess is someone was abusing the existing system and they needed to set tighter controls? My guess is some manager got it in his head to gather some bullshit metrics and evaluate people on them, and the affected employees are so low-status that they don't have the political power to push back. There's also probably a pretty but useless graph on a powerpoint involved.
  - vkou 7y ago
    That guess is likely wrong. More likely, is that whomever set this department up, has a background in managing call centers, and they've just re-implemented all the same penny-pinching, degrading practices.
  - mikekchar 7y ago
    I've worked in some big companies with call centres, etc. Often management is under pressure to achieve specific numbers for things. The pressure can be quite intense (i.e., either hit those numbers or we will replace you with someone else). They often convince themselves that the reasons they don't hit their numbers is because somebody is abusing their friendly demeanor. Sometimes that idea is also pushed onto them in their performance reviews. The main thing to realise is that often in these teams they hire just about anybody. They'll can pick up huge numbers of people a month with the idea that it's easier to let someone "prove themselves" and fire all the people who "don't perform" (statistics is usually not a strong point on these teams). People who survive for a long time are promoted into line management. Then it's the slippery pole all the way up (with everyone stomping on each other's face to get a leg up). There often isn't any respect given to other people. They are panning for gold, essentially. You are either gold or you are dirt. IT departments are usually quite civilised in comparison. This is mainly because of the difficulty of doing our jobs and the difficulty of finding replacements. You see much better treatment in all such departments, but often IT is the best of the lot.
learnstats2 7y ago
I once worked in a school where my line manager said he had observed me going to the toilet between lessons and that it was unacceptable for me not to be available to work during that time. I quit almost immediately afterward, obviously. This is not an appropriate level of oversight. There are parallels with school uniform rules - you enforce the rules on people you don't like. It's a license to discriminate. I suggest it's highly likely to constitute illegal disability discrimination within the EU.
- benglish11 7y ago
  It may be seen as discriminatory in the US as well. There are a number of diseases/ailments/conditions that are medically recognized and require frequent or sometimes uncontrolled/unexpected bathroom visits. I imagine the path forward in the US would be more difficult though and would likely just lead to a small out of court settlement as opposed to an across the board policy/law change.
- asdff 7y ago
  I thought school uniforms were about being more equitable. If everyone wore the same thing, poor kids would be less likely to be chastised for their clothes.
  - learnstats2 7y ago
    I find it weird to claim this benefits poor families. Almost all poor parents will tell you they are stressed by needing to buy extra sets of clothing for school, sold at inflated prices (these parents will also tell you who is benefiting from the uniform suppliers' deals).
motohagiography 7y ago
If you need an employee to produce a continuous task log, they aren't producing value, and as a manager, you don't understand your business well enough anyway. You may benefit from doing some personal work on yourself as well. The value in a relationship seems proportional to the smallest increment of time someone in it is accountable for. If someone asks you what you have done for them an hour ago, vs. this morning, vs. yesterday, vs. last week, vs. quarterly, vs. how's it all going and what they can do for you - this is a good measure of whether it's something worth keeping. No trust means no value. Those employees should find somewhere else to work.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > Those employees should find somewhere else to work. One can reasonably assume that if it were that simple they wouldn't be working such a shit job in the first place.
  - sieabahlpark 7y ago
    > One can reasonably assume that if it were that simple they wouldn't be working such a shit job in the first place. Then that's the trade-off they choose to take? They can still go for another job if they don't want to do Facebook.
- hnaccy 7y ago
  It's a digital assembly line, if you're not at your station you're not generating value.
- deith 7y ago
  >If you need an employee to produce a continuous task log, they aren't producing value Uh? This is not some kind of engineering job. An employee of mcdonalds who's not flipping burgers is indeed not producing any value.
  - motohagiography 7y ago
    If they have %10-%20 of their time to keep a log, that's a deadweight imposed cost on their performance, which will only be a function of the %80 remainder. You can get data on mean time between burgers from the point of sale system or add a sensor to the burger storage unit, just like you can get data on feature cadence from Jira. Beyond a certain point, management is parasitic to capital. That point is very low.
rwoodley 7y ago
Facebook is destructive to our society. Would you sign up to a KKK site just because it allowed you to share photos with your friends? Time to exit FB. I deleted my Facebook account 2 months ago. Life goes on without it. I now have more time. Nobody is missing my content.
- natechols 7y ago
  I wish even 1/10th of the people demanding that the government regulate or break up Facebook would do the same. It astounds me that so many people are complaining about a free product that nobody is forcing them to use, but which they refuse to quit.
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    You seem to be unfamiliar with the concept of a collective action problem. There are many cases in which services or activities may be detrimental to society at large, but individually leaving comes with a great cost to the individual. So for example it is totally possible that a social network has a net negative impact on society, yet you closing your account comes with significant disadvantages to yourself as long as you don't get everyone else on board at the same time. This is immediately obvious to anyone who thinks about these situations for five minutes.
    - natechols 7y ago
      Then maybe the people whining about Facebook (who refuse to quit it) should start a boycott instead of just whining and demanding that the government save them from themselves. As far as "great cost to the individual", sorry, I'm not buying this. Nobody is being forced to use Facebook and nobody is being penalized for not using it. I still don't have an account and have no plans to change that.
      - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
        What is an elected government saving people who elected them from themselves but the biggest boycott of all?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
is0tope 7y ago
The new workhouses of the digital age.
jxramos 7y ago
I've always wanted to have this on occasion for myself from time to time to sample my individual time spend. I wonder what kind of apps they use to achieve this and what the UI looks like. You'd need some sort of instant stopwatch buttons for frequently recurring activities and also allowing for custom stopwatches. I guess something like a set of Amazon Dash buttons could be useful or some kind of badge readers distributed about an environment to tag on and tag off keyed to some activity for that location.
- mikelyons 7y ago
  How much time spend do you estimate you'd log logging the time spend of logging your time spend?
  - jxramos 7y ago
    whew, stack overflow. Haha. If the UI is right it would hopefully be within 5s - 30s. But realistically I probably wouldn't count it, maybe have the app count it for me through some proxy with events or something or other. Good stuff.
michaelmcdonald 7y ago
"Bathroom break. Pooped. Extended delay due to girth of feces. Required additional straining and pressure to successfully pass."
- pssflops 7y ago
  Welp. Time to flush the logs.
  - the_snooze 7y ago
    When rotating the logs, do they go down clockwise, or counterclockwise?
    - gherkinnn 7y ago
      Depending on what side of the planet you’re on.
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  Jira reclassified to Critical Outage. Escalated to doody manager. Reviewing Log details. In all seriousness, it sounds like these folks have an awful job. Curious if they will be permitted to or have the desire to form a "Moderators Union"
- tj-teej 7y ago
  Some Backlog items still remaining, planned for next sprint.
slumdev 7y ago
Sounds an awful lot like Crossover for Work--those $300k+ remote VP postings that get spammed on LinkedIn constantly.
- msh 7y ago
  Whats the story on those?
  - simplyaccont 7y ago
    you supposed to maintain per-minute log of work that you are doing and they install on computer special software to keep track of what you are doing exactly. of course, this is only in order to help you be more productive and improve your time management skills (quote)
  - slumdev 7y ago
    All of the positions are hourly, not salaried. They require per-minute accounting of your work. Most people who "succeed" in those positions wind up working overtime that is consistent and excessive, just to hit their 40.
tenebrisalietum 7y ago
I worked in a pretty rough Tier-1 call center environment for IT for about half a year. - We had to be in Avail status at the exact start of our shift or be counted late. For example, if I was scheduled to be in at 10am, I had to be in Avail at 10am. Meaning I had to take care of booting up computer, etc. before then. - We had to check in with a workload manager via Teams and get approval before moving to Break or Lunch aux. Often during a call. - We could move to an aux to take restroom breaks, and were encouraged to do so only when no calls were waiting, but the total time taken couldn't be more than 10 minutes a day. - We also had to notify the WLM if we were going into callback aux, for example, if the line dropped. We were questioned and sometimes moved to Avail automatically if we were too long in callback. - When I started, we had 30 seconds ACW but then they moved to zero ACW. We could move to ACW aux for a max of one minute unless cleared with WLM. You had to be quick if you had things to do on your ticket after the call otherwise often you'd get thrown into another call immediately. WLM would move you to Avail automatically if you went over and they were paying attention. - Getting a "Roll Over No Answer" was really bad. Definitely a rough environment, but it wasn't as bad as it sounded, and I was able to work from home for a month before I found a much better job. It was interesting to see if I could survive under that level of discipline but I'm glad I left when I did.
- vr46 7y ago
  I have read so much about this kind of controlling behaviour and at times experienced it during summer jobs. But I have a question. Why do they do this?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dvtrn 7y ago
    When it comes to the worst elements of "bottom-line obsessed thinking", I can't think of better examples than large national call centers; and their leaders will use all sorts of borderline abusive management tactics to justify it. I started my career in one for a popular multi-national consumer electronics brand whose devices might be in your pocket right now, also as a T-1 IT person for about four years. It's soul draining. One thing I'll never forget were the amount of EMS visits we got due to people having heart-attacks. Young people too.
TaylorGood 7y ago
Anti-Autonomy. My two years working for a large company I felt micro-managed. Even as a Creative Director. My last straw was being chastised for leaving five minutes before 5pm and how it's bad "optics" – anyway, I believe the #1 thing in life is to control your schedule. From there everything else flows; health, family, social, true travel etc. This doesn't necessary mean being an entrepreneur, but having a certain level of autonomy. Once you taste it, it's nearly impossible to go back to such controlled, desk-equated productivity environments.
- cryoshon 7y ago
  >Once you taste it, it's nearly impossible to go back to such controlled, desk-equated productivity environments. yes, i've found this as well. the reason is that employer-based constraints on your schedule are always arbitrary, rarely compensated for in full, never equitable across power structures, and only tenuously negotiable in your favor. in other words: your life becomes theirs to control in spirit, if not entirely in practice. it doesn't matter if they expect you to be at work from 9 to 5 or whatever else. if your employment is contingent on holding their schedule, they effectively hold control over the rest of your life's schedule. and they excercise that control to the detriment of your life as a matter of course, routinely, ruthlessly, without hesitation, and without consideration, in nearly 100% of cases -- yes, even in the "cool startup" you're working for. remember, you need to ask them to take time off to care for your sick relatives. you need to ask them for permission to not be at work to spend time for yourself on vacation. you are explicitly their property for however many hours per day, but they also own enough of you to implicitly dictate where you're allowed to be and when, and for what reasons. i guess some people find it a good bargain to trade their autonomy for a wage. it's very hard to respect that kind of thinking a lot of the time, but i've learned to do it simply because most people accept the bargain and it'd be too isolating to behave otherwise. for me, it's an intolerable situation to bear, even for a moment.
  - TruffleMuffin 7y ago
    Are you currently employed? What job is offering you unrestricted control of your schedule? No requirement to work with others? No requirements to attend meetings at fixed times? etc. From what you said, I can't picture a workplace that is functional like that.
throwanem 7y ago
If you're still using Facebook in 2020, you're complicit. You've had the better part of a decade, knowing that Facebook is a problem, to do something about it, or at least about your complicity in it. If you still haven't, that's on you. No more excuses.
- martin8412 7y ago
  What exactly do you expect people to do? Sure, I know that Facebook is a horrible company. But at the same time I don't really have much choice if I want to use it or not. I use it to keep touch with friends and it's used to plan gatherings. I'm not about to try and be some advocate for people to use a better service, because I know that's a hopeless endeavour when I'm the only person doing it.
  - samatman 7y ago
    I've been a part of talking more than one group into moving event planning off Facebook. It can be done.
  - Brain_Thief 7y ago
    I see this sentiment expressed a lot and, frankly, I just don't buy it. I dropped my FaceBook account years ago and have never had any trouble staying in touch with people or being invited to things. Are your friends / family so insistent on using FaceBook for all communications that they would cease including you in events or talking to you if you needed to be contacted via, e.g., text message or email? If that's the case then I suggest you seriously consider the kind of relationships you have with these people and whether or not they are worth maintaining.
- bluntfang 7y ago
  Facebook is investing billions of dollars in the psychology of engagement (aka addiction). It's not an individuals fault.
- standardUser 7y ago
  Say that again, but this time replace some social media website with the cabal of multinationals profiting off of gradually decimating the planet.
IHLayman 7y ago
I didn't realize Snow Crash's chapter on Fedland (https://soquoted.blogspot.com/2006/03/memo-from-fedland.html https://soquoted.blogspot.com/2006/03/memo-from-fedland.html) would be taken as a manual. Ugh. I guess you can't say we weren't warned.
Havoc 7y ago
Timesheets are the bane of my existence. I've completed them for all of my working life. (It's common in my industry...all the way to top). Anything <15 mins is a complete waste of everyone's time.
- RugnirViking 7y ago
  why stop it at 15 minuites? I can't imagine a single scenario where splitting time reported into anything less than hours would matter all that much, and the best possible systems would be more freeform in approach, allowing the worker to specify the actual time they started and stopped, rather than only being able to start and cease work in specific intervals. It would allow for greater resolution naturally where the worker is switching tasks more often. As for people saying such a system would be misused or completed lazily, those arguments apply equally well to filling out timesheets at all. I don't imagine anyone ever recorded themselves slacking off intentionally on a timesheet.
  - patmcguire 7y ago
    It's think it's pretty common when billing for time when the base rate is high. Lots of big law firms bill in six minute increments.
    - RugnirViking 7y ago
      but why not just record when you started and stopped each task, rather than dividing the day into chunks needlessly?
      - maximente 7y ago
        you need to convert into billable units at some point, which is what the fractional system gives you, so it's just a matter of whether or not the UI accepts clock based input or not. i'm not a UI expert but timekeeping doesn't seem particularly innovative. there are probably all sorts of esoteric certifications and approvals one might need for e.g. DoD compliance, so i'm guessing there are few people thinking about this and fewer willing to get it done and certified for the sake of the users.
at_a_remove 7y ago
I had a boss who wanted everything I did logged out into five minute increments. Even lawyers only go down to quarter-hours in granularity, last I heard. This pattern of relentless squeezing by management, ratcheting ever-tighter, seems to lead to collapse each time I have encountered it. I have yet to come up with a decent metaphor for the phenomenon, but it seems to be born of the idea that efficiency can always increase in increments that themselves do not decrease. The easy answer would be to wave the disparaging "capitalism" wand over it, yet history has reliable notes of this happening in governments opposed to capitalism. Perhaps it is just the thought that one can get more ... forever.
- rckoepke 7y ago
  Many lawyers are 0.25 hour (15 minute), but many lawyers are also 0.1 hour (6 minute).
drummer 7y ago
> “The happiest people are the people who are away from Facebook. The more unhappy you are in life, the more you are going to spend on Facebook,” Quoted for truth.
Wingman4l7 7y ago
Echoes of Marshall Brain's "Manna": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel) He posits a future with micro-management of service workers via headset, down to the minute, from an automated system.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jdkee 7y ago
If only these employees would unionize so they have a say in humane working conditions.
gexla 7y ago
Maybe the real story here is that Facebook is barely functional at most things but managed to get their crap enough together to focus on being a #1 social network. Like if you went out all night, got drunk, woke up with a severe hangover and still managed to get to work and skate through the day? That's X company doing anything other than that one thing they exist to do. The manager responsible for this moderation then can only hold it enough together to focus on X metrics, and happiness isn't one of them. Add one more metric and this person would probably fall apart and get thrown onto the pavement. Engineers don't get treated like this because there's actual competition in hiring the best talent. The workers need to organize to present their own metrics. Or figure out a way to make employee happiness a metric to focus on. Or somehow find the super person who can figure this all out (but then this person would get elevated to a more important part of the business.) Maybe it would be best to outsource this part of the business and then have the contractors compete on creating and delivering on these metrics. Or maybe create competing teams internally which can do the same, but rewarded with better pay?
- discreteevent 7y ago
  Agreed on the barely functional. What I've noticed is that the more time and schedule obsessed a development manager is, the more likely they are incompetent. Time is the easiest thing to manage. A single variable. No complexity.
- dannyr 7y ago
  The moderation is outsourced to another company. --------------- From the article: Facebook, which outsources the majority of its content moderation to over 15,000 third-party contractors. --------------- My opinion is most tech companies do not want to treat their own employees like this. But they don't really want moderators to get equal treatment as their own employees so they outsource it.

233 points by rahuldottech 7y ago

It cant be that easy to get one of these jobs (facebook doesnt just hire anyone), so assuming they are educated and qualified, why dont they just go work somewhere where else?

smabie 7y ago
Because there’s a surplus of college educated people. Unless you went to a top school, the expected value of many degrees is deep in the red.
- dlivingston 7y ago
  I would like to see a source on this. This is not completely accurate, in my estimation. And even if it were accurate, that still doesn't discount parent's point.
dewey 7y ago
Aren't they mostly hired in some contracting companies that FB outsources to?
factsaresacred 7y ago
Facebook isn't doing the hiring. They outsource these type of soul-destroying jobs to companies like Majorel (prev Arvato). Sifting through the dark side of humanity for hours upon end for minimum wage is pretty bleak stuff. Some glassdoor reviews[0]: > "You feel like a rat. They even measure your time spent in the toilet. If you have less than 98% accuracy, you get mistreated." > "Avoid in all means !!!! It will destroy you psychologically and you will not save much since the payment is very low" [0] https://www.glassdoor.co.in/Reviews/Majorel-Content-Moderator-Reviews-EI_IE2539446.0,7_KO8,25.htm https://www.glassdoor.co.in/Reviews/Majorel-Content-Moderato...

tareqak 7y ago

Maybe Facebook should buy Squatty Potties and dietary fibre for their employees [0]? I have a Squatty Potty and I recommend it to everyone. At the very least, I find their infomercial-style ads entertaining. [0] https://www.squattypotty.com/ https://www.squattypotty.com/ Afterthought: What is the dollar value benefit that these moderators offer Facebook such that their time has to be measured so precisely? I would assume that a CEO’s time is even more valuable both in terms of cost and expected benefit/impact. Why doesn’t Facebook’s board get Mark Zuckerburg to account for every millisecond of his time right down to how much time he spends in the bathroom? If all this time adds up for these moderators, then why not for a CEO?

RandomBacon 7y ago
Do people really sit straight-up on the toliet? I've always just leaned forward and rested my elbows on my thighs. Seems like it accomplishes the same thing.
na85 7y ago
>If all this time adds up for these moderators, then why not for a CEO? There are different sets of rules for members of different castes.
- dlivingston 7y ago
  I've never heard of the caste system as applied to economic standing, but that's an interesting idea and perhaps worth exploring.

smabie 7y ago

While having this kind of monitoring sucks (I had to do a similar thing at my last job and it’s awful and demoralizing), what exactly is unsafe about the work environment. What is illegal about it (in Europe)? It seems to me that the shitty environment is mostly due to the nature of the job itself: viewing unpleasant content all day long. While watching this garbage might constitute as “unsafe” I suppose, until AI can fully take over, there’s not much you can do about it. Is it illegal to have a time monitoring system in Europe? Vice is a pretty terrible news site and never actually answers the real questions. Instead we get a clickbait title with very little actual facts. Not that I’m particularly surprised, though.

itake 7y ago
To add to this, I really want to know why they felt they need to do this? My guess is someone was abusing the existing system and they needed to set tighter controls?
- Seenso 7y ago
  > To add to this, I really want to know why they felt they need to do this? My guess is someone was abusing the existing system and they needed to set tighter controls? My guess is some manager got it in his head to gather some bullshit metrics and evaluate people on them, and the affected employees are so low-status that they don't have the political power to push back. There's also probably a pretty but useless graph on a powerpoint involved.
- vkou 7y ago
  That guess is likely wrong. More likely, is that whomever set this department up, has a background in managing call centers, and they've just re-implemented all the same penny-pinching, degrading practices.
- mikekchar 7y ago
  I've worked in some big companies with call centres, etc. Often management is under pressure to achieve specific numbers for things. The pressure can be quite intense (i.e., either hit those numbers or we will replace you with someone else). They often convince themselves that the reasons they don't hit their numbers is because somebody is abusing their friendly demeanor. Sometimes that idea is also pushed onto them in their performance reviews. The main thing to realise is that often in these teams they hire just about anybody. They'll can pick up huge numbers of people a month with the idea that it's easier to let someone "prove themselves" and fire all the people who "don't perform" (statistics is usually not a strong point on these teams). People who survive for a long time are promoted into line management. Then it's the slippery pole all the way up (with everyone stomping on each other's face to get a leg up). There often isn't any respect given to other people. They are panning for gold, essentially. You are either gold or you are dirt. IT departments are usually quite civilised in comparison. This is mainly because of the difficulty of doing our jobs and the difficulty of finding replacements. You see much better treatment in all such departments, but often IT is the best of the lot.

learnstats2 7y ago

I once worked in a school where my line manager said he had observed me going to the toilet between lessons and that it was unacceptable for me not to be available to work during that time. I quit almost immediately afterward, obviously. This is not an appropriate level of oversight. There are parallels with school uniform rules - you enforce the rules on people you don't like. It's a license to discriminate. I suggest it's highly likely to constitute illegal disability discrimination within the EU.

benglish11 7y ago
It may be seen as discriminatory in the US as well. There are a number of diseases/ailments/conditions that are medically recognized and require frequent or sometimes uncontrolled/unexpected bathroom visits. I imagine the path forward in the US would be more difficult though and would likely just lead to a small out of court settlement as opposed to an across the board policy/law change.
asdff 7y ago
I thought school uniforms were about being more equitable. If everyone wore the same thing, poor kids would be less likely to be chastised for their clothes.
- learnstats2 7y ago
  I find it weird to claim this benefits poor families. Almost all poor parents will tell you they are stressed by needing to buy extra sets of clothing for school, sold at inflated prices (these parents will also tell you who is benefiting from the uniform suppliers' deals).

motohagiography 7y ago

If you need an employee to produce a continuous task log, they aren't producing value, and as a manager, you don't understand your business well enough anyway. You may benefit from doing some personal work on yourself as well. The value in a relationship seems proportional to the smallest increment of time someone in it is accountable for. If someone asks you what you have done for them an hour ago, vs. this morning, vs. yesterday, vs. last week, vs. quarterly, vs. how's it all going and what they can do for you - this is a good measure of whether it's something worth keeping. No trust means no value. Those employees should find somewhere else to work.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> Those employees should find somewhere else to work. One can reasonably assume that if it were that simple they wouldn't be working such a shit job in the first place.
- sieabahlpark 7y ago
  > One can reasonably assume that if it were that simple they wouldn't be working such a shit job in the first place. Then that's the trade-off they choose to take? They can still go for another job if they don't want to do Facebook.
hnaccy 7y ago
It's a digital assembly line, if you're not at your station you're not generating value.
deith 7y ago
>If you need an employee to produce a continuous task log, they aren't producing value Uh? This is not some kind of engineering job. An employee of mcdonalds who's not flipping burgers is indeed not producing any value.
- motohagiography 7y ago
  If they have %10-%20 of their time to keep a log, that's a deadweight imposed cost on their performance, which will only be a function of the %80 remainder. You can get data on mean time between burgers from the point of sale system or add a sensor to the burger storage unit, just like you can get data on feature cadence from Jira. Beyond a certain point, management is parasitic to capital. That point is very low.

rwoodley 7y ago

Facebook is destructive to our society. Would you sign up to a KKK site just because it allowed you to share photos with your friends? Time to exit FB. I deleted my Facebook account 2 months ago. Life goes on without it. I now have more time. Nobody is missing my content.

natechols 7y ago
I wish even 1/10th of the people demanding that the government regulate or break up Facebook would do the same. It astounds me that so many people are complaining about a free product that nobody is forcing them to use, but which they refuse to quit.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  You seem to be unfamiliar with the concept of a collective action problem. There are many cases in which services or activities may be detrimental to society at large, but individually leaving comes with a great cost to the individual. So for example it is totally possible that a social network has a net negative impact on society, yet you closing your account comes with significant disadvantages to yourself as long as you don't get everyone else on board at the same time. This is immediately obvious to anyone who thinks about these situations for five minutes.
  - natechols 7y ago
    Then maybe the people whining about Facebook (who refuse to quit it) should start a boycott instead of just whining and demanding that the government save them from themselves. As far as "great cost to the individual", sorry, I'm not buying this. Nobody is being forced to use Facebook and nobody is being penalized for not using it. I still don't have an account and have no plans to change that.
    - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
      What is an elected government saving people who elected them from themselves but the biggest boycott of all?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

is0tope 7y ago

The new workhouses of the digital age.

jxramos 7y ago

I've always wanted to have this on occasion for myself from time to time to sample my individual time spend. I wonder what kind of apps they use to achieve this and what the UI looks like. You'd need some sort of instant stopwatch buttons for frequently recurring activities and also allowing for custom stopwatches. I guess something like a set of Amazon Dash buttons could be useful or some kind of badge readers distributed about an environment to tag on and tag off keyed to some activity for that location.

mikelyons 7y ago
How much time spend do you estimate you'd log logging the time spend of logging your time spend?
- jxramos 7y ago
  whew, stack overflow. Haha. If the UI is right it would hopefully be within 5s - 30s. But realistically I probably wouldn't count it, maybe have the app count it for me through some proxy with events or something or other. Good stuff.

michaelmcdonald 7y ago

"Bathroom break. Pooped. Extended delay due to girth of feces. Required additional straining and pressure to successfully pass."

pssflops 7y ago
Welp. Time to flush the logs.
- the_snooze 7y ago
  When rotating the logs, do they go down clockwise, or counterclockwise?
  - gherkinnn 7y ago
    Depending on what side of the planet you’re on.
LinuxBender 7y ago
Jira reclassified to Critical Outage. Escalated to doody manager. Reviewing Log details. In all seriousness, it sounds like these folks have an awful job. Curious if they will be permitted to or have the desire to form a "Moderators Union"
tj-teej 7y ago
Some Backlog items still remaining, planned for next sprint.

slumdev 7y ago

Sounds an awful lot like Crossover for Work--those $300k+ remote VP postings that get spammed on LinkedIn constantly.

msh 7y ago
Whats the story on those?
- simplyaccont 7y ago
  you supposed to maintain per-minute log of work that you are doing and they install on computer special software to keep track of what you are doing exactly. of course, this is only in order to help you be more productive and improve your time management skills (quote)
- slumdev 7y ago
  All of the positions are hourly, not salaried. They require per-minute accounting of your work. Most people who "succeed" in those positions wind up working overtime that is consistent and excessive, just to hit their 40.

tenebrisalietum 7y ago

I worked in a pretty rough Tier-1 call center environment for IT for about half a year. - We had to be in Avail status at the exact start of our shift or be counted late. For example, if I was scheduled to be in at 10am, I had to be in Avail at 10am. Meaning I had to take care of booting up computer, etc. before then. - We had to check in with a workload manager via Teams and get approval before moving to Break or Lunch aux. Often during a call. - We could move to an aux to take restroom breaks, and were encouraged to do so only when no calls were waiting, but the total time taken couldn't be more than 10 minutes a day. - We also had to notify the WLM if we were going into callback aux, for example, if the line dropped. We were questioned and sometimes moved to Avail automatically if we were too long in callback. - When I started, we had 30 seconds ACW but then they moved to zero ACW. We could move to ACW aux for a max of one minute unless cleared with WLM. You had to be quick if you had things to do on your ticket after the call otherwise often you'd get thrown into another call immediately. WLM would move you to Avail automatically if you went over and they were paying attention. - Getting a "Roll Over No Answer" was really bad. Definitely a rough environment, but it wasn't as bad as it sounded, and I was able to work from home for a month before I found a much better job. It was interesting to see if I could survive under that level of discipline but I'm glad I left when I did.

vr46 7y ago
I have read so much about this kind of controlling behaviour and at times experienced it during summer jobs. But I have a question. Why do they do this?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dvtrn 7y ago
  When it comes to the worst elements of "bottom-line obsessed thinking", I can't think of better examples than large national call centers; and their leaders will use all sorts of borderline abusive management tactics to justify it. I started my career in one for a popular multi-national consumer electronics brand whose devices might be in your pocket right now, also as a T-1 IT person for about four years. It's soul draining. One thing I'll never forget were the amount of EMS visits we got due to people having heart-attacks. Young people too.

TaylorGood 7y ago

Anti-Autonomy. My two years working for a large company I felt micro-managed. Even as a Creative Director. My last straw was being chastised for leaving five minutes before 5pm and how it's bad "optics" – anyway, I believe the #1 thing in life is to control your schedule. From there everything else flows; health, family, social, true travel etc. This doesn't necessary mean being an entrepreneur, but having a certain level of autonomy. Once you taste it, it's nearly impossible to go back to such controlled, desk-equated productivity environments.

cryoshon 7y ago
>Once you taste it, it's nearly impossible to go back to such controlled, desk-equated productivity environments. yes, i've found this as well. the reason is that employer-based constraints on your schedule are always arbitrary, rarely compensated for in full, never equitable across power structures, and only tenuously negotiable in your favor. in other words: your life becomes theirs to control in spirit, if not entirely in practice. it doesn't matter if they expect you to be at work from 9 to 5 or whatever else. if your employment is contingent on holding their schedule, they effectively hold control over the rest of your life's schedule. and they excercise that control to the detriment of your life as a matter of course, routinely, ruthlessly, without hesitation, and without consideration, in nearly 100% of cases -- yes, even in the "cool startup" you're working for. remember, you need to ask them to take time off to care for your sick relatives. you need to ask them for permission to not be at work to spend time for yourself on vacation. you are explicitly their property for however many hours per day, but they also own enough of you to implicitly dictate where you're allowed to be and when, and for what reasons. i guess some people find it a good bargain to trade their autonomy for a wage. it's very hard to respect that kind of thinking a lot of the time, but i've learned to do it simply because most people accept the bargain and it'd be too isolating to behave otherwise. for me, it's an intolerable situation to bear, even for a moment.
- TruffleMuffin 7y ago
  Are you currently employed? What job is offering you unrestricted control of your schedule? No requirement to work with others? No requirements to attend meetings at fixed times? etc. From what you said, I can't picture a workplace that is functional like that.

throwanem 7y ago

If you're still using Facebook in 2020, you're complicit. You've had the better part of a decade, knowing that Facebook is a problem, to do something about it, or at least about your complicity in it. If you still haven't, that's on you. No more excuses.

martin8412 7y ago
What exactly do you expect people to do? Sure, I know that Facebook is a horrible company. But at the same time I don't really have much choice if I want to use it or not. I use it to keep touch with friends and it's used to plan gatherings. I'm not about to try and be some advocate for people to use a better service, because I know that's a hopeless endeavour when I'm the only person doing it.
- samatman 7y ago
  I've been a part of talking more than one group into moving event planning off Facebook. It can be done.
- Brain_Thief 7y ago
  I see this sentiment expressed a lot and, frankly, I just don't buy it. I dropped my FaceBook account years ago and have never had any trouble staying in touch with people or being invited to things. Are your friends / family so insistent on using FaceBook for all communications that they would cease including you in events or talking to you if you needed to be contacted via, e.g., text message or email? If that's the case then I suggest you seriously consider the kind of relationships you have with these people and whether or not they are worth maintaining.
bluntfang 7y ago
Facebook is investing billions of dollars in the psychology of engagement (aka addiction). It's not an individuals fault.
standardUser 7y ago
Say that again, but this time replace some social media website with the cabal of multinationals profiting off of gradually decimating the planet.

IHLayman 7y ago

I didn't realize Snow Crash's chapter on Fedland (https://soquoted.blogspot.com/2006/03/memo-from-fedland.html https://soquoted.blogspot.com/2006/03/memo-from-fedland.html) would be taken as a manual. Ugh. I guess you can't say we weren't warned.

Havoc 7y ago

Timesheets are the bane of my existence. I've completed them for all of my working life. (It's common in my industry...all the way to top). Anything <15 mins is a complete waste of everyone's time.

RugnirViking 7y ago
why stop it at 15 minuites? I can't imagine a single scenario where splitting time reported into anything less than hours would matter all that much, and the best possible systems would be more freeform in approach, allowing the worker to specify the actual time they started and stopped, rather than only being able to start and cease work in specific intervals. It would allow for greater resolution naturally where the worker is switching tasks more often. As for people saying such a system would be misused or completed lazily, those arguments apply equally well to filling out timesheets at all. I don't imagine anyone ever recorded themselves slacking off intentionally on a timesheet.
- patmcguire 7y ago
  It's think it's pretty common when billing for time when the base rate is high. Lots of big law firms bill in six minute increments.
  - RugnirViking 7y ago
    but why not just record when you started and stopped each task, rather than dividing the day into chunks needlessly?
    - maximente 7y ago
      you need to convert into billable units at some point, which is what the fractional system gives you, so it's just a matter of whether or not the UI accepts clock based input or not. i'm not a UI expert but timekeeping doesn't seem particularly innovative. there are probably all sorts of esoteric certifications and approvals one might need for e.g. DoD compliance, so i'm guessing there are few people thinking about this and fewer willing to get it done and certified for the sake of the users.

at_a_remove 7y ago

I had a boss who wanted everything I did logged out into five minute increments. Even lawyers only go down to quarter-hours in granularity, last I heard. This pattern of relentless squeezing by management, ratcheting ever-tighter, seems to lead to collapse each time I have encountered it. I have yet to come up with a decent metaphor for the phenomenon, but it seems to be born of the idea that efficiency can always increase in increments that themselves do not decrease. The easy answer would be to wave the disparaging "capitalism" wand over it, yet history has reliable notes of this happening in governments opposed to capitalism. Perhaps it is just the thought that one can get more ... forever.

rckoepke 7y ago
Many lawyers are 0.25 hour (15 minute), but many lawyers are also 0.1 hour (6 minute).

drummer 7y ago

> “The happiest people are the people who are away from Facebook. The more unhappy you are in life, the more you are going to spend on Facebook,” Quoted for truth.

Wingman4l7 7y ago

Echoes of Marshall Brain's "Manna": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel) He posits a future with micro-management of service workers via headset, down to the minute, from an automated system.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jdkee 7y ago

If only these employees would unionize so they have a say in humane working conditions.

gexla 7y ago

Maybe the real story here is that Facebook is barely functional at most things but managed to get their crap enough together to focus on being a #1 social network. Like if you went out all night, got drunk, woke up with a severe hangover and still managed to get to work and skate through the day? That's X company doing anything other than that one thing they exist to do. The manager responsible for this moderation then can only hold it enough together to focus on X metrics, and happiness isn't one of them. Add one more metric and this person would probably fall apart and get thrown onto the pavement. Engineers don't get treated like this because there's actual competition in hiring the best talent. The workers need to organize to present their own metrics. Or figure out a way to make employee happiness a metric to focus on. Or somehow find the super person who can figure this all out (but then this person would get elevated to a more important part of the business.) Maybe it would be best to outsource this part of the business and then have the contractors compete on creating and delivering on these metrics. Or maybe create competing teams internally which can do the same, but rewarded with better pay?

discreteevent 7y ago
Agreed on the barely functional. What I've noticed is that the more time and schedule obsessed a development manager is, the more likely they are incompetent. Time is the easiest thing to manage. A single variable. No complexity.
dannyr 7y ago
The moderation is outsourced to another company. --------------- From the article: Facebook, which outsources the majority of its content moderation to over 15,000 third-party contractors. --------------- My opinion is most tech companies do not want to treat their own employees like this. But they don't really want moderators to get equal treatment as their own employees so they outsource it.