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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.
  • jjeaff 7y ago
    That's what just doesn't make any sense. A single on-site heart attack has got to undo months of trying to shave off seconds here and there and abusing people to get just a few more minutes of output per day. Not to mention the huge loss when it comes to turn over.
    • mythrwy 7y ago
      There may have been other factors. Like being yelled at by unhappy customers all day.
• tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  Contracts I think. The place I was working for probably had a contract that incurred penalties from the client if certain metrics weren't met.
• zouhair 7y ago
  Because for most Capitalists workers are not human beings, just tools.
  • dragonwriter 7y ago
    There's a reason that a company’s employees are referred to as “human resources”; they are inputs consumed in the course of producing returns on capital.
    • TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Key word being, "consumed". Resources are something to be used up in the industrial process, yielding economic value and disposable waste.
  • joejerryronnie 7y ago
    This is the same for Socialists, only they’re using human “tools” to gain political and societal power instead of profits. But make no mistake, the profits just come a little bit later for Socialist leaders.
• matwood 7y ago
  Mostly contracts. All the numbers the individual employee is being held to, the managers are being held to in aggregate. Then the client holds the call center company to those numbers in aggregate. Somewhere in there, the call center company is trying to squeeze out a bit of profit. Source - I wrote internal software for a large call center outsourcing company right out of college. Back then the company I was a part of was actually pretty progressive. They let employees work split schedules, WFH way before it was cool, factored in things like reasonable breaks, etc... The amount of data that comes off of automated dialers and inbound CMS systems can make for fun tech work, but it's still a pretty crummy industry which is why I left.
  • rtkwe 7y ago
    When I was first coming out of college interviewing I got a tiny taste of it interviewing for a company that made software for controlling and analyzing the performance of a call center and one of the weird sideways things they talked about doing was automatically dropping some calls to help call centers meet their metrics because a call sitting in a queue forever might mess up their wait time stats but dropping it and the person calling back let operators hit the reset button on the timer.
    • whammywon 7y ago
      So I guess at that point "wait time" just becomes a vanity metric? Or to show their clients "we only make callers wait X amount of time compared to our competitors"?
      • rtkwe 7y ago
        I think it does become a vanity metric at that point at least in terms of actually successfully improving customer experience. For their clients though it was an extremely valuable thing to be able to game because it could determine if they made a bonus payment or not. There's the old adage that as soon as a metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a good metric because it starts to be gamed. It's probably not universally true but it shows up again and again in things like NYC's COMPSTAT program where a decent idea becomes a goal without measuring the right thing and you wind up with police just harassing people because you've gotta get the number of arrests up or you'll look bad at the next COMPSTAT review.
• jerf 7y ago
  Manage one of those sorts of places for a week and you'll figure it out. It isn't all just being a jerk for being a jerk's sake. There's a reason why you experienced it at "summer jobs", too.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Could you describe the reasons for those of us who don't want to manage one of such places for fear of losing their humanity?
    • jerf 7y ago
      Well there are people who are, you know, less responsible than others, who will also tend to be correlated to the lower-pay employees. If you, say, had the bright idea of starting an "ethical" call center that didn't track when people came in, and since you'll be pulling from the same pool because it's not like you can afford to pay call center employees $30/hr, and you decide "I'm not going to track anyone's time!"... well, frankly, the obvious is going to happen. You're going to get people outright lying to you about being present. It won't take long before you start tracking time. And so on for most of the other practices there. But jerf... I'm only talking about the other side of the complex of forces that inevitably emerges from this sort of low pay situation. It doesn't mean that employees ought to be treated as subhumans, obviously. Another aspect is that this sort of control will also attract management who enjoys wielding that sort of power. Management isn't guilty. But these restrictions are all generally reactions to the problems management had getting their employees to show up on time. There's a whole back and forth of events that inevitably occurs at scale, which is why the whole job has a bad rep, not just particular companies. The same forces produce convergent evolution between all the companies that have large call centers. You'll get similar experience managing a McDonalds, or any number of other places where you're trying to get a whole bunch of low-paid people doing a particular job.
      • TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Thanks for explaining the dynamics of these jobs so clearly. So when you say, "It isn't all just being a jerk for being a jerk's sake.", you essentially mean that everyone involved is a victim of the circumstances? That these jobs naturally attract certain types of people on both employee and management side, trap them, and pit them against each other?
• bearcobra 7y ago
  In my experience in call centers it usually breaks down into 2 causes coming together 1) Support is viewed as cost centers so "maximizing" efficiency becomes important to the executives in charge of it 2) Customers have very high expectations around what is an acceptable amount of time to wait to talk to an agent. Because of reason 1, things are optimized so tightly that a shockingly small amount of variation can cause really large shifts in wait times. As an example, I once worked for a cable company that averaged ~2,000 agents during peak call times. Every once in a while an office would have an unannounced fire drill, taking about 200 agents offline. When that happened wait times would go from about 90 seconds to over 10 minutes for the hour or two
  • hutzlibu 7y ago
    But suddenly having 10% less workers is not a shockingly small amount I think. I believe it is more about general "efficiency" or milking of the workers. How to get the most while spending the least. Which is a working principle, but does have dark side effects, when we are talking about human ressources.