5 ms·

I briefly worked on a timekeeping system (the one that records work hours). When I started running it against real data, I hit some bugs. The system was reporti

by sargun 6y ago

I briefly worked on a timekeeping system (the one that records work hours). When I started running it against real data, I hit some bugs. The system was reporting that people had worked a few hours rather than a full shift. I had no idea how this could happen. When I started digging into the data, it became obvious. People were punching in at 08:00 on Monday, and wouldn't punch out until something like 12:00 on Friday (change days as required). This meant that they were clocking 24 hours / day. The only way this could happen is if they were colluding with their store manager, as the manager was meant to close out the time keeping system at the end of the day. The stores with employees that abused the system tended to have lower margins. This often led to them being closed down. It's not so much the individual being bad that's bad, it's that in industries where profit margin is razor thin, an individual can have an outsized effect on the group. I expect over time (10s of years) the computer industry will get closer to other professional industries as opposed to being the wild west it is today.

loopz 6y ago
It's well established timesheets are an utter failure when concerning knowledge work and derived output. There have been times where every hour had to be accounted for, allotted to projects, cost centers/departments and various general types of allowed "hours". This is more unusual today because it provably reduced productivity and sometimes even led to pointless discussions where to "punch in your hours", employees stopped caring as the time was not theirs anymore anyways. In the end, data quality would be destroyed, and the entire system a time-consuming pointless exercise in C&C futility. The system of building on trust is a more basic form of reporting, actually more in line with business thinking. Trust is currency and life blood throughout organizations and across them. There's surely some people still doing the agonizing detailed reporting of timesheets, but even consultants are given same benefits of doubt nowadays, as companies tend to use the same system for everyone. I'm sure the cycle will restart at some point. That situation will be one where employees have much less say in the day to day work and operations again.
koonsolo 6y ago
If you think clocking will make people more productive, you are terribly wrong. I've seen companies where this happens, and people have Friday afternoons off because they already did their hours that week. They have 0 loyalty to the company. Relationships work in 2 directions. If the company treats you like lazy scum, you will treat the company as an oppressive thing you want to avoid. If the company trusts you, you are less inclinded to breach that trust. This also works for blue collar workers, just look up Ricardo Semler of Semco.
- kelvin0 6y ago
  I think both individual employees and companies are guilty of one thing: greed. I've seen it personally happen on all levels of many companies. The scale of the employee's greed make it's actions seem tame at a small scale (punching false times...). They justify it by saying they are getting their dues and for once they are the ones screwing and not getting screwed. The scale and visibility of a company's greed make it much more apparent that it's incentives and moral compass are way off (mistreating, exploiting...). They justify this behavior as helping the bottom line and making the numbers look good to investors. Until ALL the actors, both companies and individuals start adjusting their 'morality' and integrity this will continue happening.
- rerx 6y ago
  > I've seen companies where this happens, and people have Friday afternoons off because they already did their hours that week. How is that a bad thing?
  - koonsolo 6y ago
    Not saying it's a bad thing, just saying that it might not improve productivity compared to their peers that still want to finish that one thing on Friday before the weekend starts. But indeed those employees (programmers, etc) saw that as a benefit of doing no more than 40 hour per week.
    - rerx 6y ago
      > finish that one thing on Friday before the weekend starts Sometimes you might fix that one bug that would haunt you over the weekend otherwise, I grant you that. More often than that, feeling that one has to enable oneself to finish stuff at the end of the week leads to fewer plans on Friday nights, too little socializing outside of work, less restful weekends. And those kill productivity and company culture in the medium term. In the short term I have seen my share of lost productivity because people feel like deploying hardly thought through changes (if only to internal system) on Friday afternoons to get it done that week.
burkaman 6y ago
The correct solution to that would be to hand some collective ownership and responsibility to the employees of a store. Make schedules public, or if that's a privacy issue (I don't think it should be), at least discuss overall statistics at some regular meeting. "Hey team, we worked x hours this month, and our best employee worked 96 ours of overtime! Amazing!" In your example, the "individual [having] an outsized effect on the group" is the store manager. They need some oversight to ensure they're correctly wielding their power over the timekeeping system and their employees. You could have the next manager in the chain conduct oversight, but then you might end of with the same issue. Better to distribute power to the employees, so no one person can ruin the store, and everyone feels a little more responsible and important.
da_chicken 6y ago
> It's not so much the individual being bad that's bad, it's that in industries where profit margin is razor thin, an individual can have an outsized effect on the group. If a business isn't capable of supporting it's labor at a rate where their employees can maintain their cost of living, then that business has already failed. It means the business subsidizing the cost of goods and services with the quality of life of the employees providing those goods and services. That's not a sustainable economic model, because it means those same workers are effectively excluded from the economy; they're only able to participate with essential goods and services, which harms the markets for anything else by artificially constraining demand. That means economics of scale won't pay off, which increases the effects of overhead on business.

by sargun 6y ago

loopz 6y ago

It's well established timesheets are an utter failure when concerning knowledge work and derived output. There have been times where every hour had to be accounted for, allotted to projects, cost centers/departments and various general types of allowed "hours". This is more unusual today because it provably reduced productivity and sometimes even led to pointless discussions where to "punch in your hours", employees stopped caring as the time was not theirs anymore anyways. In the end, data quality would be destroyed, and the entire system a time-consuming pointless exercise in C&C futility. The system of building on trust is a more basic form of reporting, actually more in line with business thinking. Trust is currency and life blood throughout organizations and across them. There's surely some people still doing the agonizing detailed reporting of timesheets, but even consultants are given same benefits of doubt nowadays, as companies tend to use the same system for everyone. I'm sure the cycle will restart at some point. That situation will be one where employees have much less say in the day to day work and operations again.

koonsolo 6y ago

If you think clocking will make people more productive, you are terribly wrong. I've seen companies where this happens, and people have Friday afternoons off because they already did their hours that week. They have 0 loyalty to the company. Relationships work in 2 directions. If the company treats you like lazy scum, you will treat the company as an oppressive thing you want to avoid. If the company trusts you, you are less inclinded to breach that trust. This also works for blue collar workers, just look up Ricardo Semler of Semco.

kelvin0 6y ago
I think both individual employees and companies are guilty of one thing: greed. I've seen it personally happen on all levels of many companies. The scale of the employee's greed make it's actions seem tame at a small scale (punching false times...). They justify it by saying they are getting their dues and for once they are the ones screwing and not getting screwed. The scale and visibility of a company's greed make it much more apparent that it's incentives and moral compass are way off (mistreating, exploiting...). They justify this behavior as helping the bottom line and making the numbers look good to investors. Until ALL the actors, both companies and individuals start adjusting their 'morality' and integrity this will continue happening.
rerx 6y ago
> I've seen companies where this happens, and people have Friday afternoons off because they already did their hours that week. How is that a bad thing?
- koonsolo 6y ago
  Not saying it's a bad thing, just saying that it might not improve productivity compared to their peers that still want to finish that one thing on Friday before the weekend starts. But indeed those employees (programmers, etc) saw that as a benefit of doing no more than 40 hour per week.
  - rerx 6y ago
    > finish that one thing on Friday before the weekend starts Sometimes you might fix that one bug that would haunt you over the weekend otherwise, I grant you that. More often than that, feeling that one has to enable oneself to finish stuff at the end of the week leads to fewer plans on Friday nights, too little socializing outside of work, less restful weekends. And those kill productivity and company culture in the medium term. In the short term I have seen my share of lost productivity because people feel like deploying hardly thought through changes (if only to internal system) on Friday afternoons to get it done that week.

burkaman 6y ago

The correct solution to that would be to hand some collective ownership and responsibility to the employees of a store. Make schedules public, or if that's a privacy issue (I don't think it should be), at least discuss overall statistics at some regular meeting. "Hey team, we worked x hours this month, and our best employee worked 96 ours of overtime! Amazing!" In your example, the "individual [having] an outsized effect on the group" is the store manager. They need some oversight to ensure they're correctly wielding their power over the timekeeping system and their employees. You could have the next manager in the chain conduct oversight, but then you might end of with the same issue. Better to distribute power to the employees, so no one person can ruin the store, and everyone feels a little more responsible and important.

da_chicken 6y ago

> It's not so much the individual being bad that's bad, it's that in industries where profit margin is razor thin, an individual can have an outsized effect on the group. If a business isn't capable of supporting it's labor at a rate where their employees can maintain their cost of living, then that business has already failed. It means the business subsidizing the cost of goods and services with the quality of life of the employees providing those goods and services. That's not a sustainable economic model, because it means those same workers are effectively excluded from the economy; they're only able to participate with essential goods and services, which harms the markets for anything else by artificially constraining demand. That means economics of scale won't pay off, which increases the effects of overhead on business.