7 ms·

It's being done by the same clowns who can't live without time clock cards, all sorts of monitoring,and tracking.These are the people who have no clue how to ma

It's being done by the same clowns who can't live without time clock cards, all sorts of monitoring,and tracking.These are the people who have no clue how to manage people,how to measure their work and act upon results.These are the same crappy companies who would rather ask their staff to email endless Excel spreadsheets to each other instead of investing some money in database or some crm system. In a nutshell,these are the bottom feeders of this world.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Fundamentally it's just an outdated style of doing business. The same people who tell you not to do personal web browsing at work will not respond to an email that arrives in the evening until they clock in the next morning. Whereas sure, I don't spend an eight hour solid block of time working each day, but I'll respond to a help ticket at 11pm because someone had a quick need and my computer is handy. My employer is still getting my eight hours, possibly more, just diffused through the whole day.
- poulsbohemian 6y ago
  >My employer is still getting my eight hours, possibly more, just diffused through the whole day. Even that sticks in my craw... we need to make this 8 hour bar die. Some days I'm just not productive. Other days I might be heads-down on a problem for 15+ hours straight. So long as I'm accountable to my work and it is producing the results we've mutually agreed upon, this hour nonsense (for workers not billing by the hour, which is its own separate discussion) needs to go away.
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    My favorite is trying to figure out a bug and nothing I can think of provides any clue. So I do some other work for a bit and go home. And the next morning sit down down and fix the problem in 2 minutes. Obviously _something_ got done between last night and this morning. But how would you bill for THAT. Or an old example from a mentor. Get in the shower, start thinking about what you're going to work on today. Realize you've been in the shower for half an hour. How you going to bill for that? I've come to the idea that you pay an engineer for his attention to your problems. Engineers I dislike working with are ones that don't. Their other interests have crowded out what they are being paid to mind. And some of those guys definitely do spend 8 hours in the chair going through the motions. They do work but there is a disunity to the whole thing.
    - cosmodisk 6y ago
      Last year we had a management meeting and somehow started talking about smoking. Someone suggested we should ban people from smoking because they are wasting company's time.I defended the smokers arguing these are usually much needed breaks for those on the phones. Then I went on explaining that I could literally sit outside the office all day and just talk to my colleague and smoke one after another and It will be a productive day for us.They were taken back for a bit by such arguments,but then I explained that we get paid for using our brains and if it takes 5 hours to sit outside and think how to do it and then jump back on the keyboard and write code in 2 hours that implements this idea,then that's what it is. Everyone agreed and we moved on from the topic:)
      - jedberg 6y ago
        When I was a junior engineer, I worked on a team where everyone but me smoked. They would smoke for five minutes of every hour. It really pissed me off that they got breaks and I didn't. So I started joining them. Not to smoke, just to hang out while they smoked. And you know what? My productivity went up! The reason? We talked about work during the smoke break. I got to be part of the conversation with the senior engineers, which meant I got to be involved in more valuable tasks.
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      >”obviously _something_ got done between last night and this morning” https://youtu.be/yjdhNyEmYpo https://youtu.be/yjdhNyEmYpo I found this video last night lounging on the couch, the first segment talks about exactly what you’ve described, and the necessity to sometimes let the mind wander or do something else entirely when you’re “in the zone” but nevertheless stumped on a particular problem. The video itself is about math and science but I think the applications extend far beyond.
  - kyuudou 6y ago
    >we need to make this 8 hour bar die. I think I get where you're coming from but I'm at the point in my career where I like work/life balance and do not give a shit about your email once I've turned off work (unless it's an emergency, obviously). If this doesn't happen, work creeps into life until that's all it is, no fun, no exercise, no fresh air, no social interaction, no family time - and all the negative mental and physical health effects that result from this. I mean, if a really productive brainstorm session bleeds over an hour or 2 every once in a while and we just can't stop the flood of great ideas or hit that "flow", of course, let's keep going. But every damn day? Get a life, kid! Before it's too late. On the flip side, if I get inspired to do work in my off-hours, I don't go charging it back, so to speak.
    - poulsbohemian 6y ago
      > I'm at the point in my career where I like work/life balance and do not give a shit about your email once I've turned off work... We aren't disagreeing here... my point is not that you should work 24x7, rather... throughout my career I've noticed that value and hours are not correlated. Therefore, it strikes me as really silly to be so focused on hours worked in fields where that metric doesn't matter. I'm not saying we should get lazy and sit around, but rather find new ways of managing our work that recognize this phenomenon and seek to create working environments where we eliminate hours as a measure of productivity and instead focus on the productive output of our work.
      - kyuudou 6y ago
        >eliminate hours as a measure of productivity and instead focus on the productive output of our work. Yes, totally agreed here. We're talking creative and analytical output, not cloud compute cycles.
gfxgirl 6y ago
I'm curious how much of this comes from working with unskilled labor (hope that's the right term). I once worked in fast food right out of high school. 80-90% of the employees were one or more of untrustworthy, unreliable, whiny, always making excuses or trying get out of work. My point being if you start there you might just assume that that's the way it always is for all employees no matter what type of job and therefore feel like you need to surveil. Most of my tech jobs didn't have this issue AFAIK (though one did) but just as one stat from a random search https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/workplace-crime-costs-us-businesses-50-billion-a-year.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/workplace-crime-costs-us-bus...
- eschutte2 6y ago
  That's been my observation too. In tech, this kind of paranoid micro-management is a great (inverse) indicator for whether someone's used to working with talented people. If I were ever managing again in tech I'd be trying to find people much smarter than me and then get the heck out of their way.
  - eschutte2 6y ago
    Edit since I just re-read the parent comment and might have misunderstood: I don't distinguish between tech and other fields in this regard. I think it's an issue in all fields.
- drevil-v2 6y ago
  Spot on. I have consulted with customer contact companies and it was always shocking to see the low productivity. Front line employees, especially the younger age group, would find ingenious ways to circumvent doing actual work while artificially inflating their KPIs. There was even information sharing economy in some companies where the best tricks were traded for goods and services. To put it in context though, it was by any measure thankless and soul crushing work. And the worst offenders were in cold call centres and strangely in email support teams.
- nicbou 6y ago
  This reflects the experiences of close relatives with unskilled labour. In some fields, it's difficult to get people who consistently show up sober and on time. Those who can do this rarely stay for long.
dvtrn 6y ago
These are the same crappy companies who would rather ask their staff to email endless Excel spreadsheets to each other instead of investing some money in database or some crm system. twitches involuntarily Buddy you're hitting way too close to home for my comfort, right now (thankfully the complaints are being heard and division chief is willing to hear out suggestions for a better system to track OKRs)
apecat 6y ago
The levels of absolute dogshit thinking that goes into what's described in the OP is astounding. Imagine that you're processing confidential customer data and you use something like https://hubstaff.com https://hubstaff.com to take screenshots randomly. You're literally uploading PII to some professional spyware provider that works on a freemium model.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

Fundamentally it's just an outdated style of doing business. The same people who tell you not to do personal web browsing at work will not respond to an email that arrives in the evening until they clock in the next morning. Whereas sure, I don't spend an eight hour solid block of time working each day, but I'll respond to a help ticket at 11pm because someone had a quick need and my computer is handy. My employer is still getting my eight hours, possibly more, just diffused through the whole day.

poulsbohemian 6y ago
>My employer is still getting my eight hours, possibly more, just diffused through the whole day. Even that sticks in my craw... we need to make this 8 hour bar die. Some days I'm just not productive. Other days I might be heads-down on a problem for 15+ hours straight. So long as I'm accountable to my work and it is producing the results we've mutually agreed upon, this hour nonsense (for workers not billing by the hour, which is its own separate discussion) needs to go away.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  My favorite is trying to figure out a bug and nothing I can think of provides any clue. So I do some other work for a bit and go home. And the next morning sit down down and fix the problem in 2 minutes. Obviously _something_ got done between last night and this morning. But how would you bill for THAT. Or an old example from a mentor. Get in the shower, start thinking about what you're going to work on today. Realize you've been in the shower for half an hour. How you going to bill for that? I've come to the idea that you pay an engineer for his attention to your problems. Engineers I dislike working with are ones that don't. Their other interests have crowded out what they are being paid to mind. And some of those guys definitely do spend 8 hours in the chair going through the motions. They do work but there is a disunity to the whole thing.
  - cosmodisk 6y ago
    Last year we had a management meeting and somehow started talking about smoking. Someone suggested we should ban people from smoking because they are wasting company's time.I defended the smokers arguing these are usually much needed breaks for those on the phones. Then I went on explaining that I could literally sit outside the office all day and just talk to my colleague and smoke one after another and It will be a productive day for us.They were taken back for a bit by such arguments,but then I explained that we get paid for using our brains and if it takes 5 hours to sit outside and think how to do it and then jump back on the keyboard and write code in 2 hours that implements this idea,then that's what it is. Everyone agreed and we moved on from the topic:)
    - jedberg 6y ago
      When I was a junior engineer, I worked on a team where everyone but me smoked. They would smoke for five minutes of every hour. It really pissed me off that they got breaks and I didn't. So I started joining them. Not to smoke, just to hang out while they smoked. And you know what? My productivity went up! The reason? We talked about work during the smoke break. I got to be part of the conversation with the senior engineers, which meant I got to be involved in more valuable tasks.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    >”obviously _something_ got done between last night and this morning” https://youtu.be/yjdhNyEmYpo https://youtu.be/yjdhNyEmYpo I found this video last night lounging on the couch, the first segment talks about exactly what you’ve described, and the necessity to sometimes let the mind wander or do something else entirely when you’re “in the zone” but nevertheless stumped on a particular problem. The video itself is about math and science but I think the applications extend far beyond.
- kyuudou 6y ago
  >we need to make this 8 hour bar die. I think I get where you're coming from but I'm at the point in my career where I like work/life balance and do not give a shit about your email once I've turned off work (unless it's an emergency, obviously). If this doesn't happen, work creeps into life until that's all it is, no fun, no exercise, no fresh air, no social interaction, no family time - and all the negative mental and physical health effects that result from this. I mean, if a really productive brainstorm session bleeds over an hour or 2 every once in a while and we just can't stop the flood of great ideas or hit that "flow", of course, let's keep going. But every damn day? Get a life, kid! Before it's too late. On the flip side, if I get inspired to do work in my off-hours, I don't go charging it back, so to speak.
  - poulsbohemian 6y ago
    > I'm at the point in my career where I like work/life balance and do not give a shit about your email once I've turned off work... We aren't disagreeing here... my point is not that you should work 24x7, rather... throughout my career I've noticed that value and hours are not correlated. Therefore, it strikes me as really silly to be so focused on hours worked in fields where that metric doesn't matter. I'm not saying we should get lazy and sit around, but rather find new ways of managing our work that recognize this phenomenon and seek to create working environments where we eliminate hours as a measure of productivity and instead focus on the productive output of our work.
    - kyuudou 6y ago
      >eliminate hours as a measure of productivity and instead focus on the productive output of our work. Yes, totally agreed here. We're talking creative and analytical output, not cloud compute cycles.

gfxgirl 6y ago

I'm curious how much of this comes from working with unskilled labor (hope that's the right term). I once worked in fast food right out of high school. 80-90% of the employees were one or more of untrustworthy, unreliable, whiny, always making excuses or trying get out of work. My point being if you start there you might just assume that that's the way it always is for all employees no matter what type of job and therefore feel like you need to surveil. Most of my tech jobs didn't have this issue AFAIK (though one did) but just as one stat from a random search https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/workplace-crime-costs-us-businesses-50-billion-a-year.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/workplace-crime-costs-us-bus...

eschutte2 6y ago
That's been my observation too. In tech, this kind of paranoid micro-management is a great (inverse) indicator for whether someone's used to working with talented people. If I were ever managing again in tech I'd be trying to find people much smarter than me and then get the heck out of their way.
- eschutte2 6y ago
  Edit since I just re-read the parent comment and might have misunderstood: I don't distinguish between tech and other fields in this regard. I think it's an issue in all fields.
drevil-v2 6y ago
Spot on. I have consulted with customer contact companies and it was always shocking to see the low productivity. Front line employees, especially the younger age group, would find ingenious ways to circumvent doing actual work while artificially inflating their KPIs. There was even information sharing economy in some companies where the best tricks were traded for goods and services. To put it in context though, it was by any measure thankless and soul crushing work. And the worst offenders were in cold call centres and strangely in email support teams.
nicbou 6y ago
This reflects the experiences of close relatives with unskilled labour. In some fields, it's difficult to get people who consistently show up sober and on time. Those who can do this rarely stay for long.

dvtrn 6y ago

These are the same crappy companies who would rather ask their staff to email endless Excel spreadsheets to each other instead of investing some money in database or some crm system. twitches involuntarily Buddy you're hitting way too close to home for my comfort, right now (thankfully the complaints are being heard and division chief is willing to hear out suggestions for a better system to track OKRs)

apecat 6y ago

The levels of absolute dogshit thinking that goes into what's described in the OP is astounding. Imagine that you're processing confidential customer data and you use something like https://hubstaff.com https://hubstaff.com to take screenshots randomly. You're literally uploading PII to some professional spyware provider that works on a freemium model.