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Devil's advocate: I think the idea with the app isn't to figure out if you're in the building, but rather whether you're moving around within the building in a
by derefr 6y ago
Devil's advocate: I think the idea with the app isn't to figure out if you're in the building, but rather whether you're moving around within the building in a manner consistent with the fingerprint of doing your particular job. A janitor could clock in and then just sit around in the custodial storage area doing nothing, and a card-based system would be none the wiser. But the app would identify that as "not working."
The app isn't to know whether you're on the clock; the app is a digital whip cracker to keep employees constantly working 100% of the time that they claim to be working.
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Which, in theory, wouldn't be a bad thing... if this was combined with a sufficient number of break-minutes per day, to be spent flexibly. Whenever you're not doing the "doing your job" movement pattern, the app could automatically mark you as being on break. If they calibrated the number of break-minutes to the actual average observed productivity of employees in each role across the industry, then the app would have a useful output — allowing employers to figure out who's doing less work than average. (And employees+unions could also use the data as evidence for uncompensated overtime disputes.)
But of course such a system won't be used/configured that way. Employers will instead wrong-headedly assume that their employees should be capable of productive output 100% of the time that they're not on their 90 minutes per shift of legally-mandated break time; and then will randomly punish/fire employees for taking "extra" breaks, even when those "extra" breaks merely bring them to the industry average level of productivity.
- CivBase 6y agoA janitor certainly could clock in then sit around in the custodial storage area doing nothing. They could also clock in and wonder around the building doing nothing. If the concern is really whether they are doing their job, management can easily verify by just checking whether the job was done.
- derefr 6y agoYou presume management has the capability to judge the quality of the work. Janitorial work — like, say, being a sysadmin — doesn't necessarily result in instant visible problems if you just decide to skip work one day. The problems are probabilistic, and often consist of smaller problems that compound over time. In this sort of job, you can frequently "get away with" not doing your job for a few hours, at the expense of working a bit harder the rest of the day; you can sometimes even "get away with" not doing your job for a day or two, at the expense of likely having to do a bit of "fire-fighting" work when you get back, rather than only prophylactic maintenance work. In either case, your absence won't necessarily be noted, if you're not part of a team with a supervisor specifically attuned to the KPIs you're delivering on. In jobs where "when you're doing the job right, nobody notices", the reverse also applies: as long as nobody is noticing anything going wrong, then they assume you're doing your job.
- iudqnolq 6y agoIf nobody notices any difference then is there a problem? Why can't they work harder on even days and less hard on odd days if they want? In your sysadmin example if someone prevents problems from happening they'd look worse than someone who constantly reacts. This already happens, why make it worse with an automated system?
- lotsofpulp 6y agoSome things might not be noticeable, such as disinfecting certain surfaces or performing routine maintenance such as cleaning filters until it’s too late.
- iudqnolq 6y agoYep. This is why humans invented trust and consequences, though. Most people aren't dicks if you aren't dicks to them, and I'd rather discover the exceptions and fire them than treat everyone like one.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoTrust doesn’t scale. And scaling results in much bigger rewards. I’d say it’s more accurate that humans have had to rely on trust due to lack of alternatives, but transparency will always be preferred.
- iudqnolq 6y agoYou don't need to scale supervision on janitors. You can just hire some people and pay them some money. If you can't afford enough supervisors to keep a vague eye on what's going on, live with dirtier buildings or go out of business. In general I think some things scale well and others don't. Why is it that HN recognizes outsourcing your tech to try and scale fails but other jobs aren't as worthy?
- kergonath 6y ago
- ipaddr 6y agoOr they could have some check if things are cleaned. We accept so much detailed tracking when in reality it is unnecessary and open to abuse.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoI imagine more detailed tracking will result in lower insurance premiums as culpability can be more easily established. This will give a competitive advantage to those that implement detailed tracking.
- smolder 6y agoIt might not be a competitive advantage to disrespect your employees.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoUnfortunately, there are large swaths of jobs where the employees don't have much choice, so there is no competitive disadvantage either.
- rland 6y agoYou can either pay someone $20 an hour and give them a sense of responsibility, autonomy, & pride, or you can pay them $10 an hour and just coerce them to do the job. Which do we reward?
- lotsofpulp 6y agoBased on the proportion of businesses that exist utilizing the latter, it indicates we are rewarding the latter. Most people are very price sensitive.
- ipaddr 6y agoThe cost of the tracking plus the cost of employee moral disappearing won't give you that competitive advantage plus the other extras youhave to do to maintain that rate (do you have a logbook of the times you had the unit serviced, semi-yearly maintance is required at your cost)
- dcanelhas 6y agoThe article says that the app only logs when they enter/exit the geofence, not how they move around inside the building. Not to say that they wouldn't want to do that if they could, but GPS location is not really reliable indoors.
- geggam 6y agoEasily fixed with subsonic transmitters or bluetooth beacons Both are used heavily in tracking apps ( think shopkick if it still exists )
- LorenPechtel 6y agoYup. Anything metal messes with GPS. Phones have fallback modes but they can fail spectacularly at times. Even outdoors--sometimes my phone won't navigate sitting on the passenger seat (The GPS constellation guarantees a minimum of 4 satellites above the horizon, it doesn't guarantee 4 satellites in positions that won't be blocked by your car roof.) If you drive onto the property with your phone on your person or in a purse on the passenger seat the geofence might fail to detect it. There's a boss somewhere who didn't look into this well enough.
- spatley 6y agoNope If you cannot tell the space has been cleaned, get new glasses. If you can tell and it is dirty, give me a warning and then fire me. Otherwise nunyabizness
- skeeter2020 6y agoThose are pretty good glasses if you can see the covid virus on surfaces.
- cwillu 6y agoSpeaking of things the CDC has recently finally admitted isn't actually that important...
- 908B64B197 6y agoI'll be completely honest: it's pretty easy to know if a building has been cleaned by just... being in the building. To me, this sounds like one layer of bureaucrats trying to justify their jobs. Truth is, with unionized school districts, for every custodian doing the job, minor maintenance and inspections, there are a few bureaucrats in offices looking at spreadsheet and attending government sponsored management seminars on how to streamline the organization...
- stjohnswarts 6y agoTeaching people to be tracked is always a bad thing. If a janitor isn't doing their job then it will become evident quickly enough or their manager isn't paying attention and both will eventually be fired. Not everything has to be done and observed down to the microsecond.