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I disagree. This sort of thing costs the company money, opens them up to possible legal issues, and doesn't actually do anything to improve performance. The co

I disagree. This sort of thing costs the company money, opens them up to possible legal issues, and doesn't actually do anything to improve performance. The companies that understand that "butts in seats" does not equate to performance will not use this, as such. If those aren't currently the most prestigious, they likely will become so, because they care about doing things that bring results, not merely make bad managers happy. Because of that, while there's an uptick right now, I don't see it lasting; I certainly don't see it taking over.

tehjoker 5y ago
This is a "just so" story.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  So is your parent post on how monitoring will take over if devs don't unionize.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    Perhaps, but do you really think developers are different from every other kind of employee? While we are well paid, the overarching story has been to systematize the work and increase the number of workers in an effort to drive down costs and increase management control. I think it's naïve to think this trend will lead to companies making wise decisions that cede additional control to workers. After all, this isn't speculation, we're discussing an article where 1/3 of workers are already subject to it! The main thing that has made our profession different is that the work is intellectually difficult and requires a lot of training. If you think similar knowledge work jobs aren't subject to such pressures, I know a doctor that is freaking out about how they are training nurse practitioners in online schools to take away hospitalist jobs.
    - lostcolony 5y ago
      No, but I think everyone being forced to work remotely due to a worldwide pandemic -is- unique. The switch was not a carefully considered bought into thing, and companies are reacting to it with what they think they need, not what they actually find they need. You call out 1/3 of workers are already subject to it; I will call out that despite almost -every- company going from "I can see who is in the office, at their computer, and I can walk by and get an idea if they're just doomscrolling Facebook, or at least staring at an IDE" to "now I can't tell at all what they're doing", a full 2/3rds of companies, in the UK (a country that already has a culture of passive surveillance, with cameras on most urban street corners and the like) -haven't- instituted such measures. As time goes on, will that 2/3rds of companies also buy in? Maybe, if they find they can't actually determine who is and isn't producing. But that has always been a challenge with knowledge workers, and the move to remote hasn't actually changed that calculus at all. What -is- certain is that increased monitoring, especially in countries that historically have objected to it (such as the US, which is also a leader in the industry when it comes to establishing trends), has a cost, both monetarily and in morale. If companies don't see a return on investment, the push for it will likely subside, and it becomes something to cut for the sake of budgets, if not also competitiveness in attracting talent. I will also point out, pre-COVID, most companies didn't actually track time spent in office for knowledge workers. While blue collar employees would clock in and out to ensure they were putting in the hours, and service industry employees would, necessarily, have specific hours they worked, knowledge workers such as devs (a very different category of beast than doctor or nurse, who though knowledgeable and highly trained, are not actually knowledge workers. A nurse is not nursing if they're staring into space thinking about their patient. They are more like service industry in that regard, working well defined shifts that require manpower. Same doctors; there are appointments and scheduled events they have to attend and do. You can't replace a surgery, unlike many meetings, with an email) generally have had no such measures, despite it being no more difficult to institute them. Why? Because companies realized that attendance is not a proxy for performance. The fact a bunch of bad 'leaders', faced with the most singular workplace disruption of our lifetime (hopefully), reacted poorly in trying to pretend it is, doesn't tell us anything about long term trends.
wisty 5y ago
The alternative to "butts in seats" is some kind of hard KPI. Uber doesn't need to pay for "butts in seats" because it can manage workers through discrete and easily monitored performance indicators. For any job where performance is hard to measure, either a company needs to basically manage contracts (why not just go to Fiverr), or manage by a bad KPI (lines of code? feature points?) or pay for "butts on seats". "Butts on seats" means "employees who are present, and hopefully intrinsically motivated (rather than driven by a bad KPI) to add value to the company in a way that's not fully specified by their manager." They very existence of employment as a phenomena (rather than contracting, as it originally happened (IIRC a "factor" was a subcontractor who made goods at home, before it became better to employ them in a "factory" where they didn't need to be micromanaged by KPIs) is because employees are better (in a lot of ways) than management by "things that bring results".
- 3np 5y ago
  You seem to make the assumption that employee productivity must be reducible to and quantifiable as one-dimensional measurable metrics. I’m not saying it’s generally wrong to do so but just because it’s tricky for certain positions doesn’t make it a good idea to force it.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  >> "Butts on seats" means "employees who are present, and hopefully intrinsically motivated (rather than driven by a bad KPI) to add value to the company in a way that's not fully specified by their manager." Does the company gain value in employees being present? Sure, if the employee is a security guard. Not so much if it's a dev. "Hopefully (something else happens)" feels like you're saying "we need a KPI, this is -a- KPI, ergo...". Hoping an easily measured KPI correlates with what you actually care about feels like a -really- bad choice of metric. I'll also mention, pre-COVID, I've worked at places where attendance wasn't tracked; we had high performers we kept, and low performers we let go. I've never worked at a place that actually checked or cared about attendance, so I can't speak to that, but I can say highly effective workplaces didn't need it. How did we determine low performers? Well, the tasks they were given didn't get done, nor did they raise up the fact they were stuck. When asked they got defensive. When it eventually was handed to someone else it was done quickly. When they were asked to work with someone else on something, the other person ended up doing all the work. Etc. None of those are "hard KPIs". They're all data points that indicate "this person is not actually moving the work forward".
js8 5y ago
> This sort of thing costs the company money You underestimate how much are companies willing to sacrifice efficiency (total amount produced) for profit (extraction of value from labor to capitalist). There was this book (I don't remember the name) that claimed that UAW unions wanted more worker autonomy to compete with Japanese, and it was more actually more efficient system, but the management killed it because it threatened their position.

tehjoker 5y ago

This is a "just so" story.

lostcolony 5y ago
So is your parent post on how monitoring will take over if devs don't unionize.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  Perhaps, but do you really think developers are different from every other kind of employee? While we are well paid, the overarching story has been to systematize the work and increase the number of workers in an effort to drive down costs and increase management control. I think it's naïve to think this trend will lead to companies making wise decisions that cede additional control to workers. After all, this isn't speculation, we're discussing an article where 1/3 of workers are already subject to it! The main thing that has made our profession different is that the work is intellectually difficult and requires a lot of training. If you think similar knowledge work jobs aren't subject to such pressures, I know a doctor that is freaking out about how they are training nurse practitioners in online schools to take away hospitalist jobs.
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    No, but I think everyone being forced to work remotely due to a worldwide pandemic -is- unique. The switch was not a carefully considered bought into thing, and companies are reacting to it with what they think they need, not what they actually find they need. You call out 1/3 of workers are already subject to it; I will call out that despite almost -every- company going from "I can see who is in the office, at their computer, and I can walk by and get an idea if they're just doomscrolling Facebook, or at least staring at an IDE" to "now I can't tell at all what they're doing", a full 2/3rds of companies, in the UK (a country that already has a culture of passive surveillance, with cameras on most urban street corners and the like) -haven't- instituted such measures. As time goes on, will that 2/3rds of companies also buy in? Maybe, if they find they can't actually determine who is and isn't producing. But that has always been a challenge with knowledge workers, and the move to remote hasn't actually changed that calculus at all. What -is- certain is that increased monitoring, especially in countries that historically have objected to it (such as the US, which is also a leader in the industry when it comes to establishing trends), has a cost, both monetarily and in morale. If companies don't see a return on investment, the push for it will likely subside, and it becomes something to cut for the sake of budgets, if not also competitiveness in attracting talent. I will also point out, pre-COVID, most companies didn't actually track time spent in office for knowledge workers. While blue collar employees would clock in and out to ensure they were putting in the hours, and service industry employees would, necessarily, have specific hours they worked, knowledge workers such as devs (a very different category of beast than doctor or nurse, who though knowledgeable and highly trained, are not actually knowledge workers. A nurse is not nursing if they're staring into space thinking about their patient. They are more like service industry in that regard, working well defined shifts that require manpower. Same doctors; there are appointments and scheduled events they have to attend and do. You can't replace a surgery, unlike many meetings, with an email) generally have had no such measures, despite it being no more difficult to institute them. Why? Because companies realized that attendance is not a proxy for performance. The fact a bunch of bad 'leaders', faced with the most singular workplace disruption of our lifetime (hopefully), reacted poorly in trying to pretend it is, doesn't tell us anything about long term trends.

wisty 5y ago

The alternative to "butts in seats" is some kind of hard KPI. Uber doesn't need to pay for "butts in seats" because it can manage workers through discrete and easily monitored performance indicators. For any job where performance is hard to measure, either a company needs to basically manage contracts (why not just go to Fiverr), or manage by a bad KPI (lines of code? feature points?) or pay for "butts on seats". "Butts on seats" means "employees who are present, and hopefully intrinsically motivated (rather than driven by a bad KPI) to add value to the company in a way that's not fully specified by their manager." They very existence of employment as a phenomena (rather than contracting, as it originally happened (IIRC a "factor" was a subcontractor who made goods at home, before it became better to employ them in a "factory" where they didn't need to be micromanaged by KPIs) is because employees are better (in a lot of ways) than management by "things that bring results".

3np 5y ago
You seem to make the assumption that employee productivity must be reducible to and quantifiable as one-dimensional measurable metrics. I’m not saying it’s generally wrong to do so but just because it’s tricky for certain positions doesn’t make it a good idea to force it.
lostcolony 5y ago
>> "Butts on seats" means "employees who are present, and hopefully intrinsically motivated (rather than driven by a bad KPI) to add value to the company in a way that's not fully specified by their manager." Does the company gain value in employees being present? Sure, if the employee is a security guard. Not so much if it's a dev. "Hopefully (something else happens)" feels like you're saying "we need a KPI, this is -a- KPI, ergo...". Hoping an easily measured KPI correlates with what you actually care about feels like a -really- bad choice of metric. I'll also mention, pre-COVID, I've worked at places where attendance wasn't tracked; we had high performers we kept, and low performers we let go. I've never worked at a place that actually checked or cared about attendance, so I can't speak to that, but I can say highly effective workplaces didn't need it. How did we determine low performers? Well, the tasks they were given didn't get done, nor did they raise up the fact they were stuck. When asked they got defensive. When it eventually was handed to someone else it was done quickly. When they were asked to work with someone else on something, the other person ended up doing all the work. Etc. None of those are "hard KPIs". They're all data points that indicate "this person is not actually moving the work forward".

js8 5y ago

> This sort of thing costs the company money You underestimate how much are companies willing to sacrifice efficiency (total amount produced) for profit (extraction of value from labor to capitalist). There was this book (I don't remember the name) that claimed that UAW unions wanted more worker autonomy to compete with Japanese, and it was more actually more efficient system, but the management killed it because it threatened their position.