9 ms·

Woman ordered to repay $2k after her employer used software to track her time

139 points by gnicholas 4y ago

tsuujin 4y ago
For context: I am a software engineering manager. If my employees are spending a lot of their time goofing off, that’s an indication that I’m doing a poor job keeping them motivated and is an opportunity to reevaluate what we’re doing and how. The idea of weaponizing “time theft” as a first recourse is just sickening to me. Your employees are not slaves nor drones, they are human beings and you have an obligation to treat them as such.
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- harvey9 4y ago
  This headline needs more context: woman was an accountant who put in billable hours that the court decided were not legitimate.
  - izzydata 4y ago
    That does seem like an important piece of information. I would be pretty upset if I hired a lawyer and they billed me for 100 fake hours.
    - nickff 4y ago
      It’s billing fraud, and a critical part of the film version of “The Firm”.
    - n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
      Never hire a lawyer, then.
      - mindslight 4y ago
        I hired an attorney once. I reviewed the invoices, the hours looked reasonable. Cue 4 months later with him saying he had forgotten to generate an invoice from a second record in his billing system - it had around 70% of additional hours. Between this and that he had been apparently ignoring one of my main concerns the whole time, only to wring his hands of responsibility when it ran aground, that relationship went south real fast.
    - krapht 4y ago
      Law firms know this, and get around it by delegating everything they possibly can to paralegals and junior staff while representing much more hands-on involvement by senior, experienced staff. Sorta like software outsourcing, actually.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Was she billing clients hourly or at one of those places that requires everybody to track their time down to some very small unit?
    - olliej 4y ago
      She was an accountant. I am not sure whether she was hourly or not, the issue is that accounting firms often bill clients by the hour, so internally they need correct records of the time employees are spending on jobs. So even if she were not being paid hourly (though the court ordered repayment implies she was?), the company would have required accurate recording for billing clients. The company also didn't just arbitrarily install the monitoring software. She was already underperforming, and on some PIP-equivalent setup when they got her consent to add monitoring software - I would guess that they were already thinking she was falsifying her time sheets at this point.
  - Swenrekcah 4y ago
    Also it seems it may be (although not clear from the information given) that originally she was simply fired for cause and not made to pay anything back. Then she sued for wrongful termination and got that result. Because the first thing I thought was: What kind of petty employer sues for $2000 instead of just letting them go.
    - jonas21 4y ago
      Yes, that's correct [1]. It's also worth noting that it was handled in small claims court where both parties represented themselves. [1] https://decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca/crt/crtd/en/item/523029/index.do https://decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca/crt/crtd/en/item/5230...
      - msrenee 4y ago
        Reading the details of the civil suit completely changes the tone of this story. So she also owed ~$3k on the unforgiven portion of an advance from the company for her CPA course, which would have been fully forgiven after 24 months. They withheld her final ~$1800 paycheck due to that. So she was actually ~$1100 ahead and then decided to sue. It also looks like the 50 hours she billed that couldn't be accounted for occurred over 6 weeks or so. I really wanted to be upset with the company here, but it sounds like she shot herself in the foot.
        tsuujin 4y ago
        > I really wanted to be upset with the company here, but it sounds like she shot herself in the foot. Both of these things can be valid at the same time. She was certainly technically in the wrong and made some questionable choices (with the huge caveat that it’s possible context we don’t have may change the story entirely), but I still think the company is overbearing to the point of absurdity. If she slacked off for 50 hours over 6 weeks, that’s like an hour and a half a day (which may not have been contiguous). I can’t think of a job I’ve ever had where I didn’t have an hour of down time a day on average. Even working crappy manual labor jobs I’m sure I dicked around with my coworkers for like an hour a day. She may be a bit on the high end there, but not so much that I wouldn’t have worked with her to correct it before firing her.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    That's a huge change in context. My initial assumption was that it was just a salaried employee caught not working
  - krisoft 4y ago
    > This headline needs more context Yeah. It is called an article. Typically provides the context for the title. The article is beautifully written and links to the actual small claims decision. Which is honestly so rare that I don’t even know when have I seen in non-specialist media. What the headline needs is people reading beyond it, and not reacting from first instinct. Grumble grumble :)
    - tsuujin 4y ago
      Genuine question: what makes you sure I didn’t read the article (because I did). Nothing in the article contradicts my post. The lady was almost certainly billing time she didn’t work, but I would still ask myself what I’ve done to enable that before I just fired her. I’m disinclined to assume the good faith and intention of a company using invasive software to monitor every minute of the day.
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      - krisoft 4y ago
        > Genuine question: what makes you sure I didn’t read the article (because I did). I was not sure that you didn’t read the article. I was just suspecting it. > Nothing in the article contradicts my post. Au contraire. You wrote: “The idea of weaponizing ‘time theft’ as a first recourse is just sickening to me.” That is not what happened in this case at all. The company was unhappy with her performance and they let her go. She sued them. Does that sound like the company weaponised anything? So why are you talking about “weaponising” and “first recourse”? How can it be “weaponised” when she was the one who was suing the company What is first recourse about this? In fact if you read the small claims court case (linked from the article), you can see that she started working in October 12, 2021. They first talked about performance problems with her manager in February the next year. That is when they installed the time tracking software! She was put on a PIP in March 16. And she was dismissed on March 29th. So clearly they were not weaponizing time theft, nor was it their first recourse. Maybe you were just commenting in general how sickening it is to weaponise time theft as a first recourse. In which case I would have expected some mention that you are just speaking in general, noting that in this specific case that did not happen. Since you didn’t say that I suspected that you either didn’t read the article carefull enough to understand the case, or didn’t read it at all.
  - tsuujin 4y ago
    Yes, but that is not in opposition to what I said above. Hours were certainly logged fraudulently, I’m not debating that. I’m saying that rather than firing her, I would have asked a lot of questions about the situation and if I pushed her to feel like she needed to. The software they were using sounds like what I have seen myself in the past, and it is a huge burden to try and justify every moment of every day the way they want you to. It’s basically a guarantee for burnout and lack of loyalty.
- ta8645 4y ago
  Isn't this just a more advanced form of punch clock? We can quibble about the specifics, but employers tracking their employees time is not a new practice. Not proud of this fact, but my father got caught punching in the time clock at the Heinz ketchup factory, and then going back home to sleep a few times every week. They were faster to catch him because of the clock.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Take that, John Kerry
  - bitL 4y ago
    Imagine punching clock every 10 minutes including a small report about what you did in those 10 minutes.
    - kelnos 4y ago
      Who is saying that anyone should be required to do that, though? Some professions require employees to track time in smaller increments than 10 minutes (IIRC most lawyers at firms in the US bill in six-minute increments), but that's for the purpose of billing that time to the correct client, not as a way of micromanaging the employee.
    - doubled112 4y ago
      At one job I had, certain departments billed by minute. Your ticket updates were expected to be to the exact minute, and there was a counter at the top to tell you how close you were to your 8 hours. Many starting out would end up needing 10-12h to make that 8.
      - bitL 4y ago
        How many people ended up in an asylum after working there?
  - tsuujin 4y ago
    I don’t think this is analogous to a punch clock. The clock just says when you’re in the building, where the kind of software they’re using here is more like just having someone stand at your desk and ask you what you’re doing every couple of minutes. There’s a mental cost to being tracked so rigidly, and the burnout it leads to may be -why- hours get logged fraudulently.
- psymon101 4y ago
  This! A pet-peeve of mine is when a vendor refers to someone as a "Resource". "One of our team members can help you with X" at least refers to a person than a person as an object or a thing... Employers must forget the 40 hour week as a measure of someone's productivity and instead set goals to be achieved. Manage/Treat people like people,be kind, but firm, if you can't trust someone in your team, you hired wrong or you have trust issues yourself. Its not rocket science, no matter how much BS the Simon Sinek`s of the world spout out.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
    > A pet-peeve of mine is when a vendor refers to someone as a "Resource". Someone should notify HR about this injustice.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      Do you contact HR when HR offends you?
      - m00x 4y ago
        I was SA'd by the VP of HR at a previous company. I asked around, and apparently there is no one that can report that to except for HR, so in several companies HR can do anything they want.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      I have an insurances company that addresses me (a customer) as ‘Mr 142,620’. I’m fine with calling their staff something similar.
      - Zancarius 4y ago
        I now have a vision of this conversation: "How are you today, Mr. 142,620?" "I'm fine, nameless, faceless script-reading CSR rep. How are you?"
    - psymon101 4y ago
- librish 4y ago
  Do you not expect a certain level of professionalism?
- hgsgm 4y ago
  The idea of posting outrage as a first recourse, without regard for the facts in the article, is sickening to me.
- watwut 4y ago
  I know a guy who was consistently slacking in all teams where he worked and I know of. In multiple companies he done nothing. I don't think all his managers and leads were bad.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
    If an employee is not contributing, yet is retained, that is bad management. If nothing else, it makes the productive workers annoyed to see someone coasting.
    - chrisfosterelli 4y ago
      But this employee wasn't retained?
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      > If an employee is not contributing, yet is retained, that is bad management. I think I agree but it isn’t that simple in many countries/legal jurisdictions. You can’t always just fire someone and performance managing an employee is utterly gruelling if the individual wants to make it so.
      - watwut 4y ago
        They could fire him legaly and some did. My point was that low productivity is fault of manager sometimes, but other times it is fully fault of the low producing person. Especially when you a single low producing person in otherwise normally effective team.
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- Eumenes 4y ago
  > If my employees are spending a lot of their time goofing off, that’s an indication that I’m doing a poor job keeping them motivated and is an opportunity to reevaluate what we’re doing and how. Sounds like a good soundbite from a management book or something. You don't think there's a possibility that someone, idk, doesn't want to work and prefers doing something else? I've been guilty of playing video games during the workday and its not due to lack of motivation or the manager doing something wrong ... I simply want to do something thats not work. Not the managers fault.
  - commandlinefan 4y ago
    > doesn't want to work and prefers doing something else It's possible, but that's really what the interview process is supposed to be for. In programming, this is kind of a necessity, because from the outside, deep work looks exactly like "loafing". You can't threaten, harass, cajole or otherwise motivate somebody to actually mentally focus on something the way you could, say, threaten to chop off their hands if they stop digging for diamonds. You might want to, but even you would eventually have to conclude that it didn't work. Ultimately, you have to trust the people responsible for doing the work.
    - Psychlist 4y ago
      > {programming} from the outside, deep work looks exactly like "loafing". Worse, from the outside causing major problems that will only show up later looks exactly like typing really intently. I remember one horrible problem I had dumped on me where I spent a week reading stuff online and doodling. Once I had a doodle I liked I threw together a multithreaded user authentication system in a week then spent a week making sure it actually worked. CIO was very impressed but afterwards admitted the first week drove him quietly insane. Luckily my team leader kept saying "that's what thinking looks like". Some managers completely miss point of thinking, and not just when other people are doing it /s
  - tsuujin 4y ago
    There is indeed a chance that someone doesn’t want to work and doesn’t have a place on the team. I have let people go for this, but only after extensively attempting to remediate. That’s why it’s an “indication” and not a “guarantee”.
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- srcreigh 4y ago
  I like this philosophy a lot! Would you mind reaching out to me? Email in the profile
- bitL 4y ago
  I worked as a VP in a company that tracked everyone in 10-minute intervals. Just having this tracking led to some managers inhumanely squeezing devs and almost all devs ended up burned out after a few years. They went to great lengths to reject any time slots where devs showed insufficient intensity on their keyboard/mouse or if they spotted anything non-work-related on dev desktop screenshots. However, when it came to manipulating metrics to look good (even down to a fraud where they lowered metrics of their devs they didn't like), it was all fine. This culture was enforced by the CEO/COO so there was not much I could do about it outside shielding my people and then leaving when my bosses went even more insane.
  - bagels 4y ago
    How did anyone stay there when that was first implemented?
    - bitL 4y ago
      Competitive salary and remote work.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    Wow, I've heard of ridiculous job performance metrics like "hours in chair" and "lines of code" but "sufficient keyboard/mouse intensity" is a new one to me! So I need to wiggle the mouse frantically and mash the keyboard all day and I'm "working"? Holy cow, that's wild!
    - bitL 4y ago
      I almost had a team fired for "too many lines of code" when I was there :D A billionaire CEO went berserk and it took considerable amount of effort to cool him down.
      - Zancarius 4y ago
        Now THAT'S bizarre. Was that because the team was making others look bad by outperforming them via the LOC metric? lol...
- m00x 4y ago
  You can only do so much as a manager/leader. Some people don't want to work and are incredibly lazy. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Also, it wasn't their first recourse. They fired her, but then she sued and they took their documentation to court and counter-sued. It was factually their last recourse.
  - bbarn 4y ago
    It must be a much more straight forward process in Canada for small business. In the US, I have worked for a company sued twice for people claiming unpaid wages. I personally knew both to be fraudulent, and retaliatory for letting the person go. The company I was with always just settled for the claimed amount if it was a couple thousand dollars because it was easier and cheaper than fighting it in court.
- kelnos 4y ago
  For US-style exempt/salaried employees, I agree with you. But when you're being paid to do a job where you're required to record the hours you work (which then go toward billing a client for time spent), then it's absolutely not ok to lie about the hours you work. The company in question is an accounting firm; imagine if you hired that firm to do your personal taxes, and the person who was doing them inflated the number of hours it took, and then the firm billed you more than it actually cost them to do the work. I know I'd be outraged if that happened. I'd sue them, never use them again, and tell everyone I know not to use them. Or a more apt example, considering your profession: imagine you're a software engineering manager at a software consulting firm. Your reports do work for a variety of your company's clients, and they have to record how much time they spend working on each client's work so that the client can be billed appropriately. Let's say that your reports are even paid a salary, and aren't paid hourly, even though they have to track their time. I personally don't think it's ok to bill a client for the time someone is doomscrolling Twitter or replying to personal email. But I agree with you that it should be fine that your people aren't generating billable hours every minute of every day. But they have to be honest about that on their timesheets.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Paying hourly for personal taxes or most things are easy to game. I prefer single price. I do my own taxes.. I could not imagine giving that responsibility away
  - tsuujin 4y ago
    Sure, they need to be honest about it and lying about it is wrong. I would definitely tell one of my direct reports not to do it again. If they persisted I’d put them on a PIP and if they failed to correct I’d fire them. I have let people go for this. The issue that I have here is that it sounds like the company is set up for failure. Rigidly monitoring your employees is a great way to burn them out and kills loyalty. If you want people to work hard, offering a little trust goes a long way. It’s always worth asking what you could have done better as a leader and starting with an assumption that they’re not just criminals.
- disambiguation 4y ago
  step 1 - be an engineering manager. step 2 - disavow perverse management methodologies, because "you're not like those other managers". step 3 - do it anyway because the higher-ups said so. step 4 - convince yourself you're not part of the problem ;)
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tedunangst 4y ago
> The dispute began last year when Besse claimed she was fired without "just cause." Not entirely clear, but it sounds like she sued first, and then they dug into the time accounting more precisely, and calculated the exact discrepancy. Would have been better to walk away.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  So to be clear: 1. She got fired by company, company did not sue her for stealing time. 2. She tried to sue the company that fired her. It failed. She was ordered to repay $2k in court fees or because of the stolen time? > Now, a civil tribunal, which is part of Canada's judicial system, has ruled that Besse owes her former company $2,756 after the software installed on her laptop revealed she misrepresented over 50 hours at work. Ah... did she bill by the hour or something? Not salary?
  - ygjb 4y ago
    It's a small accounting firm in a city with around 25,000 people. Given the time frame (March 2022) for the termination and dispute, it's likely the employee was a contract employee hired on the basis of billable hours to assist with extra workload during tax season.
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- msrenee 4y ago
  Have you seen a more detailed article on this? I feel like a lot of details are missing here. Most important to my mind is the time period this occured in. Are we talking 50 hours in 2 weeks or over the course of a year? One seems like a reasonable reason for dismissal and the other seems like nickel-and-diming a low-level employee.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    It's not "nickel and diming", it's "if you sue mean, you better not also be stealing from me"
__derek__ 4y ago
I assume ReachCPA was billing clients for the hours that the employee recorded. That could be justification for tracking/auditing actual time worked. From the ruling, though, the employee sued ReachCPA first, which triggered the counterclaim for repayment. Maybe they wouldn't have checked if not for the wrongful dismissal claim.
blitzar 4y ago
Did the firm repay the clients that were overbilled? 2k from her pocket probably billed out at 10x that so 20k in client billings.
- Justin_K 4y ago
  Where does it say she was 100% billable to clients?
  - blitzar 4y ago
    Well it didnt, I just assumed that an accountant working at an accounting firm probably would be working on client accounts. Not much else to do really.
acomjean 4y ago
Two people at my old company got fired for time theft. though in that case the story was it was one person using the others badge to make it look like they both went in for overtime when only one showed up. They'd alternate doing this. Timecards where serious business where I worked as they billed based on them. Though to be fair they never monitored us once we were at work. I don't think they even checked our badge in/out times vs our timecards, which we manually entered. I remember the "we have a gym, we want you healthy, but you use the gym on your own time" email.
KMnO4 4y ago
This seems fine to me. She was paid hourly, which is nonexempt work. If your boss found out you were getting someone to stamp your timesheet several hours before you actually came into work every day, that would be considered theft as well. If she were on salary, it would be a different story, because exempt workers get paid for the job getting done, not the hours it takes.
- EForEndeavour 4y ago
  > exempt workers get paid for the job getting done, not the hours it takes A recent full-time contract of mine stated (slight paraphrase) "as a fulltime employee, you are required to devote all working hours to your position. Your working hours will typically be 9:30am-5pm, and you will be required to be reachable and ready to work during this time."
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    Yeah "exempt" doesn't mean "choose your own hours", it means you get paid enough that you don't get to claim overtime.
- ape4 4y ago
  She's in BC, Canada. I believe "nonexempt" is a US term.
  - jdsully 4y ago
    There’s a similar concept in Canada
- mouse_ 4y ago
  Would you go so far as to extend that to mouse jigglers? Seems like a whole can of worms to me.
- kelnos 4y ago
  I have no problem with the general idea of needing to pay back your employer if you lie about the number of hours you've worked. But this pervasive electronic surveillance has to stop. The end result of all that is a lot worse than someone getting away with 50 hours of paid work they didn't actually do. Not sure how much "AI" this TimeCamp software uses, if any, but it's quite easy to imagine a near-future world where some software says you didn't do the work you said you did, and you have no recourse, and the method the software uses to determine this is proprietary and secret, and no one really can explain how or why its AI draws the conclusions it makes anyway.
userbinator 4y ago
and time spent on her work laptop for personal use — which, both parties agree, her employer allowed during staff's off-hours. A lot of companies "allow" this, but IMHO it's playing with fire. I strongly recommend that people don't use company-owned equipment for personal activities, and vice-versa.
- ryanmcbride 4y ago
  Yup I refuse to even log into personal accounts on my work computer. I've never had any issues with companies prying into my life that I'm aware of but I don't even want them to have the avenue. I even keep my work laptop on a separate vlan because I'm paranoid, and my network setup made it trivial.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    Never cross the streams when it comes to personal and work devices. Don't log into personal accounts from work computer/phone, and vice versa: Don't log into work from your personal devices. Keep a strong wall between them. Wasn't there an article a while back where someone was complaining that her employer demanded to examine the contents of her work phone but she didn't want to because she had nudes on it? Like what on earth would possess you to put personal information on a device that is owned and remotely managed by your work, let alone nudes?
    - wruza 4y ago
      I guess it had a better camera.
    - userbinator 4y ago
      Wasn't there an article a while back where someone was complaining that her employer demanded to examine the contents of her work phone but she didn't want to because she had nudes on it? I believe that was this, unless there was more than once documented instance of such a thing happening (which is definitely plausible): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28241753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28241753
ape4 4y ago
She might have a hard time finding a new job
hparadiz 4y ago
Not all work is done on a computer even when you're an IC. Time tracking programs like this misrepresent the actual time spent in favor of the employer. It is wage theft.
- kelnos 4y ago
  I mean, a) she admitted she lied, b) the software tracked printed documents, and the (relatively small) amount she printed could not have accounted for the extra time. In this particular line of work, pretty much all billable hours should have been on the computer, or should have been accounted for in printed documents. I am right with you on the general theme of employer abuses and wage theft, but it doesn't seem like this was one of those cases. I'm more concerned about the normalization of electronic surveillance.
- olliej 4y ago
  It can be, except here she literally admitted she was lying. It's also important to realize the monitoring software was installed after she was already underperforming for an extended period. It was also not the sole evidence. If you actually read the case: * She admitted to falsifying her time sheet * She was already on some kind of PIP * The monitoring software recorded that she was not doing work on her machine, but also recorded whether she printed out documents, as she claimed, but she had not. * The file access logs also showed she was not opening them. * And again: she admitted she falsified her reporting Finally: The company did not sue her for this time. After she was fired for the above she sued them claiming they weren't justified in firing her after she falsified her time sheets and demonstrably lied about the work she did. In response the court ordered her to pay back at least some costs.
ilyt 4y ago
I wonder how software like that registers say working in app with video playing on second screen. There are cases for both "they are clearly slacking and watching some show instead of working" and "it just acts like background noise, no different from running a TV in same room"
ibejoeb 4y ago
"TimeCamp is able to record when and how long employees access work-related documents, and to differentiate – based on electronic pathway – from when they're on non-work sites" Electronic pathway you say? Well, guess you've gotta be an industry person to know what the hell that is...
- londons_explore 4y ago
  I assume that is legal jargon for URL.
emsy 4y ago
Sounds like every white collar job ever, she was just unlucky she got caught.
- satellites 4y ago
  She admitted on video that she misrepresented work hours “by mistake.” That’s how they got her.
vouaobrasil 4y ago
I think this is indicative of a larger systemic problem. Outside a few jobs, most jobs are fairly meaningless in that it's hard to see the value in your work in the company. So a lot of jobs are starting to turn into a perverse form of universal basic income. I'm not trying to validate it. I'm just saying that we are in a transitory stage towards UBI and that is supported by the surge of "quiet quitting" that we are seeing.
tobyjsullivan 4y ago
(Deleted) After reading the decision on detail, I don’t think my comment was helpful.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  I live in US and I can absolutely see the same happen here. That said, cursory view of the story suggests that the company went after her in this manner as retaliatory measure. I have to admit.. up until now, I let my company run on my general wifi at home, but now.. I think I will create a separate tunnel just for them. The less they know the better.
  - krisoft 4y ago
    > That said, cursory view of the story suggests that the company went after her in this manner as retaliatory measure. Read it again. She went after the company.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      I did. I believe word 'retaliatory' captures this. I am not arguing she is right. Frankly, case suggests she is in the wrong for several different reasons. But then, she is accountant, does management really think she is making widgets on an per hour basis? I think her biggest mistake is using work PC for personal use. That is just not a good idea. edit: << She went after the company. She argued she was not fired for cause. That is hardly going after the company. << Besse argued that she found the program difficult to use and she could not get the software to differentiate between work and time spent on her work laptop for personal use — which, both parties agree, her employer allowed during staff's off-hours. << When Canadian accountant Karlee Besse was fired for being unproductive at her job, she found herself up against not only her former employer, but its time-tracking software, too. << Besse worked remotely for Reach CPA, an accounting firm based in British Columbia, Canada. The dispute began last year when Besse claimed she was fired without "just cause." << Her employer argued that Besse was rightfully let go because she engaged in time theft. Reach CPA said it gathered evidence using TimeCamp << Besse also argued that she spent a significant amount of time working with paper documents, but didn't tell her company because "they wouldn't want to hear that."
dh2022 4y ago
At $50 / hour that accountant should know better than stream Disney+ on company's laptop.
devmor 4y ago
Now audit the company and see how many hours their employees have worked before/after clocking in. Let's add in exemption violations too. Wage theft is pervasive, and I'd bet they'd be paying out a lot more than they got back here.
black_13 4y ago
[dead]

139 points by gnicholas 4y ago

For context: I am a software engineering manager. If my employees are spending a lot of their time goofing off, that’s an indication that I’m doing a poor job keeping them motivated and is an opportunity to reevaluate what we’re doing and how. The idea of weaponizing “time theft” as a first recourse is just sickening to me. Your employees are not slaves nor drones, they are human beings and you have an obligation to treat them as such.

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harvey9 4y ago
This headline needs more context: woman was an accountant who put in billable hours that the court decided were not legitimate.
- izzydata 4y ago
  That does seem like an important piece of information. I would be pretty upset if I hired a lawyer and they billed me for 100 fake hours.
  - nickff 4y ago
    It’s billing fraud, and a critical part of the film version of “The Firm”.
  - n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
    Never hire a lawyer, then.
    - mindslight 4y ago
      I hired an attorney once. I reviewed the invoices, the hours looked reasonable. Cue 4 months later with him saying he had forgotten to generate an invoice from a second record in his billing system - it had around 70% of additional hours. Between this and that he had been apparently ignoring one of my main concerns the whole time, only to wring his hands of responsibility when it ran aground, that relationship went south real fast.
  - krapht 4y ago
    Law firms know this, and get around it by delegating everything they possibly can to paralegals and junior staff while representing much more hands-on involvement by senior, experienced staff. Sorta like software outsourcing, actually.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Was she billing clients hourly or at one of those places that requires everybody to track their time down to some very small unit?
  - olliej 4y ago
    She was an accountant. I am not sure whether she was hourly or not, the issue is that accounting firms often bill clients by the hour, so internally they need correct records of the time employees are spending on jobs. So even if she were not being paid hourly (though the court ordered repayment implies she was?), the company would have required accurate recording for billing clients. The company also didn't just arbitrarily install the monitoring software. She was already underperforming, and on some PIP-equivalent setup when they got her consent to add monitoring software - I would guess that they were already thinking she was falsifying her time sheets at this point.
- Swenrekcah 4y ago
  Also it seems it may be (although not clear from the information given) that originally she was simply fired for cause and not made to pay anything back. Then she sued for wrongful termination and got that result. Because the first thing I thought was: What kind of petty employer sues for $2000 instead of just letting them go.
  - jonas21 4y ago
    Yes, that's correct [1]. It's also worth noting that it was handled in small claims court where both parties represented themselves. [1] https://decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca/crt/crtd/en/item/523029/index.do https://decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca/crt/crtd/en/item/5230...
    - msrenee 4y ago
      Reading the details of the civil suit completely changes the tone of this story. So she also owed ~$3k on the unforgiven portion of an advance from the company for her CPA course, which would have been fully forgiven after 24 months. They withheld her final ~$1800 paycheck due to that. So she was actually ~$1100 ahead and then decided to sue. It also looks like the 50 hours she billed that couldn't be accounted for occurred over 6 weeks or so. I really wanted to be upset with the company here, but it sounds like she shot herself in the foot.
      - tsuujin 4y ago
        > I really wanted to be upset with the company here, but it sounds like she shot herself in the foot. Both of these things can be valid at the same time. She was certainly technically in the wrong and made some questionable choices (with the huge caveat that it’s possible context we don’t have may change the story entirely), but I still think the company is overbearing to the point of absurdity. If she slacked off for 50 hours over 6 weeks, that’s like an hour and a half a day (which may not have been contiguous). I can’t think of a job I’ve ever had where I didn’t have an hour of down time a day on average. Even working crappy manual labor jobs I’m sure I dicked around with my coworkers for like an hour a day. She may be a bit on the high end there, but not so much that I wouldn’t have worked with her to correct it before firing her.
- themitigating 4y ago
  That's a huge change in context. My initial assumption was that it was just a salaried employee caught not working
- krisoft 4y ago
  > This headline needs more context Yeah. It is called an article. Typically provides the context for the title. The article is beautifully written and links to the actual small claims decision. Which is honestly so rare that I don’t even know when have I seen in non-specialist media. What the headline needs is people reading beyond it, and not reacting from first instinct. Grumble grumble :)
  - tsuujin 4y ago
    Genuine question: what makes you sure I didn’t read the article (because I did). Nothing in the article contradicts my post. The lady was almost certainly billing time she didn’t work, but I would still ask myself what I’ve done to enable that before I just fired her. I’m disinclined to assume the good faith and intention of a company using invasive software to monitor every minute of the day.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - krisoft 4y ago
      > Genuine question: what makes you sure I didn’t read the article (because I did). I was not sure that you didn’t read the article. I was just suspecting it. > Nothing in the article contradicts my post. Au contraire. You wrote: “The idea of weaponizing ‘time theft’ as a first recourse is just sickening to me.” That is not what happened in this case at all. The company was unhappy with her performance and they let her go. She sued them. Does that sound like the company weaponised anything? So why are you talking about “weaponising” and “first recourse”? How can it be “weaponised” when she was the one who was suing the company What is first recourse about this? In fact if you read the small claims court case (linked from the article), you can see that she started working in October 12, 2021. They first talked about performance problems with her manager in February the next year. That is when they installed the time tracking software! She was put on a PIP in March 16. And she was dismissed on March 29th. So clearly they were not weaponizing time theft, nor was it their first recourse. Maybe you were just commenting in general how sickening it is to weaponise time theft as a first recourse. In which case I would have expected some mention that you are just speaking in general, noting that in this specific case that did not happen. Since you didn’t say that I suspected that you either didn’t read the article carefull enough to understand the case, or didn’t read it at all.
- tsuujin 4y ago
  Yes, but that is not in opposition to what I said above. Hours were certainly logged fraudulently, I’m not debating that. I’m saying that rather than firing her, I would have asked a lot of questions about the situation and if I pushed her to feel like she needed to. The software they were using sounds like what I have seen myself in the past, and it is a huge burden to try and justify every moment of every day the way they want you to. It’s basically a guarantee for burnout and lack of loyalty.
ta8645 4y ago
Isn't this just a more advanced form of punch clock? We can quibble about the specifics, but employers tracking their employees time is not a new practice. Not proud of this fact, but my father got caught punching in the time clock at the Heinz ketchup factory, and then going back home to sleep a few times every week. They were faster to catch him because of the clock.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Take that, John Kerry
- bitL 4y ago
  Imagine punching clock every 10 minutes including a small report about what you did in those 10 minutes.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    Who is saying that anyone should be required to do that, though? Some professions require employees to track time in smaller increments than 10 minutes (IIRC most lawyers at firms in the US bill in six-minute increments), but that's for the purpose of billing that time to the correct client, not as a way of micromanaging the employee.
  - doubled112 4y ago
    At one job I had, certain departments billed by minute. Your ticket updates were expected to be to the exact minute, and there was a counter at the top to tell you how close you were to your 8 hours. Many starting out would end up needing 10-12h to make that 8.
    - bitL 4y ago
      How many people ended up in an asylum after working there?
- tsuujin 4y ago
  I don’t think this is analogous to a punch clock. The clock just says when you’re in the building, where the kind of software they’re using here is more like just having someone stand at your desk and ask you what you’re doing every couple of minutes. There’s a mental cost to being tracked so rigidly, and the burnout it leads to may be -why- hours get logged fraudulently.
psymon101 4y ago
This! A pet-peeve of mine is when a vendor refers to someone as a "Resource". "One of our team members can help you with X" at least refers to a person than a person as an object or a thing... Employers must forget the 40 hour week as a measure of someone's productivity and instead set goals to be achieved. Manage/Treat people like people,be kind, but firm, if you can't trust someone in your team, you hired wrong or you have trust issues yourself. Its not rocket science, no matter how much BS the Simon Sinek`s of the world spout out.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  > A pet-peeve of mine is when a vendor refers to someone as a "Resource". Someone should notify HR about this injustice.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Do you contact HR when HR offends you?
    - m00x 4y ago
      I was SA'd by the VP of HR at a previous company. I asked around, and apparently there is no one that can report that to except for HR, so in several companies HR can do anything they want.
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    I have an insurances company that addresses me (a customer) as ‘Mr 142,620’. I’m fine with calling their staff something similar.
    - Zancarius 4y ago
      I now have a vision of this conversation: "How are you today, Mr. 142,620?" "I'm fine, nameless, faceless script-reading CSR rep. How are you?"
  - psymon101 4y ago
librish 4y ago
Do you not expect a certain level of professionalism?
hgsgm 4y ago
The idea of posting outrage as a first recourse, without regard for the facts in the article, is sickening to me.
watwut 4y ago
I know a guy who was consistently slacking in all teams where he worked and I know of. In multiple companies he done nothing. I don't think all his managers and leads were bad.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  If an employee is not contributing, yet is retained, that is bad management. If nothing else, it makes the productive workers annoyed to see someone coasting.
  - chrisfosterelli 4y ago
    But this employee wasn't retained?
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    > If an employee is not contributing, yet is retained, that is bad management. I think I agree but it isn’t that simple in many countries/legal jurisdictions. You can’t always just fire someone and performance managing an employee is utterly gruelling if the individual wants to make it so.
    - watwut 4y ago
      They could fire him legaly and some did. My point was that low productivity is fault of manager sometimes, but other times it is fully fault of the low producing person. Especially when you a single low producing person in otherwise normally effective team.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Eumenes 4y ago
> If my employees are spending a lot of their time goofing off, that’s an indication that I’m doing a poor job keeping them motivated and is an opportunity to reevaluate what we’re doing and how. Sounds like a good soundbite from a management book or something. You don't think there's a possibility that someone, idk, doesn't want to work and prefers doing something else? I've been guilty of playing video games during the workday and its not due to lack of motivation or the manager doing something wrong ... I simply want to do something thats not work. Not the managers fault.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > doesn't want to work and prefers doing something else It's possible, but that's really what the interview process is supposed to be for. In programming, this is kind of a necessity, because from the outside, deep work looks exactly like "loafing". You can't threaten, harass, cajole or otherwise motivate somebody to actually mentally focus on something the way you could, say, threaten to chop off their hands if they stop digging for diamonds. You might want to, but even you would eventually have to conclude that it didn't work. Ultimately, you have to trust the people responsible for doing the work.
  - Psychlist 4y ago
    > {programming} from the outside, deep work looks exactly like "loafing". Worse, from the outside causing major problems that will only show up later looks exactly like typing really intently. I remember one horrible problem I had dumped on me where I spent a week reading stuff online and doodling. Once I had a doodle I liked I threw together a multithreaded user authentication system in a week then spent a week making sure it actually worked. CIO was very impressed but afterwards admitted the first week drove him quietly insane. Luckily my team leader kept saying "that's what thinking looks like". Some managers completely miss point of thinking, and not just when other people are doing it /s
- tsuujin 4y ago
  There is indeed a chance that someone doesn’t want to work and doesn’t have a place on the team. I have let people go for this, but only after extensively attempting to remediate. That’s why it’s an “indication” and not a “guarantee”.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
srcreigh 4y ago
I like this philosophy a lot! Would you mind reaching out to me? Email in the profile
bitL 4y ago
I worked as a VP in a company that tracked everyone in 10-minute intervals. Just having this tracking led to some managers inhumanely squeezing devs and almost all devs ended up burned out after a few years. They went to great lengths to reject any time slots where devs showed insufficient intensity on their keyboard/mouse or if they spotted anything non-work-related on dev desktop screenshots. However, when it came to manipulating metrics to look good (even down to a fraud where they lowered metrics of their devs they didn't like), it was all fine. This culture was enforced by the CEO/COO so there was not much I could do about it outside shielding my people and then leaving when my bosses went even more insane.
- bagels 4y ago
  How did anyone stay there when that was first implemented?
  - bitL 4y ago
    Competitive salary and remote work.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  Wow, I've heard of ridiculous job performance metrics like "hours in chair" and "lines of code" but "sufficient keyboard/mouse intensity" is a new one to me! So I need to wiggle the mouse frantically and mash the keyboard all day and I'm "working"? Holy cow, that's wild!
  - bitL 4y ago
    I almost had a team fired for "too many lines of code" when I was there :D A billionaire CEO went berserk and it took considerable amount of effort to cool him down.
    - Zancarius 4y ago
      Now THAT'S bizarre. Was that because the team was making others look bad by outperforming them via the LOC metric? lol...
m00x 4y ago
You can only do so much as a manager/leader. Some people don't want to work and are incredibly lazy. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Also, it wasn't their first recourse. They fired her, but then she sued and they took their documentation to court and counter-sued. It was factually their last recourse.
- bbarn 4y ago
  It must be a much more straight forward process in Canada for small business. In the US, I have worked for a company sued twice for people claiming unpaid wages. I personally knew both to be fraudulent, and retaliatory for letting the person go. The company I was with always just settled for the claimed amount if it was a couple thousand dollars because it was easier and cheaper than fighting it in court.
kelnos 4y ago
For US-style exempt/salaried employees, I agree with you. But when you're being paid to do a job where you're required to record the hours you work (which then go toward billing a client for time spent), then it's absolutely not ok to lie about the hours you work. The company in question is an accounting firm; imagine if you hired that firm to do your personal taxes, and the person who was doing them inflated the number of hours it took, and then the firm billed you more than it actually cost them to do the work. I know I'd be outraged if that happened. I'd sue them, never use them again, and tell everyone I know not to use them. Or a more apt example, considering your profession: imagine you're a software engineering manager at a software consulting firm. Your reports do work for a variety of your company's clients, and they have to record how much time they spend working on each client's work so that the client can be billed appropriately. Let's say that your reports are even paid a salary, and aren't paid hourly, even though they have to track their time. I personally don't think it's ok to bill a client for the time someone is doomscrolling Twitter or replying to personal email. But I agree with you that it should be fine that your people aren't generating billable hours every minute of every day. But they have to be honest about that on their timesheets.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Paying hourly for personal taxes or most things are easy to game. I prefer single price. I do my own taxes.. I could not imagine giving that responsibility away
- tsuujin 4y ago
  Sure, they need to be honest about it and lying about it is wrong. I would definitely tell one of my direct reports not to do it again. If they persisted I’d put them on a PIP and if they failed to correct I’d fire them. I have let people go for this. The issue that I have here is that it sounds like the company is set up for failure. Rigidly monitoring your employees is a great way to burn them out and kills loyalty. If you want people to work hard, offering a little trust goes a long way. It’s always worth asking what you could have done better as a leader and starting with an assumption that they’re not just criminals.
disambiguation 4y ago
step 1 - be an engineering manager. step 2 - disavow perverse management methodologies, because "you're not like those other managers". step 3 - do it anyway because the higher-ups said so. step 4 - convince yourself you're not part of the problem ;)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tedunangst 4y ago

> The dispute began last year when Besse claimed she was fired without "just cause." Not entirely clear, but it sounds like she sued first, and then they dug into the time accounting more precisely, and calculated the exact discrepancy. Would have been better to walk away.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
So to be clear: 1. She got fired by company, company did not sue her for stealing time. 2. She tried to sue the company that fired her. It failed. She was ordered to repay $2k in court fees or because of the stolen time? > Now, a civil tribunal, which is part of Canada's judicial system, has ruled that Besse owes her former company $2,756 after the software installed on her laptop revealed she misrepresented over 50 hours at work. Ah... did she bill by the hour or something? Not salary?
- ygjb 4y ago
  It's a small accounting firm in a city with around 25,000 people. Given the time frame (March 2022) for the termination and dispute, it's likely the employee was a contract employee hired on the basis of billable hours to assist with extra workload during tax season.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
msrenee 4y ago
Have you seen a more detailed article on this? I feel like a lot of details are missing here. Most important to my mind is the time period this occured in. Are we talking 50 hours in 2 weeks or over the course of a year? One seems like a reasonable reason for dismissal and the other seems like nickel-and-diming a low-level employee.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  It's not "nickel and diming", it's "if you sue mean, you better not also be stealing from me"

__derek__ 4y ago

I assume ReachCPA was billing clients for the hours that the employee recorded. That could be justification for tracking/auditing actual time worked. From the ruling, though, the employee sued ReachCPA first, which triggered the counterclaim for repayment. Maybe they wouldn't have checked if not for the wrongful dismissal claim.

blitzar 4y ago

Did the firm repay the clients that were overbilled? 2k from her pocket probably billed out at 10x that so 20k in client billings.

Justin_K 4y ago
Where does it say she was 100% billable to clients?
- blitzar 4y ago
  Well it didnt, I just assumed that an accountant working at an accounting firm probably would be working on client accounts. Not much else to do really.

acomjean 4y ago

Two people at my old company got fired for time theft. though in that case the story was it was one person using the others badge to make it look like they both went in for overtime when only one showed up. They'd alternate doing this. Timecards where serious business where I worked as they billed based on them. Though to be fair they never monitored us once we were at work. I don't think they even checked our badge in/out times vs our timecards, which we manually entered. I remember the "we have a gym, we want you healthy, but you use the gym on your own time" email.

KMnO4 4y ago

This seems fine to me. She was paid hourly, which is nonexempt work. If your boss found out you were getting someone to stamp your timesheet several hours before you actually came into work every day, that would be considered theft as well. If she were on salary, it would be a different story, because exempt workers get paid for the job getting done, not the hours it takes.

EForEndeavour 4y ago
> exempt workers get paid for the job getting done, not the hours it takes A recent full-time contract of mine stated (slight paraphrase) "as a fulltime employee, you are required to devote all working hours to your position. Your working hours will typically be 9:30am-5pm, and you will be required to be reachable and ready to work during this time."
- hgsgm 4y ago
  Yeah "exempt" doesn't mean "choose your own hours", it means you get paid enough that you don't get to claim overtime.
ape4 4y ago
She's in BC, Canada. I believe "nonexempt" is a US term.
- jdsully 4y ago
  There’s a similar concept in Canada
mouse_ 4y ago
Would you go so far as to extend that to mouse jigglers? Seems like a whole can of worms to me.
kelnos 4y ago
I have no problem with the general idea of needing to pay back your employer if you lie about the number of hours you've worked. But this pervasive electronic surveillance has to stop. The end result of all that is a lot worse than someone getting away with 50 hours of paid work they didn't actually do. Not sure how much "AI" this TimeCamp software uses, if any, but it's quite easy to imagine a near-future world where some software says you didn't do the work you said you did, and you have no recourse, and the method the software uses to determine this is proprietary and secret, and no one really can explain how or why its AI draws the conclusions it makes anyway.

userbinator 4y ago

and time spent on her work laptop for personal use — which, both parties agree, her employer allowed during staff's off-hours. A lot of companies "allow" this, but IMHO it's playing with fire. I strongly recommend that people don't use company-owned equipment for personal activities, and vice-versa.

ryanmcbride 4y ago
Yup I refuse to even log into personal accounts on my work computer. I've never had any issues with companies prying into my life that I'm aware of but I don't even want them to have the avenue. I even keep my work laptop on a separate vlan because I'm paranoid, and my network setup made it trivial.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  Never cross the streams when it comes to personal and work devices. Don't log into personal accounts from work computer/phone, and vice versa: Don't log into work from your personal devices. Keep a strong wall between them. Wasn't there an article a while back where someone was complaining that her employer demanded to examine the contents of her work phone but she didn't want to because she had nudes on it? Like what on earth would possess you to put personal information on a device that is owned and remotely managed by your work, let alone nudes?
  - wruza 4y ago
    I guess it had a better camera.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    Wasn't there an article a while back where someone was complaining that her employer demanded to examine the contents of her work phone but she didn't want to because she had nudes on it? I believe that was this, unless there was more than once documented instance of such a thing happening (which is definitely plausible): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28241753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28241753

ape4 4y ago

She might have a hard time finding a new job

hparadiz 4y ago

Not all work is done on a computer even when you're an IC. Time tracking programs like this misrepresent the actual time spent in favor of the employer. It is wage theft.

kelnos 4y ago
I mean, a) she admitted she lied, b) the software tracked printed documents, and the (relatively small) amount she printed could not have accounted for the extra time. In this particular line of work, pretty much all billable hours should have been on the computer, or should have been accounted for in printed documents. I am right with you on the general theme of employer abuses and wage theft, but it doesn't seem like this was one of those cases. I'm more concerned about the normalization of electronic surveillance.
olliej 4y ago
It can be, except here she literally admitted she was lying. It's also important to realize the monitoring software was installed after she was already underperforming for an extended period. It was also not the sole evidence. If you actually read the case: * She admitted to falsifying her time sheet * She was already on some kind of PIP * The monitoring software recorded that she was not doing work on her machine, but also recorded whether she printed out documents, as she claimed, but she had not. * The file access logs also showed she was not opening them. * And again: she admitted she falsified her reporting Finally: The company did not sue her for this time. After she was fired for the above she sued them claiming they weren't justified in firing her after she falsified her time sheets and demonstrably lied about the work she did. In response the court ordered her to pay back at least some costs.

ilyt 4y ago

I wonder how software like that registers say working in app with video playing on second screen. There are cases for both "they are clearly slacking and watching some show instead of working" and "it just acts like background noise, no different from running a TV in same room"

ibejoeb 4y ago

"TimeCamp is able to record when and how long employees access work-related documents, and to differentiate – based on electronic pathway – from when they're on non-work sites" Electronic pathway you say? Well, guess you've gotta be an industry person to know what the hell that is...

londons_explore 4y ago
I assume that is legal jargon for URL.

emsy 4y ago

Sounds like every white collar job ever, she was just unlucky she got caught.

satellites 4y ago
She admitted on video that she misrepresented work hours “by mistake.” That’s how they got her.

vouaobrasil 4y ago

I think this is indicative of a larger systemic problem. Outside a few jobs, most jobs are fairly meaningless in that it's hard to see the value in your work in the company. So a lot of jobs are starting to turn into a perverse form of universal basic income. I'm not trying to validate it. I'm just saying that we are in a transitory stage towards UBI and that is supported by the surge of "quiet quitting" that we are seeing.

tobyjsullivan 4y ago

(Deleted) After reading the decision on detail, I don’t think my comment was helpful.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
I live in US and I can absolutely see the same happen here. That said, cursory view of the story suggests that the company went after her in this manner as retaliatory measure. I have to admit.. up until now, I let my company run on my general wifi at home, but now.. I think I will create a separate tunnel just for them. The less they know the better.
- krisoft 4y ago
  > That said, cursory view of the story suggests that the company went after her in this manner as retaliatory measure. Read it again. She went after the company.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    I did. I believe word 'retaliatory' captures this. I am not arguing she is right. Frankly, case suggests she is in the wrong for several different reasons. But then, she is accountant, does management really think she is making widgets on an per hour basis? I think her biggest mistake is using work PC for personal use. That is just not a good idea. edit: << She went after the company. She argued she was not fired for cause. That is hardly going after the company. << Besse argued that she found the program difficult to use and she could not get the software to differentiate between work and time spent on her work laptop for personal use — which, both parties agree, her employer allowed during staff's off-hours. << When Canadian accountant Karlee Besse was fired for being unproductive at her job, she found herself up against not only her former employer, but its time-tracking software, too. << Besse worked remotely for Reach CPA, an accounting firm based in British Columbia, Canada. The dispute began last year when Besse claimed she was fired without "just cause." << Her employer argued that Besse was rightfully let go because she engaged in time theft. Reach CPA said it gathered evidence using TimeCamp << Besse also argued that she spent a significant amount of time working with paper documents, but didn't tell her company because "they wouldn't want to hear that."

dh2022 4y ago

At $50 / hour that accountant should know better than stream Disney+ on company's laptop.

devmor 4y ago

Now audit the company and see how many hours their employees have worked before/after clocking in. Let's add in exemption violations too. Wage theft is pervasive, and I'd bet they'd be paying out a lot more than they got back here.

black_13 4y ago

[dead]