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If your bottom line is actually affected by a change in employee performance that needs automated surveillance to be noticed, are you just not running a profita
by dmbche 1y ago
If your bottom line is actually affected by a change in employee performance that needs automated surveillance to be noticed, are you just not running a profitable buisness?
- dangus 1y agoAnd if you can’t find low performers, isn’t it your fault for being a bad manager and hiring bad middle managers?
- Aurornis 1y agoI think a lot of HN is more familiar with office tech jobs than the types of businesses this article is talking about. The companies they linked do things like allowing workers to clock-in remotely from their phones, and then the app uses GPS to record where you clocked in. > If your bottom line is actually affected by a change in employee performance that needs automated surveillance to be noticed, are you just not running a profitable buisness? This website is called "Rest Of World" because it focuses on countries outside of places like the US and Canada, where small businesses aren't operating with the fat profit margins of a SaaS company. Employee productivity and timeclock fraud can completely change the nature of a small business running on razor-thin profits in a developing country. It's a completely different ballgame than some software developers scrolling Reddit for a couple hours every day at a SaaS company. In the world of hourly workers where turnover is high, timeclock fraud will run rampant in a non-trivial portion of your workforce if people realize it's not being monitored closely. The subset of people abusing it also changes over time. Some employees start out operating by the book and then start pushing the limit to see how much they can get away with. The article doesn't really do the topic justice by blurring the lines between "app that lets workers clock in at remote jobsites" and "AI tool to surveil employees". I think a lot of comments are assuming it's all the latter.
- no_wizard 1y agoTo be completely honest, while the former makes some sense, the latter is where businesses want it to go, and that holds true in the US as much as it does in China or Indonesia. I think what everyone is talking about is supremely relevant, because often it starts with some arguably legitimate use case then over time morphs into the thing everyone didn't want.
- dmbche 1y agoI'm having a hard time understanding what kind of jobs you are speaking of that are both hourly, off site and bring in a low margin? Not a jab genuinely not clear to me! Edit0: after reviewing the article, it's very amusing to me that as an employee I had an app for my last desk job that demanded all those except possibly (not certain) for GPS, it might just have identified my location from the wifi connection I was using, as punching would only work on work wifi. And I work in Canada!
- standardUser 1y agoThe concept missing from this is output. All of this meta-data seems superfluous. If I completed my work at 4am in Brazil or at Noon in New Jersey, what does it matter to the company. The thing that does matter - the quality of the work - isn't being assessed and might even be masked by the meta-data.
- umeshunni 1y agoIf you're a taxi driver in Sao Paolo, it absolutely matters whether you stopped working at 12am or 4am and whether you are in New Jersey.