How Employers Track Their Workers

so yeah, if a company considers surveillance of employees' performance to be documentation of their work for the company then all employees will do is just be surveilled.

This comment gave me a thought: maybe the reason that employees rebel against these systems has less to do with the implied lack of trust, and more to do with the loss of autonomy?

If the boss isn't around to watch you all the time, you get judged by your results at the end of the day. If you're being watched all the time, you get judged by how closely you adhere to every asinine rule that management makes up.

Sadly, I think this almost always should be the case. That is, unless the employer actually is benevolent and puts effort into nurturing the futures of its employees. But how often do we see that?

People should basically work no more than 4 hours a day, and the remaining 4 hours should either be spent developing skills or running a side-hustle on a personal laptop. Better that than bullshitting, which is what the vast majority of people do after they're burned out working 3 hours.

as someone who works a blue collar job in an auto repair shop, these articles always make me pause for a moment and ask if i really want to keep learning python in the hopes of pursuing an office job. The entire environment just sounds like high school all over again. Why does anyone in an office put up with it?? is this somehow different than time keeping? do you have a punch card?

If you asked my boss where i was, shed probably just point at the garage and wave at the 'authorized personnel only' sign. She has no reason to care what size wrench im holding or why im beating the living shit out of a siezed idler pitman assembly. I once drove a car with no doors and a missing windshield out of the lot and down the street, and the only thing she wanted from me was to know if id run to leroys donut and pick up a frozen coffee.

Why is this different in an office? are office jobs just not trustworthy?

When our company first began implementing employee tracking the goal was to help our staff understand their own performance, co-educate and to attempt to support a culture of experimenting with every aspect of our work.

Our initial systems ended up being decent at keeping people "moving fast" but in our first few feedback sessions we found it stressed people out, encouraged competition instead of co-education and locked people into workflows they "knew worked" rather than fostering experimentation.

We quickly killed all but the most basic performance tracking aspects of the project and we found better ways to achieve our goals.

We now have a sort of "opt-in" tracking for staff who are interested in testing the strengths and weaknesses of a novel approach, for example. This puts the data in their hands as a tool to convince us of the validity of their approach and the empowerment is not trivial.

It's far more friendly and humane but it's also something that benefits everyone at the company.