71–80 of 170 posts
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You believe this?—ask any tradesman, mechanic or PE—"Take care of your tools and they will take care of you" is gospel in those fields. The same, then, should apply to "living tools" if your analogy obtains.
You may care about an expensive tool as long as it works, but you'll throw it away as soon as it breaks. A tool has no rights, and you'll never care about it enjoying working for you. Yes, the analogy still work for me.
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It does happen in the US, and in banks, and not just low-level employees. Palantir sells the service. It has been used by JP Morgan for a few years: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel In LOTR the Palantir is used by Sauron to corrupt and subdue Saruman by displaying visions of terror. Coincidentally a Palantir employee in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica were instrumental in the Republ…
Yes, but IIRC, the project was cancelled or greatly scaled back after Senior Management discovered that Palantir was also reading their emails and just not the drones in Sector 7G.
Stuff like this is common in the US. And newspapers are still amazed at why the socialist candidate is leading in the polls for one of the presidential election nominations. Honestly, there is no fix for this sort of thing except through the political system. Corporations will keep pushing the boundaries on maximizing worker productivity because their CEOs get massive bonuses for squeezing 1% more work out of terrifi…
With the socialists, you can't leave.
> "Managers would never get away with breathing down employee's necks, personally monitoring their screens or logging toilet and water breaks," They wouldn't? Isn't that reality for a lot of workers?
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A 2 hours lunch break is the standard in France.
"You can't fire these people" is also the standard in France. Also standard: a stagnant economy (~0.25% GDP growth on 0.18% population growth) and sky-high youth unemployment (20-25%).
Also quality of life is perhaps more important than these numbers. People don't care about the GDP growth, don't want to have artifical employment with terrible and badly paid jobs (looking at you Germany), and prefer to eat good food for 2 hours.
At work, my staff (20ish developers) usually clock in/out sharp bcoz of attendance, but they take 2+ hours lunch break and ~1hr for prayer breaks (2x within work hour), which I don't mind. But what frustrates me is their work is slow and low quality (not everyone), and I do thought about "short term" tracking like this. Thoughts? (I just joined, so I "inherited" this)
Software engineering has a phenomenal burnout rate. By the time they're 30 almost everyone I know starts thinking about their exit. I honestly don't believe software engineers can consistently put in more than 4 hours of good work a day on corporate code without being ground down in the long term. The people who stick around tend to be those who sit in meetings all day rather than actually writing code.
All of this is to say that you should prioritize things people have in short supply (happiness, dignity) over things corporations have in spades (money, time). Don't be that person who starts keeping track of how others use their work hours.
At work, my staff (20ish developers) usually clock in/out sharp bcoz of attendance, but they take 2+ hours lunch break and ~1hr for prayer breaks (2x within work hour), which I don't mind. But what frustrates me is their work is slow and low quality (not everyone), and I do thought about "short term" tracking like this. Thoughts? (I just joined, so I "inherited" this)
'2 hours lunch break and 1hr for prayer breaks' and the work is low quality. You don't need to track those people, you need to replace them.
As for the low quality output, I’ve seen teams improve significantly by implementing good biweekly retros (note that bad retros can make things worse). Fostering the right atmosphere can do wonders to bring out latent talent. Also things like tooling can really help. CI with linting, and a no-judgement ‘you broke the build you fix the build’ rule can also really help.