Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance • Hacker News Board

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#261

Post by chipotle_coyote » Wed, May 13, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

_curious_ wrote: post #225

Fargren wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"JUST QUIT" makes it sound like quitting is an easy thing to do. "like they have a gun to their head" makes it sound like direct physical threat is the only mechanism of coercion that exists. These things are just not true. For a lot of people, who have more expenses than savings and are not in highly demanded jobs, quitting puts them at great risk. They have a metaphorical gun to their heads. They might not die the…

"For a lot of people, who have more expenses than savings and are not in highly demanded jobs, quitting puts them at great risk. They have a metaphorical gun to their heads. They might not die the moment they quit, but by quitting they are endangering themselves and those that depend on them. Their relationship with employment is inherently coercive." With all of that said: whose responsibility is it to avoid this ty…

Why are you so insistent that it's absolutely, under no circumstances, the responsibility of the employer?

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#262

Post by evilolive » Wed, May 13, 2020, 9:10 PM UTC

_curious_ wrote: post #258

evilolive wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a nutshell he says : - from your tone it sounds that you have never been faced with such hardships and decisions to make. - "quickly and efficiently" to me would be anything that would allow you to pay the next bills. Esp. since 78% of american workers live paycheck to paycheck with no cushion to absorb downtime looking for new work. I'm detecting a bit of dishonesty (trolling?) in your answers too.

Is it dishonest to ask questions, probe, push-back, challenge, disagree, whatever you want to call it? I'm respectfully inquiring as to what another human thinks (and that human was not you unless you speak for them?).

It sounds dishonest to :

1. not being able to empathize with someone who is economically vulnerable. can't tell if it's on purpose, or just difficult.

2. attach yourself to the definition of vulnerability. I just gave you one : people living paycheck to paycheck. It's a pretty mundane concept, and it's trite or dishonest to have to revisit this.

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#263

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 13, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

evilolive wrote: post #241

_curious_ wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"virtue signal some sort of privilege" - I'm referring to a particular "let them eat cake" sentiment I'm detecting by your posts. An apt analogy because it was a signal of her misunderstanding of the lower classes food situation. Still confused…what does "virtue signal some sort of privilege" actually mean? Do you have some sort of privileged information on the matter? "vulnerable populations" - people who are unable…

In a nutshell he says : - from your tone it sounds that you have never been faced with such hardships and decisions to make. - "quickly and efficiently" to me would be anything that would allow you to pay the next bills. Esp. since 78% of american workers live paycheck to paycheck with no cushion to absorb downtime looking for new work. I'm detecting a bit of dishonesty (trolling?) in your answers too.

[deleted]

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#264

Post by _curious_ » Wed, May 13, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #261

_curious_ wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For a lot of people, who have more expenses than savings and are not in highly demanded jobs, quitting puts them at great risk. They have a metaphorical gun to their heads. They might not die the moment they quit, but by quitting they are endangering themselves and those that depend on them. Their relationship with employment is inherently coercive." With all of that said: whose responsibility is it to avoid this ty…

Why are you so insistent that it's absolutely, under no circumstances, the responsibility of the employer?

What do you mean by "it's" in this question - what is "it" you refer to?

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#265

Post by poulsbohemian » Wed, May 13, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

kyuudou wrote: post #259

poulsbohemian wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My employer is still getting my eight hours, possibly more, just diffused through the whole day. Even that sticks in my craw... we need to make this 8 hour bar die. Some days I'm just not productive. Other days I might be heads-down on a problem for 15+ hours straight. So long as I'm accountable to my work and it is producing the results we've mutually agreed upon, this hour nonsense (for workers not billing by the…

>we need to make this 8 hour bar die. I think I get where you're coming from but I'm at the point in my career where I like work/life balance and do not give a shit about your email once I've turned off work (unless it's an emergency, obviously). If this doesn't happen, work creeps into life until that's all it is, no fun, no exercise, no fresh air, no social interaction, no family time - and all the negative mental…

> I'm at the point in my career where I like work/life balance and do not give a shit about your email once I've turned off work...

We aren't disagreeing here... my point is not that you should work 24x7, rather... throughout my career I've noticed that value and hours are not correlated. Therefore, it strikes me as really silly to be so focused on hours worked in fields where that metric doesn't matter. I'm not saying we should get lazy and sit around, but rather find new ways of managing our work that recognize this phenomenon and seek to create working environments where we eliminate hours as a measure of productivity and instead focus on the productive output of our work.

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#266

Post by andrekandre » Wed, May 13, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #147

wolco wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was back in the day you trained and educated employees (to save money and built loyality). Back when they offered a living wage a single person could raise a family with. What happened? Free trade. Cheap goods from other countries gutted the local industries. Hard to compete on price when labour costs are so different. The only jobs remaining become min wage or importing. People not working as hard as a generati…

It's important to remember that free trade is not the ultimate cause. Greed among the wealthy elite is. What happened is that rich business owners deliberately pushed for free trade laws as a way to circumvent the laws the labor movement got passed to protect people. They sold out American workers to increase their profit margins.

said in maybe a slightly different way:

"free trade" allows for the free movement of capital, but not the free movement of labor which is stuck relatively immobile (except maybe from "cheaper" countries to the more "expensive" ones)

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#267

Post by evilolive » Wed, May 13, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

_curious_ wrote: post #256

Fargren wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When all are privileged, are any, really? That's like saying "when everybody has money, does anyone have money?". People have varying amounts (and kinds) of privilege, but some have more than others.

...and who has the privilege of judging others privilege?

And you really think this is an honest argumentation?

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#268

Post by eschutte2 » Wed, May 13, 2020, 9:30 PM UTC

gfxgirl wrote: post #226

cosmodisk wrote: post #4

It's being done by the same clowns who can't live without time clock cards, all sorts of monitoring,and tracking.These are the people who have no clue how to manage people,how to measure their work and act upon results.These are the same crappy companies who would rather ask their staff to email endless Excel spreadsheets to each other instead of investing some money in database or some crm system. In a nutshell,thes…

I'm curious how much of this comes from working with unskilled labor (hope that's the right term). I once worked in fast food right out of high school. 80-90% of the employees were one or more of untrustworthy, unreliable, whiny, always making excuses or trying get out of work. My point being if you start there you might just assume that that's the way it always is for all employees no matter what type of job and the…

That's been my observation too. In tech, this kind of paranoid micro-management is a great (inverse) indicator for whether someone's used to working with talented people. If I were ever managing again in tech I'd be trying to find people much smarter than me and then get the heck out of their way.

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#269

Post by coffeefirst » Wed, May 13, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

HumblyTossed wrote: post #74

> After two weeks of working from her Brooklyn apartment, a 25-year-old e-commerce worker received a staffwide email from her company: Employees were to install software called Hubstaff immediately on their personal computers so it could track their mouse movements and keyboard strokes,and record the webpages they visited. I'm 100 percent positive that I would tell this company to get stuffed if they suggested I put…

It's also remarkably stupid. Get everyone to start looking up medical conditions, especially related to pregnancy, and watch how fast the lawyers shut it down.

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#270

Post by drevil-v2 » Wed, May 13, 2020, 9:48 PM UTC

gfxgirl wrote: post #226

cosmodisk wrote: post #4

It's being done by the same clowns who can't live without time clock cards, all sorts of monitoring,and tracking.These are the people who have no clue how to manage people,how to measure their work and act upon results.These are the same crappy companies who would rather ask their staff to email endless Excel spreadsheets to each other instead of investing some money in database or some crm system. In a nutshell,thes…

I'm curious how much of this comes from working with unskilled labor (hope that's the right term). I once worked in fast food right out of high school. 80-90% of the employees were one or more of untrustworthy, unreliable, whiny, always making excuses or trying get out of work. My point being if you start there you might just assume that that's the way it always is for all employees no matter what type of job and the…

Spot on.

I have consulted with customer contact companies and it was always shocking to see the low productivity. Front line employees, especially the younger age group, would find ingenious ways to circumvent doing actual work while artificially inflating their KPIs. There was even information sharing economy in some companies where the best tricks were traded for goods and services.

To put it in context though, it was by any measure thankless and soul crushing work. And the worst offenders were in cold call centres and strangely in email support teams.