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Workplace surveillance is coming for you

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Re: Workplace surveillance is coming for you

#151

Post by kastagg »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #138
kastagg wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no value in thinking all day about how bananas are delicious. Before you can eat the banana, it has to be produced and shipped. That process does not even involve thinking that bananas are delicious, so that kind of thinking isn't abstracted in the production process, it's simply irrelevant.

I disagree. If you ignore the actual value your product provides to the final consumer "this banana is delicious", you'll come up with solutions that diminish that value. The only reason why blending whole bananas (peel and all), and sending that slop in an unrefrigerated shipping container isn't even considered as an option is an understanding of what the banana-buyers want.

Nobody is proposing ignoring what people will buy. What I said is that literally thinking "this banana is delicious" does not achieve anything toward the actual delivery of any bananas for consumption. It is the end of the production story, not a part of the process, so it is not abstraction to leave it out. Set up a process for sampling batches of bananas if you want, but the value of that isn't for an employee to think "this banana is delicious" 100 times per day. That is confusing consumption with production. There's a good reason why production doesn't include consumption.

Re: Workplace surveillance is coming for you

#152

Post by chrisweekly »

AyyWS wrote: post #87
bheadmaster wrote: post #52

I'm currently reading "The Tyranny of Metrics" which provides a decent analysis of how over-measuring things that don't have anything to do with the real goal often serves as a deterrent to real progress. What managers want to know is how much do their workers contribute to the success of the company . What they measure is how much time do workers spend doing X . They're completely glossing over the middle step of ho…

in 2015 I made a change that stopped 90% of the tickets that rolled into my team's queue. The remaining 10% were complicated real customer issues. Our entire department was closed 6 months later, because I assume our ticket completion was so low, and we were so slow to fix issues. :/

Ouch.

Re: Workplace surveillance is coming for you

#153

Post by Raidion »

padolsey wrote: post #65
bheadmaster wrote: post #52

I'm currently reading "The Tyranny of Metrics" which provides a decent analysis of how over-measuring things that don't have anything to do with the real goal often serves as a deterrent to real progress. What managers want to know is how much do their workers contribute to the success of the company . What they measure is how much time do workers spend doing X . They're completely glossing over the middle step of ho…

> Over-measurement is often worse than not measuring anything at all. Yes. Not only is "time spent" or "code written" or "features implemented" or even "user engagement" a lossy metric in the best of cases but it can literally end up doing the exact opposite of what you intended. Campbell's & Goodhart's laws are often cited. The trap I see in software companies is a hyperfocus on quantifiable short term wins, entirel…

You never want to built anything shoddily, but there is a lot of value in doing minimum scope. Testing, clean code, etc shouldn't be negotiable in most shops, but scope can be really trimmed down in a lot of scenarios.

Universe Z: - Programmer X implements feature A in 1 week with tiny scope - Feature B is mothballed and never gets built

Universe A: - Programmer X implements feature in 2 weeks - One year later: This functionality is broken apart into a well defined microservice with additional responsibilities. This needs a total rewrite as a v2 API.

Universe B: - Programmer implements a feature in 1 week - One month later with that extra week they were able to squeeze in an unrelated enhancement to the system that delivered .5% extra revenue during Black Friday.

I find most of the productivity metrics fail because you're squeezing the wrong end of the process. You want to spend the most time making sure you're doing what matters and has value, and then it will almost always be worth the time. This makes people feel engaged, which will lead to a lot more productivity than when you're pushing them to build something they don't care about.

Re: Workplace surveillance is coming for you

#154

Post by throwaway0a5e »

xphos wrote: post #120
giantg2 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some strict time-keeping requirements for bathroom use when it comes to certain contracts, like government ones. It wasn't too bad, but I forget the specifics. It was like it had to be less than 5 minutes, or you use your 15 minute breaks or lunch for anything longer.

Yeah I think that type of policy is mindlessly impossible by Legislative branches under the guise of eliminating "waste" no pun intended. When in reality all those policies do is eat into the mental bandwidth of government works and contractors. There are good regulations and than just dumb ones. And you might ask what law exactly is the Legislative passing but its not laws its appointees to executive positions that…

I wish they had intentions that were that noble.

Everyone on the likes to pretend that rules and regulations are either a) a boondoggle net-negative exercise in cost cutting b) "wRiTtEn In BlOoD" depending on whether they like the procedure or regulation in question.

Reality is often far more mundane and dysfunctional. It's frequently just speculative bike shedding and ass-covering, exactly the kind of "pointing out exploits" stuff the HN crowd loves to engage in when it comes to policy as though organizational policy was a firewall to configure.

Here's how it probably went down: Some people were hammering out the language of a contract and some bike-shedder replied to all pointing out that breaks, work stoppages, lunch, etc, etc, were all being counted but bathroom breaks weren't and that potentially created an exploit to the proposed system of cost/time/whatever tracking. No party had the balls to take responsibility and say "this is silly, we'll cross that bridge if/when we get to it" bathroom breaks wound up incorporated that into their formula. So thanks to some bike-shedder trying to "contribute" and nobody's willingness to take any risk whatsoever (by going on the record brushing aside a petty concern that could come back to bite them) everyone has to track their piss breaks. And to be fair, all these people are doing exactly what they are incentivized to do (!!!). And these aren't the kind of things you can roll back later because then you have to explain why you're a) deviating from established way of doing things and b) accepting some risk in doing so which nobody wants to do for a variety of reasons that have been discussed at length and are outside the scope of this comment.

Source: This crap happens like quarterly in my workplace.

Edit: of course there's other potential complications that can effect these kinds of things but you get the gist.

Re: Workplace surveillance is coming for you

#155

Post by pessimizer »

sudden_dystopia wrote: post #84

Quit reading at “large stage capitalism”. Such a bs term. This is not capitalism, this is techno corporate fascism. That is what is failing and causing misery. And the more we gaslight capitalism, the further down the totalitarian path we are going to go.

> the further down the totalitarian path we are going to go.

It's not real totalitarianism.

Re: Workplace surveillance is coming for you

#156

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #33
rightbyte wrote: post #27

I like the term "bossware". I think I will use it the next time I wiggle the mouse to make my Teams status green again.

In fact Microsoft built these features straight into Microsoft 365 under the name "Insights" (I think now being rebranded again to viva something) They say it's all anonymized but it's really easy to correlate back to users by playing with settings.

it's ironic to me how the typical boss measures productivity in emails, chats and other things that are not real work, making things, solving problems...

its like even the basis by which they measure work, is not work. but since thats all they ever do, they have no other frame of reference.

Re: Workplace surveillance is coming for you

#157

Post by Havoc »

Microsoft’s moves in this regard strike me as particularly evil. By packaging it into their product and rolling it out by default they’re helping normalize it.

For now the parts that are enabled by default (Daily digest etc) seem to only be visible to the user and announce that fact prominently.

But that does a lot to shift the conversation and acclimatise users to tracking. The jump for the hr module to be enabled is already much reduced vs installing 3rd party spyware software

Re: Workplace surveillance is coming for you

#158

Post by vladvasiliu »

kastagg wrote: post #142
jorts wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% - At my last company we had an unlimited sick policy. Wonderful for everyone - don't even question staying home if you're remotely ill. Well, it was wonderful until one employee was sick every Friday and Monday and some. We ended up having to adjust the company policy for two weeks sick time and beyond that required a doctors note. The employee continued their pattern and once they hit their two weeks of sick ti…

You didn't have an unlimited sick policy. You had an undocumented limit. Documenting it lets people know where they stand and protects them in the event they need to take sick time but the boss wants to punish them for it anyway. It also means there's one standard for everyone, rather than people being treated in a discriminatory fashion (you get three weeks, but Samantha gets one).

But isn't this how it always goes? There's an informal policy because writing up every single thing in a contract is tedious for both parties. Then someone comes up and figures "hey, free vacation, I'd be stupid not to take advantage".

So, they do take advantage for a while, until everyone realizes they're a jerk, so now everyone has to go through the new "process". Because they can't just be fired "for taking sick leave", which "is their right".

This is why we can't have nice things.

Re: Workplace surveillance is coming for you

#159

Post by s1artibartfast »

swayvil wrote: post #57
nopehnnope wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the unintended consequence of anti discrimination laws (and other laws, like those protecting unions, that defeat at-will employment). Easiest way to fire shitty employees is to document a bunch of technical rule violations. That will create a rock solid paper trail that will stand up in court. Otherwise, they will claim some kind of discrimination and it’s your word about their performance against theirs cal…

Re : documenting transgressions. Local food co-op. Very modern hippy. Nice place. Every employee has a dossier on file. Every time a rule is broken it goes into the dossier. If, for whatever reason, you are fired. The dossier is cited as legal justification. I guess this is perfectly rational from a businessy perspective, and a common tactic. But still.

I knew a lawyer that did workers comp and that's how he ran his firm. He kept a private file on every employee since they started to cover his ass waiting for when he wanted one gone.

Re: Workplace surveillance is coming for you

#160

Post by beeboop »

amelius wrote: post #103
candiddevmike wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I poop on company time"

"Boss took big risks, so save that poop for when you get home."

Yes, took risks with lots of money that he inherited or borrowed from dad
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