In Germany the entire premise of monitoring performance is prohibited. Employers aren't even allowed to look at email.
> In Germany the entire premise of monitoring performance is prohibited. How do they evaluate people for promotion if you aren't allowed to monitor anyone's performance in any way?
Big difference if you use automated means and whether you introspect on how work is performed rather than look at the final product. I have seen places where running reports of LOCs or commits is strictly forbidden to avoid lawsuits.
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.
I also get aggravated by the usage of 'late stage capitalism'. I very much prefer 'end stage capitalism' or 'terminal capitalism'.
On workplace surveillance / "bossware": > Mazzoli seems to have either not used his product, or, if he did, did so under conditions where he was in charge of it – using it the way an athlete might use a stopwatch to time their own sprints, and not the way a boss might: to decide whether to dock your pay or fire you. > This inability to understand the difference between using a technology and having the same technolog…
Once upon a time, I worked for a shop that did auto insurance. This involves handling a lot of fairly sensitive data about people and datasets about a lot of people, for reasons that boil down to it being incredibly useful data for actuarial purposes. Bossware, or working machine monitoring software, endpoint monitoring, or whatever turned out to be a key part of making it possible for our data scientists to function…
> anyone who wants to talk about doing data analysis without access to the underlying data is cordially invited to explain how to do this to statisticians who only understand R and local Jupyter notebooks.
Joint distributions and generating functions trained against the production data to generate synthetic data, generally.
> 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…
The universe X example has some merit too. The developer got a raise, the business was excited enough to get this feature done ahead of schedule that someone actually put in the effort to push through a raise, and the total cost for this was one man-week of extra work a year later - basically a drop in the bucket, budget-wise.
You're focusing too much on the specifics of the hypothetical rather than the point of the hypothetical. If you can't get out to the abstraction, then in universe X, programmer B-Z all spend 3 weeks on a feature, and in universe Y, programmer B-Z all spend 1 week on a feature. So we've got an extra man year being burned, all to save a man week upfront. Extend to whatever point short of breaking the analogy you care to.
That “complete nonsense” is what US employment lawyers would advise you. But hey, some French guy on the internet knows more.
Attempting to circumvent anti discrimination laws by documenting and firing over technical violations only for the class you aren't allowed to discriminate against doesn't improve the legal situation vs simply discriminating more straightforwardly and firing without cause. Firing for cause rather than without can avoid severance payout though.
In theory but most plaintiffs employment lawyers (working on contingency) aren’t going to invest that much time and money for a run of the mill anti discrimination lawsuit.
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…
> and other laws, like those protecting unions, that defeat at-will employment This is backwards. Union membership is at its all time low and at-will employment has mostly taken over. A union would be the best tool to curb "boss-ware".
Union membership is down but anti-discrimination laws are as strong as ever. I was just saying that in companies that are unionized, there is a strong incentive for management to turn to rigid rules and documentation of minor transgressions.
I find it so weird. Aren't there any bosses that say "Yeah, fuck you we're not doing that." That's the point of a boss. If I were in charge of a bunch of programmers and a mandate came down from on high to rate programmers based on commits or keystrokes, my first response would be "Eat shit." and my second response would be "No, really, I'm not treating my people like dogs. Eat shit."
> That's the point of a boss.
I disagree. The point of a boss is to squeeze as much productivity as possible from contributors in order to meet business goals. If they do that as a humane understanding collaborator or as a micromanaging tyrant depends on two factors: what kind of person they are and how much leeway does upper management allow. If a boss is of the 'telling their boss to eat shit' variety, they're usually not going to stay a boss for long..
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.
You still manually wiggle the mouse? Imagine how much more productive you'd be with an automatic mouse jiggler.
No I switched job to a in office.
And I didn't have to because I had a nice boss but wfh made me uneasy. I made up the need in my head that I had to be not "away" while working. So I did it out of habit ... not too strict though.
We arrived at this place on the line directly from capitalism though. This is a failure of capitalism at least, and a direct incentive of it at worst. You can’t just say it’s not capitalism when it’s the exact consequence of capitalism just because it resulted in something you don’t like. The “totalitarian path” is the one that capitalism laid bare before your feet.
When Orwell wrote 1984 with it's constant surveillance, he had "late-stage capitalism" in mind? Are you saying that totalitarian governments wouldn't have made use of technological innovation to spy on their citizens, including worker output?
I think the thing that is so beautiful about 1984 is that people almost universally think their side is the "right" side when they discuss the book. It's like how proponents of eugenics or voting rights laws assume they would pass the litmus tests they push.
I'm saying that I don't understand or need your hypothetical totalitarian government when the article is about real corporate bosses doing this today, in our capitalist system.
I find it so weird. Aren't there any bosses that say "Yeah, fuck you we're not doing that." That's the point of a boss. If I were in charge of a bunch of programmers and a mandate came down from on high to rate programmers based on commits or keystrokes, my first response would be "Eat shit." and my second response would be "No, really, I'm not treating my people like dogs. Eat shit."
...and they'd pip you out in a few months, and you'd leave without a good reference. In reality, you'd realize it was horrible, but orders are orders, so most people would do it. If they found it particularly objectionable, they'd just look for another job in the meantime, but most folks who are not financially independent wouldn't take a stand for it.
This stuff happens all of the time.
Middle management has to educate upper management on why certain metrics are bad. I do it all the time. Most recent one was length a PR was open. Some of my better devs opened PRs earlier and left them open for feedback longer, and I didn't want them penalized, so I communicated (with data) to management that it was a bad metric and we no longer measure it.