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Comment by beavis2 | Hacker News Reader

Well, it's unfortunate that we have people like this who make employers feel the need to track their workers.

I'm not entirely convinced that "people like this" are the sole reason employers want, like, and do track every breath of employees.

> I'm not entirely convinced that "people like this" are the sole reason employers want, like, and do track every breath of employees.

I would go further and assert that, in most cases, "people like this" probably aren't any, or are only a negligible part of the reason, only the excuse to allow them such tracking.

What is their actual purpose in tracking?

Honestly, I think it's mostly to assert their power over workers. It's natural for people to do this if they can: it feels good and makes them feel in control, even if it's not very effective or is downright detrimental to the bottom line. It's also natural to search for plausible excuses for such behavior - nobody wants to admit that they just get a boner (metaphorically) from bossing others around.

Just my general opinion, I have too little information to say if the tracking, in this case, is actually a rational and net-positive policy and not someone's power trip.

This is what I observed in all but 3 supervisors I've ever met (I had dozens), and that says a lot when coming from a guy with 17 years of career.

It is people like this and management's assumption that more people are like this than actually are.

What reason do you think they have?

People think others are like themselves. If managers would skip out given the opportunity, they believe their reports will as well.

I’ve actually never heard of employers tracking employees with GPS, except for cases where there is a specific plausible justification, like truck drivers or Uber drivers.

Rule of thumb: for every idiotic/draconian rule, there always was some asshole that abused the system and caused it to be created.

Depends on what you pay for. If you pay for timely good results then you don't care about whether your employee plays golf in between to get them.

If you pay for butt-in-seat-hour then you have to track hours and butts. Either by newganled gps thingies of olden days methods of assigning a foreman to look at you.

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