Facebook forcing moderators to log every second of day
vice.com
vice.com
- We had to be in Avail status at the exact start of our shift or be counted late. For example, if I was scheduled to be in at 10am, I had to be in Avail at 10am. Meaning I had to take care of booting up computer, etc. before then.
- We had to check in with a workload manager via Teams and get approval before moving to Break or Lunch aux. Often during a call.
- We could move to an aux to take restroom breaks, and were encouraged to do so only when no calls were waiting, but the total time taken couldn't be more than 10 minutes a day.
- We also had to notify the WLM if we were going into callback aux, for example, if the line dropped. We were questioned and sometimes moved to Avail automatically if we were too long in callback.
- When I started, we had 30 seconds ACW but then they moved to zero ACW. We could move to ACW aux for a max of one minute unless cleared with WLM. You had to be quick if you had things to do on your ticket after the call otherwise often you'd get thrown into another call immediately. WLM would move you to Avail automatically if you went over and they were paying attention.
- Getting a "Roll Over No Answer" was really bad.
Definitely a rough environment, but it wasn't as bad as it sounded, and I was able to work from home for a month before I found a much better job. It was interesting to see if I could survive under that level of discipline but I'm glad I left when I did.
Why do they do this?
I started my career in one for a popular multi-national consumer electronics brand whose devices might be in your pocket right now, also as a T-1 IT person for about four years.
It's soul draining. One thing I'll never forget were the amount of EMS visits we got due to people having heart-attacks. Young people too.
Source - I wrote internal software for a large call center outsourcing company right out of college. Back then the company I was a part of was actually pretty progressive. They let employees work split schedules, WFH way before it was cool, factored in things like reasonable breaks, etc...
The amount of data that comes off of automated dialers and inbound CMS systems can make for fun tech work, but it's still a pretty crummy industry which is why I left.
There's the old adage that as soon as a metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a good metric because it starts to be gamed. It's probably not universally true but it shows up again and again in things like NYC's COMPSTAT program where a decent idea becomes a goal without measuring the right thing and you wind up with police just harassing people because you've gotta get the number of arrests up or you'll look bad at the next COMPSTAT review.
Thankfully most of the time the queue wasn't ever ridiculously long (10 minutes wait time at probably the 95th percentile) customers, with 3-50 agents available depending on the previous year's traffic.
It was a good environment for a high school student. When it got super busy no one in the office was above getting on the phones.
There's a reason why you experienced it at "summer jobs", too.
well, frankly, the obvious is going to happen. You're going to get people outright lying to you about being present. It won't take long before you start tracking time.
And so on for most of the other practices there.
But jerf...
I'm only talking about the other side of the complex of forces that inevitably emerges from this sort of low pay situation. It doesn't mean that employees ought to be treated as subhumans, obviously. Another aspect is that this sort of control will also attract management who enjoys wielding that sort of power. Management isn't guilty. But these restrictions are all generally reactions to the problems management had getting their employees to show up on time. There's a whole back and forth of events that inevitably occurs at scale, which is why the whole job has a bad rep, not just particular companies. The same forces produce convergent evolution between all the companies that have large call centers.
You'll get similar experience managing a McDonalds, or any number of other places where you're trying to get a whole bunch of low-paid people doing a particular job.
So when you say, "It isn't all just being a jerk for being a jerk's sake.", you essentially mean that everyone involved is a victim of the circumstances? That these jobs naturally attract certain types of people on both employee and management side, trap them, and pit them against each other?
You're trying to motivate people who really aren't getting much out of the deal. The "managers" are still earning biscuits.
Everyone I know who works in retail, for example, seems to be stuck in a sick system hellscape. If you win, you still lose because the "best job" in a store is still only realistically suitable for a teenager.
Also, I don't think that "those places attract a certain type of managers" is much of an excuse for those managers.
I also agree that there people who profit, but I encourage you to see that as part of the dynamics rather than an exceptional case that somehow happens every time. It is perfectly predictable that people who will try to profit from this will enter the system, in ways both monetary and psychological. It's merely the n'th step, not some sort of surprise.
Call centers (and most low paying jobs) operate with a goal of minimizing costs. Most incarnations of motivating people with a carrot involve spending money on bonuses for performance, raises, etc. So those can't be implemented because it would raise costs. Another option for the carrot is promotions, but my impression is that there isn't a lot of upward mobility in call centers; at least not of the variety that eventually gets you out of the call center.
So once all your options for motivating people with carrots are gone, you end up with the stick. And this is what it looks like when your only motivation option is the stick.
You could probably operate a call center that handles calls as quickly using bonuses and such, but you would be more expensive. You'd have the benefit of having happier employees, but that's not a thing businesses are willing to expend money on. And even if you did, some enterprising soul in a few years would propose eliminating the carrots to save money and youd be back to square one.
It also doesn't help that most of these workers also lack a lot of other employment opportunities. In tech, for instance, it's hard to run a shop using sticks instead of carrots because your workers have plenty of other potential employers. They'll just quit.
I believe it is more about general "efficiency" or milking of the workers. How to get the most while spending the least. Which is a working principle, but does have dark side effects, when we are talking about human ressources.
This has wage and hour lawsuit written all over it. See "donning and doffing" litigation.
I won over 2k from a class-action lawsuit over this exact thing about a decade ago. This is not legal.
https://www.thehumanequation.com/en/news_rss/articles/2010/w...
https://slate.com/business/2014/12/supreme-court-rules-again...
If nothing else, I think the part where you are expected to start working before you start getting paid sounds pretty sketchy.
UPS drivers pee in bottles while out delivering, too.
In another life I worked facilities at a UPS distribution center and my team would have to pick up those bottles :-/
When yah gotta go, yah gotta go.
I have friends who have done this when they were stuck in traffic.
I imagine that when UPS drivers do their deliveries like in the suburbs, there might not be public restrooms nearby.
In reality, like always, it's a mix of both - meeting delivery deadlines, and meeting nature-call deadlines.
In the context of an employer monitoring employee toilet breaks, this is perversely amusing.
Not as bad as hell on earth is still really really bad.
Reminds me of the work I did for a major car company in sub-manufacturing.
We had to be at our stations by the time our shift-start buzzer went, with the machine running. Machine status was logged and visible on displays from every corner of the plant so there was no slipping in a minute late. A second late meant 15 minutes docked pay. Keeping in mind the trip from the locker room to many of the stations in my department took several minutes to walk.
Similarly for breaks—the machine had to run until the break buzzer, then you had to lock everything down for safety, record your numbers, then walk to the break room if you wanted a snack, a smoke—whatever. You also had to be back, machine spun up and running by the time the buzzer went for the end of the break. The breaks were 10 minutes long, and lunch was 20. In reality, if you were quick, you got about five minutes of your break and about 10-15 of your lunch. (Also keeping in mind the work was dirty and potentially poisonous so you had to be sure to wash thoroughly before eating anything).
These stringent rules resulted in many shouting matches between some of the management and a few staff members. It also resulted in a big campaign by the CAW (Canadian Auto Workers union) which in turn resulted in a propaganda campaign by the company and threats of shutting down to move. This plant also paid a good $10 an hour less than their unionized counterparts and competitors. Thankfully, we did have good supportive supervisors—the smallest of buffers.
Don't get me started on the quotas and their arbitrary increases to beyond the machine's production capacity...
FWIW: The larger company has a good reputation—their subsidiaries, however, were different.
I suspect they were also worried it would bubble up to the namesake auto company who has been successful at keeping the unions out for decades now.
I'm glad it's over and will forever curse those bastards that inflicted it on us.
Nope. "we weren't infected by the SF attitude" was not a correct description, we were just mobbed into submission.
Christ, it's been years...
Oh, I and I do mean sit there. You weren't supposed to stand, either. No pacing at your desk or even just standing still. You were supposed to remain seated, whether on a call or not.
This doesn't necessary mean being an entrepreneur, but having a certain level of autonomy. Once you taste it, it's nearly impossible to go back to such controlled, desk-equated productivity environments.
yes, i've found this as well. the reason is that employer-based constraints on your schedule are always arbitrary, rarely compensated for in full, never equitable across power structures, and only tenuously negotiable in your favor.
in other words: your life becomes theirs to control in spirit, if not entirely in practice. it doesn't matter if they expect you to be at work from 9 to 5 or whatever else. if your employment is contingent on holding their schedule, they effectively hold control over the rest of your life's schedule.
and they excercise that control to the detriment of your life as a matter of course, routinely, ruthlessly, without hesitation, and without consideration, in nearly 100% of cases -- yes, even in the "cool startup" you're working for.
remember, you need to ask them to take time off to care for your sick relatives. you need to ask them for permission to not be at work to spend time for yourself on vacation. you are explicitly their property for however many hours per day, but they also own enough of you to implicitly dictate where you're allowed to be and when, and for what reasons.
i guess some people find it a good bargain to trade their autonomy for a wage. it's very hard to respect that kind of thinking a lot of the time, but i've learned to do it simply because most people accept the bargain and it'd be too isolating to behave otherwise. for me, it's an intolerable situation to bear, even for a moment.
Your freedom is directly proportional to the trust your manager has in your good judgment. If you can build the trust and convince the manager (indirectly) that they don't need to handhold you and it's better to use their time to focus on other things you can be doing mostly the stuff you decide needs to be done.
From my experience, in case of FB moderators, these things happen because of some kind of corporate scarring. I guess somebody or a group of people seriously exploited their freedom and the management instead of trying to actually understand and solve the problem used shotgun/lazy management to just outright squash the problem along with every team member's freedom.
"Hey, I'm gonna be in a different TZ next week and 9AM standups really won't work for me, can we find a time in the afternoon that works for all of us?"
"Hey, Jane and i were talking and we really want to try making this standing meeting into something async for a month and see if it works for folks, how does everyone else feel about it?"
Of course you have to work with others, and you may have to work with others that for various reasons are in a very 9-5 schedule, but if you have autonomy, you can figure out how to do that without it meaning "Be at your desk by 9AM or else!"
A better guess would be that virtually all people need to generate income and most of them take whatever bargain they can get, lest they get consumed by debt or evicted from their home.
This is an underrated source of class division, I think. Working- and lower-class people in menial jobs endure tortuous levels of this stuff, far beyond what your average office worker would ever think is reasonable (or maybe even possible).
I quit almost immediately afterward, obviously. This is not an appropriate level of oversight.
There are parallels with school uniform rules - you enforce the rules on people you don't like.
It's a license to discriminate. I suggest it's highly likely to constitute illegal disability discrimination within the EU.
Almost all poor parents will tell you they are stressed by needing to buy extra sets of clothing for school, sold at inflated prices (these parents will also tell you who is benefiting from the uniform suppliers' deals).
While watching this garbage might constitute as “unsafe” I suppose, until AI can fully take over, there’s not much you can do about it. Is it illegal to have a time monitoring system in Europe?
Vice is a pretty terrible news site and never actually answers the real questions. Instead we get a clickbait title with very little actual facts. Not that I’m particularly surprised, though.
My guess is some manager got it in his head to gather some bullshit metrics and evaluate people on them, and the affected employees are so low-status that they don't have the political power to push back.
There's also probably a pretty but useless graph on a powerpoint involved.
More likely, is that whomever set this department up, has a background in managing call centers, and they've just re-implemented all the same penny-pinching, degrading practices.
The main thing to realise is that often in these teams they hire just about anybody. They'll can pick up huge numbers of people a month with the idea that it's easier to let someone "prove themselves" and fire all the people who "don't perform" (statistics is usually not a strong point on these teams). People who survive for a long time are promoted into line management. Then it's the slippery pole all the way up (with everyone stomping on each other's face to get a leg up). There often isn't any respect given to other people. They are panning for gold, essentially. You are either gold or you are dirt.
IT departments are usually quite civilised in comparison. This is mainly because of the difficulty of doing our jobs and the difficulty of finding replacements. You see much better treatment in all such departments, but often IT is the best of the lot.
The question this piece is focusing on isn’t whether this behavior is legal or not. The question is whether or not it’s the right way to treat their people.
Keep in mind that Facebook earns its living by harvesting data on users, mining it, and selling ads on it.
Now they’ve demonstrated a willingness to demand to know every little detail about a worker’s day, presumably under the guise of productivity.
People love to talk about surveillance capitalism and it’s similarly to “1984” (which I don’t necessarily disagree with), but here’s a perfect example of an authority demanding to know everything about you throughout the course of a day. Sure, they’re not a government, but given their size and power, they might as well be for the sake of this argument.
Employees are also covered by GDPR so depending on what they do with the data they may be violating regulations. As far as monitoring, in general, is concerned I'm not sure there is detailed legislation on bathrooms but the EU stipulates that employee monitoring needs to respect privacy and freedom, needs to be proportionate and on a necessity basis, and I think you could make a pretty good case that monitoring bathroom breaks violates all of those.
The manager responsible for this moderation then can only hold it enough together to focus on X metrics, and happiness isn't one of them. Add one more metric and this person would probably fall apart and get thrown onto the pavement.
Engineers don't get treated like this because there's actual competition in hiring the best talent.
The workers need to organize to present their own metrics. Or figure out a way to make employee happiness a metric to focus on. Or somehow find the super person who can figure this all out (but then this person would get elevated to a more important part of the business.) Maybe it would be best to outsource this part of the business and then have the contractors compete on creating and delivering on these metrics. Or maybe create competing teams internally which can do the same, but rewarded with better pay?
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From the article:
Facebook, which outsources the majority of its content moderation to over 15,000 third-party contractors.
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My opinion is most tech companies do not want to treat their own employees like this. But they don't really want moderators to get equal treatment as their own employees so they outsource it.
Quoted for truth.
Anything <15 mins is a complete waste of everyone's time.
As for people saying such a system would be misused or completed lazily, those arguments apply equally well to filling out timesheets at all. I don't imagine anyone ever recorded themselves slacking off intentionally on a timesheet.
i'm not a UI expert but timekeeping doesn't seem particularly innovative. there are probably all sorts of esoteric certifications and approvals one might need for e.g. DoD compliance, so i'm guessing there are few people thinking about this and fewer willing to get it done and certified for the sake of the users.
It's arbitrary. Everyone from junior to top level does time sheets our side. And accuracy expectations are a little bit malleable in that context.
15 mins has crystalized as a good all round unit of account. I've definitely booked entire days to one code though. And given juniors a hard time about half an hour. It's a very context sensitive thing.
Worth pointing out that this is a finance professional firm though not programming...so we might not be speaking the same language here.
I use it to keep touch with friends and it's used to plan gatherings. I'm not about to try and be some advocate for people to use a better service, because I know that's a hopeless endeavour when I'm the only person doing it.
I empathize with the moderators, here, I appreciate articles like these which call out bad practices, and I appreciate legislature, and efforts to create legislatures, to curtail these practices.
But if I were to stackrank which parts of the global supply chain that I personally use, make me the most complicit in evil, Facebook would not make the top 10. Or the top 25.
He posits a future with micro-management of service workers via headset, down to the minute, from an automated system.
Sifting through the dark side of humanity for hours upon end for minimum wage is pretty bleak stuff.
Some glassdoor reviews[0]:
> "You feel like a rat. They even measure your time spent in the toilet. If you have less than 98% accuracy, you get mistreated."
> "Avoid in all means !!!! It will destroy you psychologically and you will not save much since the payment is very low"
[0] https://www.glassdoor.co.in/Reviews/Majorel-Content-Moderato...
This pattern of relentless squeezing by management, ratcheting ever-tighter, seems to lead to collapse each time I have encountered it. I have yet to come up with a decent metaphor for the phenomenon, but it seems to be born of the idea that efficiency can always increase in increments that themselves do not decrease. The easy answer would be to wave the disparaging "capitalism" wand over it, yet history has reliable notes of this happening in governments opposed to capitalism. Perhaps it is just the thought that one can get more ... forever.
I guess something like a set of Amazon Dash buttons could be useful or some kind of badge readers distributed about an environment to tag on and tag off keyed to some activity for that location.
The value in a relationship seems proportional to the smallest increment of time someone in it is accountable for. If someone asks you what you have done for them an hour ago, vs. this morning, vs. yesterday, vs. last week, vs. quarterly, vs. how's it all going and what they can do for you - this is a good measure of whether it's something worth keeping.
No trust means no value. Those employees should find somewhere else to work.
One can reasonably assume that if it were that simple they wouldn't be working such a shit job in the first place.
Uh? This is not some kind of engineering job. An employee of mcdonalds who's not flipping burgers is indeed not producing any value.
You can get data on mean time between burgers from the point of sale system or add a sensor to the burger storage unit, just like you can get data on feature cadence from Jira.
Beyond a certain point, management is parasitic to capital. That point is very low.
Or negotiate better working conditions.
According to the article, one guy is suing for poor working conditions leading to PTSD and dozens if not hundreds of moderators are expected to file similar lawsuits related to poor working conditions. I can't imagine FB would find it beneficial to continue to deal with so many individual lawsuits...
Years ago when I was naive and passive, we were ordered by management to work on Saturday to meet certain deadline. One guy simply said he cannot work on Saturday. The manager with dumb look asked why, the guy replied I got plans. Manager asked about other weekends, and this guy simply replied I got plans. Manager didn't know how to respond he left. Afaik, the guy never got in trouble. But rest of the team that worked Saturday complained about this guy being not a team player and how he should not be software developer if he cannot do a little bit of crunch time. I didn't know better I thought I was hero for putting in extra work. Of course, a few years later we were laid off. I learned my lessons.
Sometimes, I wonder if there is some sort of conspiracy by big businesses to spread narrative that anyone can find a better job if they don't like their job. Crunch time is normal, abusive policies are normal, etc
That's part of the problem of relying on civil suits to try and steer company behavior at that level. They've already budgeted for a certain amount of risk, fees etc.
In order for these conditions to change you would need an actual entity (likely the government) to properly threaten the company into compliance. And not through slap on the wrist fees.
[0] https://www.squattypotty.com/
Afterthought:
What is the dollar value benefit that these moderators offer Facebook such that their time has to be measured so precisely?
I would assume that a CEO’s time is even more valuable both in terms of cost and expected benefit/impact. Why doesn’t Facebook’s board get Mark Zuckerburg to account for every millisecond of his time right down to how much time he spends in the bathroom? If all this time adds up for these moderators, then why not for a CEO?
There are different sets of rules for members of different castes.
In all seriousness, it sounds like these folks have an awful job. Curious if they will be permitted to or have the desire to form a "Moderators Union"