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Comment by koonsolo | Hacker News Reader

If you think clocking will make people more productive, you are terribly wrong.

I've seen companies where this happens, and people have Friday afternoons off because they already did their hours that week. They have 0 loyalty to the company.

Relationships work in 2 directions. If the company treats you like lazy scum, you will treat the company as an oppressive thing you want to avoid.

If the company trusts you, you are less inclinded to breach that trust.

This also works for blue collar workers, just look up Ricardo Semler of Semco.

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I think both individual employees and companies are guilty of one thing: greed. I've seen it personally happen on all levels of many companies.

The scale of the employee's greed make it's actions seem tame at a small scale (punching false times...). They justify it by saying they are getting their dues and for once they are the ones screwing and not getting screwed.

The scale and visibility of a company's greed make it much more apparent that it's incentives and moral compass are way off (mistreating, exploiting...). They justify this behavior as helping the bottom line and making the numbers look good to investors.

Until ALL the actors, both companies and individuals start adjusting their 'morality' and integrity this will continue happening.

> I've seen companies where this happens, and people have Friday afternoons off because they already did their hours that week.

How is that a bad thing?

Not saying it's a bad thing, just saying that it might not improve productivity compared to their peers that still want to finish that one thing on Friday before the weekend starts.

But indeed those employees (programmers, etc) saw that as a benefit of doing no more than 40 hour per week.

> finish that one thing on Friday before the weekend starts

Sometimes you might fix that one bug that would haunt you over the weekend otherwise, I grant you that. More often than that, feeling that one has to enable oneself to finish stuff at the end of the week leads to fewer plans on Friday nights, too little socializing outside of work, less restful weekends. And those kill productivity and company culture in the medium term.

In the short term I have seen my share of lost productivity because people feel like deploying hardly thought through changes (if only to internal system) on Friday afternoons to get it done that week.

Boeing tracked the projects people worked on to the tenth of an hour when I worked there in IT as a salaried employee.

It was a disaster and lead to all sorts of undesirable behaviors and malicious compliance.

They are required to do that by law because they work on government contracts. I have worked at a couple of contractors, they are all required to do that. IN my experience it has all been self reported, but I wouldn't immediately assume that Boeing is being nefarious.

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