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Comment by Clewza313 | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, this isn't really any different from what goes on in regular call centers. I've visited some in the Philippines, and breaks are minutely regulated, personal phones are not allowed, bringing food or drinks to your desk is strictly forbidden, and the tables are laid out in tight ranks so they can easily be supervised by roaming supervisors. It's all about the KPIs, and there's a constant battle between the agents trying to game theirs upward and management trying to squeeze more work out of people, while simultaneously trying to hit their own targets and extract more billable hours from the client.

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I worked in two different call centers in eu and it was the same. They can afford treating employees like that because there will always be another student with no money waiting to take the spot of anyone who inevitably quits in a year. Not sure how to solve this, but it definitely feels dehumanising working there.

I worked for a call centre in Canada that had all the same rules.

Some restrictions are sensible - for example call centers which routinely collect credit card information must reduce the surface area by which an employee can extract data from the facility. Same for content moderation gigs where the content also cannot be extracted.

Yes they should pay more and treat there employees better but don’t act like the average consumer does not support many of these provisions.

> reduce the surface area by which an employee can extract data from the facility

Is that what they must do? A software engineer at a FAANG could exfiltrate 1000x more data with their skills and their privileged access. I think they should be treated like call center employees.

But the FAANG employee has a lot more to lose. By getting fired, they could be loosing $200,000+ at a minimum. A call center employee typically makes maybe $30,000 per year, if that.

This would be a great anecdote if companies handling sensitive data weren't using contractors that get paid about as much as those call center workers...

At which point malice isn't even required to start losing private info to breaches

You have it backwards. The call center employee doesn't have a savings, misses rent, gets evicted and their kids taken away. The FAANG employee has a fat fucking savings account, and can live comfortably for at least 6 months while casually looking for another job.

Well, if you’re caught stealing from your employer good luck finding another job, and keeping those savings from the lawsuits coming down on you.

Many tech companies completely fail to do any kind of background check. It's easier to become an administrator at Reddit then it is to become a gas station clerk.

The FAANG employee is in high demand and therefore has implicit leverage, the call center employee does not. Whether one thinks they should or not does not matter, because the economics won’t allow it.

The amount of money needed to get a FAANG employee to exfiltrate data is by far higher than the amount of money needed to get a call center employee to exfiltrate data. That lowers the attack probability significantly since the payout must be a lot greater.

So looking/acting like a sweatshop is just a coincidence?

the difference is that they're policing somebody's own home, not company premises

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