Hacker News Reader

Is there any actual advantage business advantage in being so draconian or is it just spiteful? Like my cushy programming job has made me soft but why not just measure performance by their actual performance? I can go to the bathroom or make a pot of coffee whenever I want, and I suspect the happiness that brings increases performance.

View on HN

Talking out of my ass here because I don't know either, but maybe in these kinds of jobs, happiness doesn't really increase performance. If your job is 90% just reading out the FAQs page to customers or handling the exact same problem 50 times a day, its probably more an automatic process that the longer you sit at your desk, the more calls you are able to process and when your job has such a large supply, the contracts go out to whoever is cheapest.

Having worked in a call center myself at one point, I'd say the primary difference is the directly-customer-facing nature of that work. When a call comes in (and there are often a large number of simultaneous calls) someone has to be there at their desk to receive it - whereas with yours and my current gigs, the worst that'll happen is some production issue with a reasonable SLA.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com