Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

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Devil's advocate: I think the idea with the app isn't to figure out if you're in the building, but rather whether you're moving around within the building in a manner consistent with the fingerprint of doing your particular job. A janitor could clock in and then just sit around in the custodial storage area doing nothing, and a card-based system would be none the wiser. But the app would identify that as "not working."

The app isn't to know whether you're on the clock; the app is a digital whip cracker to keep employees constantly working 100% of the time that they claim to be working.

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Which, in theory, wouldn't be a bad thing... if this was combined with a sufficient number of break-minutes per day, to be spent flexibly. Whenever you're not doing the "doing your job" movement pattern, the app could automatically mark you as being on break. If they calibrated the number of break-minutes to the actual average observed productivity of employees in each role across the industry, then the app would have a useful output — allowing employers to figure out who's doing less work than average. (And employees+unions could also use the data as evidence for uncompensated overtime disputes.)

But of course such a system won't be used/configured that way. Employers will instead wrong-headedly assume that their employees should be capable of productive output 100% of the time that they're not on their 90 minutes per shift of legally-mandated break time; and then will randomly punish/fire employees for taking "extra" breaks, even when those "extra" breaks merely bring them to the industry average level of productivity.

A janitor certainly could clock in then sit around in the custodial storage area doing nothing. They could also clock in and wonder around the building doing nothing. If the concern is really whether they are doing their job, management can easily verify by just checking whether the job was done.

You presume management has the capability to judge the quality of the work.

Janitorial work — like, say, being a sysadmin — doesn't necessarily result in instant visible problems if you just decide to skip work one day. The problems are probabilistic, and often consist of smaller problems that compound over time. In this sort of job, you can frequently "get away with" not doing your job for a few hours, at the expense of working a bit harder the rest of the day; you can sometimes even "get away with" not doing your job for a day or two, at the expense of likely having to do a bit of "fire-fighting" work when you get back, rather than only prophylactic maintenance work. In either case, your absence won't necessarily be noted, if you're not part of a team with a supervisor specifically attuned to the KPIs you're delivering on.

In jobs where "when you're doing the job right, nobody notices", the reverse also applies: as long as nobody is noticing anything going wrong, then they assume you're doing your job.

If nobody notices any difference then is there a problem? Why can't they work harder on even days and less hard on odd days if they want?

In your sysadmin example if someone prevents problems from happening they'd look worse than someone who constantly reacts. This already happens, why make it worse with an automated system?

Some things might not be noticeable, such as disinfecting certain surfaces or performing routine maintenance such as cleaning filters until it’s too late.

Yep. This is why humans invented trust and consequences, though. Most people aren't dicks if you aren't dicks to them, and I'd rather discover the exceptions and fire them than treat everyone like one.

Trust doesn’t scale. And scaling results in much bigger rewards.

I’d say it’s more accurate that humans have had to rely on trust due to lack of alternatives, but transparency will always be preferred.

You don't need to scale supervision on janitors. You can just hire some people and pay them some money. If you can't afford enough supervisors to keep a vague eye on what's going on, live with dirtier buildings or go out of business.

In general I think some things scale well and others don't. Why is it that HN recognizes outsourcing your tech to try and scale fails but other jobs aren't as worthy?

You are not going to check if it has been done by monitoring where the janitor goes.

> You presume management has the capability to judge the quality of the work.

I presume there was a job which needed doing, which is why management hired someone to do it. Management may have difficulty evaluating the quality or extent of the work done on any given day, but they should at least be able to evaluate whether it was done at all.

My point is location tracking doesn't provide management any assurances that the employee has done their job at all, much less how well they did it. It's a breach of the employee's privacy which doesn't even further management's goals any more than my privacy-respecting scanner solution.

> It's a breach of the employees privacy which doesn't even further management's goals any more than my privacy-respecting scanner solution.

One of my businesses is currently involved in a lawsuit by someone claiming they suffered a loss due to injury from stepping on a landscaping rock (about 3in x 2in x 1in) in the parking lot. They apparently took a picture of the rock, which was adjacent to the curb. The lawyer is claiming the business is responsible for ensuring the parking lot is clear of obstacles.

The crux of the case is not about whether or not this event even took place or if this person is faking it, they don’t have to prove that without wasting a lot of my insurance company’s money. The important part of the case is whether or not the business took reasonable steps to ensure the parking lot was free of obstruction.

For this, the plaintiff’s lawyer has deposed the facilities’ manager, the landscaping company, and any staff working that day. All incredibly costly procedural tactics to try and get a settlement. Which they most likely will get from the insurance company.

However, these legal costs might be avoided if I could produce electronic logs proving the facilities manager performed routine inspection duties. This is one example of when breaching an employees’ privacy in the manner in question can further management’s goal (and bottom line).

I'm no attorney, but were I in charge of representing the plaintiff and you presented logs showing your facilities manager's locations throughout the day of the incident, my first question would be something like "how does this prove he verified the parking lot was clear?"

It's the same issue. Knowing where the janitor was is not the same as knowing whether she did her job. Knowing where your facilities manager was is not the same as knowing whether he did his.

Like I said, IANAL. I have no idea how well that would hold up in court. Regardless, I'm confident security cameras would be at least just as effective for defending your business in cases like this.

Because it’s not about proving they verified the parking lot was clear. It’s about proving the business did what is “reasonable” to prevent the problem. It’s why those wet floor signs are so important. The business is being attacked, and the insurance company is looking for any holes in the defense.

Any holes in the offense don’t matter, because the plaintiff isn’t going to suffer any loss, and their lawyer is working on commission.

So the only person that stands to lose is business and insurance company. Insurance company will fight if it’s open and shut, meaning they don’t think they will have to risk a lot of legal fees trying to shoot down various plaintiff’s claims.

But if it looks like plaintiff could drag this out and find a possibility of culpability on behalf of the business, the insurance company will pay to make them go away. And the business’ insurance premiums will rise.

Security camera footage would of course be the gold standard in this case. But storing video for so long and having so many cameras is also costly. Using GPS to prove your employee did their duties of at least inspecting the parking lot by showing they walked around it at various times might be something the insurance company can use in their defense.

Also, in my specific example, the plaintiff waited almost 11 months to file their lawsuit. These type of people know to wait as long as the legal system allows them to, to increase the likelihood the business has misplaced or thrown out records and memories get fuzzy.

> Because it’s not about proving they verified the parking lot was clear. It’s about proving the business did what is “reasonable” to prevent the problem.

If that's the case, isn't your business already going what is "reasonable" by virtue of employing a facilities manager whose job includes ensuring the grounds are clear of dangerous obstructions while the facility is in operation?

Regardless, this scenario doesn't really jive with my assertion that it should be illegal for employers to track their employees. Were that the case, the court's definition of what is "reasonable" could not include maintaining records of your employees' locations throughout the workday, as doing so would be illegal. Although your scenario does at least provide a hypothetical for why a business would consider tracking employees in the absence of such a law. Hopefully courts never set a precedent to actively encourage that kind of tracking.

In a civil suit, what's "reasonable" is up for debate, and it depends on how much you want to spend on lawyer time to prove it. The lesson is clear, if it's cheap enough, then arming yourself with more information is only beneficial to you. So much that it might make business sense to violate the employees' privacy.

The ability to track people's precise locations due to the proliferation of smartphones and various wireless technologies is pretty new, and probably hasn't been tested in various court cases yet.

I know at one point, it was enough to have paper logs of your drivers. But now, electronic GPS tracking is so cheap and commonplace, that the court might say as a business, it is your responsibility to utilize it to ensure your drivers are not regularly speeding.

The problem with civil cases is there are few well defined standards. And if you're in the sweet spot where your business is doing well enough to be a nice target, but not well enough to have lawyers on staff who can deal with swatting them down, then you've got some decent risk exposure you need to address. And the best way to do that is to have as much information as possible.

I'm sure the only reason this issue of tracking is coming up is only because it's so incredibly cheap to track them, since the employee already has a phone on them, the access points or wireless signals are already there, it costs almost nothing to physically download the app and enable functionality, and it costs almost nothing to store this data. At that point, it's a calculation of do we spend this minimal fee to protect from a host of litigation where we can prove this person was at this place at this time.

I find that many of my friends who are office employees or haven't operated a public facing business are unaware of these types of problems that you don't have to deal with when you don't physically entertain random people of the public, thereby greatly reducing your risk exposure to these kinds of scams.

>Regardless, this scenario doesn't really jive with my assertion that it should be illegal for employers to track their employees.

Yes, if it was illegal, it would eliminate this problem. But my intent was to show that at least some of the impetus might not be to make the employees' life worse.

But then checking where the janitor is, is like checking whether a programmer is typing.

i'm a janitor and i hear about it any time i forgot to check paper products in a bathroom. managment are all experienced janitors that can easily tell if work's been done.

i mean, a toilet might need to be descaled. the well to tell is to look at the toilet.

> You presume management has the capability to judge the quality of the work.

If they don't have that capability then they shouldn't be managing that type of work. That goes for any industry.

You're not fit for management if you can't judge the work of those you are managing.

If we start mandating that managers be competent we're going to lose a large proportion of managers.

The janitor is also, typically, the one who is going to sound the alarm first about things that need to be inspected in the building or further looked at.

In a school district where they have custodial staff on the payroll (not contracted) there's also sometime a bit of on-call.

The article says that the app only logs when they enter/exit the geofence, not how they move around inside the building. Not to say that they wouldn't want to do that if they could, but GPS location is not really reliable indoors.

Easily fixed with subsonic transmitters or bluetooth beacons

Both are used heavily in tracking apps ( think shopkick if it still exists )

Yup. Anything metal messes with GPS. Phones have fallback modes but they can fail spectacularly at times. Even outdoors--sometimes my phone won't navigate sitting on the passenger seat (The GPS constellation guarantees a minimum of 4 satellites above the horizon, it doesn't guarantee 4 satellites in positions that won't be blocked by your car roof.) If you drive onto the property with your phone on your person or in a purse on the passenger seat the geofence might fail to detect it.

There's a boss somewhere who didn't look into this well enough.

I'll be completely honest: it's pretty easy to know if a building has been cleaned by just... being in the building.

To me, this sounds like one layer of bureaucrats trying to justify their jobs. Truth is, with unionized school districts, for every custodian doing the job, minor maintenance and inspections, there are a few bureaucrats in offices looking at spreadsheet and attending government sponsored management seminars on how to streamline the organization...

Nope

If you cannot tell the space has been cleaned, get new glasses. If you can tell and it is dirty, give me a warning and then fire me. Otherwise nunyabizness

Those are pretty good glasses if you can see the covid virus on surfaces.

Speaking of things the CDC has recently finally admitted isn't actually that important...

Or they could have some check if things are cleaned. We accept so much detailed tracking when in reality it is unnecessary and open to abuse.

I imagine more detailed tracking will result in lower insurance premiums as culpability can be more easily established. This will give a competitive advantage to those that implement detailed tracking.

It might not be a competitive advantage to disrespect your employees.

Unfortunately, there are large swaths of jobs where the employees don't have much choice, so there is no competitive disadvantage either.

You can either pay someone $20 an hour and give them a sense of responsibility, autonomy, & pride, or you can pay them $10 an hour and just coerce them to do the job.

Which do we reward?

Based on the proportion of businesses that exist utilizing the latter, it indicates we are rewarding the latter. Most people are very price sensitive.

The cost of the tracking plus the cost of employee moral disappearing won't give you that competitive advantage plus the other extras youhave to do to maintain that rate (do you have a logbook of the times you had the unit serviced, semi-yearly maintance is required at your cost)

It could (and does in my experience) as the cost of tracking goes down to practically nothing. If the employee has options to work elsewhere, then the employee morale might enter into the equation. But as far as I can see, even doctors and pharmacists are tracked nowadays. Drivers are tracked more than ever, dash cams are becoming regular. Call center employees have been tracked for a long time now. Hotel employees have iPads where they go through their checklist.

And if you're indoors in a public business setting, there's a near certainty you're on camera for any big business. Of course, there's a difference in tracking minute by minute movement, but my point is that we went from no tracking to quite a bit of tracking already, and I don't see any reason why this won't become widespread either (absent laws preventing it).

Teaching people to be tracked is always a bad thing. If a janitor isn't doing their job then it will become evident quickly enough or their manager isn't paying attention and both will eventually be fired. Not everything has to be done and observed down to the microsecond.

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