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Comment by vincnetas | Hacker News Reader

If you would treat devs like warehouse workers right now,all devs would run away. I mean force them to be 100% effective all the 8 hours and track every move they make. On the other hand allow warehouse workers flexible schedule and decent pay so they could live decent life by puting in 20 hours a week (even while measuring every move they make) and i bet there would be devs who would convert to warehouse workers.

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If you would treat devs like warehouse workers right now,all devs would run away. I mean force them to be 100% effective all the 8 hours and track every move they make.

CleverControl employee monitoring pitch: "This software offers powerful features: keylogging, screen recording, live viewing, remote settings, clipboard control, Skype monitoring, and more. The software records time that was spent on this or that activity and shows you stats in graphs. Besides, the app captures screenshots at all important events like right-clicking and window change, and it can record activity near the device with the help of a webcam and microphone. Moreover, CleverControl records employees’ active and inactive time, letting you detect lazybones and reward hard work."

This would trigger Italian strike in me (as a dev) immediately :)

"Another unconventional tactic is work-to-rule (also known as an Italian strike, in Italian: Sciopero bianco), in which workers perform their tasks exactly as they are required to but no better."

can they already do this with all the data they have in github? Not that I would endorse it, but that sounds like better data for tracking. Instead of enforcing time you enforce activities.

No this is massively more invasive than checking your commit history. Github doesn't know moment to moment what you're doing while these invasive tracking programs do.

my point is that they can already do this with commit history (and more), while this is an inferior way of tracking, regardless of privacy concerns.

Commit history only tells them when you do commits... these tools tell you what people are doing between commits. There's no way a single tool's history gives more information than logging every keystroke and monitoring the screen... At best it's a less noisy stream but doesn't contain nearly as much information.

I heard about these tracking software and I sincerely hope they won't get any more prevalent. As I see they are somewhat present in the contracting world.

I treat it as a total, humiliating devaluation of creative engineering work (and thus their identity!) to that of unskilled factory workers.

Eventually, maybe developers will realize that they have a lot more in common with those "unskilled" workers they disdain than they do with their capitalist owners.

Unions would be helpful for both, in my view.

anyone employed anywhere should be unionized, thats just common sense

Put so much demands that they work for 12 hours per day 6 days per week, while nominal time is 8 hours and 4 days - rest is unpaid overtime.

This is how it works already in many companies, also infamous 996

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