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Comment by nexuist | Hacker News Reader

IMO this doesn't go away until we get rid of the 8 hour model. Stop caring about how much time (salaried) people are spending at work. If workers participate in meetings, remain reachable during the work day, and meet deadlines, why does it matter if they're on their work laptop for 30 minutes or 8 hours?

OTOH, this monitoring stuff makes sense for hourly paid jobs where the employee has to deliver a certain amount of completed items per hour. But that's the exception, not the norm.

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> this monitoring stuff makes sense for hourly paid jobs where the employee has to deliver a certain amount of completed items per hour.

Couldn't you just monitor that deliverable directly? Why would you have to monitor anything else?

I've observed this issue over and over at a dozen tech companies I worked for. They're not interested in deliverables IMO, they're interested in employee head count and total compliance.

Yeah, I've noticed something similar. If feels to me kind of like everyone who has people working below them are interested in having a story that prevents them from being fired if something goes wrong. "Hey, I had everyone working 50 hour weeks. So it clearly wasn't my fault." Because random events can make things go wrong at any time, there's always a pressure to have all your ducks in a row.

Apparently, just saying your employees were working a bunch of hours and having time sheets to back you up isn't enough proof for some people. Enter employee monitoring software. Prove to your bosses that you can't be fired because you made a bunch of people jiggle a mouse for 8 hours.

Yeah, it probably makes sense when there isn't an output product, like minding the counter - pay for an hour of time, doesn't really matter if you ring up 100 customers or the store is dead and you literally get no customers.

I agree with you. Salaried workers are paid based on doing a job, not based on time, so who cares what hours they work as long as the job is getting done?

It is the incompetent butt-in-chair managers and other talentless cling-ons in the tech industry that concern themselves with such trivial nonsense because they don't have the skills necessary to discern productivity in any other way.

I mostly agree with you; but what if knowing being “available for work” means being available for a specific 8 hours of the day is crucial to my mental health?

On call is brutal. What if I want to go camping, hiking, on a road trip? I’m only on call once a month and it still drives me crazy that I lose my freedom for that week.

I've realized that people who are task oriented lean more towards creative. People who are effort oriented tend to want management positions.

My manger complain, "I was so busy I had six hours of meeting"

My fellow dev would say, "I was nose down. I really wanted to get that status message to stop flickering"

My manager would report that there was 15% more story points completed over last sprint

My dev would report that the new grid view is complete and is ready to go to QA.

People who work together often have fundamental different ideas of what success looks like.

> IMO this doesn't go away until we get rid of the 8 hour model. Stop caring about how much time (salaried) people are spending at work.

Does getting rid of 8 hour days just turn into 24/7 work, in the same way that unlimited vacation time turned into less vacation time?

> in the same way that unlimited vacation time turned into less vacation time?

I think these are both related to culture. My company went to unlimited vacation earlier this year and people have been noticeably taking more PTO than before. I ran the numbers and I've used an extra week so far than I would have been allowed otherwise.

Maybe other teams haven't been taking as much, but as far as I can tell people are taking advantage of this because we've all heard the unlimited PTO leading to less time off stories, we don't want that to happen here.

It won't go away until your employers are contractually or legally unable to do so. If you're passionate about this, you'll have to get your fellow workers on your side and make your demands collectively.

>this monitoring stuff makes sense for hourly paid jobs where the employee has to deliver a certain amount of completed items per hour.

Ah, yes, so we have the 2 hours per day salaried remote-work six-figures compensation tech class and the 10 hour per day full surveillance janitorial wage class. We are so content so serve you, milord.

Rest assured that we will join the "janitorial class" as soon as our management can figure out how to quantify software deliverables. I give it 10 years.

> Stop caring about how much time (salaried) people are spending at work.

Personally I think salaried work is the problem. "Meeting deadlines" only makes sense as long as the deadlines are reasonable, and how do we decide if they are reasonable other than how much time they take? There's always more work to do, always more bugs that can be fixed, code or processes that can be improved, etc. At least in software engineering, salaried work makes no sense to me at all, and my eventual goal is to become hourly, because otherwise it's just a nebulous set of expectations and constant (explicit or implied) negotiating about how much time is worked.

It should also be easier to do less than 8 hours a day, but I view that as a mostly separate issue than the salaried vs hourly discussion. Salaried work just is just another way of saying the company gets free overtime work out of its employees.

You sell your hours to the employer at a bulk discount rate, but in return you get predictability of income independent of actual work load. This is a compromise most people are happy with.

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