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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

I have no problem with the general idea of needing to pay back your employer if you lie about the number of hours you've worked.

But this pervasive electronic surveillance has to stop. The end result of all that is a lot worse than someone getting away with 50 hours of paid work they didn't actually do.

Not sure how much "AI" this TimeCamp software uses, if any, but it's quite easy to imagine a near-future world where some software says you didn't do the work you said you did, and you have no recourse, and the method the software uses to determine this is proprietary and secret, and no one really can explain how or why its AI draws the conclusions it makes anyway.

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I think there’s some nuances that everyone (including the author of the article) is ignoring:

She works as a CPA for an accounting firm—-there are several types of occupations like hers where time tracking isn’t just for her employers payroll, but very likely how the firm bills its clients. Similar professions would include: architects, lawyers, etc. A lot of software tools for these professions automatically log time expressly for the purpose of billing the client. Chief Architect, for example, presents a pop up asking if the time tracker should be paused if you’re idle for too long. Her timecard fraud isn’t just stealing from her employer, but very likely causing her employer to overcharge (ie steal from) their customers. The firm would almost certainly refund the fraudulent billings to their customers, (lest they lose the customer or worse—-get sued). The money recuperate from the fired employee is most likely being allocated for this.

Amusingly, SHE sued THEM first. They would have gone to great lengths to gather data, pay attorneys, etc to demonstrate that their termination of her was justifiable. Having already invested in their own exoneration, why wouldn’t they counter sue to mitigate their losses?

How are you going to measure thinking time? That will always pop up as idle time in any tracker.

No offence but I don't believe that any of the times reported by lawyers, accountants etc charged to clients are anywhere close to realistic. In my interactions with lawyers, I was often charged 1-2h of work for writing a single one paragraph letter.

There's a business idea, develop a time tracking software that tracks if lawyers etc. are actually charging the correct time. Funnily enough while they are quite happy for their employees to use software like this, I seriously doubt they would agree to clients using the same software.

I think context switching is just as detrimental to lawyers as it is to software engineers.

Yes lawyers will never be treated the same as Amazon warehouse workers unfortunately.

Yea, scary how much we're allowing courts to simply rubber-stamp "Computer says you're wrong." If a software is going to act as a witness against me in a civil or criminal case, I would want to be able to at least cross-examine that software. Who knows how crappy and non-functional this automatic, blockchain, AI-based time tracking software is?

Did the woman deny it?

I'm fine with software making the accusation, as long as software isn't able to override the accused's sworn testimony that the accusations are false.

I’m usually guilty of not reading the whole article, but this time I did.

She admitted on video that she misrepresented some working hours “by mistake.” That video was cited in the ruling.

She admits the wrongdoing of billing for hours on projects she wasn't even involved with. She does dispute some details about how the time is calculated, but those were explored in the proceeding.

This has been an issue in criminal prosecutions. Breath machine: You are over a .08 BAC. Defendant: No I wasn't. Let me see the source code. Courts and companies: NO! It's secret. [1]

[1] https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2021/sep/15/clash-bet...

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63205335

"More than 700 Post Office managers were given criminal convictions after a new computer software system, built by the Japanese firm Fujitsu, wrongly showed money was going missing from individual branches between 2000 and 2014."

What scares me a lot is as we transition into a more automated society. There's a question I ask people a lot: "How do we transition into post scarcity? If 10% of our labor is fully automated, how do we restructure our economy?" One suggestion I've gotten from this is busy work (we also agreed that the cure might be worse than the disease). But I can see as we transition this way these tools can become extremely pervasive. We have to be thinking about these issues _now_ rather than later. (part of the question is how we make this transition while doing as little harm to people as possible, since revolution could be likely).

I don't think enough people are thinking about how small changes like these can cascade over time and become huge issues. After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

A tax-supported social safety net staves off a lot of the worst case scenarios. In the meantime, I think there are a lot of jobs that people could do but we don’t value it enough. With more people free from work, why not hire more teachers to have smaller class sizes? Why not have more people employed to support community activities? Clean and manicure the streets, teach classes, check in on elderly people. The last thing that will be automated is humans themselves.

For more ideas, just think about the things that are worth between $0 and minimum wage to do, and pay people to do those things. Picking up trash on the side of the road for example.

Interestingly, one thing I think will not be automated is sports. Be e-sports or physical. Computers could beat humans at chess for decades now yet people would far rather watch people play than computers. Same is true for any sport. I just thought this was kinda interesting, especially as someone that doesn't watch any of this.

Maybe refereeing can be automated. No one likes imperfect refs (except maybe someone who pays them to be that way).

Even though the best chess players in the world are computers, sports is more than just the pursuit of perfection. Imperfections are what make it interesting. Sports is about the story you can tell.

I'll preface this by saying that I largely agree with you. But just for shits and giggles, what kind of recourse, if any, should an employer of remote-working employees have here? If you're required to come into the office, it's pretty easy for your employer to tell when you lie about the number of hours worked. With remote work, that becomes quite the challenge. What's an acceptable stopgap?

I mean… they could pay for results instead of hours.

For a WFH desk job without real-time latency requirements, an hourly rate makes no sense at all to me.

I assure you moving to "results based pay" for the type of labor that is paid hourly will make their lives _more_ miserable, not less.

If you think measurement is abusive now, wait till everything they do is tracked and monitored to determine _results_.

That appears to be what they were already doing though. Which is why they turned on the monitoring software.

Results are most easily tracked when work is submitted; hours can only be tracked by intrusive monitoring.

I interpreted it as "this is the amount of work that should be accomplished in a week" rather than a piecework system. Basically figure out what 40 hours worth of work looks like and if that's getting done, it shouldn't be a big deal if documents aren't being opened and closed often enough.

Sounds like she should have set something up to open and close documents automatically if none have been accessed for a certain period of time.

The point you're missing is that the companies that already do that set the standards based on a 60- or 80-hour week, then say that anyone who can't do that in 40 hours is an underperformer who needs to try harder.

In my imaginary scenario, it would be based on the average output of current workers during a 40-hour workweek.

The existing companies that pull that crap ought to be reprimanded themselves. I worked for Gallup for a very short, very miserable tenure. When they casually mentioned that they had increased the number of completed surveys for a particular client required to meet quota simply because employees were meeting the quotas too easily, I got the heck out of there. The company was getting paid the same per survey by the client independent of how many surveys were completed per hour. They saw an opportunity to increase profits by decreasing bonus pay and away they went. It wasn't a one-off situation, it was SOP. I feel like I say this daily anymore, but there ought to be a law.

In doing so, I broke the half-sheet "contract" I had to sign requiring me to work for the company for at least 6 months under threat of lawsuit. Which is 110% unenforceable in my state and most others in the US. Didn't have to break the non-compete specifically, but it strongly reminds me of the way companies all over the country try to intimidate employees into staying in a crappy employment situation by making them sign scary, but completely unactionable contracts that the average employee is intended to mistake for a legitimate threat to their ability to provide for themselves and their families.

The existing companies that don’t do that give people 80 hrs of work at 50% pay.

Maybe this is a life pro tip for anyone entering a situation like this. Keep your own logs, and if they come after you because the AI said you slacked off, just point out all the times you answered a question from on-call during dinnertime or were pressured into commuting to an office so you could sit alone all day and talk on the telephone.

> If you're required to come into the office, it's pretty easy for your employer to tell when you lie about the number of hours worked.

No, it's easy to tell when you lie about the number of hours spent in the office.

If the remote-working employees are not performing to the level you require (and it seems that this woman was not, which is why they turned on the tracking in the first place) you can tell them to improve or they're out.

I think it really depends heavily on the job in question. If you are making physical widgets it is easy to track and prove you did things, but with less 'quantifiable' contributions, it just varies. I personally started a habit of documenting each meeting and interaction ( which also actually helped me to organize my rather messy approach to everything ) to make sure people know things are happening.

Seems like the crux of this ruling isn't the time tracking software per se, but the fact that she charged against files (i.e. clients) that she didn't work on.

FTA:

   "I've plugged time to files that I didn't touch and that wasn't right or appropriate in any way or fashion, and I recognize that and so for that I'm really sorry," Besse said in a meeting with her company, according to video cited in the ruling.

It’s not pervasive - they got her permission to install the tracking software after it became clear she wasn’t working the hours she claimed. Then she continued to falsify her time sheets.

At least we’ll also have software which can pretend that you’re working over usb keyboard, mouse and webcam simulator. I think this startup will have a lot of monetary potential.

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