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Comment by suddenclarity | Hacker News Reader

> Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished.

This always comes across as people wanting to have the cake and eat it. Employers should only care that the work is getting done, but if the work isn't done, then the employee should still be able to go home after 8 hours and get full salary?

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If the work is not getting done, spying on people isn’t going to improve things. If you want people to work, you have to properly motivate them. That means fair wages and non-toxic management.

So you are assuming that if someone is not doing a good job, it is because they are paid unfairly and/or in a toxic env ? Thats a lot of assumption. How about the deadbeats ? Do they exist or not ?

If you can't tell your deadbeat employees without logging every minute of their workday, you are a terrible manager and should be fired.

> but if the work isn't done, then the employee should still be able to go home after 8 hours and get full salary?

Of course not. If the work isn't getting done, then the employee should be fired. And that's the case even with the surveillance.

That being said, there's also a difference between progress and meeting goals. Employees can put in 100% for a full 8 hours and still miss a deadline (poor scheduling, issues/roadblocks that arise, or maybe they're not good at the job). I think a lot of the tension between management and workers is because much modern work isn't assembly-line-deterministic x widgets-per-hour.

You have to pay full salary regardless of whatever you deem work is and however you judge the status to be done or not. You can ask the employee to stay longer do it enough and that employee now pushes off their night and starts coming in later to.. because they are going to be staying late anyways. And nothing gets done after 5pm aside from making plans to hit the bar at 7/8/9. The CEO notices this and this employee has a rep of staying late. Soon he is your boss.

What would you rather have again? An employee finishing early sounds good to me

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