TikTok Rankles Employees with Return-to-Office Tracking Tools | Hacker News Reader

TikTok Rankles Employees with Return-to-Office Tracking Tools

nytimes.com

41 pointsWoollyMammoth23 comments

I work for non-tech company. I report to VP. He doesn’t care if I work 30 or 40 hours. Sometimes I work more, and sometimes I work less to clear my mind. What he cares about is deliverables.

I want to try a new challenge but I have a hard time finding a corporation that does this. There is always annoying cringey slogans about “collaboration”.

I have built large gaming communities. Hosted servers and worked with other people all over the planet. But some execs just want ass in the seats.

Metrics like "engagement" and "butts in seats" are preferred by many leaders over deliverables and profit because they are fuzzy and easy to manipulate. Hours spent by employees may seem concrete, but we all know an hour spent working doesn't have a definite or consistent output. Hopefully that attitude becomes more embarrassing for employers to have, because I'm certainly embarrassed for the ones who care about how many hours of "work" they've extracted from you or whether you work remote.

I worked in a company which decided to make employees to come back to the office during the pandemic.

The metrics of performance and delivery were somewhat public and people pointed out that performance had increased due to a lack of distractions and interruptions.

The high leadership said the numbers meant nothing and people should return immediately. I will come back to this point.

Many many people did not comply with basic health requirements like using alcohol frequently nor using face masks. One specific case was a "tech lead" who was infected with COVID but only used an open face shield without a mask. He went to the office even being sick and he got at least 5 cases that could be directly attributed to him.

One of my team mates complained because to me and as lead for that team I tried to mitigate the problem.

To make the story short, the face shield guy was praised by higher ranks and I was reprehended to stay with my team mate.

I left the company about one year ago but my team mate stayed.

Recently the company used the same numbers to layoff 25% of people due to poor performance.

I am glad to say that one person had a video of the executive saying that the numbers meant nothing and used that to win a legal dispute with the company. All dismissed employees have received 1 year of salary and had all benefits extended for that period.

Not the best solution I assume but better than nothing

My employers have always cared that I am working for 40 hours. Work less and my pay gets docked. Work more and I make less per hour.

> "the MyRTO dashboard"

nice. dealing with these office theatrics after so many years feels utterly demoralising and demeaning.

need to find a way out...

Easy, retire. That's the only way out. For most of us it'll never happen.

Something whispered about by the MBA set right now is how the recent hard RTO push at these companies is a form of "stealth layoffs". Don't have to pay severance if someone quits voluntarily.

I doubt TikTok has too many old-school types who just love being in office given they had barely a few hundred employees in the US prior to 2019, and didn't exist as a company until 2016, so it's a good control for the "outdated middle managers just want butts in seats/so they can exert power" theory (which as a prior middle manager myself I just didn't see in any of the hundreds of other tech EMs I interacted with).

TikTok did however scale from <500 US employees in Jan 2020 to >8,400(!) today. They set an aggressive hiring target of 10,000 employees by 2023 when the economy was going strong. Lots of biz dev and recruiting people amongst them who aren't required in a (predicted) recessionary cycle. So by forcing RTO and making it unpleasant, the rational conclusion (imo) is that they're hoping to thin the ranks.

Here's an article from CNBC about it:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/12/why-rto-mandates-are-layoffs...

they can hire those outdated middle managers from elsewhere

“So how is productivity? Are the employees getting their work done well and on time?”

“Please, we’re not wasting time on unimportant things like that. We’re focused on the most important metric for any company: how many microseconds a particular butt is in a particular seat.”

> “So how is productivity? Are the employees getting their work done well and on time?”

I can guarantee that this will not be measured because it will make RTO bosses look bad.

as if only TikTok is doing this...Stripe has their own attendance tracking tool as well, go/attendance.

Surely this is just a direct statement that managers have no clue what their reports are up to. Any vaguely competent manager with even a passing contact with people they're managing will know all of this and more already.

> Surely this is just a direct statement that managers have no clue what their reports are up to. Any vaguely competent manager with even a passing contact with people they're managing will know all of this and more already.

By this point in 2023 in the world of social media, everyone knows that management in tech industry is a joke. Leeches who thrive off the labor of the real brains.

This is why there is so much backlash against RTO, and so much quiet quitting and so much job hopping. Until corporate structures continue to treat people like fungible headcount, people will treat corporations like fungible source of money.

typo (Until corporate structures STOP treating people like fungible headcount)

corporations in the SF Bay Area often use contractors for hard work with deadlines.. twenty five years ago, employee salary at corporations generally started sliding downward.. thirty years of continuously rising executive pay however. Tech jockeys under thirty years old are a special case

I actually think it's not about the low level managers. I think those folks are more permissive than what senior leadership would like, hence these stupid tracking tools. If your report gets stuff done then you don't care that they are in the office. Senior leadership just sees a bunch of engineers who cost money and they want to maximize ROI. And, they see the bottom rung of managers enabling these slothful engineers to remain lazy, which is why these internal tracking tools are created.

Bottom rung managers are at the same place as ICs. They are the ones meant to do the dirty job for the "leadership".

I confirm what you said. I preferred my team to choose where they work from but C level made everyone come back to the office. During pandemic they installed key trackers and screen copying tools. They also generate metrics of performance based on number of keys and calls you made besides the number of times your computer locks for lack of activity.

Since people have returned to the office, the tools were kept and low level leadership are constantly being pressed to improve those numbers.

I sincerely hope that your reports are aware of this nonsense. If not, please be a kind manager and make them aware that these BS metrics are being measured.

Wow that's crazy. What unbelievably moronic policies.

I suspect this is happening a lot more than people realize. Even before the pandemic, in office, there was a layer of HR tracking and activity that was deliberately opaque to the people being tracked.

Now throw in a "need" to be aggressively tracking this stuff with WFH, the existing opaque structures, and now it all exists already when people RTO.

Companies not doing more invasive tracking are probably the exception or too small to pull it off.

Note: Pretty much no large companies have provided data points on why it's better to RTO, even if they're very data driven.

People assume this means they have no data and just want it. Really? Wouldnt that be a bit irresponsible to shareholders? A more likely scenario is they have data that they don't want to discuss publicly.

Every company has been trying to explore a office/home tracking system

My company added a book "work from home" to the holiday/absence booking system, even though it can be several days a week, you need to book/justify everytime

The full time remote worker has so many spyware it gives anxiety, watch desktop, view camera, websites accessed, files written...

They say they respect developers privacy, and wont be paying attention, and I believe just because they are too busy at the moment to follow-up on anything. But as soon as things start to tighten up, it has all the ingredients to turn bad

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/business/tiktok-return-to...

https://archive.ph/FxRvC

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