Leaked screenshot shows Amazon now tracking individual employee attendance
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Like I realize this is charged up by the work from home discussion, but I'd expect any building with a badge to get in the door to be tracking those events, at the very least to detect unauthorized access, but also to detect folks claiming to be working when they're not even there. Basic fraud prevention stuff really.
We need eye trackers and brain implants to make sure the workers aren't looking at something else or thinking about non work related tasks too. I don't want to pay these parasites a single cent for idle time /s
It seems to be less about "How many hours were you in the building?" than "Which days did you come to the building?" which tracks compliance with an RTO mandate that even affects salaried employees.
Side note, but when I worked somewhere with badged entrances, one person would badge the whole group. So this data wouldn't mean employees aren't there if there is no swipe.
But, random software company in the suburbs? First person off the elevator badges and everybody else follows.
I think it's outrageous to look at it this way. Tracking for security, safety, or insurance purposes—sure. Maybe even to make it easier to post your hours.
Tracking to detect who is working and how many bathroom breaks they take—that's not the way to go. We're humans right? Surely there are ways to detect when someone doesn't fulfil a task they were supposed to.
Given the way Amazon treats their warehouse workers, I'm more surprised folks don't already assume they Big Brother their office workers in a similar way.
...Amazon would just fire him for wasting time in the bathroom. Still a great worker, just needs more time than the average. What a great future we are working towards.
In my particular case, I've made extensive use of the ADA to make sure that I don't have to deal with any BS about bathroom breaks etc. Of course I work in IT so I'm pretty privileged compared to a guy slaving away in an Amazon warehouse.
If you're someone who needs the protections of the ADA, you should make sure your HR team knows what accommodations you need.
I have a disability that isn't obvious, and have to routinely make sure that my leaders are aware of the accommodations I need. I've had HR actively take action on my behalf when certain middle managers didn't know, or care, to support those accommodations. In one incident, they fired a manager over their lack of support.
While I hate that I need to do it, it tends to be worth it to make sure your company knows what you need.
I'd also like to think that, should I ever get fired because HR didn't manage to intervene in a similar situation as described, the dispute would be more likely to go my way. It at least removes the ability for the company to say "we didn't know about the disability."
Had colon cancer
Has a colostomy
Was fired during my treatment
I'm very aware of how companies can try to discriminate against employees who are disabled. If Amazon tries to fire this guy for not meeting his "quota," then they also need to demonstrate that they've made reasonable accommodations. They also need to carefully document his performance issues. Juries are very amenable to a plaintiff suing for unfair dismissal.
Yes, this requires having enough money to hire a good lawyer, or finding one either working pro bono or willing to work on a contingency basis. Or finding an agency like the EEOC etc which will help with this.
The alternative is to just say "too bad" and let companies get away with this shit.
When you said "The alternative is to just say 'too bad' and let companies get away with this shit" there were no pronouns or whatever indicating the subject of the verbs "say" and "let". I assumed the subject of the sentence was a broad "we, as a society, over the next several decades", whereas I'm now realizing you meant "one, as an individual caught in this particularly tragic moment."
Thank you for clarifying.
A union only works if you were part of the union before you were fired unjustly. Without that, "too bad" is indeed often the best you can do.
I was once in the hospital with acute pancreatitis. It was unplanned, and would have killed me had I not made it to the ER. The company I was working for at the time "let me go" because I'd gone two days without showing up to work. Given that during those two days I was unconscious and nearly dead, that would have been impossible to do.
When I spoke to a lawyer, they were very clear that the company had broken the law (FMLA protects people in situations like mine), but that fighting it would cost me a lot of money, and that there was no guarantee I'd win. I fought them anyways. I spent months fighting them, and spent thousands of dollars. The company ended up receiving a fine for less that what I paid in lawyer fees, and that's it. No payout for me, no resolution. The state felt the case was at least strong enough to justify the fine, but not strong enough to justify anything else.
So, yeah, sometimes "too bad" is about all we get.
> A union only works if you were part of the union
Likewise, shoes only fit if you wear them, medicine only works if you take it, and wings only provide lift if you push air over them.
That’s not new either, but it is pretty new for professionals in software. It’s also historically not how salaried employment worked. Salaried employment meant you’re paid a salary and you get your job done or lose your job. No one is tracking your time in any way, and you are afforded a certain amount of trust. Your performance is based on your output as judged by your managers. Paid time off accounting scuttled this for salaried people, but this is a next level of bean counting for salaried professionals.
Answers to those questions have changed over the last 6 months.
> "We're providing this data to help guide conversations as needed between employees and managers about coming into the office with their colleagues," said the memo, obtained by Insider.
The HR-speak / corp-speak really rubbers the wrong nerve with me, most probably because at $DAYJOB this started to be more and more a things in the last 18 months. I understand that an official company statement has to use a certain tone and wording but constructs like "help guide conversations" just means "your boss will scold you for this in your next 1:1".
This probably means it's high-time for me to go back to a smaller place.
Maybe we’ll see something similar from other big tech cos in the near future, since they all use the same consulting firms for these decisions.
Attrition is probably also a part of it. However, I’ve heard there’s a strongly negative bias working again Amazon in that attrition where only top talent is attriting and they’re loading up on bottom quartile who are coming into the office every day to try to cling to their job.
Why don’t they just come out and say that?
I don’t disagree, but that doesn’t explain these actions right? Amazon would be free to have a policy which was not enforced by badge tracking — leaving things up to managers and establishing a culture norm of in-office work with flexibility was pretty much standard pre-COVID. Surely the city isn’t asking for attendance records.
I guess it’s likely a confluence of factors (tax breaks, monetary incentives, old-guard management, real-estate portfolio losses, resentment toward engineers they perceive to be lazy) pointing in the same direction.
First Corporate Normal Form is messaging derogatories, or things perceived as such, to have a unoffensive coating and makes speaking about them not immediately trigger your fight or flight response.
On a related note, George Carlin has a funny skit about how messaging has gotten softer over the years that you might enjoy.
People can debate endlessly over the benefits, or not, of working in an office but it’s a perfectly reasonable thing for a company to want its workers to show up at an office and reasonable to measure if they actually do. This is a non story.
"If you hire someone to fix the plumbing in your house and you pay him by the hour, would you check that he worked what he's asking or do you pay blindly?"
Yes "Amazon bad" and whatnot but in the end it all boils down to the same thing, we live in a society where you want what you pay for, whether you're an individual or a company.
And as a plumber, if you don't want to be checked or followed by some annoying customer, you ask to be paid for the completed job, not by the hour.
Because I’ve been a consultant hired hourly, and I would never agree to that kind of surveillance. If you don’t trust me, don’t hire me.
The output of the work should be all that matters. Back to your point, if the plumber fixed the problem for what seems like a reasonable amount of time, why would I need to follow them around?
It all depends on the nature of the consultancy agreement. If you work for the financial industry as a consultant you can expect to allow monitoring.
I don't know of a single place that makes the law clear, but if you dig in a bit, you can find a lot of resources that describe the legal differences between contractors and employees. One thing that's evident in nearly anything you can find is that contractors basically have no protections.
The IRS doesn't care in the slightest if an employer monitors a contractor.
The key difference between the two is precisely that employers are not presumed to watch and control how a contractor works.
I've been a consultant and an employee many times in my career. You can take any variation of the following sentence and it'll remain true:
I've worked for a company as a [ hourly consultant | salaried employee | per project consultant ] that [ monitored my every keystroke | monitored attendance | monitored nothing ].
Every variation is possible, and I've seen every variation.
Exactly, but how can I trust you without knowing you ? Trust but verify right ?
I've also been a consultant and worked in a place where they manage sensitive data. They told you on day 1 that the computer they provided is monitored for everything and that they can take screenshot from time to time. If you don't agree, you don't work there.
> The output of the work should be all that matters.
Not when you're hired hourly/weekly/monthly, the output is irrelevant. If a company hire you for your time, it means that your time is at "their" disposal. If they tell you to be at the office during that time, you're supposed to be there.
And if they think that it's best for them to have you sit in a room with 20 other zoom callers for the possibility that you might talk with someone down the hall and that it might raise the revenue, that's their decision.
Work is a business relation between 2 entities with rules in place, if 1 entity doesn't like some rules, the relation stops.
And as they are paying, they have the right to verify that they receive what they're paying for, whatever it is.
Just like it's my decision to accept that I must pay the plumber for his time when I ask him to explain me some stuff about my boiler that I could read online.
Especially for "subscription" services. I've found it's best to trust, but verify that they are coming out as frequently as you're paying them to and doing everything you're paying them for. It's not even a malice thing; humans make mistakes.
I hire you to change the electrical panel and you charge me X to do it, I'll leave you alone and might even leave the house because the electricity is out.
If I pay 150$/h to have something fixed, you can be sure I won't be far.
But if I want to watch them work, I ask first if it's ok for them.
Germany disagrees with you. This kind of employee surveillance is illegal.
[1]: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/arbeitszeiterfassung-stechu... (in German)
it seems to be mostly true to me, though Germany may be an exception
Workers who have entered the workforce in the last few years, especially technology workers, seem to have a sense of entitlement and privilege previously unheard of.
I hate to break it to those of you in this camp, but life is hard. You have to go to work to make money and build a career for yourself. Your manager will probably ask you to come into the office at a location that is inconvenient for you and involves hours of weekly commuting time, and you'll have to decide whether you'll sacrifice your commute time for a paycheck and a chance at building your future career.
When we eventually get a recession (it will inevitably happen, sooner or later) these workers are going to have the rudest awakening ever when they discover that yes, you actually do have to work for money, and no, your manager is not required to pay you or keep you employed if you directly disobey an order like "please come into the office 3 days a week."
Many tech organizations genuinely do not reap the benefits of working in-office like some other fields might.
If I were an automotive design engineer, being in-person in the company's design studio would make sense; if I'm developing a highly abstracted and distributed messaging system, what office resources would I utilizing?
From my experience, in-office interactions are not necessarily more productive than online interactions. In fact, when a team has a good grasp of the remote-working tools, we, more often than not, end up communicating more succinctly and effectively.
"Life is hard," sure, but no need to make it any harder than it needs to be.
The fact that we _can_ get work done remotely doesn't mean it's the most effective way for software engineers (which make up most engineering teams these days) to work.
If every person instead operated a bit more like a company, rather than a vassal, they’d be a little more assertive in their negotiating of boundaries.
Goddamn, can you BELIEVE that expectations change over time? What kind of bullshit is that?
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I won't bother to add the sarcasm tag for the humor impaired here, but if you don't believe that most remote workers are actually (checks notes) working, the problem is not with the remote workers. Bosses can demand whatever the hell they want, sure. But if it turns out that some bosses don't demand everybody come back to the office and those companies turn out to do just fine, well, that's that vaunted market at work, baby. Expectations really do change, and it is not reasonable to assume that every "knowledge" worker has to be in the office all or even most of the time these days.
I never said that. I'm talking about a very specific smaller group of workers: those that started their careers between 2020 and 2023 and believe they are entitled to a full-time salary and employment whether they work or not. Reality check incoming...
That's certainly one approach towards living life.
Another might be:
Don't accept it when your employer decides to start tracking your every move and work for a company that values outcomes more than they do asses-in-chairs. When the eventual recession comes, the odds that it'll disrupt you in any significant way will be greatly reduced because you haven't spent the last three years worried about how to present yourself as "productive", and instead have been focused on actually getting things done.
During the pandemic, we have worked remotely for a year or so, and we were bloody effective. However, when I pondered about why is it so, I found out that because we have deep personal, one to one connections already. In other words, we can work effectively because we know each other very well, not only in work setting but in personal setting too.
When a remote team is assembled, the window for knowing each other is way narrower. You can work and put good results out, yes. We also do this all the time, because we work with many remote teams as a part of the said team, and we don't see them face to face for years sometimes, however when we meet with these people, even for a couple of days, our relationship and work performance changes.
Since we spend time together, we understand each other better and note our underlying characters, inside and outside work. This allows better relationships and faster, way more efficient work. Mails get shorter, things get more fruitful, and work accelerates.
WFH and remote work works, up to a point, but there's a glass ceiling. Some people may not feel or want to understand that, but it's there.
Face to face communication carries way more information than a webcam + microphone.
A mandatory first month work from the main office, bi annual everyone retreat in one location or twists on these ideas might work for remote only setups.
Total surveillance only works for drones and monkeys hitting typewriters. Totally fine for a cash cow monopoly.
I started working full remote in 2018, and I found quarterly meetups work well. 3 days to 1 week on-site per quarter. I pack the week with in-person meetings/lunches/dinners with my customers, coworkers and management to get facetime.
This makes the person you're working with more than a drone, because you have the chance to touch to other person's life. The same is also valid for your colleague.
To be able to foster these kinds of relations, you need to share the space for quite some time. Humans are not machines, this is not a file transfer operation This is way working face to face, esp. in a harmonious team is always better than WFH. Companies are not always in the wrong for wanting their teams in the office.
Of course some people may prefer WFH more, for any number of reasons, and I'm no judge. However, claiming that F2F working conditions have no advantages over WFH is just not true, to put it very mildly.
Maybe you have 2 A students (metaphors for workers) and 4 C students remote. The A students are effective regardless of attendance. But the C students actually become B students when attendance is forced.
You might argue C students should be replaced but you might still end up with C students a year later because hiring is hard.
Given this dynamic it’s obvious why one would be motivated to require attendance.
This is just a thought experiment but I think it shows how blame could be pointed at many different places. For example why couldn’t attendance be required only for lower performers? Etc.
The story here is that the badge data is being published on employee portal pages as a way to basically gamify their in-office rate.
There is a qualitative difference between "could, with a valid reason and manual effort, track" vs. "automatically tracked and shared with your management chain".
Any company with badge readers has an access log. In the before-times, that log would only be used for a legal or HR investigation, after the fact, when there are other performance problems.
This is going to be used to punish employees, semi-automatically, probably even if they are otherwise performing well.
But then I assume it depends on the BR as well, but each and every BR I encountered so far was strictly oppossed to this kind of data cross referencing. Unless, of course, entering and exiting a location is used for clocking in/out, because then there is no data to cross reference.
Granted, that's probably an odd exception to the norm, but your comment reminded me of how badge-in data presented a clever solution to a problem, even if I shudder to think of how that data could have been used for harm.
It's interesting that when a spouse does it, it is called abuse, but when employer does it, it is okay?
Which is what you do when you work for an employer that wants to track your entries/exits into their buildings. You consent to allowing systems to be put in place that serve as placeholders for when trust isn't yet or won't be established.
It is.
1.1.1.1 does not work with archive.ph and the related family of archive sites, due to choices on the archive.* end of things. See ex. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36970702
Well, this time it's apparently the other way around.
In my country (Slovakia, EU member) it's standard for corporate jobs to track fixed salary employees via badge readers. I've never worked such a job and always thought it's weird but the practice is ubiquitous.
Depending on the management, in some (most?) companies you get into problems if you spend far less than 8 hrs a day average in the offices. Only now, with remote work, I think the practice is slowly going away.
In that regard, it makes more sense to track how much time you actually work since it is a breach of contract not to work them.
Am I the only one here who ever punched a time clock?
Time tracking for pay has nothing to do with "tracking attendance".
I think when a company trusts its employees to get the job done, a few really good things happen. High performers (where "performance" is directly tied to revenue, or goal completion, or actual metrics and not "ass-in-chair" fluff) produce quality work quickly. Middle performers do fine. Terrible performers, if you have any, stick out - instead of having a hard conversation with them about how many hours they put in, you can have a hard conversation with them about how they need to improve.
What I think is fascinating is how frequently, when working in an environment that gives someone room to be creative, or less stressed, or even given more responsibilities, middle performers often become high level performers. I'm sure there are lots of reasons as to why, but I've seen it happen a lot. I suspect that when you trust someone to do what they're good at, they have room to get even better at it. At least that's been my experience.
I have also seen insanely pedantic levels of tracking and reporting and dogma at companies, and those are miserable places. High performers leave. Everyone else spends their time figuring out how to juice their numbers and play within the system so they look like high performers. Tracking everything builds a new, unspoken system that, when you're in it, becomes your first concern above all else, and even pits you against your coworkers.
I've worked 3 professional jobs where I was salaried and still had to check-in/out, one was due to the security need to know exactly who was in the building at any one time, the other two were overzealous micromanagers.
In the dystopian future employers will track every second of your movement, and see what you've been doing.
Not typing enough? And they dock ya!
Visiting the toilet too often? And they dock ya!
Moving away from your desk too often? And they dock ya!
Eyes deviating from your screen too often? AND THEY DOCK YA!
“Were they in the office” seems a much lower quality signal.
Attendance might not be a perfect proxy, but this is way worse.
Also outside of 80s cop dramas the line "but dammit I get results" does not overrule all other employer concerns. If instead of disregarding an attendance requirement an employee instead decided to disregard a safety requirement, would you give them a pass because they got the job done? How about if they mishandled private customer data? Made unauthorized purchases with the company credit card? Made a bigoted comment about another employee? Someone can be a high performer and still be a bad employee that an employer ought to let go.
Many managers (at least the good ones) try to shield their folks from the uglier nuts and bolts of upper management. They would far rather focus on results rather than pressuring their folks to meet some arbitrary (and likely not even mathmatically correlated) goals around butts in seats.
Is Amazon in trouble? Are they really this willing to tighten the reins on their workforce for...what? Numbers that technically show people are showing up?
The ugly truth is that Amazon is probably just looking for ammunition to fire folks en masses without it being seen as a mass layoff.
1. This is probably just badge-in and not badge-out data. I'd be surprised if you have to badge to exit the facility.
2. This may contain badge data when accessing other areas of the campus; such as elevators, executive offices, etc.
I'm curious how they're handling expected OOTO scenarios. E.g., a worker traveling on company assignment for several months, gets fired for not badging in frequently enough.
The enforcement spectrum on this is probably pretty broad, and probably felt most in areas where the company believes there is systemic under-performance; or in areas where the company wants to un-invest without explicitly coming out and saying it.
Fragmented teams will be reorganized and the process continues some underlying business metric, such as the labor component of SG&A, hits the desired corporate target.
Presumably they don't auto-fire employees without any human intervention in the process.
Especially if that employee is independent or soft reporting into another team.
For ooto, they are not tracking this correctly. I received one of the nastygrams when I was on vacation. I forwarded it as my notice of resignation.
Never worked in a company that tracks hours after that. Amazon aspects workers to be available for on-call 24x7, it's very difficult to provide this level of support of you have to commute to office 3 days
This is just a numbers game.
Our offices are generally small, so people hold the door for each other and that kind of thing.
I told everyone.. scan your badge at door/lock swipes every chance you get.
One place I worked people would scan in, log in, then jump the turnstile out to not track the badge out, then go back home and work.
Are they going to tattoo workers next?
(some) labor detached from Value = Hours worked a long time ago, but people love to beat that poor dear horse. Shem, poor horsy
climbs onto soap box Step right up ladies and gentlemen and hear the benefits of renting access to your skills vs selling your labor!
But we’re very much out of the broader societal norm here. Amazon checking that employees show up to work is very much a societal norm, and probably a global one for those working at a business.
Harping on standards and practices like this too hard risks making one appear out of touch with the average worker, bit of an “let them eat cake” type of statement. The average, non-HN type would see that headline and think “so what, my boss expects to physically see me daily” and has done so my entire life.
I do empathize, and a productive reaction is to map what leverage you have and what you don’t, and use that. Complaining online isn’t it