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Comment by mercwear | Hacker News Reader

Seems like basic management to me, if I was operating a company of Amazon's size I would 100% want to have some form of attendance tracking, hourly or not.

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You don’t think “do they get the job done” is a more valuable indicator of whether you want to continue paying them?

“Were they in the office” seems a much lower quality signal.

Sure, but "were they in the office" is /much/ easier to measure at scale. And I'm sure you'd throw a pretty big fit if your pay was docked because the company didn't think you did a good enough job, even though you were in the office.

Alas, “this metric doesn’t track what we care about, BUT it’s easier to collect, so let’s use it” explains a lot of really bad policies and practices in our world.

Let's start measuring keys typed per hour next! It correlates, thus will work even better at scale.

Yea but only for keyboards that can't be removed from the office.

You joke, but many companies are already measuring code velocity for developers as part of performance.

Let them be, I'll stay in the industry as long as there's choice

Isn't this literally how employment works? If I'm sitting in the office not doing my job, I get fired. (Pay docked to zero, in a way.)

You don’t need to measure at scale, you just ask each supervisor to measure at micro-scale and provide more relevant feedback than a binary reader.

You "just" need thousands of employees to do additional labor. And then you need to process all of that data, including adjusting for the variability in how supervisors measure performance.

“How is your team doing on a scale from 1-10?” might be more valuable than adding up the number of minutes people are breathing the office air.

So if I said 8, what does that mean? What actions should be taken as a result? What value has been generated in collecting that data?

Attendance might not be a perfect proxy, but this is way worse.

8 means, ‘great, everyone is performing above expectations’

They're not mutually exclusive, tracking attendance doesn't mean you are forced to ignore work quality.

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.

If the job description involves being present in the office, then being present in the office is the highest quality signal of being present in the office.

Sounds like Amazon doesn't trust its managers to track the attendance of their workers. There probably are many managers who would rather ignore the RTO requirement for their workers than need to replace ones who quit to work somewhere without the in office requirement. This allows Amazon to both see which employees are not sitting their butts in the office and which managers are letting them get away with it.

This is really what's going on.

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.

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