Comment by notTheLastMan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notTheLastMan | Hacker News Reader

Fam, what should we actually do about this?

If you want to be real for a minute, we all lived through the freedom of Covid WFH. We all did dishes and billed for it. We all told ourselves 'I needed a break, it helps me think about the problem'. (And that was true, one day I was stuck on an 8 queens problem and I ran a half marathon, when I finished I had the solution)

But... common everyone... we are humans. We take the path of least resistance.

Does anyone waste money or time on things that dont matter intentionally? If I'm making 200k a year with 0 output, I'll probably work on something else in the meantime.

If I'm in office, I don't think I need surveillance, I'm on the clock and its my manager's job to supervise. WFH? I get it.

This idea is as old as the panopticon, and Michel Foucault talks about this as well.

As I get older and run my own company, I find my juniors and seniors need to be supervised. My mid-levels are fine. Juniors dont know when to ask for help. Seniors are complacent. Mid-levels seem to have something to prove.

Can labor make a deal with management? I'll give you WFH for surveillance software.

> the freedom of Covid WFH

That's an interesting phrase. Yes, working from home comes with more freedom over your day than working in an office. During the pandemic, though, it was largely forced as we were told you can't go to the office, or the beach, or the gym, etc. That wasn't really freedom as much as a house arrest sentence.

The key here, though, is that Meta is at least claiming to be doing this to train AI not to spy on how efficient or compliant their WFH employees are.

With enough data and time many of those jobs will be rendered obsolete.

Sure, that's possible though we won't know until it happens. I'm not sure how that connects to the GP's point though, can you connect the dots for me?

Monitor output. No need for surveillance.

Surveillance = lack of trust and poor understanding of what counts as productivity. Essentially it's a great indicator of poor management.

I agree with this kind of... I did automate $4.5M/yr in labor, but I probably only worked 10 hours a week and billed for 40.

For 5 years everyone was happy, but I kind of knew what I was doing was wrong.

Not that I think I could have automated $16M/yr, but I def knew I was billing for doing dishes.

Your employer does not think anything they do is 'wrong' and neither should you when your employer is the 'victim' of one of your 'immoral' actions. Strange that they leave morality to the employee like yourself to impose on yourself to make yourself work harder for your employer. "If I bill for 40 hours and only work 10 while saving them millions of dollars, it's actually immoral on my part." You are literally admitting your shame for your own self-described immoral actions against your employer while completely blind or willfully ignorant of their proud immorality.

Hopefully you aren't one of those "well I signed the contract that let me be abused, I have no right to complain about my material conditions" kind of people. Under zero circumstances will your employer ever show you that level of empathy towards you, your coworkers, and your families. Under zero circumstances do they 'earn' your moral compass.

You saved the company you worked for 4.5 million a year and I presume your salary was less than 300,000? Who cares how much you worked? You more than 10x'd their investment in you, possibly 45x'd it. I've worked with people at the computer all day who 0.1'd their salary in a year and they were promoted. I have also worked nearby guys at their computer for 80hrs who tanked entire teams by making terrible decisions at 2am when no one else was around.

> its my manager's job to supervise

No it isn’t. The fault with your logic is that you assume people work because they’re supervised.

If I was hiring anyone for a job over 75k usd I should know very well that they can produce with very few touch points. I would also expect my team to speak up if someone wasn't producing. I wouldn't care about hours worked because they are a salary employee. I would care that the team could contact them and they contributed meaningfully to projects.

So your thing is not achieving something, your business is about keeping people busy all day? Hopefully folks like you are leaving the workforce soon.

I think we misunderstood each other. Contributing to projects means achieving something. Obviously if it's sales the goals are different than if it's development. I care about company accomplishments and teams working together.

> We all did dishes and billed for it.

I don't think intellectual work is an always on hands on keyboard task. When in the office there's plenty of extended water cooler conversations or non work related conversations at work stations. Indeed I've often seen these cited as reasons for RTO.

This is basically my case against RTO... I am a talker. I wont stop talking. I actually waste people's time talking philosophy.

I agree. In fact, even ensuring the employee is at the work station moving the mouse and pressing the keys is failing to measure their productive engagement at work. How do you know they are cogitating to the company’s benefit at all times? Many employees may rationalize time theft as “taking a second of mental rest” but it’s a breach of their employment contract, and potentially criminal embezzlement, all the same.

In the future, hopefully we can use Neuralink-like technology to quantify worker compliance and cut the wasteful sludge that want to “rest and vest” at the expense of the honest and hard working executives.

Set your seniors to dedicate one day a week to train your juniors. Let them make topic specific schedules for inhouse training days and have those topics/schedules revised/supervised by on of the other seniors. Limit the topics to themes that improve the goals of your company. Challenge both sections of your workforce by watching how the learned stuff is implemented. Do that for a year then re-shuffle personnel and start over.

This is only a proposition if you can afford 1 day/week financially.

Edit: goes without saying, maybe, but make participation mandatory.

If you feel the need to babysit your employees you probably need new employees.

Why are your seniors not unblocking your juniors? And if your seniors are complacent maybe they just need a good challenge.

Supervised != surveilled

No human should be surveilled on work. And if you're going to have surveillance on me, then I want surveillance on you. Would you be fine with that?

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