I worked in a pretty rough Tier-1 call center environment for IT for about half a year.
- We had to be in Avail status at the exact start of our shift or be counted late. For example, if I was scheduled to be in at 10am, I had to be in Avail at 10am. Meaning I had to take care of booting up computer, etc. before then.
- We had to check in with a workload manager via Teams and get approval before moving to Break or Lunch aux. Often during a call.
- We could move to an aux to take restroom breaks, and were encouraged to do so only when no calls were waiting, but the total time taken couldn't be more than 10 minutes a day.
- We also had to notify the WLM if we were going into callback aux, for example, if the line dropped. We were questioned and sometimes moved to Avail automatically if we were too long in callback.
- When I started, we had 30 seconds ACW but then they moved to zero ACW. We could move to ACW aux for a max of one minute unless cleared with WLM. You had to be quick if you had things to do on your ticket after the call otherwise often you'd get thrown into another call immediately. WLM would move you to Avail automatically if you went over and they were paying attention.
- Getting a "Roll Over No Answer" was really bad.
Definitely a rough environment, but it wasn't as bad as it sounded, and I was able to work from home for a month before I found a much better job. It was interesting to see if I could survive under that level of discipline but I'm glad I left when I did.
> We had to be in Avail status at the exact start of our shift or be counted late. For example, if I was scheduled to be in at 10am, I had to be in Avail at 10am. Meaning I had to take care of booting up computer, etc. before then.
I won over 2k from a class-action lawsuit over this exact thing about a decade ago. This is not legal.
Legal or not, this is not the way a human should treat another. I suppose this is what happens when the one and only goal is profit - Amazon delivery drivers peeing in bottles in their trucks comes to mind ...
I 100% agree on the "this is not how humans treat humans". This sort of thing is what comes up when you can only be measured by numbers. And someone four levels above you says the numbers need to improve by 2%. At that point you ar a number, or at least they are treating you as your output, not as a human.
What's not legal? Requiring that a worker be at their desk at a certain time? Doubt it. Now if they're not getting paid for the time when they're setting up, I agree that's probably not legal.
> According to the regulations interpreting the FLSA, “a stenographer who reads a book while waiting for dictation, a messenger who works a crossword puzzle while awaiting assignments, [a] fireman who plays checkers while waiting for alarms and a factory worker who talks to his fellow employees while waiting for machinery to be repaired are all working during their periods of inactivity.” Since these employees are unable to effectively use the time spent waiting for their own purposes, the time essentially belongs to and is controlled by the employer. Accordingly, in all of these examples, the time spent waiting is an integral part of the job. As such, the employees are engaged to wait, and are therefore entitled to be compensated for their time.
Even more than that, the clock starts when you walk through the front door (portal to portal). If the travel time to the actual work site is long, such as a very large campus, or a miner's trip from the mine entrance to the active dig site, then that is time that should be on the clock.
True, but that also means that you should not expect an employee to be productive immediately at 10am. "Paid from 10am" means that the expectation is to be walking in the door at 10am, on average. If you want the employee to be set up by 10am, that costs extra.
"We had to be in Avail status at the exact start of our shift or be counted late. For example, if I was scheduled to be in at 10am, I had to be in Avail at 10am. Meaning I had to take care of booting up computer, etc. before then."
This has wage and hour lawsuit written all over it. See "donning and doffing" litigation.
It really depends if they were only paid starting at 10am or if it was just an (extremely shitty) strict start time and if they're salaried or if hourly were being paid for that time. It's not clear from their post if it would be one or the other.
Sure. I'm assuming that people doing those kinds of jobs, working under those kinds of rules, are highly likely to be hourly and not salaried employees.
Yeah and as crappy as it is it being illegal depends entirely on if the employer paid them for the time spent setting up their work station to be 'Available' by 10AM sharp. It only becomes illegal if they're only paying them starting at 10AM when they become available.
Being paid from 10AM to whenever is exactly what the OP implied. They were not paid for setup time as far as I can tell from that text. Are you able to glean more?
> We had to be in Avail status at the exact start of our shift or be counted late. For example, if I was scheduled to be in at 10am, I had to be in Avail at 10am. Meaning I had to take care of booting up computer, etc. before then.
Reminds me of the work I did for a major car company in sub-manufacturing.
We had to be at our stations by the time our shift-start buzzer went, with the machine running. Machine status was logged and visible on displays from every corner of the plant so there was no slipping in a minute late. A second late meant 15 minutes docked pay. Keeping in mind the trip from the locker room to many of the stations in my department took several minutes to walk.
Similarly for breaks—the machine had to run until the break buzzer, then you had to lock everything down for safety, record your numbers, then walk to the break room if you wanted a snack, a smoke—whatever. You also had to be back, machine spun up and running by the time the buzzer went for the end of the break. The breaks were 10 minutes long, and lunch was 20. In reality, if you were quick, you got about five minutes of your break and about 10-15 of your lunch. (Also keeping in mind the work was dirty and potentially poisonous so you had to be sure to wash thoroughly before eating anything).
These stringent rules resulted in many shouting matches between some of the management and a few staff members. It also resulted in a big campaign by the CAW (Canadian Auto Workers union) which in turn resulted in a propaganda campaign by the company and threats of shutting down to move. This plant also paid a good $10 an hour less than their unionized counterparts and competitors. Thankfully, we did have good supportive supervisors—the smallest of buffers.
Don't get me started on the quotas and their arbitrary increases to beyond the machine's production capacity...
FWIW: The larger company has a good reputation—their subsidiaries, however, were different.
Pretty easy to see why they pressed back so hard against unionizing. Pretty much everything you talked about is the sort of thing a Union would squash.
When it comes to the worst elements of "bottom-line obsessed thinking", I can't think of better examples than large national call centers; and their leaders will use all sorts of borderline abusive management tactics to justify it.
I started my career in one for a popular multi-national consumer electronics brand whose devices might be in your pocket right now, also as a T-1 IT person for about four years.
It's soul draining. One thing I'll never forget were the amount of EMS visits we got due to people having heart-attacks. Young people too.
That's what just doesn't make any sense. A single on-site heart attack has got to undo months of trying to shave off seconds here and there and abusing people to get just a few more minutes of output per day. Not to mention the huge loss when it comes to turn over.
Mostly contracts. All the numbers the individual employee is being held to, the managers are being held to in aggregate. Then the client holds the call center company to those numbers in aggregate. Somewhere in there, the call center company is trying to squeeze out a bit of profit.
Source - I wrote internal software for a large call center outsourcing company right out of college. Back then the company I was a part of was actually pretty progressive. They let employees work split schedules, WFH way before it was cool, factored in things like reasonable breaks, etc...
The amount of data that comes off of automated dialers and inbound CMS systems can make for fun tech work, but it's still a pretty crummy industry which is why I left.
When I was first coming out of college interviewing I got a tiny taste of it interviewing for a company that made software for controlling and analyzing the performance of a call center and one of the weird sideways things they talked about doing was automatically dropping some calls to help call centers meet their metrics because a call sitting in a queue forever might mess up their wait time stats but dropping it and the person calling back let operators hit the reset button on the timer.
Oh, I once worked at a place with a similar system. If they waited long enough in the queue, their call would get disconnected (hopefully they heard a message saying to call later) and a counter went up for the number of times that it happened. I think you needed to wait at least 30 minutes for it to happen.
Thankfully most of the time the queue wasn't ever ridiculously long (10 minutes wait time at probably the 95th percentile) customers, with 3-50 agents available depending on the previous year's traffic.
It was a good environment for a high school student. When it got super busy no one in the office was above getting on the phones.
So I guess at that point "wait time" just becomes a vanity metric? Or to show their clients "we only make callers wait X amount of time compared to our competitors"?
I think it does become a vanity metric at that point at least in terms of actually successfully improving customer experience. For their clients though it was an extremely valuable thing to be able to game because it could determine if they made a bonus payment or not.
There's the old adage that as soon as a metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a good metric because it starts to be gamed. It's probably not universally true but it shows up again and again in things like NYC's COMPSTAT program where a decent idea becomes a goal without measuring the right thing and you wind up with police just harassing people because you've gotta get the number of arrests up or you'll look bad at the next COMPSTAT review.
Well there are people who are, you know, less responsible than others, who will also tend to be correlated to the lower-pay employees. If you, say, had the bright idea of starting an "ethical" call center that didn't track when people came in, and since you'll be pulling from the same pool because it's not like you can afford to pay call center employees $30/hr, and you decide "I'm not going to track anyone's time!"...
well, frankly, the obvious is going to happen. You're going to get people outright lying to you about being present. It won't take long before you start tracking time.
And so on for most of the other practices there.
But jerf...
I'm only talking about the other side of the complex of forces that inevitably emerges from this sort of low pay situation. It doesn't mean that employees ought to be treated as subhumans, obviously. Another aspect is that this sort of control will also attract management who enjoys wielding that sort of power. Management isn't guilty. But these restrictions are all generally reactions to the problems management had getting their employees to show up on time. There's a whole back and forth of events that inevitably occurs at scale, which is why the whole job has a bad rep, not just particular companies. The same forces produce convergent evolution between all the companies that have large call centers.
You'll get similar experience managing a McDonalds, or any number of other places where you're trying to get a whole bunch of low-paid people doing a particular job.
Thanks for explaining the dynamics of these jobs so clearly.
So when you say, "It isn't all just being a jerk for being a jerk's sake.", you essentially mean that everyone involved is a victim of the circumstances? That these jobs naturally attract certain types of people on both employee and management side, trap them, and pit them against each other?
You're trying to motivate people who really aren't getting much out of the deal. The "managers" are still earning biscuits.
Everyone I know who works in retail, for example, seems to be stuck in a sick system hellscape. If you win, you still lose because the "best job" in a store is still only realistically suitable for a teenager.
I typo'ed. I said "management isn't guilty" but I meant to type "management isn't guilt-free".
I also agree that there people who profit, but I encourage you to see that as part of the dynamics rather than an exceptional case that somehow happens every time. It is perfectly predictable that people who will try to profit from this will enter the system, in ways both monetary and psychological. It's merely the n'th step, not some sort of surprise.
In an oversimplification, there are two means to motivate people; the proverbial carrot and stick.
Call centers (and most low paying jobs) operate with a goal of minimizing costs. Most incarnations of motivating people with a carrot involve spending money on bonuses for performance, raises, etc. So those can't be implemented because it would raise costs. Another option for the carrot is promotions, but my impression is that there isn't a lot of upward mobility in call centers; at least not of the variety that eventually gets you out of the call center.
So once all your options for motivating people with carrots are gone, you end up with the stick. And this is what it looks like when your only motivation option is the stick.
You could probably operate a call center that handles calls as quickly using bonuses and such, but you would be more expensive. You'd have the benefit of having happier employees, but that's not a thing businesses are willing to expend money on. And even if you did, some enterprising soul in a few years would propose eliminating the carrots to save money and youd be back to square one.
It also doesn't help that most of these workers also lack a lot of other employment opportunities. In tech, for instance, it's hard to run a shop using sticks instead of carrots because your workers have plenty of other potential employers. They'll just quit.
In my experience in call centers it usually breaks down into 2 causes coming together
1) Support is viewed as cost centers so "maximizing" efficiency becomes important to the executives in charge of it
2) Customers have very high expectations around what is an acceptable amount of time to wait to talk to an agent. Because of reason 1, things are optimized so tightly that a shockingly small amount of variation can cause really large shifts in wait times. As an example, I once worked for a cable company that averaged ~2,000 agents during peak call times. Every once in a while an office would have an unannounced fire drill, taking about 200 agents offline. When that happened wait times would go from about 90 seconds to over 10 minutes for the hour or two
But suddenly having 10% less workers is not a shockingly small amount I think.
I believe it is more about general "efficiency" or milking of the workers. How to get the most while spending the least.
Which is a working principle, but does have dark side effects, when we are talking about human ressources.
There's a reason that a company’s employees are referred to as “human resources”; they are inputs consumed in the course of producing returns on capital.
This is the same for Socialists, only they’re using human “tools” to gain political and societal power instead of profits. But make no mistake, the profits just come a little bit later for Socialist leaders.
Sounds exactly like my time at Gap Store Support down to the letter. ACW was limited to 1 minutes per call, and eventually you had to have approval for ACW, especially during busy hours. Bathroom breaks had to be when it was dead and no more than 10 minutes in a day. Had to be told when you could take a lunch or break based on call volume. RONA was basically an automatic write-up, made that mistake when going to lunch and not hitting the Lunch button.
This paints an accurate and appropriately frightening picture of what a call center is like when it's busy, but it can be worse when it's not. For example, one call center I worked in prohibited any kind of reading or talking to others while waiting for a call. You were just supposed to sit there. Sometimes for hours. Staring forward. Waiting.
Oh, I and I do mean sit there. You weren't supposed to stand, either. No pacing at your desk or even just standing still. You were supposed to remain seated, whether on a call or not.
Anti-Autonomy. My two years working for a large company I felt micro-managed. Even as a Creative Director. My last straw was being chastised for leaving five minutes before 5pm and how it's bad "optics" – anyway, I believe the #1 thing in life is to control your schedule. From there everything else flows; health, family, social, true travel etc.
This doesn't necessary mean being an entrepreneur, but having a certain level of autonomy. Once you taste it, it's nearly impossible to go back to such controlled, desk-equated productivity environments.
>Once you taste it, it's nearly impossible to go back to such controlled, desk-equated productivity environments.
yes, i've found this as well. the reason is that employer-based constraints on your schedule are always arbitrary, rarely compensated for in full, never equitable across power structures, and only tenuously negotiable in your favor.
in other words: your life becomes theirs to control in spirit, if not entirely in practice. it doesn't matter if they expect you to be at work from 9 to 5 or whatever else. if your employment is contingent on holding their schedule, they effectively hold control over the rest of your life's schedule.
and they excercise that control to the detriment of your life as a matter of course, routinely, ruthlessly, without hesitation, and without consideration, in nearly 100% of cases -- yes, even in the "cool startup" you're working for.
remember, you need to ask them to take time off to care for your sick relatives. you need to ask them for permission to not be at work to spend time for yourself on vacation. you are explicitly their property for however many hours per day, but they also own enough of you to implicitly dictate where you're allowed to be and when, and for what reasons.
i guess some people find it a good bargain to trade their autonomy for a wage. it's very hard to respect that kind of thinking a lot of the time, but i've learned to do it simply because most people accept the bargain and it'd be too isolating to behave otherwise. for me, it's an intolerable situation to bear, even for a moment.
"i guess some people find it a good bargain to trade their autonomy for a wage"
A better guess would be that virtually all people need to generate income and most of them take whatever bargain they can get, lest they get consumed by debt or evicted from their home.
Are you currently employed? What job is offering you unrestricted control of your schedule? No requirement to work with others? No requirements to attend meetings at fixed times? etc. From what you said, I can't picture a workplace that is functional like that.
I have worked in couple of places, mainly largest banks, as a contractor Java dev.
Your freedom is directly proportional to the trust your manager has in your good judgment. If you can build the trust and convince the manager (indirectly) that they don't need to handhold you and it's better to use their time to focus on other things you can be doing mostly the stuff you decide needs to be done.
From my experience, in case of FB moderators, these things happen because of some kind of corporate scarring. I guess somebody or a group of people seriously exploited their freedom and the management instead of trying to actually understand and solve the problem used shotgun/lazy management to just outright squash the problem along with every team member's freedom.
But you can work with others and figure those things out together, all with autonomy.
"Hey, I'm gonna be in a different TZ next week and 9AM standups really won't work for me, can we find a time in the afternoon that works for all of us?"
"Hey, Jane and i were talking and we really want to try making this standing meeting into something async for a month and see if it works for folks, how does everyone else feel about it?"
Of course you have to work with others, and you may have to work with others that for various reasons are in a very 9-5 schedule, but if you have autonomy, you can figure out how to do that without it meaning "Be at your desk by 9AM or else!"
I'm a software engineer working remote for a large company. Obviously, yes, I have meetings, some of which are required. But there is no other detail of my schedule, large or small, that's restricted or required or externally imposed.
Sorry, I'll take wage slavery over the gig-economy. I'm lucky and don't have to choose between the two right now with my flexible schedule at my current job.
> Once you taste it, it's nearly impossible to go back to such controlled, desk-equated productivity environments.
This is an underrated source of class division, I think. Working- and lower-class people in menial jobs endure tortuous levels of this stuff, far beyond what your average office worker would ever think is reasonable (or maybe even possible).
Interesting way to put it. Can confirm - have C-level friends whom experience a drastically opposite work life than what you described. Separately, it is unfortunate management at any level can assert “power plays” to those below them with little downside.
I once worked in a school where my line manager said he had observed me going to the toilet between lessons and that it was unacceptable for me not to be available to work during that time.
I quit almost immediately afterward, obviously. This is not an appropriate level of oversight.
There are parallels with school uniform rules - you enforce the rules on people you don't like.
It's a license to discriminate. I suggest it's highly likely to constitute illegal disability discrimination within the EU.
It may be seen as discriminatory in the US as well. There are a number of diseases/ailments/conditions that are medically recognized and require frequent or sometimes uncontrolled/unexpected bathroom visits. I imagine the path forward in the US would be more difficult though and would likely just lead to a small out of court settlement as opposed to an across the board policy/law change.
I thought school uniforms were about being more equitable. If everyone wore the same thing, poor kids would be less likely to be chastised for their clothes.
I find it weird to claim this benefits poor families.
Almost all poor parents will tell you they are stressed by needing to buy extra sets of clothing for school, sold at inflated prices (these parents will also tell you who is benefiting from the uniform suppliers' deals).
While having this kind of monitoring sucks (I had to do a similar thing at my last job and it’s awful and demoralizing), what exactly is unsafe about the work environment. What is illegal about it (in Europe)? It seems to me that the shitty environment is mostly due to the nature of the job itself: viewing unpleasant content all day long.
While watching this garbage might constitute as “unsafe” I suppose, until AI can fully take over, there’s not much you can do about it. Is it illegal to have a time monitoring system in Europe?
Vice is a pretty terrible news site and never actually answers the real questions. Instead we get a clickbait title with very little actual facts. Not that I’m particularly surprised, though.
To add to this, I really want to know why they felt they need to do this? My guess is someone was abusing the existing system and they needed to set tighter controls?
> To add to this, I really want to know why they felt they need to do this? My guess is someone was abusing the existing system and they needed to set tighter controls?
My guess is some manager got it in his head to gather some bullshit metrics and evaluate people on them, and the affected employees are so low-status that they don't have the political power to push back.
There's also probably a pretty but useless graph on a powerpoint involved.
I've worked in some big companies with call centres, etc. Often management is under pressure to achieve specific numbers for things. The pressure can be quite intense (i.e., either hit those numbers or we will replace you with someone else). They often convince themselves that the reasons they don't hit their numbers is because somebody is abusing their friendly demeanor. Sometimes that idea is also pushed onto them in their performance reviews.
The main thing to realise is that often in these teams they hire just about anybody. They'll can pick up huge numbers of people a month with the idea that it's easier to let someone "prove themselves" and fire all the people who "don't perform" (statistics is usually not a strong point on these teams). People who survive for a long time are promoted into line management. Then it's the slippery pole all the way up (with everyone stomping on each other's face to get a leg up). There often isn't any respect given to other people. They are panning for gold, essentially. You are either gold or you are dirt.
IT departments are usually quite civilised in comparison. This is mainly because of the difficulty of doing our jobs and the difficulty of finding replacements. You see much better treatment in all such departments, but often IT is the best of the lot.
More likely, is that whomever set this department up, has a background in managing call centers, and they've just re-implemented all the same penny-pinching, degrading practices.
What about this piece is light on facts? I’ve read it and it seems pretty well substantiated.
The question this piece is focusing on isn’t whether this behavior is legal or not. The question is whether or not it’s the right way to treat their people.
Keep in mind that Facebook earns its living by harvesting data on users, mining it, and selling ads on it.
Now they’ve demonstrated a willingness to demand to know every little detail about a worker’s day, presumably under the guise of productivity.
People love to talk about surveillance capitalism and it’s similarly to “1984” (which I don’t necessarily disagree with), but here’s a perfect example of an authority demanding to know everything about you throughout the course of a day. Sure, they’re not a government, but given their size and power, they might as well be for the sake of this argument.
Employees are also covered by GDPR so depending on what they do with the data they may be violating regulations. As far as monitoring, in general, is concerned I'm not sure there is detailed legislation on bathrooms but the EU stipulates that employee monitoring needs to respect privacy and freedom, needs to be proportionate and on a necessity basis, and I think you could make a pretty good case that monitoring bathroom breaks violates all of those.
Maybe the real story here is that Facebook is barely functional at most things but managed to get their crap enough together to focus on being a #1 social network. Like if you went out all night, got drunk, woke up with a severe hangover and still managed to get to work and skate through the day? That's X company doing anything other than that one thing they exist to do.
The manager responsible for this moderation then can only hold it enough together to focus on X metrics, and happiness isn't one of them. Add one more metric and this person would probably fall apart and get thrown onto the pavement.
Engineers don't get treated like this because there's actual competition in hiring the best talent.
The workers need to organize to present their own metrics. Or figure out a way to make employee happiness a metric to focus on. Or somehow find the super person who can figure this all out (but then this person would get elevated to a more important part of the business.) Maybe it would be best to outsource this part of the business and then have the contractors compete on creating and delivering on these metrics. Or maybe create competing teams internally which can do the same, but rewarded with better pay?
Agreed on the barely functional. What I've noticed is that the more time and schedule obsessed a development manager is, the more likely they are incompetent. Time is the easiest thing to manage. A single variable. No complexity.
Facebook, which outsources the majority of its content moderation to over 15,000 third-party contractors.
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My opinion is most tech companies do not want to treat their own employees like this. But they don't really want moderators to get equal treatment as their own employees so they outsource it.
why stop it at 15 minuites? I can't imagine a single scenario where splitting time reported into anything less than hours would matter all that much, and the best possible systems would be more freeform in approach, allowing the worker to specify the actual time they started and stopped, rather than only being able to start and cease work in specific intervals. It would allow for greater resolution naturally where the worker is switching tasks more often.
As for people saying such a system would be misused or completed lazily, those arguments apply equally well to filling out timesheets at all.
I don't imagine anyone ever recorded themselves slacking off intentionally on a timesheet.
It's arbitrary. Everyone from junior to top level does time sheets our side. And accuracy expectations are a little bit malleable in that context.
15 mins has crystalized as a good all round unit of account. I've definitely booked entire days to one code though. And given juniors a hard time about half an hour. It's a very context sensitive thing.
Worth pointing out that this is a finance professional firm though not programming...so we might not be speaking the same language here.
you need to convert into billable units at some point, which is what the fractional system gives you, so it's just a matter of whether or not the UI accepts clock based input or not.
i'm not a UI expert but timekeeping doesn't seem particularly innovative. there are probably all sorts of esoteric certifications and approvals one might need for e.g. DoD compliance, so i'm guessing there are few people thinking about this and fewer willing to get it done and certified for the sake of the users.
If you're still using Facebook in 2020, you're complicit. You've had the better part of a decade, knowing that Facebook is a problem, to do something about it, or at least about your complicity in it. If you still haven't, that's on you. No more excuses.
What exactly do you expect people to do? Sure, I know that Facebook is a horrible company. But at the same time I don't really have much choice if I want to use it or not.
I use it to keep touch with friends and it's used to plan gatherings. I'm not about to try and be some advocate for people to use a better service, because I know that's a hopeless endeavour when I'm the only person doing it.
I see this sentiment expressed a lot and, frankly, I just don't buy it. I dropped my FaceBook account years ago and have never had any trouble staying in touch with people or being invited to things. Are your friends / family so insistent on using FaceBook for all communications that they would cease including you in events or talking to you if you needed to be contacted via, e.g., text message or email? If that's the case then I suggest you seriously consider the kind of relationships you have with these people and whether or not they are worth maintaining.
If you're using gasoline, electricity, plastics, metals, wood, or food grown by people using any of the above, you're complicit in a lot of human suffering and environmental destruction (Which will cause even more human suffering in the future).
I empathize with the moderators, here, I appreciate articles like these which call out bad practices, and I appreciate legislature, and efforts to create legislatures, to curtail these practices.
But if I were to stackrank which parts of the global supply chain that I personally use, make me the most complicit in evil, Facebook would not make the top 10. Or the top 25.
All of the positions are hourly, not salaried. They require per-minute accounting of your work. Most people who "succeed" in those positions wind up working overtime that is consistent and excessive, just to hit their 40.
you supposed to maintain per-minute log of work that you are doing and they install on computer special software to keep track of what you are doing exactly.
of course, this is only in order to help you be more productive and improve your time management skills (quote)
It cant be that easy to get one of these jobs (facebook doesnt just hire anyone), so assuming they are educated and qualified, why dont they just go work somewhere where else?
I would like to see a source on this. This is not completely accurate, in my estimation. And even if it were accurate, that still doesn't discount parent's point.
I had a boss who wanted everything I did logged out into five minute increments. Even lawyers only go down to quarter-hours in granularity, last I heard.
This pattern of relentless squeezing by management, ratcheting ever-tighter, seems to lead to collapse each time I have encountered it. I have yet to come up with a decent metaphor for the phenomenon, but it seems to be born of the idea that efficiency can always increase in increments that themselves do not decrease. The easy answer would be to wave the disparaging "capitalism" wand over it, yet history has reliable notes of this happening in governments opposed to capitalism. Perhaps it is just the thought that one can get more ... forever.
I've always wanted to have this on occasion for myself from time to time to sample my individual time spend. I wonder what kind of apps they use to achieve this and what the UI looks like. You'd need some sort of instant stopwatch buttons for frequently recurring activities and also allowing for custom stopwatches.
I guess something like a set of Amazon Dash buttons could be useful or some kind of badge readers distributed about an environment to tag on and tag off keyed to some activity for that location.
whew, stack overflow. Haha. If the UI is right it would hopefully be within 5s - 30s. But realistically I probably wouldn't count it, maybe have the app count it for me through some proxy with events or something or other. Good stuff.
If you need an employee to produce a continuous task log, they aren't producing value, and as a manager, you don't understand your business well enough anyway. You may benefit from doing some personal work on yourself as well.
The value in a relationship seems proportional to the smallest increment of time someone in it is accountable for. If someone asks you what you have done for them an hour ago, vs. this morning, vs. yesterday, vs. last week, vs. quarterly, vs. how's it all going and what they can do for you - this is a good measure of whether it's something worth keeping.
No trust means no value. Those employees should find somewhere else to work.
Those employees should find somewhere else to work.
Or negotiate better working conditions.
According to the article, one guy is suing for poor working conditions leading to PTSD and dozens if not hundreds of moderators are expected to file similar lawsuits related to poor working conditions. I can't imagine FB would find it beneficial to continue to deal with so many individual lawsuits...
Unfortunately, whenever these kind of lawsuits happen, a lot of people defend employers and say if worker could not have handled the work, they should have quit/looked for another job. Even if an employee doesn't file a lawsuit but refuse to be abused, other employees complain about the person standing up for themselves.
Years ago when I was naive and passive, we were ordered by management to work on Saturday to meet certain deadline. One guy simply said he cannot work on Saturday. The manager with dumb look asked why, the guy replied I got plans. Manager asked about other weekends, and this guy simply replied I got plans. Manager didn't know how to respond he left. Afaik, the guy never got in trouble. But rest of the team that worked Saturday complained about this guy being not a team player and how he should not be software developer if he cannot do a little bit of crunch time. I didn't know better I thought I was hero for putting in extra work. Of course, a few years later we were laid off. I learned my lessons.
Sometimes, I wonder if there is some sort of conspiracy by big businesses to spread narrative that anyone can find a better job if they don't like their job. Crunch time is normal, abusive policies are normal, etc
FB is already earning so much money that losing a few lawsuits here and there is par for the course.
That's part of the problem of relying on civil suits to try and steer company behavior at that level. They've already budgeted for a certain amount of risk, fees etc.
In order for these conditions to change you would need an actual entity (likely the government) to properly threaten the company into compliance. And not through slap on the wrist fees.
If they have %10-%20 of their time to keep a log, that's a deadweight imposed cost on their performance, which will only be a function of the %80 remainder.
You can get data on mean time between burgers from the point of sale system or add a sensor to the burger storage unit, just like you can get data on feature cadence from Jira.
Beyond a certain point, management is parasitic to capital. That point is very low.
Maybe Facebook should buy Squatty Potties and dietary fibre for their employees [0]? I have a Squatty Potty and I recommend it to everyone. At the very least, I find their infomercial-style ads entertaining.
What is the dollar value benefit that these moderators offer Facebook such that their time has to be measured so precisely?
I would assume that a CEO’s time is even more valuable both in terms of cost and expected benefit/impact. Why doesn’t Facebook’s board get Mark Zuckerburg to account for every millisecond of his time right down to how much time he spends in the bathroom? If all this time adds up for these moderators, then why not for a CEO?
Do people really sit straight-up on the toliet? I've always just leaned forward and rested my elbows on my thighs. Seems like it accomplishes the same thing.
I wish even 1/10th of the people demanding that the government regulate or break up Facebook would do the same. It astounds me that so many people are complaining about a free product that nobody is forcing them to use, but which they refuse to quit.
You seem to be unfamiliar with the concept of a collective action problem. There are many cases in which services or activities may be detrimental to society at large, but individually leaving comes with a great cost to the individual.
So for example it is totally possible that a social network has a net negative impact on society, yet you closing your account comes with significant disadvantages to yourself as long as you don't get everyone else on board at the same time.
This is immediately obvious to anyone who thinks about these situations for five minutes.
Then maybe the people whining about Facebook (who refuse to quit it) should start a boycott instead of just whining and demanding that the government save them from themselves.
As far as "great cost to the individual", sorry, I'm not buying this. Nobody is being forced to use Facebook and nobody is being penalized for not using it. I still don't have an account and have no plans to change that.
>Nobody is being forced to use Facebook and nobody is being penalized for not using it.
I know several people working in journalism who are as part of their job forced to maintain a social media presence and nowadays it is often the only way to even reliably contact or communicate with sources.
Not to mention that even more fundamental aspects like dating are increasingly moving onto digital platforms. So yes, for many people social media presence is part of their job, and for many young people it is increasingly becoming the primary gateway to maintaining social relations.
Journalists are an interesting counter-example that I hadn't thought of. Are there any other examples where maintaining an account is effectively a requirement of the job?
As for kids these days and their strange lifestyles, modern humans managed to survive and propagate for thousands of years without Facebook, and if the entire company was burnt to the ground tomorrow, I'm sure we'd adapt. It's only a "problem" because many people seem to think they absolutely must follow the cutting edge of hot social trends, like staring at your smartphone all day instead of talking to actual people face-to-face, or else risk being uncool and out-of-touch. Those of us who were always uncool and out-of-touch just roll our eyes when we're told this is such an essential part of their lives that they can't possibly give it up.
If I am a facebook user who is upset about this, and I boycott, how does FB know that my boycott is in relation to working conditions especially? Maybe it thinks I am boycotting because Mark Zuckerberg isn't paid enough.
- We had to be in Avail status at the exact start of our shift or be counted late. For example, if I was scheduled to be in at 10am, I had to be in Avail at 10am. Meaning I had to take care of booting up computer, etc. before then.
- We had to check in with a workload manager via Teams and get approval before moving to Break or Lunch aux. Often during a call.
- We could move to an aux to take restroom breaks, and were encouraged to do so only when no calls were waiting, but the total time taken couldn't be more than 10 minutes a day.
- We also had to notify the WLM if we were going into callback aux, for example, if the line dropped. We were questioned and sometimes moved to Avail automatically if we were too long in callback.
- When I started, we had 30 seconds ACW but then they moved to zero ACW. We could move to ACW aux for a max of one minute unless cleared with WLM. You had to be quick if you had things to do on your ticket after the call otherwise often you'd get thrown into another call immediately. WLM would move you to Avail automatically if you went over and they were paying attention.
- Getting a "Roll Over No Answer" was really bad.
Definitely a rough environment, but it wasn't as bad as it sounded, and I was able to work from home for a month before I found a much better job. It was interesting to see if I could survive under that level of discipline but I'm glad I left when I did.