Data-Crunching Could Kill Your Downtime At Work

An anonymous reader writes: How many of you are reading this at work? One of the unspoken perks of many white collar jobs is that you can waste time while still appearing productive. Workplaces are aware that this goes on, and they police it to some extent by blocking Facebook or simply looking over your shoulder — but there's only so much they can do. The new generation of workplace analytics software is starting to change that. "Employers of all types — old-line manufacturers, nonprofits, universities, digital start-ups and retailers — are using an increasingly wide range of tools to monitor workers' efforts, help them focus, cheer them on and just make sure they show up on time." This inevitably leads to the question: does cracking the whip more often actually increase productivity? To hear the makers of this software tell it, the value is almost limitless, and it will never be misused to micromanage your job. But the article lacks any independent support for that idea, and I'm sure many of you could provide examples where time-keeping software has only been a hindrance.

Comments

Thanks for the clickbait DICE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because every second of your life has to be milked for the corporate overlords.

Re:Thanks for the clickbait DICE!

[NatasRevol]

I solve half my problems by taking a short break & letting my brain work on it in the background. Not to mention finding out all kinds of new & interesting info, a fair bit of which is applicable to my job.

Re:Thanks for the clickbait DICE!

[Anonymous Coward]

What are clickbait dice?

Grammar fail, dude! Your missing a comma.

I think you meant to say: Thanks for the clickbait, DICE!

Re:Thanks for the clickbait DICE!

[Anonymous Coward]

When you run out of working memory, you need the garbage collector to kick in, which requires a stop world. Which is why I'm on /. right now.

Re:Thanks for the clickbait DICE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Grammar fail, dude! Your missing a comma.

Pedantry fail, dude! You're missing an apostrophe and an e!

I think you meant to say: You're missing a comma.

Re: Thanks for the clickbait DICE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for being the grammar police. Seriously do you feel better and more superior that you could correct someone's writing instead of contributing to current discussion? I bet your parents are very proud you.

Re: Thanks for the clickbait DICE!

[methano]

Somebody's gotta do it. Might as well be another AC.

Re:Thanks for the clickbait DICE!

[silentpinewaves]

I've been doing this for years. Glad to hear it works for you as well. I tend to take many short mental breaks throughout the day. I naturally came to the conclusion that that is what worked for me after my first few years as a developer. Companies seem quite happy with my work, and I feel more positive doing these little mental refreshers than simply continuing to try to solve the problem, which often resulted in staring at the screen or going down a rabbit hole :P

The Left Gone Wild

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3198557/The-man-tried-live-GOAT-Researcher-transforms-prosthetics-follow-herd-Alps.html

Motivation?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm reminded of this: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Second job question

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone use their downtime at work to essentially work a second job?

Re:Second job question

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a coworker who seemed to be doing so. She was on the phone speaking Russian for most of the day.

Re:Second job question

[gizmo2199]

I imagine some people do this, especially given how easy it is to do coding work over the internet. You could easily work for 2 or 3 other clients via SSH while at your "actual" job.

Re:Second job question

[Anonymous Coward]

I never did learn who she was talking to, although it sounded like she kept talking about an "aquarium" and "grues" or something - maybe it was some sort of video game. Honestly, I have no idea how she got that job reviewing secret plans for the DoD.

Re:Second job question

[ShanghaiBill]

Does anyone use their downtime at work to essentially work a second job?

I hired a guy in India to do my primary job, and I use the time freed up to work on a second, more interesting, job.

Re:Second job question

[ComputerGeek01]

I've had two or three co-workers who have managed to do this. One of them did day trading during his "downtime", he was in charge of agent scheduling and call analytics at a call center so he probably had about 30 mins of actual work a day anyway. The other guy would grab contract work from Rent A Coder. He was in data entry and had scripted most of his job without telling anyone about it. The third guy had an addiction to on-line gambling. I wouldn't call that a job simply because he was so bad at it. In all three instances they were fired for it.

Re:Second job question

[Archtech]

I hired a guy in India to do my primary job, and I use the time freed up to work on a second, more interesting, job.

It's the capitalist way! You are just demonstrating entrepreneurship - that most desirable of qualities.

Re:Second job question

[Opportunist]

Well, considering the way EvE works...

Re:Second job question

[oyenamit]

That guy in India is scamming you by billing you while working on his second, more interesting, job.

What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

100% productivity isn't even a good ideal. Past a certain point you get overwhelmingly diminishing returns in quality.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

100% productivity isn't even definable, really. In order to achieve it, you would have to be able to determine the maximum POSSIBLE level of productivity, of all possible worlds.

It sounds like what we're actually talking about is 100% time utilization, which is something completely different than productivity.

Re:What's the point?

[Malc]

I find sometimes that I have to take a break and let my mind freewheel a bit. I suppose getting up and stretching my legs might be better for my health than staring at the wall or faffing on /. There are people who spend time playing around rather than working, but I suppose their work shows it or they've got a shit manager.

Re:What's the point?

[Bengie]

maximum POSSIBLE level of sustainable productivity

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

100% productivity isn't even a good ideal. Past a certain point you get overwhelmingly diminishing returns in quality.

100% productivity means that you have 0% reserve capacity when the shit hits the fan.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find sometimes that I have to take a break and let my mind freewheel a bit. I suppose getting up and stretching my legs might be better for my health than staring at the wall or faffing on /. There are people who spend time playing around rather than working, but I suppose their work shows it or they've got a shit manager.

Slacker. You probably spend 8 hours or so a night doing nothing but sleeping.

Re:What's the point?

[ultranova]

Most companies (and people, and anything) are mediocre by definition. Since that's not acceptable to the stockholders, the managers turn to voodoo in desperation. Of course that simply makes things worse, both by wasting time and effort and by annoying the employees, but that's hubris for you.

A cynical, but possibly effective, solution might be for a company to buy and annul its own stock instead of paying dividends. That will cause the price to go up, thus simultanously pleasing the investors and getting rid of them. Once the company reaches the point where it can exit the stock market it can concentrate on long-term viability rather than short-term minmaxing.

The question is: does the law allow completely independent legal entities to exist?

Re:What's the point?

[davester666]

managers aren't interested in that.

they want you to give your all until you can't anymore, then it's next up.

Be careful what you wish for.

[Anonymous Coward]

Many jobs have an on call aspect. Basically there will be downtime that can be used in lots of ways. It can be used to fill in other gaps, or to relax. If the would be micromanagers get their wish, and can make employees articulate ever little thing they are doing and force them to defend it, they will do so at the expense of productivity.

What if relaxation is necessary for motivation? I do a good job, and it means I get to relax at work and no problems means managers get to relax. If I get no relaxation at work, I won't bother doing a good job. I'll just show up for eight hours to fudge the numbers and go home and nothing will get done. Everyone will be doing this so everything will fall apart.

Also, if there is a disaster and I have downtime, then I can fix the problem before it escalates instead of reading slashdot. With no downtime, all disasters keep managers up at night.

I can also use the downtime to keep my skills current etc.

We need more carrot, not more stick

[swb]

The problem with what boils down to browbeating by analytics is that it's still too much stick, not enough carrot (and the bullshit perks like a closer parking spot or free cafeteria tokens don't count).

American business has reaped huge productivity gains from its white collar workforces through computers, networking and telecommunications, both intrinsic gains (more output from the same effort) and structural gains (getting productivity where it would otherwise wouldn't have, like laptops in planes/hotels/homes, smartphone messaging, etc). And workers really haven't seen any income improvement from these productivity gains. You might make some side arguments that remote work enables leisure time that might otherwise be spent at a desk, but I think the reality is that pure leisure time has been degraded by electronic tethers.

In addition, business has reaped gains by other forms of wage suppression like offshoring and outsourcing to H1Bs, which probably has had a productivity increase by simply ratcheting up the fear factor and making employees less demanding of wage increases.

I'm pretty sure that global economic realities will allow employers to continue this trend, but I think they will facing rapid diminishing returns on their efforts. I can whip my dog and get some control over him, but ultimately he will stop doing anything useful. I'm much better off positively reinforcing the behaviors I want.

All of this reminds me of an apocryphal saying I was told was attributed to Soviet era workers. "They can never pay me less than I can work."

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[DarkOx]

The problem with what boils down to browbeating by analytics is that it's still too much stick

It also presumes you actually know what to analyze. Where your support staff really 'off task' for an hour because they did not close any tickets or draft any advisory documents or did they have an adhoc meeting where someone came up with a good idea for a process improvement that they can take to management later?

If you metric everything to the point the adhoc does not occur you might be missing out value you don't know how to measure.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[Anonymous Coward]

I like getting things done. If they actually came up ways to make me more productive, I'd appreciate that.

However, honestly, half of the downtime I have at work is due to the inefficiencies of the workplace. Waiting for slow servers. Waiting for queries to run. Waiting for people to get back to me. Etc.

Each of these blocks is exacerbated by my own distractibility: I find it very hard to keep focused when my work is constantly interrupted, and I find it extremely irritating if I have to stare blankly at the screen waiting to be able to do the next thing.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[nitehawk214]

They know that if they make a tangible carrot that actually effects the bottom line of the paycheck... all people will do is game the metrics instead of doing their actual work. Why would anyone do anything else, if getting your actual job done no longer is what gets you paid.

Sure, they can tune the metrics so that things that for each individual actually doing the job properly gets the employee paid the most. But at that point we would be exactly where we were before. The supervisor or manager makes a decision on each worker to see if they are performing well enough. Trying to game out that extra 10% efficiency will require so much overhead that it makes things worse.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[Registered Coward v2]

The problem with what boils down to browbeating by analytics is that it's still too much stick

It also presumes you actually know what to analyze. Where your support staff really 'off task' for an hour because they did not close any tickets or draft any advisory documents or did they have an adhoc meeting where someone came up with a good idea for a process improvement that they can take to management later?

If you metric everything to the point the adhoc does not occur you might be missing out value you don't know how to measure.

You have hit the nail on the head: People confuse data with information and assume because they have more data they are making smarter decisions. It will be easy to flay the "5 minutes a day" but then counter with the "but I stayed an hour later on such and such days..." and simply spend more unproductive time arguing over the validity of the data and its relevance. In auditor, simply measuring activity doesn't tell what the results were. I might stare at the ceiling for 4 hours, visualizing actually what needs to be done in engagement, while apparently doing nothing and then sit down and write the 10 page proposal in 1 draft. Do I now need to randomly bang away at the keyboard, increasing the time to produce the product because my train of thought is interrupted? People think answers lie in more data and companies are glad to sell them that, when the real answer is more thoughtful analysis of what you had and not making it harder by adding more noise in the form of more data.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[bluefoxlucid]

I'm pretty sure that global economic realities will allow employers to continue this trend, but I think they will facing rapid diminishing returns on their efforts. I can whip my dog and get some control over him, but ultimately he will stop doing anything useful. I'm much better off positively reinforcing the behaviors I want.

The "global economic reality" is that we've figured out how to produce more output with less labor. You still need the employees, but not full-time. "The Cloud" is a fancy word for "outsourcing"; we're going to move to more outsourced services, hiring data center engineers to work 100 hours per year to keep our shit running, paying some outside contractor to supply the engineers instead of bringing our own. Then, for your $95,000 salary, you'll be busy as living fuck--for 40 hours per week.

That's cheaper.

It means each 2000 hour engineer becomes a 100 hour engineer. Instead of 20 companies with 20 engineers, you have 20 companies outsourcing to 1 contractor with 1 engineer. 19 unemployed engineers. The salary load might increase (with so much unemployment in the field, it could decrease--and everyone will still go to college for those free STEM degrees, and argue that free college creating an overrun of cheap labor is a *good* thing, instead of putting the responsibility on businesses to build a valuable work force with exactly the same number of jobs), but the number of employees will decrease.

It's the old wealth cycle that nobody's bothered to document because economists are concerned with this "value" thing that has no place in economics. You need 100 labor-hours to make a thing; you find a new way to do it in 50 labor-hours; it costs half as much to produce; market forces eventually push the price down (fast forces like direct competition, and slow forces like changing consumer demands); consumers now have more residual wealth (as money), an increase in buying power caused by transferring the wealth of the displaced laborers to the broader consumer market; a new product is produced, or a niche product expands, to capture that wealth (this can take capital investment, which is why we need a few rich people); production requires labor (labor is 100% of all costs), so this creates jobs to replace lost jobs; and now people spend the same proportion of dollars available but buy more shit, thus there is more wealth (more buying power) in total.

In truth, the labor cost is measured in cost: cheaper labor does this as well; but, in the long term, you can't reduce labor costs without reducing total labor hours invested. Some workers may be $8/hr and some may be $12/hr, but those boundaries fluctuate back and forth; the longer downward trend of labor cost comes from cutting away raw invested labor time, but the measure of cost comes from the measure of buying power invested.

We'll see new unemployment as we pack these idle workers into contracting organizations. We'll then find new jobs for them. That turn-over takes time (and, in best fortune, happens simultaneously between markets) and may not employ the same displaced workers (1000 unemployed becomes 1100 unemployed, which becomes 1000 unemployed; the new unemployed may all still be unemployed at the end, and some of the old unemployed are newly employed). If you ever see people screaming about automation causing mass unemployment, this is the crux of it: if we don't slow the bleeding, we're going to see 80 years of high (like 60%-80%) unemployment; the same mass unemployment spread over a decade or two will probably just be an annoyance, more so to some people than others.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[K. S. Kyosuke]

They know that if they make a tangible carrot that actually effects the bottom line of the paycheck... all people will do is game the metrics instead of doing their actual work.

Except that this "gaming of the metrics" has turned into an almost 100% increase in US GDP per capita over the past 40 years, with real monetary compensation not exactly in line. So apparently their perceived inability to design the perfect carrot led to abandoning any kind of carrot at all.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[tlhIngan]

If you metric everything to the point the adhoc does not occur you might be missing out value you don't know how to measure.

Even worse, you get what you measure.

If, for example, you measure keystrokes, then you'll find productivity "went up" according to the keystroke measure. But real productivity probably went down because as anyone knows, it's trivial to write a load of crap. Or even worse, just have someone retype a bunch of crap because it counts as more "productivity" than using copy-and-paste.

The real problem is productivity isn't measurable. So people use all sorts of proxy methods, all of which are extremely poor proxies. And crunching garbage data produces garbage, thanks to that old time computer idiom, garbage in, garbage out.

It also doesn't take long before people figure out how to game the system, either, by looking at the proxies and doing just that.

Heck, remember when lines of code was the proxy to measure programmer productivity? Yeah, you can see what happened.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree, but I copy / paste everything I do never touching my keyboard...

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[war4peace]

Gosh, your text looks like it has been pasted from here: http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cg...

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[Anonymous Coward]

American business has reaped huge productivity gains from its white collar workforces

Not lately. We may be getting to the point where to improve productivity you'll have to automate yourself out of a job.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[JaredOfEuropa]

I don't think they even know what to measure (or how to measure it), let alone how to analyze the data. A guy is surfing the web 10 hours of every 40, and you might decide he's skiving. What if he is actually your best / most productive coder? Someone who continues to work on the train home? Or someone who does what everybody else is doing but declines to fill his downtime with pretend meetings or calls? Managers like to measure effort rather than results. For one, it kind of makes sense: your contract tells you to work 40 hours a week, so if you work less, they have a good legal stick to beat you with. Effort is also far, far easier to measure than results, especially individual results. But in the end, managers who only measure effort are only looking at how hard the galley slaves are rowing, not at how fast the ship is moving or even where it's going.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[bluefoxlucid]

No, it's advanced economic theory.

As in, beyond what's currently in modern circulation.

Unless you want to go back to Karl Marx, who pointed out that goods have "value" based on how much labor is invested, and so lose value when you make them more efficiently (with fewer workers), and so the key to a working economy is to make sure nobody does anything with any less labor (that is, make everything by hand, so it takes hours and hours of human labor to make stuff).

Do you remember when people stopped laboring with that hunter-gatherer stuff and started farming? Agrarian society... less work, less labor invested to produce food to feed the tribe.

How about the Industrial Revolution, when 479 labor-hours--that's $4,000 at today's $8.25 minimum hourly wage--went into producing a shirt? After mechanization, we now invest about 4-6 labor-hours, if we assume the labor is mainly $1.75-$2.50 Chinese workers; in truth, much of the cost is $30/hr invested in fuel and steel (machines) and shipping, although the amount of fuel and machine time invested in making one individual shirt is what's produced a hundred times over in mere seconds of operation (yeah, it doesn't take a lot of machine power to make a shirt... not much oil consumed at all). It's more like 20 labor minutes.

479 labor-hours to 0.33 labor-hours.

That's how it works. Each step forward is a reduction in labor invested to produce goods. Reducing the cost involved in producing goods creates more buying power--the same total number of dollars exist in the economy, after all (the rich might just have more of it--more profits), even though it costs less to produce a thing, leaving some of those dollars unspent. Market factors eventually reduces the price. Reducing the price transfers that increase in buying power down to the consumer base. The production base then wants that buying power, so must employ labor to create goods to sell to consumers.

Reduction of labor employed to produce a good or service.

Why do you think we have IAAS, SAAS, and so forth? What do you think off-the-shelf software is? Can you imagine the labor requirements if everyone built their own OS and server software in-house? Remember when they did that for cell phones, before everyone moved to Android? Do you think infrastructure hasn't gotten easier and less laboreous to build, now that we have off-the-shelf products which a skilled administrator can implement fully in 20 minutes? There's no more configuration diving and running through setting up 100 services to make something work; you put it together, enter the correct configuration, supply your keys, and it sets up all services and communications between devices and works out of the box.

We've come a long way since you had to manage /etc/lmhosts by hand.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[tompaulco]

They know that if they make a tangible carrot that actually effects the bottom line of the paycheck... all people will do is game the metrics instead of doing their actual work. Why would anyone do anything else, if getting your actual job done no longer is what gets you paid.

Why don't they make the bottom line of the paycheck tied to doing the job? Instead of recording whether you show up at 9:00 on the dot or making sure you take no more than half an hour for lunch or making sure that facebook is not installed on your laptop, why don't they measure how you performed against the goals that you and your management agreed upon, and also consider whether there were additional non-agreed projects or tasks which were assigned during the time period?

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[tompaulco]

Then, for your $95,000 salary, you'll be busy as living fuck--for 40 hours per week.

So they are going to raise my salary and lower my hours? Sounds good to me.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at it from the intellectual property side (which where most companies make money) of things:

All your ideas (and thoughts in some respect) are owned by the company... hence if you're thinking about work, even co-workers, then you're on company time. Leisure time, the last I thought, was not even thinking about work, co-workers and the company in general. That's definitely changed: mobile phones make you respond to company needs. Ads push company agendas in your face, and consumerism forces you to depend on your companies' products. For example, last I heard was 20% of Disney's incoming was from employees using its services (resorts, media, etc..), 90% or Googlers have Android phones, etc..., A lot of folks at GM buy its cars... and enrolled in its financial services, and everyone at Apple has a Macbook.

Leisure time is not leisure time anymore.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[bluefoxlucid]

I have an ostensible 40-hour job at which I work maybe 4 hours a year. The rest of the time is Slashdot. This happened because I streamlined every process into automated scripts and shit, and removed shit that breaks a lot in favor of shit that produces the same results but has fewer complex and volatile components.

My next job will have me working for 15, 20, 40 different clients doing the same, and not hanging out on Reddit all day.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Responsiveness to emails or IMs is one such proxy. If you want to know if I am sitting on my hands doing nothing, time how long it takes for me to respond to emails and IMs. If you get responses nigh immediately, I'm actually goofing off. If it's a few hours, or I don't notice your IM, it's because I'm working my ass off.

But others judge you on that. They love you when you have nothing to do, and hate you for having and doing work. If you want to get into management you have to worry about that. You avoid having substantial tasks on your plate so that you can keep people happy. CC all asking others what they are doing while not producing anything yourself so people see your name on an email thread and know you're working, and soon that will be your job, and you move up the ladder.

Perform labor, and you'll forever remain labor. Also you'll have to make something up to put on your timesheets when it's slow. If you ask for more, you'll be penalized because you were waiting to be able to perform another task and two threads will demand your full attention immediately and all others will see is unresponsiveness.

The fact that anyone can spend all day sending useless emails kinda scares me away from trying to be a pointy headed boss. The plentiful supply of such people makes me feel it would become a pain endurance contest that I would lose.

I remember making endless excuses and telling many lies an breaking promises to reform as a child in response to being bugged to do my homework or chores. I made the life decision to grow out of it and produce for real. I was lured into this because having a good reputation lets you get away with more goofing off in the long run. But perhaps this is truly lazy.

Sometimes I regret changing my lifestyle because I was pretty good at it. I see that people who behave that way as adults in the real world have their lies covered by others and rise.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[Jason Levine]

When my father was working, he used to bring home stacks of work every night to complete after dinner. Then, he'd bring home bigger stacks of work to do over the weekends. When I asked him why he did that, he said that his boss expected this level of productivity out of him and if he didn't deliver, he'd be fired.

When I got my current job, I told my then-manager that I wouldn't be doing work from home. When I left work, all of my projects and stuff would go on hold until I came back the next morning (Monday morning in the case of weekends). I wasn't averse to taking an emergency "the systems are down" phone call or working after-hours to get said systems back up and running, but that was the exception, not the rule. I certainly wasn't going to put in 12 hours of work every day when I was only getting paid for 8 hours.

There was some push-back at some points, but I held fast and was lucky that the company I work for doesn't think of its workers as batteries to be drained dry and then discarded for a new one. If, at some point, I found myself at a company where the expectation was that you would spend every waking hour working 100% for them or else, I'd head for the exit as fast as possible. Then again, I'm 40 and know my worth as a programmer. Those kinds of companies tend to target the young programmers who are fresh out of school and are more easily intimidated.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[Anonymous Coward]

because management doesn't know what you do all day. they don't know what is an acceptable amount of work, and what is an excellent amount of work. they don't know how long a project should take, its easier to ask you to change then them.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[swb]

I used to make that argument to my old boss.

The network manager who runs around busy all day is one who's doing a shitty job. The one that looks bored and takes long lunches? If you're network does what it's supposed to, that's the one who's doing his job right.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[eulernet]

you get what you measure.

I remember a documentary about a company in India doing 3D animation.
One manager explained how he monitored in real-time how people were working.

Then, the boss explained how he was proud of producing movies in India, and he showed a few seconds of the animated movie his company was working on (it was something similar to the Jungle Book).
The animation was pretty miserable.

Their system encouraged finishing tasks the fastest as possible, not the best as possible, so it was absolutely talentless.
If you try to measure work, you'll get quantity but not quality.
How is it even possible to measure quality ?

Moral of the story: if you need robots, take robots, not human beings.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[bluefoxlucid]

Yeah, but if you have all day to be bored, you can do your job right for a bunch of other businesses, too. That means there's a market to charge 4x as much for contractor time, but contractors work 1/10 as much, so it costs 40% as much for the client.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[blue9steel]

Sure, until they lay off seven of the nine people in the department.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[nitehawk214]

This is how it used to be. But only in general terms of pass/fail. Now that they can have metrics to account for every minute of time spent at the office. Nickel and diming each employee and accounting every moment they spend in the office will not increase productivity.

Also, employers don't want what you describe. When they find out that tompaulco gets as much done in 4 hours as nitehawk214 does all day, do you think they will be happy with tompaulco leaving after a half day... or paying you twice as much? No, they will find a way to force you to do twice as much work for the same pay.

The metrics are designed such that they can only benefit the employer. Why would they do something to help out the employees?

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[digitalPhant0m]

Exactly this.

They tried this at my work.Management decided to require 100% of our time be tracked in the ticketing system.

I'll be you can guess what happened, everyone employed the following formula: ticket time = tickets / 8

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[nine-times]

If you metric everything to the point the adhoc does not occur you might be missing out value you don't know how to measure.

Yes. I know, for example, that sometimes when I'm dealing with a difficult problem, I have to take a break. I go get a coffee, stare out the window for a few minutes, or read a little Slashdot. Sometimes I still won't figure out a solution until I have a chance to go home, get some sleep, and then a great solution will occur to me when I'm talking to friends over beer. It's much easier to measure "productivity" of someone making widgets in a factory than of someone who is inventing new widgets.

When the topic of metrics comes up, I'm always reminded of an experience I had early in my career. To make a long story short, some executive got it into their head that they should have helpdesk metrics for each tech based on things like "number of tickets closed" and "mean time to resolution per ticket". They collected a bunch of data and found one guy was severely under-performing, and they asked the manager to let him go, and find a better worker. The IT manager was surprised, since he thought that the under-performer was a good tech, so instead of firing him, he decided to pay close attention for a few days to figure out what the deal was.

After a few days, it became much clearer what was going on. The "under-performing" tech was frequently helping the other techs, giving them advice, and suggesting troubleshooting steps. In addition, the other techs would sometimes reassign their difficult tickets to the "under-performing" tech, since he had a knack for figuring out the really tough ones. The "under-performing" tech was taking on and completing fewer tickets because he was helping everyone else with their tickets. He was taking longer to resolve the tickets because he was taking on the more difficult cases. He was essentially the best-performing tech they had, but the metrics completely failed to capture his performance.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[Anonymous Coward]

The "global economic reality" is that we've figured out how to produce more output with less labor.

That's only part of it. The other half is that we've come up with a way to take advantage of arbitrage. There are several very large countries whose costs of living are a fraction of the Western costs of living, thanks to lack of environmental and safety regulations, reliable public utilities and other expensive comforts. Since those damn Liberals won't let us return the West to the Good Old Days of Dark Satanic Mills, we shipped work to the places where Satanic Mills are still the norm.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[tompaulco]

because management doesn't know what you do all day. they don't know what is an acceptable amount of work, and what is an excellent amount of work. they don't know how long a project should take, its easier to ask you to change then them.

Oh, well, then it sounds like we need to replace management with one that works.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[Shadow of Eternity]

This. A lot of people working intellectual tasks at a high level will do the same thing, they may appear completely unproductive for long periods and then sit down and slam out a massive amount of material in a single draft, leapfrogging anyone that seemed to be more "productive" writing and rewriting garbage day in and day out.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[houghi]

I did a lot of numbercrunching. I ALWAYS asked what they wanted the numbers for and what their goal was. No, I was not going to falsify any numbers. I would just think about what numbers they did not ask for, yet could help whatever they were after.

One of the most difficult things was productivity. In a callcenter you are able to measure almost everyting. The downside is that you have all the numbers.
So if a call takes 6 minutes (including after call work) it was almost impossible to explain why people would never have 10 calls. If they didn't, the people, department and manager would look lazy.
This already takes into account the 15 minutes break in the morning and in the afternoon, the lunchbreak, meetings, training and what not.

I have only seen one CEO smart enough to say to the call center manager: I do not understand it, but I trust you and if you say that 75% productivaty is very good, then I am going to trust you and believe you.

That does not mean numbers are useless. They can be great indicators if you know what you are looking for and if you want objectivaty. e.g. on the day that was the one with the least calls, we also did the lowest numbers. Why? Because there were less calls, people could get half a day or a day off easier (This is Europe) than on other days.
Mondays was the day with the most calls, so almost no days off were given.
This ment that there would be less people compared to the amount of calls that were coming in. Increased the FTE account just a fraction and numbers were good and decreased them on tuesday and targets were hit all the time.

But yeah, productivaty is a horible way to measure anything, unless you know ALL the other factors and even then you will NEVER reach 100%. And if you reach 100%, you can bet any if not allof the other numbers are way off.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[MrL0G1C]

The problem with what boils down to browbeating by analytics is that it's still too much stick,

I worked in a call centre, I took the most calls per hour, had the best work quality and best attitude towards callers.

What did I get? Bitching about being unplugged for a few seconds more than average and a crap pay rise to go with it.

I do feel a bit vindicated, crappy supervisor and boss were both fired, but I'd resigned before that. They lost a good worker who got stuck in when it was busy.

Don't bother working hard for companies, you don't get anything for it - unless it's your own company.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Lay Seven of Nine ... that's my kind of department

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Except you're still off because you omit innovation - labor is not a zero sum game where technology only reduces the duration of tasks, it creates new tasks too.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[war4peace]

Dude, it was a joke :)

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[bluefoxlucid]

Jokes don't work in this context. You have no idea how many people I encounter on a daily basis who don't understand economics. Considering that my economic theory is an extra step past modern, published theory, this includes professional economists with Ph.D.s and every single person who has a Nobel Prize in Economics--although a lot of those folks are targeting market economics or microeconomics to a degree beyond my personal understanding, whether or not my grasp of macroeconomics will enhance their field or not, so I'm sure they'd have something legitimate to say about what they know that I don't.

Honestly it's driving me crazy. Or maybe humans just weren't meant to be polymaths; look at what happened to DaVinci.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

He was taking longer to resolve the tickets because he was taking on the more difficult cases.

Had the exact same issue in the papers in my city with a heart surgeon that had a markedly higher death rate than the others. He must be bad, right?

Wrong. He had the most deaths because he was the best and most experienced they had. He was the one that got all the cases the others didn't want or could handle. So, the correct metric for his cases wasn't how many that died, but how many that didn't i.e. who's lives he saved. If the "higher performing" surgeons were the only ones available, then fewer people would have died in surgery, but much more patients would have died overall. They would just had been given nursing care, and a "sorry, there's nothing we can do for you".

Statistics can only answer the questions you ask...

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[nanoflower]

LOL. That reminds me of the last company that I worked at that required us to track all of our time and account for which project we were working on. Sounds good until you get to the point where the big boss comes by and says we had spent too much time on project A so now we need to put all our time on project B. Doesn't matter if you are still spending all your time on project A, charge the time to project B. Which makes you wonder why the bother tracking the time spent on various projects.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[sjames]

Excessive reliance on metrics in a call center costs money. Once they tighten up too much, incidents of customers getting 'accidentally' disconnected go up and customer satisfaction goes down. It also results in more escalations and a busier customer retention department.

Naturally, it creates a situation where they cannot see the forest for the trees. They don't manage to measure what percentage of their advertising budget gets effectively burned in a fire due to bad word of mouth created by support metrics.

People are not computers

[Anonymous Coward]

People aren't going to work for 8 solid hours with exact concentration on what they are doing, every day, every year, and expecting people to work like machines is ridiculous. This seems like a recipe for burn-out and high turnover, but that seems to be the direction all employment is going these days.

Intagibles

[DarkOx]

I wonder how carefully this stuff will consider the intangibles. How busy my team is or isn't often depends on how much selling the sales force have or have not does. I know for example if we are having a slow week. We might all go out to lunch together. It will take more than the allotted hour and nobody really cares. The flip side is when we are having a busy week and we have to work through lunch to keep up, no time for Slashdot etc; we don't feel like we are being shit on, at least I don't and I assume that goes for the others.

Optimizing away all the downtime at work sounds like a way to ensure employee burn out. I don't think just giving people more vacation would fix the problem either. Sometime what someone really needs is just to space out for 20min, drink some coffee and come back at it. Nobody is going punch out to do that. Its just going result in people being more stressed and likely less productive.

Re:Intagibles

[coofercat]

My contract (and I think just about all the permie ones I've ever had) say things like "...will keep abreast of current technological trends and advances...". I'm sure one could argue that /. is neither technological, nor a trend or an advance, but in some part at least, it's relevant learning about the industry. How do the analytics calculate the worthiness of the sites (or better - the specific pages) I'm looking at in my supposed 'downtime'?

When I was a lad, they brought in itemised phone billing. Supposedly, this would stop people gossiping all day and make them get on and do some work. All it really did was made people talk around the metaphorical water cooler instead of on the phone. Latterly, people talk in IM/Facebook/email or their personal phone instead. If none of those are available, they're taking longer in the toilet or whatever. Ultimately, people can only work so-much in a given day, and no amount of pushing them about will get much more out of them. However, what these analytics do is give crap managers another tool with which to be crap managers. The good ones will just carry on being good, and because they don't need these anaytics to be good, won't be affected by them.

On another note, I find it weird that companies seem to want to manage their peoples time so closely, when trends suggest that people should be working less (presumably for less money).

Re:Intagibles

[JaredOfEuropa]

An increasingly common cause of burnout is cognitive overload. That doesn't mean too much work, but too many tasks, and/or too may distractions throughout the day. Our work is increasingly compartimentalized; where in the past we'd work on 1-3 things, nowadays it's not uncomming to contribute to over 10 different projects at a time. Upping the pace by managing away downtime using this software is a surefire way to push more people over the edge.

In contrast, monitoring software could also be used to spot employees on the verge of burning out (something that often goes unnoticed by the employee or their co-workers and managers), and offer advice to better manage their time, not to increase productivity but to prevent an actual burnout. It might actually suggest little breaks, a bit like RSI prevention software that locks out the keyboard every now and then for half a minute (annoying but it did help me recover). Even so I am not a big fan of monitoring software even in this case, simply because I do not think most managers can be trusted with the information. You get a warning from the system that Joey is about to blow a gasket, so you inform HR and inquire as to how to best get rid of Joey.

Re:Intagibles

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is aggravated by the fact that a lot of technology companies and departments are terrible at managing, so their solution is to make all employees manage their own time, even those that are not good at managing their own time. It's a total cop-out.

Re:Intagibles

[war4peace]

I find distractions and interruptions to be the real focus/productivity killer.
Now, I'm usually not doing pure development, but my work also requires me to focus on my work for extended periods of time. By measuring myself, I found it takes about 20-30 minutes to become fully focused and ease into maximum productivity, which could last for hours if not interrupted. But as a cubicle drone (not by choice), I am frequently interrupted by:
- meetings: I don't have to be there but the colleagues that should be there in my place are incompetent (sad but true) and if left unchecked they would promise things that I have to do and most times can't be done with the tools at hand.
- sudden noise spikes: there are Support people around me and while I've grown accustomed to a constant phone chattering background noise, sometimes they start yelling at each other "JACK HOW DO I ASK FOR THIS RESPONSIBILITY FOR CUSTOMER X?" and there goes my concentration.
- groups of people trotting by: I am 30 feet from the large floor cafeteria and more often than not I see groups varying between 10 and 50 people all going for a smoke or coffee or whatnot, accompanied by a sizable uptick in noise and chatter.
- IMs: Prakash from internal support asks me where can he find that report that I built 2 years ago. Doesn't matter that he asked the same thing two days ago. And last week. And two weeks before that. And a month ago.
- E-mails: Prakash is thorough, he also sends me an e-mail with the same question, and I usually reply and attach the last 18 e-mails in which I had answered him - wondering how long until he comes back. Maybe I should take bets.

I tried isolating myself as much as possible for short periods of time (days) and invariably been called "antisocial".
"He ain't communicatin' none!"

Re:Intagibles

[Anonymous Coward]

In a few decades there will be 9 billion people competing for a diminishing number of white collar jobs. If you are lucky enough to get one of them you will absolutely throw yourself into it with the single minded dedication of a slave labourer in a death camp. However many weeks or months it takes you to 'burn out' (what a cute description) you can be sure your shoes will be filled before your worthless carcass hits the floor and is hauled out into the skip.

Re:Intagibles

[Ol Olsoc]

On another note, I find it weird that companies seem to want to manage their peoples time so closely, when trends suggest that people should be working less (presumably for less money).

Wanna drive a bean counter nuts? :

"Should I charge overhead or the project number for using the restroom?"

Puts 'em in a divide by zero situation.

Re:Intagibles

[omnichad]

I found it takes about 20-30 minutes to become fully focused and ease into maximum productivity, which could last for hours if not interrupted.

This × 1000

Re:Intagibles

[swb]

By measuring myself, I found it takes about 20-30 minutes to become fully focused and ease into maximum productivity, which could last for hours if not interrupted.

Yes, a thousand times this. Nobody understands the penalty of the context switch.

I work as an IT consultant/contractor and some of the people who are what I call "desk-biased" don't seem to understand the context switch penalty. On more than one occasion they've kind of griped about why task X wasn't done. "You left the client at 3:30, you got home by 4, why wasn't it done by 4:30?"

Even though the task itself takes about 30 minutes (if everything goes right), It's not like you can just walk in the door, sit down, and just start step 1 of task X. There's both the practical side -- setup laptop, get signed into the right VPN, bring up the right system, start the task" but a mental shift required to just get started on the task, some of which might be substantively identifiable (ie, look up documentation, etc) but some of it seems purely psychological and hard to put into words. And then there's pure distractions of coming home, dealing with the dog, the phone call that happened, the text message, the urgent email, and so on.

I find as I get older my prime window of focus is when I first get up. Maybe it's the caffeine, but I think it's a certain distraction-free clarity I only get in any quantity in the morning. Once the day gets going, it's hard to get the time necessary to get re-focused enough to be as productive.

Re:Intagibles

[Anonymous Coward]

That won't drive a bean counter nuts. Overhead comes from billing a certain amount over the actual labor cost on projects anyway. All you're doing by billing overhead instead of the project directly is eating into the funds that pay for people who prepare invoices, etc. The money still comes from the project,

Re:Intagibles

[Anonymous Coward]

You're funny, I like you!

Re:Intagibles

[Anonymous Coward]

I was productively working on a project when I got bogged down in yak shaving(I had a multi-line string of email addresses from a "CC" that I needed to convert to a CSV).

I found a regular expression that identifies them nicely so I pull up an online Python IDE(http://www.tutorialspoint.com/execute_python_online.php) only to get mired down in perpetual "loading" status icons.

Here I am 30 minutes later(Thanks Slashdot!) and the fucking thing is still loading. Goddamn JavaScript!

I would have been better off SSHing in to a linux machine or installing python on my windows 10 computer, or even switching laptops.

Fuck life.

Re:Intagibles

[Anonymous Coward]

This

Re:Intagibles

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are far too optimistic. "In a few decades" the workforce will resemble the workforce of today as closely as the workforce of today resembles the workforce of the ~80s... Except: all the jobs that didn't involve computers will probably have been replaced by robots!

Think about that for a second... Our education system is on a collision course with economic disruption so extreme that the "white collar" skills being taught in K-12 will almost uniformly be better conducted by neural networks. The university system as it is now is too expensive and too generalized to produce employees capable of competing in the market of today. The narrow skills required to be successful at flash-in-the-pan business trends become obsolete by the time the workers who are chasing the latest fad complete their training.

Just like defense acquisitions are obsolete on arrival, our human resources pipeline is equally ripe for disruption.

Can I put "Futurist" on my business card now?

Re:Intagibles

[Ol Olsoc]

Overhead comes from billing a certain amount over the actual labor cost on projects anyway. All you're doing by billing overhead instead of the project directly is eating into the funds that pay for people who prepare invoices, etc. The money still comes from the project,

ever worked for anyone who was blessed by an overzaealous bean counter, eh?

Re:Intagibles

[sjames]

You can bet that whatever metrics the PHB puts in place, none will measure the cost of seagull management or the distractions caused by cheaping out on office space or following the flavor of the week productivity theory.

Will they control phones too?

[Anonymous Coward]

I notice people around companies who prevent internet access excessively use phones.

Re:Will they control phones too?

[tompaulco]

I notice people around companies who prevent internet access excessively use phones.

Exactly. At my previous company they blocked facebook on the laptops. I didn't do facebook anyway, but all of the entry level people who spent an hour of their day on facebook changed to spending most of their day on facebook on their phones since it takes 4 or 5 times as long to do stuff on a phone that it does on a laptop.

So what.

[kqc7011]

Where management has decreed that there will not be any thing other than work on the company computers, the heads of those workers will be down looking at their smart phones.

Re:So what.

[Anonymous Coward]

the heads of those workers will be down looking at their smart phones.

I know of several companies where even taking your smartphone out of your pocket and looking at it during work hours will get your knuckles rapped by your manager. Needless to say these companies have high staff turnover rates because they take such an overbearing attitude to their staff.

Re:So what.

[__aaclcg7560]

A company I worked at implemented that policy. This was just when PDA's with colored screens and WiFi became popular in the early 2000's. It just so happened that company next door had an open WiFi access point. Many of my coworkers got new PDA's to browse the Internet.

Re:So what.

[antdude]

And then phones are (bann/block)ed.

Not again

[Anonymous Coward]

My previous job required tight micromanaging of time, recorded withing a ticketing system. It literally got to the point that I was spending 45 minutes a day, making sure my time was accounted for.

This breeds and environment of resentment and mistrust. Some employees need to be micromanaged, there will always be the people just trying to get paid for doing nothing. The rest of us however, get our stuff done.

software like this removes the human element and could only ever be abused, there's no use for this other than to micromanage your employees.

Re:Not again

[__aaclcg7560]

I worked on one company that required us to document our hours to justify hiring more workers because we were too busy trying to justify our hours to hire more workers. A vicious cycle that resulted in more people leaving than being hired.

True Story

[Anonymous Coward]

There is one giant company in lifescience/pharma world which "encouraged and allowed" to work from home. I do not work for this company, but I work in the industry and I do talk to people working in the industry.

Each and every of us sign that we will be using computer for work and the personal use will be occasional and infrequent.

When the time came for the headcount reduction, many of those remote workers were confronted and were shown, with the precision to every second, how much time they have spent in Facebook, Amazon, Ebay, shopping or simply not doing anything and being offline when they were supposed to be working.

This particular company decided to use this card when the management wanted to get their headcount level.

Re:True Story

[Anonymous Coward]

Not surprised, although I consider that "Darwinism"...

If your stupid enough to "surf" the net on the same computer you work from while telecommuting, you deserve to lose your job.

Re:True Story

[war4peace]

I usually don't respond to ACs but hey, I'll bite.
Unless someone has the mad skills of typing on two keyboards at once and being productive on one machine while they relax on another, it doesn't matter where you surf the net from. The software would still show that you were unproductive on your work machine (because you busied yourself doing something else on another).

in other news

[Anonymous Coward]

readership of /. has been drastically reduced

Depends on what you do with the data

[allquixotic]

It all depends on what you do with the data. The mere act of passively collecting the data is relatively benign, assuming that no action is ever taken with it and that it's securely stored away so that it can't be exfiltrated or abused. There ARE privacy concerns with this, of course, but most corporate networks explicitly state that users should have no expectation of privacy.

If your boss receives an email for every 5 minutes you spend on Slashdot or Reddit or Anandtech, and marches down to your cube and sternly tells you to get back on task, that solution will only improve productivity in the very near term. The worker will fear for their job, so they'll do their work more and go off-task less. But that will stop being effective as soon as the worker can leave to find another job, or come up with an alternative way to go off-task while avoiding detection, or half-heartedly do their work in a way that appears to show progress but isn't really (e.g. gaming the metrics). The end-game of "cracking the whip" is almost never a worker who willingly spends less time doing whatever they really would rather be doing besides working and suddenly enjoys their work more.

If, however, you collect all the data in aggregate and then discuss it during their annual performance review, and have it play a factor in their compensation, that could definitely be a strong motivator for people not to be off-task: if they associate slacking off with getting lower raises / bonuses / etc. and steady work output with higher compensation, most people will probably try to slack off *less*, at least. It also has the side effect of saving the company some money by being able to justify not giving a raise to someone who spends most of their time slacking off.

Either way, though, there is always going to be a way to game the system. If they track you at the network level, just use a proxy or VPN to an address that looks like it's on-task, or is too vague to get a sense of what exactly it is (e.g., since many sites use EC2 or S3 to serve content for all sorts of purposes, there's not a lot you can say about whether traffic to an EC2 box is business-related - maybe they're doing actual research for their white collar job?). If they're keylogging, set up a VM and plug in a USB keyboard straight into the VM. If you have decent cellular data at your desk, you could do your thing on a smartphone, assuming you can tolerate the display and input device limitations. Or of course you can just take frequent breaks into a hallway or empty conference room and use your own laptop/tablet/smartphone.

The only way to truly keep white-collar workers on task for 8 solid hours per day is to assign one supervisor per worker bee, but the overhead of that proposition is so high that no one will do it, because the costs will far outweigh the benefits.

Or there's Manna, http://marshallbrain.com/manna... which could be a possible future if AI or a close-enough approximation thereof turns out to be feasible.

Re:Depends on what you do with the data

[westlake]

If they track you at the network level, just use a proxy or VPN to an address that looks like it's on-task, or is too vague to get a sense of what exactly it is...f they're keylogging, set up a VM...

The problem with gaming the system is that you become over-confident and careless.

I think that as an employer I would be profoundly wary of the geek who seems to be drawing on his bag of tricks to gain access and privileges denied to others in the workplace.

Bad for morale, bad for disvipline and security.

I don't think I would wait for an annual performance review to deal with the problem.

Re:Depends on what you do with the data

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way to truly keep white-collar workers on task for 8 solid hours per day is to assign one supervisor per worker bee, but the overhead of that proposition is so high that no one will do it, because the costs will far outweigh the benefits.

The more overreaching point that you miss is the point that supervisors themselves (1) goof off often at a worse rate than their subordinate and hence are ineffectual and (2) supervisors shouldn't be there to micromanage or monitor employees except to the degree that they can help a employee get back on task (a computer breaks, the network is down, etc). Workers themselves should already be being review on their PERFORMANCE not on the hours they put in. The only reason we don't pay people in general on performance (ie, piece rate) is precisely because it quickly devolves into undercutting employees of a livable wage (some of that is supply and demand and some of that is just employers' greed). It's one reason why performance reviews with bonuses are at best a gray area and only generally acceptable because they're so relatively infrequent and hence not able ot quickly grind the status quo into an unacceptable situation.

Re:Depends on what you do with the data

[LokiSteve]

I see a lot of these comments assuming that there is an infinite workload. Many knowledge based jobs are task driven and there is downtime while you're waiting for the next task. As long as that time isn't spent doing something detrimental or offensive, I don't see why it should be looked down on.

Example being, if I spend the time while waiting on a quote from vendor reading about technology trends or just the news, I don't see a big deal. If I'm reading MLP fan fic, well, then, I can see my manager taking a walk down the hall.

Re:Depends on what you do with the data

[pla]

If, however, you collect all the data in aggregate and then discuss it during their annual performance review, and have it play a factor in their compensation, that could definitely be a strong motivator for people not to be off-task:

This entire discussion (not just responding to you) has completely missed one really critical factor here in measuring "productivity" - Hourly vs salaried employees.

As an hourly employee, yes, your employer has a reasonable expectation that you will spend a fair portion of your billable time engaged in productive activities. We can debate what "fair" means in that context (for highly skilled work, I would argue anything over 50% as the naive pipe-dreams of a slave driver), but the underlying idea of time-for-money makes sense.

As a salaried employee, however (ie, the vast majority of IT outside contracting and helpdesk), my employer doesn't "own" my time. My boss knows I read Slashdot and write this very post from work; he doesn't care. He cares that I get my work done, period. Now, if the work doesn't get done, we can look deeper into whether I spent 35+ hours a week on Slashdot, or because of a laughably optimistic schedule or budget. But the deeper issue I mean to make here, my boss has no right to micromanage my time, because he hasn't "bought" my time. He has bought a certain level of output of my brain, nothing more.

Re:Depends on what you do with the data

[allquixotic]

Yes, there is potential to become over-confident and careless; but someone who's serious about this type of behavior would constantly work to step up their game and make their behavior harder to detect. Also consider that a worker who's doing a job that is actually, genuinely easy for them to do, and has time to spare after completing all assignments on-time and *properly* (not even half-assedly), can legitimately slack off for the remaining time and the bosses shouldn't have a reason to say anything bad about them.

Also:

1. These days, in many environments, "the geek who seems to be drawing on his bag of tricks" could be anyone or everyone in the office. Are you going to fire your entire workforce? Or what if your top performers -- the people who actually get work done, and do so efficiently -- are the same people skirting your rules? Do you take the loss of a productive employee just so that the remaining employees are compliant with your network policy?

2. It's only bad for morale if others are aware of their behavior.

2a. It's only bad for security if the circumvention methods are being used to (deliberately or accidentally) exfiltrate sensitive data or cause malicious code to gain access to the network. Sure, you could have someone who's smart enough to set up a VPN but dumb enough to download a virus or visit a site with ads that exploit a Flash zero-day; but you're probably just as likely to be compromised by an employee who does not use any special techniques at all, and simply visits an ordinary site (during lunch break) that's been compromised by a bad actor or runs a malicious advertisement on your outdated "standard" browser that's chock-full of unpatched vulnerabilities.

Also, if you're *that* concerned about security, you shouldn't be allowing your employees to access the public Internet from a machine with access to internal resources or company data. Give them a separate, airgapped machine and monitor their time using it vs. their "business" machine.

2b. Bad for discipline? Sure, that's a valid argument. But no human being is so disciplined as to never go off-task. A rational, human-centric way of dealing with discipline is to enforce the minimum amount of discipline necessary for your workers to get done the assignments put before them, and don't expect 100% unrelenting focus on performing as much work as physically possible for 8 hours per day, every day. The amount of attention they need to pay to their job depends on how busy their job is. A store manager at the busiest Home Depot in the United States is going to have less downtime during the day than a security guard at a backwater office building in an area with very low crime and an office full of happy employees. If the security guard is skipping patrols or the store manager is watching Youtube instead of taking care of customers, that's a discipline problem. But most white collar workers spend at least some of their time waiting for other people to do stuff, and they should be allowed to have a little rest and mental relaxation while they do so.

And that point in 2b brings us to a point about income inequality. Although you don't need a degree to manage a Home Depot, I would be perfectly fine with an overworked store manager who's constantly got to be in "Go" mode, making much more than I do as a white-collar worker with several hours of downtime per week when I can slack off WITHOUT shirking my duties. In reality, I probably make more than them. If the compensation were reversed, I'd be fine with that - they work harder, so they deserve more pay.

Now, you might say that there's always something I could be doing instead of having downtime; but my rebuttal to that is I'm always coming up with new ideas and taking initiative to try and improve process and workflow at my job. I've been here for a number of years now, and most of the big improvements I identified have already been implemented in my first year or two, because I couldn't stand how cumbersome things were when I got here. The remaining i

Re:Depends on what you do with the data

[allquixotic]

This is a good point, and certainly makes a lot of sense.

As a more concrete example of how this can affect salaried IT workers -- for those who are not familiar with how we operate -- there was a time, a little over a month ago, where I worked 10 hours solid, and barely stopped for 10 minutes to nibble some lunch while working (I was less productive typing with 1 hand, but otherwise was still getting work done even during lunch). I never even checked my personal email the entire day, let alone visit Slashdot or anything else I would do on a normal day.

Why? Because I had a high-priority task that was due the same day, and I was assigned to get it done as soon as possible. On top of that, several additional requests came up during the day that delayed my progress on the original assignment. Nearly from the time I walked in the door until I was ready to go home -- after working two hours more than I'm officially required to -- my brain was basically 100% utilized doing productive work. I only took one bathroom break the entire day!

My management knows that I'm able and willing to do this when required, but the reality of my work is that, often, I'm simply not required to be fully utilized. My company is more than welcome to give me additional assignments to increase my utilization, and they actually do, on occasion. I assume that if they felt my time was not worth the output they were getting, I would be separated from the company. Since that hasn't happened and I've received consistent positive feedback from both customers and management, I don't feel bad at all about taking some downtime when I want/need to.

So that just obviates the question of why, exactly, these same employers feel the need to deploy such pervasive monitoring and work tracking systems. Are they doing it just because the technology is there, and some salesman convinced them it would increase productivity? Are they doing it out of fear of not detecting the 1-5% of the workforce that are actually bad apples and are in fact not getting their work done in a timely manner?

Whatever the reason, they should realize that it just makes life harder for the majority who will slave away tirelessly if the job calls for it, and won't if the job doesn't. It makes it harder to enjoy the downtime for what it is when you can feel their eyes on your keystrokes.

If you (or your software) needs to do this...

[QuietLagoon]

... something is wrong in your workplace.

.
If you need to have software that constantly looks over employees' shoulders and cheers them on, then you need to treat the root cause of your employees' dissatisfaction with the workplace. The software will only dump salt into a festering wound.

Re:If you (or your software) needs to do this...

[HornWumpus]

And because the workplace sucks so bad, they also no doubt have a workforce that also sucks and would need this kind of software to force them to be 'productive'.

If I were in that situation I'd close the doors and start over.

You will never have a good team working under such conditions. You will never turn the group that works under such conditions into a good team. If you somehow inherited a good team and used these management methods they would be gone in a week.

This is a case of clueless management trying to get to a local productivity maximum. They don't even know what a good team looks like.

Re:If you (or your software) needs to do this...

[gstoddart]

And at a certain point you have to realize the people in these jobs are humans, need to stop and catch their breath, think for a bit, stretch, pee, and interact with their colleagues.

Any corporation trying to achieve 100% engagement all day every day has no concept of the kinds of tasks their employees do and will only make productivity worse by trying to do it.

My general belief is the more a company uses metrics the worse it is to work for.

Re:If you (or your software) needs to do this...

[Anonymous Coward]

I experienced a sudden management change a couple years back.

In under a year, my team went from a highly respected group that tackled problems to an empty section of cubes after everyone left. I finally left after being required to be in the office 31 days in the month of october, then having my vacation privileges revoked when I tried to take two days off to refresh my mind.

My new manager frequently stated that all of his employees were "in a bad place mentally". I guess he didn't realize he had us all working 20+ hours of mandatory OT per week with no end in sight, plus all vacation usage was off the table "until next year".

Re:If you (or your software) needs to do this...

[HornWumpus]

Next time, be the first to go, not the last.

Oblig xkcd

[pr0nbot]

https://xkcd.com/303/

Although... the bastards keep giving me faster computers.

Re:Oblig xkcd

[slinches]

And now we know the real reason for software bloat

Re:Oblig xkcd

[Technician]

LOL. Have a fast computer and fast connection, however the security filter reduces that to slower than home DSL for internal sites. What good is a 100+ meg connection verifiable by DSL reports when the corporate VPN appears to be on a bank of 56K dial up modems?

Slashdot is what you do while waiting for Remote Desktop to refresh.

Re:Oblig xkcd

[Anonymous Coward]

We got JRebel (no affiliation, no endorsement intended). Our manager used that exact cartoon as a reason for buying it. :)

Re:Oblig xkcd

[Shimbo]

Although... the bastards keep giving me faster computers.

That's why we have continuous integration...

Cracking the Whip

[srobert]

"... does cracking the whip more often actually increase productivity?"

Maybe it does, if you're supervising low skilled workers with no discipline in an environment where it will be difficult for them to find a comparable job. Otherwise, no. Cracking the whip creates a miserable environment that productive employees don't wish to work in. So they will probably wind up working for competitors, who may be implementing workplace practices that involve strange concepts such as trust, loyalty, stewardship and so forth, leaving the whip crackers with only undesirables.

Re:Cracking the Whip

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad at my company they don't care as much. I often have to run longish (5-10mins) calculations/simulations. This is the perfect time for fb/slashdot without affecting productivity.

Re:Cracking the Whip

[war4peace]

Can you refocus that fast?
Wow.

Re:Cracking the Whip

[Anonymous Coward]

>low skilled workers with no discipline

Perfect for the millennial generation then. Those kids have no work ethic at all.

Productive workplace activity ..

[nickweller]

Doing the same job over-and-over that a few hundreds lines of code could do, because the manager doesn't understand coding and is afraid of losing authority. It's called micro-management.

Re:Productive workplace activity ..

[HornWumpus]

Most windows apps can be automated. I'd spend a week writing a 'busy worker' script then never work again.

Just another clueless metric to be gamed.

Re:Productive workplace activity ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Amongst coders, learning regular expressions and a few unix commands makes tasks doable in minutes that would take most of the people around you hours to days. Want em to think you're awesome when you deliver at an astounding rate, or do you take your time, browse slashdot a while and deliver on time... It's up to you.

Re:Productive workplace activity ..

[HornWumpus]

You can deliver in hours what it takes most people days with any of a number of tool suites.

Because 'most' are fucking morons.

Re:Productive workplace activity ..

[__aaclcg7560]

I was handed a blotched print server migration project and the server tech told me I needed to use the GUI wizard to verify that all 1,000+ printers actually work. Adding a printer with the GUI wizard takes five minute. I wrote a PowerShell that adds a printer every 30 seconds. The server tech was astonished that I completed the three-month assignment within one month.

Bootstrapped Startups

[ranton]

Bootstrapping a startup is a common way to start down the entrepreneurial path. And I doubt it is uncommon for these founders to spend no time during their 9-5 working on their new company. This may be as obvious as coding or answering tech support emails at work, or as subtle as reading articles on LinkedIn about angel investing.

Re:Bootstrapped Startups

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a fantastic way to get fired for gross misconduct, and possibly sued too.

Re: Bootstrapped Startups

[Anonymous Coward]

I do this and daytrade.

Re:Bootstrapped Startups

[ShanghaiBill]

It's a fantastic way to get fired for gross misconduct

At some point you need to leave your day job, and it is better to get fired (rather than quit) because you then qualify for unemployment benefits.

... and possibly sued too.

Highly unlikely. Lawsuits are expensive and time consuming for the plaintiff, and a lawsuit against an individual would require strong evidence, with little chance of collecting much.

Re:Bootstrapped Startups

[Anonymous Coward]

How about a successful startup founder?

Re:Bootstrapped Startups

[ShanghaiBill]

How about a successful startup founder?

If you want to sue an ex-employee for misconduct, there are strict deadlines. You can't just wait for years, until the startup is successful, and then file. A much more lucrative approach would be to save evidence that the ex-employee worked on their startup during paid work time, and therefore what they produced was "work-for-hire" and therefore you own the copyright to their source code.

Which is why I don't like BYOD

[Virtucon]

These kinds of systems are great for bean counters but lousy for workers. We're not digging ditches or plowing fields. Breathing room is expected with white collar positions and beware of companies with intrusive systems in a Bring Your Own Device bargain. Bring your own device gives them flexibility but also the same kinds of tracking that can be used on a desktop. So now your private tablet or smart phone can be used by your employer to track you as well, fuck that. Bring your tablet,bring your own 4G network connection and do your browsing on that device. Don't let your company put it's crap on your private device under any circumstance. You can access e-mail through web portals, they can send text messages and that's all they need to do and all you should be able to need.

Work everyone 70+ hours a week

[Anonymous Coward]

And make sure they don't have any downtime in the office. Cultivate an atmosphere of fear and mistrust among the employees. Coffee at work? No sir, coffee takes time away from work, so stop being unproductive.

A ~100% turnover rate and buildings full of broken employees are the best ways to succeed. Just ask Amazon's CEO as he enjoys every possible luxury that money can buy while his employees slowly die from work-related stress.

Re:Work everyone 70+ hours a week

[Z00L00K]

It's actually not the number of hours worked that matters - it's the knowledge needed to solve a problem quickly that matters. If person A uses one week to solve a problem while person B uses one hour it may look like person B is slacking between the tasks solved. On idle periods person B may have room to slack but when the shit hits the fan person B may be the one the company needs while person A instead goes into mental block unable to proceed.

Re:Work everyone 70+ hours a week

[war4peace]

But person B gets fired instead because *drumroll* the stats say he slackin'.

Previous studies

[kheldan]

Haven't there been previous studies that showed that allowing employees to goof off a little bit actually helped their overall productivity, led to fewer mistakes, better overall employee health (due, I suppose, to lower stress levels) and such? Posted here on /., for that matter? I can't see being micromanaged as being good for anyone.

Ah......

[Anonymous Coward]

That explains why /. is blocked by my employer...

stoopeed hoomans...

[Thud457]

the machines are supposed to work for you not vice-versa!

Goat.se

[davidwr]

Goat.see.what.its.like.to.be.one.well.sortof

What, you thought I meant something else???

Counterproductive

[mwvdlee]

I've worked at a company where people were required to be at work for 40 hours (not counting lunch) each week.
The company did not have any systems to check this and they suspected people cheated.
So they implemented a time registration system which required employees to justify their working hours using a feedback system.
Turns out most employees were doing well over 40 hours without noticing, so the employees started leaving for home earlier.
A few months later the feedback system was disabled, so employees no longer got reports of the registered hours.
By then, the employees had grown accustomed to monitoring their working hours and kept going home on time instead of too late.
A few months after that, the entire system was removed.
In the end, the whole ordeal managed to catch a handful of cheating employees and taught ~1,500 honest employees to work less hours.

Re:Counterproductive

[LessThanObvious]

It's impossible to force people to use their minds only for work 100% of the time they are at work. People do not function that way. If it's an easy repetitive job that allows you to think about something else while completing your tasks, so that can be a higher percentage of productive time, but tasks that require mental focus especially on things nobody actually wants to focus on require a degree of freedom to maintain one's sanity. If I were watched every moment of the day my internet time would be replaced by time spent beating my head against the desk wishing to be anywhere but there. Then soon I would quit before I began to feel compelled to go Fight Club on management. When you put people into a mental box that is too small it's just extremely uncomfortable. If you think time wasting is expensive, try to analyze the cost of people hating their jobs and the companies for which they work. People who actively hate their companies do shit work and provide shit customer service. If you need software to tell you anything about your employee's then your management is fucking useless.

Re:Counterproductive

[edtice1559]

The title and tone of your message imply that this "technology" is a bad thing (and that's my instant reaction as well). However, I don't like working with cheaters and I do like going home on time, to the outcomes you posted seem like *good* ones. There are weeks where I work long hours and times where I don't have a full 40 hours worth of work to do. I always assume that it comes out in the wash. But I don't *hide* when I work short. If I quit early to take my kid somewhere, I actually put it on my work calendar so my boss and colleagues can see it. I'm not promoting this kind of big brother, but getting rid of cheaters sure does seem appealing.

Evil software for evil people...

[__aaclcg7560]

One company I worked for implemented monitoring software to allow supervisors to keep closer tabs on their workers. On the very first day, my supervisor came running over to my cube to tell me that I shouldn't be browsing Amazon on company time or I would be written up. Except for one small problem: I had a breakfast burrito from the roach coach in hand as I was on my break. According to company policy, I can browse the Internet on my breaks. So I told him to bugger off.

You always get what you measure.

[Anonymous Coward]

See unnecessary subject.

Gaming aside it would probably be harmful

[Sycraft-fu]

People just cannot remain 100% focused and productive 100% of the time. It doesn't work that way. Never has in human history, never will. Thus if you try to force that, all you'll do is burn people out. So in the long run, it'll just decrease productivity over all. Better to have people able to goof off, take breaks, and then get back on task then just getting frazzled, working at low efficiency, and staring off in to space.

As Tech Support on the phone

[meerling]

If I take call right after call, I got through a certain number of calls.
If after each call, I spent some time hitting the net, or reading a couple pages out of a novel, or whatever, just something to get my mind off that last call, my stats went up by around 20%-30%.
This wasn't a fluke either. I had a supervisor that made me take that time, and we had tracked the numbers for the days I did or didn't have that small diversion. According to him, it's like a mental palette cleanser. Well whatever is really going on, it helps. Sometimes the most efficient speed to work at is NOT pedal to the metal bat outta hell speed.

What next?

[codeButcher]

What next? Will they also tell me that I may not bring an extra jacket/desktop fan, or my own music and earphones, to compensate for the one-size-fits-all modern open plan assembly line office environment?

Dependencies

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the rest of the world performs with perfect efficiency as well and always answers our calls and emails, can we get the same salary by working half the day?

Yes, this is how it can be useful

[raymorris]

> However, honestly, half of the downtime I have at work is due to the inefficiencies of the workplace. Waiting for slow servers. Waiting for queries to run. Waiting for people to get back to me. Etc.

Exactly. Measuring this type of thing is what can actually improve my productivity, and those of my coworkers, significantly.

At my old job, I time was spent like this:
Open a page from the dev web server and wait for it to load.
Make a small change to the code.
Refresh on the dev web server and wait for it to load.
Make a small change to the code.
Refresh on the dev web server and wait for it to load.
Make a small change to the code.
Refresh on the dev web server and wait for it to load.

Half of my day, and therefore half of my pay, was spent waiting for the dev web server to respond. If management identified that our computers spent half their time waiting on a response from dev.company.com, they could then decide it was worthwhile to spend $x,000 for faster response rather than paying me $xx,000 to wait for the server.

My current job is similar:
Run a 30-minute security scan.
Adjust a parameter to the scan, or some code.
Run a 30-minute security scan.
Adjust a parameter to the scan, or some code.
Run a 30-minute security scan.

Right now I have a scan running, and my next task is to change the code and see if that makes the scan faster. Blocking Facebook won't help that. Adding machines to our test network will help, so I can run two scans, with different versions of the code, in parallel.

Trying to sell data mining software I see

[ErichTheRed]

It's been my experience that implementing stuff like this only works if your workforce is totally undisciplined otherwise. Call centers operate almost exclusively in this manner -- relentless data obsession, micromanaging and basically providing the worst possible work environment. Some call centers I've had experience with actually make their employees ask a supervisor if they're allowed to go to the bathroom, rather than just making themselves unavailable. Maybe the Milennial twist of "gamification" makes it more palatable, I don't know. But I do know that employees in this environment who have a choice, are reasonably skilled, and have better employment available will take it at the earliest possible opportunity. I doubt even the most social media obsessed Milennial is going to be happy enough about earning badges for doing their job to keep them from seeking less horrific working conditions.

It's similar to introducing time tracking in a professional (salaried) environment. Professional services does need to track billable hours, as is common in consulting firms, but insisting that employees be warming their chairs for exact time frames and penalizing infractions just leads to a mess. Just like the call center workers, everyone who's good leaves for less abusive workplaces, and you're left with the broken people who can't get a job anywhere else.

I sound like a Luddite when I say this, I know, but the economy needs some inefficiency. Even factory workers, who are arguably performing the most robotic of tasks, shouldn't be expected to clock in, perform their tasks at 100% efficiency for the full shift and clock out.

Simply illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

In most european countries that would simply illegal. Either you allow ypur employees to use the company Internet connection also for private stuff and lose any right to control what they do, or you don't.
Employee productivity must be based on results, not on how long employee stares at their screens...

Oh yeah?

[argStyopa]

Simply put, yes, I might be posting at /. at work, but I also sit here 50+ hours a week.

If you want to 'monitor' my productivity so that I'm working every minute of every day, damn sure I'm leaving at 5:00:01, and not walking in here one second early, either.

Two can play at the "bullshit minutiae game".

I would see this working in government positions

[ErichTheRed]

Forgot to post this also -- one place I could definitely see this being used is in government positions. I know a lot of state university employees, and the big downside they cite for their job is all the paperwork required for time tracking, timesheets, requesting days off, etc. According to them, you really need to balance this with the benefits and job security. Add in micromanaging bosses who are also scared about losing their positions, and it can really be a drain. One quote -- "I have to be in at 8:30 every morning, without fail. I could be watching cat videos on YouTube waiting for everyone else I need to talk to to come in, but I have to be doing it at my desk."

One of the reasons that's needed is all the transparency needed for government positions. Almost on a schedule, the local rag goes out, files FOIA requests, and drags local government workers over the coals for unofficial use of government cars, incorrect time sheets, etc. You know, all those lazy people stealing the taxpayers' hard earned money and all that... (Yes, I'm aware there's corruption, but low level workers aren't the ones who benefit most.)

That said, I don't know if even tenure-style job security and a pension are worth the hassle.

Time spent filling out timesheet

[mindcandy]

I worked central IT in a State Government job and we had a category in the time tracking system called "Time spent filling out timesheet" .. we were allowed to bill ~4hrs per month to it.

Curiously they didn't have any problem with this .. the beancounters don't seem to care what you waste time on it, so long as it has a label.

Re:Time spent filling out timesheet

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been told that time sheets should be filled out as I go.

I think that boss had no idea what my day was actually like. Get to work, start working on something, get a call about something completely different, spend 10 minutes on that, back to the original task, get an e-mail about something completely different, spend 2 minutes on that, back to original task. I would just make wild ass guesses most of the time.

I can understand if your time is billed out to various customers that time reporting is important but that particular job was not one that billed out our labor.

Wasted time and effort

[nospam007]

People just do facebook, porn and twitter on their smartphones, who needs the company computer with the man's spyware on it.

Tenure?

[Anonymous Coward]

What tenure? I work for a government agency that had massive layoffs last year. For those represented by unions in blue collar positions, seniority held. But among the professional staff, they laid off with disregard for tenure. People who had been there 20 years were sent packing, while employees who had only been there a few years were retained. Later this year we're getting some interns for me to train. I point-blank asked my boss if I could get something in writing about not being replaced by the interns I'm training. He laughed as if I were joking.

Re:Tenure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like your state needs a white collar professional employee union.

sorry , but

[ripvlan]

I have to type this quietly from under my desk - because *they* are watching.

Although having somebody remind me to get focused again isn't a horrible thing. How many watercool conversations have you been part of or overheard and thought "yeah - this topic has gone off the rails - back to work" --- and the gang somehow doesn't do that until a more senior person asks, "you folks work here?"

No one is going to bat an eye

[Anonymous Coward]

If you fill out a paper timecard and write down 8 a.m. when you come in at 8:02, no one is going to bat an eye. But if you do that when you leave too, that means you’re getting 5 minutes more a day. After a year, that’s a few days more vacation.

Reminiscent of the FOX News poll of how many people thought scientists made up their data.

No conflict of interest here

[pseudorand]

> waste time while still appearing productive

Wow. Kudos to the new owners of slashdot. I would have guessed they'd have censored this story since it's clearly reminding all their users that we should probably close our browsers and get back to work.

Which is it capitalism?

[Simulant]

One minute our advanced technology is going to give us more leisure time, the next it's extracting every last ounce of 'productivity' from us.

Make up your damn mind.

Unions come back & we need to make full time 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Unions come back & we need to make full time 32-35 hours a week to keep up with the job losses to automaton

Misuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

It will never be anything *but* misused to micromanage you.
There's no value in that software compared to a spreadsheet and a punch-clock if you aren't using it to squeeze every last second out of the workers.

Quid Pro Quo

[ishmaelflood]

Joel Slatis, founder of Timesheets.com " “If you fill out a paper timecard and write down 8 a.m. when you come in at 8:02, no one is going to bat an eye. But if you do that when you leave too, that means you’re getting 5 minutes more a day. After a year, that’s a few days more vacation.”"

So, if I start at 757 and finish at 1702 every day then can I have a couple more days vacation? In the people's republic of Australia we do this, they are called rostered days off, basically we work 5% extra time for 19 days of the 4 weeks, and take the 20th off.

Time rounding is ok and the time from when you get

[Joe_Dragon]

Time rounding is ok and the time from when you get to the office till getting to your work place should count as work time.

well, if they were interested in focus...

[Mirar]

...they could start by eliminating everything that makes it hard to concentrate and focus when you actually want to.

I have a hard time concentrating when the environment is noisy.
Interruptions can totally ruin my _day_ of production.
Lack of motivation ruins my creativity.

So if you want a productive environment, I really don't think forcing people to stare at an IDE is the solution.
Get rid of the cubicles, let people be in personal spaces (rooms) with 1-2 people. Make sure fans and other noise sources are silent. Get rid of drafts. Make the environment friendly and not sterile.
Make sure you don't schedule meetings during the day when people need to stay focused. Put them in mornings or late afternoons (before or after a long creative period).
Make sure your people feel involved in the project and the company. Give praise on any progress. Get involved and try to understand what's going on (details are not needed for this). Listen to them, the needs (for projects and for the workplace environment and need for time off). Send people on educations, workshops and courses to keep the skills updated (after their needs and wishes).

Trust them or the motivation is lost. Never micromanage. Get bosses and leaders that are good at being bosses leaders. (Don't promote to incompetence.)

It's not that hard.

I can look like I'm wasting time

[Anonymous Coward]

while being incredibly productive. Thinking about or planning a task, waiting for a few minutes-long scripts to finish, etc. Just because I'm not moving my fingers on the keyboard doesn't mean productivity has halted. If you through some multi-tasking in their, you'll get a marked drop in productivity as my focus splits.

easy now...

[Evtim]

Do you remember when people stopped laboring with that hunter-gatherer stuff and started farming? Agrarian society... less work, less labor invested to produce food to feed the tribe.

That is simply not true. The hunter-gatherers worked less that us today, let alone the glorious times of the industrial revolution with its 16 hrs working days and horrendous safety record. If you meant that we work more in order to have a bit more than just food, shelter and clothing you might have had a point, but you specifically mention food only. Hilarious. Do you now [for instance] that the average height of humans took a hit after farming was "invented"? Sitting on one place without trade means [usually] poor diversity of food....that's just a small tread to pull if you like to study the subject....

Re:easy now...

[bluefoxlucid]

That is simply not true. The hunter-gatherers worked less that us today, let alone the glorious times of the industrial revolution with its 16 hrs working days and horrendous safety record.

Hunter-Gatherer: Wander around all god damn day trying to find or kill food. Agrarian society: Put food in one place, have food available, fewer people working, less time, more reliable access to food. Agrarian society replaced hunter-gatherer society directly because it was less work. If it were more work, they wouldn't have stopped hunting.

Herd animals move, and so you have to constantly follow them (effort) instead of settling in one place; wild plants don't grow close enough together, so you need to forage over large areas rather than farm in one place; and a big enough community makes food scarce, so you have to hunt and gather over a broad span of land, which mans, again, walking all over the place, expending more effort to collect enough food to feed everyone... versus just raising your own food in one place.

It's been found that hunter-gatherers worked for 5 hours per day average day. That's 1820 hours per person per year. The US has 749,000 farmer feeding 340 million Americans on 50-hour working weeks--2600 hours per farmer, 5.72 hours PER YEAR per American. That's an inflated number, of course: 63% of wheat, 51% of soy, and 45% of rice go out, so you can estimate about half of that feeds Americans--2.86 hours per American per year. That's not quite right, either: Farmers also produce (and export) cotton, which isn't food; but also produce other types of perishable vegetables, which aren't exported.

Hunter-gatherer: 1,820 hours per person per year to obtain food.

Agrarian: 2-5 hours per person per year to obtain food.

Industrial revolution: 479 labor-hours to make a shirt by hand. 6 labor-hours to do it using a machine, including the labor-hours that went into building the machine (amortized over the number of shirts produced by the machine, and including all maintenance in the machine's life time).

Clothes by hand: 479 hours to make a shirt, including all tools, dyes, and materials produced along the way.

Clothes by machine: 6 hours to make a shirt, including all tools (machines), dyes, and materials (including fuel, electricity) produced along the way.

Everything we do cuts down on labor invested to produce a product. Every step.

Do you now [for instance] that the average height of humans took a hit after farming was "invented"? Sitting on one place without trade means [usually] poor diversity of food....that's just a small tread to pull if you like to study the subject....

This has nothing to do with the discussion. We could also discuss penis size or the modern styles of beer versus Egyptian beer, but it would be irrelevant.

Re:easy now...

[war4peace]

I would challenge some of that data.
1820 hours are per year but not per person. A hunter would catch a prey which would feed many tribe members (depending on the animal's weight). A hunted gazelle could feed 20 people for two days straight.

749K farmers don't work solo, they have other people working with/for them.
The USDA Census from 2012 shows 3,233,358 farm operators in the USA (http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resources/Typology/typology13.pdf page 8).
I'm not sure about your other numbers (citation needed) but my assumption is that they might be off (by numbers of magnitude in some cases).

Re:easy now...

[bluefoxlucid]

1820 hours are per year but not per person. A hunter would catch a prey which would feed many tribe members (depending on the animal's weight).

First off, they hunted in groups. One person didn't go out with a spear to fetch the tribe dinner.

Second, the 4.8 hours per person per day statistic is the current scientific conjecture. That's not "some people, when they worked, worked 4.8 hours per day"; that's "we believe each person put forth an effort of 4.8 hours of working time per day."

749K farmers don't work solo, they have other people working with/for them.

Try agricultural workers. 749,400 agricultural workers in the United States in 2012.

You raise a point, and I've done more digging. Farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers...

Let's take your numbers. Produces 9-22 hours per person per YEAR.

I'm not sure about your other numbers (citation needed)

Population of the US: 318.9 million (2014).

Exports seem to vary (31% of soy versus 62% of soy, depending on who you ask?).

There's production numbers. Looks like cotton and vegetables don't outweigh corn; the USDA estimates the US exports over 20% of its corn production, but Wikipedia estimates about 15%. USDA suggests 30% of wheat exported, while FAO suggests average grain export (wheat export) fluctuates between 52% and 63% per year. I just took the chart Google gave me on the first search.

Taking the low numbers, we can raise my estimates by a further 50%. Somewhere between 15 and 33 hours per person per year of working time invested in the production of food per year.

So we're not talking about each individual human working 1,815 fewer hours each year to feed itself; we're talking about each individual human working 1,800 fewer hours per each year to feed itself. I was off a little, I guess. Across 320 million humans in the US, that's only 576 billion hours per year saved; across the 1.2 billion in developed countries, it's 2.16 trillion working hours not spent on producing food.

The sheer power of my shrug at a rounding error can move the sun.

if you use it to punish the women

[johncandale]

Why do I feel this would be used to punish the real workers even more and give the women free passes? Offices I have been at always have some lazy workers (usually women) that facebook, and generally kill 3 to 5 hours a day till it is time to go home, smart phone broswering ( how does this help that?) personnel calls, office kitchen chatter, etc. Somehow I feel they will still be gone soft on and the people will use 95% of their time well will just be ridden harder. Because certain people just seem to get a free pass because of social tyes and manager subconscious favoritism.