[martinjacobd]

> maybe because I'm not in the US? Or haven't spend much time at BigCorp?

My wife works at a BigCorp and I work at a small but established company. The differences in this arena couldn't be starker. I was given a laptop (and assembled my own desktop) and told to set it up according to my preferences first day. My wife has many metrics that she knows about tracked through her locked down MacBook (and I'm sure many more she doesn't know about). For my case I can't even think of how they'd track me while I work from home; for hers, she already knows that they do.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

If you have 2 employees, it's not worth spending a bunch of time setting up systems to monitor them. And you should just be able to do it by interactions anyway.

If you have 200k employees, it makes sense.

[martinjacobd]

There is the economy of scale problem you are talking about. There is just also a difference in culture. Many of the people at my work place are burned out from big tech jobs (or equally burned out from startup culture and want to work somewhere stable and established). I think they'd just leave if we implemented tracking. They are also unusually productive people who like the work they do. (At least it seems unusual from what I've heard about on here and elsewhere. I was self-employed before working here so unsure what is usual for wage earners.) Many of the people at my wife's workplace are hard-working but unenthusiastic and also tend to be older.

[barbazoo]

That sounds like a good place to work!

[thomastjeffery]

There economy of scale makes it less inefficient, not sense.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

For a sufficiently large business, efficiency = sense

[uoaei]

We seem to have put our finger on the problem, then: the incentives of the business diverge from the incentives of the people who comprise it.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Obviously. When you're a company of one - they're one and the same. When you're a company of 200k - you're a drop in an ocean.

What you care about diverges from everyone else, and the main thing you have in common is maximizing the compensation / enjoyment curve.

Most people's enjoyment at work is not going to go down sharply because their employer is looking at how much time the average person spends in the office.

[JohnFen]

> Most people's enjoyment at work is not going to go down sharply because their employer is looking at how much time the average person spends in the office.

I have a hard time thinking this is actually true. Is there any data on this?

[uoaei]

I don't think it's obvious, because there's actually three forces at play: the individual desires of one person, the collective desires of all people, and the individual desires of the "business entity".

The distinction is borne of the different methods of decision-making within the business. Traditional capitalist enterprises put the last in that list as the highest priority at the expense of the other two. Worker-owned coops attempt to do away with the distinction between the latter two entirely. Communes ignore the first and the last and focus only on the second.

The point is, there are different ways of organizing people into a coherent mass to achieve certain goals, but Westerners are mostly only comfortable considering these issues in terms of capitalist modes of business (see the framing used throughout this discussion, e.g., the casual use of the word "employer", etc.).

I am aware that capitalist enterprise is the default setting of economies across the globe. I just want to point out how the conversation and insights into the problem are obscured by the normalization of certain ideological choices over others.

[quest88]

Big target vs small target. Makes sense to me