[saghm]

> They line people up in rows, put headphones on their heads and wire them up to Teams and Jira to spend the whole day in isolation. Because taking a walk to another floor of building to talk to someone like a normal human being is too wasteful, but somehow forcing everyone to spend hours commuting isn’t.

Sure, this is pretty much exactly what I'd expect from companies; wasting the employee's time doesn't matter, but wasting the _company's_ time is anathema. In the absence of something to push back against it, companies will always make decisions like this. We're only a bit over a century and a few repealed regulations from another Triangle Shirtwaist Factory after all.

[erikerikson]

Except we're largely talking about salaried employees who aren't paid by the hour.

[saghm]

My point isn't that this is likely to happen today with software engineers, but that companies will 100% make decisions to improve their bottom lines at the expense of the well-being of their employees in the absence of other factors preventing this. Wasting time of salaried employees on commutes is a fairly tame version of that compared to what's happened historically, and I used an extreme example because my argument is that the main difference between then and now isn't companies fundamentally caring more about their employees, but improved safeguards for workers. Outside of those safeguards, sadly I'd find it more surprising if companies _didn't_ push to the absolute limit of what they could get away with rather than actually considering whether what they were doing was reasonable.

[erikerikson]

Thank you for moderating and clarifying a bit.

An example I would suggest is the push for "always more" no matter how much has been given.

Employer: "Great job succeeding in delivering our release death march on time! You are all the best!"

Us: "Comp time to rest?"

Employer: .oO(awkward choice employee...) "You agreed to a full time position, it will be fine for you to work your normal 40 and do make work."

That I've experienced almost that directly. Not in every role but it did happen. That particular company lied to me about the role too so I ended up leaving.

The thing that concerns me is that we start with these overly strong statements. The next stage is some of us become convinced of them. After that some of those transition to believing companies are obliged to them and start behaving accordingly. But these beliefs are bad for business and everyone involved. They create iterative counter solving games that reduce satisfaction and productivity. While I've always done my best by my employers, the concrete delivery of that effort has varied based on external factors but mostly the health of the work environment. No one has gotten as much of of me as startups that set a clear goal and let me work.

[TeMPOraL]

They may not be paid by the hour, but they're being graded by the hour.

It may be beneficial to the company to save overall "company time" at expense of wasting time for many individual employees, but I don't think this analysis accounts for the costs of people leaving or being fired. Both of those are very costly, but they're step changes and hard to attribute to any specific cause.

[erikerikson]

I've been evaluated half yearly or annually, never hourly that I've known.

Do you work in HR?

[tanjtanjtanj]

The above poster was fairly obviously using a figure of speech, they did not mean that there was a specific formal evaluation like a mid-year review every hour.

Think about what the average salaried person (especially outside of tech) might get dinged on either explicitly or implicitly. Come in at 10:00 every day? Not being "seen" enough in your seat or around the office? Not replying quickly enough in Teams/slack? Jira/Github statistics? These are not things that do not reflect a salaried worker's output but you're still getting evaluated by them on an minute by minute, hour by hour, day by ay basis.

[joquarky]

> Not replying quickly enough in Teams/slack?

This has got to be an ADA violation for someone with ADHD.

Not that it matters anymore.

[erikerikson]

This has sincerely not been my experience, even as my role has blended into management adjacency over the years.

[TeMPOraL]

But surely you experienced the fact that being paid a salary is a matter of contract, while being evaluated (formally and informally) for productivity is not independent of time. The company may find it valuable on the net to waste your time with distractions and bad process, but your manager may not know it and think you're just lazy.