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Comment by michaelcampbell | Hacker News Reader

That happens?

I've seen it be a concern at a couple companies where the person takes 30+ minute "coffee breaks" and has to leave the office to go to Starbucks. Not surprisingly they were generally lower output team members as well. (He says, on HN, in the middle of the workday.)

It happened to my wife with a past manager (customer support). It was that manager's first supervisor role and they were trying to be "metric focused" which led to extreme micro management. That management style led to most of the team quitting, including my wife. We heard that the manager was demoted about a month later.

I've seen it most in call centers, where the call balancing is so sensitive they try to stagger bathroom breaks through a forty hour call floor.

Then, that policy, which is a boring dystopia in and of itself, gets applied to other individual contributors "to make things fair". I've seen this in more than one customer-service focused company (though thankfully avoided being in the category).

Maybe they don't make quotas but if they comment on how many coffee breaks or bathroom trips you make, they obviously care about it.

Number/duration of coffee breaks is hardly "amount of coffee you drink". And I find it hard to believe any software engineer would catch grief for any amount of time spent away from the desk of their output was measurably above average. So this complaint sounds like it's actually, "I don't get anything done and don't even bother trying to appear busy and my manager tried to talk to me about it".

It's not unheard of for contractors in non-NA & non-EU locales.

Maybe at Foxconn or something

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