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Comment by gfxgirl | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how much of this comes from working with unskilled labor (hope that's the right term).

I once worked in fast food right out of high school. 80-90% of the employees were one or more of untrustworthy, unreliable, whiny, always making excuses or trying get out of work. My point being if you start there you might just assume that that's the way it always is for all employees no matter what type of job and therefore feel like you need to surveil.

Most of my tech jobs didn't have this issue AFAIK (though one did) but just as one stat from a random search

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/workplace-crime-costs-us-bus...

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I've seen plenty of bad behavior in tech. Ranges from unauthorized (but tolerable) use of servers for gaming after hours, to straight up time theft or physical theft.

When BTC was just starting out, we had one dev bring his own server to a data center and piggy back off a dumb switch for some NAS boxes. Free power for months and several BTC -- probably ~100k or more now.

We had a night admin printing out books on how to hack things from the work printer. Like 300 pages worth... which he forgot in the printer. He later tried to sell our certificates to random people via his work email.

One contract/hourly admin fudged his timecard 10 hours a week, every week, for months. He only was discovered when we did HR cost reviews and found that he was 500+ hours ahead of everyone else.

One of our junior linux admins brought his girlfriend into the NOC for a tour, then was caught on camera fingerbanging his lady on camera in the hallway just outside of the NOC door.

No shortage of switches, SFPs, half-step servers, and other gear going missing.

That's been my observation too. In tech, this kind of paranoid micro-management is a great (inverse) indicator for whether someone's used to working with talented people. If I were ever managing again in tech I'd be trying to find people much smarter than me and then get the heck out of their way.

Edit since I just re-read the parent comment and might have misunderstood: I don't distinguish between tech and other fields in this regard. I think it's an issue in all fields.

Spot on.

I have consulted with customer contact companies and it was always shocking to see the low productivity. Front line employees, especially the younger age group, would find ingenious ways to circumvent doing actual work while artificially inflating their KPIs. There was even information sharing economy in some companies where the best tricks were traded for goods and services.

To put it in context though, it was by any measure thankless and soul crushing work. And the worst offenders were in cold call centres and strangely in email support teams.

This reflects the experiences of close relatives with unskilled labour. In some fields, it's difficult to get people who consistently show up sober and on time. Those who can do this rarely stay for long.

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