Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gustomaximus | Hacker News Reader

I use a client like this for new freelancers/employees that are working full time or larger jobs. It is intrusive but 100% is needed for some people or they take the piss. I'm too busy to follow their workload and sit there estimating times of jobs match hours.

I check it one a week for ~10min to see hours logged per day and quick random to check its not loads of time wasting.

It feels intrusive but there is little difference than people walking past someone in an open plan office + they can turn it off anytime they want to do personal.

For me I see this as really useful for managing Jr remotes. And personally would have no issue running it if I was working remote. I think the pain points would be more about how management use it, and in its worse its little different from having a micro manager in a on-site office experience.

View on HN

How about assessing their work and thats that. Did they finish the tasks on time? Great, no need to snoop on them. Are they bad at the job then maybe try another person. I personally work in spurts and when im active I run through the work very fast then I need lighter tasks to put the work in the back of my head. Im still working on it even if looks like in not. It isn’t anybody’s business how I use my time as long as the work gets done. This reminds me I had a boss who was nosy and micromanaging. I followed his orders and became a lot less productive. It’s like this, you want control? I’ll give you 0 creativity back, no initiative and passion. I work on task and give 0 thoughts about it when done. Well, Im a lot older and would simply not accept to work like this and luckily i don’t need to.

> How about assessing their work and thats that.

That’s not so simple with time and materials billing. If somethings taking too long to deliver or is being delivered to a low standard, it could easily be explained by having to deal with unplanned problems (which could also be entirely the clients fault), or it could just as easily be a contractor being slow and/or useless. I’ve worked as a contractor for quite a long time, and the number of complete dead weight contractors I run into is astonishing, and so is the number of projects that go way over budget due to poor planning from the clients. The metric you propose to track doesn’t do such a good job of telling the difference between these two things. This approach doesn’t do a terribly great job of that either, but delivering your work under the conditions chosen by your client is pretty much how it always is for contractors/consultants/freelancers. If they take things too far they won’t be able to attract the high quality contractors in any case.

It seems like you're trying to shield yourself from "complete dead weight contractors" which should be easy enough to spot. Certainly don't need a dystopian monitoring system to pluck up their monitors every 10 minutes, and have months of research on trailing data to come to the conclusion that a contractor is dead weight.

I am myself a contractor so I’m not trying to shield myself from anything. They are however not simple to spot at all. I mean, I can spot them quite easily (at least I think I can). But I tend to work for people who hire me because they lack the skills that I have (or at least the skills I convince them I have). Their ability to evaluate the quality of my work, or reason about the problems I report to have with their systems, is close to non-existent. If I did terrible work it could take them quite a long time to notice, and then they’d just get themselves stuck trying to figure out if it was my terrible work, or the terrible work of a different contractor, or the terrible work of some of their employees, or simply the consequence of some other terrible work somebody else did 20 years ago. All of whom have a rather clear incentive to point the finger at each other. But don’t worry, whenever projects like that fail to deliver their planned value, there’s always some middle manager near by to say that the problem “should have been easy” to avoid.

If the client does not have the competence to spot bad work, how are screenshots gonna help?

They can give an indication that work is at least being done, or perhaps the pace at which it’s being done. Which as I said isn’t a great metric either. But it does to some extent help with something which is legitimately a problem for a lot of businesses who end up being taken for a ride by unscrupulous contractors.

This. I am not sure I as an engineer could tell the difference with screenshots. How could someone without programming experience do so?

Totally agree.

What is the value of micromanagement?

Just set expected result and output and when this should be met by.

It doesn't matter how the person has achieved it.

Isn't that a smarter approach?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE and https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/autonomy-mastery-pur...

> How about assessing their work and that's that

It doesn't work well in our enviroment. The guys we use this for tend to do a real mixed bag of tasks from a day of small fixes to days on a job. Its not realistic time wise for me to go through their days jobs lists and see all that's done in a day and if it seems right volume wise.

> Are they bad at the job then maybe try another person.

That's what this does. In 10min a week I can see if someone is putting hours and turning over work in a reasonable way.

> It isn’t anybody’s business how I use my time as long as the work gets done.

Absolutely - peeps are free to turn this on and off. I'm looking at the total work, how they break up the day is irrelevant. In that way they are very flexible. Its not like this runs when they are not working.

> This reminds me I had a boss who was nosy and micromanaging. I followed his orders and became a lot less productive. It’s like this, you want control?

I think your putting a bunch of your experience in here that isn't fair. Our enviroment is very hands off and from my end I try to follow what a mentor told me "Tell people what you want, not what to do". You may have another experience but I find this tool helps us achieve independent work while offering that coverage from people that are looking to do less than reasonable.

> little difference than people walking past someone in an open plan office

> in its worse its little different from having a micro manager in a on-site office experience

That itself is a pretty horrible thing, and I'm glad I don't have to work for people like you.

Yes, it sounds like someone is being paid as a "micro-manager" to check whether others are working. It is very dismissive towards the other employees, and it is very troubling to pay someone at a management level to do such work. Someone whose job only consists in checking over the shoulders of the people doing the actual work should be paid less, not more, than them.

I hope the "silver lining" of everyone having to WFH due to COVID is that companies realise how little contribution middle managers make to getting work done and hence the bottom line. They are just dead weight, get rid of them and share the spoils between workers and senior managers, it's a win-win.

This is one more example of terrible management. Mistrust, too much control and micromanagement are totalitarian ways of push management that do not work with thinking and creative working force. Unless what you do is already known pattern coding and repetitive work, which does not include the left or right side of the brain, the above approach may work. Maybe in movies, you can put a gun to a hacker's head and say you have 1 minute to crack this, but in reality, that does not work. Solving problems takes time, and art-wise, to get inspiration, it takes even more time. "Slacking" time is necessary to produce a good solution...

So, you give a difficult problem to your employee, he gets stressed it is difficult, but now he needs to pretend to be busy to satisfy boss, he is even more stressed as he does not have time to think about solving the problem, but he needs to think about being busy... I can see people spiraling into mental health problems.

I just remembered, at the beginning of my career, one of my coworkers got a request from a client: we need something, we need it urgently, so make it and make it interesting by tomorrow noon.

> So, you give a difficult problem to your employee, he gets stressed it is difficult, but now he needs to pretend to be busy to satisfy boss, he is even more stressed as he does not have time to think about solving the problem, but he needs to think about being busy... I can see people spiralling into mental health problems.

You're making up some horrible scenario that holds not basis of reality to support your view. I cant see that ever happening in the enviroment we are in. Maybe elsewhere but this tool is going to have both sides.

No doubt some people would be real arsehole managers with these type of tools. I also dont doubt these same managers would be like that in a physical office where they try to overwatch and micro mange there.

In our scenario the 2 main things its given us is 1) a massive time saving to management and 2) ability to leave freelancers/jr employees alone to do their thing.

Experience may differ with users :)

There isn't a way you could track results instead of the time they're sitting in front of the computer? That way you don't waste time micromanaging and the freelancer is rewarded for working smarter rather than longer.

With time tracking, the freelancer earns less if they find shortcuts and you'd probably rather the work was finished sooner rather than later so the incentives are all mixed up.

Not really. We do a really wide range of jobs and its too time consuming to dive into the detail of peoples work.

Many people are taking this like its some micromanagement its my job to watch them but its literally the opposite. I can quickly check in for 5/10min every week or so and see that things are working. The alternative would be hours of reviewing tasks and output. And this quick check saves me a bucket of time + I leave them alone to do their thing if all seems good.

I do get why people dont like it. I was quite hesitant to bring it in originally but I've found it a really useful tool for the way and employee structure of how our business works.

What if I sketch out a solution to a complex problem for most of the day and then execute it in an hour?

This will only catch the most ridiculous abuse that will be visible from results as well and harm everybody else.

And, if it's not visible in the results... why do you care?

exactly this. I usually go for a walk and start making a mental model of what I have to do, what order, etc. By the time I'm actually in front of my laptop I already have a clear image and what,when,where and how and just need to write it all down.

It won't even catch the most ridiculous abuse. If I want to spend eight billable hours reading Hacker News I'll do it on a different computer, and just make sure my "work" machine periodically scrolls, switches file or opens up a new dialog.

Might catch out somebody who deals with a couple of interruptions though...

I think the way you work, even if you produce stellar results, in some cases will actually be a worse fit than a lower-quality solution that takes longer but involves some kind of draconian control mechanism, because it's also about feeling in control, not just results. These draconian control solutions mostly work as a very crude way to care for the mental health of employers, managers etc., with disproportionate negative impact on the employed; but giving up control is always risky, and feeling risk isn't fun, and dealing with that in a healthy way is something lots of people who get into such positions have never had a chance to properly learn, or even realize it's a problem at all. But such people often do have power and leeway to put in such controls unilaterally, and the further up you go on the food chain, the easier it becomes to isolate oneself from the consequences of such thinking, and doing things differently on the lower levels may require those further up to at least tolerate such an approach; but if they're deeply insecure themselves, wouldn't they perceive such a stance as weak or soft? Won't that hurt my chances for advancement? Will it look like I didn't do my due dilligence if I actually do get screwed with? There are lots of orgs that work like that.

The underlying problem here isn't people taking the piss but a system optimised for people taking the piss.

You optimise for time wasted rather than value created.

> It feels intrusive

It IS intrusive!

Do you understand that typing the code and staring at IDE is just a small % of work? To think what and how to solve something you don't even need a computer. People who spend hours in the IDE do this mostly because of lack of experience. You interpret quality work as taking the piss...

For most of my contract work I use virtual desktops that are entirely controlled by my clients. I presume that they’re typically able to monitor everything I do in any way they choose. I’ve never had a problem with this, and I don’t see any practical difference between that system and this one. If a client ever started trying to excessively micromanage me I think I’d just not take another contract with them. I can’t remember ever getting any unreasonable questions about billing though.

> and I don’t see any practical difference between that system and this one

Right, cause they're both intrusive. You're essentially saying: it's an intrusive system but I don't mind it being intrusive. You also show that you have the possibility to deny working with a party; great. But the point is protecting people who don't like such privacy invasion and who, at the same time, do not have the luxury to deny a contract.

Contractors have an entirely different set of things they can reasonably expect from a client, opposed to what employees can expect from employers. It’s a different kind of relationship all together. You’re not an employee, and your relationship with your clients is exclusively about delivering a service for payment. A contractor will typically benefit from building a network of clients who highly trust their work, but relationships with new clients don’t start out that way, and you can’t expect a client to invest any effort into your relationship beyond what’s required to deliver the contracted work.

While systems like this can be used intrusively, they’re certainly not a violation of privacy on any level. The work you do for your clients isn’t a private matter. It’s theirs. They’re paying you to do it for them...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com