Hacker News Reader

Comment by tartoran | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

> 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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com