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Comment by giorgioz | Hacker News Reader

You assume everyone is self-oriented and wants to be autonomous and have a great work ethics and care about their privacy. There are people like that. There are also people that want a lot of guidance. There are also people that just wants to be paid and don't really care much about the current job goals. There are also people that will do the bare-minumum they can to keep the job. Understanding who is who requires good management and a good number of managers. How big is your company? What's the ratio of managers vs doers?

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> You assume everyone is self-oriented and wants to be autonomous and have a great work ethics and care about their privacy.

No, they assume that people who are self-oriented and want to be autonomous and have a great work ethic are the people that you want to have working for you. You don't need to employ "everyone", you just need enough for your workload, and you will need fewer people if you optimize your company's structure for high performers rather than deadweights.

Your employee surveillance policies are beyond the pale (screenshots every ten minutes... really?!) and treat all your employees are completely inept, lazy, or both. With policies like that, you shouldn't be surprised when the only employees you manage to hire and retain are that way.

The number of people on the planet is limited. Maybe you work in a venture backed startup and you hire people with a yearly salary of 100k or more. The rest of the startups from other locations and less funding will choose less talented people with a lower budget salary. The people you are hiring with great salaries have been educated with great effort and cost and rules previously by someone else.

I work at a bootstrapped startup with two engineers, only one full time (me). I'm paid well below my market rate, but I stick around because the CEO treats me with respect and gives me the flexibility that I need to be productive and happy.

When you don't have money, you can compensate in other ways, like autonomy and work-life balance. You may not get the best of the best, but you'll get loyal employees who appreciate the flexibility you give them.

Alternatively you can try to build a company on the backs of people who you have to micromanage and who will be gone in a year (and if not, only stick around because they have no other options). I'll leave it to you to decide which is more likely to succeed.

Taking ten minute screenshots is not a good practice. Why not just measure on output or have regular meetings?

What kind of job requires ten minute screenshots? Definitely not a software development job.

I've watched the screenshots 3 times in 2 years when someone has been missing deadlines and failing to explaining why for several weeks in a row. I employee people from all over the world. Some of them have real problems. A guy from Venezuela got his computer fried from an electrical surge. I asked him a lot of proof and he did provide it immediately. It was all true and I bought him a new laptop. Another guy from Mexico said he could not work because a hail storm had damaged his computer. When asked for proof turned out that it was all completely made up. He did not wanted to provide a single photo of his damaged equipment. He played the "You don't trust me??" card. In my experience people that do the "You don't trust me?!?" card are at the last rope and have buried theirselves in a huge pile of lies. So no, I don't trust employees from the other side of the planet that I've never met in person that I just started to work with last month. Trust need to be earned over time with actual proof of being worth of trust. I give them the benefit of the doubt and I ask for proof.

I will just talk in general terms and not say anything personal since I don't have any personal knowledge of your situation.

But in general, the problem with surveillance is that it is just all about appearances. People usually learn to "look" busy instead of being productive and that is counter-productive to actual productivity when people are just pre-occupied with appearances.

Another problem is that it creates an atmosphere of low trust in the company. When there is an atmosphere of low trust, people will be less motivated to work hard and to give their whole effort since they will feel they are just expendable since the manager doesn't trust them.

Another sign of a low-trust organization: lots of managers to "keep an eye on" employees.

Please ask me questions rather than assuming I simply do things. In Waiterio we do not have managers at all so far. We are 6 people and there isn't a single manager. There you go!

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