What is so bad about catching people taking unauthorised breaks?
i have never worked in an office environment where people didn’t routinely unwind for a couple minutes. the way we’re treated in an office setting vs those outside an office is in a lot of ways disturbing. a couple years ago my friends dad lost his job of 25 years because he was caught sneaking around a corner, out of eyesight of his foreman, to eat a candy bar. he had been warned about these “unauthorized” snack breaks in the past.
this idea is entirely foreign to any of us who sit at a computer coding or doing whatever desk job that sometimes we don’t stop to think of how ludicrous some workers are treated—my entire post college career, if i wanted to eat a candy bar, i just ate it.
were a decision to come down in just about any office full of engineers which said “unless authorized, you cannot drink or eat anything. if any unauthorized stoppage of typing occurs, there will be consequences.” people would be justifiably outraged.
but they’d be “catching” “unauthorized” non-typers.
the idea that someone somewhere decided to put trackers on human beings is wild.
did you forget about cellphones?
That everyone has accepted that owning a phone means you can be tracked with accuracy most the time, both digitally and physically, is pretty wild.
Even without intending to, everyone would go from a ticket or two per decade to dozens of tickets on every commute.
"But the law is still the same!?!"
Of course it is, but changing from poorly scalable human-required surveillance to always-on, fully-scaled electronic surveillance, changes it from completely reasonable to massively oppressive.
If everyone's productivity is fine, and people take unauthorized breaks, no one will notice, all is cool. If one or two people are noticeably unproductive, the manager will likely investigate and fix the unauthorized breaks, which is also fine.
But with constant electronic surveillance, it's no longer about meaningful productivity differences, it is about oppression.
A reasonable manager would accept the occasional smoke break, but do something about hour long naps.
Often a manager will not have any say over these things. "The metrics speak for themselves!"
Regardless, I don't think we should design systems with the assumption that the people in charge of them will be compassionate and reasonable. There are a lot of petty, corrupt (in the moral sense, not financial) people out there in positions of power over others.
It would always be entirely unworkable at anything resembling the current fine structure, with fines in the $100s for a single infraction. These are based on the assumption that people are rarely caught.
I could see a surveillance-based system working, something on the lines of a congestion toll. Maybe $0.02/mi/mph over the limit, so going 10mph over the limit for 20 miles would be a $4.00 charge. We'd also have to eliminate the bogus insurance surcharges which falsely equate speeding with unsafe driving (barring neighborhoods & construction zones, they can signify either an unsafe driver or a highly skilled driver).
In France, messing with the people's ability to drive affordably led directly to the Yellow Vest riots.
(I know I’m jumping right to where the slippery slope ends.)
There’s a good quote that goes something like “the law treats all men equally: the rich man and the poor man are punished the same for stealing bread to feed their family.”
Personally, I prefer less on the books and proper enforcement, but many people like a lot on the books and just as many loopholes.
And your best solution to this is building automated lighting systems that omit functionality? That's your grand plan?
Reminds me of people that complain about seats being removed from buses to make more room for passengers because homeless people sleep on them.
When you're trying to solve things via tertiary order effects you should consider if that's the real issue at hand .
Your profile indicates that you've commented on HN on a weekday.
Don't worry - this behavior has already been reported to the authorities.
If both pilots left the cockpit mid-flight in order to chill with the stewardesses, I would be fine with them being barred from working as pilots ever again.
I couldn't care less if a receptionist catches a quick smoking break during a slow hour.