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Comment by nine_zeros | Hacker News Reader

> Surely this is just a direct statement that managers have no clue what their reports are up to. Any vaguely competent manager with even a passing contact with people they're managing will know all of this and more already.

By this point in 2023 in the world of social media, everyone knows that management in tech industry is a joke. Leeches who thrive off the labor of the real brains.

This is why there is so much backlash against RTO, and so much quiet quitting and so much job hopping. Until corporate structures continue to treat people like fungible headcount, people will treat corporations like fungible source of money.

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I actually think it's not about the low level managers. I think those folks are more permissive than what senior leadership would like, hence these stupid tracking tools. If your report gets stuff done then you don't care that they are in the office. Senior leadership just sees a bunch of engineers who cost money and they want to maximize ROI. And, they see the bottom rung of managers enabling these slothful engineers to remain lazy, which is why these internal tracking tools are created.

Bottom rung managers are at the same place as ICs. They are the ones meant to do the dirty job for the "leadership".

I confirm what you said. I preferred my team to choose where they work from but C level made everyone come back to the office. During pandemic they installed key trackers and screen copying tools. They also generate metrics of performance based on number of keys and calls you made besides the number of times your computer locks for lack of activity.

Since people have returned to the office, the tools were kept and low level leadership are constantly being pressed to improve those numbers.

I sincerely hope that your reports are aware of this nonsense. If not, please be a kind manager and make them aware that these BS metrics are being measured.

Wow that's crazy. What unbelievably moronic policies.

I suspect this is happening a lot more than people realize. Even before the pandemic, in office, there was a layer of HR tracking and activity that was deliberately opaque to the people being tracked.

Now throw in a "need" to be aggressively tracking this stuff with WFH, the existing opaque structures, and now it all exists already when people RTO.

Companies not doing more invasive tracking are probably the exception or too small to pull it off.

Note: Pretty much no large companies have provided data points on why it's better to RTO, even if they're very data driven.

People assume this means they have no data and just want it. Really? Wouldnt that be a bit irresponsible to shareholders? A more likely scenario is they have data that they don't want to discuss publicly.

typo (Until corporate structures STOP treating people like fungible headcount)

corporations in the SF Bay Area often use contractors for hard work with deadlines.. twenty five years ago, employee salary at corporations generally started sliding downward.. thirty years of continuously rising executive pay however. Tech jockeys under thirty years old are a special case

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