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Comment by greesil | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

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

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