Devices to fool automated systems into thinking you're active and present don't exist because people are lazy, they exist because bosses count productivity by minutes not tasks and will punish idle hands for not taking longer.
It's funny when you hear horror stories of coworkers who can't use computers, typing with one finger at a snail's pace, doing spreadsheet calcs manually instead of formula, etc.
And then realizing that they are *disincentivized* from actually learning how to do things efficiently.
The person spending an hour laboriously doing a task that could be done in 5 minutes, looks busy the entire time. The person who finishes it in 5 minutes, got burned out and left because their boss kept going "hey what the hell are we paying you for?" and making them do several extra jobs unpaid
if I had the stomach to be in the white collar world anymore I would absolutely be the person who was constantly going to the manager's manager and complaining that they didn't understand metrics and were bad at their job costing the company millions.
The boss of your boss is a manipulation target.
if you spend enough time bursting into the executive suite complaining about the failures of fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders ( who is them ), they might start believing you belong in there… And that's when you can really start to do some damage!
I also lost so many temp contracts for this exact reason thinking it would potentially lead to a job offer. Nope, usually just a "thanks for getting it done quickly" and a few weeks of paycheck stretching.
One thing I'm glad a mentor told me early on: Always ask when they expect to see it completed, then aim for 10% beneath that and describe it as "challenging but good." Sit on your work if you have to, to make it take that long.
While she was right, in retrospect that's so fucked up.
Oh, absolutely. It's something I wish I learned earlier, along with how much a lot of getting the job is based on how much the boss likes your appearance versus your performance record.
Until I die, I will remember one particular boss who made me spend weeks teaching educational theory to him and a coworker, and then in his dissertation thanking my coworker *who I also taught alongside him* for "the valuable lessons on educational theory that made this dissertation possible."
One of mine paid for I think four or six weeks, maybe even more, because she was a property manager who was allergic to filing - several years of invoices randomly stuffed in boxes. When I took less than two weeks to sort it out, the big problem was that filing was the *only* thing she hated.
She was inclined to ask for a refund for all that extra time I didn't need, and on a related note, they stopped sending me out on defined projects like that.
I once had a job where I kept a daily work journal of tasks that I religiously updated with both what I was assigned and what I did because I had a review that cost me a raise since my boss felt I wasn't staying active enough. I was responsible for 82% of our sales.
Literally any time you start measuring something for employee performance it becomes a useless metric as it will be gamed because it's the only rational thing to do
Pretty cool how bosses are specifically not intrested in getting the best quality or greatest amount of work out of employees, if it means sacrificing a sense of tyrannical control over every moment they're on "company time".
Whenever this comes up I ask whether I can bill the company for ideas I have in the shower or walking the dog.
Our contributions are more than time and tasks
I had a job where one metric at review time was "Production" where more accomplished got a higher score. But there was also "Effort" where being in the office <= 40 hours would get you the lowest score and >= 50 the highest. So you literally got paid more for working slower.
Thus has its ever been. Many yrs ago a summer job in a warehouse I was getting yelled at for doing nothing until the full timers showed me how to drag out the work to fill the hours.
Sometimes I wish I sucked at my job because then I wouldn’t have to worry about looking idle.
Then I think about how useless and slow my bosses are and I realize that’s how they got there.
They sucked, “looked” like a hard worker and got pushed up.
Congrats to KPIs for making us look wistfully at any aspect of piecework. If only bosses paid well and inflation didn't incentivize our capitalist nightmare.
When I was a team leader in a corporation and later when I started my own small business I never checked to see if people were working.
I checked to see what they had achieved.
Many middle managers are buzz worders and boot lickers with no clue and so all they can do is make sure you're clicking.
It would be horrible if someone were to invent a way to badge in and out daily so we can work from home when there's no reason to be in the office
Just
Horrible
Virtue is its own punishment.
I never, ever, ever tell my boss when I've finished something before its deadline. If he asks I won't lie, but I don't volunteer the information.
This is why my partner has a mouse jiggler. Because sometimes staring into space and thinking about a problem on the toilet is actually more productive than being at the screen.
I had a manager who checked the amount of time I was on the network
I used to print out programs and do everything on paper — easier for my to flip pages than scroll screens. She was not happy with my approach
My productivity went down her way
At my job, I'm thankfully not monitored that closely to ensure I'm active, but my manager and I once got into a debate about when to do a specific task (pulling some online information).
At that time, I would do it at the end, prioritizing other tasks, often leaving days before pulling those.
This would sometimes result in the question of why I didn't do it immediately, and how it looked like I was just sitting on what we had and not collecting everything as soon as possible.
I was like, "I do other, more urgent, tasks in that time," but the answer wasn't satisfactory.
Apparently my manager's manager's manager was of the impression that if a task took the same amount of time, but was done all at once, we were working more actively than if it was done in a piecemeal approach.
It was absolutely nuts. Lol
That said, I did wind up switching my process to one more like what they were asking for, but not for that reason. It was just helpful if I had to work from home (with just my laptop screen) to not have to swap between a bunch of windows where I could avoid it.
