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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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About 25 years ago I was brought in on contract to teach a course on networking to a group of people sent there on a job skills training thing.
Many of them wanted to be there, some didn't. And so the first thing I was told was to look for people whose faced looked green: They were inn in front of computers, and this was the Windows '95 days, and they all had Solitaire, and if I saw a green glow it meant someone had zoned out and was playing Solitaire.
Over the years it turns out a lot of managers takes pretty much that approach to managing employees. Instead of talking to people and paying attention to whether they are productive, they've gotten comfortable with looking for superficial signs of whether or not people appear to be productive.
And the first sign they used to look far was whether or not you were even at your desk typing...
Of course managers who have spent their career dependent on that as their sign you're working will freak out when they can't see you.
This is really the crux of the issue. Rather than adapt the way that people are managed, it’s easier to simply stay with the status quo.
The worst part of this managerial style is that it’s so easy to “fake” work. I like to write and I wrote some of my best stories while at “work” in the office. Someone walks by your desk and sees you furiously typing away at a document that fills a whole page, and they think, “Wow! Look at her go!” despite the fact that I’m writing my 450K word fanfiction novel on company time. When the 2048 game craze took over, I had an Excel document that looked like something legit, but actually had the 2048 game in the middle of rows that talked about volume variances and efficiencies.
The appearance of work doesn’t account for anything. Managers need to account for production, i.e., here is the work that is expected, and have these employees completed the work. Even increasing the workload over time can get a good amount of work out of any employee if employers are so utterly concerned about a moment of the workday spent doing anything other than “work”.
Yes, you’re going to have employees who will just go MIA for three hours and you find out that they went out shopping or stepped out to hit a few balls at the driving range, but that is - again - a manager’s ability or inability to check-in with their team, to know what their people are working on, and ensure that deliverables are met.
Yeah, for my part I had a constant ssh connection to a screen session on my machine at home, and could work on all kinds of hobby projects from the office when I wasn't in the mood to work and had to still be present. Whether I was there had nothing to do with it - when motivated I've often done some of my best work from home in the middle of the night because I wanted to and inspiration struck. Either way, my boss would only know if the actually engaged with me rather than go by whether I was typing. Since I love programming, but sometimes not the programming I have to do at work, I've had many managers who could've stood there behind me watching me "work" and still be unable to tell if I was slacking or not.