The article notes the invention of the "mouse jiggler".

Now there is an invention that will add to the sum of happiness in the universe!

It was in Snow Crash - the portrayal of working for the rump federal government.

Is the situation in the first anecdote common? A person with the title, Senior VP, doesn't have a fixed salary, but is paid by the hour?

The Mouse Jiggler will revolutionize utilitarianism.

3 was my first reaction. I've never heard of an SVP position that's not salaried, usually with stock incentives as well.

4 finally, a reliable way for scientists to produce mouse orgasms

4,6: You people need to either start reading peep's comments, or take this conversation to Standpipe's blog.

I just didn't think he was explicit enough, but that I was exactly the right amount of explicit without being too explicit.

Close To The Machine (1997) includes this conversation with a client.

"Keystroke monitoring. It's a bad idea. The system is a tool to help people do their work, not a watchdog. If people feel they are being watched, they put their creative energies into hiding things."
"Oh, well, that's possible. But when I saw the system running, I thought to myself, 'I bet this thing can tell me what everyone is up to all day.'"
The system was installed, it ran, and it spoke to him: you can know every little thing you always wanted to know. You can keep an eye on the woman you trusted to pick up your kids from kindergarten. You can count every keystroke, and you want to count them simply because it's possible. You own the system, it's your data, you have power over it; and, once the system gives you this power, you suddenly can't help yourself from wanting more.
"Your system installation has gone extremely well, Mr. Banner. I can't recommend too strongly against this idea of keystroke monitoring."
"Well, I could always hire a local kid to do it."
"Well, I suppose you could."
Many years and clients later, this greed for more data, and more again had becom a commonplace. . . .

I would never ever take a job like this (not blaming people stuck in these jobs, just saying). I'd move to Guatemala and work the land before I did this, and I hate the land.

More generally, have you ever worked on a team where everyone didn't know very precisely who the most and least productive people were? I haven't. It just seems so unnecessary and self-defeating and short-sighted to set up this extremely low-trust system. Or maybe it's just lazy. Rather than structure the work and business in a way that makes people want to do the work, and be rewarded for a good job, you just hire an electronic cop.

8 you weren't being explicit enough!

I guess it's funny that I run a time tracker on my work machine, because as consultants, we need to keep track of time spent on client projects, and I'm completely reliant on it for billing, but of course the difference is that it's private and under my control.

10: How about rural Nebraska?

12: Does that still let you bill your poops?

I have my limits.

You can't not poop.

Don't I know it.

Besides making working many places awful and enabling counterproductive micromanaging, it also destroys systems that USED to be useful to monitor things. I say as I try to track down a package that the system says was delivered Friday. Everyone seems to agree that it wasn't actually delivered Friday and that the delivery notification is meaningless, but no one can tell where it is, if it has been lost, or when it might be delivered. Because you can't track a package that has been marked delivered.

If Aragorn could track Gollum after a long head start, you could try harder.

But if our keystrokes are being monitored for maximum efficiency, how are we supposed to have time for all those spontaneous hallway conversations that are needed to generate innovation?

Or thinking?

You'll just have to have spontaneous conversations here instead.

No one else is planning them out?

9: I imagine whoever wrote it had once talked to someone who worked in a supermarket. The tills where I was working in 1997 logged transactions per minute centrally.

Either I'm not monitored very closely or I'm monitored by people with very low standards.

I remember, as a broiler cook in a steakhouse, being very proud of setting a record for dollar throughput in an hour. That amounts to the same thing, I think (except I was also dependent on having a high-performance register person).

Problem is, performance in most jobs isn't reducible to quantity, and even when it is, managers have a hard time taking into account what you lose from standing over someone's shoulder (in effect) heckling them.

And then of course there's the human rights issue ...

Corporations have rights too. Apparently.

Why would you cook dollars?

28: Moby knows nothing about high finance or fine dining.

I know high dining.

And throughput.

Always bill your throughput.

Anyway, I have inchoate thoughts about the medium term struggle between team panopticonic dystopia and the drop in the U.S. labor force. I have no idea who will win, but it's got to be at least more difficult to worsen working conditions when covid plus the increasing olds plus impediments to immigration are cutting the supply of labor.

The fast food places were always like "if we have to raise wages, we'll replace everyone with robots" and that was clearly a bluff, at least when they said it and in the near term future.

Every kind of educational institution that I know of is bleeding workers right now.

33 is a thing I'm wondering a lot, too.

35: At least it's a healthcare plan.

Our school district is so low on bus drivers they're cutting service back to 1/3 of the routes at a time, rotating through the different schools on a three-week schedule. Luckily our route is the in the cohort that gets service the first three weeks.

Who knew that shitting all over people might lead some of them to quit?

Probably some consultant somewhere.

You can't actually shit on consultants. But if the price is right, they'll wipe your ass for you.

I don't get that much.

Which is still not as bad as being assigned to the Donald Trump taint team. That's gotta be illegal in 47 states.

38: There are some districts in Texas going to a 4 day schoolweek.

Who knew that shitting all over people might lead some of them to quit?

What mystifies me (in an econ 101 sense) is why massive labor shortages haven't caused that much reduction in shitting on your remaining people. And often, an increase in shitting, due to management taking their panic out on the workers they still have.

Excuse me, throughput.

45: Judging from the headlines, scat jobs overtook the missionary position as the official sex act of the American right several years ago. And the rest of us aren't necessarily all that much better.

45: the corporate digestive system is optimized a certain way and changing it will take years. I think they truly don't know how else to behave. It's learned stupidity.

Meanwhile, in China...

I get these mildly hilarious productivity suggestions from Microsoft every morning. Associates are scheduled for "my" projects or for training with me by their supervisor (this org chart is kind of silly) via Outlook calendar appointments that include me, him, and the associate. I got two suggestions that I spend up at 20 h per week in meetings with the supervisor and it might be wise for us to split the meetings between us to free up some time . . . Glad my robot overseer is still kind of dumb. It also comments approvingly on how many days or hours I am "unplugged" from work, which is weird, because I tend to check email (have a work phone) before bed and first thing when I get up, so it's like, "Congratulations! You spent 8 h unplugged and recharging!" which seems really, really weird.

Those cats look pretty comfortable.

50: There's no way to get those messages sent to the spam folder. At least not that I could find.

Earlier tonight, I walked by a skunk with its back arched and tailed raised. That's probably a lucky omen.

I get the same "intelligence" but managed to turn down the report frequency to monthly. Our confusing-to-AI practice is that our department coordinator sends out the invites to large recurring group meetings even though she's not a participant so I get the same suggestion to split up meetings with her. There are so many common work practices that throw it off that I wonder if it actually works in any corporate setting.

50-54. Is this the Microsoft VIVA thing? I think you can creat a folder in your Inbox (name it Productivity tips or whatever) and then set a rule to forward all mail from that account to your new folder. Then never check it.

I'm not sure what VIVA is, but it's a Microsoft thing. Except for the skunk, which is iOS.

This sort of thing baffles me. I do focused, productive work in a series of twenty-minute bursts at long intervals. On the other hand, people I work for are generally fine with my overall level of productivity. Watching me closely to make sure I am always doing something productive isn't going to result in my getting eight times as much work done in an day, it's just going to make me unhappy and give whoever's supervising me some confusing decisions to make about whether I should be fired for egregious slacking even though I'm doing a good job overall.

I'm an extreme outlier, I recognize, but a whole lot of people have to be in a milder version of the same position.

This sort of thing baffles me. I do focused, productive work in a series of twenty-minute bursts at long intervals.

That's my experience as well* and I've gradually become convinced that during the lulls of productivity my brain is still chugging away trying to organize things**, and that's one of the reasons why I couldn't just extend the bursts of productivity.

I remember David Roberts describing his own working pattern as having a long period of unproductive ramp-up, but that once he reached a productive state he could sustain for an extended period of time (and this is why he's happier being self-employed where he has more control over potential distractions that would interrupt the process and put him back at the start).

* I've commented on that before, but search isn't finding them.

** That is true at least enough of the time to be relevant. I'm aware that it's a convenient thing to believe.

57: I remember that you struggled with doing time cards when you had to bill by the hour? Did you use a stop watch and did it look like you were under billing or do you feel like you kind of fudged it?

57: It's only baffling, if you think the goal is productivity.
What is the goal? For the companies selling the tracking technologies, of course, the goal is to sell the product. For the bosses buying the product, the goal may be just to make it look like they are doing something. Other bosses may just hate the idea that their employees are posting on Unfogged, when they are supposed to be working.

I guessed, attempting to be roughly honest, and billed super low hours by the standards of my peers while spending a roughly ordinary amount of time in the office. It was awful.

I feel like tracking would encourage people to have more meetings. If you have a non-urgent group discussion by email or chat you're only "productive" when writing or reading. If you have a big meeting with lots of people who don't really need to be involved they're all technically working 100% during the meeting even if their attendance is useless.

Meetings were awful in the old times. Now that I can read Wikipedia on the other screen, they aren't bad.

58: funnily enough that's what I do...sprinting and drifting.

60: This seems like lazy cynicism to me. For at least some workplaces, management has a significant interest in productivity. If employment were about pure sadism, it'd look different than it does. There's more than zero sadism and control-freakery out there, but the desire to get whatever it is the workplace does accomplished is some kind of countervailing force.

I feel like there are some kinds of white collar jobs roter than writing words or code where productivity is much more directly related to time spent directly doing the thing.

I do focused, productive work in a series of twenty-minute bursts at long intervals. On the other hand, people I work for are generally fine with my overall level of productivity.

Yeah, this is me too. I suspect it's very common in the Unfogged demographic.

66: Sure, but even in that kind of job it's got to be possible to measure output rather than checking up on how often you move your mouse.

67: Yeah. We are not a random sample.

And especially not a random sample with replacement.

68: Well, in an effort to be less lazy and cynical, one could imagine a manager thinking that employee X is super fast and can achieve an acceptable level of output in half the time of employee Y, and also employee X is lazy and will spend as much time as they can posting on Unfogged. To get the most possible productivity out of employee X, it is necessary to track them and make sure they are actually working.

On the other hand, I don't think it is possible to be too cynical about programs to track the productivity of hospice chaplains.

But two years ago, her employer started requiring chaplains to accrue more of what it called "productivity points." A visit to the dying: as little as one point. Participating in a funeral: one and three-quarters points. A phone call to grieving relatives: one-quarter point.

Not mentioning the outline of the doctor's watch visible under skin: 15 points.

Maybe someone should gather up the film and do a productivity analysis of Willy Mays. Only came up to bat 4 times in a two plus hour game, only made, what, six or seven plays in the field? Let's be generous, and count 12 plays in the field per game. Maybe he spent more time sitting around doing nothing than standing around doing nothing. Certainly the guy didn't do 20 minutes of work a game.

Certain kinds of thing, I can get into a bit of a flow state and just keep working hard, for very long periods, but that often requires a fair bit of one or other of pressure/stress/deadlines or that the work be extremely interesting.

By most standards, I think, I am very productive. When I've done embedded periods with clients I'm often shocked at just how unproductive their people in roughly equivalent roles can be, even when they have an incentive to look good because my agency are there making them look shit, but, nonetheless, if someone was tracking me via some digital panopticon, there'd still be solid chunks of time when I look to be doing nothing, or I'm wasting time. Because I am doing nothing or wasting time (even if that adds up to greater productivity in the long run).

I don't understand how everyone here appears to stay awake during faculty workshops. Effortlessly, it appears, they just pay attention to the most boring shit. So magic.

Methamphetamines.

Not having small children at home really does great things for your ability to concentrate.

68: it does help if one of the metrics is "dollars". you can sleep all day if you sell.

OT: Could a toddler really get enough alcohol from a long-distance squirt to need to go to a hospital.

+?

80: "Treated" in this case has got to mean "we panicked and took her to the ER to be checked out."

Hopefully. But you'd think the report would hint at that.

Speaking of being tracked, LinkedIn says that my page was viewed by an employee of the fundraising arm of my alma mater with the job title of "Prospect Identification."

I'd like to see an accounting of how much of the admin overhead at unis is related to getting alumni $$

Like a lot of data producing processes, it seems helpful up until the lazy managers get their hands on it. Do they not teach Goodheart's law is business school? Surely managers think they are doing something more complicated than "make number go up"

I went to a land-grant school, so maybe getting alumni money for anything but football is new to them?

At most R1s/AAU schools in the US, development is a boat on its own bottom.

I think those are called kayaks.

Anyway, if my anxiety gears were already completely stripped from dealing with everything else, I'd probably be concerned about whether or not the Big 10 is about to destroy college athletics or if this is just normal money-seeking.

It seems at once totally normal and also so completely brazen and disgusting that it lays bare how corrupt the whole enterprise has become in ways that may be stark enough that more people will take notice. But I kind of doubt it, because I don't think there are many people who genuinely believe revenue sports, and especially football, are anything but a gladiatorial money grab. So the people who'll be upset will be upset either because their school is getting screwed out of the deal or because their Saturday mornings in fall aren't going to be quite as fun as they were last season.

90: Harvard has been maintaining files like that for more than 100 years. They were real "innovators", ahead of their peers in the Ivy League. Nothing all that new here.

I just hope Scott Frost does better. I remember him from when he was a little kid down the street.