Amazon's New Manager Dashboard Flags 'Low-Time Badgers' and 'Zero Badgers' (businessinsider.com)
- Reference: 0180554586
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/01/09/1728223/amazons-new-manager-dashboard-flags-low-time-badgers-and-zero-badgers
- Source link: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-flags-employees-rto-office-2026-1
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-flags-employees-rto-office-2026-1
AWS YDD ("Yabba Dabba Doo") (Score:2)
Are... are you trying to describe a card-punching time-clock?
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> time-clock
The last century called and wants their meme back. You may have to "card in" to a secure facility. But there's nothing that says the RFID chip in your ID can't respond to non-contact interrogations anywhere within a facility.
Anecdote: A company I one worked for was switching from dumb plastic badges to RFID. This was being discussed extensively on the internal corporate network (we actually had an internal Usenet back in the day). My input was that employees could be tracked for statistics like how much ti
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> But there's nothing that says the RFID chip in your ID can't respond to non-contact interrogations anywhere within a facility.
In most cases, there kind of is. The vast majority of employee badges are NFC, and the "NF" is "near-field." Interrogation range of those types of tags is limited to a couple inches in the case of high-frequency tags, and a few feet under ideal circumstances with a huge antenna coil for low-frequency.
Sure, there ARE other tags with much longer read ranges, like the UHF tags used for asset tracking and toll collection, or the ISO15693 "vicinity" tags, but for ID badges it's mostly the short-range standard
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> they would also not like me to be able to clone your ID badge from 6 feet away in a Wendy's.
You've never been bumped while standing in line at a Wendy's?
The state of the art in RFID security is passive chips that will not reply unless interrogated with a correct reader code. And those chips are re-programmable, so the challenge-response can be updated. Often used in facilities where they absolutely don't want employees visiting Wendy's with visible or scannable badges.
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>> they would also not like me to be able to clone your ID badge from 6 feet away in a Wendy's.
> You've never been bumped while standing in line at a Wendy's?
> The state of the art in RFID security is passive chips that will not reply unless interrogated with a correct reader code. And those chips are re-programmable, so the challenge-response can be updated. Often used in facilities where they absolutely don't want employees visiting Wendy's with visible or scannable badges.
I haven't been the bumpee, but I've been the bumper on occasion. And yes, that's the state of the art, but a whole lot of big businesses are just now moving from LF "lean against the wall with a briefcase and collect everyone's credentials" to HF "bump-the-IT-guy-at-Wendy's" systems. New sites are still installing systems that rely on Crypto-1. It'll be a while, and probably some expensive high-profile intrusions, before everyone adopts the good stuff. See an awful lot of HID Prox readers walking around
A good manager makes your life good (Score:5, Insightful)
A bad manager makes it unbearable. That's regardless of stupid company policies like this.
As a manager myself, my company wants me to use various metrics to monitor my team. They even helpfully provide tools to collect those metrics. Frankly, I'm just not interested. I know my team, I know they're good at what they do, and I know they care about their work. If I ever look at metrics, it's because I already know there's a problem, and I need to jump through HR hoops to take action.
A manager who doesn't know their team, and thinks they can manage by metrics, isn't managing well.
Oh, and I don't care one bit whether my team members come in or work from home, as long as they get the work done.
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The idea is presumably to reduce management to metrics and then the managers can be replaced with AI agents.
It's dumb, but some MBA will make a ton of money when he exercises his stock options.
Re:A good manager makes your life good (Score:5, Insightful)
Any companies that do this, will be slowly dying, and will create opportunities for other companies to undercut them by doing things in a sensible way. Ultimately, employees are people. If you treat them like numbers, they will game the numbers, and you'll get crap. If you treat them like people, they will give you their best, and you'll *far* outrun the competition.
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Yeah, but MBAs don't care if the business collapses the day after they move on to their new job.
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And the cycle of life goes on. It's the Darwin effect, for businesses.
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Oooh interesting theory, we should make sure managers everywhere hear it :-)
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An unbearable manager compels you to move on. You play manager bingo. You win. They get left behind.
unbearable /n-bâr-bl/
adjective
So unpleasant, distasteful, or painful as to be intolerable.
"unbearable heat."
So unpleasant or painful as to be unendurable.
Incapable of being put up with.
unendurable
adjective
Not to be endured; intolerable.
Incapable of being put up with.
adjective
Impossible to tolerate or endure; unbearable.
"intolerable agony."
Not tolerable; not capable of being borne or endured; not proper o
I was not thinking about badges (Score:2)
but more about badgers. Why would they be tracking those at Amazon? Who let so many badgers into the facility?
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They must have a problem with subterranean mammals and worms
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But enough about middle management.
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A snake. It's a snake.
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Mushroom mushroom.
Upset at the wrong thing. (Score:2)
The proper place to put the anger is on the policy, not on how it's enforced or monitored. Be upset that return to office is mandated, not that they look at how often you swipe in and out.
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Or be upset that your employer considers attendance, or presence, to be a measure of your availability, commitment, or attention...
Nah. (Score:1)
Not going to make the obvious reference. Sometimes you have to let others swing at the easy ones.
Re:Nah. (Score:4, Funny)
you mean this?
"Badgers?!? We don't need no steenkin' badgers!!"
(UHF, not Treasure of the Sierra Madre.....)
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Blazing Saddles!
Main duty? (Score:2)
I guess if that is the main duty of "a manager" then he is pretty useless, right?
Just tracking in and out? (Score:3)
I interviewed with [1]Convex Computer Corporation [wikipedia.org] in the 80s and, if I remember correctly, their badges tracked employees where ever they went inside the building. Kinda creepy.
At the time, I was a sysadmin with Unisys at the NASA Langley Research Center working on their supercomputer systems. They had three Convex "minisupercomputers", (I think) one C1 and two C2 systems, as well as a Cray-2 and Cray YMP. The Cray-2 "Voyager" is now at the Computer Museum of America in Atlanta: [2]Computer Museum of America Obtains a 1985 CRAY-2 Supercomputer [mimmsmuseum.org].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_Computer
[2] https://mimmsmuseum.org/news/computer-museum-of-america-obtains-a-1985-cray-2-supercomputer/
I know it's Amazon ... (Score:3)
... but how can I buy one of those "Zero" badges ??
Badge Out Loophole (Score:2)
Most companies record badge-ins, but not badge-outs for fire-safety reasons. To measure time spent at the office, they usually link to wifi or other network activity. The easy solution is to go to work, plug in your laptop, and leave.
Metrics determine stupidity (Score:3)
They can easily measure time so that is what they measure. It's like the old joke about looking for your lost keys under the light despite losing them in the dark area.
Good managers know who are good employees, they do not need to look at time sheets. Bad managers figure out this short cut which they think is the same as being a good manager. Nope. The manager that wants to know your time sheets is the moron that can't manage. Fire those guys.
The problem is some people are bad at loggin in. They get fired for that failure, I guarantee some will be people that worked long hours but were bad about loggin in. Others will get their buddies to log in for them and keep their job.
But more importantly will be the good workers that have low time. Maybe they work from home, maybe they are just faster. They will also be fired.
What you end up with is a bunch of random employees that have good time sheets, not good performance
From zero to seven (Score:2)
A colleague of mine took to tailgating and/or working from home for a while until his manager had a go at him for not attending the office. So he started to badge in every day, including at weekends if he was in the area for other reasons (the office is near several big shops) so then he was pulled up and asked why he was badging in seven days a week. He responded by asking if there was any correlation with the amount or quality of his work. That pretty much ended the stupid conversation from what I heard.
A
Where are the managers? (Score:2)
What ever happened to walking around and talking to employees at their desks?
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If it's anything like where my girlfriend works, the managers are probably working from home.
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At Disney, the managers were just as likely to be in a different building than their teams. That's certainly possible here as well.
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Then why be in the office at all? Isn't face-to-face communication supposed to be the key to productivity?
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Or in the same continent for that matter.
P.S. I work at AWS, and I'm 9 timezones away fro my manager, whom I never met in person.
Re: Where are the managers? (Score:2)
They are in the dashboard as snakes.
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> They are in the dashboard as snakes.
Hiding behind the MUSHROOM MUSHROOMs.
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> What ever happened to walking around and talking to employees at their desks?
Not just managers. As a senior software engineer and senior systems administrator, I remember talking with work-friends in the office who where on other projects and getting or, more often, giving help and ideas based off a simple, "Hey whatcha up to?" People don't often think, or have the opportunity, to ask others outside their own project for help/advice, but experience ans skills vary wildly and it's not always on your team.
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The irony is that for some companies that have instituted RTO policies, these teams can be geographically located very far from each other. For someone I know their immediate manager is several states away and their manger’s boss is in another country. So they have to drive into work just to get on a video conference call and sometimes at very inconvenient hours. But at least the company satisfied some goal for the shareholders.
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None of my management works in my building. I'm the only person on my team in my building... It's dumb as shit to require me to be there at all, but here we are.