I think you underestimate the line of future workers willing to work under almost any condition.

People said this about consulting companies when they retracted offers in 2001. People said this about wall street firms when they reigned in party culture in the early 2000s. Yet, the show goes on because fresh graduates and immigrants at all levels need jobs and are willing to bear with it all.

It's not about workers being "willing" - it is about handicapping worker "ability." You surveil me and it will reduce my performance, creativity, etc. It isn't necessarily conscious on the workers part - it's like a virus that infects all that worker does.

Well, I'm not the GP so I can't tell for sure. But "lose competitiveness" without any further said normally refers to a company as a seller, on its products markets.

When referring to the company as a buyer, like in the labor market, people usually qualify it.

What are you talking about? Every large company is jumping aboard the automatic worker surveillance, tracking and scoring. Where are you gonna go work? To a competitor who uses the exact same surveillance system?

This dystopian nightmare is coming for programmers too, soon.

Way past that. "Agile" (i.e. micromanagement) methodologies and tooling are already firmly seated which is basically this same special hell.

I guess we have a generation of technologists that didn't realize when to stop foaming at the mouth at efficiency over humanity or perhaps they were lead here with bags of money and deceit.

I love efficiency and optimisation too (with certain processes), but not at the cost of human happiness. Our current optimizations are ever growingly sacrificing basic happiness for efficiency which is not a tradeoff we should want or agree to.

It's already here in place at my company and many others. PRs, commits, comments and even slack and email activity are being tracked and compared between employees.

How do people react?

Not well. Those that can leave. Those who can't, grin and bear.

It's ravenous.

Name them please. I work for a largish company, this subject was openly addressed in a townhall and stated it's not gonna work by CEO and the board. As for where you gonna go, like everything else, it just creates opportunities for companies that might not paid as much but offer better environment, that's where I'm gonna go.

I have often complained about my employer on here, for their lack of foresight, their lack of empathy from the top, and (right now) their lack of really giving a shit about us as humans during a pandemic.

But. At the end of the day, I stay here for less money than I could make somewhere else for two reasons:

A) I don't like moving; and

B) They leave me the fuck alone. They don't really know what my office does. They don't really know how we do it. But they do know that we provide massive value for the expense. And they let us do it with as little oversight as they can stomach.

That's worth something.

I can't name my employer (too small - less than a thousand egineers) but I can tell you they are tracking using a plugin for Atlassian. We are an Atlassian shop through and through including our source code control. They deployed this plugin last year. What is really sinister is that it's open to all employees so they can see in real time how they rank against their peers ącross the various metrics.

I'm pretty sure Atlassian peddles this product to everyone who uses their suite.

Do you think this rating correlates with reality?

Of course. The best engineer should have the best workaround to inflate the highest artificial metric.

Exactly. We already know that such metrics do not identify the best performers, they identify those who are willing and able to game the system the most.

> I think those firms will likely lose their competitiveness overtime. Unless they are defacto monopoly.

I suspect that's wishful thinking that assumes a greater alignment than actually exists between what we want for society and what the market will lead us to.

Not if those firms sell a commodity product, such as delivery or retail.