At Bloomberg News right about now, hundreds of business journalists are thinking about lunch. Do they get up from their desks and grab something at the snack counter offered near the newsroom?
Or do they leave the building and grab something to go and bring it back to their desk to eat? The more ambitious may even be leaving for a source lunch, or — gasp — lunch with a friend.
Whatever they do, they’ll be asked to time those breaks, according to the function on the Bloomberg terminal. It is not required that they use the function, but editor in chief Matthew Winkler suggested it “to encourage punctuality.”
For the record, we’re told this function is available only to Bloomberg employees. And one staffer notes that the official description of the function is “a very simple countdown timer, used by Trainers to display break times, lab times, and other timed functions, in a way that the entire class can view.”
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Suggested. Sure.
Next the company will install a time clock that all must use to punch in and out each day.
Will they time bathroom breaks, too? What about employees' blink rate? When eyes are closed - even for a milisecond - valuable time is being lost!
Why do companies never offer to measure time spent working on work at home or on the road, so that overtime can be properly compensated?
And does this "encouragement" of punctuality some how land in a database for later reference by supervisors?
No. No it does not.
Bet on it. Bloomberg's review system has included tracking of how often reporters use multiple functions on the system. What's in the review changes every year, or when Winkler changes his shirt, whichever is more often, so deWorde and I can both be right. It may not be there now, but if Matt has a whim it will be there.
They don't need punch cards and time clocks. Whenever you enter or leave the building, your badge swipe is recorded and your status is displayed for all to see when they either send you a Bloomberg message, or look up your name on the internal FON function.
The notation is color coded to show if you are in the building and/or logged in to the terminal.
Since the person on break will be away from their desk and their desktop, what purpose does this serve except to alert the supervisor and generate peer pressure?
When will someone expose Bloomberg for the pyscho place it's becoming. I worked there for several months, worked like a dog. It was hard to believe how people (other than a few) get treated like slaves. It's a modern-day, Stalinist state. The factory nightmare that give Marx and Engels a good name. I'll never forget having to take an impossible test to prove I deserved a foot rest and back pad to cut carpo-tunnel pain. It's almost surreal, if it weren't so real.
Matt Winkler has spent so much time yelling, deeming himself important, and being a hater that he is paranoid other people are doing the same thing. Pretty soon folks will have chips installed in their heads via remote control.