How Employers Track Their Workers | Hacker News Reader

How Employers Track Their Workers

theatlantic.com

170 pointscrunchiebones81 comments

I've never seen an employee monitoring system that's built to the benefit of the employee. But nothing a company does it to the benefit of the employee. HR isn't there to help employees, HR is primarily a risk mitigation and compliance department. Who would assume employee monitoring systems are any different?

"They try to never speak up, never stick out, do nothing that might get noticed by management. This leads to a vicious cycle, whereby management grows more suspicious and feels justified in ratcheting up the surveillance."

This is the most troubling thing about surveillance, it changes peoples behavior. The people who implement these systems don't understand the psychology of surveillance, so they use the change in behavior as a indicator of increased risk. Its a vicious cycle.

> But nothing a company does it to the benefit of the employee

This isn't a feature intrinsic to companies, but rather a relatively recent social norm. There are still a few companies that do look after their employees, and do things to the benefit of their employees. They aren't very common though, usually it's smaller (often family run) businesses, and often a physical trade rather than an office job.

True, their are companies that have founding principles that are employee friendly, but once you have an official HR role, their job is the complete opposite. Similarly, corporate counsel is responsible to the corporate entity (are companies people?), even if that means recommending removal of the founder. A organization with employee friendly values has leadership willing to challenge HR and Legal, but that means a majority of the leadership has to be onboard. So yes, family owned businesses, tightly controlled/owned businesses probably fall into that category.

> True, their are companies that have founding principles that are employee friendly, but once you have an official HR role, their job is the complete opposite.

I really don't like or agree with this characterization at all. Sure part of their job is to prevent the company from being sued but part of their job is (usually) also keeping employees happy.

A company is made to benefit its shareholders. Sometimes employees are also the shareholders but this has historically not been the case. Historically, because of the focus on benefiting it’s owners above all else, companies have sometimes resorted to using slaves and child labor. The concept of employee-shareholders is a fairly recent invention. The concept of employee rights only gained traction in the USA during the industrial revolution.

Agricultural cooperatives, might come close...

Worker coops is a better match, producer coops are rather different as its the farm owners that are members not all their workers.

I work for a global company. When I have an HR issue I call some call center located in Poland, where they open a ticket.

The process is not different than any old tech support call.

Managers have a dedicated line, which leads to a local HR contact.

Do you see anything in this whole process designed to keep employees happy?

MM will be fun if some one in Poland with no idea of labour law in the UK or USA makes a mistake :-)

>but part of their job is (usually) also keeping employees happy.

Because happy employees are less likely to be a legal liability, and happy employees are more productive and more compliant with company policy.

> happy employees are more productive and more compliant with company policy

And also less likely to leave but why is that a problem?

In the end all employees are only there to make the company money. I really don't see why HR is any better or worse than the engineering department. Everyone is just trying to make a living so I don't see any point in looking down on them for it.

People shouldn't look down on HR, however they often present themselves as the friendly, impartial intermediaries between employees and the company when they aren't. You should approach talking to them the way you would talking to the police: don't if you can avoid it, but otherwise, assume anything you say can and will be used against you if it's in the company's best interests to do so.

" but rather a relatively recent social norm."

Ask your great-grandfather working in factory, or a mine, or as a tenant farmer (basically 99% of all work) - how he was treated by 'today's standards'. Where I did my undergrad, the main office building was built by a logger baron who literally had strikers shot. It's almost universally better today.

" usually it's smaller (often family run) businesses" - are usually lower paying and often less stable. It's really, really easy for a contractor to not get paid for a job, or to make a mistake costing him $$$ - and then to be in a position wherein he can't pay his workers the aloted amount. This is common.

Any entity that provides fairly steady, predictable work and guaranteed pay is doing a good thing for the most part.

>Any entity that provides fairly steady, predictable work and guaranteed pay is doing a good thing for the most part.

I'm not really sure about that, any big busines wouldn't hesitate to fire you and as many people needed to close the numbers or to cut your hours-wages for the same reason let's not talk about benefits, there's not "safe job" anymore.

" there's not "safe job" anymore."

Most jobs are safe actually.

First - government, which is a massive employer.

Second - healthcare - generally low turnover, and a huge portion of the economy.

Energy - parts are up and down, but anything closer to the core is very safe.

Core jobs at any classic company. They are generally safe.

Large layoffs are not common, and this idea that companies will drop huge numbers of people 'just to save a buck' is simply not true: most layoffs only happen during economic calamity, when the company is starting to face trouble. In decent times, firings is rare.

Now factory wok, hourly workers, retail workers - that's a whole other thing.

Remember that companies make money by expanding and hiring, not by laying off. CEO's are 100x more likely to want to 'grow' than 'shrink' and there's a lot of political cost with layoffs.

Rubin's startup is flailing, that's why he's laying off, that's to be expected.

>Now factory work, hourly workers, retail workers - that's a whole other thing.

These are most of the jobs, not government, energy, healthcare and whatever "core jobs at any classic company" means. Those are also overlapping sets.

No, you can see the breakdown here from the BLS [1]

Most jobs are relatively safe from calamity. Though there is ugly turnover, the same applies - in retail in particular, companies do not want to layoff - this would be very bad. They want to hire, it's just that the jobs suck. As for manufacturing - that's generally the one where 'laying off' might be good for the company as they would move the jobs overseas.

But this idea that companies are always looking to layoff and drop people is not right, it happens in specific places.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...

How about training? Training is beneficial to an employee. Employment itself should count, I’d argue, because the law of comparative advantage means both parties could (and probably do) benefit but even setting that aside, training should count.

Still agree with the monitoring, though.

Training is about delivering with consistency and compliance. Some training does benefit the employees but that’s not the “primary” purpose.

I'm in a fight with HR right now.

It is a mess right now. To say the least...

I get more and more the feeling that HR do not understand how laws work and think they (the firm) are always right...

For a company claims to hate lawyers and don't want to work with lawyers. They sure as hell make sure that soon or later you will involve lawyers (did that already)

But, it is a live lesson. Like all those people claiming they hate gays (while they are gay) or say they are not drama queens (they are) I will now listen carefully when someone says they are not xxxx..

"But nothing a company does it to the benefit of the employee"

Paying them 10's of thousands a year is definitely 'to the benefit of the employee'.

The TSA situation is a really bad analogy because it's a high security environment wherein monitoring is basically a given. It's just that with that open window, management can't help but be idiots about it and monitor 'chewing gum'. The second problem is that it's a highly authoritative system with low skilled staff. If TSA were bankers and lawyers (or developers), they'd collectively have a lot more power.

Case and point: software developers, bankers and lawyers are not monitored for 'chewing gum' and 'bathroom breaks', moreover, they aren't monitored for that much other than communications.

Email and electronic communications have to be logged for a variety of reasons (including legal)but they should not be monitored by managers.

Traders have all finances monitored. In some hedge funds monitoring is a lot more invasive. So I don’t agree, but my point is, monitoring isn’t done to protect employees, it’s done to protect the company.

Trading is a very specialized activity, huge sums of money are actively changing hands and there are tons of regulations in place on this stuff - of course that will be monitored - just as bank tellers are.

But most jobs in banking are definitely not.

And there's zero chance that traders managers are monitoring for 'bathroom breaks' or 'chewing gum' or anything like that.

But yes, monitoring is generally done to protect the company. But even in the case you described - trading - it definitely protects traders from being wrongfully accused of such and such (i.e. insider trading).

I agree with you but it's not always so extreme.

For instance, I work for a school where employees are pretty trusted (the extensive background check prior to hiring & fact that most people have master's degrees probably helps).

The only employee monitoring system we use is to turn on "find my iPhone" and the like for all devices. Technically this is pretty extensive location tracking, but no one monitors it unless a device is stolen/lost.

I really don't think it changes employee behavior. If people want to leave all of their devices at school and never take them home they can, but no one has ever brought it up as an issue.

When our company first began implementing employee tracking the goal was to help our staff understand their own performance, co-educate and to attempt to support a culture of experimenting with every aspect of our work.

Our initial systems ended up being decent at keeping people "moving fast" but in our first few feedback sessions we found it stressed people out, encouraged competition instead of co-education and locked people into workflows they "knew worked" rather than fostering experimentation.

We quickly killed all but the most basic performance tracking aspects of the project and we found better ways to achieve our goals.

We now have a sort of "opt-in" tracking for staff who are interested in testing the strengths and weaknesses of a novel approach, for example. This puts the data in their hands as a tool to convince us of the validity of their approach and the empowerment is not trivial.

It's far more friendly and humane but it's also something that benefits everyone at the company.

I'm curious; in the first version, where was the data stored and who had access to it?

There was an intranet portal available to all the staff and much of the day-to-day data was presented directly to the staff as they completed their work.

However, only management was really "engaging" with the data, the staff themselves only interacted with it enough to outrun it.

Now, employees feel excited about the opportunity to dig into datasets that they created with some specific intent and it's the staff themselves that engage directly with management.

It's just much better all around.

Pretty disgusting stuff. There are plenty of places in the world where a video camera provides relief and safety, but work is rarely one. The engineers building this tech should be ashamed, they grew up to be the bad guys.

A few years back a guy I knew from college wanted to have a meeting with me regarding a "business opportunity".

He pitched me an idea for a system that would essentially spy on IT contractors through the webcam during work. Fortunately his budget was laughably small and my participation out of the question so he never went through with this.

He is known for being utterly shameless but I guess what other kind of person would come up with such an idea?

Doesn't upwork and other freelance style sites monitor by webcam/screencapture as an option?

This man is not known for having original ideas either.

Ugh. Sounds like a porn-adjacent cam site for frustrated, bottom-feeder control freaks.

How to watch someone pick their nose for 8 hours a day. Which finger will he use next? Woah he's going for the big one!

And this is me, and it's not even lunch time.

He pitched me an idea for a system that would essentially spy on IT contractors through the webcam during work.

Doing that herearound (and I'd wager in most European countries) would be illegal as hell. Like in prison sentence illegal.

A video camera never provides relief and safety by itself.

That being said, engineers also built jira. It lets people measure ticket closure rate and time taken. It also lets you compare people on your team.

The engineers building this tech should be ashamed, they grew up to be the bad guys

Make no mistake, if Google could get away with selling a live stream of your web activity to your HR dept they would do it in a second. After all that’s basically what Dragonfly is.

as someone who works a blue collar job in an auto repair shop, these articles always make me pause for a moment and ask if i really want to keep learning python in the hopes of pursuing an office job. The entire environment just sounds like high school all over again. Why does anyone in an office put up with it?? is this somehow different than time keeping? do you have a punch card?

If you asked my boss where i was, shed probably just point at the garage and wave at the 'authorized personnel only' sign. She has no reason to care what size wrench im holding or why im beating the living shit out of a siezed idler pitman assembly. I once drove a car with no doors and a missing windshield out of the lot and down the street, and the only thing she wanted from me was to know if id run to leroys donut and pick up a frozen coffee.

Why is this different in an office? are office jobs just not trustworthy?

No one in an office job knows if anyone else is doing anything useful. Or even if they're doing anything useful.

Au contrair. mon ami. Office workers are busy keeping themselves in the office, which means that the vacation spots, and such are riffraff-free for their betters until the next major holiday break. That's quite useful.

I see some people lack a sense of humor and/or that a 'truth' perhaps cuts too close to the bone.

If by useful you mean in a societal scale, I agree. If you mean on a more prosaic level, I'd say that's not true in small bootstrapped companies.

Don't let this stuff discourage you. People who put up with stuff are like the mechanics who work at Pep boys. You can do better and you don't have to tolerate it.

Office jobs are not trustworthy.

The model you should have for an office job is that it's basically a social game within which some actual work takes place. Most of the time people spend is maneuvering within the game.

I say this as someone with an office job.

You work at an utterly dysfunctional office. I say this as someone with an office job that not at all resembles what you describe.

Most of the jobs described in the article are not office jobs, and are hourly jobs that probably have timekeeping and pinch cards or the equivalent on top of the surveillance.

Blue collar jobs, especially with large employers, aren't any less exposed to this.

Office workers put up with it for the same reason as other workers—its that or not have a job.

There are good office jobs and there are bad office jobs. There are good employers and bad employers. The best jobs I've had usually have some basic deadlines (measurable goals and results), and some basic rules (show up every day), but other than that, not much structure or micro-management or anything. If you're a full-time programmer on a team, then you might have a lot of little tasks assigned to you (eg: "add feature X to user profile page", "fix bug Y on the logout screen", etc.), but not constant surveillance or anything. If you're constantly checking in code to Github, then your boss knows that you're working.

As someone who has worked both, I’d encourage you to reconsider what you’re really seeking in an office job. I did aircraft maintenance in the Air Force, paperwork and management in the AF, got out and hopped around with AAA as a roadside assistance tech, and am finally at a remote job doing pentesting. I’ve been in then out then back in again. Let me tell you, I can’t wait to turn wrenches again. If you can tolerate the pay cut and live a simpler life, I’d hazard to say that nothing beats the satisfaction that a hands on job provides.

On the whole, id say that there is something to be said about how the tech revolution is just an iteration of the industrial revolution. People are more removed from the art of what they do. They are deprived of the fruit of their labor and instead forced to work a piece wise process instead of seeing something done start to finish. There’s no tangible result to all the toil.

Non derogatory caveat: some are content to say that the SDLC is an answer. I reject that notion, and realize that I’m the shrinking minority.

A repair job seems like a much closer analogy to a typical software development job than a factory process. My work is mostly identifying and fixing problems and installing custom-designed modules onto machines made by others. If you prefer working more end-to-end, that's also not hard to find in the consulting area.

YEMV, but I am a consultant. Putting a bow on an engagement report is really not comparable to seeing your building occupied or watching your plane take off.

> * Why does anyone in an office put up with it??*

The "prestige" of not being, ahem, blue collar.

But to be fair, there are some things in life from which you and/or one's offspring will/would be locked out if one's money comes from the wrong place(s). That said, this doesn't apply to most people. So, see my initial sentence.

It highly depends on the kind of company (and possibly country) you work in - I work in a startup in the UK and it's nothing like that.

Blue collar jobs are more rewarding and the work environment can be better for all the reasons you described but the money is worth it IMO. If the money were the same I'd hand in my two weeks and get my welding certs.

Also, calling it an idler pitman arm is somewhat contradictory (though probably not a technical contradiction) since pitman arm kinda implies it's located on the bottom of a steering gear. ;)

If the money were the same I'd hand in my two weeks and get my welding certs.

In the UK a good plumber or electrician makes comparable money to a programmer. If I had my time over again, or if I were giving careers advice to a young person, do that.

> Blue collar jobs are more rewarding and the work environment can be better for all the reasons you described but the money is worth it IMO. If the money were the same I'd hand in my two weeks and get my welding certs.

A few years back a large series of personal tragedies hit me at once which coincided with being screwed over at a job. I decided to leave tech for a while, and spent a few months in Portland becoming a certified bicycle mechanic & frame welder.

This lead to me starting a bicycle company building very solid bikes for obese riders (like myself) who were afraid to ride on the roads. I lost many thousands of dollars and had to go back to software for the financial aspects, but I have never had as much joy and satisfaction in tech as I did building bicycles.

There's no job that's perfect in every way. Some office jobs are better than others. I do some Python work, and I don't have this kind of surveillance going on AFAICT. There's some things I don't like about this job, but overall it's a pretty good deal. There's some places that are horror shows; at place that tried to recruit me, I read reviews on Glassdoor.com about how HR monitored the parking lot and the bathrooms to make sure people were coming in on time and not spending too much time on the toilet! I turned down the interview.

Monitoring can be done on multiple levels. Consider: DNS hits, traffic intensity per domain and LDAP logins. All of this can be done transparently if you work from an office or use a VPN to access intra or client stuff.

If your company is sufficiently motivated they may have theft-prevention stuff on company-owned hardware that will be more than happy to send a live audio-video stream without your knowledge.

Managers may even not know about the more insane stuff because they're being monitored as well...

Monitoring measures deployed by HR are usually laughable and just a smoke screen meant to show how "backwards" they are.

You can't send a live video stream without a camera. Cameras are plainly obvious, and easily covered up with tape.

Microphones aren't plainly obvious and they can provide far more interesting data than a selfie. Also tape barely impacts the pickup quality for mics.

I have seen people cover laptop cameras but company-owned phones are usually ignored in this regard.

Not to mention keylogging and involuntary desktop screenshots.

Employee monitoring software usually has all of this (and more) in one neat package.

It should be titled: How employers lose their best employees.

There are certain jobs that do require extra security and monitoring. But if a manager actually thinks their white collar underling is going to perform better, they should not be a manager.

In the case of IT people, it will probably just get hacked and disabled. I've done it at past jobs. I've also flat out refused to implement this sort of crap.

“It’s possible that almost any change—even changing the lighting—would have prompted a similar increase in productivity.”

Hawthorne effect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

Also relevant here is panopticon/panopticism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticism

> “a culture where … people more often alter their behavior to suit machines and work with them, rather than the other way around,” and that this tends to erode their sense of “agency.” That is, the constant surveillance of employees diminishes their capacity to operate as independent thinkers and actors.

Isn't this the point? At least until the people can be replaced? Personally, can't wait to see the autonomous robots attempts to subvert the system. That should be interesting.

How ubiquitous is this for TSA? I hear people on hackernews complain about theft from the TSA every so often, but according to this, they're being recorded so it shouldn't happen, or if it does, they should be able to prove if it was stolen by TSA.

Are people just blaming TSA for their lost things, is TSA covering up thefts that they know are happening, or what?

It said they were told that's why they were being recorded, it didn't say it was true.

It's very hard to be certain what's going on unless we install tools that monitor management. On the plus side studies show this would improve their productivity.

By "they" do you mean TSA? This is not to benefit you, it's to benefit them.

If they are being recorded, I doubt the cameras cover every possible angle. People figure out where the blind spots are.

Even if they are recording everything, there are few people who will want to spend the time watching the recordings. I've been through this a few times in different places. People make up all sorts of excuses for why they can't access the surveillance record(s), that's if they even really have them.

These type of "tools" are used by low-lives to control people so that they feel that they have some sense of control over people. In terms of getting good hard-working motivated people to work for you, this sort of technology does exactly the opposite.

It makes me think of a piece from Peopleware (1987):

> Historians long ago formed an abstraction about different theories of value: The Spanish Theory, for one, held that only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people’s backs. Then there was the English Theory that held that value could be created through ingenuity and technology. [...]

> The Spanish Theory of Value is alive and well among managers everywhere. You see that whenever they talk about productivity. Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay. There is a large difference. The Spanish Theory managers dream of attaining new productivity levels through the simple mechanism of unpaid overtime.

This comment gave me a thought: maybe the reason that employees rebel against these systems has less to do with the implied lack of trust, and more to do with the loss of autonomy?

If the boss isn't around to watch you all the time, you get judged by your results at the end of the day. If you're being watched all the time, you get judged by how closely you adhere to every asinine rule that management makes up.

The bank I was working at tried installing monitoring software on programmers' computers one day with no monitoring.

I sent my MD an email saying I wouldn't be working that day because of it, and left. The software disappeared the next day.

Most companies I've worked for (including a bank) you'd be gone the next day. Monitoring is so rampant right now. It's disgusting.

Indeed, I'm working at a bank at the moment. There are half a dozen "endpoint protection" agents installed on my laptop, and don't even mention the network filtering - the Docker, Nginx and Vagrant documentation websites are all blocked for example.

I try to work mostly on my own laptop using Citrix in a web browser to access the corporate network so that the personal data I generate in a day (for example, browsing HN during downtime) doesn't get caught up in all the monitoring but this has some obvious limitations. With the security regime in place they will actually ask you about every piece of software you have installed on your corporate laptop (on which you'll need to request temporary admin access to install most software, of course) or about why you visited x, y or z website or why you searched this or that on Google. Like the article says it's best to keep your head down and try not to get noticed - they collect so much information but nobody looks at it until they have a reason to do so.

IMHO having a camera over your head is just one (small) step worse than working in open-plan offices. It got popular only for one reason, for just like cameras it gives the management that false sense of control.

Workers who are being surveiled should do the bare minimum while developing skills during free time that benefit future employers and not the current one.

Sadly, I think this almost always should be the case. That is, unless the employer actually is benevolent and puts effort into nurturing the futures of its employees. But how often do we see that?

People should basically work no more than 4 hours a day, and the remaining 4 hours should either be spent developing skills or running a side-hustle on a personal laptop. Better that than bullshitting, which is what the vast majority of people do after they're burned out working 3 hours.

Completely off topic but The Atlantic's GDPR notice is the least intrusive and most compliant I've seen so far. Good job.

Try https://wikia.com. No "manage my preferences" or "are you sure" etc, just a simple yes/no.

As a side note, basically no one complies with Article 7.3.4: "It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent." (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/)

Personally I prefer the finer grained controls of The Atlantic, but that is still better than 99% of the rest. Though I'm not sure about the wording, it only says 'advertising cookies'.

I totally agree. The Guardian's is even simpler (track or no track).

Those things were you have to opt-out of 160 companies individually are really the pits (and quite likely illegal, but time will tell).

so yeah, if a company considers surveillance of employees' performance to be documentation of their work for the company then all employees will do is just be surveilled.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com