Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance
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If you need surveillance in this situation, you've got the wrong person -- folks like this self-selct themselves to work in these places. They are intrinsically motivated by the problem that interests them. No amount surveillence software will improve their output, if they are not interested in the problem -- they'll just quit.
Whereas sure, I don't spend an eight hour solid block of time working each day, but I'll respond to a help ticket at 11pm because someone had a quick need and my computer is handy.
My employer is still getting my eight hours, possibly more, just diffused through the whole day.
Even that sticks in my craw... we need to make this 8 hour bar die. Some days I'm just not productive. Other days I might be heads-down on a problem for 15+ hours straight. So long as I'm accountable to my work and it is producing the results we've mutually agreed upon, this hour nonsense (for workers not billing by the hour, which is its own separate discussion) needs to go away.
Or an old example from a mentor. Get in the shower, start thinking about what you're going to work on today. Realize you've been in the shower for half an hour. How you going to bill for that?
I've come to the idea that you pay an engineer for his attention to your problems. Engineers I dislike working with are ones that don't. Their other interests have crowded out what they are being paid to mind. And some of those guys definitely do spend 8 hours in the chair going through the motions. They do work but there is a disunity to the whole thing.
And you know what? My productivity went up! The reason? We talked about work during the smoke break. I got to be part of the conversation with the senior engineers, which meant I got to be involved in more valuable tasks.
I found this video last night lounging on the couch, the first segment talks about exactly what you’ve described, and the necessity to sometimes let the mind wander or do something else entirely when you’re “in the zone” but nevertheless stumped on a particular problem.
The video itself is about math and science but I think the applications extend far beyond.
I think I get where you're coming from but I'm at the point in my career where I like work/life balance and do not give a shit about your email once I've turned off work (unless it's an emergency, obviously). If this doesn't happen, work creeps into life until that's all it is, no fun, no exercise, no fresh air, no social interaction, no family time - and all the negative mental and physical health effects that result from this.
I mean, if a really productive brainstorm session bleeds over an hour or 2 every once in a while and we just can't stop the flood of great ideas or hit that "flow", of course, let's keep going. But every damn day? Get a life, kid! Before it's too late.
On the flip side, if I get inspired to do work in my off-hours, I don't go charging it back, so to speak.
We aren't disagreeing here... my point is not that you should work 24x7, rather... throughout my career I've noticed that value and hours are not correlated. Therefore, it strikes me as really silly to be so focused on hours worked in fields where that metric doesn't matter. I'm not saying we should get lazy and sit around, but rather find new ways of managing our work that recognize this phenomenon and seek to create working environments where we eliminate hours as a measure of productivity and instead focus on the productive output of our work.
Yes, totally agreed here. We're talking creative and analytical output, not cloud compute cycles.
I once worked in fast food right out of high school. 80-90% of the employees were one or more of untrustworthy, unreliable, whiny, always making excuses or trying get out of work. My point being if you start there you might just assume that that's the way it always is for all employees no matter what type of job and therefore feel like you need to surveil.
Most of my tech jobs didn't have this issue AFAIK (though one did) but just as one stat from a random search
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/workplace-crime-costs-us-bus...
I have consulted with customer contact companies and it was always shocking to see the low productivity. Front line employees, especially the younger age group, would find ingenious ways to circumvent doing actual work while artificially inflating their KPIs. There was even information sharing economy in some companies where the best tricks were traded for goods and services.
To put it in context though, it was by any measure thankless and soul crushing work. And the worst offenders were in cold call centres and strangely in email support teams.
When BTC was just starting out, we had one dev bring his own server to a data center and piggy back off a dumb switch for some NAS boxes. Free power for months and several BTC -- probably ~100k or more now.
We had a night admin printing out books on how to hack things from the work printer. Like 300 pages worth... which he forgot in the printer. He later tried to sell our certificates to random people via his work email.
One contract/hourly admin fudged his timecard 10 hours a week, every week, for months. He only was discovered when we did HR cost reviews and found that he was 500+ hours ahead of everyone else.
One of our junior linux admins brought his girlfriend into the NOC for a tour, then was caught on camera fingerbanging his lady on camera in the hallway just outside of the NOC door.
No shortage of switches, SFPs, half-step servers, and other gear going missing.
twitches involuntarily
Buddy you're hitting way too close to home for my comfort, right now (thankfully the complaints are being heard and division chief is willing to hear out suggestions for a better system to track OKRs)
Imagine that you're processing confidential customer data and you use something like https://hubstaff.com to take screenshots randomly. You're literally uploading PII to some professional spyware provider that works on a freemium model.
Solution to that using appliances available in every home:
Dangle the mouse from you desk and put a fan next to it so that it hits the mouse from time to time.
But also quit your job - managers who use such tactics are usually very trigger-happy when it comes to firing people, so you're just delaying the inevitable.
"Don't engage in games with your employees, because you can't win."
He elaborates further explaining that any scheme or incentive system created for a specific behavioral outcome is bound to be exploited or otherwise worked around.
So the bossman is saying they should be at their desk working on their thing and let 3 year old Johnny ride his bicycle down the stairs?
I don’t see how this makes any employee productive. This adds more stress imo. An employee gives you 8 of their 12 hour day. Now, you tell me if that works only for you - the management. They’re people just like you. They have a life just like you. They have responsibilities similar to you. They might have a family similar to you. There’s no fucking way they can manage all this, giving you a focused 8 hour. They might need a few mins to pay a bill, lookup a medication, place a personal Online order. And many other activities that come with “living”, being alive.
I am certain most managers that implement this are antisocial fucks. It’s poor management. Uneducated decision making.
Now, it does has its place. For example in highly secured environments or when dealing with highly sensitive documents. But for a small or regular office, no!
HR/Payroll companies such as ADP and Insperity need to start setting ground rules. I know that they’re in favor of the employer, however, it would make good on them.
Sounds like a "Tit for tat".
Why?
If I cut your finger off and stabbed you in your kidney, would it change your personal situation if you did the same?
If your immediate boss calls you every 30 minutes you are away from work, you want to do the same?
That's madness!
There is no "poor management".
What are these uneducated decision makers even doing at your place of work?
There's always a boss.
The boss is paying for the behavior they want to see.
Now if you argue the ultimate boss is clueless, then, what are you even doing there?
You might want to tell yourself that your immediate boss who calls you every 30 minutes you are away from work is just ineffective, but if he was not delivering on what his boss wanted from him, he would be gone.
"Tit for tat" is a great children's activity.
Adults are not children.
If your boss behaves like a child it's time to have a conversation.
Depending on your specific situation that conversation might very well be with a new company.
How much sleep are you getting??
Anyway, using the DOL's standard of 2,087 work hours in a work year, we can do the following calculation: 2,087 / (365.24 * 24) = 23.8% of your total time spent at work.
Let's use a generous figure of 8 hours of sleep per night: 2,087 / (365.24 * 16) = 35.7% of your waking hours spent at work. The rest is your time, to spend however you choose to spend it, whether that's commuting, cooking, chores, errands, hobbies, whatever.
And we haven't even factored in vacation and sick days -- the 2,087 work hours figure only includes federal holidays.
Suffice to say that his confusion was reflected in how engineers were treated.
At the time, there were few other choices for technology work in Kansas City.
What happened? Free trade.
Cheap goods from other countries gutted the local industries. Hard to compete on price when labour costs are so different. The only jobs remaining become min wage or importing.
People not working as hard as a generation ago doesn't factor in.
They sold out American workers to increase their profit margins.
"free trade" allows for the free movement of capital, but not the free movement of labor which is stuck relatively immobile (except maybe from "cheaper" countries to the more "expensive" ones)
Really, no reason to protect the guilty here. It was AdKnowledge.
It's definitely a popular line of thought. Though having worked in multiple areas of the US, I don't think it is. You won't need to look hard in SF, NYC, or London to find corporate leadership that doesn't really consider engineers to be humans like them.
Is it possible people are looking for patterns in noise?
Personally, I find the purported cultural commentary of others on offer here to be an uncomfortable echo of the cultural snobbery one hears daily offered by Californians to the "flyover states".
(Cerner is in the KC area.)
One of the reasons I'm a supporter of universal basic income is so that the employees can have a better negotiating position. I suspect many bullshit rules will go out the window when the alternative to employment isn't destitution.
For far too long has this negotiation been highly in favour of the employer.
I've seen no overtime pay happen, lies from management to get unemployment claims denied, management not actually firing people but just giving them zero or reduced hours to mess with the unemployment claim process, the VISA fuckery you mentioned, harrassment. Intentional scheduling of conflicting days for people with multiple jobs. Being made to work 7 days a week for long periods of time. Being made to repeatedly close late at night / early in the morning and then open the restaurant the next morning, a few hours later, and work a double. Being made to work while sick (this happens a lot).
A gold comment I heard from one manager was "I don't pay overtime because these motherfuckers already take enough of my money" (referring to the employees). This same guy was shaving time slips to keep them below 40 hours.
That was pretty much all it took.
And I understand, he'd been running that business for over 20 years and started it from nothing. He was fairly successful while I was working there, but he'd been at the bottom before and would keep working back up from there again if it came down to it.
He's probably one of the best bosses i've had, he was fair and would invest in employees and the business, but the business always came first.
Just last month: https://web.archive.org/web/20200410153705/http://www.lafari...
(They've since re-opened)
To be honest, though, the average worker doesn't have that kind of leverage, they don't have pockets deep enough to wade through the interview cycle, and many of the other employers they'd go work for are doing exactly the same thing. For them, the alternative to employment at a company deploying these kinds of tactics is very much destitution - especially right now.
I'm with you on one thing: if my employer demanded minute-by-minute accountability for my time, I'd leave, no questions asked and minimum notice given. I have that choice, though; when discussing things like UBI, I always try to remind myself that someone for whom that support would be life-changing is in a very different situation from mine, with a much more constrained set of responses / actions available to them.
Which means that with UBI, I might be less inclined to take risks. I'm not an economist enough to tell what that means, but a rough estimate say it won't increase my income. And at this point of the discussion, we haven't even touched the topic of taxes...
It sets a minimum bar.
Realistically you need both -- a UBI and a union. The UBI sets the minimum bar that all jobs must reach, the Union sets the livable bar for one particular workplace (or maybe a group of similar workplaces).
UBI and Unions serve different purposes. A UBI prevents modern slavery, a Union provides for a decent quality of life.
Henry Ford had to double the pay to lower employee turnover.
There is no "poor management".
What are these uneducated decision makers even doing at your place of work?
There's always a boss.
The boss is paying for the behavior they want to see.
Now if you argue the ultimate boss is clueless, then, what are you even doing there?
You might want to tell yourself that your immediate boss who calls you every 30 minutes you are away from work is just ineffective, but if he was not delivering on what his boss wanted from him, he would be gone.
> in highly secured environments or when dealing with highly sensitive documents
Its about control.
No matter how highly secured an environment is, human ingenuity can and will still work around it. There's literally several professions dedicated to it.
NO matter how highly sensitive a document is, if someone decides to share it, they will.
Crocodiles, fire pits, stripdowns, armed guards, MRIs or any camera is no obstacle to a determined individual.
> If you don’t understand your employees workload and don’t trust them then either you resign or fire the employees.
Nah - it's just about control.
Look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA_fJh4lzqQ
Did "Jim" not know that he was on facebook for 8 hours yesterday?
Will bringing that to his attention suddenly make him "more productive"?
Why would it have that effect?
You could try and fake empathy for the hand that feeds you (you have reason to!) but even if this kind of management had absolute clarity into employees workload, they still would do surveillance.
Why?
... because their messaging is "we control you during the hours you work for us".
It's unlikely anyone's watching the surveillance data and footage. Honestly, people don't have time and it's a very high noise-to-signal ratio activity. Even at retail where loss prevention is at least one dedicated department, it's impossible to follow up on surveillance data and footage.
Do you honestly believe anyone would look a those verbose reports generated in the video at any detail?
No.
For all purposes, its not the how but the why.
Control.
All this talk about productivity, workload and trust are "feel good" concepts that give the illusion that there just some "miscommunication" happening.
If only that "miscommunication" went away, everything would be perfect with the world again.
It provides a distraction from the reality that the people one's working for are sycophants and extremely manipulative.
The truth is - action has no miscommunication - it either works or it does not.
The toilet needed to be scrubbed?
Its either done or not done. Couldn't be done because someone was having a seizure there that required a team to come in and block the cleaning from happening? Check.
If the cleaner had to badge in and out and had a camera mounted at the restroom entrance to check if they went in or out - does not have any relation to the job getting done.
IF the individual cleaner was so determined to clean the restroom during the seizure, they would manage to do it.
Russia, China and the companies that hire the likes of InterGuard Employee Monitoring for surveillance is doing it for control.
Putin wants dirt on you so when you become a problem for him, he can use it against you.
Surveillance is all about control.
Except in cases where:
- That boss's boss is related to the CEO and is coasting / not at the wheel
- That boss's boss is already looking for ways to let go of them
- That boss's boss needs that boss in place for a while longer, due to other factors, but is still annoyed by the micromanagement
- That boss's boss is intimidated by their underling and feels something bad might happen if they take action against the unwanted behavior
I've seen all of the above and consulted management on a few of those as well. There are a million little ways in which the "system" (dynamic between a group of people at work) has achieved a form of control which is out of the grasp of the individual and in contravention of the ultimate boss's way of doing business.
Specific interventions can completely change the dynamic, but the tendency is to blame the problem on individuals rather than emergent effects, which IMO makes individuals feel even more helpless. Usually something can be done.
Let me explain.
> - That boss's boss is related to the CEO and is coasting / not at the wheel
i.e. the boss is paying for the behavior they want to see.
> - That boss's boss is already looking for ways to let go of him
then it's a solved problem - unless the boss's boss continues to look for ways to let go for months on end, in which case really, again, the boss is paying for the behavior they want to see
> - That boss's boss needs him in place for a while longer, due to other factors, but is still annoyed by the micromanagement
i.e. the boss is paying for the behavior they want to see
"annoyed"?
It seems like the value is "needs him in place for a while longer" and all the "annoyance" does is affect that somewhat.
Can we measure the effect of the "annoyance" on the decision? Let's see:
If I have a racist employee and their racism "annoys" me, I still am supporting racism with my dollars.
Otherwise, real action is: ask them to move on.
If I have a noisy neighbor and their noise "annoys" me, I still am supporting their behavior with my dollars.
The real action would be: I move/ I ask them to move, or take them to court while getting an stay order to ensure the noise is constrained while the matter is settled.
At a previous apartment, there was a stay at home mom above mine who would begin her aggressive yoga and home gymnastics at 5AM and end at 9AM. Constant pounding. I spoke with her first and she felt the gym in the complex was too crowded for her. I recorded her activities from below in my room, sent it to the office, yelp, facebook for the complex, broke my lease and moved.
Life is too short for nonsense.
> - That boss's boss is intimidated by his underling and feels something bad might happen if he takes action against the unwanted behavior
i.e. the boss is paying for the behavior they want to see
I feel there's some sympathy for the boss, almost as if they were misguided children.
Adults are not children.
If your boss behaves like a child it's time to have a conversation.
Depending on your specific situation that conversation might very well be with a new company.
If you see a purported optimization problem and a solution that doesn't fit it, there are two possible explanations. Either whatever does the optimization is bad at optimizing, or the objective function isn't what you think it is.
For almost every feasible solution, you can contrive an objective function so that that solution is the optimum. So perhaps the managers are deliberately engineering the business to take some money out of their bottom line to send a message. But in the spirit of Hanlon's razor, it's more likely that the managers are simply bad at their job.
> In some sense, it doesn't even matter. If the manager is sacrificing profit for a fuzzy feeling of domination, then he's doing a bad job at increasing profit. And if the business is in competition with another that doesn't succumb to that kind of error, then the market will make it very clear
We have to be consistent in our views.
In the first sentence, the Hanlon's razor applies but not in the second one?
What if the market is inefficient and the manager sacrificing profit for a fuzzy feeling of domination actually comes ahead?
Does the Hanlon's razor support that theory?
In that case, how does this conversation proceed?
I am (trying to) applying a consistent view - that there's always an objective function in a game and society is a game.
Right now, you and I are playing a game - I'm trying to clarify my thoughts and so are you.
My objective function is to test the clarity of my thoughts and the best way to go about it, I feel, is to discuss it with someone who holds a contrarian view.
That said, I've been having a hard time doing that here on HN as once downvotes (which work like a silencing mechanism here) happen, I literally cant respond back until a few hours have passed since the last downvote.
Don't hesitate to reach out over email. I am enjoying this exchange.
Yup!
With over a million views of my content, I have noticed that this style is preferred by an overwhelming majority of readers.
I am sure there are who disagree. I am explicitly open to open dialog with all my channels listed on my profile.
My focus is to reach people and listen to what they have to say.
My objective is to test the clarity of my thoughts and the best way to go about it, I feel, is to discuss it with someone who holds a contrarian view.
That said, I've been having a hard time doing that here on HN as once downvotes (which work like a silencing mechanism here) happen, I literally cant respond back until a few hours have passed since the last downvote.
Reality is what remains after all beliefs have been stripped away.
I did not respond to your comment as the grandparent made no sense - neither management, nor boss nor god in the sky works for you.
Only you work for you and they work for them.
Naivety is believing it works any other way.
I agree.
But the surveillance tools have been around for A LONG TIME, and people haven't really complained much about it.
The thing is whenever people ask questions about how the surveillance is performed and how to respond to it, the answer (in the USA) has traditionally been something like "It's your employer's equipment, they can do whatever they want with their equipment-- don't do anything on it unless you want the man to know."
Now, "the equipment" is at home. I don't think that makes much difference, but yeah, there's some interesting edge cases like turning on camera/microphone in employee home without employee consent.
It makes me wonder about countermeasures.
Is there a way to know if you're being screenshotted or some enterprise shit-ware is logging stuff? Yes, it's always true that it "could happen". I would like to know if it IS happening. Is that even possible?
They were told to put this on their "personal" computers. Not work computers. This is way over the line.
But how do you tell if that or something like it is on your work machine? Look for "hubstaff.dll"? ... half kidding, but seriously how do you tell if there's corporate fuckery on your work machine (eg screenshotting, logging time on URLs, keylogging, etc etc)?
This "surveillance-ware", I am suggesting, can be thought of as a kind-of malware and be detectable in some way, either on the disk or as a running process.
I am surprised that no one has created something to check if such surveillance software is running or perhaps even actively screenshotting.
I don't know how much of what these pieces of software are capable of on Mac (because of all the privacy stuff in Catalina that requires the user to agree) and Linux (because I doubt there's a huge market for these tools on Linux), so if you don't have Windows on your machine you are probably even more okay. But in any case, assume they can.
Sure, the man "could" do it, but it's a separate and more interesting thing to know if it is happening.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3047375/simulating-key-p...
to instead of simulating a single keypress, have it open a text editor and simulate typing in the source code of the app you're working on. That way any keylogger running will pick up a lot of code. If manager is dumb enough to use a keylogger he probably won't recognize that it's the same code each day.
But let's stop pretending it's an 8 hour workday then, shall we? The US habit of doing lots of random shit during work is absolutely nuts - because you can't do anything well if you're constantly switching tasks.
Oddly, it's perfectly possible to have an environment where both are true - management trusts you to get work done, and you actually get focused work done. It "just" requires maturity on both sides. A willingness to honor an agreement on both sides, as opposed to constantly looking out for #1 only.
If you are a heart surgeon or Lebron James you can understand why you are making so much money — you have exceptional skill at something in high demand. The average manager is more like someone who found a bank error in their favor and prays every morning that it isn’t discovered.
I think you're adding a bit too much personal animosity towards management.
The vast majority of management does not have goals/behaviors they are measured in.
I'm still fascinated that it's largely considered impossible to have a VP count how many 1:1's a manager had or how many times they gave positive vs. negative feedback. Imagine if no one kept any statistics for any sports player, and just say "it's too hard, you have to manually count".
Most managers should be fired, they largely are flailing around underneath directors who should also be fired, underneath VPs who have so little control over their org they largely are future predictors with no inputs (aka random output).
I say this from a place of love - I think they're all working very hard. But I've only ever met 1 manager in my life that counted their small interactions with their reports to try and improve.
They may have plenty of room for improvement, but their actions aren't motivated by "I don't know what I'm doing here", rather "I don't trust my employees enough to let them run free". That's a very different motivation and confusing the two will only lead to not understanding actions and reactions.
No need to reach for an analogy here, you could just say “if you are an engineer.”
In my experience what you’re saying is rarely true at the top tech companies, the managers there generally either come from a tech background themselves or they show an unexpectedly strong understanding of technical aspects of the product anyway, and typically have strong organizational and people skills that clearly stand on their own as rare and valuable.
What you’re saying is almost always the case at small- to mid-size tech companies (which is most of them), and I think it’s because they’re perpetually unable to attract and retain top tech talent... so anybody that can code is de facto placed and kept in a role where they’re coding, and ideally only coding.
A side effect of that is the pool of candidates for promotions and managerial positions is reduced to “only people who can’t code.”
It creates this bizarre situation where the company is looking to its least talented people and least impressive outside candidates to fill the management positions, and actively trying not to promote or give any credit to its most impressive and productive people (because then they might realize their value and demand something the company can’t give them).
These are also the companies most likely to be running against deadlines and having people work evenings and weekends, because again, they can’t attract or retain enough talent to comfortably hit those deadlines. They’re always able to create those deadlines though, because as it turns out, it’s a lot easier to sell software than it is to make software.
Then at 5pm on Friday when all the engineers are looking forward to another 4 hours of coding, all the managers get to throw up their hands and go “I’m useless anyway, I guess I get to go home now!”
And they might as well.
(If you’re an engineer and this sounds familiar to you, go apply to 50 tech companies right now because you’re way more valuable than you realize)
Average managers didn't and so they just derp around hoping everything'll turn out alright.
Everything else is the same.
Your software reports on their browser history when an employee is not on the clock, Congratulations, that's another felony.
Your terminate someone because the software is saying they aren't at their computers the whole day, that's a class action lawsuit and possibly another felony.
And all of it is EASY AS HELL TO PROOVE BECAUSE YOU MADE THE LOG FILES AND INSTRUCTED YOUR IT STAFF TO DO IT YOU DIPSHIT.
Think that your employment contract which stipulates you get to watch everything and anything they signed to keep or get their job will save you? Think binding arbitration will save you? Not only will it not save you, but it will make your sentance longer.
We have entered a brave new worlds of uncharted territory.
One of the key driving factors of bad behaivour of company staff is the consequences of a fertility rate so bad a newborn male child has a 1 in 2 shot at procreating. Many people in "trap" jobs have chosen to live well and die young; if that means fucking your company over for the maximum dollars than so be it, they will do it, and you are going to be forced into putting up with it. The disconnect of plantation management is unbelievable; they think it's honorable capitalism to cannibalize society and lament they have no choice but to do so. They have a choice, they just prefer not having responsability. And that's when they are not intentionally sabotaging you. Piss off your employee and they might let an APT group in on their personal computer who will then attack your infrastructure.
And if I were IT Staff, I'd asking the question and Nop'ing that and quoting the law.
I'll contribute a counter argument, if only because I don't see it mentioned much.
I'm the counter argument. Since I'm at home now, with kids, if I'm not directly on the phone with a coworker or boss, I'm likely not working. Recently our boss mandated that webcams must be on hereon-forward... before today, I would sometimes just have airpods on for the meeting but otherwise be doing stuff (cooking, clean dishes, other chores). Honestly this part I don't really enjoy -- because rarely there is stuff said in the meetings for which I need 100% of my brain head-on.
But that's just me with all of my mental disorders and problems, who needs a helicopter boss to be productive. You may be different.
If you're getting paid for results, then it shouldn't matter what you are doing every minute, as long as you are producing the results you are expected to produce.
It's not always an adversarial thing.
This is best done by regular check-ins, not by monitoring everything an employee does every single minute.
I'm not saying it's never abusive. Just that it isn't necessarily abusive.
So ask them what tool they are using and why. Or set up a video chat where they can show you what they are doing and you can make suggestions about better tools.
> he may be using an ineffective sales pitch
So listen in on the sales call and then give feedback afterwards.
Still don't see why any of this requires minute by minute monitoring.
> I'm not saying it's never abusive. Just that it isn't necessarily abusive.
If there are obvious alternatives that are (a) much less intrusive, and (b) much more respectful of the employee's professionalism, then it sure seems to me like minute by minute monitoring is abusive.
I'm 100 percent positive that I would tell this company to get stuffed if they suggested I put that crap on my personal computer/phone.
This is managerial paranoia. These are probably managers that worked their way up by stepping on people and bumping others into oncoming buses along the way.
In contrast - I've worked for managers that could care less about "butts in chairs" and are much more concerned with output/quality... this means they have to be actually productive/knowledgeable in my field which typically is an exception - especially for larger corps. I personally find my mental state is so much better and my output is magnitudes greater when working with this management style!
The other thing that's great about output based managers is that the bad-to-mediocre talent/work ethic folks get weeded out ASAP because it's apparent who can't cut it vs. higher output workers. "Butts in chairs" workers are good at gaming the optics + politics regardless if it's surveillance software or someone complaining about being in the office for X hours a day/week.
All-in-all I agree with your statement.
I absolutely agree that it is.
Don't like what a job is asking you do to? Don't like a policy? Don't like spyware? Peace out.
A representative anecdote re: a factory workfloor: "First the [embedded researchers] were quietly shown ‘‘better ways’’ of accomplishing tasks by their peers — a ‘‘ton of little tricks’’ that ‘‘kept production going’’ or enabled ‘‘faster, easier, and / or safer production.’’ Then they were told, ‘‘Whenever the [customers / managers / leaders] come around, don’t do that, because they’ll get mad.’’ Instead, when under observation, embeds were trained in the art of appearing to perform the task the way it was ‘‘meant’’ to be done according to the codified process rules posted for each task. Because many of these performances were not as productive as the ‘‘little tricks,’’ I observed line performance actually dropping when lines were actively supervised." From "The Transparency Paradox": https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000183921245302...
I've also interviewed a few engineers about this recently and there are plenty of horror stories. My favorite 2 quotes (from the same person) about screenshot monitoring freelancers: "It almost uniformly led to worse work..." and "... but my boss loved it." https://medium.com/@elibryan/employee-performance-tracking-d...
Unsurprising - why give up power once you've accumulated it. Regulation is the only way to reverse that. The companies building these tools are a special breed.
When I discovered the company needed to protect their data by pushing on a policy that let them wipe my personal device remotely I respected that and bought a personal device dedicated to the task of reading email and running their apps. But not everyone has that luxury. I'm fortunate to be able to buy an iPad and dedicate it to blackberry and the company app store.
It's an interesting conundrum because am I really obligated to install this to every personal device or just the one I'm using for work-related tasks? I think a reasonable person would assume the latter.
And am I under obligation to use a personal device compatible with their spyware? What if it only works under IOS and I'm an Android user? What if tsheets only works on Windows and I'm a MacOS guy, or heck I just run a remote desktop viewer from a raspberry pi? Lol.
One nice thing about being in a union is that if my upper management ever got a twinkle in their eye about this kind of thing (they wouldn't, because they're cool), I'm 100% sure I could flat out tell them no, AND keep my job.
If I wasn't in a union, I'd like to think I'm personally in a position where I could still tell them no and deal with the consequences. But I know a lot of people won't be in that position.
It baffles me how the US has trouble not understanding that paying for someone's time does not make them your slave.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jan/11/daily-telegrap...
BTW - "Reverse ferret" is a British media thing:
If you were to name/shame them, how would you brand the companies? (ie. Would you accuse them of bringing communist values to America or using 3rd world surveillance protocols in the 1st world)
Maybe some bored software developer could create the "uBlock of employee trackers". A program that would feed fake data into these trackers to make them unreliable for employers.
An open video stream to employees workstation could be reasonable if there is suspicion of fraud, like outsourcing their work to untrusted 3rd parties. It's not too unlike having an employee in the office. Though even in office employees have some expectations of privacy, like not exposing their home life or bathroom routines. Of course a company device would still need to be provided.
"Are you okay with installing surveillance software installed on your computer to track everything you do?"
Laughed at their faces. I will take ANY job (roof repairing, garbage man, security guard) before doing that.
And it's also not true in particular, you might happen to be in a group which benefits from given regulation. Hopefully, in a democratic society, the group that is negatively affected (if any) is as small as possible.
Regulation, by definition, decreases freedom.
That's the whole point of regulation - to threaten with violence, acts that people have agreed are not a good idea.
If software engineers were regulated under IEEE, the freedoms of software engineers would decrease not increase.
I quote from the article you linked:
"In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance."
Regulation, by definition, is intolerance.
For example - the minimum wage regulation. You have now removed the freedom of an untrained, unemployed person to sell their labor at a lower floor which was their only way to gain employment when there's a trained but unemployed person willing to also work for minimum wage!
Employers have immense power over their workers, and regulation is one of the tools societies can use to make sure that power isn't abused.
The word regulate, in regulation literally means "decrease freedom".
In physics, a regulator is used to decrease freedom. That's why regulators are used in the first place.
> Regulations often increase freedom for some while decreasing it for others
Again, regulations can only decrease freedom.
It does not make sense to "increase" something that already exists.
The freedom to live does not make you more alive than what you already are.
> Constitutions are just regulations for government--does preventing the government from infringing on the right to free speech, for example, increase or decrease freedom?
The concept of free speech is innate and available everywhere, including countries that does not recognize free speech.
Free speech is an inalienable right that every person is born with. It does not require someone else to grant or validate it.
All that the first amendment to the Constitution does is _recognize_ (not increase) your freedom to speak against the "government".
That is it.
The "government" still can jail you or even kill you.
All that a country that recognizes free speech promises is that after the deed is done, it will bring that misdeed to justice and hopefully right that wrong.
If that was not the case, the courts would be way less crowded than it already is.
Also, first amendment to the Constitution does not apply to private citizens.
If you suddenly started to yell at your neighbor's lawn, not matter how well placed and logical your arguments are, you will still get booted with no legal recourse.
The only thing that is left is if this was the government that booted you out, you can take them to court and expect to win if you have a valid case.
There can be no such expectation in a country that does not recognize free speech.
Sometimes it seems basic economics is an alien concept.
Assault being illegal increases my freedom because I can freely walk down the street without threat of harm.
Prohibiting outside doors from being locked in a factory increases my freedom as a worker to leave whenever I choose.
And theoretically at an absolute minimum any time you see a prisoners dilemma regulation is how you prevent it and make sure that everyone gets their preferred outcome.
If your definition of freedom can't explain why voluntary enslavement makes people less free then it's useless.
yes
> There can be no freedom without responsibility.
yes so as I like to say it - freedom is anything but free
> Regulation is legally enforced responsibility.
Yes!
The issue I have with regulation is it requires enforcement to be truly useful and part of that requires the person seeking enforcement to yield their freedom to the enforcing authority to kick in.
Yet people seem to believe that regulation is this magic pixe dust that grants everyone special powers.
That's crazy talk!
I tried to make the point here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23169673
When it comes to employment, unless you're swimming in money and are basically just working for the sole purpose that you enjoy it, you're leveraged into adjusting your vote accordingly to your best option.
When true competition exists and your labor easily transfers, then by all means, select employers with reasonable practices. Relatively few people get to completely pick where they want to work and for what position they work. Most of us who aren't the top say 5% in our field pick a few handfuls and take a shotgun approach to see which opportunity lands. If none of those options land, we move to options we don't like because not working isn't a viable option.
Right now with unemployment rates skyrocketing, you have even less flexibility because labor is even more leveraged and have to cave into more and more policies like this.
The only way to protect labor in these situations, aside from organized labor unions, is creating enforceable regulatory protections for labor.
This is the exact type of sociopathic behavior that creates unions.
But I've seen it again and again, IT people don't seem to gravitate towards unions.
I found this odd. The only measure of doing a job well is the output, isn’t it? How is this easier in an office? Plenty of people can spend all day cranking away in Excel or an IDE, with no Facebook or YouTube in sight, producing complete garbage.
The CEO talking about his product in terms of first person value judgements tells you all you need to know about the degrees of sliminess involved.
Say there are people who are not being tracked using these tools ... does the act of tracking them make them more productive?
𝗔𝗻 𝗶𝗹𝗹𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 There is the old joke paper given to the British Medical Journal (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/). The "problem" it tries to figure out is do parachutes work? There is anecdotal evidence that they work - bit there have been cases where people have fallen from great height without a parachute and not died and there are cases where someone has jumped from low altitude with a parachute and died.
What they then do is suggest a proper double blind analysis to confirm that a parachute actually works. But it is a joke so they do not go far.
The point they make applies here also. On the part of the boss it does feel like you are in control and I am sure HR would love it because they now have time sheets that they can use to process payroll etc.
But for the end user ... does it actually increase productivity?
Actually ... does it actually matter whether it does or not? Maybe their goal is to make the bosses happy. My suspicion though is that it may actually be reducing productivity as they mess up morale. But that has not been tested either. (Not sure if it can be tested).
You don't need cameras to track where the dough goes if you already know how much flour you bought, how many pizzas you sold, and how much flour it should take to make a pie.
This reflects a fundamental inability of the manager to do their job.
For any of those suffering under this problem, have a look at caffeine[1], it simulates a keystroke on your laptop every 59 seconds.
I've always had the sense that people who work remote are perfectly capable of being productive without monitoring. In some ways, depending on your personal situation, being at home can be less distracting than being at the office. On any given day, I would bet that most people in an office only put in 3-4 hours of good work (or less). Much of the rest of the time is spent being distracted by office gossip, meetings, coffee breaks, etc. Why should we expect people working from home to put in 8 solid hours of good focused work when we don't demand the same of people in the office?
It would be nice to see some actual data on this problem. I have an instinct that this is a major overreaction by managers and that it will ultimately drive productivity and retention down. However, I'm open to being proved wrong if this is an issue that has been studied in a rigorous fashion.
For any of those suffering under this problem, have a look at caffeine[1], it simulates a keystroke on your laptop every 59 seconds.
You could argue that tracking software is "disruptive" but more so to the user, not the system itself. you're conflating your dislike for both tracking software and malware as the same. Again, I'm not defending tracking software, just disagreeing with your false equivalency.
I mean I don't want it to have a 1 minute timer that clocks me out, but the expectation that work has complete ownership of their provided equipment has been the norm for at least the 10 years I have been working.
How hard would it be to get your phone to transmit gps coordinates you choose, not where you actually are?
How hard would it be to override what tattleware sends your boss with what you want it to send?
I just can’t fathom it.
And as they say, the rest is history. Good workers will eventually leave. Some will adapt. Software and hacks will appear that can trick key presses and mouse clicks. Eveyone will become 9 to 5 no matter what.
I see some examples brought up where developers are not putting up with it - that is correct. For developers, typing <> productivity, so that will not stick. But there are other occupations around - admin work, marketing, data entry, HR, etc... Productivity in those occupations will dip, some people will leave, but in larger scope work will continue. Companies will compensate by hiring more people, it won't be visible on a balance sheet as "survelliance tax" because no one is tracking. And the world will go on. Worse off than before, unfortunately.
We always knew that's bad bosses never understood this.
It's just sad to see that now there's a market for it.
Some days I think I missed out by not taking a job I could have gotten a computer to automate, and spending all my time doing interesting coding projects.
A better approach would be to trust the employees (hand-picked by the company), and set measurable performance expectations.
Are there examples of this surveillance only being conusmed at higher levels in the management structure
There's no need in my eyes for regulating this or getting in quarrel over workers rights. You, the employee, sign a contract with the employer to perform some work for some compensation. If the employer wishes to run this type of strategy on their own hardware I do not see a problem with this. You can, and should, find a job that respects you as a worker. What we are seeing here is the MBA-style spreadsheet management turned into software.
This "panopticon" management increases turnover rate and decreases productivity. I have personally seen it. I worked IT in a company that had this software (I was a low level sysadmin and had no control). People would spend an inordinate amount of time finding ways to hide their activity instead of just quickly doing what they had to do and moving on. The solution isn't to complain, or call for regulation, but rather just leave your job. If the software isn't being installed on your computer then the company is completely okay to do this, no matter how damaging it is to their bottom line through subsequent lost activity.
Unless everyone is locked into a cage like a rat in a straight jacket people will find ways to maliciously hurt themselves and others when they've been pushed too far. Many self deluded and extremely privileged people decline responsibility for these extreme behaviors, yet, in reality, we are all culpable in the actions of the worst of us. It is everyone's responsibility to arrest the decline of someone nearing the breaking point. Once a person is closeto snapping they are no longer capable of rational thought, let alone digging themselves out of a hole that they are not fully responsible for digging. If we are to dismiss responsibility for these people that have been pushed too far then we only create a habitat for more of these desperate and sad souls to develop in.
Who are these others? Are you suggesting they do not have the ability to decide if they want to continue working?
I'm fairly certain this falls into the same vein. Even if not, there is likely no compensation being offered to the employee over and above their employment for what amounts to a "rental" of their personal device, which is not an asset of the company. The proper course of action on the employer's part is to enter into a good faith negotiation with the employee to come to an agreement on terms and conditions for leasing their personal equipment to the company which the employee is free to stipulate concessions and compensation, and dictate T&C's for, or the company pays for hardware to configure and issue as it pleases.
This is not new or unprecedented. This is how stuff has always worked. The difference is the degree to which management are now technologically enabled in terms of their indulgence of their personal neuroses.
Consequences may vary, but then again, no-one is owed anything legally, morally, or otherwise so to act as though every individual does not have or exercise their own self-agency is disingenuous.
Also, it is disingenuous at least to say every has their own "self-agency", but "Consequences may vary." I would agree it's a sliding scale because people's chioces imply different levels of consequences for losing one's job (for example if you bought an expensive mortgage versus not). But morally, and legally as well, we certainly owe people the ability to make actually free choices without metaphorical guns to their heads.
It's not about courage. It's usually that someone else has already provided the same alternate view/retort, so there's no sense in starting a new comment branch.
While it is fair that "no one is 'owed' anything, legally" - actually, even that's wrong, but I'll pretend it's right for the sake of argument, some people are in situations where there is a single job in town, they do not have the money to move, and they have kids to feed.
They cannot quit.
Not having money to move and mouths to feed...that is whose responsibility/issue...an employers? A neighbors? Yours? Mine?
And yes, they can quit if they choose to. There will be trade-offs and consequences, but they 100% absolutely can quit!
Is it cowardice? Is it because they think they can't do better than what they have?
That's all I'm saying, everyone has and makes their own choices about what they will or won't put up with. As to other article subjects , I can't/won't speak for them.
My point is we all get to choose...and im not saying there are not trade-offs, or its easy, etc. But you, me, those mentioned in this article (and those who will never be notices/mentioned) we all have the power of choice!
Can we agree on that fundamental fact already?
The team that works on Indian time has good engineers, but with little overlap to the US-based management structure (and US-based engineers), there are sometimes significant delays in getting everyone on the same page.
That's one example, but there are others, such as cultural (i.e. expectations for US-based management may not be the same as non-US-based engineers) and "optics" (US-based customers like it better when US-based companies use US-based employees)
It's not easy for normies to deal with video-conferencing... Take your normal enterprise conference call bingo card, and put it on turbo.
JUST QUIT already if uncomfortable with whatever a given job entails should that include perceived invasive measures ie - surveillance.
But advisable, sure if you or anyone is not uncomfortable with what they are being subject to/asked to do as part of a job, YES, I would advise them to quit if deemed necessary.
Would you advise them to stay and subject themselves to they type of treatment they did not agree with?
Again, would you advise them to stay and subject themselves to they type of treatment they did not agree with?
But I will give you the benefit of the doubt. Vulnerable populations can have their employment opportunities gamed by powerful groups where they are essentially enslaved by their reliance on their paycheck to support their family, food, housing, etc. I don't understand why this doesn't register with you.
For a lot of people, who have more expenses than savings and are not in highly demanded jobs, quitting puts them at great risk. They have a metaphorical gun to their heads. They might not die the moment they quit, but by quitting they are endangering themselves and those that depend on them. Their relationship with employment is inherently coercive.
This is especially true during a pandemic that's causing more people to be unemployed.
With all of that said: whose responsibility is it to avoid this type of situation? Is it anyone (or anything) but the individual them-self?
And should one unfortunately find themselves in this situation described above, whose responsibility is it to figure out a solution? Is it their friends and family who is responsible? Their neighbors? The government? Are you responsible?
It's probably not a risk for most of the HN users. Most of us are in high demand jobs, and we would simply refuse to work for a company that uses this kind of spyware. A lot of people don't have that option, because there isn't as much demand for their jobs.
Should we really be given that extra privilege simply because what we chose or wanted or had the ability to do is in higher demand? I would say no, it should be a fundamental right of workers in general. It's not as if there is some drastic harm that not installing spyware would impose. If your best means of measuring worker productivity is this junk, you're not going to last as a business anyways.
So you think you are privileged because you exercised your option to decide and do what's best for you? Or because you have the demonstrable ability to make it happen - ie - learn a thing that is in demand? Is it a privilege of the ability to act in your own self-interest?
Stepping back, maybe it's because you have acquired cognitive skills that others have not that you are privileged? The mere ability to think for yourself, that's a privilege too, then? What about changing your mind, increasing your understanding of, evolving a thought...all privileges, yeah?
Perhaps somewhere along the line you have made a decision that was hard and required risk and sacrifice but that contributed to who you are and where you are today, was that pain and suffering part of the privilege? What about losing someone or something you love, because surely it's a privilege to experience love in the first place, no?
Is anything that makes us different and unique from one-another not a privilege by extension? Has the word privilege been used and abused to the degree that it means absolutely nothing anymore?
What about being alive...is that like, the ultimate privilege? So when all are privileged, are any, really?
That's like saying "when everybody has money, does anyone have money?". People have varying amounts (and kinds) of privilege, but some have more than others.
Employees have little bargaining power here. While quitting is hypothetically an option (albeit realistically not necessarily), so is shaming. And I see nothing wrong with shaming companies for their stupid, dehumanizing initiatives.
They hold all the power, actually, unless you are one who does not believe in the power of self-agency because perhaps you've already relinquished yours?
"While quitting is hypothetically an option (albeit realistically not necessarily), so is shaming. And I see nothing wrong with shaming companies for their stupid, dehumanizing initiatives."
Hey, me either, what kind of management culture even does this!?
It's hard for my response to be anything other than rolling my eyes. I'm a grad student. If my advisor demanded the ability to surveil me at all times, what would you expect me to do? Quit grad school, throwing away my last four years of work, because I have "self-agency"?
No, I'd complain to some higher power -- in my case, the graduate student association or the university.
Thanks for describing what you would do in the situation. It sounds like you are the type who would accept it given the option of quitting or continuing, is that fair to say based off an incomplete answer? There's no right or wrong, there's simply choice in the matter we all have that power to choose :)