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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.