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Comment by programmarchy | Hacker News Reader

The most salient part of this essay was the last section. Remote-first is forming in a way to break tech labor power. Employees will be less able to bond, and their personal conversations will be easier to spy upon. This will drastically inhibit collectivization. WFH may have some upside, but there’s a huge downside looming.

> Remote-First, Collective-Last

> Lastly, let’s talk about the impact of remote-first on labor. Many months, before the virus hit, a CEO friend of mine “jokingly” told me that he believed all the “remote” buzz was as much about reducing the collective power of the employees as it was about saving a dime on salaries. He personally did not want his company to go full-remote but was under some pressure from investors to consider it. We were both hammered at the time, and I didn’t put too much thought into it, but it feels right the more I think about it.

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> The most salient part of this essay was the last section. Remote-first is forming in a way to break tech labor power. Employees will be less able to bond, and their personal conversations will be easier to spy upon.

Slightly tangential to this thread, but isn't this also tacit admission that employees will be collectively less creative when working remotely.

> Employees will be less able to bond, and their personal conversations will be easier to spy upon.

How does the freedom to work remotely make one more prone to being "spied on" than being in an office?

Also, when did tech have any "labor" power? Last time I checked any talk of "unionization" will get you fired at the drop of a dime.

Because the majority of remote work communication will be electronic rather than face to face. It will be monitored, stored and searchable (Slack logs, GSuite email, etc.) That’s much more difficult to achieve at the proverbial water cooler.

Not sure which rock you’re living under, but tech is probably the last bastion of labor power in the US. Sure, they aren’t well organized, but Google employees recently canned a DoD contract [1]. Saying no to Uncle Sam is a huge flex, and you can bet that pissed off some overlords.

Blue collar workers in the US have lost almost all of their labor power due to offshore workers or immigration (i.e. scabs). Tech has had it easy for a while now, but it’s the next target; the immigration debate is already shifting from “jobs Americans won’t do” to “merit-based”. Gig economy is another false liberation ploy being used to weaken collective bargaining power. Remote-first is yet another.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/01...

> Because the majority of remote work communication will be electronic rather than face to face. It will be monitored, stored and searchable (Slack logs, GSuite email, etc.) That’s much more difficult to achieve at the proverbial water cooler.

The majority of communication is already electronic. I've worked in offices and remote, there is practically no difference on that front. Most discussion takes place in Slack, Jira, GitHub, and email either way. Most companies already have team members distributed across various offices, remote work isn't new. If you want to avoid monitoring, then spin up a Google Hangouts or Zoom meeting, nobody is monitoring that.

The difference is that in an office, 1. your physical presence is also monitored (no joke I worked at a office once where every day an office assistant would secretly record what time everyone showed up to their desks) 2. your internet is also monitored, which is extremely creepy and I'm surprised this doesn't get more attention.

When I work remotely, there are no IT managers able to spy on my internet traffic. Sure there may be some dystopian corporations who try to force their remote workers to log into "company VPNs" and install "monitoring software" - I have absolutely no interest in working for any such companies and have never had to deal with that.

As a software engineer I've been fighting for the freedom to work remotely for ever since I joined this industry, so having the freedom to live wherever I want, and work whenever I want is a huge win. I've already been working remotely since pre-COVID, so I'm happy that other workers will also be able to enjoy this freedom.

Good points. Not saying there isn’t an upside to remote work, but there are downsides as well, which in the long run, may overshadow the benefits. It’s much harder to build camaraderie in a Hangout or Zoom than in frequent, random, physical interactions with people. There’s also a biological component to bonding (pheromones, touch, oxytocin, body language, etc.) that simply won’t exist in a virtual environment.

I’d also point out, you’re enjoying the luxury of those freedoms (privacy, non-creepy norms) because labor power still exists and you can easily move to a different company or whatever. But fast forward 10 years, everyone is remote, labor pool is much larger, norms of monitoring and policing communication are established, then things start clamping down across the board as standard practice.

If you work at a corporation beyond a certain size, usually big enough to have an IT department vs one 'IT guy', there is definitely some sort of monitoring software installed on the computers given to you.

It just lives in kernel modules or as a OS config and they do not tell you as an employee, and it's done for 'compliance' or 'security' reasons so it's not obvious what it is when you look at a list of processes on your computer in the task manager.

Some popular ones in the bay area for macOS at startups are crowdstrike, carbon black, jamf, openvpn, umbrella, crashplan, munki, etc. Not mention the OS management configuration stuff like MDM profiles for macOS and active directory configurations for windows. A lot of brand name corps you might think are 'good guys' use this, like lyft or dropbox. Similarly with companies FANG, where it might custom software.

Yeah, like the one FB open-sourced (and uses internally still, I believe): https://osquery.io/

I think this is a super good tool, except for all the privacy implications.

Osquery core developer, consultant, and technical committee member here...

We've always treaded carefully around privacy concerns as a project. This is why you don't see tables that access information such as browser history. If you join our Slack channels you will see open discussion of privacy implications for changes and improvements.

There's a balance to be struck between visibility and privacy. If a security team has no visibility into a system, they can't secure that system. This doesn't mean they need to be able to look at your family photos and read your messages.

I work with folks who care deeply about privacy and trust with their users. These folks ensure that osquery configurations are available to users, so that they can see what exactly is being monitored.

If you are curious what osquery can do, I encourage you to check out https://osquery.io/schema/4.3.0/.

I think the real issue, that has nothing to do with osquery or any specific piece of software, is the corp being able to push any software on worker's computers and spy on their employees secretly. I call it the stalker IT employee problem or the psychopathic manager / lawyer problem.

The solution will be legal I think in the end, like in some european countries that don't let you do this kind of surveillance on your employees. And if you want to look at an employee's work emails, you do it in front of them with their lawyer present.

I'm glad you guys are trying to keep some semblance of privacy although.

If you’re working from home wouldn’t the way to go just to have a second physical machine set up next to your work machine and do your personal communication from there?

Yes that is what I recommend. At work I have a second BT keyboard and send messages through my phone.

There is definitely still friction in the entire process (ex send a link to an HN article to a friend that you saw in your work machine web browser) which induces a lot of people to just login directly on their work machines.

Since we are all WFH now I've been meaning to set up some sort of synergy setup so I can keep it really separated, but still have less friction in the 'share a link' scenario.

If only one company goes remote, then the collective power of employees certainly goes down (« divide and conquer «)

But if the entire /job market/ goes remote and access to the net is a public commodity, then you can apply for all jobs /anywhere/. Employees bargaining power increases significantly. Furthermore, any employee can start his/her competing business in an instant.

As a side effect, wages can go down but if you don’t work in the bay area you can come out /better off/.

So it’s not clear if the downside is going to be related to worker’s rights. I am personally more worried on the societal / mental issues with WFH.

Agreed, I found this to be the revelatory part of the post. It’s difficult enough in person to try to organize demands from management, I hadn’t considered how much more difficult that will become with a distributed workforce.

Agreed that that was the most interesting part of the essay, but not with the “easier to spy upon” part - I’ve been working remotely for years now and whenever a conversation leads anywhere close to being “sensitive” (eg, even talk of potential side projects) I just quickly open a non work communication channel and do it there (eg another Slack, fb messenger, what have you)

I connect with my colleagues on LinkedIn for this reason alone. It allows us to have discourse outside of work-sanctioned chatrooms. Having said that, I've never worked at a place where anything has resulted from private communications I've had with my peers. And it would have, had it been posted on the wall in the breakroom.

Will you trust LinkedIn to keep your data private when your employer (or a future employer) hands them a big fat check? Not trying to be snarky just want to point out the exposure points.

Yes! So sad I have scroll so far down to see this. There is a huge risk here that we will be isolated more than ever, and yet more dependent upon other unseen actors---the contrast between these two phenomena is one of downsides of capitalism in practice, and this can crank it up.

Here are some crucial steps we must take in defense:

- Make sure working with non-employees is legal: no non-disclosure agreements saying you can't work in coffee shop or other shared space because of potential of overhearing. This would be the best hope

- Towns or cheaper cities, not exurbs. People must know their neighbors better if they know their coworkers less. Time spent walking around the office must be replaced with time spent walking elsewhere.

- More Aggressive anti-trust. If labor becomes more balkanized, capital must also be.

- Workers on boards. Like Germany, if you grow past a certain size this needs to be mandated.

Notice the last two point to the two healthy solutions: decentralized small businesses economy vs giant co-op socialism. The point is to basically all institutions must score high enough on the sum decentralization or democracy, and that the total of the two is far more important then the relative merits of each.

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