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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Leave it to hn to spin a culture problem as a compliance concern. If you're dickriding your employees every keystroke, your leadership methods and corporate governance are the fucking problems.

Employees aren't cattle.

Edit: and let me be clear, corporate spyware preys exclusively on companies with weak and incompetent management. All it does is let them buckpass to the next performance eval.

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No, more like leave it to HN to have comments providing a completely different perspective and framing of the problem than what you’d expect. Some variant of the above article has been posted dozens of times across multiple message boards and link aggregators since the pandemic began, the consensus is always that the software is horrible and a huge invasion of privacy and on and on (which it is, but we already knew that). I’m thankful for the above commenter’s framing of the issue as it’s something I hadn’t considered and haven’t seen in any of the previous comment sections.

That's why I keep coming back to HN. I'll see the media coverage on some issue, then check HN where some insider actually knows whats going on and it turns out the media has no clue.

Exactly, it's also an interesting perspective in that while some people may not care about the privacy of their employees, they probably care about lawsuits and their bottom line.

Fair enough, but from a utalitarian point of view the grandfather comment is the most effective way to achieve your aims.

Lots of middle management types _want_ to dickride employees- pointing this out only makes them more eager to (ab)use bossware. Pointing out that bossware can get them into trouble however is an effective way to prevent its adoption.

Who forms a company that writes this corporate spyware and proudly sells it during a pandemic? Seems like that could be the "culture problem"? Is it the "incompetent managers" who are writing this code?

I worked for a company that put stuff like this on people’s systems. Small software shop, I think one of the owners was just a control freak. The business was successful and otherwise seemingly well run, I’ve certainly worked at worse places in my life.

Does that make it okay? What are you implying?

It sounds like he is implying the use of this software isn't proof a company lacks leadership.

1. Assume that companies act like sociopaths.

2. Assume that the described software is unethical.

Doesn't it follow that it's a good thing to highlight why unethical things are actually risky in a way that matters regardless of ethics?

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