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Comment by W0lf | Hacker News Reader

I cannot fathom how anybody could either come up with the idea of taking screenshots from a computer desktop continuously whilst working for a client (in order to somewhat _prove_ productivity, I assume) or is comfortable to a degree with a contracting company taking screenshots from a computer while working for a client.

Really, I can't grasp the absurdity of some people's mind sometimes and wonder about their morality (UpWorks in this case, not yours. Just to be clear.). Not everything that maybe is technically doable is also ethical. If you comply to such practices, I think it will have an impact on your self-esteem and self-respect. Just try to imagine how other fellow hackers, developers or software engineers you admire would think of the idea getting screenshot'ed every other minute in order to control them.

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I recently made the transition from full-time software engineer at bigco to independent consultant, so maybe I can help explain.

There's a fairly large mentality shift between salary work and contract work. When you're salaried, you're supposed to work eight hours yes - on paper. Really it's generally accepted people work 4-6 hours a day, with the rest being filled with lunch break or internet browsing or doing online chores or whatever. There is a tacit understanding between employer and employee about this, so any steps by the employer to monitor daytime computer usage is understandably seen as breaching this understanding in a misguided attempt to get employees to work more hours - or exposing the employee to arbitrary punishment if management wants to selectively undermine them for breaking rules that everyone breaks.

It's different when you're contracted per hour. When you carve out an hour for a client, it's game time. No faffing around on Facebook, no checking financial statements. You do the work. Does this mean you have to work a full 8 hours? Absolutely not. Just do part-time contracts to fill up as many hours as you want to work, then charge more per hour. Your hourly contract rate will be much more (2x or more) your hourly salaried rate anyway. So, since you're actually factually working during the contracted hours, I don't really mind whatever desktop screenshot system they want to use.

On another note: actually working 40 hours a week basically sucks. Let's acknowledge how good a deal we have as full-time tech employees and show solidarity to our brothers & sisters who do full-time shift work. Pushing full-time work down to 32 hours a week or less is a very worthy goal.

Thanks for your remarks. Few things come to mind: First I'd never charge by hour but have (at least) daily rates and I'd suggest every other independent software contractor to follow the same principle.

Second, there is no correlation between the amount of ASCII chars outputted per hour and the productivity/net gain for the client (at least for the type of work I'm doing for whatever that matters). Sometimes I do have to think hard about a problem for a longer period of time, maybe executing on a few ideas before finally presenting and motivating a solution I came up with for a given problem. That doesn't mean my computer desktop looked _productive_ the whole time. In fact much of the important work maybe even done on a sheet of paper.

For upwork you also have the option to pay per deliverable. Unfortunately this opens you up to the risk of your time estimates being off by a lot, thus lowering hourly pay.

I agree with you except for

> There is a tacit understanding between employer and employee about this, so any steps by the employer to monitor daytime computer usage is understandably seen as breaching this understanding in a misguided attempt to get employees to work more hours - or exposing the employee to arbitrary punishment if management wants to selectively undermine them for breaking rules that everyone breaks.

I think employee monitoring is a lot more common than you think. Especially so outside of tech but I know of some very big tech companies we're all intimately familiar with that record basically everything that happens on their employees computers. Do they actively monitor everyone to see that they're putting in 40 hours a week? Not really. Does HR take a looksie when a manager comes and asks for help firing an employee? What do you think?

I cannot agree more. When I started getting paid by the hour, I've noticed that doing about 6 hours of full focus paid work is about as much as I can do in a day with full productivity.

I agree with your view. You technically don't have to do screenshots on Upwork but then you are not eligible for payment protection.

On one occasion I had a client not pay, but thanks to the Upwork protection I got paid quickly and then they resolved it with the client.

If I was doing a similar service as UpWork and wanted to offer a kind of payment protection I'm not sure how I would go about that. I'm thinking maybe something like a code diff week-after-week sent to the client but at the same time not everything can be diffed (especially countless meetings with clients). Would you have some ideas?

I'd really would encourage you (and other fellow software contractors) to not think in terms of amount of code produced but in terms of solutions brought to the client that helped solving a specific business problem. As I've responded to another comment, there is no correlation between the amount of ASCII chars produced and productivity/net gain for the client.

As for UpWork it doesn't make it any better (for me) if their payment protection is bound to this kind of screenshot surveillance. If they don't offer a payment protection in every* case, I wonder why they exist in the first place other than talking a good cut from your daily rate and making everything more complicated for both the software contractor and the client.

Thanks for the advice! I'm a big fan of value pricing and I've been actively trying to win some contracts like this but didn't succeed (yet).

Also I take projects outside of Upwork, however, I don't get as much traction outside of that platform, and as much as I would like to live off direct contracts it doesn't seem it will happen anytime soon.

Yeah, it's pretty intrusive micromanagement. On the other hand, you have the white-collar consulting industry, which is pretty much the wild west compared to this. People billing their clients for 24 hours of work a day, etc.

Overbilling is not just encouraged, it's even required, at some shops. That kind of culture obviously makes clients want more oversight and documentation.

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