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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> iron grip

Jeez, give it a rest. Companies don't give a crap about your life. None have ever showed the slightest interest in anything I do when not at work.

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If this was really the case, WFH would be a no-brainer and would not meet so much resistance from management.

Most companies clearly care more about the fact that they can account for the time you’re in office, as opposed to how productive you actually are.

I switched my tech company to full WFH. I also implemented detailed surveillance on all employees, which I don’t disclose. It shows me keyboard/mouse activity levels and window update rates. It’s very interesting information, I have much better insight how and when people work, which are very different from each other. I also have other productivity measures and now I can really understand when someone is not working vs stuck or having difficulties. I expect for slackers this coming world will be harder to hide in.

That’s ridiculous, and only proves my point that management is obsessed with meaningless metrics and what employees do with their free time rather than whether they’re completing their assigned duties or not.

I feel very empowered by WFH as a manager. I get gamed much less by the developers I manage. For instance I assign a duty or task as you mention, and I can now clearly see if anytime was spent on it or not. So during my progress reviews if a developer says he is still working on it, been a bit more complex than he expected, yet I can clear see when he was active on the system, and due to proprietary nature of our software, you can’t really spend much time that is useful outside our system, so if I see only 1-2 hours actively working, my activity data is second granularity, and I have statistical reports and graphs written up in R, so I know with absolute precision, but they don’t know. I now know clearly who lies and who doesn’t. I don’t tell the ones who lie that I know. Instead I just focus on the technical issues on their task, sometimes I just do it for them, to humiliate them.

If you're getting "gamed" by your staff, the issue might not be with the developers' working habits...

That this manager chooses to “humiliate” certain employees is also indicative of the root cause of the issue.

They get pretty embarrassed when I complete their assignment in 2 hours after our meeting an assignment which should have taken them maybe one day but they have supposedly been working on for the last 8. It’s a very effective technique and so far has been applied to more junior employees with great success.

>Instead I just focus on the technical issues on their task, sometimes I just do it for them, to humiliate them.

Well, that is one hell of a viscous cycle, isn't it?

There is something you might be missing. I'm a developer. Quite a bit of my development time is not spent at a computer. It's spent working things out in my head while walking or jogging, or even just wandering around the house.

^ this is a troll post

My outrage blinded me of that possibility, thank you for bringing me back to reality

Seriously? I would never, ever consider doing that to my employees. It’s plainly obvious if someone is doing their work or not without tracking their mouse movements.

What’s the name of your company so I can tell everyone I know to avoid it like the plague? My company is gingrapp.com. We’re hiring and would never subject anyone to this.

Doesn't Microsoft Teams do this stuff automatically by default?

So either you live in a place where human rights don't exist, or will be in an entirely new world of pain and humiliation once you are found out. And in the meantime, since can't own up to your snooping, you can't act on it at ALL without parallel construction, i.e. without being a liar and a cheat. What you gain by this is only valuable to those who can't lead and inspire. What you lose is invaluable yet unknown to you. Sad.

Care to explain how a private employer collecting telemetry data on their own computer system whom the employees are paid to work on would be violating human rights and why would I feel pain or humiliation? We log everything in many situations. We also have full keylogging and all command logging via auditd. There is a lot of idealistic and childish responses to my approach, including yours. I’m not snooping anything by monitoring our computer systems in the way I do.

You treat people like toddlers, you can't even look them in the eye and tell them that, and then call me childish? Anything else, you anonymous coward? The fact that you can't tell that to the people you do it to says it all. No, I don't care to explain to you what was your responsibility to look into before you even put it into action.

> I’m not snooping anything by monitoring our computer systems in the way I do.

You just spoke of monitoring people, not systems. You spoke of "slackers". Now you're already backpedaling. I hope you get caught, and sued into the fucking ground.

What in the world are you talking about? You honestly believe I can be sued for monitoring employee activity on a private businesses computer systems? The level of entitlement expressed by some HN commenters is unbelievable. Snooping would be somehow spying on their private computer or information not their usage of their work system. We have every right to record everything and anything. I’ve actually considered expanding it to include periodic screenshots, maybe once per minute.

There is nothing for us to be “caught” you have no legal or ethical grounds. My guess is I’ve touched a nerve with you because you have realized if your manager could see such data then your scam might be up.

There are parts of the world where that is illegal, yes.

Really where? Certainly not in the United States and I don’t see any reason it should be illegal. Your an employee not a citizen.

This is illegal without employee consent in the EU and in most other civilized countries around the world.

Can you provide a reference for that? I am logging the employee’s use of the corporate computer system that they don’t own and are being paid to work on. That is total nonsense it can be illegal, there is zero legal expectation of any privacy on a private companies computer systems. Why in the world should there be?

In the EU, what you are claiming you do is illegal under the GDPR, you would be required to give prior notice at the very least.

See the "notice" section starting at bottom 3 of this for the lay persons summary on the notice requirement (or read the whole thing to see what laws around this look like in Germany) https://www.bakermckenzie.com/-/media/files/people/lutz-holg...

That only works until someone writes a "boss" app that pretends to click keys and move the mouse.

Back in the 80's, many computer games had a "boss" key which would pause the game and throw up a screen that looked like a spreadsheet.

I agree it will be spoofed if employees know what is being measured. It’s the main reason we don’t disclose it. I can already see the people who will spoof it because many of the employees make sure to connect each day, but then often just leave it and never type anything almost the whole day. I’ve also thought about adding additional telemetry data like, unique commands run, num files accessed, web access stats, etc. The last 15 months of data is pretty interesting data set with only basic activity measure and I’d imagine would be even more interesting with better context.

Has it ever occurred to you, to measure the actual work?

Of course I do that to and did that before the pandemic. I review all code commits and review reports and results from the system. I also track completed tasks and assign them complexity level. Am I stupid or something? How would I know who is completing tasks or not. This was how we operated before WFH, the change is implementing direct surveillance telemetry on employee activity on the system. Another improvement is that collaboration is all now over internal chat, which I can review these discussions and get a sense of level of collaboration. When I overlay all the information it gives me an extremely good idea of what is actually happening.

You're a troll. I don't believe you have a job, much less manage other people.

> Am I stupid or something?

To be blunt, yes, unless you're trolling. Nobody could like you, you'd be the laughingstock of the company. The literal bootlicker too inept to rise and just tries to make others miserable. I say try because I guarantee you nobody gives a shit, they all just cash in the paycheck and wonder why it takes the company so long to fire them.

Have you seen an increase in productivity?

Absolutely, I’m able to use the insights to work to increase productivity. Remember I don’t disclose I can see this. It has let me better manage cases, first the slacker that assumes because I’m old and a manager I’m stupid and they can BS me and not work, but also importantly find the hidden skilled developers, there have been a few that have completed complex tasks very quickly considering their activity on the system, so I can ramp up their load and complexity, wheres before they had hidden from me how good they really were.

Your posts are clearly designed to elicit as much outrage as possible.

Either that our you need treatment for paranoia. Not only are your incompetent employees screwing you over, but your competent employees are also out to get you by “hiding” their abilities from you. Come on.

So you think there is absolutely no difference in the kind of collaboration that can be done online vs. IRL?

People should get to pick a role where they work from wherever they want, but they should be realistic about both up- and downsides of their preferred location.

FWIW, I'm mostly pro-office - even after all this time - but I'm making a career change because I don't want to deal with living in the West anymore.

Maybe pushing for remote work would've worked, but I find it to be an overwhelmingly anti-social experience that sucks all fun out of being at work and I have no intention of continuing with that.

In my years of office work across a variety of “innovative” companies, tech megacorps and unicorn startups alike, I have found the moments of truly productive whiteboard collaboration rare and far between. It’s fun when it happens but I just don’t see it warranting the daily commute. Of course, that is my own opinion and personal preference.

But yes, I agree that it’s a no-brainer to let employees choose the work style that suits them best.

>>So you think there is absolutely no difference in the kind of collaboration that can be done online vs. IRL?

Office is not the only place where face-to-face collaboration can happen. Coffee shops, for example, are one of my favorite co-working environments.

> None have ever showed the slightest interest in anything I do when not at work.

Right, but they do what they can to increase the time you are at work. I'd say requiring 40 mandatory hours in an office is a start to that, and they do plenty to try to grow those 40.

I feel your point, but obviously not every work environment is the same.

The phrase "people like ice cream" does not mean "all people like ice cream".

That's true, but it's weird to tell someone to give it a rest because you have a different experience.

Have you ever been asked to come in on Saturdays? Often?

Sure. That's an interest in getting work done, not putting my life under iron control. I got paid overtime for it, too.

So they were very much interested in what you did when not at work : they wanted you to come in at work.

> So they were very much interested in what you did when not at work

That does not follow.

Companies don't, managers often do.

I've never, ever encountered a manager that was interested in what anyone did when not on the clock. (Well, my manager at Boeing did invite me to come flying with him, and I did, and got a nice aerial tour of Seattle.)

Of course, I'm sure they exist. Not often, though.

The people who want to control other peoples' lives go into politics and activism, not business.

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