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Comment by benjojo12 | Hacker News Reader

In a previous life (2013?) this software got forced on me and the team/company I worked on as "boss-ware".

Unsure if the founders were aware of this or just "well shit happens", but it defo means I can't see this product without also seeing the uncomfortableness of working with a "all eyeing eye" on your system tray

I have no idea if the product is still somewhat geared for micromanaging/boss spying but it left a really bad taste for the whole product segment for me.

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I would like to also specifically respond and clarify: we killed the "team" version of product that allowed for such abuse 5 years ago. We hated that use case and were no longer interested in having it be possible to have an abuse case of the product. Since that time, we have evolved a single user model, and the organization tools were for consolidated billing purposes, not shared data. This latest version further moves away from being a measuring tool and more toward a coach. Thank you for your post.

We're totally aware of this and although we've tried our best in the past to avoid this scenario with the privacy of individuals in mind, it was unfortunate that bosses made their employees do this. This version is much harder to abuse that way, the reports are designed to be less exact and more of a guide to help the individual achieve balance, not to generate reports to be used to track productivity.

This feels a bit like those “FOR TOBACCO USE ONLY” signs at headshops who sell bongs.

Fair. Apologies, that wasn't my intention. We're going to do better with this version to prevent that kind of abuse. It's a complete 180 from the analytics tool that enabled that in the past. I'd go as far as to say that we'd disable any account where we heard this was happening. We're committed to preventing this kind of thing from happening in the future. None of us want to contribute to the kind of world where workers are treated that way.

I appreciate what you are saying and how you are saying it. Thank you for that.

In an industry with plenty of founders who have said one thing and then repeatedly done another I don't think it's being jaded to be cautiously pessimistic. If the market for RescueTime ends up being primarily spy tech, then it's naive to think that's not the direction it will go.

Tech is also an industry that has let its naivety blind it to some rather obvious perverse use cases.

You may prove this all wrong becoming a legendary founder who holds the line into perpetuity against selling your SaaS as spy tech even if that's what the market wants. That would be an amazing story to watch unfold.

Totally true (and unfortunate) that so many founders go down that path. If it helps, we've never really seen a strong pull revenue-wise to go down that direction. We strongly prefer to make beautiful premium software that helps people. That kind of corporate spyware would likely need an enterprise product/sales team, and is generally a kind of race-to-the-bottom of price and (honestly boring to build) commodity features. As founders, there are plenty of more interesting spaces for us to work in instead of that and none of us are motivated to work in that direction.

It sounds to me like a genuine response regarding a useful tool that can be abused.

Given the larger context, to me it sounds like a genuine response from one of the relatively rare efforts at tackling this huge problem. I have used RescueTime personally (not mandated) in the past and found it useful.

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