There's been a big rise in monitoring workers at home
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
To sign in to MS Teams at the company you needed to run a 2FA app from your phone to get the code that would let you log in. I wrote a Python script that ran on a Raspberry Pi, that would pull the 2FA code from an Android emulator running on another machine running the 2FA app, and then the script would paste the 2FA code in to MS Teams running on the corporate laptop using a USB keyboard/mouse h/w emulator. Every morning my machine dutifully booted up, logged in, signed in at precisely 9AM and made sure it showed I was available and active throughout the day until it was "time to go home."
The company overall was pretty decent, but unfortunately there are toxic managers and little Napoleons everywhere.
If you can automate the observation, you can automate your observance of the observation. The symmetry is great.
It’s even kind of poetic, because the more creative type of person who is less valued as a drone is the type of person to extend the effort to do this, whereas the clock-in-clock-out type with less investment and motivation is less likely. Sort of a “if you’re clever/motivated enough to end run it, your clever enough to not need this anyway.”
Never measure the productivity of engineers with plain numbers. They will just take it as a challenge on how to optimise for that particular measurement.
Nice quote.
Except that controlling people changes their motivations.
That's how Edison got started.[1]
[1] https://www.gjenvick.com/Biography/ThomasAEdison/05-TheBoyTe...
At a previous job we had to log all hours of the day, with a comment, in existing tasks. I felt like my work time was spent mostly making stuff up to manage management expectations, instead of development
On Teams, I believe now on your account management, setting up the 2fa, you can say you have trouble using their app and download the otp key which you can use in a generic app like FreeOTP, or integration
On the desktop I use Caffeine like apps to force the status always online
That's fucking hilarious/brilliant!
That's amazingly brilliant, but Unfortunately it wouldn't work everywhere as in our org, the 2FA app will only be allowed to be installed on our company provided phones bound to our company issued phone numbers/SIM.
Also, depending on your company and employment agreement, if your Raspberry PI gets compromised by an attacker and uses your 2FA to gain access to your AWS account for example, and causes damage, then your employer can hang you out to dry in court.
I already saw one case where an ex-employee is being sued by his former employer because he decided to be clever and knowingly worked around the company's security policy measures, which he agreed to adhere to in his employment contract. Workaround which lead to an attacker getting his keys and stealing customer data from AWS buckets. Ouch!
Seems more healthy for your mental wellbeing in the long run, as toxic policies in workplaces rarely come alone but tend to come sequentially one after another as time goes on if the terror managers don't change or enough employee don't jump ship simultaneously to trigger a management change.
Nobody's saying they're not doing that. Depending on life circumstances and where you live, it can take months to find a new job that's actually better than the one you're in, even when actively looking.
IIRC, consumer grade paper shredders got pretty good in the past few years. And your examples both rely on the person setting up the security circumventing it by supplying bad training/enrolling. Which makes it bad if you want to guarantee a person is behind it, but fine if you want to treat it as something that belongs to the person doing the enrolling.
And I have found that most corporate security, especially in the biometric arena, is sub-par, usually because of the human component doing the enrolling. I am not saying it isn't workable, but that there is a vast landscape between people's perceived utility/functionality of the security and the actual security envelope it provides. Fortunately for me, security is very difficult to get right.
I use a P-4 shredder, also from Fellowes, that cost a couple of hundred bucks, that replaced a burnt out P-2 shredder I got for $30 from Staples. I am considering going to a higher capacity P-5 if I can find one at a reasonable price on eBay, mainly for the extra shredding capacity and the hopper feeder than any additional security it provides.
How seriously do I take my disposal security in my home? Well, I'm not a target, and there are other higher value targets with less security, so why would they go after me. I shred any mail or paperwork I don't wish to keep physical copies of, but it sits in the "to be shredded" basket near the shredder for a good six months before I get around to it. There's an oppportunity there, if I were a target. And the "to be shredded" basket will contain bills from my medical insurance provider, phone bills, ISP bills, electricity bills, cheques I've deposited, grocery receipts.
Whilst I practice good op-sec within my house -- no paperwork leaves without being shredded, tightened network security, VLANs for suspicious devices, locked down networks, and 2FA where appropriate -- I'm not a target and I have very little reason to be a target, so I don't need an onerously heavy shield. I'm cautious, not paranoid.
You need to evaluate your disposal security within the context of "what is convenient" rather than "what is best."
https://smallhacks.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/reading-codes-fr...
Pretty much, if they offer a phone app, you can replicate the 2FA codes yourself.
Edit: Of course, protect the seed with gpg or similar if you do this.
As a footnote, I can guarantee I could make it work on your company provided phones too. Even when they're locked and with a biometric scan requirement and the inability to run any non-approved software.
Brilliant. Curious what software do you use to run Android emulator(qemu, bluestack)?
Every morning my machine dutifully booted up, logged in, signed in at precisely 9AM and made sure it showed I was available and active throughout the day until it was "time to go home."
Maybe it’s the type of work or business requirement that causes this behavior, but I view this as such a violation of autonomy that it would immediately kill team morale.
You sound like a very creative/talented developer, if I were you I would not put up with this.
And all the outside-of-work time spent exploring and evaluating the ideas I came across from just being interested in the state of the art. And what I learned from building hobby projects that put those ideas to the test with things that nobody cares about except for me, instead of trying them out for the first time on the company’s flagship product.
And.
You also need to account for all the time I had nothing to do because I wasn’t allowed to proceed since I was waiting for the Product Owners to approve the development effort, and they rescheduled the meeting four times.
You need to account for the times when I asked for more work and wasn’t given any for three days, and was told to “just be available.”
You need to account for when my workspace broke when someone in Security blocked ALL of eclipse.org because “you can’t trust that open source stuff,” and your sanctioned resolution process is slower than a tortoise on quaaludes.
You need to account for choosing to band-aid your tech debt until even the scion of [Rube Goldberg, Frankenstein’s Monster, IE11’s Quirks Mode, accidental dynamic scope, the Pennsylvania Lottery] told you that the latest “feature” would break stuff with 100% confidence, and you still went for it.
I stopped putting sugar in my coffee and I think it might be affecting my outlook.
And if they just want to see you glued to your PC 24/7, doing work stuff, and if not they'll fire you?
That's an easy response for an in-demand job like programming, but for other jobs, from call centers to all kinds of services (translation, accounting, etc.), it can be met much more sternly by employers.
What's really needed is a more massive societal rejection of this, similar to how people would respond to monitoring school bathrooms...
If the mouse ain't movin somebody's shirkin
work for me, script
Eventually after a few weeks the requirement to timesheet our work was removed. Clearly it was costing more money than they anticipated. This was under the guise that they trusted us and didn’t need the reporting any more (bullshit!)
One of the glorious things about timesheets is that they are an interesting infallibility paradox. The owner of the timesheet system will tend not to question what is recorded as it proves the system is fallible, so you can record anything.
University isn't free, time spent learning as a junior (probably at another company) isn't free, and programming isn't something anyone can do well. The only real measure should be the result.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-w7JCTOpwU
"Do I owe you something?" "That's 100 pesetas". "100 pesetas just for tightening a screw?" "No, that's free. It's 100 pesetas for knowing which screw needed to be tightened".
“ According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad … Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.
Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.
Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:
Making chalk mark on generator $1.
Knowing where to make mark $9,999.
Ford paid the bill.”
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-stein...
I leave out that since I built Frankenstein's monster I may be the only one that knows where to do it :)
> You need to account for the times when I asked for more work and wasn’t given any for three days, and was told to “just be available.”
If they want you available from 9-5, then they are accounting for that time. Well, they're paying you for that time at least.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's some sort of productivity software installed on my work laptop that I'm too lazy to investigate. It's their computer, they can do what they want with it.
If a manager ever talks to me about metrics vs output, I'll likely just not listen. The advantage of being skilled labor, I guess, is you kind of make your own rules as long as you meet goals.
This situation is much more dire for upcoming generations who work low level jobs like the service desk, where metrics are absolutely hammered and abused by bad managers. I can see this breeding a generation of tech workers who have ptsd about 'not being productive', which leads to burn out before they even get to a level where being monitored stops being relevant.
In my case it helps that my current boss is not into simple metrics and goes out of his way to be fair and transparent, but not everyone is so lucky. I still remember one of previous bosses, who wanted me to track average processed cases and wanted to make sure they did not know what is being measured. What I quickly learned is that people are not idiots and figure out what is being rewarded even if they are not explicitly told.
It is possible to do this? Also, would it not be very illegal?
Yes. Intrusion detection software will want to know everything about the network and peers.
> Also, would it not be very illegal?
You've likely already agreed to let your employer and their equipment do whatever they want it to do.
Depends on the jurisdiction. In the EU, very much so.
A ruling from a few years ago, and regulations are only getting tighter ( this was pre-GDPR): https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/sep/05/romanian-chat-me...
I don’t agree. Company surveillance of workers is very stressful and invasive and saying “it’s their laptop” isnt good enough. The worksite of most workers is theirs too, so does that mean it’s okay to put microphones in the break rooms and cameras tracking bathroom breaks? I don’t mean legal, I mean morally.
I don’t want a company microphone listening on my family conversations in the distance
Indeed. These machines should not have a built-in microphone. How do you really know if it is not listening? Cameras can at least be covered.
For example, teams/zoom call? Go nuts. Screen shots of laptop screen. Go for it. Chat. Fine. Listening in to me jacking off to dwarf porn? Not cool.
I still see it as mostly useless. And I am saying this as a person, who worked at a place that had 'bathroom break' policy. The most annoying thing about it.. it was used as a tool to get rid of people management did not like.
What do you do about the laptop’s microphone?
Skilled and currently in-demand. Plenty of skilled people don’t have that chance.
—- Snowcrash
OTOH, this monitoring stuff makes sense for hourly paid jobs where the employee has to deliver a certain amount of completed items per hour. But that's the exception, not the norm.
Couldn't you just monitor that deliverable directly? Why would you have to monitor anything else?
Apparently, just saying your employees were working a bunch of hours and having time sheets to back you up isn't enough proof for some people. Enter employee monitoring software. Prove to your bosses that you can't be fired because you made a bunch of people jiggle a mouse for 8 hours.
On call is brutal. What if I want to go camping, hiking, on a road trip? I’m only on call once a month and it still drives me crazy that I lose my freedom for that week.
Personally I think salaried work is the problem. "Meeting deadlines" only makes sense as long as the deadlines are reasonable, and how do we decide if they are reasonable other than how much time they take? There's always more work to do, always more bugs that can be fixed, code or processes that can be improved, etc. At least in software engineering, salaried work makes no sense to me at all, and my eventual goal is to become hourly, because otherwise it's just a nebulous set of expectations and constant (explicit or implied) negotiating about how much time is worked.
It should also be easier to do less than 8 hours a day, but I view that as a mostly separate issue than the salaried vs hourly discussion. Salaried work just is just another way of saying the company gets free overtime work out of its employees.
It is the incompetent butt-in-chair managers and other talentless cling-ons in the tech industry that concern themselves with such trivial nonsense because they don't have the skills necessary to discern productivity in any other way.
Ah, yes, so we have the 2 hours per day salaried remote-work six-figures compensation tech class and the 10 hour per day full surveillance janitorial wage class. We are so content so serve you, milord.
My manger complain, "I was so busy I had six hours of meeting"
My fellow dev would say, "I was nose down. I really wanted to get that status message to stop flickering"
My manager would report that there was 15% more story points completed over last sprint
My dev would report that the new grid view is complete and is ready to go to QA.
People who work together often have fundamental different ideas of what success looks like.
Does getting rid of 8 hour days just turn into 24/7 work, in the same way that unlimited vacation time turned into less vacation time?
I think these are both related to culture. My company went to unlimited vacation earlier this year and people have been noticeably taking more PTO than before. I ran the numbers and I've used an extra week so far than I would have been allowed otherwise.
Maybe other teams haven't been taking as much, but as far as I can tell people are taking advantage of this because we've all heard the unlimited PTO leading to less time off stories, we don't want that to happen here.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2004/sep/05/theobserver...
- George Orwell, '1984'.
The reason the system will equilibriate is that at first you'll have your pick of many more jobs. However, certain employers at the margins try it first, then more prestigious ones that keep their employees there with golden handcuffs. Then the rest follow the prestigious ones until there are few jobs without it and your individualist strategy has no where to turn.
This is not a realistic model at all. The kind of people who tend to accumulate power in unions, especially more white collar unions, do not tend to be the same kind of person or have the same personal or political goals as the people they nominally represent.
Fledgeling tech unions in particular seem terrible here; I don't get the sense that they represent my interests as a tech worker at all, but rather that they come with a ton of political baggage and they only want my membership as a pretense for demanding random crap that I don't care about and doesn't benefit me.
For example, the (unpopular) Alphabet Union "aims to stop Google from allowing its social media platforms such as YouTube to function as a hub for right-wing extremism and white supremacy". It has nothing to do with improving the material working conditions of union members.
Stopping employers from spying on employees would definitely fall under this description. Again, I just haven't seen any tech unionization efforts in the US that legitimately seem to care about workers instead of using them as a pretense to accumulate power towards some other end.
Not all unions are the same, if you think those others are bad you can make your own.
Which is why I very specifically called out tech unions. Plenty of unions seem to be doing the thing I said unions should do (attempt to improve the material working conditions of their members).
Anti-Union bias in the US is well founded and rational due to the terrible union laws we have, combined with the terrible track record of US unions
Practically speaking, the most choice a worker has is to vote against the union in their shop, since their shop is much smaller than the union itself. Suppose you've got a shop with a hundred workers, and a union representing a million workers wants you to join. In the initial vote of whether or not to join, each worker has a hundredth of the decision making power. After they join, each worker only has one millionth of the decision making power. The only meaningful choice is whether or not to join that union; after you join you're going along for the ride with no real input into it.
In short, I want democracy to extend to the workplace. The line we've drawn is artificial and one-sided.
Not everyone cares about the social justice issue du jour, most people just want more money. Ultimately, any union plan must show clear benefits and right now if you are earning more than 6 figures, unions are nothing but a waste of time and money. You have yet to demonstrate that an upper class union can go beyond crabs in a bucket gatekeeping.
It's just not particularly valuable.
What would work better is if a union could allow for varying wages based on skill set. The problem here is demonstrating that skill, as often times it is difficult to objectively measure.
White collar unions usually negotiate a floor that individuals can up-negotiate from. Not only can you negotiate for better compensation, unions will happily represent you and help you get what you're asking for.
A union for white collar workers would be closer to UAW or AFLCIO and would most certainly have fixed compensation packages
Now of course, if you are in the minority, and still feel slighted (and under-appreciated), there is always an option to start your own business with like-minded people.
Direct democracy normally end badly because simple Majoritarianism is bad
This is way in most democratic nations the will of the majority is balanced by other means or controls.
Why do we even have the discussion, then? If you don't want to participate in society, just don't. It's not clear to me why I would support you being an individualist (and adopt any of your political positions), when (according to your philosophy) I get nothing back in turn.
That seems like a benefit to you.
>> If you don't want to participate in society, just don't.
Participation in society does not require an over aching organization either governments or collective body's to manage my participation for me. I participate just fine negotiating my own individual contracts, my own business deals, etc. I do not need a third party to inject them selves in the transaction. Looks up Voluntarism, and/or Georgism and you will get a since of my worldview, it is far from solipsist
>> when (according to your philosophy) I get nothing back in turn.
Then you have a very narrow world view. The best interactions are voluntary, I attend social events because I enjoy the conversation, I buy a new computer because a need to get X done, I work for my employer because I need income to do the other things, my employer pays me because they need my skills, knowledge, and labor to advance their mission. These are all voluntary exchange where we each get something from the other.
I am not clear how you imagine resolving conflicts in your society. That requires some sort of authority, and this authority being based on democratic vote seems to me like a decent solution. Especially if the conflict involves third parties - negative economic externalities for example. I think to try to understand the world (especially society and politics) as a series of two-party interactions is grossly reductionist.
Not to mention the distinction between parties is rather arbitrary. For example, let's say you consider joining a multinational company as an employee, and the company already has unions, but the legal contract you are having is with the local subsidiary of the large mother company. Then on what basis do you recognize who or what really constitutes the other party - the multinational, the local subsidiary, the multinational including the unions, your hiring manager, or some other combination? What about joining a worker cooperative, would you refuse to join on the principle, because it is internally democratic?
And if you, in this case, accept the legal definition of contracting party as the "other party", why do you have a problem accepting a legal concept of democratic constitution? Or any other law or regulation, for that matter?
If you start at a company, it'll be harder to rise through the ranks.
And if you start a company, you'll be forced to go through union processes to remove bad fits.
Our industry and compensation as they exist today don't need the baggage. If Europe and emerging markets put price pressure on our jobs, then maybe we can reevaluate. As it stands, we don't even need pensions when we can FIRE in under a decade on existing comp arrangements.
[1] https://iatse99.org/job-referral-rules/
[2] https://www.opeiu537.org/Portals/local537/cbas/.SAG-AFTRA%20...
You can't escape it.
Regarding developers - you seem to be ignoring that most software developers outside of FAANG are just not very good at their job. They have to put up with conditions in part because of their low value and replaceability, but certainly no one is forcing them into one industry over another. Therefore they must see the compensation as a fair trade if they are choosing to remain in the industry. Given the lower quality of work, I also wonder why you think they’re doing the “actual work” and not their management or other job functions at the company.
900 is not a huge number in Operations. Given a span of control of 10-20 per team per manager, and around 5-8 managers per senior manager, that's about 8 people for them to be managing directly, perhaps add 3-4 as heads of admin or automation functions with small teams then that's an incredibly typical Operations office, at least with boilerplate span of control recommendations that come out of McKinsey, BCG etc (indeed I have problems with these, but it is 'standard').
Was everyone lying to this Head? Did they create a culture of busywork? Did it become a dysfunctional closed shop impervious to supervision? Did the Head at least know their two-downs' names or ever have a chat, or the offer of one?
He claimed that at the same time as firing 900 people. To me it sounded much more like his internal justification for his actions rather than something that was true. Essentially I believe he was mentally shifting the blame from his own failing to successfully run a company that could profitably utilise 900 people, to making it the workers fault that he had to fire them.
The fact that he doesn't appear to be replacing the workers shows there wasn't work to be done. Is it your fault if you do all the work required of you in 2 hours?
A slippery slope argument. The fact that there exists a gradient of willingness to monitor remotely isn't a sufficient (or even necessary) condition to guarantee that most workers will be monitored: equilibriums can be established at 0% or 100% or anything in between. If remote monitoring isn't tolerated by individuals, I don't think it would become a prevalent practice, even without coordinated collective action.
Apply your logic to pay. Some employers pay very low wages. Others pay high wages. If you just quit your job, will the system reach an equilibrium with low wages? No, in fact, we know that wages in tech are quite high.
Are they? Compared to what a janitor makes or compared to what management makes? Compared to what they would be if they hadn't been held back by anti-poaching agreements in the bay area?
The companies that understand that "butts in seats" does not equate to performance will not use this, as such. If those aren't currently the most prestigious, they likely will become so, because they care about doing things that bring results, not merely make bad managers happy. Because of that, while there's an uptick right now, I don't see it lasting; I certainly don't see it taking over.
The main thing that has made our profession different is that the work is intellectually difficult and requires a lot of training. If you think similar knowledge work jobs aren't subject to such pressures, I know a doctor that is freaking out about how they are training nurse practitioners in online schools to take away hospitalist jobs.
You call out 1/3 of workers are already subject to it; I will call out that despite almost -every- company going from "I can see who is in the office, at their computer, and I can walk by and get an idea if they're just doomscrolling Facebook, or at least staring at an IDE" to "now I can't tell at all what they're doing", a full 2/3rds of companies, in the UK (a country that already has a culture of passive surveillance, with cameras on most urban street corners and the like) -haven't- instituted such measures.
As time goes on, will that 2/3rds of companies also buy in? Maybe, if they find they can't actually determine who is and isn't producing. But that has always been a challenge with knowledge workers, and the move to remote hasn't actually changed that calculus at all. What -is- certain is that increased monitoring, especially in countries that historically have objected to it (such as the US, which is also a leader in the industry when it comes to establishing trends), has a cost, both monetarily and in morale. If companies don't see a return on investment, the push for it will likely subside, and it becomes something to cut for the sake of budgets, if not also competitiveness in attracting talent.
I will also point out, pre-COVID, most companies didn't actually track time spent in office for knowledge workers. While blue collar employees would clock in and out to ensure they were putting in the hours, and service industry employees would, necessarily, have specific hours they worked, knowledge workers such as devs (a very different category of beast than doctor or nurse, who though knowledgeable and highly trained, are not actually knowledge workers. A nurse is not nursing if they're staring into space thinking about their patient. They are more like service industry in that regard, working well defined shifts that require manpower. Same doctors; there are appointments and scheduled events they have to attend and do. You can't replace a surgery, unlike many meetings, with an email) generally have had no such measures, despite it being no more difficult to institute them. Why? Because companies realized that attendance is not a proxy for performance. The fact a bunch of bad 'leaders', faced with the most singular workplace disruption of our lifetime (hopefully), reacted poorly in trying to pretend it is, doesn't tell us anything about long term trends.
For any job where performance is hard to measure, either a company needs to basically manage contracts (why not just go to Fiverr), or manage by a bad KPI (lines of code? feature points?) or pay for "butts on seats".
"Butts on seats" means "employees who are present, and hopefully intrinsically motivated (rather than driven by a bad KPI) to add value to the company in a way that's not fully specified by their manager."
They very existence of employment as a phenomena (rather than contracting, as it originally happened (IIRC a "factor" was a subcontractor who made goods at home, before it became better to employ them in a "factory" where they didn't need to be micromanaged by KPIs) is because employees are better (in a lot of ways) than management by "things that bring results".
I’m not saying it’s generally wrong to do so but just because it’s tricky for certain positions doesn’t make it a good idea to force it.
Does the company gain value in employees being present? Sure, if the employee is a security guard. Not so much if it's a dev.
"Hopefully (something else happens)" feels like you're saying "we need a KPI, this is -a- KPI, ergo...". Hoping an easily measured KPI correlates with what you actually care about feels like a -really- bad choice of metric.
I'll also mention, pre-COVID, I've worked at places where attendance wasn't tracked; we had high performers we kept, and low performers we let go. I've never worked at a place that actually checked or cared about attendance, so I can't speak to that, but I can say highly effective workplaces didn't need it.
How did we determine low performers? Well, the tasks they were given didn't get done, nor did they raise up the fact they were stuck. When asked they got defensive. When it eventually was handed to someone else it was done quickly. When they were asked to work with someone else on something, the other person ended up doing all the work. Etc. None of those are "hard KPIs". They're all data points that indicate "this person is not actually moving the work forward".
You underestimate how much are companies willing to sacrifice efficiency (total amount produced) for profit (extraction of value from labor to capitalist).
There was this book (I don't remember the name) that claimed that UAW unions wanted more worker autonomy to compete with Japanese, and it was more actually more efficient system, but the management killed it because it threatened their position.
"Owning people" in the classic sense (even during limited periods of working hours) is slavery, and that's not legal (any more, at least).
Through over 20 years of work in IT, I've learned that managers get this wrong far too often. Even performance reports are direct evidence of deep breaches of personal rights.
The model of employees not being able to use personal time as guaranteed by law, Surveillance tactics, hostile work environments, etc... have all been rampant in US culture forever.
If you're entry level you're a beast of burden, and deeply entrenched in proving yourself and solving critical problems, also at the mercy of accountability and almost always underpaid... At the "trusted top" they're playing golf on the clock and getting golden parachutes even if they under-perform... There is a better balance than this.
Now I'm not into a chaotic work protest as much as anyone else, but the truth is that even the poorest and least powerful masses can overwhelm and conquer any small handful of wealthy elites if they say "Let them eat cake" as history has shown...
We're facing a huge breakdown of everything that makes the world work unless people re-align their perspectives of equality and fairness in labor, and it's a lot bigger than just a few employees unionizing.
Employers own the productivity that employees agree to delivering, and if there is a performance issue, then there's already plenty of precedent to handle that. Expecting an employee to work every minute of an 8 hour day is insane, and not remotely realistic, even if they are a horse.
Employers adding surveillance to the mix only highlights the encroachment of the slave owner mentality in employment, and it could easily create a lawsuit over mis-use and abuse, and it probably will end up in court soon in a very public manner.
It's probably the USB "self-moving mouse" that created all this hype to be honest, but it's still a necessary move for many.
Same thing with remote working. It was a dream that came true and in record time turned to a maze of horror rooms.
Dunno. I guess do not work for such companies (if you can find something better anyway).
This only works for menial jobs where you can actually see the work happening, the widgets being cranked.
But even in a job as simple as callcenter operator you can have people who treat your customers well and you can have people who are there to just get as many calls as possible to get their stats for the day. You can't tell that by looking at time spent and number of calls served.
For people who are supposed to organise their work, think through plans, etc. the work does not happen in the computer, it happens in peoples' hearts and minds. I know a lot of people who spend their entire days with busy work providing no value to the company, because they are only interested in continuing their employment.
It is stupid because it is saying "I can't evaluate the value you provide but at least I am going to make sure you pay the costs (in time spent at the computer)"
My company has very simple vacation policy -- take as much vacation as you want. Come back when you feel fresh and ready to something great. Which makes me want to figure out how to actually be more productive.
Later, I was asked to implement some metrics in our in-house ERP, which would tell the management exactly at which time what employee was doing what - think of a same level of insight an Apache access log would give you. This was one of the few times I intentionally obstructed and eventually blocked this request. There were ways to measure performance anyway, I just refused the idea of live-monitoring.
Which operating systems can the monitoring be installed on?
I understand the principle of wanting to ensure that if you pay someone to do 9-5, they actually do it, but in practice, "nicer" employers get more from their employees by not being complete muppets. There is of course always one or two employees that spoil it for the rest, but intrusive monitoring is only one obnoxious way of detecting under performers.
Also, this sort of monitoring just reminds me of horrible stuff like Blizzard's "Warden", and Sony's root kit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...).
Activating the camera or mic without consent? Yeah, that’s bad.
What about recording which websites are visited on a work device? Not so unreasonable.
Taking screenshots of desktops at random intervals? Could be a huge liability if you capture some confidential information and the screenshots go into an unmanaged data dump.
I'd just have a fully naked picture of myself in the corner of my screen at all times :D
Creepy
> What about recording which websites are visited on a work device?
Creepy
> Taking screenshots of desktops at random intervals?
Creepy
Don't hire people if you don't trust people. Monitor their output not their process
Monitoring Remote Desktop sessions either by random interval screenshots or screen recording is valuable when you have vendors/contractors connecting to your net. IMO, this is unacceptable for normal employee workstations.
Turning on the mic or webcam is a major violation of privacy. If your doing something SO important/secret/critical that you need to monitor the person doing it you should not be working remotely to begin with.
If businesses are liable for what occurs in my home, would they not push on controlling more of what is in my home?
Managers were looking at buying a monitoring tool for a dev team. Somehow dev lead was included in the meeting. Vendor comes in, does his pitch. Dev leads pulls the manager aside and tells him "we already have a monitoring tool installed called git".
Non-technical manager is intrigued so dev leads pulls out a GUI front-end for git and shows the commit history. "You can see who added what to the codebase and when"
"Neat. How much does it costs us?"
"Nothing. It comes with the tool! How much are they trying to charge us for this monitoring software?"
"They want to schedule a separate call for pricing..."
We all know git metrics are pointless, apparently management was satisfied to know that they were collecting metrics and could use them if they wanted to (and they never bothered with it).
The best choice would be to have it open Notepad and type "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over again.
What do you think? Is this how white collar workers become more fully outsourced via automation, as an unintended side effect?
I've yet to hear a legitimate argument for monitoring employees against their will. If there's a security concern, patch it another way. There's always another way.
I think a lot of these “solutions” are rooted in the fact that managers—like the spyware-considering person above—are genuinely not good at interacting with other people. This person already knows who’s not getting work done, but for some reason isn’t comfortable having a direct conversation about it. “You’re not meeting your goals, and you don’t seem to be improving, so I think you should find another job” is a more mature, professional way of addressing the problem than surreptitiously collecting statistics on how much time your employees spend in the toilet.
Keeping in mind who I’m talking to here, I think a far better approach would be to step away from the tools and data-mining for a moment and deal with people like people, not machines.
If you're looking to catch people in a lie, there are easier ways than installing spyware.
No. Talk to them, say "Hey, it feels like you aren't performing as highly as I'd expect. Anything up?" and make it clear -you're paying attention to them-. You've now spent time you -should- already be spending (on a 1-on-1), and actually did something to try and solve the problem, rather than to try and make it "easy" to just let them go.
If their performance starts to improve now that you're engaging them, great, no privacy encroachment (and if they -were- only putting 2 hours in, and now are putting in more, even better! You avoided the pain of termination and replacement).
If their performance doesn't improve, also great; now you can let them go -knowing you did everything you could-.
Why the hell would you want a half-assed outcome that, at best, will still require the same effort from you, and at worst will save you no time (again, you should already be having regular 1-on-1s), and leave you wondering if there was more you could have done, and in either case cause a morale hit to your team who now knows you're willing to electronically track them?
Right, but it's your job to treat them like adults, not babies.
And the first rule of dealing with adults is: how they spend their time is up to them. Granted, if they were working onsite ... you could at least require that they be on site during certain times. And then there would be the implicit surveillance that comes from just being the same room with other people and all that. But sorry, the situation has changed and that luxury is no longer available to you.
Accordingly, your recourse should be: tell them what deliverables you expect, and by when. If they don't meet these goals -- sure you can offer coaching -- but it's not up to you to "diagnose" them (never mind whether this involves invasive techniques or not). Just tell them what you want, and leave it up to them to manage their own time and resources to deliver.
If you can't that -- that is, articulate your expectations, offer support and treat them like adults -- then as a manger, you're the one not "making the cut".
1. The low performer will stay a low performer.
2. Other people will leave, including high performers.
You will gain nothing, but lose something.
People keep asking me to stand inside little circles, put things on my face, walk in specific directions, etc.
The more you acquiesce to silly stuff, the more it happens.
Motorcycle riders don't wear little pin badges for good luck, tape toilet rolls to their knees, or simply look at and polish the bike, they wear real protective gear, practice evasive maneuvers, look for escape routes, etc.
It's not at all "safe" to run around like a headless chicken panicking for years on end; it's a mental disorder. Intelligent people owe it to themselves and others to protect them from maladaptive thinking and help them to develop mechanisms for operating normally in society.
And, no, you won't be able to find an alternative employer that offers remote work and doesn't monitor you.
An employer can also deny that they're monitoring you, and there's nothing you can do about it.
What I was referring to was simply that there is a little color coded status symbol by a person's chat icon, which is green if they are active, and turns yellow if they are not doing much.
However, if you have a meeting or appointment on your calendar, or you are presenting/videoconferencing it goes to red, so you really don't have to be green or yellow any more than you want to.
Oh boy are you wrong.
I think I recall threads on HN about such things existing.
But I'm not aware of how to use them or that my organization is using them.
It wouldn't shock me if they were, but my prior is no more than 50%.
I observe that people around me usually don't use 99.9% or more of Microsoft software features.
But in context, MS Teams has extensive dashboard analytics, some of it promoted under the guise of "employee wellness" but mostly used for command and control and monitoring, and there are several addons that add even more extensive tracking and analytics, e.g. ActivTrak.
[0]https://www.amazon.com/CRU-30200-0100-0011-WiebeTech-Mouse-J...
If you need to keep a log of what applications a user is running and when, or what websites they're visiting, then you have security issues elsewhere. If you solve those issues, then it makes no difference what the worker is doing.
And if they're not doing work when they should, it's not exactly rocket science to figure that out. We've been doing that for hundreds if not thousands of years.
All of those can be collected by talking to me, and few can be automated from the chat and email programs I use for company activities. The tooling they're talking about in this article is a whole other level - surreptitious screenshots and logs of which programs are open. Camera shots without warning.
My boss should know what my work-product is like and what my coworkers and customers think of my performance. They should expect me to be presentable with a moments notice while I'm on the clock, but I can do that while I'm sitting on my couch in my underwear.
Quite frankly, the ability to remotely trigger a camera without warning is a nightmare - for the employers. It's a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen. Someone will time their shots (or simply take one a second and more when they see something salacious), and it will leak. There's no business need for these tools and we should make clear in our reactions no jury would question large judgements in harassment suits for use of this software.
I don’t think monitoring is even remotely the norm, but I can see how it could be. I recall MS Teams has some kind of “productivity” monitor that could definitely be abused and eventually normalized.
The companies I’ve worked remote for can generally tell if you’re slacking off by whether or not you get shit done. No need (or time) for monitoring nonsense.
Is this what you meant by monitoring?
As the police have found, being monitored can actually help in the event of false accusations of misconduct.
Furthermore, if you are monitored and nobody has a problem with your performance, now you have evidence (even if you don't have it, it's discoverable) should they try to change the rules or the enforcement of them.
I really can't count the number of times my manager thinks something is wrong and I have to patiently dig up emails to prove it's not. Furthermore, as long as people don't really hate you for some reason, every time you successfully defend yourself against a false accusation should be some banked goodwill.
I've heard stories about how in olden days subordinates would have to take notes longhand to protect themselves from the bosses rewriting history. Sounds like a lot of work.
People used to take notes to prove their boss wrong when he said "I never said that!" because they weren't under surveillance.
A hopeful example of the value of self-recording: Car dashcams are relevant for insurance claims. Or are they?
I'm a manager at an F50 company and we have no monitoring tools out side of normal security scans of outgoing e-mail content and such. I couldn't even get stats on employees hours at their laptops if I wanted to.
I watch what is produced, if it is good and constant there isn't a problem.
Yes, there are many options for companies to do this but for most it is not worth the investment in time/money/maintenance to let you catch a low performer potentially a bit earlier than just using their output as your yardstick.
Note that while 80% of workers are against such monitoring, nearly half of workers 18-34 are being monitored. This suggests that perhaps just "quit[ting] and find[ing] another job" may not be so easy for these people.