‘Bossware is coming for almost every worker’: the software is watching you | Hacker News Reader

‘Bossware is coming for almost every worker’: the software is watching you

theguardian.com

Just quit these companies. Market allows for it and when you do clearly communicate the reason. Also building tools to disrupt the metrics should be easy. Company time of course. If they ask for a high score a dependable worker delivers.

I wish they would name the large retailer. This is valuable information for workers to be informed. It is no libel in this case.

No, "Just quit these companies" is the 100% worst possible, least effective response. They act collectively, you realize? So the worker should fight the metric. Just ask one other worker who is as angry as you are, one with lower status than you ideally, and tell your employer "BOTH OF US are quitting if you add bossware to EITHER of us!" Makes it a little better, two versus one. Or hey, if some bosses in the company you work for add it and others don't, Oh Hey, just change department! No need for collective action if the boss doesn't act collectively.

A poster that used to frequent this forum said, "always fight the metric." You always have to fight the metric, in the end you will be JUDGED and that JUDGMENT will determine your status. Metrics are all harmful.

And beyond that, never buy into promotions, they're a mirage. There will be no promotions for the most part now that the population has peaked in the Western World. You get I don't know, $15000 and that's what you live on.

And Mexico is fusing with America at this point.

I should explain. There is en masse immigration under the smiling eyes of the president, but like an order of magnitude greater than it used to be. Order of magnitude (literally 10x) for Brazilians, Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, Colombians. Mexicans? Who knows. Hard to count if there's no counting. There's no counting. You just walk and you're in. No enforcement. In fact the biggest form of enforcement is the Feds cracking down on "la migra" meaning Department of Homeland Security.

So let us not speak of problems, opinions, whether it's good or bad. But the concept of the American worker earning a premium wage purely because of his nationality is vanishing if it has not vanished already. I heard it described as a luxury the United States could afford to keep its people happy. Or did once.

So now we enter a world of much lower incomes than Americans had, but also with much greater uniformity. What do you get? You get $15000. Run out of money? Budget better! Don't eat for a few days! It is always better to fast than accept offers of credit.

I predict we'll soon have virtual USB keyboards provided by a Raspberry PI with an open source "productivity simulation" software running. If companies want people to score highly on activity metrics, some workers will do just that: Score highly on the metrics.

I mean for some jobs, work has been mostly performative for quite a while anyway, so then this is the logical next step.

Slightly unrelated: I'd also love an app that modifies my webcam stream so that I'm always staring at the camera. That way, I can read blogs and nobody will notice.

once at Home Depot an employee helped me scan 12 bolts individually as separate items. Why I asked? Because she's scoring points. Welcome to the future.

I once had a boss who measured productivity in terms of number of commits each dev made per day.

Guess when I found out you can set cron jobs to run every minute?

What did you commit each minute?

Git allows empty commits, but a fun hack might be hooking up the Vim undo/redo tree to git commits + reverts

I have to fill out two timesheets in separate systems. What the fuck, 2022? I would have expected society to move beyond timesheets at all in this millennium. But the bean counters always win.

Timesheets are a fact of life, like taxes. Timesheets also have to exist in some organizations specifically because of taxes. Many organizations capitalize software.

I require my employees to check in and out using an online time-tracking tool. Not because I'm evil, but because my office safety insurance requires me to document when people come and go, presumably so that they can refuse paying for someone falling off their chair in their free time. Plus I need precise per-day hour metrics for tax filings.

It is your prerogative to not work with a company that requires you to track people who don't have much of a choice (because let's face it: Laziness is evil, and most corporations are just as lazy :) ).

Could you elaborate on the tax aspect?

I never bothered with the details. But it was recently confirmed in EU ruling C-55/18 [1]. Plus the government sends someone to check my documentation every 4 years and then they'll calculate their expected employee salaries down to the penny and force me to issue refunds if that diverges from my company's calculation, so I know from experience that they are super strict about it.

[1] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/documents.jsf?num=C-55/18

Those are just excuses and bad ones. You could change insurers- not everyone has this kind of tracking, there are clearly ways around it. Presumably your company doesn't value employee autonomy very highly so they were fine with whatever calculation led to your particular policy.

Same with the tax filing stuff. You could ask employees to do a time sheet (still shitty but at least transfers trust), or you could look at other solutions.

So I don't think you're evil, but the culture you're in is one that doesn't really care about putting administrative burden on employees or about robbing them of autonomy and privacy. Apathy is not always evil, but its definitely a lame excuse and we should all strive for better.

(As an aside, "the insurance company made us" basically summarizes everything that's wrong with our culture. Making decision based on someone else's profit driven risk aversion is directly responsible for how lame we've all become and will eventually lead to us being conquered by societies that don't have such hangups)

> You could change insurers- not everyone has this kind of tracking

As far as I know, all of the company insurances require pretty strict documentation of when who was working (or not) because the difference between "I fell of my office chair during my free time" and "I fell of my chair while working" is financially significant for them. I did check the major ones because I also thought it's irritating - and I mean I'm legally an employee, too, so this directly affects me - but I couldn't find a better offer.

I fully agree with you that their risk aversion shouldn't force me to change my behavior, but then again, I have to accept this level of bullshit from pretty much every large supplier, because my company is too small for them to take me seriously.

>Same with the tax filing stuff.

evidently the poster is in the EU, not sure if you are but different regulatory regimes can of course significantly affect how you have to do things.

> Computer programmer and remote work advocate David Heinemeier Hansson has been waging a one-company campaign against the vendors of the technology. Early in the pandemic he announced that the company he co-founded, Basecamp, which provides project management software for remote working, would ban vendors of the technology from integrating with it.

I'm looking for other examples like Hansson as research for my next book "Ethics for Hackers", since a key audience is entrepreneurs and developers taking a principled, active stand against technofascism and pathological control fetishes.

This sounds interesting, would love to read more if you've got a webpage for the project yet

These softwares would sound interesting for personal monitoring, and share interesting stuff, like the old Wakoopa

But your boss filming you all day to see if you're picking boogers instead of working sounds scary

Management loves to implement these kinds of control that they don't have to go through

Anyway I can spend an entire day configuring my home server and no one can tell if I am working or not

This seems pretty bad but I'm not certain it will take off. The main problem is you can't really tell productivity this way. As a software engineer, a portion of my job happens on pen and paper, a whiteboard, or sometimes just thinking really hard. Taking a 10 minutes walk is extremely productive for figuring out a problem. Actually writing code is still a big part of the job, but I don't think there's a way to measure my progress besides communication.

Easy fix. hit F1 :-)

Humor, for those too young to know about the "boss" key in games.

I always knew bosskey as a tiny windows app uses for switching screens at school. Fantastic.

Reminds me of Manna, a profound story which covers this theme.

https://marshallbrain.com/manna

I think it’s unrealistic to expect to be allowed to work from home and not be monitored by accountability tools

I've been doing it for years and my boss is very happy with my output. I provision my own software and hardware and access company resources through an Okta portal. If my company mandated that I be monitored I would quit.

I think it unrealistic to believe that accountability tools work and it is quite crazy to judge people on these metrics.

If management cannot define a sensible output at the end of a work shift, they seem to be overtaxed with their responsibility.

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