Workplace surveillance is coming for you
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
I am certain “bossware” will accelerate the downfall of already shitty workplaces.
Very happy to hear Amazon is doing away with it. Strongly hope their workers unionize anyway. What kind of employer nickle-and-dimes a worker’s bathroom breaks? Not a good one, that’s for damn sure.
I used to see these job postings on LinkedIn for Crossover for Work. I was intrigued by the claim of $400yr salary. Glad I didn’t end up working there. Thanks but no thanks, I am not going to work actively oppressing already downtrodden workers. A quick search turned up this fascinating article as well: https://medium.com/@whistler_12777/heres-why-crossover-is-a-...
Fuck bossware. Fuck people who work to actively oppress others. Humanity for all, value of life for each and every person out there.
Rant over. Thanks for the link.
I had a teacher in high school who would respond the same way (more or less) whenever someone would ask to use the restroom:
> If you ever have a job that needs you to ask to use the restroom, find a better job.
The right answer is always to deal with the individuals who are the problem, but somehow it always becomes rules that make life worse for everyone.
So, they do take advantage for a while, until everyone realizes they're a jerk, so now everyone has to go through the new "process". Because they can't just be fired "for taking sick leave", which "is their right".
This is why we can't have nice things.
Extrapolating here ... employee wants 5 minutes of bathroom breaks because it was not in contract and the manager abused it, so when the 5 minutes gets written into the contract, then the manager can still abuse it by writing you up for a 6 minute break, or just refuse to help you out today because he did not have a good experience with you or someone else yesterday.
We are losing the human touch due to both-sided legalese in everything.
They file for reasonable accommodation and the idiots who get concerned about your bathroom time have to be quietly told to stand down because you have special permission to poo.
It can get more absurd as well. There’s an unlimited about of goldbricking and bullshit that people are capable of.
Or being female and unlucky with the effects of your cycle.
Or just having a rough day because something you ate was bad.
It's one thing if there's an ongoing pattern of long, unexplained breaks and someone's line manager has a discreet word about it and asks if there is anything they need to know. However routinely messing with things like breaks or availability of kitchen and bathroom facilities is surely one of the most counterproductive policies an employer could adopt. Nothing says we respect and value our people like treating them as subhuman!
Any of these situations can mean someone isn't getting their work done. Their colleagues might be left to pick up the slack, which isn't fair on them either. Any of the people involved might start to worry or get upset about the situation, which can make things worse.
Whatever is going on it's management's responsibility to figure it out and then deal with it professionally and with appropriate discretion and sensitivity. The difficult part is figuring out what that looks like when the situation could be delicate and there might be anything from very personal medical issues to criminal behaviour involved.
Everyone on the likes to pretend that rules and regulations are either a) a boondoggle net-negative exercise in cost cutting b) "wRiTtEn In BlOoD" depending on whether they like the procedure or regulation in question.
Reality is often far more mundane and dysfunctional. It's frequently just speculative bike shedding and ass-covering, exactly the kind of "pointing out exploits" stuff the HN crowd loves to engage in when it comes to policy as though organizational policy was a firewall to configure.
Here's how it probably went down: Some people were hammering out the language of a contract and some bike-shedder replied to all pointing out that breaks, work stoppages, lunch, etc, etc, were all being counted but bathroom breaks weren't and that potentially created an exploit to the proposed system of cost/time/whatever tracking. No party had the balls to take responsibility and say "this is silly, we'll cross that bridge if/when we get to it" bathroom breaks wound up incorporated that into their formula. So thanks to some bike-shedder trying to "contribute" and nobody's willingness to take any risk whatsoever (by going on the record brushing aside a petty concern that could come back to bite them) everyone has to track their piss breaks. And to be fair, all these people are doing exactly what they are incentivized to do (!!!). And these aren't the kind of things you can roll back later because then you have to explain why you're a) deviating from established way of doing things and b) accepting some risk in doing so which nobody wants to do for a variety of reasons that have been discussed at length and are outside the scope of this comment.
Source: This crap happens like quarterly in my workplace.
Edit: of course there's other potential complications that can effect these kinds of things but you get the gist.
Whomever wrote that contract was a doofus.
"Position was eliminated" works pretty well (in the US).
Private entities will do what they've always done and my original comment succinctly describes the default outcome. Nothing has changed.
Unless you also happen to be recruiting for that same position, or if your local legislation asks that you prioritise relocating your current employees in other jobs over firing them if their position disappears.
Without a contract, discrimination law is the sole course of action to fight an adverse employer situation.
Eliminating a position leaves a company open for problems, particularly if it isn’t true. Much easier to determine that you didn’t charge vacation time correctly or violated a series of minor/moderate rules.
This has absolutely nothing to do with anti discrimination law.
Local food co-op. Very modern hippy. Nice place.
Every employee has a dossier on file. Every time a rule is broken it goes into the dossier.
If, for whatever reason, you are fired. The dossier is cited as legal justification.
I guess this is perfectly rational from a businessy perspective, and a common tactic. But still.
Also, upper management somehow feel that their middle and lower managers can be trusted to act like adults while the people who do the actual work cannot be.
The proper solution is getting rid of management, and letting workers get their jobs done.
With workplace control seeming to predate worker protection by a century, you wouldn’t expect that. But it’s always exciting when intuitions get subverted. I’d love to read more of how the historian who proposed this put together their argument. Do you have a link handy?
This is backwards. Union membership is at its all time low and at-will employment has mostly taken over. A union would be the best tool to curb "boss-ware".
You may enjoy Terry Gilliam’s The Zero Theorem.
Peloton will eventually start climbing the STAC ladder (it’s literally their only remaining move). Between that, permanent covid mitigations and the office-space downsizings of the late 2020’s, Gilliam’s vision will be complete!
He makes good points and has a clear set of beliefs that he applies consistently, especially on topics like this, but gets a little overbearing if you follow closely.
Secondly, the longer I have been a participant of society and markets, I've come to realize that power imbalances are as affected by how much the participants stand up for themselves in the face of power grabs as it is how much other participants grab. But again, when inequity is described, those that grab are universally criticized for grabbing and those that allow it are never offered advice or encouragement on how to either resist or walk away. I believe the latter would be much healthier for society and markets.
> Mazzoli seems to have either not used his product, or, if he did, did so under conditions where he was in charge of it – using it the way an athlete might use a stopwatch to time their own sprints, and not the way a boss might: to decide whether to dock your pay or fire you.
> This inability to understand the difference between using a technology and having the same technology used against you is endemic to the industry.
I think this is a key failure of understanding for the "tech is neither good nor bad!" camp: just as the Death Star clearly was never going to be used for mining planetoids, it's very clear how workplace surveillance tech will be used to harm workers, if nothing else because of how it is currently being used. Continuing to work on such tech just because it could theoretically be used for non-evil purposes is morally bankrupt, and something the industry needs to establish ethical standards to prevent.
Consider history; Do you think for one minute, that a Viceroy somewhere, and legions of new administrators, won't inflict endless and strictly enforced conditions on anyone they can find, using software?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/1776_Pot...
Of course, if programmers are raised from a young age and brainwashed into believing that workplace surveillance is innocent / good, that's a different problem than adults who should know better when it comes to the real world results of using the tech they are building.
I was listening to someone describe their use in WWII, and he was I suppose trying to defend it by saying that actually most of the people it killed weren't burned at all, but rather killed because they were in enclosed fortifications and apparently flamethrowers produce prodigious amounts of carbon monoxide - basically you'd take a couple breaths and it's over - the carbon monoxide will bind into your blood cells such that even if you immediately step out into fresh air, you're a dead man walking. But at least your corpse will be recognizable for your friends and family I suppose; you won't be burned beyond recognition.
But building a reliable flamethrower is an interesting technical challenge, so I'm sure you can find an engineer who will be willing to give it a go.
I like the addendum, "...but nor is it neutral"
Bossware, or working machine monitoring software, endpoint monitoring, or whatever turned out to be a key part of making it possible for our data scientists to function. At all. It was the only way we could both protect the incredibly sensitive information about lots of people while allowing analysis work to proceed.
Aside: anyone who wants to talk about doing data analysis without access to the underlying data is cordially invited to explain how to do this to statisticians who only understand R and local Jupyter notebooks.
"But wait!" you protest, "Can't the business work just as well without that sensitive information?". That's a good question! The short answer is no. No, it cannot, and unfortunately there's a great deal of actuarial history behind this.
"But wait!" cry you, "Could you have not simply trusted them?". That's also an excellent question! To which the uncomfortable response runs roughly: how comfortable do you feel with "we trust them" as the primary security controls when some company has your data? Especially when that trust means you might not even know about a breach? How do you think a regulator concerned with privacy would look at "we trust them" as a security and privacy approach?
Unfortunately, I think some forms of bossware serve a purpose. Sometimes it's one of the few options available that enables trust beyond the directly interpersonal.
Provision some isolated machines with access to production data, and let the data scientists login remotely. You'll be able to tell who is accessing the data and when, and won't need to install invasive bossware on their systems. It's a fairly straightforward solution. It's one thing to control access to sensitive data. Its another to use that to justify monitoring employees all day, even when they aren't accessing sensitive data.
There are a lot of options for monitoring for that kind of thing. You monitor the remote machine, you monitor the network traffic between it and their local terminal... and the most valuable will be monitoring their local machine to associate with the rest of the access and usage information. Among other things, you need to be able to distinguish between someone using the data scientist's credentials and the data scientist using their own credentials.
Your idea is a wonderful approach! It improves security, privacy, traceability, and auditability. It may not be the same as removing the need for endpoint monitoring, unfortunately.
We also didn't have bossware. There were access controls on the data itself, audit trails on who accessed the data, but no software running locally on my personal dev machine looking at what I did at any particular moment.
HIPAA governs the storage, transport, and use of that health information, and we all knew we were criminally liable if the information got out.
Bossware in a HIPAA environment (or other environment where not having leaks in important) can be more of a liability than a boon, because it becomes yet another vector for attack or data leakage. You are in effect sharing all data a machine can access, with the maker of the bossware.
Something with the teeth of HIPAA but for other pieces of personal information could go a long way. It's amazing how differently executives behave when the consequences of data leaks change from "customers could be unhappy if they found out" to "I could personally go to prison".
Meanwhile this data is getting leaked every other week by other companies. Didn't Equifax leak pretty much all sensitive information for the entire nation. What happened there?
I haven't formed a constructive thought out of all this yet, I'm just frustrated that we'll get surveillance software to allegedly protect data that's already been leaked by a hundred other companies.
Often this will be like the "think of the children" argument. Of course we should be concerned about security and make efforts to protect data, but many times the same people who push surveillance software in the name of security will later turn a blind eye to other security practices or concerns that might be an inconvenience to them. Their concern for security will extend only as far as it gives them power.
To draw an imperfect comparison - improving the efficiency of electric car motors does little for those driving dino-juice-mobiles. That we as a society have the tools and ability to do better does not mean that every person and organization adopted them immediately and perfectly.
Joint distributions and generating functions trained against the production data to generate synthetic data, generally.
My takeaway is not just that that, but that it will be used to harm businesses as they train their employees to do the measured thing over and above the best thing for the company.
I suspect most people here could envision this as an extension of a "Lines of Code written" based performance metric and intuit the likely outcomes.
Similarly, I can see how the people working in this software slipped into this- they identified a need in the market with WFH, tried prototypes that were well received on the market, and keep iterating. Many of them legitimately are interested in time tracking and optimization, but of course the market for personal tools like that is very small and lots of employers want to pay you for this because they want more productive employees. Meanwhile the people buying them don’t really know what they are buying, they want to believe they have found a solution to the problem they are terrified of, employees pretending to work and milking them. And the employees exposed to it aren’t in a position of power to change it. And next thing you know we have a dystopian monster with enough funding to be responsible for people’s jobs itself, where no one individual has incentives to buck the curve or much ability to fight back.
What’s the solution then? Doctorow mentions unions, and I’d agree that could work. I think there must be another faction to join that doesn’t ruin you, something to compete with the monolith in case the monolith gets sick in this way. Being able to quit and find somewhere else only works if that somewhere else is mostly differentiated by the fact that it doesn’t do these programs you disagree with- many people will put up with this and worse if there is a large pay differential between it and the next option, or if they would have to move and uproot themselves. And if a government gets sick in this way it might not let you quit the country. You have to be able to form collective groups that can bargain with the behemoth, like a union, or political party, or other action that relies on people for it’s power and not capital. That’s one reason why money in politics is so worrying to me, because the way I see it, it messes with this crucial release valve of political action.
And author covered it as well. The technology is interesting and COULD be applied appropriately, but management class seems to be going for low hanging fruits and easy solutions completely undermining what could be a useful tool if used appropriately. The problem, and not a small one at that, is that the management class, in US at least, had a free ride for the past few decades. They only had to threaten with a stick and that was enough. They only know how to use a hammer.
I absolutely agree on Brazil. It is so easy to forget our jobs have impact on the world outside.
Why don't bosses just fire their managers and hire better ones than contract some software? It should be impossible to milk your employer if you are expected to be contributing. Anyone on your team will see right away you are full of shit if you are actually full of shit. If they can get the job done half assed, and people are none the wiser, then good for that employee figuring out how to optimize their time while still delivering acceptable performance that no one is complaining about.
What managers want to know is how much do their workers contribute to the success of the company. What they measure is how much time do workers spend doing X. They're completely glossing over the middle step of how does the time spent doing X contribute to the success of the company, which is usually taken as some kind of linear equation.
Over-measurement is often worse than not measuring anything at all.
Yes. Not only is "time spent" or "code written" or "features implemented" or even "user engagement" a lossy metric in the best of cases but it can literally end up doing the exact opposite of what you intended. Campbell's & Goodhart's laws are often cited. The trap I see in software companies is a hyperfocus on quantifiable short term wins, entirely glossing over the value created by longer term cultivation of quality. One can see projects where code cleanliness, documentation, testing, CI, and performance have been effectively disincentivised, even though, in the short, mid, and long-term, you will see gains. Such gains, however, are less visible and less quantifiable to the kinds of people who define and foster the metric regimes.
A narrative I observe variations of:
Universe X:
- Programmer A implements feature in one week. They get a admiration and a raise.
- One year later: Programmer B implements feature in 3 weeks, because they had to use Programmer A's shoddy and inconsistent API.
Universe Y:
- Programmer A implements feature in two weeks. Less admiration and no raise.
- One year later: Programmer B implements feature in 1 week, because they were able to use Programmer A's better implemented interface.
Hopefully it's obvious which universe is preferable and produced a net-win. ...
Bad metric regimes are unforuntately not _obviously_ bad when you're inside their machinations. They really need to be dug into to see the fallacies.
One has to look no further than Meta/Facebook for the absolute deteriment caused by overzealous performance reviews and a fixation of experimental upticks in user engagement. It is a bad metric regime.
Universe Z: - Programmer X implements feature A in 1 week with tiny scope - Feature B is mothballed and never gets built
Universe A: - Programmer X implements feature in 2 weeks - One year later: This functionality is broken apart into a well defined microservice with additional responsibilities. This needs a total rewrite as a v2 API.
Universe B: - Programmer implements a feature in 1 week - One month later with that extra week they were able to squeeze in an unrelated enhancement to the system that delivered .5% extra revenue during Black Friday.
I find most of the productivity metrics fail because you're squeezing the wrong end of the process. You want to spend the most time making sure you're doing what matters and has value, and then it will almost always be worth the time. This makes people feel engaged, which will lead to a lot more productivity than when you're pushing them to build something they don't care about.
Spec universe: engineer makes thing. bean counters believe they will be out of business if others see how thing is made and copywright their code. another engineer wants to make the same thing. a second engineer has to be brought in to write up a spec. the other engineer now tries to reinvent this wheel from basically a telephone game description on how it should work and behave. as a result any time an engineer needs a wheel you need a second engineer to describe it to you so you can reinvent the wheel.
open source universe: engineer makes thing. second engineer forks thing.
"How does the time spent doing X contribute to the success of the company?" is a hard question. It has incredible value and every company should spend a great deal of time considering it.
"How much time do workers spend doing X?" is an easy question, and so we have used its answer as the answer to the hard question.
The whole thing is down to poor management(-culture). Good managers already know who their top performing team members are. They don't need these tools. Measuring LOC or time spend sitting at the desk is in my view attempting to compensate for lack in management skills. It's like advertising agencies that can't sell ads without AdSense. Boss-ware is an attempt by poor managers to make up for a lack of skills by applying something that looks science from a distance.
If you can't measure output, there is no point in measuring input.
> 20 years ago, if you were eating your dinner under the unblinking eye of a video-camera, it was because you were in a supermax prison.
Or a shopping mall. Or an airport. Or a convenience store. Or the lobby of a hotel. Or a bank. Or about a million other places.
> Now, thanks to "luxury surveillance," you can get the same experience in your middle-class home with your Google, Apple or Amazon "smart" camera. Those cameras climbed the curve, going from prisons to schools to workplaces to homes.
This is a fundamentally inaccurate comparison. Nobody is forcing anyone to get a "smart" camera. I don't own one and I never will. Mandatory surveillance at work or in public is not the same issue as mandatory surveillance in private. This also totally ignores the fact that people aren't buying surveillance devices because they surveil. They're buying them for other reasons. Also, there's no "Them" out in the world making this all happen. It's natural evolution as technologies evolve and change. There's no conspiracy, just a lot of not particularly bright ideas colliding at once.
What we should be talking about are all the forms of surveillance people don't opt into - abuse of the cameras on your phone, laptop, etc. The scary thing, to me, is not "what will this technology you chose to acquire do when working as intended" but "how will forces you can't control subvert the things you have for other reasons."
This is what the point of the Shitty Technology Adoption Curve. The surveillance starts with people who don't have the agency to opt out of it.
We in the software and IT industry have a fair amount of choice when it comes to our work environments. If a potential employer insists on a screen recorder or keylogger, we can see these as warning flags and generally have options to go work someplace else. A lot of people don't have this luxury. If it's the choice between either working somewhere where your boss is timing your piss breaks or not being able to pay rent, that's really not much of a choice.
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to envisage a possible future where you won't be able to participate in the modern economy if you don't agree to corporate surveillance. Not that it's impossible to opt out, just as it's not impossible to live off the electric grid today if you really want to.
Hopefully the free market will drive idiot corporations that time their employees piss breaks out of business. Clever corporations that are smarter about their surveillance could still be around though.
I feel like a fool. I watch Microsoft like a hawk, and I didn't even know about this. Every time I think I'm too cynical about a FAANG company -- and Microsoft in particular -- I find that I haven't been nearly cynical enough.
Forgive me, a small thing but I don't think Microsoft is a FAANG. They're more like IBM 2.0. Every now and then their drones try to jam an M in the acronym in a sad 'how do you do, fellow kids' kinda way.
"instead of monitoring individual usage, employers can monitor aggregate levels of usage and send general reminders to staff. If excessive private use persists, monitoring can be increased in line with the defined rules of the organisation, for example to specifically target particular suspicions" those rules should also be made public to the employees
Additionally staff should be made aware and formally comment on any subjective interpretation of data for their evaluation.
Also if using ML the also should be published and be explainable ML
Also EY says monitoring only for "legitimate reasons" which is a legal murky area.
https://edps.europa.eu/data-protection/data-protection/refer...
https://edps.europa.eu/data-protection/data-protection/refer...
Warning: Potential Severance spoilers ahead.
I finished watching Severance S1, and one of the open questions is what work the innies are actually doing. And reading this article it strikes me that the Severance work is the ideal culmination of the worker tracking + Goodhart's law cycle.
You make # of clicks a metric, so then the best performers are those who optimize for # of clicks, and so an AI trying to improve work efficiency by emulating what the best performers are doing rewards nonsensical clicking over actual work, and that cycle continues until you end up with something like the Severance job, which involves nothing but click and dragging numbers into 1 of a few bins based on how you "feel" about the numbers. At the same time the innies are told that what they are doing is extremely important.
YOu have the perfect combination of mindless work, which is not entirely monotonous (because you have to go by your "feeling", which would not be the case if you just had to repeatedly drag 1 number to the same bin) and at the same time you're motivated because you're convinced you're participating in a great good. This way you maximize the measured busywork output while still preventing your employees from immediately burning out.
There's an election coming up in Sweden.
One of the parties is literally advertising their platform with "more security cameras on our streets" (Moderaterna), and every party is keen to expand police power to have more surveillance and wiretapping without prior criminal suspicions (at least according to the "Election compass" on SVT: https://valkompass.svt.se/2022)
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252521757/Microsoft-Offi...
I know telemetry services eat up a lot of resources in my work laptop from time to time.
I think this is basically the core. Bossware, like all technology is essentially about increasing efficiency. If your boss is shit, this technology is going to make them far more effective at being shit.
They aren't just going to do all the traditional things that make them shit - unclear goals, over-rewarding presenteeism, being sexist, racist or misogynist. Now they're going to do all those things but a lot more effectively.
Maybe in general this is a good thing, it's going to increase the gap between good bosses and bad bosses and that will in the end cause the good bosses to outperform the bad bossess and the bad bosses' will be identified, or at the least the companies that have bad bosses will be outperformed.
I would say the problem of this bossware is actually worse in schools and prisons - because those environments lack the same feedback paths that regulate this.
Also, I would disagree that shitty bosses are responsive to their own bad management consequences. Remember that at Blizzard a manager harassed a report to the point of suicide[edit: to be clear, literally passed around explicit pictures of the report through the company, the report killed themselves around that time, so this is allegedly]-- what're the consequences for that manager? They are probably still managing somewhere.
For now the parts that are enabled by default (Daily digest etc) seem to only be visible to the user and announce that fact prominently.
But that does a lot to shift the conversation and acclimatise users to tracking. The jump for the hr module to be enabled is already much reduced vs installing 3rd party spyware software
They say it's all anonymized but it's really easy to correlate back to users by playing with settings.
its like even the basis by which they measure work, is not work. but since thats all they ever do, they have no other frame of reference.
And I didn't have to because I had a nice boss but wfh made me uneasy. I made up the need in my head that I had to be not "away" while working. So I did it out of habit ... not too strict though.
Not to mention that I'm always a bit nervous typing passwords into a computer under the eyes of recording machines.
That doesn't seem right where are you getting that? A workplace is probably not considered "public" so a third party might be restricted on recording you there. But your employer isn't a third party here so you're straight back into og labor relations and what does your contract say and what does your union allow etc.
How do they evaluate people for promotion if you aren't allowed to monitor anyone's performance in any way?
nit: it's better stated as "any measurement becomes a target".
Reading the article, I had a pang of hope. If it's really as anti-effectual as described, perhaps just everyone needs to buy mouse jiggling dongles and the push behind the immediate trend will lose momentum.
Or really, it's just another step in the corporate-Keynesian make-busy-work economy that has gobbled up most of our productivity gains for decades.
All thanks to Big Tech, and by the looks of it if we don't do something to counter against this, we will also own nothing and we will be very happy under the eyes the technocratic elite.
Very recently I contacted support on a Saturday around 5pm. They replied Sunday night after midnight when I was asleep. My support ticket was closed around 5am as "did not respond". Between the reply and closing my ticket, I was asleep the entire time. I have never been so furious.
I’m less worried about the Orwellian bossware and more about the Huxleyian warning of an abundance of so much information that bosses can hardly decipher what work is even being done.
You eat a banana. It's delicious and nutritious. Cool.
You read about a fellow who ate a banana. Ah, such a fond reference.
You read about your banana-research employees. Taste, nutrition and fond references are furthest from your mind. You only care about your sales numbers.
Abstraction=progressive numbness.
We have this problem in the US armed forces rather acutely. Everyone is breaking many rules and regulations daily but the chain of command does nothing about the vast majority of infractions. Reserving enforcement for when they feel like it, for reasons having nothing to do with the actual rules.
This is anarcho-tyranny.
As a people manager in software I fight this kind of stuff, and I feel like only the most morally compromised managers push it.
It’s never an honest attempt to optimize the work. It’s a way to force you to provide evidence for your dismissal.
https://www.kjsmall.com/projects/film-soup-tips-tricks
In the context of the article, it seems the consultants would take copious notes (the negatives) and then go back and 'soup' them in order to have something interesting to present even though it's an unrealistic picture of the office.
Third party software that supports such schemes though arms-length lack of accountability, simply lower the cost of increasing the granularity of intelligence collection and control. However, it doesn't solve the foundational problems of organizations dooming themselves with unsustainable policies, or the statistical nonsense business intelligence companies produce.
My advice, "vote with your feet" and keep seeking to a better life. ;)
Some will argue these are necessary security tools, but in reality if the executives are so afraid of their employees ratting them out or selling their data to Russian hackers or whatever, then they've got larger problems with their organization (again, see Theranos).
Just because it is on an upward trajectory and higher than ever before does not mean that it is at apogee — it could just as well continue climbing to greater heights, which in this case seems rather likely.
The repeated theme of measuring things like continuous keystrokes that are actually counterproductive to accomplishing key tasks is the essence of bad management. Extended through an organization to far, it could literally kill it. Getting the key info might be tricky, but it seems worthwhile to create a stock fund of companies NOT using worker spyware and shorting companies who use it extensively.
I will believe it when I see it in action. If there is one thing that remain constant is the golden rule ( "He who has gold makes the rules" ). And boss class has the gold.
“I’m extremely happy with the progress you made this month, but HR says you worked zero hours this week.”
“I couldn’t figure out how to use the corporate laptop. Sorry about that.”
If this does actually negatively affect bottom lines, it's bad business, end of story. Capitalism seeks to optimize output and if this is truly failing to do so, it's not a capitalist pursuit.
pluralistic.net##*:style(font-family: Fira Sans !important)
pluralistic.net##*:style(font-family: unset !important)In reality, you'd realize it was horrible, but orders are orders, so most people would do it. If they found it particularly objectionable, they'd just look for another job in the meantime, but most folks who are not financially independent wouldn't take a stand for it.
Middle management has to educate upper management on why certain metrics are bad. I do it all the time. Most recent one was length a PR was open. Some of my better devs opened PRs earlier and left them open for feedback longer, and I didn't want them penalized, so I communicated (with data) to management that it was a bad metric and we no longer measure it.
I disagree. The point of a boss is to squeeze as much productivity as possible from contributors in order to meet business goals. If they do that as a humane understanding collaborator or as a micromanaging tyrant depends on two factors: what kind of person they are and how much leeway does upper management allow. If a boss is of the 'telling their boss to eat shit' variety, they're usually not going to stay a boss for long..
You can’t just say it’s not capitalism when it’s the exact consequence of capitalism just because it resulted in something you don’t like. The “totalitarian path” is the one that capitalism laid bare before your feet.
I'm saying that I don't understand or need your hypothetical totalitarian government when the article is about real corporate bosses doing this today, in our capitalist system.
The problem with the phrase is the assumption that any day now, something else will inevitably come along to replace it and make everything better. That "replacement" has unfortunately proved at least as problematic as the history of capitalism.
It's not real totalitarianism.