WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
privacyinternational.org
privacyinternational.org
Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. Bad businesses will continue to use draconian methods to try to squeeze productivity rather than foster it. Quit the bad ones, join the good ones.
Watercooler surveillance requires physical access for cameras and lip-reading, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36188381
This is why universal income is extremely important, so that people can pursue better jobs without risking being vulnerable.
A better solution is to focus on worker’s rights and labor regulations. Of course that opens the internationalism question, but so too would ubi.
At the same time, we currently have plenty of people who do not want to work and do indeed not work, that will not change regardless of what you implement. I also think that happy and healthy non-working people are worth more to humanity than unhappy or unhealthy working people.
Sorry about the cost of your bathroom addition though.
How about: a just and civil economic system is one where the more utility I produce the higher quality of life I can achieve?
This is very different from what you implied (being punished for creating value). Taxes and UBI aren't in opposition to this. It still rewards production and those that create value. It also recognizes that hard work isn't always valuable (digging a tunnel with a spoon is harder than with heavy machinery. But the latter provides more value). Maybe we should frame things this way instead. Progressive taxes do not result in situations where a raise in pay causes a decrease in take-home money. It does instead address the issue that money is sticky and the mere existence of capital passively generates capital (which actually means you generate wealth without doing work). Fine at certain levels but clearly can get out of control (generate wealth for retirement vs generational/perpetual wealth where your children end up wealthier than you passively).
That's to say that functional courts and a state that acts as the only legitimate applicator of force tends to be a lot better for the rich, and those too fall (or themselves turn on the rich, too) when they stray too far from the line.
Not the right framing, but not far off. It depends where you set the threshold and how much you extract. Remember that money is a resource where positive feedback loops exist: "you have to have money to make money", "the first million is the hardest", or "passive income." We can think of money as sticky and attractive. Momentum matters. Also remember that a capitalist market relies on competition and money to be fluid and constantly exchanged. Transactions are not zero-sum, but many times result in a positive value. This is even true in a pure fair transaction and without considering external costs like taxes.
tldr: there are sources and sinks in the economy and this is conditioned on the value in the previous time-step. Capitalism works well when value is continually exchanged: meaning sinks are bad.
Once we consider these things, "fair" gets more complicated. One can argue that it isn't fair that wealth begets wealth. That certain goods have an economic value that is not being captured by the evaluations, and are often difficult to put price tags on (e.g. air quality). Tragedy of the commons is quite real. One can also argue that it isn't "fair" that the system does not optimize for societies and instead optimizes individuals. Fair is difficult to define and none of this is as easy as it appears on the surface. Both pro and anti-UBI people make these mistakes. I'm not attacking a particular side but rather suggesting this isn't as straight forward as you have characterized.
Also important to stress that most (limited) experiments suggest this assumption to bee true. UBI is not as radical as many people pretend it is. It is essentially a one size fits all solution replacing all existing welfare programs with, in many cases, better outcomes.
Guess what: That's true for pretty much everything. That doesn't mean discounting the evidence we do have because it's just that, evidence, is a reasonable thing to do.
Yet nobody has ever proposed a version of UBI that is truly universal. It's always limited to a certain in-group. This incentivizes the in-group to stretch the most out of their UBI: that is outsource all menial work to a permanent underclass of immigrants who don't receive free government money, which is exactly what happens in Saudi Arabia.
I pointed out upthread that the so-called "universal" aspect of UBI is a dealbreaker. Special groups will complain, and have mass support for their complaints, if ever UBI is rolled out.
In your world, it's "fair" if 20yo gamers get the same monthly stipend as a 40yo cripple. In reality you'd have complaints from special groups that will be supported in their grievance by the clear majority of the population.
Counterpoint: not a single person born was asked to be put here. None. Every one of us was put here because 2 people chose to have sex (with or without consent) and left us as a result.
To that original sin of non-consent, the least those already here owe us is the minimum to live, without any "input".
> Just by being in existence, they deserve to consume natural resources / technology? I don't see how that makes sense.
The sun provides nearly limitless energy. Natural resources can be used to make things. The 'free' resources are already there. To say that every human gets a 'share' of resources upon birth isn't exactly a foreign thought, either. The richie's with trust funds get this... But somehow daddy dearest having others work hard for him means he benefits.
Yes. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We also must acknowledge the tragedy of the commons, and that just by existing both utility is being extracted from them (in the modern era) and natural resources that there is no question that they have a right to (air, water, etc) are being utilized and modified by others. E.g. a coal processing plant provides a lot of utility (electricity) but the economic model does not account for the costs that this has on both a global (carbon) and local (pollution) consequences on shared goods (that are innate rights).
Honestly, I have no idea how people are so willing to sacrife human rights, right literally millions of people had to die in order for us to have them, for the sake of profit and capitalism, benefits only an extremely limited number of people actually have.
What about human rights of those at the other side of a stick? Is it a human right to demand something from another human being? Is it a human right to have to provide to someone?
Articles 22 and 25 in the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
Either you are trolling, trying to pass as a ultra-tough meritocrate or you just don't care about other people. Maybe all of the above.
Edit: All edge and no point sums up your comment, and the GP, pretty well, I guess.
But ok, I'll bite. Nobody made the UN king, the UN so contains a vast majority of nations. As stated, those rights are universal, and apply to everyone, including you. Since th UN signed of, basically every nation did as well. That a lot are not respecting them is a different story, but doesn't neuter those rights.
Also, those rights, one way or the other and to various degrees, are already enshrined in western democratic constititions (I don't whether or those sets of law are actually called that).
And no, human rights are not defined by a majority vote. Otherwise we would have the human right to be held as slave, to be lynched because of skin color, sexual orientation or religion, imprisoned because of your political opinion without trial and a whole lot of other nasty things.
Currently, the UN isbthe hoghest, most universal body tondefine such things we have. If sometjing better comes along, fine. For the UN to be born, we needed WW2 and millions of murdered civilians. That answers your question of who died, childreny, the elderly across fronts and beligerent nations all over the world. And the same kind of people continue to die because they don not have those rights everyone in the free democracies takes for granted.
And let's not be dicks by denying our fellow human beings the most basic freedoms and human dignity. Argueing for that isn't edgy, it is pathetic and only shows incredible levels of priviledge.
Even your own examples illustrate the fragility of these rights.
> And no, human rights are not defined by a majority vote. Otherwise we would have the human right to be held as slave, to be lynched because of skin color, sexual orientation or religion, imprisoned because of your political opinion without trial and a whole lot of other nasty things.
Surely human rights _are_ defined by majority vote, given that not all humans had the right to be free in relatively recent history in the US. What force would these human rights have if they were defined by the Sri Lankan government and held by no other?
Hell, I feel like I'm trapped in an interview with Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro...
Once somebody's „human rights“ has to be provided by someone else and is someone else's work... It's no longer a „human right“. It's forced labour from the providing side. This modern version of so-called „human rights“ is a disgrace to once great idea.
Now you need to figure out rent-control.
But that could screw up the construction market, reducing the incentive to build, and thus the supply. And quite possibly the quality of said supply.
And that’s just housing.
That's never going to happen. UBI will not replace existing welfare payouts, it will augment them.
Until society is ready to let people and children die in the street because they (or their parents, in the case of children) gambled or boozed all of the UBI away, or it got stolen from them, or they simply burned it due to mental health problems, we still have to have safety nets for people who don't have money.
Which is the whole point of the current welfare assistance system.
UBI is also a no-go in terms of "universal". It's just too unfair. Why should a healthy 20yo get paid (to play video games) the same as a crippled 40yo? The latter literally needs more money just to survive, and doesn't have the same employment options as the healthy 20yo gamer.
If ever UBI is rolled out, you'll see on day two the complaints come rolling in from special groups.
What's unfair is to take away someone's welfare once they finally land a minimal pay job. That diminishes or removes the incentive to actually find a job.
Did I say otherwise?
Me agreeing that taking away
> someone's welfare once they finally land a minimal pay job.
Is not the same as me agreeing that all welfare systems are unfair (You're only considering unemployment welfare payments. There's others).
I don't understand how you can confuse the two.
It's possible to have what almost everyone would consider a fair welfare system.
It's not possible to have what even a significant minority would consider to be a fair UBI system.
Welfare systems have a goal of ensuring that people who need more get more.
UBI has the goal of ensuring that no one gets more than anyone else.
Another welfare system in addition to the existing welfare system is quite undesirable for most proponents of UBI who (like the parent I responded to earlier) present "no other welfare system" as a benefit of UBI.
I think it worth considering UBI in this light. I'm not a proponent of eliminating all other welfare.
I do. Because these sentences are in opposition, not support. If they are undesirable in the workforce (reduce productivity or whatever) then why would you want them working? If they drain x dollars from the system, UBI costs y dollars, and if y < x, then it is profitable to pay them to do nothing. Incentive structures are complex and so this is going to be more difficult than the simple equation I wrote, but it serves as a guideline. But I don't think most people want to live the basic life, the minimum.
Here's how I see it: if the measure of a man is how he treats someone who can give him nothing, then the measure of a country is how they treat those that do nothing for them. In other words: the floor. I don't believe countries should have ceilings on wealth or how quality of life, but they should have floors (they all do fwiw). That's what we should focus on more: the floor, not the ceiling.
Personally I think USSR was somewhat close to UBI. Working was mandatory and pay was crap. But everybody looked the other way when somebody slacked or was drunk at work all the time. It was next to impossible to get fired for poor performance or drink at work and so on. The result was that good chunk of population abused this by drinking their days away and doing least possible amount of work. While other portion of population was fed up with the former and didn't give a fuck either. Productivity was very low. Aside from shadow economy where the later group worked their asses off. Doing their best to build a good life for themselves and not support slackers too much.
Once we reach that point, as a society we have to answer the question of what happens to those people who find themselvesbout ofbwork. And those left with dull and dangerous jobs, usually the underpaid ones as well.
As long as you are a proponent of unlimited capitalism and still have a job, not varing is one answer. Caring about more than oneself, or taking a more long term view, aiming for some kind of social net, and UBI is an option, is only prudent. Too much social unrest is recipe for disaster, and ultimately revolution (history has examples for that as recent as the Arab Spring). Smart ruling classes want to avoid that, e.g. Bismarck who invented the Prussian / German to combat a raise of socialist ideologies.
Not smart elites, and wannabe elites, optimize for their own short term benefit. As did French nobility once.
However, there's lots and lots of stuff that needs to be done for society to function properly. E.g. all sorts of community work. From organising local community events to self-support groups to picking up trash in a local park. A lot of stuff works (or doesn't, looking at mental health statistics) just because a volunteer pops up. However, if we as society suddenly had a fuckton of money available, maybe we could improve here? Hire people who can run arts classes in local community center. Or, first, build the damn community center :) Or hire more people to pick up trash.
It's not economically viable to keep streets and parks clean. Or offer free arts classes. But if we don't care about what is economically viable, maybe we could put resources there?
Of course, with UBI, maybe someone would volunteer to pick up trashes while getting a meager amount of money. Or maybe he will sit on a couch because picking trash is a boring compared to playing Guitar Hero 24/7.
However, building strong communities with passionate people may create all sorts of issues in the future. It's easier to control couch potatoes relying on government handouts for generations.
I think right here is where the issue is going to come in. Currently society at large won't be getting that money, it's mostly accreting in the pockets of an small set of increasingly ultra wealthy people
Do they perhaps prefer covering for execs bonuses?
It’s really weird how many people will wail and rage against welfare for both their peers and poorer people, but have no issue whatsoever making a someone else richer.
Just to be clear, I personally have no issue with either, as long as it feels reasonable.
Many of them are still better than having nobody and if they have to work to get money they are also somewhat incentivized to at least do the bare minimum.
Counterpoint: Some management handbooks consider both unmotivated and motivated workers problematic. Would you rather deal with a highly motivated moron or a substantially less motivated Einstein?
...and? That's fine. there will always be some people who do not want to work. a UBI guarantees somewhat basic level of living conditions at least.
I failed to consider the audience.
I’d like to opt out of paying for war but sadly I can’t. My tax dollars going to help people instead of kill and oppress them seems like a huge upgrade.
Is your work really helping society?
In seriousness, I wish there was more self-awareness like this in our field.
Basically I’m for any system that allows people to tell bad bosses to get fucked.
Also a good argument for universal health care.
But many would not need to live with the existential dread of perhaps ending up living under a bridge some day. Or skipping meals just to make rent.
Perhaps some would not need to give up on their lives and education by getting some minimum-wage job to help out their family or because of some early accident instead of going to college.
I am quite certain it could end up a net positive for society as a whole.
Reminds me of that quote:
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
And yes, it would shift the power dynamic in the workplace.
The whole point of UBI is that it keeps incentives for working, as most people - especially the most valuable employees - do want much more than a basic income, - and also supports partial employment (as opposed to things like means-tested welfare). What it would change the most is the situation regarding "shit jobs" which are both poorly paid and undesirable; and if the desperate workers get some alternatives, then these jobs would have to pay more, improve conditions, or not get done if they aren't that needed; and that seems a good effect to me.
Good. It's preferable that people who don't want to work stay home and do other things, rather than coming into the office and not working.
Not least it is paid in arrears and is designed to take 6 weeks to get the first (backdated) payment, by which time anyone who actually needs it is already likely to be overdrawn to the tune of a month's rent and utilities.
https://www.newstatesman.com/quickfire/2022/10/universal-cre...
https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/universal-credit-chaos...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/universal-cr...
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/government-benefit-sa...
The Australian Centrelink programme is a pretty good example of what happens: one government introduces a system of unemployment benefits and then later a different conservative government (whose members and voting base don't like poor people) are able to pervert the system through means testing provisions and other bureaucratic hurdles to effectively prevent a large subset of eligible persons from actually collecting the benefits to which they are entitled, but without having to deal with the political fallout of actually ending or reducing benefits on paper.
Assessors are pressured, and incentivised financially, to get through as many cases as possible[0]. One gentleman recorded his assessment and found multiple falsifications[1]:
> On his phone recording you can clearly hear the assessor carrying out a peak test to measure his lung function, and reading out the data.
> But in the final report, his last reading appears to have doubled from 150 L/min to 300 L/min, making him seem better than he actually was.
The means testing of disability benefits in the UK is such an abject failure, that a noticeable number of people die within a month of being declared fit for work[2].
[0] https://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/news/pip-assessors-paid-bo...
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-41581060
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/27/thousands-di....
All we can be certain of is that they don't want to spend most of their lives under a dictatorship, and that's fair imo.
Except that most of the people who did not work actually did work. They would hunt for food, chop fire wood, haul their garbage to the dump, cook their own food, raise their own children, and do the many other things that are necessary to live.
I'm not saying that they type of person you describe does not exist. They do. Some of them lived in the very community I described. I am saying that because we tend to have a very specific, and peculiar, idea of what work means. We almost universally mean working for another. It doesn't much matter whether we are an employer or an employee, the product of that work is typically meant for someone outside of our family, social circles, and community. At the same time we dismiss any form of labour that isn't based upon some sort of transaction, the type of labour that is central to the health of both families and communities. Our culture has these notions so entrenched that the lack of a "proper job" does destroy people, psychologically. Not only is one's sense of value lost, but the value of other types of relationships is greatly diminished.
I don't really see worker rights or labour regulations as a complete solution since we are dealing with a problem that is stitched into the fabric of our society. Likewise, UBI is not a complete solution. If we were to dive into UBI today, which is about providing for people's basic needs from our surpluses (it is not about providing easy wealth), some people would be destroyed because we have never put much thought into what it means to live without there being some sort of transaction. We have never put much thought into what a non-authoritarian workplace would look like. We have never put much thought into what we need and our relationship with society as a whole.
The question that I have trouble answering is how can we build the foundation of a society where we aren't simply asking whether we work to live or live to work? A society where people's needs are met without coercion. A world where people want to contribute to a more egalitarian society.
I have a very hard time buying the narrative that were people to not work to make a living that they'd be a net drain on society. I see little evidence. I also see this as claiming that a post-scarce society is impossible. This is also critical as we live in a time where the potential for a post-scarce world exists (robotic workers liberate humanity from labor). It is even critical if we live in a semi or limited post scarce world, which is the transitional period to a post scarcity society (we're possibly in this).
[0] I say I'd like to read math books, research, and publish openly. Not far from what I do now (academia). People counter me saying that that's work.
Instead, we should focus on getting people to work. Whatever that takes. We should reward those who want to work and penalize those who don't. If you can't work due to a real disability, you should be helped.
Ah, the old whip, yes… -_-'
Fuck you.
Even with our current systems, we have a situation where people live in such precarity that employers are able to treat them abusively/illegally. An egregious example would be "companies hiring children to clean slaughterhouses on a nightshift". More generally, we shouldn't put people in a position where they have to accept abuse because the alternative is massive upheaval at best, homelessness at worst.
If we need everyone who can work to actually work, if we want to force people to work with a threat that if they don't contribute to society then they'll be (for example) homeless - well, then we don't (yet) need UBI and should not implement UBI until(if) we get the problem which UBI would fix.
Labor - I build a fence for my home, or fix plumbing, or make miniatures, or do cool stuff. I and those around me benefit from my labor. I may help a friend move. Or help to do light construction, or networking. Again, we benefit.
Work is labor where someone else takes the lion's share of the labor and keeps the surplus, where you nearly never see the result and keep scraps of your worth. You'll never see your 'worth', and all attempts will be made to hide it. The 'who' whom gets this massive surplus is the company you work for. Lots of hand-wavey reasons will be made why your share is low.
I have no problem with labor. I and those around me benefit. Work is exploitative and serves to make someone else richer at my, my family's, and my friends expense.
most ppl dont want to work some unrelateable, bullshit under time constraints for richer ppl they dont even know or like. so mostly we chug along and put in the required performances.
imo this is unesessary and counterproductive since we have gained access to automation of most physical and a lot of office work.
UBI, like Roko's basilisk, is the magical thinking of our age. We need a working government to meet people's needs because the market sure as hell can't. That's a lot harder than just brrrr.
UBI would, and should, replace current welfare schemes. We already have those in place.
But that would still require a huge amount of additional money if you want UBI to be above subsistence levels.
Otherwise the amount received by current welfare recipients would have to be cut several times. Also what about disabled people and others who can't work? Would they get the same amount as everyone?
Whose fault is it then? I mean if we agree that some governments/organizations are more efficient than others who else could we blame?
>UBI replacing many systems
For instance the British government spends about £2500 per capita on welfare. Even if admin etc. would cost nothing £200 per month is not exactly an amount which would allow you to not work, meaning people who can't actually work would starve/freeze/etc. to death without any additional support from the government or somebody else.
Look I am not a political philosopher, not even close. But I can refer you to Robert Nozick's the Minimal Estate. I am not sure I agree with everything he says there, but I think he describes interesting points regarding govnmt efficiency.
For fraud issue you have the bank or banks running the program handle fraud per normal procedures and the government steps in to prosecute people who abuse the system as they do in present situations. The program loses no more than a normal bank to fraud and covers losses from fraud by investing deposits in safe securities.
You can just give everyone an equal amount of cash instead but then disabled and other people who are unable to work would starve to death unless there is massive increase in taxes/redistribution.
It can't. There still needs to be a safety net for people who don't use their UBI to buy food or shelter.
And then you're back where we are now - some sort of safety net for people who don't have food or shelter.
Some initiatives still need to exist but UBI obviates the need for the majority of them, simplifies the administration, removes bureaucratic expenses, and reduces the "othering" of people who depend on the support the most.
That's still a non-zero need for the administration and overhead of a welfare system.
> Some initiatives still need to exist but UBI obviates the need for the majority of them, simplifies the administration, removes bureaucratic expenses,
How does it remove anything if the other systems still need to exist?
By definition alone, the existing systems still need to exist, only without the economies of scale that they have today.
By the way, I don't think UBI obviates the need for a "majority" of them. It obviates the need for one welfare payment system. The others still need to exist to serve whoever they are serving now.
Most of the other systems don't need to exist. Those that do are narrower in scope and can better serve a much smaller group of people.
> By definition alone, the existing systems still need to exist, only without the economies of scale that they have today.
Means tested welfare systems have almost no economies of scale. Every case needs an assessor and the more people you deal with the more assessors you need. The alternative is to reduce the quality of the assessment. Even worse, the assessment process is often contracted out. So now the program pays wages to a fleet of assessors and also to shareholders.
> By the way, I don't think UBI obviates the need for a "majority" of them. It obviates the need for one welfare payment system. The others still need to exist to serve whoever they are serving now.
In the UK, off the top of my head, it would entirely replace: unemployment benefits, housing benefits, child tax benefits, disability benefits, working tax credits, EMA, and childcare payments.
The main difference to many of the people who are "served" by the current system is that they'll actually receive the benefits they're entitled to, without having to know how to apply, and roll the dice on a minimally trained assessor with a financial incentive to say no.
Paying meaningful money would be too expensive at scale. Then few jobs could pay meaningfully more than the universal income. Why work if you get +/- not working?
What would really happen is they would raise their prices to earn the amount of profit they deem necessary to be worth the trouble of being in business. Everything gets more expensive, and the UBI payments won't be enough to live on.
If UBI was a cushy amount covering more than the bare basics, low-tier jobs would pay a very small premium over pure UBI.
The question you pose will remain with UBI, as will poverty. It might just get more extreme for anyone who gets disqualified from UBI for some reason (undocumented, etc).
This problem has not been solved for UBI nor seen in small-scale trials. But there isn't a single rich country or region in the world where the retail prices have not adjusted to consumers' spending power.
in the United States. Europe has very strict rules about surveiling employees.
Example: In Austria we are not allowed to use some of the functions that Azure-AD joined computers would be capable of because employers _might_ push remote control software the user hasn't agreed to
Companies are not homogeneous blocks of matter and there is always information some people at the company may need to know that others have no business dealing with. Tax, banking and health related information are some of the things that I can think of that would be shared on a need to know basis with people at work and have no business to be seen by people outside of the intended audience.
I am against workplace surveillance, but why would people receive this information to their work email address?
I'm not aware of any EU wide laws that prevent what you're talking about here. In the UK an employment contract will state that the employer can monitor your activity if they need to and this is completely legal.
Source: https://www.gov.uk/monitoring-work-workers-rights
In some countries (Germany springs to mind) there are much stricter rules. A blanket statement like the one you've made here is not correct unless you're being very specific about where you're talking about.
You write down when you started working and you write down when you stop. Some employers automatically subtract your legally required break time, some want you to enter it manually.
> Is there a concept equivalent to US, salary employee?
Yes. It’s called full-time employee. This encompasses anyone and everyone who does not work as an independent contractor.
> If so what are they expected to work?
40 hours per week.
With mandated minimum lunch time and breaks, paid minimum vacation, paid medical leave, paid maternity/paternity, govt mandated lunch allowance, govt mandated transportation allowance based on commute distance, and many other “perks” that US companies use as negotiation tactics.
If you work more than 40 hours per week, you can request overtime pay. Many employees waive the overtime thing for various reasons. In some industries because they’re exploited (restaurants and such), in other industries because they’re Mission Driven and want to work more (startups and such).
The law is there to protect you, but in practiceit comes down to your relationship with your boss.
edit: Personally, I don’t like this paternalistic/maternalistic attitude from either approach (as laws or as perks). Just pay me a shitload of money and let me figure out the rest. I’m old enough to buy my own lunch thank you.
Salary = exempt = no overtime for you, sucker. Over time, more and more people have fallen under that category in the US.
Is there something like that in the EU, where you don't have max hours or overtime eligibility at all?
No, the EU is pretty strict about those things. Only way you can be ineligible for overtime is if you own the business. And even then you’re technically eligible, but I’ve never heard of anyone paying themselves overtime.
In practice the “exempt” part happens in a grey area: The boss and the employee shake hands to “make things simpler” and write down 40h every week in whatever tracking thingy. Worked less than 40? Great, you get 40. Worked more? Great, you get 40. wink wink
At least in Germany, managerial employees (mostly defined through hiring and firing authority) are traditionally exempt though this might be in conflict with the relevant EU regulations. We’ll see.
What I’m seeing commonly today is that your contracts will say the work week is 40 hours but x hours of overtime a month are already compensated.
Or you can request TOIL - Time Off In Lieu. That is a system designed to allow flexibility. Some jobs can't simply clock off when doing certain tasks. Provided it is agreed upon at contract negotiation time (ie the hiring process) then TOIL/overtime rates can work well for everyone.
Our (UK for me/EU) Employment Tribunals have a lot of power and a lot of law that generally favours the employee but also strives towards equitability. For the last 20+ years I hire but I still recall what being hired is like. I have found time and time again that being fair and open pays back in absolute spades. A pissed off employee is simply a burden and a cost. You can't please everyone all of the time but if you are known for fairness, that goes a long way.
I won't give you a shitload of money until you earn it for me 8) I too buy my own lunch and all other meals as required to live. I sometimes (always) need to be forced (cough reminded) to claim when we are contracting on a job that has allowances built in.
Some top tips for employees (EU/UK - perhaps others too): Do make sure you get things ironed out at the hiring stage. At the very least some things defined, written down and signed: Get place of work defined eg town/city - in the event of TUPE you may be required to move but if you have a defined place of work then you have all the aces! Get rates defined and a formal process for review. Hours of work. Responsibilities. Industry specifics. Read up on HR and how it works: you will be sat across the table with an expert in the law and how to err get the best out of you for the company which may not match up with your ideas. Do read up on all your govt provided advice - the GOV.UK stuff is pretty decent.
Basically: you have a duty to yourself to do your own due diligence, so please do it! You can expect to be treated reasonably fairly but you may not like the outcome so get the pack stacked fairly or at least not against you.
Basically you shouldn't lose your job for refusing to work more hours than are defined in the regulations, if you do there is a tribunal process. But, if the employee is willing there are ways around it.
They say you can opt in or out at any point by providing a written request to HR, but defaulting to opt out at the point when all the power is with the company (the candidate is signing the initial contract, and may not want to rock the boat) seems wrong IMO.
The legal limit in Germany is 10 hours net, pkus whatever break time is applicable. One exception are mainly surveilling duties, e.g. monitoring security cameras, where the limit is 12 hours. One theoretical "work around" is declaring Saturdays normal working days, as they legally are. Those 10 hours are (used to be, not surw if that changed) calculated on the average of 5 days, by using Saturday as working day on which people are not working the average is calculated based on six days with one day adding 0 hours to tje total. Not sure if that was ever tried in court so.
Disclaimer: The above applies to Germany.
Fun fact: If employees violqte those limits, the line manager is liable personally. That liability includes fines, I know of one case where said fine was 10k Euro, and theoretically even jail time.
The only thing that annoy me is the software my employer chose can only be accesed from inside the corporate network and do not provide a rest api. Otherwise I'd setup a large physical button with a led light connected to a pi zero so I can just hit it on starting and stopping my work.
Every job I applied to, even the most liberal ones mandates at least 2 day per week at the office in the best case, with some SW companies having max 1 day per week WFH because "we're more efficient at the office" lol. Every time I ask at an interview if they let me work 100% from home, so I don't waste 2h/day commuting, they look at me like I asked them to let me f*ck their mom.
Also, many Austrian companies keep rigid track of your time and breaks at the office via electronic card punch in/out systems which are a government mandated legalized forms of workplace surveillance, meaning I have to spend 8h per day at the office regardless of my work being done in 5 and unable to do anything remotely productive for the remaining 3 because my brain is fried, while some companies even make you punch out for coffee breaks so you're not taking a break on your employer's dime, meaning you need to spend even more time at the office what's beyond your legal allowed 30 min lunch break which is also not included in your 8h closely-recorded workday.
So IMHO, it's not all as progresive as you make it sound. It feels like an archaic system designed to keep unionized factory workers strictly in line to their mandated 30 min lunch breaks and making sure no overtime occurs on their shift, but is severely out of place in the world of digital knowledge work where it's used in some companies to keep employees at the office glued for 8 hours to their chairs.
This sort of thing backfires on the employer in my opinion. It's quite easy to stretch a task to fill 8 hours if you have to be there anyway. But maybe you'd be happy to clock out after 5 hours one day and take a few extra unpaid hours for yourself. If your work is done, the employer should be happy to save a little money and let you do that.
All work time is tracked by law in Austria, it's just that all-in is less invasive on the time tracking because it doesn't care for overtime because it's not paid.
What about jobs that aren't creative like coding or graphic design?
Some jobs are simply "sit in your chair and do work". The productivity metrics aren't speculative - they are measurable.
You may argue "these are jobs for AI" - but realistically alot of jobs are a way off from this.
Why shouldn't the "productivity" of these staff be measured? Because you don't like it?
If you work at "big shipping co" and "box" 1 item a day and your colleagues do 100, should you not be fired?
Those are results, and not measured by "is their ass in this chair for 8 hours?", same as monitoring keyboard and mouse usage.
So measure the output, not the mouse, not the keyboard, not the chair, etc.
Law firms would love every case to be solved in 2 hours if they still got the same $ value from a case that dragged on for 6 months.
You literally said "output" the most speculative / vague definition of "work" available.
I appreciate programmers / "creatives" "output" is much harder to measure, but there are alot of jobs where "mouse moving", "words per second" is a very reliable indicator of "output".
No one is arguing against this. Stop creating strawmen.
People are against draconian practices aimed at micromanaging people when data is already available, individuals are meeting targets or the targets aren't met due to something out of their control.
In the case of programming, if you have any decent system, you can query commit dates, opened bugs/features, closed bugs/features, time in meetings put on the public agenda, and more. None of this requires surveillance during the development process, only measuring inputs and outputs.
A percentage > 90% of the world isn't programmers...
There simply isn't the same workflow to monitor "word" / "pdf" documents without an insane amount of effort / document control that most SMB's dont have.
The only option available to them, without hiring programmers, is often only the metrics that get offered built into these types of products.
I dont think that's a strawman argument.
Most trivial things can be measured outside time. Many jobs measured on time, we already know why they are measured on time (low activity, presence-based jobs). Anything else, measuring based on behavior/time spent is management being lazy and not doing what they should be doing: comparing inputs and outputs, and measuring the impact of changes to them to improve productivity.
If a manager can't do something that basic, they shouldn't be looking for more bad proxies to hound people with. They should be doing the company a favor and quit.
Metrics like opened bugs/features and time in meetings can be easily gamed and are only tangentially related to actual output unless the work done is extremely standardized and strictly defined.
Of course you have to be very alert for quality of boxes, and for selection of boxes. A savvy employee will only choose the easiest tasks as all are ranked equally.
Exactly the same with ticket based jobs. Any measure you have can and will be gamed.
No, because that isn't enough context.
Its reasonable to expect a research mathematician to output 0-1 result a year, packing 1 box a year at "big shipping co" is not "reasonable".
You reframed my entire argument about low skilled / measurable "output" jobs back into the "creative" realm, which i've said isn't as easy to measure.
But the equivalent of moving your mouse/clicking buttons would be the equivalent of moving your hands and not actual box packing. Why would you measure that instead of completed work, if as you say that work is easily measurable?
I think this software is mainly targeted at busy bee companies where nobody has a clue what the employees or any is supposed to be doing and therefore mouse activity is the only thing they can measure directly..
If each of those boxes earns >100 times the profit, the boss would be kinda dumb to fire me. At any rate measuring that doesn't require surveillance software.
I don't understand, those are creative?
Today I learned that Canada, Australia, South Korea, and Japan are third-world countries.
Thanks for the lesson in geopolitics, bboygravity!
This always comes across as people wanting to have the cake and eat it. Employers should only care that the work is getting done, but if the work isn't done, then the employee should still be able to go home after 8 hours and get full salary?
Of course not. If the work isn't getting done, then the employee should be fired. And that's the case even with the surveillance.
What would you rather have again? An employee finishing early sounds good to me
It's literally a recession. IT just experienced historically massive layoffs over the last 6 months. Could you be any more out of touch?
Goodhart's Law (HN might be annoyed at how often I reference this)
Goodhart's Law isn't just about that setting a metric as a target leads to that metric being exploited, but is more about how difficult things are to measure and evaluate. The lesson to be learned here is that measurements should only ever be considered as indicators at best, and usually as weak signals.
Proper evaluation requires significant nuance, exceptions to the rules, and care. It requires being human: messy, a bit chaotic, and inconsistent. There's good reason for our desire for good metrics. It can help make things fair, consistent, reduce bias, and help control for bad actors. There is that appeal to act mechanically, as machines are often highly interpretable and controllable. But over-reliance on metrics end up with the exact same results. Humans will always exploit a metric. Humans aren't machines. Hell, AI always exploits metrics (which creates a big irony that there's so much benchmarkism in the field). For this reason meritocracy can never exist, as unbiased metrics and evaluations can never exist. Doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for it, but rather that we need to think slow and with care. Unfortunately, our brain is lazy and wants to think fast and on autopilot. An irony with how often HN references Kahneman's book. The most human thing we can do is actually override our autopilot, as that's what differentiates us from the other animals and machines.
Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. That's hard to measure. But one needs to recognize this rather than chase mechanistic one-size-fits-all metrics. You need to embrace the chaos to navigate it. Set guidelines, not rules. Managers and business owners, take heed.
> surveillance is here to stay
I'm unconvinced. This happens because there is little to no pushback because people are convinced that the hierarchical structures are too powerful. But as I said above to embrace the chaos, this too is how you can attack these structures. I talked about this longer in another thread, but remember that you're <6 steps from any person. Ideas spread like viruses (memes), and the control only exists when we stop talking and communicating. If we self censor (e.g. are afraid to tell others our salaries because we think they'll be mad at us instead of the person that controls the pay) then the hierarchy has too much power. Hierarchies are good, but power gets abused. It isn't good for your business to have that power abused. But it also requires care: to not chase short term gains but think long term and remain fluid (environments change. Adapt or die).
I dick around all day at work, I watched YouTube video in the background, I still use paper notes so my cursor can be still for an hour sometimes, etc and I never received anything like that. That's over 4 employers since I went full time remote.
Not saying they're not "watching" me, but they don't seem to care.
Is there a typical profile for companies that go that far in the 1984 crazyness?
Context switches can really kill productivity. So much that sometimes I do much more work in a 2h window between 7am and 9am than the next 6-7 hours.
I'm not sure how much value there is in that kind of monitoring, but it isn't necessarily bad.
Outside of that, I keep my use very benign. I'm logged into the Financial Times and Stackoverflow. Most companies with knowledge workers won't look at any metrics they collect unless it's a security thing or they have a reason to look. But yes, assume that they can look if they want to.
Once they start snooping around, they're probably going to fire you regardless. They just need a story to tell.
Yet I just can’t stop to imagine the other side’s perspective and it’s making me laugh:
I’m sitting in front of the monitoring dashboard, chewing a sandwich, and then a spike of intranet activity shows on one of the charts. I look at the dashboard and immediately notice that it’s effect of some SMS broadcast. Nothing to see here: lazy Tuesday.
Then on the dashboard with user agents new column shows. 1 request. Curl’s user agent sticks out like a sore thumb.
“Oh, someone probably just copy & pasted contents of the text message to check it out through curl in order to be safe” wouldn’t take place in Top 10 thoughts that’d I have after seeing that.
What I end up thinking about is that even though I'm back at the office full time (and I'm one of the weirdos that actually prefer it) I have doctors appointments, school teacher meetings and such that have all moved online. So convenient!, except there's no way I can realistically attend them privately, so a 5 minute meds appointment is now once again a 3 hour travel ordeal.
End-to-End encryption doesn't matter if your employer is scraping your device. I know this is all obvious, but it didn't need to be this way.
You may have been caught in one of those exercises.
But anyway, always assume your workplace's VPN logs every access. The obvious retention period vary from one place to another, but the logs seem to always exist.
Is your phone personal? BYOD? Company-issued?
I can't fathom how "detecting curl" can put you in the doghouse, but I would shut you down too, for accessing malicious websites.
It seems misplaced to blame the company for surveillance when they're trying to keep everyone safe, including the devices in your home. It seems far more preferable to have a sting operation and catch mistakes, than to for-reals access malware and have it install on those same devices. That's exactly what they're trying to prevent and mitigate.
It would be the same whether you're at home on a personal device, or you're at your desk in the office with boss over shoulder. You would have a right to object to oppressive or intrusive company surveillance, but this doesn't even come close.
Of course, we have few details here, and I have leapt to a very particular conclusion about that situation; who knows what really happened. But in the interest of general knowledge, employees should be aware that phishing tests will be run, and you can expect to have a little chat if you fail the test (or actually get phished.)
Maybe your company isn't as bad as mine? If the test bypasses the spam filters and is correctly signed from an internal sender… what kind of idiot test is it?
> Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo...
> Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
FB still get paid for those impressions, but each one reinforces my desire never to let that company have a cent of my money.
Wait a moment. What was the install base of monitoring software in April/May 2019/2020? We don't know from this article. This article is only referencing an article https://www.zdnet.com/article/employee-surveillance-software... referencing another article https://www.top10vpn.com/research/covid-employee-surveillanc... that was only monitoring internet searches.
I would like to propose that in this situation searching for monitoring software in no way equates to utilizing monitoring software.
Let's just look at one of the companies mentioned in the article. Hubstaff customers up 25%, net revenue up 55%. https://blog.hubstaff.com/year-in-review/
Surveillance is of concern but I think the article is very misleading and very overhyped.
Companies should be judging their people by results. If someone's performance is acceptable then all of these surveillance metrics don't matter. If someone's performance is not acceptable then all of these surveillance metrics still don't matter. If the company can't tell if an employee's performance is acceptable then maybe that's something they should think about first.
Some of the nastier management practices are also CYA policies because of potential liability if the employee does something they shouldn't or suffers some harm personally while working from home and the company is held responsible even if there was little it could or should practically do to avoid the harm. It seems likely that some of our legal frameworks for employment relationships are outdated in the WFH era and could benefit from review. It should be clear what responsibilities an employer has to a WFH employee - for example providing WFH staff with suitable equipment to do their job properly and safely - but I don't think we should burden employers with responsibility for bad things that happen beyond their reasonable control. Maybe some of the perceived need for these aggressive and often covert surveillance measures goes away if some of the arguably unreasonable liabilities for bad things happening are also taken away.
You're not accounting for the many companies where a sizeable chunk of the workforce are "bullshit jobs" and are just there to create work for other bullshitters and/or be there for political reasons to pad someone's direct reports list and justify their salary. This is an major epidemic in some countries and cultures especially in Europe, and remote working threw a big wrench into this machinery by giving those workers a lot more power and perks that are usually reserved to elites within the company.
In this case there is no tangible output to measure, the only "output" is the suffering of the employee and the appearance of them working hard. This kind of spyware thus makes sense to force the employees to "work" hard and not become too complacent/comfortable in order to perpetuate the charade.
I don't expect this being used in startups or smaller/more modern enterprises where the org chart isn't (yet?) bloated and productivity is measurable based on output, but to be fair this is also not a vertical that Microsoft is targeting (nor can compete in even if they wanted to). This is targeted at large, bloated companies where they need to keep herds of bullshit jobs under control and make sure they don't get too comfortable - otherwise it would rock the boat if some low-level employee appeared to "have it easy" more than some high-level director/VP/executive, regardless of their actual productive output (if any). The spyware will efficiently detect such occurrences and make sure they are addressed.
Two things can be true at once: my employee can be delivering good results, and my employee can deliver even better results. Just because an employee is delivering results doesn't mean that is their maximum potential.
The other thing you're not considering is the fact that management has a responsibility to maximize productivity with the workforce they have. Where you see management failure, I see managements responsibility.
Now, none of this means there aren't poor managers (I've had those), nor does it mean that the solution is straight up surveillance. What I am saying is as someone who does manage, and as someone who does pay employees, this issue isn't nearly as cut-and-dry as you're making it out to be.
So I care very much about whether they get those jobs done well. But I couldn't care less how much time they spend with their backside in a chair or how many messages they sent last week or whether they took a 1h30 lunch break yesterday because they went out shopping for a birthday present for their kid.
I default to trusting people working for us to be honest and do their job to an acceptable standard. I'm only interested in intervening if that isn't happening. In that case the kind of metrics under discussion here aren't going to help me figure out the real problem and how we can fix it. They aren't even likely to be worth much if as a last resort we do have to lose someone who can't get the job done properly and later we have to defend that decision in some kind of dispute proceeding.
This isn't to say we can't give feedback and provide training to help anyone working for us to perform better. But I don't see what relevance these kinds of metrics have to that either. I've always found talking with people openly about how things are going to be far more effective. YMMV.
I guess this is where our perspectives differ. I want the time when people are working to be productive. People have other things going on in their lives - sometimes very important things - and someone who is sitting in the chair with their mind on something else probably isn't going to be very productive.
Of course they are there to do a job and it's important that the job gets done properly and the rest of the team shouldn't have to pick up the slack if someone is abusing the relationship. But the most reliable way to keep the work on track IME is to make sure there's a decent work-life balance and build the mutual respect that any good relationship needs. Sometimes that means trusting people to get things done without imposing too many rules on when or how they do it.
I find the recent trend for experimenting with shorter working hours fascinating because so often the outcomes are counterintuitive - at least if you expected that shortening the hours would lead to a proportionate loss of productivity. One of the most interesting results I remember - I wish I'd thought to bookmark the paper but unfortunately I didn't - was working 9-3 every day with a half-hour allowed for lunch or something like that. It turned out that the company's performance actually went up during the period of the experiment. Participants reported that because everyone knew they had only that much time in the day to get things done the level of focus improved and there were fewer distractions and more awareness of not interrupting colleagues who were trying to concentrate. They managed to sustain that for something like 3 or 6 months and it's hard to argue it was just a novelty effect after so long.
Microsoft is very intransparent here. They didn’t ask me, I couldn’t find out if that means my employer has access to my private data, and it kept coming back even after I found the “unlink” option. Creepy.
I'm in tech but these network suggestions are all quite opaque to me.
Sometimes it's cheaper/easier to just buy a shitty router to use for your untrusted devices.
I won't go back as long as I'm able.
How is that allowed lol
From the company side, they dont know whats on my machine. I might have pirated everything and keyloggers out the wazoo, thats my choice.
Given the rate of change in surveillance telemetry, AI local/remote analytics, enterprise sysadmin competence, global threat models and "chat control" draft legislation to bypass E2EE confidentiality, it is unlikely that individual humans can negotiate balanced Terms-of-Service/Employment/Citizenship.
There are OSS-based systems (QubesOS, OpenXT, Android pKVM nested-virt replacement of TrustZone) which are architecturally compatible with remote management of isolated workloads by mutually-distrusting clouds and enterprises. This is the WFH inverse of cloud "confidential computing". Workload isolation is hard/intractable on pre-CHERI PC hardware that is littered with side channels and legacy complexity, but isolation of mutually-distrusting clouds can be practical with a combination of monitoring and legal agreements. WFH humans can collaborate on OSS code to enforce OSS legal agreements that mediate between employees and corporations.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's Incorporated (2017) TV series, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7eKEHhSw00 & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series), includes thought experiments on future workplace surveillance.
> The series takes place in a dystopian Milwaukee in the year 2074, where many countries have gone bankrupt .. In the absence of effective government, powerful multinational corporations have become de facto governments, controlling areas called Green Zones. The remaining territories are called Red Zones, where governance is weak or non-existent.
Wi-Fi 7 Sensing routers (2024) can generate 3D images of human activity through the walls/floor/ceiling of homes and business, profiling human position, movements, breathing, typing, emotion and more, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480760. After standardization by IEEE in consumer routers, which remote parties would be interested in WFH WiFi Sensing Analytics? How could regulators, employers, employees and home-builders respond?
Yeah, but that's not going to happen for another few quarters, and it'll come out of some other department's budget.
Is the idea that a workforce comprised of people that obey or work around the stupid unwritten rules is going to be more effective?
"Hey HR, do you want an early peek as to which of your employees are about to quit?"
We generally dislike paying people more than a 2x difference within the same bracket which means once you hit the top of the terminal level, there is limited incentive to work hard. Folks are either working for the next gig, or they are learning to extract more life satisfaction from their employers.
I run an O365 instance for my company. We have thousands of users. The only time the data that is referenced here is being used is for some rare troubleshooting or litigation reasons.
2. If they are already happy, why are they installing spyware?
2. HR departments and poor managers making busywork to justify their existence.
^^^^ this so much!
Most HR departments desperately want to appear to be profit centres instead of the cost centres they actually are.
For example, the constant, continuous, process of eternally rolling out new terrible HR systems.
Or the latest set of CBT quizzes on corporate wrong think that come across like a Break Room session from Severance.
They need the constant set of campaigns to justify their place in the organisation but it's all just busy work.
You ever heard the saying: it takes 1 engineer 1 month to do a task that takes 2 engineers 2 months to do
At least that's how it's where I live in Europe. Companies feel entitled to the full 8h per day of productivity so if you know everything out in less then that they want to see it and give you more work to fill the remaining time, which Is why WFH is very rare and in office work is the norm here (Austria).
With remote work I have to actually have done something.
In the office I just had to show up and sometimes that’s all I want to do.
Don’t get me wrong I much prefer WFH. But I do wish I could just show up and have that be enough some days.
Everything you write in an email or say in a Teams meeting will be transcribed and read. The LLM will be instructed to check that you’re “compliant with corporate communications policy.”
Sounds innocuous, right? Just stop employees leaking PII or swearing at customers.
It’ll be expanded to also detect employees that are trying to form a union, questioning safety, revealing management malfeasance, or whistleblowing.
For these people, 1984 was a guidebook.
Then they came for peoples work clicks, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for peoples minds and souls, and I did not speak out—grown up people should know how to protect themselves.
Then they came for me, but were no people left to speak for me.
How about this: Step 0 - define the ungameable behaviours that you know will result in an improved business outcome. Step 1 - tell everyone about these behaviours so that don't have to guess about what should be done to make the business great. Step 2 - track all of behaviours to ensure that everyone is doing them. It isn't necessary to be a creep about it because the behaviours cannot be gamed. If you find that you have to be a creep to accomplish your objectives, go back to step 0.
Please don't retort with creep's favourite quote: "Once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.". If the measure is any good it is fine if it becomes a target. As an example, NPV is a fine measure and fine target.
This is settled law, so it's not changing any time soon without legislation. In other words, don't browse pornhub or work on your startup on company equipment. It's not a hard concept.
Stupidest way to measure/compare productivity.
Now I use O365 Web and it's more than enough for my use case.
For me it does not matter since the systems I work with are rather old school (line AIX) or fully open (Linux).
Am I right in thinking that anything that goes on inside that Virtualbox is 'relatively' private?
I don't believe our IT department have the capacity to go beyond something like Office 365 Admin, but who knows.
Thanks,
Assume they can see everything.
It would be helpful if firms monitoring productivity mentioned what they consider productivity to be. However, in doing this, it would also make it easy for individuals to game any productivity metrics.
It’s interesting that Teams tracks which device you join meetings on. I start my day on my work laptop around 7AM and my daily standup is at 9:30AM. I typically join the standup on my phone, and make coffee and have a snack. Our standup runs 30-45mins due to how it’s managed and doesn’t provide much value to me. I’m present and engaged during that time, but I wonder if it could be interpreted as me “joining a meeting from bed” as suggested in the article. I see it as a productivity gain as I can have my coffee break while still attending the standup.
We could all live in a beautiful world with near-total honesty and little need to protect privacy. We just need the entire human race to be reliably fair and reasonable about every possible issue and to make decisions that affect others only based on a complete and entirely accurate set of relevant facts. Shouldn't be too hard.
Workplace surveillance needs to be regulated swiftly and strongly.
Ugh, I feel you on that. (tho I don't agree with the monitoring part, there's no need for it)
I just realized that I haven't had these silly daily standups for nearly a year now, since changing companies. And guess what? My team is the most productive team I ever worked in. I provide a weekly written update on the project I'm on for leadership to read. We had a weekly 15mins standup for a while when we needed a very tight loop between people on the project as one of the releases was coming up, then scrapped it when things went back to normal.
I don't miss the daily standups and scrummasters at all.
I hated being micromanaged as an employee . Plus as a manger I’m not detail-oriented enough to micromanage anyone.
It reminds me of a blog I wrote in 2004 while working at Peoplesoft: https://web.archive.org/web/20051104174256/http://www.shon.o...
TLDR: If the lights were on in your office, you were working, even if you weren’t really there. So the game was to figure out a way to keep your lights on without being there and the blog was about that nearly 20 years ago.
These articles are very one sided and there is a productive middle ground to be established using productivity management tools. As a manager, it can be difficult to know what your team is working on and who is actually productive, especially in a remote environment. Replace the word "spy" in this article with "hold accountable" and it doesn't sound so bad all of the sudden. But with that visibility, the manager also needs to understand the context in which the data is generated. Whether somebody is productive isn't only a matter of metrics, but also their role, their seniority, and what it is they are expected to do.
As an employee, these tools can benefit you by weeding out teammates who present themselves confidently, but don't actually do much. With a good manager, you should be able to simply do your job and the metrics, in context, take care of themselves.
Nearly every performance tool I’ve seen only measures outputs. Now, outputs are critical to outcomes - but they’re not the goal themselves.
From the viewpoint of outcomes, everything beyond outputs is simply too obscured to make sense of.
I don't think that's always true but you definitely have a valid point in a lot of cases. For inputs I was thinking about stuff like measuring time spent on specific activities without reference to whether the employee had been set up to make good use of that time or whether those activities were themselves worthwhile. That would contrast with outputs like measuring a software developer's productivity by the classic lines of code metric or some modern version like number of commits per day. A developer working 80 hours/week and producing 1000 lines in 20 commits in that time will look great by those metrics but I'd rather hire the developer who would write only the 100 useful lines that would survive into production in 20 hours and 5 commits because they thought before they wrote.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
In my opinion, all these tools do is reward employees that work the way you do, which may improve stats on your metrics, but will encourage group think and diminish creativity.
Happy to be proved wrong, with some facts.
I agree, if that is the only way you measure productivity. These tools create a more holistic view of what a person does at work and should not be the sole measure of performance.
In reality, what they make visible are the people who do little to nothing for 3+ days. Graphs that shows no work for long stretches make performance conversations much easier. It's tough for a poor worker to argue their way out of that or fake the metrics going forward.
I am that worker. I've been praised for "carrying the team" on more than one occasion. If I'm doing my job to a high standard, why is this any of your business?
I've worked in places where many metrics of this type would indicate I did little to nothing for 3+ weeks. Some of the most important projects I've ever worked on in terms of business impact have been in that category.
The difference in outcomes IME is almost always whether you're working with good management and good communication so everyone understands what's really going on and it's no problem or you're working with bad management and poor communications and something of great value is incorrectly assessed as having little value leading to worse outcomes for everyone.
> In reality
IMHO the tool would be most useful in dysfunctional companies where managers don't really know what their subordinates are supposed to be doing or are trying achieve besides "working".
If you hire slackers, be prepared to be amazed at how much work they’ll do to bypass your micromanaging. It’s a race to the bottom
- Would you also allow your team mates to know same data about you to them?
- That would be a level playing field.
- Or at least MS tools should 'automatically' report to the User that an Admin did LOOK into their habits.
- This way you will not have intelligent people working in your team. I am saddened that Google does this.
- Are your teammates aware that you can do this?
Is this a cultural thing? As a Swede I can’t even begin to imagine the scenario where this statement makes any sense
How do I benefit from this? In my experience the salary of a fired employee is kept by the company not distributed to the remaining employees.
Successful managers figure out how to do their jobs without micromanaging or creating a culture of surveillance. Bad managers do what you're saying.
Literally your job. Yes it’s difficult, which is why they pay you rather than automate it. Or get someone on minimum wage to do it.
> As an employee, these tools can benefit you by weeding out teammates who present themselves confidently, but don't actually do much.
How many employers "weed out" managers who present themselves confidently but don't actually do much?
Not many, in my experience. The management hierachy in an organisation of non-trivial size will be populated by cronyism and Flynn Effect virtuosos.
Even simple metrics like number of PR/code reviews can easily become so useless. They can be good indicators when taken with a grin of salt. But judging someone's productivity from these dashboards is stupid.
I really hope companies/managers who use garbage like that suffer the consequences and the industry learns from it.
As another comment points out, the people that use these tools would never give their reports the same data about their own "productivity." Employers try not to even let employees know about this kind of surveillance because it directly undermines any supposed "team culture." They have no place in an equitable relationship. When management uses these kinds of tools they make it clear that they don't care about those being managed. They don't care enough to be honest with them, to be accountable themselves for how they manage. The obvious message these tools send to those under this kind of management is that that management does not see them as respected colleagues and team members, but rather cogs in the machine, "resources" to be exploited.