This is a bit scary. Imagine your employer using machine learning on your git commit patterns (or swearwords per comment) to check when you might quit.
Would it also be scary if your manager observed your attitude/emotions through personal interaction and deduced you might want to quit?
Of course, it's also the employee's fault for getting into such an environment in the first place, but sometimes you just need the job.
I use ManicTime Tracker, if my boss got hold of all the data contained in there, he would probably consider firing me - I average more than 2 solid hours of surfing the web on any given workday... wait, I have the exact data :) , that's the point!
I was at my work PC for 1059 hours so far this year.
Of those, I spent 325 hours on Firefox and 95 on Chrome, that averages about 13 hours a week of web surfing (probably 10 hours procrastinating or reading and 3 actually researching problems).
I also spend a shocking 8 hours a week reading and replying to mail (to be fair, we don't have any bug tracking or project management, so mail becomes both), and 5 hours a week on SQL (I do a lot of querying and reporting).
I'm less than 4 hours a week actually on a development environment, split between VB6, .NET and Forte4GL (our ugly legacy system).
And I was hired to be a "systems analyst"... And that's only time spent at the PC, it doesn't count time wasted on meetings and stuff.
This is a real-life example of why they say that on a large corporation, you only do actual work 1 or 2 hours a day (as opposed to a startup where you might do code or programming-related stuff 6 or 7 hours, I hope :) ).
It's really depressing to put it in numbers. Fortunately, I'm going to quit next year and dedicate full-time to my startup (which is just getting started right now :) ).
> Of course, it's also the employee's fault for getting into such an environment in the first place, but sometimes you just need the job.
That someone ends up in a shitty workplace isn't their fault. You can fault someone for actively making their workplace worse, but sometimes you end up in a bad place, either out of necessity or just plain bad luck. This kind of attitude towards workers in the workplace only hurts people's ability to find meaningful work and places to work.
Many managers are too busy looking up the management tree, sucking up to superiors, working their own career to actually manage their subordinates. If you're expecting to leave then you're in luck, they won't notice. But that's probably the reason you're leaving too!
I guess surfing the web is a form of short-timing - I can't actually leave early or come in late, since I'm heavily penalized for those, like any self-respecting bureaucracy, my company equals time at the desk with productivity, and heavily penalizes lateness.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124269038041932531.html#mod=...