A Remote Employee Refused 160 Webcam Photos a Day. Her Employer Fired Her
inc.com
inc.com
She's got annual positive reviews 8 years running, and has been with the company for over a decade.
The question that really cuts to the chase is: Why does it require a photograph of the employee's face every 3 minutes in order to determine if they're completing their work? Why does that make any sense at all? What exactly is the employee doing that there are no metrics at all. There's nobody monitoring work loads or task completion? Nobody is checking for accuracy? There are no clients or customers or community members complaining about poor service? How were they able to determine positive reviews for almost a decade before? Why is your management so incompetent, and why is the price of that incompetence your employee's privacy?
What I’ve learned is that most leaders don’t just have a strained relationship with their subordinates. They have an adversarial relationship with them.
They assume that employees are basically trying to do as little as they can, and that they’re running a game on them. Leaders stop being leaders and instead become babysitters or cattle herders.
It isn’t enough to complete your tasks and do it well. If you complete all your tasks excellently but you’re not fully suffering the 40 hours a week, you are cheating them. Because that’s the agreement. The agreement is not “do your job”. It’s work 40 hours a week.
The reality is that an employee working 35 hours a week but getting 10x more done is liable to be fired as compared to someone working 40 hours but mostly twiddling their thumbs. Measuring stuff you do is hard, measuring hours is easy.
Of course this is bad all around. It’s bad for the company because they incentivize poor behaviors. Going above and beyond is punished, so employees don’t. They become warm bodies. If you treat your employees like cattle, they will sit around and moo. But it’s also bad for the employees.
And then we wonder why work isn’t fulfilling? How dumb are we?
I'd also hasten a guess that the engineers at SHS are similarly below the bar you're used to.
Most SMBs in the regular world are made up of regular people and could probably be framed as incompetent if dropped into a role in big tech. I don't think it's tasteful conversation for folks like us working well-paid to point at folks in the rest of the economy and remind them how much more clever we are.
I wish I could find it, but a study almost two decades ago (way pre-COVID) found that when re remote work made good managers' teams perform better and bad managers' teams performed worse.
It was basically a matter of good managers understand the work and the goals and get their team to work towards that, and bad managers manage just by expecting their workers to know and micromanaging their irrelevant behaviors (like butts in seats visible to the manager, time on the keyboard, etc.) hoping to get results.
It does not matter what the field, but I count any manager in the second group as fully incompetent.
If a manager does not understand the work, the goals, and the methods, steps, and milestones needed to achieve the goals, and the irrelevant work that doesn't make real progress, how can they be judged as anything other than incompetent?
During COVID and after I ran a team that was majority remote and got a lot of flak from leaders and counterparts about their productivity.
I pulled up what they did. If each person gets X widgets created each week, passes quality gates and making each widget takes 15 min at best - you get the math. Nevertheless got a lot of “well it feels like” and “I just don’t feel their presence”.
Learned later in life how to better handle the perception of others, but this is one of the few places I don’t have room to be flexible. If you can’t run your team remote, you are not really managing them, you are at best drifting.
Anything that needs managers to actually go and check.
It's not that they trust the employee to work with zero supervision, it's just that most managers and execs don't want to do any kind of work.
The webcam checks are pure projection.
> “Yes,” said O’Brien, “we can turn it off. We have that privilege.”
Probably different rules for management.
In an odd sort of irony, I know that at least one WITCH in fact gives feedback to the employees about their monitoring directly, versus other 'solutions' where only the manager and/or HR gets access to the system's reporting.
Even like Facebook: the AI training stuff was applied to software engineers and staff but definitely not executives.
To wit: When one gets an order to, say, pick two people to fire, or get fired himself, carrying out the order doesn't regularly mean that they 'side' with it.
The person who has some power about who to fire, but still flips burgers or mans the cash register when everyone else is busy.
Not saying it's not a noble job, but it's very far from executive.
If you worked for a state government or defense contractor, you’d still be in the union.
That’s not an insult or a dig.
Good executives function in the background of the day to day work for most people. Good executives stand out when they set clear directions and can identify what information they need, at the top, to change direction or modify scope or whatever. They don't impact the actual work happening every single day so they just blend in. They impact the work at the entire organization, which will change the day to day, but usually for the better.
The problem is there are very, very, very few good executives. Most that I've interacted with are either narcissistic, lazy, incompetent, or a combination thereof.
In the decades and decades of my professional career, I've worked with one truly good executive leader. He was phenomenal, and guided the organization I was with through some very tough times (layoffs, then covid, then a restructure).
That's one of several hundred.
But we can still already replace 99% of C-levels with a $20 subscription to Claude and a few MCP integrations.
His point is that narcissistic, lazy, incompetent people are easy to replace with AI. In other words, most executives and grant writers. Why are you framing it like you disagree? He is correct.
Also a point about style for "someone who excels at technical writing": an LLM could help you come up with stronger, more evocative wording than very, very, and very. I try to use words like "very" zero times in a row, because there's always a better word that actually adds something more insightful to the description than a generic "very" or three. Using "very" three times in a row is like eating a whole box of unflavored starch packing peanuts.
For your second paragraph: I'm not looking for a job on here and I'm not writing technically. I'm posting on an Internet forum and using repetition to emphasize a point. Sort of like changing the voice I use for the forum or audience. That sort of thing is very, very common.
AI image analysis, gives managers a Statuspage-like dashboard of labor engagement. Green across the board, boss.
It seems like a faceless attempt to prune back WFH like you said. Even if it wasn't, nothing activates organizational levels of manager antibodies like open defiance by workers. She was cooked.
Pretty dumb, as at that time not everyone was had a home office set up, and one can work from their bed perfectly fine, especially when someone wants to put their feet up for a bit during a team meeting.
The CEO tried publicly dressing down the CTO on a large call because his workspace must be “too distracting to work from.”
CEO guy was in Mexico or something and lost his mind, and went on a 10 minute tantrum with the principal of the group the owned the company, who happened to be in my office eating brisket. It was a good laugh.
I do that because I believe in the mission and work is assessed by outcome.
The flip side too — I learned well before COVID that the Kanban principle of “make work visible” applies to WFH
That's not quite true. If you're working all remote, it is difficult to build a connection with other people, but multiples more difficult if all you ever see is a blank square with a name.
My team is all remote so a make it a point to always be on camera, it does help a bit to know these are real people not just bots with a blank zoom presence. I don't enforce it onto others but it would be nice if everyone showed up as a real person.
A noseshot with compression artifacts, joined with kitchen-wall echoes over a laptop mic. Just enough latency to inhibit natural banter. I'd rather hear your text turned into vlog. At least until we get a real coffee together.
It's also the logical corporate response to Younger Millenial remote workers bragging about "working" from paradise instead of actually working. As to why management wants it...this is literally something that management has wanted dating back to the rise of civilization. They have power and want to exercise it even if it's not necessary or efficient.
The logical labor response should be to not work for companies that require remote employees to submit to constant visual supervision.
Or make this kind of intrusive monitoring illegal? Preventing this kind of abuse is exactly the reason there are labor codes.
Sure, it's logical, just not very realistic given the power imbalance...
Ever since I saw his screen and the level of details in my activity log on the work machine, I don't even access example.com on their device anymore.
I'm sure this workers already has invasive tracking software on her work machines. Now the company was just trying to fire her without it counting as a layoff.
Is that using Zscaler? What level of detail did it have?
> Your employer should be fine with this
> all they care about is that their data is not exfiltrated.
Your suggestion for dealing with an employer that only cares if data is exfiltrated, is to... exfiltrate their data?
If an employer is using Zscaler and employees can still “pass employer data” anyway then Zscaler isn’t achieving anything. Get rid of it so employees won’t try to work around such intrusive monitoring.
Where this gets a bit more complicated is doing stuff relates to the matter of employment on the work laptop. The classic example of this going badly is union organization, which in many but not all places is a legally protected activity but may still invite illegal retaliation. HR disputes are another one where it may be extremely necessary to "exfiltrate" some emails regarding your terms and conditions.
Do work stuff on work hardware, do non-work stuff on non-work hardware.
A company that monitors every keystroke using Zscaler can be presumed to have restrictions on stuff that they care about, such as apps that should only be accessed from the corporate network.
And that's precisely the benefit of using the personal machine! Nobody wants every keystroke they make to be monitored. If you do that then it is going to backfire because people will find work arounds. Find another way.
I held a WFH and BYOD job in various roles for over 4 years. It began less than a month into the pandemic lockdowns. It would not have been WFH if not for COVID-19. In that regard, I was highly blessed.
The recruiting process was notably vague. I was asked if I had a computer that I could run software on. It turned out that they really wanted us to be running Windows (Apple Silicon was incompatible) but I was running Ubuntu and nobody really batted an eye, because I ensured it was interoperable.
We were never required to install MDM or any corporate software. They never spied on us or collected any data from our BYOD. Any metrics were collected server-side at their web apps. I felt highly trusted. But there was indeed no "work laptop" and we could either BYOD, or forget having a job at all.
This was also during a period of rapid, widespread MFA adoption. Our managers were keeping us in the loop whenever MFA was implemented for corporate systems. Late in the game, our 3rd-party payroll implemented MFA very poorly. I informed the management that they were on thin ice, because they had irrevocably encroached onto a device which was reserved for personal use only. I told them, it is unacceptable to require a smartphone for a role that neither provides a smartphone, nor notified us in advance that it's required for keeping our jobs.
I kept scrupulous separation of work-related data and activities. I had separate accounts on each device. For work, I logged out of my personal account and logged into a work-only account. Unix permissions handled the rest. Sometimes, it was darned inconvenient.
I came to understand that if my employer were ever sued or involved in criminal prosecution, my devices could've been subject to subpoena and confiscation. This was the really crazy part. I had often used personal devices, and accounts, and my phone, for volunteering at church. We had no choice there, either. But you can easily imagine church, or a publicly-traded company, to become embroiled in some legal action. And if my devices were deemed evidence, I'd forfeit them, possibly for good! Thankfully, this has not come to pass.
There is probably no guarantee, even if you're 100% using employer-dedicated hardware at home, that your personal devices wouldn't be swept up in a subpoena or search-and-seizure. But you should always consider long and hard, with any BYOD situation, that mingling your personal stuff with your employer's stuff is playing with fire. Don't get burned.
Our company was never BYOD, but they were pretty loose about personal hardware. They didn't provide or require phones, but to get office mail, documents, etc. you had to have management software on your phone or tablet. You couldn't connect your own computer to the VPN.
We came back to work in mid-2021. In early 2022 we had a ransomware breach on a Sunday evening. If you happened to have your laptop with you (I did), you could eventually do some WFH stuff, after certain servers were certified clean (they never told us, but indications were someone succumbed to a phishing attack). Otherwise you were SOL until they either certified your machine had been turned off or was otherwise certified clean, or you got a brand new laptop.
Once we were back in the office (again), things were stricter...no USB drives allowed, for instance, and software installs were more tightly controlled. But the phone/tablet policy was the same -- even if you were on call, you had to provide your own phone. MFA could be on your phone or software on your laptop, and again you weren't required to have company software on your phone.
Overall the point stands: the separation of personal vs work devices must be absolute.
As I just got done writing, in many BYOD jobs, you can either use your personal device for work, or you can file for unemployment.
> The timing seems a little off
I shouldn't have to explain myself to people who get suspicious that I'm lying, but here's how it went down: our students were 100% required to have an x86 notebook that ran Windows, and we were explicit about that in the enrollment and onboarding phases.
Some of the staff used MacOS and this was not an obstacle, until Apple Silicon became available, at which point we discovered that our virtualization software was incompatible, and that couldn't be changed. We had been at the forefront of testing and vetting this platform on its release. Therefore, the department instituted a ban on the Apple Silicon devices.
My use of Ubuntu and Fedora, however, flew under the radar for all four years, because none of the software was incompatible. There were instances of staff, and also students, who purchased Apples specifically, and they were real disappointed, to say the least.
Ultimately, the staff in my role and department were relieved of the requirement to install any software locally, at which point anyone running Apple Silicon could've also flown under the radar. But our students were prohibited, due to the unresolved technical barriers.
> Not when a company monitors every keystroke.
That is precisely why you do work activity on work devices and anything personal on things you own.
I used to mix all the time but in these days of completely monitoring of work devices, I do strictly all work activity on work devices. Then I don't really care about the monitoring because anything I type on a work devices is strictly work stuff, nothing that is personal to me.
No employer with a functional legal department would ever be okay with an employee using their personal devices for work (unless they have MDM software on the devices partition the work data).
Using your personal device(s) work for make them fair game for discovery in lawsuits, even after you have left the company. It is also generally a violation of state and federal laws and/or procurement contracts in multiple fields if you work in finance, health, or anything defense-related.
If an employer ever mandates that you use your own device for mandatory work-related functions, find a new job. It's the number one red flag that the company is a shit-show and indicates that there are a lot of other rules/regulations/etc that the company doesn't care about either.
> No employer with a functional legal department would ever be okay with an employee using their personal devices for work (unless they have MDM software on the devices partition the work data).
This works the other way as well. While I (as an individual) have no legal departement, there is no way I'd ever be ok allowing work to touch anything on my devices, MDM or not.
My devices are mine, they will contain zero work stuff. Any device that workplace wants me to use for work, will be provided by the company, not me. I'll never allow any overlap.
(20 years ago I was at 100% overlap, no boundaries at all, but times have changed.)
If you don't know the difference you're absolutely in the population of people who should not be using their personal laptop for work.
I am not necessarily opposed to putting things like messaging or email on my personal phone but I’m not going as far as allowing the company to administer my personal device.
My philosophy: if the hardware doesn't belong to me I'm not doing anything personal on it, no exceptions.
True, if you work for very early startups with no IT department, life is a lot more free. Just be careful when they grow to the point of having that IT department.
Also be aware of peer comment, devices can be shipped direct from manufacturer but already pre-registered to be company-managed. But this does require said IT department to exist to be managing this.
I do make exception to my hard rule on not sharing company/personal activities on devices when working with tiny startups where this is not an issue.
That said, can someone who is in that side of things explain why having an archive of surveillance from employee’s home wouldn’t be a liability nightmare. The way a good company treats PII makes me think that anyone with brains would say “I don’t even want access to that data, and it probably should not be saved”. The chances of a leak or a camera capturing something that should not be on my server is high enough, and completely unnecessary to running the business, that I would not want anything to do with it. It takes one naked toddler and a CSAM filter to absolutely destroy a company. Let’s not even touch the idea of employees maliciously accessing webcams, and/or out of hours webcam access. Yikes. I’d rather have a person doing nothing sometimes than have any of that shit on my servers.
Exposing employment for what it is.
This is why they dread "overemplyed" employees so much. Oh you can't have the ability to make me bankrupt, homeless, or without medical care? Then that makes me too great a "risk".
The whole point of corporate capitalism is to do exactly that. The corporation is a machine whose most-optimized purpose is to turn people into money.
Human dignity is not a concern for it.
If the people fired had years of experience in the job and the new people hired don't, the company lose talent. Is bleeding money in an endless loop of training people just to let them go soon after that, has trained somebody to nurture their competitors, and some of this people could even make new companies out of spite and compete with their former boss.
I guess the saddest thing, is that everyone just accepts this.
Fortunately, I had the means to retire, and I did.
I think it's about to happen again, but a lot faster, this time.
This is, most likely, another outcome of the wage stagnation and lack of any fit-for-purpose consumer protections in North America.
This is a constructive dismissal. If she was hourly, sure, being on camera makes sense. But if you are salaried and some clown in HR decides that they want to make sure you're working 40 hours but WON'T pay you any overtime or judge you on your output, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.
The outrage is justified. If it mattered for her job then no AI monitoring would be needed.
This is just patiently false, it's common for salaried employees to have required hours.
https://www.inc.com/alison-green/my-employee-says-i-cant-sto...
Your company can't just suddenly drastically change them on you without it being a constructive dismissal. This is not a new concept. Companies have been trying to dodge unemployment claims by making people's jobs so bad that they quit since forever. It's very easy to prove and will be seen as a firing by the courts.
Obviously there is no minimum number of hours you must work when salaried, but it’s obviously the expectation. You likely know this which is why you are against them tracking how much time you actually spend working. If they knew the work only took you 10 hours, would they still want to pay such an inflated salary?
I negotiated my salary with competing offers. If my company decides, after negotiating from a position of strength with their eyes open, that my salary is too high... that's a "them" problem. Doubly so if I had been employed for eight years and they've never complained.
The courts will treat it like a firing done for no reason at all (i.e. at-will employment). I personally shudder to think of staffing a company with the kinds of people who would put up with this nonsense, but the beauty of capitalism is that companies face financial consequences for driving off good employees.
But exempt workers, i.e. salaried, are getting paid to do a job. They are not getting paid to be at a certain place for a certain number of hours.
Earlier the main reason was to allow for a human to revisit any important discussion of they missed making detailed notes. It also allowed anyone who misses the meeting to catchup. And for global teams, team members in other time zones can catchup and maybe rewatch the meeting of accent differences made following the live meeting difficult. The coworker tasked with writing the minutes (manually!) would find it super handy. We also did recordings for "requirements gathering", "design review", "prototype walkthrough", etc so we captured all feedback and nuances thoroughly so next iteration can address them all.
For all these benefits we sometimes opened a MS Teams bridge and turned on recording EVEN WHEN we were all meeting in person. I would switch on the webcam and turn it towards the whiteboard, and try to get the best clarity possible -- a service to anyone who might be watching afterwards.
I've worked with a team who did just that, they held the vast majority of their meetings in-person (1 or 2 short meetings a day) but needed other stakeholders to keep up with their work and decisions, so they had some AI listen, keep track and send summaries and minutes.
They liked it, but I'm not sure it was more efficient than having someone send half a page of meeting summary manually.
Not that I think the broader practice for monitoring remote workers is something I think is a good idea.
Your work-specific WiFi network can also be shut off at the same time.
Devices go in a sleeve or drawer in your desk, which is usually in a separate room.
You can also close the door.
If you need more work and personal life separation than this, you might need a new job.
Wonder if that helps.
[1] Perhaps with the exception of adult webcam models, but that's an extreme edge-case where the lack of privacy is the job.
the webcam tool in question, looks likra corporate internal rollout
The employer is in Clifton, NJ... not Clinton.
after that, it changed to talking and speaking in a particular way in MRs and PRs (and "not" pushing back so much in them and being more agreeable). of course later the manager turned everything into "appease me" because whenever I would do my work and check off the boxes on the PIP he would say he couldn't see it because he didn't receive notice of it in the way he liked. Of course sharing in the pip review meetings weekly did not meet his needs to confirm "I did the things".
Employers will do anything to discriminate against you, legally or illegally, if it meets their leadership agendas. I especially have felt indian-pakistani hate and abuse during this process and was just so exhausted I never bothered to lawyer up.
Our SVP of Enterprise/Software was a serial sexual harrasment case. File in HR was as thick as a Websters. Women would constantly ask trusted male coworkers to sit next to him so that they would not be forced to sit next to him.
Another VP was a large build southern lady who forced an Indian colleague to harassment and sensitivity training after she said "yuck, McDonalds" and the white coworker was hurt. While the original complaint from her was that she was getting harassed for being Indian.
Both were subsequently fired after it became public (blog post) and the news picked up on it. The rumor is that the CEO and his chief of staff knew about these issues and didn't do anything about it until they got external pressure. Card is extremely toxic. Bank I guess less so, but still pretty bad.
We had senior managers once file a PIP/firing procedures because he saw no Github commit activity (those little green squares) FROM A PERSON ON GOVERNMENT PROTECTED SICK LEAVE.
Glad I left that hell hole years ago.
That said, it drives me up the wall that it seems like all the bad managers are exactly like the one you're experienced.
It can be hard to remember, but companies are usually giving money in exchange for a time that they measure by outcomes and results and feeling that, they might wonder what’s going on.
What I am going to write next is written with absolutely zero attempt to overstate anything. Not one person knows what is going on; very few consider wondering; most barely know how to put pants on the right way. Again, zero exaggeration based on real life experience in corporate america.
What does this mean?
I know finding work can be hellish now at days, but seem like it would still be easier to get another job.
But yeah, switching jobs is likely the best course of action, for now. Until all employers are doing some version of this, which is what tends to happen with these kinds of things.
Also I wouldn’t make the block very obvious.