Report: Personal Internet use at work out of control | Hacker News Reader

Report: Personal Internet use at work out of control

arstechnica.com

5 pointsquoderat5 comments

I can vouch for the validity of a lot of what is in this article. I set policy for a network of a little over 200 computers. When I first started I was pretty lax. My opinion in regards to the internet was I didn't care what they used it for as long as it wasn't illegal or dangerous. If it interfered with their work output their boss could deal with it in the same way he'd deal with someone reading a personal book or calling a personal friend at work.

But unfortunately it just spun out of control. I had two DS3 lines at 45mbps a piece and they were getting maxed out. I had people bringing in their personal computers and using the wireless network for p2p, people watching TV in their desktop background and all kinds of other stuff.

Eventually I had to shut it down. Employees needed the internet for actual work purposes and the personal stuff was causing that to run at painfully slow speeds. In the end I still try to give them a little freedom but only to view regular websites. Anything video/audio related is blocked (to the best of my ability)

I can vouch for it too. I'm reading Hacker News on my work laptop at midnight on a Sunday night, while also SSHed into my workstation and working on a tool to make tomorrow's task go a bit quicker. This sort of blending is somewhat inevitable when you encourage people to work "just whenever" - if I couldn't use my work laptop for personal tasks, I'd just use my personal laptop (which is what I do when I'm doing non-employer-related code), which means I wouldn't be working on work tasks, which means less productivity for my employer.

For the record, I've found that people like you are generally not the problem. People like yourself (and myself for that matter) tend to get assigned more work because they are responsible enough to ask for a new assignment once they've completed the old one. This means you have an endless supply of work, some of which you end up taking home with you. But the reality of that endless supply of work means that you spend most of your office time on it.

The people who tend to abuse workplace Internet are those who don't ask for more work but instead sit around and wait until someone comes and gives them more work. This delay leads to a lot of personal Internet time.

Something else to remember is that Broadband Penetration in the U.S. is still only at 57% which means a lot of these people (who are in the lower income level to begin with due to their lack of initiative) don't have high speed internet at home. Which leads them to do most if not all of their personal web surfing at work.

Suppose in a company of N employees, you allocated an absolute cap of 1/N of the total upstream bandwidth to each Ethernet port. You wouldn't do that, because it would be slow. So you have to recognize that what you're doing is over-committing bandwidth. You are relying on less than N users sharing. But, bandwidth is a freebie to employees. They gain and don't lose if they maximize usage. That means that they can and will pour effort into subverting any and all firewall controls. That's a race you can't win.

Looking at it economically, what's the answer? Obviously, you have to start charging for bandwidth. Treat it as part of the department's budget.

Tried it, didn't work out so well. The problem is that a lot of these people are doing actual work too. So you get situations where Department A needs the Internet because their applications are web based and Department B has all desktop apps.

If you then choose to charge Dept A. accordingly they balk because they are being penalized simply because their applications are on the web.

Also keep in mind that an IT department doesn't want to become the Internet police. Which is exactly what happens when you try to charge individual departments because they rightfully claim they can't watch their employees every second to see if they are using the Internet for personal use. Meaning it turns into a big hassle where you have to comb through firewall logs identifying each employee and how much internet they used and then create a report based on that.

All in all it's a good idea in theory but one I haven't found a way to implement in practice.

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