I own a small business, and all of us, my employees and me work from home. We've been doing this from well before the COVID-19 epidemic. My team is mostly programmers with a one marketing person. This sort of intrusive monitoring is utter garbage. My team would quit if I used it and in any case, I don't want to know what they are upto by the minute. I don't even encourage realtime slack unless we've mutually agreed to a specific time. Email, slack and the zoom calls (and lunches when COVID-19 was not a thing) are more than enough (Indeed too much.) What idiot managment even thinks this a good idea?
Most of my direct reports work from home full time, just like most people in our company. We look at the output from our teams and we frankly don't care if people are checking Facebook on their phones during business hours. Focusing on the work that's getting done results in everybody being happier than micromanaging how people spend their time.
Not sure what part of the white-collar working world you are in. But my work experience at every one of the companies I worked at prior to starting on my own, were not dissimilar. All of these companies were in the Fortune 500 when I was in their employ, and none as I can recall had surveillence of this nature. They were intense work environments, I grant that, and deadline pressure in tech and Wall street, is strong, but nobody surveilled me in this manner. Cameras in the corridor yes. Strictly controlled access to critical code repositories and databases -- yes. Keystroke monitoring and keeping webcams on -- no. Indeed, at IBM Research, one of the places I worked at, a stroll through the building at around 3pm would probably the quietest thing you ever did. I'd see pople aimlessly playing at table tennis, and the dicussion after the game over tea would turn to the research problem they were working on. Ideas would flow, some would peel away to scribble on a whiteboard. Others would just take a print out of a paper and sit in the lawn reading it. And yes some would be in their rooms typing away... These were some of the most productive computer scientists in the world, many of them now work at Google and other places you'd be familar with. (They did suck at table tennis though :-) Many pure tech startups are not that different, although the pressure levels are much, much higher. You cannot determine a technical person's productivity by the time they spend at the keyboard. It's in the kind and quiality of the software they release, that entirely eliminates the need for whole classes of time-card workers.
If you need surveillance in this situation, you've got the wrong person -- folks like this self-selct themselves to work in these places. They are intrinsically motivated by the problem that interests them. No amount surveillence software will improve their output, if they are not interested in the problem -- they'll just quit.
It's being done by the same clowns who can't live without time clock cards, all sorts of monitoring,and tracking.These are the people who have no clue how to manage people,how to measure their work and act upon results.These are the same crappy companies who would rather ask their staff to email endless Excel spreadsheets to each other instead of investing some money in database or some crm system. In a nutshell,these are the bottom feeders of this world.
I'm curious how much of this comes from working with unskilled labor (hope that's the right term).
I once worked in fast food right out of high school. 80-90% of the employees were one or more of untrustworthy, unreliable, whiny, always making excuses or trying get out of work. My point being if you start there you might just assume that that's the way it always is for all employees no matter what type of job and therefore feel like you need to surveil.
Most of my tech jobs didn't have this issue AFAIK (though one did) but just as one stat from a random search
I've seen plenty of bad behavior in tech. Ranges from unauthorized (but tolerable) use of servers for gaming after hours, to straight up time theft or physical theft.
When BTC was just starting out, we had one dev bring his own server to a data center and piggy back off a dumb switch for some NAS boxes. Free power for months and several BTC -- probably ~100k or more now.
We had a night admin printing out books on how to hack things from the work printer. Like 300 pages worth... which he forgot in the printer. He later tried to sell our certificates to random people via his work email.
One contract/hourly admin fudged his timecard 10 hours a week, every week, for months. He only was discovered when we did HR cost reviews and found that he was 500+ hours ahead of everyone else.
One of our junior linux admins brought his girlfriend into the NOC for a tour, then was caught on camera fingerbanging his lady on camera in the hallway just outside of the NOC door.
No shortage of switches, SFPs, half-step servers, and other gear going missing.
That's been my observation too. In tech, this kind of paranoid micro-management is a great (inverse) indicator for whether someone's used to working with talented people. If I were ever managing again in tech I'd be trying to find people much smarter than me and then get the heck out of their way.
I have consulted with customer contact companies and it was always shocking to see the low productivity. Front line employees, especially the younger age group, would find ingenious ways to circumvent doing actual work while artificially inflating their KPIs. There was even information sharing economy in some companies where the best tricks were traded for goods and services.
To put it in context though, it was by any measure thankless and soul crushing work. And the worst offenders were in cold call centres and strangely in email support teams.
This reflects the experiences of close relatives with unskilled labour. In some fields, it's difficult to get people who consistently show up sober and on time. Those who can do this rarely stay for long.
Fundamentally it's just an outdated style of doing business. The same people who tell you not to do personal web browsing at work will not respond to an email that arrives in the evening until they clock in the next morning.
Whereas sure, I don't spend an eight hour solid block of time working each day, but I'll respond to a help ticket at 11pm because someone had a quick need and my computer is handy.
My employer is still getting my eight hours, possibly more, just diffused through the whole day.
>My employer is still getting my eight hours, possibly more, just diffused through the whole day.
Even that sticks in my craw... we need to make this 8 hour bar die. Some days I'm just not productive. Other days I might be heads-down on a problem for 15+ hours straight. So long as I'm accountable to my work and it is producing the results we've mutually agreed upon, this hour nonsense (for workers not billing by the hour, which is its own separate discussion) needs to go away.
These are the same crappy companies who would rather ask their staff to email endless Excel spreadsheets to each other instead of investing some money in database or some crm system.
twitches involuntarily
Buddy you're hitting way too close to home for my comfort, right now (thankfully the complaints are being heard and division chief is willing to hear out suggestions for a better system to track OKRs)
The levels of absolute dogshit thinking that goes into what's described in the OP is astounding.
Imagine that you're processing confidential customer data and you use something like https://hubstaff.com to take screenshots randomly. You're literally uploading PII to some professional spyware provider that works on a freemium model.
"If you're idle for a few minutes, if you go to the bathroom or whatever, a pop-up will come up and it'll say, 'You have 60 seconds to start working again or we're going to pause your time,' " the woman said.
Solution to that using appliances available in every home:
Dangle the mouse from you desk and put a fan next to it so that it hits the mouse from time to time.
But also quit your job - managers who use such tactics are usually very trigger-happy when it comes to firing people, so you're just delaying the inevitable.
It's probably not difficult to work around these checks but nobody should be suffering this indignity in the first place. People can't even go to the bathroom without getting called out by managers over lost productivity. How dehumanizing.
And it's not even effective. There's a quote from one of the more known Total Quality Management evangelists, which stuck with me(paraphrased):
"Don't engage in games with your employees, because you can't win."
He elaborates further explaining that any scheme or incentive system created for a specific behavioral outcome is bound to be exploited or otherwise worked around.
I often wonder how managers like this manage employees with kids. Kids are little chaotic machines. It's not uncommon for a parent to need to interfere with their kids activities for 10 minutes here and there.
So the bossman is saying they should be at their desk working on their thing and let 3 year old Johnny ride his bicycle down the stairs?
The bossman is saying the employee should take care of their kid in the exact same was as if they were working from the office - which is to say someone else is usually doing it. The bossman is conveniently ignoring the fact that schools are closed, while the bossman's SO is taking care of their own kids - which is to say that the bossman is intentionally being willfully ignorant of the employee's situation. I would expect nothing less from a bossman that thought this type of surveillance was a good idea in the first place.
It’s old-fashion management. If you don’t understand your employees workload and don’t trust them then either you resign or fire the employees. Simple as that.
I don’t see how this makes any employee productive. This adds more stress imo. An employee gives you 8 of their 12 hour day. Now, you tell me if that works only for you - the management. They’re people just like you. They have a life just like you. They have responsibilities similar to you. They might have a family similar to you. There’s no fucking way they can manage all this, giving you a focused 8 hour. They might need a few mins to pay a bill, lookup a medication, place a personal Online order. And many other activities that come with “living”, being alive.
I am certain most managers that implement this are antisocial fucks. It’s poor management. Uneducated decision making.
Now, it does has its place. For example in highly secured environments or when dealing with highly sensitive documents. But for a small or regular office, no!
HR/Payroll companies such as ADP and Insperity need to start setting ground rules. I know that they’re in favor of the employer, however, it would make good on them.
One of the reasons I'm a supporter of universal basic income is so that the employees can have a better negotiating position. I suspect many bullshit rules will go out the window when the alternative to employment isn't destitution.
For far too long has this negotiation been highly in favour of the employer.
This is a bit of a tangent, but one should be careful with that path. Not all employers are 'evil' and have negative intentions for their employees. Think of an example such as the independently owned restaurant that cannot afford to pay employees high wages and their owners are not wealthy. Just as not all employees can be painted as untrustworthy and hostile, not all employers should be painted as untrustworthy and hostile.
Looming destitution never made good work. The way one engages with a good employer is a sense of co-ownership in some way. I can't tell how my way of taking ownership to an arbitrary project is influenced by a relief of financial stress. It might, but I don't believe it's going to up it any, ever.
Which means that with UBI, I might be less inclined to take risks. I'm not an economist enough to tell what that means, but a rough estimate say it won't increase my income. And at this point of the discussion, we haven't even touched the topic of taxes...
Of all the reasons to be in favor of UBI, this is a first for me to hear...but to the point, the alternative to employment at a company deploying these kinds of tactics is not destitution, it is employment at a company that does not.
Once upon a time, I worked for a company in Kansas City where upper management genuinely had trouble with the idea that engineers were humans with lives outside the office. I was walking through their section of the office one day, and overheard the President of the company asking in tones of complete bewilderment why engineers were not voluntarily working twelve-hour days.
Suffice to say that his confusion was reflected in how engineers were treated.
Had the same experience in the midwest early in my career. Underpaid, overworked, our boss expected us to work weekends without any extra pay because we "all needed to pitch in". Corporate culture in the midwest is horrifically outdated.
There was a time when that sort of made sense. When companies didn't lay people off during hard times, carried pensions that were risky for the company, etc. It seems like some didn't understand that loyalty goes both ways...pull one side and the other goes with it.
There is another aspect to this. Many employees need guidance here and there. A manager told me once that he'd often find his team members working on something that wasn't the critical path, and he'd have to nudge them back on it. Every day. Team members may also be working inefficiently, and the manager observing it can help with that, too.
> I am certain most managers that implement this are antisocial fucks.
I agree.
But the surveillance tools have been around for A LONG TIME, and people haven't really complained much about it.
The thing is whenever people ask questions about how the surveillance is performed and how to respond to it, the answer (in the USA) has traditionally been something like "It's your employer's equipment, they can do whatever they want with their equipment-- don't do anything on it unless you want the man to know."
Now, "the equipment" is at home. I don't think that makes much difference, but yeah, there's some interesting edge cases like turning on camera/microphone in employee home without employee consent.
It makes me wonder about countermeasures.
Is there a way to know if you're being screenshotted or some enterprise shit-ware is logging stuff? Yes, it's always true that it "could happen". I would like to know if it IS happening. Is that even possible?
> Employees were to install software called Hubstaff immediately on their personal computers so it could track their mouse movements and keyboard strokes, and record the webpages they visited.
They were told to put this on their "personal" computers. Not work computers. This is way over the line.
TBH these managers probably don't have work life balance, spend 12-16 hours a day on work, probably less than 4 are productive, and believe their subordinates and ingrates if they don't share the same "devotion" that they do, regardless of ability to complete the assigned job/task.
Maybe. We don't know what they're doing at their desks or away from the office, because they don't get surveiled like the plebs. Any manager who feels the need to peek over the shoulders of their workers should submit to the same.
And they probably pore over metrics more than anything else and prepare reporting based on a bunch of old queries and automated reports package it and send it off. They might also have chats with subordinates about those metrics and at the end think “what a good boy/girl am I!”
I guess if you take into account commute, cooking, cleaning and other household tasks and errands it seems possible to only have 4 hours of true free time.
> I don’t see how this makes any employee productive.
I'll contribute a counter argument, if only because I don't see it mentioned much.
I'm the counter argument. Since I'm at home now, with kids, if I'm not directly on the phone with a coworker or boss, I'm likely not working. Recently our boss mandated that webcams must be on hereon-forward... before today, I would sometimes just have airpods on for the meeting but otherwise be doing stuff (cooking, clean dishes, other chores). Honestly this part I don't really enjoy -- because rarely there is stuff said in the meetings for which I need 100% of my brain head-on.
But that's just me with all of my mental disorders and problems, who needs a helicopter boss to be productive. You may be different.
I think the question is what you are getting paid for. Are you getting paid for time, or are you getting paid for results?
If you're getting paid for results, then it shouldn't matter what you are doing every minute, as long as you are producing the results you are expected to produce.
Well you have to realize that most managers have no idea why they have it so good. When so many children are starving to death worldwide, why do they live in a 4 bedroom house with a pool? Do they have exceptional talent or intelligence? No. So they fundamentally operate from a place of fear. It’s like Twitter holding onto 140 characters forever — they had no idea why they were so successful, so their approach was “don’t touch it, you might break it.”
If you are a heart surgeon or Lebron James you can understand why you are making so much money — you have exceptional skill at something in high demand. The average manager is more like someone who found a bank error in their favor and prays every morning that it isn’t discovered.
> If you are a heart surgeon or Lebron James you can understand why you are making so much money — you have exceptional skill at something in high demand.
No need to reach for an analogy here, you could just say “if you are an engineer.”
In my experience what you’re saying is rarely true at the top tech companies, the managers there generally either come from a tech background themselves or they show an unexpectedly strong understanding of technical aspects of the product anyway, and typically have strong organizational and people skills that clearly stand on their own as rare and valuable.
What you’re saying is almost always the case at small- to mid-size tech companies (which is most of them), and I think it’s because they’re perpetually unable to attract and retain top tech talent... so anybody that can code is de facto placed and kept in a role where they’re coding, and ideally only coding.
A side effect of that is the pool of candidates for promotions and managerial positions is reduced to “only people who can’t code.”
It creates this bizarre situation where the company is looking to its least talented people and least impressive outside candidates to fill the management positions, and actively trying not to promote or give any credit to its most impressive and productive people (because then they might realize their value and demand something the company can’t give them).
These are also the companies most likely to be running against deadlines and having people work evenings and weekends, because again, they can’t attract or retain enough talent to comfortably hit those deadlines. They’re always able to create those deadlines though, because as it turns out, it’s a lot easier to sell software than it is to make software.
Then at 5pm on Friday when all the engineers are looking forward to another 4 hours of coding, all the managers get to throw up their hands and go “I’m useless anyway, I guess I get to go home now!”
And they might as well.
(If you’re an engineer and this sounds familiar to you, go apply to 50 tech companies right now because you’re way more valuable than you realize)
That sounds a bit dismissive. What if they realize "I'm not a super star, but I'm above average in these desired skills. Therefore I get a nice house, but no multi-acre villa like some NBA superstar".
I think you're adding a bit too much personal animosity towards management.
What are these uneducated decision makers even doing at your place of work?
There's always a boss.
The boss is paying for the behavior they want to see.
Now if you argue the ultimate boss is clueless, then, what are you even doing there?
You might want to tell yourself that your immediate boss who calls you every 30 minutes you are away from work is just ineffective, but if he was not delivering on what his boss wanted from him, he would be gone.
> in highly secured environments or when dealing with highly sensitive documents
Its about control.
No matter how highly secured an environment is, human ingenuity can and will still work around it. There's literally several professions dedicated to it.
NO matter how highly sensitive a document is, if someone decides to share it, they will.
Crocodiles, fire pits, stripdowns, armed guards, MRIs or any camera is no obstacle to a determined individual.
> If you don’t understand your employees workload and don’t trust them then either you resign or fire the employees.
Did "Jim" not know that he was on facebook for 8 hours yesterday?
Will bringing that to his attention suddenly make him "more productive"?
Why would it have that effect?
You could try and fake empathy for the hand that feeds you (you have reason to!) but even if this kind of management had absolute clarity into employees workload, they still would do surveillance.
Why?
... because their messaging is "we control you during the hours you work for us".
It's unlikely anyone's watching the surveillance data and footage. Honestly, people don't have time and it's a very high noise-to-signal ratio activity. Even at retail where loss prevention is at least one dedicated department, it's impossible to follow up on surveillance data and footage.
Do you honestly believe anyone would look a those verbose reports generated in the video at any detail?
No.
For all purposes, its not the how but the why.
Control.
All this talk about productivity, workload and trust are "feel good" concepts that give the illusion that there just some "miscommunication" happening.
If only that "miscommunication" went away, everything would be perfect with the world again.
It provides a distraction from the reality that the people one's working for are sycophants and extremely manipulative.
The truth is - action has no miscommunication - it either works or it does not.
The toilet needed to be scrubbed?
Its either done or not done. Couldn't be done because someone was having a seizure there that required a team to come in and block the cleaning from happening? Check.
If the cleaner had to badge in and out and had a camera mounted at the restroom entrance to check if they went in or out - does not have any relation to the job getting done.
IF the individual cleaner was so determined to clean the restroom during the seizure, they would manage to do it.
Russia, China and the companies that hire the likes of
InterGuard Employee Monitoring for surveillance is doing it for control.
Putin wants dirt on you so when you become a problem for him, he can use it against you.
This style of writing where almost every sentence is its own line is weird to me. It's like writing in all caps -- if you emphasize every single point, then you emphasize none of them. Especially when it's a long post that takes up a bunch of space.
> You might want to tell yourself that your immediate boss who calls you every 30 minutes you are away from work is just ineffective, but if he was not delivering on what his boss wanted from him, he would be gone.
Except in cases where:
- That boss's boss is related to the CEO and is coasting / not at the wheel
- That boss's boss is already looking for ways to let go of them
- That boss's boss needs that boss in place for a while longer, due to other factors, but is still annoyed by the micromanagement
- That boss's boss is intimidated by their underling and feels something bad might happen if they take action against the unwanted behavior
I've seen all of the above and consulted management on a few of those as well. There are a million little ways in which the "system" (dynamic between a group of people at work) has achieved a form of control which is out of the grasp of the individual and in contravention of the ultimate boss's way of doing business.
Specific interventions can completely change the dynamic, but the tendency is to blame the problem on individuals rather than emergent effects, which IMO makes individuals feel even more helpless. Usually something can be done.
This kinda feels like the conspiracy theory perspective to organizational management.
If you see a purported optimization problem and a solution that doesn't fit it, there are two possible explanations. Either whatever does the optimization is bad at optimizing, or the objective function isn't what you think it is.
For almost every feasible solution, you can contrive an objective function so that that solution is the optimum. So perhaps the managers are deliberately engineering the business to take some money out of their bottom line to send a message. But in the spirit of Hanlon's razor, it's more likely that the managers are simply bad at their job.
You've been speaking of bosses, but I think the topic is of management. A subtle difference, but alas this is not word-play. A "boss" does not work for you, "management" works for you.
Your software records a phone call an employee made while not on the clock? Congratulations, That's a felony.
Your software reports on their browser history when an employee is not on the clock, Congratulations, that's another felony.
Your terminate someone because the software is saying they aren't at their computers the whole day, that's a class action lawsuit and possibly another felony.
And all of it is EASY AS HELL TO PROOVE BECAUSE YOU MADE THE LOG FILES AND INSTRUCTED YOUR IT STAFF TO DO IT YOU DIPSHIT.
Think that your employment contract which stipulates you get to watch everything and anything they signed to keep or get their job will save you? Think binding arbitration will save you? Not only will it not save you, but it will make your sentance longer.
We have entered a brave new worlds of uncharted territory.
One of the key driving factors of bad behaivour of company staff is the consequences of a fertility rate so bad a newborn male child has a 1 in 2 shot at procreating. Many people in "trap" jobs have chosen to live well and die young; if that means fucking your company over for the maximum dollars than so be it, they will do it, and you are going to be forced into putting up with it. The disconnect of plantation management is unbelievable; they think it's honorable capitalism to cannibalize society and lament they have no choice but to do so. They have a choice, they just prefer not having responsability. And that's when they are not intentionally sabotaging you. Piss off your employee and they might let an APT group in on their personal computer who will then attack your infrastructure.
And if I were IT Staff, I'd asking the question and Nop'ing that and quoting the law.
In large parts of the US if a company provided phone and/or computer is used to make the phone call or do the browsing none of the actions you listed are illegal. Neither is firing someone because the software said they weren't at the computer. In many states besides being fired for being part of certain protected classes you can be fired at anytime for any or no reason.
And yet, it's perfectly possible to give a focused 8 hours. If you can't give focused 8 hours, give a focused 7 and let's talk about that.
But let's stop pretending it's an 8 hour workday then, shall we? The US habit of doing lots of random shit during work is absolutely nuts - because you can't do anything well if you're constantly switching tasks.
Oddly, it's perfectly possible to have an environment where both are true - management trusts you to get work done, and you actually get focused work done. It "just" requires maturity on both sides. A willingness to honor an agreement on both sides, as opposed to constantly looking out for #1 only.
> After two weeks of working from her Brooklyn apartment, a 25-year-old e-commerce worker received a staffwide email from her company: Employees were to install software called Hubstaff immediately on their personal computers so it could track their mouse movements and keyboard strokes,and record the webpages they visited.
I'm 100 percent positive that I would tell this company to get stuffed if they suggested I put that crap on my personal computer/phone.
This is managerial paranoia. These are probably managers that worked their way up by stepping on people and bumping others into oncoming buses along the way.
It's an extension of the "butts in chairs" management style that's all over in America. When the managers are unable to actually measure output due to incompetence + lacking the ability to do the same job as their subordinates this is one of the few levers they get to pull. It's a management style of fear and dissonance where the workers are constantly being judged not based on merit, but on useless metrics and butt kissing...
In contrast - I've worked for managers that could care less about "butts in chairs" and are much more concerned with output/quality... this means they have to be actually productive/knowledgeable in my field which typically is an exception - especially for larger corps. I personally find my mental state is so much better and my output is magnitudes greater when working with this management style!
The other thing that's great about output based managers is that the bad-to-mediocre talent/work ethic folks get weeded out ASAP because it's apparent who can't cut it vs. higher output workers. "Butts in chairs" workers are good at gaming the optics + politics regardless if it's surveillance software or someone complaining about being in the office for X hours a day/week.
I completely agree, but it's a privilege to be able to risk your job for such a principle. I hope we can push to level the power imbalance between companies and employees so that privilege is available to more people.
It's also remarkably stupid. Get everyone to start looking up medical conditions, especially related to pregnancy, and watch how fast the lawyers shut it down.
If you want an example of what workplace surveillance software can monitor and capture, watch the following video. It's simply horrible that employees have to put up with this:
Does Interguard have a license from NBC to use characters from “The Office” in their marketing and other materials? It would be pretty funny if they got dinged for this and had some revenue extracted for profiting off someone else’s work because they weren’t productive enough to generate their own content.
speaking out of my ass but from experience, it's probably just an intern that was told to put fake data in there that happened to be fan of 'The office', I can tell you with 99% of certainty they don't have the rights
Ha, didn't take long for them to turn comments off. I posted a constructive (albeit critical) comment and that's their response. Soon they'll turn off "likes/dislikes".
There's a researcher, Ethan Bernstein, who has looked into this quite a bit and has some great stories about the ways close monitoring can (sometimes) go sideways. He did a fascinating history of it here: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/BernsteinE-M...
A representative anecdote re: a factory workfloor:
"First the [embedded researchers] were quietly shown ‘‘better ways’’ of accomplishing tasks by their peers — a ‘‘ton of little tricks’’ that ‘‘kept production going’’ or enabled ‘‘faster, easier, and / or safer production.’’ Then they were told, ‘‘Whenever the [customers / managers / leaders] come around, don’t do that, because they’ll get mad.’’ Instead, when under observation, embeds were trained in the art of appearing to perform the task the way it was ‘‘meant’’ to be done according to the codified process rules posted for each task. Because many of these performances were not as productive as the ‘‘little tricks,’’ I observed line performance actually dropping when lines were actively supervised."
From "The Transparency Paradox": https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000183921245302...
I've also interviewed a few engineers about this recently and there are plenty of horror stories. My favorite 2 quotes (from the same person) about screenshot monitoring freelancers: "It almost uniformly led to worse work..." and "... but my boss loved it."https://medium.com/@elibryan/employee-performance-tracking-d...
> And with few legal barriers, employers who turn to this software during the pandemic may choose to keep using it even after work-from-home orders are lifted, he said.
Unsurprising - why give up power once you've accumulated it. Regulation is the only way to reverse that. The companies building these tools are a special breed.
Readit News
If you need surveillance in this situation, you've got the wrong person -- folks like this self-selct themselves to work in these places. They are intrinsically motivated by the problem that interests them. No amount surveillence software will improve their output, if they are not interested in the problem -- they'll just quit.
I once worked in fast food right out of high school. 80-90% of the employees were one or more of untrustworthy, unreliable, whiny, always making excuses or trying get out of work. My point being if you start there you might just assume that that's the way it always is for all employees no matter what type of job and therefore feel like you need to surveil.
Most of my tech jobs didn't have this issue AFAIK (though one did) but just as one stat from a random search
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/workplace-crime-costs-us-bus...
When BTC was just starting out, we had one dev bring his own server to a data center and piggy back off a dumb switch for some NAS boxes. Free power for months and several BTC -- probably ~100k or more now.
We had a night admin printing out books on how to hack things from the work printer. Like 300 pages worth... which he forgot in the printer. He later tried to sell our certificates to random people via his work email.
One contract/hourly admin fudged his timecard 10 hours a week, every week, for months. He only was discovered when we did HR cost reviews and found that he was 500+ hours ahead of everyone else.
One of our junior linux admins brought his girlfriend into the NOC for a tour, then was caught on camera fingerbanging his lady on camera in the hallway just outside of the NOC door.
No shortage of switches, SFPs, half-step servers, and other gear going missing.
I have consulted with customer contact companies and it was always shocking to see the low productivity. Front line employees, especially the younger age group, would find ingenious ways to circumvent doing actual work while artificially inflating their KPIs. There was even information sharing economy in some companies where the best tricks were traded for goods and services.
To put it in context though, it was by any measure thankless and soul crushing work. And the worst offenders were in cold call centres and strangely in email support teams.
Whereas sure, I don't spend an eight hour solid block of time working each day, but I'll respond to a help ticket at 11pm because someone had a quick need and my computer is handy.
My employer is still getting my eight hours, possibly more, just diffused through the whole day.
Even that sticks in my craw... we need to make this 8 hour bar die. Some days I'm just not productive. Other days I might be heads-down on a problem for 15+ hours straight. So long as I'm accountable to my work and it is producing the results we've mutually agreed upon, this hour nonsense (for workers not billing by the hour, which is its own separate discussion) needs to go away.
twitches involuntarily
Buddy you're hitting way too close to home for my comfort, right now (thankfully the complaints are being heard and division chief is willing to hear out suggestions for a better system to track OKRs)
Imagine that you're processing confidential customer data and you use something like https://hubstaff.com to take screenshots randomly. You're literally uploading PII to some professional spyware provider that works on a freemium model.
Solution to that using appliances available in every home:
Dangle the mouse from you desk and put a fan next to it so that it hits the mouse from time to time.
But also quit your job - managers who use such tactics are usually very trigger-happy when it comes to firing people, so you're just delaying the inevitable.
"Don't engage in games with your employees, because you can't win."
He elaborates further explaining that any scheme or incentive system created for a specific behavioral outcome is bound to be exploited or otherwise worked around.
So the bossman is saying they should be at their desk working on their thing and let 3 year old Johnny ride his bicycle down the stairs?
I don’t see how this makes any employee productive. This adds more stress imo. An employee gives you 8 of their 12 hour day. Now, you tell me if that works only for you - the management. They’re people just like you. They have a life just like you. They have responsibilities similar to you. They might have a family similar to you. There’s no fucking way they can manage all this, giving you a focused 8 hour. They might need a few mins to pay a bill, lookup a medication, place a personal Online order. And many other activities that come with “living”, being alive.
I am certain most managers that implement this are antisocial fucks. It’s poor management. Uneducated decision making.
Now, it does has its place. For example in highly secured environments or when dealing with highly sensitive documents. But for a small or regular office, no!
HR/Payroll companies such as ADP and Insperity need to start setting ground rules. I know that they’re in favor of the employer, however, it would make good on them.
One of the reasons I'm a supporter of universal basic income is so that the employees can have a better negotiating position. I suspect many bullshit rules will go out the window when the alternative to employment isn't destitution.
For far too long has this negotiation been highly in favour of the employer.
Which means that with UBI, I might be less inclined to take risks. I'm not an economist enough to tell what that means, but a rough estimate say it won't increase my income. And at this point of the discussion, we haven't even touched the topic of taxes...
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Henry Ford had to double the pay to lower employee turnover.
Suffice to say that his confusion was reflected in how engineers were treated.
(Cerner is in the KC area.)
It's not always an adversarial thing.
This is best done by regular check-ins, not by monitoring everything an employee does every single minute.
I agree.
But the surveillance tools have been around for A LONG TIME, and people haven't really complained much about it.
The thing is whenever people ask questions about how the surveillance is performed and how to respond to it, the answer (in the USA) has traditionally been something like "It's your employer's equipment, they can do whatever they want with their equipment-- don't do anything on it unless you want the man to know."
Now, "the equipment" is at home. I don't think that makes much difference, but yeah, there's some interesting edge cases like turning on camera/microphone in employee home without employee consent.
It makes me wonder about countermeasures.
Is there a way to know if you're being screenshotted or some enterprise shit-ware is logging stuff? Yes, it's always true that it "could happen". I would like to know if it IS happening. Is that even possible?
They were told to put this on their "personal" computers. Not work computers. This is way over the line.
How much sleep are you getting??
I'll contribute a counter argument, if only because I don't see it mentioned much.
I'm the counter argument. Since I'm at home now, with kids, if I'm not directly on the phone with a coworker or boss, I'm likely not working. Recently our boss mandated that webcams must be on hereon-forward... before today, I would sometimes just have airpods on for the meeting but otherwise be doing stuff (cooking, clean dishes, other chores). Honestly this part I don't really enjoy -- because rarely there is stuff said in the meetings for which I need 100% of my brain head-on.
But that's just me with all of my mental disorders and problems, who needs a helicopter boss to be productive. You may be different.
If you're getting paid for results, then it shouldn't matter what you are doing every minute, as long as you are producing the results you are expected to produce.
If you are a heart surgeon or Lebron James you can understand why you are making so much money — you have exceptional skill at something in high demand. The average manager is more like someone who found a bank error in their favor and prays every morning that it isn’t discovered.
No need to reach for an analogy here, you could just say “if you are an engineer.”
In my experience what you’re saying is rarely true at the top tech companies, the managers there generally either come from a tech background themselves or they show an unexpectedly strong understanding of technical aspects of the product anyway, and typically have strong organizational and people skills that clearly stand on their own as rare and valuable.
What you’re saying is almost always the case at small- to mid-size tech companies (which is most of them), and I think it’s because they’re perpetually unable to attract and retain top tech talent... so anybody that can code is de facto placed and kept in a role where they’re coding, and ideally only coding.
A side effect of that is the pool of candidates for promotions and managerial positions is reduced to “only people who can’t code.”
It creates this bizarre situation where the company is looking to its least talented people and least impressive outside candidates to fill the management positions, and actively trying not to promote or give any credit to its most impressive and productive people (because then they might realize their value and demand something the company can’t give them).
These are also the companies most likely to be running against deadlines and having people work evenings and weekends, because again, they can’t attract or retain enough talent to comfortably hit those deadlines. They’re always able to create those deadlines though, because as it turns out, it’s a lot easier to sell software than it is to make software.
Then at 5pm on Friday when all the engineers are looking forward to another 4 hours of coding, all the managers get to throw up their hands and go “I’m useless anyway, I guess I get to go home now!”
And they might as well.
(If you’re an engineer and this sounds familiar to you, go apply to 50 tech companies right now because you’re way more valuable than you realize)
I think you're adding a bit too much personal animosity towards management.
There is no "poor management".
What are these uneducated decision makers even doing at your place of work?
There's always a boss.
The boss is paying for the behavior they want to see.
Now if you argue the ultimate boss is clueless, then, what are you even doing there?
You might want to tell yourself that your immediate boss who calls you every 30 minutes you are away from work is just ineffective, but if he was not delivering on what his boss wanted from him, he would be gone.
> in highly secured environments or when dealing with highly sensitive documents
Its about control.
No matter how highly secured an environment is, human ingenuity can and will still work around it. There's literally several professions dedicated to it.
NO matter how highly sensitive a document is, if someone decides to share it, they will.
Crocodiles, fire pits, stripdowns, armed guards, MRIs or any camera is no obstacle to a determined individual.
> If you don’t understand your employees workload and don’t trust them then either you resign or fire the employees.
Nah - it's just about control.
Look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA_fJh4lzqQ
Did "Jim" not know that he was on facebook for 8 hours yesterday?
Will bringing that to his attention suddenly make him "more productive"?
Why would it have that effect?
You could try and fake empathy for the hand that feeds you (you have reason to!) but even if this kind of management had absolute clarity into employees workload, they still would do surveillance.
Why?
... because their messaging is "we control you during the hours you work for us".
It's unlikely anyone's watching the surveillance data and footage. Honestly, people don't have time and it's a very high noise-to-signal ratio activity. Even at retail where loss prevention is at least one dedicated department, it's impossible to follow up on surveillance data and footage.
Do you honestly believe anyone would look a those verbose reports generated in the video at any detail?
No.
For all purposes, its not the how but the why.
Control.
All this talk about productivity, workload and trust are "feel good" concepts that give the illusion that there just some "miscommunication" happening.
If only that "miscommunication" went away, everything would be perfect with the world again.
It provides a distraction from the reality that the people one's working for are sycophants and extremely manipulative.
The truth is - action has no miscommunication - it either works or it does not.
The toilet needed to be scrubbed?
Its either done or not done. Couldn't be done because someone was having a seizure there that required a team to come in and block the cleaning from happening? Check.
If the cleaner had to badge in and out and had a camera mounted at the restroom entrance to check if they went in or out - does not have any relation to the job getting done.
IF the individual cleaner was so determined to clean the restroom during the seizure, they would manage to do it.
Russia, China and the companies that hire the likes of InterGuard Employee Monitoring for surveillance is doing it for control.
Putin wants dirt on you so when you become a problem for him, he can use it against you.
Surveillance is all about control.
Except in cases where:
- That boss's boss is related to the CEO and is coasting / not at the wheel
- That boss's boss is already looking for ways to let go of them
- That boss's boss needs that boss in place for a while longer, due to other factors, but is still annoyed by the micromanagement
- That boss's boss is intimidated by their underling and feels something bad might happen if they take action against the unwanted behavior
I've seen all of the above and consulted management on a few of those as well. There are a million little ways in which the "system" (dynamic between a group of people at work) has achieved a form of control which is out of the grasp of the individual and in contravention of the ultimate boss's way of doing business.
Specific interventions can completely change the dynamic, but the tendency is to blame the problem on individuals rather than emergent effects, which IMO makes individuals feel even more helpless. Usually something can be done.
If you see a purported optimization problem and a solution that doesn't fit it, there are two possible explanations. Either whatever does the optimization is bad at optimizing, or the objective function isn't what you think it is.
For almost every feasible solution, you can contrive an objective function so that that solution is the optimum. So perhaps the managers are deliberately engineering the business to take some money out of their bottom line to send a message. But in the spirit of Hanlon's razor, it's more likely that the managers are simply bad at their job.
Your software reports on their browser history when an employee is not on the clock, Congratulations, that's another felony.
Your terminate someone because the software is saying they aren't at their computers the whole day, that's a class action lawsuit and possibly another felony.
And all of it is EASY AS HELL TO PROOVE BECAUSE YOU MADE THE LOG FILES AND INSTRUCTED YOUR IT STAFF TO DO IT YOU DIPSHIT.
Think that your employment contract which stipulates you get to watch everything and anything they signed to keep or get their job will save you? Think binding arbitration will save you? Not only will it not save you, but it will make your sentance longer.
We have entered a brave new worlds of uncharted territory.
One of the key driving factors of bad behaivour of company staff is the consequences of a fertility rate so bad a newborn male child has a 1 in 2 shot at procreating. Many people in "trap" jobs have chosen to live well and die young; if that means fucking your company over for the maximum dollars than so be it, they will do it, and you are going to be forced into putting up with it. The disconnect of plantation management is unbelievable; they think it's honorable capitalism to cannibalize society and lament they have no choice but to do so. They have a choice, they just prefer not having responsability. And that's when they are not intentionally sabotaging you. Piss off your employee and they might let an APT group in on their personal computer who will then attack your infrastructure.
And if I were IT Staff, I'd asking the question and Nop'ing that and quoting the law.
But let's stop pretending it's an 8 hour workday then, shall we? The US habit of doing lots of random shit during work is absolutely nuts - because you can't do anything well if you're constantly switching tasks.
Oddly, it's perfectly possible to have an environment where both are true - management trusts you to get work done, and you actually get focused work done. It "just" requires maturity on both sides. A willingness to honor an agreement on both sides, as opposed to constantly looking out for #1 only.
I'm 100 percent positive that I would tell this company to get stuffed if they suggested I put that crap on my personal computer/phone.
This is managerial paranoia. These are probably managers that worked their way up by stepping on people and bumping others into oncoming buses along the way.
In contrast - I've worked for managers that could care less about "butts in chairs" and are much more concerned with output/quality... this means they have to be actually productive/knowledgeable in my field which typically is an exception - especially for larger corps. I personally find my mental state is so much better and my output is magnitudes greater when working with this management style!
The other thing that's great about output based managers is that the bad-to-mediocre talent/work ethic folks get weeded out ASAP because it's apparent who can't cut it vs. higher output workers. "Butts in chairs" workers are good at gaming the optics + politics regardless if it's surveillance software or someone complaining about being in the office for X hours a day/week.
All-in-all I agree with your statement.
I absolutely agree that it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA_fJh4lzqQ
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Don't like what a job is asking you do to? Don't like a policy? Don't like spyware? Peace out.
A representative anecdote re: a factory workfloor: "First the [embedded researchers] were quietly shown ‘‘better ways’’ of accomplishing tasks by their peers — a ‘‘ton of little tricks’’ that ‘‘kept production going’’ or enabled ‘‘faster, easier, and / or safer production.’’ Then they were told, ‘‘Whenever the [customers / managers / leaders] come around, don’t do that, because they’ll get mad.’’ Instead, when under observation, embeds were trained in the art of appearing to perform the task the way it was ‘‘meant’’ to be done according to the codified process rules posted for each task. Because many of these performances were not as productive as the ‘‘little tricks,’’ I observed line performance actually dropping when lines were actively supervised." From "The Transparency Paradox": https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000183921245302...
I've also interviewed a few engineers about this recently and there are plenty of horror stories. My favorite 2 quotes (from the same person) about screenshot monitoring freelancers: "It almost uniformly led to worse work..." and "... but my boss loved it."https://medium.com/@elibryan/employee-performance-tracking-d...
Unsurprising - why give up power once you've accumulated it. Regulation is the only way to reverse that. The companies building these tools are a special breed.