Employers asking to install this junk on personal devices seems like an over reach.
Maybe some bored software developer could create the "uBlock of employee trackers". A program that would feed fake data into these trackers to make them unreliable for employers.
BYOD must not require spyware, period. Companies that do it are too cheap to provide corporate equipment and too insecure to trust their own employees observable output.
An open video stream to employees workstation could be reasonable if there is suspicion of fraud, like outsourcing their work to untrusted 3rd parties. It's not too unlike having an employee in the office. Though even in office employees have some expectations of privacy, like not exposing their home life or bathroom routines. Of course a company device would still need to be provided.
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.
Fundamentally it's just an outdated style of doing business.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.
My favorite is trying to figure out a bug and nothing I can think of provides any clue. So I do some other work for a bit and go home. And the next morning sit down down and fix the problem in 2 minutes. Obviously _something_ got done between last night and this morning. But how would you bill for THAT.
Or an old example from a mentor. Get in the shower, start thinking about what you're going to work on today. Realize you've been in the shower for half an hour. How you going to bill for that?
I've come to the idea that you pay an engineer for his attention to your problems. Engineers I dislike working with are ones that don't. Their other interests have crowded out what they are being paid to mind. And some of those guys definitely do spend 8 hours in the chair going through the motions. They do work but there is a disunity to the whole thing.
Last year we had a management meeting and somehow started talking about smoking. Someone suggested we should ban people from smoking because they are wasting company's time.I defended the smokers arguing these are usually much needed breaks for those on the phones. Then I went on explaining that I could literally sit outside the office all day and just talk to my colleague and smoke one after another and It will be a productive day for us.They were taken back for a bit by such arguments,but then I explained that we get paid for using our brains and if it takes 5 hours to sit outside and think how to do it and then jump back on the keyboard and write code in 2 hours that implements this idea,then that's what it is. Everyone agreed and we moved on from the topic:)
When I was a junior engineer, I worked on a team where everyone but me smoked. They would smoke for five minutes of every hour. It really pissed me off that they got breaks and I didn't. So I started joining them. Not to smoke, just to hang out while they smoked.
And you know what? My productivity went up! The reason? We talked about work during the smoke break. I got to be part of the conversation with the senior engineers, which meant I got to be involved in more valuable tasks.
I found this video last night lounging on the couch, the first segment talks about exactly what you’ve described, and the necessity to sometimes let the mind wander or do something else entirely when you’re “in the zone” but nevertheless stumped on a particular problem.
The video itself is about math and science but I think the applications extend far beyond.
I think I get where you're coming from but I'm at the point in my career where I like work/life balance and do not give a shit about your email once I've turned off work (unless it's an emergency, obviously). If this doesn't happen, work creeps into life until that's all it is, no fun, no exercise, no fresh air, no social interaction, no family time - and all the negative mental and physical health effects that result from this.
I mean, if a really productive brainstorm session bleeds over an hour or 2 every once in a while and we just can't stop the flood of great ideas or hit that "flow", of course, let's keep going. But every damn day? Get a life, kid! Before it's too late.
On the flip side, if I get inspired to do work in my off-hours, I don't go charging it back, so to speak.
> I'm at the point in my career where I like work/life balance and do not give a shit about your email once I've turned off work...
We aren't disagreeing here... my point is not that you should work 24x7, rather... throughout my career I've noticed that value and hours are not correlated. Therefore, it strikes me as really silly to be so focused on hours worked in fields where that metric doesn't matter. I'm not saying we should get lazy and sit around, but rather find new ways of managing our work that recognize this phenomenon and seek to create working environments where we eliminate hours as a measure of productivity and instead focus on the productive output of our work.
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
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.
Edit since I just re-read the parent comment and might have misunderstood: I don't distinguish between tech and other fields in this regard. I think it's an issue in all fields.
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.
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.
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.
I think this is a situation where employees need to leave the company. We vote with our choices. If we don't deem this to be appropriate, we must respond in kind. It's not simple and not everyone has the choice, but for those that can, should.
Or regulate. Consider that your same argument was applies to e.g. the 40-hour workweek, and workplace safety standards in the US. We quite rightly decided not to leave such things to the market because in practice the labor market is FAR from perfect.
And it's also not true in particular, you might happen to be in a group which benefits from given regulation. Hopefully, in a democratic society, the group that is negatively affected (if any) is as small as possible.
.. and I downvoted you, because it absolutely true by definition.
Regulation, by definition, decreases freedom.
That's the whole point of regulation - to threaten with violence, acts that people have agreed are not a good idea.
If software engineers were regulated under IEEE, the freedoms of software engineers would decrease not increase.
I quote from the article you linked:
"In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance."
Regulation, by definition, is intolerance.
For example - the minimum wage regulation. You have now removed the freedom of an untrained, unemployed person to sell their labor at a lower floor which was their only way to gain employment when there's a trained but unemployed person willing to also work for minimum wage!
You've got a pretty simplistic view of freedom there, bud. Regulations often increase freedom for some while decreasing it for others. Constitutions are just regulations for government--does preventing the government from infringing on the right to free speech, for example, increase or decrease freedom?
Employers have immense power over their workers, and regulation is one of the tools societies can use to make sure that power isn't abused.
The word regulate, in regulation literally means "decrease freedom".
In physics, a regulator is used to decrease freedom. That's why regulators are used in the first place.
> Regulations often increase freedom for some while decreasing it for others
Again, regulations can only decrease freedom.
It does not make sense to "increase" something that already exists.
The freedom to live does not make you more alive than what you already are.
> Constitutions are just regulations for government--does preventing the government from infringing on the right to free speech, for example, increase or decrease freedom?
The concept of free speech is innate and available everywhere, including countries that does not recognize free speech.
Free speech is an inalienable right that every person is born with. It does not require someone else to grant or validate it.
All that the first amendment to the Constitution does is _recognize_ (not increase) your freedom to speak against the "government".
That is it.
The "government" still can jail you or even kill you.
All that a country that recognizes free speech promises is that after the deed is done, it will bring that misdeed to justice and hopefully right that wrong.
If that was not the case, the courts would be way less crowded than it already is.
Also, first amendment to the Constitution does not apply to private citizens.
If you suddenly started to yell at your neighbor's lawn, not matter how well placed and logical your arguments are, you will still get booted with no legal recourse.
The only thing that is left is if this was the government that booted you out, you can take them to court and expect to win if you have a valid case.
There can be no such expectation in a country that does not recognize free speech.
Because you're applying a definition of freedom so absolutely and narrowly that it ceases to be useful.
Assault being illegal increases my freedom because I can freely walk down the street without threat of harm.
Prohibiting outside doors from being locked in a factory increases my freedom as a worker to leave whenever I choose.
And theoretically at an absolute minimum any time you see a prisoners dilemma regulation is how you prevent it and make sure that everyone gets their preferred outcome.
If your definition of freedom can't explain why voluntary enslavement makes people less free then it's useless.
> And theoretically at an absolute minimum any time you see a prisoners dilemma regulation is how you prevent it and make sure that everyone gets their preferred outcome.
I can assure you that not everyone is getting their preferred outcome. That's why the term "prisoners" instead of "willing teammates" are used here.
> Prohibiting outside doors from being locked in a factory increases my freedom as a worker to leave whenever I choose.
As a worker you always can leave whenever you choose. Past. Present. Future.
That does not mean you get to keep your job doing that.
Slaves too had the freedom to leave whenever they chose unless they were in chains. The only issue was the enforcement of certain labor contracts that have since been deemed illegal. To clarify, the slaves were treated as property just like you now treat your pets, in this day and age. If your pet was to flee you would capture it and offer rewards for its re-capture. The concept of it is still alive in this day and age. It's just not phrased in those specific terms.
Your mention of voluntary enslavement indicates you are well aware of what I mentioned and how modern society has just devised new means of enslavement while being compliant with anti-slavery regulations.
> Assault being illegal increases my freedom because I can freely walk down the street without threat of harm.
Absolutely not.
Making something illegal absolutely does not shield you against harm.
Making something legal absolutely does not shield you against harm either.
If you exercised your right of freedom of speech in San Francisco and serenaded Trump, you will see what I mean.
There is no magic cloak that protects you from "illegal" things.
If someone shot you with a machine gun - the former being a criminal activity with various levels of prosecution and the later being literally illegal in most practical sense in the U.S. - you are still shot and injured - illegal or not.
You are still hurt or dead.
The only concern at that point is whether the perpetrator is going to be first caught, and then prosecuted under the laws that make their activity liable for prosecution.
If they run away, tough luck - illegal and all that.
If you are a terrorist on the run, assault is no longer off the table. Saddam and Osama can speak a few words about that.
Any kind of weapons are illegal in Mexico, so it assault. Yet people die of both in Mexico.
Fact remains you are still hurt or dead irregardless of the agility of it.
You dont have the ability to arise from the ashes even if the method of your injury/mortality was illegal.
Physics and biology don't consult the roster of human idiosyncrasies. They follow the rules of science, illegal or not.
The moon rotated around the earth well before, during it was illegal to do so and it continues to.
We were having a conversation about how passing regulations against surveillance at work is meaningless because just like all regulations, majority of companies will find ways to work around it while complying with regulations.
When it became illegal to directly discriminate against race, employers found out ways to indirectly discriminate against race by putting in requirements for schooling and degrees that are just not in the reach of certain races and ethnic groups.
... but let's indulge you for a moment.
I can pass all the kinds of laws against assault I want all day and you can come along and pay enough money to redefine what assault really means.
Every regulation I pass is a restraint against my own freedom.
I can chop my foot off as much as I want in an attempt to save my head but if someone really wanted my head, they will have it no matter how hard I try to stop it.
Regulation does not help the common man at all and the rich already have help to get what they want. Regulation or no regulation.
So in your view regulation doesn’t stop anyone from doing what they want to do or we’re doing anyway. Doesn’t that imply that they can’t limit your freedom then?
If regulations are totally ineffective why give them any mind at all?
> If regulations are totally ineffective why give them any mind at all?
Because each regulation is a fly constantly nagging at you. There's nothing stopping you from continuing to do what you were doing and if you concentrate enough, you don't even feel the flies but they are still there buzzing around and nagging at you.
It's annoying as hell mate.
What's one regulation that really changed your life?
Hold on, we are not done yet - now think of one regulation, without which you really could have, really, changed your life.
One person's rights/freedoms are another person's responsibility. There can be no freedom without responsibility. Regulation is legally enforced responsibility.
> One person's rights/freedoms are another person's responsibility
yes
> There can be no freedom without responsibility.
yes so as I like to say it - freedom is anything but free
> Regulation is legally enforced responsibility.
Yes!
The issue I have with regulation is it requires enforcement to be truly useful and part of that requires the person seeking enforcement to yield their freedom to the enforcing authority to kick in.
Yet people seem to believe that regulation is this magic pixe dust that grants everyone special powers.
While there's some power in voting with your choices, it's not really voting because a true vote with your choice must occur without being under duress or leveraged.
When it comes to employment, unless you're swimming in money and are basically just working for the sole purpose that you enjoy it, you're leveraged into adjusting your vote accordingly to your best option.
When true competition exists and your labor easily transfers, then by all means, select employers with reasonable practices. Relatively few people get to completely pick where they want to work and for what position they work. Most of us who aren't the top say 5% in our field pick a few handfuls and take a shotgun approach to see which opportunity lands. If none of those options land, we move to options we don't like because not working isn't a viable option.
Right now with unemployment rates skyrocketing, you have even less flexibility because labor is even more leveraged and have to cave into more and more policies like this.
The only way to protect labor in these situations, aside from organized labor unions, is creating enforceable regulatory protections for labor.
While this is certainly one method, it is not the only one. Change from within is possible and requires organizing with your colleagues. Otherwise we become like locusts, forever driven from place to place in search of ever-shrinking fertile land.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
> Any manager who feels the need to peek over the shoulders of their workers should submit to the same.
Sounds like a "Tit for tat".
Why?
If I cut your finger off and stabbed you in your kidney, would it change your personal situation if you did the same?
If your immediate boss calls you every 30 minutes you are away from work, you want to do the same?
That's madness!
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.
"Tit for tat" is a great children's activity.
Adults are not children.
If your boss behaves like a child it's time to have a conversation.
Depending on your specific situation that conversation might very well be with a new company.
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.
You have to take into account weekends and days off too.
Anyway, using the DOL's standard of 2,087 work hours in a work year, we can do the following calculation: 2,087 / (365.24 * 24) = 23.8% of your total time spent at work.
Let's use a generous figure of 8 hours of sleep per night: 2,087 / (365.24 * 16) = 35.7% of your waking hours spent at work. The rest is your time, to spend however you choose to spend it, whether that's commuting, cooking, chores, errands, hobbies, whatever.
And we haven't even factored in vacation and sick days -- the 2,087 work hours figure only includes federal holidays.
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.
Honestly, I think this is less about the Midwest and more about purposely siting a company in a town with relatively low labor costs and few other options.
At the time, there were few other choices for technology work in Kansas City.
oh boy, nepotism is rampant. It might as well be a written rule, if your father works as a director, you can expect his kid gets to run a department for 6 figures a year
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.
That was back in the day you trained and educated employees (to save money and built loyality). Back when they offered a living wage a single person could raise a family with.
What happened? Free trade.
Cheap goods from other countries gutted the local industries. Hard to compete on price when labour costs are so different. The only jobs remaining become min wage or importing.
People not working as hard as a generation ago doesn't factor in.
It's important to remember that free trade is not the ultimate cause. Greed among the wealthy elite is. What happened is that rich business owners deliberately pushed for free trade laws as a way to circumvent the laws the labor movement got passed to protect people.
They sold out American workers to increase their profit margins.
"free trade" allows for the free movement of capital, but not the free movement of labor which is stuck relatively immobile (except maybe from "cheaper" countries to the more "expensive" ones)
It's definitely a popular line of thought. Though having worked in multiple areas of the US, I don't think it is. You won't need to look hard in SF, NYC, or London to find corporate leadership that doesn't really consider engineers to be humans like them.
Is it possible people are looking for patterns in noise?
Personally, I find the purported cultural commentary of others on offer here to be an uncomfortable echo of the cultural snobbery one hears daily offered by Californians to the "flyover states".
You may be on to something; I will say I have enjoyed the cultural aspects of my west coast jobs very much more so than my east coast and Midwest jobs, but that is not probably some form of bias.
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.
I've been a line cook, restaurant owners are absolutely untrustworthy and hostile. The food industry is one where exploitation, highly aggressive staff retention practices (making employees dependent on you for a visa, threatening to spread lies about you, etc.), crazy unhealthy hours and just a generally awful culture are standard.
Can vouch for the life science industry being like this as well. Management threatened to make us check in every hour of work. Spending an eighth of that hour writing an explanatory email was pretty toxic.
I've worked in the restaurant industry in the US. It's nothing short of horrifying, and often traumatizing for those involved.
I've seen no overtime pay happen, lies from management to get unemployment claims denied, management not actually firing people but just giving them zero or reduced hours to mess with the unemployment claim process, the VISA fuckery you mentioned, harrassment. Intentional scheduling of conflicting days for people with multiple jobs. Being made to work 7 days a week for long periods of time. Being made to repeatedly close late at night / early in the morning and then open the restaurant the next morning, a few hours later, and work a double. Being made to work while sick (this happens a lot).
A gold comment I heard from one manager was "I don't pay overtime because these motherfuckers already take enough of my money" (referring to the employees). This same guy was shaving time slips to keep them below 40 hours.
All employers will value the enterprise over any one of their employees individually. When is the last time you saw an employer shutter their business but continue paying their employees? It isn't that they aren't trustworthy, it is that it is a mistake to trust your employer to act in your best interest. As an example you yourself bring up, think of all the restaurants that only function because they pay their employees peanuts and give them unstable hours.
I had a boss sum it up pretty well for us once. It was stressful and a bunch of people had been arguing at work. The boss rounded everyone up and basically told us all that in the end, the business would go on whether he had to run it alone or not. We could all keep arguing, fucking up jobs, pissing customers off and losing the business money, but then nobody would have work at all. Or we could all get over our differences, work shit out and keep getting paid.
That was pretty much all it took.
And I understand, he'd been running that business for over 20 years and started it from nothing. He was fairly successful while I was working there, but he'd been at the bottom before and would keep working back up from there again if it came down to it.
He's probably one of the best bosses i've had, he was fair and would invest in employees and the business, but the business always came first.
It's possible that a UBI could work out to the benefit of employers that respect their workers. Suppose your job choices are an employer that treats you well and pays $20k/year, and an employer that treats you badly and pays $30k/year. You might end up having to take the higher pay and put up with the abuse just to make ends meet. But with a UBI of $15k/year, the lower paying job becomes a viable option.
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.
That works in certain fields - for instance, many of us here on HN can indeed walk across the street and get a new job if our employers are teetering into miniature surveillance states.
To be honest, though, the average worker doesn't have that kind of leverage, they don't have pockets deep enough to wade through the interview cycle, and many of the other employers they'd go work for are doing exactly the same thing. For them, the alternative to employment at a company deploying these kinds of tactics is very much destitution - especially right now.
I'm with you on one thing: if my employer demanded minute-by-minute accountability for my time, I'd leave, no questions asked and minimum notice given. I have that choice, though; when discussing things like UBI, I always try to remind myself that someone for whom that support would be life-changing is in a very different situation from mine, with a much more constrained set of responses / actions available to them.
They have all that they need should they decide to use it: the power of self-agency. That's the only and ultimate leverage anyone has if nothing else...
You've been posting all sorts of generic comments in this thread, and worse, and basically derailing it to the point of trolling. Please don't do this on HN.
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...
Personal experience. I put more into a job when I see a point in it, because I start to like it. When I don't find my work worthwhile or find interesting in any other way, it's not going to turn out good. What does it take for this? I don't know, maybe I'm screwing up the wording for it somehow.
UBI seems less risky than a union because of a long history of anti-union action, hostility towards employees, and lack of mobility once one is bound to a union. UBI provides flexible minimum support and someone could transform their life from one place to another by being sure they could at least maintain a minimum standard of living.
If they won't let you have a union then the ubi they give you won't put you on a stronger footing. Ubi could help create a minimum standard of living, that's what that tool is for, but that's separate from getting negotiating power for workers. For that, they need to negotiate together.
See jedberg. We have systematically destroyed the concept of growing with a company for it's duration in the US. Without the concept of mutual company-employee loyalty then something needs to protect inter-company transition/bargaining power.
If ubi can cover your costs of living. But if corporate america and government have broken the labor movement, then why would they give you ubi that truly gives you autonomy from work?
The point is not autonomy. The point is that it keeps you alive, so that you know that if you leave your job, at least you'll still have health care and food, so you won't die by being jobless.
It sets a minimum bar.
Realistically you need both -- a UBI and a union. The UBI sets the minimum bar that all jobs must reach, the Union sets the livable bar for one particular workplace (or maybe a group of similar workplaces).
UBI and Unions serve different purposes. A UBI prevents modern slavery, a Union provides for a decent quality of life.
Because we in the US need to understand that it's not about just passively being given something. This is about a whole country making decisions that steward the actual people who make it, not entities with highly biased representation.
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.
> 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.
I don't get the "Except in cases where" because it feels like we are on the same page.
Let me explain.
> - That boss's boss is related to the CEO and is coasting / not at the wheel
i.e. the boss is paying for the behavior they want to see.
> - That boss's boss is already looking for ways to let go of him
then it's a solved problem - unless the boss's boss continues to look for ways to let go for months on end, in which case really, again, the boss is paying for the behavior they want to see
> - That boss's boss needs him in place for a while longer, due to other factors, but is still annoyed by the micromanagement
i.e. the boss is paying for the behavior they want to see
"annoyed"?
It seems like the value is "needs him in place for a while longer" and all the "annoyance" does is affect that somewhat.
Can we measure the effect of the "annoyance" on the decision? Let's see:
If I have a racist employee and their racism "annoys" me, I still am supporting racism with my dollars.
Otherwise, real action is: ask them to move on.
If I have a noisy neighbor and their noise "annoys" me, I still am supporting their behavior with my dollars.
The real action would be: I move/ I ask them to move, or take them to court while getting an stay order to ensure the noise is constrained while the matter is settled.
At a previous apartment, there was a stay at home mom above mine who would begin her aggressive yoga and home gymnastics at 5AM and end at 9AM. Constant pounding. I spoke with her first and she felt the gym in the complex was too crowded for her. I recorded her activities from below in my room, sent it to the office, yelp, facebook for the complex, broke my lease and moved.
Life is too short for nonsense.
> - That boss's boss is intimidated by his underling and feels something bad might happen if he takes action against the unwanted behavior
i.e. the boss is paying for the behavior they want to see
I feel there's some sympathy for the boss, almost as if they were misguided children.
Adults are not children.
If your boss behaves like a child it's time to have a conversation.
Depending on your specific situation that conversation might very well be with a new company.
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.
> the spirit of Hanlon's razor, it's more likely that the managers are simply bad at their job.
> In some sense, it doesn't even matter. If the manager is sacrificing profit for a fuzzy feeling of domination, then he's doing a bad job at increasing profit. And if the business is in competition with another that doesn't succumb to that kind of error, then the market will make it very clear
We have to be consistent in our views.
In the first sentence, the Hanlon's razor applies but not in the second one?
What if the market is inefficient and the manager sacrificing profit for a fuzzy feeling of domination actually comes ahead?
Does the Hanlon's razor support that theory?
In that case, how does this conversation proceed?
I am (trying to) applying a consistent view - that there's always an objective function in a game and society is a game.
Right now, you and I are playing a game - I'm trying to clarify my thoughts and so are you.
My objective function is to test the clarity of my thoughts and the best way to go about it, I feel, is to discuss it with someone who holds a contrarian view.
That said, I've been having a hard time doing that here on HN as once downvotes (which work like a silencing mechanism here) happen, I literally cant respond back until a few hours have passed since the last downvote.
Don't hesitate to reach out over email. I am enjoying this exchange.
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.
With over a million views of my content, I have noticed that this style is preferred by an overwhelming majority of readers.
I am sure there are who disagree. I am explicitly open to open dialog with all my channels listed on my profile.
My focus is to reach people and listen to what they have to say.
My objective is to test the clarity of my thoughts and the best way to go about it, I feel, is to discuss it with someone who holds a contrarian view.
That said, I've been having a hard time doing that here on HN as once downvotes (which work like a silencing mechanism here) happen, I literally cant respond back until a few hours have passed since the last downvote.
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.
> 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.
Yes, of course, putting something like that on a personal machine is odious.
But how do you tell if that or something like it is on your work machine? Look for "hubstaff.dll"? ... half kidding, but seriously how do you tell if there's corporate fuckery on your work machine (eg screenshotting, logging time on URLs, keylogging, etc etc)?
Apps for auto mouse movements exist.
It's also possible auto feed a stream of recorded video to the cam. If my employer automated stuff to spy on me, I would automate to feed the troll in that same manner.
Unless you have access to Admin and can see ALL processes running, then no. Well, I guess you could try and analyze all data leaving your computer... but is it worth it? If you're working from home, just use a different computer for non-work stuffs.
In my experience, there is no way you can tell -- even if you are an Admin -- not unless you are highly skilled and technically competent and possess detailed knowledge and understanding of computer and program behavior.
OK, but many folks have a fair amount of control over their work PC's. For instance, they can install software manage services, etc.
This "surveillance-ware", I am suggesting, can be thought of as a kind-of malware and be detectable in some way, either on the disk or as a running process.
I am surprised that no one has created something to check if such surveillance software is running or perhaps even actively screenshotting.
Easy, just assume that they are doing it. Most probably don't, but you shouldn't do anything on your work machine you don't want them to see. Just keep your personal laptop in your bag (if possible) and use that instead, or do the thing on your phone.
I don't know how much of what these pieces of software are capable of on Mac (because of all the privacy stuff in Catalina that requires the user to agree) and Linux (because I doubt there's a huge market for these tools on Linux), so if you don't have Windows on your machine you are probably even more okay. But in any case, assume they can.
to instead of simulating a single keypress, have it open a text editor and simulate typing in the source code of the app you're working on. That way any keylogger running will pick up a lot of code. If manager is dumb enough to use a keylogger he probably won't recognize that it's the same code each day.
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.
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.
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.
It's not just management... it's all white collar middle class workers in America. Why aren't they inhaling dust in a coal mine or dying of a preventable disease? None of us really have any idea.
And I think you're giving management too much credit.
The vast majority of management does not have goals/behaviors they are measured in.
I'm still fascinated that it's largely considered impossible to have a VP count how many 1:1's a manager had or how many times they gave positive vs. negative feedback. Imagine if no one kept any statistics for any sports player, and just say "it's too hard, you have to manually count".
Most managers should be fired, they largely are flailing around underneath directors who should also be fired, underneath VPs who have so little control over their org they largely are future predictors with no inputs (aka random output).
I say this from a place of love - I think they're all working very hard. But I've only ever met 1 manager in my life that counted their small interactions with their reports to try and improve.
I'm not giving management any credit, but I believe they have a pretty good idea why they are hired and paid well, and if it's just "because I've studied this and that, have those certifications and know how to use KPI in a sentence". I don't believe that managers by and large suffer from impostor syndrome and therefore try to gain control of their situation by adding surveillance because of fear.
They may have plenty of room for improvement, but their actions aren't motivated by "I don't know what I'm doing here", rather "I don't trust my employees enough to let them run free". That's a very different motivation and confusing the two will only lead to not understanding actions and reactions.
> 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)
The difference in top companies is the people who got in, know they have it real good, because they specifically studied leetcode for 6 months to try and get in.
Average managers didn't and so they just derp around hoping everything'll turn out alright.
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.
> 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.
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.
Seeing what someone is doing is different from hearing a description of it. For example, someone may be using the wrong tool for the job. Or he may be using an ineffective sales pitch. Or he may be doing his job by going around the horn rather than using the canal.
I'm not saying it's never abusive. Just that it isn't necessarily abusive.
So ask them what tool they are using and why. Or set up a video chat where they can show you what they are doing and you can make suggestions about better tools.
> he may be using an ineffective sales pitch
So listen in on the sales call and then give feedback afterwards.
Still don't see why any of this requires minute by minute monitoring.
> I'm not saying it's never abusive. Just that it isn't necessarily abusive.
If there are obvious alternatives that are (a) much less intrusive, and (b) much more respectful of the employee's professionalism, then it sure seems to me like minute by minute monitoring is abusive.
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".
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?
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.
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.
Lack of ethics for sure. Sadly the tech industry is filled with people lacking ethics, which allows privacy breaching companies like Facebook, Google etc. to thrive.
> 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.
I don't think decency has anything to do with it. Profits are king that everyone bows to. I can see a management meeting where inevitably someone throws the idea of webcam surveillance into the rink. After all it is simple to understand, it "makes sense", (micro)managers will really enjoy it. So it will pass with flying colors.
And as they say, the rest is history. Good workers will eventually leave. Some will adapt. Software and hacks will appear that can trick key presses and mouse clicks. Eveyone will become 9 to 5 no matter what.
I see some examples brought up where developers are not putting up with it - that is correct. For developers, typing <> productivity, so that will not stick. But there are other occupations around - admin work, marketing, data entry, HR, etc... Productivity in those occupations will dip, some people will leave, but in larger scope work will continue. Companies will compensate by hiring more people, it won't be visible on a balance sheet as "survelliance tax" because no one is tracking. And the world will go on. Worse off than before, unfortunately.
My mother-in-law is trying to teach driver's ed over Zoom. It's a horrible clusterfuck, because they are trying to force everyone to keep their webcam on at all times as a means of tracking attendance. The first session was 75% her shrieking at kids because their internet connections were dropping out or Zoom was glitching and the video feeds froze. Not to mention that Zoom can only show a 5x5 grid at a time, and some of the classes had 27 or 30-something kids in it.
It's not easy for normies to deal with video-conferencing... Take your normal enterprise conference call bingo card, and put it on turbo.
Yesterday, one of my kids was in group class on Zoom. The instructor kept yelling about the kids being quiet. So my wife reached over and muted the microphone. The instructor unmuted it and proceeded to continue yelling about being quiet.
Definition of malware: software that is specifically designed to disrupt, damage, or gain unauthorized access to a computer system.
You could argue that tracking software is "disruptive" but more so to the user, not the system itself. you're conflating your dislike for both tracking software and malware as the same. Again, I'm not defending tracking software, just disagreeing with your false equivalency.
To be honest I would be uncomfortable using a work provided computer without at least some rudimentary tracking on it. Majority of my work provided machines were locked down to a limited user account, so it is up to IT to at least make sure that it is updated and not full of viruses.
I mean I don't want it to have a 1 minute timer that clocks me out, but the expectation that work has complete ownership of their provided equipment has been the norm for at least the 10 years I have been working.
Timing, for one thing. For example, we have two sites in India; one of them works on Eastern time, the other on Indian time. The one that works Eastern time is a lot easier to deal with, as they are active when the rest of the US-based company is active. However, that means the Indian-based team is working nights, which makes it harder to retain good engineers.
The team that works on Indian time has good engineers, but with little overlap to the US-based management structure (and US-based engineers), there are sometimes significant delays in getting everyone on the same page.
That's one example, but there are others, such as cultural (i.e. expectations for US-based management may not be the same as non-US-based engineers) and "optics" (US-based customers like it better when US-based companies use US-based employees)
When an employee steals all your intellectual property, would you rather sue:
1) An American citizen in an American court
2) An Indian citizen in an Indian court
"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.
It's central planning, seems like. Does "the boss" really think they can implement a system that one of their 5 or 10 or 50 or 100 employees can't figure out how to circumvent?
TQM is all about how you need to fix the system, not fix the employees. If you can't trust your team, then no amount of bathroom-break-monitoring is going to make things better...
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.
As a prelude to what i'll type below I hate these things. They are not useful and I believe they are detrimental to employee productivity through the "panopticon" idea of management.
There's no need in my eyes for regulating this or getting in quarrel over workers rights. You, the employee, sign a contract with the employer to perform some work for some compensation. If the employer wishes to run this type of strategy on their own hardware I do not see a problem with this. You can, and should, find a job that respects you as a worker. What we are seeing here is the MBA-style spreadsheet management turned into software.
This "panopticon" management increases turnover rate and decreases productivity. I have personally seen it. I worked IT in a company that had this software (I was a low level sysadmin and had no control). People would spend an inordinate amount of time finding ways to hide their activity instead of just quickly doing what they had to do and moving on. The solution isn't to complain, or call for regulation, but rather just leave your job. If the software isn't being installed on your computer then the company is completely okay to do this, no matter how damaging it is to their bottom line through subsequent lost activity.
There's a lot to say for this. One management proposes something as ridiculous as this, there's really know way to restore the relationship. If I have to live on beans and rice instead, I will.
If you need to rely on this sort of technology to feel confident your team is being productive and meeting their goals, you're not doing a very good job managing your team and/or you're simply not a great manager. Full stop.
"Are they generally active on programs and websites that I would consider productive like Excel, PowerPoint, Word, email, as opposed to YouTube or Facebook?"
The CEO talking about his product in terms of first person value judgements tells you all you need to know about the degrees of sliminess involved.
> "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.
This is the exact type of sociopathic behavior that creates unions.
Question: Is it legal for a company to provide you with a laptop that you use at home and then monitor video/audio from it? What happens if I am using it in a space with my family present? Is it legal for my employer to spy on them? What if my two year old runs naked through the room? Can they monitor during "non-working hours?" What if I have to be on 5am video conferences and am answering emails at 12am?
I think a lot of this comes back to laziness and/or lack of critical thought toward measuring efficiency of completing work. It’s perfectly normal to want to determine who is most efficient and who is not. Those who are working harder than others should be rewarded and the inverse for those that need to improve. I think the big question is how do you measure output? The wrong way is measuring how often your mouse is moving or tracking how much time you spend on Facebook. Ultimately management should have some way of measuring job efficiency, in a way that is difficult to influence in any other way. Surveillance software is going to give you terrible metrics probably unrelated to output (amongst tons of other bad side effects)
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadMaybe some bored software developer could create the "uBlock of employee trackers". A program that would feed fake data into these trackers to make them unreliable for employers.
An open video stream to employees workstation could be reasonable if there is suspicion of fraud, like outsourcing their work to untrusted 3rd parties. It's not too unlike having an employee in the office. Though even in office employees have some expectations of privacy, like not exposing their home life or bathroom routines. Of course a company device would still need to be provided.
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.
Or an old example from a mentor. Get in the shower, start thinking about what you're going to work on today. Realize you've been in the shower for half an hour. How you going to bill for that?
I've come to the idea that you pay an engineer for his attention to your problems. Engineers I dislike working with are ones that don't. Their other interests have crowded out what they are being paid to mind. And some of those guys definitely do spend 8 hours in the chair going through the motions. They do work but there is a disunity to the whole thing.
And you know what? My productivity went up! The reason? We talked about work during the smoke break. I got to be part of the conversation with the senior engineers, which meant I got to be involved in more valuable tasks.
https://youtu.be/yjdhNyEmYpo
I found this video last night lounging on the couch, the first segment talks about exactly what you’ve described, and the necessity to sometimes let the mind wander or do something else entirely when you’re “in the zone” but nevertheless stumped on a particular problem.
The video itself is about math and science but I think the applications extend far beyond.
I think I get where you're coming from but I'm at the point in my career where I like work/life balance and do not give a shit about your email once I've turned off work (unless it's an emergency, obviously). If this doesn't happen, work creeps into life until that's all it is, no fun, no exercise, no fresh air, no social interaction, no family time - and all the negative mental and physical health effects that result from this.
I mean, if a really productive brainstorm session bleeds over an hour or 2 every once in a while and we just can't stop the flood of great ideas or hit that "flow", of course, let's keep going. But every damn day? Get a life, kid! Before it's too late.
On the flip side, if I get inspired to do work in my off-hours, I don't go charging it back, so to speak.
We aren't disagreeing here... my point is not that you should work 24x7, rather... throughout my career I've noticed that value and hours are not correlated. Therefore, it strikes me as really silly to be so focused on hours worked in fields where that metric doesn't matter. I'm not saying we should get lazy and sit around, but rather find new ways of managing our work that recognize this phenomenon and seek to create working environments where we eliminate hours as a measure of productivity and instead focus on the productive output of our work.
Yes, totally agreed here. We're talking creative and analytical output, not cloud compute cycles.
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...
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.
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.
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.
And it's also not true in particular, you might happen to be in a group which benefits from given regulation. Hopefully, in a democratic society, the group that is negatively affected (if any) is as small as possible.
Regulation, by definition, decreases freedom.
That's the whole point of regulation - to threaten with violence, acts that people have agreed are not a good idea.
If software engineers were regulated under IEEE, the freedoms of software engineers would decrease not increase.
I quote from the article you linked:
"In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance."
Regulation, by definition, is intolerance.
For example - the minimum wage regulation. You have now removed the freedom of an untrained, unemployed person to sell their labor at a lower floor which was their only way to gain employment when there's a trained but unemployed person willing to also work for minimum wage!
Employers have immense power over their workers, and regulation is one of the tools societies can use to make sure that power isn't abused.
The word regulate, in regulation literally means "decrease freedom".
In physics, a regulator is used to decrease freedom. That's why regulators are used in the first place.
> Regulations often increase freedom for some while decreasing it for others
Again, regulations can only decrease freedom.
It does not make sense to "increase" something that already exists.
The freedom to live does not make you more alive than what you already are.
> Constitutions are just regulations for government--does preventing the government from infringing on the right to free speech, for example, increase or decrease freedom?
The concept of free speech is innate and available everywhere, including countries that does not recognize free speech.
Free speech is an inalienable right that every person is born with. It does not require someone else to grant or validate it.
All that the first amendment to the Constitution does is _recognize_ (not increase) your freedom to speak against the "government".
That is it.
The "government" still can jail you or even kill you.
All that a country that recognizes free speech promises is that after the deed is done, it will bring that misdeed to justice and hopefully right that wrong.
If that was not the case, the courts would be way less crowded than it already is.
Also, first amendment to the Constitution does not apply to private citizens.
If you suddenly started to yell at your neighbor's lawn, not matter how well placed and logical your arguments are, you will still get booted with no legal recourse.
The only thing that is left is if this was the government that booted you out, you can take them to court and expect to win if you have a valid case.
There can be no such expectation in a country that does not recognize free speech.
Sometimes it seems basic economics is an alien concept.
Assault being illegal increases my freedom because I can freely walk down the street without threat of harm.
Prohibiting outside doors from being locked in a factory increases my freedom as a worker to leave whenever I choose.
And theoretically at an absolute minimum any time you see a prisoners dilemma regulation is how you prevent it and make sure that everyone gets their preferred outcome.
If your definition of freedom can't explain why voluntary enslavement makes people less free then it's useless.
I can assure you that not everyone is getting their preferred outcome. That's why the term "prisoners" instead of "willing teammates" are used here.
> Prohibiting outside doors from being locked in a factory increases my freedom as a worker to leave whenever I choose.
As a worker you always can leave whenever you choose. Past. Present. Future.
That does not mean you get to keep your job doing that.
Slaves too had the freedom to leave whenever they chose unless they were in chains. The only issue was the enforcement of certain labor contracts that have since been deemed illegal. To clarify, the slaves were treated as property just like you now treat your pets, in this day and age. If your pet was to flee you would capture it and offer rewards for its re-capture. The concept of it is still alive in this day and age. It's just not phrased in those specific terms.
Your mention of voluntary enslavement indicates you are well aware of what I mentioned and how modern society has just devised new means of enslavement while being compliant with anti-slavery regulations.
> Assault being illegal increases my freedom because I can freely walk down the street without threat of harm.
Absolutely not.
Making something illegal absolutely does not shield you against harm.
Making something legal absolutely does not shield you against harm either.
If you exercised your right of freedom of speech in San Francisco and serenaded Trump, you will see what I mean.
There is no magic cloak that protects you from "illegal" things.
If someone shot you with a machine gun - the former being a criminal activity with various levels of prosecution and the later being literally illegal in most practical sense in the U.S. - you are still shot and injured - illegal or not.
You are still hurt or dead.
The only concern at that point is whether the perpetrator is going to be first caught, and then prosecuted under the laws that make their activity liable for prosecution.
If they run away, tough luck - illegal and all that.
If you are a terrorist on the run, assault is no longer off the table. Saddam and Osama can speak a few words about that.
Any kind of weapons are illegal in Mexico, so it assault. Yet people die of both in Mexico.
Fact remains you are still hurt or dead irregardless of the agility of it.
You dont have the ability to arise from the ashes even if the method of your injury/mortality was illegal.
Physics and biology don't consult the roster of human idiosyncrasies. They follow the rules of science, illegal or not.
The moon rotated around the earth well before, during it was illegal to do so and it continues to.
When it became illegal to directly discriminate against race, employers found out ways to indirectly discriminate against race by putting in requirements for schooling and degrees that are just not in the reach of certain races and ethnic groups.
... but let's indulge you for a moment.
I can pass all the kinds of laws against assault I want all day and you can come along and pay enough money to redefine what assault really means.
Every regulation I pass is a restraint against my own freedom.
I can chop my foot off as much as I want in an attempt to save my head but if someone really wanted my head, they will have it no matter how hard I try to stop it.
Regulation does not help the common man at all and the rich already have help to get what they want. Regulation or no regulation.
If regulations are totally ineffective why give them any mind at all?
Because each regulation is a fly constantly nagging at you. There's nothing stopping you from continuing to do what you were doing and if you concentrate enough, you don't even feel the flies but they are still there buzzing around and nagging at you.
It's annoying as hell mate.
What's one regulation that really changed your life?
Hold on, we are not done yet - now think of one regulation, without which you really could have, really, changed your life.
With those two now, let's talk.
yes
> There can be no freedom without responsibility.
yes so as I like to say it - freedom is anything but free
> Regulation is legally enforced responsibility.
Yes!
The issue I have with regulation is it requires enforcement to be truly useful and part of that requires the person seeking enforcement to yield their freedom to the enforcing authority to kick in.
Yet people seem to believe that regulation is this magic pixe dust that grants everyone special powers.
That's crazy talk!
I tried to make the point here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23169673
When it comes to employment, unless you're swimming in money and are basically just working for the sole purpose that you enjoy it, you're leveraged into adjusting your vote accordingly to your best option.
When true competition exists and your labor easily transfers, then by all means, select employers with reasonable practices. Relatively few people get to completely pick where they want to work and for what position they work. Most of us who aren't the top say 5% in our field pick a few handfuls and take a shotgun approach to see which opportunity lands. If none of those options land, we move to options we don't like because not working isn't a viable option.
Right now with unemployment rates skyrocketing, you have even less flexibility because labor is even more leveraged and have to cave into more and more policies like this.
The only way to protect labor in these situations, aside from organized labor unions, is creating enforceable regulatory protections for labor.
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.
Sounds like a "Tit for tat".
Why?
If I cut your finger off and stabbed you in your kidney, would it change your personal situation if you did the same?
If your immediate boss calls you every 30 minutes you are away from work, you want to do the same?
That's madness!
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.
"Tit for tat" is a great children's activity.
Adults are not children.
If your boss behaves like a child it's time to have a conversation.
Depending on your specific situation that conversation might very well be with a new company.
How much sleep are you getting??
Anyway, using the DOL's standard of 2,087 work hours in a work year, we can do the following calculation: 2,087 / (365.24 * 24) = 23.8% of your total time spent at work.
Let's use a generous figure of 8 hours of sleep per night: 2,087 / (365.24 * 16) = 35.7% of your waking hours spent at work. The rest is your time, to spend however you choose to spend it, whether that's commuting, cooking, chores, errands, hobbies, whatever.
And we haven't even factored in vacation and sick days -- the 2,087 work hours figure only includes federal holidays.
Suffice to say that his confusion was reflected in how engineers were treated.
At the time, there were few other choices for technology work in Kansas City.
What happened? Free trade.
Cheap goods from other countries gutted the local industries. Hard to compete on price when labour costs are so different. The only jobs remaining become min wage or importing.
People not working as hard as a generation ago doesn't factor in.
They sold out American workers to increase their profit margins.
"free trade" allows for the free movement of capital, but not the free movement of labor which is stuck relatively immobile (except maybe from "cheaper" countries to the more "expensive" ones)
Really, no reason to protect the guilty here. It was AdKnowledge.
It's definitely a popular line of thought. Though having worked in multiple areas of the US, I don't think it is. You won't need to look hard in SF, NYC, or London to find corporate leadership that doesn't really consider engineers to be humans like them.
Is it possible people are looking for patterns in noise?
Personally, I find the purported cultural commentary of others on offer here to be an uncomfortable echo of the cultural snobbery one hears daily offered by Californians to the "flyover states".
(Cerner is in the KC area.)
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.
I've seen no overtime pay happen, lies from management to get unemployment claims denied, management not actually firing people but just giving them zero or reduced hours to mess with the unemployment claim process, the VISA fuckery you mentioned, harrassment. Intentional scheduling of conflicting days for people with multiple jobs. Being made to work 7 days a week for long periods of time. Being made to repeatedly close late at night / early in the morning and then open the restaurant the next morning, a few hours later, and work a double. Being made to work while sick (this happens a lot).
A gold comment I heard from one manager was "I don't pay overtime because these motherfuckers already take enough of my money" (referring to the employees). This same guy was shaving time slips to keep them below 40 hours.
That was pretty much all it took.
And I understand, he'd been running that business for over 20 years and started it from nothing. He was fairly successful while I was working there, but he'd been at the bottom before and would keep working back up from there again if it came down to it.
He's probably one of the best bosses i've had, he was fair and would invest in employees and the business, but the business always came first.
Just last month: https://web.archive.org/web/20200410153705/http://www.lafari...
(They've since re-opened)
To be honest, though, the average worker doesn't have that kind of leverage, they don't have pockets deep enough to wade through the interview cycle, and many of the other employers they'd go work for are doing exactly the same thing. For them, the alternative to employment at a company deploying these kinds of tactics is very much destitution - especially right now.
I'm with you on one thing: if my employer demanded minute-by-minute accountability for my time, I'd leave, no questions asked and minimum notice given. I have that choice, though; when discussing things like UBI, I always try to remind myself that someone for whom that support would be life-changing is in a very different situation from mine, with a much more constrained set of responses / actions available to them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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...
It sets a minimum bar.
Realistically you need both -- a UBI and a union. The UBI sets the minimum bar that all jobs must reach, the Union sets the livable bar for one particular workplace (or maybe a group of similar workplaces).
UBI and Unions serve different purposes. A UBI prevents modern slavery, a Union provides for a decent quality of life.
Henry Ford had to double the pay to lower employee turnover.
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.
Let me explain.
> - That boss's boss is related to the CEO and is coasting / not at the wheel
i.e. the boss is paying for the behavior they want to see.
> - That boss's boss is already looking for ways to let go of him
then it's a solved problem - unless the boss's boss continues to look for ways to let go for months on end, in which case really, again, the boss is paying for the behavior they want to see
> - That boss's boss needs him in place for a while longer, due to other factors, but is still annoyed by the micromanagement
i.e. the boss is paying for the behavior they want to see
"annoyed"?
It seems like the value is "needs him in place for a while longer" and all the "annoyance" does is affect that somewhat.
Can we measure the effect of the "annoyance" on the decision? Let's see:
If I have a racist employee and their racism "annoys" me, I still am supporting racism with my dollars.
Otherwise, real action is: ask them to move on.
If I have a noisy neighbor and their noise "annoys" me, I still am supporting their behavior with my dollars.
The real action would be: I move/ I ask them to move, or take them to court while getting an stay order to ensure the noise is constrained while the matter is settled.
At a previous apartment, there was a stay at home mom above mine who would begin her aggressive yoga and home gymnastics at 5AM and end at 9AM. Constant pounding. I spoke with her first and she felt the gym in the complex was too crowded for her. I recorded her activities from below in my room, sent it to the office, yelp, facebook for the complex, broke my lease and moved.
Life is too short for nonsense.
> - That boss's boss is intimidated by his underling and feels something bad might happen if he takes action against the unwanted behavior
i.e. the boss is paying for the behavior they want to see
I feel there's some sympathy for the boss, almost as if they were misguided children.
Adults are not children.
If your boss behaves like a child it's time to have a conversation.
Depending on your specific situation that conversation might very well be with a new company.
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.
> In some sense, it doesn't even matter. If the manager is sacrificing profit for a fuzzy feeling of domination, then he's doing a bad job at increasing profit. And if the business is in competition with another that doesn't succumb to that kind of error, then the market will make it very clear
We have to be consistent in our views.
In the first sentence, the Hanlon's razor applies but not in the second one?
What if the market is inefficient and the manager sacrificing profit for a fuzzy feeling of domination actually comes ahead?
Does the Hanlon's razor support that theory?
In that case, how does this conversation proceed?
I am (trying to) applying a consistent view - that there's always an objective function in a game and society is a game.
Right now, you and I are playing a game - I'm trying to clarify my thoughts and so are you.
My objective function is to test the clarity of my thoughts and the best way to go about it, I feel, is to discuss it with someone who holds a contrarian view.
That said, I've been having a hard time doing that here on HN as once downvotes (which work like a silencing mechanism here) happen, I literally cant respond back until a few hours have passed since the last downvote.
Don't hesitate to reach out over email. I am enjoying this exchange.
Yup!
With over a million views of my content, I have noticed that this style is preferred by an overwhelming majority of readers.
I am sure there are who disagree. I am explicitly open to open dialog with all my channels listed on my profile.
My focus is to reach people and listen to what they have to say.
My objective is to test the clarity of my thoughts and the best way to go about it, I feel, is to discuss it with someone who holds a contrarian view.
That said, I've been having a hard time doing that here on HN as once downvotes (which work like a silencing mechanism here) happen, I literally cant respond back until a few hours have passed since the last downvote.
Reality is what remains after all beliefs have been stripped away.
I did not respond to your comment as the grandparent made no sense - neither management, nor boss nor god in the sky works for you.
Only you work for you and they work for them.
Naivety is believing it works any other way.
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.
But how do you tell if that or something like it is on your work machine? Look for "hubstaff.dll"? ... half kidding, but seriously how do you tell if there's corporate fuckery on your work machine (eg screenshotting, logging time on URLs, keylogging, etc etc)?
This "surveillance-ware", I am suggesting, can be thought of as a kind-of malware and be detectable in some way, either on the disk or as a running process.
I am surprised that no one has created something to check if such surveillance software is running or perhaps even actively screenshotting.
I don't know how much of what these pieces of software are capable of on Mac (because of all the privacy stuff in Catalina that requires the user to agree) and Linux (because I doubt there's a huge market for these tools on Linux), so if you don't have Windows on your machine you are probably even more okay. But in any case, assume they can.
Sure, the man "could" do it, but it's a separate and more interesting thing to know if it is happening.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3047375/simulating-key-p...
to instead of simulating a single keypress, have it open a text editor and simulate typing in the source code of the app you're working on. That way any keylogger running will pick up a lot of code. If manager is dumb enough to use a keylogger he probably won't recognize that it's the same code each day.
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.
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.
I think you're adding a bit too much personal animosity towards management.
The vast majority of management does not have goals/behaviors they are measured in.
I'm still fascinated that it's largely considered impossible to have a VP count how many 1:1's a manager had or how many times they gave positive vs. negative feedback. Imagine if no one kept any statistics for any sports player, and just say "it's too hard, you have to manually count".
Most managers should be fired, they largely are flailing around underneath directors who should also be fired, underneath VPs who have so little control over their org they largely are future predictors with no inputs (aka random output).
I say this from a place of love - I think they're all working very hard. But I've only ever met 1 manager in my life that counted their small interactions with their reports to try and improve.
They may have plenty of room for improvement, but their actions aren't motivated by "I don't know what I'm doing here", rather "I don't trust my employees enough to let them run free". That's a very different motivation and confusing the two will only lead to not understanding actions and reactions.
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)
Average managers didn't and so they just derp around hoping everything'll turn out alright.
Everything else is the same.
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.
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.
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'm not saying it's never abusive. Just that it isn't necessarily abusive.
So ask them what tool they are using and why. Or set up a video chat where they can show you what they are doing and you can make suggestions about better tools.
> he may be using an ineffective sales pitch
So listen in on the sales call and then give feedback afterwards.
Still don't see why any of this requires minute by minute monitoring.
> I'm not saying it's never abusive. Just that it isn't necessarily abusive.
If there are obvious alternatives that are (a) much less intrusive, and (b) much more respectful of the employee's professionalism, then it sure seems to me like minute by minute monitoring is abusive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA_fJh4lzqQ
Don't like what a job is asking you do to? Don't like a policy? Don't like spyware? Peace out.
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.
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.
I just can’t fathom it.
And as they say, the rest is history. Good workers will eventually leave. Some will adapt. Software and hacks will appear that can trick key presses and mouse clicks. Eveyone will become 9 to 5 no matter what.
I see some examples brought up where developers are not putting up with it - that is correct. For developers, typing <> productivity, so that will not stick. But there are other occupations around - admin work, marketing, data entry, HR, etc... Productivity in those occupations will dip, some people will leave, but in larger scope work will continue. Companies will compensate by hiring more people, it won't be visible on a balance sheet as "survelliance tax" because no one is tracking. And the world will go on. Worse off than before, unfortunately.
It's not easy for normies to deal with video-conferencing... Take your normal enterprise conference call bingo card, and put it on turbo.
Are there examples of this surveillance only being conusmed at higher levels in the management structure
You could argue that tracking software is "disruptive" but more so to the user, not the system itself. you're conflating your dislike for both tracking software and malware as the same. Again, I'm not defending tracking software, just disagreeing with your false equivalency.
I mean I don't want it to have a 1 minute timer that clocks me out, but the expectation that work has complete ownership of their provided equipment has been the norm for at least the 10 years I have been working.
The team that works on Indian time has good engineers, but with little overlap to the US-based management structure (and US-based engineers), there are sometimes significant delays in getting everyone on the same page.
That's one example, but there are others, such as cultural (i.e. expectations for US-based management may not be the same as non-US-based engineers) and "optics" (US-based customers like it better when US-based companies use US-based employees)
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?
There's no need in my eyes for regulating this or getting in quarrel over workers rights. You, the employee, sign a contract with the employer to perform some work for some compensation. If the employer wishes to run this type of strategy on their own hardware I do not see a problem with this. You can, and should, find a job that respects you as a worker. What we are seeing here is the MBA-style spreadsheet management turned into software.
This "panopticon" management increases turnover rate and decreases productivity. I have personally seen it. I worked IT in a company that had this software (I was a low level sysadmin and had no control). People would spend an inordinate amount of time finding ways to hide their activity instead of just quickly doing what they had to do and moving on. The solution isn't to complain, or call for regulation, but rather just leave your job. If the software isn't being installed on your computer then the company is completely okay to do this, no matter how damaging it is to their bottom line through subsequent lost activity.
The CEO talking about his product in terms of first person value judgements tells you all you need to know about the degrees of sliminess involved.
This is the exact type of sociopathic behavior that creates unions.
But I've seen it again and again, IT people don't seem to gravitate towards unions.
We always knew that's bad bosses never understood this.
It's just sad to see that now there's a market for it.