That is an insanely bad look for that employer. This kind of invasive employee monitoring is treating people like property rather than as human beings. The problem is that the power dynamic between employers and employees in many countries is such that they can make the most outrageous demands and people will have to comply because there is always another person ready to step into their shoes.
For that employer, it's going to be normal, and employees won't be looking. In the USA, managment dictates all terms of employment, take it or leave it.
Omg, covid years brought such unimaginable seethe from management class that as a result I never bought into the conspiracy theories on it. The weird amount of anger on not being able to among other bright ideas 'manage by walking' drove some to the edge of madness. They are still angry and were all too happy when Musk declared that the wfh vacation is over.
And from that point, many companies sink like a rock as they can not retain the people able to work unsupervised and only keep the meek that need instructions for even going to the bathroom.
If the people fired had years of experience in the job and the new people hired don't, the company lose talent. Is bleeding money in an endless loop of training people just to let them go soon after that, has trained somebody to nurture their competitors, and some of this people could even make new companies out of spite and compete with their former boss.
I think times have changed. I spent almost 27 years in a sort of "silo," and, when I came out into the modern tech world, I realized that the world had changed, very much, for the worse.
I guess the saddest thing, is that everyone just accepts this.
Fortunately, I had the means to retire, and I did.
I think it's about to happen again, but a lot faster, this time.
It's the normalization of deviance thing all over again. The only reason I notice the deviation is extreme is because I haven't seen all the little steps in between.
The only real power you will ever have as an employee is your willingness to walk away from a job. What necessarily follows is that ideally you would develop a set of marketable skills which are in high enough demand that employers will be wiling to accommodate your wishes because replacing you would be a big hassle.
> The only real power you will ever have as an employee is your willingness to walk away from a job
This is why they dread "overemplyed" employees so much. Oh you can't have the ability to make me bankrupt, homeless, or without medical care? Then that makes me too great a "risk".
I wonder how many employer-provided laptops are secretly recording video or audio for WFH staff. You can tape over a webcam, but what do you do about a microphone you don't trust?
The problem with microphones is that unlike cameras they are absolutely impossible to detect. And then there are all these devices that look and act like another thing but they're also microphones. Microphony is so pervasive that it is harder to make something that does not record soundwaves than it is to make something that does.
Surely employers don't add hidden microphones to laptops? I mean, it's not impossible, but I never worked for anyone who did stuff like that. I can certainly believe employers would add some monitoring software to turn your mic on all the time, but you can find it from the laptop model.
That's not really the point. Employers add software to monitor. How that software works internally they are probably clueless about and if that software decides it wants a live audio stream then it has many alternative pathways.
It’s why I used to wipe out the whole OS and install linux plus the bootloader too, and justify it with my own set of toolset and custom settings for my work.
"and if your employees try to obfuscate and turn on disrupting noise in the background, our proprietary AI helps filter that so you always know how productive your employees are being"
Probably not many. I would not want to be recording the off-the-cuff conversations of my employees should those recordings be part of discovery in a lawsuit.
Once I had an issue where I had to request access to a 3rd party vendor URL from my work machine. IT was telling me that I already had access, and that I had accessed the URL several times. Weird, because I was getting a dns resolve error. To prove that he wasn't making it up, the IT guy shared his screen with me.
Ever since I saw his screen and the level of details in my activity log on the work machine, I don't even access example.com on their device anymore.
I'm sure this workers already has invasive tracking software on her work machines. Now the company was just trying to fire her without it counting as a layoff.
At my job, it was encouraged to to enroll your personal phone with the company's configs to make it easier to do work things. After a few months I took it off, it creeped me out and wasn't necessary to do my job.
I am not necessarily opposed to putting things like messaging or email on my personal phone but I’m not going as far as allowing the company to administer my personal device.
My #1 reason to never, ever do that is that it also gives company admins the power to remotely wipe your personal device. Spending weeks just to set everything back up the way it was, just becauce someone clicked the wrong button (or some "AI" agent was hallucinating a compromise) -- no, thank you.
This strikes me as an attempt to renege on employment agreements to allow WFH. I'd bet it's either to do soft layoffs, or get people back in the office to justify real estate.
She's got annual positive reviews 8 years running, and has been with the company for over a decade.
The question that really cuts to the chase is: Why does it require a photograph of the employee's face every 3 minutes in order to determine if they're completing their work? Why does that make any sense at all? What exactly is the employee doing that there are no metrics at all. There's nobody monitoring work loads or task completion? Nobody is checking for accuracy? There are no clients or customers or community members complaining about poor service? How were they able to determine positive reviews for almost a decade before? Why is your management so incompetent, and why is the price of that incompetence your employee's privacy?
It feels like the Covid lockdown WFH times where managers mandated everyone has their webcams on. Having been in some of these management conversations, it was purely to ensure no one is just chilling on their bed.
Pretty dumb, as at that time not everyone was had a home office set up, and one can work from their bed perfectly fine, especially when someone wants to put their feet up for a bit during a team meeting.
During COVID times I witnessed the most absurd pissing match - our CTO (and founder) was taking calls from his boat at anchor (camera on, palm trees in the back drop) while was working from a coffee shop(!)
The CEO tried publicly dressing down the CTO on a large call because his workspace must be “too distracting to work from.”
> where managers mandated everyone has their webcams on. Having been in some of these management conversations, it was purely to ensure no one is just chilling on their bed.
That's not quite true. If you're working all remote, it is difficult to build a connection with other people, but multiples more difficult if all you ever see is a blank square with a name.
My team is all remote so a make it a point to always be on camera, it does help a bit to know these are real people not just bots with a blank zoom presence. I don't enforce it onto others but it would be nice if everyone showed up as a real person.
As a blank zoom presence kinda colleague, I do so because we should never confuse real comraderie with its strangely expected modern analog.
A noseshot with compression artifacts, joined with kitchen-wall echoes over a laptop mic. Just enough latency to inhibit natural banter. I'd rather hear your text turned into vlog. At least until we get a real coffee together.
I’ve never been an executive but I’ve worked as an Engineering Manager and a Senior EM of various levels at big shot software engineering companies and all the same rules always applied to me as literally every other employee I managed, directly or indirectly.
But that's the point of the vast array of fancy corporate titles, it's a nice way to get them to feel closer to the management and thus side with the execs despite not receiving the same privileges,
Not many feel very important working as a line manager, but a Senior Solutions and Progress Development Analyst...Wow!
I've never worked for a line manager that has 'sided with the execs' in any meaningful manner. I'm sure there are plenty of sycophants and sociopaths that do, but it's not a broadly accurate generalization.
To wit: When one gets an order to, say, pick two people to fire, or get fired himself, carrying out the order doesn't regularly mean that they 'side' with it.
Considering everyone today is a “social media manager” or “email marketing manager”, and I have even seen “QA manager”, chances are there are more individual-contributor being called “managers” than managers themselves.
I’m sure an EM can extrapolate the role of lead clerk at the grocery store. The EM probably goes to the grocery store and has interacted with the grocery store workers.
I know it's a joke, but you're not correct. While chatbots are very good at finding interesting data points they're not good at understanding what makes for interesting data points.
Good executives function in the background of the day to day work for most people. Good executives stand out when they set clear directions and can identify what information they need, at the top, to change direction or modify scope or whatever. They don't impact the actual work happening every single day so they just blend in. They impact the work at the entire organization, which will change the day to day, but usually for the better.
The problem is there are very, very, very few good executives. Most that I've interacted with are either narcissistic, lazy, incompetent, or a combination thereof.
In the decades and decades of my professional career, I've worked with one truly good executive leader. He was phenomenal, and guided the organization I was with through some very tough times (layoffs, then covid, then a restructure).
> Most that I've interacted with are either narcissistic, lazy, incompetent, or a combination thereof.
His point is that narcissistic, lazy, incompetent people are easy to replace with AI. In other words, most executives. Why are you framing it like you disagree? He is correct.
I guess maybe I disagree in terms of the good executives and wish for a world where that was the norm, and those character traits were sought after by companies instead of narcissism, etc.
For your second paragraph: I'm not looking for a job on here and I'm not writing technically. I'm posting on an Internet forum and using repetition to emphasize a point. Sort of like changing the voice I use for the forum or audience. That sort of thing is very, very common.
You could try technically rewriting your profile to sound less pretentious, or simply write better posts that live up to the self aggrandizing promises you make in your profile. And when you violently agree with somebody, don't tell them they're incorrect.
I have to agree with DonHopkins. Your GP comment reads like needless steelmanning or playing devil’s advocate. It’s noise. I much prefer discourse where you say what you mean and mean what you say.
In an odd sort of irony, I know that at least one WITCH in fact gives feedback to the employees about their monitoring directly, versus other 'solutions' where only the manager and/or HR gets access to the system's reporting.
unfortunately keyboard and mouse tracking, screen tracking, "what apps are open" etc. are very common for remote work so I can totally see this being looked at in a similar way
Yes, that's one way of saying it. I'd wager the moderately paid management at Sutherland Healthcare Solutions is made up of people who aren't as strong of managers as the ones we get in tech.
I'd also hasten a guess that the engineers at SHS are similarly below the bar you're used to.
Most SMBs in the regular world are made up of regular people and could probably be framed as incompetent if dropped into a role in big tech. I don't think it's tasteful conversation for folks like us working well-paid to point at folks in the rest of the economy and remind them how much more clever we are.
It may not be tasteful, but it is nevertheless accurate, and has nothing to do with tech management (much of with is also incompetent, just amplified incompetence).
I wish I could find it, but a study almost two decades ago (way pre-COVID) found that when re remote work made good managers' teams perform better and bad managers' teams performed worse.
It was basically a matter of good managers understand the work and the goals and get their team to work towards that, and bad managers manage just by expecting their workers to know and micromanaging their irrelevant behaviors (like butts in seats visible to the manager, time on the keyboard, etc.) hoping to get results.
It does not matter what the field, but I count any manager in the second group as fully incompetent.
If a manager does not understand the work, the goals, and the methods, steps, and milestones needed to achieve the goals, and the irrelevant work that doesn't make real progress, how can they be judged as anything other than incompetent?
I’m usually more a see both sides kinda guy but I agree - incompetent.
During COVID and after I ran a team that was majority remote and got a lot of flak from leaders and counterparts about their productivity.
I pulled up what they did. If each person gets X widgets created each week, passes quality gates and making each widget takes 15 min at best - you get the math. Nevertheless got a lot of “well it feels like” and “I just don’t feel their presence”.
Learned later in life how to better handle the perception of others, but this is one of the few places I don’t have room to be flexible. If you can’t run your team remote, you are not really managing them, you are at best drifting.
It's to confirm the remote employee is behind the computer. It's not always necessary that they be doing work if there's no work at that particular moment for them to do, but in that case they're still being paid for their time and for some reason these companies don't want their employees doing something else, like going to a baseball game. It's basically no different from an onsite working being at their desk even if they have nothing to do.
It's also the logical corporate response to Younger Millenial remote workers bragging about "working" from paradise instead of actually working. As to why management wants it...this is literally something that management has wanted dating back to the rise of civilization. They have power and want to exercise it even if it's not necessary or efficient.
The logical labor response should be to not work for companies that require remote employees to submit to constant visual supervision.
To latch onto your example: If she is in the office and has nothing to do why would she need to sit at her desk? Completely absurd obligation and I cannot fathom anyone putting up with this. Sure, you can write this in a contract, but such rules are clearly not about productivity but rather about power games by bad management. It adds nothing to the bottom line to take away your staff's humanity.
Yup, the most egregious one is the Morgan and Morgan injury lawyer leeches. Their CEO publicly said "We're going to put a camera up your ass". Yes he actually said this:
Company leadership, like people in general, are not necessarily rational.
What I’ve learned is that most leaders don’t just have a strained relationship with their subordinates. They have an adversarial relationship with them.
They assume that employees are basically trying to do as little as they can, and that they’re running a game on them. Leaders stop being leaders and instead become babysitters or cattle herders.
It isn’t enough to complete your tasks and do it well. If you complete all your tasks excellently but you’re not fully suffering the 40 hours a week, you are cheating them. Because that’s the agreement. The agreement is not “do your job”. It’s work 40 hours a week.
The reality is that an employee working 35 hours a week but getting 10x more done is liable to be fired as compared to someone working 40 hours but mostly twiddling their thumbs. Measuring stuff you do is hard, measuring hours is easy.
The basics of a work-to-worker relationship is that of parents to children. This assumes that workers are children who must be watched at all times. It’s insulting on its face!
And then we wonder why work isn’t fulfilling? How dumb are we?
This matches my experience. To paraphrase Cory Doctorow, corporate leadership likes to sit in the back of the car and pretend they drive with a Fischer Price steering wheel. This fact is deeply embarrassing and thus anything that increases the illusion of control, even when obviously deleterious to the company is small price to be paid.
This makes sense to me. I bet this decision was made by someone who makes millions a year but could not do the job of any person in the company that makes less than $100,000/year without significant training.
>Why does it require a photograph of the employee's face every 3 minutes in order to determine if they're completing their work? Why does that make any sense at all?
AI image analysis, gives managers a Statuspage-like dashboard of labor engagement. Green across the board, boss.
It seems like a faceless attempt to prune back WFH like you said. Even if it wasn't, nothing activates organizational levels of manager antibodies like open defiance by workers. She was cooked.
Companies usually pay you for your time and have an expectation that your butt is in a seat for a certain number of hours. Completing your work early generally does not mean that you can fuck off for the rest of the day or week.
No. Your employment is most likely at-will, and if you are a salaried employee it's because you're evaluated on your output and not the time you spend in your seat.
This is a constructive dismissal. If she was hourly, sure, being on camera makes sense. But if you are salaried and some clown in HR decides that they want to make sure you're working 40 hours but WON'T pay you any overtime or judge you on your output, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.
The outrage is justified. If it mattered for her job then no AI monitoring would be needed.
Your company can't just suddenly drastically change them on you without it being a constructive dismissal. This is not a new concept. Companies have been trying to dodge unemployment claims by making people's jobs so bad that they quit since forever. It's very easy to prove and will be seen as a firing by the courts.
Obviously there is no minimum number of hours you must work when salaried, but it’s obviously the expectation. You likely know this which is why you are against them tracking how much time you actually spend working.
Maybe they wouldn't! But OTOH the profit margin on an iPhone is still like 50% and people buy them all the time. Salaries keep going up.
I negotiated my salary with competing offers. If my company decides, after negotiating from a position of strength with their eyes open, that my salary is too high... that's a "them" problem. Doubly so if I had been employed for eight years and they've never complained.
The courts will treat it like a firing done for no reason at all (i.e. at-will employment). I personally shudder to think of staffing a company with the kinds of people who would put up with this nonsense, but the beauty of capitalism is that companies face financial consequences for driving off good employees.
That's a problem with how companies see employment, rather than a description of how it should work. This leads to employees basically pretending to work, like in school how a teacher would assign us useless task sheets and call it "busy work".
I’m talking about people doing it specifically in response to this helicopter management style. There may not unlimited work to be done, but they expect employees to be doing something productive continually. This also penalizes people who work more quickly or efficiently than others.
Just few hours ago I commented about how some companies pretend to have remote work while they technically are not, and personally, I remember a couple years ago one company was demanding (in the contract) to have a continuous non interrupted camera access for at least six hours a day, and that was before AI tools so I imagine this company is far worse and I feel sorry for whoever is working there now, I obviously rejected it and they got even more offended how dare I reject it! Crazy stuff
There’s a possibility that enough people ruin this for all the people doing it honestly. If it’s the case, there’s probably no fault of the employee.
It can be hard to remember, but companies are usually giving money in exchange for a time that they measure by outcomes and results and feeling that, they might wonder what’s going on.
What I am going to write next is written with absolutely zero attempt to overstate anything. Not one person knows what is going on; very few consider wondering; most barely know how to put pants on the right way. Again, zero exaggeration based on real life experience in corporate america.
The steel man argument is that WFO means a manager can screen glance as they are walking the floor. That can catch the worst slacking or possible contract violations like outsourcing the work.
If slacking risks randomly getting caught and fired or takes too much work to hide, then folks are more likely to just do the work or quit.
Seeing the screen, or even an activity log, is far less invasive than nearly constant monitoring of the worker's face. That steelman is built for a different debate.
No this is more like having someone standing over your cubicle, and every other person's cubicle, taking notes of every time you go to the bathroom or get a drink of water or stretch.
There's been a lawsuit about this in Europe, couple years back. Employee won, breach of privacy according to Article 8 the European Convention of Human Rights. See https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63203945
I've heard that consumers have a lot more power in the US compared to where I live. They will not tolerate things like bad product or service quality or prices that don't make sense, and that's how they teach sellers the rules. Why doesn't this translate to "job consumerism"? Regardless of what the law says, an employer will learn that if you treat your employees like shit, you will have no employees.
Apparently you're right. I thought enshittification was limited to digital goods but I see the scope has grown since I last checked, without much of a fight on the side of consumers. Hopefully this will pave the way for companies that care to eventually make a comeback.
The appetite to buy at the lowest possible price annoys me to no end. If you want anything remotely non-crap, its price goes up to still make a profit with the lower demand. That high price in turn further reduces demand for quality items, and reduces the number of people willing to supply quality items. We're at the point where anything non-crap has become a rare specialty item that comes at an extreme price.
This is, most likely, another outcome of the wage stagnation and lack of any fit-for-purpose consumer protections in North America.
> I've heard that consumers have a lot more power in the US compared to where I live. They will not tolerate things like bad product or service quality or prices that don't make sense, and that's how they teach sellers the rules. Why doesn't this translate to "job consumerism"?
Who's got the money, the consumer or the seller? The consumer. Is the worker the consumer? No, it's the company. The company's got the money.
Yeah. and when I worked at capital one last year, the auto navigator division - my manager after not liking me tried to also fire me with a PIP and it started by asking me to come into the office in a specific work window.
after that, it changed to talking and speaking in a particular way in MRs and PRs (and "not" pushing back so much in them and being more agreeable). of course later the manager turned everything into "appease me" because whenever I would do my work and check off the boxes on the PIP he would say he couldn't see it because he didn't receive notice of it in the way he liked. Of course sharing in the pip review meetings weekly did not meet his needs to confirm "I did the things".
Employers will do anything to discriminate against you, legally or illegally, if it meets their leadership agendas. I especially have felt indian-pakistani hate and abuse during this process and was just so exhausted I never bothered to lawyer up.
Having some low or middle manager PIPing and fire people based on BS personalities and whims type stuff is rarely the "leadership agenda" though. The company sees trained employees like any other asset. They don't want your manager being hard on equipment for no good reason.
That said, it drives me up the wall that it seems like all the bad managers are exactly like the one you're experienced.
Sounds about right for Capital One. Their low level managers (my title was Master Software Engineer, so "manager" but I was an IC) are called Senior Managers are mostly terrible people. But it's a rotten culture all the way to the top.
Our SVP of Enterprise/Software was a serial sexual harrasment case. File in HR was as thick as a Websters. Women would constantly ask trusted male coworkers to sit next to him so that they would not be forced to sit next to him.
Another VP was a large build southern lady who forced an Indian colleague to harassment and sensitivity training after she said "yuck, McDonalds" and the white coworker was hurt. While the original complaint from her was that she was getting harassed for being Indian.
Both were subsequently fired after it became public (blog post) and the news picked up on it. The rumor is that the CEO and his chief of staff knew about these issues and didn't do anything about it until they got external pressure. Card is extremely toxic. Bank I guess less so, but still pretty bad.
We had senior managers once file a PIP/firing procedures because he saw no Github commit activity (those little green squares) FROM A PERSON ON GOVERNMENT PROTECTED SICK LEAVE.
I don't know the specifics of what her work involves, but why do companies still think what matters is how long their employees are sitting in front of a screen? I can't think of any jobs where that's directly correlated with productivity.[1] They could easily measure other metrics.
[1] Perhaps with the exception of adult webcam models, but that's an extreme edge-case where the lack of privacy is the job.
This is gross. It says a lot about a company that they feel like they have to spy on people. Also, I’d be ashamed to work for a company that creates spyware like this in the e first place.
I’m a programmer so relatively distant from the compliance and IT side of things.
That said, can someone who is in that side of things explain why having an archive of surveillance from employee’s home wouldn’t be a liability nightmare. The way a good company treats PII makes me think that anyone with brains would say “I don’t even want access to that data, and it probably should not be saved”. The chances of a leak or a camera capturing something that should not be on my server is high enough, and completely unnecessary to running the business, that I would not want anything to do with it. It takes one naked toddler and a CSAM filter to absolutely destroy a company. Let’s not even touch the idea of employees maliciously accessing webcams, and/or out of hours webcam access. Yikes. I’d rather have a person doing nothing sometimes than have any of that shit on my servers.
I had this funny thought the other day when I was in a Teams meeting and someone wanted to record it. Sure, we all had to consent, accept agreements, and then gain the ability to turn our cameras and mics on, but it was a standard status meeting, nothing special. So, I thought to myself, what if we were doing this in-person? Would we have someone break out a camera and record our meeting? Something seems off with the WFH approach.
For teams that want to use technology to the maximum, recording MS Teams meetings allows them to use copilot transcript etc. That is the most common reason I see these days.
Earlier the main reason was to allow for a human to revisit any important discussion of they missed making detailed notes. It also allowed anyone who misses the meeting to catchup. And for global teams, team members in other time zones can catchup and maybe rewatch the meeting of accent differences made following the live meeting difficult. The coworker tasked with writing the minutes (manually!) would find it super handy. We also did recordings for "requirements gathering", "design review", "prototype walkthrough", etc so we captured all feedback and nuances thoroughly so next iteration can address them all.
For all these benefits we sometimes opened a MS Teams bridge and turned on recording EVEN WHEN we were all meeting in person. I would switch on the webcam and turn it towards the whiteboard, and try to get the best clarity possible -- a service to anyone who might be watching afterwards.
>have someone break out a camera and record our meeting
I've worked with a team who did just that, they held the vast majority of their meetings in-person (1 or 2 short meetings a day) but needed other stakeholders to keep up with their work and decisions, so they had some AI listen, keep track and send summaries and minutes.
They liked it, but I'm not sure it was more efficient than having someone send half a page of meeting summary manually.
Icing on the cake: the employee had a seemingly valid health-related concern about this and the employer -- a "healthcare" company -- ignored it inspite of doctor's recommendation.
The employee invoked health concerns to reduce the frequency of those pictures (she has a condition that's triggered by stress, surveillance increases stress). She was working for Sutherland Healthcare, a healthcare service provider. I find it ironical, which just shows how naive I am, I guess.
I could see someone making a set of videos of themselves wearing different clothing and just looping it on a screen driven by raspberry pi in front of the webcam.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 52.4 ms ] threadIf the people fired had years of experience in the job and the new people hired don't, the company lose talent. Is bleeding money in an endless loop of training people just to let them go soon after that, has trained somebody to nurture their competitors, and some of this people could even make new companies out of spite and compete with their former boss.
I guess the saddest thing, is that everyone just accepts this.
Fortunately, I had the means to retire, and I did.
I think it's about to happen again, but a lot faster, this time.
The whole point of corporate capitalism is to do exactly that.
This is why they dread "overemplyed" employees so much. Oh you can't have the ability to make me bankrupt, homeless, or without medical care? Then that makes me too great a "risk".
Your work-specific WiFi network can also be shut off at the same time.
Devices go in a sleeve or drawer in your desk, which is usually in a separate room.
You can also close the door.
If you need more work and personal life separation than this, you might need a new job.
Wonder if that helps.
Ever since I saw his screen and the level of details in my activity log on the work machine, I don't even access example.com on their device anymore.
I'm sure this workers already has invasive tracking software on her work machines. Now the company was just trying to fire her without it counting as a layoff.
Is that using Zscaler? What level of detail did it have?
I am not necessarily opposed to putting things like messaging or email on my personal phone but I’m not going as far as allowing the company to administer my personal device.
She's got annual positive reviews 8 years running, and has been with the company for over a decade.
The question that really cuts to the chase is: Why does it require a photograph of the employee's face every 3 minutes in order to determine if they're completing their work? Why does that make any sense at all? What exactly is the employee doing that there are no metrics at all. There's nobody monitoring work loads or task completion? Nobody is checking for accuracy? There are no clients or customers or community members complaining about poor service? How were they able to determine positive reviews for almost a decade before? Why is your management so incompetent, and why is the price of that incompetence your employee's privacy?
Pretty dumb, as at that time not everyone was had a home office set up, and one can work from their bed perfectly fine, especially when someone wants to put their feet up for a bit during a team meeting.
I do that because I believe in the mission and work is assessed by outcome.
The flip side too — I learned well before COVID that the Kanban principle of “make work visible” applies to WFH
The CEO tried publicly dressing down the CTO on a large call because his workspace must be “too distracting to work from.”
That's not quite true. If you're working all remote, it is difficult to build a connection with other people, but multiples more difficult if all you ever see is a blank square with a name.
My team is all remote so a make it a point to always be on camera, it does help a bit to know these are real people not just bots with a blank zoom presence. I don't enforce it onto others but it would be nice if everyone showed up as a real person.
A noseshot with compression artifacts, joined with kitchen-wall echoes over a laptop mic. Just enough latency to inhibit natural banter. I'd rather hear your text turned into vlog. At least until we get a real coffee together.
Anything that needs managers to actually go and check.
It's not that they trust the employee to work with zero supervision, it's just that most managers and execs don't want to do any kind of work.
The webcam checks are pure projection.
Even like Facebook: the AI training stuff was applied to software engineers and staff but definitely not executives.
To wit: When one gets an order to, say, pick two people to fire, or get fired himself, carrying out the order doesn't regularly mean that they 'side' with it.
If you worked for a state government or defense contractor, you’d still be in the union.
That’s not an insult or a dig.
The guy who has some power about who to fire, but still flips burgers or mans the cash register when everyone else is busy.
Not saying it's not a noble job, but it's very far from executive.
Good executives function in the background of the day to day work for most people. Good executives stand out when they set clear directions and can identify what information they need, at the top, to change direction or modify scope or whatever. They don't impact the actual work happening every single day so they just blend in. They impact the work at the entire organization, which will change the day to day, but usually for the better.
The problem is there are very, very, very few good executives. Most that I've interacted with are either narcissistic, lazy, incompetent, or a combination thereof.
In the decades and decades of my professional career, I've worked with one truly good executive leader. He was phenomenal, and guided the organization I was with through some very tough times (layoffs, then covid, then a restructure).
That's one of several hundred.
His point is that narcissistic, lazy, incompetent people are easy to replace with AI. In other words, most executives. Why are you framing it like you disagree? He is correct.
For your second paragraph: I'm not looking for a job on here and I'm not writing technically. I'm posting on an Internet forum and using repetition to emphasize a point. Sort of like changing the voice I use for the forum or audience. That sort of thing is very, very common.
But we can still already replace 99% of C-levels with a $20 subscription to Claude and a few MCP integrations.
In an odd sort of irony, I know that at least one WITCH in fact gives feedback to the employees about their monitoring directly, versus other 'solutions' where only the manager and/or HR gets access to the system's reporting.
> “Yes,” said O’Brien, “we can turn it off. We have that privilege.”
Probably different rules for management.
I'd also hasten a guess that the engineers at SHS are similarly below the bar you're used to.
Most SMBs in the regular world are made up of regular people and could probably be framed as incompetent if dropped into a role in big tech. I don't think it's tasteful conversation for folks like us working well-paid to point at folks in the rest of the economy and remind them how much more clever we are.
I wish I could find it, but a study almost two decades ago (way pre-COVID) found that when re remote work made good managers' teams perform better and bad managers' teams performed worse.
It was basically a matter of good managers understand the work and the goals and get their team to work towards that, and bad managers manage just by expecting their workers to know and micromanaging their irrelevant behaviors (like butts in seats visible to the manager, time on the keyboard, etc.) hoping to get results.
It does not matter what the field, but I count any manager in the second group as fully incompetent.
If a manager does not understand the work, the goals, and the methods, steps, and milestones needed to achieve the goals, and the irrelevant work that doesn't make real progress, how can they be judged as anything other than incompetent?
During COVID and after I ran a team that was majority remote and got a lot of flak from leaders and counterparts about their productivity.
I pulled up what they did. If each person gets X widgets created each week, passes quality gates and making each widget takes 15 min at best - you get the math. Nevertheless got a lot of “well it feels like” and “I just don’t feel their presence”.
Learned later in life how to better handle the perception of others, but this is one of the few places I don’t have room to be flexible. If you can’t run your team remote, you are not really managing them, you are at best drifting.
It's also the logical corporate response to Younger Millenial remote workers bragging about "working" from paradise instead of actually working. As to why management wants it...this is literally something that management has wanted dating back to the rise of civilization. They have power and want to exercise it even if it's not necessary or efficient.
The logical labor response should be to not work for companies that require remote employees to submit to constant visual supervision.
Or make this kind of intrusive monitoring illegal? Preventing this kind of abuse is exactly the reason there are labor codes.
Sure, it's logical, just not very realistic given the power imbalance...
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1IswwPHArJA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_bWAF-XxQM
What I’ve learned is that most leaders don’t just have a strained relationship with their subordinates. They have an adversarial relationship with them.
They assume that employees are basically trying to do as little as they can, and that they’re running a game on them. Leaders stop being leaders and instead become babysitters or cattle herders.
It isn’t enough to complete your tasks and do it well. If you complete all your tasks excellently but you’re not fully suffering the 40 hours a week, you are cheating them. Because that’s the agreement. The agreement is not “do your job”. It’s work 40 hours a week.
The reality is that an employee working 35 hours a week but getting 10x more done is liable to be fired as compared to someone working 40 hours but mostly twiddling their thumbs. Measuring stuff you do is hard, measuring hours is easy.
And then we wonder why work isn’t fulfilling? How dumb are we?
AI image analysis, gives managers a Statuspage-like dashboard of labor engagement. Green across the board, boss.
It seems like a faceless attempt to prune back WFH like you said. Even if it wasn't, nothing activates organizational levels of manager antibodies like open defiance by workers. She was cooked.
This is a constructive dismissal. If she was hourly, sure, being on camera makes sense. But if you are salaried and some clown in HR decides that they want to make sure you're working 40 hours but WON'T pay you any overtime or judge you on your output, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.
The outrage is justified. If it mattered for her job then no AI monitoring would be needed.
This is just patiently false, it's common for salaried employees to have required hours.
https://www.inc.com/alison-green/my-employee-says-i-cant-sto...
Your company can't just suddenly drastically change them on you without it being a constructive dismissal. This is not a new concept. Companies have been trying to dodge unemployment claims by making people's jobs so bad that they quit since forever. It's very easy to prove and will be seen as a firing by the courts.
Obviously there is no minimum number of hours you must work when salaried, but it’s obviously the expectation. You likely know this which is why you are against them tracking how much time you actually spend working.
I negotiated my salary with competing offers. If my company decides, after negotiating from a position of strength with their eyes open, that my salary is too high... that's a "them" problem. Doubly so if I had been employed for eight years and they've never complained.
The courts will treat it like a firing done for no reason at all (i.e. at-will employment). I personally shudder to think of staffing a company with the kinds of people who would put up with this nonsense, but the beauty of capitalism is that companies face financial consequences for driving off good employees.
But exempt workers, i.e. salaried, are getting paid to do a job. They are not getting paid to be at a certain place for a certain number of hours.
Also I wouldn’t make the block very obvious.
What does this mean?
It can be hard to remember, but companies are usually giving money in exchange for a time that they measure by outcomes and results and feeling that, they might wonder what’s going on.
What I am going to write next is written with absolutely zero attempt to overstate anything. Not one person knows what is going on; very few consider wondering; most barely know how to put pants on the right way. Again, zero exaggeration based on real life experience in corporate america.
This is not different from seeing you at the office from a CCTV camera. If you are an honest worker - you should not worry.
my 2c
Also there shouldn't be a monitoring program hooked into office CCTV either.
If slacking risks randomly getting caught and fired or takes too much work to hide, then folks are more likely to just do the work or quit.
Watching you.
All day.
every day.
This is, most likely, another outcome of the wage stagnation and lack of any fit-for-purpose consumer protections in North America.
Who's got the money, the consumer or the seller? The consumer. Is the worker the consumer? No, it's the company. The company's got the money.
after that, it changed to talking and speaking in a particular way in MRs and PRs (and "not" pushing back so much in them and being more agreeable). of course later the manager turned everything into "appease me" because whenever I would do my work and check off the boxes on the PIP he would say he couldn't see it because he didn't receive notice of it in the way he liked. Of course sharing in the pip review meetings weekly did not meet his needs to confirm "I did the things".
Employers will do anything to discriminate against you, legally or illegally, if it meets their leadership agendas. I especially have felt indian-pakistani hate and abuse during this process and was just so exhausted I never bothered to lawyer up.
That said, it drives me up the wall that it seems like all the bad managers are exactly like the one you're experienced.
Our SVP of Enterprise/Software was a serial sexual harrasment case. File in HR was as thick as a Websters. Women would constantly ask trusted male coworkers to sit next to him so that they would not be forced to sit next to him.
Another VP was a large build southern lady who forced an Indian colleague to harassment and sensitivity training after she said "yuck, McDonalds" and the white coworker was hurt. While the original complaint from her was that she was getting harassed for being Indian.
Both were subsequently fired after it became public (blog post) and the news picked up on it. The rumor is that the CEO and his chief of staff knew about these issues and didn't do anything about it until they got external pressure. Card is extremely toxic. Bank I guess less so, but still pretty bad.
We had senior managers once file a PIP/firing procedures because he saw no Github commit activity (those little green squares) FROM A PERSON ON GOVERNMENT PROTECTED SICK LEAVE.
Glad I left that hell hole years ago.
[1] Perhaps with the exception of adult webcam models, but that's an extreme edge-case where the lack of privacy is the job.
Not that I think the broader practice for monitoring remote workers is something I think is a good idea.
the webcam tool in question, looks likra corporate internal rollout
That said, can someone who is in that side of things explain why having an archive of surveillance from employee’s home wouldn’t be a liability nightmare. The way a good company treats PII makes me think that anyone with brains would say “I don’t even want access to that data, and it probably should not be saved”. The chances of a leak or a camera capturing something that should not be on my server is high enough, and completely unnecessary to running the business, that I would not want anything to do with it. It takes one naked toddler and a CSAM filter to absolutely destroy a company. Let’s not even touch the idea of employees maliciously accessing webcams, and/or out of hours webcam access. Yikes. I’d rather have a person doing nothing sometimes than have any of that shit on my servers.
Earlier the main reason was to allow for a human to revisit any important discussion of they missed making detailed notes. It also allowed anyone who misses the meeting to catchup. And for global teams, team members in other time zones can catchup and maybe rewatch the meeting of accent differences made following the live meeting difficult. The coworker tasked with writing the minutes (manually!) would find it super handy. We also did recordings for "requirements gathering", "design review", "prototype walkthrough", etc so we captured all feedback and nuances thoroughly so next iteration can address them all.
For all these benefits we sometimes opened a MS Teams bridge and turned on recording EVEN WHEN we were all meeting in person. I would switch on the webcam and turn it towards the whiteboard, and try to get the best clarity possible -- a service to anyone who might be watching afterwards.
I've worked with a team who did just that, they held the vast majority of their meetings in-person (1 or 2 short meetings a day) but needed other stakeholders to keep up with their work and decisions, so they had some AI listen, keep track and send summaries and minutes.
They liked it, but I'm not sure it was more efficient than having someone send half a page of meeting summary manually.
The employer is in Clifton, NJ... not Clinton.
I could see someone making a set of videos of themselves wearing different clothing and just looping it on a screen driven by raspberry pi in front of the webcam.
This all looks like a challenge to me.