I own a small business, and all of us, my employees and me work from home. We've been doing this from well before the COVID-19 epidemic. My team is mostly programmers with a one marketing person. This sort of intrusive monitoring is utter garbage. My team would quit if I used it and in any case, I don't want to know what they are upto by the minute. I don't even encourage realtime slack unless we've mutually agreed to a specific time. Email, slack and the zoom calls (and lunches when COVID-19 was not a thing) are more than enough (Indeed too much.) What idiot managment even thinks this a good idea?
Most of my direct reports work from home full time, just like most people in our company. We look at the output from our teams and we frankly don't care if people are checking Facebook on their phones during business hours. Focusing on the work that's getting done results in everybody being happier than micromanaging how people spend their time.
Not sure what part of the white-collar working world you are in. But my work experience at every one of the companies I worked at prior to starting on my own, were not dissimilar. All of these companies were in the Fortune 500 when I was in their employ, and none as I can recall had surveillence of this nature. They were intense work environments, I grant that, and deadline pressure in tech and Wall street, is strong, but nobody surveilled me in this manner. Cameras in the corridor yes. Strictly controlled access to critical code repositories and databases -- yes. Keystroke monitoring and keeping webcams on -- no. Indeed, at IBM Research, one of the places I worked at, a stroll through the building at around 3pm would probably the quietest thing you ever did. I'd see pople aimlessly playing at table tennis, and the dicussion after the game over tea would turn to the research problem they were working on. Ideas would flow, some would peel away to scribble on a whiteboard. Others would just take a print out of a paper and sit in the lawn reading it. And yes some would be in their rooms typing away... These were some of the most productive computer scientists in the world, many of them now work at Google and other places you'd be familar with. (They did suck at table tennis though :-) Many pure tech startups are not that different, although the pressure levels are much, much higher. You cannot determine a technical person's productivity by the time they spend at the keyboard. It's in the kind and quiality of the software they release, that entirely eliminates the need for whole classes of time-card workers.
If you need surveillance in this situation, you've got the wrong person -- folks like this self-selct themselves to work in these places. They are intrinsically motivated by the problem that interests them. No amount surveillence software will improve their output, if they are not interested in the problem -- they'll just quit.
It's being done by the same clowns who can't live without time clock cards, all sorts of monitoring,and tracking.These are the people who have no clue how to manage people,how to measure their work and act upon results.These are the same crappy companies who would rather ask their staff to email endless Excel spreadsheets to each other instead of investing some money in database or some crm system. In a nutshell,these are the bottom feeders of this world.
I'm curious how much of this comes from working with unskilled labor (hope that's the right term).
I once worked in fast food right out of high school. 80-90% of the employees were one or more of untrustworthy, unreliable, whiny, always making excuses or trying get out of work. My point being if you start there you might just assume that that's the way it always is for all employees no matter what type of job and therefore feel like you need to surveil.
Most of my tech jobs didn't have this issue AFAIK (though one did) but just as one stat from a random search
I've seen plenty of bad behavior in tech. Ranges from unauthorized (but tolerable) use of servers for gaming after hours, to straight up time theft or physical theft.
When BTC was just starting out, we had one dev bring his own server to a data center and piggy back off a dumb switch for some NAS boxes. Free power for months and several BTC -- probably ~100k or more now.
We had a night admin printing out books on how to hack things from the work printer. Like 300 pages worth... which he forgot in the printer. He later tried to sell our certificates to random people via his work email.
One contract/hourly admin fudged his timecard 10 hours a week, every week, for months. He only was discovered when we did HR cost reviews and found that he was 500+ hours ahead of everyone else.
One of our junior linux admins brought his girlfriend into the NOC for a tour, then was caught on camera fingerbanging his lady on camera in the hallway just outside of the NOC door.
No shortage of switches, SFPs, half-step servers, and other gear going missing.
That's been my observation too. In tech, this kind of paranoid micro-management is a great (inverse) indicator for whether someone's used to working with talented people. If I were ever managing again in tech I'd be trying to find people much smarter than me and then get the heck out of their way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These are the same crappy companies who would rather ask their staff to email endless Excel spreadsheets to each other instead of investing some money in database or some crm system.
twitches involuntarily
Buddy you're hitting way too close to home for my comfort, right now (thankfully the complaints are being heard and division chief is willing to hear out suggestions for a better system to track OKRs)
The levels of absolute dogshit thinking that goes into what's described in the OP is astounding.
Imagine that you're processing confidential customer data and you use something like https://hubstaff.com to take screenshots randomly. You're literally uploading PII to some professional spyware provider that works on a freemium model.
"If you're idle for a few minutes, if you go to the bathroom or whatever, a pop-up will come up and it'll say, 'You have 60 seconds to start working again or we're going to pause your time,' " the woman said.
Solution to that using appliances available in every home:
Dangle the mouse from you desk and put a fan next to it so that it hits the mouse from time to time.
But also quit your job - managers who use such tactics are usually very trigger-happy when it comes to firing people, so you're just delaying the inevitable.
It's probably not difficult to work around these checks but nobody should be suffering this indignity in the first place. People can't even go to the bathroom without getting called out by managers over lost productivity. How dehumanizing.
And it's not even effective. There's a quote from one of the more known Total Quality Management evangelists, which stuck with me(paraphrased):
"Don't engage in games with your employees, because you can't win."
He elaborates further explaining that any scheme or incentive system created for a specific behavioral outcome is bound to be exploited or otherwise worked around.
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.
It’s old-fashion management. If you don’t understand your employees workload and don’t trust them then either you resign or fire the employees. Simple as that.
I don’t see how this makes any employee productive. This adds more stress imo. An employee gives you 8 of their 12 hour day. Now, you tell me if that works only for you - the management. They’re people just like you. They have a life just like you. They have responsibilities similar to you. They might have a family similar to you. There’s no fucking way they can manage all this, giving you a focused 8 hour. They might need a few mins to pay a bill, lookup a medication, place a personal Online order. And many other activities that come with “living”, being alive.
I am certain most managers that implement this are antisocial fucks. It’s poor management. Uneducated decision making.
Now, it does has its place. For example in highly secured environments or when dealing with highly sensitive documents. But for a small or regular office, no!
HR/Payroll companies such as ADP and Insperity need to start setting ground rules. I know that they’re in favor of the employer, however, it would make good on them.
One of the reasons I'm a supporter of universal basic income is so that the employees can have a better negotiating position. I suspect many bullshit rules will go out the window when the alternative to employment isn't destitution.
For far too long has this negotiation been highly in favour of the employer.
This is a bit of a tangent, but one should be careful with that path. Not all employers are 'evil' and have negative intentions for their employees. Think of an example such as the independently owned restaurant that cannot afford to pay employees high wages and their owners are not wealthy. Just as not all employees can be painted as untrustworthy and hostile, not all employers should be painted as untrustworthy and hostile.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
TBH these managers probably don't have work life balance, spend 12-16 hours a day on work, probably less than 4 are productive, and believe their subordinates and ingrates if they don't share the same "devotion" that they do, regardless of ability to complete the assigned job/task.
Maybe. We don't know what they're doing at their desks or away from the office, because they don't get surveiled like the plebs. Any manager who feels the need to peek over the shoulders of their workers should submit to the same.
> 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.
And they probably pore over metrics more than anything else and prepare reporting based on a bunch of old queries and automated reports package it and send it off. They might also have chats with subordinates about those metrics and at the end think “what a good boy/girl am I!”
I guess if you take into account commute, cooking, cleaning and other household tasks and errands it seems possible to only have 4 hours of true free time.
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.
> I don’t see how this makes any employee productive.
I'll contribute a counter argument, if only because I don't see it mentioned much.
I'm the counter argument. Since I'm at home now, with kids, if I'm not directly on the phone with a coworker or boss, I'm likely not working. Recently our boss mandated that webcams must be on hereon-forward... before today, I would sometimes just have airpods on for the meeting but otherwise be doing stuff (cooking, clean dishes, other chores). Honestly this part I don't really enjoy -- because rarely there is stuff said in the meetings for which I need 100% of my brain head-on.
But that's just me with all of my mental disorders and problems, who needs a helicopter boss to be productive. You may be different.
I think the question is what you are getting paid for. Are you getting paid for time, or are you getting paid for results?
If you're getting paid for results, then it shouldn't matter what you are doing every minute, as long as you are producing the results you are expected to produce.
Well you have to realize that most managers have no idea why they have it so good. When so many children are starving to death worldwide, why do they live in a 4 bedroom house with a pool? Do they have exceptional talent or intelligence? No. So they fundamentally operate from a place of fear. It’s like Twitter holding onto 140 characters forever — they had no idea why they were so successful, so their approach was “don’t touch it, you might break it.”
If you are a heart surgeon or Lebron James you can understand why you are making so much money — you have exceptional skill at something in high demand. The average manager is more like someone who found a bank error in their favor and prays every morning that it isn’t discovered.
> If you are a heart surgeon or Lebron James you can understand why you are making so much money — you have exceptional skill at something in high demand.
No need to reach for an analogy here, you could just say “if you are an engineer.”
In my experience what you’re saying is rarely true at the top tech companies, the managers there generally either come from a tech background themselves or they show an unexpectedly strong understanding of technical aspects of the product anyway, and typically have strong organizational and people skills that clearly stand on their own as rare and valuable.
What you’re saying is almost always the case at small- to mid-size tech companies (which is most of them), and I think it’s because they’re perpetually unable to attract and retain top tech talent... so anybody that can code is de facto placed and kept in a role where they’re coding, and ideally only coding.
A side effect of that is the pool of candidates for promotions and managerial positions is reduced to “only people who can’t code.”
It creates this bizarre situation where the company is looking to its least talented people and least impressive outside candidates to fill the management positions, and actively trying not to promote or give any credit to its most impressive and productive people (because then they might realize their value and demand something the company can’t give them).
These are also the companies most likely to be running against deadlines and having people work evenings and weekends, because again, they can’t attract or retain enough talent to comfortably hit those deadlines. They’re always able to create those deadlines though, because as it turns out, it’s a lot easier to sell software than it is to make software.
Then at 5pm on Friday when all the engineers are looking forward to another 4 hours of coding, all the managers get to throw up their hands and go “I’m useless anyway, I guess I get to go home now!”
And they might as well.
(If you’re an engineer and this sounds familiar to you, go apply to 50 tech companies right now because you’re way more valuable than you realize)
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.
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.
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.
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.
What are these uneducated decision makers even doing at your place of work?
There's always a boss.
The boss is paying for the behavior they want to see.
Now if you argue the ultimate boss is clueless, then, what are you even doing there?
You might want to tell yourself that your immediate boss who calls you every 30 minutes you are away from work is just ineffective, but if he was not delivering on what his boss wanted from him, he would be gone.
> in highly secured environments or when dealing with highly sensitive documents
Its about control.
No matter how highly secured an environment is, human ingenuity can and will still work around it. There's literally several professions dedicated to it.
NO matter how highly sensitive a document is, if someone decides to share it, they will.
Crocodiles, fire pits, stripdowns, armed guards, MRIs or any camera is no obstacle to a determined individual.
> If you don’t understand your employees workload and don’t trust them then either you resign or fire the employees.
Did "Jim" not know that he was on facebook for 8 hours yesterday?
Will bringing that to his attention suddenly make him "more productive"?
Why would it have that effect?
You could try and fake empathy for the hand that feeds you (you have reason to!) but even if this kind of management had absolute clarity into employees workload, they still would do surveillance.
Why?
... because their messaging is "we control you during the hours you work for us".
It's unlikely anyone's watching the surveillance data and footage. Honestly, people don't have time and it's a very high noise-to-signal ratio activity. Even at retail where loss prevention is at least one dedicated department, it's impossible to follow up on surveillance data and footage.
Do you honestly believe anyone would look a those verbose reports generated in the video at any detail?
No.
For all purposes, its not the how but the why.
Control.
All this talk about productivity, workload and trust are "feel good" concepts that give the illusion that there just some "miscommunication" happening.
If only that "miscommunication" went away, everything would be perfect with the world again.
It provides a distraction from the reality that the people one's working for are sycophants and extremely manipulative.
The truth is - action has no miscommunication - it either works or it does not.
The toilet needed to be scrubbed?
Its either done or not done. Couldn't be done because someone was having a seizure there that required a team to come in and block the cleaning from happening? Check.
If the cleaner had to badge in and out and had a camera mounted at the restroom entrance to check if they went in or out - does not have any relation to the job getting done.
IF the individual cleaner was so determined to clean the restroom during the seizure, they would manage to do it.
Russia, China and the companies that hire the likes of
InterGuard Employee Monitoring for surveillance is doing it for control.
Putin wants dirt on you so when you become a problem for him, he can use it against you.
This style of writing where almost every sentence is its own line is weird to me. It's like writing in all caps -- if you emphasize every single point, then you emphasize none of them. Especially when it's a long post that takes up a bunch of space.
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 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.
You've been speaking of bosses, but I think the topic is of management. A subtle difference, but alas this is not word-play. A "boss" does not work for you, "management" works for you.
Your software records a phone call an employee made while not on the clock? Congratulations, That's a felony.
Your software reports on their browser history when an employee is not on the clock, Congratulations, that's another felony.
Your terminate someone because the software is saying they aren't at their computers the whole day, that's a class action lawsuit and possibly another felony.
And all of it is EASY AS HELL TO PROOVE BECAUSE YOU MADE THE LOG FILES AND INSTRUCTED YOUR IT STAFF TO DO IT YOU DIPSHIT.
Think that your employment contract which stipulates you get to watch everything and anything they signed to keep or get their job will save you? Think binding arbitration will save you? Not only will it not save you, but it will make your sentance longer.
We have entered a brave new worlds of uncharted territory.
One of the key driving factors of bad behaivour of company staff is the consequences of a fertility rate so bad a newborn male child has a 1 in 2 shot at procreating. Many people in "trap" jobs have chosen to live well and die young; if that means fucking your company over for the maximum dollars than so be it, they will do it, and you are going to be forced into putting up with it. The disconnect of plantation management is unbelievable; they think it's honorable capitalism to cannibalize society and lament they have no choice but to do so. They have a choice, they just prefer not having responsability. And that's when they are not intentionally sabotaging you. Piss off your employee and they might let an APT group in on their personal computer who will then attack your infrastructure.
And if I were IT Staff, I'd asking the question and Nop'ing that and quoting the law.
In large parts of the US if a company provided phone and/or computer is used to make the phone call or do the browsing none of the actions you listed are illegal. Neither is firing someone because the software said they weren't at the computer. In many states besides being fired for being part of certain protected classes you can be fired at anytime for any or no reason.
And yet, it's perfectly possible to give a focused 8 hours. If you can't give focused 8 hours, give a focused 7 and let's talk about that.
But let's stop pretending it's an 8 hour workday then, shall we? The US habit of doing lots of random shit during work is absolutely nuts - because you can't do anything well if you're constantly switching tasks.
Oddly, it's perfectly possible to have an environment where both are true - management trusts you to get work done, and you actually get focused work done. It "just" requires maturity on both sides. A willingness to honor an agreement on both sides, as opposed to constantly looking out for #1 only.
> After two weeks of working from her Brooklyn apartment, a 25-year-old e-commerce worker received a staffwide email from her company: Employees were to install software called Hubstaff immediately on their personal computers so it could track their mouse movements and keyboard strokes,and record the webpages they visited.
I'm 100 percent positive that I would tell this company to get stuffed if they suggested I put that crap on my personal computer/phone.
This is managerial paranoia. These are probably managers that worked their way up by stepping on people and bumping others into oncoming buses along the way.
It's an extension of the "butts in chairs" management style that's all over in America. When the managers are unable to actually measure output due to incompetence + lacking the ability to do the same job as their subordinates this is one of the few levers they get to pull. It's a management style of fear and dissonance where the workers are constantly being judged not based on merit, but on useless metrics and butt kissing...
In contrast - I've worked for managers that could care less about "butts in chairs" and are much more concerned with output/quality... this means they have to be actually productive/knowledgeable in my field which typically is an exception - especially for larger corps. I personally find my mental state is so much better and my output is magnitudes greater when working with this management style!
The other thing that's great about output based managers is that the bad-to-mediocre talent/work ethic folks get weeded out ASAP because it's apparent who can't cut it vs. higher output workers. "Butts in chairs" workers are good at gaming the optics + politics regardless if it's surveillance software or someone complaining about being in the office for X hours a day/week.
I completely agree, but it's a privilege to be able to risk your job for such a principle. I hope we can push to level the power imbalance between companies and employees so that privilege is available to more people.
It's also remarkably stupid. Get everyone to start looking up medical conditions, especially related to pregnancy, and watch how fast the lawyers shut it down.
If you want an example of what workplace surveillance software can monitor and capture, watch the following video. It's simply horrible that employees have to put up with this:
Does Interguard have a license from NBC to use characters from “The Office” in their marketing and other materials? It would be pretty funny if they got dinged for this and had some revenue extracted for profiting off someone else’s work because they weren’t productive enough to generate their own content.
speaking out of my ass but from experience, it's probably just an intern that was told to put fake data in there that happened to be fan of 'The office', I can tell you with 99% of certainty they don't have the rights
Ha, didn't take long for them to turn comments off. I posted a constructive (albeit critical) comment and that's their response. Soon they'll turn off "likes/dislikes".
There's a researcher, Ethan Bernstein, who has looked into this quite a bit and has some great stories about the ways close monitoring can (sometimes) go sideways. He did a fascinating history of it here: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/BernsteinE-M...
A representative anecdote re: a factory workfloor:
"First the [embedded researchers] were quietly shown ‘‘better ways’’ of accomplishing tasks by their peers — a ‘‘ton of little tricks’’ that ‘‘kept production going’’ or enabled ‘‘faster, easier, and / or safer production.’’ Then they were told, ‘‘Whenever the [customers / managers / leaders] come around, don’t do that, because they’ll get mad.’’ Instead, when under observation, embeds were trained in the art of appearing to perform the task the way it was ‘‘meant’’ to be done according to the codified process rules posted for each task. Because many of these performances were not as productive as the ‘‘little tricks,’’ I observed line performance actually dropping when lines were actively supervised."
From "The Transparency Paradox": https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000183921245302...
I've also interviewed a few engineers about this recently and there are plenty of horror stories. My favorite 2 quotes (from the same person) about screenshot monitoring freelancers: "It almost uniformly led to worse work..." and "... but my boss loved it."https://medium.com/@elibryan/employee-performance-tracking-d...
> And with few legal barriers, employers who turn to this software during the pandemic may choose to keep using it even after work-from-home orders are lifted, he said.
Unsurprising - why give up power once you've accumulated it. Regulation is the only way to reverse that. The companies building these tools are a special breed.
Working for a highly regulated company at least company owned desktop monitoring is BAU. I assume anything I do with company equipment is monitored at all times. And if I forget they remind me every time I log in.
When I discovered the company needed to protect their data by pushing on a policy that let them wipe my personal device remotely I respected that and bought a personal device dedicated to the task of reading email and running their apps. But not everyone has that luxury. I'm fortunate to be able to buy an iPad and dedicate it to blackberry and the company app store.
It's an interesting conundrum because am I really obligated to install this to every personal device or just the one I'm using for work-related tasks? I think a reasonable person would assume the latter.
And am I under obligation to use a personal device compatible with their spyware? What if it only works under IOS and I'm an Android user? What if tsheets only works on Windows and I'm a MacOS guy, or heck I just run a remote desktop viewer from a raspberry pi? Lol.
Which isn't really an option now that we have mandatory work from home. I'm not going to quit my job because they don't wish to supply me with a laptop.
Right, but now the situation is give and take. You want me to do work on my personal device? Maybe I'm willing to bring that to the table. You want me to install your spyware on it... not so much.
Vox Reset covered worker surveillance software in their most recent two episodes: https://www.vox.com/reset "The future of work pt 1 & 2"
One nice thing about being in a union is that if my upper management ever got a twinkle in their eye about this kind of thing (they wouldn't, because they're cool), I'm 100% sure I could flat out tell them no, AND keep my job.
If I wasn't in a union, I'd like to think I'm personally in a position where I could still tell them no and deal with the consequences. But I know a lot of people won't be in that position.
I think it's time to start naming and shaming these companies. This doesn't increase productivity. It's disgusting. You don't own people's lives for 8 hours a day; you pay them to help you achieve goals for the company.
It baffles me how the US has trouble not understanding that paying for someone's time does not make them your slave.
It's not just the US. We've had episodes of this sort of thing in the UK, albeit with clumsier tech, for years. Here's a tale from 2016 [1] about motion sensors under journalists' desks (management later did a reverse ferret, aka volte-face [Edited to add the aka]):
I had to laugh a little about your second paragraph. I grew up in the deep south and have actually seen caucasion slaves (they had no freedom or agency in their life), and being a military brat, their reality was almost too funny to bear. If someone was raised in slavery, they have no concept of 1st world perks.
If you were to name/shame them, how would you brand the companies? (ie. Would you accuse them of bringing communist values to America or using 3rd world surveillance protocols in the 1st world)
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.
Earlier in my career looking for my first remote job, I got an offer for 20$-30$ per hour. This is 2.5x the average salary where I live, and almost 2x of what I was making at the time.
"Are you okay with installing surveillance software installed on your computer to track everything you do?"
Laughed at their faces. I will take ANY job (roof repairing, garbage man, security guard) before doing that.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
> But in the office, it is much easier to figure out if someone is doing a job well.
I found this odd. The only measure of doing a job well is the output, isn’t it? How is this easier in an office? Plenty of people can spend all day cranking away in Excel or an IDE, with no Facebook or YouTube in sight, producing complete garbage.
"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.
Say there are people who are not being tracked using these tools ... does the act of tracking them make them more productive?
𝗔𝗻 𝗶𝗹𝗹𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
There is the old joke paper given to the British Medical Journal (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/). The "problem" it tries to figure out is do parachutes work? There is anecdotal evidence that they work - bit there have been cases where people have fallen from great height without a parachute and not died and there are cases where someone has jumped from low altitude with a parachute and died.
What they then do is suggest a proper double blind analysis to confirm that a parachute actually works. But it is a joke so they do not go far.
The point they make applies here also. On the part of the boss it does feel like you are in control and I am sure HR would love it because they now have time sheets that they can use to process payroll etc.
But for the end user ... does it actually increase productivity?
Actually ... does it actually matter whether it does or not? Maybe their goal is to make the bosses happy. My suspicion though is that it may actually be reducing productivity as they mess up morale. But that has not been tested either. (Not sure if it can be tested).
Using this software is a tacit admission that the manager is unable to measure the output of their own employees, nor are they able to determine what an appropriate level of productivity is.
You don't need cameras to track where the dough goes if you already know how much flour you bought, how many pizzas you sold, and how much flour it should take to make a pie.
This reflects a fundamental inability of the manager to do their job.
MS Teams has a "green check" next to your name if you've touched your keyboard or mouse in the last five minutes and automatically sets your status to "away" if you haven't done so. I've had people at work use this to try and figure out if I'm working or not. It is a violating feeling, but also very similar to the "is your butt in the chair" way of management when not working from home, and I can see why managers like the feature.
For any of those suffering under this problem, have a look at caffeine[1], it simulates a keystroke on your laptop every 59 seconds.
You can also script automated keystrokes and mouse movements in python easily using pyautogui, and make something that defeats activity detection surveillance like you're describing in 5 or 10 lines of code. It also has the advantage of not being easily recognized as an automated input program like caffeine.
Is anyone aware of any actual research on this issue? If so, what does it say? Do remote workers actually work less? Do intrusive monitoring apps improve productivity or decrease productivity?
I've always had the sense that people who work remote are perfectly capable of being productive without monitoring. In some ways, depending on your personal situation, being at home can be less distracting than being at the office. On any given day, I would bet that most people in an office only put in 3-4 hours of good work (or less). Much of the rest of the time is spent being distracted by office gossip, meetings, coffee breaks, etc. Why should we expect people working from home to put in 8 solid hours of good focused work when we don't demand the same of people in the office?
It would be nice to see some actual data on this problem. I have an instinct that this is a major overreaction by managers and that it will ultimately drive productivity and retention down. However, I'm open to being proved wrong if this is an issue that has been studied in a rigorous fashion.
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)
MS Teams has a "green check" next to your name if you've touched your keyboard or mouse in the last five minutes and automatically sets your status to "away" if you haven't done so. I've had people at work use this to try and figure out if I'm working or not. It is a violating feeling, but also very similar to the "is your butt in the chair" way of management when not working from home, and I can see why managers like the feature.
For any of those suffering under this problem, have a look at caffeine[1], it simulates a keystroke on your laptop every 59 seconds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a surefire way of making everyone employed at these businesses miserable. No one likes someone looking over their shoulder, especially for the entire working week. These companies are going to lose interest from their talent most likely. I feel for anyone working in these circumstances. I expect it will be extremely demotivating also.
Counterpoint: Is it really fair to say this is "more surveillance"? Requiring employees to be on site where there is a manager present is a form of intrusive surveillance. Wouldn't this kind of monitoring simply be an effort to retain existing dynamics.
It sure would be fun to write software which pretends to be working and boosts people's 'productivity scores'.
Some days I think I missed out by not taking a job I could have gotten a computer to automate, and spending all my time doing interesting coding projects.
I wish the employees of that fucked up company would band together and tell the management to sod off. If everyone done that the company could do nothing short of committing business suicide. Unfortunately this is extremely unlikely to happen.
Doubts about the efficiency of such ideas, calling managers incompetent and general handwringing will not work. The data, the tech is here. The only thing that will prevent your most horrific workplace dystopia is regulation.
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.
As avicebron said, when a person has had enough of being stomped on they will snap. Most won't drive a truck through a crowd of people, or blow up buildings, but a few will weld themselves into bulldozers* and level buildings, or shoot up schools, or rob banks, or drive through crowds of people. The action doesn't really matter. Destroy every gun in existence? We'll see more knifings and vehicular homicides.
Unless everyone is locked into a cage like a rat in a straight jacket people will find ways to maliciously hurt themselves and others when they've been pushed too far. Many self deluded and extremely privileged people decline responsibility for these extreme behaviors, yet, in reality, we are all culpable in the actions of the worst of us. It is everyone's responsibility to arrest the decline of someone nearing the breaking point. Once a person is closeto snapping they are no longer capable of rational thought, let alone digging themselves out of a hole that they are not fully responsible for digging. If we are to dismiss responsibility for these people that have been pushed too far then we only create a habitat for more of these desperate and sad souls to develop in.
People who are facing destitution with no other options frequently become radicals. Especially when there is a clear reason, abuse from powerful, untouchable organizations.
Counter-counterthought: This does not fly; an enslavement or organ sale contract is invalid and unenforceable under U.S. law regardless of whether one may deem that the signer deserves it because we acknowledge that even entertaining the option causes a substantial societal harm merely by enabling the possibility of abuse.
I'm fairly certain this falls into the same vein. Even if not, there is likely no compensation being offered to the employee over and above their employment for what amounts to a "rental" of their personal device, which is not an asset of the company. The proper course of action on the employer's part is to enter into a good faith negotiation with the employee to come to an agreement on terms and conditions for leasing their personal equipment to the company which the employee is free to stipulate concessions and compensation, and dictate T&C's for, or the company pays for hardware to configure and issue as it pleases.
This is not new or unprecedented. This is how stuff has always worked. The difference is the degree to which management are now technologically enabled in terms of their indulgence of their personal neuroses.
No they don't. They have two choices; quit or be fired. Personally, I would quit, but I've got that type of personality. Others can't just up and quit so they comply.
I'm sorry, but do I really have to answer these questions? How is it people still don't understand there's a huge segment of the working population who just can't up and quit a job?
That's a curious question. Don't most people live "at home"? I'm guessing you mean "do you live with your parents still". Do most people consider their parent's house(s) "home" even after they move out? I sure don't.
Hard to travel 2000 miles on foot without eating. Or land that first job without proper clothes. Either you had support or after you found that suitcase full of money things were probably easier.
What is the benefit of assuming things about other people whom you do not know?
I brought what clothes I had previously purchased myself from a minimum wage job I held for a few years prior. Growing up, if we wanted something, we worked for it (physical labor beginning around age 13). After moving out, I didn't eat much/well for a while there and got into debt because I didn't have a stable job/steady income for years to come.
When I realized that the subsidized housing that I landed was contingent upon providing "favors" to the landlord, I elected to go homeless at age 19. Couchsurfing, van life, camping, etc. Way of the road...
A couple years later I would file for bankruptcy flat broke - financially & morally.
The story continues for years of trial and tribulation without any familial or government support because I realized that dependencies are antithetical to personal growth and development. Eventually, I started my a company and during the first three years I worked on that for 60 hrs a week while netting less than minimum wage (eventually it paid off when I sold).
No-one is an island. It was because I opted-into (and out of) certain situations and relationships along the way (and developed proper human relations + work ethic) some amazing people extended their support at the right place in time. They will never be forgotten and are reminded to this day of the roles they had in shaping my world. I earned the trust and respect in every one of those relationships, those breaks, and those helping hands.
Establishing self-agency is step #1. Learning and living a life of self-reliance is #2. Once you accept, understand, and embody - there is nothing one cannot do and that is my message.
"What is the benefit of assuming things about other people whom you do not know?"
It forces those with troubled egos to share. There is nothing more certain in life than telling someone they haven't had it hard enough to bring up their hardship story.
You are thinking through your own len. If I was able to make it everyone else should too. Quit your job immediately if you are unhappy or not getting paid enough is what you said. That's bad advice for those not looking forward. Accept short term paid for longer term gain.
Not everyone is an engineer who have employers fawning over them. A lot of people have few prospects of employment - especially right now - and have bills to pay. So weighing the two options : no food this month, or installing spyware willingly they take the easiest route.
"... A lot of people have few prospects of employment - especially right now - and have bills to pay."
Have you considered that you may be engaging with and replying to someone who falls into this category? What makes you think I am or speaking from the POV of an engineer who has employers fawning over them?
Beyond that though - why do you think that people do not have the ability to exercise their own choice in the matter? The final paragraph of this article literally underscores my point:
"Rather than download the software on her computer, she opted out."
So your assumptions of who you are interacting with on this topic appear ignorant, your belief in other people inability to choose whats best for them suggests you do not respect their power, meanwhile you've created the only extreme - as in extremely unlikely scenario - whereby people are forced to choose between self-administered surveillance or starvation.
So is it the case? Do you have very few prospects of employments and yet would willingly chose living in poverty over surveillance of your laptop?
I don't think it's as unlikely as you seem to believe. There are no stats being brought forward on either side, so I don't see how your scenario is less or more likely than mine. And I am merely trying to empathize with the people for whom this is the sad reality.
I'm not convinced whatsoever that this surveil or starve ultimatum you have made up represents anyone's reality in the first place...let alone those examples in this article.
It's beyond your imagination to conceive that there are people who would have to accept something they loathe because they must feed their family and pay the mortgage in a very immediate future?
I'm totally open to changing my mind that this hypothetical person doesn't exist in the US, if you'd like to bring forward a peer reviewed study on the subject.
You haven't heard of anyone working a job they hate in general? Why do you think they continue working? Is it because they just love feeling miserable for 8 hours a day? Or maybe it is because if they quit, they won't have an easily available opportunity waiting for them, that would allow to feed their family, pay bills, etc.?
This is one of the very few times I've seen someone make a serious argument on HN so ridiculous, I cannot believe this is real. And not only make it in the first place, but then also double- and triple-down on it.
"You haven't heard of anyone working a job they hate in general?"
Yes I hear from people like this often.
Why do you think they continue working?
Some do continue doing things they hate, while others don't and they change their situation. Those that hate their job but don't change, I don't know their reasoning? Learned helplessness? Lazyness?
"Or maybe it is because if they quit, they won't have an easily available opportunity waiting for them, that would allow to feed their family, pay bills, etc.?"
What is easy? What is hard? That's too subjective - I'm not passing judgement in that area, just know that it's possible to change - always - no matter what anyone on HN says.
Point to an example of a company that's taking a bailout that can't just bootstrap themselves to go without a bailout right now. I'll wait.
Same thing. The capability to make the decision may be present, but an unwillingness to acknowledge that there are practical limits to the capability to execute on that decision without jeopardizing the decider's capability to fulfill higher priority commitments (family/self safety, food, transport, shelter, medical care) demonstrates a malicious willingness to indulge in the discount of the interests of others when it is to the convenience of oneself.
Just to head it off; no, morally speaking, it is your problem when you know they have no other options. You are just as much a contributor to their state of affairs through employment of abusive labor practices as they are. You drag down everyone by going above and beyond to lower the bar of acceptable business practices. If that doesn't concern you the least bit, then I'm not sure continued conversation will be fruitful in any way.
Consequences may vary, but then again, no-one is owed anything legally, morally, or otherwise so to act as though every individual does not have or exercise their own self-agency is disingenuous.
I strongly disagree. There are certain human rights that it is immoral and illegal to contract away. The common example is that selling yourself into slavery is illegal even though people have self-agency. Over time we have decided on others so for example it is illegal to take a job that disallows bathroom breaks or violates certain safety standards. It's also not legal as far as I know to take jobs with certain consequences for quitting, like "we break into your house and kill your family". Although, "we will ensure your family starves" may be an unwritten one.
Also, it is disingenuous at least to say every has their own "self-agency", but "Consequences may vary." I would agree it's a sliding scale because people's chioces imply different levels of consequences for losing one's job (for example if you bought an expensive mortgage versus not). But morally, and legally as well, we certainly owe people the ability to make actually free choices without metaphorical guns to their heads.
Thanks for strongly (and respectfully) disagreeing out loud instead of being one who just downvotes without the courage to provide an alternate view/retort!
> just downvotes without the courage to provide an alternate view/retort
It's not about courage. It's usually that someone else has already provided the same alternate view/retort, so there's no sense in starting a new comment branch.
This comment ignores the very real material realities that many people have around being able to afford life at all.
While it is fair that "no one is 'owed' anything, legally" - actually, even that's wrong, but I'll pretend it's right for the sake of argument, some people are in situations where there is a single job in town, they do not have the money to move, and they have kids to feed.
It literally says: "Rather than download the software on her computer, she opted out."
That's all I'm saying, everyone has and makes their own choices about what they will or won't put up with. As to other article subjects , I can't/won't speak for them.
Can you find a person who is not choosing one way or the other?
My point is we all get to choose...and im not saying there are not trade-offs, or its easy, etc. But you, me, those mentioned in this article (and those who will never be notices/mentioned) we all have the power of choice!
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
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.
It's up to individuals as employees to decide if they want to subject themselves to this (agreed repulsive) treatment...what's with all these comments and sentiment in this thread acting like they have a gun to their head?
JUST QUIT already if uncomfortable with whatever a given job entails should that include perceived invasive measures ie - surveillance.
"JUST QUIT" makes it sound like quitting is an easy thing to do. "like they have a gun to their head" makes it sound like direct physical threat is the only mechanism of coercion that exists. These things are just not true.
For a lot of people, who have more expenses than savings and are not in highly demanded jobs, quitting puts them at great risk. They have a metaphorical gun to their heads. They might not die the moment they quit, but by quitting they are endangering themselves and those that depend on them. Their relationship with employment is inherently coercive.
This is especially true during a pandemic that's causing more people to be unemployed.
"For a lot of people, who have more expenses than savings and are not in highly demanded jobs, quitting puts them at great risk. They have a metaphorical gun to their heads. They might not die the moment they quit, but by quitting they are endangering themselves and those that depend on them. Their relationship with employment is inherently coercive."
With all of that said: whose responsibility is it to avoid this type of situation? Is it anyone (or anything) but the individual them-self?
And should one unfortunately find themselves in this situation described above, whose responsibility is it to figure out a solution? Is it their friends and family who is responsible? Their neighbors? The government? Are you responsible?
I would argue it is the government's job to not allow businesses to impose dehumanizing conditions on workers due to the extreme imbalance of power.
It's probably not a risk for most of the HN users. Most of us are in high demand jobs, and we would simply refuse to work for a company that uses this kind of spyware. A lot of people don't have that option, because there isn't as much demand for their jobs.
Should we really be given that extra privilege simply because what we chose or wanted or had the ability to do is in higher demand? I would say no, it should be a fundamental right of workers in general. It's not as if there is some drastic harm that not installing spyware would impose. If your best means of measuring worker productivity is this junk, you're not going to last as a business anyways.
"Should we really be given that extra privilege simply because what we chose or wanted or had the ability to do is in higher demand?"
So you think you are privileged because you exercised your option to decide and do what's best for you? Or because you have the demonstrable ability to make it happen - ie - learn a thing that is in demand? Is it a privilege of the ability to act in your own self-interest?
Stepping back, maybe it's because you have acquired cognitive skills that others have not that you are privileged? The mere ability to think for yourself, that's a privilege too, then? What about changing your mind, increasing your understanding of, evolving a thought...all privileges, yeah?
Perhaps somewhere along the line you have made a decision that was hard and required risk and sacrifice but that contributed to who you are and where you are today, was that pain and suffering part of the privilege? What about losing someone or something you love, because surely it's a privilege to experience love in the first place, no?
Is anything that makes us different and unique from one-another not a privilege by extension? Has the word privilege been used and abused to the degree that it means absolutely nothing anymore?
What about being alive...is that like, the ultimate privilege? So when all are privileged, are any, really?
That's like saying "when everybody has money, does anyone have money?". People have varying amounts (and kinds) of privilege, but some have more than others.
You're out of touch with the reality for a large chunk of workers if you believe it's simple or even advisable for them to "just quit". We should be making the case for better conditions across the board, and this means not leaving it up to those in shitty situations to figure it out for themselves.
But advisable, sure if you or anyone is not uncomfortable with what they are being subject to/asked to do as part of a job, YES, I would advise them to quit if deemed necessary.
Would you advise them to stay and subject themselves to they type of treatment they did not agree with?
Would you advise them to leave and risk not being able to put food on the table if they can't find another position? If there's little to no opportunity for lateral movement in their job market right now?
I would advise them to do what they felt was in their net best interest. Either way, they are making a conscious choice - a choice to stay and continue subjecting themselves to such treatment or a choice to leave and assume the risk.
Again, would you advise them to stay and subject themselves to they type of treatment they did not agree with?
By this time I can't tell if you're deliberately misunderstanding reality to virtue signal some sort of privilege?
But I will give you the benefit of the doubt. Vulnerable populations can have their employment opportunities gamed by powerful groups where they are essentially enslaved by their reliance on their paycheck to support their family, food, housing, etc. I don't understand why this doesn't register with you.
"virtue signal some sort of privilege" - I'm referring to a particular "let them eat cake" sentiment I'm detecting by your posts. An apt analogy because it was a signal of her misunderstanding of the lower classes food situation.
"vulnerable populations" - people who are unable to quickly and efficiently move either laterally or vertically, in whatever industry they are in, such that they run real risk of losing food or shelter.
- from your tone it sounds that you have never been faced with such hardships and decisions to make.
- "quickly and efficiently" to me would be anything that would allow you to pay the next bills. Esp. since 78% of american workers live paycheck to paycheck with no cushion to absorb downtime looking for new work.
I'm detecting a bit of dishonesty (trolling?) in your answers too.
Is it dishonest to ask questions, probe, push-back, challenge, disagree, whatever you want to call it? I'm respectfully inquiring as to what another human thinks (and that human was not you unless you speak for them?).
1. not being able to empathize with someone who is economically vulnerable. can't tell if it's on purpose, or just difficult.
2. attach yourself to the definition of vulnerability. I just gave you one : people living paycheck to paycheck. It's a pretty mundane concept, and it's trite or dishonest to have to revisit this.
Presumably these invasive measures were instituted after the pandemic. Employees didn't agree to these measures when they accepted their jobs, so of course they have a right to be upset with their employers now. If these measures are unpopular, we shouldn't blame employees for being upset; instead, blame the employers for dictating those unpopular policies.
Employees have little bargaining power here. While quitting is hypothetically an option (albeit realistically not necessarily), so is shaming. And I see nothing wrong with shaming companies for their stupid, dehumanizing initiatives.
They hold all the power, actually, unless you are one who does not believe in the power of self-agency because perhaps you've already relinquished yours?
"While quitting is hypothetically an option (albeit realistically not necessarily), so is shaming. And I see nothing wrong with shaming companies for their stupid, dehumanizing initiatives."
Hey, me either, what kind of management culture even does this!?
> you are one who does not believe in the power of self-agency because perhaps you've already relinquished yours?
It's hard for my response to be anything other than rolling my eyes. I'm a grad student. If my advisor demanded the ability to surveil me at all times, what would you expect me to do? Quit grad school, throwing away my last four years of work, because I have "self-agency"?
No, I'd complain to some higher power -- in my case, the graduate student association or the university.
...Is your default reaction to hearing an opinion you do not agree with or understand to roll your eyes?
Thanks for describing what you would do in the situation. It sounds like you are the type who would accept it given the option of quitting or continuing, is that fair to say based off an incomplete answer? There's no right or wrong, there's simply choice in the matter we all have that power to choose :)
