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The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

theguardian.com

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Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#61

Post by dredmorbius »

Bartweiss wrote: post #59
dredmorbius wrote: post #56

I'm coming to the conclusion that, at a society scale , there's a fundamental conflict such that advances in communications technologies undermine trust . This is a case of paradox of composition -- whilst at a personal scale improved communications can increase trust, at a mass scale, the tendency seems to be to undermine it. This increasingly strikes me as a problem. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6j…

This ties interestingly to the news about Bitcoin power usage from last week: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mi... The beauty of Bitcoin is an inherently-trustworthy transaction structure without the need for a central authority or trust between parties. The cost is exactly what you describe - trust is replaced by a massive expenditure of work to independently verify everything. It's an int…

David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, has made just that point. I can't quote it enough (three times so far at my Reddit blog):

Decentralisation is the paramount feature in bitcoin, but it turns out that that's a bad idea that's really, really expensive, because it turns out that a tiny bit of trust saves you a fortune.

"Decentralised" isn't a useful buzzword in a lot of ways, because it turns out that you want to be a part of society.

From his interview with the Financial Times:

https://soundcloud.com/user-544122300/gerardpod

Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#62

Post by Bartweiss »

throw2016 wrote: post #16
lotsofpulp wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we’re getting better at quantifying, and the better we are at it, the more we can optimize. Factory workers didn’t use to be measured, but then they were. And now they’re automated. Many aspects of white collar jobs are not impervious to this either. As we move up the chain, we’ll see that even more can be measured and optimized, even for the decision makers. Just make sure you keep climbing! Edit: it also hel…

This is a bit of a straw man. You don't need surveillance technology for this. If a worker is expected to make 10 pieces of an item per hour its easy for managers to verify this. For a knowledge or creative worker it's similarly easy to verify expected performance. This is not new, workers have been measured for performance everywhere since manufacturing and corporate jobs began. If we ignore that for a moment, the p…

> If we ignore that for a moment, the point you are making applies to management too, yet this tech is guaranteed to not be used for management where things and outcomes are left 'more fuzzy'.

I'm not convinced this is true. Management may have been given more leeway on 'soft' outcomes, but there's a longstanding trend of (messy, failed) attempts to quantify that role. Every attempt to incentivize cost-cutting, scale pay inverse to raises given, stack rank between teams, or otherwise measure staff outcomes is in effect a performance metric on management.

It's true that most of those have been immediately eaten by Goodhart's law, and we don't know how to quantify actual success like we do for "widgets per hour". But I wouldn't suggest that a lack of will to do it has been the problem.

(I do think this argument applies to the top of the executive level. I'm fairly convinced that most non-founding CEOs could be replaced at a discount with minimal harm, and only market distortions are preventing that.)

Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#63

Post by albertgoeswoof »

matte_black wrote: post #49
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #17

Is this article a joke? "Last year an employee at an IT services company sent a private chat message to a friend at work worried that he had just shared his sexual identity with his manager in a meeting and fearing he’d face career reprisal. Wiretap detected the employee’s concern and alerted a senior company exec who was then able to intervene, talk to the manager and defuse the situation." What. the. fuck. thanks "…

Look at this from a company perspective. If it seems like someone is stealing documents, but you then discover they actually aren't, then no harm done. If someone actually was stealing documents however, and you don't have the surveillance to realize this, your best salesman might have just took off with a bunch of client information to go work at a competitor. You might never find out, and if you did, you might have…

> If it seems like someone is stealing documents, but you then discover they actually aren't, then no harm done.

If my company accused me of that I think I'd run a mile, so there's some harm.

There would be rampant abuse with this kind tool in place, as it give cause to fire anyone at any time, it would not be hard to find a reason to fire someone with this level of surveillance

Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#64

Post by Bartweiss »

pjc50 wrote: post #37
throw2016 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit of a straw man. You don't need surveillance technology for this. If a worker is expected to make 10 pieces of an item per hour its easy for managers to verify this. For a knowledge or creative worker it's similarly easy to verify expected performance. This is not new, workers have been measured for performance everywhere since manufacturing and corporate jobs began. If we ignore that for a moment, the p…

> For a knowledge or creative worker it's similarly easy to verify expected performance. No it really isn't! Coding performance metrics are a wasteland of failed techniques.

Hence, I think, the rise of judging programmers on business outcomes. Revenue increases aren't a great metric for programmers (no one has a damn clue how to quantify tech debt and futureproofing), but at least they aren't actively destructive. Similarly, "story point velocity" and the like aren't tied to anything intrinsic, but at least they can sometimes be used as a predictor of quality.

Meanwhile the history of the field is one of judging programmers on bugs fixed, lines written, commit frequency, or a hundred other standards that are only perverse incentives. Most aren't even Goodhart's law issues, because they weren't predictive before they became targets!

Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#66

Post by Balgair »

ducttape12 wrote: post #27

If an employer feels the need to do this, it's a major red flag that there are serious issues in their culture and management. Monitoring your employees will just make things worse.

Anecdote: A friend was working at a large DoD contractor. Seeing as the job was mostly meaningless not during crunch time (end of the Quarter, usually), he looked at CNN.com to pass time. Reasonable? Not to the bosses who monitored everything from start to finish. He got fired, after a lengthy process with his manager, and the one above, fighting for him hard, as he was actually a good hire. Still got fired. About 3 weeks after that boozy Friday night, about 5k other people got fired too. Not laid off, fired. Closed the plant and essentially nuked this county's economy. Fun times.

Sometimes, yeah, there are major red flags with this idea, but sometimes we can think that they are only affecting us, not the entire company. Schadenfreude? Oh you bet. But it still stinks for the local schools as their tax base is gone.

Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#68

Post by matte_black »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #63
matte_black wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at this from a company perspective. If it seems like someone is stealing documents, but you then discover they actually aren't, then no harm done. If someone actually was stealing documents however, and you don't have the surveillance to realize this, your best salesman might have just took off with a bunch of client information to go work at a competitor. You might never find out, and if you did, you might have…

> If it seems like someone is stealing documents, but you then discover they actually aren't, then no harm done. If my company accused me of that I think I'd run a mile, so there's some harm. There would be rampant abuse with this kind tool in place, as it give cause to fire anyone at any time, it would not be hard to find a reason to fire someone with this level of surveillance

You don’t have to accuse someone to investigate their activity. Hell, the person doesn’t even need to know they were investigated.

If a company really wants to fire you they will find a way with or without surveillance.

Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#69

Post by tomjen3 »

Pigo wrote: post #40
ducttape12 wrote: post #27

If an employer feels the need to do this, it's a major red flag that there are serious issues in their culture and management. Monitoring your employees will just make things worse.

My last company started having design sessions to build a system that would monitor how much employees were actively engaged at their desk. I tried to steer them to "rewarding employees who were working hard" goal, but they were only interested in punishing people. It was a real eye opener into the culture that was forming.

The sad thing is that at that point they probably did need those systems, as I imagine all the good workers would leave.

Re: The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

#70

Post by fapjacks »

defo_nonconvex wrote: post #67

"If a paralegal is writing a document and every few seconds is switching to Hipchat, Outlook and Word then there’s an issue that can be resolved by addressing it with the employee" Wait, what? Are they trying to do ADHD diagnosis from window activity?

And stupider, "can be resolved by addressing it with the employee"... You just know this company is going to put that employee through a couple hours of some awful corporate video training about motivation.
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