How Employers Track Their Workers • Hacker News Board

Re: How Employers Track Their Workers

#81

Post by krapp » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 1:37 PM UTC

sonnyblarney wrote: post #80

neuralRiot wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Any entity that provides fairly steady, predictable work and guaranteed pay is doing a good thing for the most part. I'm not really sure about that, any big busines wouldn't hesitate to fire you and as many people needed to close the numbers or to cut your hours-wages for the same reason let's not talk about benefits, there's not "safe job" anymore.

" there's not "safe job" anymore." Most jobs are safe actually. First - government, which is a massive employer. Second - healthcare - generally low turnover, and a huge portion of the economy. Energy - parts are up and down, but anything closer to the core is very safe. Core jobs at any classic company. They are generally safe. Large layoffs are not common, and this idea that companies will drop huge numbers of peop…

>Now factory work, hourly workers, retail workers - that's a whole other thing.

These are most of the jobs, not government, energy, healthcare and whatever "core jobs at any classic company" means. Those are also overlapping sets.

Re: How Employers Track Their Workers

#82

Post by sonnyblarney » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 6:36 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #81

sonnyblarney wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" there's not "safe job" anymore." Most jobs are safe actually. First - government, which is a massive employer. Second - healthcare - generally low turnover, and a huge portion of the economy. Energy - parts are up and down, but anything closer to the core is very safe. Core jobs at any classic company. They are generally safe. Large layoffs are not common, and this idea that companies will drop huge numbers of peop…

>Now factory work, hourly workers, retail workers - that's a whole other thing. These are most of the jobs, not government, energy, healthcare and whatever "core jobs at any classic company" means. Those are also overlapping sets.

No, you can see the breakdown here from the BLS [1]

Most jobs are relatively safe from calamity. Though there is ugly turnover, the same applies - in retail in particular, companies do not want to layoff - this would be very bad. They want to hire, it's just that the jobs suck. As for manufacturing - that's generally the one where 'laying off' might be good for the company as they would move the jobs overseas.

But this idea that companies are always looking to layoff and drop people is not right, it happens in specific places.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...

Re: How Employers Track Their Workers

#83

Post by panda888888 » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 4:30 AM UTC

joewee wrote: post #11

I've never seen an employee monitoring system that's built to the benefit of the employee. But nothing a company does it to the benefit of the employee. HR isn't there to help employees, HR is primarily a risk mitigation and compliance department. Who would assume employee monitoring systems are any different? "They try to never speak up, never stick out, do nothing that might get noticed by management. This leads to…

I agree with you but it's not always so extreme.

For instance, I work for a school where employees are pretty trusted (the extensive background check prior to hiring & fact that most people have master's degrees probably helps).

The only employee monitoring system we use is to turn on "find my iPhone" and the like for all devices. Technically this is pretty extensive location tracking, but no one monitors it unless a device is stolen/lost.

I really don't think it changes employee behavior. If people want to leave all of their devices at school and never take them home they can, but no one has ever brought it up as an issue.

Re: How Employers Track Their Workers

#84

Post by magduf » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 2:21 PM UTC

zamber wrote: post #75

magduf wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no job that's perfect in every way. Some office jobs are better than others. I do some Python work, and I don't have this kind of surveillance going on AFAICT. There's some things I don't like about this job, but overall it's a pretty good deal. There's some places that are horror shows; at place that tried to recruit me, I read reviews on Glassdoor.com about how HR monitored the parking lot and the bathrooms…

Monitoring can be done on multiple levels. Consider: DNS hits, traffic intensity per domain and LDAP logins. All of this can be done transparently if you work from an office or use a VPN to access intra or client stuff. If your company is sufficiently motivated they may have theft-prevention stuff on company-owned hardware that will be more than happy to send a live audio-video stream without your knowledge. Managers…

You can't send a live video stream without a camera. Cameras are plainly obvious, and easily covered up with tape.

Re: How Employers Track Their Workers

#85

Post by zamber » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 10:17 PM UTC

magduf wrote: post #84

zamber wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monitoring can be done on multiple levels. Consider: DNS hits, traffic intensity per domain and LDAP logins. All of this can be done transparently if you work from an office or use a VPN to access intra or client stuff. If your company is sufficiently motivated they may have theft-prevention stuff on company-owned hardware that will be more than happy to send a live audio-video stream without your knowledge. Managers…

You can't send a live video stream without a camera. Cameras are plainly obvious, and easily covered up with tape.

Microphones aren't plainly obvious and they can provide far more interesting data than a selfie. Also tape barely impacts the pickup quality for mics.

I have seen people cover laptop cameras but company-owned phones are usually ignored in this regard.

Not to mention keylogging and involuntary desktop screenshots.

Employee monitoring software usually has all of this (and more) in one neat package.