181–190 of 359 posts
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It is in the Netherlands, permanent surveillance of employees without a specific reason (read: related to a specific instance or incident) is not permitted.
Same in Switzerland. If there is a specific reason for surveillance the employee must also be informed of upcoming surveillance and the consequences if something were to be found.
You also cannot monitor employees using cameras.
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I've only been a professional for 8 years but I've never had this experience as a developer.
How can you be sure?
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It appears to be standard practice everywhere in corporate America.
It's standard practice if you agree to it in your employment contract.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pro...
Like this:
Can't determine the worker's output? Then you have much bigger problems than remote workers taking a nap in the afternoon.
Here is a tip for managers (new and experienced out there): If you can't tell by their work product if your people are working or not, then you have a much bigger problem than what they are doing on their computer when you aren't looking.
My experience as a new manager was pretty chaotic. I knew it was my job to lead my team to get something done but between telling them to get something done, and it being done, how could I know that they were working on it? It drove me nuts for a while so I asked a friend who had been a manager for while what they did and the answer surprised me in its simplicity, it was "How much time do you give people to do something, and did they do it?"
The secret was having something that was unambiguously measurable as "done" and establishing that expectation at the beginning. These days I'll say to the team "When we are done, these things will be true ..." and list off the set of things we can say are true to indicate completion. I'll also note them in my notebook so that I can track them over time.
The whole team knows what the exit criteria are so everyone knows if we're done or not. Once you get to know your team better you can add incentive things, so that conversation would sound more like, "The minimum we have to do to insure this is done are x, y, and z. If we can also do p, q, or r it will have this additional positive effect."
It also means I can go to a team member at a 1:1 and say, "Ok, I'd like you to take x, what needs to be true for you to be able to say that x is true?" Which encourages them to break up the problem into smaller bits.
If you have weekly 1:1s with people then you can check in on the status of their smaller bits, toward making the larger bits true. You always know who is doing work and who is under performing or needs help.
For more service type teams (like IT or SRE) you measure things like "our backlog has not grown over the last 30 days" or "the median time to resolve tickets is less than 24 hrs" etc. The key is you can measure it, and the measurement is not subjective.
Managers who need "spyware" to figure out if there folks are working or not need to be replaced with managers who know how to manage.
This happened to me years ago. I was put in an empty office at the opposite end from my boss, and because he couldn't walk up behind me to see me working, he secretly installed a program on my computer that took a screenshot every 30 seconds (or so?). I quickly noticed that my computer was hitching regularly (when the screenshot was taken - this was in the late 90s BTW), and so investigated my computer on a day when…
Where I live what he did is a fairly serious criminal offence.
They would install all kinds of stuff to monitor our computers, and continuously require explanation on why we installed this or that tool. It wasn't fun.
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Here's a FAQ for the situation in Germany: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https... Can my boss monitor my work computer? Permanent and comprehensive PC monitoring at the workplace based on a general suspicion is not permitted. The employer may only monitor the employee on the PC if there is sufficient concrete suspicion of improper use of the work computer. What applies to private use of the w…
>>If private use of the work computer is expressly permitted to the employee, PC monitoring at the workplace is fundamentally excluded. Cool. In most places that are not fancy IT companies where everyone is given a brand new MacBook Pro to use as a mixed work/personal machine, there is no such thing as "private use of the work computer". So given what you posted, there is no legal issue then.
> if there is sufficient concrete suspicion of improper use of the work computer
That is when there is no legal issue.
The largest part of my calls were not about remote specific topics, but rather general management topics like result-oriented management vs time management and how trust and alignment is foundational for motivation.
Not surprising in hindsight, but due to selection bias from working remotely for many years now, I'm used to companies who don't require spyware to get results from their team, and was quite taken aback at first.
This happened to me years ago. I was put in an empty office at the opposite end from my boss, and because he couldn't walk up behind me to see me working, he secretly installed a program on my computer that took a screenshot every 30 seconds (or so?). I quickly noticed that my computer was hitching regularly (when the screenshot was taken - this was in the late 90s BTW), and so investigated my computer on a day when…
> because he couldn't walk up behind me to see me working, he secretly installed a program on my computer that took a screenshot every 30 seconds > The irony was that I was probably the most productive person in that office (in my humble opinion). The easiest and the most efficient way to ruin my productivity is to look at my screen. I can't work (nor can I pee - a funny coincidence, that's called "paruresis") when s…
I had, what I felt, was the best seat in the office at my previous job. We had an open office with short cubicles and standing desks, and the cubicles were arranged so that two people shared a small area with two desks/cabinets/etc.
For a while, it was wonderful. My "cube-mate" worked from home 4 days a week and only came in for meetings, and we had a window on one side and an empty desk on the other. It was about as great as an open office can be.
And then my manager moved into the cube nextdoor, and arranged his desk so that when he stood at his standing desk (which was most of the time), he was looking directly over the cube wall at me and my monitors. It made me very self-concsious and uncomfortable, and was (a small) part of the reason I left, TBH.
Two things: Productivity is going to plunge no matter what, with the possible exception of singles who don’t have roommates. There is no way that during an ad hoc and unorganized push to work remote (though necessary in this circumstance) can result in good productivity, monitoring or not. Under the best of circumstances it would take months for a mass of people to adjust and be productive. The apex for open office d…
I think less than 5% of comments on open-office design, that I have ever seen, were positive. Who are the people you are describing as being “sold”?
I think that open offices are bad for most of the jobs people on HN have, but are probably fine for certain others.
