121–130 of 207 posts
Damn, I had some fairly old opinion of Doctorow where I disliked him for some reason or other, but I am definitely revising that. I thought this was a great article. I am certain “bossware” will accelerate the downfall of already shitty workplaces. Very happy to hear Amazon is doing away with it. Strongly hope their workers unionize anyway. What kind of employer nickle-and-dimes a worker’s bathroom breaks? Not a good…
On workplace surveillance / "bossware": > Mazzoli seems to have either not used his product, or, if he did, did so under conditions where he was in charge of it – using it the way an athlete might use a stopwatch to time their own sprints, and not the way a boss might: to decide whether to dock your pay or fire you. > This inability to understand the difference between using a technology and having the same technolog…
Once upon a time, I worked for a shop that did auto insurance. This involves handling a lot of fairly sensitive data about people and datasets about a lot of people, for reasons that boil down to it being incredibly useful data for actuarial purposes. Bossware, or working machine monitoring software, endpoint monitoring, or whatever turned out to be a key part of making it possible for our data scientists to function…
Provision some isolated machines with access to production data, and let the data scientists login remotely. You'll be able to tell who is accessing the data and when, and won't need to install invasive bossware on their systems. It's a fairly straightforward solution. It's one thing to control access to sensitive data. Its another to use that to justify monitoring employees all day, even when they aren't accessing sensitive data.
On workplace surveillance / "bossware": > Mazzoli seems to have either not used his product, or, if he did, did so under conditions where he was in charge of it – using it the way an athlete might use a stopwatch to time their own sprints, and not the way a boss might: to decide whether to dock your pay or fire you. > This inability to understand the difference between using a technology and having the same technolog…
Once upon a time, I worked for a shop that did auto insurance. This involves handling a lot of fairly sensitive data about people and datasets about a lot of people, for reasons that boil down to it being incredibly useful data for actuarial purposes. Bossware, or working machine monitoring software, endpoint monitoring, or whatever turned out to be a key part of making it possible for our data scientists to function…
Quit reading at “large stage capitalism”. Such a bs term. This is not capitalism, this is techno corporate fascism. That is what is failing and causing misery. And the more we gaslight capitalism, the further down the totalitarian path we are going to go.
You can’t just say it’s not capitalism when it’s the exact consequence of capitalism just because it resulted in something you don’t like. The “totalitarian path” is the one that capitalism laid bare before your feet.
Quit reading at “large stage capitalism”. Such a bs term. This is not capitalism, this is techno corporate fascism. That is what is failing and causing misery. And the more we gaslight capitalism, the further down the totalitarian path we are going to go.
Exactly, the proposed solutions are always more state power and more state intervention which will simply lead to even more regulatory capture and even stronger entrenched corporate interests.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I believe in many states it's illegal for you to be recorded at work. That doesn't seem right where are you getting that? A workplace is probably not considered "public" so a third party might be restricted on recording you there. But your employer isn't a third party here so you're straight back into og labor relations and what does your contract say and what does your union allow etc.
In Germany the entire premise of monitoring performance is prohibited. Employers aren't even allowed to look at email.
How do they evaluate people for promotion if you aren't allowed to monitor anyone's performance in any way?
Very recently I contacted support on a Saturday around 5pm. They replied Sunday night after midnight when I was asleep. My support ticket was closed around 5am as "did not respond". Between the reply and closing my ticket, I was asleep the entire time. I have never been so furious.
Damn, I had some fairly old opinion of Doctorow where I disliked him for some reason or other, but I am definitely revising that. I thought this was a great article. I am certain “bossware” will accelerate the downfall of already shitty workplaces. Very happy to hear Amazon is doing away with it. Strongly hope their workers unionize anyway. What kind of employer nickle-and-dimes a worker’s bathroom breaks? Not a good…
He makes good points and has a clear set of beliefs that he applies consistently, especially on topics like this, but gets a little overbearing if you follow closely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once upon a time, I worked for a shop that did auto insurance. This involves handling a lot of fairly sensitive data about people and datasets about a lot of people, for reasons that boil down to it being incredibly useful data for actuarial purposes. Bossware, or working machine monitoring software, endpoint monitoring, or whatever turned out to be a key part of making it possible for our data scientists to function…
> Aside: anyone who wants to talk about doing data analysis without access to the underlying data is cordially invited to explain how to do this to statisticians who only understand R and local Jupyter notebooks. Provision some isolated machines with access to production data, and let the data scientists login remotely. You'll be able to tell who is accessing the data and when, and won't need to install invasive boss…
There are a lot of options for monitoring for that kind of thing. You monitor the remote machine, you monitor the network traffic between it and their local terminal... and the most valuable will be monitoring their local machine to associate with the rest of the access and usage information. Among other things, you need to be able to distinguish between someone using the data scientist's credentials and the data scientist using their own credentials.
Your idea is a wonderful approach! It improves security, privacy, traceability, and auditability. It may not be the same as removing the need for endpoint monitoring, unfortunately.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some strict time-keeping requirements for bathroom use when it comes to certain contracts, like government ones. It wasn't too bad, but I forget the specifics. It was like it had to be less than 5 minutes, or you use your 15 minute breaks or lunch for anything longer.
I know some people with IBS for who that would amount to discrimination.
They file for reasonable accommodation and the idiots who get concerned about your bathroom time have to be quietly told to stand down because you have special permission to poo.
It can get more absurd as well. There’s an unlimited about of goldbricking and bullshit that people are capable of.