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WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

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Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#121

Post by qwytw »

hmmSceptical wrote: post #89
ResearchCode wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you work at "university" and "prove" 1 conjecture a year and your colleagues do 100, should you not be fired? No, because that isn't enough context.

Comparing a research role in mathematics vs "boxing a big shipping co" is not the same. Its reasonable to expect a research mathematician to output 0-1 result a year, packing 1 box a year at "big shipping co" is not "reasonable". You reframed my entire argument about low skilled / measurable "output" jobs back into the "creative" realm, which i've said isn't as easy to measure.

> Comparing a research role in mathematics vs "boxing a big shipping co" is not the same.

But the equivalent of moving your mouse/clicking buttons would be the equivalent of moving your hands and not actual box packing. Why would you measure that instead of completed work, if as you say that work is easily measurable?

I think this software is mainly targeted at busy bee companies where nobody has a clue what the employees or any is supposed to be doing and therefore mouse activity is the only thing they can measure directly..

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#123

Post by heresie-dabord »

kmatthews812 wrote: post #7

Full disclosure. I just built this for Google Workspace (www.gofasterhq.com). I built it because it's a tool I wish I had when managing teams in the past. These articles are very one sided and there is a productive middle ground to be established using productivity management tools. As a manager, it can be difficult to know what your team is working on and who is actually productive, especially in a remote environmen…

Yikes.

> As an employee, these tools can benefit you by weeding out teammates who present themselves confidently, but don't actually do much.

How many employers "weed out" managers who present themselves confidently but don't actually do much?

Not many, in my experience. The management hierachy in an organisation of non-trivial size will be populated by cronyism and Flynn Effect virtuosos.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#124

Post by qwytw »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #43
hmmSceptical wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bad businesses will continue to use draconian methods to try to squeeze productivity rather than foster it What about jobs that aren't creative like coding or graphic design? Some jobs are simply "sit in your chair and do work". The productivity metrics aren't speculative - they are measurable. You may argue "these are jobs for AI" - but realistically alot of jobs are a way off from this. Why shouldn't the "product…

>Why shouldn't the "productivity" of these staff be measured? Because you don't like it? No one is arguing against this. Stop creating strawmen. People are against draconian practices aimed at micromanaging people when data is already available, individuals are meeting targets or the targets aren't met due to something out of their control. In the case of programming, if you have any decent system, you can query comm…

All the things you mentioned are just a slight improvement over measuring key presses/mouse movement...

Metrics like opened bugs/features and time in meetings can be easily gamed and are only tangentially related to actual output unless the work done is extremely standardized and strictly defined.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#125

Post by dudul »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #114
notbeuller wrote: post #109

During covid when WFH, I received a legitimate looking SMS message with a link, so rather than clicking it, I curl --verbose'd it (and one subsequent redirect) before seeing it was an obvious phishing / troll. The next day, my VPN & SSO was disabled with instructions to contact corporate security. My use of curl had been detected and while they didn't accuse me of anything, they claimed that they wanted to make sure…

Yikes, that would be a clear sign to me of a... culture fit... problem at work. And I'd immediately begin looking elsewhere.

Agreed. Where do you guys work to be monitored like that?

I dick around all day at work, I watched YouTube video in the background, I still use paper notes so my cursor can be still for an hour sometimes, etc and I never received anything like that. That's over 4 employers since I went full time remote.

Not saying they're not "watching" me, but they don't seem to care.

Is there a typical profile for companies that go that far in the 1984 crazyness?

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#126

Post by qwytw »

hmmSceptical wrote: post #54
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why shouldn't the "productivity" of these staff be measured? Because you don't like it? No one is arguing against this. Stop creating strawmen. People are against draconian practices aimed at micromanaging people when data is already available, individuals are meeting targets or the targets aren't met due to something out of their control. In the case of programming, if you have any decent system, you can query comm…

> In the case of programming... A percentage > 90% of the world isn't programmers... There simply isn't the same workflow to monitor "word" / "pdf" documents without an insane amount of effort / document control that most SMB's dont have. The only option available to them, without hiring programmers, is often only the metrics that get offered built into these types of products. I dont think that's a strawman argument…

They could still monitor actual output? Instead of the number of words in a word document (I mean software companies which rank their employees according to the number of closed tickets aren't the best places to be at either...)

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#127

Post by warmwaffles »

treprinum wrote: post #52

So we need to create mechanical robots typing text generated by LLMs on a keyboard to look like we are working at the 100% utilization all the time (probably costing <$100 these days based on robotic hand prices). Then some solution for facial recognition if a webcam is needed.

You don't need a mechanical robot for that. Just need a device masquerading as a keyboard just sending that stuff in.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#128

Post by prmoustache »

lima wrote: post #103
jupp0r wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany famously just passed legislation that forces employers to record working hours for all employees.

Very annoyingly so - it's a nightmare for anyone with flexible hours.

How so. It is not tied to office hours. I am bound to similar process being located in Spain and put my hours whenever they are. My job involve on-call shifts, work with people in different timezones and releases/maintenance out of regular office hours. It works just fine.

The only thing that annoy me is the software my employer chose can only be accesed from inside the corporate network and do not provide a rest api. Otherwise I'd setup a large physical button with a led light connected to a pi zero so I can just hit it on starting and stopping my work.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#129

Post by dehrmann »

notbeuller wrote: post #109

During covid when WFH, I received a legitimate looking SMS message with a link, so rather than clicking it, I curl --verbose'd it (and one subsequent redirect) before seeing it was an obvious phishing / troll. The next day, my VPN & SSO was disabled with instructions to contact corporate security. My use of curl had been detected and while they didn't accuse me of anything, they claimed that they wanted to make sure…

I'm personally not too concerned with cases like this. I mostly avoid personal activities on work equipment unless they're benefit-adjacent. My thinking is if they over-snoop and see health or financial data they shouldn't see (and it gets out), it'll look bad because I was managing benefits that are part of my employment.

Outside of that, I keep my use very benign. I'm logged into the Financial Times and Stackoverflow. Most companies with knowledge workers won't look at any metrics they collect unless it's a security thing or they have a reason to look. But yes, assume that they can look if they want to.

Once they start snooping around, they're probably going to fire you regardless. They just need a story to tell.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#130

Post by adhesive_wombat »

2devnull wrote: post #47
gchamonlive wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quit the bad ones, join the good ones. This is why universal income is extremely important, so that people can pursue better jobs without risking being vulnerable.

Some people don’t want to work. They’ve told me so. I think UBI would destroy these people, like easy wealth does to the newly rich. A better solution is to focus on worker’s rights and labor regulations. Of course that opens the internationalism question, but so too would ubi.

The "basic" in basic income isn't there for decoration: just taking UBI and not working would probably be about as comfortable as living on something like Universal Credit in the UK, minus the adversarial means-testing, which is to say, "not very". Certainly I wouldn't characterise it as "easy wealth", more like "easy bare minimum so you don't have to worry about starvation". Besides, if it was that much gloriously easy wealth, you'd get it too!
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