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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)

#131

Post by Swizec »

notyourwork wrote: post #117
moooo99 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a non-issue regarding privacy and the intention is to ensure compliance with employee protection laws capping the maximum weekly working time. You write down when you started working and you write down when you stop. Some employers automatically subtract your legally required break time, some want you to enter it manually.

Is there a concept equivalent to US, salary employee? If so what are they expected to work?

(I’m from Europe, have lived in US the past 8 years)

> Is there a concept equivalent to US, salary employee?

Yes. It’s called full-time employee. This encompasses anyone and everyone who does not work as an independent contractor.

> If so what are they expected to work?

40 hours per week.

With mandated minimum lunch time and breaks, paid minimum vacation, paid medical leave, paid maternity/paternity, govt mandated lunch allowance, govt mandated transportation allowance based on commute distance, and many other “perks” that US companies use as negotiation tactics.

If you work more than 40 hours per week, you can request overtime pay. Many employees waive the overtime thing for various reasons. In some industries because they’re exploited (restaurants and such), in other industries because they’re Mission Driven and want to work more (startups and such).

The law is there to protect you, but in practiceit comes down to your relationship with your boss.

edit: Personally, I don’t like this paternalistic/maternalistic attitude from either approach (as laws or as perks). Just pay me a shitload of money and let me figure out the rest. I’m old enough to buy my own lunch thank you.

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

#132

Post by dehrmann »

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.

Hard disagree. I've worked at multiple companies that care about security. Monitoring employee equipment use for activity that could indicate a compromise is a positive signal.

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

#133

Post by CoastalCoder »

lannisterstark wrote: post #71
2devnull wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Some people don’t want to work. They’ve told me so ...and? That's fine. there will always be some people who do not want to work. a UBI guarantees somewhat basic level of living conditions at least.

[deleted]

I failed to consider the audience.

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

#134

Post by dudul »

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…

That's not how you hold people accountable.

Even simple metrics like number of PR/code reviews can easily become so useless. They can be good indicators when taken with a grin of salt. But judging someone's productivity from these dashboards is stupid.

I really hope companies/managers who use garbage like that suffer the consequences and the industry learns from it.

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

#136

Post by clnq »

candiddevmike wrote: post #82
mantas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universal income covering the very basic would still keep people making beyond minimum wage vulnerable. Paying meaningful money would be too expensive at scale. Then few jobs could pay meaningfully more than the universal income. Why work if you get +/- not working?

Why work now at minimum wage if it won't get you out of poverty?

UBI will just cause inflation so that you have to work to afford things again. No company will forgo an opportunity to raise prices when they can. Fiduciary responsibility to corporate boards has always been more important than morals or ethics. And easier to get sued over. So boards will demand growth, as they do, and that will include raising prices where people can afford it. Poverty will still be there, it will just cost more (nominally) to get out of it.

The question you pose will remain with UBI, as will poverty. It might just get more extreme for anyone who gets disqualified from UBI for some reason (undocumented, etc).

This problem has not been solved for UBI nor seen in small-scale trials. But there isn't a single rich country or region in the world where the retail prices have not adjusted to consumers' spending power.

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

#137

Post by SoftTalker »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #72
geek_at wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> surveillance is here to stay in the United States. Europe has very strict rules about surveiling employees. Example: In Austria we are not allowed to use some of the functions that Azure-AD joined computers would be capable of because employers _might_ push remote control software the user hasn't agreed to

As a foreign developer living in Austria I'd like to offer a counter perspective: that might be why Austria, even in the tech scene has some of the lowest and least flexibly WFH possibilities I've ever seen in any EU job market: so the bosses can keep a close eye on you at the office, because they can't via SW. Every job I applied to, even the most liberal ones mandates at least 2 day per week at the office in the be…

Are you paid by the hour? Any job I've ever had with such rigid time tracking requirements was a hourly paid position.

This sort of thing backfires on the employer in my opinion. It's quite easy to stretch a task to fill 8 hours if you have to be there anyway. But maybe you'd be happy to clock out after 5 hours one day and take a few extra unpaid hours for yourself. If your work is done, the employer should be happy to save a little money and let you do that.

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

#138

Post by phatfish »

notyourwork wrote: post #117
moooo99 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a non-issue regarding privacy and the intention is to ensure compliance with employee protection laws capping the maximum weekly working time. You write down when you started working and you write down when you stop. Some employers automatically subtract your legally required break time, some want you to enter it manually.

Is there a concept equivalent to US, salary employee? If so what are they expected to work?

In the EU you should not be asked to work more that the maximum hours defined in the European Working Time Regulations. There is usually a range in these directives so member states can choose to go to the high or low end. But there is a range that has to be put into law for each country.

Basically you shouldn't lose your job for refusing to work more hours than are defined in the regulations, if you do there is a tribunal process. But, if the employee is willing there are ways around it.

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

#139

Post by gchamonlive »

qwytw wrote: post #115
lannisterstark wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI isn't covid money printer though. You're misrepresenting it either intentionally or by mistake to discredit it. UBI would, and should, replace current welfare schemes. We already have those in place.

> UBI would, and should, replace current welfare schemes. We already have those in place. But that would still require a huge amount of additional money if you want UBI to be above subsistence levels. Otherwise the amount received by current welfare recipients would have to be cut several times. Also what about disabled people and others who can't work? Would they get the same amount as everyone?

I don't really understand the subject too deeply, just enough to have me convinced UBI should be implemented in some form, but I think the fundamental assumption is that everything that the government has to provide, it is going to do so, by no fault of the government itself, in a very inefficient way. So by the mere act of UBI replacing many systems and centralising in a single program many forms of wealth redistribution, it would do so with less waste, even if UBI would be by itself inefficient.

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

#140

Post by nologic01 »

First they came for peoples social media behavior, and I did not speak out—Because good people have nothing to hide.

Then they came for peoples work clicks, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for peoples minds and souls, and I did not speak out—grown up people should know how to protect themselves.

Then they came for me, but were no people left to speak for me.

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