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“I monitor my staff with software that takes screenshots”

bbc.co.uk

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Re: “I monitor my staff with software that takes screenshots”

#101

Post by masteruvpuppetz »

bootloop wrote: post #91
nip wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One day you come home and realize that you locked yourself out of your home. You call the locksmith. He arrives, looks at the door, fiddles with the lock for one minute, opens the door then leaves. The next day you receive the bill, 150€. Are you mad for spending so much for one minute of work? You shouldn’t: you paid for the experience that allowed him to open it in 1 minute. — Recalling it from a discussion with a…

Ha. In my case it was 700€, took 3 people and 3 hours, a crossbar broke in half and afterwards the security door needed to be replaced anyway (because at the end they cut it open with an angle grinder). All that at 1 o'clock in the morning. Nobody of the neighbors cared or called the police. 0/10, wouldn't recommend the experience to anyone else. I could have done the same for free. Fun fact: The companies boss pause…

>I found it amusing. You wanted the door opened or not?

Re: “I monitor my staff with software that takes screenshots”

#102

Post by PeterStuer »

bb123 wrote: post #97
PeterStuer wrote: post #94

My computer from work is an old Dell Latitude laptop. I work from home on my own desktop with double the ram, twice the threads and a triple 1440p monitor setup. The only thing handled on the laptop is mail and Teams.

Is your company ok with you using a personal computer for work? I would love to be able to do that, but the firm I work for would sooner let me work from the moon.

I've had no complaints. I have always made it a point that I prefer working on better equipment than the company provides.

I understand people that say the company should just provide you with the best, but honestly beyond a certain point you are often looking at a different value derivation curve.

I've always liked computers, and am rather intolerant of perceived unnecessary inefficiency. In the past I replaced the HDD in my work laptop with an SSD (1st gen, long before these were commodity) because I realized the enormous difference they made. Was working with a HDD impossible? Of course not, and most colleagues worked like that for a few more years. For me, it made me discomfortable knowing the amount of time I was wasting due to some technology hold-back that was already solved.

Re: “I monitor my staff with software that takes screenshots”

#104

Post by eequah9L »

reader_mode wrote: post #98
eternalny1 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had something similar (but opposite) happen. We hired a remote engineer to write a program to export to excel. He claimed it was done and the Excel "output" arrived every morning. We asked him to submit his code for review, and after stalling, he produced some extremely obfuscated C++ code that turned out to do absolutely nothing. He was staying up all night entering data manually into Excel to generate the final r…

>He was staying up all night entering data manually into Excel to generate the final reports. He trained a neural network to solve the problem :D

Kinda tricky to scale that kind of network ;)

Re: “I monitor my staff with software that takes screenshots”

#105

Post by Cthulhu_ »

wodenokoto wrote: post #42
zenincognito wrote: post #5

I once went to court against a client who wouldn't pay his bills. The sum more than 35K. It took over 9 months to get to court ( as the court wouldnt give a date ) and countless docs and hours spent to come up with evidence folder. In Australia, a citizen can argue their case which I did without using any lawyers. Finally, we both argued our case to a point where the client's defence was that there was no time log fo…

I'm working at a consultancy, and fixed priced projects are the worst. Clients get greedy and want every little detail they come up with implemented. When things turn out more complex than expected, you have to deliver shoddy work instead of decreasing scope and at the end of the project you ended up adding a feature they asked for halfway through and now they are complaining that the feature it superseeded wasn't in…

We tried it at my previous company once, we had a setup where customers could pay per 2-week sprint.

What they tried to do was get more work done outside of that timeframe by reporting bugs in the delivered work. Bugs that were basically missed features.

Before that my company tried a fixed price project; they sold 8 weeks of work, but to make a profit we had to quickly finish everything in the 6th week, maybe one more guy on the project in the 7th for the last bits. That was a bit shit.

Re: “I monitor my staff with software that takes screenshots”

#106

Post by ImaCake »

shakna wrote: post #9

> For the last year and a half he has used Hubstaff software to track his workers' hours, keystrokes, mouse movements and websites visited. So much more than just screenshots. Whilst the CEO in this case seems to be fairly flexible, and says he doesn't mind if people are taking a break here and there, this kind of... Someone staring over your shoulder, albeit electronically, probably wouldn't work for me, and by infe…

I work as a research assistant in a wetlab (i.e. I physically do experiments). In a previous job the lab manager was suspicious of me appearing to not be doing any work sometimes. Once I figured out I was being watched I went to extra effort to appear busy. I couldn't actually be more busy because I already did the most I could do in a day. But I could waste some time appearing busy. It was a constant drain and I was glad when that lab manager left and I could be as efficient as I wanted without needing to also appear busy.

Re: “I monitor my staff with software that takes screenshots”

#107

Post by ImaCake »

charlieda wrote: post #79
stiray wrote: post #34

I would just simply leave the company that trusts me so little that it needs to monitor what I am doing. In another words if company is so worried to squeeze the last drop of money out of employee to actually use such methods there is something wrong with it. I know one in our country that pays really good but employs such tactics. Developers are leaving on quarterly basis - not due to tactics but due to rotten relat…

And we should consider ourselves lucky as engineers that we work in an industry where we are so in demand that are able to do that. Workers in other industries (the article talks about a firm that re-sells beauty products) might not be so lucky.

Especially when everyone else got fired at the same time and finds themselves in a game of musical chairs for the few remaining jobs. You don't care if it means oppressive surveillance, at least you can pay your mortage and send your kids to school.

Re: “I monitor my staff with software that takes screenshots”

#108

Post by lostlogin »

eequah9L wrote: post #104
reader_mode wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He was staying up all night entering data manually into Excel to generate the final reports. He trained a neural network to solve the problem :D

Kinda tricky to scale that kind of network ;)

There are a lot of humans.

Re: “I monitor my staff with software that takes screenshots”

#109

Post by NicoJuicy »

nip wrote: post #36
zenincognito wrote: post #5

I once went to court against a client who wouldn't pay his bills. The sum more than 35K. It took over 9 months to get to court ( as the court wouldnt give a date ) and countless docs and hours spent to come up with evidence folder. In Australia, a citizen can argue their case which I did without using any lawyers. Finally, we both argued our case to a point where the client's defence was that there was no time log fo…

One day you come home and realize that you locked yourself out of your home. You call the locksmith. He arrives, looks at the door, fiddles with the lock for one minute, opens the door then leaves. The next day you receive the bill, 150€. Are you mad for spending so much for one minute of work? You shouldn’t: you paid for the experience that allowed him to open it in 1 minute. — Recalling it from a discussion with a…

And for the drive to you, which you didn't see

Re: “I monitor my staff with software that takes screenshots”

#110

Post by bb123 »

t0mas88 wrote: post #81
mrweasel wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually had a similar conclusion originally, but then I also saw the level of fraud by our UK customers. They where maybe 5 - 10% of our total sales, but 90+% of fraud cases. My take away is simply that there's less trust in the British society as a whole and it's not necessarily a fault or problem isolated to a single company.

It may be a bit of both, but indeed from anecdotal evidence starting a company in the UK and in the Netherlands: A lot of things are set up with less thrust in the UK. As a simple example in the Netherlands if you reclaim VAT as a company tax services just gives you the money and checks later (obviously you need to give it back if it wasn't correct). In the UK you'll need to show invoices, proof etc before HMRC pays…

Your comment about car insurance is incorrect. Actually in the UK you do not need to carry any evidence of insurance, MOT, or your licence. If you are stopped, you have 14 days to present it to a police station. Which I think is actually evidence for the exact opposite of what you are describing.

Road tax used to be sticker based (as it is in many many counties), but is also now just an online database edit.

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