Honestly lots of people are doing miminal hours WFH, not just IT, all office workers. I think companies really dont know what to do about it.
WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
171–180 of 367 posts
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#172Nearly 20 years ago we used to install monitoring software to tell if a user's mouse or keyboard hadn't been used in a while. More and more places use traffic inspection "for security". Desks now use sensors to tell when warm bodies are near. Doesn't matter whether you're working from office or in the home, surveillance is here to stay. Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. Bad businesses…
>Quit the bad ones, join the good ones.
It's literally a recession. IT just experienced historically massive layoffs over the last 6 months. Could you be any more out of touch?
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#173Earlier 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.
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 e…
How is means testing adversarial?
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#174Nearly 20 years ago we used to install monitoring software to tell if a user's mouse or keyboard hadn't been used in a while. More and more places use traffic inspection "for security". Desks now use sensors to tell when warm bodies are near. Doesn't matter whether you're working from office or in the home, surveillance is here to stay. Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. Bad businesses…
> Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. This always comes across as people wanting to have the cake and eat it. Employers should only care that the work is getting done, but if the work isn't done, then the employee should still be able to go home after 8 hours and get full salary?
> but if the work isn't done, then the employee should still be able to go home after 8 hours and get full salary?
Of course not. If the work isn't getting done, then the employee should be fired. And that's the case even with the surveillance.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#175Earlier 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.
>Some people don’t want to work
All we can be certain of is that they don't want to spend most of their lives under a dictatorship, and that's fair imo.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#176During 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 sympathize - it must’ve been stressful to go through this. Yet I just can’t stop to imagine the other side’s perspective and it’s making me laugh: I’m sitting in front of the monitoring dashboard, chewing a sandwich, and then a spike of intranet activity shows on one of the charts. I look at the dashboard and immediately notice that it’s effect of some SMS broadcast. Nothing to see here: lazy Tuesday. Then on the d…
If I'm using curl, I'm probably also using git, ssh and wget. I think an active threat would be more likely to try to blend in (a giveaway would probably to use a user agent that declared I was using a different OS because it was hardcoded into the payload.)
What I end up thinking about is that even though I'm back at the office full time (and I'm one of the weirdos that actually prefer it) I have doctors appointments, school teacher meetings and such that have all moved online. So convenient!, except there's no way I can realistically attend them privately, so a 5 minute meds appointment is now once again a 3 hour travel ordeal.
End-to-End encryption doesn't matter if your employer is scraping your device. I know this is all obvious, but it didn't need to be this way.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Quite sure he is. Usually All-In contracts don't log their time in Austria.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#178Earlier 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.
Why? I can work wehnever I want and always do so. When i worked 50 instead of 40h i get overtime pay.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#179Slavery never went away, it just shifted to encompassing the whole work force
Yea getting paid six figures to do a White Collar Job from home is slavery. Nice hyperbole.
Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)
#180Honestly lots of people are doing miminal hours WFH, not just IT, all office workers. I think companies really dont know what to do about it.
What’s there to do? If the work is getting done then enjoy the morale boost.