Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

This reminds me, back in the day I had a short term contract in Austin, TX with MCI (a now defunct telco). The site was a call center and the project was working on their friends and family product.

I remember feeling outraged for the poor schmucks working at the adjacent call center. They had metered "bt time" - that is bath room time -- and were constantly monitored. This is early 90s (the golden age of being a programmer in US, imo) and our field was fun, lucrative, and really quite unlike any other whitish collar profession. Who would have thunk it that one day we would end up being treated like 'lowly and disposable' call center human resources.

A large proportion of those smaller companies just cargo cult the practices of the big organizations, so you end up with the same kinds of frustration with the bonus of being paid much less.

Yes, but that does not preclude layering individual bargaining on top. The collective bargain could simply be something like "you may not track employees", while still leaving each individual employee to negotiate the compensation they seek. If the workers would rather be completely hands-off they could defer all negotiations to a negotiator, but, again, the workers make up the rules. It's whatever they want.

I'm interested what they're doing now that they weren't already doing before that has any value.

These companies track a lot of what you do already - a decent percentage of which makes sense from a security perspective.

I'm curious what could possibly be valuable that they weren't already tracking.

Like... How are individual keystrokes and mouse movements more valuable than all the work you already do which is largely tracked at the right amount of value already???

I wonder how much of this is just them actively trying to get even more people to quit, with somehow zero concern for losing their actual talent in the process...

All of MAG-7 is so desperate to shift R&D spending from salaries to CapEx for AI data centers, they'd literally watch ~90% of their talent go that provides ~99% of their actual valuable work in the process.

And it's not because they're idiots that are completely oblivious to what's actually happening on the ground... It's their smug confidence that they can get away with anything and use their market positioning to force everyone to deal with their bad decisions no matter how disastrous they end up being...

If our models end up sucking, so what, we'll just lobby congress to make open weight models illegal...

If people don't like our pricing, oh well, we'll just lobby congress to force the government to pay for our products...

If China or Europe does it better, oh well, we'll just lobby congress to label it national security and outlaw competition...

Etc...

I'm 40 and I am DESPERATLY trying to get out of tech. I love building stuff and I don't even mind AI.

However, the industry has just changed so much in the past 2 decades that I find it insufferable.

The leetcode grinding interviews. The bureaucracy. The weird psycho finance people who poured into the industry over time. I just can't stand being a Jira ticket coding monkey anymore.

I'm trying to do my own thing and go my own path. I've deeply suffered financially as a result. I burned through my savings and I don't have any kind of fallback but freelance work.