can I figure out if my company is doing this? will Interguard show up in Task Manager somehow?
Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance
41–50 of 312 posts
Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance
#42As a prelude to what i'll type below I hate these things. They are not useful and I believe they are detrimental to employee productivity through the "panopticon" idea of management.
There's no need in my eyes for regulating this or getting in quarrel over workers rights. You, the employee, sign a contract with the employer to perform some work for some compensation. If the employer wishes to run this type of strategy on their own hardware I do not see a problem with this. You can, and should, find a job that respects you as a worker. What we are seeing here is the MBA-style spreadsheet management turned into software.
This "panopticon" management increases turnover rate and decreases productivity. I have personally seen it. I worked IT in a company that had this software (I was a low level sysadmin and had no control). People would spend an inordinate amount of time finding ways to hide their activity instead of just quickly doing what they had to do and moving on. The solution isn't to complain, or call for regulation, but rather just leave your job. If the software isn't being installed on your computer then the company is completely okay to do this, no matter how damaging it is to their bottom line through subsequent lost activity.
Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance
#43Would you be okay with tracking software if it was installed on a work provided computer?
Why would mandatory malware ever be okay under any circumstance?
Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance
#44Would you be okay with tracking software if it was installed on a work provided computer?
Absolutely not. If I'm not trusted to do the job, that isn't the kind of relationship I want with my employer.
Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance
#45If you need to rely on this sort of technology to feel confident your team is being productive and meeting their goals, you're not doing a very good job managing your team and/or you're simply not a great manager. Full stop.
Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I downvoted you, because I think this is not true in general. Regulation can actually increase the freedom. It is a concept in philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance And it's also not true in particular, you might happen to be in a group which benefits from given regulation. Hopefully, in a democratic society, the group that is negatively affected (if any) is as small as possible.
.. and I downvoted you, because it absolutely true by definition. Regulation, by definition, decreases freedom. That's the whole point of regulation - to threaten with violence, acts that people have agreed are not a good idea. If software engineers were regulated under IEEE, the freedoms of software engineers would decrease not increase. I quote from the article you linked: "In order to maintain a tolerant society,…
Your perception of definition is not universal.
Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance
#47"Are they generally active on programs and websites that I would consider productive like Excel, PowerPoint, Word, email, as opposed to YouTube or Facebook?"
The CEO talking about his product in terms of first person value judgements tells you all you need to know about the degrees of sliminess involved.
Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance
#48> "If you're idle for a few minutes, if you go to the bathroom or whatever, a pop-up will come up and it'll say, 'You have 60 seconds to start working again or we're going to pause your time,' " the woman said.
This is the exact type of sociopathic behavior that creates unions.
Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance
#49It’s old-fashion management. If you don’t understand your employees workload and don’t trust them then either you resign or fire the employees. Simple as that. I don’t see how this makes any employee productive. This adds more stress imo. An employee gives you 8 of their 12 hour day. Now, you tell me if that works only for you - the management. They’re people just like you. They have a life just like you. They have r…
> An employee gives you 8 of their 12 hour day. How much sleep are you getting??
I guess if you take into account commute, cooking, cleaning and other household tasks and errands it seems possible to only have 4 hours of true free time.
Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance
#50If a company can have most, if not all, of its software engineering workforce WFH, why would they hire in US or Europe for those/similar roles?
Timing, for one thing. For example, we have two sites in India; one of them works on Eastern time, the other on Indian time. The one that works Eastern time is a lot easier to deal with, as they are active when the rest of the US-based company is active. However, that means the Indian-based team is working nights, which makes it harder to retain good engineers.
The team that works on Indian time has good engineers, but with little overlap to the US-based management structure (and US-based engineers), there are sometimes significant delays in getting everyone on the same page.
That's one example, but there are others, such as cultural (i.e. expectations for US-based management may not be the same as non-US-based engineers) and "optics" (US-based customers like it better when US-based companies use US-based employees)