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Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

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Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#71

Post by djhaskin987 »

MS Teams has a "green check" next to your name if you've touched your keyboard or mouse in the last five minutes and automatically sets your status to "away" if you haven't done so. I've had people at work use this to try and figure out if I'm working or not. It is a violating feeling, but also very similar to the "is your butt in the chair" way of management when not working from home, and I can see why managers like the feature.

For any of those suffering under this problem, have a look at caffeine[1], it simulates a keystroke on your laptop every 59 seconds.

1: https://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/caffeine/

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#72

Post by raztogt21 »

Earlier in my career looking for my first remote job, I got an offer for 20$-30$ per hour. This is 2.5x the average salary where I live, and almost 2x of what I was making at the time.

"Are you okay with installing surveillance software installed on your computer to track everything you do?"

Laughed at their faces. I will take ANY job (roof repairing, garbage man, security guard) before doing that.

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#73

Post by someguyorother »

subhobroto wrote: post #56
iask wrote: post #12

It’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…

> poor management. Uneducated decision making There is no "poor management". What are these uneducated decision makers even doing at your place of work? There's always a boss. The boss is paying for the behavior they want to see. Now if you argue the ultimate boss is clueless, then, what are you even doing there? You might want to tell yourself that your immediate boss who calls you every 30 minutes you are away from…

This kinda feels like the conspiracy theory perspective to organizational management.

If you see a purported optimization problem and a solution that doesn't fit it, there are two possible explanations. Either whatever does the optimization is bad at optimizing, or the objective function isn't what you think it is.

For almost every feasible solution, you can contrive an objective function so that that solution is the optimum. So perhaps the managers are deliberately engineering the business to take some money out of their bottom line to send a message. But in the spirit of Hanlon's razor, it's more likely that the managers are simply bad at their job.

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#74

Post by HumblyTossed »

> After two weeks of working from her Brooklyn apartment, a 25-year-old e-commerce worker received a staffwide email from her company: Employees were to install software called Hubstaff immediately on their personal computers so it could track their mouse movements and keyboard strokes,and record the webpages they visited.

I'm 100 percent positive that I would tell this company to get stuffed if they suggested I put that crap on my personal computer/phone.

This is managerial paranoia. These are probably managers that worked their way up by stepping on people and bumping others into oncoming buses along the way.

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#75

Post by Tade0 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #65
Tade0 wrote: post #39

"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. Solution to that using appliances available in every home: Dangle the mouse from you desk and put a fan next to it so that it hits the mouse from time to time. But also quit your job - managers who use such tact…

It's probably not difficult to work around these checks but nobody should be suffering this indignity in the first place. People can't even go to the bathroom without getting called out by managers over lost productivity. How dehumanizing.

And it's not even effective. There's a quote from one of the more known Total Quality Management evangelists, which stuck with me(paraphrased):

"Don't engage in games with your employees, because you can't win."

He elaborates further explaining that any scheme or incentive system created for a specific behavioral outcome is bound to be exploited or otherwise worked around.

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#76

Post by crispyambulance »

iask wrote: post #12

It’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…

> I am certain most managers that implement this are antisocial fucks.

I agree.

But the surveillance tools have been around for A LONG TIME, and people haven't really complained much about it.

The thing is whenever people ask questions about how the surveillance is performed and how to respond to it, the answer (in the USA) has traditionally been something like "It's your employer's equipment, they can do whatever they want with their equipment-- don't do anything on it unless you want the man to know."

Now, "the equipment" is at home. I don't think that makes much difference, but yeah, there's some interesting edge cases like turning on camera/microphone in employee home without employee consent.

It makes me wonder about countermeasures.

Is there a way to know if you're being screenshotted or some enterprise shit-ware is logging stuff? Yes, it's always true that it "could happen". I would like to know if it IS happening. Is that even possible?

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#78

Post by dbattaglia »

> But in the office, it is much easier to figure out if someone is doing a job well.

I found this odd. The only measure of doing a job well is the output, isn’t it? How is this easier in an office? Plenty of people can spend all day cranking away in Excel or an IDE, with no Facebook or YouTube in sight, producing complete garbage.

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#79

Post by tjr225 »

Kalium wrote: post #37
iask wrote: post #12

It’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…

Once upon a time, I worked for a company in Kansas City where upper management genuinely had trouble with the idea that engineers were humans with lives outside the office. I was walking through their section of the office one day, and overheard the President of the company asking in tones of complete bewilderment why engineers were not voluntarily working twelve-hour days. Suffice to say that his confusion was refle…

Hah- any chance this was at a large EMR vendor? ;)

Re: Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance

#80

Post by samizdis »

wickerman wrote: post #59

I think it's time to start naming and shaming these companies. This doesn't increase productivity. It's disgusting. You don't own people's lives for 8 hours a day; you pay them to help you achieve goals for the company. It baffles me how the US has trouble not understanding that paying for someone's time does not make them your slave.

It's not just the US. We've had episodes of this sort of thing in the UK, albeit with clumsier tech, for years. Here's a tale from 2016 [1] about motion sensors under journalists' desks (management later did a reverse ferret, aka volte-face [Edited to add the aka]):

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jan/11/daily-telegrap...

BTW - "Reverse ferret" is a British media thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_ferret

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