I think most companies that need to hire top talent know that these kinds of things drive away talent. So these practices tend to be relegated to a lower tier of companies/employers.
This is truer in a recession. And the effect can justify calls to unionize.
when an individual task is complete, there is always someone that could use help, or an idea to document, or one of a million things you want the 'top tier' to be involved in.
there is an infinite amount of work to be done. seriously. 40 hours a week is a way to meter it.
monitoring it, not very effective or valuable. weigh the contribution people make, not the hours they put in. but 40 hours a week is the expected amount of work focus today.
I told everybody that this is a time to be close to family - if your child wants to play ball in the middle of the day, then go ahead! Just clock out before you do. Get your 8 hours in and document your work.
Thankfully everybody has responded well - I have one employee than needs me to randomly call them to keep then honest, but he's a good guy and I think is struggling with a bit of depression. He likes to be called and he likes our chats.
I get that it’s not easy to set good milestones, and to keep it fair in terms of making sure everyone has approximately equal work, but I feel the same problems exist with required work “time” especially since it doesn’t encourage working more efficiently, effectively or smarter, because you gotta get those 8 hours in regardless.
Unless they’re contractors/consultants who bill by the hour, of course.
He would always say “I want you to work your ass off while you’re here but I also don’t want you taking this home with you. The company is paying you for forty hours of your time a week.”
The expectation, which everyone seemed to find fair enough, was that if you didn’t have enough to fill 40 hours that you find other projects to help with or tinker with new ideas.
Honestly it was a great culture and they had a sizable acquisition exit so I guess it worked even as the company got north of 600ish employees by the time they were bought.
Was everyone honest about it? No of course not, but enough were that people bought in.
So far, so good: Our employees are constantly coming up with better ways of doing things - with less stress, hassle, and annoyance. Over the last three years, our works has gone from suffering 40 hours to an enjoyable but hard-working 40 hours. Our retention rate has gone from 40% to 95%.
Setting limits on how long people work could have a better impact in terms of work-life balance than being able to quit early once in a while.
We all know it's easy to "work" as in get "stuff done" but "hard work" is the basis of our economy. Part of the problem is the notion of hardness, a dimensionless constant on the Moh scale which you can look up elsewhere. Difficulty, as in the complexity of thought required to predict a system, is another matter altogether. We should speak instead of power, the ability to perform work quickly.
I know a few powerful thinkers. Give them a problem and they'll return an appreciation quickly. An answer will follow, and more thereafter, until things settle, and they can share their understanding.
One of the most useful techniques in this regard is contextualisation, whereby we physically, perhaps synesthaestically, abstract ourselves from our abstractions by being with, and learning from, each other. Think of children and think of Alan Kay.
Children put in all their time to being children. When we're employed we're employed as adults. Eight hours of work is equivalent to eight hours of cooking and cleaning, or playing and teaching, of exploring and learning. When we pay each other to be adults we maintain all the rest of society.
Paid by hour or minute we're best off working as autonomous heroes for the greater good.
I love hacker news, smart people share politely. I can show my Mother on occasion. But Hacker News is still just a bit of a cuter slashdot with pretentions of lambdatheultimate and a healthy dash of shtetloptimised, downed with a bit of whatever you're having yourself.
Unless an 8 hour day of work was part of the agreement of the job.
There's no more to it than that. You signed up for an 8 hour work day. An emergency situation in which you work from home isn't going to change that.
Otherwise, why would you peg your performance to the lowest common denominator.
Once you make a deliverable the metric, work interaction and innovation suffers.
Say Bob finishes assigned Task-A in six hours. However Alice is struggling with her Task-B and could do with some of Bob's Java expertise. But in a deliverable-driven environment, Bob's done and clocks out. See ya Alice!
Or Alice is waiting for an informal reply from Trent, but Trent's reply is not a manager-assigned deliverable so he doesn't bother responding. He wants to press ahead and get Task-C finished so that he can clock out.
Instead of focusing on deliverables, most employers therefore focus on 'time dwelling' in the hope that people will interact and share the work burden.
I guess I'd understand if the company were not trying to "innovate" or "raise the bar" or anything, just fulfill some mundane requirements at the lowest cost, and paid accordingly.
one of the key points of employment is that i get s reliable salary regardless of my performance. sure, if my performance is continuously very bad then my employer may want to make an adjustment (or let me go) and likewise if my performance is good i may expect a raise.
in general that stability of income is more important than the ability to go home earlier. because the latter means that i have to work more if things don't go well because deliverables are often hard to define. in IT at least. what do you count? lines of code? number of issues closed?
one week i may close a dozen issues, the next week a single task may have stumped me, requiring me to do days of research.
deliverables reslly only work on a large scale: "finish this project" or for a sysadmin: "keep the servers running". my customer or employer doesn't care how many hours i spend on that. if there are no problems then i am free, or i may get a bonus for closing a project early.
Generally, IMO, you shouldn't be hiring people and then checking up on them and their hours to keep them honest. There's better uses of time. That time spent tracking and keeping them honest doesn't really improve you, them or the company.
I am not a child nor an inmate, and can therefore be trusted not to try and game the system to do as little work as I can possibly get away with. I shoot for eight hours. If things go past nine hours without a specific source of pressing urgency, I don't feel uncomfortable asserting my work-life balance. If I really get into the zone and have a super-productive day I don't feel uncomfortable logging off after seven hours.
Whereas if I'm on a clock, I'm watching the clock, constantly. I have trouble entering a deep-work headspace. I feel guilty and second-guess myself every time I stand up for a minute. I'll subconsciously space out at my desk more often because "I'm putting in the hours".
Everybody's different, I just wanted to add a data point. I'm somewhat ADD and if I'm forced to be either completely on and tracking the minutes or completely off, instead of jumping back and forth like I naturally do, my productivity tanks.
I do not understand (and that does not mean you are wrong; maybe there is no wrong or I am) how anyone conflates hours with productivity; you want me to do tasks a1-a10 this week; why is it relevant if I do those Thursday night in 16 hours or 40 hours spread over the week? As long as they get done and done well right? I cannot think which type of work would not work like that but cannot think of any so how is it related to ‘hours behind the screen’? I have tried these things in the past as well with my colleagues over the years and the ‘bums on seats’ only invites people to work slower (to fill the time and not have to do more work) which in turn indeed invites the use of spyware to see if they are working.
Now we have tasks; if some superhuman does them in 5 minutes instead of 40 hours; glory to her. Obviously that does not happen, but 30 vs 40 does sometimes and that is fine with me; stuff gets delivered, people are happy. I also have a few guys who get nothing done one week and over-perform the next; as long as I know that, it is fine. Weekly sprints are overrated anyway imho.
- It's applicable to most people on this site
- It's actionable: be conscious of what you use your company-issued computer for
I'm convinced that most people aren't aware that this is a common practice. I've talked to people who think it's not possible or that their company doesn't do it. On the flip side, I've worked with enough IT departments to know that most of them have the capability, even if they're not actively using it.
If your computer has any sort of remote management software on it (typically used for pushing mandatory updates), IT can probably also surreptitiously access your filesystem or observe your screen.
If it's on a device you own:
- Do not install software from your employer that requires admin permissions (i.e., requires typing your password).
- If you're on recent versions of Windows or macOS, various powerful actions like taking screenshots are restricted by default and should at least trigger a permission prompt. You can go to Settings or System Preferences and see which apps have been given permission. If you can, try to install apps only from the OS's app store (because those apps are sandboxed more tightly than traditional desktop apps) or apps from reputable publishers (e.g., it's fine to install Word or Photoshop or whatever, but don't install MyCompany Productivity Helper For Employees).
- Try to get work to give you a corporate device, or a way to work via a web browser or via remote-desktop to a computer on your desk in the closed office or something (and make sure that way doesn't involve installing custom software...).
- If you have to install custom apps, make a separate non-admin user account and don't type your admin password when you're logged into it. Then your company can watch your company work but not your personal stuff.
- If you're installing on a mobile OS, installing apps is generally fine but be very careful about installing a mobile device management (MDM) profile. When you install one, you'll be prompted about what sort of access you're giving your company; make sure you're comfortable with it.
BTW, the same goes for schools - for instance, if your school wants you to install some sort of app for taking remote exams, the purpose of the app is almost certainly to intentionally take screenshots so they know you're not looking at Wikipedia. See if you can install it in a non-admin account, or if your school is issuing laptops, use that (and don't use that laptop for personal stuff).
(Shameless plug: a friend and I run a personal security newsletter and we talked about this a bit last issue: https://looseleafsecurity.com/episodes/newsletter-2020-04-05... and we also have a guide to checking up on MDM on your phone: https://looseleafsecurity.com/episodes/newsletter-2019-12-07...)
It's quite rare for company-owned macs to be completely unmanaged. Usually the installation method for common corporate utilities is an MDM solution like Jamf (Self Service), which also transmits logs - for example how long each app was in the foreground[1] and what times you're using your computer[2].
None of them do any sort of monitoring like this.
At some of them, I have lead the security team. and others, I have been in charge of IT.
Even at the ones where its not my job to handle that, I am supremely confident that we use no such software.
Beyond the policy problems that it would cause (private keys and customer data could be viewed, requiring very broad access roles), it would also be next to impossible to implement from a technological standpoint.
At every company that I've worked at in the last 12 years, engineers have had the ability to wipe their machine and reinstall.
In most cases, they have the ability to swap out hard drives and other components, Bring them to Apple stores for repair, etc.
No one that I know of users custom VPN software, or closed source Cisco stuff anymore.
I think you are dramatically overestimating how common this sort of thing is.
And I got on the company Wi-Fi with a password. Still do.
If I get laid off (they're cutting 20% of the workforce next week), then I consider the computer my severance pay.
If they press the issue, they can come to my house and collect the machine. But I'll lick every part of it before I hand it over.
Childish? Oh, heck yeah. But when I see my own company screwing over its employees and customers to protect the CEO's pay (none of the C-levels took a cut), I just don't care.
I know its tempting and it's likely your only recourse but it won't work out for you in the end.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/upwork...
1. Write code for the project and record mouse clicks and keystrokes
2. Replay keystrokes at .5 speed inside a mirrored VM
a more sophisticated tool could also vary speed and add typos.
Me: I'm thinking about if I should use a string here in c++
Employer: fair enough
Sure, most corporate IT depts could do this - but if caught, they'd face real penalties. The brazen-ness of US employers regarding surveillance of their employees is something that continues to (negatively) amaze me, even after years on HN and Reddit.
I ended up quitting when I found out.
Honestly, there are better ways to measure productivity based on other parameters, taking screenshots is just silly.
If it's the first, as ugly as it is, it makes sense. Don't do anything on a work computer that you don't want your boss, their boss, and the corp IT/lawyers to know about.
If it's the second, that's wholly unacceptable and ridiculous. I refuse to install company-anything on personal devices with the exception of a push-app for MFA on my phone. Everything else, forget it.
Before computers could transcribe voice, the limiting factor of wiretapping is needing some poor schmuck who had to listen to all those utterly banal conversations, which has to be one of the worst jobs ever.
What I don't understand is how they explain that to their customers.
"Yeah, you're not quite getting what you paid for because we spent a portion of it hiring a couple of guys to look at screenshots of our employees computers. Sorry. You can get free screenshots?"
And customers accept this waste of money?
It's not going to catch someone who has put some thought into how to circumvent these, but it's enough to catch a lot of the non-HN people.
The raw logged data doesn't leave the computer, the boss or client gets a version that might or might not be an accurate reflection of what the worker did.
The most important thing is that you're able to "remember" what you did two weeks back, how much time you spent on it and for what project. Because that takes a lot of time and is always very inaccurate if you need to do it from memory.
There is no way I want the end user to feel spied on by the tool, that would totally kill the acceptation in the market.
Are you selling to the actual user? Usually stuff like this gets bought by the employer.
But I think It's possible to collect productivity metrics without obliterating employee trust.
I'm working on a tool to do this but I’ve stalled in the project because I’m having a hard time reconciling whether it benefits companies enough to pay for it (It seems geared towards employees more than companies)
I think it comes down to a few things. 1. There are managers that do not have good domain knowledge. 2. They don't have regular 1 on 1's, or anything else that good managers do.
Essentially you're assuming that all managers are good, or even competent when most of us have had experience to contradict this.
Which is essentially my conundrum: good managers won't need my service, and bad managers won't even be looking for it
Assumption: you use a separate computer for your personal computing needs not related to work.
If someone was watching me without my knowledge, I'd like quit when I found out. (Or perhaps make their life hell.)
Employers should just fess up and state clearly that they are doing this. It's the coverup that's the problem.
that is invasive, and they don't need the information.
if it was required, I would leave the company.
As for price, let them make an offer and see how valuable the data is for them.
Beside the fact that an individual tracking requires the employee to be informed of the fact and that the company must jump through hoops to have this registered - you coukd end up screenshooting private activities.
They are allowed on company devices and company time, and they are protected.
When I want to surf the web I use my local browser. I would be surprised if citrix can screenshot other active windows, perhaps I'm naive.
Just asking would anyone be okay if a banking app asks for a selfie or takes a photo of you when you are performing a transaction via mobile, just to know that transaction is valid.
But, I would ask, beyond a gut feeling of being creepy, what particular objections does anyone have to this? Do you believe employers are not entitled, either legally or ethically, to do this on their own equipment?
Seems to me to be a very strong indicator of a toxic workplace
Do we expect orgs not to respond to insider threats, or is it just this particular response that is especially distasteful?
[0] https://enterprise.verizon.com/resources/executivebriefs/ins...
E. G. in Poland it is not allowed to record how teachers teach as it is their IP.
Usually some of paperwork you sign when joining a large company are agreements that the company practically owns anything you do/invent/think while employed.
Basically assume it's all their IP unless you have an agreement stating otherwise.
