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How Employers Track Their Workers
- ecnahc515 8y agoHow ubiquitous is this for TSA? I hear people on hackernews complain about theft from the TSA every so often, but according to this, they're being recorded so it shouldn't happen, or if it does, they should be able to prove if it was stolen by TSA. Are people just blaming TSA for their lost things, is TSA covering up thefts that they know are happening, or what?
- caoilte 8y agoIt said they were told that's why they were being recorded, it didn't say it was true. It's very hard to be certain what's going on unless we install tools that monitor management. On the plus side studies show this would improve their productivity.
- babygoat 8y agoBy "they" do you mean TSA? This is not to benefit you, it's to benefit them.
- twblalock 8y agoIf they are being recorded, I doubt the cameras cover every possible angle. People figure out where the blind spots are.
- jsoc815 8y agoEven if they are recording everything, there are few people who will want to spend the time watching the recordings. I've been through this a few times in different places. People make up all sorts of excuses for why they can't access the surveillance record(s), that's if they even really have them.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gorpomon 8y agoPretty disgusting stuff. There are plenty of places in the world where a video camera provides relief and safety, but work is rarely one. The engineers building this tech should be ashamed, they grew up to be the bad guys.
- Tade0 8y agoA few years back a guy I knew from college wanted to have a meeting with me regarding a "business opportunity". He pitched me an idea for a system that would essentially spy on IT contractors through the webcam during work. Fortunately his budget was laughably small and my participation out of the question so he never went through with this. He is known for being utterly shameless but I guess what other kind of person would come up with such an idea?
- dawnerd 8y agoDoesn't upwork and other freelance style sites monitor by webcam/screencapture as an option?
- keyle 8y agoHow to watch someone pick their nose for 8 hours a day. Which finger will he use next? Woah he's going for the big one! And this is me, and it's not even lunch time.
- CaptainZapp 8y agoHe pitched me an idea for a system that would essentially spy on IT contractors through the webcam during work. Doing that herearound (and I'd wager in most European countries) would be illegal as hell. Like in prison sentence illegal.
- devoply 8y agoThese type of "tools" are used by low-lives to control people so that they feel that they have some sense of control over people. In terms of getting good hard-working motivated people to work for you, this sort of technology does exactly the opposite.
- Terr_ 8y agoIt makes me think of a piece from Peopleware (1987): > Historians long ago formed an abstraction about different theories of value: The Spanish Theory, for one, held that only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people’s backs. Then there was the English Theory that held that value could be created through ingenuity and technology. [...] > The Spanish Theory of Value is alive and well among managers everywhere. You see that whenever they talk about productivity. Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay. There is a large difference. The Spanish Theory managers dream of attaining new productivity levels through the simple mechanism of unpaid overtime.
- wtracy 8y agoThis comment gave me a thought: maybe the reason that employees rebel against these systems has less to do with the implied lack of trust, and more to do with the loss of autonomy? If the boss isn't around to watch you all the time, you get judged by your results at the end of the day. If you're being watched all the time, you get judged by how closely you adhere to every asinine rule that management makes up.
- paulie_a 8y agoIt should be titled: How employers lose their best employees. There are certain jobs that do require extra security and monitoring. But if a manager actually thinks their white collar underling is going to perform better, they should not be a manager. In the case of IT people, it will probably just get hacked and disabled. I've done it at past jobs. I've also flat out refused to implement this sort of crap.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- imhelpingu 8y agoWorkers who are being surveiled should do the bare minimum while developing skills during free time that benefit future employers and not the current one.
- ravenstine 8y agoSadly, I think this almost always should be the case. That is, unless the employer actually is benevolent and puts effort into nurturing the futures of its employees. But how often do we see that? People should basically work no more than 4 hours a day, and the remaining 4 hours should either be spent developing skills or running a side-hustle on a personal laptop. Better that than bullshitting, which is what the vast majority of people do after they're burned out working 3 hours.
- joewee 8y agoI've never seen an employee monitoring system that's built to the benefit of the employee. But nothing a company does it to the benefit of the employee. HR isn't there to help employees, HR is primarily a risk mitigation and compliance department. Who would assume employee monitoring systems are any different? "They try to never speak up, never stick out, do nothing that might get noticed by management. This leads to a vicious cycle, whereby management grows more suspicious and feels justified in ratcheting up the surveillance." This is the most troubling thing about surveillance, it changes peoples behavior. The people who implement these systems don't understand the psychology of surveillance, so they use the change in behavior as a indicator of increased risk. Its a vicious cycle.
- toomanybeersies 8y ago> But nothing a company does it to the benefit of the employee This isn't a feature intrinsic to companies, but rather a relatively recent social norm. There are still a few companies that do look after their employees, and do things to the benefit of their employees. They aren't very common though, usually it's smaller (often family run) businesses, and often a physical trade rather than an office job.
- joewee 8y agoTrue, their are companies that have founding principles that are employee friendly, but once you have an official HR role, their job is the complete opposite. Similarly, corporate counsel is responsible to the corporate entity (are companies people?), even if that means recommending removal of the founder. A organization with employee friendly values has leadership willing to challenge HR and Legal, but that means a majority of the leadership has to be onboard. So yes, family owned businesses, tightly controlled/owned businesses probably fall into that category.
- rifung 8y ago> True, their are companies that have founding principles that are employee friendly, but once you have an official HR role, their job is the complete opposite. I really don't like or agree with this characterization at all. Sure part of their job is to prevent the company from being sued but part of their job is (usually) also keeping employees happy.
- jsoc815 8y ago> “a culture where … people more often alter their behavior to suit machines and work with them, rather than the other way around,” and that this tends to erode their sense of “agency.” That is, the constant surveillance of employees diminishes their capacity to operate as independent thinkers and actors. Isn't this the point? At least until the people can be replaced? Personally, can't wait to see the autonomous robots attempts to subvert the system. That should be interesting.
- IamIan 8y agoI am Ian.
- itronitron 8y agoso yeah, if a company considers surveillance of employees' performance to be documentation of their work for the company then all employees will do is just be surveilled.
- ivanhoe 8y agoIMHO having a camera over your head is just one (small) step worse than working in open-plan offices. It got popular only for one reason, for just like cameras it gives the management that false sense of control.
- sologoub 8y ago“It’s possible that almost any change—even changing the lighting—would have prompted a similar increase in productivity.” Hawthorne effect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
- nimbius 8y agoas someone who works a blue collar job in an auto repair shop, these articles always make me pause for a moment and ask if i really want to keep learning python in the hopes of pursuing an office job. The entire environment just sounds like high school all over again. Why does anyone in an office put up with it?? is this somehow different than time keeping? do you have a punch card? If you asked my boss where i was, shed probably just point at the garage and wave at the 'authorized personnel only' sign. She has no reason to care what size wrench im holding or why im beating the living shit out of a siezed idler pitman assembly. I once drove a car with no doors and a missing windshield out of the lot and down the street, and the only thing she wanted from me was to know if id run to leroys donut and pick up a frozen coffee. Why is this different in an office? are office jobs just not trustworthy?
- danharaj 8y agoNo one in an office job knows if anyone else is doing anything useful. Or even if they're doing anything useful.
- jsoc815 8y agoAu contrair. mon ami. Office workers are busy keeping themselves in the office, which means that the vacation spots, and such are riffraff-free for their betters until the next major holiday break. That's quite useful.
- jsoc815 8y agoI see some people lack a sense of humor and/or that a 'truth' perhaps cuts too close to the bone.
- icebraining 8y agoIf by useful you mean in a societal scale, I agree. If you mean on a more prosaic level, I'd say that's not true in small bootstrapped companies.
- pnutjam 8y ago
- jeffalyanak 8y agoWhen our company first began implementing employee tracking the goal was to help our staff understand their own performance, co-educate and to attempt to support a culture of experimenting with every aspect of our work. Our initial systems ended up being decent at keeping people "moving fast" but in our first few feedback sessions we found it stressed people out, encouraged competition instead of co-education and locked people into workflows they "knew worked" rather than fostering experimentation. We quickly killed all but the most basic performance tracking aspects of the project and we found better ways to achieve our goals. We now have a sort of "opt-in" tracking for staff who are interested in testing the strengths and weaknesses of a novel approach, for example. This puts the data in their hands as a tool to convince us of the validity of their approach and the empowerment is not trivial. It's far more friendly and humane but it's also something that benefits everyone at the company.
- icebraining 8y agoI'm curious; in the first version, where was the data stored and who had access to it?
- jeffalyanak 8y agoThere was an intranet portal available to all the staff and much of the day-to-day data was presented directly to the staff as they completed their work. However, only management was really "engaging" with the data, the staff themselves only interacted with it enough to outrun it. Now, employees feel excited about the opportunity to dig into datasets that they created with some specific intent and it's the staff themselves that engage directly with management. It's just much better all around.
- tartoran 8y agoAlso relevant here is panopticon/panopticism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticism
- kchoudhu 8y agoThe bank I was working at tried installing monitoring software on programmers' computers one day with no monitoring. I sent my MD an email saying I wouldn't be working that day because of it, and left. The software disappeared the next day.
- ragequitta 8y agoMost companies I've worked for (including a bank) you'd be gone the next day. Monitoring is so rampant right now. It's disgusting.
- millak 8y agoIndeed, I'm working at a bank at the moment. There are half a dozen "endpoint protection" agents installed on my laptop, and don't even mention the network filtering - the Docker, Nginx and Vagrant documentation websites are all blocked for example. I try to work mostly on my own laptop using Citrix in a web browser to access the corporate network so that the personal data I generate in a day (for example, browsing HN during downtime) doesn't get caught up in all the monitoring but this has some obvious limitations. With the security regime in place they will actually ask you about every piece of software you have installed on your corporate laptop (on which you'll need to request temporary admin access to install most software, of course) or about why you visited x, y or z website or why you searched this or that on Google. Like the article says it's best to keep your head down and try not to get noticed - they collect so much information but nobody looks at it until they have a reason to do so.
- a_imho 8y agoCompletely off topic but The Atlantic's GDPR notice is the least intrusive and most compliant I've seen so far. Good job.
- lexicality 8y agoTry https://wikia.com https://wikia.com. No "manage my preferences" or "are you sure" etc, just a simple yes/no. As a side note, basically no one complies with Article 7.3.4: "It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent." (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/)
- a_imho 8y agoPersonally I prefer the finer grained controls of The Atlantic, but that is still better than 99% of the rest. Though I'm not sure about the wording, it only says 'advertising cookies'.
- CaptainZapp 8y agoI totally agree. The Guardian's is even simpler (track or no track). Those things were you have to opt-out of 160 companies individually are really the pits (and quite likely illegal, but time will tell).