The article presents the ideal of this technology, how it’s meant to gently improve productivity, guide training and alert about problem employees. Perhaps they

The article presents the ideal of this technology, how it’s meant to gently improve productivity, guide training and alert about problem employees. Perhaps they are marketing to employers who haven’t yet jumped on the bandwagon, perhaps to non-US companies? But companies are little dictatorships and once you give top level managers this snooping capability, leaders can’t help themselves from making personal personnel decisions which erodes company talent. Instead of centers of excellence it creates centers of social compliance. I see a trend in VC backed valley companies, where this technology is well-entrenched, that favors inept-but-familiar culture, as long as your workplace data falls below the radar, you have a little expertise and you are above average social, then you have a job for life. But if you push your personal boundaries in the pursuit of excellence, and criss cross the harmonious flow of work-as-usual then you’re flagged and operating under negative management bias. This is because it requires management to be far more mature and impersonal than it’s reasonable to expect. The Scott Forstalls of the world are more likely to be driven out in favor of the nice guy who says nice things about your management style on Slack. It undermines the traditional go-get-em startup culture which helped the valley create great new technologies.