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Ask HN: Has anyone ever had to spy on their colleagues when they work from home?
I'm interested to hear if anyone's boss has told them they had to check their colleagues' productivity as they remote work (e.g. in the financial world), or if anyone has used "bossware" like Teramind and ActivTrak to monitor their team for an actually good reason. What was it like? How did it affect you?
I know a lot's been said about bossware - and it gets a really bad wrap - but I haven't actually heard from anyone who's done the spying before.
- sushshshsh 6y agoFunny, I thought all of the video chat meetings being put on my calendar were basically the same thing as spying on me to make sure I was doing my work, or at least thinking about doing it...
- lillywhitenblue 6y agoThere's definitely loads of passive spying: Slack active statuses, Zoom notifications when someone's on another tab (think they removed this from backlash), and scheduling excessive video meetings which is just office presenteeism moved into the home
- sushshshsh 6y agoYou nailed it. It's really quite bad. At my current company we are judged by "results" aka how many tasks and points we bang out on Jira, but then also the same managers stuff our calendars full of video meetings.
- a3n 6y ago"Are you working?" - "Not during this specific second." "Are you working?" - "Not during this specific second." "Are you working?" - "Not during this specific second." ...
- lillywhitenblue 6y agoYeah I wonder what it's like being on the 'spying' end - many probably won't realise they're doing it. I've come across a few comments on other threads where people justified monitoring software, but there must be some out there who are told they have to spy on colleagues and feel awful doing so.