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“I monitor my staff with software that takes screenshots”
- gbajson 6y agoI am wondering if he runs any OCR or object recognition on collected screenshots.
- ende 6y agoSounds like that should be illegal.
- kleiba 6y agoGiven that this is a London-based company and we're talking about a pre-Brexit time-frame, I'm pretty sure this practice is in breach of EU regulations. However, the employees are in India so that adds another level of complication... and also makes it a lot less likely that anyone's going to sue.
- Barrin92 6y agoGeneral surveillance by an employer without probable cause is illegal here in Germany, and thank god for that. Lab animals probably have more privacy than the people working for that company. I'll never understand how we got to the point where we're reasonable enough to demand privacy in our lifes half of the day but the other half we're willing to revert to some 19th century Jeremy Bentham like panopticon prison.
- kjakm 6y agoI've experienced this kind of software working on an hourly contract via UpWork. It would take screenshots at random points in 10 minute intervals, and would track number of mouse clicks/key presses. I think everything was logged officially at the end of the day so if you happened to be on a personal site during the screenshot you could delete it and you'd lose those 10 minutes from the total number of hours you had logged. Honestly, I didn't mind it - but I was getting paid really well for the job and I'm not sure the client ever bothered checking the logs (it was just the system UpWork made you use to guarantee payment so there was also some benefit for me). In that specific use case, especially because it helped guarantee my payments (if the you hours using the software it's very difficult for the client to dispute those), it didn't feel as dystopian as it sounds. If my current employer (full-time, salary) started using something like this I think I'd feel very differently about it.
- renewiltord 6y agoI never do that on Upwork (always allow manual tracking) but I also liberally end contracts if things don't go fast. Might as well eat the loss. Don't have time to go looking through screenshots. But I wonder sometimes if its worth it to force auto-tracking just maybe for the upworker's sake (like it keeps them on a task they'd want to do but are having trouble sticking to). But that's low-end stuff. For mid-end stuff it's all milestone-based anyway. For way high-end stuff I don't care except that thing gets done and then I need high quality contractor who keeps me up to date. If he can't communicate and I start getting anxiety about the outcome, he's got to go.
- tmikaeld 6y agoBe aware that hires can see a log and reviews of previous hires. Which makes it hard to get new professional hires when the grades are too bad, I almost have a perfect score since I pay above average, but even the single disgruntled hire have been mentioned (I cancelled the work since no results was shown).
- Hokusai 6y ago> it didn't feel as dystopian as it sounds My mother grew up in a dictatorship, and most of the time is like any other country. People would come on vacations and they will not even notice any difference. The only problem is when you get into problems, then you have no recourse. Dystopias in movies are felt each minute of the day, real dystopias are not like that. You should read Kafka's "The Process". Everything is normal until it is not. It is a better depiction of a dictatorship than a 3 hours condensed movie.
- will_pseudonym 6y ago> Kafka's "The Process" This is also known as "The Trial"[0]. Just a fantastic, brutal work. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial
- sumosudo 6y ago
- zenincognito 6y agoI once went to court against a client who wouldn't pay his bills. The sum more than 35K. It took over 9 months to get to court ( as the court wouldnt give a date ) and countless docs and hours spent to come up with evidence folder. In Australia, a citizen can argue their case which I did without using any lawyers. Finally, we both argued our case to a point where the client's defence was that there was no time log for the work that I had done. I pointed out that the contract stipulates performing of tasks and is not contingent on time spent. The judge laughed and ruled in my favor because he was fully onboard the argument that it doesn't matter ,legally speaking, how much time I was at the computer but matters that the task promised were delivered with high quality. The funny thing is that the client agreed that he has seen positive returns but felt overcharged. The judge on hearing this reprimanded him for wasting everyone's time and awarded costs and interests. Pay for work not time spent on the computer.
- helsinkiandrew 6y ago> Pay for work not time spent on the computer This is the right solution, but of course is harder for some occupations - call center, sewing buttons, and more mundane work. Where 'bad' employers can push up the amount of work expected.
- ghoshbishakh 6y agoFor your specific examples it is much more easier to monitor the amount of work done.
- helsinkiandrew 6y agoYes, but with bad employers that can often result in 'wage deflation' where the amount of buttons sewn or marketing calls made required gets larger and larger - which can often result in overworked and very stressed workers - there's been quite a few cases in call centers in the last few years. When workers are paid per piece directly it can sometimes mean they will be paid less than the minimum wage.
- crispyporkbites 6y agoDoes he let employees see his screen 24/7 as well? And his investors/customers?
- SpeckOfDust 6y agoOf course not. In his mind he's probably employee of the month. Every month.
- helsinkiandrew 6y agoI used to work at a bank whose homeworking remote login system would timeout after a ridiculously short period. The solution (used by many, and widely publicised around the company) was to place an optical mouse over the face of a clock whose movement would trigger a tiny movement every so often and keep you logged in. I'm sure the remote staff at his company have worked out how to browse facebook and instagram on their phones whilst hitting the down key on their keyboard with the other hand.
- ehnto 6y agoReminds me of a friend who currently leaves a heavy object on his spacebar inside a text doc at night, so that it shows him active all the time. That way they won't see when he clocks in. It's one of those jobs where it doesn't matter when he does the work, but the silent judgment of the clock causes stress anyway and people make comments.
- C1sc0cat 6y agoYou can buy mouse jigglers on amazon to do this :-)
- shakna 6y ago> For the last year and a half he has used Hubstaff software to track his workers' hours, keystrokes, mouse movements and websites visited. So much more than just screenshots. Whilst the CEO in this case seems to be fairly flexible, and says he doesn't mind if people are taking a break here and there, this kind of... Someone staring over your shoulder, albeit electronically, probably wouldn't work for me, and by inference, others. It can increase stress, and cause the opposite of increased productivity, if your assumptions about how your workers work isn't correct. You can only have lax barriers if everyone falls within them. Most of my time with code is not spent typing. Probably about half is spent reading, and most of the rest is spent thinking. I generally do not start typing until I've already got most of the structure worked out in my head, and usually with incomprehensible diagrams (to everyone else) written on paper beside my computer. If you set up what seems proportionate at first, something like logging if I haven't touched my keyboard in twenty minutes, then you'll be flagging me as unproductive all day long. But if you compare it to tickets closed, you won't see me at all - I'd fit within the average for bugs fixed and features implemented. --- Addendum: It may also be pointless logging my mouse movements - I used to generate heatmaps for those. Until I realised that I move the mouse only a few times a day. Wasn't on purpose, but I tend to use the keyboard almost exclusively, since I started to lose my eyesight.
- ImaCake 6y agoI work as a research assistant in a wetlab (i.e. I physically do experiments). In a previous job the lab manager was suspicious of me appearing to not be doing any work sometimes. Once I figured out I was being watched I went to extra effort to appear busy. I couldn't actually be more busy because I already did the most I could do in a day. But I could waste some time appearing busy. It was a constant drain and I was glad when that lab manager left and I could be as efficient as I wanted without needing to also appear busy.
- cutemonster 6y ago> waste some time appearing busy What did that mean, in your particular case?
- Risse 6y agoAt one of my previous contracting places wanted all the developers to use Teramind https://www.teramind.co/ https://www.teramind.co/ Needless to say I terminated my contract the next day
- rdw 6y agoThe security implications of this software must be devastating. To prevent being defeated by the employee, it'll be essentially a rootkit already. Any black hat that finds a way to gain authorization will basically have a ready-made botnet. Let alone all the personal and corporate data they would be able to ransom and sell.
- travbrack 6y agoBy that logic so is a configuration management client like SCCM or even Group Policy.
- ygjb 6y agoThe difference there is that Microsoft has a huge, dedicated security team, and has spent the last ~15 years aggressively improving their security posture, as opposed to some spyware author that decided to go 'legit'.
- travbrack 6y agoI think the parent commenter was making the point that if the person with the keys to the kingdom is compromised, so is the kingdom. I was trying to point out that this is the case with any tool that has access to many systems.
- afandian 6y agoIn those cases you own the device, so that's reasonable.
- tpxl 6y agoAnd the privacy implications. Which is why it's illegal in parts of Europe. >Any black hat that finds a way to gain authorization will basically have a ready-made botnet. This has actually happened with viruses, cryptolockers, etc before. Get access to Windows group policy, add the virus to it, see it being spread around.
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- SpeckOfDust 6y agoI wonder if its actually even worth it to do this kind of shit. Forget the ethical concerns for a minute, think about the kind of company you've built and the people you've hired to even warrant this kind of scrutiny in the first place.
- AdhesiveWombat 6y agoNot every work is interesting enough to keep your employees motivated. For example, in the article they mention a company that resells beauty products. IMHO I can understand people not being incredibly motivated by this.
- hellotomyrars 6y agoWhile I understand your point, there is a level of oppressive surveillance here that is unwarranted and unneeded. It shouldn’t be difficult to track the performance of the employee with metrics that are actually specific to the task they are hired to do (Number of listings/sales). Taking screenshots, tracking keystrokes and mouse movement? It’s extreme, and doesn’t even relate to the work they’re doing in a direct way. You might be able to see them slacking off, but it doesn’t tell you the quality of the work.
- engineeringwoke 6y agoIt's just Indian control/slave culture. Like the American/UK version but even more racist and fucked up.
- ilaksh 6y agoTake a look at UpWork. Software engineers are subjected to this also. On a massive scale.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- C1sc0cat 6y agoIf you read the article its it's a shitty little company
- peterburkimsher 6y agoI was the guy in school who taught other kids how to use Encarta to browse the web. The library PCs had MasterEye installed, and the staff would monitor the name of the front window. Internet Explorer set the window name to the URL. Encarta did not. If they saw a site that didn't look like school work, the staff would then remote desktop to check what we were looking at. Yes, it felt oppressive at the time. I'm not surprised that employees feel the same as school kids.
- mrweasel 6y agoI worked for a company with a UK department, the UK boss would routinely use similar software to check that people where actually working and doing things correctly. The Scandinavian bosses opted to just trust everyone to do the right thing and people always would. Interestingly enough if was always the British employees who would do things like steal customer contact lists when they left or do deals on the side, so I suppose they had a reason to not trust people. While I don't think spying on your employees is acceptable, I was also extremely disappointed in the behavior of my British colleagues.
- lambdasquirrel 6y agoThere's also, to some degree, people acting according to the expectations that are set for them. Having run up against that myself, there is frequently no point fighting that expectation. It's better just to either play that game, or leave. Oftentimes in a low-trust environment, you just do things in order to survive. Need to run a critically important errand or pick up the kids? I'd see parents skirting around things all the time. No one gave them crap for it, because we all knew it was just life. I'd suspect your British employees are living in some part of society that is low-trust. I've usually chosen to leave situations where there was no use fighting expectations. We don't get to set that culture. To some degree, cultural context matters, and to some degree, it also comes from the top.
- nilsb 6y agoI'd argue that workplaces where people are micromanaged and monitored tend to attract people who are either willing to adapt to these circumstances or are OK with gaming the system for their own benefit ("clearly my employer doesn't value my privacy, so why should I value theirs?"). Meanwhile people who thrive on getting things done their way without interference find work elsewhere.
- raxxorrax 6y agoIf you are expected to misbehave while not under surveillance you have to cherish the time when you can let it all out.
- zem 6y ago
- evolveyourmind 6y agoThis is illegal in most western countries
- zem 6y agoyeah another reason some people love outsourcing
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lacker 6y agoEventually this will be full-fledged AI monitoring that politely interrupts you when you're reading social media and suggests that you get back to work.
- feintruled 6y agoOr perhaps even a fuller-fledged AI that monitors your work and ends up doing the work after you get sacked (twist: you've actually trained it to read social media 90% of the time)
- wesleywt 6y agoTime spent working does not equal productivity. I think most of office work is just looking busy on tasks that should take a fraction of the time to complete. If I was a leader, I would prefer tasks completed over time completed.
- andi999 6y agoBut then you get task creep (the small brother of feature creep). Like you set a task you thougjt takes a week. Employee does it in 1h, ok so this time he is free for the whole restbof the week. What do you do next week? Add more tasks..so eventually you give so many task he /she can finish in 40h.. welcome to the current system.
- jb1991 6y agoAll of this is a symptom of paying people for their time rather than paying them for their actual work or achievements. We need to get away from the idea of someone renting out part of their life at an hourly rate. Just assign jobs and pay when they are done. I realize this maybe sounds simpler than it often is, but after some growing pains, it is possible to calibrate the specific work with a value that is fair. Some people will do the work faster and thus earn more for their time. That's fair also, and it is a motivator to improve skills so your time implicitly has more value.
- auggierose 6y agoHow do you align that with minimum wage if some people just take too much time for their assigned task? How do you make sure this isn't becoming a race to the bottom, where people are getting more and more efficient, but are being paid less and less?
- jb1991 6y ago> How do you align that with minimum wage if some people just take too much time for their assigned task? Ideally you'd combine this in a world with UBI. Some day.
- stiray 6y agoI would just simply leave the company that trusts me so little that it needs to monitor what I am doing. In another words if company is so worried to squeeze the last drop of money out of employee to actually use such methods there is something wrong with it. I know one in our country that pays really good but employs such tactics. Developers are leaving on quarterly basis - not due to tactics but due to rotten relationships within company. And they are leaving for less paid positions elsewhere. They have practically lost all their seniors and are forced to pull in greenhorns.
- charlieda 6y agoAnd we should consider ourselves lucky as engineers that we work in an industry where we are so in demand that are able to do that. Workers in other industries (the article talks about a firm that re-sells beauty products) might not be so lucky.
- ImaCake 6y agoEspecially when everyone else got fired at the same time and finds themselves in a game of musical chairs for the few remaining jobs. You don't care if it means oppressive surveillance, at least you can pay your mortage and send your kids to school.
- marakv2 6y agoThis. I'm working as an ESL teacher and upper management made me install cameras in every classroom, then pipe that feed to their home and head office. Couldn't afford to leave, so I had to do it. I've left now though when I finally lined up something better.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoRemember when we didn't have personal mobile devices and we relies on work computers for digital entertainment at work?
- mdoing 6y agoEven if that software is there people will just find a way around it and the process they have in place for it. Also if a manager has to check these logs to see if their employees are working, I would question why he has some free time to do this and what of the other million things they could be doing. Unless this is written into the contract the employee signed they could find themselves in tricky waters, they are transmitting data using the users own internet connection and they could be capturing sensitive data from a machine. I used to work with so many credit card details for testing, all of it was cleaned but still some details remained.
- nine_k 6y agoWork has negative utility. This is why people demand compensation for doing it. What matters is the result. The less work you have spent to achieve the result, the better. Some employers monitor and time the work of their engineers. Of course reasonably experienced and self-motivated engineers find such monitoring useless and offending. When employers try to improve productivity of less motivated workers by monitoring, it does not work all that well either, doubly so in the case of engineers. It could maybe improve manual labor outcomes, but you can't screenshot manual labor. I suppose the employers have other reasons than productivity tracking. Some employers sell the time of their engineers, and bill clients by the hour. Then screenshots are there to prove that the engineer has been actually working, and the client is not billed arbitrarily, in a case of a dispute. Of course the incentives here are skewed from the start. Some employers use screenshots as a CYA policy to "prove" that their employees are not doing something inappropriate at the workplace, or at least something to show as an illustration of "making a reasonable effort" to prevent it. They would usually monitor and restrict network traffic, etc. IDK if it's actuslly helpful anywhere but when working on highly classified stuff. OTOH I treat the computers my employers supply me with as explicitly not-mine devices. I tend to do anything private on a separate device (my own phone, my own PC), because I signed agreements stating that the employer is entitled to see every bit of information on the work machine, and there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in this regard. For that reason, I'm fine with my employers making screenshots of my work machines any time. (Using such screenshots to measure my short-term performance would still be silly, of course.)
- mschuster91 6y agoI would vote with my feet if my employer were to introduce such crap. Thankfully it is forbidden by law here in Germany.
- goatinaboat 6y agoThe laws of psychology state that this guy is compensating for something. Time for the tax inspectors to take a closer look, or the police to check his hard drive.
- zadkey 6y agoI saw something in his face that suggests he was a fearful person afraid of loosing control, and looking for an unhealthy way to deal with that feeling.
- nottorp 6y agoThe thief thinks everyone else is a thief too? Honestly I'd be worried about hiring that company because they'd try to shaft me too if i don't monitor them.
- snapetom 6y agoMy last company, a large regional hospital, spent over a decade trying to create a remote work policy. The app and business management side spent all that time figuring out which productivity monitoring software to buy. People from the network and security teams got sucked in spending endless cycles trying to figure out how to get these platforms working in our complicated network. Legal and compliance also spent God-knows-how long making sure everything was in line with HIPAA. Rinse and repeat with every pilot and trial of monitoring software. The whole effort was so focused on employee monitoring, other things like security and actual productivity tools and protocols were essentially ignored. In the end nothing was ever formalized and business units just did their own thing. Some never even allowed it. Then COVID-19 hit. The network and security teams spent three weeks+ working on capacity upgrades for things like the VPN and laptops accommodate everyone. Old school managers who had never used anything like Slack or Teams suddenly had to figure out how to manage without patrolling the cubicle farm. During that time, nothing got done because employees were sent home but didn't have the tools to work. If management actually stuck with their charter of creating a remote policy instead of software shopping, they wouldn't have missed a beat.
- randycupertino 6y agoHa! I think we worked at similar hospitals. As an aside, one of my girlfriends used employee monitoring software to catch her husband having a string of affairs by installing it on their shared laptop. Turned out he was hiring rentboys on the side and it was very helpful in their divorce proceedings.
- acvny 6y agoWhat is the motivation behind this article? Is it an encouragement for all employers to track their employees or is it that we should all return to the office? This form of surveilance should be deemed illegal as the employer is not buying my life but my work. This is just a poor country exploitation practice that is being tried to be introduced in developed countries to maximize profits. And by advertising this on bbc makes it normal. Next step is to connect mind reading hats and to require that you only think about your work during the shift.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoIf you (effectively) spy on your staff, they will be unhappy and will want to leave. Which are most likely to be able to find other employment, a) your best staff b) your worst staff? Set high-level targets and track performance, not behaviour.
- patchtopic 6y ago"why are they spending so much time on guillotine web sites"?
- PeterStuer 6y agoMy computer from work is an old Dell Latitude laptop. I work from home on my own desktop with double the ram, twice the threads and a triple 1440p monitor setup. The only thing handled on the laptop is mail and Teams.
- bb123 6y agoIs your company ok with you using a personal computer for work? I would love to be able to do that, but the firm I work for would sooner let me work from the moon.
- PeterStuer 6y agoI've had no complaints. I have always made it a point that I prefer working on better equipment than the company provides. I understand people that say the company should just provide you with the best, but honestly beyond a certain point you are often looking at a different value derivation curve. I've always liked computers, and am rather intolerant of perceived unnecessary inefficiency. In the past I replaced the HDD in my work laptop with an SSD (1st gen, long before these were commodity) because I realized the enormous difference they made. Was working with a HDD impossible? Of course not, and most colleagues worked like that for a few more years. For me, it made me discomfortable knowing the amount of time I was wasting due to some technology hold-back that was already solved.
- habosa 6y agoTreating people as your adversary is the surest way to get them to act like it. That's true of employees, customers, and strangers. If my boss tracked me like this I'd put a good amount of effort into getting around the tracking.
- plazmatic 6y agoHOPE THEY LIKE PORN.
- johnchristopher 6y agoThe other day, while looking for cheap sensors/cameras/networking solutions for a hobbyist project, I stumbled upon this: https://partners.sigfox.com/products/simplepack-office-chair https://partners.sigfox.com/products/simplepack-office-chair Identified needs – why to focus on office chair monitoring? Data-driven managers love to monitor home officing, track work hours, save space and costs incurred by unoccupied desks when employees work away from an office or on flexible schedules Companies are willing to avoid wasting money on lighting, heating, and cooling Facility companies want to optimize cleaning services There is a shift to working hubs, hot seats and a need for shared space utilization How does SimplePack Chair work? Fix SimplePack Chair with 3M double-sided bonding tape to office chair There are 2 following ways to operate SimplePack Chair depending on the data you want to get and the business case you solve SimplePack Chair measures acceleration of 3 axis accelerometer with remote configurable intensity Acceleration or in other words vibration is measured every second
- gamesbrainiac 6y agoThese kinds of applications need to be banned. By law.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- simonkafan 6y agoI would agree to work for Shibu Philip if he applies the same rules to himself and workers can see his keystrokes, mouse movements and websites visited. And if he's not spending his time looking at employees keystrokes, mouse movements and websites visited, his bonus is halved every time someone catches him doing something else.
- mikepechadotcom 6y agoThis kind of infantilizing surveillance of employees will eventually backfire. Especially creative people will be driven out by such appalling policies, b/c they either can not or will not put up with it. Things like this are a huge reason for the current startup/indie startup /solopreneur boom, because people want to have more freedom and dont want to be treated like 9 year olds...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- weare138 6y agoIt's crap like this that made me quit working in the corporate world. I just can't deal with it.
- jdmg94 6y agoCrossover.com has been doing this for YEEAARS