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Microsoft 365 has employee surveillance and analytics built in
- rubidium 6y agoMake a script to send out @ mentions across multiple channels, start sending automated "project update" status emails daily, and generally add to useless chatter. "Look Boss, I'm a good employee. Office 365 spy says so."
- thesuperbigfrog 6y agoGive the script to everyone you know as well. Automated metrics deserve automated data. Garbage in, garbage out.
- nerevarthelame 6y agoOnly the finest hand-collected artisanal metrics are worthy of MY data.
- npmaile 6y agothis, but unironically
- thesuperbigfrog 6y agoI suppose you could hand-craft some of the script-generated responses if you want. Why not use GPT-3 or some other GAN and train it on stuff you have actually written? Then you can have high-quality, automated data to feed the metrics machine.
- a1369209993 6y ago> Automated metrics deserve automated data. Exactly this. And remember that it applies to any automated data collection. (After all, automated data collection is automated data collection.)
- ping_pong 6y agoFacebook employees are evaluated on many things, including number of reviews that they participate in. My friend said that lead to a lot of engineers adding "+1" comments to as many reviews as possible, or requesting "Thank you"s for responding to emails.
- ciarannolan 6y ago> [...] requesting "Thank you"s for responding to emails. What does this mean?
- bigwavedave 6y agoIt sounds like if employee A sends an email to employee B and employee B sends a response to A, employee B expects (implied or explicitly stated in their response) a "thank you for your time/response" email from employee A. Just a guess though.
- numpad0 6y agoI’d love to know as well. Thank you @rubidium for starting this comment tree and also @ping_pong for additional insights. Clarifications and/or corrections are totally welcome as this my comment is based on pure speculation.
- umanwizard 6y agoFacebook has an internal tool called thanksbot that you can use to “send thanks” to people, and these are recorded and can be discussed at performance review time. Ideally only in situation where it actually matters (thanks for the refactor that made our service use 50% less gCPU!) but obviously anything can be gamed.
- Aperocky 6y agoLMAO that's the funniest thing I heard all day, primarily because where I work that's not evaluated at all. More power to the managers, but all good when your managers are likable people.
- conductr 6y ago
- rootsudo 6y agoSo, this would only work if you use basic vbscript and not powershell which is enabled =per account, regardless if admin or not. But it does not take into account browser clicks, refreshing pages and general browsing. This was a very brought up topic at MSFT.
- strombofulous 6y agoCouldn't you just use browser automation tools for this? It wouldn't really make sense to use the tools that are watching the behavior to automate the behavior
- rootsudo 6y agoYes, you could, but that wouldn't be as fun.
- kilroy123 6y agoThat was my first thought.
- christkv 6y agoI might be wrong but I imagine this might be either illegal or in a grey area in most of Europe.
- jononor 6y agoUnsure why this was downvoted? If anyone disagrees on the comment, comment why instead of downvoting?
- qwerty456127 6y agoWhy the heck is this still legal anyway? Bosses should not be allowed to spy on people. If I actually fail to do the job in time repeatedly - ok, go ahead and fire me, that would be fair (I won't even resist if I see that's even partially my fault), but don't freaking spy! Anyway, I would prefer to be unaware I'm being watched - I get kind of paralyzed with anxiety and can't think when somebody's watching over my shoulder and I know they do.
- pmoriarty 6y ago"Why the heck is this still legal anyway?" Because the bosses run the world, as people seem to like being bossed around.
- qwerty456127 6y agoWorkers have achieved a huge lot in outlawing things bosses wanted throughout the history. I would love to participate in a fight against this one if people would organize. Another thing to fight against are requirements to explain resume gaps and discrimination against people who have them and people already seem starting to raise against this.[1] The society still has a lot of work to do... [1] https://www.boredpanda.com/annoying-job-interview-questions-resume-gaps/ https://www.boredpanda.com/annoying-job-interview-questions-...
- thesuitonym 6y agoJoin the IWW and start organizing your workplace!
- raxxorrax 6y agoDevelopers are sometimes part of it. We have a lot of security companies where FUD means higher sales. They pay well though.
- woahAcademia 6y agoGo ahead start your own company. I tried a few times. I'll gladly be bossed around for 8 hours when I make this much money..
- tyingq 6y agoInteresting, though the screenshot is aggregate productivity. Is there functionality that gets down to individuals?
- ckdarby 6y agohttps://twitter.com/WolfieChristl/status/1331222157347741704/photo/1 https://twitter.com/WolfieChristl/status/1331222157347741704...
- tyingq 6y agoUrgh, yeah, that's terrible. (This screen, for example: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnlzZBFWEAYsco9?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnlzZBFWEAYsco9?format=jpg&name=...)
- yread 6y agoI don't know - to me this looks more pointless than evil. Yeah, I don't use @mentions in my emails, so what? Are they going to fire me? If you really stretch it you could even imagine this being useful: "Hey Anastasia, I've noticed you don't post to Yammer and we think it's useful. Go yammer about something there, it will make us all more productive" or something.
- te_chris 6y agoUgh, I can just imagine what the product managers for this feature are like.
- 1123581321 6y agoWhat do you imagine? I could see competent and respectful people working on this feature.
- raxxorrax 6y agoMaybe so but I would argue that they have a narrow perspective. Granted, I think this isn't their only project and can only guess their motivation, but it is just the typical office (heh) busy work. I call that a bullshit job. Try to engage your people at least.
- sz4kerto 6y agoYou can do this with Slack as well. There's no sophisticated UI (yet), but the history is there.
- rzodkiew 6y agoBut, but Microsoft in 2020 is not the same Microsoft than 20 years ago.
- dustinmoris 6y agoWorse! Microsoft 2020 is Stalin dressed up as a puppy dog. 20 years ago Microsoft looked on the outside at least as rotten as they were on the inside.
- rzodkiew 6y agoTrue that. I think the main thing they've learned over the years is how to craft their public image, which I guess can be said about every corporation out there.
- marcosdumay 6y agoThe Microsoft of the late 90's wouldn't have done something like this. They did plenty of very different things, but this is something they only have done since the late XP days.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoThey would have if they had had an internet. But at that time they were still trying to lock us all into their own version of the internet, MSN the Microsoft Network :)
- marcosdumay 6y agoThey had the option for a long time. One of the main selling points of Windows 2000 and ME was native internet support without messing with anything, and people did use that. But was only near the release of Vista that Windows started to phone home.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoTrue but internet wasn't as ubiquitous then as it is now. Most laptops didn't have WiFi and sometimes not even Ethernet. In many cases they still had a modem. Also there was much more scrutiny in those days. I think Windows phoning home in those days would have been a huge thing. Similar to the resistance to the TPM which eventually made it in (but in a more watered-down version which didn't have so many privacy and vendor-lock-in concerns as the original proposal). Of course now all companies are doubling down on all of this. The TPM on steroids now exists as Apple's T2 (and built into M1) chip, Intel's ME, and Windows systems are getting next-gen lock-down crap with Pluton now. I feel like when we protest for privacy, even a major win is just slowing down the other forces, not stopping them.
- tow21 6y agoI think this is honestly a worry over nothing: this is very directly a sales tool to encourage spending on MS products. What you are seeing is basically meaningless stats dressed up in pretty charts. There are enough pretty charts there to ensure that your organization is doing "better than a peer benchmark" on at least a few metrics. Then the CIO is able to select the best-looking charts into his board presentation and say, "look guys, we are a really great IT organization that is using tools effectively, please give me more budget to go and spend" And then some of that budget will get back to Microsoft. I don't think any of the participants in this dance really believe these numbers actually mean anything, and if you suggested tracking individuals at this level I think you would get push back from the managers because it would be a waste of their time.
- minton 6y agoIn the attached video, they specifically mentioned tracking individuals as a good way to find engaged people in the organization.
- thesuperbigfrog 6y agoWith all of the telemetry in Windows 10, how is this a surprise?
- jodrellblank 6y agoThis is nothing to do with the telemetry in Windows 10. It's a very particular complaint about the telemetry in Windows 10 that Microsoft fired their QA employees, feed telemetry into an AI blackbox and no human looks at it and therefore doesn't fix things people want fixing. This being a different system, on a different product, for a different purpose, used differently, explicitly for humans to look at, is different.
- thesuperbigfrog 6y ago>> This being a different system, on a different product, for a different purpose, used differently, explicitly for humans to look at, is different. No, it is about Microsoft bringing Microsoft-style ethics and human resource practices to their customers. Same basic methodology, slightly different purpose. >> Microsoft fired their QA employees, feed telemetry into an AI blackbox and no human looks at it and therefore doesn't fix things people want fixing. Exactly. Think about how much money Microsoft has saved by firing the QA employees. Think about how much money Microsoft could save their customers by identifying under-performing employees with Microsoft-provided metrics and AI.
- rightbyte 6y agoMS Teams makes me really paranoid. I take my mouse with me to the toilet and moves it around to not trigger the away notification ...
- folkhack 6y agoGet a USB mouse jiggler for this situation - have used them in the past with great success.
- reaperducer 6y agoNot enough anymore. Now you have to jiggle and click. And the clicks can't be random. They have to be on UI elements every so often.
- ToFab123 6y agoIn the MS App store there is an free app called move mouse. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/move-mouse/9nq4ql59xlbf?activetab=pivot:overviewtab https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/move-mouse/9nq4ql59xlbf?ac... non store version: https://github.com/sw3103/movemouse https://github.com/sw3103/movemouse
- crumbshot 6y agoSame here - as well as coffee/piss breaks, sometimes I just need to sit away from the screen and think on a problem for a while, or work it out on pen and paper. But I know this will leave an 'Away' gap in whatever they are using to log, and that might look bad on my metrics. I've found that resting something heavy on one of the modifier keys, e.g. Ctrl, does the trick nicely.
- rightbyte 6y agoOh that sounds easy I will try that.
- woahAcademia 6y agoWait until you realize your company is taking screenshots of your desktop to make sure you actually are working. I've never been worried as my long breaks are necessary for Programming. I always get the job done. My biggest concerns are economic as I'm high pay and they are often let go.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- raxxorrax 6y agoFake it till you make it or something like that... Manipulating these metrics is pretty easy. I think I do a coffee break and tease the least productive colleague. Seems it is someone working in logistics that only occasionally checks his mails. Wrong profession, buddy. I though MS had changed...
- _zamorano_ 6y agoMS has actually changed, but not in the old fashioned way most people seem to understand, from BAD to GOOD. Mostly, their business model has changed, and so their incentives about proprietary and free software, the second not being a thread anymore. But as any big corp, they keep the power to be evil if their interests require so. The same as any corp.
- izacus 6y agoOf course it's also easy to get fired for manipulating such metrics. It's just another boot that steps on a worker.
- strict9 6y agoLots of shiny new tools to close more sales in the war against g suite. Yet I'll have to wait several more years for a fix for the bug in Office web mail client that incorrectly says there is new mail on the browser tab, when in fact there is no new mail. Employee tracking features or not, MS 365 is orders of magnitude worse than g-suite in every regard. Employees don't want these products, so they have to go after managers who can crow to their managers about monitoring productivity.
- judge2020 6y agoThe MS account switcher is also terrible. Maybe it’s because I have a mix of outlook-based emails, Azure AD emails, and full O365 emails, but the fact that you can’t easily open an outlook tab for each account is horrible UX.
- syshum 6y agoFF Containers are a much better way to handle this issue then attempting gmail style account switching
- jimnotgym 6y agoCan't remember the tools name, but there is an official MS browser pluggin for using multiple accounts
- ianmcgowan 6y agoIf you're using Chrome or Edge, setting up multiple profiles is a good way to handle this, as well as separating work and personal stuff. I use profiles to have Teams open for multiple organizations..
- rootsudo 6y agoFirefox containers, or delete cookies. It is because of how cookies work and not terminating a session upon logout.
- 6y ago
- esaym 6y agolol, it basically just says people that use all of 360's features are more productive.
- woahAcademia 6y agoYeah these things show uselessness when you have a senior engineer that's swamped but shows unproductive. I've recently felt guilty walking away from my desk to think about a Programming problem. I used to do this all the time but with WFH I imagine there are more screen grabs.
- Tempest1981 6y agoMaybe to sell training?
- bjornjajayaja 6y agoPersonally I haven’t seen much change in the features of office (that I use). Is there a reason for folks not to migrate to LibreOffice? Office 365 barely works nowadays without an internet connection, which is really annoying. Cloud first technologies are ridiculous, IMO. Developers out there: please test your code without and internet connection. Thank you.
- ruffrey 6y agoI’ve had endless problems with Libre/Open Office and Apple Numbers + tracked changes. Since these are critical for contracts, I end up needing it. The Microsoft tools are total shit compared to gsuite on mac. But it’s the only option for reliable tracked changes.
- hiram112 6y ago> Is there a reason for folks not to migrate to LibreOffice? Yes, because nobody else is using LibreOffice, and so whenever you send documents to someone else, you come off as very unprofessional due to the good chance your document won't render correctly for everyone using MS.
- boogies 6y agoSending them as PDFs should solve that.
- Deely123123 6y agoWhat about Excel docs?
- snarfy 6y agoI can see why companies don't trust their employees. Look at what just happened to GoDaddy.
- ping_pong 6y agogit is even worse than whatever these tweets suggest Office 365 does. Git stats have been used against me on performance reviews even though there's no context to the situation. I went from a programming role to an ops role because the ops person left the team and I was the only one left that could do the work, so my number of check-ins dropped, but my contributions that improved the ops section weren't acknowledged. Any company can create bad metrics if they want. The only solution is to either play the game, or change companies. That said, I fail to see how effective employee monitoring would be via Office 365. I don't know who would be evaluated on number of emails sent per day, unless they were some sort of support personnel. And if so, they are already being monitored by other means. Any other type of evaluation sounds absurd, ex. number of Word docs opened or created, number of spreadsheets opened, number of presentations created, etc.
- syshum 6y agoCombined with that, many employee's know how to work the metrics to make themselves look more productive than they really are. So you end up with work being done to fit the metrics, not necessarily work that is of highest need or more impactful to the organization. I have seen plenty of bad metrics lead to managers no understanding why their dept's appear to be "hitting all the numbers" but also no performing in the way they desire at the same time
- ping_pong 6y agoAfter my performance review, I talked to my boss and my boss's boss, and asked them if that's really what they wanted me to do, ie. fulfill these arbitrary metrics or if they wanted me to work on whatever made the team better. They said no, of course not, but a good engineer should be able to fulfill those metrics and make the company better. I explained the situation, that the ops person left and they haven't hired anyone to take over, so I'm left holding the bag and they refused to acknowledge it, so I quit.
- greesil 6y agoAs a manager myself, you have terrible managers. They should be able to acknowledge the facts of the situation and not put the blame on you. To the opposite, good work, such as taking over something critical when someone left the team should have been rewarded. Metrics are useful, but to only rely on them is what lazy or incompetent managers do.
- EvanAnderson 6y agoAgain w/ Neal Stephenson bring prescient (in this case his 1992 "Snow Crash"): Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo... Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
- boogies 6y ago> hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section How long does simple key logging last before they add eye tracking?
- EvanAnderson 6y agoSeems very feasible: https://webgazer.cs.brown.edu/ https://webgazer.cs.brown.edu/
- boogies 6y ago…or Apple Watch-like pulse tracking, etc., and then who knows if/when Neuralink becomes practically, widely deployable and useful. I think we’re just a bit beyond the technical capabilities of the Thought Police right now in terms of sensing — their telescreens could hear breathing in quiet rooms, but on the other hand Orwell didn’t seem to foresee people buying their own pocketable ones with GPS & cell triangulation, etc. (they didn’t necessarily know everyone’s exact location all the time) — but perhaps we’re quickly surpassing their analytics abilities (particularly bandwidth — finite human staff are less of a bottleneck) with AI.
- monkeybutton 6y agoHas anyone else been prompted by Office 365 to link your profile to your LinkedIn account? I almost went through with it because our internal employee directory is so completely useless and I'm always using LinkedIn to look people up. When I saw that information sharing could go both ways between my personal account and corporate [0], I bailed. Even without the data sharing, just creating the connection between profiles gives Microsoft information. If they're doing individual-level performance analytics, they could track it from one organization to the next, no? [0] https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/84077/linkedin-in-microsoft-applications-with-your-work-or-school-account?lang=en https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/84077/linkedin...
- leetcrew 6y ago> When I saw that information sharing could go both ways between my personal account and corporate, I bailed. how can employers possibly be okay with this?
- crocodiletears 6y agoMost people will give an inch to feed their families. Many people have difficulty considering second-order effects of innocuous decisions.
- sm4rk0 6y agoI went one step further and deleted my LinkedIn account as soon as I heard it was sold to Microsoft. Wanted to do the same with my GitHub account but decided it's not (yet) worth the hassle.
- swiley 6y agoSurveillance makes it sound like only the managers can see it. Is it just public like the github flamegraphs? Personally I'd love something like this that only I can see, I've found these sorts of things to be very motivating in the past.
- surv_throw 6y agoI've been curious about some of the work done by my team related to this and data collection. We do mass event log collection and aggregate it all into Splunk. Some of the sources are sysmon event logs, AD data, and firewall logs. This is in Europe. The purpose is security. This data is all made available through the Splunk interface, and any team member can search through the essentially raw data. On a scout's honor system we don't search up individuals unless given consent by the user. It really doesn't sit well with me, thought, and it hasn't for some time. One of the problems I see is that the employee laptops - vast majority being non-technical users - are allowed for personal usage. Thus we, by virtue of our selective VPN, send not just work-related data. Anyone with knowledge of the space that can add some light to this and my worries?
- mfer 6y agoThere are sites that use the GitHub API to collect stats on contributions and projects. The idea of using the available data to gather metrics on orgs and people isn't new. What might be the most interesting is the idea of productivity scores. It makes so many assumptions that are generalized. I bet many of them aren't documented. I also would suspect that this will lead to behavior change to improve on "productivity" that may have nothing to do with improving customer businesses but help scores go up.
- dathinab 6y agoYes it's fully impossible to generalized produce any form of productivity score. Like sometimes someone taking a full day to write a single short paragraph can be the most productive and valuable thing which happens in the recent month. Even if hounded of pages where written, mails read and responded etc. Such score can only really measure quantity but not quality but in many cases you need quality much more than quantity to be successful.
- philipodonnell 6y agoI get the knee-jerk reaction to look for scripts that fake activity and call this spying, but despite the name on the page, these kinds of metrics seem more focused on adoption of "productivity tools" (industry jargon for the suite) than measuring actual productivity. IT leaders are always looking to show that technology tools that they pay for are being used and MSFT has an interest in providing visibility to encourage proactive communication and training to deepen penetration. Maybe there are other screens that show more detail and it would be fair to disregard my comment in that case, but just based on what is in the twitter thread, metrics that count the number of days that a tool is used at least once are about as innocuous as they get.
- dimitrios1 6y agoNot to pick on you here, but to me, this is case and point of the type of "privacy rot" we have allowed to settle in the psyche of American minds. Imagine if it was discovered that Bell, or Motorolla, or Cisco installed taps on business phones in the 80s and 90s to see which "productivity features" were being used, or for "reporting" -- it would make national headlines and businesses would be up in arms. To me this is the worst side effect of the modern internet we have built, where data is being mined and pumped into every orifice available: we've lost a sense of what our privacy is truly worth. Thankfully, this latest generation is starting to lash out against it.
- philipodonnell 6y agoIts a fair point, just a bit of a tough spot to put IT in, you know? If I buy a tool for my employees to use I want to know if they are using it to see if I am getting my money's worth. How would I do that if any attempt to measure usage, not matter how high level, is "spying"?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Grimm665 6y agoMaybe talk to them?
- martinesko36 6y agoThis is yet another fail by M$. So, why do people praise Microsoft so much? Satya Nadella turned it around, really? MS365 surveils you. Windows is full of telemetry, Cortana/Bing ads and the UX is objectively bad as they have design from the 2000s mixed in with design from today. VSCode is a slow Electron app. I have a Surface - it is a flop and can't compare to Apple. The new Xbox has worse performance than PS5. LinkedIn is cancerous and nobody I know enjoys using it. The list goes on and on. I am at a loss to find a reason to use Microsoft products willingly, except GitHub which is still somewhat okay (yet).
- karmakaze 6y agoWell at least they got the name right.
- irateswami 6y agoI got my first generated report the other day. My COO has already come out and said that it's not going to count towards anything but still, this is scary. When I do move on to another job, I'm going to be asking very specific questions around if/how they track employee performance.
- dustinmoris 6y agoJust ask if they are using Microsoft and Windows or if they are actually being productive.
- sitzkrieg 6y agoyea because nothing gets done on windows eyeroll
- khyryk 6y ago> My COO has already come out and said that it's not going to count towards anything but still, this is scary. Yeah, I've heard that one before. When OKRs were introduced at a previous placed I worked, they were supposedly for fun and just for us to see our progress. In the next annual review, they were the primary means of measuring one's "performance".
- irateswami 6y agoThen I'll just find a different job.
- maroonblazer 6y agoI'd argue that if your management is using these tools to assess individual employees' productivity the problem is with management, not the existence of the tools. There are countless ways suboptimal metrics could be explained away. E.g. in my role I don't work with anyone in my workgroup. All my work is with other teams that have different reporting structures. By definition my intergroup productivity would be reported as zero, and my manager wouldn't be surprised by that. And even if my role did involve working within my group, there are plenty of other measures that would trump any of these 'productivity' metrics.
- npteljes 6y agoDid anyone expect to use SAAS, and the host _not_ abusing it?
- rootsudo 6y agoWell, yes, the options are available are in any tenant and are equal to what any it admin can enable on win10. It isn't a secret, or hidden, it's a marketed and properly governed side of microsoft if you read the o365 stuff, deployment, and general digital workplace. And it makes sense.
- motohagiography 6y agoI will do contracting for companies that use MSFT as their platform, but will not join as an employee for them. I've found a Windows laptop is basically the leading indicator of a low-growth culture and a crappy job.
- glasss 6y agoWhat alternatives would make you actually become an employee?
- motohagiography 6y agoBeing an employee is an investment, so I use the team/market/product model. Tech choice is also an investment that signals an expected return. I'd say a company using enterprise tech is indexed more on optimization problems than explosive growth. Fine if you want stability, but if you are naturally oriented toward higher risk/reward environments, platform choice is a cultural signal worth asking questions about. When the chips are down, you take what's on offer, but if you are making an active decision from a stable position, you can leverage culture tells to derive the right questions.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- PascLeRasc 6y agoI think this is a really great concept. Do you generally evaluate companies on your own before applying, like looking at their website copy, LinkedIn profiles, Glassdoor, any blog posts, etc, or do you ask direct questions about this in interviews? Or is there some other way you suss out this kind of tech culture?
- motohagiography 6y agoThanks! Have written about it before here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19280341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19280341 Can't say I'm very successful financially, but am almost always satisfied with the quality of the agreements I make. Also, I like to plug keyvalues.com because the day they won product hunt, one of my early ideas was on it as well, and I watched them go up and it was cool to see them succeed.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dec0dedab0de 6y agoFor all metrics my rule of thumb has always been to just do my job as best as I can and ignore the metrics. If a manager ever says anything about them, I ask them what they think of my actual performance. Then when they say they are happy with my performance, I suggest that they are looking at the wrong metrics. The few times that has failed i flatly tell them that I will not do anything to game the metrics, and I'm just going to keep doing my job as best as I can. So far that has always kept them busy until I got a promotion, switched companies, or the short sighted manager got fired.
- iamkroot 6y agoI agree with this. I think it's also important to regularly check it with your manager and ask about how your performance is being perceived and if there is anything they could suggest that you improve upon. Keep the feedback loop tight so that both of you can address any problems as quickly as possible.
- dec0dedab0de 6y agoAbsolutely. I left that part out, but if there is something I need to change to do my job better, I most certainly do that as best as I can. The thing is that those conversations have never been directly tied to metrics.
- iamkroot 6y agoOf course, they're almost always very qualitative discussions. If you have a track record of discussing improvement points, hopefully both you and your manager will be able to agree that any metrics that might appear during year end reviews are mostly extraneous.
- JamesBarney 6y agoI tried that strategy for a little bit. I also tried the strategy where I prioritized hitting all the metrics (which usually takes very little work relative to your job) and then did my job. The second strategy led to better reviews, faster promotions, being more well liked by my boss, and an overall more pleasant work experience. I recommend the second strategy.
- flumpcakes 6y agoOn the other hand, the same tools email me once a week with a breakdown of what I've done. It constantly shows that for the previous 28 days I have had zero quiet days: in other words every single day I have used email/chat/etc. outside of my assigned working hours (which is picked up from my in office hours from Outlook). This is something to shove back to bosses to prove that you are overworked and/or overcommitting.
- dustinmoris 6y agoYou don't need a Gestapo like surveillance culture. Messages in chat and emails already have a timestamp attached to them. No need to ask for a chainsaw if all you want is crack an egg open.
- blauditore 6y agoThis might become the work-from-home version of "looking busy doing nothing".
- hedora 6y agoWe need a right to privacy amendment to the US constitution. It should apply to the US government and to companies. All automated data gathering should be opt in.
- mjcohen 6y agoAnd what do you think it would turn into on the way? No thanks.Right now is not that good, but it could easily become worse.
- haolez 6y agoI'm a CTO and I've disabled MyAnalytics and I'll disable this as well. We have power and we can do better. Let's create better companies and fight back with actions, not words.
- Deely123123 6y agoSo... No profit for you?
- CyanBird 6y agoThese metrics are not the ones any sensible manager is interested in if they seek profit and well-being for the company
- icandoit 6y agoMaybe they would prefer KPIs like "increase sales", "average issue resolution time goes down" instead of fluff like "more @mentions used in chat to increase staff engagement". This data is a wet dream for middle managers locked out of creating actual value and doomed to micro-manage.
- haolez 6y agoIf I'm not profiting, I'll be out of business and these metrics will prove to be valuable. At this moment, I'm very profitable.
- aeternum 6y agoDo you use other metrics instead? My take on this is without metrics it's all subjective which is in many ways worse. Everyone, including your team managers have biases. Do they make decisions based on feelings rather than data?
- haolez 6y agoYes. We have metrics that are targeted towards business results.
- KWD 6y ago
- Grimm1 6y agoDoes anyone have a good recommendation to replace Msft 365? We moved to them to escape the google sphere but we're not down with this level of tracking capability either.
- PascLeRasc 6y agoI've only used the first for personal home use, and the second just a little bit working with a local nonprofit, but I really love Notion and Airtable.
- isodev 6y agoIsn’t there anyone decent working at Microsoft these days? I mean, multiple teams had to OK this... so many people collectively deciding it’s ok ...
- rainyMammoth 6y agoI hate what the workspace has become. It all started with Slack. Productivity is now equated to busy-ness on corporate chat. You are being judged on how much "chats" and "mentions" you send. If you are offline (because you want to do actual work), people now automatically think that you are not working.
- Tagbert 6y agoThat is a strange, dysfunctional work culture. Consider this a strong indicator that management has no idea what they are doing and you should look for a different company.
- raxxorrax 6y agoThere are good managers that don't know what you are doing if you don't work in a pure software house. But they know how to work with that by setting goals, talking with you about it and when you deliver they start to appreciate you and your work even if they don't know anything about the details. Hard to get those in larger corps though. It seems to always degrades to bullshit, no idea why. There are exceptions but it still seems to be a clear pattern.
- Aperocky 6y agoAnecdotes: Company on a downward trend will tend to go all in on employee surveillance and analytics, other companies on an upward trajectory gives their employee much more freedom to do whatever they want. I have worked at both (and fortunately at the latter right now). It's hard to say which is the cause and which is the result.
- Cyclone_ 6y agoSounds a little dangerous using some of those metrics, I don't think they would necessarily measure productivity well. Some managers certainly would abuse them.
- peterkelly 6y agoObligatory link to the famous "-2000 Lines Of Code" story: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nikolay 6y agoThis is a sensationalist heading. No, it's not doing surveillance - it's giving very high-level analytics - no more than most other tools we use today.
- klmadfejno 6y agoI do some work in this space. Not this exact stuff, but adjacent. Are there some employers out there using this to evaluate employees? Maybe, but not smart ones. It won't work. I haven't seen anyone do this, although I suppose I have heard of companies checking # hours connected to a vpn to get a sense for when people are working. Take whatever opinion on that you like. the reason people are doing this is because leaders of an org don't know how their business works, and they would like to. They're wary of people getting trapped in endless meetings and not actually accomplishing anything. Which makes it extra funny that the reactionary opinion in these threads seem to be "Better make a bunch of fake meetings and emails to look productive!".
- outworlder 6y ago> They're wary of people getting trapped in endless meetings Are you talking about managers here!? If so, that's hilarious.
- metmac 6y agoI’m sorry but how is this surprising or upsetting to anyone. Slack and others have similar metrics. But that’s not the point. Moreover even if some PM in Microsoft didn’t build this dashboard, the data would most likely be available via API. Look at some of the cloud security products Palo Alto ships. As others have commented, this was most likely built with the intent of showing organizations how effective they are using O365, not perfmon of their employees. At the end of the day, it’s the onus of the HR teams and leadership of corporations to have reasonable metrics to track performance against, of which we can all probably agree, obscure “productivity” graphs in your Office suite isn’t one of them. Frankly, if they don’t maintain reasonable methods of performance management, it is an incredibly effective way to limit and lose their talent pool.
- polote 6y agoZoom has a similar thing if I remember correctly
- Traubenfuchs 6y agoHello EMPLOYEE, this is Susan from HR. I hope you are doing well in this trying times! We wanted to check in with you because we have noticed that your Productivity Score is not yet excelling yet per COMPANIES NEXT and EXCEL goals for 2020. While it is totally fine that some of our COMPANY family need some additional time to increase their Productivity Score, we would be overjoyed to assist you in reaching COMPANIES goals. We would like to invite you to a meeting tomorrow morning at 8:30. Your direct line manager, you and me will be present for this meeting. We would like you to prepare a short presentation (9-10 minutes) on how you plan to improve your Productivity Score so we, as the COMPANY family can reach our goals. I am sure we can find a solution together! I am looking forward to talking to you tomorrow morning! Have a relaxing evening! Susan from HR
- lkjewOIJ 6y agoI WILL _NOT_ RENEW MY OFFICE SUBSCRIPTION ONCE IT'S EXPIRED
- feralimal 6y agoThe wider aspect to this, is that this is occurring as part of the new governance system that is currently revealed. That is technocracy. Everything will be measured, and the system will self-manage and re-allocate resources as it sees fit.
- anoncow 6y agoIf Windows and Office die, will MS die?
- ianferrel 6y agoAnyone who thinks metrics on "amount of time spent reading and responding to email" is going to tell them which workers are more productive is going to be in for a rude surprise.
- throwaway1723 6y agoEnjoy the world of corporate-owned remote work platforms.
- nxc18 6y agoNot sure if this is the right place for this, but I feel the need to give a warning: If you try to log in to certain MS apps with your work account (in particular OneNote), they will give you a checkbox to allow the org to manage Windows on that device. This checkbox is ignored (or really, visibly re-enabled during the auth flow). It is very easy to end up in a situation where your org suddenly has full control of your personal Windows device. It is also very easy (again, because of broken auth workflows) to end up with your personal MS account on your work PC. OneDrive can then at any point (most likely after a Windows update) start downloading all of your personal content to your work device. Microsoft has been trying to blur the lines between Windows and Office. IME, this has made both fundamentally untrustworthy, because it is very hard to know what I am authorizing (and they will explicitly ignore/reset my choice anyway) and where my data will end up. It feels very bad to know that, at any time and without warning, Microsoft can begin sharing my personal data into my work-managed IT systems.
- hkt 6y agoYour regular reminder of the predatory nature of tech giants
- ThinkBeat 6y agoI remember many years ago, that Microsoft was introducing features like this into Sharepoint. I think it made it into Beta 1. There was a lot of people who did not like the idea and it was not in the release version (at least not advertised if it was in there. I wonder how long MS has worked on frameworks like these
- jariel 6y agoIf they try to pin this on you, let them know the material reality of why it's probably not a good idea (these are bad measures) in a very polite email to a few of the leaders - and the resign. Of course, only if you can. But I would definitely leave a company that wanted to use these metrics.
- natas 6y agowhere/how can I disable this?
- effie_ 6y agoThis is not turned on by default in my tenant.
- intricatedetail 6y agoThis is an equivalent of pornhub to micromanagers. Frankly it's good to know who to avoid. If you company uses 365, maybe you should move to China where these things go. Few threads from hear I read people praise m$ as being the good guys now. Such a laugh.
- intricatedetail 6y agoNow we only need a virtual whip next to a clippy, so micromanagers won't have to raise from their desk to squeeze more value out of an employee
- arnaudsm 6y agoCan't wait to see people programming bots to send 10^4 emails per day, and autorefresh pages on loop to increase their "productivity score" and get a raise
- nitwit005 6y agoI noticed that teams has some call center like functionality (people's phone status, call queues, and so on). I kind of expect everything to be tracked to a painful level of detail whenever that gets added, because call centers have been like that for a long time.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoAs does Google's GSuite^h^h^h^h^hWorkspace. Employers have the "right" to use surveillance of their employees in the US (this has been litigated several times) and so product suppliers build it into their tools for those enterprises that want to use it. Since most (maybe all?) employers make you sign a document when you start work that explicitly states they reserve the right to surveil you. As a result this should not come as much of a surprise.
- withinboredom 6y agoI once worked on warehouse picking software. I implemented these types of metrics, put it right on the bottom of the screen for each picker and it showed an aggregate of the whole picking team. Before the end of the quarter, productivity soared because the picking teams ended up competing and figuring out how to game the system. It was rather entertaining.
- sm4rk0 6y agoWait MSFT, how are we (the "Free World") supposed to keep pointing finger to China and its awful social credit system!?
- quantified 6y agoStrikes me that a lot of the feature set could be useless- what is really useful about the metrics? Lot of spaghetti at the wall. However, a company that tries to use the useless will be a bit more demoralizing and ineffective. I wonder if the real goal somehow is MS collecting data that can tie into Linkedin data.
- imglorp 6y agoSo now Microsoft is selling four products. Once, you pay for the "product". Then they sell YOU three times: to whoever is buying all this W10 and O365 telemetry; then to the government who's paying for a feed; and now to your boss. 4x revenue? Buy Microsoft stock.
- llimos 6y agoThis appears to be an ORGANIZATION-WIDE score. Not on individual employees. Look at the documentation here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/admin/productivity/productivity-score?view=o365-worldwide https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/admin/product... It's true that the fact they have this data means they could one day offer it per-employee. But they're not doing that today, probably because they know that the data at that level wouldn't be useful (but would be abuseful). You'd want to measure different metrics to monitor individual productivity vs organizational.
- KWD 6y agoI work at an organization using this as it is upgrading everyone to Microsoft 365. I get a weekly MyAnalytics (think that is the name) email with my weekly engagement score for things like collaboration. It is all meaningless, and the email just gets deleted without being read now. My co-workers are doing the same with theirs.
- neycoda 6y agoWonderful! The ubiquitous private police state.
- 6510 6y agoThis is [also] good news for hard working people looking to get noticed.
- justpassingth 6y agoI am late to this discussion. I worked remotely for a large tech company. My team environment became very toxic due to managers fighting, which lead to an environment of extreme paranoia. I believe that transcripts of my Microsoft Teams calls were being read by my manager. I say this because he was not very clever about it and would often reference, in exact words I used, conversations I had in meetings he was not present in. It happened enough that I began to pay attention to it. This was the most frightening and upsetting experience of my entire career. Suspect this is the future for all of us - Every meeting transcripted, recorded and analyzed by AI. It’s coming.
- johnx123-up 6y agoApologies for my ignorance. Isn't this already possible in Gsuite?