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> I often read on HN that it's a norm for US employers to install spying software on developers computers. I haven't heard of this happening at all. Whereas i

> I often read on HN that it's a norm for US employers to install spying software on developers computers. I haven't heard of this happening at all. Whereas it is commonplace for people to use time-tracking software (like Toggl, RescueTime, etc) - and it is also not-uncommon for companies to require employees to use such software (software-eng or otherwise) for the purposes of reporting their time/hours/what-they're-doing, they all have web-based UIs for doing data-entry: which is definitely not the same thing as installing monitoring software on an employees' own personal hardware with or without their informed consent and it being a condition of employment. I think people are getting terms-conflated and using overloaded terms with negative connotations: "time tracking software" which does active-software-application-window-tracking for the benefit of the direct user can easily be mischaracterized as "monitoring software".

gailbear 5y ago
Not only have I heard of this happening, it's literally on my computer right now! Most of the monitoring on it is automated - but I also write that software. There's not a lot of ML involved in the kinds of automated activity checking that my employer is doing, but if they suspected I was not being productive, they could basically pull my entire body of network requests, which at the very least has addresses of sites, and can tell you roughly how long someone spent on them. Since 90% of my work is on the internet, this is pretty effective spying. Interestingly, I'd much prefer Microsoft's algorithms classifying me as productive or unproductive, based on how I code - while there's a lot to be said for different patterns of work being equally productive, I trust Microsoft to implement the same heuristics across the board, and not take a look at my gender and race and make assumptions about me based on that. (Of course, since the ML data of productivity will come from nearly entirely white males, if it's only available to github enterprise cloud subscribers, then the ML data will be pretty biased as it is. Guess discrimination is inevitable!)

gailbear 5y ago

Not only have I heard of this happening, it's literally on my computer right now! Most of the monitoring on it is automated - but I also write that software. There's not a lot of ML involved in the kinds of automated activity checking that my employer is doing, but if they suspected I was not being productive, they could basically pull my entire body of network requests, which at the very least has addresses of sites, and can tell you roughly how long someone spent on them. Since 90% of my work is on the internet, this is pretty effective spying. Interestingly, I'd much prefer Microsoft's algorithms classifying me as productive or unproductive, based on how I code - while there's a lot to be said for different patterns of work being equally productive, I trust Microsoft to implement the same heuristics across the board, and not take a look at my gender and race and make assumptions about me based on that. (Of course, since the ML data of productivity will come from nearly entirely white males, if it's only available to github enterprise cloud subscribers, then the ML data will be pretty biased as it is. Guess discrimination is inevitable!)