Feels like every damn thing that happens gets used as a pretext to enable more and more surveillance. Will we need job boards specifically for jobs that don't do surveillance too?
>Last year Fujitsu, a Japanese technology group, unveiled AI software which promises to gauge employees’ concentration based on their facial expression.
Just need software that punishes employees who aren't happy enough at work, then we'll have a proper nightmare.
> Everything about their employees is monitored and tracked, down to individual finger and eye movements, to prevent waste and track performance. All emails that are sent out include an estimate of how long they should take to read. Go to fast, you get scolded for not paying attention. Go too slow, you get scolded for inefficiency. Get it just right? You get scolded for being a smartass.
—- Snowcrash
'The “robot” installed at this first Burger-G restaurant looked nothing like the robots of popular culture. It was not hominid like C-3PO or futuristic like R2-D2 or industrial like an assembly line robot. Instead it was simply a PC sitting in the back corner of the restaurant running a piece of software. The software was called “Manna”, version 1.0*.'
Where's the software letting me surveil my supervisors? They're supposed to be spending some time and effort on me, so I have a legitimate need to make sure that's happening. There should be software that scans their emails and chat for discussions about open positions, projects, or trainings that are a good fit for me. Then it'll let me know if they recommended me, or mentioned my name in a negative context. Of course, we'll need AI for that. Maybe even let me just read the logs, to get a human in the loop. Purely a professional interest, of course.
At an ex-job, shortly after I quit they got a new middle-level manager. The new boss started complaining to everyone about every time he saw them arriving to the office late, so the guys collaborated on a spreadsheet to track the boss's work hours to the minute, every single day.
> Just need software that punishes employees who aren't happy enough at work
Automating the good old “floggings will continue until staff morale improves”.
Though given a choice between that and the utterly cringy gamification¹ that some managers² seem to think doesn't make us want to high-five them in the face with a chair, I know which I'd hate least.
[1] which thankfully seems to be going out of fashion, but it'll be back again soon with a slightly different mask
[2] or “team togetherness and efficiency encouragers” or other fanciful titles they might have
I genuinely shiver when I read language like this despite being very much a corporate child. I count my blessings that, at least until now, even when I was tracked, my boss either cared about results or 'metrics' were good enough or the boss liked me.
I am not entirely certain how to prepare a child for this world. Short of running your own company, it will be hard to avoid the beast.
I suspect double speak will be elevated to a new artform. a large corporation has no standard basis by which t judge output. Managers may love your work, but it's hard to objectively quantify whether they have the right calibration.
Software that automatically says “you should push how harder”, “john is harming morale”, “jane is overworking”. Will be too tempting for a detached senior leadership to resist.
At my firm, laptops seem to have mysteriously gotten slower recently, chrome now regularly crashes on moderately sized documents. I would be surprised if it's not spyware related.
I'm moving over to a Linux machine as soon as I can, that way I can benefit from lack of software support.
Many Japanese companies have really fucked up ways of measuring "work". They work hard to make these AI and tech-based things to measure some dumb stats that have nothing to do with getting actual work done.
I've heard of a company measuring how "well" a meeting went based on some AI analysis of people smiling. So much time here is wasted on managing workers and talking about how to work, instead of just getting shit done.
> I've heard of a company measuring how "well" a meeting went based on some AI analysis of people smiling. So much time here is wasted on managing workers and talking about how to work, instead of just getting shit done.
its ironic because this is what it was like in the soviet union from what i hear...
There is an urban legend that being asleep at work would be seen as being productive since you obviously work so hard. This would be my chance to become employee of the month.
Some jackass dean or administration flunky complained about (sleep deprived) students asleep on the couches in Georgia Tech's Klaus CS building. I guess it didn't look good for donors or something.
So they put up a bunch of signs above each couch and bench that said "No sleeping."
I've still got a collection of pictures of people sleeping directly under the signs. Fight the power. :-)
Now KPI is stuck in my head as Klingon Productivity Indicator…
"You have challenged me for the position of Employee of the Month, and must now meet me in single combat…! Do not forget to bring your Bat'leth, I will not be merciful."
"Live Gagh will no longer be provided in the break room, as it was encouraging too many breaks. "
"The sales team has no honor, and our Product Manager acted like a spineless P'taaq in that meeting! I have deleted their logins and assumed command myself!"
" A true Klingon warrior tests their code in production."
"What is this talk of "Pull Requests"? A true Klingon warrior makes DEMANDS! "
"The beatings will continue until this team shows a TRUE warrior spirit. "
" This burndown chart is pitiful. It is barely singed!"
" When I take a mental health day, it is for YOUR mental health. Do not waste this opportunity. "
"You joined our team over a year ago and have still not challenged me for my position. We need to discuss your career goals."
... or treat and think of your employees as human beings who sometimes are more productive than usual and sometimes less productive than usual, but on average perform "well enough".
If companies aim for maximum, minimum and average to trace one flat line across diagrams visualizing some kind of performance metrics, then us humans will never ever live up to those expectations.
>Feels like every damn thing that happens gets used as a pretext to enable more and more surveillance.
If bosses could have slaves working for them, a vast majority of them would use slaves in an instant, without thinking about it. At best, they'd use a contractor or two removed from them, to mitigate the ethical accusations (same way they justify the use of sweatshops, child labor in mines, violently threatening and beating or even murdering workers when they stand up, and so on, in the production/supply chains the most seemingly "progressive" companies).
The only reason they don't have everything they want atm, and societies got things like paid leave, the 5-day 8-hour workweek and such, has been pushback (which was reristed fiercely, with many dead in the process). Pushback, plus, when the global communist movement was still a thing, and still shiny to many, the danger of working classes falling for socialism as an alternative to capitalism, which between the 30s and 70s did wonders in securing concessions from capitalist governments.
Since pushback has stopped, and the alternative system of production is dead and/or discretided, in any job market that they have the upper hand, they'll reinforce any 19-th century norm they like.
^This a thousand times over. The workers' benefits we enjoy today in Europe like 8 hour workdays, minimum 20 days vacation, paid sick leave, free healthcare, pensions, unemployment benefits, etc. were due to the communist movements sweeping Europe after WW2 which governments and industrialists fought hard to suppress so they had to give concessions to the workers in order to keep their business afloat and prevent them from rioting/striking.
But, the collective labor pushback has stopped since the great offshoring took over in the last 30 years thanks to globalization, and various labor unions lost their power as the great industrialists moved the labor intensive jobs overseas where they could easily enforce their 19-th century norms and environmentally damaging practices and make killer profits, which in term bought them more lobbying power and political influence back home to push for lax immigration and lax trade policies with oppressive regimes, to further water down local wages and working conditions to "increase economic competitiveness" with those oppressive regimes.
Now we're slowly moving back to longer working hours and worse working conditions, but not by force like in the past, but by making housing and living so insanely expensive and getting a job so competitive, that the only chance people have is to willingly sacrifice the quality of life to get a head start in the rat race over everyone else, unless they were lucky enough to inherit some generational wealth that has appreciated, like a house.
Couple this with economic policies where at every crisis or dip in the economy, the well off, asset holder and big companies get further boosted up and amass even more wealth, while the lesser well off and small business go bust and end up worse off and pushed "further back on the monopoly board".
> But, the collective labor pushback has stopped since the great offshoring took over in the last 30 years thanks to globalization, and various labor unions lost their power
Not just that. A large portion of the loss of influence of unions was the riseup of the pacifist dogma. Just look how all the benefits were won: by (sometimes extremely) brutal violence, by the blood of the workers who died by the hands and guns of corporate goons [1].
A very good example is the social structure and workers rights of the two neighboring countries France and Germany. French workers are routinely willing and able to commit to violence both in the office (in the form of "bossnapping") and on the streets and the public supports that, and when German protests escalate into a couple of banks getting redecorated with paint, concerned citizens turn up to clean the fucking bank [2]!
As a result of that difference in attitude, German workers have it way worse than French workers - politicians in France know that the cost of going against the people is high. A society that doesn't fight for its rights eventually gets taken over by those that do. Democracy is not god-given, it is earned by blood and needs continuous maintenance, otherwise it erodes.
Re G20: The people making the mess were young activists, the article even mentions their group affiliation by name. They are not the working class, they are a nuisance to the working class. I'd be in favor of classifying them as terrorists.
>I'd be in favor of classifying them as terrorists
Same with Antifa. Some protestors are basically just mindless hooligans and their protests and property damage are harming the small business and working class people a lot more than the politicians and the ruling class.
Like during the protests in France I kept seeing many mid-range Renault/Peugeot/Citroens on fire on the streets of Paris. Chances are those were most likely the cars working class people used to get to work the next day and not the cars of fat-cats.
I agree with protesting violently against governments but what use is destroying working class property?
The problem is that violence gets attention and sometimes conciliatory action like nothing else.
Riots and terrorism generate world headlines, while peaceful picketing rarely gets anywhere near the attention (unless it's also met by violence, as the nonviolent demonstrations and sit-ins were during the Civil Rights struggles in the 60's).
I am a pacifist myself, and am completely against violence, but I can see why some people who have less of a problem with it might find it strategically advantageous.
The willingness to resort to violence is a great part of the reason that the world is as much a hellhole as it is now.
> The problem is that violence gets attention and sometimes conciliatory action like nothing else.
The thing is, the government itself is violent at its core:
- cops beating up peaceful protesters or executing people on the streets
- cops evicting people from their homes because they can't keep up with rent
- cops arresting women because of miscarriages (over 1.200 in 15 years per [1]!) and soon because they dared to abort an unwanted pregnancy
- social security systems, especially unemployment insurance, are purposefully laced with endless hoops to be jumped through, all in the name of denying as many people as possible access to these while still being able to claim that "we have a system for poor people"
"Peaceful resistance" against this level of violence is a pipe dream. The insistence on "peaceful" resistance, the complete lack of material consequences for offenders acting as part of the government is the reason why civil rights are under attack by the government as harsh as they are at the moment.
I'm not a friend of violence myself, but I absolutely refuse to look down on people for deciding to go the militant path in the face of the violence that governments are committing against the common citizen every day.
Something else to consider, for those that don't object to violence on moral or ethical grounds, is that violence is often counterproductive.
If used against powerful governments it usually results in violent crackdowns which wind up killing off and/or imprisoning the leaders of the anti-government movements.
When used against weak governments, the government may topple, but what arises in its place is often even worse than the toppled government, and that tends to be followed by much more bloodshed.
If used against the populace it tends to cause both vigilante violent reaction and a resentment of the populace against one's cause.
Violent action usually leads to violent reaction, and the moderates are killed off by those who are even less reluctant to use violence to achieve their aims.
Countries thus afflicted not infrequently are plunged in to the horrors of civil war, which suits the extremists of every stripe, while ordinary people who just want to live their life are devastated.
Non-violence however requires (!) a functioning democracy that listens to the citizens - one might argue that a democracy that listens to and serves the interests of all people is the only way for any progress that is achieved non-violently. For me, the rise in political violence in the US is not surprising at all given how more and more of the citizenship has been left behind and ignored by its representatives. And even the progress that happened in the US' recent history... a lot of it only happened after large scale riots (such as the Civil Rights Act 1968). Fittingly, it was MLK himself who said the famous quote "riots are the voice of the unheard".
Especially regarding revolutions against authoritarian regimes - I can't name even one major society that went through the change from an authoritarian government to a democracy without a war or revolution of some sort (even the British parliament's history has a couple of wars related to it). Usually, two or three revolutions, civil or external wars are part of any major democracy's history.
Burning down property of the working people is not gonna make you friends, you know. If you are being violent and made up some excuses for it, at least direct it towards your enemy.
> In Germany at least Antifa aren't terrorists. Actual hooligans are much more destructive by several magnitudes.
Not to mention much more murderous. Fascists have murdered over 200 people since the reunification [1], left-wing oriented people four in the same time [2]
It's little weird to slip tight-immigrarion into your communist manifesto. Immigration is only a problem when workers are forced to compete for livelihood. Immigrants crrate demand which creates more work opportunity.
Except you are competing for livelihood. The supply of real estate, doctors, schools, teachers, jobs, is very inelastic, all of which is needed for the newly arrived.
If there really was a shortage, employers would offer concessions, better working conditions, WFH, more vacation days, etc. Just look at truck drivers or hospitality for example. Just because employers say it's a shortage doesn't always make it true or it doesn't mean it's not their fault for the shortage for refusing to offer better conditions.
Depends on the field of course, but from my experience interviewing in tech, the market is very competitive now in my area in Europe for those without a lot of experience, and employers are not willing to offer any concessions besides the minimums mandated by law. Asking for full WFH is also out of the questions most of the time. This signals to me that there is no shortage, otherwise employers would be more accommodating for this.
In my country there is also a perpetual shortage of doctors and nursing staff in the public sector despite an abundance of them in the private sector. So the shortage is purely because the government is not offering the right financial incentives and working conditions for them to stay in the public sector.
My point is that "shortage" is always relative and we should look at the full story and the complete context to understand where it comes from and why it's happening, because without context I'm also having a perpetual shortage of Ferraris and Lamborghinis, though the full story is that my budget is $5000 and not a cent more, yet that information kind of changes and explains everything.
So, in conclusion, most of the times, "shortage of workers" just means people unwilling to work for the poor conditions and compensation being offered by employers, not that there's a shortage of people capable of doing said work or capable of learning to do it if offered the chance/training.
I think there are several factors that play into this and beyond the points you mentioned, I wanted to introduce one more.
Size of the companies appears to matter when it comes to accommodations. In my industry, companies are effectively offering the same WFH policy across the board making people like me suspicious that CEOs banded together to discuss 'best practices', but anecdata from social circle suggests that smaller companies do work to accommodate people they want to keep.
For a counter, see the following article on demand outstripping supply of remote jobs: [1]
In some fields, like tech, there's a strong demand, but not so in plenty of others -- especially if you as a worker make the unreasonable demand to be paid a living wage or not be worked to the point of burnout.
There is a shortage of people willing to work shitty jobs for shitty pay. Employers could fix this by either making the job less shitty or raising the pay.
The inflation complaint is similar. We've had ludicrous inflation in housing, college tuition, health care, and many other things for over a decade. Inflation is not a problem until it starts to hit wages and supply chains.
There's a shortage of people willing to work in terrible conditions.
I'd usually add "for a pittance," but I see FAANG (is it now "MAANG"?) companies offering pretty insane salaries, but they are notorious for difficult working conditions.
Finance is another industry notorious for working their employees like slaves. Which I never understood, as these are some of the richest companies in the world, which could easily afford to hire more people instead of overworking the ones they had.
Doctors and nurses are also infamously overworked, with crazy shifts and lack of sleep being the norm. This is even more unconscionable as lack of sleep can lead to mistakes where patients die.
Here in NY, many of my friends were once traders or brokers, in Finance. They passed their Series 7 (or whatever), and worked a few years in brokerages or banks.
Pretty much universally, they report the experience was a tornado, and they could only manage it for a few years.
But they made a lot of money. The smart ones, lived humbly, and saved up, using their earnings to do things like start small businesses.
It’s kind of surprising, to talk to a painter, or shopkeeper, and have them tell you about their “days on The Floor.”
Try front-line and front-line-adjacent healthcare. Due to federal privacy laws, a lot of ordinary office surveillance tech is not permitted.
It's not uncommon for regular offices to have "security" cameras. But when IT tried to put the cameras all over our building, the legal department told them to go stick their heads in a pig.
I wasn't part of the discussions that followed, but based on my company's privacy training, I can imagine a couple of problems:
- Legal didn't want even the remote possibility that a "security" camera might be able to view a patient's records on someone's screen.
- Legal didn't want any record that a particular patient went into a particular office, thus identifying them as having a particular ailment. (It's the same reason all of our promotional flyers sent in the mail have to be in a plain white envelope, and not postcards announcing to the world "You're overdue for your herpes follow-up!")
There are still security cameras, but they're only allowed in the employee parking lot. And I think I've seen them in the server rooms. But that's pretty much it.
They probably also didn't want video evidence when their doctors or nurses screw up, which would make malpractice cases against them stronger.
Video evidence could also exonerate them, of course. But they probably erred on the side of opacity and the status quo over more transparency, as ass-covering corporations often do.
Just make some friends in the accounting department and plant a few seeds.
Our developer systems come with 32/64GB memory, multiple TB of NVMe storage, high-end processors, discrete GPUs to drive 4 4K monitors, etc. But we save $30 via the Dell configurator by skipping bluetooth, wifi, cameras, etc.
Nah, in retail, we used to have this software known as "secret shoppers." If they didn't see someone smiling, the store or department would be docked points on its evaluation, and you'd be hearing about it from your boss and boss's boss. Now all of us WFH minions below the lowly programmers will be subject to a smiling rictus as our cameras, microphones, and keyloggers determine productivity scores, work morale, and redundancy scores for the next layoff.
Oh man, thats too funny, can you imagine the glitchy smiles snapping off someones face as they slightly turn their head? All the sudden every meeting is filled with barely perceptible uncanny artifacts... So far everywhere I've worked is cameras off except for intimate meetings (and even then its optional/reciprocated), usually a few people will try to keep their cameras on to start a trend or something but I imagine ends up feeling like an idiot with the only camera on.
you can do that with the snap filters. I use the mac app to overlay all sorts of goofy hats, sunglasses, laser eyes, etc.... onto my face to spice up dull zoom/teams calls.
I worked at a place once where we got a memo that asked everyone to stop clipping nails and farting because the microphones installed in our desks were picking these noises up. The memo even added that if you need to fart please go to the bathroom. It wasn't a joke email, they were serious.
Oh, also not many people realize this but CCTV cameras all have the capability to convey audio captured via an internal microphone. It just depends on whether they have hooked the wires up to enable this feature. But, the innate ability is there. And, the CCTV software the guards use have the ability to store, retrieve and play this back alongside the video playback.
One of the greatest benefits of working from home - which is seldom celebrated - is the ability to fart at one’s leisure without having to try silence it.
I suspect that at least in the US, its probably not illegal to do this in a business, especially if it is spelled out in the employment contract that they have the right to monitor all communications.
Most indoor gunshot detection systems use dedicated hardware, with the microphone going into an on-board audio analysis circuit. They generally cannot be used for ambient listening.
Yeah totally different sound profile, a gunshot versus a whisper. And they were designed with that in mind, materially helping police without full-on police state.
But like a lot of the time nobody goes, nobody cares. Depends on the murder...who and where, and like the budget, if the budget just got slashed...
Tangent. So that's when the apathy inescapably sets in for police departments susceptible to it, when they want nothing more than do their jobs but just can't get the resources to actually do their jobs. Have to be more selective, do something similar to doing their jobs but not as expensive. Pretend to do it, answer the phone but get victims off the phone unless the case is stereotypical, bounce people to a different state service. Or recently when I was pressing charges for being assaulted here in Santiago, first assault I actually had minor wounds in so first time I could press charges. Fought back obviously, fight back every time.
So the printer was low on toner, and my form looked blurry and shitty. Still legible though, just a legal document of inferior worth, as evidence for instance or as collateral for picking up on the case later, because of low production values. I told him a company would have a little closet stocked up with more toner things--all office supplies--so they could print all the forms they needed to print. The policeman said "yeah that's how it should be, that's the dream."
Like it was a fantasy to the extent he couldn't articulate what ought to be done about it. In the meantime, they do what the can. But they can't do what they can't do.
Another example was a rock I picked up after a riot, like 12 ounces, weighed as much as a hammer, obviously for stoning people. Picked it up at 22:16 hour when things cooled down and the show's over. Obviously the intention was to kill policemen. Brain damage. You could tell from the weight, and actually it was too heavy for its purpose, it's like a shot put, evidently malicious. And it had no business where I found it, piece of concrete specifically chiseled in order to stone people with. I got stoned in March, the stoners were aiming for police on motorcycles. Didn't get hit, but the intention was there, I was considered pro-police.
And in fact I am pro-police, pro-carabinero, so going back to that rock, I told a policeman I collected it, wanted to present it to them so they could do detective work. It was evidence of something. At the very least I got it off the street, apart from it there's no rocks there it was conspicuous. I don't know whether to post a photograph, I wish the police photographed it, did good old-fashioned detective work on who made it, with what type of chuzo (like a pick), whatever. The policeman (carabinero) said yeah...you know we're uh not the right station for forensics, you'd have to take it to another...Which other I asked...no another one. And for him I have no blame, absolutely none. These men and women are completely overwhelmed. I talked to them about it right after the assault, said "yeah everyone's insulting you, the screams, the graffiti, they say..." then struggling at how to express what I was talking about without actually spelling it out. I then saw a graffiti of what I was referring to on the wall across the street and said "There it is! You can read it for yourself!" Like people think it's so funny to insult the people who protect them. Haha, great joke, classic.
Same in California, so so many activists undermining them, like they can hardly do anything else for the benefit of society other than emasculating police. Any chance they undermine a gangster? Take a picture of a crime in progress but of the criminal, not the cops making the arrest but the actual assault or burglary or robbery?
So back to that assault, it was the stupidest shit, if the assaulter had been in a green uniform forty of the hundred witnesses would have filmed him swing at me, but because instead he took his shirt off as an escalation and obviously was not police, talked very shitty as part of the intimidation like making a show of how uneducated he was by his own volition, and made death threats like an ipso facto criminal, the witnesses respected him more, then yeah they were afraid of him. And nobody filmed it.
I looked for film evidence, photography even, nothing. Everyone was out of battery. It was a super drawn-out conflict, with like five escalations to which I didn't back down, before the punches and kicks. Like three bouts. It was a good clean fight, but oh well, I guess everyone had Apple iPhone 5S's like me whose batteries crap out weirdly, evidently not truly random.
Two witnesses though, and I thank them. A third witness wimped out on testifying.
Like he wanted best of both worlds, you see, protection from police (and men like me who fight back) against criminals, but at the same time bother criminals the least so they can be their favorite or least bullied. Suck up to criminals. That's the attitude. That's what's up.
Most CCTV cameras used in professional installations do not have any kind of on-board microphone. Many have an audio input option for an external mic, but it is very rarely used.
I'm a software developer working remotely most of the time. My unionized colleagues and I pushed for and won an agreement to prevent our employer from surveilling us in this manner. Several other recently organized companies have gotten similar agreements.
INAL, but it seems that the wording in the agreement leaves open the use of surveillance software on employees, as long as it's not for the purpose of "evaluating the employee's work product (i.e. job duties assigned to the employee), the time an employee took to complete their work, or disciplining an employee in protected concerted activity."
The company could still use such software on employees and claim it was doing so for security purposes, for instance, or maybe even just to make sure the employee was working (without evaluating the work product).
Why not prohibit the user of such software on employees entirely?
You are right that the language could be stronger. This was the outcome after a few rounds of proposals and counter-proposals. I believe that in the context of an overall agreement with a "just cause" provision, which we have tentative agreement on, we don't have to worry about "bossware" at all.
> The company could still use such software on employees and claim it was doing so for security purposes, for instance, or maybe even just to make sure the employee was working (without evaluating the work product).
This article will be incorporated into a larger collective bargaining agreement that specifies people can only be disciplined or terminated for "just cause". The most common "just cause" for termination is a failure to perform one's job duties. Our employer could not use information gleaned through software surveillance to demonstrate just cause, much as police officers can't introduce evidence obtained illegally in court.
> or maybe even just to make sure the employee was working
That would fall under "time taken to complete the work".
"Our employer could not use information gleaned through software surveillance to demonstrate just cause, much as police officers can't introduce evidence obtained illegally in court."
Interesting that you should mention this, as police have been known to use "parallel construction"[1] to get around such attempts to restrict what they're allowed to do.
If companies can still surveil their employees, they might also resort to something like parallel construction to come up with other excuses to discipline/terminate their employees, even when the real reason they did so was a result of surveillance.
I recently had a manager insist that I install some MDM-like software on my laptop so that it could be tracked and managed remotely.
I said, "okay I'll do that, but then I'm never going to put that laptop on my home network, or use it on any network I may frequent outside of the office, so I'll just leave my laptop on my work desk instead". The point, of course, is the same reasoning behind IT policies that don't let people install stuff on work computers: if you're going to access my computer remotely, I won't trust it one single bit, so it doesn't belong on my home network.
This changed their mind, quick. All it took was a little resistance and "good for the goose and the gander" mindset, and the manager droid 'got it'. No, I won't be letting you spy on my family ..
They forced that kind of software on my laptop, so I bought a personal laptop that I used from then on (I did open source work so barely ever needed to use something internal like a VPN) and then I quit.
Yup, "That's creepy as fuck mate" was all it took to dissuade a former manager from rigging the ceiling up with cameras for whatever he was looking at doing
IT should never be treated as more senior to Development, imho. Sure, IT guy, you can put that software on there - but I reserve the right to Ghidra it into dysfunction.
Management has the authority to set policies on how work-provided technology is used since they can fire you for not following those policies (constrained by law). Between IT and developers, this isn't a fully-ordered relation since IT has jurisdiction to enforce those policies, and developers have jurisdiction on ensuring that software meets needed quality. If your management has ill-conceived policies that prevent you from being productive at work, includes everything from McAfee hobbled NTFS to being scheduled for 9 hours of meetings in an 8 hour workday, then leave and find somewhere more productive to work or accept that you're being paid to be unproductive.
There are reasonable reasons to enforce MDM in some industries, e.g. healthcare, where not being able to prove that full disk encryption was turned on if an employee laptop is stolen can lead to fines large enough to end a company. The need to hire and retain talented developers leads us to do this in the least intrusive way possible while still complying with federal regulations, however.
Not to the bean counters. If they can get a good job out of you while distracted 25% of the time they think they could get 25% more out of you for no extra cost if they beat that distraction out of you.
It is one of those double standards many companies have: if you are needed to work extra “you are salaried, not paid by the hour, a bit of flexibility is normal and expected” but if you don't do 37.5 hours one week or are seen to be relaxing too much “your contract clearly says that you are paid to be actively on the job for X time, no less”. Luckily our current regime is far more sensible about this sort of thing, considerate even, though before that buy-out this sort of issue was on the list of reasons I was days away from walking out & burning a few bridges along the way.
It is an excuse for bad management that cannot set goals and verify if they are reached or not.
To be honest you should immediately exploit that for your own career. Office surveillance exploiters wouldn't hold back as well. Tell them you want set goals and no surveillance, make your employment conditional to that. If that doesn't work go to the next higher instance. If it is only the CEO or owner and he supports it, change the company. Otherwise make an offer to replace the manager or being elevated to the same position with defined goals. Often just a little resistance is enough.
Actual output is often hard to measure so we instead gravitate toward various easy-to-measure metrics - hoping that these are proxies for the real thing. The quantitative appearance of such metrics is intoxicating, particularly when it allows us to avoid thinking deeply about what would actually make a business better.
I wonder how it is that basic idea seems lost amidst a sea of increasingly painful ways to monitor and control.
The need to control is greater than...
I don't know. I lack that need, instead needing people to be great people more, and they can't be great when the environment they work in snuffs out greatness.
As a manager, would you worry about the stability of your own job role if you didn't have insight into the productivity of your reports?
Would you worry what would happen to you and the company if one of your reports introduced a serious bug or security flaw into the software?
(note: I think these concerns can -- and should -- be addressed in other ways that don't require intrusion into employees' day-to-day activities, but I raise them because I think they're part of the reason (along with compliance, perhaps in some cases?) why these systems are introduced in the first place)
>but I raise them because I think they're part of the reason (along with compliance, perhaps in some cases?) why these systems are introduced in the first place
Problem is, they are still proxies. Proxies are great at satisfying feelings, but proxies are by no means a guarantee they will reflect what they try to capture. There are no end of examples of perverse incentives showcasing how a metric can "feel" great, but end up being a big bag of nothing if not detrimental.
Other than that, even thinking along the terms of "well they must have a reason" is a great way of introducing slippery slopes all the way to extremism. I'd have a hard time arguing any answer would justify becoming more and more extremist and trying to deny people privacy and autonomy to such a degree.
> Other than that, even thinking along the terms of "well they must have a reason" is a great way of introducing slippery slopes all the way to extremism.
It's possible I misunderstand what you're saying here, but I think I agree; I wasn't intending to justify managerial surveillance, only to understand and elaborate why it might be happening.
Without understanding the cause(s), the tendency of organizations will, I'd guess, instead be to patch over any problems that arise -- the process equivalent of adding warning signs instead of fixing a dangerous bridge.
The solution in an effective employment marketplace is to build organizations that avoid the root causes entirely and thus attract (effective, motivated) employees and build desire in others to work at similar workplaces -- while perhaps reducing organizational running costs at the same time as a side-effect.
Because some office workers think they are special in regards to their output being more creative and cognitive rather than physical and therefore should not be measured in the same fashion as the number of widgets per hour made by a factory worker or tiles per hour laid by a handyman for example, even though ironically, modern SW tools like Jira and processes like Agile & Scrum attempt to do just that, turn cognitive work into factory style repetitive assembling/plumbing work. Which most of it is :) B.R.B, gotta wrap up those story points for the end of the sprint. /s, but only barely
Hum... The only thing the tools do is documenting what is done and what needs to be done. All the commoditization of laborers is done by people.
And yeah, commoditization of factory workers is a large problem too, and the commoditization of the skilled professions (WTF, a real oxymoron) is a "what the hell are you even thinking?" situation.
This is what scares me about Metaverse. Initially I was like "Oh good, Facebook is blowing all of their resources on a bad idea everyone hates. I hope this goes badly for them!". Then I realized, the target audience for Metaverse won't have a choice-- it'll be a virtual office where people can work from home while under constant surveillance.
As an aside, I think I finally understand why Mark is so bent out of shape for the metaverse: His security detail.
Last I heard, Mark spends ~$24M/yr. on his security detail. He's got very thick glass installed in his house. 2 foot thick, but I can't confirm that. It's not just bullet proof, it's RPG proof, or something. The optical distortions are quite real through that much silicon and plastic.
I'm not privy to the details on FB internally, but I imagine that the guys you're paying ~$67,000/day will keep you pretty cloistered from threats, either real or potential. Now, combine that with issues like the Dictator's Information Problem.
As such, I'd speculate that Mark doesn't really get to talk with honest people all that much. Mark ain't dumb, he knows it, but he also thinks all the stuff his security team is telling him is real too. A team that doesn't stay employed if the threats disappear.
So, in Mark's mind one solution is to 'air gap' the people from him via the metaverse. He's 'with them' in the same visual spaces, but his security won't be compromised.
In Germany a lot of that stuff is illegal already or needs to be approved by the Betriebsrat (work council) but can come in through the backdoor as little known features of common software anyway.
I worked in a telco call centre. Everything was recorded on our computers, whee as t we said on phones and they had cameras in the office to watch us, plus human supervisors.
And yet everyone still flaunted all the rules: we were drunk and on drugs, we ate and had our cellphones.
Rules exist to selectively enforce against people who are not liked.
Get this. I worked for the company that produces most of the porn on the Internet. You know, the porn you can go to any torrent site and download for free within 10 minutes (and that statement has been true for as long as there has been an Internet and BitTorrent).
That company periodically took screenshots of all (ALL!) their employees' workstations. They monitor internal network for suspicious traffic and, until COVID happened, they did not let anyone work remotely.
Never understood what they were afraid of. Their content is already plastered all over the Internet.
You have to understand the primary purpose of that whole industry, which is not what most people think, in order to answer the question about what they were “afraid of”.
Let me just put it this way, you are correct that the concern with employee monitoring makes absolutely no sense, because that’s not the right perspective, assumption of motivation.
Don't forget the home. With the ubiquity of security cameras privacy is eroding even in private. I am struggling now with properly placing cameras in an apartment and balancing safety, security, and privacy in a family environment.
Why do you want to place cameras in your apartment in the first place?
Maybe one camera for the entrance, if you have reasons to be paranoid (I was thinking about it for myself, because of weird landlord with second keys), but why more cameras?
edit: one further reason for myself I remembered, watching the small kids from the smartphone, while going out for some minutes. But in the end I never set it up
I live in a leased ground level floor through apartment with three entrances not including 6 accessible windows. In order to cover an entrance from inside some of the living space would need to be included. To fully cover I would need 5 cameras and have them in bedrooms too. Exterior cameras could help, but I have no authority to install. While I have no specific reason to worry, I wouldn't want my landlord to install them and be able to see what/who comes in and out of the apartment and/or raise the rent because of it.
Even just covering the 2 main entrances I find it uncomfortable to be able to know when my spouse is entering/exiting the home, I trust them.
2. Kids
When you need it you need it. Like when I was isolating with covid. However it is their privacy I am concerned also as I don't want them to think it's OK to be surveilled.
3. Safety
Did I leave the stove on? Not so important, but since one entrance is a galley kitchen I easily monitor this and the rear entrance.
Is the basement flooding? This is actually a big one for me. Installing one here however would mean potentially spying on the landlord which I would not do without explicit permission.
None of these seem actionable to me. What are you trying to prevent that a camera would stop? If the basement is visibly flooding then it is flooded. If someone is on camera entering your home then they are in it.
What are you going to do about it at that point that you wouldn't be able to do about it the next morning or whatever? Insurance doesn't require camera footage and realistically the most likely outcome of any of this stuff is an insurance claim.
The kids thing I don't know, it certainly depends on your family's circumstances and your personal concerns with your children, who you know and I don't. There are definitely situations where a camera can be worth it there, but not as many as most contemporary wealthy parents seem to think.
Yes, some may be un-actionable, but there are actions I could take on others (e.g. flooding is not equal to flooded in my situation). Whether they are worth it is still not clear to me. As my kids a getting older it is not so important to monitor them without special circumstances. I do fail to see where wealth has anything to do with this though.
Edit: Moved edit to reply that was not an option before.
ok. I'm not trying to be hostile I only brought this up because you mentioned concerns with privacy and what your children are learning to tolerate and accept re: surveillance.
We feel safer with cameras but in practice there are few cases where we truly are. I think what the kids are likely to learn from this is that an authority's sense of security is a more powerful demand than their own need for privacy, something with, to me, pretty direct connections to the overall worker-surveillance conversation. I'm not judging you for having cameras or even specifically recommending you don't, just agreeing that your fears are justified and they may not be, probably aren't, worth it.
TBH I'm not sure what the wealth link is either! But I was poor/working class most of my life, and am high income now, and have friends in both groups. I just do not see cameras in the homes of people who are not affluent, except sometimes camera-enabled baby monitors. It may just be a matter of access but they aren't all that expensive so I'm not satisfied by that explanation.
Thinking about this more I agree with you and think the answer for me is to simply have the cameras off by default and only use implicitly when away and monitoring makes me feel better. They provide little, possibly negative, service during the time a household member is home. Being from a similar background as you I have a hard time with the labels rich/wealthy, so my apologies for being defensive. The wealth aspect is interesting as you pointed out because that is what I think of in the past, however now I think it is accessible for many as costs of cameras and online video storage come down. The usefulness of camera surveillance seems to diminish though when you are not trying to spy on people who have privelaged access to your home that are not household members and may or may not deserve the same level of privacy (to bring this full circle back to work surveillance).
While I would not put cameras in my home, I do want a copy of the record for myself in the event something happens on my property that I could be liable for, such as a trip and fall on the sidewalk in front of my house. Or if I have to use self defense, or if cops do something unsavory, or if someone breaks in or damages car, I have evidence. It is a type of insurance that costs basically nothing.
I was already able to provide a good look at a thief’s car who stole a package from my neighbor’s doorstep to distribute around the community. And the neighbor’s camera got the theif’s face.
I also have a dash cam for the same reasons. I want to have my evidence because others will probably have theirs and my evidence can be a tool to protect me.
Yeah my point is that you don't get those things from the cameras, or don't need them. Look:
> something happens on my property that I could be liable for, such as a trip and fall on the sidewalk in front of my house
- that's a homeowner's insurance claim, and their problem now.
> Or if I have to use self defense
- in your own home? very few prosecutors would pursue this and fewer juries convict it. I have incredibly little trust in the carceral justice system but even I can believe this will end in your favor
> if cops do something unsavory
- camera won't stop them and it won't get them punished either. it *might* help turn it into a big media event which long-term may help erode these powers. but it won't help you.
> someone breaks in or damages car
- evidence for what? again this is an insurance claim, and the damage itself is sufficient evidence for this. the police may or may not pursue the damager but either way you still have a broken car, and still get your insurance payout. why care?
It may cheap in terms of money but it does not cost nothing. It normalizes surveillance and fear, and reinforces our natural inclinations towards distrust and retribution. These things are understandably tempting but we are all better to the extent that we individually fight them in ourselves.
> - that's a homeowner's insurance claim, and their problem now.
The increase in your insurance premiums due to an unfavorable judgment is my problem. I know from experience at my businesses.
>in your own home? very few prosecutors would pursue this and fewer juries convict it. I have incredibly little trust in the carceral justice system but even I can believe this will end in your favor
The cameras would not be in my home, but for example, if the victim claims I let them in, and I can easily prove that they broke in.
>camera won't stop them and it won't get them punished either. it might help turn it into a big media event which long-term may help erode these powers. but it won't help you.
It is not about punishing the cops. It is about protecting me from he said she said legal costs. And especially when it comes to cops since their word has a higher value than my word.
>It may cheap in terms of money but it does not cost nothing. It normalizes surveillance and fear, and reinforces our natural inclinations towards distrust and retribution. These things are understandably tempting but we are all better to the extent that we individually fight them in ourselves.
Sure, but everyone else is arming themselves, so it does not make sense for me to sacrifice myself and not have evidence in my corner if I want to use it, while letting others have theirs. It is not like I have easy access to a cops’ body cams.
- people put rooms up on Airbnb and are (perhaps understandably) paranoid about things being stolen. It goes too far if there are cameras in bedrooms though.
- people want to monitor their kids
- general monitoring to catch anyone who breaks in while they are out etc.
Have personally never heard of putting cameras inside for catching domestic violence: I suspect that abusers may be 'smart' in the sense that they'll catch on to this pretty quickly and prevent someone from doing it or manipulate the situation.
Abusers are far far more likely to use cameras against their victims than they are to allow a camera that could be used against them. Technology-enabled surveillance is already a major part of a contemporary domestic abuser's toolkit, this is not even theoretical.
Divorce alone barely ever works, it's not as simple as that. I'd rather not stir the hornet's nest any further as the topic itself is far more delicate than that. It's just an example of why an increasingly distrustful populace might opt to secure themselves through home surveillance.
>are secret cameras a legal way to get evidence?
Depends entirely on the context and where you live. There are no universal surveillance laws. There are also social aspects outside the realm of court why one would opt to do so.
Security cameras at work are debatably legal under many states eavesdropping laws as I interpret the text. Of course INAL, and many places have better reason to have cameras, e.g. to curb shoplifting, but a corporate office really isn't one of those places. What am I going to do, steal some paperclips?
I always wonder - who will be looking at the footage? Your manager is obviously too busy, so there must be some department of workers checking on other workers?
Then, ownership. How can you be sure this video footage is kept safe and private? Who owns it and for how long can they keep it? Imagine a teenage child entering the wfh room while you're on a break, I can image wanting to have that video removed immediately.
Also - a home office which is surveilled this way must be decorated completely neutral; you might have an incorrect world map on the wall or a product made by a competitor in view, or perhaps a beach picture of your family to which people can be very sensitive.
Even in those states it's only illegal if you're not aware or don't consent. Very easy to add a "you consent to our surveillance" clause to your contract. Pretty good odds a lot of us have them in there already if we read carefully.
I recently had to install chrom'ium' on my work pc, because all the mainstream browsers were auto installing an un-removable tracking extension via some domain policy :(. I'm sure my manager gets some report at the end of the month detailing how many hours I had a news.ycombinator.com tab open
What is the reality here? If a company adds MDM software to a laptop they have given you for work and you use it at home on your home network. Is it easy enough for them (in theory) to get on to the network and look on your kids or partners devices?
I wouldn't call it easy - they might be able to see what is publicly shared, but shouldn't have any non-public access to the other computers/devices. But most of all, they wouldn't dare. Mistakes and individual excesses happen, though.
Where do you see "celebrating" in the article? Over half of it is devoted to worker pushback against surveillance and criticism of the technology itself, including whether it even works.
The latter third of the article is devoted to push-back. Nonetheless,
as all writers understand, bias can be subtle [1]
Let's start with the title.
"Welcome to the era of the hyper-surveilled office"
Does that not lend at least tacit assent by ambivalence, if not
outright assent? Welcome?
The next 750 words are given over to normalising the "lot's of valid
reasons" to surveil workers, and lending value to an emerging
surveillance industry.
Thereafter 450 words describe the counterpoints, but frame this mainly
as "dislike" and "feelings". Towards the end, the language does shift
to a more humanistic tone, describing "snooping" and the "dangers" of
over-zealous monitoring.
Overall though, I found the article lacks mature analysis, presents an
"as is" hot take, and spins in favour of employer intrusion on the
basis of 19th century industrial justifications.
Given the enormous impact of declining labour relations in an
economically precarious era, and the currency of digital rights and
surveillance in general, I am surprised The Economist did not attempt
a more in-depth treatment of "boss-ware". It would be improved by
actual productivity studies, the psychological literature on workplace
surveillance, some modern ethical understanding of why this is
unacceptable, and what the likely negative impact is going to be on,
frankly dumb, companies that see this as legitimate.
Because ultimately, this stuff is bad for business, for everybody's
business except a few spyware companies.
[1] Unlike my own polemical theatrics which I enjoy wearing up-front
where you can be fully entertained.
> Does that not lend at least tacit assent by ambivalence, if not outright assent? Welcome?
Not at all. It reads like pure sarcasm.
> The next 750 words are given over to normalising the "lot's of valid reasons" to surveil workers, and lending value to an emerging surveillance industry
This is a rhetoric device to underline that you understand the incentive of those employing it in preparation to offer a better alternative, e.g. actually capable management. Or just to explain why managers want to use it.
An employer has of course the right to check your work to know why he is paying you. I firmly condemn management employing crapware like this, I think the developers offering these solutions are very likely shady characters. Defining a goal a worker has to reach is exactly what surveillance management isn't capable of. Employees will optimize the metric not the business goal and honestly I would help them cheat it in any way possible.
> It would be improved by actual productivity studies, the psychological literature on workplace surveillance
I really enjoyed your theatrics, moist was a nice touch. Do you ever feel like an article can be written for its intentional expected negative backlash? What better way to do that then honestly present the frothy maw right up front for all to be disgusted?
> Do you ever feel like an article can be written for its intentional
expected negative backlash? What better way to do that then honestly
present the frothy maw right up front for all to be disgusted?
Interesting point Peter. Yes. Indeed, maybe I misjudge the author's
sophistication (or how The Economist is playing it). But that tactic
opens up great risk of being misinterpreted. At some point one needs
to state an intent/position quite clearly.
Someone in an earlier comment mentions sarcasm. I think to do what
you're suggesting, at least for an Anglophone reader, would require
that you coded your prose as sarcasm. I don't find that easy. While
slipping occasionally, I honestly try to refrain from it, not just
because it's "the lowest form of wit", or because it risks
misunderstanding, but because it carries a "defensive" tone, and I
very much prefer to go on the attack in my prose in accordance with
Nietzsche's "If it's shaky, push it." Dostoyevsky said it best, that
it's a "cry of pain". Sarcasm, he thought, is "usually the last refuge
of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is
coarsely and intrusively invaded."
First, how very apt in this context. Second, as with dealing with
all bullies, better to walk right up and punch them on the nose.
Lastly, despite my sometimes acrid tone, I'm really an optimist about
fellow humans. Best to give people the benefit of the doubt to see
things as they are.
They only drifted "leftwards" after 2008 when they started lobbying for governments to bail out banks. Once this was done, they went back to "orthodoxy".
You strike me as someone who is at least right on the cusp of breaking through to understand what is really going on, however, if not, I encourage you to reconsider the assumptions and motivations of all the labels and affiliations of organizations and people and social strata you were likely also “taught” about all your life, mostly through “history”. It is an odd thing that many, if not most humans assume good faith/intentions even in the light of the starkest and most overpowering mountain of evidence. I guess not much in the universe is more powerful than the human capacity to deny having been fooled. Cue Mark Twain quote here.
As I understood it Blake's Jerusalem didn't literally anticipate the
inhumanity of the northern mills (child labour etc - which the phrase
has since come to signify), but the orthodoxy of church, schools, law,
and halls of Apollonian indoctrination which he saw as obstacles to a
more fully human reality. He was, to use a term from Christopher
Hitchens, an anti-theist in the fullest sense, against all theisms
including those we would recognise today as "technological
orthodoxies". While also arguably the worlds first multi-media artist,
he eschewed the paper 'tygers' as Promethean follies. Rather prescient
I would say.
Feels like every damn thing that happens gets used as a pretext to enable more and more surveillance. Will we need job boards specifically for jobs that don't do surveillance too?
>Last year Fujitsu, a Japanese technology group, unveiled AI software which promises to gauge employees’ concentration based on their facial expression.
Just need software that punishes employees who aren't happy enough at work, then we'll have a proper nightmare.
> Everything about their employees is monitored and tracked, down to individual finger and eye movements, to prevent waste and track performance. All emails that are sent out include an estimate of how long they should take to read. Go to fast, you get scolded for not paying attention. Go too slow, you get scolded for inefficiency. Get it just right? You get scolded for being a smartass. —- Snowcrash
'The “robot” installed at this first Burger-G restaurant looked nothing like the robots of popular culture. It was not hominid like C-3PO or futuristic like R2-D2 or industrial like an assembly line robot. Instead it was simply a PC sitting in the back corner of the restaurant running a piece of software. The software was called “Manna”, version 1.0*.'
That story was truly a horrific vision of the future.
Where's the software letting me surveil my supervisors? They're supposed to be spending some time and effort on me, so I have a legitimate need to make sure that's happening. There should be software that scans their emails and chat for discussions about open positions, projects, or trainings that are a good fit for me. Then it'll let me know if they recommended me, or mentioned my name in a negative context. Of course, we'll need AI for that. Maybe even let me just read the logs, to get a human in the loop. Purely a professional interest, of course.
/s
At an ex-job, shortly after I quit they got a new middle-level manager. The new boss started complaining to everyone about every time he saw them arriving to the office late, so the guys collaborated on a spreadsheet to track the boss's work hours to the minute, every single day.
And…?
You are looking for Sousveillance ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance).
And here's a paper on his it can be attempted at workplaces: https://www.sjjg.uk/pdfs/cecchinato-gould-pitts-2020-self-tr...
> Just need software that punishes employees who aren't happy enough at work
Automating the good old “floggings will continue until staff morale improves”.
Though given a choice between that and the utterly cringy gamification¹ that some managers² seem to think doesn't make us want to high-five them in the face with a chair, I know which I'd hate least.
[1] which thankfully seems to be going out of fashion, but it'll be back again soon with a slightly different mask
[2] or “team togetherness and efficiency encouragers” or other fanciful titles they might have
> efficiency encouragers
That is quite the title. Imagine if they would just work and you actually had someone to help you. A whole new universe of productivity.
I genuinely shiver when I read language like this despite being very much a corporate child. I count my blessings that, at least until now, even when I was tracked, my boss either cared about results or 'metrics' were good enough or the boss liked me.
I am not entirely certain how to prepare a child for this world. Short of running your own company, it will be hard to avoid the beast.
I suspect double speak will be elevated to a new artform. a large corporation has no standard basis by which t judge output. Managers may love your work, but it's hard to objectively quantify whether they have the right calibration.
Software that automatically says “you should push how harder”, “john is harming morale”, “jane is overworking”. Will be too tempting for a detached senior leadership to resist.
At my firm, laptops seem to have mysteriously gotten slower recently, chrome now regularly crashes on moderately sized documents. I would be surprised if it's not spyware related.
I'm moving over to a Linux machine as soon as I can, that way I can benefit from lack of software support.
We're used to a comfortable and secure world.
The fact is the world is not by default this way. Sometimes people have to fight, and die, for rights.
Many Japanese companies have really fucked up ways of measuring "work". They work hard to make these AI and tech-based things to measure some dumb stats that have nothing to do with getting actual work done.
I've heard of a company measuring how "well" a meeting went based on some AI analysis of people smiling. So much time here is wasted on managing workers and talking about how to work, instead of just getting shit done.
There is an urban legend that being asleep at work would be seen as being productive since you obviously work so hard. This would be my chance to become employee of the month.
Some jackass dean or administration flunky complained about (sleep deprived) students asleep on the couches in Georgia Tech's Klaus CS building. I guess it didn't look good for donors or something.
So they put up a bunch of signs above each couch and bench that said "No sleeping."
I've still got a collection of pictures of people sleeping directly under the signs. Fight the power. :-)
Depends on when you are asleep and how you act when you wake up to help your colleagues.
The moment a measure becomes a KPI it is not longer a useful KPI.
yep, and people, especially many managers just DO NOT seem to understand that... they look at you like your speaking klingon....
Now KPI is stuck in my head as Klingon Productivity Indicator…
"You have challenged me for the position of Employee of the Month, and must now meet me in single combat…! Do not forget to bring your Bat'leth, I will not be merciful."
"Live Gagh will no longer be provided in the break room, as it was encouraging too many breaks. "
"The sales team has no honor, and our Product Manager acted like a spineless P'taaq in that meeting! I have deleted their logins and assumed command myself!"
" A true Klingon warrior tests their code in production."
"What is this talk of "Pull Requests"? A true Klingon warrior makes DEMANDS! "
"The beatings will continue until this team shows a TRUE warrior spirit. "
" This burndown chart is pitiful. It is barely singed!"
" When I take a mental health day, it is for YOUR mental health. Do not waste this opportunity. "
"You joined our team over a year ago and have still not challenged me for my position. We need to discuss your career goals."
> Just need software that punishes employees who aren't happy enough at work, then we'll have a proper nightmare.
Ask, and ye shall receive: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/mar/03/c...
Alternatively you could just treat your employees well and they will want to perform for you.
... or treat and think of your employees as human beings who sometimes are more productive than usual and sometimes less productive than usual, but on average perform "well enough".
If companies aim for maximum, minimum and average to trace one flat line across diagrams visualizing some kind of performance metrics, then us humans will never ever live up to those expectations.
How to you put that in a pivot table you add to your slide deck? If it can't be measured it has no value.
Somehow that's the last thing anyone ever wants to try.
Even better is the hypocrisy.
"We value your autonomy! We know studies say happy, autonomous workers perform better!"
Proceeds to stifle autonomy by invading your privacy in whatever way is legal or difficult to prove illegal.
Lies are our most inexpensive resource. Use them wherever possible.
So... Making clear the goal isn't performance.
Has worked for me. I expect that to continue.
Consideration due is consideration given.
Put another way: people care exactly as much as they are cared about.
Costs too much. Fear is cheaper.
> based on their facial expression
Phrenology is still pseudo=scientific bullshit even when the calipers[1] are replaced with an "AI" black box of software.
> Just need software that punishes employees who aren't happy enough at work, then we'll have a proper nightmare.
"RSA ANIMATE: Smile or Die"[2]
[1] https://images1.bonhams.com/image?src=Images/live/2006-06/16...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo
>Feels like every damn thing that happens gets used as a pretext to enable more and more surveillance.
If bosses could have slaves working for them, a vast majority of them would use slaves in an instant, without thinking about it. At best, they'd use a contractor or two removed from them, to mitigate the ethical accusations (same way they justify the use of sweatshops, child labor in mines, violently threatening and beating or even murdering workers when they stand up, and so on, in the production/supply chains the most seemingly "progressive" companies).
The only reason they don't have everything they want atm, and societies got things like paid leave, the 5-day 8-hour workweek and such, has been pushback (which was reristed fiercely, with many dead in the process). Pushback, plus, when the global communist movement was still a thing, and still shiny to many, the danger of working classes falling for socialism as an alternative to capitalism, which between the 30s and 70s did wonders in securing concessions from capitalist governments.
Since pushback has stopped, and the alternative system of production is dead and/or discretided, in any job market that they have the upper hand, they'll reinforce any 19-th century norm they like.
^This a thousand times over. The workers' benefits we enjoy today in Europe like 8 hour workdays, minimum 20 days vacation, paid sick leave, free healthcare, pensions, unemployment benefits, etc. were due to the communist movements sweeping Europe after WW2 which governments and industrialists fought hard to suppress so they had to give concessions to the workers in order to keep their business afloat and prevent them from rioting/striking.
But, the collective labor pushback has stopped since the great offshoring took over in the last 30 years thanks to globalization, and various labor unions lost their power as the great industrialists moved the labor intensive jobs overseas where they could easily enforce their 19-th century norms and environmentally damaging practices and make killer profits, which in term bought them more lobbying power and political influence back home to push for lax immigration and lax trade policies with oppressive regimes, to further water down local wages and working conditions to "increase economic competitiveness" with those oppressive regimes.
Now we're slowly moving back to longer working hours and worse working conditions, but not by force like in the past, but by making housing and living so insanely expensive and getting a job so competitive, that the only chance people have is to willingly sacrifice the quality of life to get a head start in the rat race over everyone else, unless they were lucky enough to inherit some generational wealth that has appreciated, like a house.
Couple this with economic policies where at every crisis or dip in the economy, the well off, asset holder and big companies get further boosted up and amass even more wealth, while the lesser well off and small business go bust and end up worse off and pushed "further back on the monopoly board".
> But, the collective labor pushback has stopped since the great offshoring took over in the last 30 years thanks to globalization, and various labor unions lost their power
Not just that. A large portion of the loss of influence of unions was the riseup of the pacifist dogma. Just look how all the benefits were won: by (sometimes extremely) brutal violence, by the blood of the workers who died by the hands and guns of corporate goons [1].
A very good example is the social structure and workers rights of the two neighboring countries France and Germany. French workers are routinely willing and able to commit to violence both in the office (in the form of "bossnapping") and on the streets and the public supports that, and when German protests escalate into a couple of banks getting redecorated with paint, concerned citizens turn up to clean the fucking bank [2]!
As a result of that difference in attitude, German workers have it way worse than French workers - politicians in France know that the cost of going against the people is high. A society that doesn't fight for its rights eventually gets taken over by those that do. Democracy is not god-given, it is earned by blood and needs continuous maintenance, otherwise it erodes.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/the-10-biggest-strikes-in-u-s-h...
[2] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/g20-in-hamburg-bu...
Re G20: The people making the mess were young activists, the article even mentions their group affiliation by name. They are not the working class, they are a nuisance to the working class. I'd be in favor of classifying them as terrorists.
>I'd be in favor of classifying them as terrorists
Same with Antifa. Some protestors are basically just mindless hooligans and their protests and property damage are harming the small business and working class people a lot more than the politicians and the ruling class.
Like during the protests in France I kept seeing many mid-range Renault/Peugeot/Citroens on fire on the streets of Paris. Chances are those were most likely the cars working class people used to get to work the next day and not the cars of fat-cats.
I agree with protesting violently against governments but what use is destroying working class property?
The problem is that violence gets attention and sometimes conciliatory action like nothing else.
Riots and terrorism generate world headlines, while peaceful picketing rarely gets anywhere near the attention (unless it's also met by violence, as the nonviolent demonstrations and sit-ins were during the Civil Rights struggles in the 60's).
I am a pacifist myself, and am completely against violence, but I can see why some people who have less of a problem with it might find it strategically advantageous.
The willingness to resort to violence is a great part of the reason that the world is as much a hellhole as it is now.
> The problem is that violence gets attention and sometimes conciliatory action like nothing else.
The thing is, the government itself is violent at its core:
- cops beating up peaceful protesters or executing people on the streets
- cops evicting people from their homes because they can't keep up with rent
- cops arresting women because of miscarriages (over 1.200 in 15 years per [1]!) and soon because they dared to abort an unwanted pregnancy
- social security systems, especially unemployment insurance, are purposefully laced with endless hoops to be jumped through, all in the name of denying as many people as possible access to these while still being able to claim that "we have a system for poor people"
"Peaceful resistance" against this level of violence is a pipe dream. The insistence on "peaceful" resistance, the complete lack of material consequences for offenders acting as part of the government is the reason why civil rights are under attack by the government as harsh as they are at the moment.
I'm not a friend of violence myself, but I absolutely refuse to look down on people for deciding to go the militant path in the face of the violence that governments are committing against the common citizen every day.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544
Something else to consider, for those that don't object to violence on moral or ethical grounds, is that violence is often counterproductive.
If used against powerful governments it usually results in violent crackdowns which wind up killing off and/or imprisoning the leaders of the anti-government movements.
When used against weak governments, the government may topple, but what arises in its place is often even worse than the toppled government, and that tends to be followed by much more bloodshed.
If used against the populace it tends to cause both vigilante violent reaction and a resentment of the populace against one's cause.
Violent action usually leads to violent reaction, and the moderates are killed off by those who are even less reluctant to use violence to achieve their aims.
Countries thus afflicted not infrequently are plunged in to the horrors of civil war, which suits the extremists of every stripe, while ordinary people who just want to live their life are devastated.
Non-violence however requires (!) a functioning democracy that listens to the citizens - one might argue that a democracy that listens to and serves the interests of all people is the only way for any progress that is achieved non-violently. For me, the rise in political violence in the US is not surprising at all given how more and more of the citizenship has been left behind and ignored by its representatives. And even the progress that happened in the US' recent history... a lot of it only happened after large scale riots (such as the Civil Rights Act 1968). Fittingly, it was MLK himself who said the famous quote "riots are the voice of the unheard".
Especially regarding revolutions against authoritarian regimes - I can't name even one major society that went through the change from an authoritarian government to a democracy without a war or revolution of some sort (even the British parliament's history has a couple of wars related to it). Usually, two or three revolutions, civil or external wars are part of any major democracy's history.
Burning down property of the working people is not gonna make you friends, you know. If you are being violent and made up some excuses for it, at least direct it towards your enemy.
In Germany at least Antifa aren't terrorists. Actual hooligans are much more destructive by several magnitudes.
State intelligence often tries to frame them as terrorists but they break fewer laws than the state itself. Also by several magnitudes.
> In Germany at least Antifa aren't terrorists. Actual hooligans are much more destructive by several magnitudes.
Not to mention much more murderous. Fascists have murdered over 200 people since the reunification [1], left-wing oriented people four in the same time [2]
[1] https://www.dw.com/de/chronologie-rechte-gewalt-in-deutschla...
[2] https://katapult-magazin.de/de/artikel/gegenueberstellung-po...
It's little weird to slip tight-immigrarion into your communist manifesto. Immigration is only a problem when workers are forced to compete for livelihood. Immigrants crrate demand which creates more work opportunity.
Except you are competing for livelihood. The supply of real estate, doctors, schools, teachers, jobs, is very inelastic, all of which is needed for the newly arrived.
Is getting a job so competitive? Last I heard there was a labor shortage
If there really was a shortage, employers would offer concessions, better working conditions, WFH, more vacation days, etc. Just look at truck drivers or hospitality for example. Just because employers say it's a shortage doesn't always make it true or it doesn't mean it's not their fault for the shortage for refusing to offer better conditions.
Depends on the field of course, but from my experience interviewing in tech, the market is very competitive now in my area in Europe for those without a lot of experience, and employers are not willing to offer any concessions besides the minimums mandated by law. Asking for full WFH is also out of the questions most of the time. This signals to me that there is no shortage, otherwise employers would be more accommodating for this.
In my country there is also a perpetual shortage of doctors and nursing staff in the public sector despite an abundance of them in the private sector. So the shortage is purely because the government is not offering the right financial incentives and working conditions for them to stay in the public sector.
My point is that "shortage" is always relative and we should look at the full story and the complete context to understand where it comes from and why it's happening, because without context I'm also having a perpetual shortage of Ferraris and Lamborghinis, though the full story is that my budget is $5000 and not a cent more, yet that information kind of changes and explains everything.
So, in conclusion, most of the times, "shortage of workers" just means people unwilling to work for the poor conditions and compensation being offered by employers, not that there's a shortage of people capable of doing said work or capable of learning to do it if offered the chance/training.
I think there are several factors that play into this and beyond the points you mentioned, I wanted to introduce one more.
Size of the companies appears to matter when it comes to accommodations. In my industry, companies are effectively offering the same WFH policy across the board making people like me suspicious that CEOs banded together to discuss 'best practices', but anecdata from social circle suggests that smaller companies do work to accommodate people they want to keep.
"Last I heard there was a labor shortage"
For a counter, see the following article on demand outstripping supply of remote jobs: [1]
In some fields, like tech, there's a strong demand, but not so in plenty of others -- especially if you as a worker make the unreasonable demand to be paid a living wage or not be worked to the point of burnout.
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220421-are-there-enou...
There is a shortage of people willing to work shitty jobs for shitty pay. Employers could fix this by either making the job less shitty or raising the pay.
The inflation complaint is similar. We've had ludicrous inflation in housing, college tuition, health care, and many other things for over a decade. Inflation is not a problem until it starts to hit wages and supply chains.
There's a shortage of people willing to work in terrible conditions.
I'd usually add "for a pittance," but I see FAANG (is it now "MAANG"?) companies offering pretty insane salaries, but they are notorious for difficult working conditions.
Finance is another industry notorious for working their employees like slaves. Which I never understood, as these are some of the richest companies in the world, which could easily afford to hire more people instead of overworking the ones they had.
Doctors and nurses are also infamously overworked, with crazy shifts and lack of sleep being the norm. This is even more unconscionable as lack of sleep can lead to mistakes where patients die.
Here in NY, many of my friends were once traders or brokers, in Finance. They passed their Series 7 (or whatever), and worked a few years in brokerages or banks.
Pretty much universally, they report the experience was a tornado, and they could only manage it for a few years.
But they made a lot of money. The smart ones, lived humbly, and saved up, using their earnings to do things like start small businesses.
It’s kind of surprising, to talk to a painter, or shopkeeper, and have them tell you about their “days on The Floor.”
I've seen "MANGA" lately, but everyone still knows what you mean by FAANG
"Will we need job boards specifically for jobs that don't do surveillance too?"
Are there jobs that don't do surveillance?
Seems like every company's jumping in head first.
Are there jobs that don't do surveillance?
Try front-line and front-line-adjacent healthcare. Due to federal privacy laws, a lot of ordinary office surveillance tech is not permitted.
It's not uncommon for regular offices to have "security" cameras. But when IT tried to put the cameras all over our building, the legal department told them to go stick their heads in a pig.
I wasn't part of the discussions that followed, but based on my company's privacy training, I can imagine a couple of problems:
- Legal didn't want even the remote possibility that a "security" camera might be able to view a patient's records on someone's screen.
- Legal didn't want any record that a particular patient went into a particular office, thus identifying them as having a particular ailment. (It's the same reason all of our promotional flyers sent in the mail have to be in a plain white envelope, and not postcards announcing to the world "You're overdue for your herpes follow-up!")
There are still security cameras, but they're only allowed in the employee parking lot. And I think I've seen them in the server rooms. But that's pretty much it.
They probably also didn't want video evidence when their doctors or nurses screw up, which would make malpractice cases against them stronger.
Video evidence could also exonerate them, of course. But they probably erred on the side of opacity and the status quo over more transparency, as ass-covering corporations often do.
Just make some friends in the accounting department and plant a few seeds.
Our developer systems come with 32/64GB memory, multiple TB of NVMe storage, high-end processors, discrete GPUs to drive 4 4K monitors, etc. But we save $30 via the Dell configurator by skipping bluetooth, wifi, cameras, etc.
Nah, in retail, we used to have this software known as "secret shoppers." If they didn't see someone smiling, the store or department would be docked points on its evaluation, and you'd be hearing about it from your boss and boss's boss. Now all of us WFH minions below the lowly programmers will be subject to a smiling rictus as our cameras, microphones, and keyloggers determine productivity scores, work morale, and redundancy scores for the next layoff.
How long before somebody uses AI to permasmile your face in virtual conferences? The market is ripe for an arms race here.
Oh man, thats too funny, can you imagine the glitchy smiles snapping off someones face as they slightly turn their head? All the sudden every meeting is filled with barely perceptible uncanny artifacts... So far everywhere I've worked is cameras off except for intimate meetings (and even then its optional/reciprocated), usually a few people will try to keep their cameras on to start a trend or something but I imagine ends up feeling like an idiot with the only camera on.
Create 2 scenes in OBS, one a pure black background, one pure green. Video devices always seem to flicker between black and green when they're broken.
Click the "Start Virtual Camera" button and switch to this webcam in your conference software, flick between the two scenes semi-rapidly
"ah man, my webcam is playing up"
https://obsproject.com/
you can do that with the snap filters. I use the mac app to overlay all sorts of goofy hats, sunglasses, laser eyes, etc.... onto my face to spice up dull zoom/teams calls.
Another reason too keep the COVID masks on for longer
I worked at a place once where we got a memo that asked everyone to stop clipping nails and farting because the microphones installed in our desks were picking these noises up. The memo even added that if you need to fart please go to the bathroom. It wasn't a joke email, they were serious.
Oh, also not many people realize this but CCTV cameras all have the capability to convey audio captured via an internal microphone. It just depends on whether they have hooked the wires up to enable this feature. But, the innate ability is there. And, the CCTV software the guards use have the ability to store, retrieve and play this back alongside the video playback.
One of the greatest benefits of working from home - which is seldom celebrated - is the ability to fart at one’s leisure without having to try silence it.
We need a new law. The Freedom To Have Our Farts Go UnHeard Act. ;D
No no no, the name of it needs to be an acronym as well.
The Freedom-to Always Rip True Act.
I've always yearned the ability to come up with creative business names, product names, etc. It appears you have mastered it.
If only there wasn't already the Fair and Reciprocal Trade Act.
Or have that video conference call from your bathroom.. as long as you're on mute.
Well in 2019 you coughed to conceal a fart, in 2022 you fart to conceal a cough.
I’m not a lawyer, but that sounds like such a violation of wiretapping laws.
I don’t know of any zero-party consent laws for audio.
I suspect that at least in the US, its probably not illegal to do this in a business, especially if it is spelled out in the employment contract that they have the right to monitor all communications.
The legalese and marketing terms CCTV companies use to describe audio capture is, "situational awareness"
It's not all bad, though. Sometimes it's used for good like the gunshot direction detection mics.
Imagine living somewhere where "gunshot direction detection mics" are considered normal and good, instead of the dystopian nightmare it actually is.
Pretty sure these devices are being installed all over the world, including countries with very strict gun laws and very low rates of gun ownership.
Most indoor gunshot detection systems use dedicated hardware, with the microphone going into an on-board audio analysis circuit. They generally cannot be used for ambient listening.
Yeah totally different sound profile, a gunshot versus a whisper. And they were designed with that in mind, materially helping police without full-on police state.
But like a lot of the time nobody goes, nobody cares. Depends on the murder...who and where, and like the budget, if the budget just got slashed...
Tangent. So that's when the apathy inescapably sets in for police departments susceptible to it, when they want nothing more than do their jobs but just can't get the resources to actually do their jobs. Have to be more selective, do something similar to doing their jobs but not as expensive. Pretend to do it, answer the phone but get victims off the phone unless the case is stereotypical, bounce people to a different state service. Or recently when I was pressing charges for being assaulted here in Santiago, first assault I actually had minor wounds in so first time I could press charges. Fought back obviously, fight back every time.
So the printer was low on toner, and my form looked blurry and shitty. Still legible though, just a legal document of inferior worth, as evidence for instance or as collateral for picking up on the case later, because of low production values. I told him a company would have a little closet stocked up with more toner things--all office supplies--so they could print all the forms they needed to print. The policeman said "yeah that's how it should be, that's the dream."
Like it was a fantasy to the extent he couldn't articulate what ought to be done about it. In the meantime, they do what the can. But they can't do what they can't do.
Another example was a rock I picked up after a riot, like 12 ounces, weighed as much as a hammer, obviously for stoning people. Picked it up at 22:16 hour when things cooled down and the show's over. Obviously the intention was to kill policemen. Brain damage. You could tell from the weight, and actually it was too heavy for its purpose, it's like a shot put, evidently malicious. And it had no business where I found it, piece of concrete specifically chiseled in order to stone people with. I got stoned in March, the stoners were aiming for police on motorcycles. Didn't get hit, but the intention was there, I was considered pro-police.
And in fact I am pro-police, pro-carabinero, so going back to that rock, I told a policeman I collected it, wanted to present it to them so they could do detective work. It was evidence of something. At the very least I got it off the street, apart from it there's no rocks there it was conspicuous. I don't know whether to post a photograph, I wish the police photographed it, did good old-fashioned detective work on who made it, with what type of chuzo (like a pick), whatever. The policeman (carabinero) said yeah...you know we're uh not the right station for forensics, you'd have to take it to another...Which other I asked...no another one. And for him I have no blame, absolutely none. These men and women are completely overwhelmed. I talked to them about it right after the assault, said "yeah everyone's insulting you, the screams, the graffiti, they say..." then struggling at how to express what I was talking about without actually spelling it out. I then saw a graffiti of what I was referring to on the wall across the street and said "There it is! You can read it for yourself!" Like people think it's so funny to insult the people who protect them. Haha, great joke, classic.
Same in California, so so many activists undermining them, like they can hardly do anything else for the benefit of society other than emasculating police. Any chance they undermine a gangster? Take a picture of a crime in progress but of the criminal, not the cops making the arrest but the actual assault or burglary or robbery?
So back to that assault, it was the stupidest shit, if the assaulter had been in a green uniform forty of the hundred witnesses would have filmed him swing at me, but because instead he took his shirt off as an escalation and obviously was not police, talked very shitty as part of the intimidation like making a show of how uneducated he was by his own volition, and made death threats like an ipso facto criminal, the witnesses respected him more, then yeah they were afraid of him. And nobody filmed it.
I looked for film evidence, photography even, nothing. Everyone was out of battery. It was a super drawn-out conflict, with like five escalations to which I didn't back down, before the punches and kicks. Like three bouts. It was a good clean fight, but oh well, I guess everyone had Apple iPhone 5S's like me whose batteries crap out weirdly, evidently not truly random.
Two witnesses though, and I thank them. A third witness wimped out on testifying.
Like he wanted best of both worlds, you see, protection from police (and men like me who fight back) against criminals, but at the same time bother criminals the least so they can be their favorite or least bullied. Suck up to criminals. That's the attitude. That's what's up.
Most CCTV cameras used in professional installations do not have any kind of on-board microphone. Many have an audio input option for an external mic, but it is very rarely used.
> the microphones installed in our desks were picking these noises up
I'd have a fleet of these things in the office within a week of that memo haha
https://www.amazon.com/AnnoyingPCB-Ultimate-Productivity-Des...
I imagine the best place for these would be in the faux ceiling above a smoke detector
I would record one and put it on a 15 minute loop on my phone, then set the phone close to the mic. In between I'd have it play some pink noise.
Work in construction, up to the minute they install the cameras.
I would say open offices are bull pens, not offices. Offices have walls, doors, and one person capacity.
I'm a software developer working remotely most of the time. My unionized colleagues and I pushed for and won an agreement to prevent our employer from surveilling us in this manner. Several other recently organized companies have gotten similar agreements.
https://twitter.com/WeBuildNPR/status/1522586389774221313?cx...
INAL, but it seems that the wording in the agreement leaves open the use of surveillance software on employees, as long as it's not for the purpose of "evaluating the employee's work product (i.e. job duties assigned to the employee), the time an employee took to complete their work, or disciplining an employee in protected concerted activity."
The company could still use such software on employees and claim it was doing so for security purposes, for instance, or maybe even just to make sure the employee was working (without evaluating the work product).
Why not prohibit the user of such software on employees entirely?
You are right that the language could be stronger. This was the outcome after a few rounds of proposals and counter-proposals. I believe that in the context of an overall agreement with a "just cause" provision, which we have tentative agreement on, we don't have to worry about "bossware" at all.
> The company could still use such software on employees and claim it was doing so for security purposes, for instance, or maybe even just to make sure the employee was working (without evaluating the work product).
This article will be incorporated into a larger collective bargaining agreement that specifies people can only be disciplined or terminated for "just cause". The most common "just cause" for termination is a failure to perform one's job duties. Our employer could not use information gleaned through software surveillance to demonstrate just cause, much as police officers can't introduce evidence obtained illegally in court.
> or maybe even just to make sure the employee was working
That would fall under "time taken to complete the work".
"Our employer could not use information gleaned through software surveillance to demonstrate just cause, much as police officers can't introduce evidence obtained illegally in court."
Interesting that you should mention this, as police have been known to use "parallel construction"[1] to get around such attempts to restrict what they're allowed to do.
If companies can still surveil their employees, they might also resort to something like parallel construction to come up with other excuses to discipline/terminate their employees, even when the real reason they did so was a result of surveillance.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
I recently had a manager insist that I install some MDM-like software on my laptop so that it could be tracked and managed remotely.
I said, "okay I'll do that, but then I'm never going to put that laptop on my home network, or use it on any network I may frequent outside of the office, so I'll just leave my laptop on my work desk instead". The point, of course, is the same reasoning behind IT policies that don't let people install stuff on work computers: if you're going to access my computer remotely, I won't trust it one single bit, so it doesn't belong on my home network.
This changed their mind, quick. All it took was a little resistance and "good for the goose and the gander" mindset, and the manager droid 'got it'. No, I won't be letting you spy on my family ..
This sort of approach only works reliably if you have a credible alternative to the negotiation.
The alternative, which was accepted, was that the administrator understand the error of their ways and not enforce such a ridiculous policy.
They forced that kind of software on my laptop, so I bought a personal laptop that I used from then on (I did open source work so barely ever needed to use something internal like a VPN) and then I quit.
Yup, "That's creepy as fuck mate" was all it took to dissuade a former manager from rigging the ceiling up with cameras for whatever he was looking at doing
Sometimes resistance is not futile
I simply uninstalled ours. IT couldn't understand why. Very thankful I have an understanding manager.
IT should never be treated as more senior to Development, imho. Sure, IT guy, you can put that software on there - but I reserve the right to Ghidra it into dysfunction.
Management has the authority to set policies on how work-provided technology is used since they can fire you for not following those policies (constrained by law). Between IT and developers, this isn't a fully-ordered relation since IT has jurisdiction to enforce those policies, and developers have jurisdiction on ensuring that software meets needed quality. If your management has ill-conceived policies that prevent you from being productive at work, includes everything from McAfee hobbled NTFS to being scheduled for 9 hours of meetings in an 8 hour workday, then leave and find somewhere more productive to work or accept that you're being paid to be unproductive.
The alternative, productive approach: stay, educate and dissuade draconian privacy-intrusive use of technology.
There are reasonable reasons to enforce MDM in some industries, e.g. healthcare, where not being able to prove that full disk encryption was turned on if an employee laptop is stolen can lead to fines large enough to end a company. The need to hire and retain talented developers leads us to do this in the least intrusive way possible while still complying with federal regulations, however.
I'm convinced that keeping track if your employee is visibly working or not is so fundamentally wrong. Especially in an office setting.
Just look at the output. Nothing more. Does the employee provide value at the end of the day or not. That's important. Not hours or anything else.
> That's important. Not hours or anything else.
Not to the bean counters. If they can get a good job out of you while distracted 25% of the time they think they could get 25% more out of you for no extra cost if they beat that distraction out of you.
It is one of those double standards many companies have: if you are needed to work extra “you are salaried, not paid by the hour, a bit of flexibility is normal and expected” but if you don't do 37.5 hours one week or are seen to be relaxing too much “your contract clearly says that you are paid to be actively on the job for X time, no less”. Luckily our current regime is far more sensible about this sort of thing, considerate even, though before that buy-out this sort of issue was on the list of reasons I was days away from walking out & burning a few bridges along the way.
It is an excuse for bad management that cannot set goals and verify if they are reached or not.
To be honest you should immediately exploit that for your own career. Office surveillance exploiters wouldn't hold back as well. Tell them you want set goals and no surveillance, make your employment conditional to that. If that doesn't work go to the next higher instance. If it is only the CEO or owner and he supports it, change the company. Otherwise make an offer to replace the manager or being elevated to the same position with defined goals. Often just a little resistance is enough.
Actual output is often hard to measure so we instead gravitate toward various easy-to-measure metrics - hoping that these are proxies for the real thing. The quantitative appearance of such metrics is intoxicating, particularly when it allows us to avoid thinking deeply about what would actually make a business better.
Also gives them an easy reason to get rid of anyone.
I wonder how it is that basic idea seems lost amidst a sea of increasingly painful ways to monitor and control.
The need to control is greater than...
I don't know. I lack that need, instead needing people to be great people more, and they can't be great when the environment they work in snuffs out greatness.
As a manager, would you worry about the stability of your own job role if you didn't have insight into the productivity of your reports?
Would you worry what would happen to you and the company if one of your reports introduced a serious bug or security flaw into the software?
(note: I think these concerns can -- and should -- be addressed in other ways that don't require intrusion into employees' day-to-day activities, but I raise them because I think they're part of the reason (along with compliance, perhaps in some cases?) why these systems are introduced in the first place)
>but I raise them because I think they're part of the reason (along with compliance, perhaps in some cases?) why these systems are introduced in the first place
Problem is, they are still proxies. Proxies are great at satisfying feelings, but proxies are by no means a guarantee they will reflect what they try to capture. There are no end of examples of perverse incentives showcasing how a metric can "feel" great, but end up being a big bag of nothing if not detrimental.
Other than that, even thinking along the terms of "well they must have a reason" is a great way of introducing slippery slopes all the way to extremism. I'd have a hard time arguing any answer would justify becoming more and more extremist and trying to deny people privacy and autonomy to such a degree.
> Other than that, even thinking along the terms of "well they must have a reason" is a great way of introducing slippery slopes all the way to extremism.
It's possible I misunderstand what you're saying here, but I think I agree; I wasn't intending to justify managerial surveillance, only to understand and elaborate why it might be happening.
Without understanding the cause(s), the tendency of organizations will, I'd guess, instead be to patch over any problems that arise -- the process equivalent of adding warning signs instead of fixing a dangerous bridge.
The solution in an effective employment marketplace is to build organizations that avoid the root causes entirely and thus attract (effective, motivated) employees and build desire in others to work at similar workplaces -- while perhaps reducing organizational running costs at the same time as a side-effect.
Especially in an office setting.
Why especially then?
>Why especially then?
Because some office workers think they are special in regards to their output being more creative and cognitive rather than physical and therefore should not be measured in the same fashion as the number of widgets per hour made by a factory worker or tiles per hour laid by a handyman for example, even though ironically, modern SW tools like Jira and processes like Agile & Scrum attempt to do just that, turn cognitive work into factory style repetitive assembling/plumbing work. Which most of it is :) B.R.B, gotta wrap up those story points for the end of the sprint. /s, but only barely
Hum... The only thing the tools do is documenting what is done and what needs to be done. All the commoditization of laborers is done by people.
And yeah, commoditization of factory workers is a large problem too, and the commoditization of the skilled professions (WTF, a real oxymoron) is a "what the hell are you even thinking?" situation.
This is what scares me about Metaverse. Initially I was like "Oh good, Facebook is blowing all of their resources on a bad idea everyone hates. I hope this goes badly for them!". Then I realized, the target audience for Metaverse won't have a choice-- it'll be a virtual office where people can work from home while under constant surveillance.
As an aside, I think I finally understand why Mark is so bent out of shape for the metaverse: His security detail.
Last I heard, Mark spends ~$24M/yr. on his security detail. He's got very thick glass installed in his house. 2 foot thick, but I can't confirm that. It's not just bullet proof, it's RPG proof, or something. The optical distortions are quite real through that much silicon and plastic.
I'm not privy to the details on FB internally, but I imagine that the guys you're paying ~$67,000/day will keep you pretty cloistered from threats, either real or potential. Now, combine that with issues like the Dictator's Information Problem.
As such, I'd speculate that Mark doesn't really get to talk with honest people all that much. Mark ain't dumb, he knows it, but he also thinks all the stuff his security team is telling him is real too. A team that doesn't stay employed if the threats disappear.
So, in Mark's mind one solution is to 'air gap' the people from him via the metaverse. He's 'with them' in the same visual spaces, but his security won't be compromised.
"Hey, Hiro, you want to try some Snow Crash"?
This needs to be illegal.
In Germany a lot of that stuff is illegal already or needs to be approved by the Betriebsrat (work council) but can come in through the backdoor as little known features of common software anyway.
I worked in a telco call centre. Everything was recorded on our computers, whee as t we said on phones and they had cameras in the office to watch us, plus human supervisors.
And yet everyone still flaunted all the rules: we were drunk and on drugs, we ate and had our cellphones.
Rules exist to selectively enforce against people who are not liked.
Get this. I worked for the company that produces most of the porn on the Internet. You know, the porn you can go to any torrent site and download for free within 10 minutes (and that statement has been true for as long as there has been an Internet and BitTorrent).
That company periodically took screenshots of all (ALL!) their employees' workstations. They monitor internal network for suspicious traffic and, until COVID happened, they did not let anyone work remotely.
Never understood what they were afraid of. Their content is already plastered all over the Internet.
You have to understand the primary purpose of that whole industry, which is not what most people think, in order to answer the question about what they were “afraid of”.
Let me just put it this way, you are correct that the concern with employee monitoring makes absolutely no sense, because that’s not the right perspective, assumption of motivation.
What are you trying to say?
http://archive.today/SGfHh
Came here for this. Thanks!
In the EU, or any country with strong privacy protection legislation, data of this sort is a liability.
Don't forget the home. With the ubiquity of security cameras privacy is eroding even in private. I am struggling now with properly placing cameras in an apartment and balancing safety, security, and privacy in a family environment.
Why do you want to place cameras in your apartment in the first place?
Maybe one camera for the entrance, if you have reasons to be paranoid (I was thinking about it for myself, because of weird landlord with second keys), but why more cameras?
edit: one further reason for myself I remembered, watching the small kids from the smartphone, while going out for some minutes. But in the end I never set it up
1. Security
I live in a leased ground level floor through apartment with three entrances not including 6 accessible windows. In order to cover an entrance from inside some of the living space would need to be included. To fully cover I would need 5 cameras and have them in bedrooms too. Exterior cameras could help, but I have no authority to install. While I have no specific reason to worry, I wouldn't want my landlord to install them and be able to see what/who comes in and out of the apartment and/or raise the rent because of it.
Even just covering the 2 main entrances I find it uncomfortable to be able to know when my spouse is entering/exiting the home, I trust them.
2. Kids When you need it you need it. Like when I was isolating with covid. However it is their privacy I am concerned also as I don't want them to think it's OK to be surveilled.
3. Safety Did I leave the stove on? Not so important, but since one entrance is a galley kitchen I easily monitor this and the rear entrance.
Is the basement flooding? This is actually a big one for me. Installing one here however would mean potentially spying on the landlord which I would not do without explicit permission.
None of these seem actionable to me. What are you trying to prevent that a camera would stop? If the basement is visibly flooding then it is flooded. If someone is on camera entering your home then they are in it.
What are you going to do about it at that point that you wouldn't be able to do about it the next morning or whatever? Insurance doesn't require camera footage and realistically the most likely outcome of any of this stuff is an insurance claim.
The kids thing I don't know, it certainly depends on your family's circumstances and your personal concerns with your children, who you know and I don't. There are definitely situations where a camera can be worth it there, but not as many as most contemporary wealthy parents seem to think.
Yes, some may be un-actionable, but there are actions I could take on others (e.g. flooding is not equal to flooded in my situation). Whether they are worth it is still not clear to me. As my kids a getting older it is not so important to monitor them without special circumstances. I do fail to see where wealth has anything to do with this though.
Edit: Moved edit to reply that was not an option before.
ok. I'm not trying to be hostile I only brought this up because you mentioned concerns with privacy and what your children are learning to tolerate and accept re: surveillance.
We feel safer with cameras but in practice there are few cases where we truly are. I think what the kids are likely to learn from this is that an authority's sense of security is a more powerful demand than their own need for privacy, something with, to me, pretty direct connections to the overall worker-surveillance conversation. I'm not judging you for having cameras or even specifically recommending you don't, just agreeing that your fears are justified and they may not be, probably aren't, worth it.
TBH I'm not sure what the wealth link is either! But I was poor/working class most of my life, and am high income now, and have friends in both groups. I just do not see cameras in the homes of people who are not affluent, except sometimes camera-enabled baby monitors. It may just be a matter of access but they aren't all that expensive so I'm not satisfied by that explanation.
Thinking about this more I agree with you and think the answer for me is to simply have the cameras off by default and only use implicitly when away and monitoring makes me feel better. They provide little, possibly negative, service during the time a household member is home. Being from a similar background as you I have a hard time with the labels rich/wealthy, so my apologies for being defensive. The wealth aspect is interesting as you pointed out because that is what I think of in the past, however now I think it is accessible for many as costs of cameras and online video storage come down. The usefulness of camera surveillance seems to diminish though when you are not trying to spy on people who have privelaged access to your home that are not household members and may or may not deserve the same level of privacy (to bring this full circle back to work surveillance).
While I would not put cameras in my home, I do want a copy of the record for myself in the event something happens on my property that I could be liable for, such as a trip and fall on the sidewalk in front of my house. Or if I have to use self defense, or if cops do something unsavory, or if someone breaks in or damages car, I have evidence. It is a type of insurance that costs basically nothing.
I was already able to provide a good look at a thief’s car who stole a package from my neighbor’s doorstep to distribute around the community. And the neighbor’s camera got the theif’s face.
I also have a dash cam for the same reasons. I want to have my evidence because others will probably have theirs and my evidence can be a tool to protect me.
Yeah my point is that you don't get those things from the cameras, or don't need them. Look:
It may cheap in terms of money but it does not cost nothing. It normalizes surveillance and fear, and reinforces our natural inclinations towards distrust and retribution. These things are understandably tempting but we are all better to the extent that we individually fight them in ourselves.> - that's a homeowner's insurance claim, and their problem now.
The increase in your insurance premiums due to an unfavorable judgment is my problem. I know from experience at my businesses.
>in your own home? very few prosecutors would pursue this and fewer juries convict it. I have incredibly little trust in the carceral justice system but even I can believe this will end in your favor
The cameras would not be in my home, but for example, if the victim claims I let them in, and I can easily prove that they broke in.
>camera won't stop them and it won't get them punished either. it might help turn it into a big media event which long-term may help erode these powers. but it won't help you.
It is not about punishing the cops. It is about protecting me from he said she said legal costs. And especially when it comes to cops since their word has a higher value than my word.
>It may cheap in terms of money but it does not cost nothing. It normalizes surveillance and fear, and reinforces our natural inclinations towards distrust and retribution. These things are understandably tempting but we are all better to the extent that we individually fight them in ourselves.
Sure, but everyone else is arming themselves, so it does not make sense for me to sacrifice myself and not have evidence in my corner if I want to use it, while letting others have theirs. It is not like I have easy access to a cops’ body cams.
Catching acts of domestic violence would be a reason. To prevent he said/she said instances.
NB: I don't agree with the increasing paranoia, it's just devil's advocate.
The most common reasons I've encountered:
- people put rooms up on Airbnb and are (perhaps understandably) paranoid about things being stolen. It goes too far if there are cameras in bedrooms though.
- people want to monitor their kids
- general monitoring to catch anyone who breaks in while they are out etc.
Have personally never heard of putting cameras inside for catching domestic violence: I suspect that abusers may be 'smart' in the sense that they'll catch on to this pretty quickly and prevent someone from doing it or manipulate the situation.
Abusers are far far more likely to use cameras against their victims than they are to allow a camera that could be used against them. Technology-enabled surveillance is already a major part of a contemporary domestic abuser's toolkit, this is not even theoretical.
Hadn't thought of that one. If domestic violence is between young brothers, this may be useful.
Ok, if you have to worry about that, than the solution is probably rather to get a divorce. (are secret cameras a legal way to get evidence?)
Divorce alone barely ever works, it's not as simple as that. I'd rather not stir the hornet's nest any further as the topic itself is far more delicate than that. It's just an example of why an increasingly distrustful populace might opt to secure themselves through home surveillance.
>are secret cameras a legal way to get evidence?
Depends entirely on the context and where you live. There are no universal surveillance laws. There are also social aspects outside the realm of court why one would opt to do so.
Some cameras can be physically shut with a lid. It’s a feature especially found at German providers like Bosh.
Security cameras at work are debatably legal under many states eavesdropping laws as I interpret the text. Of course INAL, and many places have better reason to have cameras, e.g. to curb shoplifting, but a corporate office really isn't one of those places. What am I going to do, steal some paperclips?
I always wonder - who will be looking at the footage? Your manager is obviously too busy, so there must be some department of workers checking on other workers?
Then, ownership. How can you be sure this video footage is kept safe and private? Who owns it and for how long can they keep it? Imagine a teenage child entering the wfh room while you're on a break, I can image wanting to have that video removed immediately.
Also - a home office which is surveilled this way must be decorated completely neutral; you might have an incorrect world map on the wall or a product made by a competitor in view, or perhaps a beach picture of your family to which people can be very sensitive.
I have so many objections against this.
Even in those states it's only illegal if you're not aware or don't consent. Very easy to add a "you consent to our surveillance" clause to your contract. Pretty good odds a lot of us have them in there already if we read carefully.
You can and should negotiate terms of employment before signing. The more we stand up for ourselves the less we will slide down this slippery slope.
Any devs here work on stuff like this? Why?
I recently had to install chrom'ium' on my work pc, because all the mainstream browsers were auto installing an un-removable tracking extension via some domain policy :(. I'm sure my manager gets some report at the end of the month detailing how many hours I had a news.ycombinator.com tab open
Why even use you work pc for non-work purposes?
If you want to browse HN, why not just browse it on your phone?
Because phones are small and horrible to type on.
Same here. It’s touted as a security add on but it also just happens to do lots and lots of tracking and reports for management
There are portable versions of browsers that you don't need to install and work just out of any folder.
What is the reality here? If a company adds MDM software to a laptop they have given you for work and you use it at home on your home network. Is it easy enough for them (in theory) to get on to the network and look on your kids or partners devices?
Or is that tin hat thinking?
I wouldn't call it easy - they might be able to see what is publicly shared, but shouldn't have any non-public access to the other computers/devices. But most of all, they wouldn't dare. Mistakes and individual excesses happen, though.
imagine thinking this is tolerable.
i might get checked up on a couple of times by the customer im framing houses for, and another two times by the city inspector.
no HR, no surveillance, no office politics.
The great human-robot convergence. AI and robotics are getting closer to humans and humans (especially workers) are pushed closer to robots
The article is ironically behind a cookie wall.
Where do you see "celebrating" in the article? Over half of it is devoted to worker pushback against surveillance and criticism of the technology itself, including whether it even works.
The latter third of the article is devoted to push-back. Nonetheless, as all writers understand, bias can be subtle [1]
Let's start with the title.
"Welcome to the era of the hyper-surveilled office"
Does that not lend at least tacit assent by ambivalence, if not outright assent? Welcome?
The next 750 words are given over to normalising the "lot's of valid reasons" to surveil workers, and lending value to an emerging surveillance industry.
Thereafter 450 words describe the counterpoints, but frame this mainly as "dislike" and "feelings". Towards the end, the language does shift to a more humanistic tone, describing "snooping" and the "dangers" of over-zealous monitoring.
Overall though, I found the article lacks mature analysis, presents an "as is" hot take, and spins in favour of employer intrusion on the basis of 19th century industrial justifications.
Given the enormous impact of declining labour relations in an economically precarious era, and the currency of digital rights and surveillance in general, I am surprised The Economist did not attempt a more in-depth treatment of "boss-ware". It would be improved by actual productivity studies, the psychological literature on workplace surveillance, some modern ethical understanding of why this is unacceptable, and what the likely negative impact is going to be on, frankly dumb, companies that see this as legitimate.
Because ultimately, this stuff is bad for business, for everybody's business except a few spyware companies.
[1] Unlike my own polemical theatrics which I enjoy wearing up-front where you can be fully entertained.
> Does that not lend at least tacit assent by ambivalence, if not outright assent? Welcome?
Not at all. It reads like pure sarcasm.
> The next 750 words are given over to normalising the "lot's of valid reasons" to surveil workers, and lending value to an emerging surveillance industry
This is a rhetoric device to underline that you understand the incentive of those employing it in preparation to offer a better alternative, e.g. actually capable management. Or just to explain why managers want to use it.
An employer has of course the right to check your work to know why he is paying you. I firmly condemn management employing crapware like this, I think the developers offering these solutions are very likely shady characters. Defining a goal a worker has to reach is exactly what surveillance management isn't capable of. Employees will optimize the metric not the business goal and honestly I would help them cheat it in any way possible.
> It would be improved by actual productivity studies, the psychological literature on workplace surveillance
Not needed to reject it as an employee at all.
I really enjoyed your theatrics, moist was a nice touch. Do you ever feel like an article can be written for its intentional expected negative backlash? What better way to do that then honestly present the frothy maw right up front for all to be disgusted?
> Do you ever feel like an article can be written for its intentional expected negative backlash? What better way to do that then honestly present the frothy maw right up front for all to be disgusted?
Interesting point Peter. Yes. Indeed, maybe I misjudge the author's sophistication (or how The Economist is playing it). But that tactic opens up great risk of being misinterpreted. At some point one needs to state an intent/position quite clearly.
Someone in an earlier comment mentions sarcasm. I think to do what you're suggesting, at least for an Anglophone reader, would require that you coded your prose as sarcasm. I don't find that easy. While slipping occasionally, I honestly try to refrain from it, not just because it's "the lowest form of wit", or because it risks misunderstanding, but because it carries a "defensive" tone, and I very much prefer to go on the attack in my prose in accordance with Nietzsche's "If it's shaky, push it." Dostoyevsky said it best, that it's a "cry of pain". Sarcasm, he thought, is "usually the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded."
First, how very apt in this context. Second, as with dealing with all bullies, better to walk right up and punch them on the nose. Lastly, despite my sometimes acrid tone, I'm really an optimist about fellow humans. Best to give people the benefit of the doubt to see things as they are.
Respects.
That title clearly has a negative tone. Nobody reads that title and has a positive reaction.
As Lenin put it, "a journal which speaks for British millionaires". It hasn't changed.
They only drifted "leftwards" after 2008 when they started lobbying for governments to bail out banks. Once this was done, they went back to "orthodoxy".
I mean isn't this the american dream? Everybody can own slaves, if they just kick the ones below them hard enough and don't eat avocado toast.
You strike me as someone who is at least right on the cusp of breaking through to understand what is really going on, however, if not, I encourage you to reconsider the assumptions and motivations of all the labels and affiliations of organizations and people and social strata you were likely also “taught” about all your life, mostly through “history”. It is an odd thing that many, if not most humans assume good faith/intentions even in the light of the starkest and most overpowering mountain of evidence. I guess not much in the universe is more powerful than the human capacity to deny having been fooled. Cue Mark Twain quote here.
I hear ya Frank, but I'm a hopeless optimist and an old dog. It's probably too late for me. :)
"You'll work off that cake in the ACID MINES" - Homer Simpson, s12e07
"Dark satanic mills"
It's from a hymn describing the environmental destruction of the industrial revolution:
And did those feet in ancient time \ Walk upon England’s mountains green? \ And was the holy Lamb of God \ On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine \ Shine forth upon our clouded hills? \ And was Jerusalem builded here \ Among these dark Satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold: \ Bring me my arrows of desire: \ Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold! \ Bring me my chariot of fire.
I will not cease from mental fight, \ Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand \ Till we have built Jerusalem \ In England’s green and pleasant land.
As I understood it Blake's Jerusalem didn't literally anticipate the inhumanity of the northern mills (child labour etc - which the phrase has since come to signify), but the orthodoxy of church, schools, law, and halls of Apollonian indoctrination which he saw as obstacles to a more fully human reality. He was, to use a term from Christopher Hitchens, an anti-theist in the fullest sense, against all theisms including those we would recognise today as "technological orthodoxies". While also arguably the worlds first multi-media artist, he eschewed the paper 'tygers' as Promethean follies. Rather prescient I would say.
Damn this sounds like William Blake