Disclosure: im a "blue collar" automotive repair tech.
I cant understand why anyone would put up with a lot of this, but I can guess its probably some smug "white collar" manager who thinks production or revenue are down because people who didnt go to $college are inherently lazier than he is. Putting the screws on the workers is always the easiest way to compensate for bad decisions in the leadership change.
I worked in an old shop once that did an oil and air service for $59.99. We got a ton of business from a local rental car place because their service pool was under provisioned after their managers expanded the fleet. Now typically when working on simple stuff like a packaged deal, I inspect other stuff. Your brakes/brake lines and any leaks i might spot that seem dangerous. Those get logged in your invoice with a $0.00 fee. Typically the rental place would send the vehicle back for the additional service and a nice thank you box of donuts for the crew.
Management started seeing these 0.00 fees and assumed we were giving away free service because they didnt take the time to train on the computer system we all have to use. So they dismantled the service deal and started charging individually for everything, driving the cost up to close to $100. they also eliminated the inspection line items. We lost the rental place, and we had to spend 20 minutes hand writing issues we noticed on greasy post-its, which makes the shop look cheap.
I eventually quit the place when they started putting cameras in the garage bays "for safety" and changed our normal punch clock system to a fingerprint system...not because i dont like biometrics, but because they dont work when your hands are coated in 30 cars worth of grease and fluid. When the timeclocks broke down, we were always accused of sabotage.
> thinks production or revenue are down because people who didnt go to $college are inherently lazier than he is.
"Than he is" is unnecessary: He may think himself lazy, even to a point of pride when he thinks of the clever stuff he gets away with.
There are fundamentally two schools of thought when it comes to management:
1. People are inherently lazy, and work only to satisfy their needs - enjoying their job is at best a distant second priority. The best way to get things done is to drive them harder with closer monitoring, punishment for failures, and threats to their ability to satisfy their basic needs.
2. People are inherently creative, and work to satisfy their desire to create - your job as an employer/manager is to help them not have to worry about lower needs on Maslow's pyramid. The best way to get things done is to give them them a vision, opportinities, targets, and tools to be productive.
Just quit a job after 5 years slaving under the former type of manager, and my life has never been better since I began working under the second.
One of the common themes is the unintended consequences. For example, UPS drivers who get scolded because the truck records that it was sometimes in motion without them wearing their seat belt. Regardless of the circumstances before the scolding (there are lots of situations where it would be reasonable to make such a judgment call, esp on private property like a parking lot), afterward they would simply clip the seatbelt empty and sit on top of it. Then the truck registers 100% seatbelt compliance and they are far less safe since they're never wearing it.
Good for you. One of the most important lessons I've learned in life is knowing when to quit and having the gumption to leave unacceptable situations. The struggle of finding a new job, stressful it may be, is still a better feeling than being treated like a crap-piece. Life's too short for the assumed-guilty workplace, or to work for hack managers.
I think a lot of people grow up being told to "never quit", so they don't prepare for the day when they should quit. Thus, they don't sock away f-u money and they take on too many responsibilities too early in life.
It's funny, every time a post about hiring practices comes up, there are a million different and contrasting comments about how to hire. It's chaos.
Then an article and a comment like this come along.
Honestly, there are a lot of businesses out there that are just plain run by idiots and/or crazy people. It feels like the majority are, to me.
So, next time you feel like the only sane person in the room/interview/review, you really should consider the possibility that you are correct, and not dismiss that thought out of hand.
I was thinking up a reply and now you're confirming it before I even write it. That's amazing.
I tend to be critical during interviews and demanding during work... but I'm always ready to forward some trust towards the guys on my team. More often than not, I end up assuming "There's probably a good reason for that decision".
And so far, it has paid off. If I trust people to make good decisions, people make even better decisions than I could ask for. Many, many people want to do a good job I've found.
Over 20 - 30 people I've had on teams, there has been 1 guy who stretched that trust and he was a known troublemaker people put on my team as a test. As a result, I gave them a clean and solid case to fire that guy.
> I cant understand why anyone would put up with a lot of this, but I can guess its probably some smug "white collar" manager who thinks production or revenue are down because people who didnt go to $college are inherently lazier than he is.
That is literally exactly what happens, and how too many people in management think. David Noble's Forces of Production is about machine tool shops in the 1960s and 1970s, and is full of accounts just like yours (with details right down to management accusing workers of sabotage), with sources from both the worker and management sides.
Disclosure: I'm what most would consider "white collar". Also , this is tangential to your post.
One of my closest friends has been an automotive tech in the dealership world for the past 12 or so years and has mastertech certifications for 2 manufacturers.
I never cease to be amazed at how fucked that industry/line of work can be, even for someone who is firmly at the top of their game. The incentive structure seems totally out of whack to me, such that it's no wonder that people assume the worst when they are faced with having to take their vehicle in for service.
Was I the only one who thought about Y.T's mother reading the bathroom tissue memo in Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" (quoting below)?
Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo...
Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
Going back to Gibson's Neuromancer 10 years before 'Snow Crash' is also eerie:
"He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited
sarariman by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the back of the
man's right hand.
Was it authentic? If that's for real, he thought, he's in for trouble. If it wasn't, served him
right. M-G employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced
microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like that would
get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic."
That's how I imagine the Machine Intelligence dystopia. Not some kind of General Intelligence ruling like a evil human despot, but a inscrutable algorithm making decisions based on millions of data points, all affecting your life. Just like the gmail spam filter but affecting your job reviews, your access to health care, education, loans etc.
A majority of stuff mentioned in this article has to be outright illegal, if not borderline illegal when talking about privacy concerns. To get past it, they had to have put massive inclusions in their employee contracts and had employees sign off their entire existence to the company. It should also be noted that these happenings seem to all take place at sleazy, physical labor intensive companies. This isn't happening in any respectable sector I'd hope. I think the worst part is, is that these ideas are being created more and more by higher ups in companies and government who see no moral wrong in their plans. It doesn't affect them personally, but if it can be used in any way to further control a peon employee, then it's good for productivity. Even though it seems a bit like the article tries to defend this practice, there will never be a day on society where this is considered alright.
At the end of the day though, this is happening mostly to disposable workers who no on cares about. If one person complains about company overreach, well they can be replaced within 5 minutes. This is more something that lower income, down and out employees will have to worry about. This absolutely would not be tolerated to catch on to any respected industries/sectors. That's to not say physical labor workers aren't important, without them society would fall apart. It's that no one in authority typically cares about that type of worker and those employees concerns fall on deaf ears.
This isn't happening in any respectable sector I'd hope.
When a bigger company bought the smaller software company where I worked, almost the first thing they tried to do was change all the contracts to include things like universal IP claims and getting more visibility and control over things people were doing away from the office.
This culture was becoming pervasive even a few years ago, and the arrogance and contempt exhibited by the senior executive who came to tell us about it was almost unbelievable. It felt like he watched Darth Vader's "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further" scene and thought it was an instruction manual.
The only meaningful difference seems to be that since it was a software business, a significant proportion of the developers essentially telling them to shove their deal or we'd walk was powerful enough to put a stop to it. Obviously people working in unskilled jobs where staff are fungible aren't so lucky. We're supposed to have employment laws to protect people in vulnerable positions like that from exploitation, but welcome to 2018 I guess.
You would think so but companies like google do this for facilities management to divine usage patterns and whether to devote more or fewer resources to something. To know if more efficiencies might be derived. But yes it’s pernicious.
Most bigco has full monitoring and logging of everything that goes on in their networks and on the work computers and mobile devices. A bunch require MDM software installed on computers that access the corp network, so if you 'bring your own device', you have similar logging & control. Also security cameras recording everywhere.
Employees tend to use work computers for personal communication, browsing and shopping. They can do some fairly personal things on those computers because they don't realize the amount of monitoring, and who looks.
Some countries have laws against looking into personal usage of work computers, like Austria. Most don't.
Didn't read the article - but I have an opinion. Surprise!
I work in Infosec, and I believe filtering of web access are absolutely critical to any tech company, so much so I that I consider the lack of basic cyber security as [users can't go to malware.ru or run executables with their normal account] to be incompetent and certainly against industry regulations.
Your work computer is not yours to browse reddit on, unless the company assumes the risk of doing so.
Now, some things like behavioral analytics, emotion detection, micromanaging time and whatnot, that's spooky, costs outweigh benefits, and so on.
My employer recently started installing motion and heat sensors under employees’ desks. They claim it is not for monitoring individuals, but for analyzing workspace usage and identifying free desks.
Given that the company in question is a bank, and teams must often be physically separated from each other for compliance and liability reasons, I am highly dubious of that explanation. Only a handful of people outside my immediate team can even access the floor where we’re located, and they certainly couldn’t just plop down at an empty desk and start working. And yet we have the sensors anyway.
And even if that were the reason, the fact that they thought anyone would believe it is concerning in itself.
I know not everyone has the option to rebel against this kind of totalitarianism at the workplace, but as a person without family obligations, I'd sooner become a traveling hobo than work for a company that wants to implant a chip under my skin or so much as monitor my toilet breaks. F* that. My self-respect has no price tag.
My first bigger company experience consisted of a COO who felt the need to create seating charts every six months for no apparent reason. My smart ass blurted out, "I have not had a seating chart since kindergarten." Ya I lost that job.
One of my colleagues used to be required to clock out for a toilet break, and I recall that there was a minimum time he would be docked pay for, even if his break was less than that. He worked for a supermarket.
My partner used to work for a business that had a swipe-in resolution of 15 minutes, so if you were just 30 seconds late, you would be docked 15 minutes of pay. You had to work the unpaid 14.5 minutes or you got your butt kicked out the door. That was a factory job.
I once applied for a job that I thought was doing security engineering type stuff, and that's what the posting certainly described, but in the interview it quickly became a bait and switch, and they started explaining in detail about how their product monitors employees network usage in detail and the lengths they go through to make sure it is hidden on phones and workstations so employees don't know.
Nobody who worked there seemed to have a problem with it. I ended the interview early which apparently infuriated much of the company. Threats were made, but thankfully I never heard from them again.
You can say no to making bad things. Even if you work at Google, you can say no.
> I ended the interview early which apparently infuriated much of the company. Threats were made, but thankfully I never heard from them again.
Wow. Most would be thrilled that an uninterested candidate is moving on quickly rather than getting the job then immediately quitting or being terminated (both of which are things I have seen).
Trying to threaten a candidate into continuing an interview is just psychotic.
I've been a "techie" as long as I can remember, and truly believe in the potential of tech to make the world a better place. I put no stock in the AI fear-mongering "summoning the demon" stuff, and harbor only modest concerns about the long-term danger of "technological unemployment."
But this... this is the thing that gets me questioning if human nature is just so broken that creating newer and better tech really is a net negative for the world. This kind of story is the one thing that makes me want to wash my hands of the whole lot of it, embrace anarcho-primitivism and go live in a shack in the woods in Montana or something.
Depressing doesn't even start to describe this stuff.
Holy... I’m pretty sure that most of these things are illegal in Germany.
In any case, my prediction is that once these things go mainstream, companies with values that rely on trust as a core element of collaboration instead of surveillance will gain an advantage in the job market. I hope I’m right
My guess is that most people will happily (or not so happily) trade salary and job stability for surveillance. Modern corporations are basically authoritarian so the trend towards total surveillance will increase in my view.
A company I used to work for once tried to measure the productivity of developers by having a visible dashboard with each developer's amount of lines of code written (or rather lines of code committed to our Git repo). Anyone that knows anything about programming could tell you that quantity of code means nothing in terms of productivity and likely will make the worst programmers look best as a bad programmer will likely reinvent the wheel every chance they get thus having more lines of code that a good programmer.
Also, this company would repeatedly under-scope projects, go over budget and over the deadline in the design process, and then blame it all on developers when the project was behind schedule and over budget.
My employer monitors tap in, tap out and break times too. It started with a "good intention" from the HR and middle management started exploiting it in no time.
Background:
There was a lot of new about a year or two ago how the Japanese government was starting to take initiatives to reduce the overtime culture here in Japan. We always had to tap in our security cards to enter the building and perhaps the timings were always recorded for security concerns. But, the HR announced that in an effort to reduce overtime culture, these times will be automatically entered in the attendance system and your boss would be notified if you worked for 8 hours or more. "Ideally" the boss should then reprimand you and overtime, we would become overtime-free culture to work in.
What really happened:
While there were emails being sent for every employee working more than 8 hours, the manager would just approve it. There was no practical use of the new system and nothing improved. Rather, my managers started getting access to all this data they never had direct access to before. Colleagues were being sent emails if their break times exceeded 5 minutes more than the stipulated 1 hour. Same for coming in at 9:04 instead of 9:00.
When a colleague back lashed, upper management threatened him by telling him they could also dig up his PC on/off/sleeptimes etc to give him significant paycuts.
I started out in the IT industry as the sole tech support guy for an ISP in Oklahoma City in 1995. I eventually built it into a department of about 20 people answering phones and emails, then I eventually moved into sysadmin.
It was great when the goal was "solve the customer's problems and get them online".
When they hired an official "Customer Support Manager", it started being all about metrics and went downhill. "How many calls are you taking an hour" vs "how many problems did you solve".
I hear that one of the large hosting providers here in town even does screenshots of everyone's desktops every 30 seconds to a minute. That's insane. My employer, on the other hand, doesn't care what you're doing in another window as long as it's not illegal and you get your job done.
Luckily I've seen no evidence to support that claim other than the word of a man trying to sell microchipping services.
If anything it's the people around me in their 40s and 50s who are most cavalier about constantly sharing their location and activities with the world ala Facebook checkins.
There's also a huge problem with the article's followup question about GPS. It shows the author has no idea what he's talking about.
These chips are just passive RFID. This actually has been shown to be incredibly insecure; these chips have so little compute (necessarily), that all they can really do is broadcast a number. Walk by someone with a reader, and now you have everything you need to compromise security.
Given that you have to keep the implant super small to be easily injectable, how the hell could you put a GPS on that? You'd need not only the hardware for the GPS, but also a power supply of some kind. GPS is one of the most draining features on your phone. RFID and bluetooth are still the main technologies for consumer asset tracking because they're such a lower power drain.
This article is FUD. I would have a problem having an implant put in too, but it contains no more functionality than an employer issued badge. It's basically just a badge you can't put down. Now, that inserts all sorts of issues, yes, but it's not same as having a GPS or something that I can't put down. My phone is far, far more alarming from a privacy perspective than these are.
I'm an old millennial (or young gen X, depending on who you ask), but I can't see anyone thinking it's "cool" to have a tracking chip implanted like a dog.
I've never met anyone that's part of my generation that thinks being chipped is cool. I would argue that older generations are often more likely to "drink the kool-aid" when it comes to corporate policy.
What I see as troubling is the photo of the guy doing the chipping is a big bearded dude with tattoos. I also bet he was very smooth talker and was telling silly jokes and making people laugh. I would even go as far as saying this is done purposefully to give the procedure an edgy feel to lure young people. I wonder what the turnout would have been if an "average joe" came in to do the chipping.
It's the same thing as social media 'influencers' FOMO, envy and greed is what fuels the millennials. Too bad it's also their biggest cause of unhappiness...
Many years ago I was working on "electronic performance support" tools for call center operators at a large retail financial services organization, and someone proposed we install software on every worker's computer that measured idle time, keystrokes, etc.
I was vehemently opposed to this on simple grounds -- we already measured everything about the workers' performance that mattered to the organization's bottom line (customer satisfaction, productivity, etc.) -- what did we care _how_ they achieved their results? Measuring the wrong things is a total waste of time and effort. It's a distraction.
> In February, it was reported that Amazon had been granted patents for a wristband that ... could “read” their hand movements, buzzing or emitting a pulse to alert them when they were reaching for the wrong item.
Setting aside the privacy violations of the rest of the article, this part is really depressing for me. I'm reminded of an episode of Mind Field [1] where they steer live cockroaches through a mobile app by connecting a chip to its antennae - the potential application being scouting of buildings, since it's cheaper to use a live cockroach than build a tiny robot.
This to me feels like Amazon are working towards a fully robotic factory worker - they have all the smarts done in software, but for now they need to use a human for the body. Could you imagine how dehumanizing it would feel to be the body of a robot?
Besides the obvious ethical problems, I don't why companies are worried about inducing stupid cognitive overhead with this. Employees will obviously change their behavior in response, and that will require nontrivial mental energy.
this is tangential, but: the chips mentioned in the first section of the article are simple RFID tags, similar to the chip a vet might implant in your pet cat. they aren't GPS receivers, they aren't internet-connected, they don't even have a battery. they just store a key which is insignificant without the context of a larger system. i've seriously considering getting one of my own (to pair with smart locks or my car's ignition). i'm very privacy-conscious when it comes to technology, and people who know me are always shocked to hear me express interest.
there's a lot of unwarranted FUD surrounding implantable RFID.
The disappointing part is that these practices can easily become standard. It's a race to the bottom like sharing SSN numbers with employers, which should have never been an acceptable practice, but people will "undercut" each other.
Every single business has associations, lobbies and industry groups.
The power of collective bargaining it seems is understood with clarity everywhere in business. Except when it comes to labour suddenly the waters become muddied.
Propaganda against organizing and unions remain at the level of one bad restaurant or bank discrediting the entire idea of restaurants and banks and people with IQ see this as credible. Yet without collective action it is impossible to stop this kind of creep.
Capitalism and free markets is all about choice but working and a job is not a choice for most people. Surviving is a compulsion not a choice. True choice includes the choice not to do something which is where the economic power of choice comes from.
If all companies in a race to the bottom adopt these practices what choice does labour have and them being forced to accepting these conditions is anything but meaningful 'choice'. It's coercion.
[+] [-] nimbius|7 years ago|reply
I cant understand why anyone would put up with a lot of this, but I can guess its probably some smug "white collar" manager who thinks production or revenue are down because people who didnt go to $college are inherently lazier than he is. Putting the screws on the workers is always the easiest way to compensate for bad decisions in the leadership change.
I worked in an old shop once that did an oil and air service for $59.99. We got a ton of business from a local rental car place because their service pool was under provisioned after their managers expanded the fleet. Now typically when working on simple stuff like a packaged deal, I inspect other stuff. Your brakes/brake lines and any leaks i might spot that seem dangerous. Those get logged in your invoice with a $0.00 fee. Typically the rental place would send the vehicle back for the additional service and a nice thank you box of donuts for the crew.
Management started seeing these 0.00 fees and assumed we were giving away free service because they didnt take the time to train on the computer system we all have to use. So they dismantled the service deal and started charging individually for everything, driving the cost up to close to $100. they also eliminated the inspection line items. We lost the rental place, and we had to spend 20 minutes hand writing issues we noticed on greasy post-its, which makes the shop look cheap.
I eventually quit the place when they started putting cameras in the garage bays "for safety" and changed our normal punch clock system to a fingerprint system...not because i dont like biometrics, but because they dont work when your hands are coated in 30 cars worth of grease and fluid. When the timeclocks broke down, we were always accused of sabotage.
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|7 years ago|reply
"Than he is" is unnecessary: He may think himself lazy, even to a point of pride when he thinks of the clever stuff he gets away with.
There are fundamentally two schools of thought when it comes to management:
1. People are inherently lazy, and work only to satisfy their needs - enjoying their job is at best a distant second priority. The best way to get things done is to drive them harder with closer monitoring, punishment for failures, and threats to their ability to satisfy their basic needs.
2. People are inherently creative, and work to satisfy their desire to create - your job as an employer/manager is to help them not have to worry about lower needs on Maslow's pyramid. The best way to get things done is to give them them a vision, opportinities, targets, and tools to be productive.
Just quit a job after 5 years slaving under the former type of manager, and my life has never been better since I began working under the second.
[+] [-] mikepurvis|7 years ago|reply
One of the common themes is the unintended consequences. For example, UPS drivers who get scolded because the truck records that it was sometimes in motion without them wearing their seat belt. Regardless of the circumstances before the scolding (there are lots of situations where it would be reasonable to make such a judgment call, esp on private property like a parking lot), afterward they would simply clip the seatbelt empty and sit on top of it. Then the truck registers 100% seatbelt compliance and they are far less safe since they're never wearing it.
[+] [-] ravenstine|7 years ago|reply
I think a lot of people grow up being told to "never quit", so they don't prepare for the day when they should quit. Thus, they don't sock away f-u money and they take on too many responsibilities too early in life.
[+] [-] Balgair|7 years ago|reply
Then an article and a comment like this come along.
Honestly, there are a lot of businesses out there that are just plain run by idiots and/or crazy people. It feels like the majority are, to me.
So, next time you feel like the only sane person in the room/interview/review, you really should consider the possibility that you are correct, and not dismiss that thought out of hand.
[+] [-] tetha|7 years ago|reply
I tend to be critical during interviews and demanding during work... but I'm always ready to forward some trust towards the guys on my team. More often than not, I end up assuming "There's probably a good reason for that decision".
And so far, it has paid off. If I trust people to make good decisions, people make even better decisions than I could ask for. Many, many people want to do a good job I've found.
Over 20 - 30 people I've had on teams, there has been 1 guy who stretched that trust and he was a known troublemaker people put on my team as a test. As a result, I gave them a clean and solid case to fire that guy.
[+] [-] sedachv|7 years ago|reply
That is literally exactly what happens, and how too many people in management think. David Noble's Forces of Production is about machine tool shops in the 1960s and 1970s, and is full of accounts just like yours (with details right down to management accusing workers of sabotage), with sources from both the worker and management sides.
[+] [-] breakbread|7 years ago|reply
One of my closest friends has been an automotive tech in the dealership world for the past 12 or so years and has mastertech certifications for 2 manufacturers.
I never cease to be amazed at how fucked that industry/line of work can be, even for someone who is firmly at the top of their game. The incentive structure seems totally out of whack to me, such that it's no wonder that people assume the worst when they are faced with having to take their vehicle in for service.
[+] [-] profalseidol|7 years ago|reply
This has been ask throughout the history. And we have come a long way since we were duped that Kings, Queens and Popes have "Divine Authority".
However, today, we have been duped again. And just like in the past, people didn't readily realize it. It will take effort and probably blood.
Here's one good relatively recent example when people were finally fed up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
[+] [-] EvanAnderson|7 years ago|reply
Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo...
Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
[+] [-] sireat|7 years ago|reply
"He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited sarariman by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the back of the man's right hand.
Was it authentic? If that's for real, he thought, he's in for trouble. If it wasn't, served him right. M-G employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic."
[+] [-] Erwin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rotdhizon|7 years ago|reply
At the end of the day though, this is happening mostly to disposable workers who no on cares about. If one person complains about company overreach, well they can be replaced within 5 minutes. This is more something that lower income, down and out employees will have to worry about. This absolutely would not be tolerated to catch on to any respected industries/sectors. That's to not say physical labor workers aren't important, without them society would fall apart. It's that no one in authority typically cares about that type of worker and those employees concerns fall on deaf ears.
[+] [-] Silhouette|7 years ago|reply
When a bigger company bought the smaller software company where I worked, almost the first thing they tried to do was change all the contracts to include things like universal IP claims and getting more visibility and control over things people were doing away from the office.
This culture was becoming pervasive even a few years ago, and the arrogance and contempt exhibited by the senior executive who came to tell us about it was almost unbelievable. It felt like he watched Darth Vader's "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further" scene and thought it was an instruction manual.
The only meaningful difference seems to be that since it was a software business, a significant proportion of the developers essentially telling them to shove their deal or we'd walk was powerful enough to put a stop to it. Obviously people working in unskilled jobs where staff are fungible aren't so lucky. We're supposed to have employment laws to protect people in vulnerable positions like that from exploitation, but welcome to 2018 I guess.
[+] [-] mc32|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woolvalley|7 years ago|reply
Employees tend to use work computers for personal communication, browsing and shopping. They can do some fairly personal things on those computers because they don't realize the amount of monitoring, and who looks.
Some countries have laws against looking into personal usage of work computers, like Austria. Most don't.
[+] [-] pagerankedcunt|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unethical_ban|7 years ago|reply
I work in Infosec, and I believe filtering of web access are absolutely critical to any tech company, so much so I that I consider the lack of basic cyber security as [users can't go to malware.ru or run executables with their normal account] to be incompetent and certainly against industry regulations.
Your work computer is not yours to browse reddit on, unless the company assumes the risk of doing so.
Now, some things like behavioral analytics, emotion detection, micromanaging time and whatnot, that's spooky, costs outweigh benefits, and so on.
[+] [-] BonesJustice|7 years ago|reply
Given that the company in question is a bank, and teams must often be physically separated from each other for compliance and liability reasons, I am highly dubious of that explanation. Only a handful of people outside my immediate team can even access the floor where we’re located, and they certainly couldn’t just plop down at an empty desk and start working. And yet we have the sensors anyway.
And even if that were the reason, the fact that they thought anyone would believe it is concerning in itself.
[+] [-] ravenstine|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarsin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkirklions|7 years ago|reply
I think it backfired because the amount of people coming in late/leaving early hasnt gotten better. Tbh, fridays seem worse.
Now that we know we are tracked, people dont even hide it. Sub 40 hour weeks are becoming norm.(assuming you dont have a major issue)
[+] [-] dvtv75|7 years ago|reply
My partner used to work for a business that had a swipe-in resolution of 15 minutes, so if you were just 30 seconds late, you would be docked 15 minutes of pay. You had to work the unpaid 14.5 minutes or you got your butt kicked out the door. That was a factory job.
[+] [-] dingo_bat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] organicmultiloc|7 years ago|reply
Nobody who worked there seemed to have a problem with it. I ended the interview early which apparently infuriated much of the company. Threats were made, but thankfully I never heard from them again.
You can say no to making bad things. Even if you work at Google, you can say no.
[+] [-] pinebox|7 years ago|reply
Wow. Most would be thrilled that an uninterested candidate is moving on quickly rather than getting the job then immediately quitting or being terminated (both of which are things I have seen).
Trying to threaten a candidate into continuing an interview is just psychotic.
[+] [-] mindcrime|7 years ago|reply
But this... this is the thing that gets me questioning if human nature is just so broken that creating newer and better tech really is a net negative for the world. This kind of story is the one thing that makes me want to wash my hands of the whole lot of it, embrace anarcho-primitivism and go live in a shack in the woods in Montana or something.
Depressing doesn't even start to describe this stuff.
[+] [-] baxtr|7 years ago|reply
In any case, my prediction is that once these things go mainstream, companies with values that rely on trust as a core element of collaboration instead of surveillance will gain an advantage in the job market. I hope I’m right
[+] [-] maxxxxx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|7 years ago|reply
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communi...
Of course, Shoshana Zuboff beat me, and very nearly everyone else, to this in the 1970s:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-the-age-of-smart-machine-t...
(Her work began in the 1970s, though the book was published in 1984.)
Zuboff's laws:
1. Everything that can be automated will be automated.
2. Everything that can be informated will be informated.
3. Every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control.
[+] [-] svnsets|7 years ago|reply
Also, this company would repeatedly under-scope projects, go over budget and over the deadline in the design process, and then blame it all on developers when the project was behind schedule and over budget.
[+] [-] nevatiaritika|7 years ago|reply
Background:
There was a lot of new about a year or two ago how the Japanese government was starting to take initiatives to reduce the overtime culture here in Japan. We always had to tap in our security cards to enter the building and perhaps the timings were always recorded for security concerns. But, the HR announced that in an effort to reduce overtime culture, these times will be automatically entered in the attendance system and your boss would be notified if you worked for 8 hours or more. "Ideally" the boss should then reprimand you and overtime, we would become overtime-free culture to work in.
What really happened:
While there were emails being sent for every employee working more than 8 hours, the manager would just approve it. There was no practical use of the new system and nothing improved. Rather, my managers started getting access to all this data they never had direct access to before. Colleagues were being sent emails if their break times exceeded 5 minutes more than the stipulated 1 hour. Same for coming in at 9:04 instead of 9:00. When a colleague back lashed, upper management threatened him by telling him they could also dig up his PC on/off/sleeptimes etc to give him significant paycuts.
The work culture was never worse.
[+] [-] mrbill|7 years ago|reply
It was great when the goal was "solve the customer's problems and get them online".
When they hired an official "Customer Support Manager", it started being all about metrics and went downhill. "How many calls are you taking an hour" vs "how many problems did you solve".
I hear that one of the large hosting providers here in town even does screenshots of everyone's desktops every 30 seconds to a minute. That's insane. My employer, on the other hand, doesn't care what you're doing in another window as long as it's not illegal and you get your job done.
[+] [-] ravenstine|7 years ago|reply
If that's true to any appreciable degree, that really makes my generation the biggest sellouts there ever were.
[+] [-] quasse|7 years ago|reply
If anything it's the people around me in their 40s and 50s who are most cavalier about constantly sharing their location and activities with the world ala Facebook checkins.
[+] [-] lostcolony|7 years ago|reply
These chips are just passive RFID. This actually has been shown to be incredibly insecure; these chips have so little compute (necessarily), that all they can really do is broadcast a number. Walk by someone with a reader, and now you have everything you need to compromise security.
Given that you have to keep the implant super small to be easily injectable, how the hell could you put a GPS on that? You'd need not only the hardware for the GPS, but also a power supply of some kind. GPS is one of the most draining features on your phone. RFID and bluetooth are still the main technologies for consumer asset tracking because they're such a lower power drain.
This article is FUD. I would have a problem having an implant put in too, but it contains no more functionality than an employer issued badge. It's basically just a badge you can't put down. Now, that inserts all sorts of issues, yes, but it's not same as having a GPS or something that I can't put down. My phone is far, far more alarming from a privacy perspective than these are.
[+] [-] imgabe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] svnsets|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterTea|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] super_trooper|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vuln|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tloewald|7 years ago|reply
I was vehemently opposed to this on simple grounds -- we already measured everything about the workers' performance that mattered to the organization's bottom line (customer satisfaction, productivity, etc.) -- what did we care _how_ they achieved their results? Measuring the wrong things is a total waste of time and effort. It's a distraction.
Oh yeah, and it's hideous and creepy.
[+] [-] thinkingkong|7 years ago|reply
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
[+] [-] clusmore|7 years ago|reply
Setting aside the privacy violations of the rest of the article, this part is really depressing for me. I'm reminded of an episode of Mind Field [1] where they steer live cockroaches through a mobile app by connecting a chip to its antennae - the potential application being scouting of buildings, since it's cheaper to use a live cockroach than build a tiny robot.
This to me feels like Amazon are working towards a fully robotic factory worker - they have all the smarts done in software, but for now they need to use a human for the body. Could you imagine how dehumanizing it would feel to be the body of a robot?
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXNGvDdkXZE (YouTube Red subscription required, unfortunately)
[+] [-] glup|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkirklions|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eeZah7Ux|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodrowbarlow|7 years ago|reply
there's a lot of unwarranted FUD surrounding implantable RFID.
[+] [-] ddtaylor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zizek23|7 years ago|reply
The power of collective bargaining it seems is understood with clarity everywhere in business. Except when it comes to labour suddenly the waters become muddied.
Propaganda against organizing and unions remain at the level of one bad restaurant or bank discrediting the entire idea of restaurants and banks and people with IQ see this as credible. Yet without collective action it is impossible to stop this kind of creep.
Capitalism and free markets is all about choice but working and a job is not a choice for most people. Surviving is a compulsion not a choice. True choice includes the choice not to do something which is where the economic power of choice comes from.
If all companies in a race to the bottom adopt these practices what choice does labour have and them being forced to accepting these conditions is anything but meaningful 'choice'. It's coercion.