I once went to court against a client who wouldn't pay his bills. The sum more than 35K. It took over 9 months to get to court ( as the court wouldnt give a date ) and countless docs and hours spent to come up with evidence folder. In Australia, a citizen can argue their case which I did without using any lawyers.
Finally, we both argued our case to a point where the client's defence was that there was no time log for the work that I had done. I pointed out that the contract stipulates performing of tasks and is not contingent on time spent. The judge laughed and ruled in my favor because he was fully onboard the argument that it doesn't matter ,legally speaking, how much time I was at the computer but matters that the task promised were delivered with high quality. The funny thing is that the client agreed that he has seen positive returns but felt overcharged. The judge on hearing this reprimanded him for wasting everyone's time and awarded costs and interests.
A couple of years ago, was here an AskHN question. As far I remember, the guy worked from home, had just fill some excel sheets from other excel sheets. After a while he made some scripts and one week work was done in 20 minutes. He added even some errors, because there was another guy who checked all his work.
The question was then, if he should tell, he work just 20 minutes and not one week. But he also said he need the income and if he told, also the control guy would lose some working hours.
Which is fine for stuff that can be done as an individual contract. Otherwise, there's this thing called "Theory of the Firm" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm) in which economists try to answer just why firms exist.
What if your job is one where it's hard to measure output? What if it's a job where the's a lot of risk? What if collaboration is important, and you want people to use a bit of common sense to put effort behind the stuff that matters (and the boss isn't some super-genius overlord , running some kind of dystopian company where meat-robots are assigned certain goals that can be well specified but are still yet to be completely automated).
IANAL, but it might be worth pointing out that this depends entirely on the contract. In my contry there are two basic types of work contracts: One that is about the work where the quality of the result is the deciding factor and the time spent is irrelevant (within given constraints, e.g. milestones or due dates). The other one is explicitly about the hours spent working, regardless of the actual outcome (also within given contraints).
I'm working at a consultancy, and fixed priced projects are the worst.
Clients get greedy and want every little detail they come up with implemented. When things turn out more complex than expected, you have to deliver shoddy work instead of decreasing scope and at the end of the project you ended up adding a feature they asked for halfway through and now they are complaining that the feature it superseeded wasn't in the final delivery.
In hourly projects, the clients are so much easier to talk to. If something turns out more difficult than expected, they are willing to reprioritise. If they ask for an extra feature hafway through, they are willing to pay for it, or let something else go.
In the UK contractors actually have to be very careful to bill for deliverables and not just for time sitting on a seat.
The HMRC's IR35 regulations would regard someone who just comes in and does whatever is asked of them as a "disguised employee" where as those who have fixed deliverables can be treated as external suppliers (even if they bill for the number of days it took to deliver).
Many people are shit at their jobs and always will be.
The current system with its messiness gets them money and self respect.
I'm not against a hard world that hurts more people for the next century while we work towards utopia. But just be aware what you are advocating for. Cut throat gig contracts are different to the Fuck you, Pay me, idea.
Consider the unintended consequences of what you're proposing. Most software projects end up taking far longer than initially estimated. If you tell your manager that you can have something done in one month, and it actually takes you two months to do it, does that mean you should take a 50% pay cut for those 2 months? Or that you should work 80 hours weeks to get it done in 1 month?
If you're a freelancer who doesn't charge by the hour, more power to you. But most people prefer the stability of a fixed monthly paycheck, regardless of how productive/unproductive they may be
Unfortunately the abstract nature of our craft makes hourly pay nearly inevitable. If you want a new engine in a $50k car, you can roughly understand the difficulty and cost of that, but software just seems like magic that appears out of nowhere for free.
Many years ago I was working as a IT tech trainee, and our company had gotten a contract to upgrade some ~350 local office Unix servers to NT4 for this company. The clients used Windows 3.11, with home directories shared over SMB. Number of users varied between 20-30 to a few hundred.
Clients would still be running win3.11 on the same 486's, but instead a trimmed netboot variant which connected directly to a remote desktop on the NT4 server (Citrix).
The NT4 server would be configured and set up centrally and then shipped, us techies "just" had to copy over the user docs and mail to the new server.
See each user had a home directory and a mail directory, and after copying the data we had to go to each directory and set up the permissions. We've gotten documentation on how to do it, which involved the usual right-click property dialogs, finding the right user in the list etc.
This process was very tedious and labor intensive, not to mention error prone, and was the majority of the several days of on-premise install time.
After a couple of installs my inner programmer took over, and decided there had to be a better way. So I spent a day writing a few batch files that would copy the data, and then iterate over the directories and calling "cacls" directly. At the end I had a small tool which sent an email to an SMS gateway.
After that all we had to do was hook up the new server, start the batch file and go for a 2-4 hour lunch until we got the SMS. Then we could verify the log files from my batch files that everything went ok, possibly fix one or two small issues and go home. On most installs we were done the first day, rather than spending 3-5 days.
I distributed these files to the group and got a lot of praise from the other techies. Then my boss popped by and that's when I learned that in the contract, they would get paid by the number of users per location as they had estimated the work by that. So we would still get paid for 3-5 days of work, while the vast majority would be done in less than one day, and none went more than two days after my scripts were used. So me, a trainee, earned the company a quite significant amount of money by being lazy.
On an side note, this project also taught me the importance of planning.
This project occupied the majority of the available techs in our company during the 3 months of rollout. Servers were prepared at our headquarter and shipped so that techs started install on Mondays, and each Monday for 12 weeks roughly 30 servers got installed. The rollout went flawlessly and on schedule, with only a disk cable coming lose during transport of the very last server causing an issue.
However, the project group had been sitting next to my office so I knew they had spent one and a half years planning and testing. A significant portion of that was the logistics of the rollout itself.
This is the right solution, but of course is harder for some occupations - call center, sewing buttons, and more mundane work. Where 'bad' employers can push up the amount of work expected.
> For the last year and a half he has used Hubstaff software to track his workers' hours, keystrokes, mouse movements and websites visited.
So much more than just screenshots.
Whilst the CEO in this case seems to be fairly flexible, and says he doesn't mind if people are taking a break here and there, this kind of... Someone staring over your shoulder, albeit electronically, probably wouldn't work for me, and by inference, others. It can increase stress, and cause the opposite of increased productivity, if your assumptions about how your workers work isn't correct. You can only have lax barriers if everyone falls within them.
Most of my time with code is not spent typing. Probably about half is spent reading, and most of the rest is spent thinking. I generally do not start typing until I've already got most of the structure worked out in my head, and usually with incomprehensible diagrams (to everyone else) written on paper beside my computer.
If you set up what seems proportionate at first, something like logging if I haven't touched my keyboard in twenty minutes, then you'll be flagging me as unproductive all day long. But if you compare it to tickets closed, you won't see me at all - I'd fit within the average for bugs fixed and features implemented.
---
Addendum: It may also be pointless logging my mouse movements - I used to generate heatmaps for those. Until I realised that I move the mouse only a few times a day. Wasn't on purpose, but I tend to use the keyboard almost exclusively, since I started to lose my eyesight.
I work as a research assistant in a wetlab (i.e. I physically do experiments). In a previous job the lab manager was suspicious of me appearing to not be doing any work sometimes. Once I figured out I was being watched I went to extra effort to appear busy. I couldn't actually be more busy because I already did the most I could do in a day. But I could waste some time appearing busy. It was a constant drain and I was glad when that lab manager left and I could be as efficient as I wanted without needing to also appear busy.
My last company, a large regional hospital, spent over a decade trying to create a remote work policy. The app and business management side spent all that time figuring out which productivity monitoring software to buy. People from the network and security teams got sucked in spending endless cycles trying to figure out how to get these platforms working in our complicated network. Legal and compliance also spent God-knows-how long making sure everything was in line with HIPAA. Rinse and repeat with every pilot and trial of monitoring software.
The whole effort was so focused on employee monitoring, other things like security and actual productivity tools and protocols were essentially ignored. In the end nothing was ever formalized and business units just did their own thing. Some never even allowed it.
Then COVID-19 hit.
The network and security teams spent three weeks+ working on capacity upgrades for things like the VPN and laptops accommodate everyone. Old school managers who had never used anything like Slack or Teams suddenly had to figure out how to manage without patrolling the cubicle farm. During that time, nothing got done because employees were sent home but didn't have the tools to work.
If management actually stuck with their charter of creating a remote policy instead of software shopping, they wouldn't have missed a beat.
I worked for a company with a UK department, the UK boss would routinely use similar software to check that people where actually working and doing things correctly.
The Scandinavian bosses opted to just trust everyone to do the right thing and people always would.
Interestingly enough if was always the British employees who would do things like steal customer contact lists when they left or do deals on the side, so I suppose they had a reason to not trust people.
While I don't think spying on your employees is acceptable, I was also extremely disappointed in the behavior of my British colleagues.
There's also, to some degree, people acting according to the expectations that are set for them. Having run up against that myself, there is frequently no point fighting that expectation. It's better just to either play that game, or leave.
Oftentimes in a low-trust environment, you just do things in order to survive. Need to run a critically important errand or pick up the kids? I'd see parents skirting around things all the time. No one gave them crap for it, because we all knew it was just life. I'd suspect your British employees are living in some part of society that is low-trust.
I've usually chosen to leave situations where there was no use fighting expectations. We don't get to set that culture. To some degree, cultural context matters, and to some degree, it also comes from the top.
> Interestingly enough if was always the British employees who would do things like steal customer contact lists when they left or do deals on the side, so I suppose they had a reason to not trust people.
If you're already treating me like I've done you wrong, then trust is gone and it wasn't by my choice. That cuts both ways.
If someone feels like they are being treated as though they've already broken a social contract, then they probably have fewer qualms going a step or two further.
> ... so I suppose they had a reason to not trust people.
When you teach people that they aren't trustworthy, they tend to end up not being trustworthy.
Perhaps if the UK bosses had given their employees a bit of trust, they would have lived up to it.
And, on the flip side, perhaps if your Scandinavian bosses had implemented the same draconian monitoring measures, there would have been more people from your office doing shady things.
you took a different lesson away from that than I did - I was fully expecting you to say "and little wonder, seeing as how the company had set up an adversarial relationship with the British employees from the get go" rather than "I suppose they had a reason not to trust people"
I'd argue that workplaces where people are micromanaged and monitored tend to attract people who are either willing to adapt to these circumstances or are OK with gaming the system for their own benefit ("clearly my employer doesn't value my privacy, so why should I value theirs?").
Meanwhile people who thrive on getting things done their way without interference find work elsewhere.
Work has negative utility. This is why people demand compensation for doing it.
What matters is the result. The less work you have spent to achieve the result, the better.
Some employers monitor and time the work of their engineers. Of course reasonably experienced and self-motivated engineers find such monitoring useless and offending. When employers try to improve productivity of less motivated workers by monitoring, it does not work all that well either, doubly so in the case of engineers. It could maybe improve manual labor outcomes, but you can't screenshot manual labor.
I suppose the employers have other reasons than productivity tracking.
Some employers sell the time of their engineers, and bill clients by the hour. Then screenshots are there to prove that the engineer has been actually working, and the client is not billed arbitrarily, in a case of a dispute. Of course the incentives here are skewed from the start.
Some employers use screenshots as a CYA policy to "prove" that their employees are not doing something inappropriate at the workplace, or at least something to show as an illustration of "making a reasonable effort" to prevent it. They would usually monitor and restrict network traffic, etc. IDK if it's actuslly helpful anywhere but when working on highly classified stuff.
OTOH I treat the computers my employers supply me with as explicitly not-mine devices. I tend to do anything private on a separate device (my own phone, my own PC), because I signed agreements stating that the employer is entitled to see every bit of information on the work machine, and there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in this regard. For that reason, I'm fine with my employers making screenshots of my work machines any time. (Using such screenshots to measure my short-term performance would still be silly, of course.)
Identified needs – why to focus on office chair monitoring?
Data-driven managers love to monitor home officing, track work hours, save space and costs incurred by unoccupied desks when employees work away from an office or on flexible schedules
Companies are willing to avoid wasting money on lighting, heating, and cooling
Facility companies want to optimize cleaning services
There is a shift to working hubs, hot seats and a need for shared space utilization
How does SimplePack Chair work?
Fix SimplePack Chair with 3M double-sided bonding tape to office chair
There are 2 following ways to operate SimplePack Chair depending on the data you want to get and the business case you solve
SimplePack Chair measures acceleration of 3 axis accelerometer with remote configurable intensity
Acceleration or in other words vibration is measured every second
I wonder if its actually even worth it to do this kind of shit. Forget the ethical concerns for a minute, think about the kind of company you've built and the people you've hired to even warrant this kind of scrutiny in the first place.
I would just simply leave the company that trusts me so little that it needs to monitor what I am doing.
In another words if company is so worried to squeeze the last drop of money out of employee to actually use such methods there is something wrong with it.
I know one in our country that pays really good but employs such tactics. Developers are leaving on quarterly basis - not due to tactics but due to rotten relationships within company. And they are leaving for less paid positions elsewhere. They have practically lost all their seniors and are forced to pull in greenhorns.
All of this is a symptom of paying people for their time rather than paying them for their actual work or achievements. We need to get away from the idea of someone renting out part of their life at an hourly rate. Just assign jobs and pay when they are done. I realize this maybe sounds simpler than it often is, but after some growing pains, it is possible to calibrate the specific work with a value that is fair. Some people will do the work faster and thus earn more for their time. That's fair also, and it is a motivator to improve skills so your time implicitly has more value.
I used to work at a bank whose homeworking remote login system would timeout after a ridiculously short period. The solution (used by many, and widely publicised around the company) was to place an optical mouse over the face of a clock whose movement would trigger a tiny movement every so often and keep you logged in.
I'm sure the remote staff at his company have worked out how to browse facebook and instagram on their phones whilst hitting the down key on their keyboard with the other hand.
Reminds me of a friend who currently leaves a heavy object on his spacebar inside a text doc at night, so that it shows him active all the time. That way they won't see when he clocks in. It's one of those jobs where it doesn't matter when he does the work, but the silent judgment of the clock causes stress anyway and people make comments.
The security implications of this software must be devastating. To prevent being defeated by the employee, it'll be essentially a rootkit already. Any black hat that finds a way to gain authorization will basically have a ready-made botnet. Let alone all the personal and corporate data they would be able to ransom and sell.
I've experienced this kind of software working on an hourly contract via UpWork. It would take screenshots at random points in 10 minute intervals, and would track number of mouse clicks/key presses. I think everything was logged officially at the end of the day so if you happened to be on a personal site during the screenshot you could delete it and you'd lose those 10 minutes from the total number of hours you had logged. Honestly, I didn't mind it - but I was getting paid really well for the job and I'm not sure the client ever bothered checking the logs (it was just the system UpWork made you use to guarantee payment so there was also some benefit for me). In that specific use case, especially because it helped guarantee my payments (if the you hours using the software it's very difficult for the client to dispute those), it didn't feel as dystopian as it sounds. If my current employer (full-time, salary) started using something like this I think I'd feel very differently about it.
I was the guy in school who taught other kids how to use Encarta to browse the web.
The library PCs had MasterEye installed, and the staff would monitor the name of the front window. Internet Explorer set the window name to the URL. Encarta did not. If they saw a site that didn't look like school work, the staff would then remote desktop to check what we were looking at. Yes, it felt oppressive at the time. I'm not surprised that employees feel the same as school kids.
Time spent working does not equal productivity. I think most of office work is just looking busy on tasks that should take a fraction of the time to complete. If I was a leader, I would prefer tasks completed over time completed.
[+] [-] zenincognito|5 years ago|reply
Finally, we both argued our case to a point where the client's defence was that there was no time log for the work that I had done. I pointed out that the contract stipulates performing of tasks and is not contingent on time spent. The judge laughed and ruled in my favor because he was fully onboard the argument that it doesn't matter ,legally speaking, how much time I was at the computer but matters that the task promised were delivered with high quality. The funny thing is that the client agreed that he has seen positive returns but felt overcharged. The judge on hearing this reprimanded him for wasting everyone's time and awarded costs and interests.
Pay for work not time spent on the computer.
[+] [-] nip|5 years ago|reply
You call the locksmith.
He arrives, looks at the door, fiddles with the lock for one minute, opens the door then leaves.
The next day you receive the bill, 150€.
Are you mad for spending so much for one minute of work?
You shouldn’t: you paid for the experience that allowed him to open it in 1 minute.
—
Recalling it from a discussion with a friend of mine on a related subject: the cost of experience.
[+] [-] _trampeltier|5 years ago|reply
The question was then, if he should tell, he work just 20 minutes and not one week. But he also said he need the income and if he told, also the control guy would lose some working hours.
[+] [-] wisty|5 years ago|reply
Which is fine for stuff that can be done as an individual contract. Otherwise, there's this thing called "Theory of the Firm" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm) in which economists try to answer just why firms exist.
What if your job is one where it's hard to measure output? What if it's a job where the's a lot of risk? What if collaboration is important, and you want people to use a bit of common sense to put effort behind the stuff that matters (and the boss isn't some super-genius overlord , running some kind of dystopian company where meat-robots are assigned certain goals that can be well specified but are still yet to be completely automated).
[+] [-] spurdoman77|5 years ago|reply
Pay for the results, not for the work or time spent.
[+] [-] 0x008|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wodenokoto|5 years ago|reply
Clients get greedy and want every little detail they come up with implemented. When things turn out more complex than expected, you have to deliver shoddy work instead of decreasing scope and at the end of the project you ended up adding a feature they asked for halfway through and now they are complaining that the feature it superseeded wasn't in the final delivery.
In hourly projects, the clients are so much easier to talk to. If something turns out more difficult than expected, they are willing to reprioritise. If they ask for an extra feature hafway through, they are willing to pay for it, or let something else go.
[+] [-] Lio|5 years ago|reply
The HMRC's IR35 regulations would regard someone who just comes in and does whatever is asked of them as a "disguised employee" where as those who have fixed deliverables can be treated as external suppliers (even if they bill for the number of days it took to deliver).
The difference is subtle but very important.
[+] [-] aaron695|5 years ago|reply
And next week HN will love UBI.
Many people are shit at their jobs and always will be.
The current system with its messiness gets them money and self respect.
I'm not against a hard world that hurts more people for the next century while we work towards utopia. But just be aware what you are advocating for. Cut throat gig contracts are different to the Fuck you, Pay me, idea.
[+] [-] whack|5 years ago|reply
Consider the unintended consequences of what you're proposing. Most software projects end up taking far longer than initially estimated. If you tell your manager that you can have something done in one month, and it actually takes you two months to do it, does that mean you should take a 50% pay cut for those 2 months? Or that you should work 80 hours weeks to get it done in 1 month?
If you're a freelancer who doesn't charge by the hour, more power to you. But most people prefer the stability of a fixed monthly paycheck, regardless of how productive/unproductive they may be
[+] [-] jl2718|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magicalhippo|5 years ago|reply
Clients would still be running win3.11 on the same 486's, but instead a trimmed netboot variant which connected directly to a remote desktop on the NT4 server (Citrix).
The NT4 server would be configured and set up centrally and then shipped, us techies "just" had to copy over the user docs and mail to the new server.
See each user had a home directory and a mail directory, and after copying the data we had to go to each directory and set up the permissions. We've gotten documentation on how to do it, which involved the usual right-click property dialogs, finding the right user in the list etc.
This process was very tedious and labor intensive, not to mention error prone, and was the majority of the several days of on-premise install time.
After a couple of installs my inner programmer took over, and decided there had to be a better way. So I spent a day writing a few batch files that would copy the data, and then iterate over the directories and calling "cacls" directly. At the end I had a small tool which sent an email to an SMS gateway.
After that all we had to do was hook up the new server, start the batch file and go for a 2-4 hour lunch until we got the SMS. Then we could verify the log files from my batch files that everything went ok, possibly fix one or two small issues and go home. On most installs we were done the first day, rather than spending 3-5 days.
I distributed these files to the group and got a lot of praise from the other techies. Then my boss popped by and that's when I learned that in the contract, they would get paid by the number of users per location as they had estimated the work by that. So we would still get paid for 3-5 days of work, while the vast majority would be done in less than one day, and none went more than two days after my scripts were used. So me, a trainee, earned the company a quite significant amount of money by being lazy.
On an side note, this project also taught me the importance of planning.
This project occupied the majority of the available techs in our company during the 3 months of rollout. Servers were prepared at our headquarter and shipped so that techs started install on Mondays, and each Monday for 12 weeks roughly 30 servers got installed. The rollout went flawlessly and on schedule, with only a disk cable coming lose during transport of the very last server causing an issue.
However, the project group had been sitting next to my office so I knew they had spent one and a half years planning and testing. A significant portion of that was the logistics of the rollout itself.
[+] [-] helsinkiandrew|5 years ago|reply
This is the right solution, but of course is harder for some occupations - call center, sewing buttons, and more mundane work. Where 'bad' employers can push up the amount of work expected.
[+] [-] shakna|5 years ago|reply
So much more than just screenshots.
Whilst the CEO in this case seems to be fairly flexible, and says he doesn't mind if people are taking a break here and there, this kind of... Someone staring over your shoulder, albeit electronically, probably wouldn't work for me, and by inference, others. It can increase stress, and cause the opposite of increased productivity, if your assumptions about how your workers work isn't correct. You can only have lax barriers if everyone falls within them.
Most of my time with code is not spent typing. Probably about half is spent reading, and most of the rest is spent thinking. I generally do not start typing until I've already got most of the structure worked out in my head, and usually with incomprehensible diagrams (to everyone else) written on paper beside my computer.
If you set up what seems proportionate at first, something like logging if I haven't touched my keyboard in twenty minutes, then you'll be flagging me as unproductive all day long. But if you compare it to tickets closed, you won't see me at all - I'd fit within the average for bugs fixed and features implemented.
---
Addendum: It may also be pointless logging my mouse movements - I used to generate heatmaps for those. Until I realised that I move the mouse only a few times a day. Wasn't on purpose, but I tend to use the keyboard almost exclusively, since I started to lose my eyesight.
[+] [-] ImaCake|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snapetom|5 years ago|reply
The whole effort was so focused on employee monitoring, other things like security and actual productivity tools and protocols were essentially ignored. In the end nothing was ever formalized and business units just did their own thing. Some never even allowed it.
Then COVID-19 hit.
The network and security teams spent three weeks+ working on capacity upgrades for things like the VPN and laptops accommodate everyone. Old school managers who had never used anything like Slack or Teams suddenly had to figure out how to manage without patrolling the cubicle farm. During that time, nothing got done because employees were sent home but didn't have the tools to work.
If management actually stuck with their charter of creating a remote policy instead of software shopping, they wouldn't have missed a beat.
[+] [-] mrweasel|5 years ago|reply
The Scandinavian bosses opted to just trust everyone to do the right thing and people always would.
Interestingly enough if was always the British employees who would do things like steal customer contact lists when they left or do deals on the side, so I suppose they had a reason to not trust people.
While I don't think spying on your employees is acceptable, I was also extremely disappointed in the behavior of my British colleagues.
[+] [-] lambdasquirrel|5 years ago|reply
Oftentimes in a low-trust environment, you just do things in order to survive. Need to run a critically important errand or pick up the kids? I'd see parents skirting around things all the time. No one gave them crap for it, because we all knew it was just life. I'd suspect your British employees are living in some part of society that is low-trust.
I've usually chosen to leave situations where there was no use fighting expectations. We don't get to set that culture. To some degree, cultural context matters, and to some degree, it also comes from the top.
[+] [-] hnick|5 years ago|reply
If you're already treating me like I've done you wrong, then trust is gone and it wasn't by my choice. That cuts both ways.
If someone feels like they are being treated as though they've already broken a social contract, then they probably have fewer qualms going a step or two further.
[+] [-] kelnos|5 years ago|reply
When you teach people that they aren't trustworthy, they tend to end up not being trustworthy.
Perhaps if the UK bosses had given their employees a bit of trust, they would have lived up to it.
And, on the flip side, perhaps if your Scandinavian bosses had implemented the same draconian monitoring measures, there would have been more people from your office doing shady things.
[+] [-] zem|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nursie|5 years ago|reply
Employees are often treated like naughty children, and in return they behave that way.
[+] [-] nilsb|5 years ago|reply
Meanwhile people who thrive on getting things done their way without interference find work elsewhere.
[+] [-] Thlom|5 years ago|reply
(By the way, I have the same experience re: British/Scandinavian labor culture)
[+] [-] raxxorrax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bb123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cortesoft|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oneeyedpigeon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] FriendlyNormie|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nine_k|5 years ago|reply
What matters is the result. The less work you have spent to achieve the result, the better.
Some employers monitor and time the work of their engineers. Of course reasonably experienced and self-motivated engineers find such monitoring useless and offending. When employers try to improve productivity of less motivated workers by monitoring, it does not work all that well either, doubly so in the case of engineers. It could maybe improve manual labor outcomes, but you can't screenshot manual labor.
I suppose the employers have other reasons than productivity tracking.
Some employers sell the time of their engineers, and bill clients by the hour. Then screenshots are there to prove that the engineer has been actually working, and the client is not billed arbitrarily, in a case of a dispute. Of course the incentives here are skewed from the start.
Some employers use screenshots as a CYA policy to "prove" that their employees are not doing something inappropriate at the workplace, or at least something to show as an illustration of "making a reasonable effort" to prevent it. They would usually monitor and restrict network traffic, etc. IDK if it's actuslly helpful anywhere but when working on highly classified stuff.
OTOH I treat the computers my employers supply me with as explicitly not-mine devices. I tend to do anything private on a separate device (my own phone, my own PC), because I signed agreements stating that the employer is entitled to see every bit of information on the work machine, and there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in this regard. For that reason, I'm fine with my employers making screenshots of my work machines any time. (Using such screenshots to measure my short-term performance would still be silly, of course.)
[+] [-] johnchristopher|5 years ago|reply
Identified needs – why to focus on office chair monitoring?
How does SimplePack Chair work?[+] [-] Darthy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SpeckOfDust|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stiray|5 years ago|reply
In another words if company is so worried to squeeze the last drop of money out of employee to actually use such methods there is something wrong with it.
I know one in our country that pays really good but employs such tactics. Developers are leaving on quarterly basis - not due to tactics but due to rotten relationships within company. And they are leaving for less paid positions elsewhere. They have practically lost all their seniors and are forced to pull in greenhorns.
[+] [-] jb1991|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helsinkiandrew|5 years ago|reply
I'm sure the remote staff at his company have worked out how to browse facebook and instagram on their phones whilst hitting the down key on their keyboard with the other hand.
[+] [-] ehnto|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nottorp|5 years ago|reply
Honestly I'd be worried about hiring that company because they'd try to shaft me too if i don't monitor them.
[+] [-] rdw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kjakm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] habosa|5 years ago|reply
If my boss tracked me like this I'd put a good amount of effort into getting around the tracking.
[+] [-] peterburkimsher|5 years ago|reply
The library PCs had MasterEye installed, and the staff would monitor the name of the front window. Internet Explorer set the window name to the URL. Encarta did not. If they saw a site that didn't look like school work, the staff would then remote desktop to check what we were looking at. Yes, it felt oppressive at the time. I'm not surprised that employees feel the same as school kids.
[+] [-] Risse|5 years ago|reply
Needless to say I terminated my contract the next day
[+] [-] ende|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wesleywt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crispyporkbites|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SpeckOfDust|5 years ago|reply