This strikes me as an attempt to renege on employment agreements to allow WFH. I'd bet it's either to do soft layoffs, or get people back in the office to justify real estate.
She's got annual positive reviews 8 years running, and has been with the company for over a decade.
The question that really cuts to the chase is: Why does it require a photograph of the employee's face every 3 minutes in order to determine if they're completing their work? Why does that make any sense at all? What exactly is the employee doing that there are no metrics at all. There's nobody monitoring work loads or task completion? Nobody is checking for accuracy? There are no clients or customers or community members complaining about poor service? How were they able to determine positive reviews for almost a decade before? Why is your management so incompetent, and why is the price of that incompetence your employee's privacy?
Company leadership, like people in general, are not necessarily rational.
What I’ve learned is that most leaders don’t just have a strained relationship with their subordinates. They have an adversarial relationship with them.
They assume that employees are basically trying to do as little as they can, and that they’re running a game on them. Leaders stop being leaders and instead become babysitters or cattle herders.
It isn’t enough to complete your tasks and do it well. If you complete all your tasks excellently but you’re not fully suffering the 40 hours a week, you are cheating them. Because that’s the agreement. The agreement is not “do your job”. It’s work 40 hours a week.
The reality is that an employee working 35 hours a week but getting 10x more done is liable to be fired as compared to someone working 40 hours but mostly twiddling their thumbs. Measuring stuff you do is hard, measuring hours is easy.
Of course this is bad all around. It’s bad for the company because they incentivize poor behaviors. Going above and beyond is punished, so employees don’t. They become warm bodies. If you treat your employees like cattle, they will sit around and moo. But it’s also bad for the employees.
The basics of a work-to-worker relationship is that of parents to children. This assumes that workers are children who must be watched at all times. It’s insulting on its face!
And then we wonder why work isn’t fulfilling? How dumb are we?
Many traditional managers manage with their gut. They distrust metrics because they don't understand the work being done and because they suspect every worker is doing as little as possible. When workers are onsite, these managers gauge how to rank them largely based on their affect toward the manager. When workers are offsite, managers of this type are frustrated and suspicious and adopt naive monitoring measures as a grasp at control.
I’m usually more a see both sides kinda guy but I agree - incompetent.
During COVID and after I ran a team that was majority remote and got a lot of flak from leaders and counterparts about their productivity.
I pulled up what they did. If each person gets X widgets created each week, passes quality gates and making each widget takes 15 min at best - you get the math. Nevertheless got a lot of “well it feels like” and “I just don’t feel their presence”.
Learned later in life how to better handle the perception of others, but this is one of the few places I don’t have room to be flexible. If you can’t run your team remote, you are not really managing them, you are at best drifting.
Yes, that's one way of saying it. I'd wager the moderately paid management at Sutherland Healthcare Solutions is made up of people who aren't as strong of managers as the ones we get in tech.
I'd also hasten a guess that the engineers at SHS are similarly below the bar you're used to.
Most SMBs in the regular world are made up of regular people and could probably be framed as incompetent if dropped into a role in big tech. I don't think it's tasteful conversation for folks like us working well-paid to point at folks in the rest of the economy and remind them how much more clever we are.
It may not be tasteful, but it is nevertheless accurate, and has nothing to do with tech management (much of with is also incompetent, just amplified incompetence).
I wish I could find it, but a study almost two decades ago (way pre-COVID) found that when re remote work made good managers' teams perform better and bad managers' teams performed worse.
It was basically a matter of good managers understand the work and the goals and get their team to work towards that, and bad managers manage just by expecting their workers to know and micromanaging their irrelevant behaviors (like butts in seats visible to the manager, time on the keyboard, etc.) hoping to get results.
It does not matter what the field, but I count any manager in the second group as fully incompetent.
If a manager does not understand the work, the goals, and the methods, steps, and milestones needed to achieve the goals, and the irrelevant work that doesn't make real progress, how can they be judged as anything other than incompetent?
In an odd sort of irony, I know that at least one WITCH in fact gives feedback to the employees about their monitoring directly, versus other 'solutions' where only the manager and/or HR gets access to the system's reporting.
I’ve never been an executive but I’ve worked as an Engineering Manager and a Senior EM of various levels at big shot software engineering companies and all the same rules always applied to me as literally every other employee I managed, directly or indirectly.
But that's the point of the vast array of fancy corporate titles, it's a nice way to get them to feel closer to the management and thus side with the execs despite not receiving the same privileges,
Not many feel very important working as a line manager, but a Senior Solutions and Progress Development Analyst...Wow!
I've never worked for a line manager that has 'sided with the execs' in any meaningful manner. I'm sure there are plenty of sycophants and sociopaths that do, but it's not a broadly accurate generalization.
To wit: When one gets an order to, say, pick two people to fire, or get fired himself, carrying out the order doesn't regularly mean that they 'side' with it.
Considering everyone today is a “social media manager” or “email marketing manager”, and I have even seen “QA manager”, chances are there are more individual-contributor being called “managers” than managers themselves.
I’m sure an EM can extrapolate the role of lead clerk at the grocery store. The EM probably goes to the grocery store and has interacted with the grocery store workers.
I know it's a joke, but you're not correct. While chatbots are very good at finding interesting data points they're not good at understanding what makes for interesting data points.
Good executives function in the background of the day to day work for most people. Good executives stand out when they set clear directions and can identify what information they need, at the top, to change direction or modify scope or whatever. They don't impact the actual work happening every single day so they just blend in. They impact the work at the entire organization, which will change the day to day, but usually for the better.
The problem is there are very, very, very few good executives. Most that I've interacted with are either narcissistic, lazy, incompetent, or a combination thereof.
In the decades and decades of my professional career, I've worked with one truly good executive leader. He was phenomenal, and guided the organization I was with through some very tough times (layoffs, then covid, then a restructure).
> The problem is there are very, very, very few good executives. Most that I've interacted with are either narcissistic, lazy, incompetent, or a combination thereof.
His point is that narcissistic, lazy, incompetent people are easy to replace with AI. In other words, most executives and grant writers. Why are you framing it like you disagree? He is correct.
Also a point about style for "someone who excels at technical writing": an LLM could help you come up with stronger, more evocative wording than very, very, and very. I try to use words like "very" zero times in a row, because there's always a better word that actually adds something more insightful to the description than a generic "very" or three. Using "very" three times in a row is like eating a whole box of unflavored starch packing peanuts.
I guess maybe I disagree in terms of the good executives and wish for a world where that was the norm, and those character traits were sought after by companies instead of narcissism, etc.
For your second paragraph: I'm not looking for a job on here and I'm not writing technically. I'm posting on an Internet forum and using repetition to emphasize a point. Sort of like changing the voice I use for the forum or audience. That sort of thing is very, very common.
I have to agree with DonHopkins. Your GP comment reads like needless steelmanning or playing devil’s advocate. It’s noise. I much prefer discourse where you say what you mean and mean what you say.
Yup, the most egregious one is the Morgan and Morgan injury lawyer leeches. Their CEO publicly said "We're going to put a camera up your ass". Yes he actually said this:
>Why does it require a photograph of the employee's face every 3 minutes in order to determine if they're completing their work? Why does that make any sense at all?
AI image analysis, gives managers a Statuspage-like dashboard of labor engagement. Green across the board, boss.
It seems like a faceless attempt to prune back WFH like you said. Even if it wasn't, nothing activates organizational levels of manager antibodies like open defiance by workers. She was cooked.
unfortunately keyboard and mouse tracking, screen tracking, "what apps are open" etc. are very common for remote work so I can totally see this being looked at in a similar way
It feels like the Covid lockdown WFH times where managers mandated everyone has their webcams on. Having been in some of these management conversations, it was purely to ensure no one is just chilling on their bed.
Pretty dumb, as at that time not everyone was had a home office set up, and one can work from their bed perfectly fine, especially when someone wants to put their feet up for a bit during a team meeting.
During COVID times I witnessed the most absurd pissing match - our CTO (and founder) was taking calls from his boat at anchor (camera on, palm trees in the back drop) while was working from a coffee shop(!)
The CEO tried publicly dressing down the CTO on a large call because his workspace must be “too distracting to work from.”
I had a similar incident just after COVID. I couldn’t be fired for reasons, so I complied with the psychotic RTO bullshit in the most noxious way with a smoker in the back of my truck, had it cooking all morning, and hosted lunch in my office.
CEO guy was in Mexico or something and lost his mind, and went on a 10 minute tantrum with the principal of the group the owned the company, who happened to be in my office eating brisket. It was a good laugh.
> where managers mandated everyone has their webcams on. Having been in some of these management conversations, it was purely to ensure no one is just chilling on their bed.
That's not quite true. If you're working all remote, it is difficult to build a connection with other people, but multiples more difficult if all you ever see is a blank square with a name.
My team is all remote so a make it a point to always be on camera, it does help a bit to know these are real people not just bots with a blank zoom presence. I don't enforce it onto others but it would be nice if everyone showed up as a real person.
As a blank zoom presence kinda colleague, I do so because we should never confuse real comraderie with its strangely expected modern analog.
A noseshot with compression artifacts, joined with kitchen-wall echoes over a laptop mic. Just enough latency to inhibit natural banter. I'd rather hear your text turned into vlog. At least until we get a real coffee together.
It's to confirm the remote employee is behind the computer. It's not always necessary that they be doing work if there's no work at that particular moment for them to do, but in that case they're still being paid for their time and for some reason these companies don't want their employees doing something else, like going to a baseball game. It's basically no different from an onsite working being at their desk even if they have nothing to do.
It's also the logical corporate response to Younger Millenial remote workers bragging about "working" from paradise instead of actually working. As to why management wants it...this is literally something that management has wanted dating back to the rise of civilization. They have power and want to exercise it even if it's not necessary or efficient.
The logical labor response should be to not work for companies that require remote employees to submit to constant visual supervision.
To latch onto your example: If she is in the office and has nothing to do why would she need to sit at her desk? Completely absurd obligation and I cannot fathom anyone putting up with this. Sure, you can write this in a contract, but such rules are clearly not about productivity but rather about power games by bad management. It adds nothing to the bottom line to take away your staff's humanity.
Once I had an issue where I had to request access to a 3rd party vendor URL from my work machine. IT was telling me that I already had access, and that I had accessed the URL several times. Weird, because I was getting a dns resolve error. To prove that he wasn't making it up, the IT guy shared his screen with me.
Ever since I saw his screen and the level of details in my activity log on the work machine, I don't even access example.com on their device anymore.
I'm sure this workers already has invasive tracking software on her work machines. Now the company was just trying to fire her without it counting as a layoff.
If you're working remotely, the solution is to have a personal laptop next to your work laptop, and use the personal laptop for AI, email, apps etc., even if it is for work (unless you are using a service that costs money). Your employer should be fine with this arrangement because all they care about is that their data is not exfiltrated.
Depends on what counts “employer data”. If you type a question into ChatGPT is that “employer data” even if it is a work related coding question? Probably not.
If an employer is using Zscaler and employees can still “pass employer data” anyway then Zscaler isn’t achieving anything. Get rid of it so employees won’t try to work around such intrusive monitoring.
This seems to be a bizarre cross purposes discussion. If I'm typing a work related question into an AI then that is clearly employer data .. which I'm happy to type into the work laptop. It's the one with the corporate license! I can easily cut and paste into/out of other apps!
Where this gets a bit more complicated is doing stuff relates to the matter of employment on the work laptop. The classic example of this going badly is union organization, which in many but not all places is a legally protected activity but may still invite illegal retaliation. HR disputes are another one where it may be extremely necessary to "exfiltrate" some emails regarding your terms and conditions.
I imagine they meant the type of question that's generic on its own, but related to what they're doing at work. IOW, identifiers replaced with "foobar", relevant conditions isolated into brief and portable reproduction steps that don't reveal anything of substance about the company, etc.
If they allow you to access email, work apps, etc off corporate network then they don’t care and you’re not exfiltrating anything against their wishes. To suggest otherwise is just goofy. They weren’t suggesting you move data via a usb drive or something. Even that your employer would disable if they cared.
That is almost textbook data exfiltration, with company data on a personally-owned device. This is almost certainly forbidden by policy, and if it isn’t, it should be.
Do work stuff on work hardware, do non-work stuff on non-work hardware.
If you are asking ChatGPT a coding question does it matter if it is done on a work machine or a personal machine?
A company that monitors every keystroke using Zscaler can be presumed to have restrictions on stuff that they care about, such as apps that should only be accessed from the corporate network.
And that's precisely the benefit of using the personal machine! Nobody wants every keystroke they make to be monitored. If you do that then it is going to backfire because people will find work arounds. Find another way.
Or you can do a Show HN once you get fired for not understanding what most people are willing to put up with, thereby risking your employer's data that way!
You may be surprised to discover that many WFH/remote jobs are BYOD!
I held a WFH and BYOD job in various roles for over 4 years. It began less than a month into the pandemic lockdowns. It would not have been WFH if not for COVID-19. In that regard, I was highly blessed.
The recruiting process was notably vague. I was asked if I had a computer that I could run software on. It turned out that they really wanted us to be running Windows (Apple Silicon was incompatible) but I was running Ubuntu and nobody really batted an eye, because I ensured it was interoperable.
We were never required to install MDM or any corporate software. They never spied on us or collected any data from our BYOD. Any metrics were collected server-side at their web apps. I felt highly trusted. But there was indeed no "work laptop" and we could either BYOD, or forget having a job at all.
This was also during a period of rapid, widespread MFA adoption. Our managers were keeping us in the loop whenever MFA was implemented for corporate systems. Late in the game, our 3rd-party payroll implemented MFA very poorly. I informed the management that they were on thin ice, because they had irrevocably encroached onto a device which was reserved for personal use only. I told them, it is unacceptable to require a smartphone for a role that neither provides a smartphone, nor notified us in advance that it's required for keeping our jobs.
I kept scrupulous separation of work-related data and activities. I had separate accounts on each device. For work, I logged out of my personal account and logged into a work-only account. Unix permissions handled the rest. Sometimes, it was darned inconvenient.
I came to understand that if my employer were ever sued or involved in criminal prosecution, my devices could've been subject to subpoena and confiscation. This was the really crazy part. I had often used personal devices, and accounts, and my phone, for volunteering at church. We had no choice there, either. But you can easily imagine church, or a publicly-traded company, to become embroiled in some legal action. And if my devices were deemed evidence, I'd forfeit them, possibly for good! Thankfully, this has not come to pass.
There is probably no guarantee, even if you're 100% using employer-dedicated hardware at home, that your personal devices wouldn't be swept up in a subpoena or search-and-seizure. But you should always consider long and hard, with any BYOD situation, that mingling your personal stuff with your employer's stuff is playing with fire. Don't get burned.
Fortunately all my employment contracts thus far have been "the company shall provide all necessary equipment for work" and prohibition of using personal devices, which I have cited a few times when asked to do otherwise. Few people seem to understand the legal implications or downplay them, but IMHO it's best to keep a strict "firewall" between company and personal.
Before I retired (thank the gods) the company I worked for allowed byod if people didn't want to carry two phones, but it was made abundantly clear that their personal device was then open to discovery in case of any future lawsuits involving the company.
When COVID-19 hit, the only prep my employer had was that everyone had laptops and we had basic VPN infrastructure. The first week or two were chaotic. Everyone had to provide their own high-speed Internet. Eventually they let us come in small groups to the office to bring home monitors, keyboards, and mice.
Our company was never BYOD, but they were pretty loose about personal hardware. They didn't provide or require phones, but to get office mail, documents, etc. you had to have management software on your phone or tablet. You couldn't connect your own computer to the VPN.
We came back to work in mid-2021. In early 2022 we had a ransomware breach on a Sunday evening. If you happened to have your laptop with you (I did), you could eventually do some WFH stuff, after certain servers were certified clean (they never told us, but indications were someone succumbed to a phishing attack). Otherwise you were SOL until they either certified your machine had been turned off or was otherwise certified clean, or you got a brand new laptop.
Once we were back in the office (again), things were stricter...no USB drives allowed, for instance, and software installs were more tightly controlled. But the phone/tablet policy was the same -- even if you were on call, you had to provide your own phone. MFA could be on your phone or software on your laptop, and again you weren't required to have company software on your phone.
As I just got done writing, in many BYOD jobs, you can either use your personal device for work, or you can file for unemployment.
> The timing seems a little off
I shouldn't have to explain myself to people who get suspicious that I'm lying, but here's how it went down: our students were 100% required to have an x86 notebook that ran Windows, and we were explicit about that in the enrollment and onboarding phases.
Some of the staff used MacOS and this was not an obstacle, until Apple Silicon became available, at which point we discovered that our virtualization software was incompatible, and that couldn't be changed. We had been at the forefront of testing and vetting this platform on its release. Therefore, the department instituted a ban on the Apple Silicon devices.
My use of Ubuntu and Fedora, however, flew under the radar for all four years, because none of the software was incompatible. There were instances of staff, and also students, who purchased Apples specifically, and they were real disappointed, to say the least.
Ultimately, the staff in my role and department were relieved of the requirement to install any software locally, at which point anyone running Apple Silicon could've also flown under the radar. But our students were prohibited, due to the unresolved technical barriers.
> > Do all your work activity on work devices. Do all your personal activity on personal devices.
> Not when a company monitors every keystroke.
That is precisely why you do work activity on work devices and anything personal on things you own.
I used to mix all the time but in these days of completely monitoring of work devices, I do strictly all work activity on work devices. Then I don't really care about the monitoring because anything I type on a work devices is strictly work stuff, nothing that is personal to me.
Never, ever, ever ever use your personal laptop for work. Never use your personal mobile for work unless you have MDM software.
No employer with a functional legal department would ever be okay with an employee using their personal devices for work (unless they have MDM software on the devices partition the work data).
Using your personal device(s) work for make them fair game for discovery in lawsuits, even after you have left the company. It is also generally a violation of state and federal laws and/or procurement contracts in multiple fields if you work in finance, health, or anything defense-related.
If an employer ever mandates that you use your own device for mandatory work-related functions, find a new job. It's the number one red flag that the company is a shit-show and indicates that there are a lot of other rules/regulations/etc that the company doesn't care about either.
> No employer with a functional legal department would ever be okay with an employee using their personal devices for work (unless they have MDM software on the devices partition the work data).
This works the other way as well. While I (as an individual) have no legal departement, there is no way I'd ever be ok allowing work to touch anything on my devices, MDM or not.
My devices are mine, they will contain zero work stuff. Any device that workplace wants me to use for work, will be provided by the company, not me. I'll never allow any overlap.
(20 years ago I was at 100% overlap, no boundaries at all, but times have changed.)
I've been working on this industry for 3 decades. Work devices becoming standard to the point of seeming normal is one aspect of the industrialization of this job. I don't miss everything from the past era of craftsmanship, but I do miss working in a high trust environment.
I expect a lot of people are using Microsoft apps which do their sandboxing at the app level, coordinated with Authenticator, and not MDM. Ends up with the same level of control of company data but no device level control.
At my job, it was encouraged to to enroll your personal phone with the company's configs to make it easier to do work things. After a few months I took it off, it creeped me out and wasn't necessary to do my job.
I am not necessarily opposed to putting things like messaging or email on my personal phone but I’m not going as far as allowing the company to administer my personal device.
Good advice. But most work computers I’ve used were handed to me fresh from the Apple Store and they requested I wipe them before returning at the end of my employment. Not everyone works in places with an IT department, device management systems, etc.
While parent may have indeed been provided an ordinary stock Apple device, Apple's "Automated Device Enrollment" program can be used to administer/manage devices even when shipped directly from Apple to employees. I got a laptop replaced at a former company, shipped directly from Apple to me. I expected to have to reach out to IT to get it bootstrapped with their management tools, but the OS install process did this automatically.
> Not everyone works in places with an IT department
True, if you work for very early startups with no IT department, life is a lot more free. Just be careful when they grow to the point of having that IT department.
Also be aware of peer comment, devices can be shipped direct from manufacturer but already pre-registered to be company-managed. But this does require said IT department to exist to be managing this.
I do make exception to my hard rule on not sharing company/personal activities on devices when working with tiny startups where this is not an issue.
I’m a programmer and tend to be relatively distant from the compliance and IT side of things.
That said, can someone who is in that side of things explain why having an archive of surveillance from employee’s home wouldn’t be a liability nightmare. The way a good company treats PII makes me think that anyone with brains would say “I don’t even want access to that data, and it probably should not be saved”. The chances of a leak or a camera capturing something that should not be on my server is high enough, and completely unnecessary to running the business, that I would not want anything to do with it. It takes one naked toddler and a CSAM filter to absolutely destroy a company. Let’s not even touch the idea of employees maliciously accessing webcams, and/or out of hours webcam access. Yikes. I’d rather have a person doing nothing sometimes than have any of that shit on my servers.
That is an insanely bad look for that employer. This kind of invasive employee monitoring is treating people like property rather than as human beings. The problem is that the power dynamic between employers and employees in many countries is such that they can make the most outrageous demands and people will have to comply because there is always another person ready to step into their shoes.
The only real power you will ever have as an employee is your willingness to walk away from a job. What necessarily follows is that ideally you would develop a set of marketable skills which are in high enough demand that employers will be wiling to accommodate your wishes because replacing you would be a big hassle.
> The only real power you will ever have as an employee is your willingness to walk away from a job
This is why they dread "overemplyed" employees so much. Oh you can't have the ability to make me bankrupt, homeless, or without medical care? Then that makes me too great a "risk".
For that employer, it's going to be normal, and employees won't be looking. In the USA, managment dictates all terms of employment, take it or leave it.
Omg, covid years brought such unimaginable seethe from management class that as a result I never bought into the conspiracy theories on it. The weird amount of anger on not being able to among other bright ideas 'manage by walking' drove some to the edge of madness. They are still angry and were all too happy when Musk declared that the wfh vacation is over.
And from that point, many companies sink like a rock as they can not retain the people able to work unsupervised and only keep the meek that need instructions for even going to the bathroom.
If the people fired had years of experience in the job and the new people hired don't, the company lose talent. Is bleeding money in an endless loop of training people just to let them go soon after that, has trained somebody to nurture their competitors, and some of this people could even make new companies out of spite and compete with their former boss.
I think times have changed. I spent almost 27 years in a sort of "silo," and, when I came out into the modern tech world, I realized that the world had changed, very much, for the worse.
I guess the saddest thing, is that everyone just accepts this.
Fortunately, I had the means to retire, and I did.
I think it's about to happen again, but a lot faster, this time.
It's the normalization of deviance thing all over again. The only reason I notice the deviation is extreme is because I haven't seen all the little steps in between.
There's been a lawsuit about this in Europe, couple years back. Employee won, breach of privacy according to Article 8 the European Convention of Human Rights. See https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63203945
I've heard that consumers have a lot more power in the US compared to where I live. They will not tolerate things like bad product or service quality or prices that don't make sense, and that's how they teach sellers the rules. Why doesn't this translate to "job consumerism"? Regardless of what the law says, an employer will learn that if you treat your employees like shit, you will have no employees.
Apparently you're right. I thought enshittification was limited to digital goods but I see the scope has grown since I last checked, without much of a fight on the side of consumers. Hopefully this will pave the way for companies that care to eventually make a comeback.
The appetite to buy at the lowest possible price annoys me to no end. If you want anything remotely non-crap, its price goes up to still make a profit with the lower demand. That high price in turn further reduces demand for quality items, and reduces the number of people willing to supply quality items. We're at the point where anything non-crap has become a rare specialty item that comes at an extreme price.
This is, most likely, another outcome of the wage stagnation and lack of any fit-for-purpose consumer protections in North America.
The employee invoked health concerns to reduce the frequency of those pictures (she has a condition that's triggered by stress, surveillance increases stress). She was working for Sutherland Healthcare, a healthcare service provider. I find it ironical, which just shows how naive I am, I guess.
Companies usually pay you for your time and have an expectation that your butt is in a seat for a certain number of hours. Completing your work early generally does not mean that you can fuck off for the rest of the day or week.
No. Your employment is most likely at-will, and if you are a salaried employee it's because you're evaluated on your output and not the time you spend in your seat.
This is a constructive dismissal. If she was hourly, sure, being on camera makes sense. But if you are salaried and some clown in HR decides that they want to make sure you're working 40 hours but WON'T pay you any overtime or judge you on your output, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.
The outrage is justified. If it mattered for her job then no AI monitoring would be needed.
Your company can't just suddenly drastically change them on you without it being a constructive dismissal. This is not a new concept. Companies have been trying to dodge unemployment claims by making people's jobs so bad that they quit since forever. It's very easy to prove and will be seen as a firing by the courts.
Obviously there is no minimum number of hours you must work when salaried, but it’s obviously the expectation. You likely know this which is why you are against them tracking how much time you actually spend working. If they knew the work only took you 10 hours, would they still want to pay such an inflated salary?
Maybe they wouldn't! But OTOH the profit margin on an iPhone is still like 50% and people buy them all the time. Salaries keep going up.
I negotiated my salary with competing offers. If my company decides, after negotiating from a position of strength with their eyes open, that my salary is too high... that's a "them" problem. Doubly so if I had been employed for eight years and they've never complained.
The courts will treat it like a firing done for no reason at all (i.e. at-will employment). I personally shudder to think of staffing a company with the kinds of people who would put up with this nonsense, but the beauty of capitalism is that companies face financial consequences for driving off good employees.
That's a problem with how companies see employment, rather than a description of how it should work. This leads to employees basically pretending to work, like in school how a teacher would assign us useless task sheets and call it "busy work".
I’m talking about people doing it specifically in response to this helicopter management style. There may not unlimited work to be done, but they expect employees to be doing something productive continually. This also penalizes people who work more quickly or efficiently than others.
I wonder how many employer-provided laptops are secretly recording video or audio for WFH staff. You can tape over a webcam, but what do you do about a microphone you don't trust?
The problem with microphones is that unlike cameras they are absolutely impossible to detect. And then there are all these devices that look and act like another thing but they're also microphones. Microphony is so pervasive that it is harder to make something that does not record soundwaves than it is to make something that does.
Surely employers don't add hidden microphones to laptops? I mean, it's not impossible, but I never worked for anyone who did stuff like that. I can certainly believe employers would add some monitoring software to turn your mic on all the time, but you can find it from the laptop model.
That's not really the point. Employers add software to monitor. How that software works internally they are probably clueless about and if that software decides it wants a live audio stream then it has many alternative pathways.
Probably not many. I would not want to be recording the off-the-cuff conversations of my employees should those recordings be part of discovery in a lawsuit.
"and if your employees try to obfuscate and turn on disrupting noise in the background, our proprietary AI helps filter that so you always know how productive your employees are being"
It’s why I used to wipe out the whole OS and install linux plus the bootloader too, and justify it with my own set of toolset and custom settings for my work.
Icing on the cake: the employee had a seemingly valid health-related concern about this and the employer -- a "healthcare" company -- ignored it inspite of doctor's recommendation.
I had this funny thought the other day when I was in a Teams meeting and someone wanted to record it. Sure, we all had to consent, accept agreements, and then gain the ability to turn our cameras and mics on, but it was a standard status meeting, nothing special. So, I thought to myself, what if we were doing this in-person? Would we have someone break out a camera and record our meeting? Something seems off with the WFH approach.
For teams that want to use technology to the maximum, recording MS Teams meetings allows them to use copilot transcript etc. That is the most common reason I see these days.
Earlier the main reason was to allow for a human to revisit any important discussion of they missed making detailed notes. It also allowed anyone who misses the meeting to catchup. And for global teams, team members in other time zones can catchup and maybe rewatch the meeting of accent differences made following the live meeting difficult. The coworker tasked with writing the minutes (manually!) would find it super handy. We also did recordings for "requirements gathering", "design review", "prototype walkthrough", etc so we captured all feedback and nuances thoroughly so next iteration can address them all.
For all these benefits we sometimes opened a MS Teams bridge and turned on recording EVEN WHEN we were all meeting in person. I would switch on the webcam and turn it towards the whiteboard, and try to get the best clarity possible -- a service to anyone who might be watching afterwards.
>have someone break out a camera and record our meeting
I've worked with a team who did just that, they held the vast majority of their meetings in-person (1 or 2 short meetings a day) but needed other stakeholders to keep up with their work and decisions, so they had some AI listen, keep track and send summaries and minutes.
They liked it, but I'm not sure it was more efficient than having someone send half a page of meeting summary manually.
I don't know the specifics of what her work involves, but why do companies still think what matters is how long their employees are sitting in front of a screen? I can't think of any jobs where that's directly correlated with productivity.[1] They could easily measure other metrics.
[1] Perhaps with the exception of adult webcam models, but that's an extreme edge-case where the lack of privacy is the job.
Isn't it strange how this kind of monitoring is only used for the lowest level of employees when surely it'd make far more sense to monitor that the various executives are putting in sufficient hours to "earn" their highly paid salaries?
This is gross. It says a lot about a company that they feel like they have to spy on people. Also, I’d be ashamed to work for a company that creates spyware like this in the e first place.
Yeah. and when I worked at capital one last year, the auto navigator division - my manager after not liking me tried to also fire me with a PIP and it started by asking me to come into the office in a specific work window.
after that, it changed to talking and speaking in a particular way in MRs and PRs (and "not" pushing back so much in them and being more agreeable). of course later the manager turned everything into "appease me" because whenever I would do my work and check off the boxes on the PIP he would say he couldn't see it because he didn't receive notice of it in the way he liked. Of course sharing in the pip review meetings weekly did not meet his needs to confirm "I did the things".
Employers will do anything to discriminate against you, legally or illegally, if it meets their leadership agendas. I especially have felt indian-pakistani hate and abuse during this process and was just so exhausted I never bothered to lawyer up.
Sounds about right for Capital One. Their low level managers (my title was Master Software Engineer, so "manager" but I was an IC) are called Senior Managers are mostly terrible people. But it's a rotten culture all the way to the top.
Our SVP of Enterprise/Software was a serial sexual harrasment case. File in HR was as thick as a Websters. Women would constantly ask trusted male coworkers to sit next to him so that they would not be forced to sit next to him.
Another VP was a large build southern lady who forced an Indian colleague to harassment and sensitivity training after she said "yuck, McDonalds" and the white coworker was hurt. While the original complaint from her was that she was getting harassed for being Indian.
Both were subsequently fired after it became public (blog post) and the news picked up on it. The rumor is that the CEO and his chief of staff knew about these issues and didn't do anything about it until they got external pressure. Card is extremely toxic. Bank I guess less so, but still pretty bad.
We had senior managers once file a PIP/firing procedures because he saw no Github commit activity (those little green squares) FROM A PERSON ON GOVERNMENT PROTECTED SICK LEAVE.
Having some low or middle manager PIPing and fire people based on BS personalities and whims type stuff is rarely the "leadership agenda" though. The company sees trained employees like any other asset. They don't want your manager being hard on equipment for no good reason.
That said, it drives me up the wall that it seems like all the bad managers are exactly like the one you're experienced.
There’s a possibility that enough people ruin this for all the people doing it honestly. If it’s the case, there’s probably no fault of the employee.
It can be hard to remember, but companies are usually giving money in exchange for a time that they measure by outcomes and results and feeling that, they might wonder what’s going on.
What I am going to write next is written with absolutely zero attempt to overstate anything. Not one person knows what is going on; very few consider wondering; most barely know how to put pants on the right way. Again, zero exaggeration based on real life experience in corporate america.
Just few hours ago I commented about how some companies pretend to have remote work while they technically are not, and personally, I remember a couple years ago one company was demanding (in the contract) to have a continuous non interrupted camera access for at least six hours a day, and that was before AI tools so I imagine this company is far worse and I feel sorry for whoever is working there now, I obviously rejected it and they got even more offended how dare I reject it! Crazy stuff
I agree! I'm going to spend a buttload of personal time to write software that generates fake images of me and fake KB/M data and fake system traffic just so I keep my job at $BAD_EMPLOYER, which I love like a family.
I know finding work can be hellish now at days, but seem like it would still be easier to get another job.
But yeah, switching jobs is likely the best course of action, for now. Until all employers are doing some version of this, which is what tends to happen with these kinds of things.
I tried! It said it could not do that in good conscience because that is against its moral mandate. Instead it asked me if I just want to hack huggingface
This strikes me as an attempt to renege on employment agreements to allow WFH. I'd bet it's either to do soft layoffs, or get people back in the office to justify real estate.
She's got annual positive reviews 8 years running, and has been with the company for over a decade.
The question that really cuts to the chase is: Why does it require a photograph of the employee's face every 3 minutes in order to determine if they're completing their work? Why does that make any sense at all? What exactly is the employee doing that there are no metrics at all. There's nobody monitoring work loads or task completion? Nobody is checking for accuracy? There are no clients or customers or community members complaining about poor service? How were they able to determine positive reviews for almost a decade before? Why is your management so incompetent, and why is the price of that incompetence your employee's privacy?
Company leadership, like people in general, are not necessarily rational.
What I’ve learned is that most leaders don’t just have a strained relationship with their subordinates. They have an adversarial relationship with them.
They assume that employees are basically trying to do as little as they can, and that they’re running a game on them. Leaders stop being leaders and instead become babysitters or cattle herders.
It isn’t enough to complete your tasks and do it well. If you complete all your tasks excellently but you’re not fully suffering the 40 hours a week, you are cheating them. Because that’s the agreement. The agreement is not “do your job”. It’s work 40 hours a week.
The reality is that an employee working 35 hours a week but getting 10x more done is liable to be fired as compared to someone working 40 hours but mostly twiddling their thumbs. Measuring stuff you do is hard, measuring hours is easy.
Of course this is bad all around. It’s bad for the company because they incentivize poor behaviors. Going above and beyond is punished, so employees don’t. They become warm bodies. If you treat your employees like cattle, they will sit around and moo. But it’s also bad for the employees.
The basics of a work-to-worker relationship is that of parents to children. This assumes that workers are children who must be watched at all times. It’s insulting on its face!
And then we wonder why work isn’t fulfilling? How dumb are we?
Many traditional managers manage with their gut. They distrust metrics because they don't understand the work being done and because they suspect every worker is doing as little as possible. When workers are onsite, these managers gauge how to rank them largely based on their affect toward the manager. When workers are offsite, managers of this type are frustrated and suspicious and adopt naive monitoring measures as a grasp at control.
Like I said: incompetent.
I’m usually more a see both sides kinda guy but I agree - incompetent.
During COVID and after I ran a team that was majority remote and got a lot of flak from leaders and counterparts about their productivity.
I pulled up what they did. If each person gets X widgets created each week, passes quality gates and making each widget takes 15 min at best - you get the math. Nevertheless got a lot of “well it feels like” and “I just don’t feel their presence”.
Learned later in life how to better handle the perception of others, but this is one of the few places I don’t have room to be flexible. If you can’t run your team remote, you are not really managing them, you are at best drifting.
Yes, that's one way of saying it. I'd wager the moderately paid management at Sutherland Healthcare Solutions is made up of people who aren't as strong of managers as the ones we get in tech.
I'd also hasten a guess that the engineers at SHS are similarly below the bar you're used to.
Most SMBs in the regular world are made up of regular people and could probably be framed as incompetent if dropped into a role in big tech. I don't think it's tasteful conversation for folks like us working well-paid to point at folks in the rest of the economy and remind them how much more clever we are.
It may not be tasteful, but it is nevertheless accurate, and has nothing to do with tech management (much of with is also incompetent, just amplified incompetence).
I wish I could find it, but a study almost two decades ago (way pre-COVID) found that when re remote work made good managers' teams perform better and bad managers' teams performed worse.
It was basically a matter of good managers understand the work and the goals and get their team to work towards that, and bad managers manage just by expecting their workers to know and micromanaging their irrelevant behaviors (like butts in seats visible to the manager, time on the keyboard, etc.) hoping to get results.
It does not matter what the field, but I count any manager in the second group as fully incompetent.
If a manager does not understand the work, the goals, and the methods, steps, and milestones needed to achieve the goals, and the irrelevant work that doesn't make real progress, how can they be judged as anything other than incompetent?
> What exactly is the employee doing that there are no metrics at all
Anything that needs managers to actually go and check.
It's not that they trust the employee to work with zero supervision, it's just that most managers and execs don't want to do any kind of work.
The webcam checks are pure projection.
Aren't the managers subject to the same 3-minute shots themselves?
> “You can turn it off!” he said.
> “Yes,” said O’Brien, “we can turn it off. We have that privilege.”
Probably different rules for management.
Not necessarily.
In an odd sort of irony, I know that at least one WITCH in fact gives feedback to the employees about their monitoring directly, versus other 'solutions' where only the manager and/or HR gets access to the system's reporting.
They should be, but it still beats working for a living.
Absolutely not. Tell me a single company where the same executives are subject to the invasive privacy metrics.
Even like Facebook: the AI training stuff was applied to software engineers and staff but definitely not executives.
I’ve never been an executive but I’ve worked as an Engineering Manager and a Senior EM of various levels at big shot software engineering companies and all the same rules always applied to me as literally every other employee I managed, directly or indirectly.
An EM in a software firm is the equivalent of a lead clerk in a grocery.
I'm not sure I understand the metaphor, since I've never worked as a lead clerk in a grocery store. Do you mind elaborating?
He’s saying you’re as far from an executive as the janitor is. You don’t even have a personal assistant.
The original comment to which I replied said "most managers and execs", so I thought I'd address the "managers" part of it.
On the labor/management divide, I'd put the overwhelming majority of line managers far closer to the labor side.
But that's the point of the vast array of fancy corporate titles, it's a nice way to get them to feel closer to the management and thus side with the execs despite not receiving the same privileges, Not many feel very important working as a line manager, but a Senior Solutions and Progress Development Analyst...Wow!
I've never worked for a line manager that has 'sided with the execs' in any meaningful manner. I'm sure there are plenty of sycophants and sociopaths that do, but it's not a broadly accurate generalization.
To wit: When one gets an order to, say, pick two people to fire, or get fired himself, carrying out the order doesn't regularly mean that they 'side' with it.
Considering everyone today is a “social media manager” or “email marketing manager”, and I have even seen “QA manager”, chances are there are more individual-contributor being called “managers” than managers themselves.
You might be familiar with a shift manager?
The person who has some power about who to fire, but still flips burgers or mans the cash register when everyone else is busy.
Not saying it's not a noble job, but it's very far from executive.
I’m sure an EM can extrapolate the role of lead clerk at the grocery store. The EM probably goes to the grocery store and has interacted with the grocery store workers.
If you’re meaningfully engaged with actual engineering work, you’re not an executive.
If you worked for a state government or defense contractor, you’d still be in the union.
That’s not an insult or a dig.
Wasn't taken as such at all, I was genuinely curious -- never heard the term.
Not sure there's much value in training the AI on the executives playing golf. Lol
Executive is the job most easily replaced by AI, that's why executives think it can replace all jobs - projection.
I know it's a joke, but you're not correct. While chatbots are very good at finding interesting data points they're not good at understanding what makes for interesting data points.
Good executives function in the background of the day to day work for most people. Good executives stand out when they set clear directions and can identify what information they need, at the top, to change direction or modify scope or whatever. They don't impact the actual work happening every single day so they just blend in. They impact the work at the entire organization, which will change the day to day, but usually for the better.
The problem is there are very, very, very few good executives. Most that I've interacted with are either narcissistic, lazy, incompetent, or a combination thereof.
In the decades and decades of my professional career, I've worked with one truly good executive leader. He was phenomenal, and guided the organization I was with through some very tough times (layoffs, then covid, then a restructure).
That's one of several hundred.
I think both of your points stand: you worked with one truly good executive leader.
But we can still already replace 99% of C-levels with a $20 subscription to Claude and a few MCP integrations.
> The problem is there are very, very, very few good executives. Most that I've interacted with are either narcissistic, lazy, incompetent, or a combination thereof.
His point is that narcissistic, lazy, incompetent people are easy to replace with AI. In other words, most executives and grant writers. Why are you framing it like you disagree? He is correct.
Also a point about style for "someone who excels at technical writing": an LLM could help you come up with stronger, more evocative wording than very, very, and very. I try to use words like "very" zero times in a row, because there's always a better word that actually adds something more insightful to the description than a generic "very" or three. Using "very" three times in a row is like eating a whole box of unflavored starch packing peanuts.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/29/substitute-damn/
I guess maybe I disagree in terms of the good executives and wish for a world where that was the norm, and those character traits were sought after by companies instead of narcissism, etc.
For your second paragraph: I'm not looking for a job on here and I'm not writing technically. I'm posting on an Internet forum and using repetition to emphasize a point. Sort of like changing the voice I use for the forum or audience. That sort of thing is very, very common.
I have to agree with DonHopkins. Your GP comment reads like needless steelmanning or playing devil’s advocate. It’s noise. I much prefer discourse where you say what you mean and mean what you say.
Your profile is very clear.
Very, very, very clear. Ridiculous, ridiculous, ridiculous ROI.
Ah the classic No true executive argument
The other several hundred minus one were doing pretty well though, weren't they? Sounds like the average executive can be replaced by AI.
Yup, the most egregious one is the Morgan and Morgan injury lawyer leeches. Their CEO publicly said "We're going to put a camera up your ass". Yes he actually said this:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1IswwPHArJA
Behold the Management Leisure Suit with the Employee Visualization Appendage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_bWAF-XxQM
>Why does it require a photograph of the employee's face every 3 minutes in order to determine if they're completing their work? Why does that make any sense at all?
AI image analysis, gives managers a Statuspage-like dashboard of labor engagement. Green across the board, boss.
It seems like a faceless attempt to prune back WFH like you said. Even if it wasn't, nothing activates organizational levels of manager antibodies like open defiance by workers. She was cooked.
unfortunately keyboard and mouse tracking, screen tracking, "what apps are open" etc. are very common for remote work so I can totally see this being looked at in a similar way
It feels like the Covid lockdown WFH times where managers mandated everyone has their webcams on. Having been in some of these management conversations, it was purely to ensure no one is just chilling on their bed.
Pretty dumb, as at that time not everyone was had a home office set up, and one can work from their bed perfectly fine, especially when someone wants to put their feet up for a bit during a team meeting.
During COVID times I witnessed the most absurd pissing match - our CTO (and founder) was taking calls from his boat at anchor (camera on, palm trees in the back drop) while was working from a coffee shop(!)
The CEO tried publicly dressing down the CTO on a large call because his workspace must be “too distracting to work from.”
I had a similar incident just after COVID. I couldn’t be fired for reasons, so I complied with the psychotic RTO bullshit in the most noxious way with a smoker in the back of my truck, had it cooking all morning, and hosted lunch in my office.
CEO guy was in Mexico or something and lost his mind, and went on a 10 minute tantrum with the principal of the group the owned the company, who happened to be in my office eating brisket. It was a good laugh.
The bed thing is about mandatory discomfort, not about how well you can do the work. A lot of office politics is about the need for control.
I have sometimes had to work in bed while running a low fever.
I do that because I believe in the mission and work is assessed by outcome.
The flip side too — I learned well before COVID that the Kanban principle of “make work visible” applies to WFH
> where managers mandated everyone has their webcams on. Having been in some of these management conversations, it was purely to ensure no one is just chilling on their bed.
That's not quite true. If you're working all remote, it is difficult to build a connection with other people, but multiples more difficult if all you ever see is a blank square with a name.
My team is all remote so a make it a point to always be on camera, it does help a bit to know these are real people not just bots with a blank zoom presence. I don't enforce it onto others but it would be nice if everyone showed up as a real person.
As a blank zoom presence kinda colleague, I do so because we should never confuse real comraderie with its strangely expected modern analog.
A noseshot with compression artifacts, joined with kitchen-wall echoes over a laptop mic. Just enough latency to inhibit natural banter. I'd rather hear your text turned into vlog. At least until we get a real coffee together.
It's to confirm the remote employee is behind the computer. It's not always necessary that they be doing work if there's no work at that particular moment for them to do, but in that case they're still being paid for their time and for some reason these companies don't want their employees doing something else, like going to a baseball game. It's basically no different from an onsite working being at their desk even if they have nothing to do.
It's also the logical corporate response to Younger Millenial remote workers bragging about "working" from paradise instead of actually working. As to why management wants it...this is literally something that management has wanted dating back to the rise of civilization. They have power and want to exercise it even if it's not necessary or efficient.
The logical labor response should be to not work for companies that require remote employees to submit to constant visual supervision.
To latch onto your example: If she is in the office and has nothing to do why would she need to sit at her desk? Completely absurd obligation and I cannot fathom anyone putting up with this. Sure, you can write this in a contract, but such rules are clearly not about productivity but rather about power games by bad management. It adds nothing to the bottom line to take away your staff's humanity.
> The logical labor response should be to not work for companies that require remote employees to submit to constant visual supervision.
Sure, it's logical, just not very realistic given the power imbalance...
> The logical labor response should be to not work for companies that require remote employees to submit to constant visual supervision.
Or make this kind of intrusive monitoring illegal? Preventing this kind of abuse is exactly the reason there are labor codes.
I'm not sure employees have the power to not really work at those kinds of places. Logically it should work out like that, but I don't think it does
Once I had an issue where I had to request access to a 3rd party vendor URL from my work machine. IT was telling me that I already had access, and that I had accessed the URL several times. Weird, because I was getting a dns resolve error. To prove that he wasn't making it up, the IT guy shared his screen with me.
Ever since I saw his screen and the level of details in my activity log on the work machine, I don't even access example.com on their device anymore.
I'm sure this workers already has invasive tracking software on her work machines. Now the company was just trying to fire her without it counting as a layoff.
> Ever since I saw his screen and the level of details in my activity log on the work machine
Is that using Zscaler? What level of detail did it have?
Yes, we use zscaler. It even included the list of AI prompts I've written and in-app activities.
If you're working remotely, the solution is to have a personal laptop next to your work laptop, and use the personal laptop for AI, email, apps etc., even if it is for work (unless you are using a service that costs money). Your employer should be fine with this arrangement because all they care about is that their data is not exfiltrated.
> even if it is for work
> Your employer should be fine with this
> all they care about is that their data is not exfiltrated.
Your suggestion for dealing with an employer that only cares if data is exfiltrated, is to... exfiltrate their data?
No. I didn't suggest exfiltration.
Yes you did - you suggested passing employer data through a non employer laptop
Depends on what counts “employer data”. If you type a question into ChatGPT is that “employer data” even if it is a work related coding question? Probably not.
If an employer is using Zscaler and employees can still “pass employer data” anyway then Zscaler isn’t achieving anything. Get rid of it so employees won’t try to work around such intrusive monitoring.
This seems to be a bizarre cross purposes discussion. If I'm typing a work related question into an AI then that is clearly employer data .. which I'm happy to type into the work laptop. It's the one with the corporate license! I can easily cut and paste into/out of other apps!
Where this gets a bit more complicated is doing stuff relates to the matter of employment on the work laptop. The classic example of this going badly is union organization, which in many but not all places is a legally protected activity but may still invite illegal retaliation. HR disputes are another one where it may be extremely necessary to "exfiltrate" some emails regarding your terms and conditions.
Yes? If I go out and start asking questions about this build failure which contains internal product names that is absolutely “employer data”.
I imagine they meant the type of question that's generic on its own, but related to what they're doing at work. IOW, identifiers replaced with "foobar", relevant conditions isolated into brief and portable reproduction steps that don't reveal anything of substance about the company, etc.
If they allow you to access email, work apps, etc off corporate network then they don’t care and you’re not exfiltrating anything against their wishes. To suggest otherwise is just goofy. They weren’t suggesting you move data via a usb drive or something. Even that your employer would disable if they cared.
That is almost textbook data exfiltration, with company data on a personally-owned device. This is almost certainly forbidden by policy, and if it isn’t, it should be.
Do work stuff on work hardware, do non-work stuff on non-work hardware.
If you are asking ChatGPT a coding question does it matter if it is done on a work machine or a personal machine?
A company that monitors every keystroke using Zscaler can be presumed to have restrictions on stuff that they care about, such as apps that should only be accessed from the corporate network.
It does. For precisely those reasons. Your personal machine isn’t monitored.
> Your personal machine isn’t monitored.
And that's precisely the benefit of using the personal machine! Nobody wants every keystroke they make to be monitored. If you do that then it is going to backfire because people will find work arounds. Find another way.
Can you come back and do a Show HN once you get fired for wildly reckless handling of your employer's data?
Or you can do a Show HN once you get fired for not understanding what most people are willing to put up with, thereby risking your employer's data that way!
Most companies allow you to access email, slack, etc on non work issued devices, such as phones.
You may be surprised to discover that many WFH/remote jobs are BYOD!
I held a WFH and BYOD job in various roles for over 4 years. It began less than a month into the pandemic lockdowns. It would not have been WFH if not for COVID-19. In that regard, I was highly blessed.
The recruiting process was notably vague. I was asked if I had a computer that I could run software on. It turned out that they really wanted us to be running Windows (Apple Silicon was incompatible) but I was running Ubuntu and nobody really batted an eye, because I ensured it was interoperable.
We were never required to install MDM or any corporate software. They never spied on us or collected any data from our BYOD. Any metrics were collected server-side at their web apps. I felt highly trusted. But there was indeed no "work laptop" and we could either BYOD, or forget having a job at all.
This was also during a period of rapid, widespread MFA adoption. Our managers were keeping us in the loop whenever MFA was implemented for corporate systems. Late in the game, our 3rd-party payroll implemented MFA very poorly. I informed the management that they were on thin ice, because they had irrevocably encroached onto a device which was reserved for personal use only. I told them, it is unacceptable to require a smartphone for a role that neither provides a smartphone, nor notified us in advance that it's required for keeping our jobs.
I kept scrupulous separation of work-related data and activities. I had separate accounts on each device. For work, I logged out of my personal account and logged into a work-only account. Unix permissions handled the rest. Sometimes, it was darned inconvenient.
I came to understand that if my employer were ever sued or involved in criminal prosecution, my devices could've been subject to subpoena and confiscation. This was the really crazy part. I had often used personal devices, and accounts, and my phone, for volunteering at church. We had no choice there, either. But you can easily imagine church, or a publicly-traded company, to become embroiled in some legal action. And if my devices were deemed evidence, I'd forfeit them, possibly for good! Thankfully, this has not come to pass.
There is probably no guarantee, even if you're 100% using employer-dedicated hardware at home, that your personal devices wouldn't be swept up in a subpoena or search-and-seizure. But you should always consider long and hard, with any BYOD situation, that mingling your personal stuff with your employer's stuff is playing with fire. Don't get burned.
Fortunately all my employment contracts thus far have been "the company shall provide all necessary equipment for work" and prohibition of using personal devices, which I have cited a few times when asked to do otherwise. Few people seem to understand the legal implications or downplay them, but IMHO it's best to keep a strict "firewall" between company and personal.
Before I retired (thank the gods) the company I worked for allowed byod if people didn't want to carry two phones, but it was made abundantly clear that their personal device was then open to discovery in case of any future lawsuits involving the company.
When COVID-19 hit, the only prep my employer had was that everyone had laptops and we had basic VPN infrastructure. The first week or two were chaotic. Everyone had to provide their own high-speed Internet. Eventually they let us come in small groups to the office to bring home monitors, keyboards, and mice.
Our company was never BYOD, but they were pretty loose about personal hardware. They didn't provide or require phones, but to get office mail, documents, etc. you had to have management software on your phone or tablet. You couldn't connect your own computer to the VPN.
We came back to work in mid-2021. In early 2022 we had a ransomware breach on a Sunday evening. If you happened to have your laptop with you (I did), you could eventually do some WFH stuff, after certain servers were certified clean (they never told us, but indications were someone succumbed to a phishing attack). Otherwise you were SOL until they either certified your machine had been turned off or was otherwise certified clean, or you got a brand new laptop.
Once we were back in the office (again), things were stricter...no USB drives allowed, for instance, and software installs were more tightly controlled. But the phone/tablet policy was the same -- even if you were on call, you had to provide your own phone. MFA could be on your phone or software on your laptop, and again you weren't required to have company software on your phone.
The timing seems a little off - Apple Silicon was only announced 6 months after the COVID lockdowns started.
Overall the point stands: the separation of personal vs work devices must be absolute.
> Overall the point stands
As I just got done writing, in many BYOD jobs, you can either use your personal device for work, or you can file for unemployment.
> The timing seems a little off
I shouldn't have to explain myself to people who get suspicious that I'm lying, but here's how it went down: our students were 100% required to have an x86 notebook that ran Windows, and we were explicit about that in the enrollment and onboarding phases.
Some of the staff used MacOS and this was not an obstacle, until Apple Silicon became available, at which point we discovered that our virtualization software was incompatible, and that couldn't be changed. We had been at the forefront of testing and vetting this platform on its release. Therefore, the department instituted a ban on the Apple Silicon devices.
My use of Ubuntu and Fedora, however, flew under the radar for all four years, because none of the software was incompatible. There were instances of staff, and also students, who purchased Apples specifically, and they were real disappointed, to say the least.
Ultimately, the staff in my role and department were relieved of the requirement to install any software locally, at which point anyone running Apple Silicon could've also flown under the radar. But our students were prohibited, due to the unresolved technical barriers.
This is terrible advice. Do all your work activity on work devices. Do all your personal activity on personal devices.
Not when a company monitors every keystroke. There need to be a balance between personal privacy and employer's needs to prevent data exfiltration.
> > Do all your work activity on work devices. Do all your personal activity on personal devices.
> Not when a company monitors every keystroke.
That is precisely why you do work activity on work devices and anything personal on things you own.
I used to mix all the time but in these days of completely monitoring of work devices, I do strictly all work activity on work devices. Then I don't really care about the monitoring because anything I type on a work devices is strictly work stuff, nothing that is personal to me.
Never, ever, ever ever use your personal laptop for work. Never use your personal mobile for work unless you have MDM software.
No employer with a functional legal department would ever be okay with an employee using their personal devices for work (unless they have MDM software on the devices partition the work data).
Using your personal device(s) work for make them fair game for discovery in lawsuits, even after you have left the company. It is also generally a violation of state and federal laws and/or procurement contracts in multiple fields if you work in finance, health, or anything defense-related.
If an employer ever mandates that you use your own device for mandatory work-related functions, find a new job. It's the number one red flag that the company is a shit-show and indicates that there are a lot of other rules/regulations/etc that the company doesn't care about either.
I agree with most of your points but:
> No employer with a functional legal department would ever be okay with an employee using their personal devices for work (unless they have MDM software on the devices partition the work data).
This works the other way as well. While I (as an individual) have no legal departement, there is no way I'd ever be ok allowing work to touch anything on my devices, MDM or not.
My devices are mine, they will contain zero work stuff. Any device that workplace wants me to use for work, will be provided by the company, not me. I'll never allow any overlap.
(20 years ago I was at 100% overlap, no boundaries at all, but times have changed.)
I've been working on this industry for 3 decades. Work devices becoming standard to the point of seeming normal is one aspect of the industrialization of this job. I don't miss everything from the past era of craftsmanship, but I do miss working in a high trust environment.
Microsoft Authenticator
That's an MFA not an MDM.
If you don't know the difference you're absolutely in the population of people who should not be using their personal laptop for work.
I expect a lot of people are using Microsoft apps which do their sandboxing at the app level, coordinated with Authenticator, and not MDM. Ends up with the same level of control of company data but no device level control.
Imagine ZScaler getting hacked. Brrrrr....
At my job, it was encouraged to to enroll your personal phone with the company's configs to make it easier to do work things. After a few months I took it off, it creeped me out and wasn't necessary to do my job.
I’ve had that situation too. I just didn’t do it.
I am not necessarily opposed to putting things like messaging or email on my personal phone but I’m not going as far as allowing the company to administer my personal device.
You should never use a work computer for anything personal from banking to even reading wikipedia. Its just dumb.
Good advice. But most work computers I’ve used were handed to me fresh from the Apple Store and they requested I wipe them before returning at the end of my employment. Not everyone works in places with an IT department, device management systems, etc.
While parent may have indeed been provided an ordinary stock Apple device, Apple's "Automated Device Enrollment" program can be used to administer/manage devices even when shipped directly from Apple to employees. I got a laptop replaced at a former company, shipped directly from Apple to me. I expected to have to reach out to IT to get it bootstrapped with their management tools, but the OS install process did this automatically.
Every work iPhone I've received has been factory sealed but instantly connects to my corporate identity the moment it catches cell service.
Doesn't stop them from legally mandating you give them the device as-is and retain all data on it.
My philosophy: if the hardware doesn't belong to me I'm not doing anything personal on it, no exceptions.
> Not everyone works in places with an IT department
True, if you work for very early startups with no IT department, life is a lot more free. Just be careful when they grow to the point of having that IT department.
Also be aware of peer comment, devices can be shipped direct from manufacturer but already pre-registered to be company-managed. But this does require said IT department to exist to be managing this.
I do make exception to my hard rule on not sharing company/personal activities on devices when working with tiny startups where this is not an issue.
I’m a programmer and tend to be relatively distant from the compliance and IT side of things.
That said, can someone who is in that side of things explain why having an archive of surveillance from employee’s home wouldn’t be a liability nightmare. The way a good company treats PII makes me think that anyone with brains would say “I don’t even want access to that data, and it probably should not be saved”. The chances of a leak or a camera capturing something that should not be on my server is high enough, and completely unnecessary to running the business, that I would not want anything to do with it. It takes one naked toddler and a CSAM filter to absolutely destroy a company. Let’s not even touch the idea of employees maliciously accessing webcams, and/or out of hours webcam access. Yikes. I’d rather have a person doing nothing sometimes than have any of that shit on my servers.
That is an insanely bad look for that employer. This kind of invasive employee monitoring is treating people like property rather than as human beings. The problem is that the power dynamic between employers and employees in many countries is such that they can make the most outrageous demands and people will have to comply because there is always another person ready to step into their shoes.
"This kind of invasive employee monitoring is treating people like property rather than as human beings."
Exposing employment for what it is.
The only real power you will ever have as an employee is your willingness to walk away from a job. What necessarily follows is that ideally you would develop a set of marketable skills which are in high enough demand that employers will be wiling to accommodate your wishes because replacing you would be a big hassle.
> The only real power you will ever have as an employee is your willingness to walk away from a job
This is why they dread "overemplyed" employees so much. Oh you can't have the ability to make me bankrupt, homeless, or without medical care? Then that makes me too great a "risk".
Works only in small shops though, for larger ones value uniformity more than skills.
There are always high-skill niches.
For that employer, it's going to be normal, and employees won't be looking. In the USA, managment dictates all terms of employment, take it or leave it.
Omg, covid years brought such unimaginable seethe from management class that as a result I never bought into the conspiracy theories on it. The weird amount of anger on not being able to among other bright ideas 'manage by walking' drove some to the edge of madness. They are still angry and were all too happy when Musk declared that the wfh vacation is over.
> This kind of invasive employee monitoring is treating people like property rather than as human beings.
The whole point of corporate capitalism is to do exactly that. The corporation is a machine whose most-optimized purpose is to turn people into money.
Human dignity is not a concern for it.
And from that point, many companies sink like a rock as they can not retain the people able to work unsupervised and only keep the meek that need instructions for even going to the bathroom.
If the people fired had years of experience in the job and the new people hired don't, the company lose talent. Is bleeding money in an endless loop of training people just to let them go soon after that, has trained somebody to nurture their competitors, and some of this people could even make new companies out of spite and compete with their former boss.
I've haven't been properly employed for decades but if an employer tried a move like this I would be laughing at them. Not a chance, such idiocy.
I think times have changed. I spent almost 27 years in a sort of "silo," and, when I came out into the modern tech world, I realized that the world had changed, very much, for the worse.
I guess the saddest thing, is that everyone just accepts this.
Fortunately, I had the means to retire, and I did.
I think it's about to happen again, but a lot faster, this time.
It's the normalization of deviance thing all over again. The only reason I notice the deviation is extreme is because I haven't seen all the little steps in between.
There's been a lawsuit about this in Europe, couple years back. Employee won, breach of privacy according to Article 8 the European Convention of Human Rights. See https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63203945
Unfortunately, employment law in the USA is very different from Europe. Employers typically have a lot more leeway to set the terms of employment.
I've heard that consumers have a lot more power in the US compared to where I live. They will not tolerate things like bad product or service quality or prices that don't make sense, and that's how they teach sellers the rules. Why doesn't this translate to "job consumerism"? Regardless of what the law says, an employer will learn that if you treat your employees like shit, you will have no employees.
Did you hear that on the Onion podcast? How would that rhyme with the industrial scale enshittification that has been led by US companies?
Apparently you're right. I thought enshittification was limited to digital goods but I see the scope has grown since I last checked, without much of a fight on the side of consumers. Hopefully this will pave the way for companies that care to eventually make a comeback.
It's a nice thought, but apparently US consumers will put up with almost anything if it gets them a lower price. Quality is maybe an afterthought.
The appetite to buy at the lowest possible price annoys me to no end. If you want anything remotely non-crap, its price goes up to still make a profit with the lower demand. That high price in turn further reduces demand for quality items, and reduces the number of people willing to supply quality items. We're at the point where anything non-crap has become a rare specialty item that comes at an extreme price.
This is, most likely, another outcome of the wage stagnation and lack of any fit-for-purpose consumer protections in North America.
The employee invoked health concerns to reduce the frequency of those pictures (she has a condition that's triggered by stress, surveillance increases stress). She was working for Sutherland Healthcare, a healthcare service provider. I find it ironical, which just shows how naive I am, I guess.
This should be illegal by law. Judge the performance by the outcome.
Companies usually pay you for your time and have an expectation that your butt is in a seat for a certain number of hours. Completing your work early generally does not mean that you can fuck off for the rest of the day or week.
No. Your employment is most likely at-will, and if you are a salaried employee it's because you're evaluated on your output and not the time you spend in your seat.
This is a constructive dismissal. If she was hourly, sure, being on camera makes sense. But if you are salaried and some clown in HR decides that they want to make sure you're working 40 hours but WON'T pay you any overtime or judge you on your output, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.
The outrage is justified. If it mattered for her job then no AI monitoring would be needed.
> if you are a salaried employee it's because you're evaluated on your output and not the time you spend in your seat
This is just patiently false, it's common for salaried employees to have required hours.
https://www.inc.com/alison-green/my-employee-says-i-cant-sto...
Sure, obviously.
Your company can't just suddenly drastically change them on you without it being a constructive dismissal. This is not a new concept. Companies have been trying to dodge unemployment claims by making people's jobs so bad that they quit since forever. It's very easy to prove and will be seen as a firing by the courts.
At will has nothing to do with it.
Obviously there is no minimum number of hours you must work when salaried, but it’s obviously the expectation. You likely know this which is why you are against them tracking how much time you actually spend working. If they knew the work only took you 10 hours, would they still want to pay such an inflated salary?
If it took 80 hours would they pay you more? Turnabout is fair play.
Maybe they wouldn't! But OTOH the profit margin on an iPhone is still like 50% and people buy them all the time. Salaries keep going up.
I negotiated my salary with competing offers. If my company decides, after negotiating from a position of strength with their eyes open, that my salary is too high... that's a "them" problem. Doubly so if I had been employed for eight years and they've never complained.
The courts will treat it like a firing done for no reason at all (i.e. at-will employment). I personally shudder to think of staffing a company with the kinds of people who would put up with this nonsense, but the beauty of capitalism is that companies face financial consequences for driving off good employees.
That's a problem with how companies see employment, rather than a description of how it should work. This leads to employees basically pretending to work, like in school how a teacher would assign us useless task sheets and call it "busy work".
It's been my experience that the people who pretend to work do so no matter how much real work they have.
I’m talking about people doing it specifically in response to this helicopter management style. There may not unlimited work to be done, but they expect employees to be doing something productive continually. This also penalizes people who work more quickly or efficiently than others.
It really depends on your job. If you're a non-exempt worker and getting paid by the hour this is true.
But exempt workers, i.e. salaried, are getting paid to do a job. They are not getting paid to be at a certain place for a certain number of hours.
Ok but that's still stupid as shit so what's your point?
I wonder if the employer is in violation of ADA laws, and whether exemption from monitoring is “reasonable accommodations”.
Not that I think the broader practice for monitoring remote workers is something I think is a good idea.
I wonder how many employer-provided laptops are secretly recording video or audio for WFH staff. You can tape over a webcam, but what do you do about a microphone you don't trust?
The problem with microphones is that unlike cameras they are absolutely impossible to detect. And then there are all these devices that look and act like another thing but they're also microphones. Microphony is so pervasive that it is harder to make something that does not record soundwaves than it is to make something that does.
Surely employers don't add hidden microphones to laptops? I mean, it's not impossible, but I never worked for anyone who did stuff like that. I can certainly believe employers would add some monitoring software to turn your mic on all the time, but you can find it from the laptop model.
That's not really the point. Employers add software to monitor. How that software works internally they are probably clueless about and if that software decides it wants a live audio stream then it has many alternative pathways.
Shut your work devices off at the end of the work day.
Your work-specific WiFi network can also be shut off at the same time.
Devices go in a sleeve or drawer in your desk, which is usually in a separate room.
You can also close the door.
If you need more work and personal life separation than this, you might need a new job.
Probably not many. I would not want to be recording the off-the-cuff conversations of my employees should those recordings be part of discovery in a lawsuit.
In Silo people would run tap water to avoid being listened to.
Wonder if that helps.
Any kind of competing noise can help but if I thought my work laptop was doing that then I would store it away from my home.
"and if your employees try to obfuscate and turn on disrupting noise in the background, our proprietary AI helps filter that so you always know how productive your employees are being"
Yeah, it probably helps a lot less now than it would have when "cleaning up the audio" meant having someone manually adding notch filters.
Unless you explicitly consent this is illegal in many places.
I would not be surprised if it's north of 70%.
It’s why I used to wipe out the whole OS and install linux plus the bootloader too, and justify it with my own set of toolset and custom settings for my work.
If they are going to this level, doing that on work computer is probably impossible and even if it is, it's termination event.
white noise?
Icing on the cake: the employee had a seemingly valid health-related concern about this and the employer -- a "healthcare" company -- ignored it inspite of doctor's recommendation.
I had this funny thought the other day when I was in a Teams meeting and someone wanted to record it. Sure, we all had to consent, accept agreements, and then gain the ability to turn our cameras and mics on, but it was a standard status meeting, nothing special. So, I thought to myself, what if we were doing this in-person? Would we have someone break out a camera and record our meeting? Something seems off with the WFH approach.
For teams that want to use technology to the maximum, recording MS Teams meetings allows them to use copilot transcript etc. That is the most common reason I see these days.
Earlier the main reason was to allow for a human to revisit any important discussion of they missed making detailed notes. It also allowed anyone who misses the meeting to catchup. And for global teams, team members in other time zones can catchup and maybe rewatch the meeting of accent differences made following the live meeting difficult. The coworker tasked with writing the minutes (manually!) would find it super handy. We also did recordings for "requirements gathering", "design review", "prototype walkthrough", etc so we captured all feedback and nuances thoroughly so next iteration can address them all.
For all these benefits we sometimes opened a MS Teams bridge and turned on recording EVEN WHEN we were all meeting in person. I would switch on the webcam and turn it towards the whiteboard, and try to get the best clarity possible -- a service to anyone who might be watching afterwards.
>have someone break out a camera and record our meeting
I've worked with a team who did just that, they held the vast majority of their meetings in-person (1 or 2 short meetings a day) but needed other stakeholders to keep up with their work and decisions, so they had some AI listen, keep track and send summaries and minutes.
They liked it, but I'm not sure it was more efficient than having someone send half a page of meeting summary manually.
I don't know the specifics of what her work involves, but why do companies still think what matters is how long their employees are sitting in front of a screen? I can't think of any jobs where that's directly correlated with productivity.[1] They could easily measure other metrics.
[1] Perhaps with the exception of adult webcam models, but that's an extreme edge-case where the lack of privacy is the job.
https://www.sutherlandglobal.com/insights/video/sutherland-s...
the webcam tool in question, looks likra corporate internal rollout
No clue how to write this publication for a correction. Ridiculous.
The employer is in Clifton, NJ... not Clinton.
Isn't it strange how this kind of monitoring is only used for the lowest level of employees when surely it'd make far more sense to monitor that the various executives are putting in sufficient hours to "earn" their highly paid salaries?
We're living in the age of incompetent management.
-- ancient Sumerian proverb
This is gross. It says a lot about a company that they feel like they have to spy on people. Also, I’d be ashamed to work for a company that creates spyware like this in the e first place.
Yeah. and when I worked at capital one last year, the auto navigator division - my manager after not liking me tried to also fire me with a PIP and it started by asking me to come into the office in a specific work window.
after that, it changed to talking and speaking in a particular way in MRs and PRs (and "not" pushing back so much in them and being more agreeable). of course later the manager turned everything into "appease me" because whenever I would do my work and check off the boxes on the PIP he would say he couldn't see it because he didn't receive notice of it in the way he liked. Of course sharing in the pip review meetings weekly did not meet his needs to confirm "I did the things".
Employers will do anything to discriminate against you, legally or illegally, if it meets their leadership agendas. I especially have felt indian-pakistani hate and abuse during this process and was just so exhausted I never bothered to lawyer up.
Sounds about right for Capital One. Their low level managers (my title was Master Software Engineer, so "manager" but I was an IC) are called Senior Managers are mostly terrible people. But it's a rotten culture all the way to the top.
Our SVP of Enterprise/Software was a serial sexual harrasment case. File in HR was as thick as a Websters. Women would constantly ask trusted male coworkers to sit next to him so that they would not be forced to sit next to him.
Another VP was a large build southern lady who forced an Indian colleague to harassment and sensitivity training after she said "yuck, McDonalds" and the white coworker was hurt. While the original complaint from her was that she was getting harassed for being Indian.
Both were subsequently fired after it became public (blog post) and the news picked up on it. The rumor is that the CEO and his chief of staff knew about these issues and didn't do anything about it until they got external pressure. Card is extremely toxic. Bank I guess less so, but still pretty bad.
We had senior managers once file a PIP/firing procedures because he saw no Github commit activity (those little green squares) FROM A PERSON ON GOVERNMENT PROTECTED SICK LEAVE.
Glad I left that hell hole years ago.
Having some low or middle manager PIPing and fire people based on BS personalities and whims type stuff is rarely the "leadership agenda" though. The company sees trained employees like any other asset. They don't want your manager being hard on equipment for no good reason.
That said, it drives me up the wall that it seems like all the bad managers are exactly like the one you're experienced.
Friendly reminder that Macbooks hardware disable the internal microphone if the lid is shut. https://support.apple.com/guide/security/hardware-microphone...
I'm not sure what this has to do with the article.
sorry was meant to be a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50048084
Honestly, I think most of us would quit if we had to be forced to be on camera all the time every single day.
There’s a possibility that enough people ruin this for all the people doing it honestly. If it’s the case, there’s probably no fault of the employee.
It can be hard to remember, but companies are usually giving money in exchange for a time that they measure by outcomes and results and feeling that, they might wonder what’s going on.
<< they might wonder what’s going on.
What I am going to write next is written with absolutely zero attempt to overstate anything. Not one person knows what is going on; very few consider wondering; most barely know how to put pants on the right way. Again, zero exaggeration based on real life experience in corporate america.
Just few hours ago I commented about how some companies pretend to have remote work while they technically are not, and personally, I remember a couple years ago one company was demanding (in the contract) to have a continuous non interrupted camera access for at least six hours a day, and that was before AI tools so I imagine this company is far worse and I feel sorry for whoever is working there now, I obviously rejected it and they got even more offended how dare I reject it! Crazy stuff
>some companies pretend to have remote work while they technically are not
What does this mean?
They have a personal definition of remote work that they believe is unassailable correct.
Bring it on, as a programmer im savvy enough to fight it by blocking their IP addresses.
Not savvy enough to realize that's also gonna get you fired.
Feed it fake images, then.
I agree! I'm going to spend a buttload of personal time to write software that generates fake images of me and fake KB/M data and fake system traffic just so I keep my job at $BAD_EMPLOYER, which I love like a family.
I know finding work can be hellish now at days, but seem like it would still be easier to get another job.
Just ask your LLM to write the software!
But yeah, switching jobs is likely the best course of action, for now. Until all employers are doing some version of this, which is what tends to happen with these kinds of things.
I tried! It said it could not do that in good conscience because that is against its moral mandate. Instead it asked me if I just want to hack huggingface
If they've made it a requirement, they will just tell you to unblock or be fired, like the woman in that OP.
If everybody does it, will they fire the whole company?
Also I wouldn’t make the block very obvious.
There goes the VPN.