“I monitor my staff with software that takes screenshots”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54289152

by 867-5309 • 6 years ago

182 224 6 years ago

bbc.co.uk

gbajson• 6 years ago

I am wondering if he runs any OCR or object recognition on collected screenshots.

ende• 6 years ago

Sounds like that should be illegal.

kleiba• 6 years ago

Given that this is a London-based company and we're talking about a pre-Brexit time-frame, I'm pretty sure this practice is in breach of EU regulations. However, the employees are in India so that adds another level of complication... and also makes it a lot less likely that anyone's going to sue.

Barrin92• 6 years ago

General surveillance by an employer without probable cause is illegal here in Germany, and thank god for that. Lab animals probably have more privacy than the people working for that company. I'll never understand how we got to the point where we're reasonable enough to demand privacy in our lifes half of the day but the other half we're willing to revert to some 19th century Jeremy Bentham like panopticon prison.

kjakm2• 6 years ago

I've experienced this kind of software working on an hourly contract via UpWork. It would take screenshots at random points in 10 minute intervals, and would track number of mouse clicks/key presses. I think everything was logged officially at the end of the day so if you happened to be on a personal site during the screenshot you could delete it and you'd lose those 10 minutes from the total number of hours you had logged. Honestly, I didn't mind it - but I was getting paid really well for the job and I'm not sure the client ever bothered checking the logs (it was just the system UpWork made you use to guarantee payment so there was also some benefit for me). In that specific use case, especially because it helped guarantee my payments (if the you hours using the software it's very difficult for the client to dispute those), it didn't feel as dystopian as it sounds. If my current employer (full-time, salary) started using something like this I think I'd feel very differently about it.

renewiltord• 6 years ago

I never do that on Upwork (always allow manual tracking) but I also liberally end contracts if things don't go fast. Might as well eat the loss. Don't have time to go looking through screenshots. But I wonder sometimes if its worth it to force auto-tracking just maybe for the upworker's sake (like it keeps them on a task they'd want to do but are having trouble sticking to).

But that's low-end stuff. For mid-end stuff it's all milestone-based anyway.

For way high-end stuff I don't care except that thing gets done and then I need high quality contractor who keeps me up to date. If he can't communicate and I start getting anxiety about the outcome, he's got to go.

tmikaeld• 6 years ago

Be aware that hires can see a log and reviews of previous hires. Which makes it hard to get new professional hires when the grades are too bad, I almost have a perfect score since I pay above average, but even the single disgruntled hire have been mentioned (I cancelled the work since no results was shown).

Hokusai• 6 years ago

it didn't feel as dystopian as it sounds

My mother grew up in a dictatorship, and most of the time is like any other country. People would come on vacations and they will not even notice any difference. The only problem is when you get into problems, then you have no recourse.

Dystopias in movies are felt each minute of the day, real dystopias are not like that. You should read Kafka's "The Process". Everything is normal until it is not. It is a better depiction of a dictatorship than a 3 hours condensed movie.

will_pseudonym• 6 years ago

Kafka's "The Process"

This is also known as "The Trial"[0]. Just a fantastic, brutal work.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial

kthejoker2• 6 years ago

Reminds me of this harrowingly well written article about living through the Sri Lankan civil war

Some choice quotes

People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner.
I was looking through some old photos for this article and the mix is shocking to me now. Almost offensive. There’s a burnt body in front of my office. Then I’m playing Scrabble with friends. There’s bomb smoke rising in front of the mall. Then I’m at a concert. There’s a long line for gas. Then I’m at a nightclub. This is all within two weeks.
[There] is not a uniform experience of chaos. For some people it destroys their bodies, others their hearts, but for most people it’s just a low-level hum at the back of their minds. https://gen.medium.com/i-lived-through-collapse-america-is-a...

_Gyan_• 6 years ago

I've never installed that tracker and never been asked to, by clients. Never had a dispute or lost payment. It's mostly about choosing clients with care.

kjakm2• 6 years ago

It depends what time of job you do. I only ever installed it for one contract which was the only hourly contract I ever did. The requirements of the project were regularly changing and there were no minimum/maximum number of hours (the job went for about 16 months). Given there was no max hours and the hourly rate was high it seemed fair to me.

zenincognito• 6 years ago

I once went to court against a client who wouldn't pay his bills. The sum more than 35K. It took over 9 months to get to court ( as the court wouldnt give a date ) and countless docs and hours spent to come up with evidence folder. In Australia, a citizen can argue their case which I did without using any lawyers.

Finally, we both argued our case to a point where the client's defence was that there was no time log for the work that I had done. I pointed out that the contract stipulates performing of tasks and is not contingent on time spent. The judge laughed and ruled in my favor because he was fully onboard the argument that it doesn't matter ,legally speaking, how much time I was at the computer but matters that the task promised were delivered with high quality. The funny thing is that the client agreed that he has seen positive returns but felt overcharged. The judge on hearing this reprimanded him for wasting everyone's time and awarded costs and interests.

Pay for work not time spent on the computer.

helsinkiandrew3• 6 years ago

Pay for work not time spent on the computer

This is the right solution, but of course is harder for some occupations - call center, sewing buttons, and more mundane work. Where 'bad' employers can push up the amount of work expected.

ghoshbishakh• 6 years ago

For your specific examples it is much more easier to monitor the amount of work done.

hnick2• 6 years ago

Also known as piece work. It has a history of abuse as you say. Such as the origin of the phrase 'sweatshop'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work

roel_v• 6 years ago

Does that make them bad employers? I would expect it to be quite logical that employers want to hire the best workers, where the 'best' is those who can process the most items.

I used to work in a brush factory when I was a teenager (during school holidays). It was basically 8 hours of grabbing a metal clip and s row of brush hairs, slide the latter into the former, put the assembly under a press, put the result in a box. I made the day interesting by getting my movements down exactly so I would get into a flow and even almost dissociate (it was better than it sounds, I was not a sweatshop child laborer). The regular workers would regularly remind me not to 'overwork' myself, and after a few weeks, those 'reminders' turned into near bullying (probably because I was upping the level for what was 'normal' output levels).

Was I a bad employee or bad colleague in that case? I don't think so, but ostensibly some others thought differently.

spurdoman77• 6 years ago

Pay for work not time spent on the computer.

Pay for the results, not for the work or time spent.

brailsafe• 6 years ago

Hell no. If someone hires me to do work, it's on them whether or not it was a good idea in the first place. Unless and only unless the risk was explicitly agreed upon.

"You owe me $50000" "But I didn't make $50000 from the thing I asked you to build" "Maybe you should have thought about that before you agreed to pay me to build it, based on your idea."

poulsbohemian2• 6 years ago

Or more specifically, pay for what you say you'd pay for in the contract. If it was a time and materials contract, pay the man for his T&M.

I've spent way too much of my career dealing with nasty clients who signed a T&M agreement and then stopped paying when they didn't get the next Facebook / Google / Amazon. Not my effing problem that their expectations weren't in the realm of reality and the contract was based on time units not their pie-in-the-sky dreams. If they'd wanted a contract based on their pipe dreams, chances are I wouldn't have signed it OR I would have put in verbiage to make sure they couldn't screw me in the end.

nip• 6 years ago

One day you come home and realize that you locked yourself out of your home.

You call the locksmith.

He arrives, looks at the door, fiddles with the lock for one minute, opens the door then leaves.

The next day you receive the bill, 150€.

Are you mad for spending so much for one minute of work?

You shouldn’t: you paid for the experience that allowed him to open it in 1 minute.

—

Recalling it from a discussion with a friend of mine on a related subject: the cost of experience.

kovek• 6 years ago

Also, dispatch, and there is no guarantee that the locksmith has orders frequently.

b3lvedere• 6 years ago

I fully agree with this, but it can't hurt to try and learn some of those tricks yourself. Some locks are surprisingly easy to open.

grugagag• 6 years ago

Speaking of which there are some croocked locksmiths out there who pretend they cant lockpick the lock, try a few different methods to fail and add to labor and eventually drill through the core, damage the lock, charge you more than 500 and additional few hundred to replace the lock. It happened to my friend’s mom. Sometimes it’s experience but sometimes it’s just overcharging. If it’s higher than market price it may overcharging or better quality

27182818284• 6 years ago

You shouldn’t: you paid for the experience that allowed him to open it in 1 minute.

On the flip side, this was used at one of the first jobs I worked as a teenager selling scummy informational CDs. It isn't that you're paying 6 payments of $29.99 for some CDs, you're paying for John Doe's expert, secret knowledge. We were instructed to use this rebuttal if a customer balked at the price for some CDs.

oneeyedpigeon2• 6 years ago

I thought this was going to end something like "so the locksmith comes back the next day and locks you out of your home for two hours. '150€ please. Happy now?'"

_trampeltier2• 6 years ago

Just almost a good example. In this case, the biggest part from the bill would be the time to drive to your home. Also it is not just one minute work. It is also the time he took the phone call, prepare, maybe load some special tools on the car, then drive, work, drive back, clean everything, replace some tools, oils, make the paperwork and so on.

I did once a kind of such work as electrician, once on a weekend I got a pikett call, the work was done in 10 minutes. I wrote 1.5 hours, then of course a drama .. but finally, even these 1.5 hours was not enought with all the time I spend frome home to back home this saturday morning, because she could not open here electric door.

aemreunal• 6 years ago

Reminds of an exchange, potentially misattributed ([1]) to Picasso:

  A woman approaches Picasso in a restaurant, asks him to scribble something on a napkin and says she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, "That will be $10,000."
  
  "But you did that in thirty seconds," the astonished woman replied.
  
  "No," Picasso said. "It has taken me forty years to do that."

[1]: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/01/14/time-art/

bootloop2• 6 years ago

Ha. In my case it was 700€, took 3 people and 3 hours, a crossbar broke in half and afterwards the security door needed to be replaced anyway (because at the end they cut it open with an angle grinder). All that at 1 o'clock in the morning. Nobody of the neighbors cared or called the police.

0/10, wouldn't recommend the experience to anyone else. I could have done the same for free.

Fun fact: The companies boss paused his anniversary dinner for this job (after two of his employees couldn't do it). He and his wife showed up super nicely dressed (Highheels and everything). He promised he would make it up to her another time. I found it amusing.

0xfaded2• 6 years ago

In the case of locksmiths, yes, because it's easy to open most consumer locks. I just can't do it for friends, or even a lock on a home I rent, because I don't own the physical lock. That 150 euro bill is basically regulatory capture.

NicoJuicy• 6 years ago

And for the drive to you, which you didn't see

spurgu• 6 years ago

Yeah you're not paying a plumber to tap on some pipes. You're paying him for knowing which pipes to tap.

Aeolun7• 6 years ago

Honestly, if someone drives all the way to my house and back at my convenience (e.g. when I’m locked out), and only charges me €150 I would consider that fairly cheap.

neilwilson• 6 years ago

£1 for hitting it with a hammer

£999 for knowing where to hit and how hard

karmakaze• 6 years ago

I've heard a similar thing about paying a plumber for knowing where/how to strike the hammer. It also occurred to me that some of my work looks trivial when done--a very small source change that fixes broken edge cases by making something invisible more regular or consistent.

Edit: After shipping the changes and winning the case, send the PR diffs.

wodenokoto• 6 years ago

I'm working at a consultancy, and fixed priced projects are the worst.

Clients get greedy and want every little detail they come up with implemented. When things turn out more complex than expected, you have to deliver shoddy work instead of decreasing scope and at the end of the project you ended up adding a feature they asked for halfway through and now they are complaining that the feature it superseeded wasn't in the final delivery.

In hourly projects, the clients are so much easier to talk to. If something turns out more difficult than expected, they are willing to reprioritise. If they ask for an extra feature hafway through, they are willing to pay for it, or let something else go.

viraptor• 6 years ago

That's a different extreme though. In the middle, you can do a "phase N paid X will include Y" contact and if they want to add features halfway, you can both update the plan and payment details.

Cthulhu_• 6 years ago

We tried it at my previous company once, we had a setup where customers could pay per 2-week sprint.

What they tried to do was get more work done outside of that timeframe by reporting bugs in the delivered work. Bugs that were basically missed features.

Before that my company tried a fixed price project; they sold 8 weeks of work, but to make a profit we had to quickly finish everything in the 6th week, maybe one more guy on the project in the 7th for the last bits. That was a bit shit.

ilaksh3• 6 years ago

That's why fixed price projects should not exist. Really. It's one of the worst business practices out there.

Silhouette5• 6 years ago

If you're going to do fixed price, you really need a proper spec, change management process and approval process defined up-front. If the project isn't large enough to justify that or the participants aren't willing to do it, going fixed price is almost inevitably going to cause problems.

On the other hand, if you do have a reasonably clear idea of what you want up front as the client, and if you do have a reasonably clear idea of what it will take to achieve that as the service provider, a fixed-price contract on reasonable terms can work to both parties' advantage. The client gets a degree of certainty from early on that they would not have with time-based pricing. The service provider assumes the risk but is better able to judge it, and can price based on the value they are offering to the client and the degree of risk involved, potentially increasing their margin considerably while still having happy clients.

_trampeltier2• 6 years ago

A couple of years ago, was here an AskHN question. As far I remember, the guy worked from home, had just fill some excel sheets from other excel sheets. After a while he made some scripts and one week work was done in 20 minutes. He added even some errors, because there was another guy who checked all his work.

The question was then, if he should tell, he work just 20 minutes and not one week. But he also said he need the income and if he told, also the control guy would lose some working hours.

nhylated• 6 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945

eternalny1• 6 years ago

I had something similar (but opposite) happen.

We hired a remote engineer to write a program to export to excel. He claimed it was done and the Excel "output" arrived every morning.

We asked him to submit his code for review, and after stalling, he produced some extremely obfuscated C++ code that turned out to do absolutely nothing.

He was staying up all night entering data manually into Excel to generate the final reports.

ecdavis• 6 years ago

Reminded me of this: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Classic-WTF-The-Indexer

m-i-l• 6 years ago

A bit further back, there was the IT worker who secretly outsourced his own work: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21043693

dspillett3• 6 years ago

He added even some errors, because there was another guy who checked all his work.

That is where the company could get him legally in most jurisdictions. Doing the work in 20 minutes is a grey area and depends on contract wording, but is probably fine in my legally in-expert opinion. Deliberately introducing errors to extract money from the company is a fairly clear cut case of fraud though.

aaron695• 6 years ago

Pay for work not time spent on the computer

And next week HN will love UBI.

Many people are shit at their jobs and always will be.

The current system with its messiness gets them money and self respect.

I'm not against a hard world that hurts more people for the next century while we work towards utopia. But just be aware what you are advocating for. Cut throat gig contracts are different to the Fuck you, Pay me, idea.

hellotomyrars2• 6 years ago

So how are you defining Utopia?

What makes us reach the singularity that creates Utopia at the expense of people being miserable?

Not a lot of money and self-respect in working min wage/dead end jobs. Plenty of people out on the streets who can’t even get a job.

Not sure what you think Utopia is, but I fail to see how another century of a hard world that hurts people gets us there.

0x008• 6 years ago

IANAL, but it might be worth pointing out that this depends entirely on the contract. In my contry there are two basic types of work contracts: One that is about the work where the quality of the result is the deciding factor and the time spent is irrelevant (within given constraints, e.g. milestones or due dates). The other one is explicitly about the hours spent working, regardless of the actual outcome (also within given contraints).

wisty• 6 years ago

Pay for work not time spent on the computer.

Which is fine for stuff that can be done as an individual contract. Otherwise, there's this thing called "Theory of the Firm" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm) in which economists try to answer just why firms exist.

What if your job is one where it's hard to measure output? What if it's a job where the's a lot of risk? What if collaboration is important, and you want people to use a bit of common sense to put effort behind the stuff that matters (and the boss isn't some super-genius overlord , running some kind of dystopian company where meat-robots are assigned certain goals that can be well specified but are still yet to be completely automated).

Lio• 6 years ago

In the UK contractors actually have to be very careful to bill for deliverables and not just for time sitting on a seat.

The HMRC's IR35 regulations would regard someone who just comes in and does whatever is asked of them as a "disguised employee" where as those who have fixed deliverables can be treated as external suppliers (even if they bill for the number of days it took to deliver).

The difference is subtle but very important.

tingletech• 6 years ago

does that apply to uber drivers too?

beaconstudios• 6 years ago

In theory. But in reality, every contractor I know (including myself in a past life) bills for time on specific projects. The industry that has built up around IR35 insurance seems to think this is OK too.

Silhouette5• 6 years ago

Just in case anyone is reading this later: IR35 isn't actually as simple as that, and whether you charge fixed price or T&M is likely to be a relatively minor detail in whether you are considered a disguised employee. The "doing whatever is asked of them" in the parent comment would be a bigger indicator that someone isn't truly independent and is instead operating under direction and control like an employee.

magicalhippo• 6 years ago

Many years ago I was working as a IT tech trainee, and our company had gotten a contract to upgrade some ~350 local office Unix servers to NT4 for this company. The clients used Windows 3.11, with home directories shared over SMB. Number of users varied between 20-30 to a few hundred.

Clients would still be running win3.11 on the same 486's, but instead a trimmed netboot variant which connected directly to a remote desktop on the NT4 server (Citrix).

The NT4 server would be configured and set up centrally and then shipped, us techies "just" had to copy over the user docs and mail to the new server.

See each user had a home directory and a mail directory, and after copying the data we had to go to each directory and set up the permissions. We've gotten documentation on how to do it, which involved the usual right-click property dialogs, finding the right user in the list etc.

This process was very tedious and labor intensive, not to mention error prone, and was the majority of the several days of on-premise install time.

After a couple of installs my inner programmer took over, and decided there had to be a better way. So I spent a day writing a few batch files that would copy the data, and then iterate over the directories and calling "cacls" directly. At the end I had a small tool which sent an email to an SMS gateway.

After that all we had to do was hook up the new server, start the batch file and go for a 2-4 hour lunch until we got the SMS. Then we could verify the log files from my batch files that everything went ok, possibly fix one or two small issues and go home. On most installs we were done the first day, rather than spending 3-5 days.

I distributed these files to the group and got a lot of praise from the other techies. Then my boss popped by and that's when I learned that in the contract, they would get paid by the number of users per location as they had estimated the work by that. So we would still get paid for 3-5 days of work, while the vast majority would be done in less than one day, and none went more than two days after my scripts were used. So me, a trainee, earned the company a quite significant amount of money by being lazy.

On an side note, this project also taught me the importance of planning.

This project occupied the majority of the available techs in our company during the 3 months of rollout. Servers were prepared at our headquarter and shipped so that techs started install on Mondays, and each Monday for 12 weeks roughly 30 servers got installed. The rollout went flawlessly and on schedule, with only a disk cable coming lose during transport of the very last server causing an issue.

However, the project group had been sitting next to my office so I knew they had spent one and a half years planning and testing. A significant portion of that was the logistics of the rollout itself.

whack2• 6 years ago

Pay for work not time spent on the computer.

Consider the unintended consequences of what you're proposing. Most software projects end up taking far longer than initially estimated. If you tell your manager that you can have something done in one month, and it actually takes you two months to do it, does that mean you should take a 50% pay cut for those 2 months? Or that you should work 80 hours weeks to get it done in 1 month?

If you're a freelancer who doesn't charge by the hour, more power to you. But most people prefer the stability of a fixed monthly paycheck, regardless of how productive/unproductive they may be

Silhouette5• 6 years ago

If you're a freelancer who doesn't charge by the hour, more power to you. But most people prefer the stability of a fixed monthly paycheck, regardless of how productive/unproductive they may be

Most employees might prefer that. It seems likely that a disproportionate amount of freelancers (and other entrepreneurial types) do not, presumably because they trust that the results they can offer will justify higher compensation than they would expect to receive as an employee and they know how to manage their risk. It's a totally different kind of relationship when you're working business-to-business instead of employer-employee.

poulsbohemian2• 6 years ago

If you're a freelancer who doesn't charge by the hour, more power to you. But most people prefer the stability of a fixed monthly paycheck, regardless of how productive/unproductive they may be

Back in the day, I billed different projects by time, by fixed price, by value, by deliverables, and by time-based retainer. What I found was that what the client was willing to consider said a lot about their values and ethics. There were cases where I could save clients money by doing something other that T&M, but their need to feel in control was so great that I finally just gave up and stopped trying to be creative about contract terms. Personally - I still think retainer based is the best option for an ongoing relationship as it should eliminate all the needless haggling - I consult, you pay, we all win.

So I'm with you - for all the thinking that I might be able to increase my revenue by some other model was wiped out by the fact that it was just easier to bill hourly.

jl2718• 6 years ago

Unfortunately the abstract nature of our craft makes hourly pay nearly inevitable. If you want a new engine in a $50k car, you can roughly understand the difficulty and cost of that, but software just seems like magic that appears out of nowhere for free.

crispyporkbites• 6 years ago

Does he let employees see his screen 24/7 as well? And his investors/customers?

SpeckOfDust2• 6 years ago

Of course not. In his mind he's probably employee of the month. Every month.

helsinkiandrew3• 6 years ago

I used to work at a bank whose homeworking remote login system would timeout after a ridiculously short period. The solution (used by many, and widely publicised around the company) was to place an optical mouse over the face of a clock whose movement would trigger a tiny movement every so often and keep you logged in.

I'm sure the remote staff at his company have worked out how to browse facebook and instagram on their phones whilst hitting the down key on their keyboard with the other hand.

ehnto2• 6 years ago

Reminds me of a friend who currently leaves a heavy object on his spacebar inside a text doc at night, so that it shows him active all the time. That way they won't see when he clocks in. It's one of those jobs where it doesn't matter when he does the work, but the silent judgment of the clock causes stress anyway and people make comments.

faebi• 6 years ago

Does it ever crash?

C1sc0cat4• 6 years ago

You can buy mouse jigglers on amazon to do this :-)

shakna• 6 years ago

For the last year and a half he has used Hubstaff software to track his workers' hours, keystrokes, mouse movements and websites visited.

So much more than just screenshots.

Whilst the CEO in this case seems to be fairly flexible, and says he doesn't mind if people are taking a break here and there, this kind of... Someone staring over your shoulder, albeit electronically, probably wouldn't work for me, and by inference, others. It can increase stress, and cause the opposite of increased productivity, if your assumptions about how your workers work isn't correct. You can only have lax barriers if everyone falls within them.

Most of my time with code is not spent typing. Probably about half is spent reading, and most of the rest is spent thinking. I generally do not start typing until I've already got most of the structure worked out in my head, and usually with incomprehensible diagrams (to everyone else) written on paper beside my computer.

If you set up what seems proportionate at first, something like logging if I haven't touched my keyboard in twenty minutes, then you'll be flagging me as unproductive all day long. But if you compare it to tickets closed, you won't see me at all - I'd fit within the average for bugs fixed and features implemented.

---

Addendum: It may also be pointless logging my mouse movements - I used to generate heatmaps for those. Until I realised that I move the mouse only a few times a day. Wasn't on purpose, but I tend to use the keyboard almost exclusively, since I started to lose my eyesight.

ImaCake3• 6 years ago

I work as a research assistant in a wetlab (i.e. I physically do experiments). In a previous job the lab manager was suspicious of me appearing to not be doing any work sometimes. Once I figured out I was being watched I went to extra effort to appear busy. I couldn't actually be more busy because I already did the most I could do in a day. But I could waste some time appearing busy. It was a constant drain and I was glad when that lab manager left and I could be as efficient as I wanted without needing to also appear busy.

cutemonster4• 6 years ago

waste some time appearing busy

What did that mean, in your particular case?

Balgair3• 6 years ago

I had a similar situation as a grad student in a wet lab. I was in classes most of the day and was forced to work in the lab during the morning and evening. As the PI was in from ~10am to ~4pm, they never saw me at work, and assumed that I was doing no work. Despite that PI lecturing in some of my classes. Fortunately, I was in a rotation for that PI and was able to leave the lab easily.

I still cannot for the life of me understand what they were thinking. How can you be so smart to get the position and not think past your own nose?

Risse• 6 years ago

At one of my previous contracting places wanted all the developers to use Teramind https://www.teramind.co/

Needless to say I terminated my contract the next day

rdw• 6 years ago

The security implications of this software must be devastating. To prevent being defeated by the employee, it'll be essentially a rootkit already. Any black hat that finds a way to gain authorization will basically have a ready-made botnet. Let alone all the personal and corporate data they would be able to ransom and sell.

travbrack2• 6 years ago

By that logic so is a configuration management client like SCCM or even Group Policy.

ygjb• 6 years ago

The difference there is that Microsoft has a huge, dedicated security team, and has spent the last ~15 years aggressively improving their security posture, as opposed to some spyware author that decided to go 'legit'.

afandian• 6 years ago

In those cases you own the device, so that's reasonable.

tpxl3• 6 years ago

And the privacy implications. Which is why it's illegal in parts of Europe.

Any black hat that finds a way to gain authorization will basically have a ready-made botnet.

This has actually happened with viruses, cryptolockers, etc before. Get access to Windows group policy, add the virus to it, see it being spread around.

enether• 6 years ago

Where is this illegal?

SpeckOfDust2• 6 years ago

I wonder if its actually even worth it to do this kind of shit. Forget the ethical concerns for a minute, think about the kind of company you've built and the people you've hired to even warrant this kind of scrutiny in the first place.

AdhesiveWombat• 6 years ago

Not every work is interesting enough to keep your employees motivated. For example, in the article they mention a company that resells beauty products. IMHO I can understand people not being incredibly motivated by this.

hellotomyrars2• 6 years ago

While I understand your point, there is a level of oppressive surveillance here that is unwarranted and unneeded.

It shouldn’t be difficult to track the performance of the employee with metrics that are actually specific to the task they are hired to do (Number of listings/sales).

Taking screenshots, tracking keystrokes and mouse movement? It’s extreme, and doesn’t even relate to the work they’re doing in a direct way. You might be able to see them slacking off, but it doesn’t tell you the quality of the work.

ilaksh3• 6 years ago

Take a look at UpWork. Software engineers are subjected to this also. On a massive scale.

C1sc0cat4• 6 years ago

If you read the article its it's a shitty little company

peterburkimsher• 6 years ago

I was the guy in school who taught other kids how to use Encarta to browse the web.

The library PCs had MasterEye installed, and the staff would monitor the name of the front window. Internet Explorer set the window name to the URL. Encarta did not. If they saw a site that didn't look like school work, the staff would then remote desktop to check what we were looking at. Yes, it felt oppressive at the time. I'm not surprised that employees feel the same as school kids.

mrweasel3• 6 years ago

I worked for a company with a UK department, the UK boss would routinely use similar software to check that people where actually working and doing things correctly.

The Scandinavian bosses opted to just trust everyone to do the right thing and people always would.

Interestingly enough if was always the British employees who would do things like steal customer contact lists when they left or do deals on the side, so I suppose they had a reason to not trust people.

While I don't think spying on your employees is acceptable, I was also extremely disappointed in the behavior of my British colleagues.

lambdasquirrel• 6 years ago

There's also, to some degree, people acting according to the expectations that are set for them. Having run up against that myself, there is frequently no point fighting that expectation. It's better just to either play that game, or leave.

Oftentimes in a low-trust environment, you just do things in order to survive. Need to run a critically important errand or pick up the kids? I'd see parents skirting around things all the time. No one gave them crap for it, because we all knew it was just life. I'd suspect your British employees are living in some part of society that is low-trust.

I've usually chosen to leave situations where there was no use fighting expectations. We don't get to set that culture. To some degree, cultural context matters, and to some degree, it also comes from the top.

nilsb• 6 years ago

I'd argue that workplaces where people are micromanaged and monitored tend to attract people who are either willing to adapt to these circumstances or are OK with gaming the system for their own benefit ("clearly my employer doesn't value my privacy, so why should I value theirs?").

Meanwhile people who thrive on getting things done their way without interference find work elsewhere.

raxxorrax2• 6 years ago

If you are expected to misbehave while not under surveillance you have to cherish the time when you can let it all out.

zem2• 6 years ago

you took a different lesson away from that than I did - I was fully expecting you to say "and little wonder, seeing as how the company had set up an adversarial relationship with the British employees from the get go" rather than "I suppose they had a reason not to trust people"

mrweasel3• 6 years ago

I actually had a similar conclusion originally, but then I also saw the level of fraud by our UK customers. They where maybe 5 - 10% of our total sales, but 90+% of fraud cases.

My take away is simply that there's less trust in the British society as a whole and it's not necessarily a fault or problem isolated to a single company.

oneeyedpigeon2• 6 years ago

I have a follow-up question about chickens and eggs...

kelnos• 6 years ago

... so I suppose they had a reason to not trust people.

When you teach people that they aren't trustworthy, they tend to end up not being trustworthy.

Perhaps if the UK bosses had given their employees a bit of trust, they would have lived up to it.

And, on the flip side, perhaps if your Scandinavian bosses had implemented the same draconian monitoring measures, there would have been more people from your office doing shady things.

ksk• 6 years ago

I think you're getting to the the crux of it. Exactly What actions make it seem like the other person has branded you as untrustworthy? Would a cashier counting the money you gave them be a sign that they don't trust you? Or an airport security making you pass through a metal detector? Or a Police officer running a speed gun on your car?

With the old 'Trust, but verify' idea, the disagreement is always on the 'how' in verify.

kwhitefoot2• 6 years ago

Here in Norway I think that the kind of surveillance described would be of debatable legality. And would be regarded by pretty much everyone as a breach of trust and etiquette.

In particular such arrangements must be discussed between the employer and the representatives of the employees and the employer must choose the least invasive alternative.

Here is a document giving guidance on the subject, sorry it's only available in Norwegian: https://www.arbeidstilsynet.no/contentassets/04ec2eb566d4494...

Also this one on camera surveillance which is analogous to screenshots: https://www.datatilsynet.no/personvern-pa-ulike-omrader/over...

"For at en arbeidsgiver skal kunne kameraovervåke en arbeidsplass, krever loven at det må foreligge et særskilt behov dersom man skal overvåke områder der bare de ansatte ferdes."

in English (my translation): "In order for an employer to use video surveillance of a workplace, the law requires that there be a specific need if one is to monitor areas where only the employees go."

I imagine that the Datatilsyn (Data Protection Authority) would regard regular screenshotting as similar.

hnick2• 6 years ago

Interestingly enough if was always the British employees who would do things like steal customer contact lists when they left or do deals on the side, so I suppose they had a reason to not trust people.

If you're already treating me like I've done you wrong, then trust is gone and it wasn't by my choice. That cuts both ways.

If someone feels like they are being treated as though they've already broken a social contract, then they probably have fewer qualms going a step or two further.

lostlogin2• 6 years ago

You see this with children (and some adults if I’m being honest). Being told not to do something makes it more appealing.

cortesoft• 6 years ago

If you have to lie to do reasonable things, most people will lie.... and then you get used to lying, and find it easier to justify.

Nursie• 6 years ago

Honestly, as a Brit, I think we have a pathological work culture.

Employees are often treated like naughty children, and in return they behave that way.

b0rsuk2• 6 years ago

You might find our Polish workplaces a refreshing change. Employees are often treated like feudal peasants.

Poland never really had bourgeoisie/townsfolk class. Jews were the closest, in part because they were forbidden by law to own land.

It was almost entirely peasants and gentry(20% at most), with clergy also playing a big role but the last two would pretty often overlap.

The time when social changes happened in Europe Poland spent partitioned, under foreign rule. Progressive changes, like freeing of peasant class, were often imposed, even by Russian tzars. They were rarely a result of internal consensus.

Thlom• 6 years ago

The Scandinavian bosses didn't just opt to trust the employees. Spying on employees is illegal in (most of?) Scandinavia as far as I know.

(By the way, I have the same experience re: British/Scandinavian labor culture)

MrDresden• 6 years ago

Yes, this kind of invasive surveillance would not be allowed and could end up in the company being fined huged sums

Silhouette5• 6 years ago

Spying so intrusively on employees need to be done very carefully to stay legal in the UK as well. The ICO (the national data protection regulator) provides extensive guidance for employers on workplace monitoring, and there are several laws that might be relevant depending on the circumstances. The rules are far more nuanced than just saying that an employee on work time can be subject to whatever monitoring an employer feels like doing.

bb1233• 6 years ago

Are we just engaging in lazy cultural generalisations now? This feels in poor taste.

evolveyourmind• 6 years ago

This is illegal in most western countries

zem2• 6 years ago

yeah another reason some people love outsourcing

lacker• 6 years ago

Eventually this will be full-fledged AI monitoring that politely interrupts you when you're reading social media and suggests that you get back to work.

feintruled• 6 years ago

Or perhaps even a fuller-fledged AI that monitors your work and ends up doing the work after you get sacked (twist: you've actually trained it to read social media 90% of the time)

wesleywt• 6 years ago

Time spent working does not equal productivity. I think most of office work is just looking busy on tasks that should take a fraction of the time to complete. If I was a leader, I would prefer tasks completed over time completed.

andi999• 6 years ago

But then you get task creep (the small brother of feature creep). Like you set a task you thougjt takes a week. Employee does it in 1h, ok so this time he is free for the whole restbof the week. What do you do next week? Add more tasks..so eventually you give so many task he /she can finish in 40h.. welcome to the current system.

jb19912• 6 years ago

All of this is a symptom of paying people for their time rather than paying them for their actual work or achievements. We need to get away from the idea of someone renting out part of their life at an hourly rate. Just assign jobs and pay when they are done. I realize this maybe sounds simpler than it often is, but after some growing pains, it is possible to calibrate the specific work with a value that is fair. Some people will do the work faster and thus earn more for their time. That's fair also, and it is a motivator to improve skills so your time implicitly has more value.

auggierose• 6 years ago

How do you align that with minimum wage if some people just take too much time for their assigned task? How do you make sure this isn't becoming a race to the bottom, where people are getting more and more efficient, but are being paid less and less?

jb19912• 6 years ago

How do you align that with minimum wage if some people just take too much time for their assigned task?

Ideally you'd combine this in a world with UBI.

Some day.

stiray• 6 years ago

I would just simply leave the company that trusts me so little that it needs to monitor what I am doing.

In another words if company is so worried to squeeze the last drop of money out of employee to actually use such methods there is something wrong with it.

I know one in our country that pays really good but employs such tactics. Developers are leaving on quarterly basis - not due to tactics but due to rotten relationships within company. And they are leaving for less paid positions elsewhere. They have practically lost all their seniors and are forced to pull in greenhorns.

charlieda• 6 years ago

And we should consider ourselves lucky as engineers that we work in an industry where we are so in demand that are able to do that. Workers in other industries (the article talks about a firm that re-sells beauty products) might not be so lucky.

ImaCake3• 6 years ago

Especially when everyone else got fired at the same time and finds themselves in a game of musical chairs for the few remaining jobs. You don't care if it means oppressive surveillance, at least you can pay your mortage and send your kids to school.

marakv22• 6 years ago

This. I'm working as an ESL teacher and upper management made me install cameras in every classroom, then pipe that feed to their home and head office.

Couldn't afford to leave, so I had to do it. I've left now though when I finally lined up something better.

ilaksh3• 6 years ago

Actually many many thousands of good engineers are being forced to accept monitoring software on sites like UpWork.

And no, they don't have a good choice, because the pay and opportunities in many countries just doesn't compete well with those sites.

srtjstjsj• 6 years ago

Remember when we didn't have personal mobile devices and we relies on work computers for digital entertainment at work?

mdoing• 6 years ago

Even if that software is there people will just find a way around it and the process they have in place for it. Also if a manager has to check these logs to see if their employees are working, I would question why he has some free time to do this and what of the other million things they could be doing.

Unless this is written into the contract the employee signed they could find themselves in tricky waters, they are transmitting data using the users own internet connection and they could be capturing sensitive data from a machine. I used to work with so many credit card details for testing, all of it was cleaned but still some details remained.

nine_k• 6 years ago

Work has negative utility. This is why people demand compensation for doing it.

What matters is the result. The less work you have spent to achieve the result, the better.

Some employers monitor and time the work of their engineers. Of course reasonably experienced and self-motivated engineers find such monitoring useless and offending. When employers try to improve productivity of less motivated workers by monitoring, it does not work all that well either, doubly so in the case of engineers. It could maybe improve manual labor outcomes, but you can't screenshot manual labor.

I suppose the employers have other reasons than productivity tracking.

Some employers sell the time of their engineers, and bill clients by the hour. Then screenshots are there to prove that the engineer has been actually working, and the client is not billed arbitrarily, in a case of a dispute. Of course the incentives here are skewed from the start.

Some employers use screenshots as a CYA policy to "prove" that their employees are not doing something inappropriate at the workplace, or at least something to show as an illustration of "making a reasonable effort" to prevent it. They would usually monitor and restrict network traffic, etc. IDK if it's actuslly helpful anywhere but when working on highly classified stuff.

OTOH I treat the computers my employers supply me with as explicitly not-mine devices. I tend to do anything private on a separate device (my own phone, my own PC), because I signed agreements stating that the employer is entitled to see every bit of information on the work machine, and there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in this regard. For that reason, I'm fine with my employers making screenshots of my work machines any time. (Using such screenshots to measure my short-term performance would still be silly, of course.)

mschuster91• 6 years ago

I would vote with my feet if my employer were to introduce such crap. Thankfully it is forbidden by law here in Germany.

goatinaboat• 6 years ago

The laws of psychology state that this guy is compensating for something. Time for the tax inspectors to take a closer look, or the police to check his hard drive.

zadkey• 6 years ago

I saw something in his face that suggests he was a fearful person afraid of loosing control, and looking for an unhealthy way to deal with that feeling.

snapetom• 6 years ago

My last company, a large regional hospital, spent over a decade trying to create a remote work policy. The app and business management side spent all that time figuring out which productivity monitoring software to buy. People from the network and security teams got sucked in spending endless cycles trying to figure out how to get these platforms working in our complicated network. Legal and compliance also spent God-knows-how long making sure everything was in line with HIPAA. Rinse and repeat with every pilot and trial of monitoring software.

The whole effort was so focused on employee monitoring, other things like security and actual productivity tools and protocols were essentially ignored. In the end nothing was ever formalized and business units just did their own thing. Some never even allowed it.

Then COVID-19 hit.

The network and security teams spent three weeks+ working on capacity upgrades for things like the VPN and laptops accommodate everyone. Old school managers who had never used anything like Slack or Teams suddenly had to figure out how to manage without patrolling the cubicle farm. During that time, nothing got done because employees were sent home but didn't have the tools to work.

If management actually stuck with their charter of creating a remote policy instead of software shopping, they wouldn't have missed a beat.

randycupertino• 6 years ago

Ha! I think we worked at similar hospitals.

As an aside, one of my girlfriends used employee monitoring software to catch her husband having a string of affairs by installing it on their shared laptop. Turned out he was hiring rentboys on the side and it was very helpful in their divorce proceedings.

acvny• 6 years ago

What is the motivation behind this article? Is it an encouragement for all employers to track their employees or is it that we should all return to the office? This form of surveilance should be deemed illegal as the employer is not buying my life but my work. This is just a poor country exploitation practice that is being tried to be introduced in developed countries to maximize profits. And by advertising this on bbc makes it normal. Next step is to connect mind reading hats and to require that you only think about your work during the shift.

throwaway_pdp09• 6 years ago

If you (effectively) spy on your staff, they will be unhappy and will want to leave. Which are most likely to be able to find other employment, a) your best staff b) your worst staff?

Set high-level targets and track performance, not behaviour.

patchtopic• 6 years ago

"why are they spending so much time on guillotine web sites"?

PeterStuer2• 6 years ago

My computer from work is an old Dell Latitude laptop. I work from home on my own desktop with double the ram, twice the threads and a triple 1440p monitor setup.

The only thing handled on the laptop is mail and Teams.

bb1233• 6 years ago

Is your company ok with you using a personal computer for work? I would love to be able to do that, but the firm I work for would sooner let me work from the moon.

PeterStuer2• 6 years ago

I've had no complaints. I have always made it a point that I prefer working on better equipment than the company provides.

I understand people that say the company should just provide you with the best, but honestly beyond a certain point you are often looking at a different value derivation curve.

I've always liked computers, and am rather intolerant of perceived unnecessary inefficiency. In the past I replaced the HDD in my work laptop with an SSD (1st gen, long before these were commodity) because I realized the enormous difference they made. Was working with a HDD impossible? Of course not, and most colleagues worked like that for a few more years. For me, it made me discomfortable knowing the amount of time I was wasting due to some technology hold-back that was already solved.

habosa• 6 years ago

Treating people as your adversary is the surest way to get them to act like it. That's true of employees, customers, and strangers.

If my boss tracked me like this I'd put a good amount of effort into getting around the tracking.

johnchristopher• 6 years ago

The other day, while looking for cheap sensors/cameras/networking solutions for a hobbyist project, I stumbled upon this: https://partners.sigfox.com/products/simplepack-office-chair

Identified needs – why to focus on office chair monitoring?

    Data-driven managers love to monitor home officing, track work hours, save space and costs incurred by unoccupied desks when employees work away from an office or on flexible schedules
    Companies are willing to avoid wasting money on lighting, heating, and cooling
    Facility companies want to optimize cleaning services
    There is a shift to working hubs, hot seats and a need for shared space utilization

How does SimplePack Chair work?

    Fix SimplePack Chair with 3M double-sided bonding tape to office chair
    There are 2 following ways to operate SimplePack Chair depending on the data you want to get and the business case you solve
    SimplePack Chair measures acceleration of 3 axis accelerometer with remote configurable intensity
    Acceleration or in other words vibration is measured every second

Darthy• 6 years ago

You’ve got to be kidding.

Balgair3• 6 years ago

Add a heater to it and a house cat will have no problem defeating it's purpose.

nottorp• 6 years ago

The thief thinks everyone else is a thief too?

Honestly I'd be worried about hiring that company because they'd try to shaft me too if i don't monitor them.

gamesbrainiac• 6 years ago

These kinds of applications need to be banned. By law.

simonkafan• 6 years ago

I would agree to work for Shibu Philip if he applies the same rules to himself and workers can see his keystrokes, mouse movements and websites visited. And if he's not spending his time looking at employees keystrokes, mouse movements and websites visited, his bonus is halved every time someone catches him doing something else.

mikepechadotcom• 6 years ago

This kind of infantilizing surveillance of employees will eventually backfire. Especially creative people will be driven out by such appalling policies, b/c they either can not or will not put up with it.

Things like this are a huge reason for the current startup/indie startup /solopreneur boom, because people want to have more freedom and dont want to be treated like 9 year olds...

weare138• 6 years ago

It's crap like this that made me quit working in the corporate world. I just can't deal with it.

jdmg94• 6 years ago

Crossover.com has been doing this for YEEAARS

“I monitor my staff with software that takes screenshots”

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