Workplace surveillance is coming for you

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

by anonymfus • 4 years ago

382 175 4 years ago

Does anyone else not like the design of this website or is it just me? I find the articles fascinating, but the design I don't jive with...

wrycoder• 4 years ago

Well, according to the sidebar, it was "optimized for Netscape Navigator". It seems to have hit that mark.

patchtopic• 4 years ago

I like the design but it's a bit difficult to link to I find. One of my favourite web sites with a lot of well thought out content.

skyfaller3• 4 years ago

It's really just the font I hate. In the past I've used Reader Mode in Firefox to make it readable, but just now I went into Ublock Origin to change the font to something I like, using the suggestions from this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/r4gzzl/how_do...

  pluralistic.net##*:style(font-family: Fira Sans !important)

If you like your default browser font, you could instead just unset it:

  pluralistic.net##*:style(font-family: unset !important)

agileAlligator2• 4 years ago

It's not so much the font as it is the lack of separators for me. There's no lines or anything separating one article from the rest, and when I click continue reading it takes me to the heading of that article in the page for that day rather than a separate page for the article. These two things are specifically what bother me.

mindslight• 4 years ago

or, more formally, "any target becomes a measurement" (AKA Goodhart's Law).

nit: it's better stated as "any measurement becomes a target".

Reading the article, I had a pang of hope. If it's really as anti-effectual as described, perhaps just everyone needs to buy mouse jiggling dongles and the push behind the immediate trend will lose momentum.

Or really, it's just another step in the corporate-Keynesian make-busy-work economy that has gobbled up most of our productivity gains for decades.

dmitriid• 4 years ago

Successful shitty tech rollouts start with people you can abuse with impunity (prisoners, kids, migrants, etc) and then work their way up the privilege gradient.

There's an election coming up in Sweden.

One of the parties is literally advertising their platform with "more security cameras on our streets" (Moderaterna), and every party is keen to expand police power to have more surveillance and wiretapping without prior criminal suspicions (at least according to the "Election compass" on SVT: https://valkompass.svt.se/2022)

skyfaller3• 4 years ago

On workplace surveillance / "bossware":

Mazzoli seems to have either not used his product, or, if he did, did so under conditions where he was in charge of it – using it the way an athlete might use a stopwatch to time their own sprints, and not the way a boss might: to decide whether to dock your pay or fire you.
This inability to understand the difference between using a technology and having the same technology used against you is endemic to the industry.

I think this is a key failure of understanding for the "tech is neither good nor bad!" camp: just as the Death Star clearly was never going to be used for mining planetoids, it's very clear how workplace surveillance tech will be used to harm workers, if nothing else because of how it is currently being used. Continuing to work on such tech just because it could theoretically be used for non-evil purposes is morally bankrupt, and something the industry needs to establish ethical standards to prevent.

mistrial9• 4 years ago

semi-randomly, I was reading about the colonial Spanish mining city of Potosi in the South American Andes today, before opening YNews. The Spanish Viceroy (administrator for the King) oversaw the conscription (slavery) of 1 in 7 adult males each year, over a vast area, to service the poisonous and intensely profitable silver mines. Stories of courage and death predictably follow, while the administrators, unconnected to the daily life in the mines in that region, made record profits, among the largest wealth in Europe at the time (late 1500s). Comments on the social structures that supported that, left as an exercise to the reader.

Consider history; Do you think for one minute, that a Viceroy somewhere, and legions of new administrators, won't inflict endless and strictly enforced conditions on anyone they can find, using software?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/1776_Pot...

WilTimSon• 4 years ago

Yeah, if tech is developed with the explicit purpose of surveillance on workers, it's definitely not some dubious case where "well maybe it's done with good intentions". Nothing good comes from putting extra mental strain on your workers, showing you don't trust them and being an invasive boss overall.

bigDinosaur3• 4 years ago

This stuff is worse than the Death Star. At least that thing made no pretence about helping its targets. I cannot fathom how much my mood has dropped on reading about Bossware. I'd do pretty much anything in my career to avoid it.

skyfaller3• 4 years ago

I was referring to some material from the no-longer canon Star Wars Extended Universe, where it was referred to during development as the "Imperial Planetary Ore Extractor", and some characters working on its design genuinely believed (due to brainwashing) that the Death Star "was developed to break up dead, lifeless planets to extract the valuable ores and elements within". https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Qwi_Xux

Of course, if programmers are raised from a young age and brainwashed into believing that workplace surveillance is innocent / good, that's a different problem than adults who should know better when it comes to the real world results of using the tech they are building.

hotpotamus• 4 years ago

This made me think about other tech that has no good use. Flamethrowers come to mind. Not the fun ones that Elon will sell you as a gimmick, but the ones that toss sticky flammable liquids at people.

I was listening to someone describe their use in WWII, and he was I suppose trying to defend it by saying that actually most of the people it killed weren't burned at all, but rather killed because they were in enclosed fortifications and apparently flamethrowers produce prodigious amounts of carbon monoxide - basically you'd take a couple breaths and it's over - the carbon monoxide will bind into your blood cells such that even if you immediately step out into fresh air, you're a dead man walking. But at least your corpse will be recognizable for your friends and family I suppose; you won't be burned beyond recognition.

But building a reliable flamethrower is an interesting technical challenge, so I'm sure you can find an engineer who will be willing to give it a go.

rogermecizki• 4 years ago

I think this is a key failure of understanding for the "tech is neither good nor bad!" camp:

I like the addendum, "...but nor is it neutral"

Kalium4• 4 years ago

Once upon a time, I worked for a shop that did auto insurance. This involves handling a lot of fairly sensitive data about people and datasets about a lot of people, for reasons that boil down to it being incredibly useful data for actuarial purposes.

Bossware, or working machine monitoring software, endpoint monitoring, or whatever turned out to be a key part of making it possible for our data scientists to function. At all. It was the only way we could both protect the incredibly sensitive information about lots of people while allowing analysis work to proceed.

Aside: anyone who wants to talk about doing data analysis without access to the underlying data is cordially invited to explain how to do this to statisticians who only understand R and local Jupyter notebooks.

"But wait!" you protest, "Can't the business work just as well without that sensitive information?". That's a good question! The short answer is no. No, it cannot, and unfortunately there's a great deal of actuarial history behind this.

"But wait!" cry you, "Could you have not simply trusted them?". That's also an excellent question! To which the uncomfortable response runs roughly: how comfortable do you feel with "we trust them" as the primary security controls when some company has your data? Especially when that trust means you might not even know about a breach? How do you think a regulator concerned with privacy would look at "we trust them" as a security and privacy approach?

Unfortunately, I think some forms of bossware serve a purpose. Sometimes it's one of the few options available that enables trust beyond the directly interpersonal.

detaro• 4 years ago

I think there is certainly a place for audit trails etc, but it again comes back to how that data is used. An access log is an access log, but it's a difference if you analyze it to find people looking at data they have no reason to look at, or if you analyze it to track who spends how long on their toilet break. And a lot of what's offered by current "bossware" clearly falls in the latter category.

bart_spoon• 4 years ago

Aside: anyone who wants to talk about doing data analysis without access to the underlying data is cordially invited to explain how to do this to statisticians who only understand R and local Jupyter notebooks.

Provision some isolated machines with access to production data, and let the data scientists login remotely. You'll be able to tell who is accessing the data and when, and won't need to install invasive bossware on their systems. It's a fairly straightforward solution. It's one thing to control access to sensitive data. Its another to use that to justify monitoring employees all day, even when they aren't accessing sensitive data.

wazanator• 4 years ago

Yeah, do people really want no supervision on employees handling their PII or other sensitive info? I think I would be upset if I found out my info was not even being attempted to be protected while in an employees possession.

biotinker• 4 years ago

I worked as a bioinformatician at a medical device company. We did genetic testing on cancer patients, and had huge amounts of private, personal information on the patients we were testing, because it was necessary to provide the correct clinical determination.

We also didn't have bossware. There were access controls on the data itself, audit trails on who accessed the data, but no software running locally on my personal dev machine looking at what I did at any particular moment.

HIPAA governs the storage, transport, and use of that health information, and we all knew we were criminally liable if the information got out.

Bossware in a HIPAA environment (or other environment where not having leaks in important) can be more of a liability than a boon, because it becomes yet another vector for attack or data leakage. You are in effect sharing all data a machine can access, with the maker of the bossware.

Something with the teeth of HIPAA but for other pieces of personal information could go a long way. It's amazing how differently executives behave when the consequences of data leaks change from "customers could be unhappy if they found out" to "I could personally go to prison".

Buttons840• 4 years ago

It was the only way we could both protect the incredibly sensitive information about lots of people while allowing analysis work to proceed.

Meanwhile this data is getting leaked every other week by other companies. Didn't Equifax leak pretty much all sensitive information for the entire nation. What happened there?

I haven't formed a constructive thought out of all this yet, I'm just frustrated that we'll get surveillance software to allegedly protect data that's already been leaked by a hundred other companies.

Often this will be like the "think of the children" argument. Of course we should be concerned about security and make efforts to protect data, but many times the same people who push surveillance software in the name of security will later turn a blind eye to other security practices or concerns that might be an inconvenience to them. Their concern for security will extend only as far as it gives them power.

tomrod• 4 years ago

anyone who wants to talk about doing data analysis without access to the underlying data is cordially invited to explain how to do this to statisticians who only understand R and local Jupyter notebooks.

Joint distributions and generating functions trained against the production data to generate synthetic data, generally.

Ntrails• 4 years ago

it's very clear how workplace surveillance tech will be used to harm workers

My takeaway is not just that that, but that it will be used to harm businesses as they train their employees to do the measured thing over and above the best thing for the company.

I suspect most people here could envision this as an extension of a "Lines of Code written" based performance metric and intuit the likely outcomes.

Ancalagon• 4 years ago

Oh come on. He's playing dumb for the positive PR view. Of course he knows what his product is going to be used for.

avg_dev2• 4 years ago

Damn, I had some fairly old opinion of Doctorow where I disliked him for some reason or other, but I am definitely revising that. I thought this was a great article.

I am certain “bossware” will accelerate the downfall of already shitty workplaces.

Very happy to hear Amazon is doing away with it. Strongly hope their workers unionize anyway. What kind of employer nickle-and-dimes a worker’s bathroom breaks? Not a good one, that’s for damn sure.

I used to see these job postings on LinkedIn for Crossover for Work. I was intrigued by the claim of $400yr salary. Glad I didn’t end up working there. Thanks but no thanks, I am not going to work actively oppressing already downtrodden workers. A quick search turned up this fascinating article as well: https://medium.com/@whistler_12777/heres-why-crossover-is-a-...

Fuck bossware. Fuck people who work to actively oppress others. Humanity for all, value of life for each and every person out there.

Rant over. Thanks for the link.

rgrieselhuber• 4 years ago

Doctorow has always been solid on this topic.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 4 years ago

What kind of employer nickle-and-dimes a worker’s bathroom breaks?

I had a teacher in high school who would respond the same way (more or less) whenever someone would ask to use the restroom:

If you ever have a job that needs you to ask to use the restroom, find a better job.

giantg2• 4 years ago

There are some strict time-keeping requirements for bathroom use when it comes to certain contracts, like government ones. It wasn't too bad, but I forget the specifics. It was like it had to be less than 5 minutes, or you use your 15 minute breaks or lunch for anything longer.

nopehnnope6• 4 years ago

This is the unintended consequence of anti discrimination laws (and other laws, like those protecting unions, that defeat at-will employment). Easiest way to fire shitty employees is to document a bunch of technical rule violations. That will create a rock solid paper trail that will stand up in court. Otherwise, they will claim some kind of discrimination and it’s your word about their performance against theirs calling you a racist/sexist/whatever.

unity1001• 4 years ago

You talk as if the corporations havent kept squeezing more labor out of their employees throughout 20th century. Regardless of any laws and regulations. They would keep doing it even if anti discrimination laws did not exist. They may be using that for an excuse now. They would use another excuse to make people work until death if there weren't any such laws.

helloworld972• 4 years ago

That's some pretzel logic there. They can't arbitrarily implement/enforce rules without first disclosing them, and it looks bad in a court of peers if they start doing this haphazardly. I would actually say it's easier for them to get away with this in an at-will environment without these rules.

"Position was eliminated" works pretty well (in the US).

jacquesm2• 4 years ago

This is complete nonsense. The easiest way to fire shitty employees is to fire them for being shitty, which you should have documented to begin with.

This has absolutely nothing to do with anti discrimination law.

swayvil2• 4 years ago

Re : documenting transgressions.

Local food co-op. Very modern hippy. Nice place.

Every employee has a dossier on file. Every time a rule is broken it goes into the dossier.

If, for whatever reason, you are fired. The dossier is cited as legal justification.

I guess this is perfectly rational from a businessy perspective, and a common tactic. But still.

sillystuff• 4 years ago

This is the result of managers who have no idea how to do the tasks of the employees they are "managing". E.g., non-technical manager managing technical employees who uses silly metrics like LOC because he/she has no idea how to evaluate the employee's performance.

Also, upper management somehow feel that their middle and lower managers can be trusted to act like adults while the people who do the actual work cannot be.

The proper solution is getting rid of management, and letting workers get their jobs done.

https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers

https://www.inventium.com.au/learned-fired-managers/

swatcoder• 4 years ago

That’s interesting. Do you have a reference for that?

With workplace control seeming to predate worker protection by a century, you wouldn’t expect that. But it’s always exciting when intuitions get subverted. I’d love to read more of how the historian who proposed this put together their argument. Do you have a link handy?

mtberatwork• 4 years ago

and other laws, like those protecting unions, that defeat at-will employment

This is backwards. Union membership is at its all time low and at-will employment has mostly taken over. A union would be the best tool to curb "boss-ware".

hedora4• 4 years ago

Read some of his young adult fiction, then get all gag-me-with-a-spoon over the coming of age stuff. (But then stay for the occasional afterward by Bruce Schneier…)

You may enjoy Terry Gilliam’s The Zero Theorem.

Peloton will eventually start climbing the STAC ladder (it’s literally their only remaining move). Between that, permanent covid mitigations and the office-space downsizings of the late 2020’s, Gilliam’s vision will be complete!

candiddevmike• 4 years ago

"Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I poop on company time"

amelius• 4 years ago

"Boss took big risks, so save that poop for when you get home."

Spooky233• 4 years ago

Doctorow is a professional activist.

He makes good points and has a clear set of beliefs that he applies consistently, especially on topics like this, but gets a little overbearing if you follow closely.

mbostleman• 4 years ago

Yea, I suffer from serious oppression and inequity narrative fatigue. I couldn't really get past the first few paragraphs. Sure there is inequity between workers and their management. But first off, it's not always tilted towards management. There are many indexes on which we can measure how one party fares over another. But anyone who is moved to write about inequity only assumes a single index and that management is always oppressive and employees are always helpless and oppressed.

Secondly, the longer I have been a participant of society and markets, I've come to realize that power imbalances are as affected by how much the participants stand up for themselves in the face of power grabs as it is how much other participants grab. But again, when inequity is described, those that grab are universally criticized for grabbing and those that allow it are never offered advice or encouragement on how to either resist or walk away. I believe the latter would be much healthier for society and markets.

6510• 4 years ago

Jeff Bezos is the urine man. He made his billions by banning urination. Everything depended on it.

avg_dev2• 4 years ago

One question about the article. What does the phrase “soup the negatives” mean?

JustSomeNobody2• 4 years ago

I'm curious as well. The context is film, so I imagine it refers to the chemical process of developing the negatives in some way.

mikeyouse• 4 years ago

Pretty close - but "souping" is when you add some random ingredient that destroys the negatives but creates an interesting effect when developing the photos. You can use vinegar, lemon juice, vodka, bleach, any number of chemicals that create different effects;

https://www.kjsmall.com/projects/film-soup-tips-tricks

In the context of the article, it seems the consultants would take copious notes (the negatives) and then go back and 'soup' them in order to have something interesting to present even though it's an unrealistic picture of the office.

potmat• 4 years ago

Perhaps this will help: https://youtu.be/S6RCKPY32Lg?t=338

rvz• 4 years ago

Now, thanks to "luxury surveillance," you can get the same experience in your middle-class home with your Google, Apple or Amazon "smart" camera. Those cameras climbed the curve, going from prisons to schools to workplaces to homes.

All thanks to Big Tech, and by the looks of it if we don't do something to counter against this, we will also own nothing and we will be very happy under the eyes the technocratic elite.

rightbyte3• 4 years ago

I like the term "bossware". I think I will use it the next time I wiggle the mouse to make my Teams status green again.

GekkePrutser• 4 years ago

In fact Microsoft built these features straight into Microsoft 365 under the name "Insights" (I think now being rebranded again to viva something)

They say it's all anonymized but it's really easy to correlate back to users by playing with settings.

rightbyte3• 4 years ago

Ye. I solved it by booking a meeting with myself for a year so my status was always "one way street" when I WHF:ed.

mouzogu• 4 years ago

it's ironic to me how the typical boss measures productivity in emails, chats and other things that are not real work, making things, solving problems...

its like even the basis by which they measure work, is not work. but since thats all they ever do, they have no other frame of reference.

falcolas2• 4 years ago

One thing I appreciate about slack is my ability to turn off the "auto-afk" check.

doubled112• 4 years ago

For now.

zyx321• 4 years ago

You still manually wiggle the mouse? Imagine how much more productive you'd be with an automatic mouse jiggler.

rightbyte3• 4 years ago

No I switched job to a in office.

And I didn't have to because I had a nice boss but wfh made me uneasy. I made up the need in my head that I had to be not "away" while working. So I did it out of habit ... not too strict though.

EMM_386• 4 years ago

I think I will use it the next time I wiggle the mouse to make my Teams status green again.

https://github.com/arkane-systems/mousejiggler

thenerdhead• 4 years ago

I feel like life finds a way even if it went down this path. People will create bots that randomize opening up a list of programs you use and make various gestures to throw off any tracking tool.

I’m less worried about the Orwellian bossware and more about the Huxleyian warning of an abundance of so much information that bosses can hardly decipher what work is even being done.

gitfan86• 4 years ago

Yes. And boses don't want to admit that they have no idea how to measure employee productivity, because that would mean that their own productivity is bad. Now maybe there is hope that the boses boss could detect lack of work of those teams, but he may also be afraid of saying the truth.

cybrox• 4 years ago

I agree but we already wage this never-ending tug of war against advertisements and "viruses", we don't need another one. But hey, off we go, all in the name of "employee productivity"

patientplatypus• 4 years ago

I find it so weird. Aren't there any bosses that say "Yeah, fuck you we're not doing that." That's the point of a boss. If I were in charge of a bunch of programmers and a mandate came down from on high to rate programmers based on commits or keystrokes, my first response would be "Eat shit." and my second response would be "No, really, I'm not treating my people like dogs. Eat shit."

wing-_-nuts• 4 years ago

...and they'd pip you out in a few months, and you'd leave without a good reference.

In reality, you'd realize it was horrible, but orders are orders, so most people would do it. If they found it particularly objectionable, they'd just look for another job in the meantime, but most folks who are not financially independent wouldn't take a stand for it.

silksowed• 4 years ago

people over leveraged in their personally lives don't seem to be able to take risks at work for the greater good. all it takes is 6 months of runway cash and i think more people would say "eat shit" instead of blindly following orders to help protect themselves

softawre• 4 years ago

This stuff happens all of the time.

Middle management has to educate upper management on why certain metrics are bad. I do it all the time. Most recent one was length a PR was open. Some of my better devs opened PRs earlier and left them open for feedback longer, and I didn't want them penalized, so I communicated (with data) to management that it was a bad metric and we no longer measure it.

decebalus12• 4 years ago

That's the point of a boss.

I disagree. The point of a boss is to squeeze as much productivity as possible from contributors in order to meet business goals. If they do that as a humane understanding collaborator or as a micromanaging tyrant depends on two factors: what kind of person they are and how much leeway does upper management allow. If a boss is of the 'telling their boss to eat shit' variety, they're usually not going to stay a boss for long..

mattnewton• 4 years ago

I’ve recently watched Brazil, and the film has one of the most chilling dystopian views I’ve ever seen because it’s easy to see yourself as part of the machine doing your best just trying to get by.

Similarly, I can see how the people working in this software slipped into this- they identified a need in the market with WFH, tried prototypes that were well received on the market, and keep iterating. Many of them legitimately are interested in time tracking and optimization, but of course the market for personal tools like that is very small and lots of employers want to pay you for this because they want more productive employees. Meanwhile the people buying them don’t really know what they are buying, they want to believe they have found a solution to the problem they are terrified of, employees pretending to work and milking them. And the employees exposed to it aren’t in a position of power to change it. And next thing you know we have a dystopian monster with enough funding to be responsible for people’s jobs itself, where no one individual has incentives to buck the curve or much ability to fight back.

What’s the solution then? Doctorow mentions unions, and I’d agree that could work. I think there must be another faction to join that doesn’t ruin you, something to compete with the monolith in case the monolith gets sick in this way. Being able to quit and find somewhere else only works if that somewhere else is mostly differentiated by the fact that it doesn’t do these programs you disagree with- many people will put up with this and worse if there is a large pay differential between it and the next option, or if they would have to move and uproot themselves. And if a government gets sick in this way it might not let you quit the country. You have to be able to form collective groups that can bargain with the behemoth, like a union, or political party, or other action that relies on people for it’s power and not capital. That’s one reason why money in politics is so worrying to me, because the way I see it, it messes with this crucial release valve of political action.

A4ET8a8uTh02• 4 years ago

<<Mazzoli seems to have either not used his product, or, if he did, did so under conditions where he was in charge of it – using it the way an athlete might use a stopwatch to time their own sprints, and not the way a boss might: to decide whether to dock your pay or fire you.

And author covered it as well. The technology is interesting and COULD be applied appropriately, but management class seems to be going for low hanging fruits and easy solutions completely undermining what could be a useful tool if used appropriately. The problem, and not a small one at that, is that the management class, in US at least, had a free ride for the past few decades. They only had to threaten with a stick and that was enough. They only know how to use a hammer.

I absolutely agree on Brazil. It is so easy to forget our jobs have impact on the world outside.

asdff3• 4 years ago

employees pretending to work and milking them

Why don't bosses just fire their managers and hire better ones than contract some software? It should be impossible to milk your employer if you are expected to be contributing. Anyone on your team will see right away you are full of shit if you are actually full of shit. If they can get the job done half assed, and people are none the wiser, then good for that employee figuring out how to optimize their time while still delivering acceptable performance that no one is complaining about.

SilverBirch• 4 years ago

The bossware problem is a boss problem, in other words.

I think this is basically the core. Bossware, like all technology is essentially about increasing efficiency. If your boss is shit, this technology is going to make them far more effective at being shit.

They aren't just going to do all the traditional things that make them shit - unclear goals, over-rewarding presenteeism, being sexist, racist or misogynist. Now they're going to do all those things but a lot more effectively.

Maybe in general this is a good thing, it's going to increase the gap between good bosses and bad bosses and that will in the end cause the good bosses to outperform the bad bossess and the bad bosses' will be identified, or at the least the companies that have bad bosses will be outperformed.

I would say the problem of this bossware is actually worse in schools and prisons - because those environments lack the same feedback paths that regulate this.

PuppyTailWags• 4 years ago

I actually don't think this would be a good thing even for a good boss, because a good boss simply wouldn't use this surveillance bullshit in the way a good boss simply wouldn't sexually harass the intern.

Also, I would disagree that shitty bosses are responsive to their own bad management consequences. Remember that at Blizzard a manager harassed a report to the point of suicide[edit: to be clear, literally passed around explicit pictures of the report through the company, the report killed themselves around that time, so this is allegedly]-- what're the consequences for that manager? They are probably still managing somewhere.

nixpulvis• 4 years ago

I believe in many states it's illegal for you to be recorded at work. I'm not sure how so many places are getting around this. If the claim is that it's audio vs video, then I say that's a bunk argument. A) we can reconstruct some audio from video (lip reading software), and B) a lot of what would have been "verbal" conversations now happen in text chats, recorded by cameras perfectly in the clear.

Not to mention that I'm always a bit nervous typing passwords into a computer under the eyes of recording machines.

giraffe_lady• 4 years ago

I believe in many states it's illegal for you to be recorded at work.

That doesn't seem right where are you getting that? A workplace is probably not considered "public" so a third party might be restricted on recording you there. But your employer isn't a third party here so you're straight back into og labor relations and what does your contract say and what does your union allow etc.

oezi3• 4 years ago

In Germany the entire premise of monitoring performance is prohibited. Employers aren't even allowed to look at email.

anonporridge• 4 years ago

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

whoomp12342• 4 years ago

lol, bring it. tech industry is still strong, I wont tolerate such behavior

bheadmaster• 4 years ago

I'm currently reading "The Tyranny of Metrics" which provides a decent analysis of how over-measuring things that don't have anything to do with the real goal often serves as a deterrent to real progress.

What managers want to know is how much do their workers contribute to the success of the company. What they measure is how much time do workers spend doing X. They're completely glossing over the middle step of how does the time spent doing X contribute to the success of the company, which is usually taken as some kind of linear equation.

Over-measurement is often worse than not measuring anything at all.

padolsey• 4 years ago

Over-measurement is often worse than not measuring anything at all.

Yes. Not only is "time spent" or "code written" or "features implemented" or even "user engagement" a lossy metric in the best of cases but it can literally end up doing the exact opposite of what you intended. Campbell's & Goodhart's laws are often cited. The trap I see in software companies is a hyperfocus on quantifiable short term wins, entirely glossing over the value created by longer term cultivation of quality. One can see projects where code cleanliness, documentation, testing, CI, and performance have been effectively disincentivised, even though, in the short, mid, and long-term, you will see gains. Such gains, however, are less visible and less quantifiable to the kinds of people who define and foster the metric regimes.

A narrative I observe variations of:

Universe X:

- Programmer A implements feature in one week. They get a admiration and a raise.

- One year later: Programmer B implements feature in 3 weeks, because they had to use Programmer A's shoddy and inconsistent API.

Universe Y:

- Programmer A implements feature in two weeks. Less admiration and no raise.

- One year later: Programmer B implements feature in 1 week, because they were able to use Programmer A's better implemented interface.

Hopefully it's obvious which universe is preferable and produced a net-win. ...

Bad metric regimes are unforuntately not _obviously_ bad when you're inside their machinations. They really need to be dug into to see the fallacies.

One has to look no further than Meta/Facebook for the absolute deteriment caused by overzealous performance reviews and a fixation of experimental upticks in user engagement. It is a bad metric regime.

IWillForgetThis• 4 years ago

The universe X example has some merit too. The developer got a raise, the business was excited enough to get this feature done ahead of schedule that someone actually put in the effort to push through a raise, and the total cost for this was one man-week of extra work a year later - basically a drop in the bucket, budget-wise.

Raidion• 4 years ago

You never want to built anything shoddily, but there is a lot of value in doing minimum scope. Testing, clean code, etc shouldn't be negotiable in most shops, but scope can be really trimmed down in a lot of scenarios.

Universe Z: - Programmer X implements feature A in 1 week with tiny scope - Feature B is mothballed and never gets built

Universe A: - Programmer X implements feature in 2 weeks - One year later: This functionality is broken apart into a well defined microservice with additional responsibilities. This needs a total rewrite as a v2 API.

Universe B: - Programmer implements a feature in 1 week - One month later with that extra week they were able to squeeze in an unrelated enhancement to the system that delivered .5% extra revenue during Black Friday.

I find most of the productivity metrics fail because you're squeezing the wrong end of the process. You want to spend the most time making sure you're doing what matters and has value, and then it will almost always be worth the time. This makes people feel engaged, which will lead to a lot more productivity than when you're pushing them to build something they don't care about.

etothepii• 4 years ago

Universe Y is fine if the company is certain to survive for one year but it is quite possible that slow development of features will mean that in Universe Y there is no Programmer B to benefit from the beautiful API.

wussboy3• 4 years ago

I think this was covered in "Thinking Fast and Slow", but when our brains encounter a hard problem, we often substitute the answer for an easy question. I think this process is at play in the dynamics you list above.

"How does the time spent doing X contribute to the success of the company?" is a hard question. It has incredible value and every company should spend a great deal of time considering it.

"How much time do workers spend doing X?" is an easy question, and so we have used its answer as the answer to the hard question.

AyyWS• 4 years ago

in 2015 I made a change that stopped 90% of the tickets that rolled into my team's queue. The remaining 10% were complicated real customer issues. Our entire department was closed 6 months later, because I assume our ticket completion was so low, and we were so slow to fix issues. :/

chrisweekly• 4 years ago

Ouch.

mrweasel• 4 years ago

It's not even over-measuring, it's measuring the wrong thing, because the thing you actually want to know isn't (easily) measurable.

The whole thing is down to poor management(-culture). Good managers already know who their top performing team members are. They don't need these tools. Measuring LOC or time spend sitting at the desk is in my view attempting to compensate for lack in management skills. It's like advertising agencies that can't sell ads without AdSense. Boss-ware is an attempt by poor managers to make up for a lack of skills by applying something that looks science from a distance.

UweSchmidt• 4 years ago

Workplace surveillance is bad even if it "measures the right thing" and makes us all super-efficient, over-surveilled workers.

A4ET8a8uTh02• 4 years ago

<< The irony, of course, is that bossware is now coming for execs, and, what's more, they lack the engineering skills to optimize their work so they can get a high score and do the job, so they have to settle for just getting the score – and hang the job itself.

I will believe it when I see it in action. If there is one thing that remain constant is the golden rule ( "He who has gold makes the rules" ). And boss class has the gold.

pnf• 4 years ago

I can't recall the name of it but there was a pre-pandemic startup for remote teams where it took a picture of you at your desk every few minutes to share with your team, supposedly to achieve less lonely remote-only workplaces. They marketed it as pro-worker, lol.

tgtweak• 4 years ago

Has a similar experience with upwork once where the contractor (who are screen recorded by upwork to make sure they're "working") would just spend large amounts of time scrolling up and down on the IDE looking at source code - literally hours - to look busy and keep the meter rolling.

If you can't measure output, there is no point in measuring input.

swayvil2• 4 years ago

Here's an interesting pattern.

You eat a banana. It's delicious and nutritious. Cool.

You read about a fellow who ate a banana. Ah, such a fond reference.

You read about your banana-research employees. Taste, nutrition and fond references are furthest from your mind. You only care about your sales numbers.

Abstraction=progressive numbness.

kastagg4• 4 years ago

There's no value in thinking all day about how bananas are delicious. Before you can eat the banana, it has to be produced and shipped. That process does not even involve thinking that bananas are delicious, so that kind of thinking isn't abstracted in the production process, it's simply irrelevant.

TremendousJudge2• 4 years ago

I disagree. If you ignore the actual value your product provides to the final consumer "this banana is delicious", you'll come up with solutions that diminish that value. The only reason why blending whole bananas (peel and all), and sending that slop in an unrefrigerated shipping container isn't even considered as an option is an understanding of what the banana-buyers want.

fareesh• 4 years ago

I would just use another computer and automate some BS on the surveilled one.

hedora4• 4 years ago

I’d just put the surveilled one in a drawer.

“I’m extremely happy with the progress you made this month, but HR says you worked zero hours this week.”

“I couldn’t figure out how to use the corporate laptop. Sorry about that.”

chaostheory• 4 years ago

Surprised that no one mentioned this yet in the top comments, but isn’t Microsoft one of the top purveyors of workplace surveillance since MS Office is so dominant?

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252521757/Microsoft-Offi...

I know telemetry services eat up a lot of resources in my work laptop from time to time.

antman• 4 years ago

Not that easy in EU:

"instead of monitoring individual usage, employers can monitor aggregate levels of usage and send general reminders to staff. If excessive private use persists, monitoring can be increased in line with the defined rules of the organisation, for example to specifically target particular suspicions" those rules should also be made public to the employees

Additionally staff should be made aware and formally comment on any subjective interpretation of data for their evaluation.

Also if using ML the also should be published and be explainable ML

Also EY says monitoring only for "legitimate reasons" which is a legal murky area.

https://edps.europa.eu/data-protection/data-protection/refer...

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

Note also Theranos executives were using similar email monitoring tools to make sure low-level employees weren't copying emails to private folders (because executives knew Theranos was engaging in fraud and didn't want their emails showing up in criminal or civil court cases later on). These are tools like Nagios, Zabbix, etc. which allow application and data movement monitoring.

Some will argue these are necessary security tools, but in reality if the executives are so afraid of their employees ratting them out or selling their data to Russian hackers or whatever, then they've got larger problems with their organization (again, see Theranos).

sudden_dystopia• 4 years ago

Quit reading at “large stage capitalism”. Such a bs term. This is not capitalism, this is techno corporate fascism. That is what is failing and causing misery. And the more we gaslight capitalism, the further down the totalitarian path we are going to go.

HideousKojima• 4 years ago

Exactly, the proposed solutions are always more state power and more state intervention which will simply lead to even more regulatory capture and even stronger entrenched corporate interests.

shakezula3• 4 years ago

Does the author ever promote stronger state powers as a solution?

TremendousJudge2• 4 years ago

Do you believe that worker unionization is more state power and intervention?

shakezula3• 4 years ago

We arrived at this place on the line directly from capitalism though. This is a failure of capitalism at least, and a direct incentive of it at worst.

You can’t just say it’s not capitalism when it’s the exact consequence of capitalism just because it resulted in something you don’t like. The “totalitarian path” is the one that capitalism laid bare before your feet.

donatj3• 4 years ago

We arrived at this place on the line directly from the formation of the sun. You don't talk about "late stage solar energy". This isn't any more the suns fault than it it is capitalisms fault; it's just a popular scapegoat.

goatlover2• 4 years ago

When Orwell wrote 1984 with it's constant surveillance, he had "late-stage capitalism" in mind? Are you saying that totalitarian governments wouldn't have made use of technological innovation to spy on their citizens, including worker output?

kastagg4• 4 years ago

Capitalism is what it is in reality, not just in our fondest hopes.

The problem with the phrase is the assumption that any day now, something else will inevitably come along to replace it and make everything better. That "replacement" has unfortunately proved at least as problematic as the history of capitalism.

pessimizer• 4 years ago

the further down the totalitarian path we are going to go.

It's not real totalitarianism.

decebalus12• 4 years ago

I also get aggravated by the usage of 'late stage capitalism'. I very much prefer 'end stage capitalism' or 'terminal capitalism'.

TheRealDunkirk2• 4 years ago

"Office 365 went from being an online version of Microsoft Office to being a bossware delivery-system."

I feel like a fool. I watch Microsoft like a hawk, and I didn't even know about this. Every time I think I'm too cynical about a FAANG company -- and Microsoft in particular -- I find that I haven't been nearly cynical enough.

fezfight2• 4 years ago

The enabling of not just workplace monitoring, but their ability to associate it with your career data via LinkedIn is next level spooky but no one seems to want to talk about it. What do they provide employers on your behalf?

Forgive me, a small thing but I don't think Microsoft is a FAANG. They're more like IBM 2.0. Every now and then their drones try to jam an M in the acronym in a sad 'how do you do, fellow kids' kinda way.

TheRealDunkirk2• 4 years ago

Aha! THAT'S why there's a new tickbox in Outlook preferences to connect your LinkedIn profile! Again, I'm not NEARLY cynical enough!

ivraatiems• 4 years ago

I'm all for privacy and I cringe at the idea of workplace surveillance of the type described. That said, this article is loaded with false comparisons and poor analogies and just doesn't make its point very well. In general, it confuses "The Bad Government want to intentionally surveil you" with "idiot corporations chasing profits incidentally surveil you and think you're enough of an idiot to swallow it".

20 years ago, if you were eating your dinner under the unblinking eye of a video-camera, it was because you were in a supermax prison.

Or a shopping mall. Or an airport. Or a convenience store. Or the lobby of a hotel. Or a bank. Or about a million other places.

Now, thanks to "luxury surveillance," you can get the same experience in your middle-class home with your Google, Apple or Amazon "smart" camera. Those cameras climbed the curve, going from prisons to schools to workplaces to homes.

This is a fundamentally inaccurate comparison. Nobody is forcing anyone to get a "smart" camera. I don't own one and I never will. Mandatory surveillance at work or in public is not the same issue as mandatory surveillance in private. This also totally ignores the fact that people aren't buying surveillance devices because they surveil. They're buying them for other reasons. Also, there's no "Them" out in the world making this all happen. It's natural evolution as technologies evolve and change. There's no conspiracy, just a lot of not particularly bright ideas colliding at once.

What we should be talking about are all the forms of surveillance people don't opt into - abuse of the cameras on your phone, laptop, etc. The scary thing, to me, is not "what will this technology you chose to acquire do when working as intended" but "how will forces you can't control subvert the things you have for other reasons."

loudmax• 4 years ago

I tend to agree with your point about voluntarily buying devices to allow corporations to spy on ourselves. Nobody is forcing you to get one of these things. At least not yet. I don't think the danger is that the government is going to force you to install a surveillance device in your house. The danger is that this will come from the free market.

This is what the point of the Shitty Technology Adoption Curve. The surveillance starts with people who don't have the agency to opt out of it.

We in the software and IT industry have a fair amount of choice when it comes to our work environments. If a potential employer insists on a screen recorder or keylogger, we can see these as warning flags and generally have options to go work someplace else. A lot of people don't have this luxury. If it's the choice between either working somewhere where your boss is timing your piss breaks or not being able to pay rent, that's really not much of a choice.

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to envisage a possible future where you won't be able to participate in the modern economy if you don't agree to corporate surveillance. Not that it's impossible to opt out, just as it's not impossible to live off the electric grid today if you really want to.

Hopefully the free market will drive idiot corporations that time their employees piss breaks out of business. Clever corporations that are smarter about their surveillance could still be around though.

terracatta• 4 years ago

As an infosec person, I'm trying to get us disentangled from this mess. Lots of orgs install surveillance under the guise of security reqs, but let's be honest, they are doing it because they're afraid folks aren't working. IMO this stuff hurts the security team's mission.

https://honest.security

asdajksah2123• 4 years ago

Kraemer discovered that the only way to avoid wage-theft was to do "mindless busywork" that produced the clicks that her bossware demanded, even if it got in the way of her work.

Warning: Potential Severance spoilers ahead.

I finished watching Severance S1, and one of the open questions is what work the innies are actually doing. And reading this article it strikes me that the Severance work is the ideal culmination of the worker tracking + Goodhart's law cycle.

You make # of clicks a metric, so then the best performers are those who optimize for # of clicks, and so an AI trying to improve work efficiency by emulating what the best performers are doing rewards nonsensical clicking over actual work, and that cycle continues until you end up with something like the Severance job, which involves nothing but click and dragging numbers into 1 of a few bins based on how you "feel" about the numbers. At the same time the innies are told that what they are doing is extremely important.

YOu have the perfect combination of mindless work, which is not entirely monotonous (because you have to go by your "feeling", which would not be the case if you just had to repeatedly drag 1 number to the same bin) and at the same time you're motivated because you're convinced you're participating in a great good. This way you maximize the measured busywork output while still preventing your employees from immediately burning out.

donatj3• 4 years ago

realized that she could juke her stats by closing tickets prematurely by marking them "did not respond"

Very recently I contacted support on a Saturday around 5pm. They replied Sunday night after midnight when I was asleep. My support ticket was closed around 5am as "did not respond". Between the reply and closing my ticket, I was asleep the entire time. I have never been so furious.

hedora4• 4 years ago

Yeah. I go back and forth between responding with a scathing review of the employee when the inevitable follow up survey arrives, and trying to help them figuratively burn down their dystopian hellscape of a working environment.

Joel_Mckay• 4 years ago

A company is like a tiny country... Despotism requires an authoritarian regime maintain sustained intelligence campaigns against its own citizens. Primarily, this is necessitated as internal propaganda or perceived surface culture is eventually indistinguishable from reality. Thus, the authoritarians must grip tighter to maintain information asymmetry over an imaginary threat of their own creation, as eventually these folks undermine the credibility of leadership.

Third party software that supports such schemes though arms-length lack of accountability, simply lower the cost of increasing the granularity of intelligence collection and control. However, it doesn't solve the foundational problems of organizations dooming themselves with unsustainable policies, or the statistical nonsense business intelligence companies produce.

My advice, "vote with your feet" and keep seeking to a better life. ;)

toss1• 4 years ago

>Curve Reaches Apogee

Just because it is on an upward trajectory and higher than ever before does not mean that it is at apogee — it could just as well continue climbing to greater heights, which in this case seems rather likely.

The repeated theme of measuring things like continuous keystrokes that are actually counterproductive to accomplishing key tasks is the essence of bad management. Extended through an organization to far, it could literally kill it. Getting the key info might be tricky, but it seems worthwhile to create a stock fund of companies NOT using worker spyware and shorting companies who use it extensively.

donatj3• 4 years ago

The authors own point seemingly being that this will negatively affect companies bottom lines in the long run in the name of chasing stats seems to undermine the point of this being "late stage capitalism".

If this does actually negatively affect bottom lines, it's bad business, end of story. Capitalism seeks to optimize output and if this is truly failing to do so, it's not a capitalist pursuit.

hedora4• 4 years ago

The author is calling out a failure mode of capitalism. The people producing the tools are pursuing capitalism, and the people adopting them likely have financial motivations to do so (stock plans, conflict of interests, etc…)

jksmith• 4 years ago

Seemingly far more insidious to me is surveillance justified by business to monitor remote work.

m0llusk• 4 years ago

Holy fuck. I just want stuff. Shouldn't there be an option for buying stuff and not treating people like garbage?

Havoc• 4 years ago

Microsoft’s moves in this regard strike me as particularly evil. By packaging it into their product and rolling it out by default they’re helping normalize it.

For now the parts that are enabled by default (Daily digest etc) seem to only be visible to the user and announce that fact prominently.

But that does a lot to shift the conversation and acclimatise users to tracking. The jump for the hr module to be enabled is already much reduced vs installing 3rd party spyware software

jwie• 4 years ago

The surveillance for higher status workers is more about always having a reason to manage out a worker more than actually optimizing anything, like they do with lower status workers.

We have this problem in the US armed forces rather acutely. Everyone is breaking many rules and regulations daily but the chain of command does nothing about the vast majority of infractions. Reserving enforcement for when they feel like it, for reasons having nothing to do with the actual rules.

This is anarcho-tyranny.

As a people manager in software I fight this kind of stuff, and I feel like only the most morally compromised managers push it.

It’s never an honest attempt to optimize the work. It’s a way to force you to provide evidence for your dismissal.

gbro3n• 4 years ago

We get what we tolerate.

vlod• 4 years ago

100%. For me, it's going to be another one of those red-flags to not join your org.

nullc• 4 years ago

Manna[1] was a cautionary tail, not a roadmap. Some people didn't get the memo.

[1] https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

Workplace surveillance is coming for you

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