
Ask HN: Has anyone ever had to spy on their colleagues when they work from home? - lillywhitenblue
I&#x27;m interested to hear if anyone&#x27;s boss has told them they had to check their colleagues&#x27; productivity as they remote work (e.g. in the financial world), or if anyone has used &quot;bossware&quot; like Teramind and ActivTrak to monitor their team for an actually good reason. What was it like? How did it affect you?<p>I know a lot&#x27;s been said about bossware - and it gets a really bad wrap - but I haven&#x27;t actually heard from anyone who&#x27;s done the spying before.
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sushshshsh
Funny, I thought all of the video chat meetings being put on my calendar were
basically the same thing as spying on me to make sure I was doing my work, or
at least thinking about doing it...

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lillywhitenblue
There's definitely loads of passive spying: Slack active statuses, Zoom
notifications when someone's on another tab (think they removed this from
backlash), and scheduling excessive video meetings which is just office
presenteeism moved into the home

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sushshshsh
You nailed it. It's really quite bad. At my current company we are judged by
"results" aka how many tasks and points we bang out on Jira, but then also the
same managers stuff our calendars full of video meetings.

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lillywhitenblue
Yeah I wonder what it's like being on the 'spying' end - many probably won't
realise they're doing it.

I've come across a few comments on other threads where people justified
monitoring software, but there must be some out there who are told they have
to spy on colleagues and feel awful doing so.

