
Employers are mining the data their workers generate - JumpCrisscross
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-ways-your-boss-is-spying-on-you-11563528604?mod=rsswn
======
seneca
The idea that McKesson does this, along with their completely tone deaf idea
of adding open offices to increase retention, points to a bigger issue: a
complete lack of understanding of people. These people running these companies
are utterly detached from the reality that their work force lives day to day,
such that they think implementing one of the most universally hated office
schemes and mass surveillance are ways to keep people.

~~~
ziddoap
This is what I really am having trouble understanding.

How disconnected from reality do you need to be to think surveillance and
converting to an open office is going to somehow _increase_ retention of
employees?

~~~
dhruvmittal
A surprising number of people in management seem to think "Oh, that'll make us
very silicon valley and signal how cool & hip we are!"

And a surprising number of people who haven't had to work in open offices
before think "Oh, that'll be cool: social, innovative, and collaborative!"

~~~
trilila
In the UK almost all offices are open offices. I am not sure of the benefits
of a cubicle as i never worked in one.

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
Mostly sound suppressing, but does guarantee privacy (I've had to tell someone
to fuck off as I'm doing managerial work)

~~~
trilila
Thats a good point re managerial stuff. So did i and i always had to sit in a
corner or somewhere secluded.

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phlowbieuq
_McKesson has not yet determined what changes it will make as a result of the
findings, but has considered adopting a more open office plan to encourage
more discussion between employees._

LOL, way to be super creepy AND learn exactly the wrong lesson from this.

~~~
saltminer
Imagine telling your investors how much money you spent to decrease morale and
increase turnover cargo-culting SV companies. This article reads like
something out of a Dilbert strip.

I can't imagine why they're having problems with "higher turnover".

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JTbane
>McKesson has not yet determined what changes it will make as a result of the
findings, but has considered adopting a more open office plan to encourage
more discussion between employees.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

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jedberg
People keep forgetting that equipment _and subscriptions_ are your employers
property and data, not yours. They have the right to access anything they pay
for without telling you. It's important to remain aware of this any time you
do anything for work.

Back before we had computers, there was nothing stopping a company from
opening every memo that came through the mail room and recording every phone
conversation and opening your file cabinets when you weren't there. The
diffence was it was a lot more work for them to do those things, so it never
really came up. Now it's super easy for a company to process every single
thing you do or say, even including recording audio in the workplace.

So maybe it's time for us to look for some legal protections for worker
privacy?

~~~
MegaButts
> there was nothing stopping a company from opening every memo that came
> through the mail room

I hope I'm misunderstanding this, because I read it as saying they can open
your mail...which I thought was a felony taken very seriously.

~~~
marcosdumay
As well as bugging your phone. I don't think companies were ever allowed to do
that.

~~~
jedberg
Sure they could. It’s their phone. As long as they buried in the hiring
paperwork that all calls were recorded your consent was part of your
employment.

~~~
MegaButts
It's very different if you sign a document consenting to it than if they do it
without telling you (which is considered wiretapping by federal law and is
also taken very seriously). Employee agreements aren't like EULAs; you should
actually read them because it's probably your livelihood.

And if they do include it in the employee agreement like you suggest, it
wouldn't be too difficult to create a PR headache for them by alerting the
media.

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Topgamer7
"I’m not all tinfoil hat or anything" \- To be honest, you'd only be a
tinfoiler if it wasn't the case. We can guarantee in this information age,
your information is collected, potentially by multiple parties. You can rest
assured that if your internet traffic hits US network nodes, they are
collecting at least some data. A good example is the Kazakhstan mitm stuff
going on. We know the US tries to backdoor encryption algo's. They are just
less blatant about it. You can guarantee that China, the UK and numerous other
governments are at least trying to listen.

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lettergram
I’m also in this business [1], the reality is everyone has to do it to
compete. These systems help you fire bad apples, which could bring down your
business. Personally started my company because I saw the lack of
understanding and abuse of these systems.

Not a single company I know of built their systems to increase retention. No
matter what they claim, HR doesn’t really care about that - they care about
bad apples. It’s for insider threat detection and mitigation. Fire the trouble
makers, keep the people who do work by the system metrics. The problem is that
the system metrics don’t reflect what employers look for (skill sets,
influence, etc) that’s why I started my business — to focus on skill sets and
knowledge retention.

In any case, is this a bad thing? I don’t know.

It’s a fine line companies that build mass surveillance tread. HR and
management typically fully trust the system numbers. Meaning, the amount you
spend on email becomes a promotable/fireable metric... what if you just email
efficiently or you use email ineffectively, the system may not pick that up.

Most of these surveillance companies are unscrupulous and the management of
the companies they sell to fall into the point system trap. There’s also no
getting away from it. Every large company has, or will have these systems. So,
the best thing you can do (and the difference with my company) is you make it
clear to employees and try to provide benefits in some way. Our company uses
as chat bot and provides a search engine. Most companies provide nothing to
the employees, just monitor and fire them.

[1] [https://metacortex.me/](https://metacortex.me/)

~~~
bassman9000
_In any case, is this a bad thing? I don’t know_

If the benefit of catching a bad apple is less than the downside of 100+
pissed employees due to being spied on, it is a bad thing, specially when a
few KPI can't give you an accurate view of an employee's performance or
impact.

------
riazrizvi
The article presents the ideal of this technology, how it’s meant to gently
improve productivity, guide training and alert about problem employees.
Perhaps they are marketing to employers who haven’t yet jumped on the
bandwagon, perhaps to non-US companies? But companies are little dictatorships
and once you give top level managers this snooping capability, leaders can’t
help themselves from making personal personnel decisions which erodes company
talent. Instead of centers of excellence it creates centers of social
compliance. I see a trend in VC backed valley companies, where this technology
is well-entrenched, that favors inept-but-familiar culture, as long as your
workplace data falls below the radar, you have a little expertise and you are
above average social, then you have a job for life. But if you push your
personal boundaries in the pursuit of excellence, and criss cross the
harmonious flow of work-as-usual then you’re flagged and operating under
negative management bias. This is because it requires management to be far
more mature and impersonal than it’s reasonable to expect. The Scott Forstalls
of the world are more likely to be driven out in favor of the nice guy who
says nice things about your management style on Slack. It undermines the
traditional go-get-em startup culture which helped the valley create great new
technologies.

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tempsy
there’s something uniquely soul crushing about working in a corporate
environment. After 6 years of it I think I’ve really had enough. I don’t think
we as humans were programmed to live this way.

~~~
maximente
some corporate setups let you get away with 10-20% effort, while collecting a
"tech salary". that includes being detached from all shared suffering,
political game playing, etc. depending on where you're at in life, this can
absolutely be worth it.

sure, you won't get to senior VP but you can use that other 80% for ... self
improvement.

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oh_hello
Is anyone familiar with what data Slack makes available to management? Can
they see a nice breakdown of when I was online?

~~~
dudul
I don't have an answer, but it always surprised me what people would say
either in Direct Messages or in private channel. This is a corporate slack,
I'm pretty sure management can access _all_ conversations, even in DM or
private channels.

~~~
ziddoap
I know, at least at our tier, I _cannot_ access private messages.

~~~
ereyes01
Even if weren't possible now, it may be possible in the future because Slack
(in practice) owns and controls that data without any oversight from you.
Anything you say might be deleted after a while, or might be held
indefinitely.

~~~
ziddoap
Well... Yeah. I didn't intend to imply that it will never be a feature (it
might already be in higher tiers), and I never intended to imply anything
about Slack's data retention.

I was just stating that at the moment, at my tier, I am unable to see private
messages.

~~~
GauntletWizard
Your employer can always change your password and then login as you to read
your private messages. It leaves behind a trace (you've gotta reset your
password afterwards, they can't restore your old one), but it's a
"workaround".

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b_tterc_p
I don’t think this is especially bad though am perhaps biased. If anyone is
curious about their own data, Office365 exposes a nice API to get email and
calendar data, as well as one called “People” that calculates an edge strength
to others based on the various things. You usually have permission to pull
your own data without corporate involvement.

Perhaps to rephrase the question. I hear a lot of privacy concerns about
something like Facebook that knows too much about you and calculates all sorts
of things. I agree with those concerns. Are people equally concerned if a
metadata analysis reveals that individuals who communicate with a wider
network of other employees tend to do better or worse, or quit or whatever-
and you are an anonymized part of the individuals that led to that conclusion?

~~~
Retric
Personally I don’t care about this data. I am simply concerned it’s going to
be interpreted incorrectly. Doing this kind of data analysis with just
metadata is hard, and it’s really easy to make major mistakes.

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BillSaysThis
"McKesson has not yet determined what changes it will make as a result of the
findings, but has considered adopting a more open office plan to encourage
more discussion between employees."

Sure, that's going to help with retention.

~~~
commandlinefan
It will, actually. It works like this: make the working environment so
miserable that the only people who will stay are people who absolutely don’t
have any other options and will never speak up or organize against abuse.
Bingo, you have a group of people who will never go anywhere!

~~~
president
You may be joking but it's true. This is essentially the core of why companies
hire H1-B workers.

------
nickfromseattle
IBM claims to be able to predict with 95% accuracy which employees will quit.

This seems super helpful as an employer.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/03/ibm-ai-can-predict-
with-95-p...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/03/ibm-ai-can-predict-
with-95-percent-accuracy-which-employees-will-quit.html)

~~~
b_tterc_p
Without any insider information, I feel confident guessing that the accuracy
number is merely % correct in environments where people quitting is relatively
rare to begin with. If 95% of people aren’t planning to quit next year, 95%
accuracy is remarkably easy to achieve.

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_o-O-o_
I know this is a cheap potshot, but who has a keyboard setup like that?
[https://images.wsj.net/im-90409?width=1260&size=0.6666666666...](https://images.wsj.net/im-90409?width=1260&size=0.6666666666666666)

And the caption:

    
    
        Diana Hubbard, working from her home office in Texas, says she does not communicate about her private life on work devices at all. PHOTO: JONATHAN ZIZZO FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

~~~
Duladian
In my experience I've yet to encounter a USB switch that will forward the LCD
display data properly to the G15 keyboard. Although, I was using cheap USB and
KVMs switches.

Another good question is who uses an overpriced "gamer" keyboard for work?

~~~
Nullabillity
"Gamer" equipment tends to be far more reasonably priced than most good
office-oriented equivalents. They also seem to be the only laptop segment that
hasn't completely fallen to anorexia.

My old company ended up standardizing on Fnatic keyboards because they were
the cheapest way to get silent Cherry switches with a reasonable layout.

I also used a gaming MSI laptop, because it was cheaper to buy and upgrade
that than to buy a reasonable business Dell. ThinkPads weren't much better
eiter (but also not an option anyway, thanks to Superfish and co).

------
debt
Hopefully this is just US-based employee surveillance as this type of
employee-data data mining is strictly illegal in Germany.

~~~
torified
It's a pity that a country needs a Nazi holocaust to realize that mass
surveillance is a bad thing.

The US will learn, as will the UK and Australia.

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neonate
[http://archive.is/JsTT5](http://archive.is/JsTT5)

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RIMR
Working for a startup that gave me a blank laptop and told me to set it up the
way I liked is wonderful.

I think most Software Engineers don't have to worry as much about the spying,
as we have full control over our system.

Corporate users, with locked down machines, however, should be wary.

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elicash
I would be more understanding of employers on this stuff if they also created
dashboards of how much of our personal time got interrupted by work.

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QuickToBan
How am I supposed to read this paywalled article? I'm not paying for it.

~~~
chipperyman573
Why do you feel you have a right to read this article? WSJ has paid someone to
write it and for the infrastructure to deliver it to you (and technically, for
the bandwidth as well - however negligible, there is a real financial cost
associated with delivering the content to your computer that does add up).
Either pay up or leave, but don't complain that you don't get it for free.

