
How does it feel to be watched at work all the time? - pseudolus
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47879798
======
revvx
That might sound like the most obvious thing ever written here to the point of
sounding stupid, but:

In my experience as a manager, ANY kind of micro-level timekeeping or
micromanagement is not only dehumanizing, but also an utterly unsustainable
waste of time and resources and a recipe to let deadlines slip by.

How much time someone spends in front of their computer, how focused they are,
and how their process works only gives bullshit metrics and teaches bad
employees to game the system. By "squeezing productivity" you teach
underachievers how to fake work while still underdelivering, while
overachievers will get burned out quickly.

You'll fool yourself into believing that everything is "in control" but
productivity will lower in a boiling frog effect that you'll only notice after
several months of having everyone glued to their screens.

What I learned after failing: You need to sample a large interval in order to
have ANY confidence on employee productivity data. So, it is better to allow
employees to just be adults for longer periods of time (say, a sprint, or even
a month) and measure them by their macro output and only act when they need
you (aka be a real manager).

EDIT: Oh, and one more thing, if you don't have good metrics in place (like
every programming shop ever), letting the OWN WORKER pick their metrics and
give their own deadlines. This is a completely valid approach and will weed
out under-performers like crazy.

EDIT 2: If you don't actually act on those macro metrics and pretend
everything is fine, your team will resent you start looking for other jobs.

~~~
ascar
One of my manager once told me: Sometimes you are unproductive all week and
then you push out two weeks of work in a day.

It's not always this extreme, but I would be crushed, when measured on a daily
basis including some very unproductive whole weeks.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Uggh, reminds me of daily “standups” where I have to make yesterday’s work
sound important even though half of the days are a firefighting
crapshoot/standstill.

~~~
mcv
If it's a firefighting crapshoot/standstill, then that's what you say at the
standup. That's exactly what it's for; not to justify how you spent your time,
but to share problems and delays.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Yes, but it has to be presented in a manner to avoid blame, which is
exhausting over the long haul.

------
ravenstine
No offense to those who think that being watched while you work is a good
thing, but it does surprise me how this topic has popped up multiple times in
the past few weeks and how many HN'ers are on board with having someone(even
their boss) watch them as they work.

I'll let my manager watch me as my work if I got paid in proportion to the
amount of supposedly increased output. Oh, what's that you say pointy-haired
boss? I _won 't_ be paid more for letting you spy on me? Oh, okay, _FU_ then.
I wouldn't even give an at's rass about "productivity" if it only serves the
employer. Valuing productivity for its own sake doesn't seem like a healthy
perspective to me.

In a way, I'm speaking from experience. I had a boss at one point that we all
had to "watch out for" because he'd visit all the engineers every hour or so,
look over our shoulders, and ask us for an update on what we were doing. We
got a lot done, yet we were all underpaid and our work wasn't particularly
valuable. I'm sure he got to go to his bosses and assure them of their ROI.
(EDIT: lol, now I'm remembering how this same company wanted us to do
standups, which gradually devolved into status updates for management)

~~~
maze-le
I wouldn't be surprised if the stress that this kind of surveillance is
inducing leads to lower productivity and less succesful projects overall -- a
constant "North Korea" in your head might cause more depression, more
overthinking and less creativity for finding solutions in the long term.

~~~
ravenstine
For a period of time, we had a handful of brilliant engineers. I can't really
say that I was one of them back then, but I can tell brilliance when I see it.
All three of them ended up leaving within two months of each other, and one of
them whom I knew personally told me they left because of that sort of
micromanagement. That person works for Apple now, so it's for the best anyway.
But once the people with experience and talent left the oppressive
environment, that left the more junior engineers who couldn't realistically
pick up the slack. I think you're right not only in that it will eventually
become counterproductive, but it will also cause a company to simply lose its
best employees.

------
maxxxxx
Stuff like this may start with good intentions but in the end management will
almost always transform it into micromanagement hell. Management will ask you
"Why did you spend less time on X than the average worker?" but if you give an
explanation with suggestions to fix something that will mostly get ignored.
Happened with Scrum/Agile for example. The original idea was that the whole
company would get transformed and improved by a series of retrospectives but
in a lot of companies it has devolved into daily micromanagement from top down
but feedback doesn't trickle up.

In the end companies behave internally like dictatorships so they shouldn't be
given more tools that befit a totalitarian dictatorship.

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
> "Why did you spend less time on X than the average worker?"

"Because I wanted it to work correctly."

Edit: I assumed you meant "more time"

~~~
maxxxxx
I meant something like “why did you spend less time in front of your
computer”. It doesn’t really matter . My point was that management will pick a
simple metric and micromanage people for that metric without considering that
there may be a little more nuance.

------
firefoxd
Every job i had as a programmer, the first thing I did was kill VNC and remove
it from the startup script. No one ever complained about it.

The reason I did so was because I worked as an IT before and I was often asked
to dive into someone else computer to monitor what they were doing. Often
without their knowledge.

Side note: One person that I found particularly interesting was an employee
that had been affected by malware. I had him on the phone while I told him
I'll access his computer. Right then, this person decided it was the right
time to make a purchase online, showing me all his credit card information.

~~~
dylz
They were entering their details into a presumably infected and logged
machine?

~~~
firefoxd
Yep.

------
bigred100
I feel like some people are too entitled. Most companies do not turn a profit
and survive over extended periods of time. Most managers do not lead
extraordinary teams. Most managers are not assured extraordinary careers. Why
can’t we just be adults, accept that a mediocre outcome is (by definition)
what we should expect, and then try to be reasonably good people? Instead
these fragile egos want to torment their employees into giving them something
that they were never going to get in the first place.

Now instead of a mediocre manager with a mediocre track record but an
upstanding moral character and at least a respectable reputation as a human
adult, you’re a mediocre manager with a mediocre track record and a depraved
moral character and manipulative personality. For all I know this is leading
into your personal life making your kids and wife hate you because you’re a
control freak asshole. And you likely didn’t even increase your results.

------
postpot
when i worked at apple they monitored even our private phones. i only found
our afterwards that they had been reading the conversations i had with my
wife. they way they did it was to ask me to install a certificate or something
like that under the pretense that they needed me to participate in testing and
providing feedback on the software service they were working on.

apple can go suck it.

~~~
AlexTWithBeard
Wait.

Did they install certificates in your personal private phone?

~~~
bitwize
This is par for the course in BYOD regimes. On a past job, I was once given
the option -- not required -- to install an app called "Good" on my phone to
grant access to corporate email and messaging through my phone. I found out
that "Good"'s real purpose is Mobile Device Management -- tracking and
controlling phones that connect to the corporate network, including forcing
software installs and updates, remote monitoring of device and app activity,
and installing certificates that let corporate IT MITM your device.

I told the IT department that if they want me to receive email via cellphone,
they will need to provision a corporate phone for me to use because I am not
installing anything of theirs on my personal device.

I never heard about it again.

~~~
snazz
But the OP’s use of the word “private” suggests that they had _both_ a
personal and a work phone, and that even the personal one was being MDM
controlled. I can’t think of a reason that this would be acceptable.

------
courtf
Just insert this slim, minimally intrusive sensor into your anus until the
soft beep it emits can no longer be heard; that's how you know it's in far
enough. Our team in Copenhagen came up with the sleek design (you should see
the office there!). Our CEO even wears one, and you can watch his colon expand
and contract, in real time, up on the big board!

Over time, we've found that a rectum capable of dilating to at least 1.5
inches in diameter is correlated with improved productivity, so try and stay
loose throughout the day! There are lube and applicators available in the
restrooms, and welcome to Job Corp!

~~~
mirimir
The Yes Men approach:

> AG: How did you get started?

> MB: We got started by accident when Andy put up a fake website for the World
> Trade Organization in 1999 and people started writing for advice and
> questions. Eventually people started inviting us to conferences and we
> realized we didn’t have to be the WTO to go. Pretty soon we had been to half
> a dozen conferences. No one objected no matter how ridiculous the thing we
> proposed.

> AB: We got invited a textile conference in Finland as the WTO by a technical
> university. We lectured about the WTO’s solution to various problems,
> including the problem of modern slavery. The problem of modern slavery is
> they are across the world in places you don’t want to go, so you have to
> control them remotely and you want hands-free operation. The natural place
> to mount a view screen is at the crotch. We developed “the employee
> visualization appendage,” basically a 3-foot golden penis. People from major
> corporations were in the audience, including DOW Chemicals. They applauded.

0) [https://indypendent.org/2009/09/the-yes-men-
speak/](https://indypendent.org/2009/09/the-yes-men-speak/)

------
TomMckenny
> that coders who sat at 12-person lunch tables tended to outperform those who
> regularly sat at four-person tables... >...driving more than a 10%
> difference in performances

Yeah, so this is exactly the sloppy analysis that makes these policies so
counter productive: there's a pile of data, it is interpreted so poorly as to
be random yet instills an absolutely unreasonable level of confidence.

It certainly does not compensate for the loss in productivity that such
demoralizing practices create.

~~~
jrochkind1
Worker 4575 you are not sitting with the optimal number of coworkers for
lunch, please move to table 21b.

------
teddyh
“It approves of rereading.”

— _Snow Crash_ , Neal Stephenson, 1992

Excerpt of the relevant section available here:

[https://www.deaneckles.com/blog/700_docsend_in_snow_crash/](https://www.deaneckles.com/blog/700_docsend_in_snow_crash/)

------
kartan
> "The sales pressure was relentless," she recalls. "The totality was
> horrible."

This sounds very dystopic.

> These include tools to analyse e-mails, conversations, computer usage, and
> employee movements around the office. Some firms are also monitoring heart
> rates and sleep patterns to see how these affect performance.

This can actually end being good. Once you get the data and add to it any
study that proves how stress, bad office environments, etc. affect negatively
employees health. Companies should be liable for an unimaginable amount of
money. People waste a lot of their lives in jobs that are pernicious for their
health but usually, it is difficult to prove.

Otherwise, there is a grim future for humanity when management tries to become
psychologists while doing some un-regulated human experimentation in the hopes
of getting a promotion. Like lobotomies, gay therapy, etc. humans are really
good at coming with the most ridiculous and hurtful ideas to improve how
others live or do their jobs.

~~~
sureaboutthis
In the specific case, the company--a bank--is already liable for a lot of
money and that is the reason the tellers are watched and tracked as closely as
they are. That was a poor example.

In the fast food restaurants I used to own, one girl complained that I was
watching her every move and using a stop watch to time everyone but this
wasn't true. I wasn't watching her. I was watching the whole line. I wasn't
timing her. I was timing how long it took the customer from the door to the
order counter and the time it took to get to the cash register.

However, the last job I ever had working for someone else, my supervisor said
I needed to turn my desk around in my cubicle so that, when the owner walked
by, he could look and see that I wasn't just surfing the 'net instead of
working. I understand his point--I'm being paid to work not surf the 'net--but
you can't work continuously without some kind of break for the mind (which, in
my case, was actually a slow walk to get a coffee from the lunch room).

~~~
maze-le
>> I understand his point

I don't. If at the end of the week, you got your work done (issues resolved,
specs written, test cases covered, classes implemented, documentation
written), it doesn't matter at all what you have done in between.

------
Sohakes
> Larger lunch tables were "driving more than a 10% difference in
> performances". A fact that would probably have gone undetected without such
> data analysis.

Isn't this poor data analysis, though? Correlation doesn't imply causation and
all that. I think it's more plausible that people who sit at 12-person lunch
table have more friends on the company, and that drives performance up, than
the lunch table affecting performance. I mean, it could be any reason, but I
highly doubt the lunch table is the cause of the higher or lower performance.

~~~
megaremote
Depends how they studied it. If they changed a few floors of the building to
larger lunch tables, and observe the difference on those floors, keeping
everything else the same, they would have a good case. If they difference
stayed for months after the change, it further strengthens the case.

~~~
mesozoic
They still have to apply a random sampling or you risk the same correlations
in the new data.

------
fwip
Ask any retail employee in the last thirty+ years.

It feels bad.

~~~
cgriswald
I think it depends. I worked at a credit card factory for awhile. We printed,
encoded, and mailed the cards so we had access to finished cards. There were
cameras everywhere. But the company only used them for security ( _i.e._ when
cards went missing). Management never used them against us or tried to
micromanage us. Maybe because of that none of us ever cared about the cameras.

~~~
asdff
If you worked there, why even steal a card? I've had online purchases where
I've entered the wrong billing address by mistake and it still went through
fine; all you needed was the numbers on the card. Surely someone looking at
these everyday would end up _really_ good at memorizing the numbers, or at
least memorize them well enough to run to the bathroom stall and write them
down quickly.

~~~
cgriswald
Because it was 1995.

------
lewis1028282
IMO this just worsens the already bad employee/manager relationship when it is
the employees by definition that add value to the company. And I bet you the
upper management/CEO won't have these trackers installed.

------
bitwize
More proof that we're living in Clownworld. This was a _joke_ from 1994:
[https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-02-27](https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-02-27)

~~~
massivecali
Pretty sure there are 'efficiency expert' jokes from the 1950s era on the same
subject.

~~~
bitwize
Thing is, now we're actually _doing it_ \-- and dead serious.

------
NoPicklez
I think it largely depends on the industry and perhaps the reason why you are
being watched. From working in retail on a shop floor selling, they used to
have management join us when we would speak and "sell" products to customers,
this type of watching was terrible and put you under immense pressure to
perform with someone literally standing over your shoulder hearing you speak
and watch you do your work.

Fast forward 4 years working in professional services, if my manager set next
to me and watched me work it would be fine and probably a positive experience.

------
iamleppert
"Machine learning algorithms analyse all the data, and create beautiful
charts," he says.

Duly noted as a quip for my next bullshit tech job.

------
vorpalhex
Even if you're gaining a benefit from it, it's terrifying that you don't own
the data.

I measure my sleep and heartrate via fitbit - for me this is useful
information - but I would never pass this on to my employer. Likewise, I have
my terminal set to keep a very long history but would be quite upset if my
employer kept a copy.

------
dredmorbius
Shoshana Zuboff:

Psychological and organizational implications of computer-mediated work

Author: Shoshana Zuboff

Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Center for Information Systems Research, Alfred
P. Sloan School of Management, 1981.

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/psychological-and-
organizatio...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/psychological-and-
organizational-implications-of-computer-mediated-
work/oclc/9150777&referer=brief_results)

In the age of the smart machine : the future of work and power

Author: Shoshana Zuboff

Publisher: Oxford : Heinemann, 1988

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-the-age-of-the-smart-
machi...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-the-age-of-the-smart-machine-the-
future-of-work-and-power/oclc/1091639380&referer=brief_results)

------
mirimir
I certainly don't like it, but I know that I have no guaranteed privacy at
work. Or at least, using devices and services owned by my employer. As others
note, obsessively tracking "productivity metrics" is stupid and pointless. And
demeaning and dehumanizing. But on the other hand, someone has to guarantee
good OPSEC, so admins gotta see everything.

However, I _do_ expect privacy at work when I'm using my own devices. At
appropriate times, of course. During breaks, when there are personal
emergencies, and so on. And I expect that there will be WiFi hotspots for
those personal devices, and for guests. Which are not monitored, except when
good OPSEC demands it.

------
MikeGale
Needs a study of different kinds of people. The difference being how they
respond to surveillance.

I'd guess there's a very high performing group that hates surveillance, and
when it's noticed finds something else to do. Might be those people whose
results are 20 or more times better than the others.

Then there's those who get into flow. Would be interesting to see what impact
surveillance has on them.

As a corollary, study the managers who chose to do and not do this. Figure out
how good they are.

My attitude, if there's monitoring, it should be done by the individual and
used by them for self improvement, no oversight.

------
newman8r
Also see the Hawthorne Effect[1] - I think we're actually experiencing this on
a global level as we all accept that there's the possibility of being
surveilled at any time via use of mobile devices.

It's like the bit in 1984 about never knowing when the telescreens are
watching you (if ever) - but the mere possibility that they might be watching
was enough to keep people in line.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect)

------
lifeisstillgood
I have / had a plan to work on a MOOP (massive open online psychology) where
Alexa / iPhone would listen you your conversations and coach / guide you
through life.

To do this is technically possible but the _trust_ problem is huge - basically
it involves medical / legal levels of confidentiality baked into our legal and
social systems.

It was obvious that in the workplace was the early traction for this (and hey
guess what I waited too long) but the good parts and the bad parts of this all
hinge on one simple question - is the technology and the legal and support
frameworks around the technology aimed utterly in the best interests of the
individual in all cases.

Only then do we get the trust levels - only then is the foundation strong.

And we in the West "know" that a dictatorship cannot put in place those
systems - and yet we think we can put them in place in our workplaces.

There is I think a vast beneficial life coaching framework that technology can
bring to we humans.

But it must come with a medical "patient interests first and only" approach -
and the companies that benefit from that (and they will benefit from empowered
optimised engaged happy workers) can only benefit by being the kind of
companies that one can completely trust - which almost certainly means total
rewrite of the rules of how companies work - the laughable dictatorships of
today must give way to open communes of equals.

And the catch 22 at the heart of this is only the kind of well adjusted people
for whom AI coaching will have least effect are those that will build those
companies first

------
sebastianconcpt
Chipping parties? Welcome to the era of nano-management #behavioralControl

------
jonnycomputer
the lunchtable example in the article sounds like overfitting.

~~~
majewsky
More like Texas Sharpshooter. The more data you have, the more likely you are
to find _some_ correlation, no matter how nonsensical.

See also [http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-
correlations](http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations)

------
Havoc
Don't think that's a trend that is stopping any time soon.

It's also why I carry two phones...keeping the employer at bay.

------
lucb1e
Some of the methods sound very interesting. I would love to see if there are
patterns in data from microphones, keyloggers, location tracking, etc.
Realistically, though, I doubt much will come out of it (the 12-person lunch
table fact is probably the most interesting one they have, or they would have
given a more impactful example).

So while it would be fun, I already don't expect it would produce much... but
on top of that, _I would never want to be tracked that way in a workplace
environment._ It would indeed be dehumanizing. I will happily track myself,
but there is a power relation between an employer (or even colleagues) and
myself. Data about me might be negative, or positive data about me will be
negative for a colleague. This is the reason why employers cannot use your
data under GDPR with consent: you cannot _freely_ give consent. A request from
your boss is not the same as a request from a local restaurant to track my
choice of dishes across visits: I might or might not feel an implied pressure,
so it's not free. It's even worse here: this kind of data is always negative
about whoever turns out to perform less well on whatever metric it tracks.

(One example of self-tracking is that I like to look back on my trips, so I
have OsmAnd record every time I use it for navigation, but I deny Google Maps
that permission because then it is no longer me that is tracking myself.)

------
ddingus
Makes me feel like making sure they see me scratching my ass.

------
revskill
Actually, the feeling that there's someone to watch you at work all the time
has an invisible benefit: Focus.

You'll be forced to be focus on what you're doing. But depends on situation,
it might be your loved or hated kinds of work you want to focus.

Without anyone watching, it's easier to get distracted.

~~~
flaque
It is so much more distracting to know someone is watching you.

~~~
revskill
That's why i said it's "feeling".

------
mmjaa
Anecdote: I've found that developers tend to be more productive - as in
producing higher quality code, in shorter periods of time - when the
environment they're working in encourages shoulder-surfing - that is, we set
up the physical environment such that developers are mostly in a circle, and
should one wish to, one can easily swing ones chair around in a circle and see
the groups activity on each screen.

This has its detractors - sure, unless you've worked this way, you might find
it intrusive that any dev can shoulder-surf at any time - but after a few days
it rapidly becomes clear that such a configuration encourages developer
participation, and more particularly: honesty about what is going on.

Too many times, dev teams I've managed have been tripped up by the one guy who
doesn't like to share anything and rather prefers to work privately without
any oversight - well, those guys don't last long in an environment where
everyones work is equally open for shoulder-surfing. And I have found,
anecdotally, that the most productive devs really don't care if you shoulder-
surf - and in fact those that openly invite it, are a net positive effect on
the teams own morale. People really learn a lot faster, and are seemingly more
motivated to share their work, when the cubicles are set up for observation
and not privacy.

Just an anecdote, but I've seen this, effectively, in action over 3 decades
now and its just something I insist is a great way to build a developer team.
Those that resist it, usually don't have good reasons to do so, either ..

~~~
maxxxxx
This sounds horrible at first look but I would like to see how this looks in
the real world. I assume management is part of that circle too, right?

~~~
mmjaa
Yes, managers sit in the circle too. Its not hierarchical, and thats the point
- there is nobody in the group with the special privilege of withholding our
screens, therefore we all feel comfortable with whatever is on each others
screens.

Respect, equalised this way, means we don't care if one of us is doing
something non-work related on their system - its accepted, and nobody cares.
Its just so much more productive to be able to understand, at a glance, what
ones colleagues are up to without them having to worry about having 'privacy
issues' in a workplace where really, the work isn't private.

~~~
snazz
Despite the fact that this system seems unpopular in the average HN reader’s
mindset (and I can see why), it also seems like it would select people who are
good communicators and encourage good communication and collaboration. I’d be
interested to see it play out in practice. Is it stressful to have what
effectively amounts to no privacy, or does the collaborative aspect make it
seem like everyone is constantly pair-programming with the entire group (which
might not be a bad thing at all)?

I’d also be interested in my own reaction and whether I’d adjust to that kind
of workplace.

~~~
maxxxxx
The question is whether it's real collaboration or "Collaboration" with an
open office, noise and everybody wearing headphones.

~~~
mmjaa
It is not a noisy, open office. Its a circle of desks where people can easily
see what each other are working on and collaborate with each other without
having to leave ones own desk...

------
externalreality
Well, as a software developer, I don't mind my work being monitored as long as
I am unaware that the employer is monitoring me. If I know the employer is
monitoring me I will become self-conscious and the employer would then, in
essence, destroy my productivity. However, like writers, coders think about
what they are going to write next and web search stuff a lot more than they
code so monitoring a developer in real time would probably be pretty boring -
and employers would probably be dismayed at how much they pay us to
google/cut/paste/modify/test.

In all seriousness though the situation is that, privacy concerns be damned,
if valuable data can be collected it will be collected. Absent laws protecting
worker privacy, employers will collect as much information about you as they
can and use it in whatever way the deem necessary. It's a sad and unfortunate
truth.

~~~
myspy
Well and it needs to be prohibited with absurd large amounts of fines when
doing it any way.

When you can‘t make goals and check their success as a manager without
surveillance you need to stop managing people.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
As long as "right to work" (anti-unionization) and "at-will" (immediately
fired for no reason, or any reason listed as non-protected) states exist,
those states will be free to implement whatever checks on employees.

And they will be free to make decisions on this data without ever disclosing
it, hence the 'at-will' status of the state. And if they are put in a position
of court, the company will have ample data to show cause, even if the employee
never explicitly approved or knew.

The 'right-to-work' also protects companies since unions that are formed can't
force employees to pay into the union... Yet the union must negotiate for all
employees, including the ones who refuse. In this way, "right-to-work" is a
way to drain and kill unions by attacking their solvency.

Perhaps through Europe, their governments care more for workers. In the US, I
have no illusion that the local governments, the state government, the federal
government, or the company I work for truly cares for us workers. The worse
times shows just how little we workers are thought of.

(Edit: And I deal with, as a system administrator, that no demographic or
monitoring shows how we are performance-wise. If you count closed tix/day,
each job gets split into X tickets for number bloating. Time to close is also
sad because some tickets are autogen'd or long term projects. And like
plumbers, our jobs aren't noticed _UNTIL_ the 'shit' is backing into the sink.

I've proposed only counting internal and external customers' time in our
group, but that too encourages us to blame and bounce tickets to other groups
to stop the clock.

Tl;Dr. Sysads are even more fucked than devs that can show feature/ticket over
time. We can't show 'crisis averted/ticket/time'.)

~~~
posterboy
ÄI wonder, why the downvotes

