
How My Boss Monitors Me While I Work from Home - catacombs
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/technology/employee-monitoring-work-from-home-virus.html
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smabie
It's really amazing the lengths managers and organizations go to in order to
feel like they own their employees. At my old job in finance, a random VP
would always show up at like 11pm to do a "desk check" of the analysts. No one
was explicitly reprimanded for not working at 11pm, but the message was clear:
it's better to play candy crush on your phone until past midnight at the
office instead of actually getting some goddamn sleep. It was a pretty common
occurrence for average performers who lived in the office to get promoted over
top performers who didn't work as many hours.

Companies don't want you to think of your job as a job, instead they want you
to buy in, join the cult, and become a company man, someone who's identity is
inextricably linked to the firm. This software is just the next evolution of
in office desk checks that have probably been going on for centuries.

Another way to look at it is that companies have almost no transparency into
how productive their employees actually are. The problem is especially acute
among managers who are unable to verify the quality of their subordinates
work. How does your boss know if you're simply not working very hard or
working hard on a very hard problem? Without domain expertise, it's
impossible.

The solution is for organizations to ditch desk checks, ditch standard working
hours, invest in tools and structures to provide greater transparency into
real performance, and make sure all managers have the same domain expertise as
their subordinates.

If your need software to spy on your employees to make sure they're actually
working, your company is far too broken for the software to help.

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aSplash0fDerp
The communism/capitalism hybrid labor model is not going to be very popular
and is a poor fit for any kind of work/life balance.

Instead of a company car, maybe detached home offices will become the
desirable perk in a pay package.

I can imagine outside of the city and the suburbs, you could install a
portable office, modular building, travel trailer or repurposed tiny home and
retire with your sanity, but trapped at home is going to be the new meme for
the urbans stuck in that drama 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

