

Why corporate IT should let us browse any way we want. - tptacek
http://www.slate.com/id/2226279/

======
DanielStraight
My company, as far as I know, has no restrictions on either internet or
computer use. I'm pretty certain I could use the pirate bay while at work if I
wanted to (though I've never wanted to at home either, so that's unlikely to
happen).

But, and this is a big but, I'm a computer guy. I understand how to keep my
computer secure and running well. The chances of my computer getting messed up
by anything but a hardware failure are slim to none. This is simply not true
for most employees in most companies. People click on pop-up ads and install
fake virus scanning spyware all the time. I'm sure you can think of other
examples.

To simply say "give them training" is ignoring the fact that it takes YEARS to
gain this kind of computer proficiency. It's also ignoring the fact that most
users just don't care. They just want to use their computers and have someone
else (either a person or a software package) watch out for them.

It's amazing how often people fail to think like an owner when writing things
like this. If I have to give 500 employees 50 hours of computer training,
that's 25000 hours of training. If my average employee earns $50,000 a year
(about $24/hr with a 40 hour work week), that's _$600,000_ of lost time, not
to mention the cost of training. And I'm giving a very conservative estimate
of 50 hours of training. To get to the average proficiency of the average HN
reader would probably take much, much longer. Since most large companies need
an IT department anyway, the additional cost of having them administer content
blocking and virus scanning software is much less.

------
jsz0
This is another one of those techno-libertarian ideas that sounds great if
you've never had any experience working in a real IT department. Installing
unsupported software always results in employees who don't understand where
the line of official support ends. You don't want your IT staff
troubleshooting third party software or cleaning up after it.

I'm a fan of liberal web filtering policies although I do not trust client-
side anti-phishing applications. I would feel irresponsible not doing some
basic filtering and maybe some targeted filtering depending based on real
world usage. I don't buy the morale argument at all because I always hear a
lot of resentment along the lines of "oh he's on facebook all day" as a common
put down of unproductive employees. And honestly, it's true often enough that
people who might not go overboard can get swept up into it. That's bad morale.

