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Negative Effects of Workplace Net Monitoring
Masem writes "Business2.com reports that while many corporations have monitoring tools and restrictions on Internet usages for non-work related activities, these can have negative effects on the productivity of the workplace. The report notes that people have to take days off from work to deal with personal business that could have been done in a few minutes or hours from a work net connection, and that employee morale is generally down when net controls are in place." A related study suggests employees spend more time doing work from home than playing at work.
You're commenting on this AT WORK.
sulli
RTFJ.
... but i'm playing solitaire at work.
Another pointy haired boss policy. Treating professionals like children does lead to decreased productivity.
If my workplace ever started filtering /. I'd be fux0r3d.
Trolling is a art,
I was the porno cop at a 150 employee telecom company a few years ago. Highly paid programmers with tight deadlines turned out to have
At the end of the day, two people left before the ax swung, the sexual harrasment was institutional and only slightly blunted
3% - 5% in any company are going to have some sort of problem and it ought to be dealt with on a performance basis rather than using a squid enforced police state.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
When we get a blocked site, we just plug in an 802.11x card and surf through one of the TWO DOZEN unsecured access points in range... Or VNC home...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Where else can you get high speed access to rare Squirrel p0rn (tm)?
Remember, if you comment on this from work you're stealing from your employer. I always take days off to read Slashdot.
The solution that has worked best for me...is to avoid public discussion. -- CmdrTaco
I think especially as projects get piled on people, the ability to take a break and escape from your projects is of paramount importance. An Internet connection is the water cooler of the future, so to speak.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
...whoops! I guess I should stop monitoring my corporate network. :)
...and he fired me for reading /. on company time. The link is wrong BTW.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
If you can do it on the web from work in a few minutes, why would you need to take a day off to do it from home? The web is open 24 hours! Take a few minutes at home to get it done in the evening instead of taking the day off. If you don't have an Internet connection at home, go to the library. That's just ridiculous.
I sometimes do visit "questionable" sites from work. When I am doing that, I just SSH tunnel home and proxy from there.
Why does everyone complain when they are expect to actually do work at work. They are not paying you to keep the seat warm.
On another point I say two can play at that game. You want me to work every second I am at work that's fine. But when that clock hits 5:00 I drop everything and leave.
...with remote administration abilities my boss expected me to keep an eye on things 18 hours a day. During that woeful period I definitely worked more at home than I played at work. That is, until we learned that our overworked and understaffed dept was being outsourced. Then it was all play and little work for 6 months with some job searching going on, too.
The meme police, They live inside of my head
and was in charge of the "web tracking database". Although we blocked porn (about 30k sites) you can never get them all. Part of my duty was to give monthly lists of top porn abusers.
...
I felt like I was peeping, looking at people's web habbits. It was truly the low point of my job. However, the execs (who were given access) thought it was a hoot, and (rumour has it) spent hours snikering over this stuff.
I just noticed none of this is really "on topic"... oh well
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
and all of us know it. Many employees spend all day doing nothing but reading news and shopping.
The fact they've yet to find out implies they don't use the watchdog software very often.
Otherwise, they'd simply require you use their monitoring software, no matter what OS you have.
Provided you are not a troll, hasn't anyone walked over yet to see why they are having trouble "supporting" your box? Or don't they care?
-Brent>> The report notes that people have to take days off from work to deal with personal business that could have been done in a few minutes or hours from a work net connection
/., because I'm on salary!
If you're payed a wage, and you take a day off, you dont get paid. If you handle it in the office, you do get payed. So while employers may want less unproductive time, at least they arent paying for it.
Usually the strictly controlled ones are the cubicle jockeys, not those with a salary.
As for morale; that's what casual fridays are for! Me, I'm in my spider-man underroos. And I'm not worried about wasting time on
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Zero monitoring is done for "performance management"--all that is handled through an employee's management chain. The expectation is that employees get all their work done. If they deliver good work on time, who CARES how much they surf? We treat our employees like adults, and find that the vast majority of them are able to manage their time properly.
Senior management long ago decided to embrace the Internet economy--how hypocritical would it be for Intel to forbid our employees from participating on company time and Internet connectivity?
I eBay online, bank online, read news (and /. too) online, and yes, I'm posting from work. It's a wonderful policy, "reasonable personal use." If in doubt, ask your manager: it's as simple as that.
This has happened where I work. There are various technical work arounds employed with but I will have to let other people give hints as the kind of hints I give will identify me, and get me shut down
But yes it is depressing, the best fun that comes with it is trying to find loopholes, otherwise it's too depressing for words, and yes, I end up taking longer lunch breaks because of it.
That can make a difference. If a company is monitoring and blocks certain web sites, say p0rn, they are rightly to do so. I can not see how that can have a negative impact on a workplace. I can also understand if a company wants to block activity of music share programs, I believe, they are rightly to do so. You are not paying for the bandwidth, they are.
I can also see that if a technology company (for example) blocks sites like slashdot (for example), that could possible be harmful. There seems to be a fine line of the control that is put into place and the up-keep of morale.
There is also a thing call respect and honesty. Yes, somethings can be done faster while at work without net monitoring, but is the company really getting what they are paying for? (that is the worker, and the product s/he produces)
The question is, "Is what I am doing honest towards the company or not?"
I can do it in 5 minutes surfing porno at my desk. This is an obvious productivity improvement.
I work in a small office and I'm the only one who knows how to administer the Watchguard Firebox. They made me responsible for administering it because they got tired of paying consultants $150 an hour to do it.
:/
I have considered blocking certain sites because I surf them too much
Take a look around and see how many office mates make personal phone calls from work.
I've worked with people that made 5-10 personal calls every single day.
Now, take a look at how many services have moved over to the web. Airline reservations, hotel bookings, banking and much more can be done over the web.
I think that companies are really making too big of a deal out of "lost production because of internet usage."
Place the blame where it should be placed - on the employee whos productivity suffers.
Hey Mr Boss - if you install this software to spy on us, our productivity will go down.
It will?
Er, yeah - this report says so.
Hmmm... Well, on the basis of it, you'd better continue peer-to-peer filesharing and pr0n surfing then...
Get your own free personal location tracker
...you work for an online porn monolith? Do they block CNN? How exactly would your productivity fall if you're already too busy with an 8-hour boner?
SNACKS ARE AWESOME
As a manager I don't care if my employees surf the web at work. When I assign them a task I have a good idea how long it should take. If Joe Blow always takes longer than expected, I'll fire him, web surfing or not. If Jane Bleep routinely finishes her work ahead of time, I'll make sure she gets the biggest raise, come evaluation time, plus I'll praise her work in the next team meeting, and little could I care if she reads
From: Management
Re: Corporate "watchdog software"
In regard to your comment #5252053, the administration would like to point out that we HAVE found out, and request that you would kindly remove all personal belongings from your cubicle by the end of the day. You can find boxes in the supply room.
Sincerely,
PHB
PS: Don't bother coming in on Monday.
track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
while on a conference call, eating my lunch, and waiting for a response on sametime...Some of us can multi-task, but I don't expect my management to understand that, so as a firewall admin I go outside it....
are usually made by idiots or people with a real power trip going.
I tell them I monitor it, and I kind of do with the squid proxy for porn related... yes, I'm evil and squashing your rights to disallow you watching fisting or beatality videos here at work...
but it's common knowlege in all the offices I maintain and supply that I dont give a rats ass what you do or where you go...BUT, if you are the source for a virus attack or I get complaints... I will fry your but hard.
Overzealous monitoring is only done by people that really need to be on medical leave and treated for the social and mential disorders that they are afflicted with.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I mean, after you fire joe blow.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
First it was the phone. Then it was e-mail. Then it was the Internet. Ever since 19th century sweatshops had people reading Bible verses to their employees, management has worried about lost productivity.
The question they fail to ask, though, is: why do people waste part of their eight hour day? Because they don't need eight hours every day to do their jobs. Maybe they need twelve one day and four the next. Maybe they need six months of fourteen hour days and six months off.
I think a larger issue needs to be addressed: do we still need the traditional eight-hour work day? If you're in a reactive job (manning phones or a cash register), I can understand it.
For everyone else, it is just for appearance's sake. "Quick! Look busy!"
Um, weren't these guys one of the original hypemongers of the "new economy," telling us that the way dotcommers ran their business would become The Way? Yeah, I'll be sure to take their business suggestions real seriously. Now, why the hell should an employer have to pay for an employee doing personal things for "a few minutes or hours" (Hours?! Jesus.) when they're supposed to be helping improve the company?
That and the second part about employees doing more work at home than goofing of at work all boil down to one thing: Learn how to manage your friggin' time properly and you won't have to worry about that.
I am the network admin at a small manufacturing company (~300 people, including plant workers). With the ever-increasing number of workstations available to low-skilled workers (especially after hours), there is a great temptation to mess around with the computer when the boss isn't looking. We've had hard drives and RAM stolen (solution), people drawing "creative" wallpaper in MS Paint (solution), and all sorts of other unproductive stuff.
I'd love to be able to trust ALL network users, but unfortunately it is not possible in a manufacturing facility. If this was purely an office setting, then our T1 would be unrestricted.
I hate my job and so why should I care abo^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
/. at work is stealing and might be a violation of the DMCA!
****BOSS NET FILTER ACTIVATED!****
I love my job and want to apologize to the world for stealing company electrons for my own personal use. I am the happiest corporate drone of all time and would like to remind all employees that reading
Never confuse feeling with thinking.
I hit pr0n all the time, but not because I want to; rather because the company mandates I use an email program (Outlook) that insists on fetching all the remote content linked from the spam, so my computer is fetching pr0n all the time because I follow company policy (use the Outlook client, check my mail, don't change to a new address; all three company policies that I've complained about).
I am pondering making a harassment complaint about the pr0n, as I consider it something forced on me by unreasonable company policy.
I can't see how the company can do anything about pr0n access when their (stupid) policies are the culprit in my case.
Running a properly configured GNU/Linux system to solve that problem is like buying steel doors, deadbolts, window bars, and $3,000 security system for your house. Now, do you still have the UPS man leave your packages on the sill of the front door?
Maybe you're spoofing your box's identity when you connect to the company's internet onramp? Swiped someone else's IP address, didja? That'd help, but there's still other things you'd have to consider.
Try this, too:
https://proxy.magusnet.com/-_-[your url here]
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I'm the guy stuck monitoring web usage where I work. We try to be reasonable, but it only takes one idiot to bring the world down on everyone. Our HR dept tells us we really can't handle issues on a case-by-case basis: we have to have a blanket policy that (in theory) applies to everyone. So the guy who does (or wants to do) a little banking from work is punished because some moron won't quit trying to get to pornobabes.com. As bad as it was when it was "no personal use of the internet," it became worse when we tried a "limited personal use of the internet" policy. We have met the enemy, and it is us....
Wouldn't the Win2k users (or any users for that matter) just be able to firewall incoming traffic?
A recent survery found that the majority of US Businessess practice some form of computer workplace monitoring.
PS: Don't bother coming in on Monday.
Woohoo! Three day weekend!
My religion forbids the use of sigs.
If you really fire folks for abusing Internet usage on a weekly basis, you REALLY, REALLY need to fire the people responsible for hiring all these asshats in the first place. They are the real problem.
1. As a programmer, I often have to learn new technologies and find new ways of doing things. Books are good, but there is nothing better than the internet. When I've had to do things like image compression (not my forte as a developer) I've blatantly 'stolen' code from various sites.
/. is because it's frequently updated with something new (and occasionally interesting) to read. I'm so used to this, that when I reboot, my first impulse is to switch to my browser. Then I realize that I can't, and I look around for a book or something.
2. As a programmer, I'm often presented with short minutes of downtime, while I recompile. My habit of switching to my browser at these moments is very deeply ingrained. The reason I read
"....employee morale is generally down when net controls are in place."
Administrator morale is generally down when employees are free to download every spyware app known to man, then complain to IT about their Windoze boxes blowing up while they were entering their network passwords into Gator.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
I think the point isn't so much internet traffic in this case, but monitoring whatever shows up on the desktop. A little common sense can easily handle internet monitoring.
10) Discuss last night's Bachlorette/Weakest Link/Whatever with coworkers.
9) Three words: Longer bathroom breaks
8) Meetings
7) Clean your area (tidy it up, not to leave.)
6) Exercise by walking through all of the corridors in your building with a folder and a grimace.
5) Clean and redraw your whiteboard
4) Defrag your hard drive, in the interest of efficiency
3) Review all your old emails, to catch anything that may have fallen through the cracks
2) Read magazines/journals related to your business
1) Take advantage of you boss's open door policy
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
You can just use httptunnel or any of the commercial products (www.loopholesoftware.com) out there to do all your secure browsing, chatting etc. It shows up as encrypted ssl web traffic so you don't have to worry about people watching everything you do. At my place of work, all web, phone and chat access is monitored through proxies. During the times when I need to unwind from the stress at work, it's good to be able to chat or browse /., etc. and then get back on track. I think people need diversions during the day to keep productive.
The point of this rant is "trust but verify." I was pretty permissive about what people did, and almost everyone paid that back with respect for my requests. Some hard-line sysadmins I knew were always complaining of problems, and trying desperately to implement technical measures preventing people from (e.g.) shopping during their lunch hours. Consequently their users hated them. I had, and enforced, only one policy, trusting the users to make the best use of their own time. If they had a performance problem it was their manager's problem, not mine, and it was measured by actual work performance, not 'net access logs.
When I ran the network for a 60-person architecture firm, I used to bust people for porn, but nothing else. Every new employee got the same schpiel: "Do what you want with your computer, aside from setting it on fire. See these settings here? They're company-wide. You can change 'em, but they'll be back in the morning. Here's where you make your own custom settings. You can't install anything from your browser, which is for your own security; ask me if you want to install anything else and I'll probably say yes. One thing - no porn."
It worked well, and most people said it was much more lenient than other places they'd worked. The company's policy was "no porn" and I supported it whole-heartedly. I don't care if people watch porn, but doing it at work is (a) nasty and (b) begging for a lawsuit.
I'd bust someone, usually a new hire, about every six months. Some of them did a brilliant job of sanitizing their machines, but they couldn't get to the proxy logs. They'd get a stern talking to by the principals, enough to make most of 'em wet themselves, 'specially when presented with a list of all the sites they visited, and we had no repeat offenders.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
This is old. I can remember a few of my jobs
where monitoring was close, if not closer than
what I see today.
One of them was where I was working for the
Department of Defense. We all worked in an open
area. The desks were set up like desks in a large
classroom. There were not deviders or partitions.
In front of the room was the glass enclosed (not
frosted glass, mind you, but the clear kind)
office of the manager. He might has well had
his desk in front, just like my teacher when I
was a little boy in school.
4 people shared each phone. The computer terminals
were on tables along one side of the room, also
in plain site of the manager's. office.
No newspapers were allowed. If you spent too
much time talking with someone, the manager is
bound to notice and look up with a frown.
A buzzer sounded at 7 AM when the workday started.
The horn of the lunch truck signaled the beginning
of lunch. A buzzer sounded at 3:30 in the
afternoon for the day's. end.
Another job I had was in a high security
environment. A closed circuit TV camera was
mounted in one corner of the room, visible to
all desks. The person at the monitor for that
camera could see all of us and what we were
doing.
IMHO, this is monitoring.
Mark
Cleara
Just set up a ssh tunnel from your desktop to your home computer....problem solved, sniff that bitch...
Got Code?
I'm not sure what the reason was really, perhaps it wasn't helpful, perhaps it got in our way too much, or perhaps the company just didn't want to pay for it anymore in this frugal economy, but we don't have it anymore.
:) How useful that was...
When we did, it was the WebSense filtering tool. It was annoying as it had a tendency to block sites useful for work, such as looking up something about Perl scripting, and other things. And it also didn't encourage us to stay late to wait for simulations or chip place/route operations to complete, which was nearly all computer time, and start the next step in whatever the design flow was. Staring at the screen or the wall got boring, and less people stayed after hours, especially as we're mostly salary and don't get overtime or any other benefits as a reason not to go home "on time". At least the web has news or some other interesting stuff to keep us occupied while the CPU chugs away on a couple-hour-long (sometimes couple-day-long) job.
Ironically, our sys admin tried to update the WebSense stuff one time and the filter blocked WebSense's own web site.
Is it any worse than the employee who takes 15 10 minute smoke breaks a day? Not to mention the time they wander around the office looking confused, or the time they spend chatting with coworkers...
Is it really that much worse? No one seems to mind that, yet we surf for ten minutes and we're looked on as lazy thieves stealing corporate hours...
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Interestingly enough, a few days back I was working in one of the computer labs at my university (Toronto, Canada) which didn't have classes at the time. After about 20 minutes, a student comes in and finding no place to sit, went and sat the computer connected to the digital projecter and the large screen. Guess he was new or something. Anyway, he had to sit facing us all (about 40 PCs) and started doing some docs. After about 15 mins, he started surfing porn sites (not blocked BTW) and opening movies! And it was shown up by the projecter on to the 52" screen! About 10 of use were just staring at the screen, quite shocked. This guy never even looked at us giggling about it. After a few minutes, somebody actually called security, and they came and called him away.
Well, moral : stay away from not doing work at work.
Where I work (a 250 bed hospital), every employee who has a desk has a computer which is wired to the network. We also have monitoring software which can and does monitor the outbound traffic. Being one of two network admins (it's a large network) part of my responsability is to make sure that no one ABUSES the priviledge of being able to surf the web. Don't get me wrong, company policy states the usuall "no personal business at work", but it's very loosly enforced. Recently I have been having to more closely monitor the traffic becuse there were a few individuals that were spending most of their time visiting porn sites - some of them nurses. The thing is, everyone jumps to accuse corporate policy about monitoring, but the problem really lies in the few employees that abuse the privilage.
My good sig is in the laundry
> I, for one, welcome our calamari overlords.
Absolutely, but why stop at a single company? In the next election, vote Cthulhu for president. Don't settle for immidations:
http://www.cthulhu.org/
This is one of the pluses of a cell phone. I can call whenever, and whomever, at any location, without even touching the bosses equipment. And with the new phones, one can even access the web.
You compare the guy that wants to do banking to the guy who wants to look at boobies and say that the banker isn't doing anything wrong when the guy looking at porno is. I think you should realize that the problem with people using the "Internet" for personal use during work is that while they're doing that, they're not working. It doesn't matter if an employee is banking or looking at snatch - either way it's leading to employees not working. So a limited use seems fine. If some guy wants to spend his limited amount of time per day going over his finances, that should be fine. Likewise, if some guy wants to look at jiggly bigglies, as long as he keeps his pants on and is fairly discrete about it, that should be fine too. If you're going to allow personal use, fucking allow it! I don't think you understand what you're monitoring for at all. This is why you're the monitor guy and not the manager guy. Take a class in business and you might come around. Happy employees are good employees. So as long as they're still productive, let them use the Internet for whatever they want for a limited period of time, as long as those mothertruckers aren't breaking the law.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
We monitor, using a combination of two programs, all web traffic (without blocking), email and ftp traffic as well as (a nice battle) block all IM programs.
Our employee's know we do this and honestly over the past six years I dont think they really care. Our productivity hasn't diminshed and overall employee's are happy in the offices.
But, unlike the cut and dry approach of some larger corporations we use a common sense approach to things. If your log shows you looked at the playboy website, either through an errant link or a direct lookup once, then we see no true harm. If the same employee is looking at playboys website every day, then we email him a simple (dont do this at work) message and 99.9% of the time they "get it".
Maybe it's because were a smaller company (45) but I really dont mind if at lunch or even while doing proposals someone wants spend 5 minutes and look at the last interception of the superbowl.
We monitor and to a degree, restrict, and our employees dont care.
Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?
Now if only there were more managers out there like you...
Long story short: you can never just trust all network users - regardless of their education or how much they make. There's always going to be someone in a group of employees who will abuse the system. That's why you have to be vigilante. Remember what Uncle Ben said, "With great power, comes great responsibility."
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Block This:
ssh -L 3128:squidserver:3128 squidserver
Now I set my proxy to localhost:3128
Of course The snoops sure do see a lot of ssh traffic to my house.
Damn Maybe I should have checked [] Post Anonymously.
But I don't care about that. What I hate is that they have the network set up so I cannot look at anything but Windows Media Player Files. No realplayer, no quicktime. Nada
What, me Tweet?
I am not standing up for this but just rather giving you the alternative view point. Infact according to the gartner group a coffee maker can cost an office over 30k a year. Because people chat at the coffee maker instead of working at their desks. Yes bussinesses are so desperate these days they are looking into things like banning coffee makers. Now in alot of companies like UPS for example, not only are coffee makers banned but you can not evem bring coffee to your desk. No shit. Studies have showed a %15 drop in productivity so ban it for %15 more profits is the motto by management.
I know this sounds silly but the economy sucks and your competition doing everything possible to save money and you have a responsiblity to your shareholders to outperform them. This is why they are transfering all the white colar jobs to India. If they don't there competitors will. Same is true for the China syndrome. Lets market to CHina because our competitors are doing it. Turns out they are poor and its not the magical market some would like it to be.
Morale be dammed. Just bring in the most possible money possible with the least amount of time. This is effeciany.
This is why I would love to work for the government or a University. Stuff thats happening in corporate America is just crazy and I want no part in it.
http://saveie6.com/
I think web monitoring is a good idea, but I don't like blocking. We monitor with WebSense but do not block anything. I prepare reports for managers that show the most common categories of sites people visit, but not with individual info. If surfing to "bad" sites becomes an issue a VP will send out a reminder email that we do monitor and CAN crack down if needed. The next day the "bad" sites stop showing up.
Treat your employees like professionals and you'll usually get the result you want. We allow "reasonable" personal use of the systems. But, if someone spends too much time online that's just like spending too much time on the phone or smoking.
I already know what a lot of people will say:
Work is work, you're not there to surf the net.
Agreed, we are not at work to play.. but humans were not built to work, it is only sensible that we have some amenities to make it more comfortable. That's why you sit in a chair and not on the floor, etcetera.
Look at net usage the same way as telephone usage. When you need to use it, the telephone is there.. you can even call your friends on your break, as long as it doesn't cost the company money. But you'd be outraged if they were monitoring your calls. Just because it happens inside their building does not make it their business that you and your friend are discussing his divorce. Of course, some people abuse the priveledge of having a phone.. but they are eventually found out when they don't produce any work. The same thing goes for the internet. Use it, but don't abuse it, or you won't get any work done.
Here at my work, they recently changed the web filtering system. The official policy states that the only categories you are not permitted to access from work are: hate speech/hate propaganda, copyright violating material, or pornography. That's fine, if you ask me, anyone doing any of that stuff at work is asking for it.
But the *NEW* software has many many categories blocked.. including anything to do with the word "game".
I don't play games at work.. besides the fact that we don't have crazy geforce cards of course, it's just wrong. But on my lunch hour i like to peruse some gaming sites, see what's new, what's good, what's not worth even renting.. but since the new filtering software was installed, any attempt to read a gaming review only gets me a page informing me (AND my supervisor) that i have attempted to reach a site in a blocked category.. and then refers them to the list (which as i said, contains only hate speech, copyright violations, and pornography).
It's one thing for them to have a policy, it's a completely different thing to list those but then make me look like some kind of rule-breaking miscreant when i only want to read something to fill the last part of my lunch break.
The full expression is de minimis non curat lex. This is a Latin phrase which means "the law does not care about very small matters". It can be used to describe a component part of a wider transaction, where it is in itself insignificant or immaterial to the transaction as a whole, and will have no legal relevance or bearing on the end result.
Is taking a pen from work stealing? What about paper?
Its one of those "crimes" that aren't crimes.
Who knows, maybe I'm just morally bankrupt and will go to hell for my life of free red pens and internet access.
if that's the case, I might as well download the YATTA quick time again!
"G....R.....double E....N....LEAVES!"
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
- Hire decent, reliable people. (seriously, who can't point to half the people they work with and go, "why were they hired in the first place?") You should be able to tell based on their interview, credentials, past performance, etc, if you are about to hire a responsible person, or a day-trading addict. If you can't, maybe you shouldn't be the one hiring people. Find someone who can.
- Give people work to do, and expect it gets done on time. If you have an employee that CAN piss away 7 hours reading Slashdot, then you should probably "down-size" them. How about assign projects, give them a reasonable time to do it, and let them do it. If they can do the work well, and give themselves some free-time to surf, hey, whatever. If they surf the whole time, and the deadline rolls around and nothing is done or the work is shoddy. "goodbye".
- Check on your employees once in awhile. Do managers just have teams they never talk to? Yes, probably, the manager himself is probably in his office beating off to goatce.sx. How about hire managers that round robin their employees, staying in touch with them, checking on them, helping them. You'll find those idiots that always seem to have Minesweeper on the screen when you walk in, real fast. No need for Big Brother.
You shouldnt be hiring humans if you want robotic fixed patterns of movements and actions. I dont know about everyone else, but very much of the time Im staring off into space or glancing at CNN.com, the problems at hand are bubbling around in my head, imaginging the scenarios out, taking in the big picture of the project... then when I lay hands to keyboard, I do it once, and I do it right. It just seems to me, it should never have to get as far as this elementary school spy bullshit.I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
do it over port 80 or 81 and they will need some advanced packet monitoring software. If that becomes common I'm sure there will be a way to bypass that by having a special version of SSH that uses what looks like HTTP requests and sends.
Come on people....-1 and he hacked the Gibson. I say FUNNY
Looking over your comment (skimming really; you certainly do go on at length, don't you? I hope no one lets you hold meetings.) I can see your point. You believe that blue collars have less interesting work and therefore are more often looking for ways to goof around. This is a good point and one I had not considered when replying to you. Thank you for clearing this issue up.
That being said, would I be misquoting you if I were to state that you said, "Hey guys, let's go cornhole some blue collar chimps in the breakroom. We'll use the big black anal dildo!"
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Every week, the proxy logs were automatically collated and sorted by userid[1] and bandwidth used, then posted to a web site. All completely automatically. It took about 30mins to set up. The logs linked from the internal corporate web site so everyone in the company can see them and all the employees (several tens of thousands) were informed that their web viewing habits would be published.
There was a couple of porn sites and some *serious* bandwidth hogs the first few weeks, but nothing since. I can't imagine a reason to hire people specifically to do this kind of crap, sounds like someone has too much money.
[1] You have to login to the gateway proxies.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
You are using that damn t3 line, that is leased anyway. You are using as much as 200 watts of electricity every SECOND. My bad, haven't you noticed that you waste more energy & resources while PISSING in the corporate bathroom than while surfing after work?
I would suggest reading the article again. Than you would fcking know that YES it is using corporate resources, but YES it benefits the corporation by creating loyalty among the employees. Pr0n & alcohol is out of the question whilst at work, but fragging away on the corporate network after hours is ridiculous to forbid.
Imagine this scenario: Admin & Co-Workers are having some unpaid "overtime" checking out that new quake map. Ok, leased lines, paid by volume, it costs their employer money. Max. 20 bucks per gig, while one gig lasts 24 hours online gaming, cheaper than paper, but ok, lets assume it's costing money. But now hehe, something goes wrong, imagine a fire in the NAS-compartment or a serious hacker in the R&D-server. Four people still on the premises and notice instantly that somethings wrong with the network, they smell fire or notice that funny LED blinkin'. They quit their game, rescue valuable corporate assets by taking the fire extinguisher and finish off that small piece of chinese crap electronics while it is still slowly smoking. Voilà, the corporation just saved a million $$$. Never underestimate the value of workers doing late overtime.
Something can happen and will happen eventually, and then you've got one of your employees at the right place and the right time.
Life has a lot going on, and sometimes you are forced to wait till the last minute on some things. I highly doubt the poster suggests waiting till the last minute for everything they do.
Do you have a family?... kids? Probably not. They're HUGE time sinks.
At a company I worked for I was once requested by a corporate level higher-up to check out the PC of a local district manager. Apparently they noticed a lot of activity to some, um, content inappropriate for the workplace. So I went there to have a look see. The manager was there, behind his PC. I let him know that I needed to take a peek through his machine. "Sure," he says. So I checked his browse history. Hmm, nothing there. Look at his bookmarks. Pretty clean. The manager is very confident and sits back to drink his coffee. Finally I start checking through the on-disk cache. Bingo. Wow. I was startled. Pictures of men and women doing things with winebottles, animals, you name it. Plus lots and lots of ads, banners, animated gifs...
He gave some excuse about how the employees were always checking their COMPANY email on this machine. Maybe one of them did it. Deflect deflect etc.. Seeing what I saw, I couldn't bring myself to shake his hand before leaving.
Nobody found out here before, it seems. The amount of work you're getting done counts, not the hours you are at your desk. Or is it really like Dilbert in RL?
Some say it is already too late. Attendance is what counts. First one to come, last one to go is employer of the month every time. No one cares if he does insane lunch breaks and ten walks to the copier per hour. But hey, productivity isn't needed anymore. But kissing asses. The final sign that corporations, that have reached budgets of some corrupt south american states are beginning to behave like them. Loyalty to your employer is measured in a lower salary than appropriate and efficiency is irrelevant, as long as you are the last one to leave your office. if you still have one and not a damn chicken farm lookalike cubicle.
Yes, that's why he's a troll.
Gotta do it.. gotta parse those Snort logs and see what's been crossing the wire. At this company, no one cares if you take a break and catch up on the scores, political news, slashdot, etc... but when 19 unique PORN signatures show up (about 250 total hits) for a month, that's out of line. And when your Gnutella habits suck up half the available upstream circuit, you're also out of line. You're paid to work, to complete a set of tasks and move on to the next set. No one denies the occasional break, especially if previous job performance shows good work. But, you're not paid to swap files or check out hentai. Deal with it.
Personally, it depresses me.. I despise the times I have to check the logs, knowing that some coworkers cannot seem to maintain some professionalism, even if they aren't being actively managed at 2am.
Dump the IRS - http://www.fairtax.org
boss: they also said that a lot of it was about homosexuality
me: well, it was a unfiltered HUMOR mailing list. and only a small proportion of it mentioned that anyway. it's hardly indicative of the material I was recieving. You haven't seen the emails have you?
boss: yeah, but some of it was gay
me: I said it was a humor mailing list. it is bound to touch on that subject at some point. I don't think its possible for anyone in their right mind to consider them salacious or derogatory, either.
boss:(ignoring me completely) Are you gay?
me: whaaat?
boss: Are you gay?
me:(dumbfounded that they are asking such a question)um, what?
boss: Are you gay?
this went on and on until i realised i really didn't want to be working for these people (i'm not gay, incidentally);
me: uh, whatever.. yeah, i'm gay..
boss: you will recieve your final paycheque nextweek, minus the estimated* cost of your misuse of the email account.
I admit I was stupid to get caught in the first place (i was quite young then), but what really pissed me off (and still does) was the amount of money that they valued email at - so 356 kb of bandwith managed to cost me 4/5ths of my monthly paycheck. =). niiiiiiiice.
oh, and none of this was in the contract either, never mind that in-work recreational net use was rampant there amongst other staff during work hours.
</RANT>
<B>note to self:</B> <I>post as html</I>
I work from home on weekends sometimes and I surf and do personal stuff at work sometimes. Its a trade-off as far as I'm concerned. If they ever complained or took it away at work then they would see me in at 9 out at 5, right on the dot. I also wouldn't be doing any work at home. They don't trust me then I won't go the extra mile for them.
this is because you cannot fire your mom... stop trying.
Yeah, my friend works for a company that sets up porn sites, and he said when I.T. implemented Net filtering, productivity went down the tubes... :-)
employee morale is generally down when net controls are in place
Firings will continue until morale improves!
---
Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares?
Yes, the stupid users, thinks that all is free, and that they do a favor to employer, blah!
And they make work extra to SysAdmin, because they download virus..
Slow the internet speed and audite all of them. Disable download of mp3, vbs, ocx, dll, and whatever that is not text... shield up firewall.. The internet is good but only is you do in your home... ahh and don't take your home-disk to work.
I wish that don't exist virus, trojan, evil, then no throuble using internet. But, this is real life, and virus coder sukz
And I never will read the answer for this post, because I go to work.
So, enjoy!
Im not coward, Im don't have time to register ever.
...you can reduce every business story to an "Office Space" quote. It's amazing but true. And keep your hands off my red Swingline stapler, buddy. ;-)
"But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever....In the digital world, we don't need back-ups..."
-- Jack Valenti
I'm still trying to download the Animatrix.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The most abused piece of communication gear at my place of work isn't the router, it's the human voice box:
...
Sports talk, car talk, parenting talk, movie talk, vacation talk, marriage talk, tech talk,
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
That's assuming you don't get put on hold. If at work, you could just have your headsets/speakerphone on, and continue with your work until someone comes on the line. Also, while doing this at 6am sounds all fine and dandy, you are forgetting about commute time. Sometimes if you aren't out-the-door by 6-6:30, your commute time starts to rise at a higher than linear rate.
You go to that page, type in which site you want to visit, and you're off to that site, and off the company's squid radar. At school, I use it every day to read forbidden bulletin boards that are blocked by the school's squid-based proxy.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
That's assuming your cell phone can get a signal from your cave, err I mean cube...
You insensitive clod!
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
I do it all the time. In fact we are encouraged to tele-commute from home. So I swap files all the time between home/work. I assume pushing/pulling work to/from work&home is a reasonable use? YMMV
No problem... Spend the next ten minutes reading Slashdot if you want, but then I want a good 40 hours out of you before you go home. Better get cracking.
Off topic perhaps, but:
What is it about gaming that works so well to help focus? In some places it is being used as a treatment for ADD. I know my development team was overworked badly at one point, and we still managed to get the project done on time by working 80 hour week by taking 30 minute half-life breaks every 2 hours. Actual programming time was probably only a 60h week, but I never was tired like you get after you program for that much. We had clean code that didn't need a much debugging at all.
It would be a cool study to figure out if there is any chemical/physical reason this is so. Perhaps when you play a game you are using another part of your brain that is overactive until that part is tired, while the chemicals used to fire neurons or just raw energy or even oxygen comes back to the logical reasoning parts of the brain.
It's kind of like stairing at a light that only has one color... like the old orange/green monitors... after a while, you can't see that color as bright as before. I guess as programmers, we sometimes forget that we are organic and can't work like a computer.
Karma Clown
They haven't cared for me. I run 3 Linux desktop stations and I've even asked for 3 static ip addresses and they didn't care. They sent this IT support guy to help me configure my static ip addresses but was completely dumbfounded when he sat at my terminal (which was running blackbox). You shoulda seen his face.... he's like where's "My Computer??"
My company technically only supports Windows95, NT, and 2000. (Believe it or not, but 90% of the company still uses that 8 year old operating system win95)
I once wanted to order some old books from ebay in order to get an older version of Internet Explorer for testing for compabilities with older machines, but ebay was blocked. I had to order it at home.
I just read that NASA has to buy shuttle parts off of ebay in order to get vintage electronics that are compatable. Kind of hard to do if ebay is blocked.
On another note, it is hard for most people to do the same thing for 8+ hours a day. People want variety to refresh themselves. High level managers often gab for hours about food, sports, and other personal stuff. I don't see anybody policing that. It is a double-standard if you ask me.
Table-ized A.I.
Seriously. Educated managers who are competent understand that some unobvious tasks are work related.
Ahhh...Crikey! Look!! A manager in grunt territory! Let's take a gander and see what he has to say...
"As a manager I don't care if my employees surf the web at work."
Here we have the typical "blowing smoke up your ass" maneuver. I seen it a thousand times...they lull you into a false sense of security with talk like this and then WHAMMO...pink slip city when they catch you on www.bangbus.com. Happens every time...sad it is.
"When I assign them a task I have a good idea how long it should take."
The "idea" he has is based upon a proprietary formula taught to all "managers" at manager school. Factor the relative meekness and subservience of employee X into the number of ass-licking sessions contributed per day by said employee, then multiply by the inverse of the percentage chance that employee X has pictures of you with the gay midgets at the christmas party. There's a few more steps in this formula that ultimately results in a seed number used to decide whether you give Joe Blow a completely unreasonable ammount of time to finish his project, or just an absurdly inadequate one.
"If Joe Blow always takes longer than expected, I'll fire him, web surfing or not."
Yep.
"If Jane Bleep routinely finishes her work ahead of time, I'll make sure she gets the biggest raise, come evaluation time..."
Hmmm...the females get preferrential treatment. Sentence structure and syntax will reveal why. "Jane gets"..."the biggest raise", "Come evaluation time", "finishes her work a-head of time". Oh, and what expletive is the "Bleep" covering up?? Yes, yes, yes, poor "manager" is sexually frustrated and yearns to replace all his "Joe Blows" with a harem of "Jane Hummers."
Strange animal this, "manager." Trecherous and beguiling. Best to keep your distance and always watch your back!
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
I used to work for a company that did this. It was a great place to work and socialize. We'd go out after hours to relax together - all 30 to 40 of us.
We all got our work done before deadlines.
Then the 'management' instituted this internet/mail watch. One video clip e-mailed *to* me later wound up hurting 15 guys on the cc list. The guy who sent it was banned from the net. The rest of us were all banned from the net for 30 days and we didn't even have to have seen it. I hadn't even checked my mail before they summoned us into one room to chew us all out.
I left the company three weeks later over this as did several others. Now, for the people that still work there, they say the company morale sucks and morale was never like it was from 1998 to 2000. Too bad, too. Really great bunch of people they were.
Now, the company has gone through four layoffs and is working with a skeleton crew.
Where I work the controls are almost non-existant on where people go.
Staff can get audited on what they do for any number of reasons.
The number of people who get sacked for doing absoultely stupid shit is ridiculous.
Our companies Internet policy says you can use the Internet for non-work related purposes as long as it doesn't become a problem to you performing your job. (And some clauses around innappropriate material) A fairly moderate policy.
And too many people still behave like children.
Goodbye!
Not that you are bitter or anything... =)
Checking up on pix of themselves?
Was just a joke, meant to include a line that it wasn't personal to you...Am a manager myself!
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
och aye
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
- Systems repair because some jerk downloaded some pr0n4U.exe file that fucked up his machine
- Systems repair where people fill their hard drives with pr0n, mp3s, warez
- LAN slowdown because people are downloading pr0n, mp3s, warez
The list goes on and on! You know what *I* think of people who do this crap instead of work? Lazy bastards! So do you know what I think of spying on them?
Pointless.
I mean, you knew who did work and who didn't. I don't care what employee A's reason of lack of work was, he wasn't working! He could have been reading highly technical manuals, staring off into space, embracing co-ed frottage at the water cooler, whatever. He/she's a slacker! And not in the good "Bob" way, either. I could have told you that without any bandwidth-stealing monitoring software.
The fact is, if you can't tell how an employee is doing with proof of work... you got bigger problems._
_________________________________________________
www.punkwalrus.com - a journal into the forays of living mysteries
WooHoo! Lucky for me I work for a web hosting firm:
[Boss walks in]"Hey what the hell is that on your monitor?...Porno?"
[Me]"Um, yes, boss, it's really great pr0n."
[Boss]"Is the site one of our customers?"
[Me]"Yep."
[Boss walks out]"Send me the URL."
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
I will provide a suitable Bond as a replacement, with my profuse apologies!
(Alternately, I could provide a high-mileage Tom Jones as a replacement.)
So what you are saying is that they aren't actually actively monitoring employees desktops, they just have the ability to take over desktops remotely to support them. You don't ask them for support, so they don't need to connect to your desktop.
I have a friend that worked in a really large company who went to do some "updates" to computers in the marketing department. He came upon one employees cube and there was Red Hat instead of NT running on the computer. Fortunetaly, I had introduced him to Linux, so he thought that was cool and moved on.
-BrentI had the dubious luxury of sharing an office with my boss. I was the jr. admin at a land surveying/architecture firm that employed about 50 autocad technicians. My boss, whose previous employment was a drill seargant in the marines for 8 years, sat about 2 feet from me. He didn't tolerate any extracuricular websurfing and expected some long days out of me. Needless to say I wasn't that depressed when I got the pink slip.....the owner of the firm actually commended me for being able to tolerate the marine. He even admitted it difficult working with this guy.
Where I work as a sys admin, we used to have a box dedicated to monitoring web activity. While I disagreed with the monitoring of employees, I was told to implement it by the director. Morale across the office plummeted the very next day. It was horrible. One of the biggest complaints people had was that the monitoring software has no idea if you are on break or not... and if you are on break, why not visit your online banking? It is after all, YOUR time. To compound this matter, it turned out that the director had a voyeuristic streak to her.... She would spend over an hour a day looking at what sites people would go to....remember, this was not the employee's boss, this was their bosses' boss. She would never say anything to anyone about the stats.... She just liked to watch.
I thought, and still do think, that this was a complete waste of her time.... After all, isn't observing web based stats of employee web use just as bad?
It's just impossible to focus on work for 8 hours straight, especially one that requires a lot of concentration, like programming. I've found that when I'm coding a difficult problem, I have to step away from the computer for a while and just sit and think about it.
And back in the days of time-and-motion studies (like the '50s and even before) it was discovered that this applies to ALL office jobs. Executive decision making, typing, filing, adding figures, you name it. If the employee takes several short breaks across the day (like 15 minutes every couple hours, if I recall correctly) the productivity during the rest of the time goes up, and the error rate goes down, to more than compensate - much more. Same applies to people on productions lines, too. (Only there a mistake may mean a man down with an injury rather than just a little rework to do.)
So the "coffee break" was invented. (Turns out a little caffeine increases the effect, too.)
And breakrooms were added to every office suite.
(Similarly, the 40-hour week is a 40-hour week at least partly because productivity drops drastically after 8 hours per day on a 5-day work week.)
Of course many hi-tek managers were promoted from the ranks (or self-promoted by entrepreneurial activity), with only a few hours of management training (if that). So they didn't get an education that included these facts.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... than most of the women I can see from my desk spend applying hand cream.
why do people waste part of their eight hour day? Because they don't need eight hours every day to do their jobs. Maybe they need twelve one day and four the next.
Some jobs are EXPLICITLY patchy, too. For instance: Plant maintainence. If the maintainence crew isn't spending half it's time playing Eucre, you don't have enough maintainence men for when things break down.
This leads to pathologies, when management tries some organizational tweak that doesn't take this into account. For instance:
There was a steel mill whose bean-counters decreed that every interval on an employee's timecard had to show the project number on which the employee was working (so they could charge each customer the right amount, see?) Sounds reasonable, eh?
But what about the guys that build and fix up the plant equipment? Well, they made up "project numbers" for each piece of equipment, so they could allocate a cost for its use based on how much labor was spent setting it up and maintaining it. Still sounds reasonable, eh?
But where do the maintainence men bill their Eucre time, as they wait for something to break down and result in a fire-department style scramble? Oops!
Well, they had recently fixed this conveyor. So they happened to know its account number. So they used that account number for their downtime.
And everything worked fine for a few months. Until a bean-counter was looking over the records and discovered that this conveyor seemed to need a LOT of repair.
So they tore it out.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I was once busted for visiting CNN.com during lunch, one time.
I was also busted for visiting the MSDN site as well as other C++ websites. I'm a programmer.
A co-worker who conducts ALL his personal business from work ( he blames it on all his phone calls from home being long-distance and his mortgage) had pages and pages of non-work sites he had visited in 2 weeks time. Not a word was said to him.
It's fine to be restrictive, but be consistent.
Rules and regulations should be self-imposed. I realize that some people need to be given rather strict rules, but generally, people who have a dedicated computer at work should not belong to that category. Making too many rules and regulations and telling people what to do would not work in the end. Of course, employees should not be surfing on the internet 8 hours a day (unless that's their assignment), but they should figure out what's appropriate (1 hour a day? Maybe?) by themselves.
> The expectation is that employees get all their work done.
After all, that's the company's objective, their goal. I don't think that enforcing such and such rules and regulations is the way to go.
If you post a list of people and "inappropriate sites visited" for the month, people will take the hint:
John Smith: funwithgoats.com 172 visits
Depending on which department you're in of course. Certain departments may take this the wrong way and use this to find popular links.
Since we run a Win shop with Internet Exploder as the browser, I obviously wasn't too keen on letting the great unwashed touch any external hosts froma production machine... quite frankly, there is no business reason to allow it, it serves no purpose. My solution was simple - it isn't allowed, except for about 4 of us (out of 40 or 50).
The rest... well, we retire boxes all the time. They all get wiped, and some get Mozilla, others IE, and others Konquerer. They get stuck in disused corners in the building, and connected outside our DMZ. People can use 'em whenever they want... and if the box breaks, well... big deal, it's outside of my production.
Interesting side note - everyone is told that those boxes are "disavowed" by us - if they get hosed, they stay hosed, and we'll fix them in a few months when we're bored. Six months, and only one hose-up so far... and this in a demographic that often has big hair, chews bubblegum and thinks AIM is "cute!".
- SBB
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Forget all this bullshit about productivity and smoke breaks and inappropriate web content. I have a subscription filtering system (be jealous, I work for a defense contract with IT money to burn) and we don't worry about what you're trying to browse on the clock. I could care less about you surfing over to cozycoeds.com. What I'm more concerned about are the uninformed user masses who assumed every pop-up they encounter is okay for them to explore. If not for a decent (and none are perfect) filter, Lord knows what trash my systems would be exposed to. But even with filters and firewalls, I still manage to have some dumbasses screw up my network. Excellent case in point, some web-clinker decides it's okay to d/l things on his own, load his own software, despite my best restrictions on Windohs. Turns out he causes this huge bottleneck on my network since his machine is consuming more bandwidth than my Exchange, SQL and file/print servers COMBINED! Users are 90% idiots. Bring on the filters.
--I guess it would depend on the business, but maybe figure out a way to offer a base low salary or hourly, then the 'real' money kicks in dependent on productivity, if there's a way to calibrate it. Then there's the incentive to work harder and more efficiently, and there's no real reason to have serious rules on when you want to take a break and surf or do some online personal business.
And definetly I'd agree with you on having to be able to google for answers and to keep up to speed, if it's one thing I've learned as a linux noob is google is THE set of useful man pages.
A friend in York, England was asked to pay £95 to the "Crown Data Collection Enforcement Agency". The UK Goverment's Data Protection Registry has a note on their website warning against such "individuals posing as 'collectors on behalf of data protection'".
My friend looked up their address on Google and found 46 web pages, including an adoption agency a glamour model agency and somebody selling hardcore porn videos. He emailed York's trading standards department.
He got a phone call back saying York Council policy bans Google so his complaint could not be investigated. How the f*** can they find anything out?
My first though was, "Oh no! What did these people do BEFORE the internet became popular?!" Kinda like those people who whine about not being allowed to have cell phones in movie theaters... "But what if my kid is sick while I'm watching the movie!?" Gee, what did you do before you got a cell? Sorry, but the reasons for lost productivity presented in this story is nothing but fluff. Maybe there is a legitmate one, but "I can't access Kazaa or my favorite p0rn site from work!" ain't it.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
YHL. HAND!!!!
Post it logged in.
I had people screwing around downloading crap, playing games, warez, pr0n, chatting and everything else except working.
TOO F-ING BAD.... I cut off all access to those types of sevices, filter email and delete non company related email, removed floppies and CD drives and generally forbid anyone from doing anything at work except work.
If people want to play they can do it at home. I don't hire people to play while I pay them.
Yes, I am Mr. hardass but I don't care, if they don't like it they can go work somewhere else. I also do not hire smokers or drinkers. Smokers STINK and are sick all the time and waste time smoking, and drinkers are always drunk and are always late for work, forget things, and are untrustworthy in general.
Work is for work. I can't believe people have the balls to show up and demand to be paid for screwing around!!
One negative effect of employee monitoring is, they don't trust you (or they don't trust you even more than before). Here is an article about some employees who received an email, pay us $50 or we'll tell your boss you were pr0n-surfing.
Nearly all of the (innocent) employees paid up rather than report the scam! Few, if any, trusted their PHBs to take their word for it that they were being scammed on!!
The biggest problem is what counts as "work related"? Without a human being constantly checking everything you do on the web, you have to rely on a program to be the watchdog. And computer software is absolutely terrible at figuring out semantic context. Is it non - work related to surf eBay so it should be banned for all? The truthful answer is, "depends on context". Is it non - work related to surf a particular newsgroup? The truthful answer is, "depends on context". In fact, that's always the truthful answer. But, corporate big-wigs interested in trying to stop this problem aren't interested in the truthful answer, they want the easy answer. And the easy answer is to just ban sites rather than ban by content.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Do emplyoers who ban personal web browsing ban smoke-breaks too?
I was shown a work position with four cameras on the employee.
What were they doing?
Counting/Sorting Dollars and other currencies. It was a regional office of the Central Bank of Russia. The money arrived in cassettes was loaded into the counting machine and then left in cassettes. Sometimes the machine had to be opened by the operator and that was why the cameras were there.
I have also visited secret facilities in the west and frequently had to work under the camera. Although none were so bad as the Central Bank office. OTOH, I've not been in a nuclear weapons facility.
See my journal, I write things there
Tell your boss that you may have to leave for the day to deal with personal business but if he ok's it you could use the company's net connection to deal with it and you could do it in a lot less time. Or do it at lunch
MGR: I think Smith is surfing the web for pr0n.
SA: You sould go tell him to stop it.
MGR: Can you make a report of his websurfing?
SA: I could... <lie>But I'll need a new Quad Xeon server to do it</lie>
MGR: What will the new server run?
SA: A product called Quake Server
MGR: OK get oe.
Three hours later...
SA: Hey Smith stop surfing for pr0n.
SMITH: OK I will.
This
I don't think it is always appropriate to send emails about what is happening at my work site to my employers who are not at the work site. It is not negative about particular activity nor is it detailing things I should not share; but I find it hard to remember to tell them things until I get to my home office.
I also have a *real* home office with high-end printer, fax machine, nice desks and chairs, and a small home network that I have worked in before when telecommuting or consulting so I fall back into that pattern.
Last but not least, there is a lot of "inappropriate filtering" done at work. I need access to certain technical bulletin boards and just because they run bulletin board software they are filtered to prevent posting by employees. I literally print certain threads into PDFs at home so that I can read them at work. Another example; what good is it to filter security and hacker sites when your unit is responsible for network security and anti-hacking? It is not always prudent to read only the 'approved' sites (which are generally corporate partners or particular vendors and often less technical than you require in order to get your work done!!! you can't just look at the whitehat party line stuff to stay on top of your game) for information that you need.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
Offtopic?!? It was a *joke*, get it?!? See, I'm at work, and the article is about employers monitoring web stuff, and I'm trying to download... ah, forget it. Eesh.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Baiting the mail filter has become a game where I work. We try to work out what rules its using by trimming down messages until they pass through. This does waste a lot of time.
The filters are daft though. I get enough porn spam through to show that they're not working that well. I send email about software design, things like
Consider a wotzit, XXX, then XXX+YYY=ZZZ
and that gets blocked because it contains the string XXX. Our graphic designer often has images blocked, even sending promotional material to other parts of the company. Its all getting really silly.
My boss drops by the the server room every once in
a while and asks if I can find out what sites are
visited by various people. Since I don't have
direct access to the cache logs, I occasionally
troll through browser cache files and have even
gone as far as to intall a bridging openbsd box
with dsniff. I suppose some people have been
"fired" or "disciplined", but personally, I really
don't give a flying fsck.
What does piss me off is when these requests
become overtly political. And what piss me off
even more is when the boss wastes my time of
fscking snipe hunts. The last time that
happened, I refered him to the folks to take care
of the web cache. Funny thing, they're
centralized and pretty divorced of politics.
They told him to talk to the Legal Dept./HR.
The disappointment in his eyes was palpable and
that was really fun to watch. I highly recomend
this procedure to any and all system admins who
are in my shoes.
I also recomend that everyone who wants their
work place web surfing behavior to go unmonitored
to have an alternate network path available.
An external wireless provider on a laptop/PDA is
perfect. If anyone asks you why you're not using
your corporate desktop, tell'em you don't trust
your corporate desktop (that'll throw'em for a
loop).
VI:
A hungry dog hunts best.
A hungrier dog hunts even better.
VII:
Decreased business base increases overhead.
So does increased business base.
VIII:
The most unsuccessful four years in the education of a cost-estimator
is fifth grade arithmetic.
IX:
Acronyms and abbreviations should be used to the maximum extent
possible to make trivial ideas profound. Q.E.D.
X:
Bulls do not win bull fights; people do.
People do not win people fights; lawyers do.
-- Norman Augustine
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