Slashdot Mirror
Workplace Privacy - IBM Hot, Lilly Not
Brahmastra writes "Reuters has posted an article about the best and worst companies for workplace privacy, passing on information from the forthcoming issue of Wired Magazine, and IBM comes out on top. How does your workplace compare?" According to the summary, Eli Lilly was rated "the most notorious Big Brother boss", after "...its invasive background checks of workers after Sept. 11, 2001, some of which led to dismissals."
Wow! IBM seems to really be doing well in a geek's eyes right now. They don't spy on employees...they are helping the Linux battle against SCO, not to mention helping further open source by contributing to Linux, eclipse, and others.
Good job, IBM!
ikeya
---- Move SIG...For great justice!
while Ford and Sears were praised for voluntarily signing on with stringent data-protection laws in Europe and California.
How can you voluntarily sign on to a law? Does that imply I can opt out of the laws I don't like?
snoops peoples emails, record the websites they went to, monitor phone calls (incoming and outgoing) and watch how much time you spent in the bathroom and away from your desk. If she found out you were planning on quitting, she'd have tech image your drive so she could look for anything to sue you for.
And that was if you were on the boss's good side.
Glad to hear the bitch's company is on the verge of failing.
It's one of the few companies I know that has a yahoo group made of former employees where you can go to vent your spleen without worrying about getting sued by your former boss.
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
Then their business model fell apart. No more near monopoly on computers. They couldn't even control the "IBM-compatible" market. They were in deep trouble, and somebody realized that their arrogant corporate culture was a big part of the problem. So they hired a new boss from outside the industry, and retooled everything, from the way people worked together to their overreliance on proprietary technology. Worked out well. That which does not kill you, yada yada.
Companies are always searching for ways to squeeze more productivity out of their staff - I wonder if there's ever been any objective study to show that people *don't* work as effectively when they know they are amoebas under microscopic management.
Or do they work harder, and quit earlier? What's the cost of replacement?
It'd sure be nice if a well-funded and run study showed that being nice made people more productive... any studies at all?
Anybody remember the campus of a software company that had free medical (via on-site doctor) child care, membership in a health club, free food (all you can eat) soccer games, and the like?
I seem to remember seeing "60 Minutes" or something on this company - how they were able to improve productivity *and* morale by providing the extras on campus so that the people are just free to work...
Anybody have a link? Can this method be brought to everyday, or is/was this a fluke based on uncommonly good market conditions for said company?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
what if they want to look into your wallet? is that ok?
look I work, my time at work is for work, but there should be a level of privacy, even at work.
I think it is reasonable for the work place to relize you have a life outside of work, and sometimes the to cross.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I work in the parmaceutical research industry (cancer biochemistry) and it doesn't surprise me that a pharmaceutical company brings up the rear w.r.t. privacy concerns (specifically background checks)
I'm in Canada and a friend got a job in the States for a big pharma a few years back. They did the whole background check and called up all his references etc... I assumed it was because he was Canadian trying to work in the US, but all this was before 9/11. I imagine it's gotten even more stringent since.
One reason for the security is that big pharma have HUGE animal facilities for thier pre-clinical experiments. Not trying to start a flame war here, but it's part of the process that you test potential drugs on animals before you submit an application for a new drug for human trials (IND) to the FDA.
It's quite normal to use thousands of rodents to develop a potential new drug. Not only efficacy, but parameters like maximum tolerated dosage, bioavailability of various formulations, biological half-life, clearance routes, metabolism, etc etc, all have to be characterized in animals before you even think about testing in humans. While appalling to some, it's part of the industry and just a small part of what it takes to get a drug onto the market.
For some companies, the animal facilities are housed in their own massive buildings and secured like a military installation. They probably use hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of animals per year and would make prime targets for animal activists. Probably not a very enticing a target for terrorists, but background checks in this industry are nothing new.
I work for a small company, and we dont do background checks, but during interviews we try and get a sense of a candidates interests and hobbies. Things like volunteering for PETA immediately raises serious red flags.
In the work place, I expect to have all my correspondence, activity, anything that crosses their network to, at least, be open to scrutiny.
... alas, that privacy has become a victim of 1980s anti-drug hysteria and the radical right agenda that has followed, one that now interprets a private communication as being 'property' of one's employer merely because it happened to be conducted using a piece of company equipment (the telephone) ... at one end.
... and your expectation shows that you have been unfortunate enought to swallow a particularly radical right-wing agenda hook, line, and sinker, to your own, and everyone elses, detriment.
Then you expect to work for felons. Opening a piece of US Mail not addressed to you is a felony, whether the envelope is sitting in your private home mailbox or on your bosses desk. Even the worst libertarian excesses of the 1980s War on Drugs, as presided over by Edwin Meese never changed that particular aspect of the law. These excesses, which encouraged such nonsensical interpretations of property rights to include invading the privacy of anyone who happens to be on said property (taken to its logical conclusion, your employer should have the right to strip search you on "his" property), are in fact in opposition to 200+ years of statutory and common law in the United States.
You have a reasonable expectation of privacy on your person (and, thankfully, our only somewhat brainwashed culture continues to agree...so your boss cannot order you strip searched on suspicion of hiding company documents...yet).
You have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your snail mail correspondence, backed by federal law enforcing that privacy with downright draconian penalties should it be violated.
You have a reasonable expection of privacy when speaking on the phone
You should have a reasonable expectation of privacy in conducting correspondence via email, but again, the same flawed logic has been applied to extend property rights over the medium to include property rights over the content (your correspondence), merely because the medium is new (a computer network) and ignoring two centuries of precedent to the contrary in every other communications medium (including, until the 1980s, telephony).
It is unfortunate that you expect no privacy at work. You are certainly entitled to it
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
But the levels of privacy made many things difficult and ultimately proved a factor in why I left. Information on salaries, expectations, and how you compared to others were confidential to the point where it was hard to tell where you were. The Personal Business Commitments (PBCs) program that would determine your variable pay (Read: bonus counted as your salary) was obfuscated and it was impossible to see the metrics behind the scores. Pay levels were discussed in closed rooms in whispered voices and it was verboten to speak of possible career advancing points. The thing that pushed me over the edge was learning that a college hire made more money than me even though my experienced dwarfed him (and I had graduated with a similar major).
Ultimately yes, privacy at IBM was a good thing, but brought with it just as many evils.
--Chag
At Dell, they are always watching you. That is, they use SMS management installed on all Win9x (2K and XP as well) to take snapshot photos of all desktop PCs. In fact, I had at least 5 known shots taken of mine while working (you can tell when the screen refreshes). A co-worker I know says that they will once in awhile have one or two people in IT dedidicated to surveillance. If you get cought with questionable content displayed, your manager will be notified. Of course, the key word is "questionable" because browsing CNN.com is frowned apon as lost productivity.
Life is not for the lazy.
I also worked at a Bank before 9/11. There was massive surveillance of its employees. Ebay? You're fired. Talk about looking for another job? You're fired. Using Hotmail or Yahoo for personal email? You're fired. That bank lost a major lawsuit for videotaping the bathrooms in that West Palm Beach headquarters. They still videotape it: the "winners" of the lawsuit also got fired. They had a security department devoted to listening to phone calls, watching your email and snooping your web tracks. Being hired to develop software with Visual Studio, my first task was to hack the locked down NT boxes (wow, padlocks on the floppy drives! C2 is a joke) because Visual Studio was not on the approved software list. And of course, after a few months, the software audit showed unapproved software on the computer, so I was fired. LMAO.
Background checks for employees probably got a big boost after the tylenol tampering case. I am sure that some disgruntled employees have flicked boogers into the medicine before it gets bottled or tabletized. I am sure you have seen the "real tv" shows with the surveillance footage of some guy urinating into a coffee pot at the office. Could your company afford to make 100,000,000,000 pills with urine in them?
I'm a current IBM employee. And yes, the rules are pretty strict about leaving stuff out unattended. But you have to remember we have a zillion different customers from all over the world. Some of them, like major banks, governments, etc, tend to stipulate a certain level of general security "cleanliness" as part of their contract. When security is a habit, you don't make dumb mistakes. When you only do it when you remember you're on a sensitive projuect, you're more likely to slip.
It's a pain, but you adjust quickly. I have a locked drawer on my desk. End of the day, everything paper on my desk goes in my desk. The next day, stuff comes out as I need it. Every coupla months, the drawer gets full. And all that semi-sensitive stuff goes en-masse to the confidential recycling bin. Clean office, and no slip-up's from double stakcing papers, etc...