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."
My employer is pretty good when it comes to workplace privacy and freedom. Afterall, they don't seem to mind me reading Slas
Still can't masturbate in the privacy of my cube without someone complaining to HR. The terrorists have already won...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
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!
Remember when IBM was The Man? Not as in "You The Man", but as in "You've sold out to The Man, man!" The Evil Empire? Big, corporate, bad guys? Now, they love Linux, they don't snoop on employees, they fight SCO-style crap, and so on? When did they get all nice-nice?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
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?
So let's see.. This is an article about an article about an article that hasn't been published yet? Awesome.. Let's create news articles by playing that old game of Telephone! Oh wait.. I think that's how the media works in the first place...
So.. This is a comment about a comment about an articl.. Oh forget it..
Geoffeg
In the work place, I expect to have all my correspondence, activity, anything that crosses their network to, at least, be open to scrutiny.
;)
Honestly, my time at work is for working. I know that's not a popular view with some, but it really comes down to asking yourself what you use your time for.
If you're comfortable with your boss knowing what sites you're looking at and he's comfortable with you looking at them, then there's no problem.
But to *expect* privacy I think is assuming you have a different relationship with your boss/company than you do: they're paying you to be there and do a job, and whatever means they take to ensure they're getting their money's worth is reasonable.
With all that said... I did post this from work.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
While it's esay for us to sit here and complain on them for invasive background checks of workers after Sept. 11 its not that easy for them to avoid getting decent workers that don't disclose their research to terrorists. For example if Bin-Laden got hold of all the research of Elly he might avoid getting diseases like osteoporosis, cancer, depression, schizophrenia and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. So actually its better that they check their future employees than Bin-Laden getting 120 yeras old.
Proud patriot and republican voter.
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.
Reminds me of an old job, when one of the bosses tried to install a key-logger on my machine. It stored the key presses as a text file in C:\. Of course I noticed this (hard not to, it kept crashing) -- and being the evil person that I am, I replaced it with some imaginative ASCI art.
I don't work there anymore.
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.
Not to troll or anything, but after Bush Sr. left the CIA in '77, he became director of Eli Lilly.
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...
There are a lot of managers out there. A relatively few number of them actually have any special training, most within IBM have special training. An MBA alone doesn't turn you in to a good manager or executive. IBM knows that and they have a process of creating good managers and execs, just like the military has a process of creating officers. People from the engineering career path decide to become managers, they go through training than then they are managers. At other companies it's an over night process, one day a guy is a senior software engineer and the next he's a manager. Subsequently, the MBAs I've had to deal with who weren't manager tended to be assholes who thought of themselves in a completely different light that the worker bees (just by virtue they should be paid more, drive a BMW and give orders, not all of them but an alarming number of them were that way) and those engineers come managers that I've worked with desparately wanted a number to quantify employee performance without actually knowing how the employees were doing. They either micro managed and their employees could only ever fail because they "could never do it as good as the boss" or they were left totally hands off and the boss had no idea who did what, when or why. At IBM my bosses trusted my judgement, they worked within that, they protected me, they asked my advice on technical matters, they dealt with politics, they were enablers and at the end of each year they had a pretty good idea why I worked for them, what I brought to the table, how i needed to improve and how I was of value; they knew the skill-set that I had and at times they moved me to better match that or to grow those skills in directions I desired. Also at IBM if you screw up, it goes to your manager, you surf porn and it's your manager that hears about it and sees the report, except for a few major offenses it's usually put in to your boss' hands when you do something wrong. Who better knows what the circumstances may be? Who better to judge your value to the company when you screw up?
I think the classic example was a coworker who got caught drinking in his car at lunch time. He was just sitting out there drinking from the bottle, it was a flat violation of policy (I think booze is semi okay at IBM now, they have beer at some functions) well as it turns out his wife had left him the night before. He could have been fired, HR at a midsized company may have just fired him. His manager had a talk with him, gave him a repremand, explained that it can't happen again and didn't fire him. Offered to get him enrolled in some alchohol classes or rehab and at that point this person essentially started to rebuild his life that had just been falling apart.
Now there are always problems, but IBM is a company that is built on trust and when the right people are in the right places and the trust is there they are a very very powerful company and a very difficult company to compete with. They've been around nearly 100 years and I expect them to be around another if they keep to these practices. They are a company to emulate in many ways and the ways they manage and trust their employees is one of them.