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Using Employee-Owned Technology in the Workplace?
digitalvengeance asks: "As of Monday, my company is initiating a 'no cell phone' policy at all of our offices, including the IT department, where I work. I consider my cellular phone a necessity both in my personal and work lives. I have a number of servers and custom applications configured to notify me by text message, in the event of a problem. I am considering refusing to take work calls or text messages on my personal cell phone, and even quitting in protest of the new policy. How have other Slashdot readers dealt with policies regarding use of employee-owned technology at work? Any suggestions as to how I can get this policy overturned without looking like someone who wants to spend my working time on my cell rather than coding?"
Actually, both my friends who work in the government and my father who works in a hospital have this requirement. One has to do with security, the other with interference of pacemakers and electronic equipment. Sometimes a cell-phone ban (though I'm not in favor of it) actually is the responsible thing to do.
This assumes you're in an environment with wireless, and you have a wireless-enabled PDA. Or, like another poster mentioned, see if they'll allow an alpha pager and go from there.
"Well, I am mad, and I'm a crazy fucka when it comes to tea"
I think you need to spell out to your employers the importance of your cell phone particularly as it relates to your work. Make it clear to them that their new policy will substantially diminish your ability (and that of anyone else you can reasonably claim) to work efficiently, and that if it's implemented as planned, your company's productivity will diminish. Those are the terms that any executive or middle manager will understand.
And if that doesn't work, it might be worth it to try to get the company to issue work-only cell phones. It would be kind of a hassle to keep switching between two, but it might be the kind of alternative they'd be willing to agree to.
I used to run my own webserver at home on a mac. I did Mac phone tech support, and over time quite a few of the sites & hints I did for customers ended up on my server.
When I needed to sell the mac to cover school fees and told my work they should really host the stuff themselves, I was told under no circumstances should I remove work material from where it was used. Hell I was happy to give them the domain too, it was just a small vanity one that had no other use to me.
So in the end I had to sell the Mac, the site went down, and I lost my job. Sucks
Why don't you suggest an employee/employer focus group? You could suggest that employees requiring notification via text and voice is a neccessary for you to perform your job.
You really should side with them employer on banning employees from cell phones unless they really do need it for their position. This position should leave you neutral to both techies and employers.
Perhaps your company is willing to purchase a few dedicated email capable cell phones for technical employees? Many possible solutions are out there if you can sit down as a group and properly discuss the matter.
-
And then argue that it's not a cellular phone, but a two-way radio. You'd be tecnically correct.*
*And that's the best kind of correct.
I have a number of servers and custom applications configured to notify me by text message, in the event of a problem. I am considering refusing to take work calls or text messages on my personal cell phone, and even quitting in protest of the new policy.
Well, make the the servers and applications send their messages elsewhere and by all means refuse to take work calls and text messages on your cell. If it is really important to your employers that they be able to contact you on your mobile they will either make an exception for you or find another solution.
If you are really concerned about this policy for work reasons speak to your manager, I'm sure he would rather you be the one getting text messages from servers and apps than him.
I have a number of servers and custom applications configured to notify me by text message, in the event of a problem.
If I were you... I woudl think it would be in your best interest to get them to sport for either an alphanumeric pager, or a two way pager.
Just a oneway alpha/numeric pager should work as well as your current mobile setup, may not even require changes to your script.
Two way pager may be able to be attached to a serial port... provided you use TTL levels, and just accept error messages regardless of whether you have a network connection or not.
It seems to me that you are doing your job and using your equipment to do it. If they won't allow you to bring in your own equipment it's only common sence for them to buy it.
Otherwise, you can invest in a handheld internet terminal, which while can be used as a mobile phone, are more likely to inspire sympathy as being a IT required device. Unless they plan to ban handheld palm like devices.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Consider for a moment working for someone who's either too poor or too PHB stupid to foot the bill for the technology to do a job effectively. You bring in your own toys (or buy them out of your own pocket, as I have on occasion) to make your job easier.
When I leave for a new job, I take it all with me. It's their problem getting along without the proper tools.
If the poster can't do his/her job effectively under the new company policy, sometimes it's a good practice to go along with the policy to show the folly of it.
I can understand some of these policies, as I've been super irritated in the past by people who answer cell phones in meetings (unless it's a relevent call to what the meeting is about.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
One of my former employers had to implement a ban on personal devices unless otherwise approved because the salespeople were all bringing in personal laptops and wanting to use them despite the fact that they had perfectly good computers on their desks. This was getting to the point that they were starting to trip the circuit breaker and taking the entire room's power down.
The reason they wanted to use their own laptops became a bit of a turf war. See, these were mostly new sales reps who had worked for other companies before joining ours. They wanted to keep their sales contact list on their own laptop so they could bring it from employer to employer. The company wanted them to store their sales leads only on the company server because even though sales reps could only see their own accounts, when a rep leaves it becomes very easy to split their leads list among other reps and also limits the outgoing rep's ability to contact their existing accounts under a new employer.
The IT department's offer was to convert any contact database into our system. We never did get any reps who took us up on that, but some left in protest of being unable to keep their laptops up-to-date.
I've been in similar positions with software purchases over the years; management doesn't see the 'need' to spend money on an essential upgrade or license renewal until something breaks. When faced with downtime that you can document would have been preventable or significantly softened the impact, management will then typically listen (or be replaced by even higher management).
Play the CYA (cover your ass) game with documentation until the day comes that someone has to answer for downtime/response delays/missed deadlines, then put them on the spot with it. It works wonders.
"Powers. I have them."
Nobody took it seriously. They had cellphones going off all over the show, including bosses. People even lacked the discretion to use vibrate mode so that it was a discreet breaking of the rules. I think it was instituted due to some localised abuse (people using it excessively on company time), which is fair enough, but could have been dealt with more diplomatically.
They also had a policy that you were not permitted to have music going at your workstation, be it with headphones, or whatever. I work far better when I can shut out the ambient noise of an office. I felt naked without headphones on and it reduced my productivity, but went along with the rules for a while til i noticed nobody really cared if I had my sounds going or not.
Find out why this rule was introduced, and make a judgement call as to whether it is a BS rule that you are happy to break, or if there is a serious reason behind it that would mean you should get formal permission for not following it.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
Can't use USB pen drives anymore!
But that's just because management hasn't started using them yet. When our new firewall started blocking sites, every site with the word 'mail' in it and every site not using the standard port 80 was blocked. I just shrugged and went on with life at work.
Recently, just for the heck of it, I tried my university mail account (port 8000) and it worked! Then I tried my personal webmail site and it worked too!
It looks like some higher exec type got locked out of his favorite site and made the networks guys open the firewall a little wider.
Maybe your 'no cell phones' rule is just another flavor of the week and it will go away also.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
put your phone on silent mode, vibration on.
if you get a call on your cell, look at the callerID, and call the person back on your office phone.
if you dont have callerID, explain the situation briefly in your voicemail message and that you will immediately call back anyone who leaves their name and phone number.
take your voicemail messages from your office phone.
In the time before cell phones, it wasn't as easy to digitally record every conversation that you have. If my wife calls about a personal emergency, I really don't want it to be common knowledge by the owners of the company. The company does not OWN me, and if I need to take 5 or 10 minutes to talk to my family about something, I am damn sure going to do that. They are batting arround the same policy here (no cell phones) and when that happens, I will find other employment. In the current environment, where there are many people for each job, it is easy for companies to push this type of B.S. policy, but that by a long shot doesn't make it correct.
No matter where you go, there you are. So Enjoy it.
Ah, middle management edicts, the dead wood (and I'm not talking about the paper used to print their memos on) in ANY organization ;)
;)
Here is how I deal with stupid management:
I try to use polite, logical argument.
If that fails I will then impliment what they want TO A T and watch disaster to unfold. When it does, I show the memo/policy that ordered me to do it.
I'm a systems administrator for a local IT firm and I manage systems for a couple dozen clients. I have a personal cell phone. The company won't provide one, and they only offer me a mere $10 a month in compensation, which I turned down so I have the priviledge of NOT taking someone's call if I so choose not to, as I always choose not to when it's the owner calling. I'll use my phone as a pager, and call from a land line when it's convienent.
Our owner has become increasingly paranoid about monitoring our every minute. He pays a small fortune for internet monitoring (Stellar) at the office (of course, we mostly ARENT THERE), and is paranoid about our IT people even having the admin password to the company server (he wouldn't know how to even add a user).
Most of us on the staff have taken to using our personal laptops with our Citrix remote access server in the office so that our every keystroke isn't potentially logged... We also use an "underground" remote access machine to surf the web on
You just can't do that sort of thing to techies without consequences. We are always three steps ahead.
Frankly, since having a cell phone, I've found it to be a curse. I HATE being reachable all the time, I've found that it causes me to do MORE work. I miss being able to drive from one site to another and not be bothered DURING... I think anyone like me who has to know a couple dozen diffrent client site setups NEEDS a few mintues here and there to clear our minds!
But, by keeping my cell phone personal, I can avail myself of the priviledge to use the OFF button, which I do often.
Corporatism != Free Market
An employer can force you to have a cell phone for your job just as they can require you to have a car. In fact my wife works for several companies that require a car and a higher level of auto insurance in order to take clients from them. At the end of the year you can write off all the expenses off your taxes.
It is a pain, indeed, but there *are* some valid reasons for controlling what equipment is brought on campus. It does create problems, e.g. a visiting professor brings his own laptop, or a company wants to provide on loan some equipment, or you are doing a joint research project with another institution and they send you some equipment to use, etc...
I strongly suspect the real reason behind this is the increasing proliferation of camera-phones. Smaller and more discreet than a conventional camera, and you can pretend to be making a phone-call while you use one. So far, my employer only bans visitors from bringing all cellphones onto the site (simpler than trying to find out whether the phone in question contains a camera), but I wouldn't be surprised if this were also extended to employees in the near future. Given the obvious security risk that camera phones pose, not to mention the litigation risks they open up, I think this is a perfectly sensible policy.
Switch it to email/IM notification and tell your employers they should get you a pager or cell phone so those notifications can also reach you when you're away from your desk.
I agree completely.
I used to work at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which is on an air force base and does some classified research. As a result, cell phones and cameras aren't allowed in the workplace.
Once you have those restrictions in mind, you can make do just fine. And there was full-time maintainence going on there much more critical than system administration. For example, one of my coworkers maintained one of the cleanrooms stocked with arsine and phosphine gas. He had to be 'on-call' 24-7, and the lack of using a cell phone at work didn't hinder him at all. He may have used one at home, I don't know. But at the lab (and it's a big place) between various other means he was able to be touch just fine.
And of course the employees still had land-line phones in their offices, and personal codes, so one can take care of all necessary personal business at the workplace.
So it should definitely be possible, but if somebody has addicted themselves to their cellphone, then they'll have to go through the withdrawl. And finally, quit if you don't like it, but IMHO if a company decides to make the place cell-phone free, they should be able to do so.
make world, not war
An example of this taken to extreme
Oakland Harbour started to have an unusual high rate of accidents (thnakfully no one hurt, but big cargo boxes dropped from cranes tend to have financial implications). Management decides to implement the policy that if any accident happens while in violation of the safety rules, then the disciplinary action could include days off without pay or even termination.
The dockworkers union decides to follow the safety rules strictly. All breaks were taken on the hour, no one worked any overtime, forklifts were not driven over 5mph, you get the idea.
cargo gets backed up - ships are waiting out in the bay cause the cargo can't be unloaded at the same speed it was before, everyone getting angry etc (but no more accidents).
Management locks out dockworkers union - the press calls it a strike, cargo is left rotting on ships, farmers can't send their crops to their customers, etc
finally Pres Bush calls in the Taft act and breaks the lockout but without resolution 5 weeks before xmas so walmart (and others) can get their chinese made junk on the shelves in time (I'm over-dramatizing, but you get the idea).
policy about accidents while in violation of safety code is still in place to this day.
Real SUV's don't have cupholders
It's 5:42 A.M., do you know where your stack pointer is?
My company has a "No Cell Phone BATTERY" policy in effect.
That means, if you want to come in, you have to REMOVE your cell phone battery. Not only is powering it off not enough, but you physically have to prove that it can not be powered on and transmit any information.
They also insert keylocks on floppy and CD drives.
Laptops, if you are so 'fortunate' to have one, have the IR ports desoldered and the microphone jack plugged.
All documents are to be carried in folders; nothing is to be made visible.
Optical cabling is run out from shielded conduit; converter boxes take it the last few feet to the computer.
So yeah, whining about losing your cellphone? Check your messages a bit more often or work to get a pager in place, if they'll let that (I don't think mine does).
Besides, I used to work in another area that banned cell phones because they were concerned that the fumes from 2000 gallon tanks of boiling solvent might get ignited. After a few demonstration videos of small scale going ka-boom, I declined carrying any form of contact with me except a paper clipboard.
They might not be cost effective but I feel much more comfortable having my critical alerts going to it.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
When my Mom was in the intensive care unit 3 years ago, there were all kinds of "NO CELL PHONES ALLOWED" signs posted, but what did I see at nurse's station in the center of the room, not 10 feet from my mom and no more than 20 feet than most of the ICU stations? A DOCTOR ON HIS CELL PHONE!
At that point, I knew it was a bullshit ban implemented by either lawyers ("save us from 0.00000001% liability risk") , administrators ("working the the dihydrogen monoxide risk, too"), or some anti-cellphone zealot ("it is not polite to patients to hear ringing or talking during nap/meal time").
Maybe at one time there was medical equipment that was analog-monitored on FCC part 27 ("unregulated") spectrum, but I highly doubt that anymore. I'd think that manufacturers would have hardened their wireless system to be immune from casual interference, since fuckups would cost them money, too.
Really? You *know* this? Since 1996, I've never met one of these. But then, I don't work in some shit hole with a server attached to a DSL line either.
Apparently he's never worked in a corporate environment. I don't know about him, but if I'm getting a cup of coffee, and I lose a server, the anti-virus server kicks off an alert, or maybe a VPN connection to a remote site drops, I need to know *THEN* - not 5 minutes later when I get back to my desk.
The techs protested that it would not be flexible for the way they worked, but it fell on deaf ears.
Needless to say, the next time the system crashed, at 5pm, none of the people fixing the problem were prepared to stay on and get it repaired for the morning.
We're a financial services company and we banned camera/cell-phones recently after our competitors had a nightmare scenario pop-up.
A person who was running their imaging group (scanning signed loan documents into imaging DB) and would use her cell/camera to take a close-up of the docs, and harvest the personal information for later sale to organized crime. Very embarassing for them, and costly as well, as they were sued by half-a-dozen people whose info was stolen in this manner. It is getting ugly. AND the Feds might fine them for the breach of security... Ouch!
So while I agree, the IT guy needs a phone, its understandable for people to be leery of their employees cell-phones.
Who did what now?
Here's the technology policy at this Fortune 50 company I worked at once.
3 people per company-sponsored computer.
No bringing in a computer.
No PDA's.
No outside software.
No use of outside e-mail (e.g., Hotmail).
No using the company name outside of work in any e-mail.
Strangely, cell phones were ignored.
You know, on another post folks are all over me because I mentioned that being reachable all the time is energy draining.
;-)
I happen to agree with you. I think we all ought to seriously consider the costs and benifits of cell phones. I went without for a while and found it liberating. For me, I like having one but having it be known that I usually don't have it on or with me.
Funny, though. My wife and our kid's school always seem to be able to get through
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
Or just create up a text file with false headers, and pump it to a telnet session connected to your local mail server on port 25. :-)
:-)
... much.
SMTP is such a wonderfully delicious hacking tool. And the lack of any sort of digital signatures on 99% of business related email that goes out surely can't hurt either.
Not that I've actually had to resort to this....
I would guess the policy exists because of the possible security threat. Notice that a LOT of the newer cell phone models have cameras on them? Think about how this enables corporate espionage or sabotage. How easy would it be for someone with a cell phone/camera to surreptitiously take a picture of a sensitive document and send it to the company's competitor?
This is a pretty shortsighted mindset on the part of the people implementing policies because of it.
I'm sure in a few years, some wristwatches will come with built-in cameras too. In a decade or less, it will be sunglasses, or replacement eyes for the blind.
What are they going to do then, require that no one with any technology on their bodies enter the building?
People are just going to have to get used to the idea that anyone could potentially take a picture at any time. It will definitely be an interesting change. There are certainly privacy concerns, but I would rather that private citizens have this capability than that it be limited to corporations and governments.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Well, I remember when Hurricane Whats-its-face swept through last fall. We lost power in the area of our office building for 1-2 days. We had battery backup, but only enough for 30 minutes or so.
I was feeling a lot of inadequacy around the fact that our servers couldn't be up during that whole time (We stayed with the servers during the work day [in mostly darkness] and then checked back every hour or so). And then I thought:
Okay, so people expect our clients' websites to be "open" 24 hours a day (unlike the company itself), and so now all of a sudden we're suppose to be up for hurricanes?!?
That made me feel better.
Of course, none of our servers run what I would call "mission critical" systems. If you're a financial company, or a health care company it might be another story. Of course, the hospital just down the road had to run on extreme emergency power (practically everything but life support turned off) because although it has a generator, and a second backup generator, they had been both placed at the exact same spot, and a tree hit them both (That also made me a feel a little less bad about our servers being down).
Some people do get paid quite a lot to keep servers up. I don't, and I still will go to the server room at off hours if the servers go down. It's called caring about your customers.
On the other hand, 99.9999% uptime isn't something that every hosting company can or should guarantee.
And remember:
If you guarantee 99% uptime, that means your servers can be down for 3 full days each year!
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Like it or not, when you're on the clock, they own your time. If they say no cel phones, that is their right. I've ran into this problem in the past, on bringing my notebook to work. My solution to the problem was to draft a request for clarification/exception on my notebook, and was accompanied by a convincing and long list of incidents where my notebook did a job that no other computer in the building was capable of, or when company time/money was saved as a result of me having my notebook. I was actually more interested in the sheer convenience of having my own system with me at work, but I had a valid point in that I am more valuable as an employee to them when I have my laptop.
;-)
The counter-argument that was raised by my manager was "if the company needs your notebook, then what the company really needs is its own notebook". That got about two steps up the management ladder before being shot down by the bean-counters. Since they had already agreed that I had a point, and since they now couldn't do the best thing about it, they did the second-best thing - they got off my case about it. (I wasn't a formal exception, but was basically left alone, I could walk past managers with my laptop bag in tow without getting "pulled over")
I think you should persue this route. Since they're not all that expensive, you're very likely to get your own company-provided cel phones as a result, and you'll probably get less static from them about redirecting your warning instant messages to the company phone than you are getting now about your own cel phone. The down-side of this is you are now basically chained to the phone... it's like a pager and they'll expect you to answer it off-hours. At this point, just take it over... give out that as your 'new' cel number and ditch your own phone. Save on monthly charges and keep the peace at the same time.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Company policy makers are great at coming up with silly policies that are not carefully thought out. (Which is why we can all laugh at Dilbert)
Several years ago I worked for a micro-manager. He required all developers to receive permission from him before any changes could be made to a reporting system. Even if you wanted to correct a spelling error on a report you were required to fill out a request for change form and meet personally with the director for approval.
As soon as this policy was implemented, the efficiency in the department dropped to almost nothing. We all joked that it took longer to fill out the paperwork than it took to actually do the work in the first place.
Things reaced a head during a business trip to Asia. I was working with some consultants who were giving me information on how to format tax reports required for that country. Before we could open up for business, the reports needed to be modified and printed out for approval by various government agencies. Because of the time zone difference, the change management policy really got in the way; yet the director insisted that he still wanted to approve every single change by phone each day.
Since he didn't specify a time to call, I would wait until the end of each work day in Asia and call him before leaving for the day (at 2:00 A.M. his time). Sometimes I would "remember" something I had forgotten to ask permission for and have to call him a second or third time. After about 3 days, I was given blanket permission to make any needed changes to the report for the balance of the trip.
Soon after that, the policy was modified extensively, to allow us to do our jobs. Major releases and new projects were managed by committee, but minor changes were allowed to go through as long as they passed the QC process.
This is just stupid. If you NEED to be notified instantly then your company should supply you with a pager or cell phone. If they specifically ban the devices and deem you don't need one to do your job then why argue about it? When the server goes down let them know you weren't aware of it because you don't have a pager and were at lunch.
"BTW: I do know which end of the IDE cable goes into the motherboard but we tend to use SCSI these days on any machine that I'm likely to touch so I'll probably forget eventually ;)"
I work in West Virginia... Cost is everything. IDE RAID, and Serial ATA are all the rage.
Better do a refresher on IDE.
PS: my PC (AMD Athlon 64 3200) has a WD Raptor 10K SATA hard drive, as fast as anything but a 15K SCSI drive...
SATA/IDE is the future, for cost, if any other reason. Performance is becoming less and less a reason to go SCSI.
Corporatism != Free Market
Last year I fought a similar battle. As one of the 6 remaining engineers, we each take turns on the "help-desk" rotation - meaning we are required to take calls from angry customers at all hours for a week at a time. We leave a modem with the customer that they can turn on when they need us to dial in, provided we have access to an analog line to dial out from. After years of hanging up on telemarketers, I had finally (happily) rid myself of a phone line only to have my company turn around and require me to have one. I'm quite happy with my personal cell phone, and my employer provides me with a work cell phone with which I must take incoming calls. On top of that, the meager pay that we had been recieving for support was basically terminated (although we were still charging customers, go figure). I mentioned several time to my boss, and his boss, that I was in violation of their policy - but I was as likely to pay for a phone line as I was to write the company a check for $20 a month. Eventually, they decided that 20 bucks was a small price to pay for me to shut the hell up, especially when we're routinely charging customers $100/hour for phone support. So I expensed the first few payments to prove that I had won, and dropped it after that. After all, it's not really worth our time to fill out those expense reports. It [i]is[/i] worth our time to make sure that management thinks twice before trying to "save money" at your expense. Remember: Your loss is their gain.
"Let the Spanish keep it, it's a sh*thole," we said, but you had to have your goddamned orange juice.
I simply stopped using my cellphone for work use. All calls from my boss were redirected to voicemail and I refused to give anyone at work my cell number. After about two weeks the company agreed to give me a "Company Cell Phone" which I couldn't use for personal use. I refused to carry that beyond work hours since I'd have to carry 2 phones. They eventually relented.
I had problems a couple of years ago with an employer not wanting to supply me with a cell phone (I was working as a consultant and spent all of my time at a customer in a different town). I ended up changing my private cell phone number and refusing to give it to the employer, I made sure that they knew I had a cell phone however. This at least made them see the problem but I ended up quitting the job after a couple of months as they still refused to solve the problem.
Good luck!
NON OMNIS MORIAR