Slashdot Mirror
Judge Rules in Favor of Websurfing at Work
MirrororriM writes "According MSNBC article, a judge has ruled in favor of a worker that was repeatedly warned for surfing the internet on company time. Only a "reprimand" is a fitting punishment - not termination. From the article: 'It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work.'"
I think around 99% of /.'s have been warned of this. Some of us even signing "company papers" indicating immediate termination to anyone caught surfing.
I once read a book by an anally retentive time management consultant. Yes, that was his job. He would always have his watch set 3 minutes fast to "be ahead of the world", and would always make todo lists, and would always be doing something while waiting, and all that jazz.
The most ironic thing was that he said that he encouraged his employees to bring puzzles, books, needlepoint, or whatever they wanted to occupy their time when they were done with their work.
Why? Well, because people will stretch a project until the deadline or miss the deadline completely. By having a carrot in front of them saying "I can goof off when I'm done with this", he was able to tell when they were done with their tasks, and assign them a new one. He got more work out of these people by encouraging them to goof off than not.
Its just as irrational to assume that 100% of ones working time is going to be 100% productive work. Its more on the order of 10% to maybe 30% depending on the kind of work. Also, for a lot of white-collar and professional/skilled labor people, they do things and think about things outside of their work that helps them do better work.
How many slashdotters out there have private projects or even outside of work computing interests if you work on computers for a living? Doesn't this stuff help you at your job? If your job encouraged private projects, as Google does, do you think your job would be more fulfilling and productive?
"I can see if the guy was researching something online but he was goofing off."
In this case, you're probably right. However, I've gotten busted for this. My boss came in, saw me playing Solitaire, and geared up to yell at me. I minimized the window to reveal my computer was rendering. "IE eats too much RAM."
I was off the hook. Heh.
Down the road, we were encouraged to browse the web from time to time. Almost everybody at that office had something to gain by reading up on tech news sites and so forth. Even Slashdot was expressly allowed. (Although I doubt my boss would have OK'd that if she had ever wandered into the comments section.)
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)