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U.S. Government Crippled by Sex, Gaming Sites
BobB writes "The U.S. Department of the Interior's inspector general has released a report that says department employees are wasting their taxpayer-funded work time going to prohibited web sites. Some of these sites relate to sex, computer games, gambling and auctions. The study found that almost $2 billion a year in productivity was being lost to these 'excessive indulgences.'" From the article: "Computer-use logs revealed more than 4,732 entries relating to sexually explicit Web sites and gambling sites. Some computers accessed sex sites for 30 to 60 minutes during the test period. More than 1 million log entries were discovered indicating 7,763 Department computer users spent 2,004-plus hours accessing game and auction sites. Extrapolated over the year, that could account for 100,000 lost work hours. Put another way, this would equal 50 full-time employees doing nothing but surfing online game and auction sites."
In a couple of prior jobs executives and managers were the ones caught with gobs of pr0n on their computers. On was actually walked out the door while we all watched, his computer had been examined by the techs and was crammed with child pr0n. Dunno if he was prosecuted, I certainly hope so.
We have logs of our sites activities, too, which can be linked directly to users. I haven't heard of anyone getting the dusting for it, possibly because half the staff in Personnel are surfing while their boss tells me how busy they are and can't do some work which truly belongs to their department.
Even I do a little surfing, but usually during breaks or while waiting for some task to run.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Put another way, this would equal 50 full-time employees doing nothing but surfing online game and auction sites."
I just have one question: are they taking applications?
Monstar L
I'm one of those 50.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
It's great and all that we hear there are 50 full-time employees worth of waste, but out of how many employees total? I'll bet you can find as much waste in even some large, successful companies.
Too much time on sex and gambling instead of reading slashdot
err...wait a sec
"The study found that almost $2 Billion a year in productivity was being lost to these 'excessive indulgences'"
How fast does $2 Billion get used in Iraq? I'm all for efficiency, but lets have it across the board.
Those bondage sites were just research for the CIA's "rendition" program.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Thank God I'm not wasting all of my time surfing web sites.
(reload)(reload)(reload)(reload)Yay, new article!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
All productivity in the software industry ground to a halt as geeks flocked to shlashdot to check out the story about the decrease in productivity.
I know LOTS of people that use their lunch hour to surf the net or stay late and play video games after 5PM. I don't consider that unethical.
Similarly, I don't think it is wrong to spend 15 minutes checking out an ebay auction or reading your personal email, while some addict goes outside and smokes a ciggarette/takes a coffee break.
Without more information, this looks like a rabble rousing report instead of something usefull.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
i'm certain that before the www there was just as much time wasting going on on just as many useless pursuits (cards, crossword puzzles, etc). if you have a job to do, and it doesn't get done, someone notices. but if you have downtime, which frequently happens in any large bureacracy, you waste your time with pointless pursuits. true in 1806, true in 2006
it's just that logfiles make it easy to actually quantify this lost productivity for the first time. but in fact, one could make the case that the internet allows users to waste their time more... um... efficiently (snicker)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The study found that almost $2 Billion a year in productivity was being lost to these 'excessive indulgences'.... Put another way, this would equal 50 full-time employees doing nothing but surfing online game and auction sites.
I didn't RTFA, but this would imply that those 50 full time employees have a bill + production rate of $40,000,000/year. Or roughly $20,000 dollars an hour. Unless the 50 employees they are talking about are lobbyist, I just don't see this as accurate.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
These studies all operate on the "presumption" that if they didn't "surf the web", they would be more productive. If they didn't have the Web, they would find some other way to occupy their time, and it most probably would not be work related.
>
> How fast does $2 Billion get used in Iraq? I'm all for efficiency, but lets have it across the board.
A better question: What economic output are these DOI employees (and for that matter, our mercenaries working for private contractors at 5-10 times the expense of an enlisted serviceman/woman) supposed to be creating that's worth $2B per year? In order to speak meaningfully of productivity, one first must be in the business of producing stuff.
This is government work. Nothing's being produced, only consumed.
Total all the "hours" spent surfing junk sites ... for 100,000 employees ... and even at 6 minutes a day you'd have 600,000 minutes = 10,000 hours = 416 hours = 52 employees working 8 hour shifts.
Now, for 50,000 employees, they'd have to spend 12 minutes out of an 8 hour day to get those numbers.
25,000 employees would require 24 minutes out of an 8 hour day.
And so forth. These "statistics" are meaningless without knowing how many TOTAL employees there are and what the mean and median are. Are there 10,000 employees and 5 of them spend 10 hours a day surfing junk while everyone thinks they're working? And the rest of the "hours" are people surfing junk sites during lunch?
Back when I did IT work for a certain government agency, I'd often have to clean porn dialers, viruses and spyware off users' machines, all obviously the result of people browsing inappropriate sites at work. We even had to fire a few individuals for using the office T1 to swap songs on Napster (this was back when Napster was both popular and illegal). This sort of behavior wouldn't suprise me at the typical office, but many of these individuals were in their 40s or 50s and had Masters degrees/doctorates and made high 5 digit (or even six digit) salaries, with good medical and benefits. It suprised me that so many of the engineers and other govt. employees would waste so much time and basically damage government property at work instead of waiting until they got home to do it - it's not like they couldn't afford their own computer and internet connection. Often the stupid things they did would prevent them from using the machine to actually get work done, because the software they had installed impaired the operation of the system.
:)
And strangely enough, in my free time while administering some fairly sizable gaming forums, I've actually had to ban users with hostmasks indicating they were using government internet connections. I even went to the trouble of tracking down the name of one individual and contacting their boss about their behavior. It's suprising how badly some professionals will behave at work when they think nobody's watching.
(And yes, IT is watching you. Always watching.)
Boy am I glad I don't work in IT anymore.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
You have to wonder if some are park rangers, kind of lonely (sex sites), who like to play poker over the net since the next human is 500 miles away.
Ah, bet you forgot that they're part of the Department of the Interior, didn't you?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Lets look at the numbers. Over a week they counted about 7,000 employees going to illicit sites. This represents about than 1% of the 70,000 employees of the DOI. Furthermore they found that these employees spent 2000 hours on these illicit sites, or perhaps 15 minutes a day during the test week.
From these stated fact, they found three interesting things. First, the wasted time represented 50 employees, or less than 0.1% of the workforce. Second they found that the internet use represented about 24 hours of internet use, presumable bandwidth. They then took this 24 hour number and, presumable, combined it with the total budget of the DOI, 10.4 billion, realized that 24 hours was one fifth of a week, and came up with 2 billion dollars in loss.
So here is what we have. 1% of the employees, wasting 0.1% of the potential productive time of the DOI, uses 20% of the budget. This result does not indicate a problem with the employees, but a fundamental issue with the process of budgeting and managing money. Any structure that exposes 20% of the budget to risk due to the actions of 1% of the employees is surely inadequate.
Now, the article did state that 'some' computers were accessing sites that would normally be considered uncool for work, and certainly those few people at those 'some' computer can be handled by management, unless those people are themselves high ranking officials that cannot be easily reprimanded. One wonders why those 'some' computers are even allowed to go to those sites.
In the end it shows the lack of logical skills possessed by the average reporter, and, i fear, by posting it on /., the lack of logic skills of the average geek..
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The problem is, the "US Government" is dozens of departments, with hundreds of different divisions inside of some of those departments... and that's not counting the military.
A lot of parts of the federal government do exactly what you describe... but it's not a consistent thing throughout, nor should it be, really.
For instance, in one of the (U.S. Navy) office buildings I've done work in, where they have normal (for the military) 0700-1600 work hours, they have firewalls with site blockers, and the like. But go to another base a few miles away, and you'll be able to surf pretty much whatever you want. It's still against policy to look at porn or gamble, but there's nothing actually stopping you from doing so. And that's within the same organization...
But to address another issue... what exactly are these people doing? If these are workers in an office, and they're spending an hour a day, during the normal workday, looking at Ebay, they should be reprimanded. But if this is a park ranger, or an emergency worker, just sitting by his desk, with nothing to do until a call comes in... then what productivity are you really affecting?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
I don't know you personally so I can't say I hate you, but if I ever figure out who you set these policies up with, I would never work for them. I can understand blocking things like porn sites if for no other reason than to save yourself from sexual harrasment suits and maybe the gambling sites to avoid embezzlement temptations. But why in the world would you block non-official email, financial sites and sports sites?
It's not wrong to expect your employees to work. So you set up a policy that says they have certain duties to perform and if they don't perform those duties then they are liable to be fired for failure to do their job. Then if they do their job, what are you worried that they happened to spend a few minutes seeing how their buddy is, seeing how their stocks are, and seeing how their team did? They did their duty. And if they don't do their duty, it doesn't matter one iota if they didn't because they wasted time one the web, at the water cooler, or because they are incompetent.
I hate it when people have the "One bad apple ruins it for the whole class" mentality. Punish/discipline the people who do wrong, reward those who go above and beyond, and let everyone else do their thing.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
E.G. The United states spends 1million hours per year blinking -- Just think how much time we could save if we could outlaw blinking
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
It has been my experience that people goof off most at work when they have nothing else to do.
So what they need to do is find more work for them or fire 50-100 of there full time employees for surfing the net to much and and not replace them, problem solved.
In a New Report on Reports it was reported that reports are a waste of time and money. Reportedly the report reporter was unavailable for further reporting.
The original report actually says $2 million ("$2,027,887.68"), not $2 billion:
http://www.doioig.gov/upload/InternetUsage1.txt
The space unintentionally left unblank.
This sort of thing gives some justification for enforcing the .xxx domain.
.xxx at the corporate firewall and a big part of your problem goes away.
Simply block
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife