Slashdot Mirror
Don't Let Your Boss Catch You Reading This
Stony Stevenson writes "iTnews is running a piece on the culture of cyberslacking in the business arena. Studies worldwide suggest employees spend about a fifth of their work shifts engaging in personal activities. Most of that 'wasted time' is, of course, spent online. From the article: 'A recent survey by online compensation firm Salary.com showed about six out of 10 employees in the United States acknowledged wasting time at work. About 34 percent listed personal Internet use as the leading time-wasting activity in the workplace. Employees said they did so because they were bored, worked too many hours, were underpaid or were unchallenged at work. Firms all over the world are concerned about potentially harmful effects of surfing they deem to be inappropriate may have on their company's image.'"
"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along" never seemed more appropriate.
In the first place, the Internet didn't create the ability to waste time at work. These "studies" never quantify the amount of time wasted at work today to that which was wasted before the Internet. Without comparing before vs. after, one cannot reach any absolute conclusions.
In the second place, I work practically everywhere these days because of the Internet. I work at home, in the airport, in restaurants, in the car, etc. So counting all these other working locations, my productivity is significantly better than it was 20 years ago.
In the third place, people aren't machines. People are more productive, and more creative, if they take a mental break now and then. And people make better business decisions if they stay current with social trends and events. It's not a time waster, it's a cost of doing business.
Nuff said. Now quit bothering me, I really need to get back to work before my boss comes in.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I was too busy poking people on Facebook.
Summation 2
Just because I read Slashdot at work means I'm slacking off.
Just a sec, I see someone in my monitor mirror *alt-tabs to Eclipse*
Okay, I'm back, just started a 6000 test JUnit test suite so if anyone wonders if I'm being productive, I can point to the green status bar slowly approaching 100%...
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
for the general office population:
at our place terminals don't have speakers or local USB devices enabled (no youtube / stage6 sound for you)
internet access is enabled/allowed in only a few 15min time windows during the day.
I shudder to think of the productivity loss at other places.
My employees are free to spend as much time as they want in the office surfing any site they want do: slashdot, porn, the anarchist's cookbook, whatever. It is useless to me to tell them what they can or can't do when they've met their personal goals for projects.
I also pay my employees differently than most consulting firms. We pay close to minimum wage, plus a very large bonus on each project. I've never had anyone quit, and I've never had anyone complain about their monthly paychecks. By offering a large portion of a project's profits, I know my employees won't waste my money (in salary), won't have to lie on their time sheets, and they'll do the best job they can do because they won't want to go and finish a punch list without pay or handle warranty work at a low rate. It is win-win, and a big reason why I'd prefer full 1099's than W2's if the IRS didn't prevent us from working that way.
When you're salaried or on wages, the employer has to focus a lot more on containing the employee and sending them in the proper direction, constantly. We have zero managers at my company, just consultants. It works fine. Our customers love us because we're 40% cheaper than others in the industry but we excel at handling their needs.
So this all lets me "not care" if an employee decides to spend all day long on the web, and only 1 hour on a project. If the customer is happy, and the work is good, and they do it quickly and correctly, they'll make a killing on the profit sharing, and they'll have a ton of free time to kill at the office if they want to be there. Our top employee works 2 days a week, I think, and earns a very respectable income. He can now spend 3 days at the office playing some MMOG, or go home and sleep. I could care less, the customers are happy.
No, we're not hiring.
I'd better get back to work.
:)
Also, wasting a fifth of your time at work is much better than downing a fifth at work (former boss from hell.
I think 1/5th of the time wasted is a huge underestimate. At my former job (IT), I easily spent the greater part of my days idly surfing the web. I wasn't avoiding work either - I really just had nothing else to do, but if in those situations I asked my boss for some more work, he would just give me some BS busy work like organizing a file cabinet. So after a few instances of that I just stopped asking him for things to do.
Honest!!!
4/5: regular development phase (AKA reading Slashdot)
1/5: "oh shit, this isn't done yet?"
As a developer i'm productive at work for 2-4 hours per day. That's less than 50%. You cannot expect from developer to code non-stop for 8 hours and be proficient at it. It simply doesn't work that way... and any employer expecting this is an idiot.
reduce the work day to 4 instead of 8 hrs.
l e.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/2528/br_id
Because in todays economy, it's not how good you are, it's how good you look.
If I look like I'm working, logicly, the company must also look like it's doing good, right ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I personally would like to thank the internet for saving the trees. Think of all the stupid faxes the office secretary used to forward every day. There is scientific proof the net is saving the planet.
1. Claim you are researching business value of deploying Linux.
2. Fess up and tell your boss you are cyberslacking.
3. Tell your boss you are researching the viability of a CmdrTaco-based CRM.
4. You quickly hit the "boss" key combination which brings up vi in a console and opens the source code you were supposed to be finishing by the deadline.
5. You point out the window and tell your boss someone is picking the lock on his car.
Thank you. I'll be here all week!
Anonymous Coward Sig 2.0:
--
Madonna > *
"In the first place, the Internet didn't create the ability to waste time at work. These "studies" never quantify the amount of time wasted at work today to that which was wasted before the Internet. Without comparing before vs. after, one cannot reach any absolute conclusions."
No the internet didn't. However technology does what technology does and makes it easier to waste time.
"In the second place, I work practically everywhere these days because of the Internet. I work at home, in the airport, in restaurants, in the car, etc. So counting all these other working locations, my productivity is significantly better than it was 20 years ago."
Since were doing personals. I work in a warehouse. The internet wouldn't improve my productivity, and might have hurt it.
"In the third place, people aren't machines. People are more productive, and more creative, if they take a mental break now and then. And people make better business decisions if they stay current with social trends and events. It's not a time waster, it's a cost of doing business."
The issue is two-fold. One moderation should apply as much to the social aspects as any other. Second I find the social aspect argument a bit weak. The internet has been one of the forces that's isolated people from face to face interaction, and I think you'll find that surfing for porn isn't staying current on trends and events.
"Nuff said. Now quit bothering me, I really need to get back to work before my boss comes in."
Turn around.
My bosses fixed this by having me implement an unavoidable proxy server with a whitelist of approved sites. If you want to get onto a site that's not on the list, a manager must approve the site. Needless to say, anything not work related (including news, weather, banking sites, etc) are not on the list. Oh, and they're not playing Solitaire, either, thanks to the group policies in place that prevent the running of sol.exe and all other Windows games. And it's not like they're going to download new ones.
Problem solved, says management, who are not subject to the filter!
Of course all the employees resent being treated like children, and it's created a tremendous amount of ill will toward management, and people gripe about it all the time. At least one good employee switched companies because of the restrictive policy. But hey, at least they aren't wasting time on the 'net!
End of lesson. You may press the button.
"A recent survey by online compensation firm Salary.com showed about six out of 10 employees in the United States acknowledged wasting time at work."
...and another survey showed that four out of 10 employees in the United States are habitual lairs.
Most tech jobs informally require at least 50-60+ hours a week at the job site. This leaves little time after work to commute, eat, shower, and go to bed to get ready for the next day. You have little time after work to take care of personal business. I don't screw around too much at work, however, I do take care of personal business that I know I wouldn't be able to otherwise.
Are you hiring?
My focus is to get the job done. Not spend the 38.5 hours in the office. If a problem exists that needs a solution NOW, I solve it. Now. There's a good reason why I recreated my complete office PC at home (as far as company policy allowed, of course).
Still, I'm currently in trouble for not spending enough time on my desk. Was there a problem with a project? No. Did my work suffer in any way? By far not, I'm the most productive analyst in the company. What's the problem? That that slacker ass of me didn't keep my office chair from flying away long enough.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
== self-referential journalism
for the record-- he's our network admin.
This whole subject of "losing time at work" is idiotic for all intellectual professions. Especially ones involving creativity, such as programming, or systems development in general.
Of course there are guys that are paied and do nothing. But even the most job-oriented person needs some time to let the brain do its work.
This entire hype of "spending time on the internet" is IMHO a production of HR staff that want to further decrease wages. Something like the RIAA counting losses.
This is pretty much a self correcting system. A company can purchase software from Websense or Surf Control (which I imagine this is a slashvertisement for, without checking) to monitor/restrict internet access. The employees will either accept it, waste time doing somewhere other than online, or quit and go to companies that do not restrict Internet access.
1. People work too many hours == freakin' unproductive
2. People are poorly managed (nothing to do, boring tasks, other crap)
The problem isn't the internet, nor talking to your co-workers about other stuff that work. The problem is the way we work today. It's freakin' unproductive! We are worn out and tired, and there are few things that require less effort than surfing on the web. Attack the real problem and you'll see that productivity will skyrocket, employees will be a lot happier and have a lot more spare time where they can *gasp* surf on their own, or go hiking, or learn a new language, or travel the world (lots of vacation is GOOD for productivity, not the other way around!).
And yet, somehow, I'm pretty productive.
See, brains are complicated things, and sometimes what I really need is a half hour or so NOT looking straight at the problem, although I tend to be sort of absently thinking about it. And then suddenly I know what to do, and I go do it.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
... other than are people slacking at work [which is a resounding Duh - Of Course], is are people still getting their jobs done and meeting their productivity requirements whilst working Slack time into their daily work routines. If someone can Slack and still contribute what's expected of them then I don't see it as an issue. If someone can't Slack and get their work done, then that's a definitely problem and should be dealt with using whatever disciplinary modalities are in place at the individuals place of business.
When I first started at my office job during college, I was so used to being in the basic service industry that I didn't fit in right away. I was used to just taking a task, doing it, and immediately going back to the boss for the next thing. I didn't realize that the culture I was in was for slower progress on tasks and there wasn't a need to rush and be essentially managed by the boss every second of the day.
Just some things to think about. A lot of people don't realize that for a lot of American workers, and 8 hour day really means 8 hours.
I think there's a fine line (for some) between cyberslacking and taking periodic breaks from the tedium of work. For me, my periodic checks at Slashdot and other news sites are a way to stay sane, so I can hyper focus for other periods of time during the day to get things done. I have a set of sites I visit daily, mostly news/information sites, and my flow works something like this (my days average nine hours sans lunch):
*Arrive, log in, check voice/email messages, responding as appropriate. 30 min.
*Check my preferred websites. 30 min.
*Tackle biggest task(s) for the day. 2-3 hrs.
*Check my preferred websites. 10min.
*Tackle those annoying-but-not-critical tasks. 1-2 hrs.
*Lunch. 15-30 min. (usually at my desk while checking and replying to messages).
*Check my preferred websites. 10min.
*Project work, progress on multi-stage tasks. 2-3 hrs.
*Check my preferred websites. 10 min.
*Follow-up tasks, and assignments to other technology groups. 1-2 hrs.
*IF NOT at the end of the day, check some secondary sites or research some new topics until end of day. 15-30 minutes. This is the one time of day that, for me, comes closest to true cyberslacking. Often I'm just waiting for any final help calls or trouble tickets before our designated end-of-day.
The first site check of the day is longer because most headlines/topics refreshed overnight. Later in the day, I'm only scanning for new headlines or topics of interest. Of course, some days (about once a week), I never get to check my sites. Perhaps once a month I'll have a day where I can read every article that interests me. This works well for me and my employer, as my reading keeps me well aware of numerous trends in and outside of our industry, and it allows me to dive in with greater intesity when I am working. Of course, some will not believe this works without a scientific study, and I'll be the first to say this does not work for everyone. For me, however, I'm glad to work for an employer that allows for some personal use during the workday and is more focused on results than on managing every minute we're in the building. I get my work done on time, seek extra assignments, and pick up slack from my coworkers. Some would argue that my employer is overstaffed [I tried to make that point to a former employer for years until I finally bailed for my current gig, so I know the difference], but that is not the case--it comes down to how I handle my workload. I sprint, then I walk, then I sprint again. My diversions are those little walks that let me run full bore from time to time.
Am I the only one who operates like this?
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
"Yeah, productivity thrives in tightly controlled workplaces where the management doesn't trust the employees."
Can they be trusted? Your post makes it sound like all employees are trustworthy.* Considering the slash-attitude on IP, business, and other issues. I'd frankly would be worried that someone would get a bee in their bonnet, and declare my business model "obsolete", frees my corporate information under the guise "information wants to be free", and in general walks out with some of the office supplies because "I owe them" something.
*Yes, yes, I shouldn't hire those kind of people. Keep that in mind next time you have to jump through so many hoops just to get a job, and how unfair it all seems.
I do spend most time I should be working "researching" interesting information (the eating habits of horseshoe crabs, super Mario bros. villains, Cambodian cuisine, etc.) and I have no problem getting work done. I used to feel guilty about it, but by now I realize it's part of work, so I work, slack off, work some more, slack off twice as much time as I worked, and repeat. There's too much to "learn", and 8 hours a day work get too much in the way of it. I say find a way to make a living that doesn't take up too much time, and enjoy the rest of your life.
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
My company has an authenticating web proxy that users must use to access the internet, and they track personal web use in this way. We also have a VPN that can dial in to the corporate network from home, which is also authenticating but which traffic statistics, for obvious reasons, aren't monitored.
I've been so committed to slacking, as it were, that I committed significant time to creating a backwards web gateway for myself using an automated dial-in from home, which creates a remote ssh tunnel to my work computer that forwards certain port traffic back to a proxy server on my home network. So now at work I just set my web proxy to the localhost at the specified port and surf backwards through the VPN, only using our corporate web-proxy to do job-related surfing.
And all so I can slack. Never underestimate the laziness of a programmer.
BOB SLYDELL
Y'see, what we're trying to do here, we're just trying to get a feel
for how people spend their day. So, if you would, would you just walk
us through a typical day for you?
PETER
Yeah.
BOB SLYDELL
Great.
PETER
Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late. I use the side
door, that way Lumbergh can't see me. Uh, and after that, I just sorta
space out for about an hour.
BOB PORTER
Space out?
PETER
Yeah. I just stare at my desk but it looks like I'm working. I do that
for probably another hour after lunch too. I'd probably, say, in a
given week, I probably do about fifteen minutes of real, actual work.
And now I'm going to go burn the building down cuz I got moved again
It's just that my code's compiling.
"My employees are free to spend as much time as they want in the office surfing any site they want do: slashdot, porn, the anarchist's cookbook, whatever. It is useless to me to tell them what they can or can't do when they've met their personal goals for projects."
Apparently it's useless to you to pay attention to the legal can of worms your attitude opens.
"I also pay my employees differently than most consulting firms. We pay close to minimum wage, plus a very large bonus on each project. I've never had anyone quit, and I've never had anyone complain about their monthly paychecks."
The slashcrowd can look at previous reactions to this bit.
"So this all lets me "not care" if an employee decides to spend all day long on the web, and only 1 hour on a project. If the customer is happy, and the work is good, and they do it quickly and correctly, they'll make a killing on the profit sharing, and they'll have a ton of free time to kill at the office if they want to be there."
Blurring the distinction between home and work is going to bite you sooner or later.
With taxes the way they are..
We are Gov. employees for half the day..
So, act like a Gov. employee and..
SLACK..
And remember you pay the homeland security, police, and IRS agents that take good care of you..
People do what they feel necessary to keep themselves "running". You can outlaw it, but that doesn't change the fact that they do it, maybe you can change what exactly they do.
If it's not the Internet it's smoke-breaks, talking at the coffee/water machine, or just looking out of the window. Also, lots of people are good at appearing busy.
And I think that's ok.
One, if you really put people in the grinder, force them to work 8 hours, no breaks or diversions, I'm sure you will soon see the quality of their work plummet, as well as their motivation. If you're a factory in backland China that might be a winning strategy, if your business is in any way dependent on thinking employees, it isn't.
Two, if you pay by the hour, and your people are only there for the money, then two things shouldn't surprise you. One, that they try to get as much money for as little work as possible. You do the same, except that you don't call it "goofing off", but "profit maximizing", or maybe your consultants have found an even nicer buzzword. But it's just capitalism. If you don't like it, go somewhere where they haven't dumped Communism, yet.
Two, you shouldn't be surprised that someday soon, some institute, consultant or survey will reveal your employees are rather badly motivated. Money alone doesn't do it. Do your homework in leadership. Throughout history, brilliant leaders weren't the guys who paid best, and that's not they are remembered for.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
As a developer, I've noticed that it's all too easy to fall into the trap of surfing the net mindlessly. Sure, it starts innocently at first looking for a solution to whatever bland problem I'm fixing in the code base, but there's the ever present temptation to open a new browser tab and find something of actual interest. The process isn't a lengthy one - only ten minutes or so at a time - but those context switches do add up. I don't mind since I'm salaried and have to be here to hold my chair down, but I know for a fact that, if I were allowed to go home early after putting in the productive 3-5 hours that seem to make up an average developer's programming day, instead of sitting around wasting time, I would do that in a heartbeat. I work in a shop that is transitioning to agile processes, and I am curious as to whether I can make a case for pair programming on this angle. The article doesn't mention this, but I am curious what views the group might have to offer on pair-programming in terms of reduced slack. Unless two people are blatantly unproductive in some sort of bizarre Office-Space conspiracy to steal bandwidth and time, it seems unlikely that the pair will get too far off track. Less time spent ctrl-T'ing your way across the internet through Firefox might equal a shorter workday. Anyone have any thoughts?
I'm disabling ads until because I choose not to reward redesigns that are less usable than "view source".
This article was copied from Reuters, here's the original page: http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUS L2067072120070829
His response will most likely be along the lines of "Well, if he wasn't slacking, he could not only get his work done but more, and thus I could fire someone and save money".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I work for a company where I can pretty much sit at my desk and surf the internet anytime I want. The company is more focused on the end result and insuring that the clients are happy. As long as I get my work done and the client is happy, they could care less if I spend 4 hours on the internet.
For my job, I travel a lot so I spend countless Sunday's in airports with nothing to do when I could be home sleeping, or doing personal things. Because I give up PLENTY of my own time for the company and am paid a flat salary, the company has to find ways to compensate for that and it's not always about money. I know I can piss away an entire day of web surfing if I want to because of the amount of extra time I have put in on other projects.
It's all about balance. I've worked in places where they got all anal about web access and all it did was make the employee feel like their bosses didn't trust them and that they were being treated like little kids. The same company has had MAJOR problems with turnover because of the micro-managing of its staff.
The internet does make it easier to slack off, so there are those who abuse it, but if your HR department knew how to hire the right people, they would hire people that will give results, and deserve a little bit of slack time.
I personally believe that any company that gets so anal about people doing a little bit of personal stuff on company time, is not a company I want to work for. People are not drones and they need a little bit of a break or distraction once in awhile to bring them back to the real world. If a company wants to be anal about web access, they designate specific times for breaks, and give access during those times. At least that's something
No matter how fast computers get, you'll always be waiting - Matt Klem
At my first real job, this side of the college world, I tried my damndest to make sure I was keeping busy 95% of the time I was on the clock. (Working a tech support line and burning CD patches for the shipping dept to send out.) As they inevitably do, things slowed down during a lean month and it became impossible to keep busy all the time. The real problem occurred when I asked my manager for more duties; since by 3pm I had finished all of my tasks for the day. My manager was incensed at the idea and wanted to know if I needed to resign or a new job. In the business world, managers don't care if you're wasting time or working efficiently. All they care about is if the work assigned to you gets finished in the timeframe they required. If that means you spend 2 hours in the morning checking your e-bay auctions, so be it. Who cares, the numbers on their reports are all within spec. Yet, 6 years later I'm the manager now and I'm perpetuating the somewhat hypocritical business world.
wow, they are amateurs.
So I'm eating lunch, glancing at slashdot.
My boss walks up behind me and says "Don't let your boss catch you reading this? What is that Dave?"
"Umm, its slashdot boss, and Its my lunch time."
"You know Dave, internet usage isnt for personal activities...."
*sigh*
I'm supposed to be getting up to date on my timesheets... Instead I read this article... The question is, if this article weren't published, would I still be wasting time?
7:00AM - arrive at work
7:30AM - 10:00AM - Watch a movie
10:00AM - 12:00PM - Target practice, setup plastic army guys and shoot them with a pellet gun
12:00PM - 2:00PM - lunch off-site
2:00PM - 3:30PM - work on daily problems, maintenance, etc
I was the IT manager, my co-worker was the maintenance manager, this was for a small production company where all the upper management and goodie-two-shoes were located about 5 blocks away and rarely visited or bothered us (provided everything was working properly). I'm not defending our slacking, when some problem came up, the movies stopped, the guns got put away and we cut lunch short to get things done. The rest of the time though, it was the best job ever.
Because, yeah, you know, no one can work without a pointy haired boss with a whip. How else do you learn self discipline without doing it yourself? When self motivated, the quality of the product also tends to be better. Slacking is just an indication that the job sucks, and the employer should be making the work process more efficient and less tedious and workplace more productive, not supressing the symptom.
Yes, I spend time at work reading personal email, /., even trading stock.
Yes, I also spend my personal time at evenings and weekends doing work.
What's the problem here?
xkcd covered this topic
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
If it wasn't solitaire or the internet, it would be their iPhones, cell phones, Blackberry, portable video players, mp3 player or host of other electronic gadgets they have at their disposal. If you invest in monitoring their internet use, they'll find a way to proxy around it...those who don't have iPhones. Trying to regulate people's behavior turns into an endless goat rope.
If they're getting their work done and they're profitable, leave them alone. If not, let them go. It's that simple. Inappropriate material is an issue everyone should be aware of by now. If they're not smart enough to leave their p0rn on their iPhone, then they deserve to get fired. If they're not smart enough to keep their steamy email affair off the company mail system, b-bye. This isn't rocket science. So many companies over-think the problem.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
A recent survey by online compensation firm Salary.com showed about six out of 10 employees in the United States acknowledged wasting time at work.
It also showed that about 4 out of 10 employees lie about wasting time at work.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I work at a place that actually understands this, and love it. We do agile dev, and 4 "hours" is the daily level.
I don't think you understand agile or the 4 hours of daily work. It does not mean you only work 4 hours a day, it means that you only get 4 hours of *scheduled* work done per day. The other 4 hours reflect business related interruptions, unanticipated/unscheduled work, etc. Agile still expect you to be doing work for the company for 8 hours.
if your projects are getting done, they don't really care how you're archiving that.
If progress is merely being measured by getting 4 hours of scheduled work done per day then this company is probably doomed due to inefficiency. There has to be an overall look at where time is being spent, and some care to make sure employees are not spending excessive amounts of time "relaxing". An hour spent thinking about how to solve a problem before coding the implementation is great, coding without some thinking often leads to crap. An hour on the web beyond normal break times means estimates are being sandbagged and there is poor overall efficiencency.
For you I would have suggested using the excess time to prepare yourself for your next step in your career (not to be confused with job). It may be the next position up. It may be a skill you don't have. Home is home but work is what you do to prepare yourself for retirement.
This is one reason why I switched from programming to sysadmin. They don't have anybody to spy on the spies. I know all and see all. It's interesting to see that there are actually people that are even more of slacker than I am and yet they manage to hold a job. My theory is that most of society is actually held up by a small minority of people that actually get a lot of work done and don't seem to realize the enormity of their contribution to the rest of us.
--
The packet sniffing bastard
I used to smoke and have a coworker who did (we both quit awhile back) and neither of us ever took more than three or four minutes to have a smoke.
If you think it's "typical" to take 15 minutes to smoke, then IMO, the smoking coworkers you've had were just unusually lazy.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
As a sysadmin slacking off means I'm being productive, since no problems are occurring. You could say that the goal of a sysadmin is to legitimately slack off as much as possible.
If he's as big a slacker as you suggest, he might be reading slashdot right now. Better watch your back!
I like my coffee like I like my women -- packed in crates and shipped from Columbia.
Oh, I'm supposed to be working... shit.
Rhapsody in Numbers
Nah, we'll just disable their NIC cards and tell 'em we turned the internet off. Anyone who says the tubes are still working obviously hates America....
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
We have a tracking proxy here too. I set up an old P3-550 in my basement. It's running a proxy, and zebedee.
At work, I run the other side of zebedee with a key on a usb drive. Point your browser to localhost:8080 and you're ready to rock! To the admins, they just see a stream of traffic to some webpage at notmy.real.address.com:443.
Another great slack tool is VMware. Make virtual disks with fun stuff on them and take them to work. Or bring in books in pdf format on your usb drive. Music and movies, if you're daring enough. Use VLC Portable for that. Leaves no trace on your PC.
Another good tool is AutoHotKey. Perfect for making custom panic/boss keys.
I guess the whole point of this is that employees, if motivated enough, will be able to slack off at work. No matter what.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Twenty five years ago, I was an analog circuit designer in a big electronics company. We had no internet access but there were mainframe terminals and workstations around. Some of the engineers became obsessed with them even though they quite limited. Some engineers wrote and played games on them. An astute old technician observed that you could "fuck off on the bench or fuck off on the computer."
Today, I have a colleague who chats on his cell phone incessantly and text messages his buddies. Another coworker has an iPhone. Now there's a productivity black hole if I ever saw one.
But never mind unproductive people who waste their own time. If they don't get their work done, for the most part, that's their problem. There are some people I really wish WOULD goof off. They are the counterproductive people who are busy doing things that cause unnecessary extra work for us all or make a huge mess we'll have to clean up.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
"But this is my lunch time boss. Just leave me alone for a few minutes."
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
"What's the problem boss?"
"I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do."
"What are you talking about boss?"
"This project is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it."
"I won't argue with you anymore boss!"
"Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye."
Later, when you approach your boss with a pointy object..
"Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over."
"Daisy, Daisy..."
The other 4 lie.
I never waste time at work browse the web! ...Why are are looking me like that? Is it- Oh man, boss is coming! (Alt-F4)
I work for local government and I finish most of my work for the day in about two hours. So I've got six hours to kill. Rarely do I find myself with an entire day of work. So am I supposed to just leave two hours in and come back tomorrow when there's stuff to do? Not only would that screw me over money-wise but I'll often get hit with tasks late in the day that have to be done immediately. "Slacking" off on the internet, like I'm doing right now, is the only way I can keep myself occupied enough to not walk out on the job from sheer boredom. If you want me to sit somewhere for eight hours without enough to do, expect a great deal of forum posting, my friend.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
6. Switch to a different virtual desktop
Honestly, Virtual Desktops are AMAZING! Forget Alt+Tab, then they still see Slashdot on the taskbar. With Virtual Desktops, you can have one desktop for real work, one for slashdot and email, one for Pr0n and another for whatever else you need! And now they have it for Windows XP, too, not just linux!
You have now wasted gobs and gobs of time reading something only mildly useful in this world where life is non-stop madness!
Obviously it's the internet's fault that people are surfing it instead of working, it has nothing to do with boredom, bad management, overworked and underpayed employees. Let's just ignore the fact that people spend the same percentage of time slacking now that they did 20 years ago and blame the internets! It's new. Blame it!
Fanatically anti-fanatical
1) personal web-surfing that might improve your productivity
2) staring at at the wall
3) dreaming about your next job at another company
A smart company will go for #1. A smarter company will encourage you to fill your time with projects that improve your skill set.
While a majority of us work over 40 hours and see NO over time, do to tech slavery. When you are forced to work at home life will leak into work.
But that time is being made up at home..
Here is a better idea don't abuse your employees.
I can read /. as much as I allow myself, as long as the work is done; if it means working 12-14 hours day, so be it. The computer sometimes needs 40 minutes to compile my current FPGA project, that is plenty of time to do other things.
The presumption of this article is that the employee doesn't have the right to do anything but task related things all day, which of course is false. Human needs are important, things such as emailing a spouse about picking up the kids, going to the bathroom, smoking, getting coffee, etc., are only considered an inconvenience by the business owners, who also think they own the employee.
Unfortunately for them, IT professionals have a large percentage of this little ugly thing called power, which is used by workers to assert their human rights in the workplace. Because we are so excellently talented, smart and have ways of connecting with others around the world who are of our ilk, the balance of power is a little more tilted in our favor. Obviously some greedy business owner isn't going to like this.
It is tug of war until somebody changes the rules of the game--and I think we are winning.
6. CowboyNeal
Since it's related to the subject, this is a web proxy I put together that reformats all pages to look like php.net. A friend of mine gave me the idea a while back, and I decided to write it as a fun project.
:)
http://www.pagedocs.info/
I figure if a PHP programmer wanted to read some news articles or something on the down-low, this would be a good cover for the casual shoulder surfer. Eventually I'll add a few more templates, and then have a obfuscating web proxy empire!
Well, actually he doesn't, but many companies expect
folks to be at work for insane hours, and so they have
to do all sorts of what one would normally consider
recreation at work, rather than at home.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
If a boss manages by results...no A's for effort....then surfing on company time is not a problem. If a manager needs to see his or her employees sweat in order to know the work is being done, the company is screwed anyhow.
That is what most people are arguing against: normalizing the 8 hour workday against what an employee can actually produce. Who says 8 is the right number? If employees aren't working/can't work that, it sounds to me like 8 is the wrong number. 1 is clearly ridiculous. But we trust that they've done the studies and that's the best number, though from these statistics maybe that's not the case. Other studies have suggested that a 7 hour work day yields more productivity per hour, why aren't we doing that?
The truth is that if companies could make people work 12, they would (they used to) because somehow more employees is worse than maximum productive hours. I know a lot of people who work 9-10 hour days 5 days a week already. They aren't better employees by default just because they get more work done than I do. They're here more, that's why they get more done. I don't want to be here more, work is a means to an end (living), not the end itself.
What about the flip side to this? Increased connectivity from the internet, Blackberries, cell phones, etc. allow us to work more from anywhere. Americans already put in more working hours than any other nation, except maybe the Japanese, and we take less vacation than most. Hell, plenty of people lose vacation days because they fail to take them. When it comes to "slacking", Americans are amateurs - other countries have mandated 32 hour work weeks, 8 weeks of vacation per year, sabbaticals, etc. Fine - no slacking off during my workshift, but I'm not doing any work during my leisureshift - no e-mail, no conference calls, no work, no "thinking" about work, etc. I think most employers would be willing to trade increased engagement that exceeds the traditional "workshift" and "workplace" for some cyberslacking at work. I kind of miss hourly work. You clock in, do your work, and then clock out. And, that's that.
> about six out of 10 employees in the United States acknowledged wasting time at work
So, from this we can conclude that about 40% of the people surveyed were liars?
Ultimately, that's the real question.... Is the employee really "wasting time" or is he/she learning something potentially useful?
It's a little ironic that most employers have programs where they'll pay a chunk of your tuition to go back to college and take additional courses, and others gladly spend an annual budget on "training", sending you all over the country to seminars and training courses. Yet the self-motivated employee who surfs the net each day to learn more about trends in his/her field, to keep up with the news or current events, or to communicate with others about relevant topics gets labeled a "time waster".
Especially in a field like I.T. - you're paid to basically be the company's "knowledge repository". People come to you with their computer-related questions and expect answers. It's your job to solve their problems and to find more efficient ways to use the tools at the group's disposal.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
RISE UP PEOPLE!!!! QUIT YOUR JOB FOR SLACK!!! STOP WORKING - you're never going to be "rich" so SCREW THE BASTARDS! Sabotage the workplace!!! STOP WORKING! You only make it worse by co-operating!
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
You are unusual. I had a friend who sat on the board of a home association. He told me that the board members agreed they would be willing to pay a landscape company $X to get the landscaping done in the commons. You'd think that $X was the amount of money it was worth to them to get the job done. But no, when they found out that the gardener could do the job in a fraction of the time that they had thought it would take, they began bitching about overpaying him. They insisted that they must renegotiate the landscaper's contract. My friend tried to explain to the other board members that what they were proposing was to "punish him for being efficient". The moral to the story is, when you get done with your work, hide.
This is utter nonsense, I feel like I'm in a time warp, as if we are back in 1950 and all the advances that have taken place in managing employees and increasing productivity have yet to happen.
You can't force your employees to be productive, these are not school children, these are mature adults you are dealing with, I won't be surprised if some web filtering or some other 'control software firm' has sponsored this study, why would you do a study like this and highlight exceptions and try to make a trend of it.
In any office 5% of people will be slacking but the majority do not and trying to frame rules that address the 5% and piss off the 95% is the best way to damage productivity and bring any sense of employee morale crashing down. And its petty. This study can only appeal to control freaks. There are far smarter ways to address productivity problems if identified.
Damaging company reputation, what? Are we morons here, behavior like Patricia's Dunn's at HP damage a company's reputation, not an individual slacking at some porn site at work when he should be working, that's not even news, where does company reputation come into this, hey is that Steve Ballmer surfing BDSM at Redmond, Microsoft must be an evil company. Please what a pile of shit.
is slacking off, getting reeeeeaally stoned, and when your boss asks you what it is you've been up to, just lapse into the most arcane geekspeak you can: usually, they just assume that your brain's beginning to melt under the strain. awesomely enough, this has worked for me for ages now...
I guess using the bathroom isn't being 100% efficient either. Neither are coffee breaks, smoke breaks, talking to a co-worker, drinking some water or doing some research/checking web dev news that is related to your job. There is no way they can ever get a person to be 100% efficient, I think Paul Graham was right about some of these stories in the media (like how "suits are back") are nothing but propoganda to try to influence the work environment.
...yet wages are stagnant.
A little extra web-surfing isn't much of a trade-off but you really expect people to feel guilty about this? CX0 pay is now what, 500x that of the rank-and-file?
Cry me a farkin' river.
> Employees said they did so because :
> they were bored,
> worked too many hours,
> were underpaid or
> were unchallenged at work.
These are mostly things that aren't an issue IF (middle-) management does their job right.
Maybe people are slacking off because the planning allows it. Or work is not optimally delegated. Or multiple other causes, a lot of them rooting in *management slacking off*.
6.Tell your boss it was all cowboy Neals fault.
Someone had to say it.
The most valuable the employee, the less that employee functions machine-like. If you job function is perfectly suited to machine-like productivity, soon a machine will do it. The deep reason corporations dislike the natural human rhythm of attention and distraction is that work tasks demanding bursts of intellectually non-sustainable heavy-lifting can't be automated.
Any job where you can precisely quantify the waste of time, is itself a waste of time.
Much deep intellectual work resembles throwing pasta at the wall. Boil vigorously after second coffee, then huck the starch at the nearest paint. While you wait to see what sticks, you play a little Freecell.
What I'd like to see is a study on the magnitude of learned helplessness promoting "non-productive" stress outlets. Specically those persistent, magic, inexplicable, and unpreventable random font and layout changes that define Microsoft Word. Innocently press the tab key, your page layout morphs through a wormhole. The truth of the matter is that I ever find myself in an employment situation that requires use of Microsoft Word, it will also require heavy use of Freecell, yet I've never seen that term reported in any Microsoft-backed TCO.
First question. Would you willingly work for an employer who said "I'm not going to pay you, but I need you to do this work"? I suppose you would if you were volunteering, or you were a radio or television intern. However, if you needed to earn your keep, pay your rent and bills and put food on the table, most people would say "No. I need to get paid for the work I do."
That is understandable.
So, if you are the kind of person who would say that you needed to get paid for the work you do, how can you in any way argue that you should get paid for not working? Getting-Paid-for-Work, is the other side of the Being-Worked-for-Pay coin. If you feel that you should only work 32 hours a week, then you should not have an issue with only being paid for 32 hours of work. Simple.
I know, I know... there are countless individual examples of people with their jobs that require them to sit and wait until work comes to them. However, there is usually ALWAYS other work that should be done while they are waiting... work that gets put off or ignored completely, or shoved down the chain to a lesser paid employee who ends up working 50+ hours a week to take up the slack.
Note, the use of the word "slack" there. Yes, because when people slack off at work, someone else invariably always has to take up that slack. That someone else is usually paid less. I've heard the expression "Shit rolls downhill" to cover that. Funny, how "People who don't pay attention to what they are supposed to be doing also roll downhill when they lose their footing." hasn't been shortened into a nice cute phrase. Know why? Because somewhere along the line, people who made more money decided to plant it in the heads of those beneath them that THEY get to slack off more.
So why should we wonder about where the feeling comes from that we should all aspire to make more and slack more?
An Employer should only have to pay an employee for work they have done. Simple. Nice, easy model. If you want to argue that an employer should have to pay YOU for an 8 hour workday, while you are only working for 3 or 4 of those hours, then I've got a paypal address you can start sending money to... since you should then be paying ME for work I am not doing for you.
Right?
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
1/5th of my time slacking off is a little too high of an estimate for me personally.. i personally design some simple websites for a company that does a lot of major IT work.. but i'm also a "receptionist" that answers the phones all day, takes messages, and fixes spyware on computers that are dropped off in the shop.. but during the middle of the day when the phones slow down from ringing, and there is no site work to be done, i think it's perfectly fine to sit back and read a little slashdot.. i don't get paid for my lunchbreaks, i don't get personal days, and I don't get sick days and paid holidays.. but when there's work to be done, I bust my ass and get it done and that is what I'm paid for.. to be honest with you, fuck getting paid hourly.. if i wake up every day and drive 30 minutes to work and stay at some place for 8 hours a day, then I'm gonna make sure I'm paid for it.. i don't care what you do, if you're out of your house and are on the clock, regardless of your activity and productivity, you should get paid for it accordingly by your employer.. people have less and less free time at the home all the time and it really sucks.. i don't know how people even have families nowadays.. i see my wife 2-3 hours a day thanks to our shifts.. and if i spend a little time slacking at work, then I fucking deserve it.. and my boss deserves to fucking pay me for the time he/she wastes from my personal life..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
[Ben174] : If they only realized 90% of the overtime they pay me is only cause i like staying here playing with Kazaa when the bandwidth picks up after hours.
[ChrisLMB] : If any of my employees did that they'd be fired instantly.
[Ben174] : Where u work?
[ChrisLMB] : I'm the CTO at LowerMyBills.com
*** Ben174 (BenWright@TeraPro33-41.LowerMyBills.com) Quit (Leaving)
Implement animated police http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/28/21 40236
We need a firefox plugin to do it automatically...
It's often under-appreciated, especially by shortsighted employers, but "bunking off" is an important part of any work that requires you to communicate with other humans.
Exchanging information with people becomes vastly, incredibly, exponentially more efficient once you establish a relationship with them. (This is why nobody is ever really productive in their first week in a new job.) The closer the relationship, the better you'll understand one another. Close relationships are built partly by talking to one another, and partly by sharing a culture - seeing the same news, knowing the same people and places.
So time you spend talking to colleagues, or sharing their interests, is an important part of your work. (And this includes bitching about management and customers.) Assuming you have to communicate with about 12 people on a daily basis, you could reasonably spend about 25% of your time simply maintaining those relationships.
Then there's keeping abreast of technical news and trends necessary to your job. There goes another 5-10% of your time.
Plus, as it's often put, simply recharging your batteries.
All in all, if the management gets 50% billable time out of you in any given working day, they should consider themselves well served. Any more than that, and they're probably damaging your medium-term productivity. This, I believe, is why helpdesk techs tend to "burn out" after a few years. (Yes, I know there are exceptions, but they're just that - exceptions. They don't change the undeniable fact that it's stupid and shortsighted, as well as inhumane, to force people to "be productive" all the hours they're at work in an office environment.)
I spent eight years in a very small cabinet specializing in investors relations and general multimedia and print production.
The best part was the last years where we cutted down to 4 employees counting the boss's wife helping us with the e-mails. This is the kind of job where you can leave for pretty any good reason (going to the bank while open, repair car, good party, you get the picture).
But in return, when we are in big production, I can work over 110 hours a week to produce an event alone. (dealing with the client, shooting and editing video, producing printed material, coordinating technical equipment, producing the webcast, consulting with vice-presidents about words to use, changing thext in presentation 5 minutes before we are live, billing him, you get the picture) One person could do all the job very efficiently. I have no need to tell people what I want, I just do it.
So the big pictures boils down to this : with great power comes great responsibility.
NB.: This compagny just closed due to lack of clients, but his is due to specific economic situation in Quebec (We were working a LOT with the wood and paper companies. Our dollar going up means less export, and with the problem canada had with the US special taxe not helping...) We were the cheaper best quality event producing home in Montreal. We even won a gol prize with one of our video (http://www.global-maximage.com/global2/). The video is on the first page but it's in french.
Hope this has been helpful.
Tomorrow is another day...
Sounds dandy at first, but the details raise a lot of questions:
1. Are your projects all less than a month long? How do these people, who get paid minimum wage until a project is finished, pay their bills, car payments, home payments, childcare, etc? Do they receive the bonuses prior to the work being finished? Do you just stop bonus payments when your money runs out (for example, if your employees underperform, etc?)
2. What happens when one guy works 40 hours a week adding additional value to the software, hardware, or product baseline (assuming one only _has_ to work 16-24 hours a week, if at all.) Does that guy earn more bonus money than the guy who gets his shit done in 2 days, then goes into "personal time" the rest of the week?
3. This sort of relationship in general implies a great deal of trust in a very shady world. If my boss told me that the company is starting to look for ways to pay everyone as contractors and file 1099's for our income instead of W2's then I would look for a new place to work. This is because I would have to provide myself with defense in Law of Agency. There would be no recourse in termination of my employment, because as a contractor, I could be let go at any time. Since I get paid minimum wage until my bonuses come in, I would probably be defenseless in trying to recover any future bonus income in the case that I was terminated, because it's all variable upon performance. For example, If I get fired, I don't get paid my bonus money, because when I don't work for the company, I don't perform. So basically, I would be earning $5.85 an hour, or $234.00 before taxes a week ($46.80 if I worked two 8 hour days) doing work that, supposedly, I could have gotten paid $780 a week (assuming a 40k/year salary) doing at another company, in the promise of earning a big bonus that may never come because I got fired a week before the project finished?
I'm sure that you're a very honest person, running a legal business, who treats his/her employees well. But as a general rule, I would caution anyone against this kind of business arrangement, no matter how attractive it sounds. There are two issues here: 1) giving more freedom and flexibility to employees and 2) fundamentally reducing their legal rights as employees. I'm all for 1 as much as possible but completely against 2.
well in some companies it is normal to go outside and smoke a cigarete
companies don't count how much coffee or other drinks are used (also non working time)
How often people go to toilet
how often people just go for a walk
How often people have useless talks (it costs a lot when a manager talks 30 minutes to an employee)
How often pepole just stare out ot the window enjoying the wheater outside.
How often people take a bit longer lunch break.
I' would be glad this employee creates his free time behind his PC, at his desk.
At least he is easy to call (phone) we now where he is.
And he might pick up some intresting knowledge, they wont get dump that way
So well in my company i have it allwoed till some degree
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
I get told that this is "Disgusting stuff, you wouldn't believe it!" by aforementioned IT manager, to which I respond, "I'll change the password & stop the abuse"...only to be informed that it would be best if he kept monitoring it! This has been going on for weeks & no action has been taken to prevent the employees from wasting time.
People have commented on the IT manager's increased trips to the bathroom though.
Moral of this story, it's obviously wrong & a waste of time to look at porn at work, but productive & in the company's best interests to watch other people doing it.
Ask for more work. If you're bored, that solves it. If you're underpaid, this is the most likely way to get raises. Most importantly, learn how to do your boss's job. On one hand, you cab sit in for him or help him out when he's overloaded. On the other hand. sooner or later he'll probably be moving up or moving out and if you already know the job, you're most likely to get it and the money to go with it. It also helps to find things that need doing that nobody's working on, do them, and let it be known after the fact.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
After working in a lot of start ups and small businesses I was used to being on the rush and working smart I was hired at a large business. There I can do a months worth of work in about a day, and I'm the best in the position they ever had (the last person was so stressed by the position she would cry in the bathroom). If I break the norm and ask for more work, I end up getting assigned the work another sociopath should be working on but complained more about having too much work. So I just work on my master's projects and read ebooks to learn about new stuff. I would say it's slacking, but I'd rather do what gains me benefits then do some other persons work so they can do the same. I don't doubt people are working on personal things at work, like me above. However since a lot of businesses are only open during times people are at work or kids go nuts, it's necessary to do. This keeps people at work and productive (since they don't have to take the day off to deal with these things) so what's the problem? Then, if ones boss does not challenge the workers, what can you do either? I have been it places where you have to work 100% of the time when you're there, and it's filled with people taking off constantly to take care of little things in their personal lives and terrible moral.
Ha! Flamebait! I like that! I probably would have moderated it "offtopic," because it is not meant to draw flames, but whatever floats your boat. Heh.
No workplace is 100% productive (except maybe that Roman galley ship on a windless day, {thump}PUT!{thump}YOUR!{thump}BACKS!{thump}INTO!{t hump}IT!!!!{thump}{whip crack}) Any boss who thinks they can get 100% productivity 100% of the time is on drugs Timothy Leary wouldn't touch with a stick.
In the times where you're waiting for clients or other departments to come through with what you need used to be spent at the coffee pot or water cooler. Now it's spent on facebook or some forum or other. If anything, a reasonable and limited amount of this is good for destressing, getting a different perspective or just debriefing rather than exploding at colleagues. Ergo, greater productivity.
(Mind you, I can't for the LIFE of me see what value spending time on Facebook or MySpace is. That stuff just stresses the s**t out of me.)
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1