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Big Brother In the Home Office
hessian writes with this excerpt from the New York Times' "Bits" column: "Tens of thousands of programmers, writers, accountants and other workers labor at home doing contract work for companies like Google, Hewlett-Packard and NBC. The computers they use contain software that takes snapshots of what they are doing six times an hour. The snooping occurs randomly, making it impossible for the computer user to game the system. It is probably more invasive than what happens to those working in offices, where scooting through Facebook entries, shopping on Cyber Monday, and peeping at N.S.F.W. ('Not Safe for Work') Web sites on corporate computers is both normal and rarely observed by managers."
Use another PC for private stuff!
What about the other (personnal) computer next to the work computer ?
Because most people are still paid by the hour.
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I don't understand why anyone would tolerate this. I've done remote work for decades, since long before the internet made it possible to access client's source repositories or documentation sites as you can now. I've never had my billable hours questioned, and have always delivered quality software in the end.
I'd be so insulted to have a client even suggest such an intrusive back-handed accusation that I'm ripping them off that I would immediately leave the negotiating table with a pair of digits waved on high as I headed out the door.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
In this case, Big Brother is invited. The monitoring software they describe seems perfectly acceptable to me. If I was vying for a freelance position where I work at home and the condition was my work would be periodically checked, I would be fine with it. As long as all the expectations and the ways the data would be collected are presented up front, it seems completely reasonable.
And having different standards in this case makes sense. This isn't monitoring full-time employees that you've rigorously hired and who will be reviewed by HR regularly and that have a real stake in keeping the position. This is for freelance, hourly workers that could be located anywhere in the world.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
...you're doing it wrong. Lines of code, keystrokes per hour, etc. are almost universally shitty metrics. Your teleworkers are hired to do a job. Take the time to figure out how to effectively measure that, and then realize that intrusive steps like those in TFA are worse than useless.
If you are suppose to be working, you are getting paid to work, why do you spend so much time and effort to find ways around not working.
Let me guess this is also the same group of people who complain when they don't get promoted or are the first to get layoffs.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.