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Big Brother In the Home Office

Posted by timothy on from the where-the-raspberry-pi-comes-in dept.

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."

7 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Use another PC for private stuff!

    1. Re:So... by AdrianKemp · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I am assuming that any company so paranoid that they're logging everything the employee is doing would be equally as batshit crazy about unexplained lulls in activity.

      I'm very suspicious about the "cannot be gamed" thing... it's software, ffs.

  2. Humm, not possible to game the system ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What about the other (personnal) computer next to the work computer ?

  3. Why would anyone tolerate this? by msobkow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Why would anyone tolerate this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Exactly the above. People with no sense of their work's worth and no self-respect are willing to submit to degradation in order to get jobs that don't pay well, and when they lower their personal value it lowers the businesses' perception of the value of each and every one of us.

  4. If you're measuring productivity that way by Jawnn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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.

  5. Re:You are at work... by preaction · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Part of my job is knowing how to program efficiently and effectively. This involves perusing websites, twitter feeds, wikipedia, personal blogs, news sites and other easily-misinterpreted content. I should not have to justify every single web request I make. I should not have to ask, before each decision to click a link, "Is this good for the Company?".