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New Office Sensors Know When You Leave Your Desk (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: About a year ago, in a widely reported story, journalists at British newspaper the Telegraph found little black boxes installed under their desks. The devices, which had "OccupEye" emblazoned on them, detected if employees were at their workstations. Not shockingly, writers and editors were suspicious, worried that bosses were monitoring their moves, even their bathroom breaks. The National Union of Journalists complained to management about Big Brother-style surveillance. The company insisted the boxes were intended to reduce energy costs, ensuring that empty cubicles weren't overheated or over-air-conditioned, but the damage was done, and the devices were removed. Sensors that keep tabs on more than temperature are already all over offices -- they're just less conspicuous and don't have names that suggest Bond villains. "Most people, when they walk into buildings, don't even notice them," says Joe Costello, chief executive officer of Enlighted, whose sensors, he says, are collecting data at more than 350 companies, including 15 percent of the Fortune 500. They're hidden in lights, ID badges, and elsewhere, tracking things such as conference room usage, employee whereabouts, and "latency" -- how long someone goes without speaking to another co-worker. Proponents claim the goal is efficiency: Some sensors generate heat maps that show how people move through an office, to help maximize space; others, such as OccupEye, tap into HVAC systems.
How is this new?
Everyone wants to micromanage everyone else all in the name of safety/efficiency/feelings etc.
I don't even know WTF I just read.
Just do your job, slackers!
>how long someone goes without speaking to another co-worker.
The length of time I go without talking to a co-worker is directly proportional to my productivity.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Are we talking about tracking people and making them more "efficient", or tracking for making the machines, such as smart office or home more efficient? Going forward towards the glorious time of AI at every workplace and home, perhaps the efforts should be focused on the machines and try to create a more creative and ultimately productive workplace where the productivity gains are implemented with the machines by default.
Even more reason to work from home (remotely)
Should take care of the problem.
Barring absolutely needing the job not to be on the street, I would not work at such a place.
This sort of thing will get to the point where even the rabid anti-union types will be rethinking that opinion, and maybe companies who would like to remain union-free should think about such things.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Meaning the amount of time between when my admin hears about this and when she casually asks what it would take to install and monitor the devices on all the staff desks.
#DeleteChrome
There is going to come a point in the not-far-off-future where most consumer facing gear wont even run unless a user is actively present, has ID'd them self through social media and is operating it. See Oculus Rift for an example. It wont run if the sensor says it not on my head. Now i understand in most use-cases thats fine, but sometimes i want a game to play out, even if im not attending it right then. I should have the option of taking off the HMD without it pausing everything.
Good-bye
Please somebody let me know if they report when you fart.
Proponents claim the goal is efficiency
Yes, but what kind of efficiency? You're making a ton of assumptions that being at a desk, in a meeting room, or elsewhere leads to work being done, which leads eventually to profit. Work rarely is so attached to anything of the like that attempting to measure an individual's output for anything other than CO2 production is a waste of time, money, and thought.
Work, as we all know it, has been as industrialized as it possibly can be. And not everything that could be put into some sort of process needs it. Part of work is knowing where things can lead, it's following your instincts since you're supposed to be familiar with what you're doing.
And then there's the whole being valued by what work you do. That whole thing where your personal worth and wealth is directly tied to how "good" you're viewed as. Wealth as a virtue signaling! How sickening is that? How messed up as a society to you have to become to think that way?
Fight this sort of bullshit. Fight it hard.
Where I work there are locator beacons that allow you to be located by co-workers so you don't have to stay at your desk. The app on the phone allows me to turn it on and off (like a chat app) and it will lead me to my meeting even if I don't know where the room is.
It's not for energy use at all. Individual cubicles or offices for that matter, are not heated or cooled singularly. They are part of a zone. Me not being in my office has absolutely no bearing on heating the other 5 offices in the same HVAC zone.
Same for the 20 cubicles on the floor. It makes no difference if 1 person is in the office or all 20.
If they want to reduce heating/cooling expense, install a fucking motion sensor or do what every other company has done and put the fucking system on a timer. God forbid you're in my office after hours during the summer the cooling system will allow the entire building to heat up to 80F and you can't do anything about it.
If we only had more unions BS like this would not even make it to the install part unless there is a big list of things needed to fire someone / rules in place to make so that the boss needs to show that to use this to fire some takes a lot of paper work.
It's like alot of the BS metrics that just end up making people cheat the system / hurt things in areas that are not tacked.
This article sums up a lot of the problems I had with the office: https://shift.newco.co/why-i-o...
This issue in particular:
ROWE (results only work environment) is a fantastic framework that needs to be adopted in places employing knowledge workers. You should be measuring the output of your workers, not the amount of time you can see them sitting in your office. I refuse to work in a place with such a cynical view of their employees. If you really think your employees will not be working if you cannot look over their shoulder to check, you have the wrong way of looking at the relationship with your employees (especially at a startup). You should be hiring people who are engaged by their work and believe in the company’s mission. If people slack off when you aren’t watching them, your company has a disease, and you have discovered a symptom. You cannot treat this symptom and expect the disease to be cured. More on this later (Remove the safety nets and let the bad actors fail).
If you are looking at your employees through the lens of “I can’t give these people freedom and autonomy to do work in the best way they see fit:” You should consider finding different people for your organization instead of pursuing an authoritarian regime.
Aluminum foil makes a great Faraday cage. A camera under a desk sounds pervy.
What the fuck are you smoking?
Until we're all replaced by robots anyway, we require a certain amount of autonomy, freedom, or 'slack'.
Apparently that's going to need to be codified in law before we can accept all these monitoring devices watching us 24/7, because we don't trust the people who own the systems... and experience shows we are right not to trust them.
Knowing which areas need heat, which doors see the most traffic, whether a meeting room is wasted space or not, or even how many times a day the toilets are flushed - each of those things provides useful information for something other than tracking the minutia of an individual's day so you can go 'Big Brother' on them in an attempt to squeeze out a little more productivity at the expense of morale.
My employer, for example, encourages people to work from home. The new office, for example, has very few permanently-assigned desks — and there are only 3 cubicles for every 5 employees. It is expected, that, on average, two out of five (40%) people will be working from home on any given day.
There is no presence-monitoring hardware mandated for home offices and the company-issued laptops don't run any such software either (yes, I know for sure).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The company insisted the boxes were intended to reduce energy costs, ensuring that empty cubicles weren't overheated or over-air-conditioned
What a load of bullshit. A cubicle by its very nature is a division of a larger room. It has no ceiling to hold heat in or meaningful insulation, and it's certainly not climate controlled on an individual level.
A more believable excuse would be that the device shut down the computer and desk lights when the employee was not in to save energy, but most businesses leave machines on to facilitate after-hours backups/maintenance and with modern high-efficiency lighting, there would be no net cost benefit to controlling lighting with them.
Wow, the onion is getting real good at anonymizing their articles now.
"We're gonna need a bigger boat"
If we only had more unions BS like this would not even make it to the install part unless there is a big list of things needed to fire someone / rules in place to make so that the boss needs to show that to use this to fire some takes a lot of paper work.
It's like alot of the BS metrics that just end up making people cheat the system / hurt things in areas that are not tacked.
Unions seem like a good idea for unskilled work, but not for technology workers. I am not interested in any sort of collective bargaining. If I have a device at my desk or software on my laptop that I find onerous, I can (a)disable/delete/destroy it or (b) go work somewhere else. The good thing about software development is that for every programmer worth his salt there are 100 jobs waiting.
- Vincit qui patitur.
Seriously. If they wanted to know if somebody is at their workstation, just download some software from the Interwebs and install it on the computers used by employees.
You'll get a report on when employees are at their desks and, as a bonus, you can see what they're doing, where they're surfing and who they're talking to.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
With your union you are counting your lines of code and trading your h1b replacement.
Years ago I developed an early mobile computer app (on palm pilots) for use in field work (exotic vegetation control, mosquito control, that kind of thing). And the supervisors would often warn me that the workers were unhappy and hostile toward the idea of a new system.
So I'd take the field guys aside and talk over their concerns. Inevitably the question would come up whether their supervisors would be tracking their movements all through day. I'd assure them that no, the system couldn't tell if you stopped to grab a cup of coffee or take a whiz, but I warned them that it would give management a very precise assessment of how much work each individual worker actually accomplished.
And here's the thing: everyone was OK with that. They didn't mind being evaluated on accomplishment, they just didn't want to be treated like children or judged by some bullshit metric.
As a manager you need data, but you shouldn't have a bias toward easily obtained data. Someone who is on top of his employees' performance doesn't need an ass-in-chair time tracker, unless an employee's actual function is simply to sit on a chair.
If you're really doing your job as boss, the people who report to you won't be worried about being tracked. They'll worry about doing a good job. Because when they do a good job, you notice, and when they do a bad job, you notice... and promptly. Nobody is going to think you're judging them on bathroom breaks.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The Rift headset contains a light sensor to detect if the headset is being worn. So it can power down the screen and/or pause software when you remove the headset. If you want to keep it running (useful as a developer), it's easily covered with a finger, or I guess you could put tape over it...
(The real annoyance with the Rift is the health+safety warning. Has anyone come up with a hack to disable that yet?)
No no, they got the wrong idea. These OccupEye units just designed for upskirt pictures.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I doubt unions would be particularly able to disable some level of employee tracking. For example, using ID badges for access control is a form of tracking that is difficult to protest, because it's actually useful. Same thing with using motion sensors in rooms to control lighting/ventilation/heating load. If I dim or turn off the lights, and reduce the heat load, I can use less cooling in that zone. Not to mention that I can put some outlets (If the system is designed with this in mind) into a list to be turned off (Say, monitors, desk top outlets for things like fans/heaters/scanners), while leaving others like computers, printers, fax machines, fridges, and coffee pots on. I can also say "OK, this zone is unoccupied. If there's a power issue, I can let the UPS's shut it down without connecting it to the backup generator" All of these are examples of real world reasons to have these features. If one also uses the NFC/RFID chips in the id badge be used as a username (Not a password, or as a secondary one) for the computers, you can have improved security, by making it easier for users to log in at arbitrary computers, as well as when they come back from lunch. You could also make it so that when they leave the cube it locks the computer for security reasons, and if you're working with medical data or other sensitive stuff, if any other badge comes in. You're tracking badges rather than people, and anyone could leave it behind. But all of these accomplish tracking, with actual useful results beyond that.
Not to mention that most unions, like IBEW, UAW, or other working unions usually have their members working in places where you punch in and out. Educators are moving towards that too.
A handheld taser will render the unit inoperable quite quickly.
Come to think of it: 50,000 volts of electricity pretty much renders the majority of electronics inoperable.
Them: Your unit isn't reporting.
Me: What unit? What report ?
Them: Um. . . . never mind.
Barring absolutely needing the job not to be on the street, I would not work at such a place.
This. A million times this.
Code in your underwear. They'll remove the webcam pretty quick.
An employee's actual function is simply to sit on a chair.
A job I'm qualified for!
Cool nightmare dystopia capitalism is creating for us all. Insatiable desire for infinite growth combined with a competitive business environment and a disregard for the well-being of the workers in the trenches all but guarantees this kind of shit will become more and more common unless it is fiercely resisted in perpetuity. That or we need to radically reimagine how society functions.
the supervisors? Isn't it their job to keep an eye on the workers?
If the managers have no clue where their staff are most of the time, then you are running an org wrong. Even if the org uses cheesy gizmos to verify people are physically at their desks, that says almost nothing about actually doing work. And it's bad for morale.
I can see using such for a problem employee who repeatedly abuses their time, but not as a default.
Table-ized A.I.
Quit.
This will inevitably become a problem for government use... we can't easily quit/vote with our wallets. This is private companies leveraging technology to increase the bottom line... you know, that activity that keeps most of us nerds employed?
{cussy}Fucking outrage culture is getting outrageous.
Dial it the fuck back a little and have some goddamned perspective. {/cussy}
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
For whatever reason, apparently due to some quirk by some past Slashdot management, I never get mod points, so it seems to me that the best I can do is to comment that a post is good when I see an exceptionally good post, and yours is a good post. Likewise, I also point out when a post is bad and hint at why in a way that amuses me.
Indiana is a fire at will, quit at will state and employers discovered that employees will quit without a two-week or somesuch notice.
When I worked at a Fortune 500 company, I actually witnessed some woman spend an entire day updating her stupid Franklin planner. A whole damn day. Showing up for work is not a valid method of determining compensation. One should get rewarded for results not for the amount of hours they're at their place of employment.
I left my pants in my cubicle.
Have gnu, will travel.
Option one: You can run it like a kindergarden.
Option two: You can run it like a university.
Each has it own merits for management. But most of us would choose to be a worker in an option-two company.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Who in their right mind would believe such bullshit? Air conditioning can only heat an entire room, not per cubicle.
Hey Silicon Valley nerds: you do realize that California mandates exactly this sort of technology in your homes and offices, don't you? The 2013 and later building codes require occupancy sensors in all offices less than or equal to 250 sq. ft., as well as conference rooms, multi-purpose rooms and a whole host of other places. If you build a new home all garages, laundry rooms and utility rooms must have occupancy-sensor lighting. Feel free to be violated in the name of the environment, courtesy of your nanny state.
It is easy to criticise this sort of things as intruding on privacy, but I think it misses the mark. Seeing how people in general accept - and sometimes even ask for - more and more CCTV in the public spaces, I think it is clear that privacy isn't the main concern - it's about feeling that you are trusted and respected. Privacy is important in the sense that we all need to have a private space, where we can put our guards down and just be ourselves, but in general, in public and in our workplace, we want to feel that the basic assumtion is that we are honest and trustworthy.
> you shouldn't have a bias toward easily obtained data
Nicely summed up. Management is hard, if you're not up to that challenge, then get out and let someone else have a crack at it. It seems though, as humans, having a nice graph to look at makes us feel like we have some control over something.
do the sensors correlate when somebody is at their desk reading Slashdot?
The rift has OLED screens that will suffer from burn-in if you leave them on with a static image being shown. It is literally a screen saver, and has nothing to do with restricting the user.
No need to work for such companies.
Other alternatives are push back, persist till you're laid off and oh well!
Sabotage and subversion are time honored responses to bad management practices.
I remember one large player that tracked the number of mouse clicks.
If you are away from your desk no mouse clicks.
I get all that, the point is once eye-tracking and such comes online, advertisers are going to demand that ads are confirmed to be watched by getting the eye tracking data. There will come a point where you wont be able to even look away from the ad or it will pause and wait for your attention.
Good-bye
Clearly you have never worked in a union shop. On the railroad (in the US), black boxes watch union employees and monitor speed of driving the train, whether they are paying attention, how long they allow the train to sit idle, and many other metrics. Their every move is watched, and management is constantly looking for ways to monitor them more in order to weed out the least little inefficiency. All the union does is promise that a union worker will be at certain locations and perform certain tasks. The employment contract basically turns a worker as an automaton. As such, the company is trying to treat a human as closely to an automaton as possible.
I had to fix a projector that became a paperweight because it couldn't pass an iris check. I spent hours taking it apart to roll the cheap servo back and forth a couple times, loosen the cheap grease.
I was fortunate to find an engine test button on a printer with no display, just the paper jam LED eternally lit. It ignores all the whiny sensor conditions and just fucking prints a test sheet. This let me actually diagnose the fucking situation, which was miles from any paper jam sensor.
I don't own a Keurig but I got a good laugh at the device refusing to work until an "official lid" condition was met.
I cut open past the user-accessible parts on a label printer because it wouldn't work (just rattle) unless I held in an irrelevant lever with my finger.
Artificial rejection checks are bullshit.