The discussions here seem to fall into one of these categories:
- employee activities cause functional problems at work
- employee activities cause legal problems at work
- people who gripe about using company resources for personal use
- people who gripe about (possibly) losing company resources for personal use
I'd like to comment on each of these.
I can think of a few employee activities which have nothing to do with the Internet which can be defined as disruptive behaviour. Using a hands-free phone in an open cubicle with the volume turned WAY up; plugging in a device (like a coffee maker) into an overloaded circuit; propping open a "secure" door to permit a cooling breeze (thus allowing anyone to walk in). Never mind that someone could show up to work under the influence, or with body odour, etc. Or showing up with a miserable cold/flu/whatever because he dare not take any time off work! Horrors!
- if an employee brings booze or recreational drugs into work, he could be putting the company on the legal hook; harassment is another potential problem; potentially activities that the employee does at home could end up implicating the employer, or at least drag them through court and a sea of expensive lawyers.
- Doing personal things on company time isn't a new phenomenon. Wild speculation on my part, but this could have been a problem since the abolishment of slavery, and perhaps even before then. Short of taking time off without pay (and I'm sure it'll add up to a substantial amount rather quickly), employees will still need to phone their doctor, their dentist, their kid's daycare/babysitter, their spouse, their accountant, their mechanic, their real estate agent (and lawyer), and so on. Sure, they could use a cell phone (if they have one, even assuming it works on the premises), but the obvious answer is for the employee to take 15-30 minutes to find a pay phone off-site, or simply walk/drive over to the person they wish to speak with. And if the person is busy or unavailable? Guess the employee will just have to make another visit. Maybe I'm one of the few people here who remembers what life was like before the fax machine.
I'm in agreement with those comments which suggest that a happy employee will likely work more effectively and/or longer hours. And yes, if it's not the Internet, then it's yakking on the phone with a friend (or with a headhunter) or wandering the office in search of a fresh pot of coffee or that water cooler with the perfect temperature (and obscure location), or taking extended "bio breaks", or for those folks who need it, more frequent smoking breaks. An oppressed employee is someone who will try to abuse the system the most. (Again, wild speculation on my part.) Either that, or his spirit will be broken and his motivation will be weak.
Personally, yeah, I get personal e-mail and check the web now and again. In my personal time at home, I enjoy online chatting. But when I'm at work, I get grumpy when I start to see more than just a couple of e-mails on what I would call a "fluff" subject. And it sure takes me far less time to describe certain information in an e-mail (or to forward it to a friend or relative or business associate) than it is to have someone phone me, I write it down, I hang up, I phone someone else (maybe a few other someone elses), I painstakingly give the other person(s) the details I'd written down, and so on. Heaven forbid if anyone in the chain made a transcription error!
Obviously, downloading any porn or viruses using an employer's computer/network/firewall/electricity/time is A Bad Thing, but sometimes you do a web search, you think you find what you're looking for, you click on it, and much to your chagrin, hidden links start turning your desktop into a popup porn-fest. The embarassment factor speaks for itself. So what do you do when the Net Abuse Police come and give you a stern talking to?
As far as virii, sure, put a firewall in place that can scrub the Evil Virii from incoming messages. It may not be a perfect solution, but a flu shot doesn't protect the recipient from all new strains, either. And it won't stop employees from bringing in things like floppies, CD-ROMs they've burned at home, zip drives, or even that egg salad (tainted with camphylobacter) that they brought in for the team to enjoy.
As they used to say on the Firewalls mailing list many years ago, if you want a secure system, no problem: just turn it off, encase it in concrete and toss it in the ocean.
Another point to consider (which I think someone already alluded to): Unhappy employees will leave inflexible corporations for the likes of greener pastures; happy employees will help their companies build superior products which will supersede those made by the inflexible corporations.
All of this may be moot: the pendulum will swing inexorably towards wherever the benefits are perceived, and in the short term those benefits may be perceived as being rooted in extraordinarily inflexible access (if any) to the Internet.
You can find that at http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html .
My personal take on it: Stay away from dry, hard-to-remember hostnames. Try to come up with naming themes for any loosely groupable set of hosts, like character names or locations from The Simpsons, or from Star Trek, etc. Utilize host aliases to simplify what servers actually use to talk to each other, and to make life simple if you want to move a function from one server to another (eg, migrating the database server alias "oraprod" from hostname "ninja" to hostname "samurai"). Use the facilities within DNS. A lot. Take advantage of the HINFO and TXT RR types. Carve up subdomains by location or by department (or both).
Whatever you do, avoid at all costs the urge to compress all the above functionality into an 8-character hostname.
Slashdot Mirror
- employee activities cause functional problems at work
- employee activities cause legal problems at work
- people who gripe about using company resources for personal use
- people who gripe about (possibly) losing company resources for personal use
I'd like to comment on each of these.
I can think of a few employee activities which have nothing to do with the Internet which can be defined as disruptive behaviour. Using a hands-free phone in an open cubicle with the volume turned WAY up; plugging in a device (like a coffee maker) into an overloaded circuit; propping open a "secure" door to permit a cooling breeze (thus allowing anyone to walk in). Never mind that someone could show up to work under the influence, or with body odour, etc. Or showing up with a miserable cold/flu/whatever because he dare not take any time off work! Horrors!
- if an employee brings booze or recreational drugs into work, he could be putting the company on the legal hook; harassment is another potential problem; potentially activities that the employee does at home could end up implicating the employer, or at least drag them through court and a sea of expensive lawyers.
- Doing personal things on company time isn't a new phenomenon. Wild speculation on my part, but this could have been a problem since the abolishment of slavery, and perhaps even before then. Short of taking time off without pay (and I'm sure it'll add up to a substantial amount rather quickly), employees will still need to phone their doctor, their dentist, their kid's daycare/babysitter, their spouse, their accountant, their mechanic, their real estate agent (and lawyer), and so on. Sure, they could use a cell phone (if they have one, even assuming it works on the premises), but the obvious answer is for the employee to take 15-30 minutes to find a pay phone off-site, or simply walk/drive over to the person they wish to speak with. And if the person is busy or unavailable? Guess the employee will just have to make another visit. Maybe I'm one of the few people here who remembers what life was like before the fax machine.
I'm in agreement with those comments which suggest that a happy employee will likely work more effectively and/or longer hours. And yes, if it's not the Internet, then it's yakking on the phone with a friend (or with a headhunter) or wandering the office in search of a fresh pot of coffee or that water cooler with the perfect temperature (and obscure location), or taking extended "bio breaks", or for those folks who need it, more frequent smoking breaks. An oppressed employee is someone who will try to abuse the system the most. (Again, wild speculation on my part.) Either that, or his spirit will be broken and his motivation will be weak.
Personally, yeah, I get personal e-mail and check the web now and again. In my personal time at home, I enjoy online chatting. But when I'm at work, I get grumpy when I start to see more than just a couple of e-mails on what I would call a "fluff" subject. And it sure takes me far less time to describe certain information in an e-mail (or to forward it to a friend or relative or business associate) than it is to have someone phone me, I write it down, I hang up, I phone someone else (maybe a few other someone elses), I painstakingly give the other person(s) the details I'd written down, and so on. Heaven forbid if anyone in the chain made a transcription error!
Obviously, downloading any porn or viruses using an employer's computer/network/firewall/electricity/time is A Bad Thing, but sometimes you do a web search, you think you find what you're looking for, you click on it, and much to your chagrin, hidden links start turning your desktop into a popup porn-fest. The embarassment factor speaks for itself. So what do you do when the Net Abuse Police come and give you a stern talking to?
As far as virii, sure, put a firewall in place that can scrub the Evil Virii from incoming messages. It may not be a perfect solution, but a flu shot doesn't protect the recipient from all new strains, either. And it won't stop employees from bringing in things like floppies, CD-ROMs they've burned at home, zip drives, or even that egg salad (tainted with camphylobacter) that they brought in for the team to enjoy.
As they used to say on the Firewalls mailing list many years ago, if you want a secure system, no problem: just turn it off, encase it in concrete and toss it in the ocean.
Another point to consider (which I think someone already alluded to): Unhappy employees will leave inflexible corporations for the likes of greener pastures; happy employees will help their companies build superior products which will supersede those made by the inflexible corporations.
All of this may be moot: the pendulum will swing inexorably towards wherever the benefits are perceived, and in the short term those benefits may be perceived as being rooted in extraordinarily inflexible access (if any) to the Internet.
My personal take on it: Stay away from dry, hard-to-remember hostnames. Try to come up with naming themes for any loosely groupable set of hosts, like character names or locations from The Simpsons, or from Star Trek, etc. Utilize host aliases to simplify what servers actually use to talk to each other, and to make life simple if you want to move a function from one server to another (eg, migrating the database server alias "oraprod" from hostname "ninja" to hostname "samurai"). Use the facilities within DNS. A lot. Take advantage of the HINFO and TXT RR types. Carve up subdomains by location or by department (or both).
Whatever you do, avoid at all costs the urge to compress all the above functionality into an 8-character hostname.
CLF