Kind of terrifying to see all the comments just believing it as is
Line managers, even managers of managers, would have 0 loyalty to the company and could easily prove this is all true. The thousands of employees could prove the webcam flash every laptop login.
Things like this would be VP+ (who would have an org of 1000 or more, why would they even look if one of their reports body language is different this morning?) if it even existed under such a secretive blanket. Plus banks are literally known in the tech world as having the absolute oldest and crumbling tech
And lastly, as someone who works in the CV world, even having all those cameras up, successfully streaming, uploading, and inferencing as described in that post would be a technological marvel
At JPM a VP isn’t going to have an org of 1,000+. That’s going to be managing director level. There are some VPs on the business side that can have numerous employees but that’s about it. In finance you can equate VP to being senior and line manager level at other companies Google, Meta, etc.
One you hit executive director things change a bit. Managing director is the real deal.
Agreeing with/adding to your post here:
With that being said this Reddit post has some fishy elements to me. I wouldn’t doubt the existence of this so called WADU but the capabilities (and laughable suggestions in the Reddit post like “don’t use a corporate laptop” as if JPM issues corporate laptops - most employees use the stupid VDI) seem a little outrageous to me. More likely scenario is they just track badge in and badge out and maybe something like the number of meetings on your calendar and do some super basic reporting up the chain to the HR tech teams who are trying to figure out what to do with the workforce.
Now from the article:
“Some employees described adopting unusual behaviors to evade the system's detection during breaks or interludes throughout the day.”
I don’t know where these so called employees work, but at least in the corporate offices uh nobody pays any mind to any breaks you take unless you have some really anal manager. At the Polaris office in Columbus people bring walking shoes and do laps and things. They have lots of space intended for leaving your desk and grabbing coffee or meeting. The Starbucks in there at the time I was there was supposedly one of the most busy Starbucks locations you could find. I don’t think they’re worried about taking breaks.
“Another current employee within the firm's commercial-banking division said she and her colleagues have resorted to discussing some work-related topics on forums like the iMessage app”
You mean like just normal work? You don’t text your colleagues? Since when is iMessage a forum? Dumb.
The article is really lacking substance and the Reddit post seems kind of conspiratorial. Is JPM tracking things like how long your VDI session is open and your badge in/out? Yea definitely. Is it some big AI conspiracy? No. To what end anyway?
Source -> worked in Digital tech for a little over 4 years and have a number of close friends who still work there and numerous colleagues in executive and managing director level roles.
> “Another current employee within the firm's commercial-banking division said she and her colleagues have resorted to discussing some work-related topics on forums like the iMessage app”
Now that's amusing and quite a tell as to how much BS the whole thing is.
No one at JPM cares how much loafing there is. However:
"JPMorgan Chase is paying $200 million in fines to two U.S. banking regulators to settle charges that its Wall Street division allowed employees to use WhatsApp and other platforms to circumvent federal record-keeping laws." https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/17/jpmorgan-agrees-to-125-milli....
discussing work related stuff on iText? That will literally get you fired.
> discussing work related stuff on iText? That will literally get you fired.
I guess it depends on who and also what we mean by work-related stuff.
I don't disagree with you or others that something like discussing a confidential deal or sharing idk screenshots of customer accounts or something would get you fired. As it should.
The article was generic with "work-related topics" so I was too. Sending a text saying "Hey I'm in the CCB analytics weekly business review meeting with so and so can I call you back" won't get you fired. Both are "work-related" but clearly there are differences.
In the context of the Reddit post and the article, I think the substance was basically a few 601 level employees (at most) sharing some vague "leak" of things they really don't know much about or understand and then the whole Internet speculating on Jamie Dimon sitting there taking screenshots of your bedroom to see if you bought a Playstation or an Xbox.
Like any good conspiracy there are elements of truth - JPMC absolutely monitors badge in/out and absolutely logs all of your VDI activities and it would not surprise me if from time to time (or even all the time) they take a quick screenshot when you log in to see if your face matches your employee ID as a security prevention feature.
But a lot of that post seemed like nonsense and saying "employees have to resort to talking about work on iMessage forums!" redoubled my doubt on the whole thing.
> The article was generic with "work-related topics" so I was too. Sending a text saying "Hey I'm in the CCB analytics weekly business review meeting with so and so can I call you back" won't get you fired. Both are "work-related" but clearly there are differences.
Being deposed by the OCC, SEC, Fed or OFHEO and having to make the argument that somehow your business communications weren’t subject to Federal banking record keeping regulations, is just not a spot you want to be in.
> Another current employee within the firm's commercial-banking division said she and her colleagues have resorted to discussing some work-related topics on forums like the iMessage app
> You mean like just normal work?
Not in a commercial banking division. I would expect that to be at least a reprimand, if not straight termination. There are very strict regulations about that sort of thing in banking. You are absolutely not allowed to discuss work on non-official media without approval. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it's actively and strictly controlled.
And for good reasons! The SEC levied more than a billion in fines over text messages on non official media without even having to prove that those texts where eg insider trading,
> Really? You think they dont issue corporate laptops? The suggestion that they do "destroys" the case made?
I know they don’t issue corporate laptops to most employees. I had a Mac because I worked in Digital but that was the exception, not the rule. Yes some employees get laptops. It wasn’t the norm. In fact I believe MD and above aren’t actually allowed to have laptops.
This doesn’t “destroy the case” (whatever that means) - it makes me question the Reddit post given that most employees aren’t given laptops so suggestions “like cover your laptop cam” don’t make a lot of sense.
I have no doubt the firm is tracking a lot of stuff and always have been. Using swear words in chat apps like Symphony would get flagged to HR.
Like all good conspiracies there’s an element of truth. For example, let’s say you sit down at your VDI one day and you see some web cam flash. Does it make sense that they may have some app that takes a picture of the person logging in and makes sure it matches? Yea.
This, however, doesn’t make a lot of sense:
“You’ll notice that your web camera will flash right after login. This is not an “initial connection” flash. Your web camera just took a burst shot of pictures and sent them to WADU. The pictures will be scanned for anything deemed unprofessional or unsafe. Recreational drug paraphernalia, TVs, game consoles, and several other things are all flagged if detected in the pictures. If you see your web camera flash randomly, that was your manager or someone in security requesting a burst shot of pictures from your web camera.“
TVs and video game consoles are unprofessional? Surely they must hate when you bring your Switch to the office and talk about the new Zelda game with all your recent grad workmates!
> At most banks using non monitored communication tools to talk to colleagues would be a fireable offence.
I was consulting at a big 4 IB once. My company used Slack for ourselves, but were onboarded the client's chat tools and told to use them for all project communication which we mostly did. One time a coworker sent me an IM saying he'd follow up with me on Slack. The compliance team flagged it and came after me (not sure why me and not the guy who sent the message). They asked if I discussed company business on Slack and I, not wanting to lie and not wanting to stay on an account that was a meat grinder, just said "yes". They never followed up and I worked on that account for like 8 more months.
Peter Thiel’s data-mining company Palantir was an early contributor. In 2009 JP Morgan Chase engaged Palantir to track internal communications for suspicious activity. According to Bloomberg, the group “vacuumed up emails and browser histories, GPS locations from company-issued smartphones, printer and download activity, and transcripts of digitally recorded phone conversations. Palantir’s software aggregated, searched, sorted, and analyzed these records, surfacing keywords and patterns of behavior that [were] flagged for potential abuse of corporate assets”. Social network analysis allowed the firm to zero in on suspects.
What you’re describing JPMC was ahead of 14 years ago
<< I don’t know where these so called employees work, but at least in the corporate offices uh nobody pays any mind to any breaks you take unless you have some really anal manager.
I would not automatically discount it. I was once in a company that overnight went from happy clappy to 'more with less'. Upon that change, bathroom breaks became timed to capture specifically disliked employees so that a case can be built later to fire them. US. It can be such a bewildering space to work in.
I worked for a large health insurance company. The development team switched to macbooks and could install their own tools. Corporate laptops where shitty and no one had local admin. The installed a tool like that on the macbooks. In the end they just used to check if the OS was up to date and your virus scanner was running. No one checked anything else.
Now this could be a slippery slope. A new manager finding out what is possible and demanding reports on the "dangerous" stuff could change this quickly.
> I don’t know where these so called employees work, but at least in the corporate offices uh nobody pays any mind to any breaks you take unless you have some really anal manage.
I have first hand knowledge of a business that did not control the employees in the office, but wanted to rule that any time not spent in front of the computer while remote was not to be considered working time.
Don't know how it ended in the end, AFAIK the latest review wasn't so strongly worded.
So some business may bother with that, but not necessarily on all fronts.
The old saying is titles are cheap. A VP title is a great way to give someone a small promotion with a small pay increase and they still feel special. Banks/Financial firms figured this out a long long time ago.
Most the VP's I've known at BoA and Chase over the years were individual contributors.
Idk why we dial back to Snowden, when it was James Risen who exposed Stellar Wind years earlier. And his expose lead to the program being shut down. Most of the huge NSA surveillance programs have withered due to lack of valuable intel or due to gradual sunset of the post-9/11 laws.
can your friend share a gif via imgur of the camera flashing when he turns on the laptop? preferably multiple times, with timestamps. There shouldn't be any identifying info in the gifs.
That would be unequivocal proof to everyone in this thread, in my mind.
I don’t have trouble believing that working conditions in the US are sometimes dire, but I also suspect that r/antiwork and other associated subreddits are heavily influenced by foreign actors. I mean, why wouldn’t they?
/r/antiwork isn’t about improving working conditions, though. There was a huge drama about people splitting to some other “work reform” subreddit because they were tired of the, literally, anti-work tone that took over the subreddit.
They try to say it’s about something else, but the posts that hit the front page are always just being angry about something like a supposed text from someone’s boss or a piece of paper with a message taped to a wall. The effort to fake any of these posts is 10 minutes of imagination and prep, at most.
I believe the origins of r/antiwork are actually more literally "anti-work" like you mentioned. As in, moving towards a basic income post scarcity society where we don't have to work. It's a noble utopian goal but since we're so far away from it of course the posts make the problem feel intractable. As the subreddit grew there was a natural tensions between those that actually wanted to improve things and those that wanted to dream about a future and complain.
Well I've seen a huge number of r/antiwork posts and in my opinion they pretty much are all healthy.
They all tell stories of workers putting up with an unreasonable boss. I never see posts about workers criticizing all bosses or reasonable bosses, at least not that make frontpage.
I have a hunch it's actually to the long-term benefit of the economy if unreasonable bosses (emotionally abusive, sexually exploitative, illegal-action-requestinging, etc) are rooted out or rallied against.
I've always found the tone on r/antiwork to be immature and ineffectual.
It's telling that the vast majority of posts come from people working in jobs that would typically be taken early on in someone's working life, i.e. wage slaves. You don't really hear much from people who are established in their careers. It's true that wage slave jobs typically aren't very rewarding, but it's also true that most people have to work in unrewarding jobs for awhile until they gain the experience necessary to move up.
It appears to me that the folks in that forum feel entitled to skip over the whole part where they "gain experience in the world".
Not only that, but I've seen a repeating theme in which a manager makes a request of someone, and their response is utterly devoid of tact. Instead of just saying, "Oh, sorry I can't do that" or even just not responding and saying that they were busy and didn't see the message, they feel the need to become adversarial and "stick it to the man". I would argue that not only is it more effective to "take the high road" in such situations, it also takes less effort than adversarially engaging with your manager.
Like instead of starting a message with, "I already told you last week that I planned <some thing>, and in fact, I quit." Maybe instead try something like, "Hey, I'm so sorry, I can't tonight. I have that <some thing> at 7. Maybe Carter can cover the shift?"
Foreign actors are motivated to foment discount and internal conflict. This might actually lead to improving working conditions, but that’s not the goal.
Or maybe paid shills are insinuating that an international worker's rights movement is some kind of foreign attack on one specific country, in an attempt to discredit it so they can keep exploiting people.
Reminds me of what lengths Amazon went to, spending millions on union busting instead of paying people a living wage. I wouldn't put it below them to do a little astroturfing, it probably pays for itself.
Wow I think this is the first time it's been insinuated I'm a paid shill! Also being a noble genuine worker's rights movement AND a movement being amplified by foreign actors aren't mutually exclusive. If you want to cause internal strife of course it makes sense to pick a cause with credibility and grassroots support. Like I'm sure the US would jump at the chance to promote sweeping democratic reforms in its major opponents. That cause sounds pretty noble but the US's interest in promoting it is certainly not noble.
Also even the credible threat of something being the result of foreign influence, whether true or not, can already create the desired conflict. As we've demonstrated.
Back to the topic, I really have no opinion on whether r/antiwork has malicious influence. I have no idea on that. And either way the cause is still a just one. But my comment above was just noting that if it being influenced then those actors aren't "motivated to improve US working conditions", as the parent commenter said.
Since this alludes to my comment, as I was the one who said up the tree that that r/antiwork may very well have foreign interests working against the US, I'll say that my account is not anonymous, I'm not American, and I certainly have better uses of my free time than taking a few bucks from Amazon to shill anti-union propaganda.
I think it's safe to assume that nothing that happens in r/antiwork or anywhere near it will ever result in anything a sane adult could describe as "improvement". Not even by accident.
It is, though, at least extrapolated from some real things, like non-trivial analysis of badge scans, fairly deep tracking of Citrix, Teams, O365 activity, and so on. Probably embellished to drive more interest, outrage, press coverage, and so on. Some attempt at a bit of bad PR revenge in exchange for being monitored in this way.
It sounds dystopian as hell but the software engineer in me has some suspicions about how well the whole system works. Basically I see 3 places where this tech would not work quite like the commenter said:
* The base stack - This is JPM, not OpenAI or Google. I would assume what the commenter mentioned is the "ideal" and certainly not how the system functions on a day to day basis. I'm sure there are bugs, and areas where managers are told "don't trust this info, it's most likely wrong".
* The integrations - To be able to track you like the commenter mentioned, WADU would have to integrate with all of JPM's existing systems. I don't know how many different systems JPM has but I would assume it's in the hundreds or thousands. I'm gonna say that maybe 75% of those integrations are working at any given time.
* The Usage - So assuming the system works, and alerts a manager to an employee having a 'bad day', is the manager going to care? Are they even going to notice? I would assume that the system is not accessed by managers on a daily basis unless you have a manager that is extra anal. Most likely managers only look into an employee if they have been hearing that they are underpreforming.
All of this is pure speculation, not associated in any way with JPM.
> I would assume what the commenter mentioned is the "ideal" and certainly not how the system functions on a day to day basis.
It's also possible they're just making it up.
There are lots of incentives to do so: revenge, boredom, karma farming, economic destabilization, stock shorting, competition, talent poaching....
It reads to me like embellishment from someone with a bone to pick. They noticed basic tracking and invented dystopian details that would be popular with the outrage sub they posted to.
They actually claim that Chase scans employees' homes for "TVs, game consoles, and several other things," which are "all flagged if detected," as if Chase will only employ the Amish.
It's just a little too perfectly tailored to Reddit.
Yeah that makes sense, I meant 3rd-4th level manager.
I work at a US BigCorp and am sure they check office swipes, even laptop usage, but as a line manager get absolutely no insight into any of those when it comes to performance/ratings/feedback. My direct reports could be using their laptop 2 hours a day and no one in the company is letting me know that
If someone is getting that data, its definitely not me or my manager. Beyond that level who knows really
Are there even similar solutions available commercially? Even at a size of JPM, I highly doubt that they would develop such a complex system in-house. Also, for any high-skill job, I feel such an "activity metric" is utterly useless and not correlated with value contributions.
Here I can probably weigh in a little. While we can argue day and night over whether tracking this is worthwhile, JPM ( and likely Discover ) has some history ( and manpower to do it ) of building their own systems when reasonable.
It feels like AI scare propaganda. Everything is just a little too perfectly dystopian.
I'd keep aware of updates on the story, but it just feels like exactly the kind of thing I would expect to emerge if there are powerful interests that want to slow down AI advancement.
As an employee, I can confirm I have seen my webcam light up when logging onto Citrix from my desktop, and every time I access it via the web, Chrome asks for permission to use the webcam.
They can be doing limited testing for now. I worked for a company that tracked everything they could get away with and managers routinely enforced minimal threshold of activity so I won't be surprised if some larger bank jumped on the same bandwagon.
Bridgewater famously had pretty obscene levels of tracking and monitoring and were open about it, lauding it as part of their company culture. This seems like the same type of thing.
While some areas of the firm may indeed have what you call old and crumbling tech, this is far from the rule. I expect the electronic trading arm of JPM to be far and beyond what you normally can find at tech firms. The arms race in electronic trading constantly produces innovations out of necessity. The reality is innovate or die, and no inventing yet another sloppy JavaScript framework does not constitute innovation.
That sub is +95% made up posts though. Like frustrated fanfiction + attention seeking at the same time.
Maybe there is some truth to this post but there are so many fake stories and made up iMessage conversations posted there that it's hard to take anything seriously anymore.
What is written in that JPM doc is completely standard in banking as it's mandated by most, if not all, regulators. It's not a JPM thing.
Some of the items in the original post, like face recognition from internal cameras, are definitely not required. I have no idea whether or not that's actually true though.
But what's in that doc about tracking messaging, phones, building access etc is definitely all happening because they absolutely have to and are regularly audited on it.
I can assure you this article is 98% made up stuff. Source: MD at JPMC. WADU exists, but it does nothing even close to what is being made up in this post on reddit. Just because some terms can be cross referenced doesn't mean the entire thing is true. IMO they don't even have the skills to do this even if they wanted to.
It almost feels like how Councilman Jamm in the TV show Parks and Recreation convinces the crowd of what he wants with some random arbitrary references to real things while mixing it up so much lies.
The tool and department seem real but it’s possible the Reddit post is heavily exaggerated.
JPMC has thousands of managers. If all of them have access to the strangest/most invasive aspects of the tool described it wouldn’t be a secret. It would also be a great way to create a toxic culture.
Ok so it is real, but they have nobody actually working on it.
> Heres the employees working on it.
Ok so it is real, and they have a team, but it is illegal.
> Most of it is mandated by the regulators, and they have a pretty big legal team (dont make me post their linkedin profiles to prove that a bank has a legal department).
Ok so it is real, and they have a team, it is legal, but ...
A friend of mine just recently did a stint with an outside firm that worked with JPMC.
She readily confirmed that her JPMC laptop shipped to her via her company's address, and her outside management had informed her to "be careful with it." Her JPMC management told her that she had to put it on a "normal network" after she got a dedicated LTE network for it that was literally only used by that device alone. She was reprimanded for not turning on her webcam during meetings, and JPMC IT emailed her when she physically disconnected the camera on her (outside) management's advice after being (again) reprimanded for working in the nude at her desk in her own home. She said "Sorry the camera just stopped working" and the next day a new machine arrived at her home, the address of which was not given to JPMC at any time.
This is how they treat outside contractors. This outside firm has decided to never work with JPMC again and cut off the contract early.
> She readily confirmed that her JPMC laptop shipped to her via her company's address, and her outside management had informed her to "be careful with it."
That’s standard for company laptops. Nobody should be using the company laptop, which contains sensitive company information and access, to play games or whatever. Use it for work, then go use your personal devices for personal activities.
> Her JPMC management told her that she had to put it on a "normal network" after she got a dedicated LTE network for it that was literally only used by that device alone.
Common security requirement. Mobile connections tend to have frequently changing IPs. This creates problems with security software that tries to detect anomalous behavior.
> She was reprimanded for not turning on her webcam during meetings,
Having video on is a meeting requirement at some companies. It’s not unreasonable, even though some people dislike it. Video meetings are supposed to be analogs of meetings, where people talk face to face.
> She said "Sorry the camera just stopped working" and the next day a new machine arrived at her home, the address of which was not given to JPMC at any time.
I think you’re being fed exaggerations, or your friend doesn’t remember giving them her address. There’s no way a company would just guess an employee’s address and ship a $2,000 laptop there, hoping it arrived at the intended recipient.
> Common security requirement. Mobile connections tend to have frequently changing IPs. This creates problems with security software that tries to detect anomalous behavior.
I don't know about your work, but mine actively encourages us to use our laptops from literally whatever network we want. There's some that only ever tether. What set it off was the fact that the device saw no other neighbors -- they stopped complaining as soon as she put a printer on the same network.
> Having video on is a meeting requirement at some companies.
If that was a requirement, it was inconsistently applied. She was singled out.
> doesn’t remember giving them her address
There's no way they could have known the address she was working at since it wasn't listed anywhere; I id bury the lede here a bit: She was on LTE working from a camper in the middle of a forest. None the less, an in-person courier arrived at the *camp site* she was at the next day with a new laptop.
I wish I was being fed exaggerations, because *that would make more sense*. No, the hanlon's razor here is that they ship all their machines with one of the location tracking systems, in this case probably Absolute (the replacement for Computrace).
Even that is not sufficient to ship a 2,000 machine there.
This is fanfiction or she told them her address and consented to receive the shipment. Delivery companies do not simply take location coordinates to deliver a laptop for a multitude of reasons, including insurance liability.
This also may run afoul of privacy regulations etc depending on where she lives.
Is the premise that the LTE was being used to ensure no connectivity happened when she wasn't using the laptop? And they weren't happy with this because they wanted the laptop to regularly phone home when not in use?
By invasive technologies, do you mean what is alleged on the Reddit post? My point is that the Business Insider article isn't evidence of this. The article refers to standard monitoring that every financial institution uses to catch financial crime.
In your own links I couldn't find anything about constant audio and video recording, body language, stress, whatever monitoring. Just presence, email, call, and some data monitoring. Just because some parts are true doesn't mean it wasn't embellished.
Point about the *made up* stuff is that the subreddit in question has a lot of questionable content and straight up lies. Whole point of the subreddit in question is to pain capitalism and every employer as the devil just reaping money out of mistreating their employees.
Depends on the sub. Personal anecdote subs are the same yes, and not surprisingly they are very popular. There is a reason subs like /r/thathappened exist.
But there are good ones too imo that I follow, usually the more on-topic ones like /r/buildapc, /r/datahoarder, /r/networking, main sport sub like /r/soccer or /r/baseball.
Okay, but “Surveillance and monopolies are out of control” isn’t what are talking about. Some kid’s complaint about The Man is not HN-worthy. And that’s all that you’re posing.
I hear you, though you don't get to decide what's HN-worthy and what's not.
I guess my brain felt compelled to remind about the important underlying message of the post, because the comment felt like it was undermining it. The main motivation is probably fear of a shitty dystopian future, because I cannot remember the last time I read any positive news.
> I think everyone expects their employer to track them to some extent. It is pretty standard practice for employers to monitor and run analysis on things like building badge swipes and the amount of time spent connected when working from home. It has also become very common place for employers to record audio and video at the office.
That sounds dystopian to me already (maybe because I'm not in the US? Or haven't spend much time at BigCorp? But is that really the default minimum these days?)
If you asked someone 10-20 years ago if that description sounded dystopian, would you be more likely to get a "yes definitely" than you are today?
I'm way more worried by the dystopia society accepts as "normal" than one that is forced on us and that we could potentially fight against.
> That sounds dystopian to me already (maybe because I'm not in the US? Or haven't spend much time at BigCorp? But is that really the default minimum these days?)
It's not the norm for white collar professional jobs, no.
On the other hand, some blue collar jobs have a long history of detailed tracking. Clocking in when you arrive, maybe with biometrics, and clocking out when you leave. A call centre worker might find their employer monitors the number of calls they take, the time they spend on each call, records the contents of the call, and surveys the caller for their feedback.
Working a job where I moved from the blue collar grunts to the white collar office denizens, the difference even within the same company couldn't be starker.
In lab you had to use a clock, only got a 30 min lunch, all work was tracked including time per unit, weekly/monthly quotas, manager breathing down your neck, strict PTO rules (if you have to leave for 1 hour, you must submit for it), station checks, gear/equipment checks, workmanship checks. Basically the pinnacle of "cog in the machine" work.
Then once in the office, it basically became "you get a salary, do whatever you want as long as your work gets done". Hell it's not uncommon for me to go a week without even talking to my boss.
I will say though, working in the lab as a "cog", when you clock out you are done, and when you take off, others pick up your load. In the office you end up taking work home with you and taking off means having to work extra to get ahead. I kind of miss being able to wake up and say "I don't want to go to work day" and just call it in.
Reminds me of when I used to work as an automation engineer at factories. We used to have to work late into the night during new process line installations. One time one of the assembly line workers who was assigned to help us out told me he felt sorry for me. When I asked why, he said no matter how the project was going, he was punching out at 3PM, was going to play a round of golf, have dinner, and not give work a second thought until the morning. In contrast, I was going to be there all night.
> When I asked why, he said no matter how the project was going, he was punching out at 3PM, was going to play a round of golf, have dinner, and not give work a second thought until the morning. In contrast, I was going to be there all night.
He sounds like someone who doesn't actually enjoy their job.
> Then once in the office, it basically became "you get a salary, do whatever you want as long as your work gets done".
In my opinion, this is the only ethical and sensible way to do it. You judge an employee by whether or not they're producing acceptable work in an acceptable amount of time. Nothing else should matter.
If you are paying people to operate in the cogs in a machine style, there are other cogs depending on them. You need them performing at certain times and at a certain rate, or the assembly line breaks down.
Different roles are judged on different work; "I pay you based on what you get done in an hour" is supportive of fundamentally different work than "I pay you based on what you get done in a year" or "I pay you based on how much you get done".
That isn't at odds with what I was saying. The only legitimate concern of an employer is that the employees are producing acceptable work at an acceptable speed.
There's no need to engage in intrusive surveillance. If the employee isn't performing acceptably well, that shows in the work.
Right — "dystopian" is when white collar workers and professionals start getting treated like blue collar workers, or when people in the imperial core start getting treated like colonized people.
Dystopian is when leaders exert a frightening level of control and surveillance over ordinary people and it becomes normalized to the extent that you're told that you should shrug it off because "somebody else out there has it worse".
Literally the opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying people shrug off what's happening to other people because they don't think it will happen to them, while in fact, what's happening to other people is a good preview of what's coming for you.
I think dystopian is when you track workers to a degree that invades their privacy.
For example, if you recorded personal conversations people have on break. This is effectively what happens if you record all audio and video, and possibly the screen, of a work from home device. Not sure blue collar workers have been surveiled using hidden microphones and other such devices, say, 20-30 years ago.
If you are tracking time by "how much time the employee spends in the building" then yes, you need to check when they come and go.
You dont need to do this in jobs where performance is very obvious based on commits and similar metrics, as compared to jobs where possibly your attendance is your job (i.e. you dont produce anything, by "just" protecting something, or surveiling something, etc).
There is a reasonable degree of employee surveilance, such that you can make sure someone does their job.
Most of the stuff in the article absoutely goes beyond that.
I dont think this has ever been about poor vs rich, imperial core vs colony (yikes), or blue collar vs white collar. Its simply that white collar workers may have more ways to see theyre being surveiled (i.e. webcam being on). White collar workers are IMO more likely to be in a position where they know that their livelihood is not at risk by simply speaking out about being surveiled to this degree.
When I hear the phrase "wage theft" I think of all the money stolen from workers not the alleged hours workers are not perfectly productive. People have continued to become more productive over the last 40+ years but have not reaped the rewards of that.
One of the major focus areas of the last 100 years or so of management theory is row to reduce bespoke professional white-collar roles where judgement is involved to assembly-line workers. The thinking is, if you can't force the job to become rote, then you can at least apply a forcing function to keep them in line.
It's well known that even famous companies Meta, Google and Amazon track various forms of SLOC-related metrics, tickets closed, etc of their SWE. It's usually left to the managers discretion to use it, but its is there and is used often as a coarse measure of productivity.
Hell, last time I worked in call centers they were tracking how much time you spent shitting, and that was 10 years ago. And to be clear I don’t mean how much time was spent on breaks, I mean they literally discussed the distinction between 2 minute breaks to the bathroom and longer and asked individual employees if they really were using the bathroom.
i sold software on cell phones early in my career and it was quite typical for the average small business to track its employees (say repairmen, HVAC people, gardeners, etc) using geofencing to alert if they went to bars, home, etc.
> maybe because I'm not in the US? Or haven't spend much time at BigCorp?
My wife works at a BigCorp and I work at a small but established company. The differences in this arena couldn't be starker. I was given a laptop (and assembled my own desktop) and told to set it up according to my preferences first day. My wife has many metrics that she knows about tracked through her locked down MacBook (and I'm sure many more she doesn't know about). For my case I can't even think of how they'd track me while I work from home; for hers, she already knows that they do.
If you have 2 employees, it's not worth spending a bunch of time setting up systems to monitor them. And you should just be able to do it by interactions anyway.
There is the economy of scale problem you are talking about. There is just also a difference in culture. Many of the people at my work place are burned out from big tech jobs (or equally burned out from startup culture and want to work somewhere stable and established). I think they'd just leave if we implemented tracking. They are also unusually productive people who like the work they do. (At least it seems unusual from what I've heard about on here and elsewhere. I was self-employed before working here so unsure what is usual for wage earners.) Many of the people at my wife's workplace are hard-working but unenthusiastic and also tend to be older.
Obviously. When you're a company of one - they're one and the same. When you're a company of 200k - you're a drop in an ocean.
What you care about diverges from everyone else, and the main thing you have in common is maximizing the compensation / enjoyment curve.
Most people's enjoyment at work is not going to go down sharply because their employer is looking at how much time the average person spends in the office.
> Most people's enjoyment at work is not going to go down sharply because their employer is looking at how much time the average person spends in the office.
I have a hard time thinking this is actually true. Is there any data on this?
I don't think it's obvious, because there's actually three forces at play: the individual desires of one person, the collective desires of all people, and the individual desires of the "business entity".
The distinction is borne of the different methods of decision-making within the business. Traditional capitalist enterprises put the last in that list as the highest priority at the expense of the other two. Worker-owned coops attempt to do away with the distinction between the latter two entirely. Communes ignore the first and the last and focus only on the second.
The point is, there are different ways of organizing people into a coherent mass to achieve certain goals, but Westerners are mostly only comfortable considering these issues in terms of capitalist modes of business (see the framing used throughout this discussion, e.g., the casual use of the word "employer", etc.).
I am aware that capitalist enterprise is the default setting of economies across the globe. I just want to point out how the conversation and insights into the problem are obscured by the normalization of certain ideological choices over others.
Think about any dystopian sci-fi. There's always groups that live in the dystopia and groups that don't feel the effects of it. That's the current state of the world. 1% of the population (including basically everyone on this site) live in luxury, while the rest of the 99% of the population toil under increasingly desperate and precarious living standards.
There's no avoiding it anymore, it's unambiguous, the world is a hellscape of our own doing that we could have avoided if not for wanton, rampant anti-social greed.
Think of this quote and it will be clear: "The future is here it's just unevenly distributed"
Where "future" is synonymous with "hope, life, time, joy"
Agree with everything in your comment, except, this isn't just greed. It's also hubris coupled with technology-worship / scientism / futurism. I'm a pretty unabashedly greedy person, in my own opinion, and this social trajectory absolutely disgusts and frightens me. I can want money without wanting to pry into people's private lives beyond what they will personally tell me. I can very easily be greedy without wanting to violate those norms. I understand the point that greed helps people erode any moral sense that this is simply wrong, but I think they have to have some level of belief in technology and some sort of futurism ideology to take the next step toward, "This data can be analyzed correctly and will be highly useful for our productivity!" Just my opinion of course.
If they ever come up with a way for tech to read your mind, companies like Chase will have zero qualms about employing it. Fun thought: Gaddafi got knife-raped by a mob while Jamie Dimon roams free.
> There's always groups that live in the dystopia and groups that don't feel the effects of it. That's the current state of the world. 1% of the population (including basically everyone on this site) live in luxury, while the rest of the 99% of the population toil under increasingly desperate and precarious living standards.
Wait, what? I don't think everyone on HN is a billionaire tech mogul. Most of us are probably just common office worker schmucks. This is one of the main ways the actual Elite 1% works to divide us, by trying to convince the blue collar half of workers that it's those uppity white collar workers who are the problem.
Almost all of us here are in the top 1% of the world population in terms of income, not of our own national populations. Even so, those of us not in the top 1% of our national populations are in relative terms all seeing our living standards becoming more precarious, and our working conditions decline.
Global living standards have been rising sharply for the last 50 years, first in China, then South East Asia, recently India and there are signs it's going to start happening in Africa.
The idea that the newly middle-class in Asia ( including software developers working for international companies ) are increasing desperate and precarious is simply not true.
I've heard of bosses asking about whether they could monitor WFH employees personal conversations in their own homes. I think the answer was "there are loopholes". In the US there are very few protections for workers. The only buffering people can get is by reaching C level positions. But even then... It's only what you can negotiate.
> The only buffering people can get is by reaching C level positions.
Director and above is good enough at most orgs, but of course VP is the level where you really start to enjoy privileges.
You can't get to those positions without speaking smoothly and spinning situations. Unless you are completely incompetent you can always find a way out, when given a chance to do so. Being given the chance is a result of how good you are at forging relationships.
>I've heard of bosses asking about whether they could monitor WFH employees personal conversations in their own homes.
You probably signed an agreement to allow audio and visual recording. This is usually for the company to CYA to allow video conferencing but also for more nefarious reasons like you said. If you signed an agreement for audio recording (almost every Fortune 500 requires this), then assume your mic is always hot and that you cannot control when it records
Right, you have to agree to audio recording in certain states (google 2-way recording laws). To ensure they have that acceptance, they have you sign a disclosure that audio recording may happen while you are using work resources. Nothing federally that is being invalidated here, just CYA for all 50 states
Except that I live in Canada where the laws are different. You may be able to record employees with consent in the workplace, but that doesn't extend into allowing an employer to apply surveillance into an employees private spaces and personal life. I am saying 'private space' intentionally, because public spaces are regulated differently. The laws around employee monitoring are rapidly changing in Canada however. I am hoping that we will see stronger regulations in the future regarding the use of surveillance in the workplace. One party consent exists in Canada, but that assumes a call between two people where one person is recording the call. What is being described is an employer that is recording video and audio indiscriminately at all times. This also is not allowed in America.
The right to privacy in the constitution is most explicitly mentioned in Amendment I, Amendment III, and Amendment IV of the U.S. Constitution. The privacy of belief, privacy of home, and privacy of the person and possessions is included in the U.S. Constitution.[19]
In regards to my comment about contracts, I have seen several contacts where employers think they can negate laws by adding clauses to their contracts. I am sure you have seen some of these these clauses, such as non-compete clauses. I know this is still legal in some states, but it isn't here, and adding such a clause is not enforceable.
My organization accounts for this by putting the onious on you to have a work safe environment in your background. Lack of compliance in this can lead to termination.
You're morally right, but they'd flip it around and ask why you chose to create a situation where inappropriate images are being stored on company infrastructure.
"How fucking dare you body shame my wife and kids!?" Now I'm threatening to call local news.
You see, its not really about having an airtight case to win a billion dollar settlement. It's about being able to bluster your way out of a situation that's trying to be used against you.
Wasn't this the game that some police officers in the US engaged in? Nothing illegal about them blasting Lady Gaga or whatever is popular while they work. But if you record the audio, you're unlikely to be able to share it anywhere without explicit permission from the rightsholders.
Honestly, I think that most of the dystopian developments happened during Covid. When I left whiteshoe finance back in 2019, it wasn't this bad. Sure, swipe cards and stuff were normal, but nowadays, it even baffles me how much people-to-people things like online interview selections and the like have been automated away.
Edit:- I was also in a European office so it's possible that we didn't get to experience some of the more dystopian facets.
I can guarantee your compliance department was monitoring all of your private communications and not telling you about it. This is just what happens in the finance industry, but the data is not used the same way it is in other places. Your manager and his manager (and so on) may not even know that any sort of surveillance happened. This is not the usual type of workplace surveillance, which is management-driven.
> I can guarantee your compliance department was monitoring all of your private communications and not telling you about it. This is just what happens in the finance industry
It’s a little bit like the government’s argument that they collect data but they don’t read it
Lots of companies track you, the flow of data, your use of USB ports, web traffic, etc. But they don’t do anything with it 99% of the time. The one time Google or Goldman Sachs realizes you’ve exfiltrated source code or something though, they have the full paper trail they can pull up at will should they choose to pursue it
iPhones had to go to IT to be upgraded to the new iOS ... everytime they would "test" that the install worked by browsing through your photos (always check the deleted folder too ...) and messages
Oh yeah, definitely. We had strict regulations about what we could talk about, where we could talk about it and how we were supposed to. There was always the looming threat of FCA regulation. But tracking and other privacy-breaching forms of surveillance and tracking were definitely not bothered with - in fact, a number of firms would have rather not tracked employee work hours because of all the conversation around junior level fatigue at the time. Most of the tight-lipped tracking of email and other communication came from compliance largely because of regulations against insider trading and the like.
Edit:- we all had personal phones that we could use out of work, which compliance did not track. But it was strictly enforced to not communicate to any business connection using that. They would just fire us if we were caught and shun liability that way.
This is the answer. That level of tracking is not common in industry generally, but it is pretty standard in the heavily regulated banking sector. (The stuff described on Reddit, of course goes way beyond even that.)
Doesn't have to be a big Corp. Monitoring of screen activity, keystrokes, email/messaging communications, personal email/accounts via mitm, webcam, etc was done by my last employer. Management used it to play politics. Even learned from IT some managers used it to read the CEOs emails between them and their SO.
> Monitoring of screen activity, keystrokes, email/messaging communications, personal email/accounts via mitm, webcam, etc was done by my last employer
Honestly, why would one go anywhere near one's personal email account - or indeed one's personal anything - from any device owned or controlled by someone else, barring a complete emergency?
In the old times people used their work email for everything - browse the ashleymadison leak from way back and you will likely find people registered using their @jpmorgan work email.
Very common in these circles (banking), and in most places it is even forbidden to log in to your private accounts from a company network. The popular options (eg. gmail, social media) are obviously blocked. This makes sense on multiple levels, for example stops you just uploading internal documents to your private account...
Mitm is done via the proxy, which has its own SSL certificate, using company CA, so anything you send or receive is obviously captured and repackaged by the proxy. One more reason not to do anything related to your private life on company systems. TBH it is not that big a deal in this age of tablets and mobile phones and mobile subscriptions.
A bit more annoying is the blocking of Stackoverflow, for example (you can read stuff, but you can't post / ask), for this reason internal QA sites exist, with more or less success.
And by far the most annoying thing is that you cannot post to HN, well, at least it is not univserally blocked, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this post now... :)
At a prior company, this was the case. If you wanted to access a personal website, they had a fleet of repurposed Citrix servers running Windows Server 2012 that had nothing but Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox for this purpose. The account you used was ephemeral and wiped after 4 hours of inactivity with the servers located in the company DMZ. You had full access (less the usual NSFW filters). You could not browse anything that was not whitelisted through your local computer and even then, it all passed through a proxy to make sure it was safe.
You also couldn't use unapproved tools so you were limited to VS Code and PuTTY on Windows.
Eventually they got smart and issued Macbook pros to programmers and implemented zero-trust policies for related internal services. Unfortunately, technical managers and product managers were not so lucky.
>A bit more annoying is the blocking of Stackoverflow
If you care about your organization you would stop using stackoverflow. The license on stackoverflow responses are CC-SA. How many are copy and pasting these stackoverflow responses directly into their proprietary code base? Even reading the responses could taint your codebase.. but I haven't seen that level of litigation in 20 years
It's pretty common for corporate networks to have MITM devices snooping on all traffic by default (usually exceptions are made for known medical sites and for high-bandwidth traffic like YT). This is a big enough use-case that special provisions were made for it in TLS 1.3.
Normally not, but: to make the MITM work, your PC is pre-configured to trust the company's certificate authority as a trusted root. This is not a per-connection setting, it's a global setting in your browser(s) & OS. So, IF they have a technical way to intercept your traffic even if not connected to the VPN, this will keep working.
Of course, in some other cases, a client proxy is configured instead of/in addition to a VPN, in which case obviously all your traffic will be sent to this proxy before reaching the internet.
If you are using hardware provided by the firm, you ARE on the VPN. If not, network is blocked (as are all private hardware items like pen drives, for obvious reasons).
As a former employee of some of the largest European corporations I can assure you they usually operate way pass legal boundaries. The absolute worst that can happen to them is to get fined, which is not enough deterrent as usually the fines eat a tiny portion of their profits. No one goes to jail either, a major corruption scandal may send a CEO on early retirement with a full compensation package and/or to work for a competitor. So assuming European companies won't spy on employees just because it is illegal is pretty naive. Always assume you are being monitored by your employer, because more likely than not you are.
Thanks for confirming that euro nationalism is at the "murica fuck yeah" stage that was common back in the 2000. Though it is even less grounded in reality in this case lol.
There are multiple but the main one is that all communication related to the activity of the bank needs to be recorded and be auditable. There are limitations for expediency. For example, only phone calls with customers or peer organisations are usually recorded. Most phone calls aren't as it's very expensive and not massively useful (although AI may change the calculus on usefulness). But all email, IM, BBG chats etc are recorded.
And it's as pervasive as it is primarily because of the scandals of the credit crunch. Similar controls existed before then but they were less pervasive and not as strictly enforced.
> There are multiple but the main one is that all communication related to the activity of the bank needs to be recorded and be auditable.
That’s very different from constantly recording audio and video of the employee which is what the grandparent described as dystopian. I’d also argue the focus here is on audits / transparency, rather than employee productivity.
Any workers council, and union, I onow woupd slap managers backsidesnfrom here to Mars and bavknforbthat. Before, during and after suing said employer to death. With basically a guaranteed win at any labour court.
Since everybody knows that, only the most sketchy employers consider something along these lines. Again one ofnthe reasons I am really happy with my job and the country I have it in.
This is a perfect example (finally) of why even white collar workers need unions. Yes, even you in finance. Yes, even you in software engineering. It’s not just about pay!
There are perfectly good reasons for having unions in finance. This is definitely not one of them.
The heavy monitoring of communications, access etc is mandated by regulators primarily for the protection of customers. There's zero chance a union, or any other body below government, will get them to change that. I doubt they'd even try and nor should they.
Monitoring of workplace comms is fine and legal, ditto for access logs; (taking this post at face value) monitoring of facial expressions, undisclosed webcam and microphone monitoring at home, abusing access to workers’ personal phones, and feeding all this in to a black box for a score that your manager basically pinky swears to not use as part of your review is not okay.
I agree. I wasn't responding to the original post, I was responding to a comment about monitoring.
I also don't believe for a second that JPM are doing what the original post is saying they're doing in regard to private devices. It would be astonishingly expensive and illegal in some jurisdictions. And thousands of people would need to know, in detail, for it to be useful so wouldn't just have come out in a subreddit. It would be widely known in the industry (and it isn't).
Unions can do whatever they want. The rules are different. Sort of how the FBI meets with leaders of a terrorist militia to negotiate because they are afraid of a shootout (it's called "power"). An individual would just be arrested.
> common place for employers to record audio and video at the office
Curious for a source on that. My BigCorp has disallowed Zoom recordings, since they don't want legal liability of anything embarrassing leaking out. Or the usual reason of having to produce all those recordings when they get sued.
You might want to check your Task Manager if you've got a windows device provided by your employer.
Even in europe you quiet often have CarbonBlack installed (cb.exe) as an Administrator, which provides the employer with full access to everything you do, including screengraps etc.
You just might not be aware that this is true over here as well, even if its technically illegal for the employer to do so. they usually dont care any way.
Carbon Black is one of the most evil pieces of software I've ever seen. Back in the late 90s, early 2000s there was a trojan that did pretty much all the same stuff this thing does.
The worst part about it is that I could barely use my machine! Typing `ls` in a terminal made me wait 5 seconds. Using Vim was soooooo bad.
Here's a PowerShell script courtesy of ChatGPT to detect if Carbon Black is installed on your machine:
# Define the registry path where installed programs are listed
$registryPath = "HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall*"
# Get the name of all installed programs from the registry
$InstalledPrograms = Get-ItemProperty -Path $registryPath | Select-Object -Property DisplayName
# Check if Carbon Black is among the installed programs
$CarbonBlackInstalled = $InstalledPrograms -match 'Carbon Black'
if ($CarbonBlackInstalled) {
Write-Output "Carbon Black is installed."
} else {
Write-Output "Carbon Black is not installed."
}
It sounds just crazy to me. Reason 10231 I'm thankful my employer doesn't issue us "Work laptops", and just outright buys us ours which we happen to use for work _and_ personal use.
If you ever get popped then your entire laptop is sent off for forensics, and if you delete personal data it will appear as if you were tampering with it and will get fired anyway.
Always use a separate machine for work, and another for personal.
And any personal work you might have done using your work laptop now has a legal opening for your employer to claim ownership to, since you developed it using company assets.
I built and sold a company on "Work machine" since I've been employed here in the last 7 years. This setup only works because of the company and the culture. I can sympathize that it wouldn't work for larger employers.
Definitely the case in the US. I don't know about Europe. It can feel silly thinking about this in our industry with laptop usage. However, for the general legal reasoning consider something like using a company server farm or a chemistry lab for research on your side project. The difference is only in scale.
> you ever get popped then your entire laptop is sent off for forensics, and if you delete personal data it will appear as if you were tampering with it
You have the right to have your counsel filter what’s turned over for personal content.
This varies by country for sure. At my current company, you do not have this right. The device and all data on it belongs to the company and they can do what they want with it.
This is fine if your work is at a small company of some sort, but your personal data is at risk of be combed through if the company is ever subpoenaed or forced to participate in discovery and the discovery gets to "direct access". Even if not compelled by a court, when your company gets big enough, they may request you hand over said laptop for their own internal investigations over things like NDA compliance or workplace misconduct.
It could also come back to you in terms of IP ownership of personal code - using company-provided hardware can be a big factor for cases where the company claims that some amount of work you did was work-for-hire and thus owned by them.
Curious, why wouldn't you rather them buy you (or issue you) a work laptop and you get a personal laptop? Just don't use work hardware for not work things. (Unless you don't make enough to buy a personal laptop I guess, but of the jobs where they issue you hardware I bet they probably pay you enough to buy your own.)
My work overlaps so much that it would simply be a hassle to have two different machines. A lot of problems I solve on my own end up being used in our code base, and vice-versa. But I also work at a small company (less than 90 people), so we're more nimble than other companies I imagine.
Especially if you do a lot of travel, having to consciously partition what you use your devices for is just inconvenient. Circumstances differ of course. But I've never had an issue intermixing personal and work use.
What happens if you try to start a side business? Any work you do with your work laptop has questionable copyright.
What happens if your company realizes they need to track leaks of their data for compliance? Do they need to force you to install software that looks at every file you download on your personal machine?
Separate machines is better for both the employee and employer.
Personally I struggle with the blurring of work and personal time so allowing myself up access personal social media, news, study materials makes it harder to say for sure when I've given my employer the amount of hours owed and can go do something else.
A lot of people don't have this issue, but I can't be the only one that does. I find strictly compartmentalising everything the only way to go.
Travels a good one. Also, it's nice to be able to use personal devices for work stuff. Say you want to read a doc on your iPad or respond to an email on your phone. I totally understand the security perspective though.
Totally depends on circumstance. Senior government officials should almost certainly maintain clear separation. Highly regulated industries that are logging everything as in the current example. But a dogmatic position that no employee should ever intermix personal and work presences just isn't universally the case.
Surely you would think differently if you were working in a heavily regulated environment with hefty fines and even heftier publicity stakes. It would be crazy if these restrictions were not in place.
Nobody will care about your average web development shop working on the usual stuff. Why would they spend all the money and resources to track you?
Once you have worked in both environments you realize it's just not that big a deal. I do have my private laptop anyway, and I prefer to keep it separate from workplace stuff anyway - even when I was in the same position (working for a company who provided a laptop that I had full control over). It just seems healthy to me.
The reason why you do not want to co-mingle personal and work compute resources. If you are part of a legal discovery request at your organization, any device used to access corporate resources is at risk for retention. Suddenly all of those private photos and messages are not so private. So do yourself a favor and never ever ever mix your work resources with your personal devices. Never.
Absolutely and I feel exactly the same way. I have a base station for my Android phone and a KVM switch, both very cheap.
A double click of the middle mouse button and I can instantly switch between my work laptop and my phone. Interacting with my phone with a keyboard and mouse is surprisingly fast and easy.
It’s low probability for many cases but it happens.
The most common scenario is when people conduct business via text/iMessage/WhatsApp/etc on personal equipment. It’s easy to establish that the phone number doesn’t belong to the company.
If you do that for convenience you should have a practice of regularly cleaning up your personal stuff (or work stuff as applicable) periodically. If you have a consistent practice, you avoid exposing your entire personal/work paper trail while avoiding getting tagged for destroying evidence.
> That sounds dystopian to me already (maybe because I'm not in the US?
My singular anecdote: I worked for a company I won’t name but you’d be familiar with if you work in tech. We did a lot of expansion and hiring in European offices. The EU managers were far more likely to track and show things like number of lines of code written and they’d want to publicly reward employees who worked nights and weekends. Not all of them, of course, but it was common enough that we had to spend some time training that habit out of some of those teams when they came on. We had a few projects that went bad because the teams were chasing vanity metrics like number of commits, number of lines of code written, or number of Jira tickets closed.
It happens in the US, too, but it’s definitely not a US-specific thing.
I won’t even begin to talk about some of the draconian work time measurements that happened in our Asian offices. The work culture in some countries is… harsh.
Just keep work devices separate from personal. I think there may be some regulatory aspect to recording conversations in banks.
Either way workplace isn’t personal space. What exactly are folks planning at work that shouldn’t be recorded? Some may say have unions. But only Union activity would be covered under that. I don’t think you’ll ever get a Union that can negotiate for not tracking time and activity while on the clock.
I use a system76 for personal use and an iPhone. My Apple accounts for personal and work are separate. I also use a vpn on all personal devices and use Firefox for browsing.
What about the employer’s side of the story though? The one that’s on the other side of the economic engine.
You expect to be paid in full and in exactly the right amount at the right time, but if we so much as superficially check you are actually present it is dystopian?
I know checking “results” is what should be happening, but guess what? That’s actually pretty difficult and open to all kinds of debate. You being “present” during office hours is not up for debate and easy to check. We all know you are not “making up for it” in the evenings. You are watching netflix and eating hot dogs while sending some superficial emails and notes to give off the impression you are working.
It’s not some small marginal group taking advantage every way they can every chance they get, it’s nearly everyone I know. It’s insane. But they expect to be paid in full. I am not completely opposed to introducing some metrics to track your value.
I agree time “in seat” is not the best metric, but it’s better than nothing.
This is how, in-office, you get employees showing up at 6am to drink coffee and chat. It is also how, at home, you get employees to install a mouse-wiggling script and never close their laptop.
Your problem is unproductive employees - the ones who are going to get you business results are not going to appreciate being spied on and nickel-and-dimed for their time, and the ones who are not going to do so will not be suddenly transformed by you checking how long their laptop is open for.
And it just reeks of control freak.
Also, I always like to flip it around. What do managers even do? Those layabouts, I bet they're watching netflix and eating hot dogs while sending superficial emails all day while I'm here coding and actually producing value.
"I know checking “results” is what should be happening, but guess what? That’s actually pretty difficult and open to all kinds of debate"
"It’s not some small marginal group taking advantage every way they can every chance they get, it’s nearly everyone I know."
> What about the employer’s side of the story though?
> ....
> I know checking “results” is what should be happening, but guess what? That’s actually pretty difficult and open to all kinds of debate.
If you don't know definition of "results", then how can you be sure that making people tired will somehow achieve the results?
In the end do you need "results" from work or do you just want to make people maximally tired?
"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." I do not think you can quantitatively assess the value a single person brings to an organization. Even so-called "cost centers" enable the revenue generating aspects of the organization. These metrics also fail to account for specialized subject matter experts who may be only needed in very unique situations but otherwise can have lots of downtime. Moreover, organizations waste millions of dollars a year on vanity projects and resume driven development by middle management, yet I don't see machine learning being used to identify when competing divisions or factions of managers are wasting time and resources on trying to elevate themselves and their own ideas. If companies legitimately want to understand the value a person brings to an organization, they to have an empathetic, servent-leader manager who takes the time to understand the work each person does within the organization through observation and conversation. These poorly thought through metrics do more harm than good, you'll wind up with crappy products or services as employees focus on gaming metrics as opposed to actually delivering value.
These people taking advantage of it at home(nearly everyone) are very likely doing the same thing in office. What the heck is wrong with having Netflix on and eating a hot dog while you work? You didn’t mention they didn’t accomplish what they needed to.
Companies have strong incentives to mix and match two paradigms of employment/compensation, such that they get the best of both, and their employees suffer the worst of both.
In one paradigm, people are paid per productivity unit. In the other, people are paid a set amount per time period but are required to perform above some minimum threshold.
They tend towards the latter paradigm outside of specialized scenarios... so the hope is that someone performs well above the minimum and perhaps even at some extraordinary level in this second paradigm. But the pay does not increase for the employee if he or she does overperform.
However, the minimum performance is rarely spelled out, and can (and does) increase without employees being aware that this has happened. Regardless though, the pressure is to demand that employees work in a way that would only make sense if they were paid-per-unit. That is to say, constantly, and with the minimum amount of rest that they must have without being injured or dying of exhaustion (maybe without even that!).
This is bad enough if your work is pulling onions out of the ground by hand (a job that I remember reading is sometimes paid-per-unit). It is far worse for someone salaried, working something semi-creative. I don't know that the drugs exist that might make me able to focus only on work for 8 or 9 hours at a stretch, day-in and day-out. I have my good days when I look up and its 5pm, and I never let go of a problem the entire time. And then there are the mornings where I flounder about, not even sure where to start.
Bonuses for those who can do it seem rare to non-existent. So those that can drive themselves that way are often angling for promotion, sometimes for positions that aren't even available.
They want the productivity from A, but to pay the wages of B. I don't think this is some conspiracy... they don't even realize they're doing this, when they do it. If they were that self-aware, they might start to wonder what happens when exhaust the supply of what is a rare and difficult-to-acquire resource. They can't make more of it. And once it's used up and gone, business will eventually take a big hit.
But, as un-self-aware as they are, and given the timetables involved (it can take years for the consequences to rear their heads), they'll chalk it up irrationally in their heads as that things beyond their control changed to make the business unviable. Supposing of course, that any of the original management is still there to worry. One might think it would almost be better to be managed by supervillains than by buffoons.
So, to answer your question... the problem with Netflix and hot dog eating is that if an employee is doing that, then they aren't performing at the maximum theoretical output. They're not constantly working at that level.
> As a developer my job was less the typing and more the thinking about what I was going to write.
Where was it exactly that I stated that the bulk of my work was done in my sleep?
I never said that - but rather stated that the majority of work was contemplation rather than typing.
However, at least once a week I woke with a solution to something - just because your brain doesn't function that way on a regular basis does not mean that no-one else's does (or perhaps you need to think harder?).
My point was, it didn't really matter what time I actually arrived at my desk, the actual contemplation of the issue was happening regardless of where I was.
So, for at least two hours a day outside of the office I was continuing to do the most important part of my job.
> Also good luck answering the phone at night and while “thinking what to do”.
> What about the employer’s side of the story though? The one that’s on the other side of the economic engine.
Also the side of the "economic engine" that historically cheerfully exploited workers until the labor movement enacted basic protections. IMO employers (in general) are guilty until proven innocent when it comes to workers' rights.
> I know checking “results” is what should be happening, but guess what? That’s actually pretty difficult and open to all kinds of debate.
Yeah my job is difficult too, but I don't take shortcuts because it was "pretty difficult" to do things correctly. Seems like a bad example to set for your employees if you want them to be hard workers...
> You being “present” during office hours is not up for debate and easy to check.
It's also not part of my employment agreement! I'm salaried, I'm paid for getting the job done. Of course, part of "the job" is to be available during business hours in order to participate in meetings, off the cuff discussions, and of course I value that part too. But so long as I communicate when I may be away from my keyboard for a bit, we're all able to manage this easily.
> We all know you are not “making up for it” in the evenings. You are watching netflix and eating hot dogs while sending some superficial emails and notes to give off the impression you are working.
This is such condescending arrogance it almost doesn't merit a response. But rest assured, there are plenty of us who say they'll make something up in the evening, and they do it without hot dogs and Netflix. (Also, if somebody did their job functions successfully and efficiently while eating hot dogs and watching Netflix... who cares?)
> It’s not some small marginal group taking advantage every way they can every chance they get, it’s nearly everyone I know. It’s insane. But they expect to be paid in full. I am not completely opposed to introducing some metrics to track your value.
Obviously you should track the value of employees, but you track it by results, not by this garbage. If your management isn't able to detect freeloaders who aren't getting results: that's a problem with your management and business.
As a manager I have never wanted this kind of intel. It is meaningless to me. Are deadlines being hit? What is the work quality? Are they responsive to email? If all of that is happening who cares if they are in their seat. This isn’t daycare and I am not a babysitter. If I feel like I have to constantly check on an employee to make sure they are working it is probably a sign they aren’t going to last long.
What do you mean you can’t have a time card? You aren’t paid based on it usually, but you most certainly can track your hours. This is standard in any company that bills out their employees’ services hourly (lawyers, consultants, engineers, doctors). In fact, some salaried employees get overtime by law or by company policy. How could this be paid if time wasn’t tracked?
If I can get access to these tracking systems full of recorded conversations and video, can I use this information to advance my attack?
Maybe I can even set queries on the collected data, like "mark all conversations about domain admins" or "mark all videos containing a clear view of somebody typing in a password on a terminal".
This also opens up a new trove of espionage. Imagine getting inside info on big investement.
Yeah, this is a strong counterpoint. Oftentimes companies don't want to know what their employees are doing or saying in private, all of that data is just additional liability. There just isn't a good enough reason. No company is going to fire you because you have bad posture.
This is an important perspective. Surveillance capitalism is so often justified with "as long as they don't misuse the data". No, fuck that. The data should not have been collected in the first place.
"Y.T.’s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the
memo. It’s better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that
they’re careful, not cocky. It’s better for older workers to go a little
fast, to show good management potential. She’s pushing forty. She scans
through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular
intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier
section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of
rereading. It’s a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really
shows up on your work-habits summary."
Does anybody know if the tracking extends all the way to top?
As we are now deep into a digital surveillance society an interesting (if abstract) question is if privacy will be somehow a luxury product, stratified according to socio-economic status.
Will there be a partially private middle class, a fully tracked underclass and a mostly private upper class etc.
The correlation of privacy with wealth in paper-based infromation societies is clearly there (e.g., offshore financial centers) but it is interesting to think how all this might mutate in the digital era.
OP:> "I know there was this 10-minute period where I totally look like I'm a bad employee — but really, I'm a good employee."
> Will there be a partially private middle class, a fully tracked underclass and a mostly private upper class etc.
Almost 3 decades ago I was doing a consulting gig for a telecomm in Austin. It was a call center and turned out that the operators were on a strict bathroom regiment, timed down to the seconds. After the shock was over, realization of the just how disjoint is the life experience for even contempories in the same society hit me. It was clear to me that this sort of micromanagement and assertion of control is directly correlated with socio-economic standing. 30 years later and we have JPMorgan employees -- that woman quoted likely went to an ivy league -- pleading for understanding for a "10 minute" activity. (!)
This commoditization of the 'educated but financially dependent class' is relatively new and imo reflects the economic-technical paradigm shift. The battle lines are already drawn and blows are already being exchanged over at WFH and BigBrother@Work frontlines.
> a mostly private upper class
As for WFH, we hear that execs at these companies still wfh. We don't know to what extent they are also surveilled but it would be surprising if c-suite was being monitored by IT security.
A bifurcated humanity is imho a very likely future unless there are major global events that disrupt the current (aggregate trends) curve.
What is fun to contemplate is that the very top of the pyramid is also tracked - but in a covert, unacknowledged manner. So the true privacy goldilocks regime might be just at the bottom of the top pyramid - important enough not to be a 24/7 monitored number but not too important to receive individual "attention".
Just joking. The potency of the digital realm is such that fully adaptive algorithmic surveillance will anihilate any constraints linked to historical practices.
> A bifurcated humanity is imho a very likely future unless there are major global events that disrupt the current (aggregate trends) curve.
It is depressing to be living through that transition. It blows up the illusion that society is somehow destined to progress.
That's the difference between a profession and non-professional work. Professionals are able to maintain minimum quality standards often through licenses, have some cultural authority as exerts in their domain, and through their membership in a guild exert influence on the nature of the work.
Businesses are in an eternal march to lower costs. Licenses limit labor supply. Brand value substitutes for expert knowledge. Jobs are systematically deskilled until a professional can be replaced with someone off the street, and from there simplified until the lowest quality worker can't mess it up.
At the end of the day, it's power that stratifies life experience.
Wealth is just the most obvious summary of power in capitalist societies.
Controlling the means of production (or, say, housing) is also power.
Historically, the worst excesses were prevented by labor having its own inherent power: farms didn't get harvested without labor. As we've moved further away from inherent power in every human (i.e. to industrialization, then knowledge work), that leaves a lot of people with little to no power.
And when you have none, people can exploit the hell out of you.
Personally, that's why I think UBI is going to be a required bandaid on the system -- you're going to have to afford people some level of "I will not willfully enslave myself to you, even if I don't have any skills / education."
Otherwise Amazon warehouses are going to seem free and quaint.
Privacy already is a luxury product and has been. The very wealthy can afford massive private properties to separate themselves from others, can hire people to do things for them as proxies through an array of mechanisms, etc.
Traditionally wealth in the case it draws fame made it a little less obvious. Famous people walking in public seem to have less privacy. To be realistic though it's not that fame lead instrinicly to less privacy, it's that fame drew attention and attention is what reduced privacy. The reason I can walk around the grocery store down the street and Joe Biden can't isn't privacy related, we ultimately have the same levels of privacy, it's that no one is interested that I'm picking up donuts unlike if it's Joe Biden, they will care. They have the same level of information access really.
This changes in a surveillance economy. Ultimately people who want to extract wealth from me, be it marketers, advertisers, or employers have always had some degree of attention towards me (the royal me, all of us consumers and workers). The issue is their attention was too costly to be worth looking at me. As surveillance technology grows more affordable and ubiquitous, that changes a bit and giving attention and even monitoring me becomes economically feasible. Suddenly, the privacy I thought I had (privacy through obscurity) has disappeared.
The difference between me and Joe Biden or some other famous or perhaps wealthy person is that they tend to have some degree of options of buying back or controlling privacy. Their body guards, private estates, proxies and so on. In a world where everyone has attention, the financial ability to hide one's self makes it clear that as with most things, wealth let's you buy more of these things we often considered rights before.
> Suddenly, the privacy I thought I had (privacy through obscurity) has disappeared.
Yes, that concept is truly dead. We face a tremendous challenge. Sensors and processors and networks of all sorts are so cheap and so widespread that even with the best intentions it would be tricky to preserve privacy (Let alone when various actors absolutely do not have the best intentions).
> The difference between me and Joe Biden or some other famous or perhaps wealthy person is that they tend to have some degree of options of buying back or controlling privacy
The other difference is there are lots of people who are actively trying to know things about those famous people. The risk is much higher for them, both in terms of probability and impact, of a privacy breach.
The surveillance system described does absolutely nothing to counter the most common workflow of MNPI-driven insider trading conducted by investment banking employees, e.g.:
- Investment banker is working on a deal to sell CorpCo to BuyCo at a price of $30/share. CorpCo is currently trading at $20/share
- Investment banker tells his college buddy about the deal, whether because he wants a cut of the insider trading profits or because he's just trying to throw him a bone
- College buddy gets someone he thinks he can't be linked to - e.g., his bookie's brother-in-law - to buy a lot of out-of-the-money call options on CorpCo on his behalf
- The deal closes and the call options return a ton of cash
- The SEC catches and prosecutes everyone involved because the random purchase of out-of-the-money call options was a huge red flag
None of this is addressed by invasive software that constantly takes audio and video of you when you are working.
Also, I'm pretty sure that the Pentagon does not have a keylogging / face tracking program similar to the one described.
Invasive security measures that constantly take audio and video of you when you are working absolutely helps address the “Investment banker tells his college buddy about the deal” step.
Investment banker cannot tell his college buddy about the deal around work hardware. Anybody that does gets caught. This will result in catching the dumbest criminals, but it absolutely counters one of the steps in your “most common workflow.”
I don’t agree with this level of surveillance, but let’s not act like invading someone’s privacy isn’t effective at preventing/prosecuting crime.
> Invasive security measures that constantly take audio and video of you when you are working absolutely helps address the “Investment banker tells his college buddy about the deal” step.
Literally nobody who is thinking about maybe doing some insider trading is having out-loud conversations about it while at the office. I see your point in theory, but it's a pretty ridiculous edge case.
You might be missing the point the parent is making. The point is not to address the problem, but to appease the regulator by having a tool that makes it reasonable to argue that you are compliant with regulations. FWIW, SEC did issue some fines, one could argue it is a reaction to it to some extent.
What the Pentagon does have, however, is metal detectors and enforced no-cellphone zones, along with multiple computer networks, and only one is connected to the Internet, the other is air-gapped and Intentionally not connected to it.
Most of the surveillance is because of banking compliance. I'm not convinced they actually use that data for managerial purposes. The last time I worked for a financial company, they were reasonably open about all the tracking, but never really looked at the data.
If one of many keywords got dropped in a written communication or on a recorded line my boss would get a call within 5 minutes to explain, and an incident report would get filed.
I dont want to be a corporate shill, but I do see it from the banks side to a degree. They have a trillion regulations and laws they have to follow and more than 100k employees. Surely you have to turn to automation to meet your legal responsibilities.
I have yet to see any convincing argument for monitoring employee behavior/attentiveness/time, for any job role or level, really.
The whole world needs to hurry up and learn that what matters is what your employees really accomplished. You don't need to track hours, or clicks, or chat lines, or documents opened. You need to track that they're producing the accomplishments they were hired to accomplish.
Did they fix the software bugs you asked them to fix this week? Did they sign up 10 new customers today? Did they write that research report yesterday? Did they flip all the burger patties they were supposed to flip today?
As a manager, if you can't define productivity in real terms like that, and manage employee performance based on real work outputs, you're just doing it wrong. Someone else that does it right at a competing team or org is going to eat your lunch eventually.
>As a manager, if you can't define productivity in real terms like that, and manage employee performance based on real work outputs, you're just doing it wrong.
That's easier said than done for white collar work.
It is hard to detect liars, cheats, and saboteurs in workplaces with a baseline expectation of trust and low micromanagement.
The problem IMHO is not people who do a great job on time, but people who inflate timelines, and derail projects.
If you give someone a novel problem, and they say it is difficult and will take 80 hours instead of 20, the only way to catch them in the act is to duplicate the work yourself or with another employee. Similarly, if they raise lots of questions and involve other people, it is difficult to determine if these are valid complications, or manufactured complexity, without replicating the work.
Humans are pretty good at deceit. Opportunities for deceit increase radically once you have tasks that are more complex than pushing buttons or punching tickets
If you have a singular employee doing a certain unique job, or a very small handful, then it's pretty trivial to instead manage them directly on a human level. You don't need Orwellian tech tools to have conversations with them and make a one-off evaluation as to whether they're giving it the effort and authenticity it should, and again: results matter. What were your expectations (in terms of accomplishments) in hiring this role, and are they being approximately met?
But if you have a lot of employees doing a similar job, then it just gets increasingly easier to be objective about it. Look at their actual outputs statistically, and find the outliers and focus effort on those cases. Does Joe's output sit two standard deviations below the median? Why? Maybe there's a good reason and you document it and move on, or maybe they're just being deceitful. I still don't think mouse/eyeball tracking or virtual timecards are going to help much.
So disgusting. Imagine being stressed at work because of personal reasons (e.g., you find out a family member is sick, your SO just dumped you, etc.) and your manager comes over to ask you why you're stressed out. Maybe the intentions are good, but to me, this sort of behavior clearly crosses a line. This wasn't inevitable, but blurring the line between work and personal, especially the whole work-as-family bullshit meme, has always made this outcome more possible.
I had the same problem in the open plan office at a former employer. A vicious circle sparked by me getting upset from a family related issue, and amplified by the manager opposite.
The more he would start interfering and observing me, the more upset I would get. It became a matter of getting him to leave me alone, so that I could calm down.
Once I did that, it all went away. Yes, his actions, presumably 'for my own good' caused me to get severely distressed.
Open plan offices are a surveillance and privacy nightmare already, without the need for any cameras at all.
> Upper management wants to see everyone at all levels back in the office five days a week. They have invested millions into the WADU system, and they want to get a return on that investment. That only happens whenever people are in the office as much as possible.
Lol. Millions to JP Morgan would be like dollars to the average person. Upper management there is not making any big decisions over anything involving less than 9, and maybe 10 zeros.
Just another voice in the shouting match, but my old roommate in college works directly on WADU in Columbus and this post is dramatically blown out of proportion. It’s fueled by a lot of genuine anti RTO sentiment, but the HD video feed that measures changes in stress etc are completely made up.
Just for one thing, managers can only see aggregate data for say their team, and there must be 10+ people in aggregate to have access.
so you are saying JPM does keep a log of video, audio, and monitor screens. Today, they are just too incompetent to process all of the data.
The fact that they even have this productivity measuring program is the real problem. Give this bank and others like it billions of dollars during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis that they helped to create, and these mofos do shit like this.
What's often missed when people get upset about this type of thing is how few distinct types of information you need to build up a pretty good picture of someone's life to the point of working out quite private details - it's more about getting a long time series. Simply tracking things like badge swipe times (in/out and within areas etc), time logged in/out of computers, and company email metadata could easily be enough to deduce quite a lot of private details about someone's personal life.
In that sense, 1984/Orwell gives a false sense of security because you don't need some all-seeing "big brother" style panopticon to lose a lot of privacy you think you have.
WADU tracks you in the office, but most JPM staff are 9-5 and WADU has no data on what staff do outside of work. For other reasons, JPM staff are on best behavior in the office.
There are orgs & jobs that require staff be on-call outside the office and require them to carry a "work phone" which tracks your location, etc.
Reading the comments here, I remember reading this article [1] about JPM traders using iMessage instead of official company comms. The scenario I see happening with WADU in mind is traders/employees know about this tracking and explicitly go outside of the bounds (ie use iMessage) so that WADU doesn't track them.
It can reveal a lot more than you might at first think. For example, just with badge swipe timings for the whole cohort (and email/internal office chat metadata - even if people are careful with message content) you could see who might be likely having an affair with someone at work.
Not on company time - that's the point. In this example, you can look at eg who arrives together or leaves together, then perhaps restrict that to times which are out of the norm, and correlate with when and how often they message each other as well. And that's a fairly straightforward one.
And … ? Companies have policies against workplace romantic relationships for reasons that we eventually concluded in the 90s as needed to protect women.
I still don’t understand. I’m pretty sure the crowd of outraged people have never been a manager or an employer.
Employers realistically need to collect large amounts of information for all sorts of reasons. Especially JPM as the world’s largest bank and custodian.
But even the activity level issue. These days employee can try to sue you and claim all sorts of fabricated reasons for their dismissal. By having detailed event logging you insure you have an accurate proof of empirical facts.
This whole antiwork fiction story post is a bit embarrassingly childish in my opinion.
I agree some of the stuff in the Reddit post seems fanciful at best, but my point was that it doesn't take much data to work out things people think are relatively private - and the analysis of more "mundane" stuff can be very powerful. I thought we'd learned that lesson from Snowden but apparently it's easily forgotten. Also worth bearing in mind that just because the company has good intentions, doesn't mean the people with access to these tools and data are going to be honourable all the time - we see that routinely with those in the police, intelligence services, armed forces, etc.
JPM does have regulatory obligations to collect and monitor some data (I work in the financial sector so I'm well aware of this) and I don't think it's fair to single them out here but I do think a debate around whether the privacy protections we have in place for employees are sufficient is warranted. Personally I think it's impossible to stop abuse of this type of data so the right course might well be to simply reconsider the amount of data being collected or retained despite any benefit it might bring.
On the topic of workplace relationships - very few companies have policies which outright ban them - certainly none I've ever worked for. In fact I'm not even sure whether that would be legal in much of the world.
American corporations are dystopian entities run by shareholder cartels, and the only real fix is the German approach, i.e. give worker organizations the same number of corporate board seats as the shareholder organizations have.
This would enable employees to place limits on practices like invasive monitoring, stock buybacks, etc., and lead to better decision making as well.
If this happened the pendulum might just swing the other way, with workers effectively siphoning all profits instead of reinvesting it into the company for continued growth or paying out anything to the shareholders. Maybe not the worst situation to be in from a humanity and workers' rights perspective, but the US is powerful because of its economic position, so such regulation allowing/forcing this would need impeccable checks and balances to ensure the U.S. doesn't lose its foothold as the largest world power that other countries have to cater to.
If the workers are empowered why does Germany lag behind the US, most Nordics, and other Northern European neighbors in PPP per capita? I assume work organizations would be able to get more share of profits.
I think that software engineers need to start strongly considering a professional organization/association akin to Drs and Lawyers.
Do you think that other professionals would put up with this shit? Absolutely not.
There’s also the matter of an association binding its members by a professional code of ethics. The software engineers who are tasked with building systems like these need to stand up and say no when asked to do. These systems will make life worse for you, your coworkers, and society.
> Do you think that other professionals would put up with this shit? Absolutely not.
Lots of them do?
>> very employee at JPMC has a profile in the WADU database.
This, allegedly, isnt just for swes. JPMC has legal staff who would be, "putting up with this shit" as well as other countless employees in other orgs who would have the same type of monitoring.
If anything engineers are technical enough to at least know their work computer is being monitored. Many employees dont even know that IT can likely access their computer at any time.
I guess I should have clarified, not put up with being monitored but, more to my second paragraph, be so willing and eager (maybe even write a fun technical blog about it) to construct cages for themselves and others.
Much more helpful. Only initially seeing this through the lens of the Reddit thread immediately made me question if it was legit or some clever GPT-4 disinformation.
Banking’s super highly regulated for good reason. It’s an inherently risky business built on borrowing short (I.E. your depositors can “call” their deposits at any time (see Silicon Valley Bank for a recent example of depositors calling short)) to lend long (E.G. a 30 year mortgage).
Considering 2008, the recent LIBOR scandal, and all the fines levied against large financial institutions for having bankers communicate at all for work purposes outside of captured communication lines (e.g. WhatsApp, Signal, text messages) of course everything a bank employee does on company time is regulated.
The SEC is watching as best they can the fundamental liquidity providers of the world’s largest economies.
Because when they fail, failures spread, and shit goes chaotic really quick. But if they’re not there in the first place all the money that makes our world go around doesn’t… keep moving and everything slows down.
You can argue whether or not we should be slowing down as a species or whatever but that’s a different argument and orthogonal to the conversation.
Banking’s highly regulated, and incredibly onerous about tracking all communications for discovery. If you’re a banker, you don’t have the luxury of mixing private and personal communications on the same devices.
Worked there (in Chase tower downtown Chicago) last year. The oddest thing is that it was hybrid work (where we were onsite 3 days out of the week). So good luck tracking things the other two days. I took to listening to midi files of old VG music as my "background tunes" during work, so as to not use bandwidth that would be tracked for streaming music while coding. The tracking didn't really get to me (after all, it is "their time" that they're paying for). The tough part is that it makes "Oh I need to do a personal thing for 5 / 10 minutes." a near impossibility, and a change in my personal life drove me to switch jobs for better work life balance.
So no, I don't think that this tracking is the dystopian nightmare it's being portrayed as, but it does have consequences, which make the post-covid work / life intermingling schedule impossible to maintain. The real dangers of such a policy are who they will lose as a result of it.
EDIT -
I feel the need to add, that the tracking at the time of my departure was not as extensive as some of the claims being made here, which I am a bit... skeptical of.
>after all, it is "their time" that they're paying for
On so many levels, it is not. Even if you're being paid for time, people don't "own" your time or shouldn't be allowed to "own" your time. Ultimately you own your time, they should pay for the privilege to nudge or direct your agency during that time. You should always have agency within that time to refuse to work or do whatever, otherwise we're on paths back toward slavery.
On another level, most employees these days are salaried. Businesses adopted this for several reasons but the primary reason is its a beneficial reduction of labor costs in most cases. Paying employees salary not only makes labor costs more predictable (one argument) it sets a cap on the labor expense to try and maximize work within. Under a salary model, you're really paid for function not time, even though employers want to conveniently, to their advantage, choose when they want to view you as a functional or time based cost within that salaried definition. If you're salaried, there's almost no argument for your "time" which is why most salaried employees have infinite queues of uncompletable tasks stacked on them whilst hourly employees are often scrambling just to find tasks to do, depending again on the context.
You do realize once this is normalized, it wouldn't even come as a surprise to have them eventually mandating company devices to be on when at home and so on.
As long as you really are. I’d just point out that on numerous occasions I’ve run into people who
drastically overestimate their abilities and productivity. Their self perception is fundamentally broken and it most comes down to under estimating what other people actual do and how much work it is and then when combined with your comment is a recipe for disaster. These are high IQ people who apply some rationalization like this to be lazy and somehow think others and management doesn’t notice. It’s super frustrating as one knows they are very capable but when they get fired these people are in complete shock. That tends to happen after they embark on a simple project that should take only a day or two, but after convincing themselves they are a 10x developer and a refactor like
this project would take everyone else at least 3 weeks, so no big deal if it takes 2 weeks. Opps, socially awkward is trying to explain to them that everyone knows you aren’t working … and now you are fired … might be a reason you have been let go previously… even though you’re clearly capable.
Sorry for the rant. Just pointing out people who think they are 10x are probably more like 2x when pushing themselves and can risk being 0.3x when applying your attitude.
That is a good point. People like that are generally measuring the wrong things when comparing themselves to others. Being 10x better at dependency injection is of no value to many businesses and can lead to unexpected firing if you don't understand that. No that I agree with how every business prioritizes metrics, just that it can happen that one team member is capable of doing 60% of a team's work in some situations.
I was referring to metrics that are valued by the business.
I worked as consultant at several of these big banks, and a few top end private equity firms. And what I learned was I would never want to work there full time. The whole culture of these places is really awful. And it comes from the top.
Hi everyone! Just jumping in to make a comment on this. The post initially got caught in our spam filter for low karma, approved by us, then gaining tens of thousands of upvotes and tons of awards, and then removed because the OP had their account shadowbanned due to being perceived as 'spam' Screenshot of post being approved here: https://you.banned.today/6FE6X2f.png
On one hand, the engineer/data scientist in me thinks more data is good.
On the other hand, having managed teams, this seems like major compensation for lack of performance measurement and goal setting.
The reality is probably that from a large white-collar corporations perspective employees are viewed more as factory workers, simply expendable warm bodies designed to fill a seat, rather than dynamic knowledge workers.
At some point, these types of jobs will simply be automated away.
I worked for JPMC from 2016 to 2019 and they had nothing like this. Not saying they couldn't have rolled it out in the past 4 years... oh wait, there's no way they're competent enough to roll ANYTHING this complicated out in 4 years.
There's probably some internal system called WADU that the poster is dramatically exaggerating. They have lots and lots of useless internal systems.
There is always a question of what is acceptable. My current employer seems to employ wide range of scanning, but it seems to mostly targeted at ensuring there is no 'data leakage'.
All I can tell you for sure is that JPM is off my potential employer list although admittedly that is partly because compared to other peers its pay does not even begin to offset that level of intrusion.
I was recently let go by JPMC last month b/c I was doing a javaScript tutorial on w3schools.com when I had no other work to do and the alternative was being on my phone the rest of the day. It's completely oppressive and management is extremely toxic. Constantly going behind each-others back to HR -__-.
This whole WADU system and secrete "employee scorecards" that can only be viewed by management is total bs. JPMC can get away with it now that they employ so many people but nothing lasts forever and the bigger they are, the harder they fall eventually.
Banks are highly regulated entities. Post 2009 they are almost required to track their employees by law. The government wants to know whether their employees are breaking the firewall between the sell and buy sides, it wants to know whether they are doing insider trading, etc.
Even if JP Morgan did not want to track their employees at all, they would still be tracking them because they're legally required to (most regulation isn't "track your employees"...it's more like "you must ensure your employees in these 2 divisions are not communicating with each other"). And since they've setup the infrastructure anyways it's inevitable they will also use it for their own uses and try and use some of the cost for their benefit.
I have a keycard for work, so that means I'm tracked. Every time I go through the campus gate. Every building I enter. Cafeteria scans. Active Directory signons. Computer unlocks/wakes. Someone, or something, is crunching those numbers. Just waiting to flag a discrepancy in my timecard, a missing entry/exit...
Part of it is the under the guise of safety, they want to know where people are in case of an emergency, but the information will be used for whatever they deem necessary. In bad economic times, that data has been used to find people in violation of policies in order to let them go.
Ironically, I bet the physical sign-in books get archived and never processed anywhere.
That's funny.
Why to waste so much money on obvious things?
I mean, a regular, moderately emphatic, non-narcistic boss just goes by a desk of the guy to see if he's stressed, or notices it during a meeting. It can be also seen via teams/zoom, just requires a bit more attention.
Why to build big and costly tech around simple things that sane humans are doing all the time subconsciously within seconds?
Except that the tasks of low-to-mid-managers are far beyond reading the moods of employees, and many/most of these tasks are still far beyond what "AI" can do.
This is not for productivity measurements. Banks are regularly paying billions in fines for various infractions, like money laundering, insider trading, trader collusion, sanction violations, workplace harassment etc. This is their attempt to reduce those fines.
FWIW, I learned the startup I was at was doing this when I was fired after not even 60 days (as a Senior SWE mind you) for "browsing personal internet too much" in addition to a bunch of other stupid reasons.
Like how much time did InfoSec have on their hands?
This is /r/antiwork, which is basically equal parts socialism advocacy, creative writing, and unfocused gen-z frustrations that the world doesn’t operate like they wish. It is not a source of accurate or useful information.
Every time I read things like this I wonder what the managers themselves are thinking since they themselves are employees and have their own managers. And in a company of that size there's A LOT of managers.
I’ve always been curious what the true boundaries of Citrix are when WFH. Can an employer see what other apps are doing outside the Citrix view if running on one’s own hardware? Could they monitor web browser usage?
AFAIK no. It might collect some telemetry data but those can be generated and viewed by yourself anyway. Things like username, computer name, OS etc.
There is this utterly annoying thing called App Protection that injects a driver into your OS low level functions that aims to prevent things like keyloggers, screenshots and recordings. The problem here is that it often breaks some OS functionalities doing it. I used to work for company A as a resource for company B. Company B's Citrix literally prevented my computer from using Teams to speak with company A. Also if you have the big galaxy GPU and experiencing 2FPS on your games? Yeap... app protection is at it again.
Funny thing is that it blissfully runs on a VM from where you can do whatever you want including the things it should prevent you to. Shrugs.
A lot of people are arguing that the particulars are overblown, but you can bet these things are already being done in China, and they will eventually all be done in companies like Chase.
Does sound like there is at least a bit of speculation in there though. Stuff like automatic reporting when you say something bad about coworkers seems a bit far fetched
China's "Social Credit System" is exaggerated by the media[2]. Meanwhile in the US, "credit scores" materially affect the lives of every resident, determining who can own a house for example[3]. In the US, only 23% of people own their home outright[4]. In China 90% own their home with no mortgage and no property tax[5].
Line managers, even managers of managers, would have 0 loyalty to the company and could easily prove this is all true. The thousands of employees could prove the webcam flash every laptop login.
Things like this would be VP+ (who would have an org of 1000 or more, why would they even look if one of their reports body language is different this morning?) if it even existed under such a secretive blanket. Plus banks are literally known in the tech world as having the absolute oldest and crumbling tech
And lastly, as someone who works in the CV world, even having all those cameras up, successfully streaming, uploading, and inferencing as described in that post would be a technological marvel