Nearly 20 years ago we used to install monitoring software to tell if a user's mouse or keyboard hadn't been used in a while. More and more places use traffic inspection "for security". Desks now use sensors to tell when warm bodies are near. Doesn't matter whether you're working from office or in the home, surveillance is here to stay.
Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. Bad businesses will continue to use draconian methods to try to squeeze productivity rather than foster it. Quit the bad ones, join the good ones.
in the United States. Europe has very strict rules about surveiling employees.
Example: In Austria we are not allowed to use some of the functions that Azure-AD joined computers would be capable of because employers _might_ push remote control software the user hasn't agreed to
Same here. Employers can't even look inside user's mailboxes because there is no guarantee that it doesn't contain anything personal. Even if the company has a rule that you're not allowed to use it for personal things, the law supersedes that and you still can't do it willy nilly.
> Even if the company has a rule that you're not allowed to use it for personal things, the law supersedes that and you still can't do it willy nilly.
Companies are not homogeneous blocks of matter and there is always information some people at the company may need to know that others have no business dealing with. Tax, banking and health related information are some of the things that I can think of that would be shared on a need to know basis with people at work and have no business to be seen by people outside of the intended audience.
> Tax, banking and health related information are some of the things that I can think of that would be shared on a need to know basis with people at work and have no business to be seen by people outside of the intended audience.
I am against workplace surveillance, but why would people receive this information to their work email address?
Honestly I wasn't sure how much that point applied. However with people that suffer chronic illnesses or disabilities that require special consideration I would be surprised if it was always possible to adequately communicate those needs without also mentioning information that the employee might not want to share publicly.
You can communicate special needs (e.g. "do not put this person in a loud room"), but not health information (e.g. "this person has epilepsy"). I struggle to think a special consideration a person could need that you could not just articulate instead of whatever medical issue they have (at least it has never come up for me).
I don't think this is correct - even under the GDPR. If the company has good reason to look inside someone's mailbox (I don't think the bar for that is particularly high for a company email account) then any personal data they encounter would be being processed under "legitimate interest" as long as they don't do anything unnecessary with it in order to achieve whatever it was they were doing.
Tue bar is actually quite high. Teo things can block it: if there is a workers council, it has to approve surveillance of an employees use of IT systems. That surveillance can only be target to specific, named users and for specific purposes, almost like a mini search warrant. If there is no workers council, at the latest stage a court will have a very, very close look at what isbpresented as evidence. The middle ground is an affected employee's lawyer and the employer. Result being, that kind of comms / IT surveillance is basically never happeneing. Which is a very, very good thing!
You need to be specific about what legal jurisdiction you're talking about here then - the world is a very big place and different laws apply.
I'm not aware of any EU wide laws that prevent what you're talking about here. In the UK an employment contract will state that the employer can monitor your activity if they need to and this is completely legal.
In some countries (Germany springs to mind) there are much stricter rules. A blanket statement like the one you've made here is not correct unless you're being very specific about where you're talking about.
As a foreign developer living in Austria I'd like to offer a counter perspective: that might be why Austria, even in the tech scene has some of the lowest and least flexibly WFH possibilities I've ever seen in any EU job market: so the bosses can keep a close eye on you at the office, because they can't via SW.
Every job I applied to, even the most liberal ones mandates at least 2 day per week at the office in the best case, with some SW companies having max 1 day per week WFH because "we're more efficient at the office" lol. Every time I ask at an interview if they let me work 100% from home, so I don't waste 2h/day commuting, they look at me like I asked them to let me f*ck their mom.
Also, many Austrian companies keep rigid track of your time and breaks at the office via electronic card punch in/out systems which are a government mandated legalized forms of workplace surveillance, meaning I have to spend 8h per day at the office regardless of my work being done in 5 and unable to do anything remotely productive for the remaining 3 because my brain is fried, while some companies even make you punch out for coffee breaks so you're not taking a break on your employer's dime, meaning you need to spend even more time at the office what's beyond your legal allowed 30 min lunch break which is also not included in your 8h closely-recorded workday.
So IMHO, it's not all as progresive as you make it sound. It feels like an archaic system designed to keep unionized factory workers strictly in line to their mandated 30 min lunch breaks and making sure no overtime occurs on their shift, but is severely out of place in the world of digital knowledge work where it's used in some companies to keep employees at the office glued for 8 hours to their chairs.
Are you paid by the hour? Any job I've ever had with such rigid time tracking requirements was a hourly paid position.
This sort of thing backfires on the employer in my opinion. It's quite easy to stretch a task to fill 8 hours if you have to be there anyway. But maybe you'd be happy to clock out after 5 hours one day and take a few extra unpaid hours for yourself. If your work is done, the employer should be happy to save a little money and let you do that.
All work time is tracked by law in Austria, it's just that all-in is less invasive on the time tracking because it doesn't care for overtime because it's not paid.
Interviewing around Munich and big players have policies between 3 days in the office on the strict end and “please, show sometimes in the office” on easy going end. C’mon, it’s big step forward already from 5 years ago when people had occasionally Fridays home office. However I am stuck in the company with toxic culture from 1995, they really exist! Full back to the office!
I once had an employer, for a short time, that sold a flexible working time model. No clocking of exact hours, back when that was still normal, WFH. The day I started they handed me the detailed docs to sign: core presence hours at the office wherw more than the 40 hours I signed up for (the amounted to basicall, 10 net hours per day), WFH required Managing Director approval and was never granted. The culture was so toxic, no recyvling company wpuld have ever touched it... The head of im-house sales was regularly asked, well more like ordered, to walk the Managing Directors dog... Horrible place.
That is a non-issue regarding privacy and the intention is to ensure compliance with employee protection laws capping the maximum weekly working time.
You write down when you started working and you write down when you stop. Some employers automatically subtract your legally required break time, some want you to enter it manually.
(I’m from Europe, have lived in US the past 8 years)
> Is there a concept equivalent to US, salary employee?
Yes. It’s called full-time employee. This encompasses anyone and everyone who does not work as an independent contractor.
> If so what are they expected to work?
40 hours per week.
With mandated minimum lunch time and breaks, paid minimum vacation, paid medical leave, paid maternity/paternity, govt mandated lunch allowance, govt mandated transportation allowance based on commute distance, and many other “perks” that US companies use as negotiation tactics.
If you work more than 40 hours per week, you can request overtime pay. Many employees waive the overtime thing for various reasons. In some industries because they’re exploited (restaurants and such), in other industries because they’re Mission Driven and want to work more (startups and such).
The law is there to protect you, but in practiceit comes down to your relationship with your boss.
edit: Personally, I don’t like this paternalistic/maternalistic attitude from either approach (as laws or as perks). Just pay me a shitload of money and let me figure out the rest. I’m old enough to buy my own lunch thank you.
"Salary" or "exempt" in the US is a sub-status of "Full Time Employee". FTE in the US has much of the same of what you say - less, but still some protections, most significantly requirements around paying overtime, and paying more for it: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/overtime - "Unless exempt, employees covered by the Act must receive overtime pay for hours worked over 40 in a workweek at a rate not less than time and one-half their regular rates of pay."
Salary = exempt = no overtime for you, sucker. Over time, more and more people have fallen under that category in the US.
Is there something like that in the EU, where you don't have max hours or overtime eligibility at all?
There are some very limited cases where overtime doesn’t apply. For example, managing directors are outside the scope of most labor regulations as they’re not technically employees.
At least in Germany, managerial employees (mostly defined through hiring and firing authority) are traditionally exempt though this might be in conflict with the relevant EU regulations. We’ll see.
What I’m seeing commonly today is that your contracts will say the work week is 40 hours but x hours of overtime a month are already compensated.
> where you don't have max hours or overtime eligibility at all?
No, the EU is pretty strict about those things. Only way you can be ineligible for overtime is if you own the business. And even then you’re technically eligible, but I’ve never heard of anyone paying themselves overtime.
In practice the “exempt” part happens in a grey area: The boss and the employee shake hands to “make things simpler” and write down 40h every week in whatever tracking thingy. Worked less than 40? Great, you get 40. Worked more? Great, you get 40. wink wink
Also contractors though. I got into a quarrel with the lowlife recruiter that tried to coax me into accepting going on pager duty. They had no room for negotiation, whatever the customer said was the deal. I left… but it must have cost them a fortune in productivity loss. Penny wise, pound foolish
> If you work more than 40 hours per week, you can request overtime pay
Or you can request TOIL - Time Off In Lieu. That is a system designed to allow flexibility. Some jobs can't simply clock off when doing certain tasks. Provided it is agreed upon at contract negotiation time (ie the hiring process) then TOIL/overtime rates can work well for everyone.
Our (UK for me/EU) Employment Tribunals have a lot of power and a lot of law that generally favours the employee but also strives towards equitability. For the last 20+ years I hire but I still recall what being hired is like. I have found time and time again that being fair and open pays back in absolute spades. A pissed off employee is simply a burden and a cost. You can't please everyone all of the time but if you are known for fairness, that goes a long way.
I won't give you a shitload of money until you earn it for me 8) I too buy my own lunch and all other meals as required to live. I sometimes (always) need to be forced (cough reminded) to claim when we are contracting on a job that has allowances built in.
Some top tips for employees (EU/UK - perhaps others too): Do make sure you get things ironed out at the hiring stage. At the very least some things defined, written down and signed: Get place of work defined eg town/city - in the event of TUPE you may be required to move but if you have a defined place of work then you have all the aces! Get rates defined and a formal process for review. Hours of work. Responsibilities. Industry specifics. Read up on HR and how it works: you will be sat across the table with an expert in the law and how to err get the best out of you for the company which may not match up with your ideas. Do read up on all your govt provided advice - the GOV.UK stuff is pretty decent.
Basically: you have a duty to yourself to do your own due diligence, so please do it! You can expect to be treated reasonably fairly but you may not like the outcome so get the pack stacked fairly or at least not against you.
In the EU you should not be asked to work more that the maximum hours defined in the European Working Time Regulations. There is usually a range in these directives so member states can choose to go to the high or low end. But there is a range that has to be put into law for each country.
Basically you shouldn't lose your job for refusing to work more hours than are defined in the regulations, if you do there is a tribunal process. But, if the employee is willing there are ways around it.
A lot of contracts I'm seeing nowadays include the opt out of this working time directive.
They say you can opt in or out at any point by providing a written request to HR, but defaulting to opt out at the point when all the power is with the company (the candidate is signing the initial contract, and may not want to rock the boat) seems wrong IMO.
Whether ypu opt in or out of recording hours (not sure if ypu actually can opt out, courts will propably decide that soon enough), you cannot opt out of the max working hour limits put in law. One of the exceptions being upper management, and in Germany, funny enough, doctors...
The legal limit in Germany is 10 hours net, pkus whatever break time is applicable. One exception are mainly surveilling duties, e.g. monitoring security cameras, where the limit is 12 hours. One theoretical "work around" is declaring Saturdays normal working days, as they legally are. Those 10 hours are (used to be, not surw if that changed) calculated on the average of 5 days, by using Saturday as working day on which people are not working the average is calculated based on six days with one day adding 0 hours to tje total. Not sure if that was ever tried in court so.
Disclaimer: The above applies to Germany.
Fun fact: If employees violqte those limits, the line manager is liable personally. That liability includes fines, I know of one case where said fine was 10k Euro, and theoretically even jail time.
It must akin to the Spanish similar regulation I guess, but the idea is to force employers recognize and pay extra worked hours, not to spy on the employees.
How so. It is not tied to office hours. I am bound to similar process being located in Spain and put my hours whenever they are. My job involve on-call shifts, work with people in different timezones and releases/maintenance out of regular office hours. It works just fine.
The only thing that annoy me is the software my employer chose can only be accesed from inside the corporate network and do not provide a rest api. Otherwise I'd setup a large physical button with a led light connected to a pi zero so I can just hit it on starting and stopping my work.
it sure forces the issue that most ppl in white-colar jobs dont put in the contracted hours, because of reasons. which was and is fine, but now there is documented lying required, which creates mistrust and vulnerabilty.
What leads you to believe that people who do not want to work are desirable to have in the workplace? UBI also doesn't give you wealth, it gives you basics, and overal that's much cheaper than dragging down an entire team or department.
At the same time, we currently have plenty of people who do not want to work and do indeed not work, that will not change regardless of what you implement. I also think that happy and healthy non-working people are worth more to humanity than unhappy or unhealthy working people.
It's hard to infer someone's particular motivations. I'd rather work with code that was carefully crafted than something that was nervously hammered away at while looking over their shoulder just to catch a breath.
> What leads you to believe that people who do not want to work are desirable to have in the workplace?
Many of them are still better than having nobody and if they have to work to get money they are also somewhat incentivized to at least do the bare minimum.
Counterpoint: Some management handbooks consider both unmotivated and motivated workers problematic. Would you rather deal with a highly motivated moron or a substantially less motivated Einstein?
They ain't desirable. But who wants to pay them do nothing? Many people ain't happy to cover existing welfare. Increase welfare and even more people would feel it's unfair.
You know, it's not just labor that contributes to economic output. Natural resources and accumulated knowledge and technology contribute too. Both belong to everyone with equal share. Giving people what their share of resources and technology has produced is only fair.
How does anyone have any claim to 'their share' of resources without any input? Just by being in existence, they deserve to consume natural resources / technology? I don't see how that makes sense.
> Just by being in existence, they deserve to consume natural resources / technology?
Yes. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We also must acknowledge the tragedy of the commons, and that just by existing both utility is being extracted from them (in the modern era) and natural resources that there is no question that they have a right to (air, water, etc) are being utilized and modified by others. E.g. a coal processing plant provides a lot of utility (electricity) but the economic model does not account for the costs that this has on both a global (carbon) and local (pollution) consequences on shared goods (that are innate rights).
> How does anyone have any claim to 'their share' of resources without any input?
Counterpoint: not a single person born was asked to be put here. None. Every one of us was put here because 2 people chose to have sex (with or without consent) and left us as a result.
To that original sin of non-consent, the least those already here owe us is the minimum to live, without any "input".
> Just by being in existence, they deserve to consume natural resources / technology? I don't see how that makes sense.
The sun provides nearly limitless energy. Natural resources can be used to make things. The 'free' resources are already there. To say that every human gets a 'share' of resources upon birth isn't exactly a foreign thought, either. The richie's with trust funds get this... But somehow daddy dearest having others work hard for him means he benefits.
Wow, so we reduce human beings and life to what, something without value of its own? You do know where that ideology ultimately leads, don't you? Hint: it leads to very bad, very dark places...
Honestly, I have no idea how people are so willing to sacrife human rights, right literally millions of people had to die in order for us to have them, for the sake of profit and capitalism, benefits only an extremely limited number of people actually have.
Is it a human right to be fed & sheltered by others? Without giving anything in return?
What about human rights of those at the other side of a stick? Is it a human right to demand something from another human being? Is it a human right to have to provide to someone?
UN can go fuck themselves. Corrupted fuckers, sometimes literally (e.g. blue helmets). Silly forum, run mostly by dictators nowadays.
Once somebody's „human rights“ has to be provided by someone else and is someone else's work... It's no longer a „human right“. It's forced labour from the providing side. This modern version of so-called „human rights“ is a disgrace to once great idea.
Not who you responded to but, who died and made the UN king? Are they the final say in the determination of human rights? There are countries that are not members of the UN, do these human rights apply to people in those countries? If so, by what authority? If another group of countries forms a group and makes a declaration of human rights that is the antithesis of this one, does it have the same merit?
I love people just asking "questions", the laziest version of dark rethoric there is. What's next, define human, define right?
But ok, I'll bite. Nobody made the UN king, the UN so contains a vast majority of nations. As stated, those rights are universal, and apply to everyone, including you. Since th UN signed of, basically every nation did as well. That a lot are not respecting them is a different story, but doesn't neuter those rights.
Also, those rights, one way or the other and to various degrees, are already enshrined in western democratic constititions (I don't whether or those sets of law are actually called that).
And no, human rights are not defined by a majority vote. Otherwise we would have the human right to be held as slave, to be lynched because of skin color, sexual orientation or religion, imprisoned because of your political opinion without trial and a whole lot of other nasty things.
Currently, the UN isbthe hoghest, most universal body tondefine such things we have. If sometjing better comes along, fine. For the UN to be born, we needed WW2 and millions of murdered civilians. That answers your question of who died, childreny, the elderly across fronts and beligerent nations all over the world. And the same kind of people continue to die because they don not have those rights everyone in the free democracies takes for granted.
And let's not be dicks by denying our fellow human beings the most basic freedoms and human dignity. Argueing for that isn't edgy, it is pathetic and only shows incredible levels of priviledge.
The point of my line of questioning was not to be edgy, it was to illustrate the utterly ephemeral nature of "human rights". These rights are not carved in stone anywhere, and even in places where they are "enshrined in western democratic constitutions" they are not applied universally and are eroded still. There is nothing stopping a powerful and large enough group from redefining these rights.
Even your own examples illustrate the fragility of these rights.
> And no, human rights are not defined by a majority vote. Otherwise we would have the human right to be held as slave, to be lynched because of skin color, sexual orientation or religion, imprisoned because of your political opinion without trial and a whole lot of other nasty things.
Surely human rights _are_ defined by majority vote, given that not all humans had the right to be free in relatively recent history in the US. What force would these human rights have if they were defined by the Sri Lankan government and held by no other?
So, are you in favor of the UN version of human rights or not? Or human rights, as they are commonly understood (you know this whole freedom, safety, security, privacy and not be surpressed and abused stuff), in general?
Hell, I feel like I'm trapped in an interview with Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro...
> They ain't desirable. But who wants to pay them do nothing?
I do. Because these sentences are in opposition, not support. If they are undesirable in the workforce (reduce productivity or whatever) then why would you want them working? If they drain x dollars from the system, UBI costs y dollars, and if y < x, then it is profitable to pay them to do nothing. Incentive structures are complex and so this is going to be more difficult than the simple equation I wrote, but it serves as a guideline. But I don't think most people want to live the basic life, the minimum.
Here's how I see it: if the measure of a man is how he treats someone who can give him nothing, then the measure of a country is how they treat those that do nothing for them. In other words: the floor. I don't believe countries should have ceilings on wealth or how quality of life, but they should have floors (they all do fwiw). That's what we should focus on more: the floor, not the ceiling.
Humans are not rational economic units. There's much more at play. My issue with UBI (and too lax welfare in general) is cultural issues. Once you get multiple generations of people who never worked.. It's not good.
Personally I think USSR was somewhat close to UBI. Working was mandatory and pay was crap. But everybody looked the other way when somebody slacked or was drunk at work all the time. It was next to impossible to get fired for poor performance or drink at work and so on. The result was that good chunk of population abused this by drinking their days away and doing least possible amount of work. While other portion of population was fed up with the former and didn't give a fuck either. Productivity was very low. Aside from shadow economy where the later group worked their asses off. Doing their best to build a good life for themselves and not support slackers too much.
We are, slowly but surely, approaching a point where worl is no longer a feasible way to distrubute wealth of a society to everyone. Reasons are automation, efficiency improvements, limited growth and, yes as much as I hate it, AI.
Once we reach that point, as a society we have to answer the question of what happens to those people who find themselvesbout ofbwork. And those left with dull and dangerous jobs, usually the underpaid ones as well.
As long as you are a proponent of unlimited capitalism and still have a job, not varing is one answer. Caring about more than oneself, or taking a more long term view, aiming for some kind of social net, and UBI is an option, is only prudent. Too much social unrest is recipe for disaster, and ultimately revolution (history has examples for that as recent as the Arab Spring). Smart ruling classes want to avoid that, e.g. Bismarck who invented the Prussian / German to combat a raise of socialist ideologies.
Not smart elites, and wannabe elites, optimize for their own short term benefit. As did French nobility once.
I'd word it slightly differently. I agree there may shrinking pool of economically viable jobs and it's likely to shrink considerably in coming decades.
However, there's lots and lots of stuff that needs to be done for society to function properly. E.g. all sorts of community work. From organising local community events to self-support groups to picking up trash in a local park. A lot of stuff works (or doesn't, looking at mental health statistics) just because a volunteer pops up. However, if we as society suddenly had a fuckton of money available, maybe we could improve here? Hire people who can run arts classes in local community center. Or, first, build the damn community center :) Or hire more people to pick up trash.
It's not economically viable to keep streets and parks clean. Or offer free arts classes. But if we don't care about what is economically viable, maybe we could put resources there?
Of course, with UBI, maybe someone would volunteer to pick up trashes while getting a meager amount of money. Or maybe he will sit on a couch because picking trash is a boring compared to playing Guitar Hero 24/7.
However, building strong communities with passionate people may create all sorts of issues in the future. It's easier to control couch potatoes relying on government handouts for generations.
I think right here is where the issue is going to come in. Currently society at large won't be getting that money, it's mostly accreting in the pockets of an small set of increasingly ultra wealthy people
You can accuse UBI of many things but unfair it is clearly not, hence the "universal". Everyone gets the same amount - but the assumption is most will then choose to work and earn extra income on top of that.
> but the assumption is most will then choose to work and earn extra income on top of that.
Also important to stress that most (limited) experiments suggest this assumption to bee true. UBI is not as radical as many people pretend it is. It is essentially a one size fits all solution replacing all existing welfare programs with, in many cases, better outcomes.
So what's your argument? That we shouldn't try UBI because we can't for sure how it will work out until we do?
Guess what: That's true for pretty much everything. That doesn't mean discounting the evidence we do have because it's just that, evidence, is a reasonable thing to do.
How is it fair? You do give the same amount to everyone, but you do not take the same from everyone - you have to take more from those who chose to work. Hence the unfair part.
Taxation is quite separate though - we all have the same access to government provided services and infrastructure regardless of how much income tax we pay, I don't see anybody arguing that's unfair.
A just and civil society being one where the harder I work, the more taxes I pay? Where stores are closing right and left because theft isn’t prosecuted but I have to pay $7,000 to get a bathroom permitted while an RV on the street outside my house is considered a home and gets to dump shit on the street with no repercussions?
> A just and civil society being one where the harder I work, the more taxes I pay?
How about: a just and civil economic system is one where the more utility I produce the higher quality of life I can achieve?
This is very different from what you implied (being punished for creating value). Taxes and UBI aren't in opposition to this. It still rewards production and those that create value. It also recognizes that hard work isn't always valuable (digging a tunnel with a spoon is harder than with heavy machinery. But the latter provides more value). Maybe we should frame things this way instead. Progressive taxes do not result in situations where a raise in pay causes a decrease in take-home money. It does instead address the issue that money is sticky and the mere existence of capital passively generates capital (which actually means you generate wealth without doing work). Fine at certain levels but clearly can get out of control (generate wealth for retirement vs generational/perpetual wealth where your children end up wealthier than you passively).
Again, nothing to do with whether UBI is fair. I accept progressive income taxation isn't fair and in fact I'd rather we did look for better ways to structure how tax is collected. An ideal economy wouldn't tax income at all - why discourage people from earning money? And if a UBI could do better job of reducing extreme and destabilizing levels of inequality, we could probably do away with income tax, and tax things there's a reason to discourage instead.
Only a--reasonably and relatively; no society is perfect--just and civil society provides (over a sufficiently long time horizon) the kind of stability and structure that allows the rich to stay rich. Which doesn't mean that you can't get rich in other societies, of course. But, broadly and historically speaking, having to expend those riches directly on men who will harm and kill for you has something of an expiration date, usually around when they realize they can just take more than you'd be paying them.
That's to say that functional courts and a state that acts as the only legitimate applicator of force tends to be a lot better for the rich, and those too fall (or themselves turn on the rich, too) when they stray too far from the line.
> you have to take more from those who chose to work
Not the right framing, but not far off. It depends where you set the threshold and how much you extract. Remember that money is a resource where positive feedback loops exist: "you have to have money to make money", "the first million is the hardest", or "passive income." We can think of money as sticky and attractive. Momentum matters. Also remember that a capitalist market relies on competition and money to be fluid and constantly exchanged. Transactions are not zero-sum, but many times result in a positive value. This is even true in a pure fair transaction and without considering external costs like taxes.
tldr: there are sources and sinks in the economy and this is conditioned on the value in the previous time-step. Capitalism works well when value is continually exchanged: meaning sinks are bad.
Once we consider these things, "fair" gets more complicated. One can argue that it isn't fair that wealth begets wealth. That certain goods have an economic value that is not being captured by the evaluations, and are often difficult to put price tags on (e.g. air quality). Tragedy of the commons is quite real. One can also argue that it isn't "fair" that the system does not optimize for societies and instead optimizes individuals. Fair is difficult to define and none of this is as easy as it appears on the surface. Both pro and anti-UBI people make these mistakes. I'm not attacking a particular side but rather suggesting this isn't as straight forward as you have characterized.
It's fair to the extent that anyone can drop out and have the remaining workers pay for their livelihood. As more people do this, the more rational it becomes, and the closer to economic collapse we get.
If there were evidence that a substantial percentage of people would simply opt out of contributing to society at all but it still required considerable levels of human labour to support the standard of living a UBI is expected to provide then I would absolutely be against it. I don't believe the former is true though, and the latter will continue to become decreasingly so, to the point automation etc. will generate more than enough goods and services than we need for everyone to enjoy decent lifestyles.
> You can accuse UBI of many things but unfair it is clearly not, hence the "universal". Everyone gets the same amount -
I pointed out upthread that the so-called "universal" aspect of UBI is a dealbreaker. Special groups will complain, and have mass support for their complaints, if ever UBI is rolled out.
In your world, it's "fair" if 20yo gamers get the same monthly stipend as a 40yo cripple. In reality you'd have complaints from special groups that will be supported in their grievance by the clear majority of the population.
Yes, it's fair because I wouldn't expect that stipend to be required to pay for whatever extra medical costs said cripple had.
Further a "fair" system is never going to abolish all unfairness inherent in human existence - at a minimum it just needs to provide sufficient support that those who are struck with particularly bad luck don't suffer unnecessarily for it.
Yet nobody has ever proposed a version of UBI that is truly universal. It's always limited to a certain in-group. This incentivizes the in-group to stretch the most out of their UBI: that is outsource all menial work to a permanent underclass of immigrants who don't receive free government money, which is exactly what happens in Saudi Arabia.
UBI in the ideal world replaces welfare, food stamps, and rental assistance. It's supposed to be enough for a person to live a basic, decent but pretty no-frills life. I personally don't think it would work, as it ignores economics and human nature. But that is how I understand it.
> UBI in the ideal world replaces welfare, food stamps, and rental assistance.
That's never going to happen. UBI will not replace existing welfare payouts, it will augment them.
Until society is ready to let people and children die in the street because they (or their parents, in the case of children) gambled or boozed all of the UBI away, or it got stolen from them, or they simply burned it due to mental health problems, we still have to have safety nets for people who don't have money.
Which is the whole point of the current welfare assistance system.
UBI is also a no-go in terms of "universal". It's just too unfair. Why should a healthy 20yo get paid (to play video games) the same as a crippled 40yo? The latter literally needs more money just to survive, and doesn't have the same employment options as the healthy 20yo gamer.
If ever UBI is rolled out, you'll see on day two the complaints come rolling in from special groups.
> UBI is also a no-go in terms of "universal". It's just too unfair.
What's unfair is to take away someone's welfare once they finally land a minimal pay job. That diminishes or removes the incentive to actually find a job.
UBI doesn't prevent a fair welfare system on top of it. It doesn't have to be one or the other. UBI replacing unemployment welfare but not other welfare makes the most sense, IMO.
> UBI doesn't prevent a fair welfare system on top of it. It doesn't have to be one or the other. UBI replacing unemployment welfare but not other welfare makes the most sense, IMO.
Another welfare system in addition to the existing welfare system is quite undesirable for most proponents of UBI who (like the parent I responded to earlier) present "no other welfare system" as a benefit of UBI.
I like the idea of UBI, but I agree with you that it can't replace all welfare. But UBI replacing unemployment welfare is not another welfare system in addition to the existing one. It would simplify the existing welfare system by replacing a complex part (unemployment welfare) with a simpler one (UBI).
I think it worth considering UBI in this light. I'm not a proponent of eliminating all other welfare.
However, most UBI theories rely on taking all welfare funds and redistributing them evenly. If you take unemployment welfare only, you're looking into massive tax increases or UBI that won't provide even very basic living.
The first thing that comes to mind is that rents would quickly adjust to extract as much money as possible from someone on UBI. And any increase on UBI would just lead to an increase in rent prices. People working while on UBI would squeeze those not working, or not earning enough, out of the housing market. Meaning people will probably need to work to afford living. So back to square one.
Now you need to figure out rent-control.
But that could screw up the construction market, reducing the incentive to build, and thus the supply. And quite possibly the quality of said supply.
In reality, it's more likely that UBI-happy people would move to cheap backcountry while working people would move to more productive areas. Resulting in ghettos with little interaction between both groups. I wouldn't be surprised if over time one group decided it's about time to stop paying to strangers far away. Democratical process would be awesome too. With both groups split along UBI size.
Do they prefer covering for shareholder value? Who wants to pay people simply for having, or being able to borrow, the money to buy shares? Or put money in a VC fund?
Do they perhaps prefer covering for execs bonuses?
It’s really weird how many people will wail and rage against welfare for both their peers and poorer people, but have no issue whatsoever making a someone else richer.
Just to be clear, I personally have no issue with either, as long as it feels reasonable.
I used to be employed in a community where the vast majority of people collected welfare and did not work.
Except that most of the people who did not work actually did work. They would hunt for food, chop fire wood, haul their garbage to the dump, cook their own food, raise their own children, and do the many other things that are necessary to live.
I'm not saying that they type of person you describe does not exist. They do. Some of them lived in the very community I described. I am saying that because we tend to have a very specific, and peculiar, idea of what work means. We almost universally mean working for another. It doesn't much matter whether we are an employer or an employee, the product of that work is typically meant for someone outside of our family, social circles, and community. At the same time we dismiss any form of labour that isn't based upon some sort of transaction, the type of labour that is central to the health of both families and communities. Our culture has these notions so entrenched that the lack of a "proper job" does destroy people, psychologically. Not only is one's sense of value lost, but the value of other types of relationships is greatly diminished.
I don't really see worker rights or labour regulations as a complete solution since we are dealing with a problem that is stitched into the fabric of our society. Likewise, UBI is not a complete solution. If we were to dive into UBI today, which is about providing for people's basic needs from our surpluses (it is not about providing easy wealth), some people would be destroyed because we have never put much thought into what it means to live without there being some sort of transaction. We have never put much thought into what a non-authoritarian workplace would look like. We have never put much thought into what we need and our relationship with society as a whole.
The question that I have trouble answering is how can we build the foundation of a society where we aren't simply asking whether we work to live or live to work? A society where people's needs are met without coercion. A world where people want to contribute to a more egalitarian society.
This is a very important part of the equation and I think many miss. "Work" is not well defined. I often ask what people would do if money wasn't an issue and they didn't have to have a job[0]. Most people end up answering that they'd pursue passions like art, volunteering, doing research, or other things that many call "work" but might not pay (after they say they'd travel and do other things like that, of course (follow-up is always required)). A lot of work is not quantified by traditional economic transactions (i.e. pay for work). People don't want to sit around and do nothing their entire lives. The other thing is people also seem to forget that this is exactly the situation those from generational wealth are in, and that the vast majority of them do some form of work. Yes, there are those that don't (especially while younger) but the majority do.
I have a very hard time buying the narrative that were people to not work to make a living that they'd be a net drain on society. I see little evidence. I also see this as claiming that a post-scarce society is impossible. This is also critical as we live in a time where the potential for a post-scarce world exists (robotic workers liberate humanity from labor). It is even critical if we live in a semi or limited post scarce world, which is the transitional period to a post scarcity society (we're possibly in this).
[0] I say I'd like to read math books, research, and publish openly. Not far from what I do now (academia). People counter me saying that that's work.
The "basic" in basic income isn't there for decoration: just taking UBI and not working would probably be about as comfortable as living on something like Universal Credit in the UK, minus the adversarial means-testing, which is to say, "not very". Certainly I wouldn't characterise it as "easy wealth", more like "easy bare minimum so you don't have to worry about starvation". Besides, if it was that much gloriously easy wealth, you'd get it too!
The purest idealistic version of means testing may well be fine in theory, but in practice means testing is universally co-opted by conservative governments to make it difficult or impossible for the people with the least resources (and thus most in need of the benefits) to actually get them.
The Australian Centrelink programme is a pretty good example of what happens: one government introduces a system of unemployment benefits and then later a different conservative government (whose members and voting base don't like poor people) are able to pervert the system through means testing provisions and other bureaucratic hurdles to effectively prevent a large subset of eligible persons from actually collecting the benefits to which they are entitled, but without having to deal with the political fallout of actually ending or reducing benefits on paper.
If it's helpful, there are cases in which means testing was introduced in the UK Disability benefits. Once disabled people are determined to be able to work, there were more than one case where the disabled person starved in their home because they could no longer afford food. [i.e. they starved before they had time to even worry about rent...]
In practice it almost always leads to people who are entitled to that benefit being wrongly denied it, or unable to access it. It also introduces a grey area of people who should qualify but don't.
Assessors are pressured, and incentivised financially, to get through as many cases as possible[0]. One gentleman recorded his assessment and found multiple falsifications[1]:
> On his phone recording you can clearly hear the assessor carrying out a peak test to measure his lung function, and reading out the data.
> But in the final report, his last reading appears to have doubled from 150 L/min to 300 L/min, making him seem better than he actually was.
The means testing of disability benefits in the UK is such an abject failure, that a noticeable number of people die within a month of being declared fit for work[2].
Adversarial as well as means-tested, I should have said. The Universal Credit system is famously cruel in how it is designed.
Not least it is paid in arrears and is designed to take 6 weeks to get the first (backdated) payment, by which time anyone who actually needs it is already likely to be overdrawn to the tune of a month's rent and utilities.
Work and labor are 2 different things. And I would never 'work' either, if it weren't for hanging starvation and destitution over my head.
Labor - I build a fence for my home, or fix plumbing, or make miniatures, or do cool stuff. I and those around me benefit from my labor. I may help a friend move. Or help to do light construction, or networking. Again, we benefit.
Work is labor where someone else takes the lion's share of the labor and keeps the surplus, where you nearly never see the result and keep scraps of your worth. You'll never see your 'worth', and all attempts will be made to hide it. The 'who' whom gets this massive surplus is the company you work for. Lots of hand-wavey reasons will be made why your share is low.
I have no problem with labor. I and those around me benefit. Work is exploitative and serves to make someone else richer at my, my family's, and my friends expense.
> Perhaps we could make paying for such people voluntary?
I’d like to opt out of paying for war but sadly I can’t. My tax dollars going to help people instead of kill and oppress them seems like a huge upgrade.
What is your actual contribution to society? I'm going to assume you work at some useless startup (like most of us) that will be gone in a few years, having left nothing useful to society.
UBI is a solution to the problem of structural unemployment when due to advances in automation we don't have enough reasonable jobs for people who are capable of working, when we don't really want everyone to work as much.
If we need everyone who can work to actually work, if we want to force people to work with a threat that if they don't contribute to society then they'll be (for example) homeless - well, then we don't (yet) need UBI and should not implement UBI until(if) we get the problem which UBI would fix.
> Some people don’t want to work. They’ve told me so. I think UBI would destroy these people
most ppl dont want to work some unrelateable, bullshit under time constraints for richer ppl they dont even know or like. so mostly we chug along and put in the required performances.
imo this is unesessary and counterproductive since we have gained access to automation of most physical and a lot of office work.
Huh, UBI has its own moral panic. Never thought I would see that, but it seems obvious in retrospect. Both capitalism and communism worship work like some insane religion. If you work, you are a good person. If you don't, you are scum.
People who don't work are usually economic parasites for those who do, so it makes sense to encourage working regardless of which economic system is used.
Free money is never going to solve anything. I don't mind helping people in need but just handing out money to people especially the ones that are already lazy wouldn't solve a thing.
Instead, we should focus on getting people to work. Whatever that takes. We should reward those who want to work and penalize those who don't. If you can't work due to a real disability, you should be helped.
I used to think HN is full of brilliant people but then there's emotionaly stunted priviliged yuppies like you spewing the most retarded shit I've ever seen. Please fuck off and work yourself to death so there's less of you.
I'd rather require employers to make themselves a place someone would freely choose to work. If a person's basic needs are taken care of and they don't want to work for you, that's your problem.
Even with our current systems, we have a situation where people live in such precarity that employers are able to treat them abusively/illegally. An egregious example would be "companies hiring children to clean slaughterhouses on a nightshift". More generally, we shouldn't put people in a position where they have to accept abuse because the alternative is massive upheaval at best, homelessness at worst.
So if you have the opportunity to stop working and keep being paid, wouldn't you take it?
I'm sure the mayority of people don't want to work. It's not a natural thing to do.
If I had the opportunity to stop working and keep being paid half or third of my salary, that would be an interesting consideration, where I'd probably work but work less, and I know people who'd do differently in both directions; the doctors would still keep their patients, but some struggling people would stop working for pay and work on their dependents (both kids and elderly/sick parents).
The whole point of UBI is that it keeps incentives for working, as most people - especially the most valuable employees - do want much more than a basic income, - and also supports partial employment (as opposed to things like means-tested welfare). What it would change the most is the situation regarding "shit jobs" which are both poorly paid and undesirable; and if the desperate workers get some alternatives, then these jobs would have to pay more, improve conditions, or not get done if they aren't that needed; and that seems a good effect to me.
This is the real reason I like the idea of UBI. It’s not because I want to do nothing all day, it’s because I want to shift the power dynamic. For example, imagine a worker living paycheck-to-paycheck who needs their employer-provided health insurance, with an asshole boss who refuses to let them take a day off to attend a family member’s funeral: the UBI improves their ability to tell that boss to get fucked without ending up broke and homeless.
Basically I’m for any system that allows people to tell bad bosses to get fucked.
But many would not need to live with the existential dread of perhaps ending up living under a bridge some day. Or skipping meals just to make rent.
Perhaps some would not need to give up on their lives and education by getting some minimum-wage job to help out their family or because of some early accident instead of going to college.
I am quite certain it could end up a net positive for society as a whole.
Reminds me of that quote:
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
And yes, it would shift the power dynamic in the workplace.
sure. and helping your neighbour build his shelter is relateable and social. but somewhere along the way towards "build a distributed, scaleable and beautiful mvp app for this useless service, so we can flash the vc and get a good valuation so our stockoptions are worth more when we decide to close shop" it got wired
Doing those things, as needed, for yourself or your immediate community is very different than performing the same task on a factory line for 70 hours a week so that a person you've never met can earn more than your yearly salary playing golf with the board members.
Universal income covering the very basic would still keep people making beyond minimum wage vulnerable.
Paying meaningful money would be too expensive at scale. Then few jobs could pay meaningfully more than the universal income. Why work if you get +/- not working?
Your understanding of universal income is broken. Everybody receives a monthly income, regardless of them working or not. The incentive to earn more by working is always there.
Not if employers are taxed so much to fund UBI that they hire fewer workers. The ability to work and earn more is contingent upon enough jobs existing.
What would really happen is they would raise their prices to earn the amount of profit they deem necessary to be worth the trouble of being in business. Everything gets more expensive, and the UBI payments won't be enough to live on.
People would still pay taxes ;) UBI is essentially a negative tax. If you make nothing - you get some money. If you make some - there's a breaking point somewhere where you pay more taxes than is UBI.
If UBI was a cushy amount covering more than the bare basics, low-tier jobs would pay a very small premium over pure UBI.
UBI will just cause inflation so that you have to work to afford things again. No company will forgo an opportunity to raise prices when they can. Fiduciary responsibility to corporate boards has always been more important than morals or ethics. And easier to get sued over. So boards will demand growth, as they do, and that will include raising prices where people can afford it. Poverty will still be there, it will just cost more (nominally) to get out of it.
The question you pose will remain with UBI, as will poverty. It might just get more extreme for anyone who gets disqualified from UBI for some reason (undocumented, etc).
This problem has not been solved for UBI nor seen in small-scale trials. But there isn't a single rich country or region in the world where the retail prices have not adjusted to consumers' spending power.
And people don't work at minimum wage if welfare is close enough to it. In my country it is rather popular to sit on welfare in countryside. Grow few berries to sell in local market for cash. Maybe help neighbour in a farm or construction for cash. At the end of the day you may stash more than minimum wage working few days a month.
You'd think people would learn after the covid money printer that giving people paper with funny pictures doesn't actually do anything.
UBI, like Roko's basilisk, is the magical thinking of our age. We need a working government to meet people's needs because the market sure as hell can't. That's a lot harder than just brrrr.
> UBI would, and should, replace current welfare schemes. We already have those in place.
But that would still require a huge amount of additional money if you want UBI to be above subsistence levels.
Otherwise the amount received by current welfare recipients would have to be cut several times. Also what about disabled people and others who can't work? Would they get the same amount as everyone?
I don't really understand the subject too deeply, just enough to have me convinced UBI should be implemented in some form, but I think the fundamental assumption is that everything that the government has to provide, it is going to do so, by no fault of the government itself, in a very inefficient way. So by the mere act of UBI replacing many systems and centralising in a single program many forms of wealth redistribution, it would do so with less waste, even if UBI would be by itself inefficient.
It is incredibly easy to automate giving every citizen an unconditional electronic deposit. The inefficiency and overhead of social programs comes from individual assessments to figure out who to exclude.
I am not sure if I agree. Govmnt has to deal with much more than mere function of their programs. It must have approval, integrate with other social databases, be somewhat resilient against fraud. Not to mention this assumes everybody can be reached by electronic deposits which isn't a given.
This is pretty much a reasonably solved problem. You issue a bank card to anyone who doesn't have a bank and deposit the funds and resolve issues of identity by physically showing up an an office. Post offices are pervasively available and usually very close to where most people live.
For fraud issue you have the bank or banks running the program handle fraud per normal procedures and the government steps in to prosecute people who abuse the system as they do in present situations. The program loses no more than a normal bank to fraud and covers losses from fraud by investing deposits in safe securities.
Identity fraud is a solved problem (in most developed countries anyway) a bigger issue is false claims and general inefficiency of government welfare programs.
You can just give everyone an equal amount of cash instead but then disabled and other people who are unable to work would starve to death unless there is massive increase in taxes/redistribution.
> it is going to do so, by no fault of the government itself, in a very inefficient way
Whose fault is it then? I mean if we agree that some governments/organizations are more efficient than others who else could we blame?
>UBI replacing many systems
For instance the British government spends about £2500 per capita on welfare. Even if admin etc. would cost nothing £200 per month is not exactly an amount which would allow you to not work, meaning people who can't actually work would starve/freeze/etc. to death without any additional support from the government or somebody else.
It is nobody's fault, it is intrinsically difficult to organize a large group of humans. Some countries deal with it better, many examples come to mind from Europe, but they have many advantages and still are far from being efficient in general.
Look I am not a political philosopher, not even close. But I can refer you to Robert Nozick's the Minimal Estate. I am not sure I agree with everything he says there, but I think he describes interesting points regarding govnmt efficiency.
That's a much smaller proportion of people than are served by welfare programs, and as a group, they're often not able to access current programs due to mental health issues or lack of knowledge.
Some initiatives still need to exist but UBI obviates the need for the majority of them, simplifies the administration, removes bureaucratic expenses, and reduces the "othering" of people who depend on the support the most.
> That's a much smaller proportion of people than are served by welfare programs,
That's still a non-zero need for the administration and overhead of a welfare system.
> Some initiatives still need to exist but UBI obviates the need for the majority of them, simplifies the administration, removes bureaucratic expenses,
How does it remove anything if the other systems still need to exist?
By definition alone, the existing systems still need to exist, only without the economies of scale that they have today.
By the way, I don't think UBI obviates the need for a "majority" of them. It obviates the need for one welfare payment system. The others still need to exist to serve whoever they are serving now.
> How does it remove anything if the other systems still need to exist?
Most of the other systems don't need to exist. Those that do are narrower in scope and can better serve a much smaller group of people.
> By definition alone, the existing systems still need to exist, only without the economies of scale that they have today.
Means tested welfare systems have almost no economies of scale. Every case needs an assessor and the more people you deal with the more assessors you need. The alternative is to reduce the quality of the assessment. Even worse, the assessment process is often contracted out. So now the program pays wages to a fleet of assessors and also to shareholders.
> By the way, I don't think UBI obviates the need for a "majority" of them. It obviates the need for one welfare payment system. The others still need to exist to serve whoever they are serving now.
In the UK, off the top of my head, it would entirely replace: unemployment benefits, housing benefits, child tax benefits, disability benefits, working tax credits, EMA, and childcare payments.
The main difference to many of the people who are "served" by the current system is that they'll actually receive the benefits they're entitled to, without having to know how to apply, and roll the dice on a minimally trained assessor with a financial incentive to say no.
Covid printer money worked just fine, in terms of allowing businesses to stay afloat while not being able to operate at normal capacity. But it was never set up as a long-term sustainable program.
There may well be things to learn about how well and in what ways UBI might work from it, but there are way too many unusual circumstances surrounding how government policy helped economies navigate a once-in-100-year pandemic to extrapolate many general principles from.
Meanwhile in 2023 a favourite argument of management who want everyone back in the office is that it's essential to have those casual interactions around the watercooler. When of course your keyboard and mouse won't be used at all.
> Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished.
This always comes across as people wanting to have the cake and eat it. Employers should only care that the work is getting done, but if the work isn't done, then the employee should still be able to go home after 8 hours and get full salary?
If the work is not getting done, spying on people isn’t going to improve things. If you want people to work, you have to properly motivate them. That means fair wages and non-toxic management.
So you are assuming that if someone is not doing a good job, it is because they are paid unfairly and/or in a toxic env ? Thats a lot of assumption. How about the deadbeats ? Do they exist or not ?
That being said, there's also a difference between progress and meeting goals. Employees can put in 100% for a full 8 hours and still miss a deadline (poor scheduling, issues/roadblocks that arise, or maybe they're not good at the job). I think a lot of the tension between management and workers is because much modern work isn't assembly-line-deterministic x widgets-per-hour.
You have to pay full salary regardless of whatever you deem work is and however you judge the status to be done or not. You can ask the employee to stay longer do it enough and that employee now pushes off their night and starts coming in later to.. because they are going to be staying late anyways. And nothing gets done after 5pm aside from making plans to hit the bar at 7/8/9. The CEO notices this and this employee has a rep of staying late. Soon he is your boss.
What would you rather have again? An employee finishing early sounds good to me
lol oh the good old days. The funniest part is, it would take screenshots of desktop periodically, but I would know when it's happening due to micro lag in mouse movement as it happened. It was so hilarious. I didn't give a crap because I worked hard anyway. Ended up staying at the place for 17 years.
> Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished.
Goodhart's Law (HN might be annoyed at how often I reference this)
Goodhart's Law isn't just about that setting a metric as a target leads to that metric being exploited, but is more about how difficult things are to measure and evaluate. The lesson to be learned here is that measurements should only ever be considered as indicators at best, and usually as weak signals.
Proper evaluation requires significant nuance, exceptions to the rules, and care. It requires being human: messy, a bit chaotic, and inconsistent. There's good reason for our desire for good metrics. It can help make things fair, consistent, reduce bias, and help control for bad actors. There is that appeal to act mechanically, as machines are often highly interpretable and controllable. But over-reliance on metrics end up with the exact same results. Humans will always exploit a metric. Humans aren't machines. Hell, AI always exploits metrics (which creates a big irony that there's so much benchmarkism in the field). For this reason meritocracy can never exist, as unbiased metrics and evaluations can never exist. Doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for it, but rather that we need to think slow and with care. Unfortunately, our brain is lazy and wants to think fast and on autopilot. An irony with how often HN references Kahneman's book. The most human thing we can do is actually override our autopilot, as that's what differentiates us from the other animals and machines.
Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. That's hard to measure. But one needs to recognize this rather than chase mechanistic one-size-fits-all metrics. You need to embrace the chaos to navigate it. Set guidelines, not rules. Managers and business owners, take heed.
> surveillance is here to stay
I'm unconvinced. This happens because there is little to no pushback because people are convinced that the hierarchical structures are too powerful. But as I said above to embrace the chaos, this too is how you can attack these structures. I talked about this longer in another thread, but remember that you're <6 steps from any person. Ideas spread like viruses (memes), and the control only exists when we stop talking and communicating. If we self censor (e.g. are afraid to tell others our salaries because we think they'll be mad at us instead of the person that controls the pay) then the hierarchy has too much power. Hierarchies are good, but power gets abused. It isn't good for your business to have that power abused. But it also requires care: to not chase short term gains but think long term and remain fluid (environments change. Adapt or die).
You literally said "output" the most speculative / vague definition of "work" available.
I appreciate programmers / "creatives" "output" is much harder to measure, but there are alot of jobs where "mouse moving", "words per second" is a very reliable indicator of "output".
Almost no jobs are meaningfully measured in such a fashion because it penalizes thinking at the expense of spinning your wheels even when latter is far less or even negative in value if it wastes other employees time as well. It also fails to capture any relationship between input and output. If all you care about is butts in seats you can bill someone else for there productivity means nothing all you want is someone to take as long as possible to produce a level of output the client will pay for.
Their clients are not paying for lawyers to sit on their chairs and click their keyboards. Billable hours is still completed specific work (even though it might not lead anywhere and/or help winning the case/etc. directly)
>Why shouldn't the "productivity" of these staff be measured? Because you don't like it?
No one is arguing against this. Stop creating strawmen.
People are against draconian practices aimed at micromanaging people when data is already available, individuals are meeting targets or the targets aren't met due to something out of their control.
In the case of programming, if you have any decent system, you can query commit dates, opened bugs/features, closed bugs/features, time in meetings put on the public agenda, and more. None of this requires surveillance during the development process, only measuring inputs and outputs.
A percentage > 90% of the world isn't programmers...
There simply isn't the same workflow to monitor "word" / "pdf" documents without an insane amount of effort / document control that most SMB's dont have.
The only option available to them, without hiring programmers, is often only the metrics that get offered built into these types of products.
Pretty sure the burden is on you to prove it is not just a method, but also the only method.
Most trivial things can be measured outside time. Many jobs measured on time, we already know why they are measured on time (low activity, presence-based jobs). Anything else, measuring based on behavior/time spent is management being lazy and not doing what they should be doing: comparing inputs and outputs, and measuring the impact of changes to them to improve productivity.
If a manager can't do something that basic, they shouldn't be looking for more bad proxies to hound people with. They should be doing the company a favor and quit.
They could still monitor actual output? Instead of the number of words in a word document (I mean software companies which rank their employees according to the number of closed tickets aren't the best places to be at either...)
All the things you mentioned are just a slight improvement over measuring key presses/mouse movement...
Metrics like opened bugs/features and time in meetings can be easily gamed and are only tangentially related to actual output unless the work done is extremely standardized and strictly defined.
Of course you have to be very alert for quality of boxes, and for selection of boxes. A savvy employee will only choose the easiest tasks as all are ranked equally.
Exactly the same with ticket based jobs. Any measure you have can and will be gamed.
> Comparing a research role in mathematics vs "boxing a big shipping co" is not the same.
But the equivalent of moving your mouse/clicking buttons would be the equivalent of moving your hands and not actual box packing. Why would you measure that instead of completed work, if as you say that work is easily measurable?
I think this software is mainly targeted at busy bee companies where nobody has a clue what the employees or any is supposed to be doing and therefore mouse activity is the only thing they can measure directly..
> If you work at "big shipping co" and "box" 1 item a day and your colleagues do 100, should you not be fired?
If each of those boxes earns >100 times the profit, the boss would be kinda dumb to fire me. At any rate measuring that doesn't require surveillance software.
During covid when WFH, I received a legitimate looking SMS message with a link, so rather than clicking it, I curl --verbose'd it (and one subsequent redirect) before seeing it was an obvious phishing / troll. The next day, my VPN & SSO was disabled with instructions to contact corporate security. My use of curl had been detected and while they didn't accuse me of anything, they claimed that they wanted to make sure that I hadn't been hacked. I've never felt safe since then - I don't know how "deep" this spying goes. Yes it's their equipment, their network, etc. But I hate the way this makes me feel.
I sympathize - it must’ve been stressful to go through this.
Yet I just can’t stop to imagine the other side’s perspective and it’s making me laugh:
I’m sitting in front of the monitoring dashboard, chewing a sandwich, and then a spike of intranet activity shows on one of the charts. I look at the dashboard and immediately notice that it’s effect of some SMS broadcast. Nothing to see here: lazy Tuesday.
Then on the dashboard with user agents new column shows. 1 request. Curl’s user agent sticks out like a sore thumb.
“Oh, someone probably just copy & pasted contents of the text message to check it out through curl in order to be safe” wouldn’t take place in Top 10 thoughts that’d I have after seeing that.
If I'm using curl, I'm probably also using git, ssh and wget. I think an active threat would be more likely to try to blend in (a giveaway would probably to use a user agent that declared I was using a different OS because it was hardcoded into the payload.)
What I end up thinking about is that even though I'm back at the office full time (and I'm one of the weirdos that actually prefer it) I have doctors appointments, school teacher meetings and such that have all moved online. So convenient!, except there's no way I can realistically attend them privately, so a 5 minute meds appointment is now once again a 3 hour travel ordeal.
End-to-End encryption doesn't matter if your employer is scraping your device. I know this is all obvious, but it didn't need to be this way.
At the beginning of the covid it became popular to hire some companies that send those links, and then report back who opened them to you, so you could train the people.
You may have been caught in one of those exercises.
But anyway, always assume your workplace's VPN logs every access. The obvious retention period vary from one place to another, but the logs seem to always exist.
I'm personally not too concerned with cases like this. I mostly avoid personal activities on work equipment unless they're benefit-adjacent. My thinking is if they over-snoop and see health or financial data they shouldn't see (and it gets out), it'll look bad because I was managing benefits that are part of my employment.
Outside of that, I keep my use very benign. I'm logged into the Financial Times and Stackoverflow. Most companies with knowledge workers won't look at any metrics they collect unless it's a security thing or they have a reason to look. But yes, assume that they can look if they want to.
Once they start snooping around, they're probably going to fire you regardless. They just need a story to tell.
Wait, so you curled a phishing link while connected to a corporate network and you didn't think that would be monitored? I am sorry but your company's security team is not doing well if you're surprised by this. What is your expectation if I may ask? Because I spend a LOT if time just looking at what what people are doing via email, endpoint and network logs (looking for malicious activity, don't care about their performance or going to naughty sites), do you not know that is happening?
Yeah. Like... monitoring network activity on the VPN for security is one of the areas I would be surprised if the employer IT wasn't doing. I don't know why that would surprise anybody.
Hard disagree. I've worked at multiple companies that care about security. Monitoring employee equipment use for activity that could indicate a compromise is a positive signal.
I agree. I worked at a company that has this endpoint monitoring software and occasionally got emails saying "was it you that ran this command". I just said "yes" and they were like "ok carry on".
I'm not sure how much value there is in that kind of monitoring, but it isn't necessarily bad.
Agreed. Where do you guys work to be monitored like that?
I dick around all day at work, I watched YouTube video in the background, I still use paper notes so my cursor can be still for an hour sometimes, etc and I never received anything like that. That's over 4 employers since I went full time remote.
Not saying they're not "watching" me, but they don't seem to care.
Is there a typical profile for companies that go that far in the 1984 crazyness?
Besides paper notes and brainstorming with my own self on my whiteboard, I sometimes disconnect from the vpn and put myself offline in MSTeams for several hours, telling my manager and direct teammates that they can use pagerduty to ping me if urgency calls for my immediate availability, when wanting to focus on a specific task/piece of code/resesrch/document/architecture decision.
Context switches can really kill productivity. So much that sometimes I do much more work in a 2h window between 7am and 9am than the next 6-7 hours.
Were they taking issue with your use of a tool, or the fact that you apparently click on phishing links? Was that a test run by your company's cybersecurity department?
Is your phone personal? BYOD? Company-issued?
I can't fathom how "detecting curl" can put you in the doghouse, but I would shut you down too, for accessing malicious websites.
Sure. Companies run phishing trials all the time; it is a favorite pastime of security consultants. They want to see how many of their employees will click on suspicious links. It's extra-difficult to deal with SMS when it comes in from the airwaves, and not a company-controlled system that can be firewalled and IPS'd.
It seems misplaced to blame the company for surveillance when they're trying to keep everyone safe, including the devices in your home. It seems far more preferable to have a sting operation and catch mistakes, than to for-reals access malware and have it install on those same devices. That's exactly what they're trying to prevent and mitigate.
It would be the same whether you're at home on a personal device, or you're at your desk in the office with boss over shoulder. You would have a right to object to oppressive or intrusive company surveillance, but this doesn't even come close.
Of course, we have few details here, and I have leapt to a very particular conclusion about that situation; who knows what really happened. But in the interest of general knowledge, employees should be aware that phishing tests will be run, and you can expect to have a little chat if you fail the test (or actually get phished.)
Trying to keep everybody safe using misguided strategies that do not work, instead of doing something that works (like using 1 internal domain and nothing else, for example).
I'm not sure what you view as misguided, but it's a somewhat effective and accessible tool in the box for CISO to gauge and graph employee behavior when confronted with suspicious communication. Also I have no idea how "1 internal domain" has anything to do with phishing on some dude's phone.
Ah yes the famous phishing tests. They bypass every spam filter, and if your company is like mine, that uses a new external website every week for something, it's completely impossible to tell apart phishing from actual email.
Maybe your company isn't as bad as mine? If the test bypasses the spam filters and is correctly signed from an internal sender… what kind of idiot test is it?
> Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo...
> 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.
"Global demand for employee monitoring software increased by 108% in April, and 70% in May 2020 compared with searches carried out the preceding year."
Every time one of these stories comes out I sigh a little and conclude that it's more showing the failure of modern management practices and the legal environments these companies are required to operate in than anything about employee responsibility.
Companies should be judging their people by results. If someone's performance is acceptable then all of these surveillance metrics don't matter. If someone's performance is not acceptable then all of these surveillance metrics still don't matter. If the company can't tell if an employee's performance is acceptable then maybe that's something they should think about first.
Some of the nastier management practices are also CYA policies because of potential liability if the employee does something they shouldn't or suffers some harm personally while working from home and the company is held responsible even if there was little it could or should practically do to avoid the harm. It seems likely that some of our legal frameworks for employment relationships are outdated in the WFH era and could benefit from review. It should be clear what responsibilities an employer has to a WFH employee - for example providing WFH staff with suitable equipment to do their job properly and safely - but I don't think we should burden employers with responsibility for bad things that happen beyond their reasonable control. Maybe some of the perceived need for these aggressive and often covert surveillance measures goes away if some of the arguably unreasonable liabilities for bad things happening are also taken away.
> Companies should be judging their people by results.
You're not accounting for the many companies where a sizeable chunk of the workforce are "bullshit jobs" and are just there to create work for other bullshitters and/or be there for political reasons to pad someone's direct reports list and justify their salary. This is an major epidemic in some countries and cultures especially in Europe, and remote working threw a big wrench into this machinery by giving those workers a lot more power and perks that are usually reserved to elites within the company.
In this case there is no tangible output to measure, the only "output" is the suffering of the employee and the appearance of them working hard. This kind of spyware thus makes sense to force the employees to "work" hard and not become too complacent/comfortable in order to perpetuate the charade.
I don't expect this being used in startups or smaller/more modern enterprises where the org chart isn't (yet?) bloated and productivity is measurable based on output, but to be fair this is also not a vertical that Microsoft is targeting (nor can compete in even if they wanted to). This is targeted at large, bloated companies where they need to keep herds of bullshit jobs under control and make sure they don't get too comfortable - otherwise it would rock the boat if some low-level employee appeared to "have it easy" more than some high-level director/VP/executive, regardless of their actual productive output (if any). The spyware will efficiently detect such occurrences and make sure they are addressed.
This is a naive take imo, especially in a small business where you're signing checks from your personal bank account to your employees. When I'm paying someone for work out of my own pocket, I'm going to make sure that they're reaching peak productivity. I don't know why this expectation wouldn't exist at a larger company as well.
Two things can be true at once: my employee can be delivering good results, and my employee can deliver even better results. Just because an employee is delivering results doesn't mean that is their maximum potential.
The other thing you're not considering is the fact that management has a responsibility to maximize productivity with the workforce they have. Where you see management failure, I see managements responsibility.
Now, none of this means there aren't poor managers (I've had those), nor does it mean that the solution is straight up surveillance. What I am saying is as someone who does manage, and as someone who does pay employees, this issue isn't nearly as cut-and-dry as you're making it out to be.
I don't understand your objection. I also run a business. I also pay people to do things for that business. The amount of money that eventually reaches my personal bank account does depend on the performance of the business and that in turn does depend on how much we pay people and how good a job they do for us.
So I care very much about whether they get those jobs done well. But I couldn't care less how much time they spend with their backside in a chair or how many messages they sent last week or whether they took a 1h30 lunch break yesterday because they went out shopping for a birthday present for their kid.
I default to trusting people working for us to be honest and do their job to an acceptable standard. I'm only interested in intervening if that isn't happening. In that case the kind of metrics under discussion here aren't going to help me figure out the real problem and how we can fix it. They aren't even likely to be worth much if as a last resort we do have to lose someone who can't get the job done properly and later we have to defend that decision in some kind of dispute proceeding.
This isn't to say we can't give feedback and provide training to help anyone working for us to perform better. But I don't see what relevance these kinds of metrics have to that either. I've always found talking with people openly about how things are going to be far more effective. YMMV.
Hey good on you if you’re signing over paychecks to employees that leave work to go shopping or take extended lunch breaks. Apparently I just don’t have that kind of cash to spend on non-productivity.
I care very much how much time their backside is in the chair as that is significantly more correlated to productivity than shopping.
I care very much how much time their backside is in the chair as that is significantly more correlated to productivity than shopping.
I guess this is where our perspectives differ. I want the time when people are working to be productive. People have other things going on in their lives - sometimes very important things - and someone who is sitting in the chair with their mind on something else probably isn't going to be very productive.
Of course they are there to do a job and it's important that the job gets done properly and the rest of the team shouldn't have to pick up the slack if someone is abusing the relationship. But the most reliable way to keep the work on track IME is to make sure there's a decent work-life balance and build the mutual respect that any good relationship needs. Sometimes that means trusting people to get things done without imposing too many rules on when or how they do it.
I find the recent trend for experimenting with shorter working hours fascinating because so often the outcomes are counterintuitive - at least if you expected that shortening the hours would lead to a proportionate loss of productivity. One of the most interesting results I remember - I wish I'd thought to bookmark the paper but unfortunately I didn't - was working 9-3 every day with a half-hour allowed for lunch or something like that. It turned out that the company's performance actually went up during the period of the experiment. Participants reported that because everyone knew they had only that much time in the day to get things done the level of focus improved and there were fewer distractions and more awareness of not interrupting colleagues who were trying to concentrate. They managed to sustain that for something like 3 or 6 months and it's hard to argue it was just a novelty effect after so long.
This is why I got really worried when MS somehow combined my private O365 with that of my employer. Likely happened because I had both accounts on the same iPhone. Suddenly, my work computer offered to open a word doc from my private OneDrive.
Microsoft is very intransparent here. They didn’t ask me, I couldn’t find out if that means my employer has access to my private data, and it kept coming back even after I found the “unlink” option. Creepy.
The link is because Microsoft's account system is such an old beast that a proper account switcher, like the one Google has, is completely out of the question. Instead, it seems the product team for M365 / Office.com created this high-level account linking process to make it at least palpable to the majority of users that only have one enterprise-based account and one personal account. If you happen to have more than 1 account, the account switchers on anything other than office web apps is going to break.
Why does it even need to be "request"? Are they that cheap these days that they won't pay unless asked (begged)? If the company needs you to use a computer, it needs to provide you one. I am sure not letting my personal and work machines mix, both for this and IP reasons, and on the other side, if I was in control of such things, using personal machines would be an exception.
Good employers already give you your own laptop and might offer to give you a phone. But good employers are few and far between, especially in recession-esque periods where everyone that doesn't have an extremely resilient IT staff (or isn't a public company) will have bean counters cutting costs in many areas, either downsizing new laptop purchases (making doing work harder) or cutting them all-together.
My company would rather have me waste several days shuffling data around partitions rather than pay for the cloud disk that I actually need (3T, nothing insane).
Can you expand on this at all? Is it consciously better, or was the presence of work devices subconsciously affecting you? Did you notice particular improvements, or ...
So like, how does that work. I've got a pair of Asus routers with one acting as an access point (AI mesh).
Would I need to buy new routers? Do I daisy chain the routers or can I reuse the wifi ap? Or put Merlin on my existing ones?
I'm in tech but these network suggestions are all quite opaque to me.
The point is just that you shouldn’t trust work issued devices. They are never going to be as secure as your private network, unless you have a big family or are a high profile target.
Depends on the hardware, even consumer networking hardware often support VLANs. Sometimes it's hidden behind settings, other times you'll have to use something like OpenWRT. Some hardware lets you run multiple APs at once, and you can have an AP for your VLAN.
Sometimes it's cheaper/easier to just buy a shitty router to use for your untrusted devices.
Contracts between parties with asymmetrical power often require collective bargaining (regulation, reputation, unions, insurance) to design systems that meet the long-term needs of all participants. Compare the terms of EU-US data sovereignty negotiations, or corporation-corporation data rooms, with corporation-employee agreements.
Given the rate of change in surveillance telemetry, AI local/remote analytics, enterprise sysadmin competence, global threat models and "chat control" draft legislation to bypass E2EE confidentiality, it is unlikely that individual humans can negotiate balanced Terms-of-Service/Employment/Citizenship.
There are OSS-based systems (QubesOS, OpenXT, Android pKVM nested-virt replacement of TrustZone) which are architecturally compatible with remote management of isolated workloads by mutually-distrusting clouds and enterprises. This is the WFH inverse of cloud "confidential computing". Workload isolation is hard/intractable on pre-CHERI PC hardware that is littered with side channels and legacy complexity, but isolation of mutually-distrusting clouds can be practical with a combination of monitoring and legal agreements. WFH humans can collaborate on OSS code to enforce OSS legal agreements that mediate between employees and corporations.
> The series takes place in a dystopian Milwaukee in the year 2074, where many countries have gone bankrupt .. In the absence of effective government, powerful multinational corporations have become de facto governments, controlling areas called Green Zones. The remaining territories are called Red Zones, where governance is weak or non-existent.
Wi-Fi 7 Sensing routers (2024) can generate 3D images of human activity through the walls/floor/ceiling of homes and business, profiling human position, movements, breathing, typing, emotion and more, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480760. After standardization by IEEE in consumer routers, which remote parties would be interested in WFH WiFi Sensing Analytics? How could regulators, employers, employees and home-builders respond?
Now that Microsoft owns LinkedIn, I wouldn't trust them one bit to keep your activity there away from your employer. It would be really easy to correlate your sentiment analysis on Teams/email against your LI messaging traffic.
Fortunately in at least some parts of the world providing personal data based on use of LinkedIn to a third party like an employer who happened to use other Microsoft products would clearly violate legal data protection rules and potentially land both Microsoft and the employer with expensive penalties. It's not the same situation as an employer providing an IT facility to their own employees so they can do their jobs but then having morally and perhaps legally questionable abilities to perform covert surveillance of how the employees use that facility.
Now that there's a tick box in Outlook to tie your surveilled corporate account to your real-life personal account on LinkedIn -- combined with the fact that we know that Microsoft aggregates our "productivity" data to allow companies to compare their scores -- do people really think that Microsoft ISN'T selling a person's "productivity" scores from their previous and current employers to potential recruiters?
Is this going to turn into a game where the individual who uses Microsoft products the most is considered the most productive? These scores do have some meaning, after all, there are folks who are giving the job their all and folks who are phoning it in. These people aren't guaranteed to be the same in 6 months. The hard worker may burnout, and the person taking it easy might have life circumstances change. The person working hard may be so successful they leave anyway.
We generally dislike paying people more than a 2x difference within the same bracket which means once you hit the top of the terminal level, there is limited incentive to work hard. Folks are either working for the next gig, or they are learning to extract more life satisfaction from their employers.
To what end? Like I'm not saying that there won't be people doing it, I just don't understand why a company that valued it's employees would be doing sentiment analysis on LinkedIn vs the many other ways they could approach the relationship.
Is the idea that a workforce comprised of people that obey or work around the stupid unwritten rules is going to be more effective?
All enterprise productivity products are capable of spying on their users. It is up to the sysadmins, legal/ethics teams, and company culture to not allow for that surveillance to be used. And to be fair, most of the data that is being discussed isn't new and has been available to employers for ~10 years in one form or another. Not that that makes it better.
I run an O365 instance for my company. We have thousands of users. The only time the data that is referenced here is being used is for some rare troubleshooting or litigation reasons.
Let them discover just how little work is done when people are in the office. So many people who are professional water cooler talkers. Few people are putting in a full eight hours a day.
Because companies assume if you've got time to dick around after your work is done then you've got time to do more work till your 8 hours are up.
At least that's how it's where I live in Europe. Companies feel entitled to the full 8h per day of productivity so if you know everything out in less then that they want to see it and give you more work to fill the remaining time, which Is why WFH is very rare and in office work is the norm here (Austria).
I guarantee that all large enterprises that can legally get away with it, will soon start monitoring everything electronic their employees do using LLMs.
Everything you write in an email or say in a Teams meeting will be transcribed and read. The LLM will be instructed to check that you’re “compliant with corporate communications policy.”
Sounds innocuous, right? Just stop employees leaking PII or swearing at customers.
It’ll be expanded to also detect employees that are trying to form a union, questioning safety, revealing management malfeasance, or whistleblowing.
I have known about this for a long time and make inconvenient efforts to avoid O365 as much as possible. I do all my writing in other apps such as notepad++ and then paste into Outlook or other app when finished. I use my own Nextcloud server for meetings and other activities. I use Brave browser with VPN extension. If they are not key logging me, it might look like I am not doing much. Nobody has asked me anything yet.
In my previous job in a small company, the CEO (also the admin of 365, yeah I know!!) didn’t know what to do with some issue, so I offered to help him out, he gave me the full admin access to the 365 and after some digging I found what’s listed on the article and even more data logged of the usage, etc., took screenshots on a hope when I get time to write something up, but glad the article went on depth too, funny later I left the job because he wanted “more productivity” by returning to the office..
Microsoft is spyware. How the tables have turned. My preferred test for if a company does spying is to tell them i use linux. If they disagree, they are spying. Next client please.
How about this: Step 0 - define the ungameable behaviours that you know will result in an improved business outcome. Step 1 - tell everyone about these behaviours so that don't have to guess about what should be done to make the business great. Step 2 - track all of behaviours to ensure that everyone is doing them. It isn't necessary to be a creep about it because the behaviours cannot be gamed. If you find that you have to be a creep to accomplish your objectives, go back to step 0.
Please don't retort with creep's favourite quote: "Once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.". If the measure is any good it is fine if it becomes a target. As an example, NPV is a fine measure and fine target.
Literally everything you do with your work supplied hardware, software and services is fair game for your employer. If you don't like what your employer does with that access, then find a new job. Personally, I'm amazed at people who treat their work laptop like their personal property. It's not.
This is settled law, so it's not changing any time soon without legislation. In other words, don't browse pornhub or work on your startup on company equipment. It's not a hard concept.
This is why I completely reinstalled my Win10 after multiple attempts to get rid of MSFT and O365 telemetry and bloatware. In the new install I used O&O Shutup and other debloaters and completely wiped out MSFT bloatware (apart from Edge who is now built into the system and it's impossible to get rid of because MSFT ..).
Now I use O365 Web and it's more than enough for my use case.
I run a couple essential apps in a Virtualbox on my work laptop. Mainly due to compatability but more and more so due to privacy and articles like this.
Am I right in thinking that anything that goes on inside that Virtualbox is 'relatively' private?
I don't believe our IT department have the capacity to go beyond something like Office 365 Admin, but who knows.
If you use Microsoft Windows, and your employer is a client of theirs, then it seems a reasonable expectation that MS would like to "enhance" their reports on you with information they harvest from your OS. Can you trust any machine using software from companies that your employer pays a lot of money to [in part] in order to track you?
This is nothing new and we have brought this on to ourselves. This is a gross invasion of privacy and the employer had no fcuking right to snoop like that on you even if they own the communication devices, laptop, cell-phone etc.. Why have we surrendered so much to these corporations.
I don’t have an issue being monitored if it means I can work from home more frequently. I think the data would help highlight that I’m more productive working from home than in the office due to less distractions and wasted commute time.
It would be helpful if firms monitoring productivity mentioned what they consider productivity to be. However, in doing this, it would also make it easy for individuals to game any productivity metrics.
It’s interesting that Teams tracks which device you join meetings on. I start my day on my work laptop around 7AM and my daily standup is at 9:30AM. I typically join the standup on my phone, and make coffee and have a snack. Our standup runs 30-45mins due to how it’s managed and doesn’t provide much value to me. I’m present and engaged during that time, but I wonder if it could be interpreted as me “joining a meeting from bed” as suggested in the article. I see it as a productivity gain as I can have my coffee break while still attending the standup.
I don’t get why it matters where you join a meeting from. If you’re in bed, so what? You’re still on the meeting aren’t you? If I can do my job perfectly fine sitting poolside, and still hit all my metrics, does it matter that I’m at a pool and not sitting at a desk?
This is the eternal problem with all such metrics. What the data actually says and what someone looking at it thinks it says can be very different things. And yet decisions will necessarily be made based on the latter and that can lead to bad decisions.
We could all live in a beautiful world with near-total honesty and little need to protect privacy. We just need the entire human race to be reliably fair and reasonable about every possible issue and to make decisions that affect others only based on a complete and entirely accurate set of relevant facts. Shouldn't be too hard.
I think the problem is more fundamental than just what "data says". I think in a sense the way you measure things carry a lot of information, of course, but the resulting data in itself doesn't tell anything without context. A good book that I think illustrates this is How to Lie With Statistics, by Darrel Huff.
> my daily standup is at 9:30AM. I typically join the standup on my phone, and make coffee and have a snack. Our standup runs 30-45mins due to how it’s managed and doesn’t provide much value to me
Ugh, I feel you on that. (tho I don't agree with the monitoring part, there's no need for it)
I just realized that I haven't had these silly daily standups for nearly a year now, since changing companies. And guess what? My team is the most productive team I ever worked in. I provide a weekly written update on the project I'm on for leadership to read. We had a weekly 15mins standup for a while when we needed a very tight loop between people on the project as one of the releases was coming up, then scrapped it when things went back to normal.
I don't miss the daily standups and scrummasters at all.
Every job I have ever held I assumed that there was basically no expectation of privacy. I'm always very surprised when people work from their personal machines or use any personal device for work related tasks (even emails?)
IT can screen capture you computer without you knowing so this isn't new. Furthermore they can also see what application is in the foreground and OCR the captured image for more information. The possibilities to monitor you are endless.
The delta between possible and easy makes all the difference in the world in situations like this. A periodic static screenshot obtained through an onerous process is one thing. A “productivity dashboard” packaged and distributed for the intended use of end managers begs to help drive micromanagement and misconception.
The company I work for doesn't require any employee monitoring stuff on our own PCs. The only thing they require is top have disk encryption and a anti-virus software and ad blocker installed
At the time I was a /sci/ regular and great Greg Egan fan, so that Matt Parker video that referenced both of them felt like an incredible crossover episode.
So we need to create mechanical robots typing text generated by LLMs on a keyboard to look like we are working at the 100% utilization all the time (probably costing <$100 these days based on robotic hand prices). Then some solution for facial recognition if a webcam is needed.
The motivation behind this is always interesting to me. When managing, I try to find simple measurable work-output metrics, establish them clearly, and give people as much freedom as possible outside of getting work done.
I hated being micromanaged as an employee . Plus as a manger I’m not detail-oriented enough to micromanage anyone.
TLDR: If the lights were on in your office, you were working, even if you weren’t really there. So the game was to figure out a way to keep your lights on without being there and the blog was about that nearly 20 years ago.
when they openly talk about this, they give ideas to those less aware of technology (business people), about how they can leverage the existing technology for surveillance.
You're entitled to nothing but a fair wage if you work for someone else. Don't like it? Start your own company with your ideology at the forefront. The same people that complain about this probably pimp Microsoft on their resumes.
Full disclosure. I just built this for Google Workspace (www.gofasterhq.com). I built it because it's a tool I wish I had when managing teams in the past.
These articles are very one sided and there is a productive middle ground to be established using productivity management tools. As a manager, it can be difficult to know what your team is working on and who is actually productive, especially in a remote environment. Replace the word "spy" in this article with "hold accountable" and it doesn't sound so bad all of the sudden. But with that visibility, the manager also needs to understand the context in which the data is generated. Whether somebody is productive isn't only a matter of metrics, but also their role, their seniority, and what it is they are expected to do.
As an employee, these tools can benefit you by weeding out teammates who present themselves confidently, but don't actually do much. With a good manager, you should be able to simply do your job and the metrics, in context, take care of themselves.
As a manager, I feel that using metrics from productivity tools to measure productivity is lazy and counter productive. If your team is so large that you can’t measure productivity without using these cheats, then your team is too large for you to manage. But you’re also ignoring the fact that people work in different ways, and may be just as productive without generating the metrics you’re looking for. And before you tell me you can just taper the metrics, why not just spend time with your team setting goals that can be measured in an open and direct way?
In my opinion, all these tools do is reward employees that work the way you do, which may improve stats on your metrics, but will encourage group think and diminish creativity.
"As a manager, I feel that using metrics from productivity tools to measure productivity is lazy and counter productive."
I agree, if that is the only way you measure productivity. These tools create a more holistic view of what a person does at work and should not be the sole measure of performance.
In reality, what they make visible are the people who do little to nothing for 3+ days. Graphs that shows no work for long stretches make performance conversations much easier. It's tough for a poor worker to argue their way out of that or fake the metrics going forward.
In reality, what they make visible are the people who do little to nothing for 3+ days.
I've worked in places where many metrics of this type would indicate I did little to nothing for 3+ weeks. Some of the most important projects I've ever worked on in terms of business impact have been in that category.
The difference in outcomes IME is almost always whether you're working with good management and good communication so everyone understands what's really going on and it's no problem or you're working with bad management and poor communications and something of great value is incorrectly assessed as having little value leading to worse outcomes for everyone.
> In reality, what they make visible are the people who do little to nothing for 3+ days.
I am that worker. I've been praised for "carrying the team" on more than one occasion. If I'm doing my job to a high standard, why is this any of your business?
So an 'employee' who attending 4 meetings every day and edited 20 documents but didn't actually accomplish anything useful is better than the one who did nothing for 3 days but managed to produce a lot of actual value for the company in the other two?
> In reality
IMHO the tool would be most useful in dysfunctional companies where managers don't really know what their subordinates are supposed to be doing or are trying achieve besides "working".
It's worse than that. A lot of these management tools don't even measure outputs, only inputs, and then only partially and with doubtful predictive value.
From the viewpoint of outcomes, everything beyond outputs is simply too obscured to make sense of.
I don't think that's always true but you definitely have a valid point in a lot of cases. For inputs I was thinking about stuff like measuring time spent on specific activities without reference to whether the employee had been set up to make good use of that time or whether those activities were themselves worthwhile. That would contrast with outputs like measuring a software developer's productivity by the classic lines of code metric or some modern version like number of commits per day. A developer working 80 hours/week and producing 1000 lines in 20 commits in that time will look great by those metrics but I'd rather hire the developer who would write only the 100 useful lines that would survive into production in 20 hours and 5 commits because they thought before they wrote.
I'm in management, have been for about 5 years. I've never found it difficult to judge the productivity of my team members. Even in the 15 years I was primarily an IC it was obvious, to me, who the most productive people on the team were and who were the least. If you are actually involved in the work the team is doing, and if you take even a little bit of time to have an actual relationship with people, it is not hard. What to do about it (besides the lazy "fire them") can be very hard. Helping people grow can be very hard, depending on the people. But my team doesn't work "for me," they work with me. I'm as much responsible to them as I am for them.
As another comment points out, the people that use these tools would never give their reports the same data about their own "productivity." Employers try not to even let employees know about this kind of surveillance because it directly undermines any supposed "team culture." They have no place in an equitable relationship. When management uses these kinds of tools they make it clear that they don't care about those being managed. They don't care enough to be honest with them, to be accountable themselves for how they manage. The obvious message these tools send to those under this kind of management is that that management does not see them as respected colleagues and team members, but rather cogs in the machine, "resources" to be exploited.
Even simple metrics like number of PR/code reviews can easily become so useless. They can be good indicators when taken with a grin of salt. But judging someone's productivity from these dashboards is stupid.
I really hope companies/managers who use garbage like that suffer the consequences and the industry learns from it.
Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. Bad businesses will continue to use draconian methods to try to squeeze productivity rather than foster it. Quit the bad ones, join the good ones.