[HN Gopher] Microsoft 365 has employee surveillance and analytic...
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Microsoft 365 has employee surveillance and analytics built in
Author : ColinWright
Score : 707 points
Date : 2020-11-24 14:31 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| klmadfejno wrote:
| I do some work in this space. Not this exact stuff, but adjacent.
| Are there some employers out there using this to evaluate
| employees? Maybe, but not smart ones. It won't work. I haven't
| seen anyone do this, although I suppose I have heard of companies
| checking # hours connected to a vpn to get a sense for when
| people are working. Take whatever opinion on that you like.
|
| the reason people are doing this is because leaders of an org
| don't know how their business works, and they would like to.
| They're wary of people getting trapped in endless meetings and
| not actually accomplishing anything. Which makes it extra funny
| that the reactionary opinion in these threads seem to be "Better
| make a bunch of fake meetings and emails to look productive!".
| outworlder wrote:
| > They're wary of people getting trapped in endless meetings
|
| Are you talking about managers here!? If so, that's hilarious.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Fake it till you make it or something like that...
|
| Manipulating these metrics is pretty easy. I think I do a coffee
| break and tease the least productive colleague. Seems it is
| someone working in logistics that only occasionally checks his
| mails. Wrong profession, buddy.
|
| I though MS had changed...
| _zamorano_ wrote:
| MS has actually changed, but not in the old fashioned way most
| people seem to understand, from BAD to GOOD.
|
| Mostly, their business model has changed, and so their
| incentives about proprietary and free software, the second not
| being a thread anymore.
|
| But as any big corp, they keep the power to be evil if their
| interests require so. The same as any corp.
| izacus wrote:
| Of course it's also easy to get fired for manipulating such
| metrics. It's just another boot that steps on a worker.
| strict9 wrote:
| Lots of shiny new tools to close more sales in the war against g
| suite.
|
| Yet I'll have to wait several more years for a fix for the bug in
| Office web mail client that incorrectly says there is new mail on
| the browser tab, when in fact there is no new mail.
|
| Employee tracking features or not, MS 365 is orders of magnitude
| worse than g-suite in every regard.
|
| Employees don't want these products, so they have to go after
| managers who can crow to their managers about monitoring
| productivity.
| spaced-out wrote:
| Small nitpick, but as of last month, G Suite has been
| officially renamed as Google Workspace.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/6/21503649/google-workspace...
| kerng wrote:
| I dont like Office 365, but its lightyears ahead of GSuites.
| Just look at GMail - it can't even handle threads and mail is
| commonly all messy and unreadable when multiple people start
| replying. Generally for anything slightly complex GSuites
| fails.
|
| It's so bad, that I'm thinking my next company has to use
| Microsoft stuff again - sort of an interview criteria. I'm only
| semi joking because Outlook and Co seems like a low bar to
| beat.
| judge2020 wrote:
| The MS account switcher is also terrible. Maybe it's because I
| have a mix of outlook-based emails, Azure AD emails, and full
| O365 emails, but the fact that you can't easily open an outlook
| tab for each account is horrible UX.
| jcstryker wrote:
| > The MS account switcher is also terrible. Maybe it's
| because I have a mix of outlook-based emails, Azure AD
| emails, and full O365 emails, but the fact that you can't
| easily open an outlook tab for each account is horrible UX.
| syshum wrote:
| FF Containers are a much better way to handle this issue then
| attempting gmail style account switching
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Can't remember the tools name, but there is an official MS
| browser pluggin for using multiple accounts
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| If you're using Chrome or Edge, setting up multiple
| profiles is a good way to handle this, as well as
| separating work and personal stuff. I use profiles to
| have Teams open for multiple organizations..
| rootsudo wrote:
| Firefox containers, or delete cookies. It is because of how
| cookies work and not terminating a session upon logout.
| mbesto wrote:
| > MS 365 is orders of magnitude worse than g-suite in every
| regard.
|
| You clearly have never sent/received a calendar invite from a
| g-suite email to a non-g-suite email. The experience is
| abysmal.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| I respectfully disagreed. I felt MS365 is superior than GSuite.
| Google Drive have reoccurring issues that drove my boss and me
| crazy and apparently it is a common issue. Outlook have
| features that I want to use that Gmail don't have.
|
| My boss is considering to moving to MS365 because GSuite
| showing its ugly head often and that have a impact on our
| productivity.
| gumby wrote:
| > I felt MS365 is superior than GSuite.
|
| Wow, talk about a low bar!
|
| Less snarkily: G suite works for low complexity tasks (let's
| not get int G drive which seems designed to _add_ gratuitous
| complexity). Channeling Clayton Christiansen, it 's a
| "minimill" that does a tiny part of the job, not well but
| adequately.
|
| And it could be argued that most people don't need the
| capabilities of MS Office. Certainly no one person needs most
| of the features. There are definitely small problems for
| which less is more.
|
| Much as I hate using MS365 (back-compatible nightmare of poor
| UX decisions, too many features for _my_ particular use case)
| my heart, and productivity, sinks when I have to use the
| gsuite tools.
|
| It's interesting that nobody has managed to really upend this
| market, not for lack of trying. There must be huge
| institutional inertia.
| strict9 wrote:
| I will concede Google Drive is garbage. But even in that
| garbage product there aren't as many glaring bugs that have
| been around forever.
|
| The worst example: you can't use the browser's back button in
| the MS 365 mail client! Instead of using the back button like
| any other web app, you have to hit ESC to drop from message
| detail back to the inbox or folder. The back button instead
| goes to the next message in the queue.
|
| MS 365 is full of mind-boggling UX decisions on top of
| annoying bugs that have been around for years.
| petre wrote:
| > The back button instead goes to the next message in the
| queue.
|
| That must be a feature: one could use the back button to
| open many mails and even reply to them in order to game the
| employee 'evaluation' metrics.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| But the desktop apps are best in class, Word and Excel in
| particular.
| maxerickson wrote:
| What class is Word best in?
|
| I use it a quite a lot and think it is okay, but it has
| all sorts of problems and behaviors that don't make a lot
| of sense.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Track changes. It is an industry standard for legal
| documents.
| azalemeth wrote:
| `vimdiff new.tex old.tex` is _infinitely_ faster, easier,
| and so on. Using git provides a _far_ better backup and
| restore functionality, with searchable history, and
| multiple branching versions. I 've met exactly one lawyer
| (a barrister) who uses tex and loves it -- it's
| particularly good at making trial bundles with
| complicated paginations and cross references -- but he
| _does_ have the advantage of being an IP barrister with a
| PhD in particle physics...
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| I used it daily for my work. I prefer Word due to their
| mail merge for creating certifications (sometime, I have
| to make 150 certs and mail merge made it so easy). Also,
| I use it for form creations, Word's table structure is
| superior and flexible than LibreOffice Writer and Apple
| Pages.
|
| Yea, it does have their quirks. I am aware of those and I
| know how to work around it or with it. Microsoft Word
| been around more than 20 years and it have legacy codes
| in Word to ensure it works with older format and few
| other oddities.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| That hyperbole...
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Maybe if they have time, they fix also the many graphics bugs
| in (and around) Excel (one funny bug I found just make the left
| side of the Excel window broken, even the Startmenu, but just
| on a horizontal FullHD monitor.)
| mfer wrote:
| There are sites that use the GitHub API to collect stats on
| contributions and projects. The idea of using the available data
| to gather metrics on orgs and people isn't new.
|
| What might be the most interesting is the idea of productivity
| scores. It makes so many assumptions that are generalized. I bet
| many of them aren't documented.
|
| I also would suspect that this will lead to behavior change to
| improve on "productivity" that may have nothing to do with
| improving customer businesses but help scores go up.
| dathinab wrote:
| Yes it's fully impossible to generalized produce any form of
| productivity score.
|
| Like sometimes someone taking a full day to write a single
| short paragraph can be the most productive and valuable thing
| which happens in the recent month. Even if hounded of pages
| where written, mails read and responded etc.
|
| Such score can only really measure quantity but not quality but
| in many cases you need quality much more than quantity to be
| successful.
| philipodonnell wrote:
| I get the knee-jerk reaction to look for scripts that fake
| activity and call this spying, but despite the name on the page,
| these kinds of metrics seem more focused on adoption of
| "productivity tools" (industry jargon for the suite) than
| measuring actual productivity.
|
| IT leaders are always looking to show that technology tools that
| they pay for are being used and MSFT has an interest in providing
| visibility to encourage proactive communication and training to
| deepen penetration.
|
| Maybe there are other screens that show more detail and it would
| be fair to disregard my comment in that case, but just based on
| what is in the twitter thread, metrics that count the number of
| days that a tool is used at least once are about as innocuous as
| they get.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Not to pick on you here, but to me, this is case and point of
| the type of "privacy rot" we have allowed to settle in the
| psyche of American minds.
|
| Imagine if it was discovered that Bell, or Motorolla, or Cisco
| installed taps on business phones in the 80s and 90s to see
| which "productivity features" were being used, or for
| "reporting" -- it would make national headlines and businesses
| would be up in arms.
|
| To me this is the worst side effect of the modern internet we
| have built, where data is being mined and pumped into every
| orifice available: we've lost a sense of what our privacy is
| truly worth. Thankfully, this latest generation is starting to
| lash out against it.
| philipodonnell wrote:
| Its a fair point, just a bit of a tough spot to put IT in,
| you know? If I buy a tool for my employees to use I want to
| know if they are using it to see if I am getting my money's
| worth. How would I do that if any attempt to measure usage,
| not matter how high level, is "spying"?
| yodelshady wrote:
| How could I establish if my employees, aka _human beings
| with a brain and set of vocal chords or functional
| equivalent_ , use a given tool?
|
| I know what you mean but if that's satire, it's excellent.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Seriously? Ask them if they use it and what they think
| about it.
|
| I am so lucky that our IT actually values privacy very
| much. We have the spy tools but they have a real work ethic
| and therefore are far too lazy to look up private info.
| user9372829 wrote:
| Please, ask him
| Grimm665 wrote:
| Maybe talk to them?
| [deleted]
| thebean11 wrote:
| I'm not sure anyone's claiming that _any_ attempt to
| measure usage is spying. We 're not talking about metrics
| like "the technology org created 452 documents and spent
| 9h47m reading them". We're talking about "Sally spent 4m52s
| looking at the doc Tom wrote".
|
| Big difference.
| SulfurHexaFluri wrote:
| The page linked just says stuff like "50% of users
| installed the mobile app"
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _Imagine if it was discovered that Bell, or Motorolla, or
| Cisco installed taps on business phones in the 80s and 90s to
| see which "productivity features" were being used, or for
| "reporting" -- it would make national headlines and
| businesses would be up in arms._"
|
| I seem to remember that phone bills were a thing in the 80s
| and 90s, an itemised list of every number you called, when,
| how long you spent on the call, logs of every incoming and
| outgoing call on an entire system, used for reporting.
| Possibly judging sales people on call volumes and engagement
| metrics? Judging customer support people on time to close
| calls? And no national headline outcry.
|
| No? Wasn't that a thing?
| raddy wrote:
| What about call centers - Don't they also have metrics
| about phone calls such as call time, hold time etc? How is
| this any different?
| hyperdimension wrote:
| Yeah, I remember at least one report coming out after the
| (first? Maybe the 3G?) iphone came out of people receiving
| thousand-page bills that had to be sent in _boxes_ because
| they detailed every data connection, back when they nickel-
| and-dimed you, either by time spent connected or by the kB.
|
| It definitely seems absurd now in the midst of XX GB plans!
| (They just found different ways of charging you in silly
| ways, seemingly.)
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I noticed that teams has some call center like functionality
| (people's phone status, call queues, and so on). I kind of expect
| everything to be tracked to a painful level of detail whenever
| that gets added, because call centers have been like that for a
| long time.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I will do contracting for companies that use MSFT as their
| platform, but will not join as an employee for them. I've found a
| Windows laptop is basically the leading indicator of a low-growth
| culture and a crappy job.
| glasss wrote:
| What alternatives would make you actually become an employee?
| motohagiography wrote:
| Being an employee is an investment, so I use the
| team/market/product model. Tech choice is also an investment
| that signals an expected return. I'd say a company using
| enterprise tech is indexed more on optimization problems than
| explosive growth.
|
| Fine if you want stability, but if you are naturally oriented
| toward higher risk/reward environments, platform choice is a
| cultural signal worth asking questions about. When the chips
| are down, you take what's on offer, but if you are making an
| active decision from a stable position, you can leverage
| culture tells to derive the right questions.
| [deleted]
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| I think this is a really great concept. Do you generally
| evaluate companies on your own before applying, like
| looking at their website copy, LinkedIn profiles,
| Glassdoor, any blog posts, etc, or do you ask direct
| questions about this in interviews? Or is there some other
| way you suss out this kind of tech culture?
| motohagiography wrote:
| Thanks! Have written about it before here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19280341
|
| Can't say I'm very successful financially, but am almost
| always satisfied with the quality of the agreements I
| make.
|
| Also, I like to plug keyvalues.com because the day they
| won product hunt, one of my early ideas was on it as
| well, and I watched them go up and it was cool to see
| them succeed.
| Cyclone_ wrote:
| Sounds a little dangerous using some of those metrics, I don't
| think they would necessarily measure productivity well. Some
| managers certainly would abuse them.
| isodev wrote:
| Isn't there anyone decent working at Microsoft these days?
|
| I mean, multiple teams had to OK this... so many people
| collectively deciding it's ok ...
| rainyMammoth wrote:
| I hate what the workspace has become. It all started with Slack.
|
| Productivity is now equated to busy-ness on corporate chat. You
| are being judged on how much "chats" and "mentions" you send. If
| you are offline (because you want to do actual work), people now
| automatically think that you are not working.
| Tagbert wrote:
| That is a strange, dysfunctional work culture. Consider this a
| strong indicator that management has no idea what they are
| doing and you should look for a different company.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| There are good managers that don't know what you are doing if
| you don't work in a pure software house. But they know how to
| work with that by setting goals, talking with you about it
| and when you deliver they start to appreciate you and your
| work even if they don't know anything about the details.
|
| Hard to get those in larger corps though. It seems to always
| degrades to bullshit, no idea why. There are exceptions but
| it still seems to be a clear pattern.
| lkjewOIJ wrote:
| I WILL _NOT_ RENEW MY OFFICE SUBSCRIPTION ONCE IT'S EXPIRED
| martinesko36 wrote:
| This is yet another fail by M$. So, why do people praise
| Microsoft so much? Satya Nadella turned it around, really? MS365
| surveils you. Windows is full of telemetry, Cortana/Bing ads and
| the UX is objectively bad as they have design from the 2000s
| mixed in with design from today. VSCode is a slow Electron app. I
| have a Surface - it is a flop and can't compare to Apple. The new
| Xbox has worse performance than PS5. LinkedIn is cancerous and
| nobody I know enjoys using it. The list goes on and on. I am at a
| loss to find a reason to use Microsoft products willingly, except
| GitHub which is still somewhat okay (yet).
| rubidium wrote:
| Make a script to send out @ mentions across multiple channels,
| start sending automated "project update" status emails daily, and
| generally add to useless chatter.
|
| "Look Boss, I'm a good employee. Office 365 spy says so."
| rootsudo wrote:
| So, this would only work if you use basic vbscript and not
| powershell _which is enabled_ =per account, regardless if admin
| or not. But it does not take into account browser clicks,
| refreshing pages and general browsing.
|
| This was a very brought up topic at MSFT.
| strombofulous wrote:
| Couldn't you just use browser automation tools for this? It
| wouldn't really make sense to use the tools that are watching
| the behavior to automate the behavior
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| Give the script to everyone you know as well.
|
| Automated metrics deserve automated data.
|
| Garbage in, garbage out.
| nerevarthelame wrote:
| Only the finest hand-collected artisanal metrics are worthy
| of MY data.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| I suppose you could hand-craft some of the script-generated
| responses if you want.
|
| Why not use GPT-3 or some other GAN and train it on stuff
| you have actually written?
|
| Then you can have high-quality, automated data to feed the
| metrics machine.
| npmaile wrote:
| this, but unironically
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > Automated metrics deserve automated data.
|
| Exactly this. And remember that it applies to _any_ automated
| data collection. (After all, automated data collection is
| automated data collection.)
| ping_pong wrote:
| Facebook employees are evaluated on many things, including
| number of reviews that they participate in. My friend said that
| lead to a lot of engineers adding "+1" comments to as many
| reviews as possible, or requesting "Thank you"s for responding
| to emails.
| ciarannolan wrote:
| > [...] requesting "Thank you"s for responding to emails.
|
| What does this mean?
| umanwizard wrote:
| Facebook has an internal tool called thanksbot that you can
| use to "send thanks" to people, and these are recorded and
| can be discussed at performance review time. Ideally only
| in situation where it actually matters (thanks for the
| refactor that made our service use 50% less gCPU!) but
| obviously anything can be gamed.
| bigwavedave wrote:
| It sounds like if employee A sends an email to employee B
| and employee B sends a response to A, employee B expects
| (implied or explicitly stated in their response) a "thank
| you for your time/response" email from employee A. Just a
| guess though.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I'd love to know as well. Thank you @rubidium for starting
| this comment tree and also @ping_pong for additional
| insights. Clarifications and/or corrections are totally
| welcome as this my comment is based on pure speculation.
| Aperocky wrote:
| LMAO that's the funniest thing I heard all day, primarily
| because where I work that's not evaluated at all.
|
| More power to the managers, but all good when your managers
| are likable people.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| That was my first thought.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| As does Google's GSuite^h^h^h^h^hWorkspace. Employers have the
| "right" to use surveillance of their employees in the US (this
| has been litigated several times) and so product suppliers build
| it into their tools for those enterprises that want to use it.
|
| Since most (maybe all?) employers make you sign a document when
| you start work that explicitly states they reserve the right to
| surveil you. As a result this should not come as much of a
| surprise.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Well at least they got the name right.
| anoncow wrote:
| If Windows and Office die, will MS die?
| ianferrel wrote:
| Anyone who thinks metrics on "amount of time spent reading and
| responding to email" is going to tell them which workers are more
| productive is going to be in for a rude surprise.
| christkv wrote:
| I might be wrong but I imagine this might be either illegal or in
| a grey area in most of Europe.
| jononor wrote:
| Unsure why this was downvoted?
|
| If anyone disagrees on the comment, comment why instead of
| downvoting?
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Why the heck is this still legal anyway? Bosses should not be
| allowed to spy on people. If I actually fail to do the job in
| time repeatedly - ok, go ahead and fire me, that would be fair (I
| won't even resist if I see that's even partially my fault), but
| don't freaking spy!
|
| Anyway, I would prefer to be unaware I'm being watched - I get
| kind of paralyzed with anxiety and can't think when somebody's
| watching over my shoulder and I know they do.
| jononor wrote:
| I am pretty sure that the individual-level data would be
| illegal to collect on employees in Norway under labor law.
| According to the linked Twitter stream, author says it would be
| illegal in Germany and Austria. Probably for many other
| European countries as well.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Different tenants per geographic regions have different
| standards.
| gbil wrote:
| Sure it is illegal in Germany or at least the Workers'
| council needs to approve it :)
|
| But in other countries the laws are different. Managing a VPN
| solution you can't imagine how easy it is to get a data
| protection officer in the US approve a manager request for
| remote working data of an employee, reasoning being "to check
| if he worked from home as he told me and not from another
| place"
| kevindong wrote:
| Why would it be illegal?
|
| The employee is doing work for a employer on a platform
| provided by the employer.
| laboroflaw wrote:
| Because being an employer doesn't give you carte blanche to
| do whatever you want to an employee.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| In the USA, it seems like it might as well. And somehow
| most employees have been convinced this is suitable.
| Whether it _should_ is another question.
| gspr wrote:
| Good point! Said platform should also electrocute an
| employee lagging behind. You know, for motivation.
|
| See how broken your logic is?
| kevindong wrote:
| Your counterexample is a straw man argument where the
| example approaches abuse.
|
| My reasoning of why employee surveillance is fine is that
| there's a genuine purpose/need (measuring employee
| productivity) while personal privacy is retained (e.g.
| don't import personal information into the corporate 365
| environment and personal privacy is retained). I'm not
| saying the metrics provided by 365 are correct, but I
| don't see the legal argument against it.
| petre wrote:
| Because then less people would want to be employed and
| would rather stay on unemployment benefits burdening the
| state and the other employers? Or maybe because slavery was
| abolished 200 years ago?
|
| I knew a guy who worked night shifts because he wasn't
| getting notoced by the shift supervisors when he went out
| for a smoke. There were less shift supervisors on night
| shifts.
| baah wrote:
| those metrics are so useless it probably doesn't even count as
| spying.
|
| but seriously totally get how you feel.. it's been my first few
| months with an IT-managed laptop, and even with the creepier
| stuff off (hurray european laws) i'm nowhere near used to it
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I know employee surveillance is useless, that's obvious, but
| that hardly really matters to the person being watched.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Why the heck is this still legal anyway?"_
|
| Because the bosses run the world, as people seem to like being
| bossed around.
| laboroflaw wrote:
| No, capital runs the world. The people who have little don't
| want to risk losing it and the people who have a lot have no
| reason to risk losing it.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Workers have achieved a huge lot in outlawing things bosses
| wanted throughout the history. I would love to participate in
| a fight against this one if people would organize.
|
| Another thing to fight against are requirements to explain
| resume gaps and discrimination against people who have them
| and people already seem starting to raise against this.[1]
|
| The society still has a lot of work to do...
|
| [1] https://www.boredpanda.com/annoying-job-interview-
| questions-...
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Developers are sometimes part of it. We have a lot of
| security companies where FUD means higher sales. They pay
| well though.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Join the IWW and start organizing your workplace!
| woahAcademia wrote:
| Go ahead start your own company.
|
| I tried a few times. I'll gladly be bossed around for 8 hours
| when I make this much money..
| 0goel0 wrote:
| Bosses pay for lobbyists that fight regulation to keep shit
| like this in check
| vaccinator wrote:
| some track how long you stay in the bathroom using the RFID
| badge that they gave you
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| NFC RFID badges have a range of 10-20 cm. Unless an employer
| is requiring badging in and out of the bathroom or is using
| UHF RFID badges (is there even such a thing?), your assertion
| is unlikely to be true.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Leaving and re-entering your office, buzzing the locks on
| the way?
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Although it's plausible, I would think that offices with
| a layout that requires badging out to reach an external
| restroom are rare. Seems as if there would be fire or
| disaster evacuation concerns.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| The face recognition cameras catch you on the way out,
| the camera catches you on the way back in.
| SulfurHexaFluri wrote:
| My building has the toilets in the fire escape stairs
| which you can push button out to but badge back in from.
| You would have some difficulty measuring time since you
| don't know who pushed the button but you could certainly
| measure frequency.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Not really, in case of a fire alarm all doors unlock
| anyway.
|
| When I was a consultant I visited many offices where I
| needed a badge to go to the loo. It's really common in
| shared office buildings, the toilets tend to be in the
| elevator hall outside the badge perimeter. Don't think
| they were monitoring it though.
| Aunche wrote:
| For certain jobs like in finance, compliance has to spy on
| people to check they aren't manipulating the market.
| esaym wrote:
| lol, it basically just says people that use all of 360's features
| are more productive.
| woahAcademia wrote:
| Yeah these things show uselessness when you have a senior
| engineer that's swamped but shows unproductive.
|
| I've recently felt guilty walking away from my desk to think
| about a Programming problem. I used to do this all the time but
| with WFH I imagine there are more screen grabs.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Maybe to sell training?
| tyingq wrote:
| Interesting, though the screenshot is aggregate productivity. Is
| there functionality that gets down to individuals?
| ckdarby wrote:
| https://twitter.com/WolfieChristl/status/1331222157347741704...
| tyingq wrote:
| Urgh, yeah, that's terrible. (This screen, for example: https
| ://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnlzZBFWEAYsco9?format=jpg&name=...)
| yread wrote:
| I don't know - to me this looks more pointless than evil.
| Yeah, I don't use @mentions in my emails, so what? Are they
| going to fire me?
|
| If you really stretch it you could even imagine this being
| useful: "Hey Anastasia, I've noticed you don't post to
| Yammer and we think it's useful. Go yammer about something
| there, it will make us all more productive" or something.
| hedora wrote:
| We need a right to privacy amendment to the US constitution. It
| should apply to the US government and to companies.
|
| All automated data gathering should be opt in.
| mjcohen wrote:
| And what do you think it would turn into on the way?
|
| No thanks.Right now is not that good, but it could easily
| become worse.
| [deleted]
| effie_ wrote:
| This is not turned on by default in my tenant.
| te_chris wrote:
| Ugh, I can just imagine what the product managers for this
| feature are like.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| What do you imagine? I could see competent and respectful
| people working on this feature.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Maybe so but I would argue that they have a narrow
| perspective. Granted, I think this isn't their only project
| and can only guess their motivation, but it is just the
| typical office (heh) busy work. I call that a bullshit job.
| Try to engage your people at least.
| nxc18 wrote:
| Not sure if this is the right place for this, but I feel the need
| to give a warning:
|
| If you try to log in to certain MS apps with your work account
| (in particular OneNote), they will give you a checkbox to allow
| the org to manage Windows on that device. This checkbox is
| ignored (or really, visibly re-enabled during the auth flow).
|
| It is very easy to end up in a situation where your org suddenly
| has full control of your personal Windows device. It is also very
| easy (again, because of broken auth workflows) to end up with
| your personal MS account on your work PC. OneDrive can then at
| any point (most likely after a Windows update) start downloading
| all of your personal content to your work device.
|
| Microsoft has been trying to blur the lines between Windows and
| Office. IME, this has made both fundamentally untrustworthy,
| because it is very hard to know what I am authorizing (and they
| will explicitly ignore/reset my choice anyway) and where my data
| will end up.
|
| It feels very bad to know that, at any time and without warning,
| Microsoft can begin sharing my personal data into my work-managed
| IT systems.
| irateswami wrote:
| I got my first generated report the other day. My COO has already
| come out and said that it's not going to count towards anything
| but still, this is scary. When I do move on to another job, I'm
| going to be asking very specific questions around if/how they
| track employee performance.
| dustinmoris wrote:
| Just ask if they are using Microsoft and Windows or if they are
| actually being productive.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| yea because nothing gets done on windows _eyeroll_
| khyryk wrote:
| > My COO has already come out and said that it's not going to
| count towards anything but still, this is scary.
|
| Yeah, I've heard that one before. When OKRs were introduced at
| a previous placed I worked, they were supposedly for fun and
| just for us to see our progress. In the next annual review,
| they were the primary means of measuring one's "performance".
| bjornjajayaja wrote:
| Personally I haven't seen much change in the features of office
| (that I use). Is there a reason for folks not to migrate to
| LibreOffice? Office 365 barely works nowadays without an internet
| connection, which is really annoying. Cloud first technologies
| are ridiculous, IMO. Developers out there: please test your code
| _without_ and internet connection. Thank you.
| hiram112 wrote:
| > Is there a reason for folks not to migrate to LibreOffice?
|
| Yes, because nobody else is using LibreOffice, and so whenever
| you send documents to someone else, you come off as very
| unprofessional due to the good chance your document won't
| render correctly for everyone using MS.
| boogies wrote:
| Sending them as PDFs should solve that.
| ruffrey wrote:
| I've had endless problems with Libre/Open Office and Apple
| Numbers + tracked changes. Since these are critical for
| contracts, I end up needing it. The Microsoft tools are total
| shit compared to gsuite on mac. But it's the only option for
| reliable tracked changes.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| For all metrics my rule of thumb has always been to just do my
| job as best as I can and ignore the metrics. If a manager ever
| says anything about them, I ask them what they think of my actual
| performance. Then when they say they are happy with my
| performance, I suggest that they are looking at the wrong
| metrics. The few times that has failed i flatly tell them that I
| will not do anything to game the metrics, and I'm just going to
| keep doing my job as best as I can. So far that has always kept
| them busy until I got a promotion, switched companies, or the
| short sighted manager got fired.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| I tried that strategy for a little bit.
|
| I also tried the strategy where I prioritized hitting all the
| metrics (which usually takes very little work relative to your
| job) and then did my job.
|
| The second strategy led to better reviews, faster promotions,
| being more well liked by my boss, and an overall more pleasant
| work experience. I recommend the second strategy.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| That is because the system (organization) prefers its nodes
| to be legible rather than illegible. It might hear that some
| nodes are "more productive", but that is illegible and
| unauditable from the system's point of view. In light of
| this, I see no reason why employees shouldn't conform to the
| metrics; yes, some "true productivity" is sacrificed, but
| that is the price of legibility. That has always been the
| price of legibility, whether you're a state or a company or a
| community. For large organizations, that is a price they
| often choose to pay.
| prewett wrote:
| There's a third strategy for the no-BS, independent types:
| opt out. Contracting/consulting avoids a lot of that. You're
| not a worker bee that the company "owns/rents", you are a
| vendor providing a service. It's usually fairly concrete what
| you're providing, and it's fairly clear if they are satisfied
| (if they aren't, they stop paying you). As a bonus, it's
| expected that you set your schedule (as a 1099 requirement),
| so you get a lot of flexibility.
|
| Of course, if you're contracting for a company that thinks in
| terms of "resources" that will trickle down into contractors,
| too. Sometimes team perks like the quarterly see-a-random-
| movie are "members-only", which doesn't feel great. But then,
| nobody complains much if you take three weeks off to go
| hiking.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Contracting/consulting comes with an entirely different set
| of problem/challenge, though.
|
| I feel like this suggestion is akin to remodeling your
| house simply because the walls are the wrong paint color.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| This has not been my experience consulting at all.
|
| Unless you're working for a small company directly for the
| owner you will be dealing with someone who has to convince
| their boss the project was a success or you were
| responsible for the failure. And you need to care about a
| lot of metrics and outcomes to make that you are successful
| as measured by those metrics, or that it doesn't look like
| you are responsible for the failure.
|
| Just doing a great job doesn't cut it. No client ever
| really wants on day 90 what they signed up for on day 1.
| For most clients the person who is signing your checks, the
| person you work with on a day to day basis, and the people
| who will be using your apps will be different people. They
| will all have different ideas of what success and failure
| are, and they all have other people they are responsible
| to. And all of these tensions need to be managed
| successfully, and this involves a ton of BS that is
| completely unrelated to what a naive engineer would
| describe as "delivering value".
|
| In a normal job your boss is usually your friend, and looks
| bad if he throws you under the bus. This is not the same
| for a lot of consulting engagements where people are highly
| motived to blame their failures on you.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| >Unless you're working for a small company directly for
| the owner
|
| These are the only clients I take as a consultant. As an
| individual, you aren't going to be able to have that many
| clients at once; there's no reason, then, not to target
| the ones that make the job more satisfying. You do often
| wind up working for small (<50 employees) businesses, but
| at the same time, this also means your work has a greater
| chance of having a bigger positive impact across the
| board.
|
| Everyone has their different wants, of course, and there
| are plenty of headaches that come from being a 1099
| worker. But there's no reason it has to be a slog,
| either.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| That no longer will be possible in the UK next year as
| government changed IR35 rules. Clients to be safe will
| declare you a deemed employee and as a bonus they'll be
| able to use tools used on employees plus you get no
| employment rights.
| Nursie wrote:
| A good part of the reason I'm independent these days is
| hatred of the annual review.
|
| Of course the pay bump helps :)
| toyg wrote:
| Been there, done that; the problem is the hassle over
| unrelated overhead (like chasing payments, in one case for
| almost a year...) and the uncertainty (it's feast or
| famine, most of the time).
| blackearl wrote:
| If you work at a company where bullshit flows uphill it's a
| winning strategy. If your manager's manager likes those kind
| of stats it certainly makes their job easier. I don't know
| how long I'd want to work at a place like that though.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| I've worked on 5 fortune 500 companies and every single one
| worked like that.
|
| This was far less true at smaller companies where the
| owners/founders were directly involved.
|
| Are there large companies where it doesn't work like that?
| tubularhells wrote:
| I know autistic developers who are not unwilling but unable
| to use the second startegy. They cannot comprehend the
| insanity the manager wants from them. Regardless, they get
| shit done so it's the manager who has to change strategies. I
| say if you openly do not care and stick to #1, the world will
| align.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Ah, if it's about faster promotions, I can be only happy that
| my pay was rising acceptably throughout years of using
| strategy #1. I briefly tried strategy #2 but it was a near-
| instant burnout for me, hence decidedly not a "pleasant work
| experience".
| wilt wrote:
| I have a low tolerance for bs like this. I usually articulate
| why its bs to my manager to give them a chance to fix it and
| if they are unwilling to i get a new job. No point in staying
| to deal with that kind of bs, life is short.
| iamkroot wrote:
| I agree with this. I think it's also important to regularly
| check it with your manager and ask about how your performance
| is being perceived and if there is anything they could suggest
| that you improve upon. Keep the feedback loop tight so that
| both of you can address any problems as quickly as possible.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Absolutely. I left that part out, but if there is something I
| need to change to do my job better, I most certainly do that
| as best as I can. The thing is that those conversations have
| never been directly tied to metrics.
| iamkroot wrote:
| Of course, they're almost always very qualitative
| discussions. If you have a track record of discussing
| improvement points, hopefully both you and your manager
| will be able to agree that any metrics that might appear
| during year end reviews are mostly extraneous.
| skohan wrote:
| I think the issue with this can be when the metrics are being
| consumed by people you don't directly work with
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I think this works for some roles but not others. The CEO can
| choose what criteria to use, and so the people reporting to the
| CEO can make your argument. The manager of a team of CX reps
| might not have that power to chose the criteria, so the people
| reporting to that manager are just as powerless. Then there's
| the whole spectrum in between.
|
| This is actually one of the privileges I'm most thankful for.
| That I have been able to make it work in an industry where I
| (and my managers) have the agency to decide how I should be
| evaluated. I have friends who aren't so lucky, even when they
| push hard for the people below them to be evaluated more
| sanely.
| m463 wrote:
| f*ck that.
|
| block as much as you can.
|
| delve.office.com and I think it was vortex.data.microsoft.com
|
| umatrix lets you block lots of other parts. Microsoft sites are
| a cesspool of tracking and cross-tracking.
|
| I wish there was a comprehensive list.
|
| I also wonder how much CCPA and other laws could help with
| these issues.
|
| All privacy policies say you are entitled to make a privacy
| request, but none of them provides guidance or a form.
|
| It would be nice to have CCPA advice or even form letters.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yeah since working from home I've seen a LOT of chatter
| blocked by my pihole when the VPN is off. Also
| browser.pipe.aria.microsoft.com, telemetry.microsoft.com,
| trafficmanager.net, hockeyapp.net,
| self.events.data.microsoft.com . And this is with uBlock
| origin also adding up blocked stuff constantly (so that's not
| even reaching pihole).
|
| Some of them (like trafficmanager.net) do seem needed for
| proper operation but most aren't.
|
| Even when I'm just working locally on a document... I really
| don't like this either. Nor do I like those 'helpful' O365
| reports about my habits and how to spend my time.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| In the kind of company that uses that, you also don't get to
| install anything you want on your computer.
|
| For example I can only log into my company's online office
| suite from the company-provided Chrome installation, and no
| addon can be installed unless whitelisted by IT.
| acuozzo wrote:
| Then a DNS Sinkhole it is! Pi-hole on the Raspberry Pi 0W
| is tiny.
| leesalminen wrote:
| I'd imagine the company owned laptop doesn't let you set
| custom DNS servers.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| That won't work on the company VPN I'm afraid.
| akudha wrote:
| This can be applied to other areas in life too. As an example,
| Instead of using a smart watch for tracking sleep we can simply
| base our decisions on how our body feels, intuitively.
|
| I feel like we are losing touch with our own bodies, feelings,
| nature and other people. We are relying too much on data for a
| lot of things where it doesn't make sense
| haolez wrote:
| I'm a CTO and I've disabled MyAnalytics and I'll disable this as
| well. We have power and we can do better. Let's create better
| companies and fight back with actions, not words.
| Deely123123 wrote:
| So... No profit for you?
| icandoit wrote:
| Maybe they would prefer KPIs like "increase sales", "average
| issue resolution time goes down" instead of fluff like "more
| @mentions used in chat to increase staff engagement".
|
| This data is a wet dream for middle managers locked out of
| creating actual value and doomed to micro-manage.
| CyanBird wrote:
| These metrics are not the ones any sensible manager is
| interested in if they seek profit and well-being for the
| company
| peterkelly wrote:
| Obligatory link to the famous "-2000 Lines Of Code" story:
|
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
| hkt wrote:
| Your regular reminder of the predatory nature of tech giants
| sz4kerto wrote:
| You can do this with Slack as well. There's no sophisticated UI
| (yet), but the history is there.
| snarfy wrote:
| I can see why companies don't trust their employees. Look at what
| just happened to GoDaddy.
| rzodkiew wrote:
| But, but Microsoft in 2020 is not the same Microsoft than 20
| years ago.
| dustinmoris wrote:
| Worse! Microsoft 2020 is Stalin dressed up as a puppy dog. 20
| years ago Microsoft looked on the outside at least as rotten as
| they were on the inside.
| rzodkiew wrote:
| True that. I think the main thing they've learned over the
| years is how to craft their public image, which I guess can
| be said about every corporation out there.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The Microsoft of the late 90's wouldn't have done something
| like this.
|
| They did plenty of very different things, but this is something
| they only have done since the late XP days.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| They would have if they had had an internet.
|
| But at that time they were still trying to lock us all into
| their own version of the internet, MSN the Microsoft Network
| :)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| They had the option for a long time. One of the main
| selling points of Windows 2000 and ME was native internet
| support without messing with anything, and people did use
| that.
|
| But was only near the release of Vista that Windows started
| to phone home.
| metmac wrote:
| I'm sorry but how is this surprising or upsetting to anyone.
| Slack and others have similar metrics. But that's not the point.
|
| Moreover even if some PM in Microsoft didn't build this
| dashboard, the data would most likely be available via API. Look
| at some of the cloud security products Palo Alto ships. As others
| have commented, this was most likely built with the intent of
| showing organizations how effective they are using O365, not
| perfmon of their employees.
|
| At the end of the day, it's the onus of the HR teams and
| leadership of corporations to have reasonable metrics to track
| performance against, of which we can all probably agree, obscure
| "productivity" graphs in your Office suite isn't one of them.
|
| Frankly, if they don't maintain reasonable methods of performance
| management, it is an incredibly effective way to limit and lose
| their talent pool.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| This is an equivalent of pornhub to micromanagers. Frankly it's
| good to know who to avoid. If you company uses 365, maybe you
| should move to China where these things go. Few threads from hear
| I read people praise m$ as being the good guys now. Such a laugh.
| polote wrote:
| Zoom has a similar thing if I remember correctly
| Grimm1 wrote:
| Does anyone have a good recommendation to replace Msft 365? We
| moved to them to escape the google sphere but we're not down with
| this level of tracking capability either.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| I've only used the first for personal home use, and the second
| just a little bit working with a local nonprofit, but I really
| love Notion and Airtable.
| flumpcakes wrote:
| On the other hand, the same tools email me once a week with a
| breakdown of what I've done.
|
| It constantly shows that for the previous 28 days I have had zero
| quiet days: in other words every single day I have used
| email/chat/etc. outside of my assigned working hours (which is
| picked up from my in office hours from Outlook).
|
| This is something to shove back to bosses to _prove_ that you are
| overworked and /or overcommitting.
| dustinmoris wrote:
| You don't need a Gestapo like surveillance culture. Messages in
| chat and emails already have a timestamp attached to them. No
| need to ask for a chainsaw if all you want is crack an egg
| open.
| blauditore wrote:
| This might become the work-from-home version of "looking busy
| doing nothing".
| ping_pong wrote:
| git is even worse than whatever these tweets suggest Office 365
| does. Git stats have been used against me on performance reviews
| even though there's no context to the situation. I went from a
| programming role to an ops role because the ops person left the
| team and I was the only one left that could do the work, so my
| number of check-ins dropped, but my contributions that improved
| the ops section weren't acknowledged.
|
| Any company can create bad metrics if they want. The only
| solution is to either play the game, or change companies.
|
| That said, I fail to see how effective employee monitoring would
| be via Office 365. I don't know who would be evaluated on number
| of emails sent per day, unless they were some sort of support
| personnel. And if so, they are already being monitored by other
| means. Any other type of evaluation sounds absurd, ex. number of
| Word docs opened or created, number of spreadsheets opened,
| number of presentations created, etc.
| _jal wrote:
| I don't want to see tools built for surveillance, although
| that's a lost cause at this point.
|
| But the tool doesn't force managers to use it, and the absence
| of a surveillance mechanism, someone who seeking an excuse will
| invent a metric for the purpose.
|
| The only cure I've found for toxic culture is to remove someone
| from it. Usually me.
| Beached wrote:
| if you use a full 0365 stack there are a lot more datapoints to
| use than just emails sent, or documents opened/created.
|
| you have login times to see if they are late, chat metadata to
| see time to response on dm, idle status to see if keyboard /
| mouse went inactive. meetings attended, page views on the
| intranet, etc. if your a full stack o365 shop, then you can
| essentially log any and all activity for most employees, and
| therefore target kpi's that you want. even it admins to a
| degree will have these logged. powershell sessions opened,
| commands executed against the stack, every single click 8n the
| web gui in o365, every single action in azure. they are all
| logged and assessable, I used the same data for security
| monitoring before I moved to a Google shop
| coldtea wrote:
| > _That said, I fail to see how effective employee monitoring
| would be via Office 365. I don 't know who would be evaluated
| on number of emails sent per day, unless they were some sort of
| support personnel._
|
| Nobody cares for effectiveness above a certain company size.
| Even if the company crashes the managers will still get their
| bonuses and golden parachutes...
| Rillen wrote:
| They might have not been any indication for you but i used it
| as an additional marker;
|
| When there is a team member where you feel something is off
| from a performance perspective and they should do the same
| things as other colleges and there is a hard difference between
| them, it helps you that your gut feeling is not that off.
| bjohnson225 wrote:
| I used to work at a company which used GitPrime, a product
| which tries to use git statistics to create graphs and
| productivity rankings for management, but of course it lacks
| any context.
|
| The easiest way to shoot up the ranking was to avoid any work
| where you'd not be instantly coding. Never fix a bug where you
| need to spend time tracking down the issue, never take on the
| more complicated pieces of work, never use your time to help
| out junior team members. Instead focus on simple work and
| trivial refactoring. The statistics are vaguely interesting and
| I never had it used against me, but the old quote applies:
| "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure."
| npsimons wrote:
| > never use your time to help out junior team members.
|
| Yeah, I'll be honest, if I had this sort of metric forced on
| me, I would completely ignore _everyone_ , not just junior
| devs who (quite often) ask for my help on finding the right
| tool to accomplish a task. I can bang out code all day,
| that's easy as shit.
|
| But I think I'd quit before I'd sink to that level.
| na85 wrote:
| >when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure.
|
| I see this get thrown around a lot but it's not really true.
| If a metric can be gamed then I agree it's a flawed or poor
| metric, but there are definitely good metrics that make good
| targets as well.
|
| Concrete example: I used to work in aircraft maintenance
| putting Search and Rescue aircraft into the sky to go pull
| people out of lakes or out of crevasses, etc. One of our
| KPIs/metrics was the number of hours spent in what's called
| the "Red" state, i.e. you have no serviceable aircraft that
| can fly if a callout happens, meaning the region is lacking
| airborne SAR assets.
|
| There isn't really a way to (legally) game this metric.
| Either your aircraft is serviceable or it's not. The only way
| you could cheat is to just lie on your statistics and release
| aircraft for missions that are actually not serviceable, but
| that's going to bite you in the ass sooner or later, would
| require a conspiracy of 10+ people to lie on official
| airworthiness documents, and doing so is a federal crime not
| to mention a big ethical no-no.
|
| Our monthly target was zero. I.e. we tried to go each month
| keeping at least one serviceable aircraft at all times. We
| only hit that target a few times while I was in that job but
| it was rewarding, and on months where the Red indicator was
| particularly large I would drill down with senior staff to
| determine if it was an anomaly or if there was a trend
| starting, and we'd address it.
|
| And yet it's still a good measure because it's directly
| measuring what was our primary objective (i.e. can you put
| aircraft in the sky to carry out rescue missions or can you
| not?)
| lhopki01 wrote:
| That doesn't provide a way of measuring your individual
| performance only that of the team. Analogous to that for me
| would be amount of downtime in our system but that's a
| whole team metric not an individual one.
|
| In most cases the measurements are proxies for your "share"
| of the job. In these case they are almost always bad. In
| all my years in tech I've not seen a way of directly
| measuring what I do.
| outworlder wrote:
| > That doesn't provide a way of measuring your individual
| performance only that of the team
|
| Exactly!
|
| Team metrics can be useful. It is important to know if,
| say, a team is missing deliverables more than another
| team. Then you can potentially track down _systemic
| reasons_.
|
| On an individual level? Can't do it, there's not enough
| context.
|
| On a pure "lines per code" metric, the most important
| members on my team would have an abysmal metric. But if
| they didn't do their jobs, the productivity for everyone
| else would drop enormously.
| na85 wrote:
| >That doesn't provide a way of measuring your individual
| performance only that of the team.
|
| Indeed.
|
| Is there a clause I'm unaware of in the saying I quoted
| that stipulates a target/metric must be an individual one
| only?
| jlj wrote:
| I once saw something similar where a co-worker on a newly
| formed team wanted to keep design documents in a git repo.
| Those types of documents can have dozens of small changes, or
| in this case commits, each day. It was also painful to read
| and edit. Luckily our manager stopped the practice early
| before it took root.
|
| Another anecdote, I was once in a tech lead role and spent a
| lot of time pairing and guiding others on their development
| work. My commits were low but impact was high. Low commits
| counted against me during promotion review.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _I once saw something similar where a co-worker on a newly
| formed team wanted to keep design documents in a git repo.
| Those types of documents can have dozens of small changes,
| or in this case commits, each day. It was also painful to
| read and edit. Luckily our manager stopped the practice
| early before it took root._
|
| There's a thing now called GitOps, where you manage your
| infrastructure by tweaking things in a Git repo then
| Puppet/Ansible/Terraform/Saltstack/whatever runs them
| automatically. Easy way to get "number of commits" way, way
| up in a plausible way.
|
| I have a colleague who creates a Jira for every tiny thing
| that for most people would be just a routine part of their
| job. He literally spends more time fooling around in Jira
| than he does actually doing his real job. But he looks
| great in the stats...
| BruiseLee wrote:
| Good ole Gitprime! The source of so many bad memories. I used
| to be on a 4 person team and Gitprime was used to stack rank
| us for every quarterly "performance" review. Woe to the one
| who ended up ranked at the bottom...
| qz2 wrote:
| At least you can git squash all your slacking into one commit
| and merge.
| kreitje wrote:
| Ha! I worked at a place where every Monday I had to count the
| number of commits each team member made and put them on a
| weekly report.
|
| Once the company got bought, my new boss in charge of all
| developers across all divisions asked me to not mention that
| again so he doesn't have to do that. Once I moved on, it
| sounds like ParentCo took a more active role in the
| development and hopefully they stopped that.
| qz2 wrote:
| Yeah that was a shitty approach. Stuck at same sort of
| place. I did an order of magnitude more commits than my
| peers last year. I had to explain that it's because commits
| are cheap which makes experiments and rollbacks easy, not
| that I'm code jesus or something.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| or make a bunch of tiny commits and change the dates to make
| it seem like you've been productive.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Not trying to go off-topic here, but has anyone here actually
| used git in the workplace? I'm 3 for 3 on jobs that don't
| believe in version control, and other companies in my city
| haven't known what it is, I'm constantly asked about having it
| on my resume skills section. I've been told everything from
| "it's not enterprise ready and there's no SLA" to "open source
| is communism".
| Nursie wrote:
| > I'm 3 for 3 on jobs that don't believe in version control,
|
| _Any_ version control?
|
| Because if so ... wow. That's bad, I thought that sort of
| practice went out in the 90s.
|
| Most places I've worked in the last decade use git. A big
| bank used private instances of bitbucket or stash or
| something. Another fintech was on github, a smaller company
| had gitlab or something set up. All git.
|
| Outside of git, one of the tech behemoths had several of its
| own systems going, clearcase and something in rational team
| concert. Even the tiniest, worst-run places I've been to in
| the last 15 years or so have at least used svn or something,
| and going back to the beginning of my career, 20 years ago,
| there's always been PVCS or SCCS or something...
|
| Honestly I would find it hard to claim that any serious sort
| of software development at all was going on if there wasn't
| some sort of vcs!
| names_are_hard wrote:
| Yes, git is pretty much the default at tech companies
| nowadays, although some large companies use more "exotic"
| source control systems like mercurial.
|
| It's also well supported out of the box by Azure Devops (aka
| VSO aka TFS) so I would expect to see it in more traditional,
| non tech companies as well. The idea that it's not enterprise
| ready is ridiculous.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| I only used git and MS team foundation server once. Never
| going to use that again, you cannot imagine how slow that
| monster was. It had VS integration, but it was such a bad
| product overall.
|
| Used SVN previously for private stuff and I think it is still
| spread in many companies. I liked it, just all the small
| folders are a PITA and git is faster for larger repositories.
| It had far better tools than git in my opinion, TortoiseSVN.
| Heavy, but practical.
|
| I would always use git now, even if only locally.
| pjlegato wrote:
| Yes, git is more or less universal in San Francisco / Silicon
| Valley companies.
|
| The only places I'm aware of that don't use it are game
| companies, which tend to use source control systems like
| https://www.plasticscm.com/games specialized in better
| handling of very large binary blob asset files like textures,
| movies, audio clips, etc.; and Google, which has the
| monopoly-scale dev budget to be able to suffer heavily from
| "not invented here syndrome," so they built their own
| proprietary in-house SCM.
| offtop5 wrote:
| What type of living hell doesn't have version control?
|
| Git is the first thing I set up when I start a new side
| project, every job aside from one which let me set it up,
| have used version control. I will say Plastic SCM sucks and
| no one should use it though. One of my side projects ran into
| massive issues with my contractor due to no one, including
| myself understanding how plastic works. GitHub for life
| outworlder wrote:
| > What type of living hell doesn't have version control?
|
| I've worked (thankfully not as an employee) for a well
| known _BANK_ which did not have any kind of version control
| whatsoever. None. Not even folders with dates.
|
| "Where's the latest release?"
|
| "Oh, it's in John Doe's flash drive over there"
|
| I am not kidding.
|
| After a lot of pestering by my company (which was working
| on a consulting role), they spent big bucks on some unknown
| version control system used by hardly anyone else. It
| followed the old Source Safe's "lock" mechanism. Except you
| had to use their own software and navigate to each file in
| question (no searching). Imagine how amazing it was to work
| on a java project and sloooowly open each folder in the
| reverse DNS package convention until you got to the file
| you wanted. Very slowly, because all actions happened on
| the server.
|
| Later on they were bragging on how they were able to create
| a branch in less than a week. Merging was a day long affair
| with all code contributors present.
|
| EDIT: still, that was over a decade ago. I didn't know
| there were companies involved with software in any capacity
| that still don't have version control in 2020.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| When I interview for a job, I ask what their KPIs are. If they
| have an answer at all, I withdraw my application.
| gvfdabgea wrote:
| Ill have to start doing this too.
| teekert wrote:
| We have "Inner Source" as a kpi now. Meaning we constantly
| ask projects where their code is, how others can use it and
| where an internal community can develop. I like this kpi.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| That's a bit extreme. I would ask them to explain why they
| chose the KPIs, because that's where you'll get the
| bullshitters to break down very obviously.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| What about "whether you're doing the work", or "whether your
| team benefits from you being in it"?
| MisterKent wrote:
| Why?
| paxys wrote:
| So you only work for companies that don't do any kind of
| performance reviews or promotions?
| user5994461 wrote:
| I've worked at companies that had promotions/reviews and no
| official KPI.
| core-questions wrote:
| I want to work for companies where the management knows
| that performance reviews and most other HR things are a
| bullshit formality. I should be continually getting
| feedback from a proper human relationship from my boss. If
| I am letting them down I want to know right away, not next
| quarter.
|
| Most of these processes are designed to compensate for
| managers who don't know what the hell they're doing and
| shouldn't be in charge of anyone.
| maxehmookau wrote:
| Half of your post was reasonable.
| dboreham wrote:
| > or change companies
|
| Definitely that.
| boogies wrote:
| At least git is Free, transparent, auditable software, designed
| to track the work itself, not surreptitiously log each device
| you glance at a document on and MS only knows what else.
| npsimons wrote:
| > At least git is Free, transparent, auditable software,
| designed to track the work itself, not surreptitiously log
| each device you glance at a document on and MS only knows
| what else.
|
| Yeah, GP's comment was completely off base. O365 is user-
| hostile tracking-ware _by design_. git is just a tool with
| incredibly high granularity. We don 't say scalpels suck
| because psychopaths use them to torture people.
| xorcist wrote:
| Gamification has consequences.
|
| I have seen git commits change over time because someone
| started to look at stats. You absolutely get what you benchmark
| for.
| syshum wrote:
| Combined with that, many employee's know how to work the
| metrics to make themselves look more productive than they
| really are.
|
| So you end up with work being done to fit the metrics, not
| necessarily work that is of highest need or more impactful to
| the organization.
|
| I have seen plenty of bad metrics lead to managers no
| understanding why their dept's appear to be "hitting all the
| numbers" but also no performing in the way they desire at the
| same time
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > you end up with work being done to fit the metrics, not
| necessarily work that is of highest need
|
| Obligatory reference to (generalised) Goodhart's Law:
|
| "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
| ping_pong wrote:
| After my performance review, I talked to my boss and my
| boss's boss, and asked them if that's really what they wanted
| me to do, ie. fulfill these arbitrary metrics or if they
| wanted me to work on whatever made the team better. They said
| no, of course not, but a good engineer should be able to
| fulfill those metrics and make the company better. I
| explained the situation, that the ops person left and they
| haven't hired anyone to take over, so I'm left holding the
| bag and they refused to acknowledge it, so I quit.
| greesil wrote:
| As a manager myself, you have terrible managers. They
| should be able to acknowledge the facts of the situation
| and not put the blame on you. To the opposite, good work,
| such as taking over something critical when someone left
| the team should have been rewarded. Metrics are useful, but
| to only rely on them is what lazy or incompetent managers
| do.
| blub wrote:
| What was the point of saying all of the above? In the
| real world there's many bad managers and new managers are
| assigned to existing projects all the time. Any tool
| which provides more misleading metrics is bad news.
|
| Proving that the initial problem can be reduced to a
| people problem is useless.
| jsgo wrote:
| my guess is they're trying to say that the person was in
| the right, their managers in the wrong (and they are a
| manager themselves) and if they run into the situation
| again, they know what to look for. Also, in the event
| this person is beating themselves up over the situation
| (thinking this is the norm, thinking that maybe they made
| the wrong decision, etc.) it would appear it is intended
| to put them at ease that they did the smart thing and it
| isn't like this on every team.
| greesil wrote:
| The point is that some metrics are useful tools, and that
| some managers are tools.
|
| To be more specific about metrics, something that
| measures what your users care about, or is beneficial to
| your company is actually useful. Sometimes the most
| important metric is a zero or one, which is did you ship?
| Measuring commit frequency seems intrinsically useless.
| wolco2 wrote:
| Why not just ignore the DevOp work and focus on what
| counts. If no one is measuring ops then it doesn't matter.
| Someone will get upset the issue will go above you and they
| will magically hire someone.
|
| If you are covering up for something (no staff) than you
| will look bad. Push the problem up. Make the people above
| you look bad instead of taking every bullet.
| coffeemaniac wrote:
| this sounds like a good idea but in practice, shit rolls
| downhill. end of the day it just depends on the people
| above you not being jerks, and if they are there is no
| trick to overcoming it.
| agentultra wrote:
| > Git stats have been used against me on performance reviews
|
| That sounds awful. Sorry that happened to you.
|
| I've been an engineering manager, for a time, and I used
| Gitprime to track stats.
|
| It was never used for performance reviews or in making
| promotion decisions or anything.
|
| What it was used for was to manage upwards and demonstrate to
| the upper management how decisions affect the team, to indicate
| when we needed to spend on hiring and had room to onboard new
| people, etc.
|
| I don't see metrics as "surveillance," unless they're used that
| way. They can be used for good. But I think as you and others
| have pointed out -- it requires context and transparency: you
| can't just rely on metrics for reporting on a person.
|
| Tech managers: _you need to bring your people up, develop their
| skills, and pay attention!_ Metrics are useful but only
| relationships bring context.
|
| (I eventually returned to engineering as I didn't find I
| enjoyed management much)
| closeparen wrote:
| The gospel of metrics in tech management is toxic.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| The overall commits/engineer graph plotted over time was one of
| the metrics used to justify first round of layoffs at Uber last
| year. Not necessarily at the individual level but to come up
| with an aggregate reduction target.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Anecdotes:
|
| Company on a downward trend will tend to go all in on employee
| surveillance and analytics, other companies on an upward
| trajectory gives their employee much more freedom to do whatever
| they want.
|
| I have worked at both (and fortunately at the latter right now).
| It's hard to say which is the cause and which is the result.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I remember many years ago, that Microsoft was introducing
| features like this into Sharepoint.
|
| I think it made it into Beta 1.
|
| There was a lot of people who did not like the idea and it was
| not in the release version (at least not advertised if it was in
| there.
|
| I wonder how long MS has worked on frameworks like these
| feralimal wrote:
| The wider aspect to this, is that this is occurring as part of
| the new governance system that is currently revealed. That is
| technocracy. Everything will be measured, and the system will
| self-manage and re-allocate resources as it sees fit.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Again w/ Neal Stephenson bring prescient (in this case his 1992
| "Snow Crash"):
|
| _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._
| bjarneh wrote:
| Spooky reading. Almost strange how many times this sad prophecy
| about surveillance has been told without us reacting properly.
| Even now; when we are approaching some of the most pessimistic
| scenarios foretold, we don't seem to react.
| coldtea wrote:
| As if that's the only thing people don't react about?
|
| Their jobs got outsourced, the police kills without penalty
| (especially blacks but any race will do), the lobbies run
| amok, their wages have been stagnant since the late 70s,
| their employers get increasingly more power over them,
| health, housing, and college have skyrocketed in costs, ...
|
| ... given all the above, which range from quality of life to
| life and death matters, and which not much protest has been
| done, surveillance is close to the bottom of the priority
| list...
| core-questions wrote:
| People react, but their reaction is channeled into a false
| dichotomy. What the elites learned from 1984 etc. is that
| you do need to provide an enemy for the people, but the
| people are not united; so you need to provide two enemies,
| each of which is a champion of one side and a foe for the
| other, and then let the spectre of this false choice become
| the defining characteristic of people's identity.
|
| Witness it in the people who hate Trump or Clinton or Biden
| or anyone else that is put forward: you can divide an
| entire country on it right down the middle, and meanwhile
| their policies in reality (not policy positions!
| implementations!) are basically indistinguishable. The same
| thing would happen regardless of who is elected, for the
| most part, because the election is a show, a pressure
| release valve to make people think they've done something.
|
| Even now we have people who think that electing Biden will
| help solve the problems you've pointed out. People
| ostensibly on the Left are mad about four years of rhetoric
| that has been riling them up, and have pulled the lever for
| "change" to resolve this. And yes, you will _hear_ less
| about blacks being shot by police for four years - that's
| part of the strategy, which the media cooperates /
| coordinates with. The actual number of incidents may not
| change... Instead, it will be time for news stories and
| events which angry up the Right for a few years, again
| forcing them to direct their resources and energy at
| fighting some spectre that won't change anything instead of
| directing their efforts inward to truly root out corruption
| and decay.
|
| There is no protest. Protests are just the establishment
| throwing a different sort of parade, celebrating their
| power by demonstrating what they can allow to happen
| without facing any consequences themselves. Go ahead, yell
| in the street, burn down a city - nothing changes because
| nobody is listening and your actions ultimately only hurt
| people lower down the chain.
|
| Surveillance did not stop the summer of Antifa and BLM
| rioting. It will not stop a summer of redneck riots if
| that's in the cards either. Surveillance probably does stop
| people who actually stand some chance of causing real
| change; but if that is a functional, working thing, you
| won't hear a word about it.
| throwaway1723 wrote:
| Everything's to the point except it wasn't Orwell who
| taught elites proper sheepherding. They've been doing it
| throughout all the known history.
| earleybird wrote:
| What is teaching if not summing up history in a concise
| presentation :-)
| core-questions wrote:
| Good point, yes. 1984 just gives us that crystal clear
| image of everyone hating Goldstein - whereas in this
| reality half the people hate Goldstein and the other half
| hate Steingold (or whatever you'd put in as a convenient
| narrative opposite, not intending to reflect any
| individuals in reality) and neither of them realizes that
| their hate should be focused on Big Brother himself.
|
| (A quick google shows me that Steingold is famous for
| bagels, and nobody hates bagels)
| Gabrielfair wrote:
| And marx taught us about false consciousness.
| bjarneh wrote:
| That's a very bleak outlook. I hope you are wrong, but
| fear you are right.
| core-questions wrote:
| I hope I am wrong too. It is bleak! It might be the six
| months of grey rain that I'm looking at out the window,
| it might be a year of heavy burden bearing down on me, or
| it might just be a heroic dose of Depressive Realism.
| bjarneh wrote:
| You're right; there are certainly worse things happening
| which deserves our full attention and reaction. But perhaps
| this type of "surveillance state", or the general loss of
| civil liberties is a key to eroding everything else to its
| core. In a true "surveillance state", anything is easy to
| rig for those controlling it...
| [deleted]
| boogies wrote:
| > not much protest has been done
|
| > surveillance is close to the bottom of the priority
| list...
|
| These are directly related. Surveillance causes chilling
| effects.
| phkahler wrote:
| Sure, but so does apathy. Another approach would be to
| encourage apathy by legalizing pot. Oh...
| rebelos wrote:
| Astute observation. The people are essentially being
| pacified with an ensemble of token gesture legislative
| palliatives and morale-sapping sedatives.
| rightbyte wrote:
| That one has always felt suspicious to me too ...
| feralimal wrote:
| In conspiracy culture, this is called predictive programming.
| We are shown the ideas in films etc, so then when it appears
| in reality, we don't react in shock and reject it. Rather we
| shrug and are resigned to its appearance in reality.
|
| This also correlates to the idea of boiling frogs.
| Apparently, if you turn up the heat slowly the frog will stay
| in the warm water and be boiled, as opposed to jumping out,
| which is what happens if you place the frog directly into
| warm water.
| mrec wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog#Experiments_and_
| a...
|
| Overall, results seem inconclusive. I don't see that
| Hutchinson's result (frog becomes increasingly active as
| water is heated by 1degC per minute) contradicts
| Heinzmann's (no movement as water is heated by 0.2degC per
| minute).
|
| Goltz's finding that "a frog that has had its brain removed
| will remain in slowly heated water" seems... unsurprising.
| feralimal wrote:
| I did say 'apparently'. :) Good research though!
| throwaway1723 wrote:
| By the time everyone can tell conspiracy theories from
| conspiracy practices it's already too late.
|
| It's all based on three words: 'already', 'will', and 'we'.
| 'We are already being tracked by our smartphones - So we
| will be wearing implanted radio chips soon".
|
| Reject 'we' by not using one and you're not being 'aready'
| tracked, and hence 'will' not accept whatever coming after
| this.
|
| But it requires some bravery, which is known to be
| eradicated in people these days.
| feralimal wrote:
| Well, conspiracy has a bad name, but really I think
| that's the only domain you can understand the possible
| reality of what's been planned and undertaken in this
| world nowadays.
|
| It really should be a bad term - of course very powerful
| people conspire to ensure that they get the best they
| can. And that would mean writing legislation, defining
| what education is, etc, etc. Its all very obvious...
| crististm wrote:
| I remember a naval officer survivor of a rocket or torpedo
| hit (post WWII) describing what he was going through at those
| moments. He basically was tracking the thing with his eyes as
| it approached, practically mesmerized, not incapable of
| moving but locked in awe of that unstoppable thing
| approaching, knowing fully well that he should take cover
| immediately but practically doing nothing.
|
| I think we're doing the same, in a sense asking privately
| "bring it on; let's see what this would do... to _them_ " as
| if we're watching a tornado from the safety of the TV not
| caring of the results; and like that navy officer not able to
| defend the ship, locked in awe (or ignorance?) of our own
| peril.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| It isn't a prophecy it is reading in what you want to see
| from it. Snow Crash was over the top camp when it was first
| written.
| coldtea wrote:
| Well, I haven't read Snow Crash, but this excerpt is
| neither "over the top" nor camp, and appears quite
| prophetic given 2020.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| The main character of Snow Crash is named Hiro
| Protagonist. The above is meant to be absurdity, like the
| full body scanner in Airplane 2.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| You mean like the ones we have now?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| It was an absurdity _at the time_.
| rriepe wrote:
| Well, I haven't seen Airplane!, but this example is
| neither "over the top" nor camp, and appears quite
| prophetic given 2020.
| throwaway1723 wrote:
| https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
| boogies wrote:
| > hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals,
| occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier
| section
|
| How long does simple key logging last before they add eye
| tracking?
| na85 wrote:
| Not long. Software as an industry feels particularly devoid
| of ethics these days. If Bloggins doesn't build this for his
| employer the guy in the next co-working space will.
| pjlegato wrote:
| There is no coherent "software industry" as a unitary
| entity with shared norms and standards. There never was.
|
| Since all you really need to get started is a laptop, there
| are rather millions of more or less atomized software shops
| and developers attached to other industries, other streams
| of revenue and capital, other entirely disconnected
| cultures and social norms.
| drdaeman wrote:
| If this happens, two^W three can play this game. If this ever
| becomes a thing, I'm definitely going to open a business,
| selling 3D printed heads with animated eyes.
|
| Elevator pitch for VCs would be about machine learning -
| neural networks generating consumer head nodding behaviors
| that match the read phrases, as well as rising simulated body
| temperature in righteous awe or anger upon "reading" certain
| pieces of spam. And how all that behavioral data is somehow
| valuable (lol).
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| You'll need that fake head to be vascularized too.
| Photoplethysmography is a thing. >smile<
| danudey wrote:
| Okay so now I'm just meant to hire someone who looks like
| me to read my e-mails for me? Definitely going to have to
| try to expense that.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > selling 3D printed heads with animated eyes
|
| I figure it's an arms race that will play out in the
| software space. More generally, it's deep-fakes vs deep-
| fake-detectors.
| boogies wrote:
| ...or Apple Watch-like pulse tracking, etc., and then who
| knows if/when Neuralink becomes practically, widely
| deployable and useful. I think we're just a bit beyond the
| technical capabilities of the Thought Police right now in
| terms of sensing -- their telescreens could hear breathing in
| quiet rooms, but on the other hand Orwell didn't seem to
| foresee people buying their own pocketable ones with GPS &
| cell triangulation, etc. (they didn't necessarily know
| everyone's exact location all the time) -- but perhaps we're
| quickly surpassing their analytics abilities (particularly
| bandwidth -- finite human staff are less of a bottleneck)
| with AI.
| n0nc3 wrote:
| Given that its already deployed in academic contexts, I
| suspect that the more invasive employers are already using
| it. Finance, defense, etc.
| caymanjim wrote:
| Having worked extensively in both finance and defense, your
| assumptions are way off base. This kind of monitoring is
| the purview of corporations like Amazon, Walmart,
| McDonald's, and others who treat employees like machines.
| Defense and finance have highly skilled brain workers and
| they aren't micromanaging performance metrics like this.
| They are tracking information access for security reasons
| where appropriate, and in the case of finance, tracking
| results insofar as it relates to risk and profit, but
| they're not monitoring grunt-level input metrics the way
| you imply.
| n0nc3 wrote:
| "Former JPMorgan colleagues describe the environment as
| Wall Street meets Apocalypse Now, with Cavicchia as
| Colonel Kurtz, ensconced upriver in his office suite
| eight floors above the rest of the bank's security team."
| [0]
|
| What really scares me is the number of people that adopt
| this strange Panglossian view dismissing every abuse of
| power as a one-off that cannot possibly reveal widespread
| systemic failures.
|
| [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-
| peter-thiel...
| koonsolo wrote:
| That would be illegal in EU
| temp667 wrote:
| Are you sure. The EU mandates much MORE monitoring in
| most cases. Self driving cars may need to have camera's
| on occupants to monitor them during driving etc. A lot of
| the safety stuff in EU is MUCH more nanny state and CCTV
| is much more widespread it seems. Also very power data
| collection and centralized databases about everyone in
| the EU (ie, I don't think "states" or localities issue
| local ID's).
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I think the point was that while the various governments
| in the EU deploy surveillance systems en masse, private
| companies can not.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Spying on employees is very restricted. Anything that
| would even come close to it would be strongly rejected by
| the unions.
| [deleted]
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Seems very feasible: https://webgazer.cs.brown.edu/
| user5994461 wrote:
| Eye tracking is already live in production.
|
| Had the joy to see some contractors at work. The webcam is
| recording 24/7 to ensure their face is in front of the
| screen.
|
| If the employee looks away for a second, the screen flashes
| something about no user being present.
|
| If somebody else shows up in the field of view, for example
| me walking by, the screen flashes something about an
| unauthorized user.
|
| The session is locked out after a few notifications.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Wow I would hate to work there.
|
| Unless this is some kind of top-secret government
| consultancy thing that is totally unappropriate.
| user5994461 wrote:
| The work involves reading and reviewing some documents.
| Some confidential documents but nothing fancy.
|
| It's minimum wage, hourly contracting with no benefits.
| zentiggr wrote:
| So in other words, easily swapped out for something far
| more humane. Sounds like the best path.
| Loughla wrote:
| Higher education 'anti-cheating' technology is just like
| that.
|
| They're trash.
|
| This is what it looks like for students: use your laptop
| webcam to scan the room with your webcam, remove anything
| deemed suspicious; provide proof of identity (student id),
| wait for the software to register your face, name, and
| identity; test opens take test, do not look down or it
| locks, do not look away or it locks, do not refer to your
| notes or it locks, do not have people walk behind you or it
| locks, do not have pets walk behind you or it locks, do not
| have posters of movies behind you or it registers as a
| person and locks, do not accidentally click another tab or
| window or it locks, do not use any of the built-in windows
| accessibility tools or certain 3rd party accessibility
| tools (dragon software) or it locks, do not use a mac or it
| locks; fail test.
|
| Single parents, individuals living with many people in the
| home, and anyone who does not have access to an isolated
| quiet, alone work space is screwed.
|
| And it's completely asinine. Just ridiculous.
| toyg wrote:
| Please tell us where this is happening, so that we can
| avoid ever working there. Pretty sure this would be illegal
| in most European countries.
| zebnyc wrote:
| Had the pleasure of applying to reddit earlier this year.
|
| Was sent a link for an online test (hackerrank if I
| remember right) for which I needed to keep my camera ON.
| user5994461 wrote:
| The software is made by a US software company.
|
| You have to onboard user accounts to them, install the
| authentication software on a laptop, and it will open a
| remote desktop to an AWS workspace. The session is
| constantly tracking the user's face and gets terminated
| if they look away for a minute.
|
| Contractors are disconnected regularly because their face
| stopped being recognized, or they can't login in the
| first place after 5 tries.
|
| Recall one contractor that contacted support because they
| couldn't login, support told him that their face was too
| dark.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> The session is constantly tracking the user's face and
| gets terminated if they look away for a minute_
|
| The hell did I just read?! Can't tell if this is satire
| or real at his point but anyway let me just beat your
| employee tracking system by propping up a photo of my
| face in front of the webcam.
|
| Wait, is your fancy system looking for features of life
| like facial twitches and eye movement to not be fooled by
| a photo?
|
| Fine, here's a deepfaked avatar of my face acting alive
| powered by nvidia's latest deep learning magic.
|
| See where this is going?
| [deleted]
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It wasn't that prescient. GroupWise allowed that in the 90s. I
| knew a few psycho manager types who were angry when I moved
| them to Exchange because they would track who opened their
| messages and yell at them if it wasn't fast enough. :)
| paxys wrote:
| This isn't even close to satire anymore. I know managers who
| track which of their employees have read Google Docs they send
| out, and how long they take to first open it.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I do that occasionally, but it's never to single out an
| employee. If I'm sending things out that my reports can't or
| don't want to read, I'm wasting everyone's time.
| why-el wrote:
| You can just ask them if they read it in your one-on-ones
| or in a direct email/Slack/whatever? Instead of tracking
| their habits?
| anoncow wrote:
| It seems managers don't want to talk to their reports.
| peterwoerner wrote:
| Asking which of the fifteen memos they read this past
| quarter might not be a great use of time when you only
| have ~30 minutes for the one on one.
| triceratops wrote:
| People aren't always honest.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| In the same vein, I'm part of a reporting chain that uses
| "Officevibe". Mini little surveys to measure our happiness.
| Now managers have goals for various metrics.
|
| Of course, that has turned the entire thing into the most
| annoying game you can imagine. Add in the "beatings will
| continue until morale improves" meetings on the reports, and
| I'm now convinced one of the best questions I can ask of a
| new employer is "how do you track employee morale?".
| danudey wrote:
| I saw a great idea for a Slack integration a few years
| back.
|
| Instead of having these quarterly "how is working here?"
| surveys that no one likes, you could input a bunch of
| questions and it would "randomly" (probably not randomly,
| but arbitrarily) message them to members of your
| organizations, and anonymise the results.
|
| That meant that instead of having some huge process every
| quarter where everyone just kind of skips through the whole
| thing, if they even read it at all, you could get a semi-
| live feel for how things are going day to day or week to
| week, and even get relatively-realtime indications about
| what effect company events were having on employees.
|
| You can easily get into cynical territory, where you know
| that an impromptu office ice cream and macaron party will
| bump up morale by 30%, while laying off an entire team will
| generally drop it by 20%, so obviously you should lay
| people off on the Thursday and then have an ice cream and
| macaron party on the Friday, but overall it's a good idea
| to get a continual sense of the feeling of your teams and
| what might be troubling or exciting them.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| You're basically describing Officevibe.
|
| It emails people with some frequency between weekly and
| monthly, and it only asks you a few questions every time.
| Mostly it's a 1-10 scale thing, with cute little
| graphics.
|
| It also asks open ended questions where you're told the
| answers are anonymous. That's all well and good, but if
| your manager can't figure out who's who from the tone of
| the message, they're a new manager.
|
| And sure, it sounds like a great idea to spot issues. The
| instant two managers compare scores, or worse, are
| compelled to compare scores, all bets are off on it's
| usefulness. Then when you have a meeting where a high
| level manager painfully asks for input on how to make
| things better from the entire team while going over each
| chart in painful detail, the clear goal every individual
| contributor has is to just pick 8 or 9 and make the
| stupid meetings stop.
| lb1lf wrote:
| -At a former employer - a vast engineering multinational
| - we had a big, annual questionnaire to determine how
| happy we were to work there. 'On a scale from 1-10, how
| satisfied are you with...'
|
| We were assured the results were only to be used in
| aggregate and no response would be possible to trace back
| to the individual who'd made it.
|
| I almost fell off my chair laughing when the report had
| been compiled - the responses were anonymized. Of sorts.
| Responses used in aggregate. Of sorts.
|
| The engineer, female, age bracket 40-49 years, $SITE in
| the office next door wasn't as amused.
|
| As the sample size was one, her every response had been
| printed in the report.
|
| Oops.
| notabee wrote:
| Recently had a similar "anonymization" experience in a
| workplace survey. There were a lot of short answer
| questions, and people's names were converted into
| numbers. The same number for each employee, on every
| question. Not exactly hard to correlate who's who with a
| few dozen responses from each person. They also failed
| completely to clean up any names mentioned in the
| reponses.
| pklausler wrote:
| My organization has also switched to web-based "frequent
| quick anonymous surveys". I always do them to keep my boss
| out of trouble for poor response rates, but I skip all of
| the questions and just add a comment that I don't believe
| in the anonymity guarantee.
|
| Someday, I'll get asked why that is, and I'll get a chance
| to quote Seymour Cray's "I think that you just answered
| your own question."
| throwaway888abc wrote:
| Always randomly clicked through it ie Form filler.
|
| https://fakefiller.com/
|
| Feel your pain
| harryf wrote:
| The GSuite apps (when you're paying) tell you who looked a
| spreadsheet, doc etc and when they did it. Missing is how long
| philsnow wrote:
| Also comically missing is what document version they looked
| at. At best, it might say you saw version "Friday".
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Steps please. Asking for a friend.
| crazygringo wrote:
| But that's not a feature primarily for management, it's a
| feature for the document _creator_.
|
| When you send around slides or a doc, there are times when
| it's actually pretty useful to see who took a look or not --
| so if it's important you can ping them. It's not perfect, but
| it helps.
|
| Privacy-wise it's not a whole lot different from being able
| to see who's currently viewing the document, which has
| existed forever.
| indymike wrote:
| There's a big difference in how they are being presented
| and to who the numbers are presented to.
| tow21 wrote:
| I think this is honestly a worry over nothing: this is very
| directly a sales tool to encourage spending on MS products.
|
| What you are seeing is basically meaningless stats dressed up in
| pretty charts. There are enough pretty charts there to ensure
| that your organization is doing "better than a peer benchmark" on
| at least a few metrics.
|
| Then the CIO is able to select the best-looking charts into his
| board presentation and say, "look guys, we are a really great IT
| organization that is using tools effectively, please give me more
| budget to go and spend"
|
| And then some of that budget will get back to Microsoft.
|
| I don't think any of the participants in this dance really
| believe these numbers actually mean anything, and if you
| suggested tracking individuals at this level I think you would
| get push back _from the managers_ because it would be a waste of
| their time.
| minton wrote:
| In the attached video, they specifically mentioned tracking
| individuals as a good way to find engaged people in the
| organization.
| maroonblazer wrote:
| I'd argue that if your management is using these tools to assess
| individual employees' productivity the problem is with
| management, not the existence of the tools. There are countless
| ways suboptimal metrics could be explained away.
|
| E.g. in my role I don't work with anyone in my workgroup. All my
| work is with other teams that have different reporting
| structures. By definition my intergroup productivity would be
| reported as zero, and my manager wouldn't be surprised by that.
| And even if my role did involve working within my group, there
| are plenty of other measures that would trump any of these
| 'productivity' metrics.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| With all of the telemetry in Windows 10, how is this a surprise?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| This is nothing to do with the telemetry in Windows 10.
|
| It's a very particular complaint about the telemetry in Windows
| 10 that Microsoft fired their QA employees, feed telemetry into
| an AI blackbox and no human looks at it and therefore doesn't
| fix things people want fixing.
|
| This being a different system, on a different product, for a
| different purpose, used differently, explicitly for humans to
| look at, is different.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> This being a different system, on a different product, for
| a different purpose, used differently, explicitly for humans
| to look at, is different.
|
| No, it is about Microsoft bringing Microsoft-style ethics and
| human resource practices to their customers. Same basic
| methodology, slightly different purpose.
|
| >> Microsoft fired their QA employees, feed telemetry into an
| AI blackbox and no human looks at it and therefore doesn't
| fix things people want fixing.
|
| Exactly. Think about how much money Microsoft has saved by
| firing the QA employees. Think about how much money Microsoft
| could save their customers by identifying under-performing
| employees with Microsoft-provided metrics and AI.
| rightbyte wrote:
| MS Teams makes me really paranoid. I take my mouse with me to the
| toilet and moves it around to not trigger the away notification
| ...
| ToFab123 wrote:
| In the MS App store there is an free app called move mouse.
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/move-mouse/9nq4ql59xlbf?ac...
|
| non store version: https://github.com/sw3103/movemouse
| otreblan wrote:
| xdotool mousemove_relative
| jciochon wrote:
| If you're on Mac, there's a nifty free app for keeping your
| computer from sleeping called Amphetamine, which can move your
| mouse for you at a set interval.
|
| It's pretty ridiculous there's no setting in Teams to disable
| that, and I really hope no one is monitoring those status icons
| so closely.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| There's also Jiggler for Mac, works pretty well though it
| doesn't fool Apple's own "App Nap" sleep mode for apps,
| sadly. The Mac stays awake but apps still stutter like crazy
| when I come back to the computer, they're clearly waking up
| in some way.
| crumbshot wrote:
| Same here - as well as coffee/piss breaks, sometimes I just
| need to sit away from the screen and think on a problem for a
| while, or work it out on pen and paper. But I know this will
| leave an 'Away' gap in whatever they are using to log, and that
| might look bad on my metrics.
|
| I've found that resting something heavy on one of the modifier
| keys, e.g. Ctrl, does the trick nicely.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Oh that sounds easy I will try that.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| I'm not a programmer, but for this purpose I run a PowerShell
| script to hit the Scroll-Lock key every 5 minutes. It works
| _perfectly_ (almost too perfectly) Echo "Keep-
| alive with Scroll Lock..." $WShell = New-Object -com
| "Wscript.Shell" while ($true) {
| $WShell.sendkeys("{SCROLLLOCK}") Start-Sleep
| -Milliseconds 300 $WShell.sendkeys("{SCROLLLOCK}")
| Start-Sleep -Seconds 240 }
| majkinetor wrote:
| AHK is better for stuff like this, something like
| #Persistent SetTimer, CapsLock, 60000 return
| CapsLock: Send {CapsLock}
|
| AHK is very small, 0 on resources and this script is visible
| in tray. You could even enable/disable it via another hotkey
| or when specific app (PDF reader) is started.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Use this instead otherwise it's quite obvious: Random,
| Time, 5800, 6400
| woahAcademia wrote:
| Wait until you realize your company is taking screenshots of
| your desktop to make sure you actually are working.
|
| I've never been worried as my long breaks are necessary for
| Programming. I always get the job done. My biggest concerns are
| economic as I'm high pay and they are often let go.
| icandoit wrote:
| Any details?
|
| What applications and what measures did you try? Feel free to
| share just links.
| seppin wrote:
| Is this proven with Teams?
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| The screenshots thing came to my mind back in 2010 when I
| worked at Intel and we were never quite sure how they
| monitored us. I created my own C# application that with calls
| on user32.dll. It not only move the mouse and perform clicks,
| but it's also named as a vendor utility (e.g. LenovoUpdates)
| that can be minimized to the system tray. I use it to open up
| various programs (email, browser, code, etc.) and I get to
| define where it clicks and how long in-between each set of
| clicks. If you were to open it up, you'd have no idea what
| the hell it is. The buttons are so generically labeled and
| the saving/loading features are done using F-keys. Still
| going strong after 10 years :)
| woahAcademia wrote:
| That might have worked in 2010, but when it comes to bot
| detection it's You vs Big Company.
|
| I recently lost the battle of defeating a bot detector.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| Perhaps, but I've yet to see evidence of needing any
| level of sophistication beyond "move the mouse" just to
| show you're online and in most companies that's even
| overkill as 15 minute breaks are typically not an issue.
| If they are, time to look elsewhere.
|
| I created my program because I had a ruthless boss at the
| time, but I don't think any spying was ever going on. I
| use it now out of convenience when I take extended breaks
| and peace of mind from potential jealous co-workers
| complaining I'm not online when I should be or something
| stupid along those lines.
| npteljes wrote:
| Put your mouse on an analogue clock's face. Use a clock that
| has an arm for seconds.
| g00gler wrote:
| I installed an app called cliclick
| https://www.bluem.net/en/projects/cliclick/
|
| Then I wrote a script to move the mouse randomly across the
| screen.
|
| I'd post the script but I did a clean install. It wasn't very
| in-depth, though. 1. Write an endless loop
| 2. Generate 2 random numbers 3. call cliclick to
| move the mouse to those coordinates
| brixon wrote:
| installing apps is another thing that will be watched and
| limited. a one line powershell script will do this and would
| be less noticeable since the system and admins run powershell
| stuff on the computer everyday anyway.
| majkinetor wrote:
| You don't have to install apps, you can run them from
| directory.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| Echo "Keep-alive with Scroll Lock..." $WShell =
| New-Object -com "Wscript.Shell" while ($true)
| { $WShell.sendkeys("{SCROLLLOCK}") Start-
| Sleep -Milliseconds 300
| $WShell.sendkeys("{SCROLLLOCK}") Start-Sleep
| -Seconds 240 }
| boogies wrote:
| oof, Powershell users have a very different definition of
| "one line" then I do. In bash I'd run
|
| while true; do xdotool key Pause; sleep 240; _done_
| majkinetor wrote:
| while(1) { (New-Object -c
| "Wscript.Shell").SendKeys("{Pause}"); sleep -m 240 }
|
| Note that you use xdotool which is external so you are
| cheating. On Winodws you can do better with AHK which is
| compared to xdotool like spaceship to bucycle.
| boogies wrote:
| That's over 80 characters long.
|
| Note that comparing AHK to xdotool is like comparing a
| Titanic-sized roll of Flex Tape to duct tape. I don't use
| boats that have taken a lot of damage, so I don't need
| Titanic-sized Flex Tape.
| majkinetor wrote:
| Thats because you cheated. You also don't know how to
| count. This is 78 chars and few more can be removed.
| boogies wrote:
| I cheated? You edited your comment.
| root:~ # xclip -o while(1) { (New-Object -c
| "Wscript.Shell").SendKeys("{SCROLLLOCK}"); sleep -m 240
| }root:~ # xclip -o | wc 0 9 87
| root:~ # xclip -o | wc -c 87
| majkinetor wrote:
| Just replaced scrollock to pause to be identical as your
| case.
|
| You need xWindows to count chars ? Noice :)
| boogies wrote:
| > Just replaced scrollock to pause to be identical as
| your case.
|
| I noticed.
|
| > You need xWindows to count chars ? Noice :)
|
| Tell me, oh Windows master, your superior spaceship ways
| of counting characters.
| [deleted]
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| You can program an Attiny (like a USB Digispark) to send inputs
| over USB also, can't be detected at all :)
| folkhack wrote:
| Get a USB mouse jiggler for this situation - have used them in
| the past with great success.
| throwaway1723 wrote:
| Enjoy the world of corporate-owned remote work platforms.
| [deleted]
| jariel wrote:
| If they try to pin this on you, let them know the material
| reality of why it's probably not a good idea (these are bad
| measures) in a very polite email to a few of the leaders - and
| the resign. Of course, only if you can. But I would definitely
| leave a company that wanted to use these metrics.
| nikolay wrote:
| This is a sensationalist heading. No, it's not doing surveillance
| - it's giving very high-level analytics - no more than most other
| tools we use today.
| paxys wrote:
| No, it isn't just high-level. A Teams admin can filter down to
| an individual employee and see their usage.
| npteljes wrote:
| Did anyone expect to use SAAS, and the host _not_ abusing it?
| intricatedetail wrote:
| Now we only need a virtual whip next to a clippy, so
| micromanagers won't have to raise from their desk to squeeze more
| value out of an employee
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Can't wait to see people programming bots to send 10^4 emails per
| day, and autorefresh pages on loop to increase their
| "productivity score" and get a raise
| monkeybutton wrote:
| Has anyone else been prompted by Office 365 to link your profile
| to your LinkedIn account? I almost went through with it because
| our internal employee directory is so completely useless and I'm
| always using LinkedIn to look people up. When I saw that
| information sharing could go both ways between my personal
| account and corporate [0], I bailed.
|
| Even without the data sharing, just creating the connection
| between profiles gives Microsoft information. If they're doing
| individual-level performance analytics, they could track it from
| one organization to the next, no?
|
| [0]
| https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/84077/linkedin...
| leetcrew wrote:
| > When I saw that information sharing could go both ways
| between my personal account and corporate, I bailed.
|
| how can employers possibly be okay with this?
| [deleted]
| rootsudo wrote:
| Well, yes, the options are available are in any tenant and are
| equal to what any it admin can enable on win10.
|
| It isn't a secret, or hidden, it's a marketed and properly
| governed side of microsoft if you read the o365 stuff,
| deployment, and general digital workplace. And it makes sense.
| swiley wrote:
| Surveillance makes it sound like only the managers can see it. Is
| it just public like the github flamegraphs?
|
| Personally I'd love something like this that only I can see, I've
| found these sorts of things to be very motivating in the past.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Hello EMPLOYEE, this is Susan from HR. I hope you are doing well
| in this trying times! We wanted to check in with you because we
| have noticed that your Productivity Score is not yet excelling
| yet per COMPANIES NEXT and EXCEL goals for 2020. While it is
| totally fine that some of our COMPANY family need some additional
| time to increase their Productivity Score, we would be overjoyed
| to assist you in reaching COMPANIES goals.
|
| We would like to invite you to a meeting tomorrow morning at
| 8:30. Your direct line manager, you and me will be present for
| this meeting. We would like you to prepare a short presentation
| (9-10 minutes) on how you plan to improve your Productivity Score
| so we, as the COMPANY family can reach our goals. I am sure we
| can find a solution together!
|
| I am looking forward to talking to you tomorrow morning! Have a
| relaxing evening!
|
| Susan from HR
| natas wrote:
| where/how can I disable this?
| surv_throw wrote:
| I've been curious about some of the work done by my team related
| to this and data collection. We do mass event log collection and
| aggregate it all into Splunk. Some of the sources are sysmon
| event logs, AD data, and firewall logs. This is in Europe. The
| purpose is security.
|
| This data is all made available through the Splunk interface, and
| any team member can search through the essentially raw data. On a
| scout's honor system we don't search up individuals unless given
| consent by the user. It really doesn't sit well with me, thought,
| and it hasn't for some time.
|
| One of the problems I see is that the employee laptops - vast
| majority being non-technical users - are allowed for personal
| usage. Thus we, by virtue of our selective VPN, send not just
| work-related data.
|
| Anyone with knowledge of the space that can add some light to
| this and my worries?
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