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Some of the privacy shutters still allow infared light through so you can still be seen for face unlocks. "In theory" only face id can access this camera.
Face ID? Who is out here giving their biometrics to the company they work for? If you want me to use a piece of equipment that shit better have a password cause I'm not scanning my face, finger or anything else.
I do crime in my off time. I can't have that data in some database that might be accessible for law enforcement. If they are going to catch me they need to do it old school. I'm not getting busted because some AI bullshit went "We have a match in a employee database"...
A lot of people where i work for some reason seem to be happy giving all of their bio details to anyone who asks. I agree completely. Interestingly there is a push currently for something called passkeys as the new MFA method and a phasing out mfa texts, calls and e-mails. Where i work and i suspect anywhere else that rely on Microsoft or passkeys, you will need to use an authenticator app and/or biometric info to access your work.
It gets rid of any plausible deniability though (oh I didn’t realize I covered my camera). I have sticky notes all around my computer and monitor to remind me to do various things so it doesn’t seem out of place.
You can buy camera covers that slide open and closed at the dollar store or Amazon 3/$2. Verrry convenient - I only open mine during a meeting as insurance so I don't accidentally go on camera.
I would record a video of me working for 30 minutes, loop it, put the camera on it. Maybe every 4 hours splice in a 3 minute segment where I rub my belly and look down then step away. was I hungry? did I shit? who cares it was FAST. Does he always wear a black shirt? directly behind me will be a clothes rack woth 50 black shirts.
I mean their free to fire you for that. Unfortunately every state in the us except
Montana is a at will employment state where they can fire you for any or no reason. With the economy the way it is rn I wouldn’t risk a comfy work from home job.
Of course that’s only if they’re actually actively monitoring anything.
Of course that’s only if they’re actually actively monitoring anything.
True, their "metrics" to measure that are usually illogical to begin with -- they're only doing it because they think it's going to enforce more active work out of employees when in reality it's typically just destroying morale and creating unhappy employees that are more likely to "look busy" and be less productive.
Happy employees are productive employees, but they rarely care about finding ways to actually increase happiness.
How insane does one have to be to install cameras in their employees' homes to ensure that they're "working". And this coming from a lawyer is even more baffling.
My job currently has a system that takes a screenshot of my laptop every 3 minutes, and then uses AI to compare the screenstates. If it hasn't changed - they log it as afk as if I'm not working. It then combines the data into a BI report for senior managers. I wouldn't be surprised if laptop mic audio and webcam are also somehow tracked.
THey actually hired an entire team and dedicated resources to producing a system that counts whether I scroll my screen every 3 minutes or not. An entire server and its respective sysadmin team is dedicated to monitoring if I'm "working" 9 hours straight or not.
Well, I’d rather have an AI produce believable activity that having to do it myself.
If they are actively screen shotting my screen it would need to look like real work is taking place. Infinitely browsing jira, confluence, looking at different files in a code base. AI is great for that stuff.
It has a beautiful circularity about it too. We read a lot about specification gaming, reward hacking, training-game etc all the alignment problems. Meanwhile humans have been fucking around with goodhart's law for thousands of years. Brief wave to campbell.
You're not thinking of the shareholders. Could they be meeting their targets faster so we can increase their workload to earn a few extra pennies to increase share value.
I mean my job requires me to have a safe and secure place if I want to work from home and they can come inspect it if they so please. Otherwise there's an office in the city and I'm more than welcome to go there every day where everything is provided.
Given the nature of my work I have no issues with it, though I most certainly would have a problem with a camera on me all day.
So interesting story. I knew a guy years ago who worked for Microsoft. His job was literally looking at all the shit that gets reported as like offensive etc. Not sure exactly what h did but he mentioned having to view some pretty sick shit multiple times and it took a toll on him.
They wanna watch me and even if they wanna sell that shit then I'd make certain that someone is going to pay the iron price.
I worked for a guy who decided to put up cameras all over the place to watch the employees. Everyone hated it including his son-in-law who worked there at the time.
We told him it was against the employees rights and he would just dismiss it and say “well what’s the difference from me standing and watching the shop?” Dude, idgaf if you understand the difference, you just need to know it’s not allowed (also, you standing over people is creating a hostile environment which also isn’t allowed numb nuts)
Fast forward a few months and while his son-in-law was in the data room he just unplugged the ethernet so the cameras wouldn’t relay to the owners’ computer.
The owner being the cheap, completely tech-illiterate asswipe he was didn’t want to call for the company to come fix it so he did nothing, thinking the employees would still think they’re being watched. I didn’t know until just before I quit and the son-in-law told me with a laugh.
Btw, this is the same piece of shit that didn’t believe in praising employees for good work because then they would think they deserve more. He literally thought good motivation was for people to be afraid of him. Jfc
Trust fund, lottery, spur inheritance, stupidly successful/lucky in one professional area just to pivot and flail around in another profession/venture.
Franchises/businesses of all kinds get bought and sold all the time if you have 6 figures and don't flinch at the massive upfront costs. You kinda need to be crazy to agree to such a gamble tbh
That's a good point about the gamble. A lot of these morons probably came into a pot of money, and then gambled it by spending it all on some questionable business because they can't stand working for someone else and want to be "the boss". Normal, sane, balanced people wouldn't make such a gamble.
In this case the owners first husband (very loved by the workers) died and he married into it. There were even theories that he somehow had a hand in his death. Would not surprise me in the slightest.
I had a manager who had this perfect thought of 'letting the clients know we're busy - we install a webcam so they can see'
We protested, but he pushed through.
Just before the Ethernet cable got plugged in, I gave him 2 documents.
One in which he was 'assigning' that work order in writing (the emails and documents provided for the intent of use)
And another with our current privacy laws and regulations (Europe / Netherlands)
I even highlighted the section in which it stated up to 4% of the annual GLOBAL income.of the organisation could be a sanctioned fine if he was to put this online (or even internal recordings of the way we operate)
It didn't take 10 minutes to take it down.
EU privacy is a powerful tool for the workers
He hasn't practiced law in years. I think he was disbarred actually. He's built a brand over the years of ambulance chasers. Nationwide basically. That's how he's rich. I still remember the TV commercials in the Tampa area before he got rich. "Morgan, Colling & Gilbert. FOR the People"
His billboards are ALL OVER Boston. Morgan & Morgan. They paid some obscene amount of $$ to call themselves the official personal injury lawyers of the Red Sox.
Not disbarred. He just plays politics now. He is in office 3-4 times a week but spends most of his time with politicians or business leaders coming and going. When Rick Singh was an elected official here in Orlando the two of them would meet once or twice a week and by noon would both need their drivers... allegedly.
I saw this happen at work one time, a d-bag supervisor was trying to discipline an employee with the manager. The supervisor had a list of all the times the employee was idle or didn't respond right away. The employee explained that often they were on the phone with a client, so the computer would go idle, they also didn't respond to messages to give the client their full attention. The employee also explained that they batch their time, so they don't respond right away, but will do things like 1 hour of design, then pause for 15 minutes to respond to messages, emails, etc. This allowed them to concentrate on their task.
The employee also showed their production numbers, which were well above the standard and average.
The supervisor pushed that because he had all these data points the employee was goofing off at home and not doing their job. The employee dead stopped, looked at the supervisor and asked "so is your job to count my minutes? Do you have design? What's your production numbers? Should we go through the chat logs and see how long it takes you to respond to anyone?"
This rattled the supervisor, he said some stuff about important work that he does and can't always respond right away. To which the employee responded "imagine that, working means you can't respond immediately..."
Last I heard, that supervisor got moved to a "special team" and is basically coffee bitch for someone else (I left the company for other reasons soon after this.)
I think managers should to coordinate between teams, set priorities for the team, and ensure that everyone has everything they need to work effectively. Counting minutes is a waste of time and counterproductive.
it's essentially impossible for a billionaire to be broke. Even if he does go broke, his "broke" level is the type of wealth middle class families will never achieve. People don't quite comprehend how rich a billionaire is. If you had 1 billion and bought a 100k car per day each day, it would take 30 years to earth through a billion. And you'd have 13,000 cars by the end of those 30 yrs
Im unfortunately from the city he is from, or works mostly, Orlando. I was at a bar that he came in to and he tried to make a speech but everyone ignored him. It was great
If they're productive working from home, leave them the F alone. If they're not productive, have them onsite one or two days a week to improve then send them back to work from home. Don't be a dick like this guy.
You're assuming that managers or biz owners actually understand how to evaluate employees or set performance goals or even at times understand what their employees do
Stupid and lazy managers use the simplest metric they have-- physical presence = working (i.e., Im getting something for the money I pay these people).
Oh no, it gets better. You have to be productive at all times. My personal favorite was being so good at my job that I finished all the work weeks ahead of schedule because I take my job seriously. So he starts having me spend hours dusting each day because im not being productive and he has no actual work for me.
Reports already indicated the majority of workers were more productive and generally happier at home during the pandemic not having to drive in to work and that's more time that can be used to actually work and end the day at a reasonable time as opposed to waking up early to get in on time and facing rush hour traffic to get home.
But companies already spent the money on their offices and their only "logical" response despite that reality is to continue to force people to go into the office.
Seen several stories in /r/antiwork where people found ways to prevent their company's communication apps from going to idle/away and managers thought they were being more productive.
They want to rule in secret, remove their houses from the internet but want everyone else to live in a glass house with on-demand access to your every waking moment
When I take a step back and ask myself where this is all supposed to be going, all that I see is a society so micro-managed that the entire point of existence simply ceases to be relevant no matter what it might possibly be.
It really is long past time we let these guys make their own money. They pay themselves like they do the work of hundreds if not thousands, so why don't we let them prove they do that much work?
I cant stand boomers. They make everything harder in society and complain about younger generations when they themselves experienced life on a way easier mode. Especially when it comes to work
Because they have mental illnesses and have the urge to see their number go up as much as possible. They're not any different from a substance user trying to OD all the time. If they can squeeze a single cent out of you, they'll do everything to get it. We should not let them be on the top and allow them to control people's lives, because they are unfit for it.
Now put cameras on everyone's office computers and see how many leave. The issue isn't wfh. The issue is constant surveillance. I don't know how this isn't obvious to anyone.
True, but it's so much more intrusive when you are capturing video of inside someone's home. But this corporate fix on needing to spy on everyone is getting out of hand at this point
Many work places already have that though. I work at an insurance company and there are absolutely security cameras all around the place. That’s not that uncommon for any corporation.
To me it is the issue it is inside my home because that’s my private space. Even when on zoom I blur the background.
This sort of thing proves that the rich classes view work as some sort of penance or punishment. Its not just about productivity, its literally a duty we have, a payment we have to make for existing. We dont just have to do the job given to us, we have to be seen to suffer for it.
My boss used to believe that, and at least included herself in it. Work shouldn’t be fun or easy, if it was it defeated the point. I had a rather public argument with her that no, it was something we did to get paid and the value we provided the company was the only point of it, it was not an existential test. Her attitude was why the staff turnover was high. She did change her attitude eventually, but she still works when she doesn’t really like it, or need to do it financially.
They were being watched by Morgan and Morgan and Morgan and Morgan...
Can't stand this guy. When they were smaller their commercials used to air incessantly in Nashville. They would show his father, who looked like the grim reaper, delivering paper checks to lower income black families. They continued even after public outcry about the stereotype and image is was presenting. Only finally stopped when his dad died.
It's unrealistic to think that every single person who works from home is working as hard as they claim. We have a mix of guys who WFH who really do work hard and work better than if they were in the office. Then we have some that are lazy in the office and when they work from home they are even worse. It's probably a 50/50 mix between the two. It's not hard to tell who's working and who's not just by their volume of tickets.
You seem to have realized that not all employees are the same. This will no doubt help you in your future endeavors.
WFH is a tool smart companies can leverage to get access to talent they otherwise could not. It is, of course, not a silver bullet to magically increase productivity across the board.
People who get stuck in and in a good enviroment to do so, less commute and more work time, easier to work some extra in the evenings etc.
People who are work shy can disappear even more.
Problem is people focus on the negative and tend to mange everyone to the work shy crowd standards. Bosses need to be smart enough to track output where possible, then WFH is great but management need to be smart enough to set performance metrics that matter which is often harder than it sounds.
If you feel obliged to put your employees under surveillance. Then you are the cause of the problem in the first place by not recruiting trustworthy employees.
At that moment he learnt what trust meant. It's a two-way street. You put up cameras because you don't trust your employees, well they won't trust you either after having their boundaries and personal space violated.
He’s against remote work (because he’s not a good leader) and tried to make it hell for those who chose that path. Spoiler alert: he still thinks he’s right and that he’s the victim.
I had a wfh job implement this when the company was going down the drain back in 2013. Everyone had to be on a Zoom call all day. We had 5 people on our team and the other team had to sit on it as well of 4 people. One quit right off the bat. It really led to way more micromanagement in a customer service job that was already heavily micromanaged. Another two people quit after a week. The other team ended up with only one person by the end of the month.
I got called out for playing with my dog when I didn't have any work to do. I lost it and proceeded to snap without thinking about it and give my boss a dressing down in front of everyone. I asked what more do you want me doing when I already did 40% of the work when it was a 5 person team, continued to handle more work than the rest of the team, and I'm already done with everything I was given. Also reminded them that I was storing the company office equipment for free in my basement when the office shut down and I could put it all out on the curb when I found another job. Cause I didn't see the point of putting up with going down on a sinking ship if I had to sit bored watching my boss pick his nose on camera.
Came to sudden realization of what I said and thought I was going to be fired right there. Was told instead to just look busy in case someone joins the call from corporate (which never happened). The zoom call policy was changed at the end of the week to you just to be on a group zoom call, but you didn't have to be on camera, could stay on mute, minimize the call, and just had to answer if someone asked for you.
Its finally good to see society has learned all these camaeras we have been willingly buying and accepting are actually harming you and the people around you.
We were sold "protection" and "peace of mind," but the Trojan horse was hiding control all along.
He leaves off all the details. The camera was always on. There was a mandatory sit in a zoom room that was recorded from 7 am to 8 pm, for them to stalk you basically. There were numerous emails going back and forth about that noone should be coming into your "office" area during business hours. It was quite insane. he leaves all of that off though
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