Many traditional managers manage with their gut. They distrust metrics because they don't understand the work being done and because they suspect every worker is doing as little as possible. When workers are onsite, these managers gauge how to rank them largely based on their affect toward the manager. When workers are offsite, managers of this type are frustrated and suspicious and adopt naive monitoring measures as a grasp at control.

> What exactly is the employee doing that there are no metrics at all

Anything that needs managers to actually go and check.

It's not that they trust the employee to work with zero supervision, it's just that most managers and execs don't want to do any kind of work.

The webcam checks are pure projection.

Yup, the most egregious one is the Morgan and Morgan injury lawyer leeches. Their CEO publicly said "We're going to put a camera up your ass". Yes he actually said this:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1IswwPHArJA

unfortunately keyboard and mouse tracking, screen tracking, "what apps are open" etc. are very common for remote work so I can totally see this being looked at in a similar way

It feels like the Covid lockdown WFH times where managers mandated everyone has their webcams on. Having been in some of these management conversations, it was purely to ensure no one is just chilling on their bed.

Pretty dumb, as at that time not everyone was had a home office set up, and one can work from their bed perfectly fine, especially when someone wants to put their feet up for a bit during a team meeting.

It's to confirm the remote employee is behind the computer. It's not always necessary that they be doing work if there's no work at that particular moment for them to do, but in that case they're still being paid for their time and for some reason these companies don't want their employees doing something else, like going to a baseball game. It's basically no different from an onsite working being at their desk even if they have nothing to do.

It's also the logical corporate response to Younger Millenial remote workers bragging about "working" from paradise instead of actually working. As to why management wants it...this is literally something that management has wanted dating back to the rise of civilization. They have power and want to exercise it even if it's not necessary or efficient.

The logical labor response should be to not work for companies that require remote employees to submit to constant visual supervision.

> Ever since I saw his screen and the level of details in my activity log on the work machine

Is that using Zscaler? What level of detail did it have?

At my job, it was encouraged to to enroll your personal phone with the company's configs to make it easier to do work things. After a few months I took it off, it creeped me out and wasn't necessary to do my job.

You should never use a work computer for anything personal from banking to even reading wikipedia. Its just dumb.

For that employer, it's going to be normal, and employees won't be looking. In the USA, managment dictates all terms of employment, take it or leave it.

The only real power you will ever have as an employee is your willingness to walk away from a job. What necessarily follows is that ideally you would develop a set of marketable skills which are in high enough demand that employers will be wiling to accommodate your wishes because replacing you would be a big hassle.

"This kind of invasive employee monitoring is treating people like property rather than as human beings."

Exposing employment for what it is.

And from that point, many companies sink like a rock as they can not retain the people able to work unsupervised and only keep the meek that need instructions for even going to the bathroom.

If the people fired had years of experience in the job and the new people hired don't, the company lose talent. Is bleeding money in an endless loop of training people just to let them go soon after that, has trained somebody to nurture their competitors, and some of this people could even make new companies out of spite and compete with their former boss.

> This kind of invasive employee monitoring is treating people like property rather than as human beings.

The whole point of corporate capitalism is to do exactly that. The corporation is a machine whose most-optimized purpose is to turn people into money.

Human dignity is not a concern for it.

Unfortunately, employment law in the USA is very different from Europe. Employers typically have a lot more leeway to set the terms of employment.

Companies usually pay you for your time and have an expectation that your butt is in a seat for a certain number of hours. Completing your work early generally does not mean that you can fuck off for the rest of the day or week.

The problem with microphones is that unlike cameras they are absolutely impossible to detect. And then there are all these devices that look and act like another thing but they're also microphones. Microphony is so pervasive that it is harder to make something that does not record soundwaves than it is to make something that does.

Shut your work devices off at the end of the work day.

Your work-specific WiFi network can also be shut off at the same time.

Devices go in a sleeve or drawer in your desk, which is usually in a separate room.

You can also close the door.

If you need more work and personal life separation than this, you might need a new job.

Probably not many. I would not want to be recording the off-the-cuff conversations of my employees should those recordings be part of discovery in a lawsuit.

In Silo people would run tap water to avoid being listened to.

Wonder if that helps.

Unless you explicitly consent this is illegal in many places.

I would not be surprised if it's north of 70%.

It’s why I used to wipe out the whole OS and install linux plus the bootloader too, and justify it with my own set of toolset and custom settings for my work.

white noise?

For teams that want to use technology to the maximum, recording MS Teams meetings allows them to use copilot transcript etc. That is the most common reason I see these days.

Earlier the main reason was to allow for a human to revisit any important discussion of they missed making detailed notes. It also allowed anyone who misses the meeting to catchup. And for global teams, team members in other time zones can catchup and maybe rewatch the meeting of accent differences made following the live meeting difficult. The coworker tasked with writing the minutes (manually!) would find it super handy. We also did recordings for "requirements gathering", "design review", "prototype walkthrough", etc so we captured all feedback and nuances thoroughly so next iteration can address them all.

For all these benefits we sometimes opened a MS Teams bridge and turned on recording EVEN WHEN we were all meeting in person. I would switch on the webcam and turn it towards the whiteboard, and try to get the best clarity possible -- a service to anyone who might be watching afterwards.

>have someone break out a camera and record our meeting

I've worked with a team who did just that, they held the vast majority of their meetings in-person (1 or 2 short meetings a day) but needed other stakeholders to keep up with their work and decisions, so they had some AI listen, keep track and send summaries and minutes.

They liked it, but I'm not sure it was more efficient than having someone send half a page of meeting summary manually.

Sounds about right for Capital One. Their low level managers (my title was Master Software Engineer, so "manager" but I was an IC) are called Senior Managers are mostly terrible people. But it's a rotten culture all the way to the top.

Our SVP of Enterprise/Software was a serial sexual harrasment case. File in HR was as thick as a Websters. Women would constantly ask trusted male coworkers to sit next to him so that they would not be forced to sit next to him.

Another VP was a large build southern lady who forced an Indian colleague to harassment and sensitivity training after she said "yuck, McDonalds" and the white coworker was hurt. While the original complaint from her was that she was getting harassed for being Indian.

Both were subsequently fired after it became public (blog post) and the news picked up on it. The rumor is that the CEO and his chief of staff knew about these issues and didn't do anything about it until they got external pressure. Card is extremely toxic. Bank I guess less so, but still pretty bad.

We had senior managers once file a PIP/firing procedures because he saw no Github commit activity (those little green squares) FROM A PERSON ON GOVERNMENT PROTECTED SICK LEAVE.

Glad I left that hell hole years ago.

Having some low or middle manager PIPing and fire people based on BS personalities and whims type stuff is rarely the "leadership agenda" though. The company sees trained employees like any other asset. They don't want your manager being hard on equipment for no good reason.

That said, it drives me up the wall that it seems like all the bad managers are exactly like the one you're experienced.

I'm not sure what this has to do with the article.

<< they might wonder what’s going on.

What I am going to write next is written with absolutely zero attempt to overstate anything. Not one person knows what is going on; very few consider wondering; most barely know how to put pants on the right way. Again, zero exaggeration based on real life experience in corporate america.

>some companies pretend to have remote work while they technically are not

What does this mean?

Taking pictures inside people’s privately owned homes is very different from a wide shot cctv camera in a company-owned building.

No this is more like having someone standing over your cubicle, and every other person's cubicle, taking notes of every time you go to the bathroom or get a drink of water or stretch.

Watching you.

All day.

every day.

What, like you can't be lazy in person?

Also there shouldn't be a monitoring program hooked into office CCTV either.

There goes the VPN.

Not savvy enough to realize that's also gonna get you fired.

If they've made it a requirement, they will just tell you to unblock or be fired, like the woman in that OP.