[laurent92]

I don’t understand why people think the employer cannot check whether the employee is slacking off.

Maybe what we should prevent is employer keeping months of proof and only bringing it up as inappropriate later, but if the employer uses the camera to tell an employee within 24hrs that he needs to ramp up, it feels ok. Maybe we should impose rules like “24hrs max” and “can’t be used legally, just orally.”

[csharptwdec19]

> I don’t understand why people think the employer cannot check whether the employee is slacking off.

On some level it depends on what 'slacking off' means.

I've had employers where 'slacking off' meant actively doing some %mundane/repetitive/unnecessary% task with every moment of my free time. We were literally pulling the finish off the counters; there was no need to keep dusting them.

I've had software shops where reading integration documentation was 'slacking off'.

An interesting data point; In Germany, MS Office doesn't track how long you have been editing a document. My understanding is this is because the law there more or less says if you pay someone to do a task, you aren't supposed to (i.e. can't) care about how long it took them to actually do it as long as it was done on time.

So I guess that's my problem. There's a very fine line between employers using surveillance to catch 'bad actors' and employers using surveillance as another tool to bully substandard work conditions onto people.

[ocdtrekkie]

My guess is that micromanagement actually decreases quality and productivity as well, just due to the disconnect between management opinions and real-world employee experience. If you are judging performance on the output correctly, the employee will, out of own self-interest, maximize the quality and quantity of the output while minimizing their own effort expended in creating it.

[meowface]

100% of the information an employer needs to determine my productivity can be found by looking at my work output. They don't need to know what I'm doing or looking at at every given moment. The results speak for themselves.

I'm sure they have a legal right to check (in the US), but I really wouldn't want to work for such a company and would immediately start looking for a new job if it happened to me.

[stjohnswarts]

The day one says I'm "slacking off because we noticed inactivity on your laptop" is when I stand up and walk out the door. Hasn't happened yet but I suspect it will at some point.

[the_only_law]

Yeah I’m waiting for it too. It’ll be funny because otherwise people have had nothing but good things to say about my output.