[eksapsy]

I know people who work for Fortune 500 companies who don't have such crap installed in their company laptops, and they mainly work remotely. I also work remotely and I dont have such thing installed either.

Installing agents is a sign that the company doesn't value trust with their employees and treats them as liabilities. Companies that made me an offer who had asked me if I would have an issue installing an agent just got rejected from my employer list. If they don't trust me doing my job why should I trust them doing their job. Why not install an agent to the CEO's computer as well? After all I should trust him that he's doing his job well enough for us not to lose our jobs. I'm also dependant on him after all. These are all relationships where trust plays a major role.

After all, if you think an employee isn't performing you can just have an annual PDR (Performance and Development Review) and figure out if you have to get rid of that employee or talk to him. Why spy on all of employees? Agents are just an excuse, not the means. It's a disgusting in my opinion excuse to spy on everyone.

Whatever the case or how common this is, I won't ever accept agents to spy on me. You do you but I think everyone should do the same. I demand your respect to be mutual to my and your privacy and sense of trust. Agents are harming the remote development space and skew the perception of what it means to have a healthy team.

[illud_tempus]

Have you been met with such expectations often?

I have been a developer for more than 3 decades, and I have never even heard about it before.

[saati]

It almost happened to me once, some dude appeared at my desk and said he will install it now, I said ok, but this isn't MacOS like he assumed as I replaced it with linux (I got CTO approval first). He said he will be back in five and I never saw him again.

[illud_tempus]

+

[guhcampos]

These agents are not really meant to check if you are doing any work or not. They are there to find out if you are leaking company data out.

I have worked with some DLP such as digitalguardian.com that does indeed report the time you spent focusing on each app, for instance, which is a big no-no for me too, but most of the time the company is just interested if you haven't been copying data between your computer and some thumb drive, or copying it between you corporate and personal cloud drives, or syncing your corporate e-mail to an external account, that kind of stuff.