Reminds me of "Snow Crash", specifically when Y.T.'s mom games reading a memo at her .gov job:

"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."

I'm always amazed by how long it takes some people to go through these. Just press next as fast as possible to get to the quiz at the end. The questions are always like:

A stranger offers you a free USB stick in the parking lot do you:

A) Put it in the nearest electrical outlet

B) Stick it up your butt

C) Start a fire in your trash can and cast it in

D) Report it to corporate security at extension xxx, notify your manager, and warn coworkers not to use them

Unless you work at Amazon where the training pauses if the tab isn’t actively focused.

I’m convinced that it’s a form of torture.

We have that too. A second computer works wonders here. Worse is the training I'm doing now which lets you run it in the background but makes you push a button every 30s to continue the training.

Up next: a training video that turns on your webcam and pauses if you look away from the screen.

Next step, ever watched "15 million merits", an episode of Black Mirror? If you close your eyes, an excruciating sound requires you to open them again and continue watching.

> pauses

Nit: You spelled "tazes" wrong.

That sounds positively Orwellian.

There is something to be said for employers that are less technologically organized and competent. A friend at a company that did this used a virtual machine to run the training.

> I’m convinced that it’s a form of torture.

Ten years later, you will nostalgically think about the good old trainings in 2020 when the web camera yet didn't watch your eyeballs and analyze your face expressions in order to determine whether you need to watch the training again.

There's no good way to certify people on this knowledge from the organization's perspective. Just get your phone out if you're feeling confident in it.

Just put it on a second monitor and mute it?

You don't even need to do that. I found a demo for the page visibility api[1] (presumably what they use to detect whether the tab is focused), and found that having the window not minimized is sufficient to make the tab think it's focused. That is, all you have to do is move the tab to a new window, and click your main window. Now your training video is in the background and not taking up any screen space (you can mute the tab if you want), but the page doesn't realized it's not focused/visible.

[1] https://jsfiddle.net/0GiS0/cAG5N/

Not saying that these videos are a good thing, but would doing things like this be proof (assuming muting/active viewing is logged somehow) of gross negligence allowing the company to hold you personally liable if you make a mistake that could have been prevented had you watched the video?

If you can turn your monitor sideways (portrait mode) and then full-screen the security video it will be a lot more entertaining.