> One approach would be to monitor what management considers productive / successful employees and also on employees who have gone on PIP's - then train the AI on that data set.

I look forward to the papers on how to slack off on your job while the AI classifies you as "a straight shooter with upper management written all over him". Possible title: "An adversarial approach to the TwoBobs Productivity Classifier"

(/s if this was not clear)

Sadly, not /s.

I’ve been pitched the TwoBobs Productivity Classifier.

My feedback was anyone who needs it has classified themselves as an unproductive dev manager.

I suggested the concept be made available as being by devs, for devs, purposed as a personal coach, with no uplink to the mothership.

> I suggested the concept be made available as being by devs, for devs, purposed as a personal coach, with no uplink to the mothership.

Ah yes, the classic "foot in the door" approach. Despite all the good intentions behind it, it still would end badly.

As long as there's more demand than supply for SWE workers, something like that would never become the norm.

All of the dystopic news stories of WFH employees being subject to monitoring are invariably from fungible employees.

I often read on HN that it's a norm for US employers to install spying software on developers computers. I don't see how is it different. I would try to avoid from working in such a companies, because I don't feel secure knowing that someone is spying on me.

> I often read on HN that it's a norm for US employers to install spying software on developers computers.

I haven't heard of this happening at all.

Whereas it is commonplace for people to use time-tracking software (like Toggl, RescueTime, etc) - and it is also not-uncommon for companies to require employees to use such software (software-eng or otherwise) for the purposes of reporting their time/hours/what-they're-doing, they all have web-based UIs for doing data-entry: which is definitely not the same thing as installing monitoring software on an employees' own personal hardware with or without their informed consent and it being a condition of employment.

I think people are getting terms-conflated and using overloaded terms with negative connotations: "time tracking software" which does active-software-application-window-tracking for the benefit of the direct user can easily be mischaracterized as "monitoring software".

Not only have I heard of this happening, it's literally on my computer right now! Most of the monitoring on it is automated - but I also write that software. There's not a lot of ML involved in the kinds of automated activity checking that my employer is doing, but if they suspected I was not being productive, they could basically pull my entire body of network requests, which at the very least has addresses of sites, and can tell you roughly how long someone spent on them. Since 90% of my work is on the internet, this is pretty effective spying.

Interestingly, I'd much prefer Microsoft's algorithms classifying me as productive or unproductive, based on how I code - while there's a lot to be said for different patterns of work being equally productive, I trust Microsoft to implement the same heuristics across the board, and not take a look at my gender and race and make assumptions about me based on that.

(Of course, since the ML data of productivity will come from nearly entirely white males, if it's only available to github enterprise cloud subscribers, then the ML data will be pretty biased as it is. Guess discrimination is inevitable!)

> but are YOU paying for it. If not - someone else is the revenue source

even if you are paying for it, it's quite possible that they also have other revenue sources that conflict with your interests.

Exactly, this heuristic doesn't work all (or even most?) of the times. A more accurate approach is to rely on the terms you agree to when you buy/use software (if you don't want to read them, then you can depend on faulty shortcuts instead).

> if you don't want to read them, then you can depend on faulty shortcuts instead

Or refuse to use software that requires you to agree to long and confusing terms and conditions.

I really hope that if this happens, DPAs bring the hammer down on everyone involved (both MS and companies using it) in a useful timeframe (i.e. before it has become socially acceptable because "everyone is doing it" and there are no consequences).

Everyone is already doing it. Not to engineers yet, but look at Amazon warehouses.

These things are always deployed against the least powerful first.

It's also easiest to implement in the warehouse.

Do you have a right to privacy in the workplace?

Back in the day the boss would be right there with you in the store etc and could watch you all the time.

Or maybe this will be something that really only shows up in china etc? I think they are a bit further along on some of these types of things.

I prefer to say "they're a bit less developed on some of these types of things". Their attitude is still very much that of the Industrial Revolution, where a worker was no more than a replaceable meat unit with no rights and no expectations of a life of any kind outside of productive work.

You don't have the same rights to privacy when performing your job for a corporation, and everyone else is already doing it in other industries.

Just this week was a big story about how a call center provider (used by Apple and others) was forcing employees to install cameras in their own homes to monitor their remote work: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/big-tech-call-center-...

I was just going to mention customer service reps, who traditionally would have worked out of call centers and been subject to restrictions to make it more difficult for them to steal customer data (with the side 'benefit' of micromanaging productivity). With the pandemic, businesses that had considered CS staff they couldn't replace with AI as not sitting for remote were forced to figure out a way, and that way was essentially to replicate many of the security conditions of the call centers in the home, rationalized as a necessity to keep people employed and get through the pandemic. But let's be real, CS has long been a race to the bottom cost segment, often outsourced and run as a computer with a mere human overlay. So it was only a matter of time before management was satisfied that the security risks were mitigated enough to justify the new coat savings. Some big companies have already decided to stick with the home-based support setups they put in place only because of the pandemic. And now to apply the formula elsewhere.

Customer support is a computer with a mere human overlay. A profound statement.

I am not sure what is possible in other jurisdictions such as the EU, but I have not seen something like this so far.

I'm not sure about individual member states, but there was this story in Germany the other day:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/gdpr-german-laptop-retailer-fi...

€10M fine for keeping employees under video surveillance for no good reason.

This is an example showing that there are limits to employee surveillance on-site.

In the US, or in Europe?

woah, this is bonkers !

What’s a DPA, please?

Data Protection Authority

I believe it's data privacy advocate?

Data Processing Agreement: https://gdpr.eu/data-processing-agreement/

Thank you!

Not that hard to imagine, it's happening already in their other products[0], it's what the management wants.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198713

It doesn't matter who is paying for the product. You could pay for the product and they could still add usage terms about monetizing and sharing your personal data.

I think that any workplace that would do this in the future, is already doing similarly toxic things. This isn't an excuse - there's a danger in commodifying and making things like this even easier - but there's already shit workplaces out there with plenty of red flags.