'''

Y.T's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this:

Less than 10 min. Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.

10-14 min. Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.

14-15.61 min. Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.

Exactly 15.62 min. Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.

15.63-16 min. Asswipe. Not to be trusted.

16-18 min. Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.

More than 18 min. Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).

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.

'''

In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded and used against the employee for any reason. In practice, however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing life-activities on their work machines. Oh, here I am on hacker-news when I should be working.

With AI, this changes significantly since the man can now employ a robot to categorize and finely scrutinize every little thing with the pretext of "training" (to take your job). We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.

Why don't you quit this very toxic company, and start working at another place or even on your own? I genuinely don't understand...

Let just Meta die!

"You can..."

"Yes...we are allowed that privilege"

53 minutes per week.

53 minutes. Not even a full hour. It was specific enough that you knew some bureaucrat went out of their way to hyper optimize this, creating a maximum slap-in-your-face effect.

This 30 minutes thing feels the same way.

Well, in 1984 the protagonist learns after a while, that inner party members had the amazing perk of being able to turn off the mandatory surveillance screen for up to 30 minutes. But I guess in this case the workers still will be tracked by the usual Meta tracking that applies to everyone surfing the internet.

So, whenever one of my employees opts out of surveillance for 30 minutes... is exactly when they secretly get maximum surveillance attention. Because what is that weasel up to.

Humorously, when an employee thinks they are off-the-record is actually when my special security unit is operating off-the-record. With questionable methods. (On-the-record, they spend all their time making employee badges and infosec reminder posters for the kitchenettes.)

I remember feeling outraged for the poor schmucks working at the adjacent call center. They had metered "bt time" - that is bath room time -- and were constantly monitored. This is early 90s (the golden age of being a programmer in US, imo) and our field was fun, lucrative, and really quite unlike any other whitish collar profession. Who would have thunk it that one day we would end up being treated like 'lowly and disposable' call center human resources.

I get that the money is good but holy hell I don't understand why anyone still works at Meta.

The best ideas I've had came to me overnight or over the weekend while my mind was at rest. Those ideas are those that keep paying dividends.

But I also need frequent breaks day-to-day, especially if using an LLM to code; I need to step back and refine my approach. I don't want to let the LLM seamlessly vibe-code me into a bad decision.

I've never met anybody who could come up with good ideas in a rapid-fire way. The stress associated with the need to churn out a steady stream of work makes you fall prey to sunk cost fallacy because you don't pause to reflect on anything you do and it gets worse over time. You end up creating unnecessary problems without even realising it because your mind is subconsciously trying to fill the time with work. The goal takes a backseat.

The taboo is awful because I see the effect in my junior colleagues sometimes, leading to over-engineering and I just want to tell them to take more frequent breaks to let the idea rest but it feels like something I'm not supposed to say.

Sometimes using a company device is even a risk for the company... They shoot themselves in the foot by allowing IT to silently remote takeover/view a device, or install key loggers.

That's just too bad and Meta does not care. If these employees don't like it, just leave Meta. (They won't).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)

See also: Learned Helplessness; Stockholm Syndrome.

Meta’s biggest culture problem is definitely “not enough masculine energy”.

30 minutes of opt out should be enough for anyone. Let's all praise Meta and Mark Zuckerberg for their thoughtfulness, kindness, and empathy!

The best part? Strikes work!

This has got to be something a blue haired HR person came up with

The message is: Fuck you if you're a software developer. Your skills are irrelevant. You should be grateful that we haven't made conditions even worse.

In many cases they pay really well I heard, so I'm not too bothered by it. If you are a high paid specialist and you do not like how you are treated, you can go and find another, friendlier, job.

For low paid workers I have more sympathy: if you have no options but to be tracked and pee in bottles and ... whatnot; that's just sad. We need better labour law to protect them.

Also all corporates that did anti-unionizing and never got punished for this are simply criminals operating above the law at this point. We know many FAANG++ did it.

"Employees are able to turn off tracking".

Sure, but there is a power imbalance, and employees will come to understand ( although never stated in any handbook ) that the rate at which they disable it will be taken into account in performance reviews.

Just like "unlimited PTO" is not a benefit, because employees self-regulate their use down to less than they'd get if they negotiated a fixed amount.

It's a twisted legal trick to get out of an obligation.

If they deny your exemption, make a tool that every 30 minutes fakes a bunch of nonsensical keystrokes for a few seconds, then automatically request another 30 minute pause. If they ever find out and confront you about it, say you’ve always heard Meta leadership encourages “moving fast and breaking things” and “asking for forgiveness instead of permission”, so you were only following the company’s ethos.

Or, you know, quit Facebook if you have the means.

But that idea was shot down real fast by the unions, who informed the employer that it with great likelihood also would clash with data protection laws, and GDPR (this was not in the US). So it was quickly abandoned. Among workers that was one of the most dystopian ideas we had heard of.

If you take a job there today, what the hell is wrong with you?

The silver lining(If you can call it that) of the latest slump in tech employment is that it has laid bare the reality of the tech oligarchs. Someone should set up a website to catalog this behaviour so that these corporations and leaders can't easily sweep this under the rug in the future.

Home stuff stays on home property.

Work wants me to use a phone for work, they get me a work phone. Or I dont do it.

Why? If you have ever had to go through discovery, Youd know. Company I worked for got sued by Oracle for bullshit licensing (aws RDS licensed oracle is evidently NOT for commercial use, sigh).

And know what they do for all engineers maintaining? They subpoena EVERYTHING.

If you did personal stuff on work machine, your personal stuff is now in lawsuit scope.

I don't think anyone is fully comfortable with it but it is considered "standard practice".

It wasn't such a huge issue until recently because processing all of this was a burden, but obviously this can be automated very well now.

The trend is genuinely dystopian.

Quite objectively, the track record for management demonstrating bad faith and lying about this is deep and long.

This is coming for all of us.