So this is a question to all of you reading this at work, or those who blog at work, or comment on the blogs of others at work, or ever use a work computer for non-work related purposes: Do your companies have internet policies that categorically forbid all use of company resources for every activity other than entering data into spreadsheets or whatever it is you do that they supposedly got you a computer for in the first place? How do you get around this? Do you just assume that nobody's checking and go about your business? Do you go about your business but "watch what you say" (a la Donald Rumsfeld)? Do you tell your boss you're keeping a blog and then proceed to write nothing but entries about how cool the new product line is going to be once it comes out and how happy you are to be working for such a great corporation? Or do you wait until you get home and spend another couple hours sitting at a home computer doing all your personal web business on your own time, according to the stated policy as clearly delineated in the employee handbook?
My workplace is shifting to a new system within the next few weeks where all computers will now be terminals that run applications on a centralized server and all information will therefore be readily available to system adminstrators (presumably in the form of statistical breakdowns of where time is spent, etc.) This carries with it all the standard boilerplate from management about how employees have no reasonable expectation of privacy and every keystroke is being captured. I currently have no sense of whether there is actually a system administrator working in this organization who has enough free time to monitor me to see if I have too much free time. But I suppose it's possible. If so and that person happens to be reading this, hi! You're doing a great job! You deserve a cigarette break, or a snack!
I assume that the proliferation of employer-approved blogs means that employers have decided to take lemons -- in this case, bitter employees using work time and resources to publish acerbic screeds about how this job is destroying their soul and sucking their will to live or whatever -- and turning them into lemonade: Free PR for the company produced with a rough-hewn, down-home "regular guy" feel that amateur writers whose bosses are looking over their shoulders can produce with such effortless élan.
Between these and all these pseudo-blogs by professional pundits that already have access to other more widely-distributed media (notice my non-use of the cliché term "mainsteam media"), I'm wondering if the golden age is over. Is it all going to be Arianna Huffington and Bill Gates and celebrity blogs from here on out? No more delightfully inchoherent treatises furtively typed by underpaid clerical employees about how the World Bank deliberately keeps indigenous people down or how the Freemasons control professional baseball? No more celebrity-dishing performed by enthusiastically mean-spirited amateurs? No more armchair media criticism (like this)? No more lighthearted office-worker tales of last nights drunken debauch and todays hangover? And the real burning question at the heart of this: Am I finally gonna have to stop goofing off and knuckle down to some real honest-to-goodness work?
Maybe the golden age has been over for a while. I'm usually late to pick up on these things.
Thoughts?
( I'll understand if you wait till you get home to reply. Hell, why not use a pseudonym? It's fun!)
I blog from work and just hope that my not blogging at all *about* work and meeting my goals helps them overlook it. Because, good lord, I would go freaking postal if I didn't have some surreptitious outlet during work hours (presumably, they've guessed this already).
Posted by: yukino at May 17, 2005 06:59 PM
one of the reasons i work for my 5 person company is that there is no one to watch me. i AM the IT department (which is scary). on the other hand, when no one's paying attention, i can spend 7 out of an 8 hour day blogging and commenting and surfing and not do anything but answer the phone. sometimes i rationalize it by arguing that hey - it's all the time i've spent bloggin and surfing that's enabled me to be the company webmistress and billable as a web designer for clients.
so obviously, i would be so, SO much more productive if someone were monitoring how much time i spend surfing compared to working on spreadsheets, and so from a productivity and efficiency point of view, i totally understand, and maybe agree with, companies who do this.
the thing is, there's little motivation to do all your work as fast as you can. they just give you more work. the optimal thing for desk jockeys would be that everyone would have a pre-defined workload at the beginning of a week, and if you finished your designated 40-hour workload, you could go home. if it takes you 20 hours, fine. go home early on wednesday and enjoy your weekend. if it takes you 40, that's expected. i know i'd do all my work as quickly as possible so i could go home and blog. but that's not how it works, so instead the companies are investing in who know how many dollars worth of tracking software to monitor work productivity so that they can find ways to get you do to more work.
i need to get out from behind my desk.
My company policy is also that all is being watched. But as there are over 300,000 employees - they'd already have to be pretty pissed at me to really be able to focus on what I do.
I also don't EVER name my employer by name - when I must rant about work I call it the Evil Empire and my particular office is the Western Outpost of the Evil Empire. My co-workers are Minions of Evil and my bosses are Boss Minions of Evil.
Posted by: Moira at May 18, 2005 11:53 AMI use a series of what I consider reasonable precautions: I use a pseudonym, I never mention my company or anyone associated with it by name, and I lie about certain key details in order to create plausible deniability. Otherwise I operate on the assumption that my sysadmin could be watching me-- but why would they bother?
There was a period of about 9 months when there was someone in upper admin who really had it in for me. During that time I blogged less and I used one of the Dwarf Lord's proxy servers for all my personal web surfing. If someone had chosen to monitor my usage during that time they would have known I was up to something, but they wouldn't have been able to see which sites I was visiting.
The funny thing is, all this is becoming moot. WiFi signals are so ubiquitous that I can just set my personal laptop up next to my desktop and ride a signal I pick up from somewhere else in the neighborhood. I also play music off my laptop, so if anyone looks in on me, I'm just listening to (stolen) MP3s.
Posted by: Joshua at May 18, 2005 12:16 PMwelp, my first day on this job, The Big Boss sent everyone a link to an elf bowling game he'd found on-line. sooo, i intuited they don't reeeally care too much around here about that sort of thing.
'cause i'm insightful like that.
every other Real job i've ever had, i had to sign some sort of compy-loyalty oath, yes, but being a practical anarchist, i then just went ahead and did what i wanted.
would've welcomed being fired from those jobs anyway.
Posted by: Samuel Clemens at May 18, 2005 03:39 PM