Hacker News

This is something that genuinely runs the gamut across different companies—plenty don't even know the serial numbers of company-owned machines, never mind which devices individuals have, while others do effectively have live feeds of every employee's screen available to managers at all times. In between you have many businesses that manage their devices but only insofar as to enforce some basic protection and reserve the right to investigate it in the case that something does go wrong. In having conversations about this kind of stuff with company leaders, many will strongly reject any of the most invasive tracking stuff, believe it or not.

I do agree, though, that for any type of surveillance, the rise of AI presents a really problematic opportunity to allow more targeted observation, since nobody has to spend their own time looking for what people are doing, they can ask an AI to keep tabs and look out for the things they care about.

On that note, I think one of the more realistic risks for an everyday person doing personal things on a work machine is probably insider threat from a rogue IT admin, whose access allows them insight into company devices without enough oversight.

I've always, throughout a 25+ year career, kept personal business on personal devices and work business on work devices, and never cross the streams.

Oddly, this is really controversial on HN, though! I've gotten so many weirdly angry responses when suggesting people try it, like it's a huge inconvenience to just bring a personal phone to work in order to do your banking and fuck around posting on HN. It's so much easier now than pre-smartphone to keep worlds separate.

There's no reason my employer needs to know what personal errands I need to attend to throughout the day, and they obviously are not going to approve of me doing confidential work business on my personal devices, so it's a win-win.

> We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.

Somehow this reminds me of the old adage in finance :"The optimal amount of fraud is not 0"

Meaning that you could of course come up with a system in your accounting or banking or stocks or whatever that is totally 100% fraud proof.

But that system would be so onerous that none would use it. They'd go back to a more fraudulent system that is easier. Like, 15 retinal scans, a blood draw, and a bank approved minder just to buy a taco isn't workable, duh.

I'd say the same here too. You can of course use AIs and LLMs to figure out exactly how much work a person is doing and try to optimize them down to the second. Amazon is currently doing this in their warehouses. Any given month comes up with yet another instance of a worker dying on the floor and people having to continue working around the literal corpse.

And Amazon then has to run through communities, one after another, trying to hire people to work in that system. Their SEC filings note, incredibly, that population exhaustion is a real threat to the workforce.

Thus, the optimal amount of surveillance for an evil megacorp is not 100%.

Draconian, sure. But Amazon is already over the balance point and is trying to squeegee back towards the optimum. So far, it seems to be a lot further back than we thought.

> 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

I don't expect this. I know that some companies install spyware on their devices, but I don't expect it, I don't accept it, and if they did it without disclosing it I'd be furious. I understand they're allowed to do it. I'd never work anywhere that did.

Regarding what is available, imagine a system with reports and dashboards showing a timeline of which application was in focus and for how long, metrics on "activity" like keypresses and mouse clicks, periods of inactivity, lists of websites visited, whether you are joining scheduled zoom meetings, whether your camera was on, when you badged into and out of the office, periodic photos being taken from your webcam, geolocation on where you sign in from, and I could go on.

Most of these things are available bundled with most of the business Microsoft subscriptions while other telemetry comes from other tools or homegrown sources and is available to managers and IT staff on demand. Now, most of the time no one was really looking at most of this unless they had a reason to, and while I am no longer in this end of things since LLMs have reached this stage of maturity, I can imagine they are now being tasked with constantly watching for patterns in worker activity which deviate from the expected norm and are fully capable of notifying your manager automatically along with a detailed analysis of your activity.

The thing to understand is that the modern office is a veritable panopticon.

Doesn't visiting hacker news count as personal growth? Or am I supposed to grow professionally outside the work?

> It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much).

Having worked at a FAANG and then downsizing back to IT (it's pretty great if you don't need the paycheck), I'll say a bit here. I was FAANG for 8.5 years, though in a more limited role for half of that. I've been doing the IT thing since 2018, first at a small private company and then at a gov state agency.

We were ~25 people and we had one person who was a nightmare. They created a toxic work environment. I asked for a meeting with the owner and brought a laundry list of documentation about their behavior, including spending most time not performing the job (browsing online shopping instead). He asked if I knew their device name so he could pull it up and see what she was doing right then. I didn't know. I'm sure he checked later.

Every computer had management software that allowed remote viewing and remote control because of course they did; we managed fleets of machines. I genuinely don't think the owner ever had the impulse to spy or check up on anyone until that moment, when he was receiving really troubling news. I worried more about the security camera installed after a break-in because it could expose my long breaks when I came in super early in the morning.

Where I work now, users have to approve a screen sharing session. I can't just spy on someone like at my former employer. But there's undoubtedly metrics being recorded in case anyone ever needed to profile a user's work time (say a labor lawsuit, for example). We all know we can be tracked on work devices.

My expectation is that while your company can, theoretically, track everything, they have no motivation to waste their time unless given a reason. Maybe AI will change that as the cost of tracking creeps closer to nil (probably). And at Meta, I think they're evil enough to consider the cost worthwhile anyway. But probably not a big deal most places so long as you aren't up to anything beyond slacking off. People have work to do.

I don't think AI introduces anything new. In theory, manager could pull the reports of their 4-12 people to see which programs are active and what websites they are using for how long once a month, targeting individuals that they are looking for a reason to bump. No AI needed.

I wonder if the AI's that replace us will be periodically web surfing and checking HN as part of their daily work flow?

In so far as bracing for draconian tracking, I already would have never worked for Meta and especially wouldn’t now. I think we can vote with our feet and not work for companies that do this.

> With AI, this changes significantly since the man can now employ a robot to categorize and finely scrutinize every little thing

Corporate endpoint monitoring software has been able to track time spent in apps and websites for a very long time. They could produce breakdowns of time spent in apps and even categorize popular websites based on a database.

This is unrelated to the topic, but worth mentioning in case someone assumes that AI tools were needed for time tracking and breakdowns.

When AI takes all the jobs, it will also need to take care of supplying all the demand/customers, as humans will no longer have the resources for that.

Why would you do that on the employer-provided device? I just use another laptop and my smartphone. I am even using headphones if I want to listen to something for privacy, no idea if my company would go as far as recording from my microphone but I am not willing to take the risk.

Regardless of your stance on AI, we shouldn’t normalise tracking of this magnitude at all. Some safety guardrails for security and IP protection - fine, most tools have that builtin. Anything beyond that is abuse, plain and simple.

And employees will employ robots to do hyper realistic work like activities to game the system. Here's an idea...... find good leaders who understand team building and culture and let the score take care of itself.

Is it really that different with the current iteration of AI compared to what was possible 10 years ago? There may be some new awareness at the executive level of what is possible, but I feel like a "slacker detector" or whatever would have been possible with xgboost or lstms.

Reading hacker-news is work; and never tell my Boss otherwise.

What you’re concerned about doesn’t stop at the employer.

Anyone with access to data being processed about you may have incentives that align similarly with your employer’s use case.

Advertisers, Internet service providers, phone manufacturers, social networks, tech platform providers, schools, families, spouses, nosy neighbours, nosy governments.

The scale at which you can build a summary about someone is astonishing.

How they breach policies, how they break laws, how they mishandle sensitive data, how they materially negatively impact customers.

This whole thing is now a litigation nightmare, and frankly I can’t believe Meta is doing this so publicly. They’ve created an incredibly dangerous and lucrative lever in which vexatious and otherwise incentivised individuals and organisations can subpoena and demand evidence which, provided the ample data available, will surely produce enough evidence given the expanse of their employer base. They simply need to have a thread to pull on, so a judge doesn’t deem it a fishing expedition.

Similarly, I worry for democracies with no checks or balances to prevent ruling parties from exploiting or abusing this power. For example, in India, there’s accusations of their equivalent of the NSA being used to spy on the opposition —- under the guise of “keep them honest”. https://www.idsa.in/system/files/book/book_IntellegenceRefor...

In other Western countries whenever this type of work is conducted, it’s usually at Director or Minister-level approval. There’s lawyers involved, it’s heavily documented. What happens when systems, or products, are given the implicit approval of this same function by their very nature?

We’re in weird times.

With companies enrolling AI to help look over the shoulder of their employees, I wonder how hard it would be to do some prompt injection just changing what is displayed in the surveiled screen for it to see. Potential for a new vulnerability vector?

Or, the tracking won't change much, it'll be the big-brothering that will dramatically accelerate

> (IT pros tend to not talk about it much) > 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

Uh, kind of, you have to explicitly be fully aware of it, if they don't tell you in a meaningful capacity, you still have a reasonable expectation to privacy and it could turn into a lawsuit in your favor. ESPECIALLY if you access anything personal, medial, or even financial it could land your employer in hot hot water.

In fact, they probably added the 30 minute escape hatch because of those things I mentioned, because yes, those are valid scenarios to have total privacy.

Other than adding buzzwords to a features list, I don't see AI really moving the needle here. As you've said, it's always been the expectation that employers are watching over their networks.

There's already loads of monitoring software available that can scrutinize, categorize, and track everything going through corporate networks. A company I worked at ~20 years ago had an internal website showing a live display of URLs accessed through their whole network, a "top 100" list, a break down into categories (news, email, games, etc.) and other stuff along those lines. They were absolutely categorizing and scrutinizing everything way back then, no AI needed.

> however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing life-activities on their work machines

I'd suggest doing it on your phone, not work PC.

If you have urgent personal errands e.g. an email to respond to here and there and you'd rather have a keyboard, bring a personal laptop, connect it to 5G and do it from your car.

> employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded

And the location, yes, your physical location as well

If you can afford it, set up a proper trust fund for them.

I quit tech at 40. I still do cool things with technology, but now at a community-owned grocery co-op.

I can't recommend leaving tech highly enough. My cortisol levels are so much lower than they used to be. I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours. I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it, which I sometimes do, because I actually enjoy my work now. I make a tangible difference for people, and get to work on things I care about. Instead of pleasing investors or VCs, I focus on maximizing impact and breaking even every year.

There are some things that are worse, mostly around compensation and benefits, but I don't really care. I'm lucky to have a working spouse with decent health insurance, so we use hers. We paid off our house and put a ton into savings while I worked in tech. I didn't get rich in the sense that people who work in tech think rich means, but I could probably sell my belongings and live a very good life on a beach somewhere in Latin America at whatever point I choose and never work again. That's likely the plan after my wife's parents are gone.

My advice, actually take the time to research the number you need to quit. Mine ended up being a lot lower than I thought it would be because I had been used to six figure salaries, but never lived above a five figure lifestyle.

I think we need to unionize, across companies. We need to be able to block stuff like this, and to be able to demand that you can’t lay off someone to replace them with AI (bringing US workers rights up to the bar set by China). We also need to be able to hold our leadership to some kind of code of ethics. I don’t want to work for a company that makes kill bots, or can renege on climate pledges.

My single minded focus is getting my finances in order so I don't need to work in this industry (financial independence) past 50. It's just getting worse and worse in terms of the open contempt for employees from the top down with no end in sight. Once you reach 50 it's just luck of the draw whether or not you are in the annual culling of the senior folks.

There's no excuse anymore for being ignorant of how this industry works, the mask has been off for years.

I dream about it everyday.

I love building software, but I can't stand working in the industry.

It's such an unholy combination of bad corporate culture and questionable moral principals.

I see all this complaining from people in big tech nowadays, but I can't help but wonder, why act like the industry is just big tech?

There are so many small companies, research groups etc that can pay a livable wage (just not as exuberant as big tech) without the ethical scruples, while still posing challenging technical problems.

Today is my last day at my current employer. After some time off, I'm considering several different options. I have enough saved that retirement is probably doable, although last time I took extended time off I got bored much quicker than I expected. I'm also considering retraining for a different field but that seems kinda daunting, and no certain bet either. I was thinking of doing some open source contributions to test the waters on whether I really want to give up software dev or not. I might do part time work just for something to do and for decent health care. Luckily working in tech has been very lucrative, so there are plenty of options on the table.

Your call, of course. But when in your situation, I looked at when my youngest was to head off to college (when the nest would be empty) and I marked my calendar. To your point, while the rest would empty when I was at the age of 57, it didn't seem like I would need to continue to accumulate the spoils of a software engineer when I had the 529's, the 401k by that point [1].

And so at the appointed time, I walked away.

(My retirement plans though also involved leaving the Bay Area—which I did not want to do while I had kids in school. Selling the Bay Area house, buying one in Nebraska paid the early retirement—why I thought it necessary to move in order to retire.)

[1] Told the wife I could get a job at Home Depot if it looked later like we needed an income injection. (Wondering if I subconsciously want to work at Home Depot.)

I'm younger than you, and probably haven't been working in tech as long, but I've been having similar thoughts. No kids, so I'm maxing retirement accounts, saving as much as I can, and trying to start my own small software company for niche applications.

Hopefully in a few years I have a couple mildly profitable applications, and I can pull the rip cord on working in tech and coast while I figure out next steps for myself professionally.

I'm curious what industries are you going to switch to, and it is just to get like healthcare, or soemthing...

I've been contemplating the same. Saved my whole life. But I still don't feel like I have enough saved for a long retirement (i'm in US, and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements, like you hear so many people around here tout).

Idk I calculated through my financial needs after retirement for 13 years (67-80) which would be around 400k€ and calculated through my savings I'll accumulate until then, if I keep up my current saving rate. I'll end up saving around 270k€ so ultimately I decided fuck it, Ill just take jobs where I can live comfortably right now and hope for the best in retirement. I take jobs that are fun to me. I have 37 years until retirement and will never be able to afford a house or whatever so I can switch industries whenever I feel like doing so.

Same here, I just need to figure out what I realistically want to do. Health care is the primary requirement; enough money to get by and not hit my retirement accounts is a relatively close second.

Already did it. Own a coffee shop now. I still do some tech work, but it's mostly for my own use.

I retired last year at 38. I live off 4% of my investments and I get to travel around to different countries every 6 months.

The key is budgeting and living a not so extravagant lifestyle. Figure out how much you need per year and multiply it by 25. That's your FIRE number, what you need in an investment portfolio with a return of 10% per year on average. Then live off 4% for the rest of your life.

I've been thinking about it a lot. I've been looking into becoming an electrician for maybe like 6 years before I retire.

Nothing solid, but if I have to spend 55-62 pouring beer at my local pub to cover medical insurance, I won’t be sad.

Or I’ll finally get around to obtaining an Irish passport and move to the Med.

I'm 40 and I am DESPERATLY trying to get out of tech. I love building stuff and I don't even mind AI.

However, the industry has just changed so much in the past 2 decades that I find it insufferable.

The leetcode grinding interviews. The bureaucracy. The weird psycho finance people who poured into the industry over time. I just can't stand being a Jira ticket coding monkey anymore.

I'm trying to do my own thing and go my own path. I've deeply suffered financially as a result. I burned through my savings and I don't have any kind of fallback but freelance work.

I'm out in 2 years, late 30's and a decade in IT/Sec, run a security team now.

Going into something like nursing - union gig, a relationship with AI and tracking I'm comfortable with, walking around money, a job I can show my kids that is about service vs. the inhumane aspects of tech, a career that scales despite technology of the next 20 years (or at least my best estimate of these risks).

End of the day, writing on the wall is clear as day

- Automation of a professional class is coming, just like in trading from '90s-2000s. It's ugly, the pros will deny it until the end, but I've seen it happen to the last technically-inclined 500k+ job class that was untouchable by all accounts. Engineers are up, financial analysts are up, jr lawyers are up... that is a scary future, I don't need to wait for 5 years for thought leaders to catch up to this.

- Labor rights and labor conflict are always a thing, it has been fair that SWEs exempted themselves from caring about it pre-AI, but post-AI I'd buckle up. If you're an engineer that has dug into AI heavily, and understand how the nature of your job for the next 5-10 yrs has changed, then you should be thinking about your relative labor advantage. Is it still a cake 500k/yr job if you're tracked every 30 minutes? Give me a break.

Fwiw, this tracking shows up at Big Corp and should be expected - Fortune 500s, likely FAANGs, and other spots with top-line insider threat risk. There are specific vendors worth seeing if they are installed via the MDMs or local processes.

Past that, most IT/Sec teams can do it with existing tools, but it's often down the line after getting capable detection/response for real security issues, insider threat, and then monitoring a workforce if so desired.

In my early 40s here, FAANG for 20 years, definitely don't see myself working in tech for much longer.

I understand and sympathize with the motivation here... but not all software engineering is bad. The best job I've ever had was working on cancer research as a software engineer. Brilliant biologists need engineers to help them run their analysis at scale to make discoveries. It was a non-profit, people genuinely cared and the org was good. Pay wasn't FAANG competitive of course, but my point is that not all software jobs are terrible.

I 24/7 never stop thinking about leaving tech at this point. Dependents is what makes the decision in any way complicated for me. When you have others that have become accustomed to a certain level of comfort, telling them you want to take that away so you personally don't have to deal with the absolute hell that is 'agentic' corporate america becomes a real pain in the ass.

probably a year or two. definitely less than three years. by then SWE as a job is gone.

I'm 57. I was a photojournalist until I was 36. I quit shortly after 9/11 (which I covered) to move with my wife to her new job and start a freelance career. That was 90% trying to gin up work and 10% photography and I was not a natural fit. I struggled financially (even though at one point a NYT photo editor reached out to me to say that they loved an essay I had done on China and they used it for inspiration for one of their younger photographers... still no work that paid enough to support my family). I pivoted to building websites.

It took me a long time to teach myself how to do this and I was making sites for family and friends (weddings, birth announcements) before finally starting to gain traction building sites for local businesses. Eventually a small marketing firm started using me for content updates and then bigger and bigger things. I build sites, created user management systems, handled databases and struggled to learn it all because my fine arts mind was chaotically bouncing all over the place with ideas and designs and finding there were a dozen different ways to do anything. After a few years of this I moved to a large consulting firm, quickly became a technical manager (mostly coding and problem solving but some people management). Then I moved to another and another. By the end I was leading small teams and working with some San Francisco based companies (as a contractor... no bonuses and I was hiring and managing people earning twice what I did). I eventually decided to move to work on a product at a single company.

Pay increased, bonuses appeared but I was now in my 50s and realizing that the corporate ladder favored me about as well as the marketing and sales part of photojournalism had. I am pretty much stalled out now. Salary is solid, bonus is great, upward trajectory has stalled and I am in my late 50's.

All of this is to say, I have given no thought to switching industries at this age. I think it would be too daunting and I am not willing to give up the higher salary that tech is providing this late in the game. I am holding tight (hopefully, lol... sigh) until 62 because my slow start in the industry and lean early years means that I will need to add social security into my income streams in order to lead the life I want to in retirement. I cannot afford the overall cost of living without that extra chunk added to my retirement drawdowns.

I don't plan on leaving technology, but I am scaling up a side hustle as a hedge.

save 70% of net and (try to) reject the hedonistic treadmill

I'm pretty much there right now too. I'm not quite 40, but I want out

Not sure what to do next, I know it probably won't pay as well, but damn I want out

Im thinking about getting certifications to become a drone pilot. Try and get on with a GIS firm to do aerial surveys for farm land or mining companies or something

I’ve been searching. I can’t find anything else that pays even remotely close to tech. It’s a sea of $40-60k jobs with a lot of work at the ground level.

Leaving tech altogether and working for dystopian companies like Meta are just two choices in a broad band of possibilities. You could also go work for yourself.

If I can get a few more good years in the stock market and save and invest as much as possible I could probably be done in 5 years and not have to work anymore or just work till I’m fired.

As people in tech we live very expensive lives but if you are in a major city and own your own home and have worked for a decade or more you probably have a lot more opportunity to retire today than you might think. Even with children, life can be much less expensive by moving to a low cost of living area. Often in online discussions about FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) high income people will discuss needing many millions to retire, but you can retire on less.

Switching industries is a romantic idea but it is very difficult, especially going from the tech world with big money to the normal world with small money. You can still work to keep yourself busy but thinking about it as retirement will better help you plan. Going part time in tech is usually more sustainable than trying to switch industries.

A good place to start is thinking about what you want from life without work. Where do you want to be? Where does your partner and your kids want to be? What do they want out of life? From there you can assess the financial needs and plan accordingly.

> how many more years do I need to work in tech?

The right answer should be "until you are able to do it".

That's the whole premise of welfare. Anything less or more is privilege/vice

Gavin Belson:

The Scene: Gavin’s development team complains that his new tech ("The Box") is antiquated. He fires back in frustration: "Why did you all take my money then, you entitled little pricks? You all think you’re John Lennon until someone waves a dollar in your face!"

I think this is a unrealistic point of view. If Meta really were as draconian and toxic as many people make it seem, most smart people would have left. Market is tough right now, but then there were other times when jobs were booming. And people still joined Meta. Money is one big aspect.

I am not saying Meta is a paradise. I completely want Meta to face their reckoning for what they have done to the world, but painting it as like a prison camp is misplaced I feel.

The number of people in these comments who would be happy to be "paid well" to contribute to what's inarguably a huge net negative worldwide is exactly how the company got to this point.

It's astonishing how many people value a ton of money over doing something good. Everyone who talks about setting values aside for cash is the problem. Gross.

There are tons of good reasons to work for Meta. You can work on interesting projects, build your resume and network, work on interesting engineering problems, learn from other people, and of course, they pay very well. People do need to support their family, secure their retirement and so on...

Is it perfect? certainly not. Is the company toxic? where do you draw the line? how much are you willing to compromise given the other advantages you get? Everybody has a different answer to these questions. Some people would tell you that even working in tech is wrong due to environmental concerns.

Personally, I would happily work for Meta. Many people use their services and like them. Is it the greatest thing for society? probably not, but neither is Netflix or Amazon or Apple...

People always answer this question with money. But if we think of it as a version of the prisoner dilemma (Meta is one prisoner, the employee is the other), the right move is probably to work somewhere else for a lower salary. By working for Meta, they are defecting against you (openly screen recording you to train your AI replacement). Choosing to work somewhere else would be like you defecting against Meta.

Extremely simplified example. Ignore inflation, raises, etc.

Which choice is better?

- $400k/yr for 5 years followed by a layoff, with the possibility that the thing you've helped Meta build rolls out everywhere, and there are next to no job opportunities

- $200k/yr for the rest of your career, and employment opportunities don't dry up because you didn't help build the thing meant to replace you

Median pay at Meta is $380k. Median. I'm sure it's high variance but I would put up with a lot for that kind of money

One thing I have observed so far in SV (haven't been here long) is that folks who work in big tech but aren't from the US don't fully understand the difference in costs depending where you live in the US. I have to wonder if that informs the decision to stay in SV no matter what the work is.

Like, intellectually they know that it costs less to live in Beaverton Michigan than it costs to live in Palo Alto. But the magnitude of that difference, and how that scales your income needs, they've never thought to do the math. It doesn't scale proportionally, and that's counterintuitive.

This isn't a dig against anyone, and exceptions abound. But when I told my foreign-born SV-lifer colleagues how much my rent was in Wisconsin, you'd have thought I was the one from a foreign country!

Spy camera manufacturer workers complaining about office cameras....

Post some links to companies hiring at similar compensation levels. Or, are you suggesting that every Meta employee is in a position to just like off of any random job they can find, or even no income at all while they go off "on their own"?

$$$,$$$

If you can hang, it pays great. I don't work there but I know some who do.

Have you tried finding a new job recently?

Money. Even I would put up with this if they paid me enough.

This seems like rhetorical question where you know the answer.

Despite corporate propaganda, work is not self-fulfillment, moral quest, or meaning for most people. It's money and future. When you earn $191K-$4.36M+ and don't want to move your family to some cheaper neighborhood, you put your head down and keep working.

Unless you are hardcore libertarian, these questions of workplace privacy are solved individual by individual. They are political questions. Improve labor laws, privacy laws etc.

In the end, most people choose money.

Maybe you should be asking that question on 1.3 acres and not here

Money and/or visa sponsorship obviously. Some things are more important than internet cool points.

In the US, if you quit your job, you lose access to many benefits, including affordable health care. It might be hard to get a loan for a car, to find an apartment, etc. This is systemically set up this way, including making sure employment doesn't get too low, which would give more power to employees.

Meta is still better than 80% of the companies. Other company spies on you, do micromanagement and still pay way less.

Pick your poison.

You need to be more cruel if you actually want these people to quit.

Make them fear for their professional and personal reputations.

Make them embarassed to show their face or state their place of employment.

We need to treat these people like Nazis.

> I genuinely don't understand...

Really? Its quite obvious to me. They get astonishing resume and salary. That is until they get fired or burned.

I'm trying to have sympathy for those who work there and are opposed to this, but the irony is so thick that it's a struggle.

I'm interested what they're doing now that they weren't already doing before that has any value.

These companies track a lot of what you do already - a decent percentage of which makes sense from a security perspective.

I'm curious what could possibly be valuable that they weren't already tracking.

Like... How are individual keystrokes and mouse movements more valuable than all the work you already do which is largely tracked at the right amount of value already???

I wonder how much of this is just them actively trying to get even more people to quit, with somehow zero concern for losing their actual talent in the process...

All of MAG-7 is so desperate to shift R&D spending from salaries to CapEx for AI data centers, they'd literally watch ~90% of their talent go that provides ~99% of their actual valuable work in the process.

And it's not because they're idiots that are completely oblivious to what's actually happening on the ground... It's their smug confidence that they can get away with anything and use their market positioning to force everyone to deal with their bad decisions no matter how disastrous they end up being...

If our models end up sucking, so what, we'll just lobby congress to make open weight models illegal...

If people don't like our pricing, oh well, we'll just lobby congress to force the government to pay for our products...

If China or Europe does it better, oh well, we'll just lobby congress to label it national security and outlaw competition...

Etc...

Painful levels of irony. These people sit at their computer all day scheming and coding ways to grab any new bits of data they can with the intent of capturing everything they can about the user's friends, location, wealth, hobbies, etc. to push more targeted ads.

Just like all those drones we use on our adversaries. The next American civil war will definitely be fought with drones.

I would bet that the 30 minute windows are tracked even more closely, just secretly.

Opt outs lower your KPI by a fixed value

If they give you shit for being opted out every day around lunchtime they would just find something else to give you shit about anyway.

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever"

best I can do is incoherent muttering about illegals and blaming all problems on them.

Or just other companies. Not every company does this insane level of tracking. People at Meta put up with it for the salary. There are lots of insane things people pursuing FAANG comp seem okay with enduring. There are plenty of much more relaxed environments where you may only earn a couple hundred grand a year, which of course is just awful (/s).

Client side react with three state changes that makes the violin janky.

Meta: Just as incompetent as Microsoft, but somehow more evil!

They should just create a leaderboard of how many minutes opted out this week/month...

Although... If an employee is pretty low on this leaderboard, that means s/he'll freely feel s/he can opt out a bit more. The overlords wouldn't want that!

Requires a functional legal system, so it seems unlikely to come into play.

I was thinking of those eyelid holders from Clockwork Orange. That way you won't waste time blinking.

Why would they care about software developers when they're busy replacing them with AGI?

We already have a solution to this, though. It's called criminal law. Where do you draw the line if you monitor people doing HR?

I don't think there are legal concerns with employee tracking. I suspect it would still be legal if they didn't provide an opt-out.

This is the United States, land of the free and home of the slaves. Workers are subhuman here.

Because someone made a video glamorizing their life working at microsoft? I don’t get the issue here - she’s basically doing free promotion for the hiring department

This is a perfect reason to unionize. Individual action is never as powerful as collective action.

It's part of meta-mating, we would not understand.