How My Boss Monitors Me While I Work from Home

It's really amazing the lengths managers and organizations go to in order to feel like they own their employees. At my old job in finance, a random VP would always show up at like 11pm to do a "desk check" of the analysts. No one was explicitly reprimanded for not working at 11pm, but the message was clear: it's better to play candy crush on your phone until past midnight at the office instead of actually getting some goddamn sleep. It was a pretty common occurrence for average performers who lived in the office to get promoted over top performers who didn't work as many hours.

Companies don't want you to think of your job as a job, instead they want you to buy in, join the cult, and become a company man, someone who's identity is inextricably linked to the firm. This software is just the next evolution of in office desk checks that have probably been going on for centuries.

Another way to look at it is that companies have almost no transparency into how productive their employees actually are. The problem is especially acute among managers who are unable to verify the quality of their subordinates work. How does your boss know if you're simply not working very hard or working hard on a very hard problem? Without domain expertise, it's impossible.

The solution is for organizations to ditch desk checks, ditch standard working hours, invest in tools and structures to provide greater transparency into real performance, and make sure all managers have the same domain expertise as their subordinates.

If your need software to spy on your employees to make sure they're actually working, your company is far too broken for the software to help.

The communism/capitalism hybrid labor model is not going to be very popular and is a poor fit for any kind of work/life balance.

Instead of a company car, maybe detached home offices will become the desirable perk in a pay package.

I can imagine outside of the city and the suburbs, you could install a portable office, modular building, travel trailer or repurposed tiny home and retire with your sanity, but trapped at home is going to be the new meme for the urbans stuck in that drama 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.