Worked there (in Chase tower downtown Chicago) last year. The oddest thing is that it was hybrid work (where we were onsite 3 days out of the week). So good luck tracking things the other two days. I took to listening to midi files of old VG music as my "background tunes" during work, so as to not use bandwidth that would be tracked for streaming music while coding. The tracking didn't really get to me (after all, it is "their time" that they're paying for). The tough part is that it makes "Oh I need to do a personal thing for 5 / 10 minutes." a near impossibility, and a change in my personal life drove me to switch jobs for better work life balance.
So no, I don't think that this tracking is the dystopian nightmare it's being portrayed as, but it does have consequences, which make the post-covid work / life intermingling schedule impossible to maintain. The real dangers of such a policy are who they will lose as a result of it.
EDIT -
I feel the need to add, that the tracking at the time of my departure was not as extensive as some of the claims being made here, which I am a bit... skeptical of.
>after all, it is "their time" that they're paying for
On so many levels, it is not. Even if you're being paid for time, people don't "own" your time or shouldn't be allowed to "own" your time. Ultimately you own your time, they should pay for the privilege to nudge or direct your agency during that time. You should always have agency within that time to refuse to work or do whatever, otherwise we're on paths back toward slavery.
On another level, most employees these days are salaried. Businesses adopted this for several reasons but the primary reason is its a beneficial reduction of labor costs in most cases. Paying employees salary not only makes labor costs more predictable (one argument) it sets a cap on the labor expense to try and maximize work within. Under a salary model, you're really paid for function not time, even though employers want to conveniently, to their advantage, choose when they want to view you as a functional or time based cost within that salaried definition. If you're salaried, there's almost no argument for your "time" which is why most salaried employees have infinite queues of uncompletable tasks stacked on them whilst hourly employees are often scrambling just to find tasks to do, depending again on the context.
You do realize once this is normalized, it wouldn't even come as a surprise to have them eventually mandating company devices to be on when at home and so on.
As long as you really are. I’d just point out that on numerous occasions I’ve run into people who
drastically overestimate their abilities and productivity. Their self perception is fundamentally broken and it most comes down to under estimating what other people actual do and how much work it is and then when combined with your comment is a recipe for disaster. These are high IQ people who apply some rationalization like this to be lazy and somehow think others and management doesn’t notice. It’s super frustrating as one knows they are very capable but when they get fired these people are in complete shock. That tends to happen after they embark on a simple project that should take only a day or two, but after convincing themselves they are a 10x developer and a refactor like
this project would take everyone else at least 3 weeks, so no big deal if it takes 2 weeks. Opps, socially awkward is trying to explain to them that everyone knows you aren’t working … and now you are fired … might be a reason you have been let go previously… even though you’re clearly capable.
Sorry for the rant. Just pointing out people who think they are 10x are probably more like 2x when pushing themselves and can risk being 0.3x when applying your attitude.
That is a good point. People like that are generally measuring the wrong things when comparing themselves to others. Being 10x better at dependency injection is of no value to many businesses and can lead to unexpected firing if you don't understand that. No that I agree with how every business prioritizes metrics, just that it can happen that one team member is capable of doing 60% of a team's work in some situations.
I was referring to metrics that are valued by the business.
So no, I don't think that this tracking is the dystopian nightmare it's being portrayed as, but it does have consequences, which make the post-covid work / life intermingling schedule impossible to maintain. The real dangers of such a policy are who they will lose as a result of it.
EDIT -
I feel the need to add, that the tracking at the time of my departure was not as extensive as some of the claims being made here, which I am a bit... skeptical of.