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To convince workers to join the unstable and unreliable world of freelance work, startups and platforms often promise freedom and flexibility. But on the digital freelance platform Upwork, company software tracks hundreds of freelancers while they work by saving screenshots, measuring the frequency of their clicks and keystrokes, and even sometimes taking webcam photos of the workers.
Upwork, which hosts "millions" of coding and design gigs, guarantees payment for freelancers, even if the clients who hired them refuse to pay. But in order to get the money, freelancers have to agree in advance to use Upwork's digital Work Diary, which counts keystrokes to measure how "productive" they are and takes screenshots of their computer screens to determine whether they're actually doing the work they say they're doing.
Upwork's tracker isn't automatically turned on for all gigs on the platform. Some freelancers like it because it guarantees payment, but others find it unnerving. Adam Florin is a digital freelancer who says he's used various time tracking tools during his 15-year career, and he finds Upwork's software particularly "creepy."
[...] "I've never had a client expect to be able to look over my shoulder for every minute of every day," Florin told BuzzFeed News via direct message. "That's what Upwork is providing."
Florin said the idea of rating a freelancer's productivity by counting keyboard taps and mouse clicks is "bogus," and he thinks Upwork's use of screenshots is an overreach.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @10:17PM (7 children)
Eh fuck off with that. Grinding people into dust is a big problem, otherwise they wouldnt need suicide nets outside the worst places. Having your every action monitored is a recipe for mental disorders.
But go ahead, trot out that bullshit rationale.
Better method: have competent managers who can evaluate employees. The measures are bogus, especially with work where the brain is the primary tool. All this bullshit will do is teach employees how to appear busy, and managers will still have to dig around to find out who is screwing around.
Being a masdive piece of shit im not surprused you agree with this. Ill just wait till they come for you and then watch the hypocrisy unfold.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @11:54PM (1 child)
"Better method: have competent managers who can evaluate employees."
Upwork allows anyone to get work done without hiring full-time employees and managers. Hiring managers to evaluate work would increase cost for employers by a large amount.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Saturday August 11 2018, @12:57AM
Nonsense.
Someone at the customers' end is evaluating the work. Just because the names have shifted from "manager" to "customer" does not negate the fact that the evaluation has to be done.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by requerdanos on Saturday August 11 2018, @02:54AM (2 children)
So, having your every action monitored by Upwork is a recipe for mental disorders that grinds its users to dust. No argument here.
What, then, is having your every action monitored by Facebook? By Google? By the NSA and friends? I am curious what the difference is, should there be a notable difference. Better suspension of disbelief, maybe?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 11 2018, @01:16PM (1 child)
None of those groups are capable of that degree of surveillance yet. And should they become capable of such they'll be much more of a threat to me than they currently are.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11 2018, @08:24PM
The NSA is already a massive threat to democracy and freedom. And since it can gather data from all of those companies as well, by extension, Facebook's and Google's surveillance are threats as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11 2018, @05:02PM
Competent managers are in very short supply. You can't expect a Harvard-style MBA to do anything as déclassé as actually talk to the peons, can you? Then who'd make all the fancy Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Sunday August 12 2018, @04:25AM
Where do you propose to get these competent managers?
If they were competent, they wouldn't be managers. They would do actual work. Management is an overhead, a friction, a function that while necessary, doesn't actually do whatever business you are in business to do. It should be treated that way. But management has the value hierarchy inverted.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.