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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: 4, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Saturday August 11 2018, @12:51AM (2 children)
How does the system monitor the times I lie back on the couch with a cup of tea thnking of the best way to approach a problem with the code?
(Score: 2) by JustNiz on Saturday August 11 2018, @01:16AM
Exactly. Keyboard/click monitoring is such an invalid way of measuring actual productivity of software engineers, it must take a special kind of completely clueless idiot to even think of it.
This is the kind of mentality that we engineers encourage everytime we let agents and managers get away with calling us "coders", like we're just some kind of non-creative transcription typist.
Clearly they are eating their own dogfood now.
Apart from anything else, any software developer worth their salt can easily come up with multiple ways to not even be present at their PC and still fool software like this into thinking we're working.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday August 11 2018, @08:49AM
That's the first thing that popped in my mind as well, but you beat me to it. So I will post under you.
I make no beans about it anymore... I am an old fart, and when I went through University in the late 60's/early 70's, I went through Electrical Engineering and never took Data Structures. Didn't even know what they were. About fifteen years ago, I knew I was getting more and more into embedded microcontrollers, and went back to University for some CS stuff. Especially things like Data Structures / File Structures / HTML, that sort of thing.
I found Data Structures extremely useful. I was given a bunch of data and asked to sort it using various keys, and how to organize it in ways that made the sort key generation efficient. Then we all went off and coded our stuff then brought it back to class. Some of us could see exactly what we had to do and produced very elegant programs... minimal code, but maximal understandability, maintainability, and efficiency. I could look at those and see exactly what was going on.
While *some* of the other students, unclear on what they had to do, beat all around the bush, making all sorts of code, pages and pages and pages of it, that were just about as readable as the contracts that businessmen ask me to sign.... pages and pages of fine print. While some made some fine code as well.
The professor liked my submission quite a bit.
Now, I am a seasoned engineer, coming back for very specific purpose, and knowing full good and well I was after the concept, not implementation on a specific framework ( i.e Visual C++ for Microsoft ), the professor let me do my assignments in Borland Turbo C++ for DOS, ( Which I got for "free" off a CDROM included with PC Plus Magazine a year earlier ) with the caveat that the rest of the class was doing it in Visual C++, as that's what the bookstore offered, and he would not be able to spend any time trying to teach me to code in something he did not use everyday himself. I felt confident, as I had already been using C++ for quite some time, so I took off on my own, with the Borland compiler, coded his assignments up, exactly as he described the algorithms in class, even down to the names he used. He looked at my work, told me that I had come up with the most efficient implementation of the concepts he had ever seen, and asked me if I would mind if he used my work as a handout for all his subsequent classes. I wrote him up a quick note of release - just for legal stuff as he did not want any questions about whether or not he could copy it off, just as I had turned it in. To the best of my knowledge, he used it as a handout during his course for the rest of his tenure there.
I note the above as a query... had I been hired by the byte, would I have paid a stiff penalty for trying to be elegant and efficient, as it took me a long time to sit down and sort this whole thing out, as to how the program should flow. If this was a work for hire, under the pay-by-the-keystroke algorithm, I would have taken a huge hit, as some of the other students turned in a helluva lotta code... I got mine into around 40 pages of code, most of which was comment. No function/subroutine spanned more than one printed page. That was one of my goals... if the function gets too unwieldy, break it up so I can debug it easier. And leave lots of hooks for the debugger!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]