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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) 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.