The Dystopian Reality of Productivity Culture

theodp writes: Employee monitoring software became the new normal during COVID-19," reports James Purtill. "It seems workers are stuck with it. In early 2020, as offices emptied and employees set up laptops on kitchen tables to work from home, the way managers kept tabs on white-collar workers underwent an abrupt change as well. Bosses used to counting the number of empty desks, or gauging the volume of keyboard clatter, now had to rely on video calls and tiny green "active" icons in workplace chat programs. In response, many employers splashed out on sophisticated kinds of spyware to claw back some oversight. 'Employee monitoring software' became the new normal, logging keystrokes and mouse movement, capturing screenshots, tracking location, and even activating webcams and microphones. At the same time, workers were dreaming up creative new ways to evade the software's all-seeing eye."

And in The Diminishing Returns of Productivity Culture, Anne Helen Petersen writes, "This is the dystopian reality of productivity culture. Its mandate is never 'You figured out how to do my tasks more efficiently, so you get to spend less time working.' It is always: 'You figured out how to do your tasks more efficiency, so you must now do more tasks.' She adds, "We've reached the point of diminishing returns. I think we know this. You can see it explicitly manifest in anti-hustle culture, in the renewed embrace of unions and the labor movement, in the popularity of books like How to Do Nothing and movements like The Nap Ministry. Some people have known it for a long time, some are just gradually coming to terms with it. A lot of it, I've found, depends on just how inculcated you were by productivity culture. Were you surrounded with examples of productivity as success? Or were the "productive" people in your life the most exhausted and pissed off?"

So, what's the state-of-the-art in software developer productivity monitoring (and creative workarounds) these days — do you feel tools like GitHub, Jira, Microsoft Teams, and SonarQube monitoring reports and metrics are being used more for or against you?