As much as it's funny to dunk on meta this type of surveillance is becoming the norm. Failed start ups are selling all their emails, chats, commits, etc for companies to train on. Most job offers now come with statements about how you don't have right to your likeness, or your personal network I think most people assume that's for photo ops, but ... Yea. I expect more and more of this. products and product features rolling out with this as a focus

Companies have shown us that IP going to AI providers is acceptable. Once you cross that line your thought workers are assets not people.

This is a naive take on this. Do you think it stops with just metamates(lmao that’s what they call themselves) being surveilled? Nope. This is the exact type of thing that software IC’s should reject in solidarity. Being happy with BadCompanyX trampling employee expectations directly allows for GoodCompanyY to enact the same policies.

There are large organizations at Meta focused on basic research & design (FAIR, Open Compute, PyTorch, etc) and giving back to the community. Not everyone is maximizing revenue.

> Yes they could have accessed logs before but there’s a difference between directed checking after incidents and active surveillance at scale.

at this point employees should be kept in cold storage to acclimate so as to prevent being shocked from any more chilling announcements. also will cut down on bathroom breaks

> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

Feel like I'm reading a Gibson novel here.

There shouldn't be any expectation of privacy? There absolutely should!

> the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.

A bogus argument, methinks. Consider that the company also owns the phones, but can or do they listen to every phone call ?

> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

I know you’re in India, but in the US, could this not be considered intellectual property theft on “right of publicity”? Your persona and working style is one of your core values you bring to market; building a simulacrum of that is not something I expect to be part of the “your output is the company’s IP” in an existing contract.

I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.

Wait so the engineers doing novel work are ousted; you fire the engineer that had the skill set to produce the work in the first place? Surely this is creating a Stasi-like neighbour snitching environment with chilling effect where the better you do the faster you become a target for replacement by engineer's incentivized to win points by replacing you. Even being very charitable where the scenario is the code was so poor that the code the employee is working on is so entrenched in domain knowledge they've become a huge bus factor, an LLM is going to make that kind of code worse. I'm struggling to imagine the subset of people this replaces that is not a long term detriment to everyone working there. Those people became "key personnel" for a reason no?

Just speculating, but the intention wasn't reducing key personnel risk. It was so that your employer could fire them and replace them with an agent running off of their associated skills.md.

skills.md heh they serialized you into a config file and used it to boot your replacement. could've at least picked a better extension.

Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.

There remains a thing called human dignity.

If a company can't trust the people it hires, that's a fault in the hiring process, not the employees.

>we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues

Like that "Scott is an asswipe who never agrees to any idea that isn't his" or what?

>A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

This is exactly what they're doing, and they aren't the only ones.

[dead]

I insulted him in my mandatory Exit Interview form from HR when I resigned.

It had no impact of recruiters trying to win me back since then.

He's already got the willing-intern-finder.md skill locked and loaded

All enterprise messaging apps support exporting your DMs today, for legal compliance.

Would require a government willing to hold criminals accountable even after taking bribery into account.

It's absolutely their right, but it's a dramatic cultural departure from the history of the company.

In the late 2010s/pre-covid it was very common for employees to port their personal cell phone number to their work phone and just not have a personal cell phone. The internal culture at the company was remarkably open for their size.

That all went away by the time I left in 2022, and from what I've heard it has only accelerated into an employee-hostile environment. I'm not shocked at this move.

While you have the right practical approach, I do believe companies should face harsh regulations preventing this kind of monitoring. It has almost universally negative effects, from enabling union-busting to exploitation to all kinds of discrimination and favoritism.

Engineers build tools for other people. The profession exists in support of human life. We make the substrate that civilization runs on.

If humans are the point, this also goes for keeping work environments humane.

1. But they are not paying for your training which you are bringing to the company. 2. About ranting about company, it is difficult to organize. That's why unions existed, and that's why unions were allowed to meet in work hours.

I cannot understand how can anyone hold such outrageously antihuman beliefs.

Governments, corporations and any other organizations should all exist FOR the people, not the other way around.

American-style capitalism truly is a disease.

There is no clean separation between personal and work. It is also more efficient to blend them (if I expect a baseline level of non-snoopiness on my work computer, I will text my boyfriend from my work laptop... obviously beneficial for the firm).

Either way when it comes to ranting about the company: many workplaces don't have a watercooler where all your team mates congregate (e.g. remote/different offices). Also what, you'll rant about confidential work projects over non-work texts?

This comments pairs really well with the song Sixteen Tons - I cued the song[1] and re-read your comment.

More substantively: I would like the employer/employee transaction to be one of buing/selling labor. To me, training AI on keystrokes nudges the deal towards selling one's "soul" next to other dystopian tropes like brain implants and work toilets that analyze excretions.

You are correct that employers own the laptops and can install anything they want, which is why I never do anything other than work there - the farthest I will go is participate in employer-hosted shitpost groups/channels, which are not anonymous, and they are free to train their models on that.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1980WfKC0o

>Why do people expect to have a right to do non-work related stuff on the job?

Like use the restroom? Personally, I'm not a slave. I am getting more and more used to the idea of having to push back on those who do exhibit such a mentality. Y'all are beginning to become a threat to the rest of us.

You would love the world of Severance! Drop your humanity and individuality at the door. Become a mindless drone

Companies pay their employees to build things. They do not pay their employees for their likeliness or the inner workings of their brains. Meta is trying to get the latter by keystroke tracking. It is an overreach in that context.

If they just want to monitor your computer for the purposes of productivity tracking, that is in their right, imo - just a shitty thing to do.

I don’t care if a company monitors which websites I go to on a work computer, what applications I run or what I say on Slack.

On the other hand I would be looking for another job if they had keyloggers or were taking screenshots even if they said anything about me shopping on Amazon or randomly browsing Hacker News or any website that wasn’t gaming or Netflix during work hours.

Heck I use to travel a lot more for business and I used my work laptop for Netflix and other streaming services in the hotel.

As long as I’m meeting performance standards it shouldn’t matter.

What a pathetic quisling attitude to life.

In most developed countries, dissent in the workplace is protected by labor laws.

It's absolutely wild to me that anyone has ever operated under any other assumption.

Maybe because they're aware that complaining about the boss is protected by law (in the United States and many other countries).