Judge Rules in Favor of Websurfing at Work 279
MirrororriM writes "According MSNBC article, a judge has ruled in favor of a worker that was repeatedly warned for surfing the internet on company time. Only a "reprimand" is a fitting punishment - not termination. From the article: 'It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work.'"
I love my job! (Score:5, Funny)
Wow... cool!
Re:I love my job! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I love my job! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I love my job! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I love my job! (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry your web surfing was interrupted by fired employees trying to hand you old office supplies. Please, please, don't quit. As you know, without a good office manager, the whole company is doomed because all executives are helpless children. A fruit basket has been sent to your desk, and your clothing stipend will be doubled. Also, your job title has been escalated yet again, from "secretary" to "receptionist" to "office manager" to "company overlord."
Thank you for your patience, and also for helping me write this. Why don't you take the afternoon off for another massage? We'll get a temp to handle the phones for you, as usual.
Re:I love my job! (Score:5, Funny)
Since you lot spend so much time posting on slashdot, I found another vendor.
Joe.
Re:I love my job! (Score:5, Funny)
Since you spend all your time posting on slashdot and looking for vendors, I'm leaving you for the metermaid.
Re:I love my job! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I love my job! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I love my job! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I love my job! (Score:5, Funny)
This is Nietzsche...
Re:I love my job! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I love my job! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I love my job! (Score:5, Funny)
Please stop filling up the garbage can with office supplies. It makes the trash heavier. I hate surfing the web in sweaty clothes.
Re:I love my job! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I love my job! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I love my job! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I love my job! (Score:2)
Oh man, the next time you're going to promote your grandiose personal site in a thinly concealed frist psot, make sure it holds up at least...
Re:I love my job! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I love my job! (Score:3, Interesting)
Go ahead, try and find an older cite..
I leave looking into the details of his life up to you....
Bookmarking this! (Score:4, Interesting)
Not valid outside NY (Score:5, Informative)
You won't be able to use this as binding precedent against an employer unless you live in New York. The cost of bringing a wrongful termination suit to establish a corresponding precedent in your jurisdiction may be more than you can afford. Worse yet, employment laws tend to vary greatly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Re:Not valid outside NY (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not valid outside NY (Score:2)
IOW if you spend too much time surfing, or talking on the phone, you can still get fired.
Re:Not valid outside NY (Score:4, Insightful)
Not valid inside NY too. (Score:4, Informative)
NY happens to be one of those states where an employer can fire you for any reason ("Employment at will"), except for 8 very specific circumstances (Here's [state.ny.us] the list of exceptions).
Given that, I guess the critical point to this case was that the employer was the Dept of Education: a public sector job.
Albany's culture of "pay to play", indeed.
Re:Not valid outside NY (Score:2)
Re:Not valid outside NY (Score:3)
Only the morale of whiners.
Or how about the fact that now employees will need to actually take time off to do minor things that they otherwise could have taken just a few minutes out of their day to work on.
Amazingly, the world survived and actually prospered prior to 1995.
If port 80 traffic to non related sites was blocked (and good luck identifing all those sites, and hope you don't have anyone who actually needs the web for their job, like t
Re:Not valid outside NY (Score:3, Insightful)
Ofcourse. Anyone who's got a complaint against a draconian office policy must be a whiner. Why not just label anyone who disagrees with you at all as a 'whiner.' You should also try the grade school favorite, "I know you are, but what am I?" That one's a real winner too.
Yea, and technology/the world has also changed since 1995. Making your employees work in pre-1995 conditions isn't likely to improve your busine
Re:Bookmarking this! (Score:2)
Besides my boss seems to have the attitue of:
If your work gets done I'm happy && as long as I don't get heat for your actions I'm happy
As long as both those conditions are met I'm free to do what I want. These last few months I've been working on a kids to work day project using sound energy and resonance.
-nB
Re:Bookmarking this! (Score:3, Funny)
You're making a mix-CD?
I think I speak for all of us when I say (Score:3, Funny)
On the other hand... (Score:4, Funny)
I can just see people trying to abuse this... (Score:2, Funny)
Simple Fix (Score:4, Informative)
If this was a problem, why in the world didn't they simply block outbound port 80 from the local NAT address (192.168.0.dumbass-that-won't-get-to-work) -> 255.255.255.255/0?
You can do this type of thing on any SOHO firewall, surely they had this ability.
Re:Simple Fix (Score:2)
Re:Simple Fix (Score:2)
Re:Simple Fix (Score:4, Informative)
If this was a problem, why in the world didn't they simply block outbound port 80 from the local NAT address (192.168.0.dumbass-that-won't-get-to-work) -> 255.255.255.255/0?
Another possibility if your employee workstations run any flavor of Linux or BSD is to simply remove all the web browsers. Seriously. Unless your company uses apps that can only be access via the web (which I know is many nowadays), there is no need for most employees to have web browsers.
Another possibility is to block all web traffic except through a proxy. Make the proxy authenticate. Use the proxy to allow intranet-only traffic for those people that don't need access to the public Internet.
Any moderately-sized business should be able to accomplish this. Given that the guy in question was a city employee, I would say that the city government should invest in some decent IT people.
Re:Simple Fix (Score:2)
Someone using Linux or BSD can't figure out how to sneak in a copy of firefox-x.xx.tar.gz and unpack it in his home directory?
Re:Simple Fix (Score:2)
Re:Simple Fix (Score:2)
re: simple-minded "fix" is more like it (Score:5, Insightful)
It could probably be done, but it creates a hostile work environment. People expect to be able to check their personal email during lunch breaks and so forth, and these things usually require web access. Furthermore, it's increasingly difficult to make a determination that "employee X never needs Internet access". What if their boss suddenly asks them to "find me some documentation on how this machine is disassembled", or maybe "get me some price quotes on a new air compressor"? Does it makes sense to limit them to making phone calls from numbers they can find in the phone book, and talking to a few salespeople to find out "the best possible price"? If they had Internet access, a few searches on a search engine could yield them much better results.
Even your secretaries/administrative assistants (who many bosses think do nothing with the Internet besides play online games and waste time chatting) often save a company money when they realize they can use the net to get better pricing on toner or ink cartridge refills, paper, and other office supplies than what they've always gotten through their normal vendors. And if your company still uses a travel agent to book flights - shame on them. Give your employees access to the airline web sites and car rental/hotel chain sites, and let them take care of those things themselves!
Bottom line: Giving people more tools to accomplish tasks is never a "bad" thing. The issues only come about when poor management allows employees to waste too much time. It doesn't really matter if we're talking about the Internet, trips to the water cooler, or reading books.
Re:Simple Fix (Score:2)
Great (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Great (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Great (Score:2)
Of course it is!! I'd hate to be bisexual, can you imagine wanting to fuck every single person you meet????
Instead of a 'little black book' what do you carry? The white pages???
Yay (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Yay (Score:2, Funny)
Websurfing is ok (Score:2)
hot damn! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:hot damn! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:hot damn! (Score:5, Funny)
They already have this.
It's called PowerPoint.
Re:hot damn! (Score:4, Funny)
With PowerPoint, everybody ends up raw and sore after 20 minutes too much.
Today surfing (Score:3, Funny)
"Uncomfortable working environment" my ass - HR - you're goin' DOWN. Um - to coin a phrase.
Working for City/State is different (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Working for City/State is different (Score:2)
Re:Working for City/State is different (Score:2)
Not only will we have to pay for their surfing, because a judge has practically made it a "right", we get to fund their pensions as well.
Sorry, but government jobs that don't need access to the internet need to not have any access. Just as people make fun at work crews for lack of "working" while observed people will now make jokes about the city hall guy that just plays solitaire or surfs.
They are working for us, they already have nearly all hol
Don't most employers block websites? (Score:3, Interesting)
My last job with internet access came with restrictive software that blocked most websites the company didn't want employees visiting. There was no news websites, no sports, no entertainment, no shopping. The company also activly added new websites to the filter when the IT people noticed surfing that wasn't explained by a company need. That seems like the better option than telling employees "don't surf". Instead, most people brought a copy of the local newspaper to read.
Re:Don't most employers block websites? (Score:3, Interesting)
Because "bad at sales" is a subjective judgement of performance, which could require expensive litigation to defend. Also complicating this route is the fact that, if there were other sales people who were arguably "worse" than this person, but who weren't fired, it would then look bad for the employer if it went to court, especially if, say, the person fired was a minority of some sort and the person not-fired for same c
Re:Don't most employers block websites? (Score:2)
Blocking web sites (blacklisting) is a waste of time for everyone. It doesn't work. Whitelisting makes much more sense. People ask for access to legit sites and you add it to your forced proxy. This prevents free-association browsing, but enables you to give access to those who have good reason to go to particular sites (business need). Then set up a location that people can go to and use on
content (Score:2)
".. after a search of Choudhri's computer files revealed he had visited several news and travel sites..
Travel sites? on office time? hmmmn
Time management (Score:5, Interesting)
I once read a book by an anally retentive time management consultant. Yes, that was his job. He would always have his watch set 3 minutes fast to "be ahead of the world", and would always make todo lists, and would always be doing something while waiting, and all that jazz.
The most ironic thing was that he said that he encouraged his employees to bring puzzles, books, needlepoint, or whatever they wanted to occupy their time when they were done with their work.
Why? Well, because people will stretch a project until the deadline or miss the deadline completely. By having a carrot in front of them saying "I can goof off when I'm done with this", he was able to tell when they were done with their tasks, and assign them a new one. He got more work out of these people by encouraging them to goof off than not.
Its just as irrational to assume that 100% of ones working time is going to be 100% productive work. Its more on the order of 10% to maybe 30% depending on the kind of work. Also, for a lot of white-collar and professional/skilled labor people, they do things and think about things outside of their work that helps them do better work.
How many slashdotters out there have private projects or even outside of work computing interests if you work on computers for a living? Doesn't this stuff help you at your job? If your job encouraged private projects, as Google does, do you think your job would be more fulfilling and productive?
Re:Time management (Score:3, Funny)
No need to be redundant.
Re:Time management (Score:2)
Google doesn't encourage private projects. Google does encourage employees to spend 20% of their time on side projects. The difference seems like semantics, but is actually a big deal. Google owns the copyright and IP to every one of those side projects.
But yes, my job is much more fulfilling because it encourages side projects. I work on WiX (http://wix.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]) in my spare t
Headline is very misleading (Score:3, Informative)
I think the judge is nuts, but even so, the ruling only applies to a narrow class of public employees, many of whom were already notoriously slow and useless -- even before the days when web access was available.
David
Re:Headline is very misleading (Score:2, Interesting)
David
This AC is contradictory (Score:3, Insightful)
Save for later... (Score:3, Informative)
This pecident will serve me well!
Solitaire=internet? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Solitaire=internet? (Score:5, Interesting)
In this case, you're probably right. However, I've gotten busted for this. My boss came in, saw me playing Solitaire, and geared up to yell at me. I minimized the window to reveal my computer was rendering. "IE eats too much RAM."
I was off the hook. Heh.
Down the road, we were encouraged to browse the web from time to time. Almost everybody at that office had something to gain by reading up on tech news sites and so forth. Even Slashdot was expressly allowed. (Although I doubt my boss would have OK'd that if she had ever wandered into the comments section.)
Great...but why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Try that at a real company and hasta la vista! (Score:2, Insightful)
If you try that at a real company (i.e. not a state job) and your ass is gone. Surfing for hours on the net is not acceptable anymore than talking on the phone with your girlfriend for hours. With the logic of this ruling.. wouldn't it be ok to surf porn? Because you can talk on the phone with one of those 900 numbers. Bottom line is this... a company is paying you to do a job and thats it. Now if your job is to surf the net, then I guess you're ok :)
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]
Re:Try that at a real company and hasta la vista! (Score:5, Insightful)
A "real" company accepts that their workers may need to make personal calls, look up info on the internet and do some reading.
As long as employees get their work done and don't blow company resources, there is no harm in it. In fact, it probably helps keep morale up.
Re:Try that at a real company and hasta la vista! (Score:2)
That said, it's down to the employer what's unacceptable. I would say a brief call to your girlfriend to say hello is acceptable occasionally. Calling home for an hour to discuss the new bathroom isn't.
Re:Try that at a real company and hasta la vista! (Score:2)
The Downside... (Score:5, Funny)
Not so fast (Score:2)
Is this why the U.S. has trouble competing? (Score:2)
This court ruling sounds stupid (relative to my expectations that an employee should spend his time as directed while doing work), and it makes me wonder: are rulings/laws like these part of why other countries eat our lunch?
Re:Is this why the U.S. has trouble competing? (Score:2)
In other words, jobs - both skilled and unskilled - are being farmed around the world looking for the lowest common denominator. (Whether this should be controlled, to keep the US/West high while slowly bringing up the rest of the world, or whether the US should be allowed to crash and rise
Can't comment on this now; the boss just came in (Score:2)
Sarbanes Oxley (Sox) (Score:2)
I lose more time to PMO than I do to SOX compliance (there was one horrible 4 week period where I basically billed yet wasn't allowed to work because no projects were approved- yup- I couldn't even check out stuff and do things i knew needed doing because it wasn't an approved project).
Then there are cancelled projects.
Then there are super-rush projects that get replaced by another super-rush project without ever being installed.
I
Ok, fine (Score:5, Insightful)
-matthew
Seems like a no-brainer (Score:5, Insightful)
What if you terminate the employee for not getting their work done?
It does seem rather obvious, doesn't it? I suppose all this business about unrestricted employee Internet access harming businesses indicates how poorly most companies are managed.
Newspaper, book, goofing off on Slashdot, crossword puzzles, phone gossip, water cooler loitering. The bottom line ought to be: are you getting your work done, or not? Hell, plenty of people don't goof off in tangible way, but still manage to waste hours every day and avoid getting work finished. I've also encountered plenty of folks who "work" 50 hour weeks but manage to get almost nothing done.
It seems like managing for outcomes is a helluva lot easier, too. If you're spending time as a manager trying to figure out if your employees are surfing the Web, that's time you could be spending checking your employees' actual work output.
I better get back to work ... (Score:2)
internet is evil (Score:2, Funny)
and now!
still doing it...
Surprising coming out of New York (Score:3, Informative)
Eat it Bossman (Score:3, Funny)
As long as the person gets the work done... (Score:2, Interesting)
Funnily enough, this comes from the US, which I seem to remember prides itself on being result-oriented (i.e.: looking at how the person and the company performs, not so much on how it's done) rather than process oriented
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Surf at home.... (Score:3, Insightful)
When I came on the scene - I had a slow, saturated T1 with people complaining all the time. A couple days analysis and I discovered that all the bandwidth was going to bullshit - music, shopping, news, downloading screen savers/ringtones, etc. So I set up DansGuardian and blocked everything but what we decided to allow. Now I have a T1 line that's not saturated, and get's about 50% use with 75% peaks (so I'm looking at going to a fractional to save some $$$).
Yep - I'm the "Company Dick", people hate me, but the boss is happy that I've cut costs and have people working in the office... Even better - people get their shit done during the day, so once they got with the program, they were able to get more work done and go home on time - so they're slowly starting to come around too... And nope, no one quit...
I have the same policy with email - no personal use. We whitelist all the known addresses/domains that we use for business, and let the rest hit the spam filters. We monitor the spam filters daily to make sure nothing either slips by or gets caught unnecessarially, and when we discover a bizillion messages that have nothing to do with business - we blacklist that address - we don't bounce anything, just blackhole it... that problem takes care of itself after a day or so and some "Test messages"... Requests to open up those addresses are summarially ignored.
Yep - I'm the company dick, but my email server isn't overloaded with a lot of shit, and I don't need to increase the capacity to handle a bunch of non-business crap.
My company cell phones - no personal use. I monitor all the #'s and match against known personal numbers/known business #'s. All the rest are looked at statistically to see if there's high usage. If there is, and it's not business related - I charge the employee back.... Yep, I'm the company dick, but I saved this company hundreds of thousands of minutes last year on our cell bill.
And yep - we DISCLOSE everything we do at the time of hire - employee is free to not accept the agreement, and we just won't hire them. If they do accept it, then I expect, require, and demand that they hold up their end of the bargain or I'll charge back just like I said I would. Once the first few chargebacks go out, people get the message pretty quickly and the shit stops.
If you want to get personal calls at work - carry your own damn cell phone. But if that affects the time that you are to put in for this company - we'll fire your ass, so keep it short and sweet and only when you need to. None of that all day SMS/IM crap about what you plan to do after work, blah blah blah...
I've had a couple people go to court, try to challenge it, but hey, we're employment at will, not some bullshit governmental shop so they get no where with it once we pull out the copy of the agreement they signed...
My advice: Grow up. Be professional. When you're at work - try WORKING for a change.
(and no, I'm not doing this from work...)
Re:Surf at home.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, you may well get the occasional person that spends too much time on their connection. You can catch that using your big brother software and counsel/fire/shoot/whatever that person. Yep, you probably have that right.
Trust me, you're still not getting 8 hours a day of work out of your people. They're using MS Word to update their resumes, or they are staring at pieces of paper on their desk looking like they are working, but in reality, they're counting minutes. Or they're at home, taking every single vacation/sick/comp time minute they are entitled to, in an effort to rebalance the work/life ratio that the US has completely screwed up. Or they're around the coffeepot/water cooler complaining about you. Probably taking 90 minute lunches too, because they're having to take care of the personal business you're not letting them take care of at their desk.
Of course, I'm probably feeding the troll here, but I couldn't let it stand.
Re:Surf at home.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree fully.
Remember that time you called me late one evening because something was acting up on your servers? Tough shit, I'm no longer on the clock.
You want me to work a few minutes late to help keep a client happy? Sorry, it's 5:01 pm, and you're not paying me to work one second more than 9-5.
You're a bit short-staffed just when I have some time off planned? Aww, too bad. This is my vacation time, and there's simply no way I'm willing to be flexible about anything involving my personal life.
I'll tell ya what - when I'm on MY time, using MY car, or in MY house - then I tell YOU what I can and can not do. If you don't like it, then use YOUR time, YOUR car, and YOUR skillset..
My advice: Grow up. Be professional. This cuts both ways. The employer who runs a punch clock sweatshop is just as much of an ass as the employee who thinks they can surf the Internet for 5 hours a day while at work. Oh, and you have some seriously incompetent employees, and management, if you've honestly improved working conditions with your act.
Re:Honestly (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, but time online should not be treated any differently to time spent on the phone or reading a newspaper. Seems perfectly sensible to me. That's what the judge is saying. Beats me why so many folks think we need special rules and regulations whenever THE INTERNET is involved.
Re:Honestly (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately the system logging net usage does not attempt to correlate it to compiler usage, so it doesn't show that you were surfing while waiting for a 15 minute build and link to complete because a header file used by only 21% of the code had to be touched and you need the resulting binary to do testing.
Re:The problem.... (Score:5, Insightful)
That is something most employers are doing. When hired, the human resources officer says your gaurenteed 15 minutes of paid break time for every 4 hours, gaurenteed by federal law. But as soon as the HR person is gone, the manager of the department says you don't get any breaks. It is like the legal department tells the left hand one thing, and the right hand another. Just as long as the company prints the policy on paper, they can do anything in practice. Who's going to risk a job over two 15 minute breaks?
It reminds me of a job I had before college, in a factory. There were OSHA posters everywhere about what the law required. But nobody did it the OSHA way, unless there was an inspection. It was done the way the person signing the check wanted. I saw people get fired for complaining about not wanting to do a job an unsafe way. I only stayed there a year, but I did notice many white workers who were paid $12-13 an hour were being replaced with mexicans who spoke broken english and one told me he was paid $7 an hour. The mexicans didn't give a crap about OSHA. How does that translate to IT? Well, I guess it is the equivelent of watching your job go to India.
We gotta do it the way the company owner wants, or he'll relocate out of the USA and there will be no jobs. What alternative is there?
Re:The problem.... (Score:2)
This is another reason it is such a bitch to give up smoking!!! All those little 5-7 minute breaks a day, to go outside and enjoy the weather sure add up.
I find I really miss them the most during some hard coding....used to, I'd work and get stuck, go outside for a
Re:The problem.... (Score:2)
You know, walking through a cloud of smoke to get into a building is nowhere near as bad as being stuck in a lift (elevator) with someone who's just had a smoke
Quit folding. Call his bluff. (Score:2)
Anyone who's more like Peter [insidepulse.com] than Tom [luminomagazine.com].
It's all a big poker game. Most bosses probably don't want to hire and train a new person over a petty issue, but they don't have to worry about that because you're too afraid to stand up for yourself. You'll spend the rest of your life f@#$ed if you fold every time your boss tosses a few chips into the pot.
Re:So now you can't fire a goof-off... (Score:2)
But... you can still terminate a goof-off for not getting his work done.
The key I think is that looking at a newspaper, or hitting a travel site to to book tickets for personal travel, can't be used as automatic proof that a person is not doing his job.
If you could show that looking at a web site or newspaper was incompatible with
Re:Don't get too excited. . . (Score:2, Insightful)
not a big deal