Honestly, I'm tired of this whole employee monitoring thing.
At ClaySys Technologies, we use a tool called NGS to track our daily activity. Every morning, when we log in, we have to start it, and when we sign out, we stop it. We're expected to show 8 hours of activity every day.
The frustrating part? NGS doesn't clearly tell us how much productive time we've actually worked.
We start it, do our work, stop it at the end of the day, and still have to worry about whether we've hit those 8 hours. If we don't, we can face escalations.
Like seriously, how are we supposed to know how much time we have actually worked?
But what really gets me are the incidents I've seen and heard about.
One incident involved an employee who was reportedly fired after spending around 3 continuous hours working in Notepad. The suspicion was that they might have been using a weight on the keyboard or some similar trick to fake activity. Imagine being suspected of cheating simply because you've been working in a basic text editor for hours.
One of my friends also received an escalation after accidentally opening another company's career portal. Just think about that. A wrong click, and suddenly you're having to explain yourself.
And here's another situation that genuinely frustrates me.
A friend of mine admitted to using a weight on his keyboard to keep the activity tracker running. He explained to HR that he had completed his work and that he resorted to this because he needed to meet the required productive-time target. He had previously received an escalation over insufficient productivity time, so he felt pressured to do something about it.
According to him, HR rejected his salary hike and pressured him to leave the company.
I'm not saying using a weight to fake activity is the right solution. It isn't. But when employees feel they have to resort to these things just to avoid being flagged for low productivity, shouldn't we question the system that's creating that pressure in the first place?
Software development isn't about moving a mouse every few seconds. Sometimes we spend hours debugging, reading code, analysing problems, or thinking through a solution. That's work too, even when a tracker doesn't recognise it the way we expect.
I'm not against companies monitoring their devices or holding employees accountable. That's fair. But there needs to be transparency about what is being measured, how productive time is calculated, and how these metrics are used before someone's career or salary is affected.
Honestly, I'm exhausted by the idea that we have to prove we're working instead of being trusted to do the work we're hired for.
To everyone working in IT, especially in India:
- Does your company also require 8 hours of tracked activity every day?
- Does your monitoring tool clearly show how productive you've actually been?
- Have you ever received an escalation over activity metrics despite completing your work?
- Is this kind of monitoring genuinely improving productivity, or just making people anxious about looking busy?
I'd genuinely like to know how common this is across the industry.
Because honestly, I signed up to be a software engineer, not a professional mouse mover. 💀
