Recently our company woke up to a revelation that Internet browsing is affecting the productivity of the developers. Fair enough. They have every right to decide on that. But I really get annoyed how it has been handled. I go to work one day and can’t access Internet. I think may be it’s down so I send out a nice email asking if the Internet is down. The IT people confirm it is. So I do some local work and pass away my time. But later I see people accessing Internet and then I start to get emails from my team basically asking me to enable Internet for them. I am a little confused as I am under the impression that the Internet is down.
Upon checking the IT people change the tune now. The guy just comes to my computer and configures it to a proxy server. So, I had to figure it out myself that they are curtailing Internet access. There is no frigging policy on it. There is no email sent to everyone about it. It’s just on a need a to know basis. God forbid we let everyone know that we are using a proxy to use Internet. OOH.
It’s so typical of an organization. To totally mis-trust the employees and treat them as stock animals. No one complains. They just go along with IT person’s proxy setup. But everyone is secretly trying to figure out to over come it. The company is dealing with Tech people – we are not dumb nuts. Everyone has a way to circumvent it. A lot of rebel heroes are born out of no where who guide everyone else to by pass the blocks on Internet.
If you want anything to be get done, the best and surest way to do is to make the person want to do it. If you impose it secretly and then have no policy or no intimation it then it’s just going to waste more time of the employees. I personally think that if the Management had just sent an email to everyone telling them why we are having a block on Internet and why the company takes productivity seriously – then it would have been in such a positive spirit. Now it’s all about breaking the wall in front of us. Totally opposite attitude of what Management expects.
And you would think that the guys who configured proxy and blocks are bright enough. They say we have only some allowable timings for browsing. Guess what it doesn’t work! It’s a block on browsing all day and all night.
They still wonder how I get my gmail?
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