Bossware: The #7 Developer Productivity Killer 

Engineering teams love autonomy. The freedom to work on their own terms without micromanagement, flexibility to manage their time, work, and toolstack, along with a sense of ownership has historically made developers happier, and productive. 

Over 80% of developers seem to agree with the statement – “With greater autonomy came better innovation, and higher growth!”. 

However, their desired autonomy, and trust within the system is threatened by the inevitable rise of bossware. 

As more and more companies turn to remote work after the pandemic, organizations have started to virtually look over their developer’s shoulders, and deploy workplace surveillance software. 

What might have started as a noble intention to track developer activities without hampering their flow state is now threatening organizational culture, and overall engineering productivity. 

Read this insight to know more about the menace of bossware, and how to navigate it to build happier, and productive engineering teams. 

What is Bossware?   

Bossware uses the pseudonym of “productivity, and performance monitoring software” to track developer efforts, even recording every second of your work activity. The term itself suggests its primary use: it's a tool for bosses to oversee the digital activities of their teams. Some even liken bossware to "spyware" due to its capability to observe and record numerous aspects of a worker's day.

Not all bossware is created equal. Some versions, like Microsoft Productivity Score, are relatively benign, focusing on aggregating data across a team to provide general insights into application usage and offer suggestions for boosting productivity. These less invasive tools do not track individual activities but rather aim to enhance team performance holistically.

However, other versions of bossware can be more intrusive, raising significant privacy concerns. These programs can log keystrokes, access microphones and cameras remotely, and operate undetected by the user. The rise of remote work has accelerated the adoption of such monitoring technologies; it's estimated that 78% of companies now employ some form of bossware.

Historically, workplace monitoring software was designed to prevent data leaks and manage internal risks in sensitive sectors like pharmaceuticals and fintech. During the pandemic, these tools were further leveraged to maintain visibility into remote operations, aiming to streamline workflows and balance workloads without the need for constant check-ins.

However, the current trend in bossware usage is becoming increasingly aggressive, often to the detriment of developer productivity and engineering excellence. Modern bossware tools analyze and rank employees based on various metrics, such as time spent active on communication platforms, mouse movements, and even social media use. Alarmingly, some systems are configured to flag personal activities, such as eating or taking breaks, potentially penalizing normal human behavior.

The widespread adoption of bossware calls for a balanced approach, ensuring productivity does not come at the cost of privacy and employee well-being. It's crucial for both employers and employees to engage in open discussions about the ethical use of monitoring software and its impact on the workplace culture.

Types of Bossware

Bossware is typically categorized into two types, each differing in transparency and how much employees know about the monitoring:

1. Open Monitoring

In this approach, employers are straightforward about using monitoring software. They explain its purpose, what data it collects, and how this information will be used. Sometimes, employees might have some control over the monitoring, like choosing when it runs or what data to keep. This transparency helps build trust and maintains openness within the workplace.

Employee Control Options

To further empower employees, some companies offer ways to manage the monitoring:

Opt-In/Out Options: Employees can decide if and when the monitoring software is active.
Data Selection Choices: Employees can choose which types of data are collected and how long they're kept, giving them some privacy control.

2. Covert Monitoring

This type of bossware operates without the employees' knowledge. It collects data secretly, and employees have no control over or insight into the process. This lack of transparency can raise privacy concerns and may harm trust between employers and employees.

Privacy Concerns

The hidden nature of covert monitoring can feel intrusive and may lead to decreased trust within the workplace, as employees are unaware of being monitored.

Is Bossware Legal?

Yes, bossware is legal in many jurisdictions, but its use is subject to specific regulations regarding employee privacy and data protection.

Navigating the legality of bossware is complex:

1. Local Laws: The rules around employee monitoring differ by location. Employers need to understand the specific laws in their area.
2. Acceptable Monitoring: Generally, monitoring work-related activity on company devices is more acceptable than tracking personal information or activities outside of work hours.

Understanding these aspects is key for both employers and employees to ensure that monitoring practices are respectful, legally compliant, and balanced with privacy concerns.

How Does Bossware Work?

Bossware acts like a digital watchdog, monitoring employee activity on their devices. It continuously gathers information and sometimes uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze that data and provide insights.

Here's a breakdown of what bossware can track:

1. Basic Activity: Bossware can monitor which applications and websites employees use, along with how often they use them. This gives a general idea of work habits.
2. Detailed Monitoring: Some bossware goes a step further. It can track things like:

• Every keystroke typed (including deleted ones)

• Emails sent and received

• Computer commands entered

• Screen activity and screenshots

• Mouse movements

• App usage and switching

• Chat conversations

• Browsing history (including incognito tabs)

Alerts and Actions

Bossware can be configured to send alerts to managers when it detects specific activity. It may also have the ability to:

• Notify employees about potential policy violations or being monitored

• Lock employee computers if suspicious activity is detected.

If you suspect your work computer is being monitored, the best course of action is to check your company's employee handbook or onboarding materials. These documents often outline any monitoring practices in place.

If the information isn't readily available, have an open conversation with your manager or HR representative.

It's important to remember that there might be legitimate reasons for companies to monitor employee activity on work devices. However, transparency is key. By having open communication, you can understand the company's practices and ensure they align with your comfort level.

The Impact of Bossware on Developer Productivity

Using bossware to measure developer productivity often backfires, resembling a wild-goose chase. It depends on outdated metrics like Slack activity or keystrokes that fail to accurately reflect developers' actual work. This approach not only adds undue pressure on engineering teams to be perpetually online but also fosters mistrust and forces developers to constantly demonstrate activity, which doesn't necessarily correlate with real productivity.

Despite intentions to boost productivity and secure company assets, employing bossware in software development often has mixed outcomes, fostering trust issues and interrupting the natural workflow. Ironically, bossware promotes context switching and loss of flow state for developers. Also, these notifications can break your developer's concentration, disrupting their deep work hours.

Pros:

• Security Enhancements: Bossware helps detect unusual activity, securing sensitive information within the workplace.

• Compliance with Regulations: In regulated industries, it ensures adherence to protocols, reducing legal risks.

• Transparency: Ethically used, it can foster an open environment where performance metrics are discussed, setting clear expectations.

• Identifying Inefficiencies: It can pinpoint workflow inefficiencies, facilitating productivity enhancements.

• Objective Evaluations: A data-driven monitoring system can lead to fairer employee assessments.

• Reduction of Distractions: Monitoring may deter personal web browsing or social media use during work hours.

• Workflow Optimization: Some bossware effectively identifies how tools are used, suggesting workflow improvements.

• Managerial Insights: Certain tools provide managers with insights into workload distribution and essential data for payroll and scheduling.

Cons:

• Questionable Metrics: Bossware often relies on superficial metrics that don't capture the quality or impact of developers' work, valuing presence over contribution.

• Erosion of Trust: An MIT Sloan study shows that 92% of monitored employees feel distrust towards their employers, and 81% of managers reciprocate this feeling, which can hinder recognition of actual achievements.

• Promotion of an Always-On Culture: It encourages constant availability, overshadowing genuine productivity and innovation.

• Workflow Disruption: Alerts and notifications can break developers' concentration, crucial for effective and innovative programming.

• Increased Anxiety and Stress: Constant surveillance can heighten self-consciousness and imposter syndrome, with looming fears of job loss.

• Reduced Autonomy: Continuous monitoring can restrict developers' independence, compelling them to justify every action.

• Misleading Metrics: An excessive focus on quantifiable data like hours worked or keystrokes shifts attention away from more significant productivity indicators, such as code quality.

• Psychological Toll: The stress from monitoring can lead to burnout, detrimentally affecting developers' health and overall productivity.

The potential business impacts of invasive monitoring include high turnover costs, as such practices may drive away particularly younger talent who prefer companies that value people over profits. Additionally, losing skilled developers to a hostile work environment can significantly increase recruitment expenses, given the lengthy hiring process. Financially, the turnover of staff can lead to losses of up to 250% of an annual salary per developer, accounting for the associated costs of lost productivity, recruitment, and training.

What Can Engineering Teams Do About The Bossware Sprawl?

Bossware promotes micromanagement in the garb of improved workflow visibility and higher productivity. So what should managers do next?

The fundamental problem here is not bossware per se, but the lack of trust, and autonomy between engineering leaders, and individual contributors. 

A different, but sustainable path would be to accept your developers with all their strengths, and weaknesses, while offering them the autonomy to work, and innovate. Some of them might experience imposter syndrome more frequently than others, a few will hate to speak their concerns on daily standups while another cohort won’t be able to say no to excessive workload. 

This way engineering managers might measure less, but understand, and trust more. 

Most high-performing teams celebrate autonomy, and a culture of trust. In the long-run, it is the only path to take for sustainable engineering success. As per Deloitte’s latest report, developer-manager trust has been established as a business-critical metric. 

Another way is to deploy actionable analytics, and privacy-driven software while you roll back your bossware laterally. 

An engineering management platform offers data-driven visibility into your engineering workflows with help of “real productivity” metrics. Rather than surveilling your developer’s work, an EMP helps teams recognize engineering work, flag workflow bottlenecks, and unblock devs to do their best work without sifting through Slack, or worrying about logging their workhours. 

An EMP collects and aggregates data from various sources within the engineering workflow, including code repositories, project management tools, and communication platforms to generate and segregate real-time, developer-centric reports that helps teams to improve their productivity in real-time. 

Tracking, and acting on code quality metrics, DORA metrics, technical debt, or project delivery vs mulling over browsing history, or cursor strokes of your developers– what would you choose?

The factual, and contextual data helps engineering teams to understand each other's work processes, while making room for individual growth and autonomy. 

Bottom Line: Invest In Developer Experience, Not Bossware 

Engineering leaders now need to know that putting trust in your developers than a workplace surveillance software will reap greater benefits in future. 

And that is why, developer experience and engineering productivity have seemed to take a center stage in all executive conversations. Given the potential of DevEx in shortening time to market, and the role of developer productivity in adding another $3 trillion to the global GDP. 

Bossware is antithetical to measuring and maximizing engineering efficiency. It measures people, rather than analyzing processes, and workflows, and that’s where it falls short of fulfilling its prophecy as a necessary-evil, or an “employee-friendly” tool.

The best way forward is to empower your workforce to constantly invest in their own development. The change will be possible only when their current developmental silos are broken, and engineering frictions are taken care of. 

Engineering management platforms like Hatica are doing their bit in driving transformation and inching them closer to engineering excellence with every passing day. 

Know how Hatica can empower your engineering team to be hyper-productive without over-the-top monitoring. Book a free demo here→