The real reason you need a screenshot monitoring software to track productivity of your (remote) team.

Published in

SoftwareMill Tech Blog

8 min readJan 28, 2019

Recently I had an interesting conversation. Interesting as in “what was that?!” sense. I talked with a group of software developers just starting out their career. They are in a code school, but unlike at the three months bootcamps, they have to attend lectures, prepare presentations, work on group projects, learn not only the basics of a few languages, but also practice soft skills. All these turns out to be as challenging as coding. After 1.5 year of studying, they’re about to take on their first jobs, so they asked me what I think about working remotely. I’ve been always working remotely, it’s almost 15 years now, so I felt really well prepared for that conversation and mentioned all the goods and bads.

But! One question stroke me like a lightning on a sunny afternoon:

Does remote work require you to install software that tracks the amount of time you spend on work and captures screenshots and takes photos?

The “what was that?!” moment captured by Joe Ridley/Beth Martin on Unsplash

Firstly, I did let the thunder roar, then used a long period of silence to gather my thoughts, took a deep breath… and I was ready. Ready to take up this idea with all what it deserves to be dealt with: fire, acid and a nuke on top if it.

Dear employer, you’re not tracking every minute of work of your on-site staff — what makes you do so with your remotees?

Web Cam snapshots while you work

I started with my very personal opinion, just to be clear. I don’t like the idea of having pictures of me being processed by anyone else than me. Do you like photos being taken by surprise? Yeah, some are funny, but not all of them should enter the non-forgetting Internet space. Ever.
I can’t imagine pressing the stop recording button just to kiss or hug my kids goodbye when they are leaving for school. Also, although the room I work from is a so-called office, it happens that someone enters my Developer’s Cave and this person has never signed up for such an “adventure”.

All you need is trust, but…

I’ve spent the last 9 years in a completely remote company. As of today, we’re almost 50 people, mainly: developers, quality and devops engineers, ux designers plus business people: marketing wizards, sales representatives and administration staff — without whom our monthly company meetings would be as boring as watching your friends pictures from their last holidays — just imagine all these nerds in one place :)

Anyway:

all of us work from home, or other place suitable at a given time,
none of us has this tracking software installed,
all of us get their work done,
none of us is micromanaged,
all of us do work during work time.

Wait, wait, wait, all of us? Well, that’s not true, because we happened to have a cock-up. Yes… a few years ago, we hired this guy, let’s call him Janoosh. He started in a well established project and worked with some other developers from our company. Then we decided to spawn a start-up and he was supposed to lead the project, together with a new-hire. It took us — the whole company — 2 months to figure it out, that instead of doing his job, Janoosh was working on his private career outside software development. If we had this screenshot capturing software and the new-hire was an oldtimer, we may have had figured it out earlier.

Now we have a running joke in the company: Janoosh’s endeavour is one of the few investments we succeeded in. So all in all, good luck Janoosh and thanks for letting us grow, or rather strengthening us and teaching us a lesson. This is what we’ve learned and adapted, and guess what— capturing screens and web cams were never mentioned when we were looking to solve the problem.

The Hiring Question

Our hiring process is not a very common one. Besides a technical assessment, we also check candidate’s soft skills. We invite them for lunch to see how well our potential new-hire makes use of knife and fork. Then, during the next years, we evaluate how these skills, together with the ability to communicate, degrade, slowly but steadily ;) But back to the hiring question — what we ask is:

How would you act, if your teammate was not performing as good as you would expect?

None of our candidates ever mentioned this kind of software.
We are aware that asking such question does not solve the real issue. It’s more about to be prepared for next Janoosh. And to highlight that trust is a fragile gift offered to every team member on their very first day. It happens, that for reasons we may not understand, this precious stone is given away, potentially letting the whole company to look bad in front of clients.
We also figured out, that it’s very difficult to approach your teammate and tell them you’re not satisfied with the progress. It gets even worse if you happen to like each other. But here we come to our second solution:

Personal Feedback Loop

We introduced a standard way of telling each other how we perform. It’s similar to a retrospective in an Agile-driven project, where we discuss what went well, what could be improved, what went wrong. The KALM — Keep, Add, More and Less — retrospective activity is an approach that can be used in giving personal feedback. Another tool that we’re evaluating lately is MadLib. And there are more options available. The point is not to just have a feedback loop around, but to use it on a regular basis to recognise potential problems early, without using tools like a capturing software.

Being aware that trust can be occasionally abused, plus having a tool to give feedback continuously, we believe to be prepared for the next Janoosh. There is no doubt we may face this problem again. People are just people and the world is not as bright as your social media friends paint it on their accounts. What I think we do different, is solving the root cause by understanding why things are not getting done.

Screen capturing and time tracking software cannot address the problem this way. They can be tricked, as mentioned in this article. All such software does is trying to show, if someone is having the right applications opened and is doing the right mouse moves. But this is not software development at all.

So what is software development?

I have never seen a job announcement where the employer would require to install this kind of software, but I see there is a lot of supply. I hope I will never have to even evaluate such offer.

Software development is not about working 8 hours a day.
Software development is sometimes about working 5 hours a day and sometimes 12 hours a day.

Software development is not about being focused 8 hours in a row.
Software development is about going for a 1 hour run or having a shower in the middle of the day, taking a nap at 1 PM just after lunch, but also lying in the bed and rethinking the problem again, when it’s already 11 PM.

Software development is not about having your IDE opened and being always active (next to a browser with StackOverflow).
Software development is also about chatting with team mates, sometimes discussing private matters, and this is what let you grow as a senior lead developer. It’s also about opening a meme, a funny animated gif, to just get your head off the problem. There are techniques to keep focused on one task for a certain period of time and they definitely do not require having your desktop being tracked. E.g. I find Pomodoro useful, but there are more tools, which are free to use.

Last but not least, if I would look at how a surgeon is doing a heart bypass, I’m absolutely sure, I wouldn’t be able to tell if he’s doing it properly, or rather efficiently to keep the context. All I could say is if the surgery was a success, seeing the patient alive. If the software is not delivered, why bother to track this developer’s desktop and face — you are simply not a fit.

I’d like to leave you with a thought: is there any profession at all, which should be tracked? What about professions, where trust and responsibility go hand in hand and not doing it right can cause harm or death?

The real reason to use screen capturing tools

It’s time to answer the question from the title. The true reason you would use such software, is because you haven’t been told how the work of a software developer looks like. You are not aware of ways to check and verify progress. And it is not about capturing the developer’s frowning face and the desktop having the right apps launched.
It’s about having daily meetings and asking why this task takes in your opinion so long. Are there blockers? Has the task been underestimated? Do you (the developer) need a helping hand? And even then, when you’re not satisfied, why would you require a proof? Just go and look for someone else, who can deliver what you expect in a time frame that satisfies you. You need to learn how to work with developers, like you learned how to do your job in the first place. Screen capturing software doesn’t teach you anything in this matter.

In Poland we have a saying: only cows do not change their minds. Since I’m not a cow, feel free to challenge my skepticism. The objections I have are summarised below:

Tracking does not solve the core issue, it just may confirm your suspicion which can be dispelled with better tools and approaches.
Using screen and camera capturing software cannot be justified by the deliverables developers provide. Although we create software that can do harm and cause death, software development provides tools and services to deliver the required stability and quality.
Buying tracking software does not free you up from investing into building a trustful relationship with your remotees.