The new service takes pictures of employees every 5 minutes. They hate him for it.

Remote work is “famous” among managers for the fact that many of them feel as if they have less control. What do workers do, do they do what they should? To monitor the hard work of employees, someone looks only at the results. Which is sometimes good, but far from suitable for all areas and projects. Someone is introducing a time tracking system at the computer, although most of them are fairly easy to trick if you wish.

But now in the USA, against the background of coronavirus, another system is becoming popular. A videoconference, which is constantly connected, and through periodic snapshots of a webcam determines whether an employee is at his workplace. The most popular system is called Sneek , and it has already found many ardent opponents ...

Millions of companies around the world abandoned their offices and began to try to establish work from home. For many who have managed to organize employee management, such as Google, Oracle and Microsoft, the transition to remote work has given a good plus to productivity . But not everyone was so successful. To make sure their employees don’t “fly off,” some companies are starting to use tools like Sneek. A free cloud service creates a “wall of faces”, which simultaneously shows all the members of your team that you invited. It turns out such a virtual office where you can communicate through microphones and see what your colleagues are doing.

Photos of employees are constantly updated - every 5 minutes, 1 minute or manually, at the touch of a button. Using a webcam on a computer or laptop. To maintain a certain privacy, each employee can temporarily turn off the camera, but then it will immediately be noticeable, and the “Away” plate will appear on the screen next to his photo. Any employee of the "office" can click on any other to instantly start a personal video chat. You can also chat right away with the whole group, in the style of the Zoom video call.


SoundCommerce employees spend their day at Sneek

The startup was created in September 2016, but did not become particularly popular - until recently. Quarantine changed everything. For two months since the beginning of March, its user base has increased 10 times and reached 160 thousand. Customers include GoFish, SoundCommerce, Fred Perry, and thousands of other mid-sized companies.

Del Carry, co-founder of the startup, says that he knows that many have problems with their idea, but the task of the service is to create a real office atmosphere where everyone can see everyone and talk to him. It is an ideal environment for sharing knowledge and ideas, for creating a common culture.

After the rise in popularity of Sneek in March and April, journalists began to writeand Twitter celebrities, a flurry of criticism fell on the service. Some call it "the peak of disrespect for the individual." David Heinemeyer Hansson, author of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of Basecamp, says in his tweets that such services “have goose bumps.” Like, people's personal lives are worth nothing.



The fun is that, according to Curry, the idea of ​​a startup came up with him just after reading Hansson 's book about the problems of remote work. And now the company receives daily threats from its subscribers, informing them that they should close the project as soon as possible and calling the developers "pieces of g --- on."

To the words of his critics, Curry replies that the goal of his Sneek is not total surveillance, but help in creating an office culture:

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