I'd like to take a slightly different angle and dig a little deeper into the user mentality. Using my own experiences and a few quotes from Office Space (which I believe is one of the greatest movies to portray the typical office worker mentality), I think can I better explain why people defy rules and surf during work hours irregardless of warnings.
Quote:
it's a problem of motivation. If I work my ass out, I don't see an extra dime!
self-explanitory and very true. I've felt this way very often at my old job and found myself thinking "f**k the boss, I'm ahead of my work and I'm going to relax and enjoy some chat".
Quote:
Ambition is not necessarily good and mediocrity is not necessarily bad
I was always told, good work will be promptly punished with more work. I'll be damned if that isn't the god aweful truth. When I was a programmer, I used to allocate my time wisely. I would generally get ahead on all my projects, and leave around 1-2 hours to jerk around towards the afternoon. Here's the key, I never let my boss know just how far ahead of my work schedule that I was. This lead him to believe I was just competent enough to do the work on schedule and left me all kinds of time to email my buddies, play online games and chat.
Quote:
That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired
I used to feel, if I did enough work (to be on or ahead of schedule), I deserved some down time to relax and goof off. The more I was pressured into working, the less likely I was to do anything even remotely productive. The more threatened I felt, the more rebellious I became. I knew nothing at the time about computer security (as do most typical users) and could care less about spyware/trojans/viruses, etc. In my mind, that was the admins job...to protect the system (after all, that's what he was getting paid to do). So what is a little surfing going to hurt?, I thought. If they came after me, I felt they were being anal retentive *****s and didn't appreciate any work that I did do.
Quote:
Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work
Some days, there was just barely enough work to keep a lemming occupied let alone an entire staff of workers. And what to do? surf the internet! of course. This made sense to me and besides, there's nothing to do anyways, I thought.
This was during my early 20's. I'm now almost 30 and all the wiser to computer security. All those things my admin used to tell me back then, actually *make* sense now...almost 10 years later. Ironically enough, I'm thatguy now...the guy whose supposed to take care of the network, that's what I'm paid for, right? Funny thing is, if I met myself now, when I was 21-22 years old, I would have told me to f**k off and stop being such a tightwad about surfing the internet.
All I'm trying to do is offer a different perspective on maybe why some people disregard warnings and policies even at the expense of their own jobs. I've been on both ends of the stick. The idiot user and now the pain in the ass admin(only part-time thank god :D). Maybe the solution would be better incentives to work? bonuses for completing projects early? I don't know. I think the problems crosses many boundries, from users, to admins, to the how the company is ran, etc. Maybe coming down on users with policies and strict rules works, but could there be better ways of handling this issue from a non-techincal viewpoint?