Opinion: Treat Staff like Adults

There’s a nasty trend that I’ve seen at a number of sites in recent years. It’s the tendency to try to block and or censor anything that the company thinks might be an issue. Some companies are so concerned about their IP (intellectual property) that they even try to stop any potential leak of that property.

While on the surface, that all might seem to make sense, it’s not sensible. It’s unproductive.

• When staff can’t look up the syntax of things like BULK INSERT because the system flags it as a shopping site (which is forbidden), you’ve stopped people working effectively.
• When staff can’t look up how to work efficiently with threads because the discussion they want to read happens to be about threading in games (and gaming sites are blocked), you’ve stopped people working effectively.
• When staff can’t look at content from a presentation because it’s shared on a site like SlideShare (and sharing sites are blocked), you’ve stopped people working effectively.
• When staff systems work at one third of the normal speed because of all the “protective” code that you’ve added (I have a personal dislike for the impact of tools like CyberArk), you’ve stopped people working effectively.
• When staff can’t download a presentation or code sample because it’s on a Google Drive, Azure Storage Account, etc. (because they could be used for sharing files), you’ve stopped people working effectively.

And so on, and so on.

Automated censorship has never worked effectively yet. (Machine Learning and AI might change that).  And this is no different.

Rather than try to guess and block all the things you fear staff might look at or use, please consider treating them as adults. A better set of rules for technical staff like developers is:

• We recognize that you are a professional staff member.
• We don’t block what you do.
• We will, however, monitor all your usage.
• You might be required to justify your usage.
• We’ve detailed the types of things that are never allowed (that don’t fit with the company ethos or the law) and some do attract significant penalties.

These auto-censoring and blocking tools that try to keep you safe end up just causing angst and frustration, don’t work very effectively, and from what I’ve seen, almost always end up with staff finding ways to circumvent them.

Worst of all, treating the staff like children won’t make them love your company. Neither will anything that keeps blocking them from doing their jobs.

2018-01-09