After listening to our resident alien life form and cable industry sleuth Jon Brodkin lament yesterday evening that he hadn’t been invited to join Verizon’s funded cadre of tech writers over at SugarString, I popped over to the site and flipped through the articles, wondering what Brodkin was missing out on. SugarString's layout isn’t afflicted with what StackExchange developer Jeff Atwood once referred to as "Pinterest Cancer," so I scrolled through and clicked on a few things to get a feel for what kind of reporting—or possibly "reporting"—the Verizon-controlled site was producing.
This story caught my eye:
In the piece, author Meredith Haggerty reached out to three different professionals and gauged their reaction to the idea of being made to work in an office where the employer disallows the use of Google Chat (informally, "GChat"). Haggerty’s first interview subject drew a line in the sand, responding strongly in the negative when asked whether or not he would work in such an office:
Jason Oberholtzer, the co-founder of I Love Charts and a content strategist currently embedded at IBM Studios, emphatically would not. When asked if he would quit a job that blocked Gchat, he did not hesitate to say yes.
Meredith: just straight up quit? why?
Jason: because that’s f___ing garbage.
Oberholtzer’s vehemence boggled me, because in the corporate world I come from, blocking external instant messaging is par for the course. It's not the exception—it's the way things are.
Welcome to real life
Although the other two respondents (Buzzfeed’s Katie Heaney and freelancer Beejoli Shah) had a more balanced view, the idea that being able to use GChat is on someone’s make/break list of workplace requirements strikes me as incredibly short-sighted. Restricting access to external instant messaging is a basic security play for just about every Fortune 500 company out there; in fact, the bigger the company, the more stringent the restrictions tend to be.
Speaking from personal experience, none of the three companies I worked for from 2001 through 2012—Boeing, EMC, and Symantec—allowed external instant messaging. No Google Chat, no AIM, no YIM, no MSN, no nothing. You could work around the restrictions at each of the companies if you wanted to break the rules (tunnel your GChat traffic over ssh through your home computer, for example), but then you’re actively subverting a corporate policy and inviting punishment if you’re discovered. Is it worth breaking the rules so we can, as Haggerty puts it, "start our mornings GChatting about last night’s Homeland?"
Generally speaking, it's not. Large companies chronically suffer from policy ossification, especially in IT, which means that policies tend to get made in crisis and then retained long past the point of being outdated. This is one of many consequences that follow from treating enterprise IT purely as a cost center (a tragic mistake most large organizations make): IT is forced into a reactive mode. IT fixes problems as they arise and tries to keep the leaks plugged with what most reasonable people would consider overly restrictive computing policies. Such policies often include several of the following items: no personal devices, mandatory auditing software, mobile device management software, remote control software, antivirus/antimalware software, intrusion detection software, and mandatory whole-disk encryption.
And, of course, no outside instant messaging.
Disallowing external IM makes sense if you look at things from the perspective of a CIO with a lot on his or her plate: unmonitored and potentially encrypted instant messaging traffic is an avenue through which controlled, proprietary data can be rendered uncontrolled and then exfiltrated outside the company. There are plenty of ways to regulate external IM, usually with Data Loss Prevention software, but those methods cost time and money—it’s far easier to simply block the ports and be done with it.
I’d never work at a place that does this!
Wholesale disallowing of external IM is a nuclear option, but it’s the option many large companies have chosen. The attitude exhibited by Oberholtzer is either hyperbolic or highly privileged—if you can afford to quit a job because that job won’t let you use GChat, then you’re either swimming in job offers or you don’t need to work. Either way, good for him.
For the rest of us, it’s highly likely that at some point—especially if you work for a really big company—you’ll have to deal with not being allowed to fire up the instant messaging application of your choice and gab with your friends or family.
Oberholtzer’s defense is one I’ve heard echoed before by tons of overly entitled employees:
Beyond the issue of personal contentment, he considers the [IM] client to be an indispensable business tool: efficiency matters and employees need to be allowed to “run their days productively.” If a company was unable to understand the utility of GChat or the value of employee freedom, he says, “That’s not a relationship I would want to get into because it wouldn’t end well for either party.”
This shortsighted and ultimately selfish view misses a bunch of important points. There are often factors at play that go far beyond "I want to use my own IM app because I believe I should be able to." Some companies face legal discovery requirements or other regulatory compliance issues, and in those cases the potential cost of breaking the law by leaking uncontrolled information overbalances an individual employee’s feelings about what they should and shouldn’t be allowed to do.
Some people really do need externally accessible instant messaging as part of their jobs, of course—especially those who are primarily freelancers or contractors and who need to be able to talk to contacts who aren’t sitting in the same building. But on the other hand, "I need to use IM to talk to my spouse because I derive significant satisfaction from that" simply isn’t a good enough reason when pitted against security, legal, or regulatory requirements.
It’s not an outrage, and it’s not a matter of the company not "trusting" or "valuing" employees. Work, as with all things in life, can involve some compromise. Sometimes you don't get to play with the exact toy you want to play with, and rage-quitting a job isn't the mature reaction. Real companies—not fantasy SF-based startups or regional businesses with casual outsourced IT, but big blue-chip players with multi-billion dollar IT budgets—sometimes have crappy IT policies. And sometimes, putting up with them is the price for being able to pay your mortgage and have good insurance.
How can I work without instant messaging?
One issue is that Haggerty’s piece doesn’t distinguish between internal and external instant messaging, using GChat as a stand-in for all IMs and even attempting to augment GChat’s value proposition by noting that companies can use it for "intra-office communication" (although actually doing so would likely send many Fortune 500 IT security managers into pearl-clutching panic).
At every office job I’ve ever had, disallowing external instant messaging went hand-in-hand with an internal IM solution—usually Microsoft Communicator/Lync but also sometimes an XMPP server. I don’t think you could find a single person who disagrees that IM is a valuable tool, and therein lies the huge missed point of the SugarString story. Just because you’re throwing out the external instant messaging bathwater doesn’t mean you have to toss the entire internal IM baby into the trash with it.
Turning the mic over to you
But enough soap-boxing from me; I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Is the idea of a job that disallows external instant messaging in fact so repugnant that it would drive you to quit? Is disallowing external IM indicative of an unhealthy corporate culture or of other systemic problems that would interfere with having a career at a large company? Do any readers work at places that allow unrestricted external instant messaging applications?
336 Reader Comments
This kind of dumb policy is also why people work so hard to undermine and subvert IT.
Go ahead, try and IM your CDW/Dell/HP sales team, you will get their presence information and be able to chat back and forth.
Not being allowed external IM shows a much deeper problem with the corporate structure and their attitude towards the employees, not trusting you to work like adults. We actively encourage our employees to use our guest WiFi, especially in big cities where cell service 50 floors up can be spotty at best.
Last edited by sryan2k1 on Wed Oct 29, 2014 4:12 pm
External IM is less important, but I would (and have) definitely weigh that in my job offers compared to other companies. I've been working in corporate areas of various sizes for about 15 years and it's a real quality of life difference during work to have external IM.
However, as the article notes, this is one symptom of "[IT] policy ossification" and "overly restrictive computing policies" such as no BYOD. Considered together, these poor policies would definitely move a job offer to the trash can.
I wouldn't quit because of a policy change I didn't like, but I sure would start looking for new opportunities.
If you work doesn't require any outside communication then I'd agree you don't need IM but then the question surely becomes the same as the "should they block Facebook" one?
Or is that too old fashioned?
And yes I've worked such places - for years in one case.
Last edited by Kazper on Wed Oct 29, 2014 4:11 pm
Last edited by jeromatron on Wed Oct 29, 2014 4:16 pm
Or is that too old fashioned?
Yeah, I thought that was the grown-up way of thinking too. But reading the comments, it's apparently not as unanimous as we'd think.
The awkward part is despite policy people would generally just circumvent these blocks through various means. I'm not saying I do or don't, just that it's what I've seen people do. It gets even less controllable now that a lot of people will just jump on their phones anyway and chat if they're in a situation where they can get a signal (not in a SCIF or something)
When it comes down to it though, I'd love to always work somewhere that trusted me with being able to manage my own internet use and conversations... truth is I haven't had that option, or at least I haven't seen that option being presented.
We run an internal instant messaging service, and we allow access to external XMPP services. That seems to be a nice compromise... our internal communications stay that way, but our people get access to the rest of the world. Our people would lose out on both valuable access to clients and on access to support for tools they use if we were to block it.
Would it be enough to make me quit if I worked someplace that blocked it? Not all by itself. But I would question the calculus that leads an employer to trust me with confidential information while not trusting me to use chat responsibly. An employer that's buying into that kind of stupidity is probably doing several other idiotic, employee-hostile things. It's very likely that the atmosphere created by management that stupid would make me want to find another place to spend my working time.
As for texts, by boss is the king of texting messages that should proabably be emails, so I doubt that would ever fly.
For DoD contractors like Boeing, stuff like blanket personal electronics bans exist as security measures, but for any company that isn't going to that level, blocking IM is nothing more than security theater.
And I'm pretty sure all companies would love employees who they could just trust to manage their internet use and conversations...
If it was suddenly blocked tomorrow I would happily continue working.
Or is that too old fashioned?
Yeah, I thought that was the grown-up way of thinking too. But reading the comments, it's apparently not as unanimous as we'd think.
Yeah, I'm honestly surprised at all the responses insisting on being able to chat at work. Maybe it's a millenial thing...
IM is important. Before rolling Lync (that, by the way, I despise because it is Windows only - engineering tools are only provided for Linux), some colleagues of mine even tried to use IRC and XMPP. As it was not supported by IT, nobody followed. Some people even installed Skype - something that from my point of view should be a no-no.
And now I realize people around me use Spotify and Dropbox. IT has been lax lately.
Or is that too old fashioned?
Yes, that is old fashioned.
As long as you are getting your work done, and are there the appropriate hours it doesn't matter *how* you accomplish your job.
Everyone in our department is salary.
Example: I was waiting on a few servers to reboot in different regions of the planet for firmware updates, I was monitoring them via their out of band consoles (DRAC). The process can take ~20 minutes or so, and can sometimes get stuck so I keep a causal eye on the process, which can stall for minutes at a time different phases.
On another monitor I was GChatting with a friend we are seeing this weekend for Halloween. Am I a bad employee?
I like my job because my boss doesn't treat me like a child and trusts me to do the job I was hired for. But we will also take impromptu half days off and go to baseball games during the summer if we feel like it, to give you the idea of our corporate culture.
Last edited by sryan2k1 on Wed Oct 29, 2014 4:17 pm
Or is that too old fashioned?
It is very old fashioned unless your working a customer facing service job or on an assembly line or something. Most professional jobs fail to acknowledge any distinction between work hours and not work hours, why shouldn't it go both ways ?
We run our own XMPP server and it's our primary method of communication, we use it even more than email (which is a close second). We also use XMPP for chatting among ourselves. There is nothing wrong with that.
We are allowed to run other IM programs, and I also use IM to chat with a few other people, in fact they're mostly former employees that I met at work and am now close friends with. One of them now works for a competitor in another city — and we still chat daily.
I don't see how there is any productivity difference between chatting to other staff and chatting to people outside the company. In fact I often receive work related advice from people who don't work here. That improves my work.
Basically, a happy employee is a good employee in my opinion. Allowing IM makes employees happy.
As for people spending all day chatting... well that is solved simply: check how much actual work they are getting done. If they're not getting enough done, then ask them to fix it or fire them. Perhaps that means spending less time on IM but it should not mean banning it altogether.
I will not work for any company that bans IM. It's a deal breaker for me.
Last edited by Abhi Beckert on Wed Oct 29, 2014 4:17 pm
Plus things have moved on, if people really want to chat then we have WhatsApp, Facebook and other forms of communication, often available on a phone or iPad which some companies (even banks!) allow you to use on wifi that doesn't go remotely near the corporate LAN.
What does annoy me is the blocking of webmail providers. At the end of the day it means a lot of people use their work email address for social stuff and, if I was running my own company, I'd far rather that personal messages were sent from personal email accounts and so kept well away from the corporate email address.
Last edited by mrsilver on Wed Oct 29, 2014 4:57 pm
You make a good point there. But I think the remedy is to make companies respect the barrier between work and life, not blur it even more.
I check Yahoo mail on my phone. It's not much of an inconvenience.
My current employer provides an XMPP server, and we're encouraged to use that for chat by folks in different buildings for example, but we're not forbidden from using other IM tools. I've found other IM systems critical for working with, for example, consultants that we bring in. (Better to chat with them before they visit, so their time on-site can be made more efficient, and then chat with them afterwards as followup. Saves us money.)
Heh, something of an issue is actually that my employer is starting to provide multiple chat services. Our VoIP system has XMPP built in, and it hasn't yet been federated to the one most of us were already using. But once it's further along, we'll actually have working IM built into our desk phones (and the mobile apps that we use in place of our desk phones while away from the desk).
Go ahead, try and IM your CDW/Dell/HP sales team, you will get their presence information and be able to chat back and forth.
Not being allowed external IM shows a much deeper problem with the corporate structure and their attitude towards the employees, not trusting you to work like adults. We actively encourage our employees to use our guest WiFi, especially in big cities where cell service 50 floors up can be spotty at best.
Don't know how it is at your company, but guest wi-fi at most I've worked at has always had a captive portal, which is a major PITA and makes always-connected wi-fi unfeasible. I wish someone could address the captive portal issue and do away with it. Passpoint maybe?
Or is that too old fashioned?
Yeah, I thought that was the grown-up way of thinking too. But reading the comments, it's apparently not as unanimous as we'd think.
Yeah, I'm honestly surprised at all the responses insisting on being able to chat at work. Maybe it's a millenial thing...
Reading some more, I think you're right. It's a generational thing.
Millenials have grown up with always available communication, to them that's normal. Blocking IM thus is not. I understand that, though I don't "get" it.
Go ahead, try and IM your CDW/Dell/HP sales team, you will get their presence information and be able to chat back and forth.
Not being allowed external IM shows a much deeper problem with the corporate structure and their attitude towards the employees, not trusting you to work like adults. We actively encourage our employees to use our guest WiFi, especially in big cities where cell service 50 floors up can be spotty at best.
Don't know how it is at your company, but guest wi-fi at most I've worked at has always had a captive portal, which is a major PITA and makes always-connected wi-fi unfeasible. I wish someone could address the captive portal issue and do away with it. Passpoint maybe?
Our guest network is unrestricted. Directly NAT'd to the internet via a cable/DSL modem in each office. The only thing is each client gets throttled to 3Mb up/down by the access points.
Or is that too old fashioned?
Yeah, I thought that was the grown-up way of thinking too. But reading the comments, it's apparently not as unanimous as we'd think.
If you're hourly, this is certainly true.
If you're salaried, it's significantly more nuanced. "Work" is frequently done both at the office and at home, and job performance is usually (ought to be?) measured by results rather than time spent. I frequently talk with my wife over messaging apps at work- it doesn't impact my ability to get my work done, and I would certainly consider restricted messaging access to be a significant downside when considering a job offer.
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