This is the real reason I have one of those damn mouse jigglers. The timeouts on our laptop are CRAZY short, like 5 minutes tops. Just stepping away for some coffee or to take a shit then I have to re-authenticate. Heaven forbid I make myself a toasted bagel or something!
It’s even worse as I work 95% inside multiple virtual machines in the cloud that also timeout (and in some cases shut down) so there are multiple layers of password +2fa just to get back to whatever I was doing.
So yeah, $10 USB device from Amazon allows me to not spend a hour a day just having to re-auth.
I added 10% to my estimate for login and authentication issues. The manager was not amused.
My previous work started cracking down on having us write down what we were up to in the day to the minute. I was doing 5m blocks, got in trouble. I switched to the by the minute bullshit and also logged the time spent logging my time and they were not amused either but couldn’t really do anything about it. That whole job was as much time convincing them I was working as time spent actually working, which meant I ended up not working very much because I felt strangled all the time and I had built a bunch of effective ways to lie to them about my day
You had to log your time to the minute? I would quit instantly if my job got down to 5m increments, fuck that shit. Sounds like it is a former job so you made the right decision getting out of there.
How pathetic is the state of business that it wastes so much time we have to do that?
Yup, I hate that Microsoft chat programs no longer give you the option of showing available whenever signed in. Has to force it’s own system of timeouts and away. So people will start emailing me thinking I’m away when I’m just waiting for a ping. Ended up installing Caffeine and having it press Shift so that the system will recognize that I’m actually alive and available.
There often are portable versions of programs that you don’t have to install.
There’s an old but IMO still very relevant white paper by Microsoft titled “So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users”. It argues that security measures often cost more in employee time (and hence wages) than the potential benefit. It’s an interesting read and I think about it whenever our chief of security cooked up with another asinine security measure.
