Comments on: Are you bypassing your company’s IT policies?

By: Curtis

Curtis — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 19:32:06 +0000

My manager and i both stream radio over internet and network. We also have a mini that is streaming jazz on the showroom floor. our internet policy is so lax that we can surf porn, play on craigslist, or even play online poker if we want to. I am IT at my job as well as bookkeeper. needless to say I have my hands full without having to answer the bellow of "internets not working".

By: Pinball

Pinball — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 19:05:37 +0000

Where I work we have IT policies that actually hinder our workflow. For example downloads above 60 megabytes – banned. Working for consulting engineers, sets of drawings from other consultants can often exceed that limit, forcing us to download each individual drawing, rather than download one zip file. Quiet time consuming especially when there can be over 150 drawing to download. Similarly USB sticks are banned. In the pass it has affected the workflow. Once a client asked if I have a flash drive on me, I was like "yes", he was like "great, I'll put all this data you need on it, it's a few gig", and I had to be like, "our policies prevent us from plugging these in at our work", which meant he had to find someone with a DVD burner, burn a DVD, give me the DVD, and then I had to take the DVD back to work, find someone with a DVD drive and then get them to save the data onto the file server.

By: Avalonink

Avalonink — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 18:48:39 +0000

I used to work in emails all day, and I agree that if your work gets done on time and properly, what's the problem with doing a little surfing or chatting on the side? If there's enough bandwidth for everyone to do their work and you're not hogging it all by streaming pirated Twilight movies, you're golden. :D FB is actually designed so you can go do something else (like work, who knew!?) while the games do their boring-ash waiting crap.

By: conedude13

conedude13 — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:56:11 +0000

IT policies have not changed as the times have. Anything new and interesting that pops seems to get blocked as soon as it starts getting a lot of hits through the corporate proxy at my work.

I was able to hang out on myspace for a bit, but then jumped to facebook when myspace got blocked. Facebook, however, soon followed on the blocked list.

with more and more co-workers on facebook and twitter and the like, blocked lists should flex a bit and unblock the sites you are trying to communicate with your friends/co-workers/family/relatives and continue to block the NSFW/malicious sites that the first are linking to.

By: jr.ewing.78

jr.ewing.78 — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 13:22:30 +0000

At my last job (I am self-employed now), my employer blocked all social networking sites. Didn't bother me because I didn't use those servces, aside from Linkedin, which wasn't blocked.

But they also had an utterly STOOOPID policy of blocking all WEBMAIL access, too – Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, all of them – on the grounds that they were worried about "viruses." What was the result? People just used their corporate exchange-based email for personal stuff and all kinds of inappropriate and damaging stuff just came flooding in that way instead. The IT support guys all agreed with me that webmail accounts weren't any more damaging than viewing any other type of web content, but the corporate types had decided that web based email was bad and that was the end of the debate.

Towards the end I figured out how to access Gmail through a backdoor Google URL that wasn't blocked (and technically still not in violation of the internet policy), but I think that policy was totally misguided.

The IT policies were just the tip of the Iceberg. That was a bad place to work and is still a basketcase of a company. I'm glad I had the guys to finally walk away.

By: Nicole B

Nicole B — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 09:31:50 +0000

I'm a graphic designer at an ad agency, so there are no blocks here (we have to research a wide variety of topics for projects) but it is frowned upon to spend too much time doing non-work stuff. The way I see it, as long as you're getting your work done properly and on time, who cares? I think its important to know what's going on in the world and be up to date on the latest information, especially in my industry.

By: Bryan Price

Bryan Price — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 06:45:31 +0000

I AM the entire IT department! Ha!

Well.

I'm a baby boomer and I'm the stay at home dad, so of course I read GAS at work. I cook and eat at work. I also sleep at work.

I EVEN HAVE SEX AT WORK!

Talk about your benies!

The pay sucks. I do some offsite consultation though.

It's sad(? good?) that my home network is larger than most of the clients I do have. Three desktops and three to five laptops at any one time. That doesn't include the case that I'm thinking about turning into a Home Server/NAS. Probably Home Server as I only have one Mac laptop to support, the rest are some version of Windows.

By: robin

robin — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:02:35 +0000

I read this @ work. No websites at all are blocked here. Most of the staff thinks we monitor what they watch and we keep that myth up by telling them they have a survey with IT at the end of the year if they watch too much pr0n at work. It's funny how easily people are scared :)

Anyway, no blocks at all. Maybe not a very good idea, but everybody is working hard, so doing a bit of socializing during their breaks is ok I think.

By: Bones

Bones — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:52:19 +0000

As an It manager, i do spend some of my time during the day, to surf, read my rss feeds, and sometimes go on facebook. I do restrict people as my administration tell me to, but in the other case, and like brian, i block site, only when there are abuses (as i try to not abuse myself).

By: Colin

Colin — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:39:16 +0000

I'm a welder, I work when I'm at my job.

By: Ms Constantine

Ms Constantine — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:41:54 +0000

I have a lot of downtime in my job so spend a good portion of the day browsing the web, reading blogs in Google Reader, sometimes I'll catch up on an episode of Shortland Street even though we're not meant to stream anything. Everyone does it, and I'm friends with the IT manager so he knows I do it too.

The lax internet policy is pretty much the only reason I'm still working there.

The only site that some to mind (apart from the obvious porn etc) that is blocked is Trade Me. NZs version of Ebay.

I would be reading this at work if today wasn't a public holiday.

By: -=Ben=-

-=Ben=- — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 17:15:05 +0000

I see Facebook as an ENTIRE waste of resources. It should be blocked at schools, work, and even at home. It wastes your time and is a terrible service.