Coalition Technologies purports to hire the ‘best people in the world’ who are vetted through skills tests and trained with university-level courses, yet in the same breath they will praise their monitoring software, Time Doctor, as the backbone of their remote work model - implying that without constant surveillance, their supposedly elite team couldn’t be trusted to do their jobs.
Listen to the negative reviews on Time Doctor. This is an intrusive monitoring software that you have to install on your personal device (the company does not provide hardware). It takes webcam photos of your face every 7-10 minutes, among other things. Those photos are then reviewed by their ‘operations team’ that will flag the photos if they see someone looking away from their screen, out of their chair, if they don’t see their whole face in the camera, if they have someone standing behind them, or whatever they subjectively feel like you shouldn’t be doing. If I were in an office staring out of the window for a moment, no one would penalize me - but under this system, the same action could be flagged, and I’d be questioned.
The company claims that Time Doctor is the same as you being in the office and your boss coming to look over your shoulder and pester you about what you’re doing. That is also a toxic environment that I would not want to be a part of. Regardless, I have to disagree with their comparison - it’s more like your boss coming in every 3 minutes to look at your screens, and then coming back in every 7 minutes to take a photo of you while you’re working, then leaving. It’s the excessive nature of the monitoring that throws me and many other people off.
They also claim that Time Doctor is used to build trust with clients - yet in my year and a half of experience, no client has ever mentioned it. I’m not even sure if they’re aware that it involves taking webcam photos. That raises an important question: if a client requested photo proof of us working, would the company willingly provide images of employees in their private environments, taken on their personal computers? And if not, what purpose do these photos actually serve in this so-called trust-building exercise?
I don’t think I’ll ever know, and frankly, it’s no longer my concern. I’ve spent more than enough time under this system, and there are plenty of remote companies that operate efficiently without resorting to this kind of draconian micromanagement. For the sake of your mental health and sanity, I strongly recommend looking elsewhere.
