Kohei Nozaki's general blog

Basically, I oppose such kind of website blocking because it conflicts with my point of view of a software engineer.

I remember a project for an investment bank in my former job. I worked in a building of my customer which blocked many useful websites of technical stuff such as references, blogs or discussion forums, as well as social media networks while software engineers have to surf tons of websites to solve their problem every day.

Also the customer blocked any installation of additional tools for software development while every software engineer has tools that they prefer. it maximizes their productivity but the customer didn’t allow engineers to use them.

Restricting those things means something like forcing us to be a fish out of water. their intention was to prevent information leakage and computer virus infection. I understand that it’s quite important and they should take care of it, but their countermeasure for it was just an overkill. our productivity suffered from those restrictions pretty much and nobody gained a profit from that.

Also, every employer should understand that overly strict security policies may cause an opposite effect. In such a situation, employees may start finding how to cheat those policies. It reminds me about a silly story of a company which has overly strict security rules of usage of computers for work. Eventually, many of their employees started bringing their own personal computer to their workspace for work!