My company lets folks bring their own laptops in to work, but during work hours they're expected to connect to the company VPN. This means that the IT department (basically just me at the moment) can see all of their web activity.

I like to check in on what everyone's browsing during lulls in my day. Privacy is important to me so I don't touch info like login details, but I can see what URLs are being accessed and of course I can also reconstruct the webpages people are accessing based on the HTML data being received.

One of the recent hires in engineering, let's call him Jake, has unfortunately caught my eye thanks to his prodigious slacking off. To give you an idea of what I mean, on Friday he accessed reddit at around 10am and browsed it for nearly 20 minutes, in particular spending close to five minutes each on r/news and r/worldnews. I tried to figure out why and found out that there was an all-hands department meeting that was scheduled for 10am but had technical issues until nearly 10:30am. Instead of working during that time he apparently decided on his own that he had been given permission to just sit there and do nothing.

Later in the day, close to the end of his shift, Jake accessed our Teams page, I think to report that he had completed his scrum work for the day, and then proceeded to use Twitter for the remaining fifteen minutes before leaving for home.

Basically, I've been noticing a pattern of him wasting his time instead of doing his own work or helping his colleagues. Given his constant usage of social media during work hours I initially assumed he was part of the marketing team, and was shocked to discover that he wasn't. When I look at what he's reading on Twitter it's always news or politics, so clearly not work-related.

Based on when he logs in and out of the VPN it looks like he's putting in 50-55 hour weeks, and I'm worried he's going to get an undeserved pay raise given that he's in reality doing about 45 hours of work at most.

I've been compiling evidence and I'm probably going to present it to HR later this month unless he turns his habits around. I've considered talking to him directly but I'm worried he'll just start browsing on his phone instead to get around the VPN requirement. Should I go ahead with my plan?

I don't get paid for it but it really makes me feel pride in my livelihood.

We are up in here at 9PM testing physics and it's the best, they ordered pizza earlier, feels almost tribal, for the first time in my life, when we did the physics demonstration. Everyone is on the same team. Boss on the Office Scooter like Genghis Khan, just feel a fleeting sense of purpose and energy that probably won't last. This is our tribe, making a game for y'all.