Working from home? Your boss may want to spy on you more than you would wish.
Welcome to the wonderful age of remote working. A translation agency I used to work for decided to time track the time actually spent translating. The official reason was to see if the technology was effective, the actual reason was to see if the translator was making "too much" in relation to the time spent on the job. We were asked to work on an online platform that had a timer counting the time where it registered a mouse pointer movement or typing in the window. Whenever we left the working windows, for example to run a terminology research or to check Facebook (where there are also professional groups and it is a quick way to check one own's terminology doubts with colleagues), the timer would stop.
Whenever I saw advertising of freelancer-nomads making a thousands from their hammock in Thailand, I realized even more that maybe it's not much about landing the dream job but about selling the idea of landing one. I had a colleague whose language pair was not very on demand. She was very focused on making a career. I told her that maybe the money is not in translating but in selling the idea that it was a profitable profession. She has become a translator mentor, trainer, and coach and earn much more money by being a coach/trainer than actually translating.
