New York Times Profiles Back-to-Office Culture at Company That Used Surveillance to Harass Coworkers at the Office

The New York Times has added a new twist on the already-overstuffed genre of stories about why we all must return to working in physical offices: an approving little profile of Verkada, a Bay Area startup that, the last time it had employees working IRL, had some of its workers using the company's own facial recognition technology to harass and surveil female colleagues. The Times used Verkada as an example of, in its words, “why some people were choosing to leave jobs with flexible work arrangements in search of an office where they could cultivate relationships.” The story’s dek touts what it calls “a hidden penalty of flexibility: less supervision.” 

As Motherboard’s Lauren Kaori Gurley and Joseph Cox reported in 2020, a sales director at Verkada used the company’s in-office security cameras to photograph a female colleague, posting those photos in a Slack channel called #RawVerkadawgz, where, as Gurley and Cox wrote at the time, “they made sexually explicit jokes about women who worked at the company.”  Sources also told them that men in the #RawVerkadawgz channel “posted sexually graphic content about multiple female employees in similar Slack messages.” This incident, which ultimately led to three employees being fired from the company and was widely covered at the time, was not mentioned in the New York Times story about the benefits of working in an office.

Employees at the firm told Motherboard at the time that the Slack messages were part of a broader culture of tolerance towards sexism at the company. The employees involved weren’t initially fired or demoted after the Slack channel came to light; a Verkada spokesperson said at the time that all employees involved were “disciplined accordingly.” 

"I think it's 100 percent fair to say I left Verkada because of the culture," one former employee told Motherboard. After publication of Gurley and Cox’s story, Verkada’s co-founder and CEO issued a statement saying three employees involved had been terminated, adding, “[I]t is clear that my handling of this incident fell short of our commitment to maintaining the supportive work environment our employees deserve. I take responsibility for that, I apologize, and I hope this action will demonstrate to all of our employees that Verkada does not, and will never, tolerate this kind of behavior.” 

The 2020 story also detailed how the company threw maskless parties in its office during the early days of COVID, which were captured on the company's surveillance cameras. (In 2021, in a separate bit of bad publicity, the company was hacked; the hackers released the company’s massive client list, and, according to Bloomberg’s reporting at the time, accessed live feeds for Verkada clients, including jails, hospitals, Tesla and Cloudflare.)

All of this goes absolutely unmentioned in the Times piece, which brightly reports that Verkada has begun requiring employees to come in five days a week again, and features exuberant quotes from employees about the change. 

“During her first week at Verkada, back in an office,” one characteristic line reads, “she realized what she had been missing.”