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It sounds like it might be in a death spiral to me...
As part of an internal realignment from supporting dedicated servers and on-premises and in-datacenter customers to cloud consulting
[...]
Last year Apollo took Rackspace public again, in part to pay off the debt it accumulated buying the cloud management company in the first place.
Together these are ominous signs to my mind. It would seem that the cloud is cutting out traditional hosting providers like Rackspace and they are not able to pivot and compete with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft.
Buying into consultancy in a field that is not usually heavy with consultancy and being saddled with the debt for buying your own company are both bad signs for the future.
I'd have thought tha Apollo are looking for someone stupid enough to take the carcass off of their hands. Oh, hang on, that was the IPO wasn't it.
modified 25-Jul-21 1:16am.
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It seems that my view here is in agreement with most of the comments over at ElReg.
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I thought death spiral as well. What customers are going to want to stick around?
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Quote: In its latest full-year financial results, released in February, Rackspace banked a net loss of $245.8m in 2020, versus a $102.3m loss in 2019, from sales of $2.7bn, up 11 per cent year-on-year.
They've been around for a while. If they can't turn a profit at this point, they should just quit the business. How anyone can lose money with sales of almost $3 billion is beyond me. IMO.
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This nonsense has been going on for a long time, courtesy of easy money policies. "We lose money on every sale but plan to make it up on volume." That was over 20 years ago now. 
One can only laugh because there's no point in crying. The number of zombie companies--those that can only service their debt by constantly rolling it over and issuing more of it--is a shocking percentage. It will all end in tears, but no one knows when.
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Sounds like a friend who got acquihired there was lucky to get out when he did. He's a mysql guru; and at his prior company mostly helped customers who were murdering their DB performance with badly designed queries/lack of indexing. Rackspace decided he was too expensive to be client facing and then derped around trying to use him internally on projects that never actually went anywhere. He said it felt like they had no real idea what to do with someone with his skillset/abilities. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
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UK celebrates 25 years of wasteful, 'underperforming' government IT projects • The Register[^]
Seriously? The ROOT cause of under-performing government IT projects is the "lowest bid" contracting system.Here's how it usually goes:
0) Government asks for bids on a new project.
1) Since the project is new, there is no current incumbent entity from which to gauge salaries, so bids come in at a reasonable (?) pay scale for the devs.
2) Two years later (or whatever the re-compete time frame might be), the incumbent re-bids, and competitors undercut the incumbent with their bids, thus winning the contract.
3) The new contractor company now has to find a way to keep the existing devs, usually be negotiating lower salaries, reduced benefits, or both. Of course, this causes a number of the experienced devs to leave (pissed off no doubt), and the new contractor company will fill those empty seats with devs that will take less money (and that means devs with less experience).
4) Every re-compete cycle, repeat steps 2 and 3, until the result is such a severe reduction of expertise on the dev team that there is nobody left that can actually do the work.
5) Fingers are pointed, the project is abandoned, and chalked up to a "lack of experience" on the part of the devs. Because management couldn't possible be the f*ckin problem.
I'm not a bitter old man, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
modified 24-Jul-21 7:13am.
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Only 25 years? Government projects have been underperforming since IT was a thing!
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"No, darling, it's the Washington Post - Honest!"
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Seems more like Washington's Post.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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I saw a video of a KFC somewhere. Some bugger had hacked their self-serve ordering computers.
Same deal - porn..
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I believe there may be a straightforward yes/no answer to this. I just want to find out if my way of thinking (being "hell no") is outdated.
There is a surprisingly low amount of information on this topic, the most relevant thing I could find is 11 years old, and back then the person who asked for a screen recording solution in order to keep track of a hired coder has received a lot of negative response and was advised to give it up, but that was 11 years ago. remote desktop - I have a programming contractor - how do I record their screen remotely? - Server Fault[^]
I've been a remote developer under various arrangements (employee, freelance..) for about 15 years now, and was always able to find work despite refusing to install any sort of screen capture / work hour tracking software. But my last application didn't go well as the employer insisted on screen capture. And while I know why I refused, that got me thinking, does one still has solid chance of acquiring a decently paid contract or a full employment these days without screen track? Is it that employer who is clueless or me? Has the situation changed with the new generations, new reality and all?
Rather than opinions (we all probably still know that capturing a coder's screen is counter productive (I think?)) I'd like some information from those with insight in this area, thanks.
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"Hell no" would be very polite compared to what I'd tell them.
Their outlook is cretinous. You should be paid for what you produce, not for how many hours it takes. This assumes, of course, that the requirements don't change. The acceptance testing also needs to be fairly clear from the outset. After that, they leave you alone except for status reports and whatever ongoing discussions are required.
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Greg Utas wrote: You should be paid for what you produce, not for how many hours it takes.
I'm working as a contractor right now and I would never knowingly agree to screen capture.
However, you *are* being paid for how many hours it takes, if you're being paid by the hour. The only time it works that you are paid by what you produce is if you are being paid a lump sum for the project.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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I would never agree to that, and if someone wanted that of me it would be a huge red flag.
If you can't trust me, don't hire me. It's that simple. I'll find someone who can.
And if you don't trust *anyone* you have no business supervising people, and I want no part of that circus you're running.
That's my $0.02 as politely as I can bring myself to put it.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I have been on both sides of the fence as a contractor and one who employs them and I have never used anything resembling that. As far as I am concerned, if you can't trust your contractor enough to be productive then you hired the wrong person.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Rick York wrote: if you can't trust your contractor enough to be productive then you hired the wrong person.
Or you are the one having a problem
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Why trust an employer who doesn't trust you?
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I have occasionally done contracting work outside my normal employment.
I would never accept any kind of work monitoring or screen recording software from a client. That tells me they're going to be a bastard about paying me, regardless of the quality or timeliness of the work I do.
Software Zen: delete this;
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If they want visual entertainment in addition to engineering work, charge an extra fee, per hour, paid in advance, for each hour they want that entertainment 
Jokes aside, I think other people hit the nail on the head. It indicates a lack of trust, probably obsessive micromanagement, and potentially future payment disputes (you aren't doing it like I think you should, despite me not knowing anything about software engineering).
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I very much agree with what everyone wrote and am glad to see that all is well at the moment. I guess I should have mentioned in the original question that I ponder about the near future as well.
During the googling that I mentioned, where queries were variations of "should remote coder accept screen recording", I managed to find only one hit with some sort of discussion about this practice applied on coders, multiple pages of remaining hits were exclusively advertisements for existing screen tracking solutions and articles about how to most efficiently track screens of your employees and contractors, only that one hit was about moral issues and anti productivity of this idea.
Looking back, when the business world adopts some unpopular and impractical method to the point that it becomes a norm (in most environments), you are not able to oppose by relying on statements such as "you must trust me", "I will never agree to this", "you are asking me to do it for your own amusement", "you are only looking for ways to pay me less", and "you are a control freak" or "you have mental problems". Not even the "I get less work done that way" would help to talk them into allowing you to breach the company's own policy. And the next thing you know, your only comfort is the assumption that your employer doesn't actually spend hours staring intensely into your screen. They don't really want to monitor you anyway, that screen recorder is just a necessary part of this hot new tool for developers that intends to really bring people closer together. At least the tool is a massive help when you code, can't live with it, can't live without it. And why would you worry if you have nothing to hide, right? So if such a hypothetical near future is possible, I guess we should be looking for the most solid arguments to prevent it from taking off.
Not to appear a hater, I do think that screen sharing could work well in a very limited number of cases, for example when a tiny team of equally dedicated developers wishes to create an atmosphere of everyone sitting in the same room, where they would be able to see each other's screens anyway and reap productivity benefits from that.
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Kr4ft3r wrote: for example when a tiny team of equally dedicated developers wishes to create an atmosphere of everyone sitting in the same room, where they would be able to see each other's screens anyway and reap productivity benefits from that.
That's the stupidest thing I've read in a long time.
I turned down a 6-figure job back in the 80's because all of the devs were in a big auditoruium sized room with 8 devs sitting around big round tables. The noise was deafening. I don't know any devs that would enjoy or feel like the would benefit from such an environment.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Because you have read it in the stupidest way that you could imagine. But I guess I wasn't clear enough, that tiny team would be 2-4 developers who are equally dedicated to a single project and therefore wouldn't mind sharing a room/screens and would even have benefits from that since everyone would be busy with their own work and only look at screens of others when they need to. Not the chicken coop that you described.
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