Easy question for any corporation is should it black list any sites or not. Of course! Employee should work all the time to produce as much %your_stuff% as possible.
But wait, do you realy think so? Do you realy think that GitHub could break productivity of your developers? I’m not sure at all.
Ok. Perhaps one of the developers will login to his lovely GitHub/BitBucket and download some strange project. Will it break his productivity? Sure no.
There are some reasons to have no black listed web sites.
I know developers, most of them are quite lazy but they are lazy in some specific way. They keep working even at home. “To work” here means “to develop”. Of course if your aim is to keep this developer on the same position for his whole life then it’s your way. But if you’re big business with customers, big market and many competitors then you should innovate somehow. I know how it works: day by day codebase grows. Grows tremendous. No way to stop this. And this is fine: new features, old bugs. And your product became more and more complex and slow (don’t argue with me). And one day processing of one message (domain agnostic) takes a little bit less then SLA allows you to do. Next fixed JIRA will break everything. What to do? Create new project or fix this one. If your programmers are not complete idiots (I hope so) then current software could be made better but not much. The only way is to change architecture or the way of processing your data, etc.
Well, congratulations. You’re in the trap. YOUR emploeyes know YOUR architecture and YOUR aproach. They know it well but it will not help you.
Developers’ expertise will grow only in the open environment with full access to any information they want/need. Any external resource will help them be better.
You will say: “Ok. Assume you’re right. I’ll open access to developers’ specific portals, but YouTube! Who needs YouTube?”
A: “Everyone”.
YouTube contains not only videos with kittens. Now it’s big source of good videos for any theme. Besides everyone have to relax from time to time.
Yeah, I’m the developer so probably there is some bias in my words. But sometimes I’m waiting for some ticket to be done or while the software builds, or tests are running, etc. And at this time I wish to find the guy who restricted GitHub and kick his desktop and tell him that no one will put his code to gist. We don’t want to violate any policies or spy or sell his secrets. We want to work and grow.
That’s all folks.