Definition:
To sit and watch an automatic or long process, so you are on hand to instantly fix or restart it, should there be an issue.
Explanation:
‘Babysitting’ has been a term that has been around for ages and ages, I remember doing it with backups, back when tape drives would fail randomly for no reason. With the growth of serious remote working, it has taken on a slightly double edged meaning, traditionally, if you were babysitting something that meant that you sat with it, what ever it was, praying for it to not fail and watching it like a hawk to make sure that it completed and if there was any issues you were there to fix them. It was vitally important when you simply couldn’t afford for an unattended process to go wrong.
In modern times, particularly with a lot of the remote working there is a new use of the term babysitting.. and that’s if you’re babysitting a process that shouldn’t really be ‘babysat’, so you can skip work. The most common one now is sitting and watching a job run on your laptop when it should be running on a server, such jobs need 100% of your laptops effort so you can’t do anything else, its this decades version of “its compiling” but smarter, as all the monitoring software that is jammed on remote workers machines show that they’re active users who’s computers are going flat out.
Ultimately when people are doing this kind of thing, its rare that they are actually deliberately slacking off, and more likely they are suffering from “being managed” and are just pushing back to try and give them self some breathing room or deal with an infrastructure issue, so investigate first before having a melt down.
Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.