So you did not notice that they didn’t actual do anything…? But were happy that their mouse was moving around…?
This is what I fail to get. You give people things to work on. Why do you want to spy on them instead of just looking at the results? Even if someone spends half the time watching YouTube, if all the work is done… who cares?
The lesson is to work really, really slow
This is actually exactly the lesson. If the issue in this case was the mouse jiggler, then just working slow would be perfectly fine?! Are they all stupid?
The problem is that companies have unrealistic expectation of how you spend your day. Everybody knows that most “white collar” jobs don’t actually have you working 8hrs every day with the only time you stop working being bathroom breaks and lunch. People take all kinds of informal breaks and get distracted throughout the day. So there is this weird thing where everybody knows that, but companies have to pretend like they don’t, which leads to asinine decisions like keyboard and mouse trackers to determine if people are actually working. Which then leads to people looking for solutions that earn them their little informal breaks back, which everybody takes and are perfectly fine. But again, we sort of pretend water cooler time doesn’t occur.
It’s some sort of perverse arms race built around a shared lie we all pretend we don’t know about.
It’s some sort of perverse arms race built around a shared lie we all pretend we don’t know about.
There’s a lot of that when it comes to work in general. It’s like it’s taboo to point out that the only reason people show up to their jobs is because they get paid for it.
Right?
“Nobody wants to work anymore!”
Like no shit man.
News Flash: nobody has wanted to work ever. They work because the compensation lets them live the lives they want outside of work. If nobody wants to work for you, it’s because you either aren’t willing to compensate them enough to do that, or your job makes them so miserable that it’s not worth it for them to trade away that much happiness for the compensation.
Or both. In lots of cases it’s both.
There are jobs I want to work, they just don’t pay a living wage.
But let’s say you could also make that living wage just by existing. In a world where you wake up each day and a day’s worth of your living wage was automatically deposited into your account whether you worked a job you liked or even if you went out for a walk in the park…would you still choose to work every day?
I want to work, but the way I like to work.
If an employer only has a say in what I deliver, fuck yeah I want to work!
This
The only reason why any employer would be like “this is the way you work” would be in a team context, and even then, it should be a discussion, an adjustment, for practical reasons. never an arbitrary law
But you’re working in that scenario because you’re being paid.
If you had that job where your employer only had a say in what you deliver (ignoring the obvious pitfalls of that arrangement), and they suddenly stopped paying you, or started only paying you half…would you still be okay with it?
If not, then you’re working because you like being paid, not because you want to work.
On the flip side: if you had some sort of situation where you got paid a comfortable living that allowed you to cover all your expenses, indulge some luxury, and save…and you got this money no matter what, just for waking up…would you still work every day? Or work until your employer was satisfied with your output each day/week/pay period?
Some might…most specifically (I would think) people whose jobs provide some sort of personal fulfillment like teachers, caregivers, etc. but I think the vast majority of people would take the money and live lives that offered personal enjoyment and fulfillment, doing what they wanted to do, not what an employer (who at that point isn’t their source of pay) would like them to do.
I would like to point out its not even we. Its upper management and ‘the stockholders’. Everyone from the peon to lower management knows that people don’t work continuously for their shift. I doubt anyone can work continuously for that long and not go crazy.
But the reward from mid and management and above for completing your work is more work. Which is great for them since you completing more work means they get bonuses.
I’m gonna reduce that. Shareholders don’t give a shit about working hours. They just care about revenue and expenses.
This is purely a management issue. Upper management might insist on these metrics as a way to crack down on productivity. In my personal experience as a dev, middle management doesn’t give about metrics unless someone (upper management) forces them to. Because at the end of the day, its just a pain in the ass hounding subordinates about trivial shit if theyre actually performing where it matters. So anecdotally, I will say this seems to exclusively come from upper management. But I’m sure people have different experiences.
The problem is that upper management is usually so divorced from the real day to day problems that the easy win they can take to their superiors is stupid shit like apm metrics.
You are being far too generous to many of your colleagues. I assure you there are plenty of “peons” and lower/middle management playing teachers pet who enable this crap. I’m not saying you are strictly exception, but you are definitely not representative of a significant portion of leadership.
This problem becomes even more asinine when you consider that the whole point of the Return to Office drive is the “Magic Hallway Conversation” that happens during those informal break time periods.
Also unless you can hyperfocus and literally exhaust yourself in those 8h, you can’t do any type of white collar job for 8h a day. It’s impossible to be mentally productive for that amount of time day in day out. Forget doing anything creative.
Yeah, this is why it’s time we have an honest conversation to seriously consider a 24 hour work week.
Productivity has gone up consistently since the 70s while wages have stagnated. It’s going up at an even faster rate now with AI assistant tooling. Workers deserve to enjoy some of the rewards from that increased output, and I can’t think of a better way than letting them enjoy life more outside of work.
If you work in an office job you will find that it’s all a scam. You must work very slow. Otherwise, you get rewarded with MORE WORK.
The beauty of it all is that you can be the most productive person at the company and save the company wads of cash, but show up 15 min late for work a few times and you’re fired.
I was written up due to having tasteful stripes on my otherwise business casual shoes. Two stripes. I’m a non client facing computer monkey. Everything in the office is a weird game of house that everyone has just forgotten that they’re playing.
It’s a juggle between having too much work and being bored for 7 hours.
I dont think wanting to use your free time effectively is stupid.
How is that what I said? The stupid is about wanting such absurd things instead of actual productivity.
To quote Homer Simpson:
Lisa! If you don’t like your job, you don’t strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.
Finally. My low sensitivity for gaming is about to pay off.
“Did you see that email?”
“My cursor is on its way to check”
There fact that I have been told seriously, more than 0 times, to work more slowly in my life is insane to me.
It’s a rachet effect. If you do things quickly, often enough, it’ll just be expected. You won’t be rewarded for it.
And you better be able to keep up that pace constantly for the next ten years.
You can certainly deliver things early, just try to stay at a sustainable pace.
I know people who use the mouse jiggler. They get all their work done and are good employees.
I’m a manager at a large company and have employees who work mostly from home. I don’t bother checking if their picture has a green or yellow mark next to their name. If they respond to my emails quickly and get their overall work done, I’m happy.
Their productivity is naturally increased because they aren’t force to re-authenticate on their laptops because they were inactive for 5 minute while reading a report or going to the bathroom. Or worse, if they have multiple laptops because of security or compliance reasons, and one will inevitably be inactive forcing yet another sign in.
This is the real reason I have one of those damn mouse jigglers. The timeouts on our laptop are CRAZY short, like 5 minutes tops. Just stepping away for some coffee or to take a shit then I have to re-authenticate. Heaven forbid I make myself a toasted bagel or something!
It’s even worse as I work 95% inside multiple virtual machines in the cloud that also timeout (and in some cases shut down) so there are multiple layers of password +2fa just to get back to whatever I was doing.
So yeah, $10 USB device from Amazon allows me to not spend a hour a day just having to re-auth.
BAGELS ARE FORBIDDEN, WORK SLAVE!!! /s
I added 10% to my estimate for login and authentication issues. The manager was not amused.
My previous work started cracking down on having us write down what we were up to in the day to the minute. I was doing 5m blocks, got in trouble. I switched to the by the minute bullshit and also logged the time spent logging my time and they were not amused either but couldn’t really do anything about it. That whole job was as much time convincing them I was working as time spent actually working, which meant I ended up not working very much because I felt strangled all the time and I had built a bunch of effective ways to lie to them about my day
You had to log your time to the minute? I would quit instantly if my job got down to 5m increments, fuck that shit. Sounds like it is a former job so you made the right decision getting out of there.
Yeah it was bad. I really needed that job since I was saving to move to Seattle and most the other jobs paid in rejected potatoes. I was there for a few months after the track by minute stuff happened so not great but I did get out of there
How pathetic is the state of business that it wastes so much time we have to do that?
Pharmaceutical sector. They can be very paranoid.
Yup, I hate that Microsoft chat programs no longer give you the option of showing available whenever signed in. Has to force it’s own system of timeouts and away. So people will start emailing me thinking I’m away when I’m just waiting for a ping. Ended up installing Caffeine and having it press Shift so that the system will recognize that I’m actually alive and available.
You didn’t need admin privileges to install that?
It was a long time ago, but I’m pretty sure I just put it in the windows Startup folder. It’s not installed as a service or anything.
There often are portable versions of programs that you don’t have to install.
I just tried. IT is one step ahead, the site is blocked 😂
There’s an old but IMO still very relevant white paper by Microsoft titled “So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users”. It argues that security measures often cost more in employee time (and hence wages) than the potential benefit. It’s an interesting read and I think about it whenever our chief of security cooked up with another asinine security measure.
I have Teams installed on my phone (in a special work partition). A mouse jiggler let’s me move around the house, go on walks, change the laundry all while being able to immediately respond to anyone reaching out.
Management is pretty bad about actually doing their jobs to keep a steady stream of work coming my way. They’re too disorganized to actually plan effectively so there’s always one team under crunch while everyone else is waiting around for them to finish.
If I ever actually tell them I don’t have enough work to do, they’ll happily fill my time with extremely obvious bullshit busywork (like, why don’t you take yet another HR diversity survey?) So I just don’t say anything and let the work trickle in and everyone seems really happy with this setup (3 straight years of very positive reviews). A mouse jiggler letting me be ‘on call’ during the slow months has been huge for my sanity.
Not all work can be parallelised.
Ah, a lower end manager I see. The higher ups wouldn’t be smart enough to get that.
That’s what salaried positions are supposed to be like. You’re getting paid for the job, not the hours.
You’d like to think that, but the last several years have proven beyond a doubt that they’re much more concerned that we’re sitting at our desks during set hours than any actual outcomes.
The more the old lies are proven as lies, the closer we get to the truth:
Just as important as “getting the job done” is the notion among many employers that they truly believe that with their payroll they are buying human lives and happiness. That if they are paying a worker for their time and labor that they are entitled to also dictate how that person feels about it…and if that worker is not sufficiently miserable, then they can be squeezed further.
I used to think that it was purely about money…that the idea was that if a worker ever got “all caught up” and had free time, then they should be generating more wealth for their employer in some other way…but then we had the pandemic.
The pandemic where lots and lots of workers had to suddenly do the whole work from home thing. And in that time, these employers were thrilled to go along with it, since it meant continuing to make money. And in that time, most office workers eventually turned out to be happier and even more productive.
…yet in the wake of the pandemic, many of these employers have chosen less productivity in exchange for bringing their employees back to offices. The only explanation for bringing employees back in who were happier and more productive from home is that these employers value the image of control and the ability to make their workers unhappy more than they value productivity and money.
The alternative explanation is that the employers have investments in corporate real estate and don’t want their investments to lose value. Personally, I think that the the people at the top probably have investments in corporate real estate, while middle managers are the way you describe.
I don’t think the people at the top usually care what the employees are doing so long as they’re making money, and being in the office means they’re keeping corporate real estate prices afloat. As such, being in office makes money for the executives, even if that money isn’t made directly through the company.
Middle managers on the other hand, likely don’t have any significant corporate real estate investments, nor are they as likely get significant bonuses for company productivity. As such, it makes more sense for their motive to be more about control than it is money.
That said, I do know some executives do indeed see employees the way you’ve described them; an infamous example comes to mind about the Australian real estate executive talking about how they needed to bring workers to heel and crash the economy to remind workers that they work for the company and not the other way around. I’m just not sure that many executives actually think about their workers in that much depth. I think if they did then we’d see a stark contrast of very ethical companies and highly abusive companies instead of the mix of workplace cultures we have now; because some ceos would come to the conclusion that a happy worker is a good worker, while others would become complete control freaks.
think about their workers in that much depth
They absolutely don’t. It’s a combination of apathy, an aversion to recognising a workers specific value, and the utility of letting them spin their wheels while you ignore them, so they don’t have the cognitive capacity to do something bad for you like find a different work environment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does
Seeing the world through this lens has been both freeing and disheartening…
No, that’s not how employment works in this country. Employers pay people for the right to tell them what to do. You, as an employee, have sold your time to someone else. You are literally paid for the hours. Your employer is paid for the job. You are paid to do the things your employer tells you to do, which usually is part of the job they were paid to do.
Ofc all of this is subject to a whole mess of laws, regulations, policies, and whatever other horseshit HR decides to try. The important lesson is that you as an employee should NEVER put in work beyond the time you are paid to work.
That’s why I used the qualifier “supposed to be”
Because it’s not about getting work done, it’s about having power over your employees.
Found the answer.
Slaves is what they want and we fail to provide it to them.
Even if someone spends half the time watching YouTube, if all the work is done… who cares?
They care because it means you could be doing even more work in the time allotted.
It’s the “if you have time to lean you have time to clean” of the white collar world, why would they be paying the peasants if the toil isn’t visible
Another way of putting it is that it’s the “I paid for X, I want to use all of the X” of the upper management world.
These people are salaried. They don’t owe companies hours.
No, they don’t actually owe them shit. But the employer thinks they do.
“I paid for this traffic light, therefore I want to use all three bulbs at once”
capital sucks up all the surplus value of your labor. you don’t get to keep it.
They don’t have a real job…
According to the disclosures, the terminated employees worked in Wells Fargo’s wealth- and investment-management unit.
Time and time again, these funds don’t really beat the average of an index fund.
But the Uber wealthy dont like being lumped together with regular people. So they pay commissions to get the same performance, resulting in less profits than an ind x when it’s all said and done.
But the company points to the small parts that do over perform, and downplays the bad parts.
Turn 1 million into 5 million, and it’s easy to forget there was another 10 million that’s worth 6 million now.
Sure you up a million, but you’re focused on that 5x gain and not the 4 million loss. So before commissions it’s a draw.
In real life there’s interest, inflation, and lots of other stuff that muddies the waters.
It’s like their version of horse racing, they bet on a bunch and hope one hits it big and pays off the losses on the others. It’s the same as gambling and just as addictive.
So if these employees were answering their phone when a big client calls and letting stuff sit, their performance was probably fine.
Because it’s not a real job.
I’ve been the one identifying the people who use jigglers. Usually it was a manager coming to us to look for a reason to fire a poor employee or a contractor trying to bill a suspiciously large number of hours for the work produced. If it was just poor performance, HR would make us do a PIP and waste 3 months on them. Violating security procedures and falsifying time sheets was an immediate termination. And for the contractors, you need evidence in order to refuse payment.
Btw, if you want to get away with it, don’t use a software or USB one. Get one that interfaces with a regular mouse. Modern cybersecurity software logs every process executed and device connected.
But the USB one is going to be identified as a mouse (input device), you can even change the hardware id to be the same as the work mouse no?
USB devices have a hard coded vendor identifier and product identifier built into them that are issued from a central authority. The ones I saw were easily identifiable as not legitimate mice.
I know but you can change it, I think, at least in the bad usb devices that we use for red team
“because they might finish their work in 2 hours, which means they’re stealing 6 hours of pay from us!” - Idiots who spent dollars obsessing over pennies.
I mean, if you can do it in 2 hours I think it’s pretty fair to want you to do something else, but if it’s whole day thing and you finish an hour early you’re probably not going to be effective in that last hour anyway.
That’s not the best time to start something completely new
This just punishes the people that are better or at least more efficient than their peers.
What they want and what they pay me for are never the same.
One thing to keep in mind: with “knowledge work”, the work is never done - there’s always more to do.
So for middle management it’s really hard to measure productivity, so we get this nonsense.
This is also why Agile project management is so popular - it provides a daily metric of what’s going on, what people are doing. It forces a granularity of communication (which for those of us with lots to do, gets pretty fucking annoying).
Exactly. I kind of don’t give a shit about how my employees manage their time. If they get the thing done when we both agreed it should reasonably be done by, and they’re reasonably available to support their coworkers during business hours, then they can play video games for half the day for all I care.
You measure the results, not the clicks.
That means you have to do actual management. Talk to people. Keep on top of workloads. Rebalance things. Build relationships. They don’t have time for that - they have their own tasks to do. So they rely on the green checkmark to mean that lil Davey is being a good busy bee.
I don’t know why things got to be this way.But then you can’t fire them and not have to call it a re org.
A Wells Fargo spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company “holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior.”
I mean the jokes write themselves
The only two things higher than that are the fees they extract from overdraft and the money they pay their legal team.
The shareholders will be furious.
Poor Wells Fargo. Maybe they should sign a bunch of customers up to loans they didn’t ask for about it to feel better.
After that fiasco I can’t believe anyone still uses Wells Fargo.
After that crime spree I can’t believe Wells Fargo is still allowed to exist.
I’ve never used Wells Fargo, but I never heard about this fiasco you guys are talking about.
Banks like to think that branch employees (bank tellers) are sales people. Most of them give ‘goals’ to each employee requiring them to open a certain number of new accounts, land a certain number of loans, etc each week/month. It isn’t ethical since the only people you can really sell on those services are the ones who should least get them. Anyone who actually wants/needs the services will come to you.
Wells Fargo differed from the rest of the industry by setting completely impossible goals, not just unethical ones. This led to them developing a culture where signing people up for services they didn’t agree to became commonplace.
It isn’t ethical since the only people you can really sell on those services are the ones who should least get them.
Yes, all sales is essentially unethical unless all you do is provide info when asked.
You don’t have a choice where your loan ends up plus there are all the corporate contracts that aren’t going to change. They were stealing money from the elderly not businesses.
I have a company I deal with at work where the owner of that one cussed out and hung up the phone on the CEO of where I work. We still do business with them because it’s way too much money to walk away from.
Funnily enough an accounting teacher I had used Wells Fargo
There’s a hallmark/lifetime movie about this. The bank isn’t WF but we all know who it is.
After his corporate rah-rah and disbelief his bank full of good ethical people would do such a thing, at the behest of the main character he finds out from some marketing chuds it is in fact true. Believing in the company to do the right thing he goes against the main character’s wishes and tells an exec who expectedly closes the accts of the vocal customers and sweeps it all under the rug - deleting all record.
The love interest finds out his company doesn’t actually care about their customers when he asks if they are going to do a full company investigation and the exec laughs and instead offers up a potential promotion instead.
I knew the whole plotline was bullshit when he quit to become a whistleblower. As he gave his first interview on the main character’s tv station, he gave his full name as he did a live interview and didn’t get murdered by the bank immediately.
Thanks to Boeing we all learned that whistleblower is a far more dangerous profession than police officer and the chance of dying is thousands of percent higher. You really have to suspend disbelief at the movie plot.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around suffering watching a Lifetime movie in purpose tbh… but yeah, their plots are unintentionally farcical every time.
e: suffering=someone but it still works so I’ll leave it
Lifetime movies are awesome because you can put them on in the background and they’re not at all distracting from the main task you’re working on.
I’m trying to suspend my disbelief at you watching a hallmark movie and remembering it well enough to give a synopsis.
Turns out the employees didn’t actually do that. It was the mouse jigglers and clickers conspiring together.
Friendly reminder that Wells Fargo is a criminal enterprise masquerading as a bank.
That applies to all investment banks no? Or is Wells Fargo a special kind criminal?
No you’re right. It’s like Mitch Hedberg used to say about drinking though… Still does, but he used to too.
They are, but Wells Fargo too.
Wells Fargo specifically committed widespread, systemic fraud and identity theft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scandal?wprov=sfla1
They’re the same picture.
A Wells Fargo spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company “holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior.”
Says an unethical piece of shit corporation that secretly opened millions of unauthorized accounts of their customers to collect bogus fees, appease their shareholders and financial status.
Were the executives fired? No. Were they jailed for financial fraud? No.
“Highest standards” my ass. My job provides service to Wells Fargo; their fraud claims department is full of the rudest, most condescending people I’ve had the displeasure to work with.
Says an unethical piece of shit corporation that secretly opened millions of unauthorized accounts of their customers to collect bogus fees, appease their shareholders and financial status.
It’s unethical for the workers to pretend to open those accounts by using software to trick their administrators into looking busy.
But they did use their mouse for valid company business, so it is all OK.
I’m not disagreeing with you, but your last sentence isn’t correct.
Last year, the former head of the bank’s retail operation was sentenced to three years of probation, while the bank’s former CEO was banned from the industry.
Sorry to come with “um, ackshuslly” but they didn’t ask if they were convicted of a crime. The question was "were they jailed? And according to your post, they were not.
True. I was referring more to the first part about being fired. After rereading it, the two weren’t “fired”. Although 3 years of probation isn’t nothing, it’s a far cry from what many feel should have been done. The CEO was banned from the industry, which is something.
I’d really be curious to know if the punishment of the CEO & “head of retail operations” provided relief to the people affected by their crime AND was substantial enough to change their behavior.I feel that those items are what the sentencing should be about.
I think technically op may be correct, as being banned from an industry is different from the business firing them. And probation isn’t jail time
My ex-MIL worked for Wells Fargo and opened an account for me to help meet her quota. Then I started getting overdraft fees because there was no money in the account to pay the monthly fees for the account I didn’t want or use. I had her close it. So yeah the whole company was kinda duplicitous.
If they’re yet another stereotypical thieving baron then doesn’t that make it actually ethical to do fucking any kind of damage or do you gotta be heath ledger to actually be the good guy there?
If they’re firing people for this then the way they judge employee productivity is incorrect. What I want to know is what did these employees even do day to day? Sounds like a whole bunch of bullshit job positions to me. Wells Fargo is a shit leech corporation, drain on society, middle-man hell.
It works like this. You work your ass off. Then when you’ve earned money, give it to them. Still with me? If you give them your money, they’ll figure out a way to give your money to someone else to make money off of them. You’ll get a small meaningless cut from the deal. They earn that money and pay shit to their employees who are wiggling mice around.
Know what the people I play world of warcraft with do, I’d say they’re busy playing world of warcraft
i work with a guy who used to play that at work until one day the big boss caught him
Did the boss drop any good loot?
Yeah, a legendary bow. A bow that had magical ammo, so you didn’t have to by any arrows. The hunters thought they were going to have to roll for it, but the GM just gave it to the Rogue for the extra stats. Whole guild ended up breaking up.
Ah yes. Work that tracks you, not by your output, but by whether your mouse jiggles a statistically correct amount. Nice.
70 year old management member who came up with the idea of using this metric in the first place:
-
“The system shows you haven’t touched your mouse for half an hour.”
-
“Yes, I worked out a solution on paper, like back in the old days.”
[confused noises]
-
The jigglers keep you online status from changing to “away.”
Some jobs require you to be at your desk, and using mouse jigglers to fake being at work is the kind of thing that keeps more companies from allowing WFH.
Sure. Yes. I’m aware.
The point is, if an employee isn’t productive, the company should notice, because they should be running some kind of oversight over the work either being done or not being done.
If the work is being done, even if the employee isn’t always 100% focused, the company shouldn’t care.
If the work is not being done, the company should care, regardless of how active the mouse moves.
using mouse jigglers to fake being at work is the kind of thing that keeps more companies from allowing WFH.
No, companies don’t allow WFH because they don’t trust employees or can’t verify, employees doing their work from home. Most of the time, because the company people don’t understand that work and couldn’t judge if it’s being done correctly without adults in the room.
tldr: people should be hired and fired based on their performance. Crazy talk, I know.
It’s crazy how quickly
peopleBoomers, managers, executives and capitalists flip flop between “Salary is performance based you don’t have set hours” to “You didn’t work every hour from 9-5”. This hypocritical nonsense only drives more people to take on anti-work perspectives.
If the job requires you to be at your desk then presumably that means you have work to complete. Judge people for what they get done, not how often they mindlessly move a mouse and this wouldn’t be a problem!
Some jobs necessarily include idle time when you’re waiting for work to come through even if there’s nothing to do in that specific moment. The flip side of that is that the employer is able to require that the worker be available instantly. If they’re leaving their work area because they’re bored then they’re not “at work.”
My Dad was a career firefighter, and he spent most of his time sitting in the station watching TV, cooking meals, or sleeping. He was paid for every minute of that time because at the drop of a hat he could be called to a wreck, fire, or medical emergency.
The reason he had to be paid is federal law requiring that all workers who are “engaged to wait” are on the clock. If someone is installing mouse-jiggler software so they can leave their workstation and do whatever they want, they’re no longer being engaged to wait.
My Dad was a career firefighter, and he spent most of his time sitting in the station watching TV, cooking meals, or sleeping. He was paid for every minute of that time because at the drop of a hat he could be called to a wreck, fire, or medical emergency.
So if I’m WFH and need to be available I can be watching TV or cooking a meal as long as I’m available at the drop of a hat if something comes in. This can be more usefully measured by how quickly I respond or my work output rather than how much my mouse moves.
Is that really true though? If I crank my volume for notifications and then read a book while waiting for my next call how is that less engaged than like reading an ebook on the same computer?
Frankly - it’s a lot harder to quantify. “Time at desk” is easy to track. Response times to tickets are much more variable and difficult to measure.
Even if you are at your desk and say waiting for a ticket to come in or a call, you’ll be set to away so it doesn’t make sense to moitor by that.
Worked in IT 9 years and never come across a company that monitors this.
I use a mouse jiggler while I’m working because I often spend quite a bit of time just thinking through data structures and code composition and Teams is absolutely sure that I’m away from my desk if it’s more than 5 minutes.
Same here. Also I sometimes think about these kinds of things when I’m off the clock too. I don’t want to but you can’t exactly tell your brain to stop thinking about work stuff at 5pm. Sometimes I’m just watching TV or whatever and a thought about how to solve a work problem pops into my head.
To me it says more about how bad the management is at a company that has to resort to try to detecting mouse jigglers. Do they know so little about what the employees do that they don’t simply notice that work isn’t getting done if an employee isn’t actually working?
Hilariously enough there’s tons of empirical data that shows people are far more productive in socializing environments where micromanaging doesn’t happen, and arbitrary rules aren’t put in place. Give people an actual sense of community, they actually engage in work they have to get done.
Absolutely. If you have an adversarial relationship with your employees and why would you think they’d ever be loyal or go the extra mile?
I really don’t get employers like that…
If you join a private meeting with yourself it will show you busy
That explains my turbulent pubescence.
Just a heads-up, there are activity reports that can be run that will readily show this.
Start a meeting. Then mark yourself as available.
Only downside with teams is that you can’t accept direct teams calls while in a meeting and they can see you are in a meeting. You always get the odd person who dials before asking via chat if you are available so you don’t get the chance to close your meeting first.
You can accept direct calls on teams while in a meeting. It puts your original meeting on hold
Code up an F24 presser in Excels VBA macro editor, and run that between your work hours.
That is a good suggestion. Interesting. I’ll have to try it. Although if you’re in a meeting doesn’t that mark you as busy?
Try reading step 2. 😂
Which one is step 2? Is that the one after step 1?
Nooooooononono…it’s the one before step 3
No no it’s the one just before step 3
I just open notepad and put something on the enter key and lay the laptop lid on it.
That’s an interesting solution. What, may I ask, are you using on the enter key?
I set my pocket knife on mine
Depends if I want to use my phone or not. If I balance it correctly the mouse works, cellphone works perfect as well.
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Is the job to be interacting with a computer for the entire duration of your shift? Fuck this incentive structure that requires people to fake touching their computer parts to show that work is being done.
in my previous job i lost the privilege to work from home because my boss told me i am “tickling my girlfriend and not working”. when in reality my job was so easy i could do all of it in about 2 hours, so i left a magnet holding down space bar to keep the pc from sleeping. of course they had taken screenshots and could tell that pretty much nothing was being done for the whole day. so then i had to drive 40km every day to do the exact same thing in the office.
They let you tickle your girlfriend at the office? That’s pretty progressive!
i doubt they would’ve allowed tickling there either, but thats how we ended up together. she was my colleague.
When I worked there, they wouldn’t assign me tasks and then blamed me when nothing got done.
Did you try just staring at the screen and jiggling the mouse? This appears to be their only way of measuring productivity.
Ya really gotta click occasionally and maybe type a few things.
Getting blamed for their incompetence was the task.
Please
The way you phrased this could go either way: were you never taking on more work, no matter how obviously it needed to get done, just because you weren’t explicitly told to do that job? Because that would be a fair criticism in my estimation.
the reality is that incompetent managers love to blame their employees for not doing shit they never told them to do.
Once had a manager repeatedly tell me I needed to “manage my time better” when I told them I didn’t have enough time in the day to get all my tasks done. So I logged my time one day (9-11 worked on task A, 11-1230 worked on task B, etc.) and went to my manager to show them. “This is how long I am spending on each task, can you tell me which ones I am spending too long on and how I can be more efficient?” Manager told me to give them the log and they’ll get back to me.
They never did get back to me, but they did end up reassigning my duties to other people who were also not given enough time to complete them.
If you want me to make executive decisions then pay me like an executive.
executive decisions
3 Wood or 9 Iron?
I’ll trade you a coal and 2 brick.
I wish executives were that cool.
were you never taking on more work, no matter how obviously it needed to get done
Bad management creates excess redundant and disorganized labor for the base worker.
If your boss is shitting this stuff out uncontrollably, perhaps that’s their problem more than yours.
Either way, sacking all those people won’t get the work done any faster.
I’m not sure how fair it is. How would you know what work there is if there aren’t any tickets being assigned for example?
I guess it depends on the employer. I don’t do office work myself, but according to what I’ve heard from my wife about her jobs in banking adjacent fields, she has a few different queues of things to do that everyone takes from.
Same actually
maybe stop tracking people’s minute movements you fucking absolute creeps
Monitoring employees in this way is just the shittiest shit of all the shit. Surely they can assess output in a different way?
Right. Do they have a manager assigning them work? And then after a couple of weeks of mouse-juggling, no assignments done.
It sounds like poor management, too, aside from the mouse-jiggling.
Management is probably also mouse jiggling…
We cant use the same performance metrics used in other industries on IT. I could be struggling with a coding problem for hours but it doesn’t mean im not working.
The amount of times I’ve logged off work with a coding problem only to stew on it for 4 hrs including when I’m laying in bed. I’m not billing work for any minute of that nor would I be able to if I tried. Game is fucking rigged in favour of the employer.
Similar problem for me as a lawyer. I can have a case that keeps me up at night stewing and trying to think of a solution, but I feel it would be ethically irresponsible to bill them for 5 hours when I’m not “technically” working on their case.
I realize I’m very privileged. If I’m working on an issue for a whole day or a half day, everything I do during that day is part of the solution and will be billed to the customer (and I’ll be paid for by my employer too). If that includes taking a nap, so be it. Results are what matter, as it should be. If someone ever starts saying I’m taking too long to do something I may consider changing my ways.
Just because I’m not sitting at a keyboard doesn’t mean my brain isn’t working on the problem. I’ve had epiphanies taking a shit before. I’m a systems architect so not really a code monkey but I solved a DNS/networking issue the other day doing dishes. No idea why it hit me then but then again I have ADHD and my brain is fucking weird.
Eh, it’s pretty common for your subconscious to process things in the background. If I’m stuck on a problem at the end of the day, I leave early and I’ll have solved it 9/10 times by the time I get to work the next day. I don’t have ADHD AFAIK (never tested nor felt the need to be), so I’m pretty sure it’s a common experience for creative jobs.
If you worked for me (or any other of about 20 PO’s at my company), you’d be comfortable telling me that you were struggling. You’d explain the challenge and your estimate to completion, and I’d either reshuffle our priority list so that you could park the task and pick another one, or find someone for a pair programming session with you. That’s the common practice, and nobody should care whether you’re yellow on Teams or use a mouse jiggler, as long as you communicate your work and challenges.
or find someone for a pair programming session with you.
Then you would make it take longer.
I bet they forgot to rig the webcams, microphones, seat weight sensors, and infrared desk presence trackers.
And the Blutooth butt plugs
And here I am, wearing those just for fun
This is Wells Fargo, not a chess tournament
MOVEMENT NOT DETECTED!! COMMENCING FIRING IN 5…4…
Employee frantically running out of the bathroom towards his PC, Toilet paper dragging from his pants
I WAS TAKING A SHIT!!!
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My guess is these were underperforming problem employees that they wanted to drop. This provided an easy out to skip a PIP and severance. A company the size of wells fargo there are going to be way more people than 14 using a jiggler. If it were a blanket 1-strike, it would be a lot more folks gone.
Tossing a dozen employees they were anyways with a big headline about it being because of not constantly working is a net profit from how many other employees will now be scared into working constantly.
I am an AV tech and we use a mouse jiggler script to prevent computers from going into an inactive state for presentations during events at my company. The script doesn’t need to be installed, you just open the file by double clicking.
I use an rpi2040 with circuitpython and usbhid. Plug it into anything and it shows up as a mouse and moves the mouse in a tiny circle every few minutes. You can get one for $6.
Wild that Wells Fargo would issue computers that would allow people to install anything on them.
That’s a very common thing. I don’t know a single company or organization that prevents executables from running. You don’t have to install programs to use them, it’s just that most software ships installers
I’ve seen it done, can be a PITA to manage but worth it for the lack of stupid shit from custies IMO.
The software probably doesn’t need to actually be installed.
