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?
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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
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.
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.
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?
To quote Homer Simpson:
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 😂
Could do it on a personal computer and load it on USB? Idk, just thinking out loud right now
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.
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.
They don’t have a real job…
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.
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.
But then you can’t fire them and not have to call it a re org.