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:
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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?
Wells Fargo specifically committed widespread, systemic fraud and identity theft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scandal?wprov=sfla1
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.
They’re the same picture.
Poor Wells Fargo. Maybe they should sign a bunch of customers up to loans they didn’t ask for about it to feel better.
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 trying to suspend my disbelief at you watching a hallmark movie and remembering it well enough to give a synopsis.
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.
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?
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.”
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“Yes, I worked out a solution on paper, like back in the old days.”
[confused noises]
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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.
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.
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?
Depends if I want to use my phone or not. If I balance it correctly the mouse works, cellphone works perfect as well.
When I worked there, they wouldn’t assign me tasks and then blamed me when nothing got done.
Getting blamed for their incompetence was the task.
Same actually
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.
If you want me to make executive decisions then pay me like an executive.
executive decisions
3 Wood or 9 Iron?
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.
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.
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.
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.
maybe stop tracking people’s minute movements you fucking absolute creeps
I bet they forgot to rig the webcams, microphones, seat weight sensors, and infrared desk presence trackers.
And the Blutooth butt plugs
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!!!
why though? Were they not getting enough done? And if its only like a dozen, does it justify the productiviry loss of hiring keyboard police?
To entrench back to office sentiment
Joke’s on them, I can slack off just as hard in an office as I can at home
More, even.
So glad I work a job where if I show ‘Away’ on Teams no one says anything, because my work is getting done. Sounds like bad management imo.
Chat-gpt can you please follow my mouse around and then just keep doing that movement for a while until I move the mouse myself? Put my video from yesterday’s windows 11 recall at this time on so that any admin logging in right now can think that I’m actually working.
As a reminder, at work, an admin can login to your PC and watch a stupid mouse jiggler do its jiggling to catch you. Be smarter, work harder!
All you really need is a better mouse mover. Cradle for the mouse with a wheel under it with a pattern designed to make the mouse move around randomly.
Hardware solution is the way. Then they need much bigger software to detect it.
Yep hardware that’s not connected to your work device at all
But literally the admin can remote to your screen and watch the pointer jiggle if you’re using a jiggler lol.
I never mentioned a jiggler. I was talking about better devices that move the device at random. They can move the mouse all over the screen, but an observer might be able to see that it was not normal activity if they watched it for long.
Oh lord. Glad i don’t live in a country where that kind of intrusion and surveillance is legal.
I think it hasn’t been tried in court enough. Like it’s illegal to watch you poop by installing a camera in the restroom and making sure you are actually pooping and not just sitting and pretending to poop.
But would the court find it illegal to have the laptop camera be used to secretly look at you say every 3 minutes to make sure you’re focused on work and not slacking off?
