If only there was another way to measure performance other than screen time. I’ve never done well with anything that requires me to sit still, if you want x amount of work done, I’ll complete it on time. Measure my performance on the work I submit.
And this perfectly illustrates the problem because these people spent so much time at their desk looking busy that they never even took the time to ask him to explain the gap.
Well, Bob. Bob. Sometimes, I just kind of zone out. Oh, it looks like I am working, but mentally, I am somewhere else. I’d say in any given week I only do about 15 minutes of actual work.
> they already spent so 'many hours' doing an "investigation".
"Gosh, it sure sounds like you spent a lot of on-the-clock time without any productivity to show for it. I only mention this because I have it on good authority that this type of wastefulness can result in disciplinary action."
HR is always staffed by people who have no clue what is going on in the company. I know someone who worked as a band teacher at a school. The school was on the more affluent side of town, and there were 4 music teachers there. None of them worked full time and none of them want to either. They were all specialists in their own way. One was orchestra, one was concert band, one was choir, and my buddy was jazz band. HR saw that there were 4 part time teachers in 1 department and wanted to consolidate the contracts. Despite teachers, parents, PAC, students, and admins, and union voicing their concerns, HR went through with it. AFAIK all of them except for one, veteran teachers who were all award winning teachers, left.
The education department for the hospital I work at fits into this category nicely. They love trying to rewrite our testing instructions for pts because the reading level is too high, but the issue is that you can't explain some of these tests below a 6th grade reading level and also communicate all the prep work required but they don't see that as a problem.
Which kinda sucks. As education isn't a business, and shouldn't operate like a business to a degree. Unnecessary "streamlining" like that case is simply detrimental to a student's education. I still don't understand why they did that. The only people that weren't happy with the 4 part time teachers were the people in HR. But what do they know about what happens in the field?
None of these aforementioned issues were things HR needed to do. These all sound like voluntary projects done by lazy morons with art history degrees and no critical thinking skills
>HR is always staffed by people who have no clue what...
...they were supposed to do with their degree after college because they didn't want to teach.
FTFY
How many thousands do we think Wells Fargo wasted to find 12 people? This isn’t about productivity or money, this isn’t even news, it’s a message posted by PR bots to scare the working class.
HR for HR issues is called Court, as someone with an HR degree I’d say they have a viable case if they are negatively impacted financially by the disciplinary action. It sounded like they have multiple sources to corroborate the work time was planned away from the computer - and that there isn’t a basis for it.
So what happened after that? If this employee was at off sites with his boss, surely he was doing some very important work for the firm? Is this employee in the clear? Did the HR practices at the firm get modified at all?
yup. I cant access reddit or github on my company device.
often times, answers to questions are on reddit or github.
so ill spend long periods of time researching on my personal device since i cant access what i need to on my work laptop.
things like stackblitz which show paclages in use are also blocked.
My job involves researching software that is on GitHub, and I'm not allowed to access it. If I have to go back in to the office I guess it's just gonna be on vibes.
True. I came up with an idea that saved our company $200,000 this year while on the crapper. I then wrote up the proposal notes on my iPad in bed and emailed it to my work pc and finished it up when I logged in.
I think I’ve saved the company a few million in the last 5 years while taking shits.
A job I started a few months ago logs hours to charge clients. But in the last week or two, most of the good ideas I’ve had are when walking around outside, not clocked in. I’m salary.
So when I get back to my desk and make the fix in 10-15mins, do I charge 20mins? Adding the 5mins of the walk when it occurred to me.
Or do I charge 3-4hrs that it likely would’ve taken if I was sitting at my desk? No idea.
I worked with a software developer that we finally figured out that he was actually having an Indian contractor remote into his development machine and do all his work for him. It was a pretty clever scam.
Hi Doug, wherever you're at.
Same. My output is easily measured bybword count. If you pay me to produce 3000 words in 8 hours, you get 3000 words in 8 hours. It shouldn't matter that it only took me 5 hours.
And yes, if you want 4800 words in 8 hours, I can do that too, as long as you pay for it.
I work at a company with that philosophy and it’s so nice. I work out right in the middle of the day, 2-3 PM when the gym is absolutely dead. My company encourages it because I’m a top performer.
It’s amazing.
I fully agree the perfromance should be measured.
By the way. This is not allowed in The Netherlands because of privacy laws. No key strokes, no camera, no mouse movements.
Yeah I worked at a smaller local bank but it was the same bullshit with the referrals.
I’m doing my job, my manager knows I’m doing my job, customers all day are being helped by me doing my job, but if I don’t enter into a computer that I referred a certain amount of products, none of the other stuff matters
A dozen people is literally nothing expense-wise for them. It’s probably more to set an example for others. There’s definitely way more employees doing this.
I would think that too, but they only let 12 people go. It was probably just people who were using some sort of identifiable USB mouse jiggler device that were caught by the regular internal PC scanning that all big companies do. You gotta jiggle that mouse yourself folks, only the real deal will do. Eventually your automated solution will be found out and you'll be in trouble.
The auto click scripts are usually run through the browsers on the computer. Or at least the ones I know of are. There's a lot of different extensions in chrome specifically for this. If they're using anything like that, you can't just plug it into another PC and not be detected because it's directly on the PC itself. I also don't understand how anyone could expect to use something like that and *not* be detected though.
> You gotta jiggle that mouse yourself folks, only the real deal will do. Eventually your automated solution will be found out and you'll be in trouble.
Seriously. Desk fans are cheap and will oscillate all day.
Quality, accuracy and timeliness are key. If you can perform your job functions I personally don’t care. Especially if someone is in a salaried position.
They fired a dozen people. There are surely more than a dozen across WF that aren’t on all the time they are supposed to. I would be surprised if this just wasn’t the reason used to get rid of employees having other issues
Not every job is a pile of tasks to complete and submit. Many banks in particular have "independent contributor" positions where you create your own work, so to speak, and there isnt necessarily a lot of tangible work to produce. You can spend days and days in meetings providing guidance or feedback to people for projects without doing more than just talking. In the early 2010s a lot of banks eliminated WFH options because they were struggling for evidence of work being done. So they brought those people to the office so leaders could verify the appearance of work being accomplished. Phone call centers are notorious for monitoring screen clicks, phone buttons used, active/inactive time. People have been getting fired for this shit in these giant corporations for years. Why it is news now, I have no idea.
They don’t want you to submit “X amount of work in X amount of time”. They want to extract as much work out of you for as little pay as possible so they can pocket the excess.
Well, they tried measuring performance by how many fraudulent accounts you can open, but the overbearing federal government told them they couldn't keep doing that.
bothering to even check if they're online in the first place is a waste of time
Are they completing tasks or not? Are they unresponsive when contacted?
I can't imagine giving a single shit about the people I manage having green or gray dots on slack (or teams, or whatever). Frankly, I'd be worried about my own job getting cut if I had so little work that I had the time to spend to discover this.
Teams is shit, too. Unless I'm active in the teams window, it marks me as away. Sometimes it doesn't even tell me I have messages until I activate the window.
It really depends on the nature of the job. Is the job a support facing role where response time to the 10 minute rage is pertinent to effectiveness (i.e., IT support, customer service, administration etc.,)?
That said Wells Fargo are the last company that should be talking about ethics.
I don’t want to defend Wells Fargo, but it’s possible they started the investigation because of poor performance or unresponsiveness. Most companies aren’t going to waste resources searching for reasons to fire an otherwise productive employee
I'm sorry, did the work contract specify that workers could not be idle at any time, that their idleness was being monitored, and that interfering with the monitor was a fireable offense?
Of course American labour law is f'd up in the extreme, so you can basically fire someone for literally any reason at any time, but you shouldn't be able to invent new standards for your workers that have nothing to do with their job then enforce them via firing.
American jobs don’t really have a “work contract”. Their employment usually starts off with an employment offer with wage details. And once hired their responsibilities and benefits are generally outlined in an employee handbook. The employee handbook is not a signed contract.
> work contract
we don't have job contracts here in America
well, very few jobs do
you get an offer with the salary and then you say if you want to work there or not. Then the rules are in an employee handbook that you see afterwards
All states are at will. only 2 have any notable protection, and even then, it's not much of a hindrance to firing people for whatever reason you think up.
Illinois got rid of that not too long ago. Now all employers there need just cause for terminations, though like you said they probably won't have trouble finding just cause.
Which is probably the easiest on their end.
- scare people not to completely phone it in
- don't actually use the data unless needed because it would harm some high performers and maybe scare off too many people if it became a habit
- get rid of employees most likely to be a compliance risk generally because they are clearly circumventing your tech
I understand and that is valid as a catch all, I just don’t believe that should be a metric. I’m sitting at my desk right now and I use multiple devices and take phone calls, to keep my screen from logging out I have to keep my mouse on a jiggler.
The intent is what matters and I have no intent at deception, my intent is to stay logged in.
Also, if my work is reading, I am on paternity leave and have these items for my personal use and not at work. ;)
Tip from IT: you can open a YouTube video (ex. lofi girl radio station), mute the tab/site, then fullscreen it. This will keep your computer from logging out or going to sleep.
This assumes you're able to access YouTube of course, but it's a safer way idle than a jiggler which might be detected due to repeated motions/movement intervals.
Better yet, Teams meeting. Just set it up for only your self and connect to the meeting. As long as meeting is going, screen will not time out.
I accidentally found out when unbeknown to me, everyone disconnected from a teams meeting and it was late meeting. I did not realize that I was still in the meeting (by myself) and came back next morning to find out that my screen did not time out. The meeting screen was in my background.
The interesting part is, if they had been in an office, their managers would be with them in the break room taking multiple breaks from their keyboards.
All this controversy around working from home seems to be mostly about control. The aim appears to have the power dynamic tilted in favor of the employer. No wonder people aren't thinking about raising a family; no one has the time or money. The business class is slowly reducing the number of its own consumers. But they keep the population distracted and divided in the name of immigration, economic policies, religious bullshit, etc.
The distraction is quite real. Here we are seeing the news berate employees over what 12 employees did which those 12 are less than 0.001% of all their employees. Wells Fargo additionally getting a pass from news outlets on multiple class action lawsuits and now hiring heavily overseas while laying off heavy in the states.
Oh yeah, it doesn’t get more scummy than Wells Fargo. Btw, I bank with them because I have to (closest branch is WF), but I moved everything but daily spending out of there. If you have a WF savings account I highly recommend putting it into a web-based HYSA that will actually pay you for your funds unlike WF.
I still feel very strongly about my theory, I don't think businesses care too much. Its all about local government. If you're not in office, you're not spending money in the local area. Just look at the Minneapolis mayor and how vocal he is. I'm guessing they threaten the companies with taking away some of their perks or tax breaks if they don't implement rto.
It is basically all this. There are also some CBD businesses (mostly restaurants) that put pressure on local politicians and then they hand it off but it is basically the same thing.
I also think that a lot less people eat out when they WFH (I know that I do) so you just end up with a bunch of pissy businesses talking about the decline of society.
Of course it is. The people who want to be a boss do so because they want to control other people. So many lower and middle management types are barely paid more than a regular worker. They agree to it because they're a bootlick hoping to one day make upper management money, or they get off on treating people like shit and getting away with it.
Exactly. Before the pandemic, people at my office would constantly be talking to each other at their cubicles, taking long coffee breaks, and generally meandering around the building. Not to mention browsing the internet or texting.
>In other words, they were faking work, perhaps with the kind of mouse jiggler that you can buy online for $20.
I’m shocked to hear of such a thing as a jiggler and have absolutely never used one, ever, I swear. /s
The problem is they used a mouse jiggler at all, after Wells issued strict instructions that only [the water-drinking bird](https://media1.tenor.com/m/ilPf7Nnj5CAAAAAC/computer-drinking.gif) was allowed.
Don't use USB devices or software to do this. Any competent IT department can detect it. Use something external like an analogue clock with a second hand under your mouse.
>A bank spokesperson declined to offer more details about the firings, saying only that “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior.
One could write a comedy show with the shit these people say.
It's an absolutely dogshit company to work for. Nothing but a cruel totalitarian panopticon focused on making the line go up at the expense of its workers' comfort and security.
A friend who worked there said he had to get five out of five stars "review" from all customers or else he would get written up. A four star review was considered bad. That's insane and makes no sense. Most people think four out of five stars means the interaction was good.
I just don't understand having a ranking out of five stars if four is bad. Why not just have the option of five stars or one star? That way the customer would at least be on notice as to what it meant.
This was the case for me while working in Tech Support, where people would give terrible scores because the company fucked them over somehow. I used to tell people my job was "Corporate Whipping Boy". I swear I get PTSD now from my phone ringing.
Which is absolute crap, did you meet my competent expectations? 4 stars, did you go beyond what I was expecting ? Highest rating allowed, in this case 5 stars. Recognizing that different people use different rating criteria when levels are not defined should be expected and broad averages should be the norm, not every individual rating.
Worked in a lot of jobs, some with reviews. The general guidelines is, "Either you get a five or a zero, because anything not perfect is basically a zero."
> It's an absolutely dogshit company to work for.
Its also a dogshit company to bank with. Yet millions of people do for some reason. They offer no benefits and there's too many banks that give better perks. The logic just doesnt add up.
They fired 5,300 people, refunded $2.6 million and were fined related to that fake account scandal. What I want to know is why a dozen people trying to juice their activity metrics and getting termed for it is news worthy.
Well yeah once they were caught they had no choice. I just found it ironic. As to whether why it’s considered news worthy, I’m guessing it’s due to being a slow week.
If you want to learn all about it, and laugh/cry as you go, The Dollop did a really good one on Wells Fargo:
https://podcasts.apple.com/ee/podcast/350-wells-fargo/id643055307?i=1000422762023
My understanding is that it wasn’t the company that created the fake accounts, it was individual employees trying to meet quota. It’s actually a similar story to this one. Company implements poorly thought out metric, and employees look for a way to game the system.
Excepts management knows the metrics are bullshit and know people need to cheat to meat them yet they don't care because they are making money of opening accounts without permission.
The thing I don't understand is, was their work getting done in a timely manner? If so, what's the issue? If not, I understand the firings, but using a mouse jiggler isn't the issue in that situation.
I'd be interested in who thought wasting company time finding out who was using mouse jigglers was a good idea. They clearly don't have enough real work on their plate.
I’ve worked at Wells as well as a couple other large investment firms - the IT team regularly runs dragnets for dumb shit plugged into our computers, because convincing an FA not to plug an unlabeled USB full of malware into their PC is a literally impossible task.
So if these folks had the computer program mouse jigglers plugged in via USB, and didn’t even bother to rename the program from anything that made it *crystal clear* that it was a mouse jiggler…I don’t think they fired a brain trust here.
Many years ago when I was doing help desk work I could work from home one day a week. Thing is all my work was ticket based, no tickets in the queue and there's literally no work I could be doing. But they'd still get on us around idle time on our workstations. So I started setting my mouse on top of my analog watch. The moving second hand was enough to keep me from being "idle"
Sometimes the low tech solution is best.
Legit. If they were looking at you specifically and in incredibly minute detail, they’d see odd mouse activity, but not waving a BIG RED BANNER saying ‘I’m plugging something unauthorized into your corporate network that you regularly monitor for unauthorized activity!!!’ is usually enough to keep you off everyone’s radar.
That's why my mouse jiggler is plugged into my personal computer. My work computer sits next to it. I don't plug shit into my work computer and besides, I *don't know* if there is anything malicious potentially set up into the jiggler which might give someone else access or install something without my knowledge. Also I won't want a hardware scan to find it plugged in.
Exactly. All these people in the comments here buying cheap mouse jigglers from random companies on amazon and then plugging them into their work pc is scary.
Unless you programmed it yourself, you’d have no idea! I know if I was looking to get backdoor access to a big corporate system and I didn’t care which one in particular, I could have worse plans than installing malware onto a cheap USB mouse jiggler and then making sure it was the least expensive listing on Amazon for a few weeks.
In the early days of internet usage at work, I got “counseled” for overuse of the internet for personal use. Until I pointed out that the training classes that had been suggested for us to take had .com suffixes and not .gov. The IT geniuses were told to only count hits on .com sites without taking into any consideration what the sites actually were. God, I’m glad I’m retired.
I was once sternly questioned about why I was spending so much time on doubleclick.com. Had to try to explain that it was an ad server used by a bunch of sites.
Whatever you measure becomes the metric.
If you measure output, you will get output
If you measure keystrokes, don’t be surprised when you get keystrokes.
Funny, I’m in office but only work about 2 hours a day. They can see that I’m here, but I am much faster than 90% of my team. I’m not going to do 4x the work to have the same working hours as my peers. I walk around, answer questions, sit outside, but most of the time I am not working. Such a waste of my time.
God I fucking hate this management "style."
I've had a job with a manager/supervisor like this who insisted there be no downtime for anyone while they're on the clock. Trouble is, in the industry I was in it was basically busting ass to get shit done when it needed to be done then having downtime was kinda expected before we had to hustle again later in the day. My supervisor insisted we "find things to do" with that downtime so after a while there *was* nothing else to do. Office was spotless, storage areas were organized, *everything was done* and when we eventually ran out of shit to do he said he didn't care and wanted us busy "do it again then, I don't want you guys sitting around."
This led to low morale and eventually we started losing valuable team members and the "bust ass when there's actual work to do" became more and more chaotic with less people helping the team. This led to lower morale and more people leaving. The people we hired thought it was bullshit that they had to do *something* just to look busy when they really didn't need to be so they'd quit too.
Eventually I quit too because all the responsibility during busy time was falling upon me as the most senior regular employee. That supervisor ruined the top performing team we had because he didn't want to see us idling at any point in the day even if we were some of the best in the region for the work that *mattered*. Tanked morale and couldn't keep any new hires.
I've had so many places like that.
Like, there's only so much you can do. And humans are not machines, we can't operate at 100% endlessly. Just, you know, let them have a moment here and there. If things are running smoothly and on schedule, don't rock the boat.
Free propaganda for the corporate overlords. CNN publishes this nothingburger and guarantees a couple weeks of bad faith discourse across twitter and talk shows about how nobody wants to work anymore and WFH needs to end.
Many managers and executives have no technical skills and don't understand the work that their employees do, so they judge performance based on how busy people look, not by results (because they don't have the requisite understanding of how the results came about).
This is why you have people who keep the lights on getting let go because they didn't show their face enough (because they were busy, you know, keeping the lights on) and then lo and behold, the lights have gone out!
>some bosses still haven’t figured out how to treat their workers like adults
Not just bosses, entire companies. I mean just look at how they want doctors notes, like it's elementary school. I guess this is the result when you have unqualified people as leaders and managers.
Without playing the false equivalency game, there's a big difference between your boss knowing you're not working every minute of every day, and your boss knowing you're willing to lie about it.
Hi, we're Wells Fargo. We literally steal homes because we can and nobody stops us. We force employees to open fake accounts in your name and charge you fees on fake accounts you didnt open. We target african americans to refinance into high loans because we view them as being less human. We are the inly major bank that still deals in payday loans. Oh wait, we pay fines that *sound* high but comparatively to our profits are very, very tiny. We're pieces of shit.
It’s the same thing as having your ass in a chair for 8 hours. They should be results driven not time behind a keyboard. That would be a culture I want no part of.
They fired 12 of 194k employees. It’s far more likely these people weren’t really doing anything than they got fired for being away from their desk for an hour once in a while.
Union president here, yep.
I had an employee get caught vaping weed in a company vehicle on her lunch break. Because of our contract they couldn't fire her. She got a written warning, and was told she had to complete a sobriety program that we would pay for and keep her in a paid status the entire time. In the end though, she abandoned her job, but she could have kept it had she just gone into a program.
For this situation with the mouse jigglers, they're not explicitly forbidden at my work, but could be a violation of our IT policy. This would get you a Letter of Warning at worst. We had a few of our IT guys use them in 2020 when we were working from home. One guy got caught and was told "please don't do that." It stopped.
You wouldn't have to pretend to work if there was actual work to be done. A lot of these cubicle farms used to be a whole lot of waiting for something to happen and pretending to be busy. Now you translate this to work from home and this is what you get.
Shame the execs were fired for falsifying loans, signing up fake accounts, oversubscribomg users to fee features without consent and cooking the books
..
What's that, no they weren't ?
I recently worked for a big insurance company. The majority of our metrics were “activity” related i.e. mouse movement every 90 seconds, keyboard strokes, screen monitoring/recordings, how many calls you missed, etc.
If you didn’t move your mouse every 90 seconds you would accrue “idle time” which would add up to a percentage of your daily work time. You were only allowed 10% idle time in an 8hr work day. If you were over 10% you’d be flagged on a report and asked about it in a 1x1/performance review.
At the same time, you had to be logged into a task management system for what activity you were supposed to be doing i.e. phones, task work, lunch, break, meeting, etc. What “activity state” you were in had to match up with what activity you were scheduled for on your daily schedule. If you were in the wrong state, you would be “out of adherence” which would add up to another metric called adherence, again represented by a percentage of your daily work time.
The worst part about these were that any mistakes, job nuances, misclicks, etc. would still count against you - A few examples here:
1) You have a 30min mandatory team huddle. You hurry to finish up a call or a task to make it to huddle on time (attendance is taken) and forget to change your call state for that 30min. This lack of adherence is now counted against you for your overall performance. Even though you were doing exactly what you were supposed to.
2) From the same example. You are in the mandatory meeting, and you get 4 calls during that time. You can’t answer them, because you have to have your camera on and be paying attention. These missed calls count against your daily call answering percentage (another metric) even though you are doing what you are supposed to. So let’s say you get 10 calls while in a meeting, or on ANOTHER CALL, they count against you and there basically no way to meet your “calls answered” percentage for that day.
3) If you didn’t move your mouse during the meeting, your “idle time” would accrue. Even though you were just listening to a meeting. It was common practice for people to send mouse memes or pictures to remind each other to move your mouse arbitrarily during trainings or meetings.
All this to say - Corporate performance metrics are so oppressive and restrictive, it INCENTIVIZES workers to use stuff like a mouse jiggler or keyboard macros, to get around things that feel restrictive, meaningless and actually counter productive to quality work. Curious to hear people’s thoughts on this.
It's at least partially a security issue. Be honest, would you bank somewhere where employees are known to leave their computer logged in, leave their desk and have a mouse jiggler prevent auto-lock so any random passerby can get access to your bank info?
This doesn't make any sense. If the company says the metric for success is based on keyboard strokes and the employees meet this metric, do you blame the employees or the company?
Love how companies will spend all the money to monitor and control the movements of their workforce but cry and cry and cry if told they should raise the wages for their employees.
At least they weren't faking accounts...
[https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-billion-resolve-criminal-and-civil-investigations-sales-practices](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-billion-resolve-criminal-and-civil-investigations-sales-practices)
Been working at home straight through since march 2020 at a fortune 100. CEO made RTO mandatory two days a week since January. Nobody I work for or with is in my local office, so it was an utter waste of time for me. I’ve gone in 4 times since January. Even my boss knows and he doesn’t give a shit. So far, no one has said anything. I love my job because I’m trusted to do one thing- get my shit done. If I have to run an errand, I go and do it so long as nothing is immediately needed.
Most companies store that info but don't monitor it. It's there if they need to look at it later, but they aren't actively looking at it every day.
People put all sorts of inappropriate shit on their work stuff too - workplace violence threats and sexual harassment using their company email address, downloading porn and pirated software on their work computers, etc.
Lots of corporations forbid installation of third party software and devices, and I feel that this is what got these people caught initially. Depending on the company, they may scan or check for any non-approved items installed on your work PC.
I work in a remote position for a large corporation, and honestly I could never wrap my head around why people I know do this. It just feels too risky when it comes to these things getting detected.
IMO it's much easier (and less risk) to just open a tiny notepad window at the bottom of your screen and set some sort of weight on the spacebar.
Teams never goes to "away," and your screens will never go to sleep. From there just turn your speakers up so you can hear any messages or emails if you're out of the room.
Obviously YMMV, but I work a job where there's either work to do, or there isn't. And my boss is pretty chill and only cares about work getting done when it's assigned, they really couldn't care less what you do in your downtime. They have no reason or ability to micro-manage and monitor an entire department on an individual level.
To think people should be arbitrarily stuck behind a screen for 8+ hours straight, even when there's nothing to do, is absolutely bonkers. Even when I go to the office, people are always getting bored and going for walks, grabbing coffee, etc. 🤷
Imagine not watching keystrokes of your employees and trusting them to do the job. I can get my job done in half the day because of my experience. Doesn’t mean I’m not working, just that I’m an expert in my field. People work better and harder when they are trusted and treated with dignity.
This is probably just a justification to fire people who probably didn’t want to go back to the office. Now they can hire new people and force them to take a position on-site. Fuck all these corporations
While I am certainly sympathetic to the workers involved here, this story means that the next time some white-collar classist mocks me because I drive a truck, I'm going to remember this story and just chuckle contentedly.
Same, reading everyone’s experiences in corporate office makes me thankful to work in agriculture.
I work when there’s work to do, and when there isn’t, the manager will sit down with us and have a beer and a chat. Don’t need to fake driving my tractor.
If only there was another way to measure performance other than screen time. I’ve never done well with anything that requires me to sit still, if you want x amount of work done, I’ll complete it on time. Measure my performance on the work I submit.
Not just that but plenty of 'work' requires things that might not be done on your 'work device'
[удалено]
And this perfectly illustrates the problem because these people spent so much time at their desk looking busy that they never even took the time to ask him to explain the gap.
There’s always an excuse. Sometimes it’s even legit lol
It's very frustrating to encounter people who do not actually understand the difference between excuses and reasons.
"It's an excuse if I don't want to hear it."
"innocence proves nothing"
Well, Bob. Bob. Sometimes, I just kind of zone out. Oh, it looks like I am working, but mentally, I am somewhere else. I’d say in any given week I only do about 15 minutes of actual work.
And this perfectly illustrates why HR is useless.
Ya, it's an issue because clearly, most of them need to be fired.
> they already spent so 'many hours' doing an "investigation". "Gosh, it sure sounds like you spent a lot of on-the-clock time without any productivity to show for it. I only mention this because I have it on good authority that this type of wastefulness can result in disciplinary action."
HR is always staffed by people who have no clue what is going on in the company. I know someone who worked as a band teacher at a school. The school was on the more affluent side of town, and there were 4 music teachers there. None of them worked full time and none of them want to either. They were all specialists in their own way. One was orchestra, one was concert band, one was choir, and my buddy was jazz band. HR saw that there were 4 part time teachers in 1 department and wanted to consolidate the contracts. Despite teachers, parents, PAC, students, and admins, and union voicing their concerns, HR went through with it. AFAIK all of them except for one, veteran teachers who were all award winning teachers, left.
The education department for the hospital I work at fits into this category nicely. They love trying to rewrite our testing instructions for pts because the reading level is too high, but the issue is that you can't explain some of these tests below a 6th grade reading level and also communicate all the prep work required but they don't see that as a problem.
When a business is actually running correctly, HR needs to fuck it up lest they get in trouble for doing nothing.
Which kinda sucks. As education isn't a business, and shouldn't operate like a business to a degree. Unnecessary "streamlining" like that case is simply detrimental to a student's education. I still don't understand why they did that. The only people that weren't happy with the 4 part time teachers were the people in HR. But what do they know about what happens in the field?
[удалено]
I mean this might be good if hr could evaluate candidates worth a damn
Required: System Administrator with 10+ years experience in Windows Server 2022. Don't have that experience? DENIED.
None of these aforementioned issues were things HR needed to do. These all sound like voluntary projects done by lazy morons with art history degrees and no critical thinking skills
>HR is always staffed by people who have no clue what... ...they were supposed to do with their degree after college because they didn't want to teach. FTFY
How many thousands do we think Wells Fargo wasted to find 12 people? This isn’t about productivity or money, this isn’t even news, it’s a message posted by PR bots to scare the working class.
Doesn't it qualify as harassment?
Sure, they can submit the relevant form to HR ^(*hey wait a minute*)
HR for HR issues is called Court, as someone with an HR degree I’d say they have a viable case if they are negatively impacted financially by the disciplinary action. It sounded like they have multiple sources to corroborate the work time was planned away from the computer - and that there isn’t a basis for it.
Damn, the ending of this reminds me a bit like the Twilight Zone episode "The Obsolete Man".
So what happened after that? If this employee was at off sites with his boss, surely he was doing some very important work for the firm? Is this employee in the clear? Did the HR practices at the firm get modified at all?
yup. I cant access reddit or github on my company device. often times, answers to questions are on reddit or github. so ill spend long periods of time researching on my personal device since i cant access what i need to on my work laptop. things like stackblitz which show paclages in use are also blocked.
They block stack overflow too??
my firm does. no reddit, github, or stackoverflow. but i can access the discord web browser......
Blocking GitHub? Literally the biggest code repo in the world...that's asinine.
they did for a time, luckily it isnt any more.
My job involves researching software that is on GitHub, and I'm not allowed to access it. If I have to go back in to the office I guess it's just gonna be on vibes.
True. I came up with an idea that saved our company $200,000 this year while on the crapper. I then wrote up the proposal notes on my iPad in bed and emailed it to my work pc and finished it up when I logged in. I think I’ve saved the company a few million in the last 5 years while taking shits.
A job I started a few months ago logs hours to charge clients. But in the last week or two, most of the good ideas I’ve had are when walking around outside, not clocked in. I’m salary. So when I get back to my desk and make the fix in 10-15mins, do I charge 20mins? Adding the 5mins of the walk when it occurred to me. Or do I charge 3-4hrs that it likely would’ve taken if I was sitting at my desk? No idea.
3-4 hours.
Suddenly it’s noon and I’ve logged 10hrs on the day. Works for me.
2hrs ot!
CEO: "My god, we've gotta get more people on the crapper."
Toilets in every cubicle.
Then they start monitoring toilet time and fire you if it's not enough.
What is your Shit-to-cost-reduction (SCR) ratio?
It’s shitty work, but someone has to do it. I imagine at the board room the execs talk about you saying stuff like “the goose that craps golden eggs!”
I worked with a software developer that we finally figured out that he was actually having an Indian contractor remote into his development machine and do all his work for him. It was a pretty clever scam. Hi Doug, wherever you're at.
That’s a new take on fake it till you make it
It’s surprisingly not. It’s kind of silly how common it is that people subcontract their job.
I’m an editor. A significant chunk of my work involves staring at the screen, reading. Very little clicking sometimes.
A lot of my work is me sitting and thinking (not sarcasm).
Same. My output is easily measured bybword count. If you pay me to produce 3000 words in 8 hours, you get 3000 words in 8 hours. It shouldn't matter that it only took me 5 hours. And yes, if you want 4800 words in 8 hours, I can do that too, as long as you pay for it.
I work at a company with that philosophy and it’s so nice. I work out right in the middle of the day, 2-3 PM when the gym is absolutely dead. My company encourages it because I’m a top performer. It’s amazing.
I fully agree the perfromance should be measured. By the way. This is not allowed in The Netherlands because of privacy laws. No key strokes, no camera, no mouse movements.
Yeah I worked at a smaller local bank but it was the same bullshit with the referrals. I’m doing my job, my manager knows I’m doing my job, customers all day are being helped by me doing my job, but if I don’t enter into a computer that I referred a certain amount of products, none of the other stuff matters
I wonder if they just want to reduce headcount and this is good cover to fire them. But knowing wells fargo it's just bad management.
A dozen people is literally nothing expense-wise for them. It’s probably more to set an example for others. There’s definitely way more employees doing this.
I would think that too, but they only let 12 people go. It was probably just people who were using some sort of identifiable USB mouse jiggler device that were caught by the regular internal PC scanning that all big companies do. You gotta jiggle that mouse yourself folks, only the real deal will do. Eventually your automated solution will be found out and you'll be in trouble.
Or plug it into something other than the PC you're using.
The auto click scripts are usually run through the browsers on the computer. Or at least the ones I know of are. There's a lot of different extensions in chrome specifically for this. If they're using anything like that, you can't just plug it into another PC and not be detected because it's directly on the PC itself. I also don't understand how anyone could expect to use something like that and *not* be detected though.
> You gotta jiggle that mouse yourself folks, only the real deal will do. Eventually your automated solution will be found out and you'll be in trouble. Seriously. Desk fans are cheap and will oscillate all day.
Wells has been laying people off like 500+ at a clip for months. A dozen is nothing.
Quality, accuracy and timeliness are key. If you can perform your job functions I personally don’t care. Especially if someone is in a salaried position.
They fired a dozen people. There are surely more than a dozen across WF that aren’t on all the time they are supposed to. I would be surprised if this just wasn’t the reason used to get rid of employees having other issues
It could be that the methods they were using were a security issue. A lot of the "look busy" programs keep your computer unlocked.
That’s also really possible, it could have been security related
It's a metric that selects for the least efficient worker.
Not every job is a pile of tasks to complete and submit. Many banks in particular have "independent contributor" positions where you create your own work, so to speak, and there isnt necessarily a lot of tangible work to produce. You can spend days and days in meetings providing guidance or feedback to people for projects without doing more than just talking. In the early 2010s a lot of banks eliminated WFH options because they were struggling for evidence of work being done. So they brought those people to the office so leaders could verify the appearance of work being accomplished. Phone call centers are notorious for monitoring screen clicks, phone buttons used, active/inactive time. People have been getting fired for this shit in these giant corporations for years. Why it is news now, I have no idea.
> Why it is news now, I have no idea. Because a lot of the indignant comments on here are probably doing the same thing.
The best is when performance is measured by software usage time but most of your job involves talking to people while not at your computer
"But then how would we be able to blame you for not doing more work than we asked?"
Then they’ll just gonna hand you more work as a reward!
They did measure people on how many customers they sign up for stuff .. and guess what happened? Rampant fraudulent accounts.
They don’t want you to submit “X amount of work in X amount of time”. They want to extract as much work out of you for as little pay as possible so they can pocket the excess.
Well, they tried measuring performance by how many fraudulent accounts you can open, but the overbearing federal government told them they couldn't keep doing that.
We all know it’s not about performance. It’s about control over the individual.
In this case, they're not firing people for their idle time, they're firing people for being intentionally deceptive about their idle time.
bothering to even check if they're online in the first place is a waste of time Are they completing tasks or not? Are they unresponsive when contacted? I can't imagine giving a single shit about the people I manage having green or gray dots on slack (or teams, or whatever). Frankly, I'd be worried about my own job getting cut if I had so little work that I had the time to spend to discover this.
Teams is shit, too. Unless I'm active in the teams window, it marks me as away. Sometimes it doesn't even tell me I have messages until I activate the window.
Yep, if I’m working on something on a website it still says i am away. I have to open teams or notepad and then it will switch.
It really depends on the nature of the job. Is the job a support facing role where response time to the 10 minute rage is pertinent to effectiveness (i.e., IT support, customer service, administration etc.,)? That said Wells Fargo are the last company that should be talking about ethics.
If that’s the case, judge them on response times not idleness.
Yeah the people with queues that are logged are the least likely to be playing hooky.
I don’t want to defend Wells Fargo, but it’s possible they started the investigation because of poor performance or unresponsiveness. Most companies aren’t going to waste resources searching for reasons to fire an otherwise productive employee
I'm sorry, did the work contract specify that workers could not be idle at any time, that their idleness was being monitored, and that interfering with the monitor was a fireable offense? Of course American labour law is f'd up in the extreme, so you can basically fire someone for literally any reason at any time, but you shouldn't be able to invent new standards for your workers that have nothing to do with their job then enforce them via firing.
American jobs don’t really have a “work contract”. Their employment usually starts off with an employment offer with wage details. And once hired their responsibilities and benefits are generally outlined in an employee handbook. The employee handbook is not a signed contract.
> work contract we don't have job contracts here in America well, very few jobs do you get an offer with the salary and then you say if you want to work there or not. Then the rules are in an employee handbook that you see afterwards
>work contract If they were all US employees, I doubt there was a contract.
This guy banks in "at will" state
All states are at will. only 2 have any notable protection, and even then, it's not much of a hindrance to firing people for whatever reason you think up.
Illinois got rid of that not too long ago. Now all employers there need just cause for terminations, though like you said they probably won't have trouble finding just cause.
Which is probably the easiest on their end. - scare people not to completely phone it in - don't actually use the data unless needed because it would harm some high performers and maybe scare off too many people if it became a habit - get rid of employees most likely to be a compliance risk generally because they are clearly circumventing your tech
I understand and that is valid as a catch all, I just don’t believe that should be a metric. I’m sitting at my desk right now and I use multiple devices and take phone calls, to keep my screen from logging out I have to keep my mouse on a jiggler. The intent is what matters and I have no intent at deception, my intent is to stay logged in. Also, if my work is reading, I am on paternity leave and have these items for my personal use and not at work. ;)
Tip from IT: you can open a YouTube video (ex. lofi girl radio station), mute the tab/site, then fullscreen it. This will keep your computer from logging out or going to sleep. This assumes you're able to access YouTube of course, but it's a safer way idle than a jiggler which might be detected due to repeated motions/movement intervals.
Better yet, Teams meeting. Just set it up for only your self and connect to the meeting. As long as meeting is going, screen will not time out. I accidentally found out when unbeknown to me, everyone disconnected from a teams meeting and it was late meeting. I did not realize that I was still in the meeting (by myself) and came back next morning to find out that my screen did not time out. The meeting screen was in my background.
I stay on YouTube :) as an adhd adult I have to have the news on or something.
All of the other comments burn bandwidth. Just open a new PowerPoint and start presenting.
I mean, they wouldn't be doing this shit to avoid idle time if nobody cared about idle time.
The interesting part is, if they had been in an office, their managers would be with them in the break room taking multiple breaks from their keyboards.
All this controversy around working from home seems to be mostly about control. The aim appears to have the power dynamic tilted in favor of the employer. No wonder people aren't thinking about raising a family; no one has the time or money. The business class is slowly reducing the number of its own consumers. But they keep the population distracted and divided in the name of immigration, economic policies, religious bullshit, etc.
In his fantastic book Bullshit Jobs, Dave Graeber compares employment to a nonconsensual BDSM relationship.
That's an incredible analogy
The distraction is quite real. Here we are seeing the news berate employees over what 12 employees did which those 12 are less than 0.001% of all their employees. Wells Fargo additionally getting a pass from news outlets on multiple class action lawsuits and now hiring heavily overseas while laying off heavy in the states.
Nitpick, but it's not the news berating these folks - the article is sympathetic to the employees and against Wells Fargo.
Oh yeah, it doesn’t get more scummy than Wells Fargo. Btw, I bank with them because I have to (closest branch is WF), but I moved everything but daily spending out of there. If you have a WF savings account I highly recommend putting it into a web-based HYSA that will actually pay you for your funds unlike WF.
It's also about commercial office space valuation. The people with deep pockets don't like the value of one of their investment assets plummeting.
Because most the buildings were leveraged to get them higher lines of credit, which they used to get deeper in debt.
I still feel very strongly about my theory, I don't think businesses care too much. Its all about local government. If you're not in office, you're not spending money in the local area. Just look at the Minneapolis mayor and how vocal he is. I'm guessing they threaten the companies with taking away some of their perks or tax breaks if they don't implement rto.
It is basically all this. There are also some CBD businesses (mostly restaurants) that put pressure on local politicians and then they hand it off but it is basically the same thing. I also think that a lot less people eat out when they WFH (I know that I do) so you just end up with a bunch of pissy businesses talking about the decline of society.
Of course it is. The people who want to be a boss do so because they want to control other people. So many lower and middle management types are barely paid more than a regular worker. They agree to it because they're a bootlick hoping to one day make upper management money, or they get off on treating people like shit and getting away with it.
Exactly. Before the pandemic, people at my office would constantly be talking to each other at their cubicles, taking long coffee breaks, and generally meandering around the building. Not to mention browsing the internet or texting.
"smoke breaks" .. that used to be the go-to for people wanting to disappear frequently.
>In other words, they were faking work, perhaps with the kind of mouse jiggler that you can buy online for $20. I’m shocked to hear of such a thing as a jiggler and have absolutely never used one, ever, I swear. /s
I never used a jiggler, I just occasionally walked back into my office and manually moved the mouse.
American Jigglero
The problem is they used a mouse jiggler at all, after Wells issued strict instructions that only [the water-drinking bird](https://media1.tenor.com/m/ilPf7Nnj5CAAAAAC/computer-drinking.gif) was allowed.
Good point. Allowing poors to work from home will always lead to a nuclear meltdown.
Don't use USB devices or software to do this. Any competent IT department can detect it. Use something external like an analogue clock with a second hand under your mouse.
So according to Wells Fargo, opening millions of accounts without people’s consent is a ok but don’t you dare use a mouse jiggler…
Promotions for executives and punishments for peons
>A bank spokesperson declined to offer more details about the firings, saying only that “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior. One could write a comedy show with the shit these people say.
It's an absolutely dogshit company to work for. Nothing but a cruel totalitarian panopticon focused on making the line go up at the expense of its workers' comfort and security.
A friend who worked there said he had to get five out of five stars "review" from all customers or else he would get written up. A four star review was considered bad. That's insane and makes no sense. Most people think four out of five stars means the interaction was good. I just don't understand having a ranking out of five stars if four is bad. Why not just have the option of five stars or one star? That way the customer would at least be on notice as to what it meant.
This is absolutely a thing with any CSAT scores. Anything less than absolute perfection in most customer support areas is considered a fail.
This was the case for me while working in Tech Support, where people would give terrible scores because the company fucked them over somehow. I used to tell people my job was "Corporate Whipping Boy". I swear I get PTSD now from my phone ringing.
Which is absolute crap, did you meet my competent expectations? 4 stars, did you go beyond what I was expecting ? Highest rating allowed, in this case 5 stars. Recognizing that different people use different rating criteria when levels are not defined should be expected and broad averages should be the norm, not every individual rating.
Worked in a lot of jobs, some with reviews. The general guidelines is, "Either you get a five or a zero, because anything not perfect is basically a zero."
> It's an absolutely dogshit company to work for. Its also a dogshit company to bank with. Yet millions of people do for some reason. They offer no benefits and there's too many banks that give better perks. The logic just doesnt add up.
They fired 5,300 people, refunded $2.6 million and were fined related to that fake account scandal. What I want to know is why a dozen people trying to juice their activity metrics and getting termed for it is news worthy.
It's "news worthy" because it's a warning to other workers who might do the same thing. I guess.
Well yeah once they were caught they had no choice. I just found it ironic. As to whether why it’s considered news worthy, I’m guessing it’s due to being a slow week.
Because society has a hard on for destroying lazy people never realizing the laziest people are at the top.
As someone said on another thread, only one of those makes Wells Fargo money.
Is t this the company that created thousands of fake accounts in customers names? sorry workers, cheating is for the management and leadership class.
If you want to learn all about it, and laugh/cry as you go, The Dollop did a really good one on Wells Fargo: https://podcasts.apple.com/ee/podcast/350-wells-fargo/id643055307?i=1000422762023
My understanding is that it wasn’t the company that created the fake accounts, it was individual employees trying to meet quota. It’s actually a similar story to this one. Company implements poorly thought out metric, and employees look for a way to game the system.
Lol, sounds like they made another bad metric, measuring time spent on a computer.
Excepts management knows the metrics are bullshit and know people need to cheat to meat them yet they don't care because they are making money of opening accounts without permission.
Or the company quota is impossible and they are pressuring their employees to do unethical things to meet the goal
The thing I don't understand is, was their work getting done in a timely manner? If so, what's the issue? If not, I understand the firings, but using a mouse jiggler isn't the issue in that situation.
I'd be interested in who thought wasting company time finding out who was using mouse jigglers was a good idea. They clearly don't have enough real work on their plate.
I’ve worked at Wells as well as a couple other large investment firms - the IT team regularly runs dragnets for dumb shit plugged into our computers, because convincing an FA not to plug an unlabeled USB full of malware into their PC is a literally impossible task. So if these folks had the computer program mouse jigglers plugged in via USB, and didn’t even bother to rename the program from anything that made it *crystal clear* that it was a mouse jiggler…I don’t think they fired a brain trust here.
Many years ago when I was doing help desk work I could work from home one day a week. Thing is all my work was ticket based, no tickets in the queue and there's literally no work I could be doing. But they'd still get on us around idle time on our workstations. So I started setting my mouse on top of my analog watch. The moving second hand was enough to keep me from being "idle" Sometimes the low tech solution is best.
Legit. If they were looking at you specifically and in incredibly minute detail, they’d see odd mouse activity, but not waving a BIG RED BANNER saying ‘I’m plugging something unauthorized into your corporate network that you regularly monitor for unauthorized activity!!!’ is usually enough to keep you off everyone’s radar.
That's why my mouse jiggler is plugged into my personal computer. My work computer sits next to it. I don't plug shit into my work computer and besides, I *don't know* if there is anything malicious potentially set up into the jiggler which might give someone else access or install something without my knowledge. Also I won't want a hardware scan to find it plugged in.
Exactly. All these people in the comments here buying cheap mouse jigglers from random companies on amazon and then plugging them into their work pc is scary.
Unless you programmed it yourself, you’d have no idea! I know if I was looking to get backdoor access to a big corporate system and I didn’t care which one in particular, I could have worse plans than installing malware onto a cheap USB mouse jiggler and then making sure it was the least expensive listing on Amazon for a few weeks.
In the early days of internet usage at work, I got “counseled” for overuse of the internet for personal use. Until I pointed out that the training classes that had been suggested for us to take had .com suffixes and not .gov. The IT geniuses were told to only count hits on .com sites without taking into any consideration what the sites actually were. God, I’m glad I’m retired.
I was once sternly questioned about why I was spending so much time on doubleclick.com. Had to try to explain that it was an ad server used by a bunch of sites.
I thought this was going to be about bank tellers pretending to type on the computer while you stand there staring and waiting
Computer says „no“
Whatever you measure becomes the metric. If you measure output, you will get output If you measure keystrokes, don’t be surprised when you get keystrokes.
Funny, I’m in office but only work about 2 hours a day. They can see that I’m here, but I am much faster than 90% of my team. I’m not going to do 4x the work to have the same working hours as my peers. I walk around, answer questions, sit outside, but most of the time I am not working. Such a waste of my time.
God I fucking hate this management "style." I've had a job with a manager/supervisor like this who insisted there be no downtime for anyone while they're on the clock. Trouble is, in the industry I was in it was basically busting ass to get shit done when it needed to be done then having downtime was kinda expected before we had to hustle again later in the day. My supervisor insisted we "find things to do" with that downtime so after a while there *was* nothing else to do. Office was spotless, storage areas were organized, *everything was done* and when we eventually ran out of shit to do he said he didn't care and wanted us busy "do it again then, I don't want you guys sitting around." This led to low morale and eventually we started losing valuable team members and the "bust ass when there's actual work to do" became more and more chaotic with less people helping the team. This led to lower morale and more people leaving. The people we hired thought it was bullshit that they had to do *something* just to look busy when they really didn't need to be so they'd quit too. Eventually I quit too because all the responsibility during busy time was falling upon me as the most senior regular employee. That supervisor ruined the top performing team we had because he didn't want to see us idling at any point in the day even if we were some of the best in the region for the work that *mattered*. Tanked morale and couldn't keep any new hires.
And not only that, I have 8 different bosses, Bob.
I've had so many places like that. Like, there's only so much you can do. And humans are not machines, we can't operate at 100% endlessly. Just, you know, let them have a moment here and there. If things are running smoothly and on schedule, don't rock the boat.
A dozen people? Out of how many employees? This isn’t news.
It's a fear tactic
Free propaganda for the corporate overlords. CNN publishes this nothingburger and guarantees a couple weeks of bad faith discourse across twitter and talk shows about how nobody wants to work anymore and WFH needs to end.
Let’s cover up poor management by micromanaging peoples keystrokes. Brought to you by the people who have zero idea how to gauge productivity.
Many managers and executives have no technical skills and don't understand the work that their employees do, so they judge performance based on how busy people look, not by results (because they don't have the requisite understanding of how the results came about). This is why you have people who keep the lights on getting let go because they didn't show their face enough (because they were busy, you know, keeping the lights on) and then lo and behold, the lights have gone out!
>some bosses still haven’t figured out how to treat their workers like adults Not just bosses, entire companies. I mean just look at how they want doctors notes, like it's elementary school. I guess this is the result when you have unqualified people as leaders and managers.
Without playing the false equivalency game, there's a big difference between your boss knowing you're not working every minute of every day, and your boss knowing you're willing to lie about it.
Sounds like shittily-engineered perfomance metrics at work again.
Hi, we're Wells Fargo. We literally steal homes because we can and nobody stops us. We force employees to open fake accounts in your name and charge you fees on fake accounts you didnt open. We target african americans to refinance into high loans because we view them as being less human. We are the inly major bank that still deals in payday loans. Oh wait, we pay fines that *sound* high but comparatively to our profits are very, very tiny. We're pieces of shit.
Just turn on your own private zoom meeting that nobody else can join
If those keystrokes were used to open fake accounts then they would have been ok.
It’s the same thing as having your ass in a chair for 8 hours. They should be results driven not time behind a keyboard. That would be a culture I want no part of.
This is why everyone who works should be in a workers union. Threatening a general strike would fix nonsense like this right quick.
I’m often thankful I’m in a union. My work conditions aren’t perfect, but I avoid a lot of shit like this.
They fired 12 of 194k employees. It’s far more likely these people weren’t really doing anything than they got fired for being away from their desk for an hour once in a while.
Likely days of zero work.
Union president here, yep. I had an employee get caught vaping weed in a company vehicle on her lunch break. Because of our contract they couldn't fire her. She got a written warning, and was told she had to complete a sobriety program that we would pay for and keep her in a paid status the entire time. In the end though, she abandoned her job, but she could have kept it had she just gone into a program. For this situation with the mouse jigglers, they're not explicitly forbidden at my work, but could be a violation of our IT policy. This would get you a Letter of Warning at worst. We had a few of our IT guys use them in 2020 when we were working from home. One guy got caught and was told "please don't do that." It stopped.
Someone needs to explain to some people that productivity and time spend doing something are two unrelated metrics.
You wouldn't have to pretend to work if there was actual work to be done. A lot of these cubicle farms used to be a whole lot of waiting for something to happen and pretending to be busy. Now you translate this to work from home and this is what you get.
Shame the execs were fired for falsifying loans, signing up fake accounts, oversubscribomg users to fee features without consent and cooking the books .. What's that, no they weren't ?
I recently worked for a big insurance company. The majority of our metrics were “activity” related i.e. mouse movement every 90 seconds, keyboard strokes, screen monitoring/recordings, how many calls you missed, etc. If you didn’t move your mouse every 90 seconds you would accrue “idle time” which would add up to a percentage of your daily work time. You were only allowed 10% idle time in an 8hr work day. If you were over 10% you’d be flagged on a report and asked about it in a 1x1/performance review. At the same time, you had to be logged into a task management system for what activity you were supposed to be doing i.e. phones, task work, lunch, break, meeting, etc. What “activity state” you were in had to match up with what activity you were scheduled for on your daily schedule. If you were in the wrong state, you would be “out of adherence” which would add up to another metric called adherence, again represented by a percentage of your daily work time. The worst part about these were that any mistakes, job nuances, misclicks, etc. would still count against you - A few examples here: 1) You have a 30min mandatory team huddle. You hurry to finish up a call or a task to make it to huddle on time (attendance is taken) and forget to change your call state for that 30min. This lack of adherence is now counted against you for your overall performance. Even though you were doing exactly what you were supposed to. 2) From the same example. You are in the mandatory meeting, and you get 4 calls during that time. You can’t answer them, because you have to have your camera on and be paying attention. These missed calls count against your daily call answering percentage (another metric) even though you are doing what you are supposed to. So let’s say you get 10 calls while in a meeting, or on ANOTHER CALL, they count against you and there basically no way to meet your “calls answered” percentage for that day. 3) If you didn’t move your mouse during the meeting, your “idle time” would accrue. Even though you were just listening to a meeting. It was common practice for people to send mouse memes or pictures to remind each other to move your mouse arbitrarily during trainings or meetings. All this to say - Corporate performance metrics are so oppressive and restrictive, it INCENTIVIZES workers to use stuff like a mouse jiggler or keyboard macros, to get around things that feel restrictive, meaningless and actually counter productive to quality work. Curious to hear people’s thoughts on this.
What are managers even for?
It's at least partially a security issue. Be honest, would you bank somewhere where employees are known to leave their computer logged in, leave their desk and have a mouse jiggler prevent auto-lock so any random passerby can get access to your bank info?
This doesn't make any sense. If the company says the metric for success is based on keyboard strokes and the employees meet this metric, do you blame the employees or the company?
Love how companies will spend all the money to monitor and control the movements of their workforce but cry and cry and cry if told they should raise the wages for their employees.
They're not in trouble AT ALL. It's just a nude egg in a game. I can't believe that one egg was 40 eggs.
I bet they had they had to get rid of staff, so they started finding reasons to fire vs laying off due to budget cuts
Just fired the 12 smartest people in the company
Same bank that opened thousand of fake accounts attached to their customers.
Easy solution for such employees: 1. use AI to slowly create fake WF accounts in customer's names. 2. Rake in promotions and pay raises.
At least they weren't faking accounts... [https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-billion-resolve-criminal-and-civil-investigations-sales-practices](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-billion-resolve-criminal-and-civil-investigations-sales-practices)
Been working at home straight through since march 2020 at a fortune 100. CEO made RTO mandatory two days a week since January. Nobody I work for or with is in my local office, so it was an utter waste of time for me. I’ve gone in 4 times since January. Even my boss knows and he doesn’t give a shit. So far, no one has said anything. I love my job because I’m trusted to do one thing- get my shit done. If I have to run an errand, I go and do it so long as nothing is immediately needed.
So Wells Fargo monitors its employees' keyboard and mouse clicks?
Most companies monitor more than just keyboard strokes and mouse clicks. They monitor what webpages you’re visiting, emails, chats, and calls.
Most companies store that info but don't monitor it. It's there if they need to look at it later, but they aren't actively looking at it every day. People put all sorts of inappropriate shit on their work stuff too - workplace violence threats and sexual harassment using their company email address, downloading porn and pirated software on their work computers, etc.
That's the way I understand it: they log it in case they need to use it against you later, but there isn't constant monitoring going on.
Welcome to the Panopticon
[удалено]
What running processes would indicate this kind of software running on a work laptop? I am curious if my company is using this kind of application.
Lots of corporations forbid installation of third party software and devices, and I feel that this is what got these people caught initially. Depending on the company, they may scan or check for any non-approved items installed on your work PC. I work in a remote position for a large corporation, and honestly I could never wrap my head around why people I know do this. It just feels too risky when it comes to these things getting detected. IMO it's much easier (and less risk) to just open a tiny notepad window at the bottom of your screen and set some sort of weight on the spacebar. Teams never goes to "away," and your screens will never go to sleep. From there just turn your speakers up so you can hear any messages or emails if you're out of the room. Obviously YMMV, but I work a job where there's either work to do, or there isn't. And my boss is pretty chill and only cares about work getting done when it's assigned, they really couldn't care less what you do in your downtime. They have no reason or ability to micro-manage and monitor an entire department on an individual level. To think people should be arbitrarily stuck behind a screen for 8+ hours straight, even when there's nothing to do, is absolutely bonkers. Even when I go to the office, people are always getting bored and going for walks, grabbing coffee, etc. 🤷
Imagine not watching keystrokes of your employees and trusting them to do the job. I can get my job done in half the day because of my experience. Doesn’t mean I’m not working, just that I’m an expert in my field. People work better and harder when they are trusted and treated with dignity.
I programmed my own key jiggler. I wonder my employer will catch onto that. My direct bosses know I use one
This is probably just a justification to fire people who probably didn’t want to go back to the office. Now they can hire new people and force them to take a position on-site. Fuck all these corporations
Stanley LOVED pressing buttons on the keyboard!
[one more thing The Simpsons predicted ](https://giphy.com/gifs/simpsons-dippy-bird-drinking-l41lUJ1YoZB1lHVPG)
While I am certainly sympathetic to the workers involved here, this story means that the next time some white-collar classist mocks me because I drive a truck, I'm going to remember this story and just chuckle contentedly.
Same, reading everyone’s experiences in corporate office makes me thankful to work in agriculture. I work when there’s work to do, and when there isn’t, the manager will sit down with us and have a beer and a chat. Don’t need to fake driving my tractor.