Wells Fargo fires more than a dozen employees for faking work using mouse jigglers and keyboard activity simulation
Wells Fargo fires more than a dozen employees for faking work using mouse jigglers and keyboard activity simulation
The good old mouse jiggler is alive and well
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So you did not notice that they didn't actual do anything...? But were happy that their mouse was moving around...?
This is what I fail to get. You give people things to work on. Why do you want to spy on them instead of just looking at the results? Even if someone spends half the time watching YouTube, if all the work is done... who cares?
The lesson is to work really, really slow
This is actually exactly the lesson. If the issue in this case was the mouse jiggler, then just working slow would be perfectly fine?! Are they all stupid?
The problem is that companies have unrealistic expectation of how you spend your day. Everybody knows that most “white collar” jobs don’t actually have you working 8hrs every day with the only time you stop working being bathroom breaks and lunch. People take all kinds of informal breaks and get distracted throughout the day. So there is this weird thing where everybody knows that, but companies have to pretend like they don’t, which leads to asinine decisions like keyboard and mouse trackers to determine if people are actually working. Which then leads to people looking for solutions that earn them their little informal breaks back, which everybody takes and are perfectly fine. But again, we sort of pretend water cooler time doesn’t occur.
It’s some sort of perverse arms race built around a shared lie we all pretend we don’t know about.
It’s some sort of perverse arms race built around a shared lie we all pretend we don’t know about.
There's a lot of that when it comes to work in general. It's like it's taboo to point out that the only reason people show up to their jobs is because they get paid for it.
Right?
"Nobody wants to work anymore!"
Like no shit man.
News Flash: nobody has wanted to work ever. They work because the compensation lets them live the lives they want outside of work. If nobody wants to work for you, it's because you either aren't willing to compensate them enough to do that, or your job makes them so miserable that it's not worth it for them to trade away that much happiness for the compensation.
Or both. In lots of cases it's both.
There are jobs I want to work, they just don't pay a living wage.
But let's say you could also make that living wage just by existing. In a world where you wake up each day and a day's worth of your living wage was automatically deposited into your account whether you worked a job you liked or even if you went out for a walk in the park...would you still choose to work every day?
Define "work".
If by "work", you mean contributing to the capitalistic growth of The Economy™, then no I wouldn't want to work.
If by "work" you mean meaningfully contribute to my community and society as a whole, yes I'd still want to work. Not every day, but I was on unemployment benefits for almost a year, and it gets boring after a while not feeling like a useful member of your community.
I want to work, but the way I like to work.
If an employer only has a say in what I deliver, fuck yeah I want to work!
This
The only reason why any employer would be like "this is the way you work" would be in a team context, and even then, it should be a discussion, an adjustment, for practical reasons. never an arbitrary law
But you're working in that scenario because you're being paid.
If you had that job where your employer only had a say in what you deliver (ignoring the obvious pitfalls of that arrangement), and they suddenly stopped paying you, or started only paying you half...would you still be okay with it?
If not, then you're working because you like being paid, not because you want to work.
On the flip side: if you had some sort of situation where you got paid a comfortable living that allowed you to cover all your expenses, indulge some luxury, and save...and you got this money no matter what, just for waking up...would you still work every day? Or work until your employer was satisfied with your output each day/week/pay period?
Some might...most specifically (I would think) people whose jobs provide some sort of personal fulfillment like teachers, caregivers, etc. but I think the vast majority of people would take the money and live lives that offered personal enjoyment and fulfillment, doing what they wanted to do, not what an employer (who at that point isn't their source of pay) would like them to do.
Wait, did you take my comment as “pay doesn’t matter”???
Of course it matters. Just saying some do value their work intrinsically as opposed for only extrinsically.
I would like to point out its not even we. Its upper management and 'the stockholders'. Everyone from the peon to lower management knows that people don't work continuously for their shift. I doubt anyone can work continuously for that long and not go crazy.
But the reward from mid and management and above for completing your work is more work. Which is great for them since you completing more work means they get bonuses.
I'm gonna reduce that. Shareholders don't give a shit about working hours. They just care about revenue and expenses.
This is purely a management issue. Upper management might insist on these metrics as a way to crack down on productivity. In my personal experience as a dev, middle management doesn't give about metrics unless someone (upper management) forces them to. Because at the end of the day, its just a pain in the ass hounding subordinates about trivial shit if theyre actually performing where it matters. So anecdotally, I will say this seems to exclusively come from upper management. But I'm sure people have different experiences.
The problem is that upper management is usually so divorced from the real day to day problems that the easy win they can take to their superiors is stupid shit like apm metrics.
You are being far too generous to many of your colleagues. I assure you there are plenty of “peons” and lower/middle management playing teachers pet who enable this crap. I’m not saying you are strictly exception, but you are definitely not representative of a significant portion of leadership.
This problem becomes even more asinine when you consider that the whole point of the Return to Office drive is the "Magic Hallway Conversation" that happens during those informal break time periods.
Also unless you can hyperfocus and literally exhaust yourself in those 8h, you can't do any type of white collar job for 8h a day. It's impossible to be mentally productive for that amount of time day in day out. Forget doing anything creative.
Yeah, this is why it’s time we have an honest conversation to seriously consider a 24 hour work week.
Productivity has gone up consistently since the 70s while wages have stagnated. It’s going up at an even faster rate now with AI assistant tooling. Workers deserve to enjoy some of the rewards from that increased output, and I can’t think of a better way than letting them enjoy life more outside of work.
If you work in an office job you will find that it’s all a scam. You must work very slow. Otherwise, you get rewarded with MORE WORK.
The beauty of it all is that you can be the most productive person at the company and save the company wads of cash, but show up 15 min late for work a few times and you're fired.
I was written up due to having tasteful stripes on my otherwise business casual shoes. Two stripes. I’m a non client facing computer monkey. Everything in the office is a weird game of house that everyone has just forgotten that they’re playing.
It's a juggle between having too much work and being bored for 7 hours.
I dont think wanting to use your free time effectively is stupid.
How is that what I said? The stupid is about wanting such absurd things instead of actual productivity.
Finally. My low sensitivity for gaming is about to pay off.
"Did you see that email?"
"My cursor is on its way to check"
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.
There fact that I have been told seriously, more than 0 times, to work more slowly in my life is insane to me.
It's a rachet effect. If you do things quickly, often enough, it'll just be expected. You won't be rewarded for it.
And you better be able to keep up that pace constantly for the next ten years.
You can certainly deliver things early, just try to stay at a sustainable pace.
I know people who use the mouse jiggler. They get all their work done and are good employees.
I'm a manager at a large company and have employees who work mostly from home. I don't bother checking if their picture has a green or yellow mark next to their name. If they respond to my emails quickly and get their overall work done, I'm happy.
Their productivity is naturally increased because they aren't force to re-authenticate on their laptops because they were inactive for 5 minute while reading a report or going to the bathroom. Or worse, if they have multiple laptops because of security or compliance reasons, and one will inevitably be inactive forcing yet another sign in.
This is the real reason I have one of those damn mouse jigglers. The timeouts on our laptop are CRAZY short, like 5 minutes tops. Just stepping away for some coffee or to take a shit then I have to re-authenticate. Heaven forbid I make myself a toasted bagel or something!
It's even worse as I work 95% inside multiple virtual machines in the cloud that also timeout (and in some cases shut down) so there are multiple layers of password +2fa just to get back to whatever I was doing.
So yeah, $10 USB device from Amazon allows me to not spend a hour a day just having to re-auth.
BAGELS ARE FORBIDDEN, WORK SLAVE!!! /s
I added 10% to my estimate for login and authentication issues. The manager was not amused.
My previous work started cracking down on having us write down what we were up to in the day to the minute. I was doing 5m blocks, got in trouble. I switched to the by the minute bullshit and also logged the time spent logging my time and they were not amused either but couldn't really do anything about it. That whole job was as much time convincing them I was working as time spent actually working, which meant I ended up not working very much because I felt strangled all the time and I had built a bunch of effective ways to lie to them about my day
You had to log your time to the minute? I would quit instantly if my job got down to 5m increments, fuck that shit. Sounds like it is a former job so you made the right decision getting out of there.
Yeah it was bad. I really needed that job since I was saving to move to Seattle and most the other jobs paid in rejected potatoes. I was there for a few months after the track by minute stuff happened so not great but I did get out of there
How pathetic is the state of business that it wastes so much time we have to do that?
Pharmaceutical sector. They can be very paranoid.
Yup, I hate that Microsoft chat programs no longer give you the option of showing available whenever signed in. Has to force it's own system of timeouts and away. So people will start emailing me thinking I'm away when I'm just waiting for a ping. Ended up installing Caffeine and having it press Shift so that the system will recognize that I'm actually alive and available.
You didn't need admin privileges to install that?
It was a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure I just put it in the windows Startup folder. It's not installed as a service or anything.
There often are portable versions of programs that you don't have to install.
I just tried. IT is one step ahead, the site is blocked 😂
Could do it on a personal computer and load it on USB? Idk, just thinking out loud right now
I could email it to myself, (Flash Drives are prevented) but it's not worth it. I am extremely fortunate that my company does not give two shits about micromanaging, and so no one really cares about my status. It's just annoying to me that it goes yellow so quickly, but it's not worth the risk.
There’s an old but IMO still very relevant white paper by Microsoft titled “So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users”. It argues that security measures often cost more in employee time (and hence wages) than the potential benefit. It’s an interesting read and I think about it whenever our chief of security cooked up with another asinine security measure.
I have Teams installed on my phone (in a special work partition). A mouse jiggler let's me move around the house, go on walks, change the laundry all while being able to immediately respond to anyone reaching out.
Management is pretty bad about actually doing their jobs to keep a steady stream of work coming my way. They're too disorganized to actually plan effectively so there's always one team under crunch while everyone else is waiting around for them to finish.
If I ever actually tell them I don't have enough work to do, they'll happily fill my time with extremely obvious bullshit busywork (like, why don't you take yet another HR diversity survey?) So I just don't say anything and let the work trickle in and everyone seems really happy with this setup (3 straight years of very positive reviews). A mouse jiggler letting me be 'on call' during the slow months has been huge for my sanity.
Not all work can be parallelised.
Ah, a lower end manager I see. The higher ups wouldn't be smart enough to get that.
That's what salaried positions are supposed to be like. You're getting paid for the job, not the hours.
You’d like to think that, but the last several years have proven beyond a doubt that they’re much more concerned that we’re sitting at our desks during set hours than any actual outcomes.
The more the old lies are proven as lies, the closer we get to the truth:
Just as important as "getting the job done" is the notion among many employers that they truly believe that with their payroll they are buying human lives and happiness. That if they are paying a worker for their time and labor that they are entitled to also dictate how that person feels about it...and if that worker is not sufficiently miserable, then they can be squeezed further.
I used to think that it was purely about money...that the idea was that if a worker ever got "all caught up" and had free time, then they should be generating more wealth for their employer in some other way...but then we had the pandemic.
The pandemic where lots and lots of workers had to suddenly do the whole work from home thing. And in that time, these employers were thrilled to go along with it, since it meant continuing to make money. And in that time, most office workers eventually turned out to be happier and even more productive.
...yet in the wake of the pandemic, many of these employers have chosen less productivity in exchange for bringing their employees back to offices. The only explanation for bringing employees back in who were happier and more productive from home is that these employers value the image of control and the ability to make their workers unhappy more than they value productivity and money.
The alternative explanation is that the employers have investments in corporate real estate and don't want their investments to lose value. Personally, I think that the the people at the top probably have investments in corporate real estate, while middle managers are the way you describe.
I don't think the people at the top usually care what the employees are doing so long as they're making money, and being in the office means they're keeping corporate real estate prices afloat. As such, being in office makes money for the executives, even if that money isn't made directly through the company.
Middle managers on the other hand, likely don't have any significant corporate real estate investments, nor are they as likely get significant bonuses for company productivity. As such, it makes more sense for their motive to be more about control than it is money.
That said, I do know some executives do indeed see employees the way you've described them; an infamous example comes to mind about the Australian real estate executive talking about how they needed to bring workers to heel and crash the economy to remind workers that they work for the company and not the other way around. I'm just not sure that many executives actually think about their workers in that much depth. I think if they did then we'd see a stark contrast of very ethical companies and highly abusive companies instead of the mix of workplace cultures we have now; because some ceos would come to the conclusion that a happy worker is a good worker, while others would become complete control freaks.
think about their workers in that much depth
They absolutely don't. It's a combination of apathy, an aversion to recognising a workers specific value, and the utility of letting them spin their wheels while you ignore them, so they don't have the cognitive capacity to do something bad for you like find a different work environment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does
Seeing the world through this lens has been both freeing and disheartening...
No, that's not how employment works in this country. Employers pay people for the right to tell them what to do. You, as an employee, have sold your time to someone else. You are literally paid for the hours. Your employer is paid for the job. You are paid to do the things your employer tells you to do, which usually is part of the job they were paid to do.
Ofc all of this is subject to a whole mess of laws, regulations, policies, and whatever other horseshit HR decides to try. The important lesson is that you as an employee should NEVER put in work beyond the time you are paid to work.
That's why I used the qualifier "supposed to be"
Because it's not about getting work done, it's about having power over your employees.
Found the answer.
Slaves is what they want and we fail to provide it to them.
Even if someone spends half the time watching YouTube, if all the work is done... who cares?
They care because it means you could be doing even more work in the time allotted.
It’s the “if you have time to lean you have time to clean” of the white collar world, why would they be paying the peasants if the toil isn’t visible
Another way of putting it is that it's the "I paid for X, I want to use all of the X" of the upper management world.
These people are salaried. They don't owe companies hours.
No, they don't actually owe them shit. But the employer thinks they do.
"I paid for this traffic light, therefore I want to use all three bulbs at once"
capital sucks up all the surplus value of your labor. you don't get to keep it.
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
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.
"because they might finish their work in 2 hours, which means they're stealing 6 hours of pay from us!" - Idiots who spent dollars obsessing over pennies.
I mean, if you can do it in 2 hours I think it's pretty fair to want you to do something else, but if it's whole day thing and you finish an hour early you're probably not going to be effective in that last hour anyway.
That's not the best time to start something completely new
This just punishes the people that are better or at least more efficient than their peers.
What they want and what they pay me for are never the same.
One thing to keep in mind: with "knowledge work", the work is never done - there's always more to do.
So for middle management it's really hard to measure productivity, so we get this nonsense.
This is also why Agile project management is so popular - it provides a daily metric of what's going on, what people are doing. It forces a granularity of communication (which for those of us with lots to do, gets pretty fucking annoying).
Exactly. I kind of don’t give a shit about how my employees manage their time. If they get the thing done when we both agreed it should reasonably be done by, and they’re reasonably available to support their coworkers during business hours, then they can play video games for half the day for all I care.
You measure the results, not the clicks.
That means you have to do actual management. Talk to people. Keep on top of workloads. Rebalance things. Build relationships. They don't have time for that - they have their own tasks to do. So they rely on the green checkmark to mean that lil Davey is being a good busy bee.
I don't know why things got to be this way.But then you can't fire them and not have to call it a re org.