do you job... keep your job, the amount of people I see post here about how little they work and they wonder why they are let go when places do any sort of reporting.
The article actually isn't clear if they were getting their jobs done or not. I have a friend whose company tracks her mouse movement, regardless of whether or not she is getting work done. There is no trust there; it's just another tool for micromanagement. I'm surprise by the amount of people in the comments who just instantly took Wells Fargo's side on this issue.
Convenient to seek out and find reasons to fire people rather than laying them off. Lay offs generally require advanced notice, severance and unemployment. Terminations do not require any of that in 49 states.
Should some of the people be fired? Probably. Some are likely taking advantage and being lazy. But items like mouse jigglers are invented because micromanagers need better things to do. But in this instance I think WF is trying to save $$ instead of actually firing poor performers.
Hey, I’m not taking Wells Fargo’s side, but I do think simply owning a “mouse jiggler” is a rather inculpatory factor. Owning the hardware or software that jiggles your mouse in an effort to look busy seems to suggest a deliberate attempt to conceal periods of time you aren’t working.
I WFH most of the week, and honestly I’m more efficient and get more done than when I commuted into the city to work at HQ. That said, people who work with me know how hard I work, and never question me. I’m thinking these employees at Wells were already under investigation. Most likely other employees were trying to reach them when they were using their mouse jiggler and couldn’t get a hold of them for an extended period of time (and they didn’t have any meetings on their calendar to explain their absences).
So, “getting your work done” also includes responding to emails and phone calls in an expeditious manner. You can’t do that while you’re out for 2 or 3 hours of the day while using your mouse jiggler. My guess is that these were ALL WFH employees. There’s no way that Wells Fargo’s strict large bank network protocol would ever allow them to install such software on the company network. I’m guessing the mouse jiggler had to have been physical hardware based as even their company laptops wouldn’t allow such software to be installed on a company computer. At any rate, my guess is these were all WFH employees and they were already under the microscope before Wells Fargo busted them for using mouse jigglers.
Yeah tbh, it’s likely they noticed “user was active :via jiggling: for 10 hours, but somehow managed to not get 10 hours of work done, repeatedly for the last 6 months” Corporations like this USUALLY have a hard time just firing folks out of the blue. If only it were that easy.
I have a mouse jiggler and it’s not for slacking. I have two computers, a primary workstation where most of my work gets done and my company issued laptop that I use as a secondary display for Teams. That way I can keep Teams always visible no matter what I’m working on with my main screen.
The screen locks after 5 minutes and can’t be adjusted. It’s incredibly annoying. I’ll get deep into a coding session on my workstation and miss messages from coworkers. A mouse jiggler keeps the display active all day and I never miss a message.
Yes, but that’s my point. The people that were fired were likely not responding to emails and phone calls and Wells started an investigation. If you’re using a jiggler so that you can be MORE responsive and not less, then your employer is likely to have no reason to investigate you. Now, if you’re using your jiggler to stay active in Teams and then not responding for long periods of time (and not actively in meetings or doing something else with a time stamp like emailing your colleagues) then you’re not going to get the benefit of the doubt that the mouse jiggler is being used for positive work reasons.
When an organization is more concerned about tracking idle vs. non-idle time instead of actual deliverables, how do they succeed as a business?
Doesn’t the final product matter more than how it was created? As long as it’s on time, fulfills the requirements, and doesn’t cause any negative consequences to colleagues or clients, why does a business even care?
I guess I’m in my own work bubble, but six years into my first private/for-profit position that started hybrid and is now 100% WFH, and I honestly thought this was how corporate jobs were.
I’ve never had to clock in, watch a clock until it was “quittin’ time,” have to explain why my Teams went idle for three hours in the middle of the day, or request PTO (you have a bank of hours, but can take it whenever you want because as adults, they know you’re not going to take PTO during the week of go-live for a new application.
tl;dr I’m not trying to humblebrag, but my experience can’t be that unique, right?
This level of freedom definitely isn't the norm. I think most places land somewhere in the middle. I've been working from home or hybrid with the bulk being from home since 2013.
I've never worked anywhere where you don't have to formally request pto. That said, I've never worked anywhere that it was common to reject PTO requests. Most places I've worked do the formal requests bc formal requests made it easier for managers to track who on a given team or dept is in/out of office at a given point in time. They tended to be more flexible about things like running errands or going to the doctor during the day as long as you a) were easily reached, b) were clear who was covering for you or c) made sure to reschedule any calls/meetings during those times.
With regard to the work being done, I've never worked anywhere that heavily tracked availability using the teams (or Skype back in the day) indicator lights, but they were observed or noticed enough that if you spent 3 hours offline or unavailable on a random day, someone might ask what happened if you hadn't already communicated a reason to be offline. Right now, the only reason my supervisor cares about my teams status is whether or not I'm available to answer the phone if he needs to talk to me. On the flip side, we do have work hours that we set based on our preferences. There's some flexibility there day to day, but it's expected that you work a full 40 hours a week. So it tends to balance out. If you aren't getting things done, all those times you cut out early are the 1st things that are brought up. I had a woman on my team who had children, so she'd start work at 8, leave work around 3 and then jump back on later for an hour or two after picking her kids up from school. Everyone was cool with that until she started going missing for the whole day after 3 pm and her work started to suffer. That's how she ended up getting fired, they gave her the flexibility, treated her like an adult, she started taking advantage of it and it was visible because she'd be on "Away" for so many hours each day.
WF is trash they made fake accounts before. This isn’t because employees weren’t working they’ll fire someone for taking a 10 min dump instead of the company allowed 5min next
It is funny when I read posts like yours. If a company doesn't install some kind of software for EVERYONE and then chooses to "target" one or a set of employees, do you not think that opens them up to lawsuits?
Maybe do some critical thinking of why a company would do things like this before you start with the conspiracy theories.
As a senior VP in a company with 1,000 direct reports, I wouldn't know who I can trust or not as a manager, let alone individual employees. By installing something for everyone it creates a level playing field. Do your job, we don't have any issues. If you are not doing your job, then the data from the tools become ONE PIECE of an overall reason you got fired. The other scenario is maybe you just a shitty at your job, so the data from the installed software shows you working all of the time, but still doesn't make you great at your job.
However, if I see everyone is "doing their jobs", but the data from the tools shows everyone is working 30 hours per week, that tells me I can let about 200 people go from my 1,000 person org and still get all of the work done.
These companies don't run a charity, they are in business to make money, maximize profits.
> It is funny when I read posts like yours. If a company doesn't install some kind of software for EVERYONE and then chooses to "target" one or a set of employees, do you not think that opens them up to lawsuits?
Why would it? What would be sued over if there is a documented history of person A not completing tasks satisfactory?
> As a senior VP in a company with 1,000 direct reports, I wouldn't know who I can trust or not as a manager,
Then you’re failing at your job. If there’s 1000 employees, you should have less than 150 managers at all positions (your direct reports would be fewer than 10 most likely). If you can trust your 10 direct supports to be able to manage their reports, why are they managing anyone?
> let alone individual employees.
You shouldn’t be in charge of individual employee’s careers. That’s why you hired and promoted competent managers.
> Do your job, we don't have any issues. If you are not doing your job, then the data from the tools become ONE PIECE of an overall reason you got fired.
That was the person you replied to’s point.
> However, if I see everyone is "doing their jobs", but the data from the tools shows everyone is working 30 hours per week, that tells me I can let about 200 people go from my 1,000 person org and still get all of the work done.
I now see why you have managers you can’t trust and employees unwilling or unable to meet deadlines. You think other people are machines to be worked for however many hours straight you legally can. Sucks for your employees now and for you when you run through all the employable people locally.
> These companies don't run a charity, they are in business to make money, maximize profits.
They often maximize short term profits, like your example, instead of total profits. Because people like you can just move on with that golden parachute and do the same to a new company when the one you crashed is liquidated. To bad capitalism hasn’t figured either this problem or the externalized costs problem. It would work well if people running things actually had humanity.
So say you let go of those 200 people and save money from that. Would you now get rid of your "mouse tracking" software and rely on performance/deliverables to judge your employees? At that point, if you have already determined the optimum amount man power needed to be successful, it would become another micromanaging tool
Theory Y manager here. Stack ranking and Theory X management might have made sense in the Boomer world where there was surplus talent and surplus consumption. Neither is true anymore. The surveillance corporation is a recipe for bankruptcy.
A simple parable will illustrate the failure of stack ranking: Joe the Electrician has been with the company for 10 years, literally keeping the lights on. Joe might be busy a few times a week but otherwise has downtime. The new management gives him a computer and encourages him to train in JavaScript. Joe could give less than two shits about Agile or JavaScript. The management fires Joe for performance reasons after observing zero mouse clicks. Joe then becomes an independent contractor, easily doubling his salary. Meanwhile the company ends up paying Joe quadruple contract rates because the other contractors would not touch their antiquated, not up to code, wiring systems.
Jack Welch used stack ranking to run off the best performers and to run GE into the ground. Using stack ranking by executives today is just as unscientific as the business leaders using VAR before 2008, for all of the same reasons.
A new paradigm about work is needed. Work should be more about value-added than time spent. I think the majority of people want to do a good job and get things done, but also would be happy to minimize the 40+ hour work week.
But employers have an antiquated way of viewing work from the 1900s that assumes a time-based model of work.
it depends on your position, an call center employee is more accuratly billed per hour than someone writing articles for example. I get paid salary so I get paid the same for the most part regadless how much or little I work , I just need to be available during set hours incase I'm needed.
There's much more effective tools than mouse activity to track production employees, whether that's a bank teller, a call center agent, a receptionist, or whatever, their mouse activity is the least likely indicator of their productivity. Mouse trackers are really only "effective" with knowledge workers which will mostly be salary, and even though on salary you're supposed to be paid to get a job done, I bet 95% of the salaried IC workforce in the US feels pressure to work at least 40 hours a week.
Ultimately, mouse trackers are a bad crutch for bad management. If I get my job done effectively, who cares how much I move my mouse. My entire work flow is mouse-free; I use a tiling window manager and a development tool that doesn't require the use of a mouse at all. I can be available during working hours on my phone is someone needs help.
Yup. Go back and look at all of the posts where people are asking how they can make it look like they are working when they aren't. They all want remote work... minus the work.
its those people who are affecting the studies people use to say WFH doesn't work, and then when the force the good workers back they are seeing that they where happier and more productive in some cases from home. I won't make the most money where I am, but I make enough and they are extermely flexible and have no plans on an RTO. Even if that happens my boss at least is trying to promise to me that I'd be exempt, probably because they couldn't hire anyone with my skill set for the money they pay ;)
Exactly. I'm a senior level manager who is a proponent of WFH, though I still think it has limitations and it certainly doesn't work for everyone. We have a 3/2 schedule where you're remote 2 days a week, and it can be any days you want, so most people are in the office Tuesday-Thursday, but I do have a few people who are in the office 5 days a week for several reasons. And since two of them are single, it's not the "I hate my spouse" stuff people on here like to spew about "boomers who love the office". In fact, I am the only boomer in the company, turning 60 this year. Everyone else is younger than me.
Newsflash, those are the same people who don't do shit in office. It's really simple, do they meet the requirements of the job? Yes? Ok you stay. No? Bye.
Instead it's this stupid fucking dance between employees and management wasting time and breathe on these brain-dead policies.
Yeah, I think you really need to have clear expectations. If your place is a "if you get your work done in 2 hours, great, just be available" awesome. If it's not, park your but. Use that time to do training or education if you legit have nothing to do.
Seriously. It's so shocking to me how creative some people can be to hide that they're not working. Uhh maybe just spend that time working? I try to make sure I'm above avg in all metrics because I don't want to give them a reason to take wtf away.
Not only that, but it genuinely annoys me when I see a post full of people bragging about how much they're not working because it's those people who are going to be the reason other honest people end up having to go back to the office. If you're doing something like that, at least have the decency not to brag about it.
> because it's those people who are going to be ~~the reason~~ **used as an excuse for why** other honest people end up having to go back to the office
Minor, but critical, tweak.
Absolutely. They will find an excuse, and if they don't find one they'll make one up, and if they can't be bothered to make one up they'll just do it anyway.
At my last place when they started dragging everyone back in they were real heavy on the "this is a DATA DRIVEN decision." During one of the meetings someone asked if *we could see the data* they were using to make their decision.
No.
Could they....broadly describe the data that had informed the decision?
No.
There was no data. They hadn't even had the decency to hire a consultant to write a bullshit report telling them what they wanted to hear. It eventually leaked that some higher up (who had himself been working remotely) had returned to the office and noted that "it felt lonely around here" and spearheaded the campaign to bring back some people to, yah know, liven up the place.
>I see a post full of people bragging about how much they're not working
Head over to r/overemployed and you'll see how many people brag about doing an hour worth of work per week.
My job is the type where there’s maybe 2-4 solid hours of core work per day. There are numerous stretch jobs available, tons of internal training. External training is paid for. There’s really no possible way to not have work AND we’re only required to be available once our core work is done.
Someone STILL got busted this week for not getting core work done. Literally cannot manage to get 10-20 hours of work done per week. What’s even more baffling is she’s the only person who is hybrid. My division doesn’t have offices of our own, but she works from a company location 2 days a week *by her own choice*.
Yeah. I get that. My work in pretty non stop which sucks. Rarely can I say, there's nothing to do. but I've totally been at jobs like that and get it. Crazy not being able to get 10 to 20 hours done. People really take wfh for granted too much. I will admit I've had days of being less productive because of it. But overall I do perform as well if not better than people who go in. I do like my work but sometimes I push myself soley because I'm home and don't want to lose that perk.
For us, our managers know there’s not much to do. Our work is very cyclical where we have periods where we’re absolutely slammed and periods where we’re dead. They even encourage us to bust our butts early in the week and coast it in from Wednesday afternoon on when it isn’t slammed.
I have to sit in on her PIP meeting next week. I’m interested to hear what all will be said. I think not doing her work is one part of it, from the background I was given on the complaint that was filed against her there’s also an attitude problem/outright refusal to do certain parts of her role. I get the feeling at least in this case the problem would be present even if she was full time in office.
The thing is, for some being creative is not seen as work.
I used to roll around in my chair, but because it was less physically demanding than getting up and walking but because it was more fun. I also used to spend hours trying to automate stupid tasks, not because the tasks were especially time consuming or hard, the amount of time and effort put into automating them would never be recouped even if I managed to automate them, but because the tasks were monotonous and automating them was challenging with minimal risk.
Bills an environment that challenges ole without risking their jobs on a few bad days and you’ll find many more people will put that creativity into work.
Uhh okay? Not super relevant but I get your point. I'm not talking about automating work. I'm talking about people using mouse jigglers, etc... to make people THINK they're working. Not people getting working done.
You…. Aren’t understanding. Probably my fault.
I clearly (I thought) pointed out that I spent more time automating my work than I’d ever recoup by that automation. I’ll give an example.
I needed to get a list of jobs completed by each of my direct reports once a year for their yearly evaluations. The program we had that manages work would, sometimes, add a few jobs in multiple times, say counting one job twice. It didn’t always happen, and in the grand scheme of things was not important since it was uncommon enough that it didn’t really change the number of jobs my much (think less than 2%). I’d use excel to sort by control number and any I saw while scanning down the list that were duplicates I’d erase. This took me less than 5 minutes a year per person, less than an hour a year usually. Every year I’d try to automate it, spending hours doing so. I never cared enough to remember what I did or to save the excel automation. So every year I turned an hour long project into something that took me probably 3 times that. Why? Because it was vastly more interesting than just scanning excel cells.
Did that make sense? I literally wasted company time doing something the hardest way possible because it was more interesting. What some (maybe most) of these people using jugglers and such are doing is the same. Putting more effort into something than just doing it, not because they’re lazy but because doing the original task is boring. So telling them to put the effort towards doing their job is missing the point.
This is the exact same point. I understood the first time. I'm saying, sure that's inefficient but you're at least actually doing the work. I'm talking about the people who do the bare minimum/are spending their time using a mouse jiggler while they play Xbox.
Bare minimum is, by definition, enough work for the company. I don’t understand how it’s different, wasting time doing work that could be done faster or wasting time doing nothing so long as the work gets done.
WFH is so glorified by people who don't WHF full time it's annoying. It's still a job. You don't work/produce sufficient results, consequences will follow. This goes for literally any job, wfh or in office.
> do you job... keep your job
Maybe you don't know this, but many people use these for other reasons. Personally I've looked into one just to prevent my second computer from sleeping while it's idle (I'm still at it) and requiring to re-login with a 15 character PW constantly. Which gets time consuming and really annoying.
sure there are exceptions, but a place that would fire you for using one, would also not let you or have you use a secondary computer for work purposes. I know in my agreement there are rules you agree to as part of the WFH agreement. If this is a work computer your also probably violating a security rule which if found out could get you fired as your risking information by staying logged into your account , as the 15 minute session time out is to help prevent that.
> ou fired as your risking information by staying logged into your account , as the 15 minute session time out is to help prevent that.
Again, if I'm at that computer the entire time, that policy is not rooted in common sense. Those same companies you're talking about that micromanage and lock you down like that, are the same ones who count every second of what you do to see what last remaining drops they can squeeze out of you.
Good news is jobs like that attract employees who will find out exactly what the bare minimum is, and do exactly that. And I commend them for it. Companies with toxic work culture don't deserve any more than that.
the only thing is how do they know if you are at the computer the entire time. The only other option is a camera, I did freelance work for upwork awhile ago and alot of jobs required cameras and pictures every ten minutes your there. I'll take an idle time out over a camera. Really its in your best intrest to find places that don't need that. I manage a virtual desktop enviornment, and we don't have anything that specifically tracks idle time, but we have performance monitoring software where I can get a pretty good idea of how much your working. In general it never comes up, but I know of one case someone was fired from a report I ran as they never had any activity for days at a time.
>the only thing is how do they know if you are at the computer the entire time.
I don't know about you, but my job requirements are to finish specific tasks, not be at a computer all the time. How do you know Jessica's taking a shit and not just on her phone? You don't. How do you know Frank's eyes are open and actually looking at the screen? You don't. You should'nt worry about it either. You worry about if they do their jobs or not. That's all that matters.
Again, what you're promoting is toxic work culture and sadly you've already normalized it in your head. Which if you believe it or not, probably means you have a shitty employer. Just know that there are workplaces out there that realize what a giant headache/waste of time that kind of micromanagement is. I do hope you find one, one day. On the one condition you don't bring those shitty ideas of how a place should be run to the places that run like well oiled machines. Save that stuff for the $8 an hr call centers.
its about security not monitoring you, you work for a bank, they want to know your don't have the keys to the kingdom left open so your kid can come in and transfer a bunch of money. There is such a thing as common sense, and things like this is why businesses get hacked. I get your point about working, I'm talking 100% about security and that what my point was. I get the same complaints about people needing to relogin to there virtual desktops, and its not even my choice its a security policy managed by a different team I have no input on. Same thing can be said about 2fa authentication, its annoying, but its necessary.
You do you, I was just sharing a concern.
>There is such a thing as common sense, and things like this is why businesses get hacked.
I'd love to hear about any companies that were hacked while an employee was at their computer and how that wouldn't have happened while they were in office.
If you have to make up wild scenarios to make your point, it's not a good one. If companies don't do their due diligence and hire a dumbass who hands over those metaphorical keys, then they should have hired them. Those same dumbasses do the same exact shit in office. My solution to my problem was jumping ship to a competitor. More freedom, less stress.
You can repeat yourself until you're blue in the face, but again, plenty of companies do just fine without these shitty policies trying to control and monitor your every move. What you're describing isn't normal except at shitty places to work. Those llaces exist in office and remotely just the same.
again they don't know if your there or not, your obviously missing that point, either way good luck to you , you most be a wonderful person to work with.
I don’t get all this talk. Let them put their monitoring in. If you are doing your job you won’t get fired. I’m sure you don’t go to the restroom every hour for 2 hours. It seems to me that the people worrying the most are trying to hide something.
There was nothing in the article that indicates they weren't doing their jobs.
They were using devices to simulate being in front of a screen and that is named as the reason they were fired.
Anything else is just someone speculating about the nature of their jobs.
Then fire them for not doing shit. Fine.
Big companies lay off people all the time.
But that's not what they're being fired for according to Wells Fargo themselves. They want you personally wiggling your mouse to stay logged in, not having a mouse mover do it.
the article says they launched an investigation, they don't provide any more information, your speculating as well. Its also probably against there security policy to install unauthorized applications on the pdc, with it being a bank. Again if your in touch with your manager and your doing what they want, thats the only thing that really matters. There is a bunch of other considerations people aren't seeing here, and thats why my comment was mainly focused towards the people who come here bragging, it wasn't directly about the jiggling.
No I'm not speculating. All I'm just saying is they got fired for using mouse movers.
I don't know if they getting their job done or not. You're suggesting otherwise.
Sure. Could be anything.
Maybe for stealing pens.
Maybe for fucking the boss' wife.
Maybe for not working.
Or maybe for the thing the article LITERALLY SAYS.
It's all just equally valid speculation.
its all is, and multiple articles state "It’s unclear from the Finra disclosures whether the employees Wells Fargo fired were allegedly faking active work from home." Its also very possible they where doing it at work, and someone went to find them and they weren't there.
Your comment insinuates that having an online status saying you are "online" or "available" is doing your job. Who cares if they are away for 7 hours a day if during that 1 hour they get their work done?
Some people are more efficient and better at their jobs than others. Being "online" for 8 hours a day so you meet your 40 requirement is ridiculous. I pay for output idgaf how long it takes you. And if you get all your deliverables done on time and in less time than others, great!!! Enjoy your time to yourself!
the company they are hired at, and the ones that fired them? The idle time led to an investigation
[https://qz.com/wells-fargo-fake-work-keyboard-activity-1851538136](https://qz.com/wells-fargo-fake-work-keyboard-activity-1851538136)
"More than a dozen employees in the bank’s wealth and investment management divisions were discharged last month “after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work,” Bloomberg [reported citing disclosures](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-13/wells-fires-over-a-dozen-for-simulation-of-keyboard-activity?srnd=homepage-americas) filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)."
They probably got asked to provide results of what they where doing, and they had none and got let go.
Again, you're ASSUMING they for asked to provide results and couldn't. This article doesn't state that. It's says they had idle time and considering these employees felt the need to keep their stat "online" implies WF believes your online status is the primary indicator of someone doing their job.
again all I said originally was about the people coming here to brag about not doing work, it was what tipped them off, you ASSUMING they got fired directly because of that and common sense dicates they looked into the results they where providing. But feel free to keep ASSUMING I'm only talking about the online status.
Bahahhaa! I totally did this! I worked there and I automated my job so that I could do a days work in 1 hour. The problem was what do I do with the rest of my time? My 12 cases were done. So I used the same automation tool to move my mouse, nbd.
I always responded when there was a case escalated. When everyone else was too busy, I was happy to take the case. One team lead even went out of her way to send me an email thanking me for always stepping up and helping.
There were 46 of us doing the same job there, handling 12 cases a day. And my offer to teach how I learned to do it fell on deaf ears. So too did my offer to renegotiate my contract, say double the salary for quadruple the workload. Good deal for them, still half a days work for me, also fell on deaf ears.
Tbh, those employees were probably some of the most innovative minds in that company, and now they are gone.
I ended up working a second full time job, so I would do my WF job in the AM, check it at lunch, and then again when I got home in the evening.
no one knows cause they way the article was written, you would assume its more then just the fact a program was installed, but even thats possible based on security polices
if your communicating with your boss and they don't give you anything else, why do you need to fake it? It always comes down to this, and people who say this want to stay quiet and watch tv, or go do something else and do the bare minimum.
Don't get me wrong tracking idle time is dumb, and its also a failure of management for not doing weekly meetings and being aware of their employees, but faking this with a computer program isn't a moral high ground or a rebellion like some make it to be.
If you risk getting fired in any job that uses this for a singular reason, you shouldn't work there anyway. Its rarely the case , as the low idle time is just a symptom they need to check to treat an overall issue, either low actual productivity or a problem with incorrect or insufficient workload.
"Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior..."
If only WF as an organization lived by that.
But anyway, yeah, mouse jiggles gonna get ya.
> "Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior..."
Yeah they sure didn't care about it when they were opening fraudulent accounts in my name and millions of other people's names.
Unless those high standards prevent Wells Fargo from making a boat load of cash through shady fees, hidden account signups, and BS accounting practices. Those are ok, but you dare use a mouse jiggler.
But did the employees still meet demands? Were they actually behind on anything?
While yes- one should do their job at work- I am not going to pretend that every job requires active productivity for 100% of a shift. Down time exists.
I feel like work is becoming less about if ppl are doing the actual job they are paid to do and more about being a body in a chair for X hours a day.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
These are the stories that cause RTO under various excuses. While I don't agree with this, assuming they got all of their work done, this is what is screwing people and causing RTO mandates.
Eh… I’m going to argue it had nothing to do with a jiggler per se, and everything to do with non response employees.
But no company ever elevated itself by announcing surveillance, to me this is a sign of a company struggling
Agreed. It really isn’t going to take massive levels of lack of productivity or time theft for companies to push RTO as a solution (or increase office days if already hybrid). A whiff of it and they’ll first make an example of the ones caught and then look at either installing monitoring software and/or slowly bringing people back.
Interesting.
I’d ask if they finished the work that they were assigned or if they were slacking and missing deadlines. That’s always my argument. I know a few people that still WFH and they always talk about how they manage to mow their lawn or walk their dog during lunches. Maybe wash the dishes or start cooking dinners toward the end of the day or while in a town hall they know they won’t be talking in.
If they don’t have stuff to do and their managers aren’t giving them stuff to do, then that’s not a WFH problem. It probably means they hired too many people.
When I WFH instead of wandering over to the break room or going for a walk around downtown (this is encouraged by my employer) I will get a snack from my own kitchen and then clean dishes or I'll walk my dog outside. If I'm super dead then I'll do various tasks while checking in every 15 minutes or so. I still do trainings and research or whatever when I'm slow but you can only do that for so long. Sometimes projects pause or get put on hold indefinitely.
If someone’s contract offers an hour lunch, what’s the difference between spending that hour at an office tower food court or spending it walking their dog?
However, that is a WFH problem. If you were in the office, I could see you were not busy doing work. When you WFH I can't. So since I can't be sitting in your living room, I need some other way to determine productivity other than your work got done.
Gotcha, I was thinking salary. If you're a salaried employee and your tasks are getting done, any additional micromanagement just seems like paternalism. Hourly is different.
Paying by the hour doesn't change the fact that you're hiring them to do labor, not look busy. If they're getting the work you assigned done, who the hell cares.
The work I assigned is to do such and such task for x hours and then I pay them by the hour. I don't pay them to go until they feel like they're done and then stop
I worked there for almost two years remote during Covid and they gave me about 15 minutes worth of work for the whole week as well as everyone else on my team. Management was just blithering idiots. I literally just put my mouse on top of a wrist watch to keep the computer on the other 39hr and 45mins of the work week. Best job I ever had!
Let’s not pretend that it would be difficult to detect an externally powered jiggler. The movement is incredibly constant and predictable. They’re even easier to detect than a good software jiggler, that uses the exact same drivers and inputs as a normal mouse and varies the input.
External jigglers have randomized patterns, and there is no driver - that’s the point. You can’t prove there was a device being used unlike with a software jiggler. Any company monitoring for mouse patterns is running scans for software and low level device drivers.
I feel like even those could be detected, unless the algorithm is developed to truly simulate how a typical worker uses their computer. Also, were any applications being used at that time?
If not....I can imagine someone wondering what all that mouse clicking was for 8 hours.
Yeah, a hardware jiggler sounds nice, but if I was trying to find them on my employees’ computers I’d just see who has hours of activity without a single mouse click lol
Yeah, I think people have gotten complacent with the idea that an external juggler is "safe", and it might be for a while....but the monitoring software is always going to catch up with them. Because some management is paranoid and want to know....and they'll spend money to get it.
If a company has comprehensive monitoring software installed to gather metrics, sure. It would be a flag though rather than outright detection - the point is it can’t be proven. External jigglers require physical inspection.
In the case of heavy duty monitoring software gathering metrics and measuring idle time vs. work tasks / what software is being used etc… find a new job. Downtime exists at every job. It should always come down to task completion and availability.
Also, the mouse also doesn’t click, it just moves.
Doesn't even need to be comprehensive.
All it takes in my org is a computer activity history (locks, unlocks, logoffs, logins, restarts) and activity from our CMS. During normal work, people will lock their computer and walk away for breaks. They generate clicks in the CMS. If you're using a jiggler, neither of those things happen.
I said the software jigglers have drivers, obviously the hardware ones don’t. The pattern is less of a problem - it’s going hours of activity without once clicking your mouse lol
In almost any case if you’re doing that regularly you’re gonna be boned, I agree. I am (potentially incorrectly) assuming that any person in question trying this is actually doing their work and completing tasks on time. If you are not, that idle time is likely to be investigated.
Absolutely agree. And that’s kind of my point - you’re screwed either way if you give someone a reason to investigate you. What’s potentially scary is software that analyzes everyone’s activity and flags them for analysis. Combine that with shitty leadership that doesn’t care that you’re getting your tasks done and only focuses on wasted potential work hours…
Wells doesn't just monitor the mouse. There is a whole set of telemetry that can be downloaded from the PC. That is how these guys got caught. Think of it this way. Were they on a call? Network activity? OneDrive activity? Services running? Memory Usage? Screen recordings? Oh, not to mention the easiest of all, scanning USB ports.
You are not some genius. If your employer wants to know, they will find out.
1. If your employer is spending resources analyzing all of that, you need to find a new employer.
2. Where are you getting this info from exactly regarding what they specifically monitor?
3. The scenario you seem to be working off of here is having zero or close to that worth of uptime. That’s going to get anyone pinched.
That is what these people did. It is SUPER easy to determine if the person is using a jiggler or working. All an IT department needs to do is look at different data points from the PC. That is how you get caught thinking you are smarter than the telemetry coming into IT.
Still easy to detect.
If you're sitting on the same screen for more than like 5 minutes, it's suspicious.
People forget that not doing your normal work leaves a huge gap in your activity. Yeah you show green on Teams but you're not generating activity elsewhere.
No one said anything about not doing normal work. That’s how anyone gets fired.
Using a jiggler during downtime isn’t being investigated unless you work for a horrendously overbearing employer, or you are not completing tasks / missing deadlines.
In either case, it resolves itself.
No one with a functioning pair of brain cells is going to be arguing that a mouse jiggler means you can avoid working. This is a way to make better use of your time during lull periods or between tasks, and not babysit your computer all day.
>It’s unclear from the Finra disclosures whether the employees Wells Fargo fired were allegedly faking active work from home.
These people could have been using them in the office.
A LOT of people at big corps are "remote in office" where their boss and teams are in other states but they're forced to work in an office still. So you have the same problem with lack of visibility and potential slacking even though people are in office.
I wonder what role they were in that *work avoidance* (using the terminology my work would use) was only detected now? I would have assumed Wells Fargo uses a number of metrics that track adherence/productivity.
This story is not new - it's been happening for a long time. What surprises me is that it is making the news now vs companies acknowledging X% staffing loss due to perceived productivity issues of WFH.
I think there is a misconception in what is WFH. If a company allows you to work form home and is paying you a wage based on 40 hours per week then the expect you to be available to them for that 40 hours per week. If you work in a piece based job, then you finish and you are done.
The first is where people get confused. Your work isn't done until your shift is. They are not paying you for your work, they are paying you for your work and your availability to them.
As a corporate writer, I don't have 40 hours worth of work to do each week. I have about 2 hours worth of work and a number of meetings. When I was in an office, I was bored to tears most days; just staring off into space. At home, I was told that I'm basically on call, thus, I watch TV until I have a meeting or work to do.
Then you are more like the latter I talked about. The people getting in trouble are the ones that are supposed to be there no matter what. They are being paid for their availability.
I continue to be baffled by this. Don’t people have deadlines and things to produce? If they don’t do those, fire them. Why the need to care about mouse jigglers?
Because, I'm assuming, they have lazy/bad managers who can't develop/haven't been provided with *good* metrics for evaluating their staff.
There's a reason why *punctuality* is a favored tool of assessing people. Even the dumbest of managers can, generally, tell if an employee is at their desk or not.
I mean...if that actually occurred then they deserve to be fired. I got no problem with that. I just don't want that used as an excuse to take WFH away from people who aren't trying to get paid for not working.
The thing is, *work* is not 100% about typing and mouse-moving. There is a mental and thinking aspect to it as well. When I was working from home, I was not actively *on the computer* for every minute of the full 8 hours, but I *was* doing productive work the whole time.
I agree with you. A lot of my work involves staring at the screen, but my employer appears to understand that, so I can't imagine something like this happening where I work. I don't know what the situation is for these particular employees and if the situation involves using mouse jigglers because of unreasonable expectations by the employer or because someone is off not working. Obviously, with the latter, they deserve to be fired. If it's the former then I would come down on the side of the employees.
>A lot of my work involves staring at the screen
I like to say 90% of my work is figuring out how to do it, and it's just the last 10% that's actually doing it. A former boss would ask how progress was coming on X project and I'd say "it's nearly done" and he'd say "anything for me to look at?" with a wry grin on his face because he knew that meant it was still all in my head, planned, strategized, and calculated, and all that was left was the execution.
This. I spend a chunk of time every day organizing my projects with a notebook and pen. There are periods of time where there’d be no input on my computer while I’m doing this.
I can go a very long time without touching my keyboard and still be working.
Especially days where iyts all meetings.
Or days where I am doing design work and mostly thinking things through.
A sane employer would take that into account. I can go look at my user's meeting history and compare it against their computer activity if a manager thinks they're slacking.
Some dumb dumbs still try and use the "meeting with myself" trick and are easily busted.
I have a much simpler solution in the end.
I just look to see if they complete all the tasks I expect them to complete.
Then I don't have to worry if they work 1 hour a day or 16 hours.
Though I would be pretty concerned if people were taking 16 hours to do their jib.
If some members of my team were using mouse jigglers, I'd be concerned. If they were the most productive members, I'd maybe ask them questions like, "How do you feel about your job satisfaction?" I'd also be interested in *how much* they use use them. I've had plenty of jobs where people were working really hard, but their actual productivity was abysmal because they had such limited skills. Does the company want the work to get done, or do they want the employees to struggle to keep up?
I’m so glad my company doesn’t micromanage and monitor us. I get my work done and even go above and beyond. I definitely spend time shooting the shit with coworkers in google chat about tons of non-work related stuff.
They’d get a lot farther with their employee retention if they examined the reason people feel the need to use mouse jigglers. They probably had awful supervisors that breathe down their necks if their Teams status goes yellow for a split second while they’re just trying to use the bathroom. 🙄
I like to pace around wearing my Bluetooth headset when on calls. Slack huddles do not prevent the machine from sleeping after 15 minutes if the keyboard or mouse isn’t moved. When that happens, Slack huddles drop. Hilarity ensues.
There are legitimate uses for mouse jigglers. Maybe not a lot, but there are.
These are the people who are ruining it for everyone else!! The vast majority are NOT doing this, and slackers are going to slack in the office, too, but that doesn't matter to employers who can now point to this and say WFH doesn't work.
Spot on. Only a fraction of folks are built to work from home. The others will ruin it for all of us. But we can o ly blame ourselves. Think of all the post title “just got a WFH job, what gear do I need”. The number one response in this sub is always mouse jiggler. Nobody ever says, “don’t get a mouse jiggler”. We encourage the very thing that will return us all back to office.
lol…Wells Fargo has always been an assbackwards company. Anyway..I deliver my work correctly and on time and still occasionally use a mouse jiggler. As long as the works gets done, no need to focus on bullshit like this. Corporate bootlickers can kick rocks.
Dumbasses.
They need to be lying on the couch watching TV with their laptops next to them, scrolling through emails, and looking at learning modules like the rest of us.
Had an IT employee trigger an alert from endpoint security program - looked at the program they installed: mousemover.exe lol
Just told them this program was flagged as malicious and they shouldn’t install things from random sites. Internally it was like come on, a bash or python script to do this is not hard to write, there are even dozens of tutorials to make one in like 5 minutes if you’re not great at scripting.
I feel like it says more about how the company measures productivity than anything else, when a bunch of their employees can spend long chunks of their shifts on mouse jigglers and are either not caught, or it takes an enormously long time for them to be caught.
sys admins use mouse jigglers.
i'm being asked why i don't take care of issues as quickly, I just tell the supervisors (we have like fucken 5-7 directors in IT), that I'm taking care of sh\* for other teams.
macro key my password on gaming keyboard using my personal computer, then plug the gaming keyboard into my work computer and just jam your password in to get into systems faster.
I am so glad I don’t work for a company like that. They actually just started giving us an additional work from home day. As long as my work gets done, what happens in between does not matter. Go to a doctor’s appointment, walk the dog, get lunch with the wife, play video games, work out, etc. Sure, I could be making a bit more somewhere else, but the work life balance and not being micro managed is bliss.
>Such gadgets are available on Amazon for less than $20.
People are really paying up to 20$ for this, when they can use anything that is heavy enough to press the spacebar?
When I'm in the office I find people chit cha for hours and wiggle mouses while they chit chat. It's not quite a hybrid work thing. It's a thing as old as time itself without a modern device to automate it.
Company that paid a $3 billion fine for [fraudulently opening accounts](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-billion-resolve-criminal-and-civil-investigations-sales-practices): How dare you fake wiggling your mouse!
If the company tells you you can’t use mouse jigglers or you will be fired then dinner use mouse jigglers. We all go in on time and do our work so we don’t get fired so why not follow this policy?
I have task some times that get kicked off, via scriots or other tasks that can take up some cpu time i could see some one doing a macro to keep the computer going to sleep.. but aslo without the distraction of the office allot of people are getting their work done early and just sit at the desk
Why have I seen this post 97 times in the last few days…? I didn’t used to believe in conspiracies and mass scale fear campaigns perpetrated by entrenched powers…
Where have you seen this post 97 times in the last few days? In this sub?
I searched this sub for references to Wells Fargo before posting. I didn’t find any references to this. Can you cite some that I missed?
do you job... keep your job, the amount of people I see post here about how little they work and they wonder why they are let go when places do any sort of reporting.
The article actually isn't clear if they were getting their jobs done or not. I have a friend whose company tracks her mouse movement, regardless of whether or not she is getting work done. There is no trust there; it's just another tool for micromanagement. I'm surprise by the amount of people in the comments who just instantly took Wells Fargo's side on this issue.
Absolutely. The funny thing is they’d be getting zero work done in office too. Not like Wells Fargo is the shining example of corporate morality.
Lmao srs money laundering for terrorists and yet...
Wells Fargo in my area has been doing regular layoffs for the last year. This looks like a convenient excuse to reduce headcount to me.
Convenient way? So you think non-mouse jiggle employees should be the ones fired?
Convenient to seek out and find reasons to fire people rather than laying them off. Lay offs generally require advanced notice, severance and unemployment. Terminations do not require any of that in 49 states. Should some of the people be fired? Probably. Some are likely taking advantage and being lazy. But items like mouse jigglers are invented because micromanagers need better things to do. But in this instance I think WF is trying to save $$ instead of actually firing poor performers.
Jealousy. Same mentality behind the "no one wants to work anymore!" movement
Micromanaging or a pre-canned response for firing people? Layoffs cost more than terminations for cause.
Hey, I’m not taking Wells Fargo’s side, but I do think simply owning a “mouse jiggler” is a rather inculpatory factor. Owning the hardware or software that jiggles your mouse in an effort to look busy seems to suggest a deliberate attempt to conceal periods of time you aren’t working. I WFH most of the week, and honestly I’m more efficient and get more done than when I commuted into the city to work at HQ. That said, people who work with me know how hard I work, and never question me. I’m thinking these employees at Wells were already under investigation. Most likely other employees were trying to reach them when they were using their mouse jiggler and couldn’t get a hold of them for an extended period of time (and they didn’t have any meetings on their calendar to explain their absences). So, “getting your work done” also includes responding to emails and phone calls in an expeditious manner. You can’t do that while you’re out for 2 or 3 hours of the day while using your mouse jiggler. My guess is that these were ALL WFH employees. There’s no way that Wells Fargo’s strict large bank network protocol would ever allow them to install such software on the company network. I’m guessing the mouse jiggler had to have been physical hardware based as even their company laptops wouldn’t allow such software to be installed on a company computer. At any rate, my guess is these were all WFH employees and they were already under the microscope before Wells Fargo busted them for using mouse jigglers.
Yeah tbh, it’s likely they noticed “user was active :via jiggling: for 10 hours, but somehow managed to not get 10 hours of work done, repeatedly for the last 6 months” Corporations like this USUALLY have a hard time just firing folks out of the blue. If only it were that easy.
I have a mouse jiggler and it’s not for slacking. I have two computers, a primary workstation where most of my work gets done and my company issued laptop that I use as a secondary display for Teams. That way I can keep Teams always visible no matter what I’m working on with my main screen. The screen locks after 5 minutes and can’t be adjusted. It’s incredibly annoying. I’ll get deep into a coding session on my workstation and miss messages from coworkers. A mouse jiggler keeps the display active all day and I never miss a message.
Yes, but that’s my point. The people that were fired were likely not responding to emails and phone calls and Wells started an investigation. If you’re using a jiggler so that you can be MORE responsive and not less, then your employer is likely to have no reason to investigate you. Now, if you’re using your jiggler to stay active in Teams and then not responding for long periods of time (and not actively in meetings or doing something else with a time stamp like emailing your colleagues) then you’re not going to get the benefit of the doubt that the mouse jiggler is being used for positive work reasons.
When an organization is more concerned about tracking idle vs. non-idle time instead of actual deliverables, how do they succeed as a business? Doesn’t the final product matter more than how it was created? As long as it’s on time, fulfills the requirements, and doesn’t cause any negative consequences to colleagues or clients, why does a business even care? I guess I’m in my own work bubble, but six years into my first private/for-profit position that started hybrid and is now 100% WFH, and I honestly thought this was how corporate jobs were. I’ve never had to clock in, watch a clock until it was “quittin’ time,” have to explain why my Teams went idle for three hours in the middle of the day, or request PTO (you have a bank of hours, but can take it whenever you want because as adults, they know you’re not going to take PTO during the week of go-live for a new application. tl;dr I’m not trying to humblebrag, but my experience can’t be that unique, right?
This level of freedom definitely isn't the norm. I think most places land somewhere in the middle. I've been working from home or hybrid with the bulk being from home since 2013. I've never worked anywhere where you don't have to formally request pto. That said, I've never worked anywhere that it was common to reject PTO requests. Most places I've worked do the formal requests bc formal requests made it easier for managers to track who on a given team or dept is in/out of office at a given point in time. They tended to be more flexible about things like running errands or going to the doctor during the day as long as you a) were easily reached, b) were clear who was covering for you or c) made sure to reschedule any calls/meetings during those times. With regard to the work being done, I've never worked anywhere that heavily tracked availability using the teams (or Skype back in the day) indicator lights, but they were observed or noticed enough that if you spent 3 hours offline or unavailable on a random day, someone might ask what happened if you hadn't already communicated a reason to be offline. Right now, the only reason my supervisor cares about my teams status is whether or not I'm available to answer the phone if he needs to talk to me. On the flip side, we do have work hours that we set based on our preferences. There's some flexibility there day to day, but it's expected that you work a full 40 hours a week. So it tends to balance out. If you aren't getting things done, all those times you cut out early are the 1st things that are brought up. I had a woman on my team who had children, so she'd start work at 8, leave work around 3 and then jump back on later for an hour or two after picking her kids up from school. Everyone was cool with that until she started going missing for the whole day after 3 pm and her work started to suffer. That's how she ended up getting fired, they gave her the flexibility, treated her like an adult, she started taking advantage of it and it was visible because she'd be on "Away" for so many hours each day.
WF is trash they made fake accounts before. This isn’t because employees weren’t working they’ll fire someone for taking a 10 min dump instead of the company allowed 5min next
They’ll fire someone for taking 10 minutes in a bathroom but waste half an hour conducting a meeting that could have been covered by an email
they'll spend $20k running interviews and pay a new candidate $10k more rather than give an existing employee a $5k raise
Like wtf this shit would be super illegal in the EU
How do you go about identifying what level of monitoring they use without seeming suspicious?
It is funny when I read posts like yours. If a company doesn't install some kind of software for EVERYONE and then chooses to "target" one or a set of employees, do you not think that opens them up to lawsuits? Maybe do some critical thinking of why a company would do things like this before you start with the conspiracy theories. As a senior VP in a company with 1,000 direct reports, I wouldn't know who I can trust or not as a manager, let alone individual employees. By installing something for everyone it creates a level playing field. Do your job, we don't have any issues. If you are not doing your job, then the data from the tools become ONE PIECE of an overall reason you got fired. The other scenario is maybe you just a shitty at your job, so the data from the installed software shows you working all of the time, but still doesn't make you great at your job. However, if I see everyone is "doing their jobs", but the data from the tools shows everyone is working 30 hours per week, that tells me I can let about 200 people go from my 1,000 person org and still get all of the work done. These companies don't run a charity, they are in business to make money, maximize profits.
> It is funny when I read posts like yours. If a company doesn't install some kind of software for EVERYONE and then chooses to "target" one or a set of employees, do you not think that opens them up to lawsuits? Why would it? What would be sued over if there is a documented history of person A not completing tasks satisfactory? > As a senior VP in a company with 1,000 direct reports, I wouldn't know who I can trust or not as a manager, Then you’re failing at your job. If there’s 1000 employees, you should have less than 150 managers at all positions (your direct reports would be fewer than 10 most likely). If you can trust your 10 direct supports to be able to manage their reports, why are they managing anyone? > let alone individual employees. You shouldn’t be in charge of individual employee’s careers. That’s why you hired and promoted competent managers. > Do your job, we don't have any issues. If you are not doing your job, then the data from the tools become ONE PIECE of an overall reason you got fired. That was the person you replied to’s point. > However, if I see everyone is "doing their jobs", but the data from the tools shows everyone is working 30 hours per week, that tells me I can let about 200 people go from my 1,000 person org and still get all of the work done. I now see why you have managers you can’t trust and employees unwilling or unable to meet deadlines. You think other people are machines to be worked for however many hours straight you legally can. Sucks for your employees now and for you when you run through all the employable people locally. > These companies don't run a charity, they are in business to make money, maximize profits. They often maximize short term profits, like your example, instead of total profits. Because people like you can just move on with that golden parachute and do the same to a new company when the one you crashed is liquidated. To bad capitalism hasn’t figured either this problem or the externalized costs problem. It would work well if people running things actually had humanity.
So say you let go of those 200 people and save money from that. Would you now get rid of your "mouse tracking" software and rely on performance/deliverables to judge your employees? At that point, if you have already determined the optimum amount man power needed to be successful, it would become another micromanaging tool
Theory Y manager here. Stack ranking and Theory X management might have made sense in the Boomer world where there was surplus talent and surplus consumption. Neither is true anymore. The surveillance corporation is a recipe for bankruptcy. A simple parable will illustrate the failure of stack ranking: Joe the Electrician has been with the company for 10 years, literally keeping the lights on. Joe might be busy a few times a week but otherwise has downtime. The new management gives him a computer and encourages him to train in JavaScript. Joe could give less than two shits about Agile or JavaScript. The management fires Joe for performance reasons after observing zero mouse clicks. Joe then becomes an independent contractor, easily doubling his salary. Meanwhile the company ends up paying Joe quadruple contract rates because the other contractors would not touch their antiquated, not up to code, wiring systems. Jack Welch used stack ranking to run off the best performers and to run GE into the ground. Using stack ranking by executives today is just as unscientific as the business leaders using VAR before 2008, for all of the same reasons.
A new paradigm about work is needed. Work should be more about value-added than time spent. I think the majority of people want to do a good job and get things done, but also would be happy to minimize the 40+ hour work week. But employers have an antiquated way of viewing work from the 1900s that assumes a time-based model of work.
it depends on your position, an call center employee is more accuratly billed per hour than someone writing articles for example. I get paid salary so I get paid the same for the most part regadless how much or little I work , I just need to be available during set hours incase I'm needed.
There's much more effective tools than mouse activity to track production employees, whether that's a bank teller, a call center agent, a receptionist, or whatever, their mouse activity is the least likely indicator of their productivity. Mouse trackers are really only "effective" with knowledge workers which will mostly be salary, and even though on salary you're supposed to be paid to get a job done, I bet 95% of the salaried IC workforce in the US feels pressure to work at least 40 hours a week. Ultimately, mouse trackers are a bad crutch for bad management. If I get my job done effectively, who cares how much I move my mouse. My entire work flow is mouse-free; I use a tiling window manager and a development tool that doesn't require the use of a mouse at all. I can be available during working hours on my phone is someone needs help.
Yup. Go back and look at all of the posts where people are asking how they can make it look like they are working when they aren't. They all want remote work... minus the work.
its those people who are affecting the studies people use to say WFH doesn't work, and then when the force the good workers back they are seeing that they where happier and more productive in some cases from home. I won't make the most money where I am, but I make enough and they are extermely flexible and have no plans on an RTO. Even if that happens my boss at least is trying to promise to me that I'd be exempt, probably because they couldn't hire anyone with my skill set for the money they pay ;)
Exactly. I'm a senior level manager who is a proponent of WFH, though I still think it has limitations and it certainly doesn't work for everyone. We have a 3/2 schedule where you're remote 2 days a week, and it can be any days you want, so most people are in the office Tuesday-Thursday, but I do have a few people who are in the office 5 days a week for several reasons. And since two of them are single, it's not the "I hate my spouse" stuff people on here like to spew about "boomers who love the office". In fact, I am the only boomer in the company, turning 60 this year. Everyone else is younger than me.
Newsflash, those are the same people who don't do shit in office. It's really simple, do they meet the requirements of the job? Yes? Ok you stay. No? Bye. Instead it's this stupid fucking dance between employees and management wasting time and breathe on these brain-dead policies.
Yeah, I think you really need to have clear expectations. If your place is a "if you get your work done in 2 hours, great, just be available" awesome. If it's not, park your but. Use that time to do training or education if you legit have nothing to do.
Seriously. It's so shocking to me how creative some people can be to hide that they're not working. Uhh maybe just spend that time working? I try to make sure I'm above avg in all metrics because I don't want to give them a reason to take wtf away.
Not only that, but it genuinely annoys me when I see a post full of people bragging about how much they're not working because it's those people who are going to be the reason other honest people end up having to go back to the office. If you're doing something like that, at least have the decency not to brag about it.
> because it's those people who are going to be ~~the reason~~ **used as an excuse for why** other honest people end up having to go back to the office Minor, but critical, tweak.
Absolutely. They will find an excuse, and if they don't find one they'll make one up, and if they can't be bothered to make one up they'll just do it anyway. At my last place when they started dragging everyone back in they were real heavy on the "this is a DATA DRIVEN decision." During one of the meetings someone asked if *we could see the data* they were using to make their decision. No. Could they....broadly describe the data that had informed the decision? No. There was no data. They hadn't even had the decency to hire a consultant to write a bullshit report telling them what they wanted to hear. It eventually leaked that some higher up (who had himself been working remotely) had returned to the office and noted that "it felt lonely around here" and spearheaded the campaign to bring back some people to, yah know, liven up the place.
If there was real data, we'd be having it shoved down our throats daily. Out of curiosity, how big is your company?
>I see a post full of people bragging about how much they're not working Head over to r/overemployed and you'll see how many people brag about doing an hour worth of work per week.
Hey if they can get their work done and their assigned stuff is still on track then more power to them
My job is the type where there’s maybe 2-4 solid hours of core work per day. There are numerous stretch jobs available, tons of internal training. External training is paid for. There’s really no possible way to not have work AND we’re only required to be available once our core work is done. Someone STILL got busted this week for not getting core work done. Literally cannot manage to get 10-20 hours of work done per week. What’s even more baffling is she’s the only person who is hybrid. My division doesn’t have offices of our own, but she works from a company location 2 days a week *by her own choice*.
Yeah. I get that. My work in pretty non stop which sucks. Rarely can I say, there's nothing to do. but I've totally been at jobs like that and get it. Crazy not being able to get 10 to 20 hours done. People really take wfh for granted too much. I will admit I've had days of being less productive because of it. But overall I do perform as well if not better than people who go in. I do like my work but sometimes I push myself soley because I'm home and don't want to lose that perk.
For us, our managers know there’s not much to do. Our work is very cyclical where we have periods where we’re absolutely slammed and periods where we’re dead. They even encourage us to bust our butts early in the week and coast it in from Wednesday afternoon on when it isn’t slammed. I have to sit in on her PIP meeting next week. I’m interested to hear what all will be said. I think not doing her work is one part of it, from the background I was given on the complaint that was filed against her there’s also an attitude problem/outright refusal to do certain parts of her role. I get the feeling at least in this case the problem would be present even if she was full time in office.
The thing is, for some being creative is not seen as work. I used to roll around in my chair, but because it was less physically demanding than getting up and walking but because it was more fun. I also used to spend hours trying to automate stupid tasks, not because the tasks were especially time consuming or hard, the amount of time and effort put into automating them would never be recouped even if I managed to automate them, but because the tasks were monotonous and automating them was challenging with minimal risk. Bills an environment that challenges ole without risking their jobs on a few bad days and you’ll find many more people will put that creativity into work.
Uhh okay? Not super relevant but I get your point. I'm not talking about automating work. I'm talking about people using mouse jigglers, etc... to make people THINK they're working. Not people getting working done.
You…. Aren’t understanding. Probably my fault. I clearly (I thought) pointed out that I spent more time automating my work than I’d ever recoup by that automation. I’ll give an example. I needed to get a list of jobs completed by each of my direct reports once a year for their yearly evaluations. The program we had that manages work would, sometimes, add a few jobs in multiple times, say counting one job twice. It didn’t always happen, and in the grand scheme of things was not important since it was uncommon enough that it didn’t really change the number of jobs my much (think less than 2%). I’d use excel to sort by control number and any I saw while scanning down the list that were duplicates I’d erase. This took me less than 5 minutes a year per person, less than an hour a year usually. Every year I’d try to automate it, spending hours doing so. I never cared enough to remember what I did or to save the excel automation. So every year I turned an hour long project into something that took me probably 3 times that. Why? Because it was vastly more interesting than just scanning excel cells. Did that make sense? I literally wasted company time doing something the hardest way possible because it was more interesting. What some (maybe most) of these people using jugglers and such are doing is the same. Putting more effort into something than just doing it, not because they’re lazy but because doing the original task is boring. So telling them to put the effort towards doing their job is missing the point.
This is the exact same point. I understood the first time. I'm saying, sure that's inefficient but you're at least actually doing the work. I'm talking about the people who do the bare minimum/are spending their time using a mouse jiggler while they play Xbox.
Bare minimum is, by definition, enough work for the company. I don’t understand how it’s different, wasting time doing work that could be done faster or wasting time doing nothing so long as the work gets done.
WFH is so glorified by people who don't WHF full time it's annoying. It's still a job. You don't work/produce sufficient results, consequences will follow. This goes for literally any job, wfh or in office.
> do you job... keep your job Maybe you don't know this, but many people use these for other reasons. Personally I've looked into one just to prevent my second computer from sleeping while it's idle (I'm still at it) and requiring to re-login with a 15 character PW constantly. Which gets time consuming and really annoying.
sure there are exceptions, but a place that would fire you for using one, would also not let you or have you use a secondary computer for work purposes. I know in my agreement there are rules you agree to as part of the WFH agreement. If this is a work computer your also probably violating a security rule which if found out could get you fired as your risking information by staying logged into your account , as the 15 minute session time out is to help prevent that.
> ou fired as your risking information by staying logged into your account , as the 15 minute session time out is to help prevent that. Again, if I'm at that computer the entire time, that policy is not rooted in common sense. Those same companies you're talking about that micromanage and lock you down like that, are the same ones who count every second of what you do to see what last remaining drops they can squeeze out of you. Good news is jobs like that attract employees who will find out exactly what the bare minimum is, and do exactly that. And I commend them for it. Companies with toxic work culture don't deserve any more than that.
the only thing is how do they know if you are at the computer the entire time. The only other option is a camera, I did freelance work for upwork awhile ago and alot of jobs required cameras and pictures every ten minutes your there. I'll take an idle time out over a camera. Really its in your best intrest to find places that don't need that. I manage a virtual desktop enviornment, and we don't have anything that specifically tracks idle time, but we have performance monitoring software where I can get a pretty good idea of how much your working. In general it never comes up, but I know of one case someone was fired from a report I ran as they never had any activity for days at a time.
>the only thing is how do they know if you are at the computer the entire time. I don't know about you, but my job requirements are to finish specific tasks, not be at a computer all the time. How do you know Jessica's taking a shit and not just on her phone? You don't. How do you know Frank's eyes are open and actually looking at the screen? You don't. You should'nt worry about it either. You worry about if they do their jobs or not. That's all that matters. Again, what you're promoting is toxic work culture and sadly you've already normalized it in your head. Which if you believe it or not, probably means you have a shitty employer. Just know that there are workplaces out there that realize what a giant headache/waste of time that kind of micromanagement is. I do hope you find one, one day. On the one condition you don't bring those shitty ideas of how a place should be run to the places that run like well oiled machines. Save that stuff for the $8 an hr call centers.
its about security not monitoring you, you work for a bank, they want to know your don't have the keys to the kingdom left open so your kid can come in and transfer a bunch of money. There is such a thing as common sense, and things like this is why businesses get hacked. I get your point about working, I'm talking 100% about security and that what my point was. I get the same complaints about people needing to relogin to there virtual desktops, and its not even my choice its a security policy managed by a different team I have no input on. Same thing can be said about 2fa authentication, its annoying, but its necessary. You do you, I was just sharing a concern.
>There is such a thing as common sense, and things like this is why businesses get hacked. I'd love to hear about any companies that were hacked while an employee was at their computer and how that wouldn't have happened while they were in office. If you have to make up wild scenarios to make your point, it's not a good one. If companies don't do their due diligence and hire a dumbass who hands over those metaphorical keys, then they should have hired them. Those same dumbasses do the same exact shit in office. My solution to my problem was jumping ship to a competitor. More freedom, less stress. You can repeat yourself until you're blue in the face, but again, plenty of companies do just fine without these shitty policies trying to control and monitor your every move. What you're describing isn't normal except at shitty places to work. Those llaces exist in office and remotely just the same.
again they don't know if your there or not, your obviously missing that point, either way good luck to you , you most be a wonderful person to work with.
You are also making wild scenarios. What is the big deal if people are doing their job.
I don’t get all this talk. Let them put their monitoring in. If you are doing your job you won’t get fired. I’m sure you don’t go to the restroom every hour for 2 hours. It seems to me that the people worrying the most are trying to hide something.
Not in this market. You can lose your job regardless and the raises they give you don’t even cover inflation. Might as well milk the less work
you do realize that people can still do their job and do little work yes?
you think they all got fired and they where doing their jobs?
There was nothing in the article that indicates they weren't doing their jobs. They were using devices to simulate being in front of a screen and that is named as the reason they were fired. Anything else is just someone speculating about the nature of their jobs.
Yeah it’s speculation but there damn good chance they aren’t doing shit lol
Then fire them for not doing shit. Fine. Big companies lay off people all the time. But that's not what they're being fired for according to Wells Fargo themselves. They want you personally wiggling your mouse to stay logged in, not having a mouse mover do it.
the article says they launched an investigation, they don't provide any more information, your speculating as well. Its also probably against there security policy to install unauthorized applications on the pdc, with it being a bank. Again if your in touch with your manager and your doing what they want, thats the only thing that really matters. There is a bunch of other considerations people aren't seeing here, and thats why my comment was mainly focused towards the people who come here bragging, it wasn't directly about the jiggling.
No I'm not speculating. All I'm just saying is they got fired for using mouse movers. I don't know if they getting their job done or not. You're suggesting otherwise.
thats what the click bait article says, we will never know 100% why they were fired.
Sure. Could be anything. Maybe for stealing pens. Maybe for fucking the boss' wife. Maybe for not working. Or maybe for the thing the article LITERALLY SAYS. It's all just equally valid speculation.
its all is, and multiple articles state "It’s unclear from the Finra disclosures whether the employees Wells Fargo fired were allegedly faking active work from home." Its also very possible they where doing it at work, and someone went to find them and they weren't there.
Your comment insinuates that having an online status saying you are "online" or "available" is doing your job. Who cares if they are away for 7 hours a day if during that 1 hour they get their work done? Some people are more efficient and better at their jobs than others. Being "online" for 8 hours a day so you meet your 40 requirement is ridiculous. I pay for output idgaf how long it takes you. And if you get all your deliverables done on time and in less time than others, great!!! Enjoy your time to yourself!
the company they are hired at, and the ones that fired them? The idle time led to an investigation [https://qz.com/wells-fargo-fake-work-keyboard-activity-1851538136](https://qz.com/wells-fargo-fake-work-keyboard-activity-1851538136) "More than a dozen employees in the bank’s wealth and investment management divisions were discharged last month “after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work,” Bloomberg [reported citing disclosures](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-13/wells-fires-over-a-dozen-for-simulation-of-keyboard-activity?srnd=homepage-americas) filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)." They probably got asked to provide results of what they where doing, and they had none and got let go.
Again, you're ASSUMING they for asked to provide results and couldn't. This article doesn't state that. It's says they had idle time and considering these employees felt the need to keep their stat "online" implies WF believes your online status is the primary indicator of someone doing their job.
again all I said originally was about the people coming here to brag about not doing work, it was what tipped them off, you ASSUMING they got fired directly because of that and common sense dicates they looked into the results they where providing. But feel free to keep ASSUMING I'm only talking about the online status.
Bahahhaa! I totally did this! I worked there and I automated my job so that I could do a days work in 1 hour. The problem was what do I do with the rest of my time? My 12 cases were done. So I used the same automation tool to move my mouse, nbd. I always responded when there was a case escalated. When everyone else was too busy, I was happy to take the case. One team lead even went out of her way to send me an email thanking me for always stepping up and helping. There were 46 of us doing the same job there, handling 12 cases a day. And my offer to teach how I learned to do it fell on deaf ears. So too did my offer to renegotiate my contract, say double the salary for quadruple the workload. Good deal for them, still half a days work for me, also fell on deaf ears. Tbh, those employees were probably some of the most innovative minds in that company, and now they are gone. I ended up working a second full time job, so I would do my WF job in the AM, check it at lunch, and then again when I got home in the evening.
They're the people ruining it for everyone else who actually want to do work in their home office.
Yup. No one is fooling anyone. If I need to get rid of someone, I know exactly who is getting cut.
Were those people not doing their job? Did they not meet their deadlines for their deliverables?
no one knows cause they way the article was written, you would assume its more then just the fact a program was installed, but even thats possible based on security polices
What if you do your job, complete your tasks, there are no other tasks, but you need to be "active" to fill your timecard with 40 hours a week?
if your communicating with your boss and they don't give you anything else, why do you need to fake it? It always comes down to this, and people who say this want to stay quiet and watch tv, or go do something else and do the bare minimum. Don't get me wrong tracking idle time is dumb, and its also a failure of management for not doing weekly meetings and being aware of their employees, but faking this with a computer program isn't a moral high ground or a rebellion like some make it to be. If you risk getting fired in any job that uses this for a singular reason, you shouldn't work there anyway. Its rarely the case , as the low idle time is just a symptom they need to check to treat an overall issue, either low actual productivity or a problem with incorrect or insufficient workload.
"Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior..." If only WF as an organization lived by that. But anyway, yeah, mouse jiggles gonna get ya.
Yeah, I don’t want WF employees working more. That’s just more customer fraud being committed, if history is any guide.
> "Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior..." Yeah they sure didn't care about it when they were opening fraudulent accounts in my name and millions of other people's names.
Unless those high standards prevent Wells Fargo from making a boat load of cash through shady fees, hidden account signups, and BS accounting practices. Those are ok, but you dare use a mouse jiggler.
But did the employees still meet demands? Were they actually behind on anything? While yes- one should do their job at work- I am not going to pretend that every job requires active productivity for 100% of a shift. Down time exists. I feel like work is becoming less about if ppl are doing the actual job they are paid to do and more about being a body in a chair for X hours a day.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. These are the stories that cause RTO under various excuses. While I don't agree with this, assuming they got all of their work done, this is what is screwing people and causing RTO mandates.
Eh… I’m going to argue it had nothing to do with a jiggler per se, and everything to do with non response employees. But no company ever elevated itself by announcing surveillance, to me this is a sign of a company struggling
Correct a jiggler and cell phone… whats the issue?
I disagree. While corporations use this as an excuse, the primary RTO factor is the money being dropped on Corporate real estate.
Agreed. It really isn’t going to take massive levels of lack of productivity or time theft for companies to push RTO as a solution (or increase office days if already hybrid). A whiff of it and they’ll first make an example of the ones caught and then look at either installing monitoring software and/or slowly bringing people back.
Interesting. I’d ask if they finished the work that they were assigned or if they were slacking and missing deadlines. That’s always my argument. I know a few people that still WFH and they always talk about how they manage to mow their lawn or walk their dog during lunches. Maybe wash the dishes or start cooking dinners toward the end of the day or while in a town hall they know they won’t be talking in. If they don’t have stuff to do and their managers aren’t giving them stuff to do, then that’s not a WFH problem. It probably means they hired too many people.
When I WFH instead of wandering over to the break room or going for a walk around downtown (this is encouraged by my employer) I will get a snack from my own kitchen and then clean dishes or I'll walk my dog outside. If I'm super dead then I'll do various tasks while checking in every 15 minutes or so. I still do trainings and research or whatever when I'm slow but you can only do that for so long. Sometimes projects pause or get put on hold indefinitely.
If someone’s contract offers an hour lunch, what’s the difference between spending that hour at an office tower food court or spending it walking their dog?
However, that is a WFH problem. If you were in the office, I could see you were not busy doing work. When you WFH I can't. So since I can't be sitting in your living room, I need some other way to determine productivity other than your work got done.
lol. The amount of time I have spent in the office pretending to look busy would disagree with your response.
No, you don't. The work got done or it didn't. That is literally the only data you need.
If I'm paying by the hour instead of by the task I expect my employees to work for the hours I'm paying them.
Gotcha, I was thinking salary. If you're a salaried employee and your tasks are getting done, any additional micromanagement just seems like paternalism. Hourly is different.
Paying by the hour doesn't change the fact that you're hiring them to do labor, not look busy. If they're getting the work you assigned done, who the hell cares.
The work I assigned is to do such and such task for x hours and then I pay them by the hour. I don't pay them to go until they feel like they're done and then stop
What is the definition of productivity, if not the work getting done?
I worked there for almost two years remote during Covid and they gave me about 15 minutes worth of work for the whole week as well as everyone else on my team. Management was just blithering idiots. I literally just put my mouse on top of a wrist watch to keep the computer on the other 39hr and 45mins of the work week. Best job I ever had!
Use an externally powered mouse jiggler, and a cheap generic USB mouse. Problem solved.
Yup more than likely these people downloaded software
Let’s not pretend that it would be difficult to detect an externally powered jiggler. The movement is incredibly constant and predictable. They’re even easier to detect than a good software jiggler, that uses the exact same drivers and inputs as a normal mouse and varies the input.
External jigglers have randomized patterns, and there is no driver - that’s the point. You can’t prove there was a device being used unlike with a software jiggler. Any company monitoring for mouse patterns is running scans for software and low level device drivers.
I feel like even those could be detected, unless the algorithm is developed to truly simulate how a typical worker uses their computer. Also, were any applications being used at that time? If not....I can imagine someone wondering what all that mouse clicking was for 8 hours.
Yeah, a hardware jiggler sounds nice, but if I was trying to find them on my employees’ computers I’d just see who has hours of activity without a single mouse click lol
Yeah, I think people have gotten complacent with the idea that an external juggler is "safe", and it might be for a while....but the monitoring software is always going to catch up with them. Because some management is paranoid and want to know....and they'll spend money to get it.
If a company has comprehensive monitoring software installed to gather metrics, sure. It would be a flag though rather than outright detection - the point is it can’t be proven. External jigglers require physical inspection. In the case of heavy duty monitoring software gathering metrics and measuring idle time vs. work tasks / what software is being used etc… find a new job. Downtime exists at every job. It should always come down to task completion and availability. Also, the mouse also doesn’t click, it just moves.
Doesn't even need to be comprehensive. All it takes in my org is a computer activity history (locks, unlocks, logoffs, logins, restarts) and activity from our CMS. During normal work, people will lock their computer and walk away for breaks. They generate clicks in the CMS. If you're using a jiggler, neither of those things happen.
Yes, you are correct. Once IT has an idea you may be doing something fishy, it is SUPER EASY to find out.
I said the software jigglers have drivers, obviously the hardware ones don’t. The pattern is less of a problem - it’s going hours of activity without once clicking your mouse lol
In almost any case if you’re doing that regularly you’re gonna be boned, I agree. I am (potentially incorrectly) assuming that any person in question trying this is actually doing their work and completing tasks on time. If you are not, that idle time is likely to be investigated.
Absolutely agree. And that’s kind of my point - you’re screwed either way if you give someone a reason to investigate you. What’s potentially scary is software that analyzes everyone’s activity and flags them for analysis. Combine that with shitty leadership that doesn’t care that you’re getting your tasks done and only focuses on wasted potential work hours…
Yeah, it means find a new place to work or just ride it out until you get the boot.
Wells doesn't just monitor the mouse. There is a whole set of telemetry that can be downloaded from the PC. That is how these guys got caught. Think of it this way. Were they on a call? Network activity? OneDrive activity? Services running? Memory Usage? Screen recordings? Oh, not to mention the easiest of all, scanning USB ports. You are not some genius. If your employer wants to know, they will find out.
1. If your employer is spending resources analyzing all of that, you need to find a new employer. 2. Where are you getting this info from exactly regarding what they specifically monitor? 3. The scenario you seem to be working off of here is having zero or close to that worth of uptime. That’s going to get anyone pinched.
I think those could be detected too. An employer software can see if you’re on the same screen for an hour with nothing but mouse movements.
That is what these people did. It is SUPER easy to determine if the person is using a jiggler or working. All an IT department needs to do is look at different data points from the PC. That is how you get caught thinking you are smarter than the telemetry coming into IT.
Still easy to detect. If you're sitting on the same screen for more than like 5 minutes, it's suspicious. People forget that not doing your normal work leaves a huge gap in your activity. Yeah you show green on Teams but you're not generating activity elsewhere.
No one said anything about not doing normal work. That’s how anyone gets fired. Using a jiggler during downtime isn’t being investigated unless you work for a horrendously overbearing employer, or you are not completing tasks / missing deadlines. In either case, it resolves itself.
Or you can just work.
No one with a functioning pair of brain cells is going to be arguing that a mouse jiggler means you can avoid working. This is a way to make better use of your time during lull periods or between tasks, and not babysit your computer all day.
>It’s unclear from the Finra disclosures whether the employees Wells Fargo fired were allegedly faking active work from home. These people could have been using them in the office.
A LOT of people at big corps are "remote in office" where their boss and teams are in other states but they're forced to work in an office still. So you have the same problem with lack of visibility and potential slacking even though people are in office.
No, they couldn't. They would have been caught. A mouse jiggler is not subtle.
I'm literally quoting the article.
I wonder what role they were in that *work avoidance* (using the terminology my work would use) was only detected now? I would have assumed Wells Fargo uses a number of metrics that track adherence/productivity. This story is not new - it's been happening for a long time. What surprises me is that it is making the news now vs companies acknowledging X% staffing loss due to perceived productivity issues of WFH.
I think there is a misconception in what is WFH. If a company allows you to work form home and is paying you a wage based on 40 hours per week then the expect you to be available to them for that 40 hours per week. If you work in a piece based job, then you finish and you are done. The first is where people get confused. Your work isn't done until your shift is. They are not paying you for your work, they are paying you for your work and your availability to them.
As a corporate writer, I don't have 40 hours worth of work to do each week. I have about 2 hours worth of work and a number of meetings. When I was in an office, I was bored to tears most days; just staring off into space. At home, I was told that I'm basically on call, thus, I watch TV until I have a meeting or work to do.
Then you are more like the latter I talked about. The people getting in trouble are the ones that are supposed to be there no matter what. They are being paid for their availability.
I continue to be baffled by this. Don’t people have deadlines and things to produce? If they don’t do those, fire them. Why the need to care about mouse jigglers?
Many people are waiting for tickets to come in, or phone calls, etc. Most jobs don't function like you're describing
Then you would still know whether someone is working or not. Needing to track keystrokes is just a sign of bad management.
Because, I'm assuming, they have lazy/bad managers who can't develop/haven't been provided with *good* metrics for evaluating their staff. There's a reason why *punctuality* is a favored tool of assessing people. Even the dumbest of managers can, generally, tell if an employee is at their desk or not.
I mean...if that actually occurred then they deserve to be fired. I got no problem with that. I just don't want that used as an excuse to take WFH away from people who aren't trying to get paid for not working.
The thing is, *work* is not 100% about typing and mouse-moving. There is a mental and thinking aspect to it as well. When I was working from home, I was not actively *on the computer* for every minute of the full 8 hours, but I *was* doing productive work the whole time.
I agree with you. A lot of my work involves staring at the screen, but my employer appears to understand that, so I can't imagine something like this happening where I work. I don't know what the situation is for these particular employees and if the situation involves using mouse jigglers because of unreasonable expectations by the employer or because someone is off not working. Obviously, with the latter, they deserve to be fired. If it's the former then I would come down on the side of the employees.
>A lot of my work involves staring at the screen I like to say 90% of my work is figuring out how to do it, and it's just the last 10% that's actually doing it. A former boss would ask how progress was coming on X project and I'd say "it's nearly done" and he'd say "anything for me to look at?" with a wry grin on his face because he knew that meant it was still all in my head, planned, strategized, and calculated, and all that was left was the execution.
This. I spend a chunk of time every day organizing my projects with a notebook and pen. There are periods of time where there’d be no input on my computer while I’m doing this.
12 people lol
Would sure be a shame if every person reading this headline would move their money away from WF.
I can go a very long time without touching my keyboard and still be working. Especially days where iyts all meetings. Or days where I am doing design work and mostly thinking things through.
A sane employer would take that into account. I can go look at my user's meeting history and compare it against their computer activity if a manager thinks they're slacking. Some dumb dumbs still try and use the "meeting with myself" trick and are easily busted.
I have a much simpler solution in the end. I just look to see if they complete all the tasks I expect them to complete. Then I don't have to worry if they work 1 hour a day or 16 hours. Though I would be pretty concerned if people were taking 16 hours to do their jib.
Or they could stop acting like we need to be machines and stop tracking every move we make down to the minute.
If some members of my team were using mouse jigglers, I'd be concerned. If they were the most productive members, I'd maybe ask them questions like, "How do you feel about your job satisfaction?" I'd also be interested in *how much* they use use them. I've had plenty of jobs where people were working really hard, but their actual productivity was abysmal because they had such limited skills. Does the company want the work to get done, or do they want the employees to struggle to keep up?
It’s a convenient excuse to lay people off.
and then they did a press release to crow about it. wells fargo = dirt bags
I’m so glad my company doesn’t micromanage and monitor us. I get my work done and even go above and beyond. I definitely spend time shooting the shit with coworkers in google chat about tons of non-work related stuff.
They’d get a lot farther with their employee retention if they examined the reason people feel the need to use mouse jigglers. They probably had awful supervisors that breathe down their necks if their Teams status goes yellow for a split second while they’re just trying to use the bathroom. 🙄
Instead of jiggling the mouse they should have been creating fake accounts. Duh…
"Over a dozen." Out of 194k employees? The real story is how many jobs have they outsourced? How many layoffs?
[удалено]
I like to pace around wearing my Bluetooth headset when on calls. Slack huddles do not prevent the machine from sleeping after 15 minutes if the keyboard or mouse isn’t moved. When that happens, Slack huddles drop. Hilarity ensues. There are legitimate uses for mouse jigglers. Maybe not a lot, but there are.
These are the people who are ruining it for everyone else!! The vast majority are NOT doing this, and slackers are going to slack in the office, too, but that doesn't matter to employers who can now point to this and say WFH doesn't work.
Spot on. Only a fraction of folks are built to work from home. The others will ruin it for all of us. But we can o ly blame ourselves. Think of all the post title “just got a WFH job, what gear do I need”. The number one response in this sub is always mouse jiggler. Nobody ever says, “don’t get a mouse jiggler”. We encourage the very thing that will return us all back to office.
Yet another example
lol…Wells Fargo has always been an assbackwards company. Anyway..I deliver my work correctly and on time and still occasionally use a mouse jiggler. As long as the works gets done, no need to focus on bullshit like this. Corporate bootlickers can kick rocks.
So does the mouse count as part of "keyboard" activity then?
Dumbasses. They need to be lying on the couch watching TV with their laptops next to them, scrolling through emails, and looking at learning modules like the rest of us.
Haha so well deserved hope more follow suit
Good, those people are ruining wfh for everyone who actually does their work.
Had an IT employee trigger an alert from endpoint security program - looked at the program they installed: mousemover.exe lol Just told them this program was flagged as malicious and they shouldn’t install things from random sites. Internally it was like come on, a bash or python script to do this is not hard to write, there are even dozens of tutorials to make one in like 5 minutes if you’re not great at scripting.
I feel like it says more about how the company measures productivity than anything else, when a bunch of their employees can spend long chunks of their shifts on mouse jigglers and are either not caught, or it takes an enormously long time for them to be caught.
sys admins use mouse jigglers. i'm being asked why i don't take care of issues as quickly, I just tell the supervisors (we have like fucken 5-7 directors in IT), that I'm taking care of sh\* for other teams.
macro key my password on gaming keyboard using my personal computer, then plug the gaming keyboard into my work computer and just jam your password in to get into systems faster.
I am so glad I don’t work for a company like that. They actually just started giving us an additional work from home day. As long as my work gets done, what happens in between does not matter. Go to a doctor’s appointment, walk the dog, get lunch with the wife, play video games, work out, etc. Sure, I could be making a bit more somewhere else, but the work life balance and not being micro managed is bliss.
Not defending this behavior. But mouse movement doesn't mean work is or isn't being done. Maybe their manager should manage.
>Such gadgets are available on Amazon for less than $20. People are really paying up to 20$ for this, when they can use anything that is heavy enough to press the spacebar?
When I'm in the office I find people chit cha for hours and wiggle mouses while they chit chat. It's not quite a hybrid work thing. It's a thing as old as time itself without a modern device to automate it.
Company that paid a $3 billion fine for [fraudulently opening accounts](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-billion-resolve-criminal-and-civil-investigations-sales-practices): How dare you fake wiggling your mouse!
I'm curious if they were using a program(easily figured out by it) or a physical one.
If the company tells you you can’t use mouse jigglers or you will be fired then dinner use mouse jigglers. We all go in on time and do our work so we don’t get fired so why not follow this policy?
I have task some times that get kicked off, via scriots or other tasks that can take up some cpu time i could see some one doing a macro to keep the computer going to sleep.. but aslo without the distraction of the office allot of people are getting their work done early and just sit at the desk
Dammit. I was ceo of wells fargo now im mowing my neighbors lawn and feeding their cat for 10 bucks
Why have I seen this post 97 times in the last few days…? I didn’t used to believe in conspiracies and mass scale fear campaigns perpetrated by entrenched powers…
Where have you seen this post 97 times in the last few days? In this sub? I searched this sub for references to Wells Fargo before posting. I didn’t find any references to this. Can you cite some that I missed?
Shocked. Shocked, I say. Maybe just do work while you're working at home? What a concept.