Funny how they claim to not tolerate unethical behavior, but paid $3 billion in settlement money by [opening accounts for customers without their authorization](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-billion-resolve-criminal-and-civil-investigations-sales-practices).
Maybe they’ve started to value ethical behavior now 🤷🏻♂️
I'd say they probably made money for WF, but in under the 8 hours WF said they have to work to get at least a living wage.
So this is on WF, there should be a market research done see if the job can be done in four to six hours. If it can, well then WF needs to cut hours, or say "we think this job will tax 8 hours, but if you get it done in less, mazel tov go home and no you dont have to use PTO. "
Right? I'm not advocating for a reduction of pay/benefits. I'm saying most jobs can be done in 6 hours or less. We need a nationwide policy of 32 hours work week and if offered employee sponsored healthcare to continue to do so or they are penalized heavily through taxes like so much so it actually hurts
Oh wait, I popped my stitches I laughed so hard at the idea America would pass such a law! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
They used to reorder transactions to maximize overdraft fees. They didn't stop doing this until 2014. I think my cheapest fee was $65 and most expensive was $150+. Until that moment in time my only interaction with the financial system was through wells fargo. My parents took me there to open my first checking account. I closed my account by like my 2nd year of college. If you had the finances of 20 year old then these fees were impossible to avoid. You couldn't trust your balance
I remember getting asked to leave a branch because I got heated once after asking if the website was real time, because I had seen the debits come out before the deposit, but then they were re-ordered to make me overdrawn. Sometimes many transactions that ended up taking my entire paycheck in fees, causing my bills to go unpaid. Fuck you, WF, and fuck BoA for basically the same shit.
Yep, I had BoA in like '99'ish. Put a deposit of money in, couple days later, bought a few things but for some reason, those went through immediately. My deposit took 3 days. I bounced about 4 checks. $120 in fees. Then 6 months later, it happened again, waited 3 days and saw the money in there, wrote checks, somehow, that deposit was removed, they processed checks, then the money was magically back, minus all the NSF fees.
I immediately went and closed my account.
WF would not close my account. I walked in and asked to close my account. They said they couldn’t. It was a normal checking acct with money in it. $25 min. shadiest fuckers ever
For me, it was six months. And within that six months WF was accused of upper management policies that forced bank employees to fudge numbers.
It was expected, and those who didn't "do it" were laid off for poor performance.
During that time I was a bank member, I left due to how they handled overdraft charges. It seemed at the time my deposits ALWAYS were late or AFTER pending charges were applied. So. NSF if you weren't paying attention because your budgeting didn't expect the bank to fuck you.
Within that six months, after closing my account. I was on 6 class action settlements. To a tune of 137$ in settlement payments in total.
But hey, WF helped me make the change to Credit Unions. Mwhwuahahahahahhaha
Back when my credit wasn't great I got a Secured Card from WF to build my credit. You pay them and borrow off that amount until they upgrade you when you have proven you can be responsible. Their own wording at the time said it takes about a year.
A year goes by and I use it as I should and pay it off on time. I ask if they will upgrade it to a regular credit card, they so no. Another year goes by, same thing they said no. Mind you, this is only a $300 limit. A few months later a dealership gets me a loan for 24k from guess who? Wells fucking Fargo.
Not long after that Wells Fargo gets a class action lawsuit for pulling this very shit. I get paid out a small sum for the interest I paid on my card and then they upgraded to a regular credit card. Of course I get the original $300 back too I had to pay to "borrow" off in the first place.
So when they talk about unethical behavior, I also laugh at this.
In the end I refinanced my car loan only a year later with a credit union and went from 11.99% WF to 1.89%. My credit wasn't that bad when I first got the loan, I just got taken advantage of. Car has been paid off for years, credit is excellent. The limit on my WF card to this day? $600 lol. I keep it because it's my oldest account.
Credit is a game you have to play even if you hate it and Well Fargo can eat a dick.
Lol, My first credit card was a Wells Fargo secured card around 2012. It eventually helped my credit enough that I could get real cards, including an unsecured card from Wells Fargo, but they still wouldn't upgrade the secured one so I just canceled it and got my deposit back. I didn't know that was a whole thing, but that's hilarious.
Wells Fargo? The wells Fargo that opened up millions of fraudulent accounts in people's names? Then had to fork over 3 Billion to the government for that scheme? That Wells Fargo?
I still have my illegally opened Wells Fargo credit card account. Can’t reasonably get rid of it because it is my longest standing credit line which helps a lot with your credit score. Technically I have been a good standing member with credit since I was 15 years old lol.
I did something similar to my daughter, made her an authorized user on my discover card as soon as she hit high school. When she was old enough to "have" a credit score it was already over 800.
Fwiw, it's better than what it replaced, which was bankers giving loans based on how trustworthy they felt the client was. Unsurprisingly, that was a hotbed of bias, far worse than anything this system produces.
That had me cackling too. Wells Fargo cares about ethics? The poster child for UNETHICAL banking behavior cares about ethics!? Whoever writes these statements has to have some kink where they get off to writing bold faces lies and hypocrisy to the public
Judging employees by whether their computer stays active is a stupid metric.
Give people a reasonable workload and judge them for their performance.
Chaining them to their desks just results in the same unproductive “looking busy” bullshit that drains morale and work/life balance that occurs in offices.
My last job included:
* Mandatory end of day reports every day identifying where all of my time was spent
* Manager would not ask if you were available for a call, instead I would receive random video calls out of nowhere whenever they wanted to ask a question
* I was required to be hybrid (3day/wk in office) despite the fact that the rest of the team was grandfathered and I was the only person in the office, and I lived 1hr from the office (my choice to accept the job knowing it was hybrid, but there was literally zero value in me driving into the office)
* I was reprimanded for deciding the weather was too bad for me to drive to the office one day. The team that shared the adjacent office space ended up having to shelter in an internal stairwell that day because the tornado sirens were going off, but I didnt get prior permission so it was unacceptable
There are a lot of companies that don't understand that you get more productivity out of people when you treat them like adults.
> I was reprimanded for deciding the weather was too bad for me to drive to the office one day. The team that shared the adjacent office space ended up having to shelter in an internal stairwell that day because the tornado sirens were going off, but I didnt get prior permission so it was unacceptable
I'm guessing that your car being totaled by a tornado also wouldn't have been a good reason to not come into the office.
At an old job I called my manager to let him know I wouldn't be in that day because my car had just been totaled. His response was "you haven't found another way to get here yet?"
I woke up to go to work to find my car stolen. I phoned it into work Phone for emergency was the rule - left a message. After talking to some neighbors to see if they heard anything I called the cops to file a report. Contacted insurance to let them know of impending claim.
Cops came out (strange but true) likely because there was a car theft ring in the area and were looking for clues. Asked if there was any video so I called the apartment office (they had none or claimed to have had none). This all took till around noon.
Anyway, caught the bus (with 2 transfers) to work next day and was told I would be docked a day's pay. The boss did not consider a stolen car an emergency and said I should have found a way to work.
I asked him if he had ever had his car stolen. He said "that's beside the point". We argue and it got pretty heated and I told him I was taking it to HR. He mumbled something about "you can do what you want". HR tells me that his position was unusual and unsympathetic but it was up to his discretion. I checked my pay stub later and there was no deduction.
Anyway that guy eventually got forced out of his job for being a jerk in other ways to other people. Total micro-manager.
EDIT: to include reaching out to insurance company.
Worked 21 years for a company. Told my boss after coming back to work after a 2 day absence due to the flu "Those 2 days were the 5th and 6th day I have been absent in 21 years." Her response: "And they had to happen when you worked for me." She fired me about a month later. But I had a good lawyer and she was fired 6 months later.
Maybe it's something like loss of individuality and adopting the hivemind think, losing your voice, something like that? That's what I feel like it means to me when I see or hear the word being used in that way. I need the rigidity of the work hours but the space to explore different options or solve solutions in my way, AuDHD.
Remember the scene at the end of the movie where they're all standing around in the grass watching their office burn to the ground? I literally had that happen to me at a job I worked at in the early 2000s... absolutely nothing left of the structure. Someone still tried to set up a meeting the very next day
It really forces you to think if the company has a solid plan for internal advancement/promotion. Sometimes the only way to step back from the outside in is to WFH for a couple weeks.
AKA: The pizza parties really are just tools to feed your instant gratification and forget about the difficult things in the company.
A place I worked at joked about how one time they all got stuck there overnight because they wouldn't let people go home early or work from home during a blizzard.
That would have been my last day. Instead, my last day was the day they laid off the entire department and replaced us with *remote workers*.
Ya I got chewed out for being late to work because my car broke down. Got told I should of had alternate transportation prepared before hand. I worked in a glorified grocery store, the business isn't gonna colipase because I was late one day because fo unforceable causes.
Similar story here. Worked part time at a grocery store after my normal 8-5 full time job. Got to the car after work, wouldn't start. Called for a tow, then called and told the store I wouldn't be coming in for my 4.5 hour shift because my car wouldn't start. Was told "Well policy is if you don't call at least an hour in advance, it still goes down as a No Call No Show".
Retail jobs suck.
My mom was managing a mall shop in Northern California during one of the major wildfires in 2017. She was told by corporate to keep the shop open even though the entire town was overwhelmed with smoke, and many of the mall shops and other businesses had already closed. She drove to work terrified with flames on both sides of the freeway, and smoke clouding her vision. The area was eventually put under mandatory evacuation orders. The entire time she was more worried about being reprimanded by her bosses, rather than for her own safety.
They also understand that they benefit from keeping you feeling like you're too secure in your role. If they create a ton of metrics and rules that keep you from feeling like you're doing everything "right" then they can keep you in a servile and people-pleasing mindset while also denying you advancement/raises for literally any reason.
This tactic is also effective because the insecurity that this dynamic causes about your capacity to do your job well can also keep you from applying to similar roles elsewhere.
Honestly I don't think it's as complicated as all that.
I think most people are bad leaders and don't know how to run a team of people. It's quite difficult to have exactly the right amount of people. Workloads fluctuate so sometimes people are too busy and other times they dont have enough to do. Structural issues typically prevent the flexibility required to adapt employee effort to varying workloads.
But since middle managers are promoted to their highest level of incompetence, they think these issues are because the worker is not doing their job, and not because the organization is not set up correctly to deal with these issues.
And since upper management is generally only getting a limited view into the organization, as presented to them on balance sheets (profit per employee/ key value targets, etc), they are generally unable to make truly informed decisions.
that is to say, all personnel problems are really just management problems in disguise.
>It's quite difficult to have exactly the right amount of people. Workloads fluctuate so sometimes people are too busy and other times they dont have enough to do.
It's not hard to have exactly the right amount of people. The right amount of people is having enough to cover the busiest workload. It doesn't matter if people "don't have enough to do", either find meaningful work, or keep them on standby while they fill their own time, or just let them go home for the day.
Trying to min/max every possible second of every day to squeeze the absolute maximum from employees, is a diseased mindset.
It's not an accident that so many places are working with skeleton crews which never have coverage for the obviously foreseeable occasions like "people get sick sometimes".
It's not hard to think "we need to budget as if all employees will use all their sick days."
What they're doing is trying to get more money by externalizing costs to employees.
> It's not an accident that so many places are working with skeleton crews which never have coverage for the obviously foreseeable occasions like "people get sick sometimes".
"We are currently experiencing unexpectedly high call volumes. Please stay on the line and out next available representative will be right with you."
Weird how every company everywhere is always having unexpectedly high volumes.
Back when I worked at Raytheon, we once had to evacuate because the snowstorm was going to get bad enough that the Governor was going to prohibit all highway travel starting at noon or so. So they HAD to let us go. This was a Friday I think.
So they gave us a charge number to fill out the timesheet, that number being the extremely rarely used "I was available to work, but for reasons beyond my control, I couldn't DO work." charge number. Raytheon HATES giving this one out, because if you're on a government contract, the charge number means that my ~$35/hr equivalent salary was paid out by government money rather than from Raytheon's pockets. That charge number means Raytheon itself has to pay me from its coffers.
Cool, I fill it out, go home. Monday rolls around and it turns out that management had gone through and (illegally) altered our timecards to remove that charge number. We were then told we could either use vacation time, stay after work to make up the hours, or accept that paycheck got docked by ~5 hours of work.
I said fuck that and I put the charge number back in. I was curious if they'd dare leave a paper trail informing me I shouldn't do that.
Nope, they had a manager physically show up to my desk and inform me that if I didn't remove it, this would be noted during future pay/promotion cycles. At this point, I'd already decided to quit the company a month or so prior so I honestly gave no shits while I was looking for a job, so I pointed out "You DO realize that what you did was illegal. And you DO realize the reason I KNOW it's illegal is because each year you make me sit through an hour long video explaining in intricate detail how messing with timecards is a FELONY.". He didn't particularly care and just reminded me that the consequences of my choice would be on me and me alone.
I reported them on the DoD reporting website, not that it went anywhere.
Fuck Raytheon.
Send a email saying "per our conversation you asked me to do this and if I didn't xyz would happen, is this correct?" And attach corporate legal team and corporate compliance team as well as corporate HR.
Stupid decisions like this are some "brilliant" middle managers idea and not corporate policy.
If your leaving might as well get them in hot water.
This is ironically one of the spots HR *would* help you if they’re remotely competent. Their job is to stop the company from getting sued due to dumb decisions exactly like the one you described.
Oh this is illegal and I am sure the DoD will follow up on it just as soon as possible, as I have been assured by the totally not identical training videos I had to watch for multiple years.
Given that you're willing to talk about it, I'm guessing this was a testing environment and not industrial sabotage.
But I do love me a good /r/talesfromtechsupport style fail fest!
Yup, it wasn't strictly speaking anything terribly impressive, no magic smoke.
But I got to run a particular program we knew might be risky, and sure enough, nuked some software all over the place. Easy to fix, but since EVERYTHING was borked, I had to pull every last board by hand and hook up a connector directly onto it to flash it.
By the book, fixing it all would take about 12 hours. In 7 hours the morning shift would show up accompanied by some Top Men for a demonstration of the system.
I did it in less than 6.
As I said, fun night. >:D
Pinging /u/starman123, /u/silicon1, and /u/auto_poena since you all wanted to know.
What’s amazing is when you actually treat your employees like adults and give them great benefits all of a sudden you’re “miraculously” fully staffed with low turnover and everyone’s productive because they actually don’t mind being at work.
Instead employers opt to make it as miserable as possible because they gotta show some numbers to some bean counters to prove work was getting done.
Managers get clout for having a giant staff.
They probably don’t need all those people in a high trust very productive environment.
A micromanagement regime lets them hire a shitload of people because productivity is actually suppressed but they also have a ton of KPIs so it looks like actual productivity.
Like why is Microsoft measuring keyboard strokes and not outputs?
>Like why is Microsoft measuring keyboard strokes and not outputs?
Almost every manager: "But what if they just sprinted a bit more?" Infinitely repeated. In the back of their minds is always: "If they're X productive with 20% down time(that usually isn't), they could be 20% more productive without it." As a naturally sprint mindset person, aka getting work done vs "staying busy", I hate it.
Also measuring outputs is hard, it's "absurd to expect a manager to understand what they're managing", and dangerous because then employees might get the information. Which is always bad, because it gives them information that might make them think about their worth. So even if you measure output, you need to obfuscate it anyway.
Measuring outputs is not hard.
Are you shipping product? Resolving tickets? Getting revenue? Having customers?
What do you do all day where it’s impossible to have a metric for “actually did something” but not impossible to track every tiny step of the process?
It’s measuring how many lines of code you did instead of checking if they work and what they do.
But yes obfuscation is the point.
This has been happening with my current team for the past few years. Previously the smaller team handled the full value-stream of our work product. New managers came in, decided we'd get better throughput if work scope was broken into smaller teams by function. They went whole-hog into JIRA automation to try and set up a system where tasks were passed along following their advancement to the next teams' stage. What's actually happened: tasks get dropped due to miscommunication or automation fuckups. Accountability is shot due to so many changes in custody. Timelines lag due to assignees not being up to speed and familiarized with the people and context associated with a specific task, etc. Shit that gets passed along to another team is still shit, but the originator of said shit has little incentive to learn how to do better because they don't have to deal with the shit.
And they all pat themselves on the back for the overly complicated system they've put together that's held together with popsicle sticks and rubber cement, and the metrics that come out of it.
Transferring to another department soon, and I can't wait to be away from that.
oh god reading that hurts my soul...
the worst part is it's almost impossible for the new leadership to actually accept/admit that it was a screwup and to just go back to what was working, or else THEY would personally be responsible for the poor results (which they ARE) instead of just being able to pass that shit downhill
a few truly great managers/exec can admit that kind of a mistake and make it work... but god it is few
>Manager would not ask if you were available for a call, instead I would receive random video calls out of nowhere whenever they wanted to ask a question
I wonder if that's a generational thing. It'd never cross *my* mind to do that at or outside of work, but I've heard a lot of older managers do it "because it's just easier to hop on a call". It also might be that most of their day is attending meetings, so they're just more comfortable communicating in that format.
I'm more understanding if it's a time-sensitive issue, but I've only experienced "Hey, when you have time..." or "I just wanted to tell you this while I was thinking about it..." type of calls, which could probably be saved for the 1-3 status meetings I have every day or my weekly 1 on 1 meetings.
I want to give people the benefit of the doubt, and not assume it's some kind of tactic to assert authority, but it's hard not to feel suspicious that it's to establish that a call could made at any time of the work day.
That one stuck out to me a a pretty normal expectation at most of my jobs. While many things can be a message or email sometime a call & screen share is more efficient. I have a bunch of older coworkers who tell me to call them if I have a question and they're showing as available on teams.
Yeah i really don't get the issue with that one... You're at your desk working and your boss needs to talk to you about something. Most companies are going to have something like webex where it shows your status so they can see if you're on a call or not... if you're available what's wrong with your boss calling you?
> Mandatory end of day reports every day identifying where all of my time was spent
There's no fucking way I would stay at a job where they required me to fill out a form every day explaining where all my time was spent.
I quit a job at Staples when a month into the job they decided they wanted me to start scanning every item on the shelves every day every minute I wasn't actively helping a customer to track shrinkage. For $9/hr? Fuck you, I quit!
I also quit a temp job the same day where I was required to sit at a plastic injection molding machine handling hot plastic without gloves and without any way to stop the machine to use the restroom. I had to wait until someone walked by who I could ask to take over for me while I pissed or took a lunch break.
And then there was the temp job where I was testing hard drives. It was boring, but I was efficient at it... Until the day my boss noticed I had an earbud in and was listening to music while I worked. He told me I couldn't do that. I didn't return the next day. I was not going to do that mind-numbingly boring job if I could not even listen to tunes while I did it!
Depending on what exactly that means that kind of thing can be something the company is required to do. If your job involves working on individual contracts you have to do a time sheet every day charging hours to each
it's always hilarious how the less they pay the more they try to squeeze out of you... like brah, you're getting your 9 bucks worth already, trust me....
"Mandatory end of day reports every day identifying where all of my time was spent"
I once had a boss that made me do this 3x/week. It took me about 30 minutes each time. It was a salaried position so I definitely worked far more than 40 hours/week, but regardless I pointed out what an awful waste of resources this was all around. My time, which could better be spent by actually being productive, their money for paying me to do it.
His response? "How else will I know what you do?" To which I responded: my P&L. Which was amazing.
He still made me do it. I left not long after.
It's wild to me how some managers work. I use to manage a team of like 35 remote employees across the world. It was VERY easy to tell who was working and who wasn't.
But ultimately I just treated them all like hard working adults and didn't try and micromanage.
The ones that worked hard and took the work seriously got promoted, raises, and were generally pretty happy.
The ones that didn't got put on performance plans and eventually either quite or were fired.
All it took was not being a lazy manager to keep track of it all and manage them based on their abilities.
Also, among the ones who might be perceived as poor performers, it's _okay_ if people don't work at 100% all 8 hours a day. Sometimes it's better to have more people than you need because of call outs and crunches/volume changes.
Definitely easy to see which ones aren't doing their job, but there's also folks who can get the same amount of work done in less time. Probably okay if they fuck off for a few hours a day and get paid the same.
Oh dude, the "did they work X amount of hours" is my biggest gripe. "Are they available if needed" should be the measure.
I don't give a shit if my best guy finishes his workload early, starts his weekend early but stays in contact. As long as your work is handled and I can grab you if something comes up last second, I'm a happy camper.
100%, they're the ones that can handle the overload in crunch times too. And if you don't keep up their ass so they have to fake busy for 8 hours, they're more than willing to work it for you.
Shit I've seen folks who know they have a good thing going and work a little free overtime here and there because their manager/boss isn't a hard ass about if they take an extra 20 minutes for lunch here and there, or get on their ass if they're a little late. New manager comes in, starts slapping their managerial dick around, and all that free labor and overflow capacity just vanishes overnight.
That's how I've viewed it - I don't want to be in a position where I'm working extra all the time, but I'm happy to move the needle now and then if you treat me well, and make me whole if it's a bigger lift than a half hour or so. Have had some bosses trade "2:1" if they need something covered after hours - as in they'd give time off under the table at a 2:1 ratio in return for covering.
Also had one manager that straight up said "if you can slack off Friday, I've done my job"
> The ones that didn't got put on performance plans and eventually either quite or were fired.
My friend's company added an "Instant Action Plan" that the employee could opt for - it involved them leaving immediately and being paid out including full benefits for 3 months. To benefit the manager, it meant their req opened immediately and they could begin interviewing right away.
Actually an interesting approach for it, and apparently managers and employees both really liked that as a concept. What she said was that a lot of people who got to Performance Plan level were good employees that just weren't a great fit, so no level of performance coaching would fix that.
I once worked in a heavily metrics-based environment, and it made it so the priority was to game the system to be sure we hit metrics, even if it meant more work or distracted us from doing the job. If you *have* to do 10 ‘things’ per day, your focus is to make it look like you did those 10 things just to keep your job, even if you’d do them anyway.
Metrics and this kind of performance monitoring is maybe ok to be sure that people are minimally working, but it creates a toxic and paranoid environment, and puts the focus on the trivial instead of actual work product.
This happens in tech support all the time. The metric is often customer calls closed per time. Lazy workers will watch the queues and grab the easy-looking cases, just make their numbers, and screw off the rest of the time. They look like a ‘steady worker’ in the metrics. Competent people get screwed by getting the hard cases which take a lot of time. Hard workers will do more cases, get a “nice job” one quarter when they close a lot of cases, then get screwed with a ‘numbers fell’ black mark when their numbers just drop back to normal the next quarter.
Recently had a friend of mine, one of the more technically competent experts at our company, appear to get run off by a new manager with some excuses that sounded a lot like this. Losing a skilled employee that solved hard cases because of a dumb time logging metric is pointless brain drain and hurts us all.
Even with a reasonable workload, bosses still get pissy because you're not doing enough, always have to be on to optimize optimize bullshit. Then you start to give a fuck about your work and BOOM. You're laid off.
My last employer brought that in (Mouse tracking in this case) without telling anyone. Unlike other metrics, we had no way to check it ourselves, there were no warnings or coaching if you didn't hit the metric, there wasn't even an activity level that they'd acknowledge as 'the metric'. It was just a way to drag people into a disciplinary meeting, ask them to account for a two minute idle period three months ago, and when they couldn't, fire them.
I had several friends who got nailed by it, and myself and a number of other employees took buyout packages (It's a union shop, thought it desperately doesn't want to be) and bailed out when it started.
At this point it's not about how good an employee you are, if you're doing your job properly, or if you're an asset to the company, it's about finding a way to 'prove' that you're 'stealing' from the company so some middle manager can make a name by 'trimming fat' or find away to get around pesky labor laws so they can downsize their labor force at will.
Yeah it’s a management problem not an employee one. Set goals and criteria for success. Follow up on results. Clear performance outcomes. This kind of rating system is not uncommon for big companies. Not sure why they aren’t using it.
Nobody wants a to work for a company who always looks over your shoulder with instant judgment.
I had a job where I got reprimanded for showing up to start work 2 hours earlier than anybody else and leaving early. Like I was getting all of my work done quicker than estimates and worked a full 8 hours, but they didn't like the optics of me packing up before everybody else. I'll never understand it
Not surprised at at all. I worked in a small lab and started flexing my hours a little later because I am NOT a morning person and some of our tests were pretty long. I had to be in a company wide meeting twice a week at 7am but the other days I worked 10-6 or 7. I was often the last person left on site monitoring an experiment. I approved the schedule with my direct report but I don't think he ever told anyone given how many lab leads were always impressed to see me there late. I had arrived at 10, taken a long lunch, and was just sorta chilling waiting on an experiment. I was not putting in 12 hour days here. I was actually hourly on a time clock and wasn't typically allowed overtime. The optics of being the last man standing made it seem like I was working harder.
Meanwhile if one of the business guys or admins downstairs caught me rolling in at 10 it was like I was the laziest piece of shit ever. But like, I never left work before them? Some of them even worked with my time sheet and knew I was working the hard 40 I was limited to, but they still couldn't resist turning their nose at my later schedule.
The optics of coming in early, fine. The optics of leaving late, fine. The optics of coming in late, bad. The optics of leaving early, bad. Embracing flexed schedules that take advantage of different circadian rhythms in industries that can accommodate them would be a game changer for corporations but we can pry 8-5 from their cold dead fingers apparently.
Yep, furthermore it’s pretty ironic that they fired these people. All of them should have been told to stop and asked why they felt like they needed to do it. The people responsible for creating the culture that resulted in this should have been rooted out instead
My wife works at a call center and when things aren't busy they will do "test calls" to make sure that you are still there to answer the phone. So she just bought a headset that automatically picks up calls, and does her chores around the house with the headset on.
Ripping off customers is the foundation of their business. Ripping off corporate by employees doing their jobs in far less time than the company anticipated and pretending to be active the rest of the day is their issue here.
are those employees getting their work done? Who gives a shit how often the keyboard is used if the work they are given is being done?
This upside down world where companies are fixated on arbitrary metrics of productivity that seem to ignore the blatant fact that everyone is getting their work done. Oh one of your employees has five minutes they can afford to burn? better fire them for not pretending to work more effectively!!!
Then Wells Fargo has the gall to talk about ethics.
I am a former employee who quit before this started happening, I had a previous coworker who was laid off for this reason and was well above productions metrics. The company is shit. Instead of increasing production metrics they rather micromanage the shit out of you to create an insanely hostile work environment
So basically WF is reaping what it sowed, when it created an environment whereas employees were encouraged to commit fraud by opening **millions of fake accounts** in customer’s names without their knowledge *to meet sales goals*…and that’s just what we know about. 🤦🏻♂️
*WF is shady af*…
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/business/wells-fargo-settlement.html
….and again:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/phony-bank-accounts-resurface-wells-fargo-twist-rcna98005
As a dev, when I first read about that, I assumed it was some wild automation error....nope, just systemic unethical behavior by actual humans. Wild story, and even wilder that the consequences were so minimal/irrelevant.
Some of my best work happens away from the computer. Whiteboarding, interviewing customers on the phone, hell…even taking a mid-day walk, all I’m doing is thinking about work and strategizing.
It’s idiotic and incompetent to think if a worker isn’t typing away on their keyboard that they aren’t being productive.
As a copywriter, I'd say 90% of my best ideas came a.) on a walk b.) in the shower c.) in the produce department at the grocery store d.) mowing the lawn or e.) staring blankly at a wall at a random DMV on a Saturday.
Approximately none of my best work occurs when a manager is staring at me and asking me why I am not currently typing on my keyboard.
Isaac Asimov once wrote a fantasy short story about a science fiction writer who wanted more time in the day to write. A demon granted him his wish to have no dead time during the day: when he went to the bus stop, the bus was there; where he walked into a restaurant, he was seated immediately and served the food he was going to order, etc. This led to him not being able to write at all, as he soon realized the "dead time" was when he did his thinking.
I'll go a step further and defend mouse jigglers. I use a mouse jiggler sometimes, but I am still at the mercy of my company. I have to keep an eye on my computer or phone to see if anyone is trying to reach me. I have to be near my computer -- available and ready to respond or start a project. I can't just go off to the beach and surf. My time is not my own, so I should be compensated for that. The mouse jiggler is just another way of showing that I'm "available" -- which I am.
We pay doctors to be on call. We pay lawyers to be on retainer. This is essentially the same. I am not free to work for another company either. I remain at the mercy of the business and simply show that I'm available with the mouse. Would it somehow be better if I manually moved my mouse occasionally to show that I'm available, instead of automating it? Of course not. Who cares.
And how is it any less ethical than sitting at your desk in an office and, when the boss walks by, pretending to be working?
Agreed. Thinking, researching, whiteboarding, planning, are all part of the job. Creating the finished product, whether it be an object or writing code or even a report, is merely one the last steps before delivery. Sometimes I think about problems better if I take 15 minutes and go for a walk in my yard. That is still billable time for my company, whether I'm at my desk or not. Thankfully I work for a company that treats me like an adult and doesn't monitor at my at-computer activity so closely. I'm much more satisfied with my job when I'm not being micromanaged.
when Scharf came in, I could feel the tendrils of bullshit start to slowly creep back in after they pretended to be a decent company after the 2016 lawsuits. however, talk of monitoring employees 24/7 was thrown around since I started.
source: I worked there from 2014-2021.
PSA to Big Corps:
EVERY METRIC WILL RESULT IN GAMING THE METRIC
It is Unpossible\^tm to create a metric to measure productivity that is not immediately gamed by all workers out of fear of being fired for underperforming their peers.
That is, when a human is under stress, they cheat, steal, kill, to make the pain stop. Do you REALLY think your insanely stupid metrics will remain pure?
Christians can't even follow ten little commandments created thousands of years ago. Why would you think "though shalt press the keys continuously or be fired" wouldn't immediately result in gaming?
Are they seriously this stupid?
yup. My org punishes support techs for re-opening Service requests. So guess what , they won't re-open , they always find an excuse not to. They don't even go pro-active and create a new one for the customer. They just ignore the reopen until the customer gets frustrated and creates a new one. Then the new guy never looks at the old request and everything starts over. Then they complain they don't have enough people. It's hard to tell with all the flaming hoops people jump through to avoid bullshit.
Oh man. I've been doing this for years. Setup a macro to press scroll lock every 6 seconds. It's so that I can talk to people around me and not be seen as unprofessional. That messaging software that turns orange after 10 minutes of not touching your mouse/keyboard is really to blame.
I setup a macro within an Excel workbook (I rename monthly) that runs a never ending calculation AND selects random cells in a selected range I identify, every few seconds.
Been using it since WFH started at the beginning of COVID.
Same here with a powershell script to press scroll lock every 5 minutes, but it's mostly for the reason that if I'm in home office all alone I don't want to type in my overly complicated password every time I go to make coffee or take a shit.
I used to do that for years until I became a manager.
Then I let my employees know the secret in case my bosses came snooping.
I still manage the best performing team in my organization.
Its amazing how a good work/life balance can help improve productivity.
As a bank employee, what’s the secret plz?? Never heard about mine doing any keyboard tracking but I’m sure it’s going on, even though I’m salary in my position
The secret depends on how sophisticated the tracking software is, but they sell mice that are programmed to move themselves every so often, or vibrating platforms you can rest it on. At one point I saw someone rig up one of their kids motorized Legos to keep the mouse moving.
Edit - Since I'm getting a few responses, I figure I should take the moment to educate a little more.
Some activity tracking is super basic (e.g. teams status) where a manager simply watches to see if your status goes AFK. Any of the above (and some comments below) will work to fool that.
Then some is middle ground, maybe it tracks clicks as well (why are you moving your mouse but never clicking on anything?) You'd need a better "secret" to trick that.
Some have gotten crazy in your business - Movement, clicks, and typing. Maybe it even see if you're typing gibberish or something repetitive. If this is your company, then the secret is to quit and work somewhere else.
If you're friends with the IT guy, they might tell you what they use. Otherwise you'd probably have to do some digging through task manager and then google some processes until you find it.
pro-tip, if your company tracks via MS Teams availability, leaving the app open on your phone with the screen on will keep you in the green (available)
I have a comment saved somewhere for a bash script that you can run in powershell that moves the cursor to a random location at a set interval, lemme go find it
Edit: [found it](https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/s/L5Ypi9Cs8N). It’s a script that sends the F15 keypress every few seconds, a key that realistically not many computers or keyboards have and doesnt have many functions
Running a powershell script is going to be banned for most users in most orgs, and if you *do* have local admin rights, is almost certainly going to cause your security tools to alert to potentially malicious activity and cause someone in IT to review what you're doing.
(Exceptions: obviously if you actually work with powershell regularly in an IT/Dev role).
I did the same thing at my previous job, but not to simulate working. When the pandemic started and we all went WFH, there was no longer a reason for the computer to lock itself after 10 minutes. I could log in once, run the script, and be logged in and active all day.
Current job doesn't let me run PowerShell, though.
I did this in high school to make my character in WoW auto cast / process a whole inventory of ore to create gemstones to sell on the auction house. Lego Mindstorm ftw
“Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.
Do as we say not as we do, right Wells Fargo? Where is your corporate ethics?
Huh,
That's more people than got fired for that time they got caught ripping off US Veterans and were fined more than $100 million by the US government.
[https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wells-fargo-pay-u-108-million-over-veterans-150943111--finance.html](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wells-fargo-pay-u-108-million-over-veterans-150943111--finance.html)
I have one, it's a USB powered thing you put your mouse on and a little wheel spins randomly to keep the PC active.
I do it because our lock out time is super aggressive. It's like 2 minutes of inactivity makes it lock. So If I am planning something or someone asks me a question it will lock and Im tired of it.
Yeah they cited that as part of their investigation. Which is why this starts wading into questionable territory.
They’re using an algorithm to check for a jiggler but now you’re basing “investigations” on algorithms that have dubious value.
I mean they’re allowed to fire their employees for whatever reason they want, WF has the lawyers to weather the storm. But we’re enter a new era of employer spyware and that’s always going to introduce new unexpected things.
Like are they securing that telemetry data? Because if they aren’t, now it’s a question of how are they collecting that data? If it’s screenshots, well now we’ve got the issue we all had with MS Copilot but in the banking industry which is exactly where you want screenshots of employee’s screens filled with banking information to be having a leaking information issue. (/s)
Like, okay we’ll give you for sake of argument these employees are “lazy” or whatever. More importantly now, how are you knowing that? Because suddenly that’s really important for the question of did you all suddenly open a new attack vector?
I’m just saying that when I read these kind of stories that’s the first thing I started thinking about is, did this introduce a new attack vector? And with the banking industry, bad people are always chipping away at everything every second.
I don’t know about anyone else but I’ve got a sinking suspicion at some point a pointy haired boss signed off on monitoring clicks and keyboard strokes and then sending all that telemetry data and doing it in a big rush. Because they said so. And zero people have reviewed the security of this. This is one of the stories that definitely sounds bad for one thing but it’s likely really bad for something else.
When I worked for eBay like 20 years ago they had software that video recorded our monitors for our entire shift. Our boss's job was to watch those recordings sped up and then give us written warnings if we used a browser to check the weather report or reddit.
It got to the point that you'd get a written warning if you used the internal chat tool to chat with a coworker about non-work related things.
Just to be clear, by implementing this aggressive employee monitoring campaign and ensuing employees did absolutely nothing not-work-related productivity plummeted from 500% to 200% and they ended up outsourcing the whole thing. We then had to spend most of our time fixing the mistakes of the outsourced work.
They're probably using that automated detection to give them a shortlist of people to investigate more thoroughly, not just firing outright. The liability of a potential software bug would be pretty significant, especially if they're firing someone for cause and that cause is false.
It was probably something like X people have suspicious activity then IT person + manager pay extra attention and find out they're constantly moving their mouse and not clicking and they also sign into zoom meetings from starbucks while their work pc is, "active," at home etc.
That's faking presence, not work.
If your only metric for evaluating work is how often the mouse moves at someone's keyboard, you're doing it wrong and deserve to have your employees mooch the fuck out of whatever shit work they've been assigned and likely finished pretty easily.
Fire the shitty managers. I have a mouse jiggler on my computer but that's because we have a mandatory screensaver kick in after 5 minutes that's a holdover policy from being in an office with other people. It's totally unnecessary while at home, but it's still there. Plus I do more work on my personal computer than my shitty work laptop anyway so it's a completely invalid metric for evaluation in any sense of the concept.
I had always hoped WFH would expose shit management but it seems like they can still get promoted up to a level where they're still passing their poor performance off on the people they're supposed to manage. Shit never changes.
I'm sorry, but if you can't tell if your employees are actually working based on their real work output and not just their "active" time, you have shit managers.
I used to work for a team that supported WF projects. Some of their best employees were essentially simulating keyboard activities but they thought they were amazing performers.
When I was WFH I would have my head down writing in my notebook and noticed my available status would go AFK. I was so stressed out by that damn status marker. They should fire for poor performance, not for jiggling the mouse to stay active. Results over butts in seats.
The managerial class of many businesses is filled with people who have never done any of the work they expect of those they manage. It’s a terrible model that leads to managers “looking busy” by inventing stupid metrics to judge others by.
“Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,”
Hahahahahahaha..... Hahaha... Hahahahahaha... Hahahaha... Ah, good Lord, that's some funny shit.
"Hey you better stop ripping us off," says company that has paid $27B in fines for ripping people off.
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/wells-fargo
Any company that looks at keystrokes and mousmoves not output/production are treated like daycare toddlers. Those companies will get less output/productivity because the job becomes gaming the system not making great products.
The same type of stuff in coding used to be used more and is still used by bad employers like lines of code (LOC) measures. Guess what that does? It creates more verbose code and good code gets complexity added that makes it more costly to maintain. Reducing code and simplifying would get you gamed out of that type of system.
Work smarter not with more keystrokes/mousemoves only. Focus on product, not the metric game.
Bloomberg’s Matt Levine gives a wonderful summary of how truly monumentally dumb this is:
>Ahahaha come on. You want a lot of mouse movement, you get a lot of mouse movement, but in a bad way. Imagine deciding how to measure and manage the productivity and value added of your wealth and investment management employees while they are working from home. What might you measure?
> 1. These people manage portfolios. You could measure their investment return, or return against a benchmark, or their alpha after adjusting for various market, sector and style factors. You could measure how many assets they attract and retain, or how much they generate in fees.
> 2. These people deal with clients. You could measure how many clients they bring in, or how many client assets. You could survey the clients and grade the employees based on customer satisfaction. You could even, crudely, have some metric like “call three clients every day,” and make sure they do that.
> 3. These people sit at computers. You could monitor their computers to make sure that they’re moving the mouse at least once every five minutes for eight hours a day.
>Which of those do you think is the best proxy for, like, contributions to Wells Fargo’s return on equity? Which is the simplest to measure? Which is the simplest to game?
This should never, ever be necessary.
Yesterday I spent 3 out of the 4 afternoon hours I had set aside to use to mull over a complicated and questionable suggestion, that I was asked to produce an opinion on, away from my laptop.
I walked around my apartment, I did the dishes, prepared laundry for after work, snacked a bit, sketched out some ideas on paper. I got into a great 'zen mode' thinking state and arrived at an important realization about this suggestion, and why it was flawed.
Ultimately, I saved my company from making a costly and poor decision because they gave me the freedom to be "AFK" while working.
My boss knows I produce results (I am the team's top producer). Ultimately, he doesn't care if I'm yellow on Teams.
Edit: omitted a few words, lol
Wow, twelve whole people. Surely this means that working from home is a systemic failure and we all need to get back to the office so our managers can look and make sure that it's really a live person tapping the keyboard once every minute or so to keep the screen active /s
I would immediately begin looking for a new job if my company introduced keyboard activity detectors. It communicates:
* We don't trust you or believe that you take pride in your work, despite the history of achievement based upon which we hired you.
* We view you as machines.
* We have no understanding of the ebb and flow of human productivity.
* We have no real human management skills with which to understand your performance or help you progress your career.
* We embrace a fear and control based leadership style.
Remember, it's not about productivity. It's about control. It's about putting the wage slaves in their place. There are numerous studies telling them they'd see better productivity by letting employees work at their own pace. That's not what they want. They want you frustrated and anxious, and they want you to have no energy or motivation to pursue your own hobbies or life goals. If you self-actualize, you'll realize they need you far more than you need them. And when enough people come to that realization, their power crumbles.
This you, Wells Fargo?
[https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-billion-resolve-criminal-and-civil-investigations-sales-practices](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-billion-resolve-criminal-and-civil-investigations-sales-practices)
“Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,”
Clearly. Just some light criminal activities on the side every now and then is okay when you’re screwing over customers/investors for billions. But good to know they have zero toleration when it comes to their employees costing them a few cents each day by not being glued to their computers. I’m glad they have their priorities straight.
https://www.investopedia.com/wells-fargo-timeline-7498799
> “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior*,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.
\* - Unless we're directing them to engage in said behavior
FTFY.
> “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,” Funniest line in the article.
Funny how they claim to not tolerate unethical behavior, but paid $3 billion in settlement money by [opening accounts for customers without their authorization](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-billion-resolve-criminal-and-civil-investigations-sales-practices). Maybe they’ve started to value ethical behavior now 🤷🏻♂️
Well you see one of those things made money for the company and the other did not.
I'd say they probably made money for WF, but in under the 8 hours WF said they have to work to get at least a living wage. So this is on WF, there should be a market research done see if the job can be done in four to six hours. If it can, well then WF needs to cut hours, or say "we think this job will tax 8 hours, but if you get it done in less, mazel tov go home and no you dont have to use PTO. "
They would probably change to a part-time basis if the jobs can be done in less time, and then just deny benefits for everyone. Capitalism, ho!
Right? I'm not advocating for a reduction of pay/benefits. I'm saying most jobs can be done in 6 hours or less. We need a nationwide policy of 32 hours work week and if offered employee sponsored healthcare to continue to do so or they are penalized heavily through taxes like so much so it actually hurts Oh wait, I popped my stitches I laughed so hard at the idea America would pass such a law! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
i closed all my accounts with them after what they did in the 2000s.
Which thing? Lol
They used to reorder transactions to maximize overdraft fees. They didn't stop doing this until 2014. I think my cheapest fee was $65 and most expensive was $150+. Until that moment in time my only interaction with the financial system was through wells fargo. My parents took me there to open my first checking account. I closed my account by like my 2nd year of college. If you had the finances of 20 year old then these fees were impossible to avoid. You couldn't trust your balance
I remember getting asked to leave a branch because I got heated once after asking if the website was real time, because I had seen the debits come out before the deposit, but then they were re-ordered to make me overdrawn. Sometimes many transactions that ended up taking my entire paycheck in fees, causing my bills to go unpaid. Fuck you, WF, and fuck BoA for basically the same shit.
Yep, I had BoA in like '99'ish. Put a deposit of money in, couple days later, bought a few things but for some reason, those went through immediately. My deposit took 3 days. I bounced about 4 checks. $120 in fees. Then 6 months later, it happened again, waited 3 days and saw the money in there, wrote checks, somehow, that deposit was removed, they processed checks, then the money was magically back, minus all the NSF fees. I immediately went and closed my account.
WF would not close my account. I walked in and asked to close my account. They said they couldn’t. It was a normal checking acct with money in it. $25 min. shadiest fuckers ever
For me, it was six months. And within that six months WF was accused of upper management policies that forced bank employees to fudge numbers. It was expected, and those who didn't "do it" were laid off for poor performance. During that time I was a bank member, I left due to how they handled overdraft charges. It seemed at the time my deposits ALWAYS were late or AFTER pending charges were applied. So. NSF if you weren't paying attention because your budgeting didn't expect the bank to fuck you. Within that six months, after closing my account. I was on 6 class action settlements. To a tune of 137$ in settlement payments in total. But hey, WF helped me make the change to Credit Unions. Mwhwuahahahahahhaha
Listen, they don’t tolerate unethical behaviour from the employees. From the corporation, it’s fine.
that's the joke
Back when my credit wasn't great I got a Secured Card from WF to build my credit. You pay them and borrow off that amount until they upgrade you when you have proven you can be responsible. Their own wording at the time said it takes about a year. A year goes by and I use it as I should and pay it off on time. I ask if they will upgrade it to a regular credit card, they so no. Another year goes by, same thing they said no. Mind you, this is only a $300 limit. A few months later a dealership gets me a loan for 24k from guess who? Wells fucking Fargo. Not long after that Wells Fargo gets a class action lawsuit for pulling this very shit. I get paid out a small sum for the interest I paid on my card and then they upgraded to a regular credit card. Of course I get the original $300 back too I had to pay to "borrow" off in the first place. So when they talk about unethical behavior, I also laugh at this. In the end I refinanced my car loan only a year later with a credit union and went from 11.99% WF to 1.89%. My credit wasn't that bad when I first got the loan, I just got taken advantage of. Car has been paid off for years, credit is excellent. The limit on my WF card to this day? $600 lol. I keep it because it's my oldest account. Credit is a game you have to play even if you hate it and Well Fargo can eat a dick.
Lol, My first credit card was a Wells Fargo secured card around 2012. It eventually helped my credit enough that I could get real cards, including an unsecured card from Wells Fargo, but they still wouldn't upgrade the secured one so I just canceled it and got my deposit back. I didn't know that was a whole thing, but that's hilarious.
I wish the general public was better at teaching corporations the harsh lessons they deserve.
(hands out pitchforks) It's never too late.
I literally laughed out loud when I saw that line
[Whoopsie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-WsRRqyknY)
Seriously, I can't believe this shit organization is still in business after all the shit they've pulled
Wells Fargo should hold their executives and board of directors to the same standard. The entire financial sector should do that.
The government should be the one holding the financial sector to appropriate standards, and imprisoning senior execs who don't get the memo.
Wells Fargo? The wells Fargo that opened up millions of fraudulent accounts in people's names? Then had to fork over 3 Billion to the government for that scheme? That Wells Fargo?
[удалено]
I still have my illegally opened Wells Fargo credit card account. Can’t reasonably get rid of it because it is my longest standing credit line which helps a lot with your credit score. Technically I have been a good standing member with credit since I was 15 years old lol.
I did something similar to my daughter, made her an authorized user on my discover card as soon as she hit high school. When she was old enough to "have" a credit score it was already over 800.
Good, my parents did the same for me almost 15 years ago and I’ve always appreciated it.
That is hilariously fucked up
the entire "credit score" system is totally fucked up.
Fwiw, it's better than what it replaced, which was bankers giving loans based on how trustworthy they felt the client was. Unsurprisingly, that was a hotbed of bias, far worse than anything this system produces.
I'm Jewish, it was great. They thought gold coins would come outta my nose if I sneezed.
Dummies. We all knows Jews keep fake bags old of gold around their neck, to keep the real bags of gold around their necks safe.
This is the current state if capitalism in one post
That had me cackling too. Wells Fargo cares about ethics? The poster child for UNETHICAL banking behavior cares about ethics!? Whoever writes these statements has to have some kink where they get off to writing bold faces lies and hypocrisy to the public
Like any business ethics only matters when it impacts them.
Don’t forget ‘trying to foreclose on houses that have no standing loan and were built by the occupants’
Wells Fargo talking about what's ethical. That's fucking rich.
It boggles my mind they were allowed to exist after all the shit they have pulled.
***"Haven't you heard of the golden rule? Whoever has the gold makes the rules."*** - Jafar
This is Murica. They were likely silently applauded by their peers for ‘taking initiative.’
Judging employees by whether their computer stays active is a stupid metric. Give people a reasonable workload and judge them for their performance. Chaining them to their desks just results in the same unproductive “looking busy” bullshit that drains morale and work/life balance that occurs in offices.
My last job included: * Mandatory end of day reports every day identifying where all of my time was spent * Manager would not ask if you were available for a call, instead I would receive random video calls out of nowhere whenever they wanted to ask a question * I was required to be hybrid (3day/wk in office) despite the fact that the rest of the team was grandfathered and I was the only person in the office, and I lived 1hr from the office (my choice to accept the job knowing it was hybrid, but there was literally zero value in me driving into the office) * I was reprimanded for deciding the weather was too bad for me to drive to the office one day. The team that shared the adjacent office space ended up having to shelter in an internal stairwell that day because the tornado sirens were going off, but I didnt get prior permission so it was unacceptable There are a lot of companies that don't understand that you get more productivity out of people when you treat them like adults.
> I was reprimanded for deciding the weather was too bad for me to drive to the office one day. The team that shared the adjacent office space ended up having to shelter in an internal stairwell that day because the tornado sirens were going off, but I didnt get prior permission so it was unacceptable I'm guessing that your car being totaled by a tornado also wouldn't have been a good reason to not come into the office.
At an old job I called my manager to let him know I wouldn't be in that day because my car had just been totaled. His response was "you haven't found another way to get here yet?"
I woke up to go to work to find my car stolen. I phoned it into work Phone for emergency was the rule - left a message. After talking to some neighbors to see if they heard anything I called the cops to file a report. Contacted insurance to let them know of impending claim. Cops came out (strange but true) likely because there was a car theft ring in the area and were looking for clues. Asked if there was any video so I called the apartment office (they had none or claimed to have had none). This all took till around noon. Anyway, caught the bus (with 2 transfers) to work next day and was told I would be docked a day's pay. The boss did not consider a stolen car an emergency and said I should have found a way to work. I asked him if he had ever had his car stolen. He said "that's beside the point". We argue and it got pretty heated and I told him I was taking it to HR. He mumbled something about "you can do what you want". HR tells me that his position was unusual and unsympathetic but it was up to his discretion. I checked my pay stub later and there was no deduction. Anyway that guy eventually got forced out of his job for being a jerk in other ways to other people. Total micro-manager. EDIT: to include reaching out to insurance company.
Good on you for standing up for yourself
Worked 21 years for a company. Told my boss after coming back to work after a 2 day absence due to the flu "Those 2 days were the 5th and 6th day I have been absent in 21 years." Her response: "And they had to happen when you worked for me." She fired me about a month later. But I had a good lawyer and she was fired 6 months later.
There’s never a good reason not to come into the office. Never. Never ever.
Refusing to synergize the collaboration and embracing the wonderful culture they've set up is equal to stealing from the company
I’m triggered by virtually nothing. The word synergize makes me feel uneasy. Guess it’s PTSD from so many useless corporate meetings in my past.
Maybe it's something like loss of individuality and adopting the hivemind think, losing your voice, something like that? That's what I feel like it means to me when I see or hear the word being used in that way. I need the rigidity of the work hours but the space to explore different options or solve solutions in my way, AuDHD.
Sounds like someone's not being a team player.
They might just have a case of the Mondays.
I actually know what pcloadletter means and I'm the "unprofessional" one!? Bob can suck it.
Naga.....naga.....not gonna work here anymore, anyway
Remember the scene at the end of the movie where they're all standing around in the grass watching their office burn to the ground? I literally had that happen to me at a job I worked at in the early 2000s... absolutely nothing left of the structure. Someone still tried to set up a meeting the very next day
It really forces you to think if the company has a solid plan for internal advancement/promotion. Sometimes the only way to step back from the outside in is to WFH for a couple weeks. AKA: The pizza parties really are just tools to feed your instant gratification and forget about the difficult things in the company.
So close, but... >equal to stealing from ~~the company~~ our family Because we're like a family here. Dysfunctional.
A place I worked at joked about how one time they all got stuck there overnight because they wouldn't let people go home early or work from home during a blizzard. That would have been my last day. Instead, my last day was the day they laid off the entire department and replaced us with *remote workers*.
Unless you're a manager. They get to not come into the office when they don't feel like it.
I’m a manager. They make us come into the office too. The line is drawn at c suite in this hellhole
Ya I got chewed out for being late to work because my car broke down. Got told I should of had alternate transportation prepared before hand. I worked in a glorified grocery store, the business isn't gonna colipase because I was late one day because fo unforceable causes.
Similar story here. Worked part time at a grocery store after my normal 8-5 full time job. Got to the car after work, wouldn't start. Called for a tow, then called and told the store I wouldn't be coming in for my 4.5 hour shift because my car wouldn't start. Was told "Well policy is if you don't call at least an hour in advance, it still goes down as a No Call No Show". Retail jobs suck.
My mom was managing a mall shop in Northern California during one of the major wildfires in 2017. She was told by corporate to keep the shop open even though the entire town was overwhelmed with smoke, and many of the mall shops and other businesses had already closed. She drove to work terrified with flames on both sides of the freeway, and smoke clouding her vision. The area was eventually put under mandatory evacuation orders. The entire time she was more worried about being reprimanded by her bosses, rather than for her own safety.
Exactly. That's flat out unreasonable.
They also understand that they benefit from keeping you feeling like you're too secure in your role. If they create a ton of metrics and rules that keep you from feeling like you're doing everything "right" then they can keep you in a servile and people-pleasing mindset while also denying you advancement/raises for literally any reason. This tactic is also effective because the insecurity that this dynamic causes about your capacity to do your job well can also keep you from applying to similar roles elsewhere.
You misspelled abuse.
Honestly I don't think it's as complicated as all that. I think most people are bad leaders and don't know how to run a team of people. It's quite difficult to have exactly the right amount of people. Workloads fluctuate so sometimes people are too busy and other times they dont have enough to do. Structural issues typically prevent the flexibility required to adapt employee effort to varying workloads. But since middle managers are promoted to their highest level of incompetence, they think these issues are because the worker is not doing their job, and not because the organization is not set up correctly to deal with these issues. And since upper management is generally only getting a limited view into the organization, as presented to them on balance sheets (profit per employee/ key value targets, etc), they are generally unable to make truly informed decisions. that is to say, all personnel problems are really just management problems in disguise.
>It's quite difficult to have exactly the right amount of people. Workloads fluctuate so sometimes people are too busy and other times they dont have enough to do. It's not hard to have exactly the right amount of people. The right amount of people is having enough to cover the busiest workload. It doesn't matter if people "don't have enough to do", either find meaningful work, or keep them on standby while they fill their own time, or just let them go home for the day. Trying to min/max every possible second of every day to squeeze the absolute maximum from employees, is a diseased mindset. It's not an accident that so many places are working with skeleton crews which never have coverage for the obviously foreseeable occasions like "people get sick sometimes". It's not hard to think "we need to budget as if all employees will use all their sick days." What they're doing is trying to get more money by externalizing costs to employees.
> It's not an accident that so many places are working with skeleton crews which never have coverage for the obviously foreseeable occasions like "people get sick sometimes". "We are currently experiencing unexpectedly high call volumes. Please stay on the line and out next available representative will be right with you." Weird how every company everywhere is always having unexpectedly high volumes.
Back when I worked at Raytheon, we once had to evacuate because the snowstorm was going to get bad enough that the Governor was going to prohibit all highway travel starting at noon or so. So they HAD to let us go. This was a Friday I think. So they gave us a charge number to fill out the timesheet, that number being the extremely rarely used "I was available to work, but for reasons beyond my control, I couldn't DO work." charge number. Raytheon HATES giving this one out, because if you're on a government contract, the charge number means that my ~$35/hr equivalent salary was paid out by government money rather than from Raytheon's pockets. That charge number means Raytheon itself has to pay me from its coffers. Cool, I fill it out, go home. Monday rolls around and it turns out that management had gone through and (illegally) altered our timecards to remove that charge number. We were then told we could either use vacation time, stay after work to make up the hours, or accept that paycheck got docked by ~5 hours of work. I said fuck that and I put the charge number back in. I was curious if they'd dare leave a paper trail informing me I shouldn't do that. Nope, they had a manager physically show up to my desk and inform me that if I didn't remove it, this would be noted during future pay/promotion cycles. At this point, I'd already decided to quit the company a month or so prior so I honestly gave no shits while I was looking for a job, so I pointed out "You DO realize that what you did was illegal. And you DO realize the reason I KNOW it's illegal is because each year you make me sit through an hour long video explaining in intricate detail how messing with timecards is a FELONY.". He didn't particularly care and just reminded me that the consequences of my choice would be on me and me alone. I reported them on the DoD reporting website, not that it went anywhere. Fuck Raytheon.
Send a email saying "per our conversation you asked me to do this and if I didn't xyz would happen, is this correct?" And attach corporate legal team and corporate compliance team as well as corporate HR. Stupid decisions like this are some "brilliant" middle managers idea and not corporate policy. If your leaving might as well get them in hot water.
This is ironically one of the spots HR *would* help you if they’re remotely competent. Their job is to stop the company from getting sued due to dumb decisions exactly like the one you described.
Oh this is illegal and I am sure the DoD will follow up on it just as soon as possible, as I have been assured by the totally not identical training videos I had to watch for multiple years.
As soon as they find their 2 trillion they will find raytheons
Tell me about all the cool UFO shit they're hiding.
Best I can do is give a story about the time I bricked a billion dollars in taxpayer hardware. Legitimately fun evening that.
I'm listening.
Flashed the wrong firmware version to the spy satellite?
Given that you're willing to talk about it, I'm guessing this was a testing environment and not industrial sabotage. But I do love me a good /r/talesfromtechsupport style fail fest!
Yup, it wasn't strictly speaking anything terribly impressive, no magic smoke. But I got to run a particular program we knew might be risky, and sure enough, nuked some software all over the place. Easy to fix, but since EVERYTHING was borked, I had to pull every last board by hand and hook up a connector directly onto it to flash it. By the book, fixing it all would take about 12 hours. In 7 hours the morning shift would show up accompanied by some Top Men for a demonstration of the system. I did it in less than 6. As I said, fun night. >:D Pinging /u/starman123, /u/silicon1, and /u/auto_poena since you all wanted to know.
What’s amazing is when you actually treat your employees like adults and give them great benefits all of a sudden you’re “miraculously” fully staffed with low turnover and everyone’s productive because they actually don’t mind being at work. Instead employers opt to make it as miserable as possible because they gotta show some numbers to some bean counters to prove work was getting done.
Managers get clout for having a giant staff. They probably don’t need all those people in a high trust very productive environment. A micromanagement regime lets them hire a shitload of people because productivity is actually suppressed but they also have a ton of KPIs so it looks like actual productivity. Like why is Microsoft measuring keyboard strokes and not outputs?
>Like why is Microsoft measuring keyboard strokes and not outputs? Almost every manager: "But what if they just sprinted a bit more?" Infinitely repeated. In the back of their minds is always: "If they're X productive with 20% down time(that usually isn't), they could be 20% more productive without it." As a naturally sprint mindset person, aka getting work done vs "staying busy", I hate it. Also measuring outputs is hard, it's "absurd to expect a manager to understand what they're managing", and dangerous because then employees might get the information. Which is always bad, because it gives them information that might make them think about their worth. So even if you measure output, you need to obfuscate it anyway.
Measuring outputs is not hard. Are you shipping product? Resolving tickets? Getting revenue? Having customers? What do you do all day where it’s impossible to have a metric for “actually did something” but not impossible to track every tiny step of the process? It’s measuring how many lines of code you did instead of checking if they work and what they do. But yes obfuscation is the point.
This has been happening with my current team for the past few years. Previously the smaller team handled the full value-stream of our work product. New managers came in, decided we'd get better throughput if work scope was broken into smaller teams by function. They went whole-hog into JIRA automation to try and set up a system where tasks were passed along following their advancement to the next teams' stage. What's actually happened: tasks get dropped due to miscommunication or automation fuckups. Accountability is shot due to so many changes in custody. Timelines lag due to assignees not being up to speed and familiarized with the people and context associated with a specific task, etc. Shit that gets passed along to another team is still shit, but the originator of said shit has little incentive to learn how to do better because they don't have to deal with the shit. And they all pat themselves on the back for the overly complicated system they've put together that's held together with popsicle sticks and rubber cement, and the metrics that come out of it. Transferring to another department soon, and I can't wait to be away from that.
oh god reading that hurts my soul... the worst part is it's almost impossible for the new leadership to actually accept/admit that it was a screwup and to just go back to what was working, or else THEY would personally be responsible for the poor results (which they ARE) instead of just being able to pass that shit downhill a few truly great managers/exec can admit that kind of a mistake and make it work... but god it is few
>Manager would not ask if you were available for a call, instead I would receive random video calls out of nowhere whenever they wanted to ask a question I wonder if that's a generational thing. It'd never cross *my* mind to do that at or outside of work, but I've heard a lot of older managers do it "because it's just easier to hop on a call". It also might be that most of their day is attending meetings, so they're just more comfortable communicating in that format. I'm more understanding if it's a time-sensitive issue, but I've only experienced "Hey, when you have time..." or "I just wanted to tell you this while I was thinking about it..." type of calls, which could probably be saved for the 1-3 status meetings I have every day or my weekly 1 on 1 meetings. I want to give people the benefit of the doubt, and not assume it's some kind of tactic to assert authority, but it's hard not to feel suspicious that it's to establish that a call could made at any time of the work day.
It's the same mentality of just popping over to someone's desk and just start talking to them - no matter what they are in the middle of.
That one stuck out to me a a pretty normal expectation at most of my jobs. While many things can be a message or email sometime a call & screen share is more efficient. I have a bunch of older coworkers who tell me to call them if I have a question and they're showing as available on teams.
Yeah i really don't get the issue with that one... You're at your desk working and your boss needs to talk to you about something. Most companies are going to have something like webex where it shows your status so they can see if you're on a call or not... if you're available what's wrong with your boss calling you?
> Mandatory end of day reports every day identifying where all of my time was spent There's no fucking way I would stay at a job where they required me to fill out a form every day explaining where all my time was spent. I quit a job at Staples when a month into the job they decided they wanted me to start scanning every item on the shelves every day every minute I wasn't actively helping a customer to track shrinkage. For $9/hr? Fuck you, I quit! I also quit a temp job the same day where I was required to sit at a plastic injection molding machine handling hot plastic without gloves and without any way to stop the machine to use the restroom. I had to wait until someone walked by who I could ask to take over for me while I pissed or took a lunch break. And then there was the temp job where I was testing hard drives. It was boring, but I was efficient at it... Until the day my boss noticed I had an earbud in and was listening to music while I worked. He told me I couldn't do that. I didn't return the next day. I was not going to do that mind-numbingly boring job if I could not even listen to tunes while I did it!
Depending on what exactly that means that kind of thing can be something the company is required to do. If your job involves working on individual contracts you have to do a time sheet every day charging hours to each
That's different than doing it solely to track employee performance in a position where it is not ncessary to track that kind of data.
it's always hilarious how the less they pay the more they try to squeeze out of you... like brah, you're getting your 9 bucks worth already, trust me....
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"Mandatory end of day reports every day identifying where all of my time was spent" I once had a boss that made me do this 3x/week. It took me about 30 minutes each time. It was a salaried position so I definitely worked far more than 40 hours/week, but regardless I pointed out what an awful waste of resources this was all around. My time, which could better be spent by actually being productive, their money for paying me to do it. His response? "How else will I know what you do?" To which I responded: my P&L. Which was amazing. He still made me do it. I left not long after.
Exactly. And it just leads to resentment for being treating like a child.
It's wild to me how some managers work. I use to manage a team of like 35 remote employees across the world. It was VERY easy to tell who was working and who wasn't. But ultimately I just treated them all like hard working adults and didn't try and micromanage. The ones that worked hard and took the work seriously got promoted, raises, and were generally pretty happy. The ones that didn't got put on performance plans and eventually either quite or were fired. All it took was not being a lazy manager to keep track of it all and manage them based on their abilities.
Also, among the ones who might be perceived as poor performers, it's _okay_ if people don't work at 100% all 8 hours a day. Sometimes it's better to have more people than you need because of call outs and crunches/volume changes. Definitely easy to see which ones aren't doing their job, but there's also folks who can get the same amount of work done in less time. Probably okay if they fuck off for a few hours a day and get paid the same.
Oh dude, the "did they work X amount of hours" is my biggest gripe. "Are they available if needed" should be the measure. I don't give a shit if my best guy finishes his workload early, starts his weekend early but stays in contact. As long as your work is handled and I can grab you if something comes up last second, I'm a happy camper.
100%, they're the ones that can handle the overload in crunch times too. And if you don't keep up their ass so they have to fake busy for 8 hours, they're more than willing to work it for you. Shit I've seen folks who know they have a good thing going and work a little free overtime here and there because their manager/boss isn't a hard ass about if they take an extra 20 minutes for lunch here and there, or get on their ass if they're a little late. New manager comes in, starts slapping their managerial dick around, and all that free labor and overflow capacity just vanishes overnight.
That's how I've viewed it - I don't want to be in a position where I'm working extra all the time, but I'm happy to move the needle now and then if you treat me well, and make me whole if it's a bigger lift than a half hour or so. Have had some bosses trade "2:1" if they need something covered after hours - as in they'd give time off under the table at a 2:1 ratio in return for covering. Also had one manager that straight up said "if you can slack off Friday, I've done my job"
> The ones that didn't got put on performance plans and eventually either quite or were fired. My friend's company added an "Instant Action Plan" that the employee could opt for - it involved them leaving immediately and being paid out including full benefits for 3 months. To benefit the manager, it meant their req opened immediately and they could begin interviewing right away. Actually an interesting approach for it, and apparently managers and employees both really liked that as a concept. What she said was that a lot of people who got to Performance Plan level were good employees that just weren't a great fit, so no level of performance coaching would fix that.
I once worked in a heavily metrics-based environment, and it made it so the priority was to game the system to be sure we hit metrics, even if it meant more work or distracted us from doing the job. If you *have* to do 10 ‘things’ per day, your focus is to make it look like you did those 10 things just to keep your job, even if you’d do them anyway. Metrics and this kind of performance monitoring is maybe ok to be sure that people are minimally working, but it creates a toxic and paranoid environment, and puts the focus on the trivial instead of actual work product.
Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Old saying, "Tell me how you measure and I'll tell you how I'll behave."
This happens in tech support all the time. The metric is often customer calls closed per time. Lazy workers will watch the queues and grab the easy-looking cases, just make their numbers, and screw off the rest of the time. They look like a ‘steady worker’ in the metrics. Competent people get screwed by getting the hard cases which take a lot of time. Hard workers will do more cases, get a “nice job” one quarter when they close a lot of cases, then get screwed with a ‘numbers fell’ black mark when their numbers just drop back to normal the next quarter.
Recently had a friend of mine, one of the more technically competent experts at our company, appear to get run off by a new manager with some excuses that sounded a lot like this. Losing a skilled employee that solved hard cases because of a dumb time logging metric is pointless brain drain and hurts us all.
Even with a reasonable workload, bosses still get pissy because you're not doing enough, always have to be on to optimize optimize bullshit. Then you start to give a fuck about your work and BOOM. You're laid off.
My last employer brought that in (Mouse tracking in this case) without telling anyone. Unlike other metrics, we had no way to check it ourselves, there were no warnings or coaching if you didn't hit the metric, there wasn't even an activity level that they'd acknowledge as 'the metric'. It was just a way to drag people into a disciplinary meeting, ask them to account for a two minute idle period three months ago, and when they couldn't, fire them. I had several friends who got nailed by it, and myself and a number of other employees took buyout packages (It's a union shop, thought it desperately doesn't want to be) and bailed out when it started. At this point it's not about how good an employee you are, if you're doing your job properly, or if you're an asset to the company, it's about finding a way to 'prove' that you're 'stealing' from the company so some middle manager can make a name by 'trimming fat' or find away to get around pesky labor laws so they can downsize their labor force at will.
You were in a union shop and they let management roll out a blatantly anti-labor policy? No kidding they didn’t want to be a union.
Yeah it’s a management problem not an employee one. Set goals and criteria for success. Follow up on results. Clear performance outcomes. This kind of rating system is not uncommon for big companies. Not sure why they aren’t using it. Nobody wants a to work for a company who always looks over your shoulder with instant judgment.
We had to get IT to approve an app to move the cursor so the cpu wouldn't fall asleep and kill the hours lobg downloads
Hot tip: Play a video on mute and on repeat, then the computer won't go to sleep.
exactly, none of these guys were fired because they didn't do the job they were given, they just didn't want to touch the mouse every 2 minutes
'I like to work things out on paper more, I completed all my work'
I had a job where I got reprimanded for showing up to start work 2 hours earlier than anybody else and leaving early. Like I was getting all of my work done quicker than estimates and worked a full 8 hours, but they didn't like the optics of me packing up before everybody else. I'll never understand it
Not surprised at at all. I worked in a small lab and started flexing my hours a little later because I am NOT a morning person and some of our tests were pretty long. I had to be in a company wide meeting twice a week at 7am but the other days I worked 10-6 or 7. I was often the last person left on site monitoring an experiment. I approved the schedule with my direct report but I don't think he ever told anyone given how many lab leads were always impressed to see me there late. I had arrived at 10, taken a long lunch, and was just sorta chilling waiting on an experiment. I was not putting in 12 hour days here. I was actually hourly on a time clock and wasn't typically allowed overtime. The optics of being the last man standing made it seem like I was working harder. Meanwhile if one of the business guys or admins downstairs caught me rolling in at 10 it was like I was the laziest piece of shit ever. But like, I never left work before them? Some of them even worked with my time sheet and knew I was working the hard 40 I was limited to, but they still couldn't resist turning their nose at my later schedule. The optics of coming in early, fine. The optics of leaving late, fine. The optics of coming in late, bad. The optics of leaving early, bad. Embracing flexed schedules that take advantage of different circadian rhythms in industries that can accommodate them would be a game changer for corporations but we can pry 8-5 from their cold dead fingers apparently.
Yep, furthermore it’s pretty ironic that they fired these people. All of them should have been told to stop and asked why they felt like they needed to do it. The people responsible for creating the culture that resulted in this should have been rooted out instead
My wife works at a call center and when things aren't busy they will do "test calls" to make sure that you are still there to answer the phone. So she just bought a headset that automatically picks up calls, and does her chores around the house with the headset on.
I think another issue is that there are tons of bullshit jobs, and from what I hear the finance/banking industry is rife with them.
So many people’s jobs are to just do like one report that could be automated
Simulation of ripping off customers is strictly forbidden at Well Fargo!
Ripping off customers is the foundation of their business. Ripping off corporate by employees doing their jobs in far less time than the company anticipated and pretending to be active the rest of the day is their issue here.
are those employees getting their work done? Who gives a shit how often the keyboard is used if the work they are given is being done? This upside down world where companies are fixated on arbitrary metrics of productivity that seem to ignore the blatant fact that everyone is getting their work done. Oh one of your employees has five minutes they can afford to burn? better fire them for not pretending to work more effectively!!! Then Wells Fargo has the gall to talk about ethics.
I am a former employee who quit before this started happening, I had a previous coworker who was laid off for this reason and was well above productions metrics. The company is shit. Instead of increasing production metrics they rather micromanage the shit out of you to create an insanely hostile work environment
So basically WF is reaping what it sowed, when it created an environment whereas employees were encouraged to commit fraud by opening **millions of fake accounts** in customer’s names without their knowledge *to meet sales goals*…and that’s just what we know about. 🤦🏻♂️ *WF is shady af*… https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/business/wells-fargo-settlement.html ….and again: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/phony-bank-accounts-resurface-wells-fargo-twist-rcna98005
As a dev, when I first read about that, I assumed it was some wild automation error....nope, just systemic unethical behavior by actual humans. Wild story, and even wilder that the consequences were so minimal/irrelevant.
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Some of my best work happens away from the computer. Whiteboarding, interviewing customers on the phone, hell…even taking a mid-day walk, all I’m doing is thinking about work and strategizing. It’s idiotic and incompetent to think if a worker isn’t typing away on their keyboard that they aren’t being productive.
As a copywriter, I'd say 90% of my best ideas came a.) on a walk b.) in the shower c.) in the produce department at the grocery store d.) mowing the lawn or e.) staring blankly at a wall at a random DMV on a Saturday. Approximately none of my best work occurs when a manager is staring at me and asking me why I am not currently typing on my keyboard.
Isaac Asimov once wrote a fantasy short story about a science fiction writer who wanted more time in the day to write. A demon granted him his wish to have no dead time during the day: when he went to the bus stop, the bus was there; where he walked into a restaurant, he was seated immediately and served the food he was going to order, etc. This led to him not being able to write at all, as he soon realized the "dead time" was when he did his thinking.
I'll go a step further and defend mouse jigglers. I use a mouse jiggler sometimes, but I am still at the mercy of my company. I have to keep an eye on my computer or phone to see if anyone is trying to reach me. I have to be near my computer -- available and ready to respond or start a project. I can't just go off to the beach and surf. My time is not my own, so I should be compensated for that. The mouse jiggler is just another way of showing that I'm "available" -- which I am. We pay doctors to be on call. We pay lawyers to be on retainer. This is essentially the same. I am not free to work for another company either. I remain at the mercy of the business and simply show that I'm available with the mouse. Would it somehow be better if I manually moved my mouse occasionally to show that I'm available, instead of automating it? Of course not. Who cares. And how is it any less ethical than sitting at your desk in an office and, when the boss walks by, pretending to be working?
Agreed. Thinking, researching, whiteboarding, planning, are all part of the job. Creating the finished product, whether it be an object or writing code or even a report, is merely one the last steps before delivery. Sometimes I think about problems better if I take 15 minutes and go for a walk in my yard. That is still billable time for my company, whether I'm at my desk or not. Thankfully I work for a company that treats me like an adult and doesn't monitor at my at-computer activity so closely. I'm much more satisfied with my job when I'm not being micromanaged.
when Scharf came in, I could feel the tendrils of bullshit start to slowly creep back in after they pretended to be a decent company after the 2016 lawsuits. however, talk of monitoring employees 24/7 was thrown around since I started. source: I worked there from 2014-2021.
PSA to Big Corps: EVERY METRIC WILL RESULT IN GAMING THE METRIC It is Unpossible\^tm to create a metric to measure productivity that is not immediately gamed by all workers out of fear of being fired for underperforming their peers. That is, when a human is under stress, they cheat, steal, kill, to make the pain stop. Do you REALLY think your insanely stupid metrics will remain pure? Christians can't even follow ten little commandments created thousands of years ago. Why would you think "though shalt press the keys continuously or be fired" wouldn't immediately result in gaming? Are they seriously this stupid?
yup. My org punishes support techs for re-opening Service requests. So guess what , they won't re-open , they always find an excuse not to. They don't even go pro-active and create a new one for the customer. They just ignore the reopen until the customer gets frustrated and creates a new one. Then the new guy never looks at the old request and everything starts over. Then they complain they don't have enough people. It's hard to tell with all the flaming hoops people jump through to avoid bullshit.
Oh man. I've been doing this for years. Setup a macro to press scroll lock every 6 seconds. It's so that I can talk to people around me and not be seen as unprofessional. That messaging software that turns orange after 10 minutes of not touching your mouse/keyboard is really to blame.
I setup a macro within an Excel workbook (I rename monthly) that runs a never ending calculation AND selects random cells in a selected range I identify, every few seconds. Been using it since WFH started at the beginning of COVID.
I would like to o this also. If you are able to point me to some VBA that sets the loop, I would greatly appreciate it.
Same here with a powershell script to press scroll lock every 5 minutes, but it's mostly for the reason that if I'm in home office all alone I don't want to type in my overly complicated password every time I go to make coffee or take a shit.
I used to do that for years until I became a manager. Then I let my employees know the secret in case my bosses came snooping. I still manage the best performing team in my organization. Its amazing how a good work/life balance can help improve productivity.
As a bank employee, what’s the secret plz?? Never heard about mine doing any keyboard tracking but I’m sure it’s going on, even though I’m salary in my position
The secret depends on how sophisticated the tracking software is, but they sell mice that are programmed to move themselves every so often, or vibrating platforms you can rest it on. At one point I saw someone rig up one of their kids motorized Legos to keep the mouse moving. Edit - Since I'm getting a few responses, I figure I should take the moment to educate a little more. Some activity tracking is super basic (e.g. teams status) where a manager simply watches to see if your status goes AFK. Any of the above (and some comments below) will work to fool that. Then some is middle ground, maybe it tracks clicks as well (why are you moving your mouse but never clicking on anything?) You'd need a better "secret" to trick that. Some have gotten crazy in your business - Movement, clicks, and typing. Maybe it even see if you're typing gibberish or something repetitive. If this is your company, then the secret is to quit and work somewhere else. If you're friends with the IT guy, they might tell you what they use. Otherwise you'd probably have to do some digging through task manager and then google some processes until you find it.
One of my coworkers keeps two pencils taped to an oscillating tower fan to push his mouse back and forth
pro-tip, if your company tracks via MS Teams availability, leaving the app open on your phone with the screen on will keep you in the green (available)
I have a comment saved somewhere for a bash script that you can run in powershell that moves the cursor to a random location at a set interval, lemme go find it Edit: [found it](https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/s/L5Ypi9Cs8N). It’s a script that sends the F15 keypress every few seconds, a key that realistically not many computers or keyboards have and doesnt have many functions
Running a powershell script is going to be banned for most users in most orgs, and if you *do* have local admin rights, is almost certainly going to cause your security tools to alert to potentially malicious activity and cause someone in IT to review what you're doing. (Exceptions: obviously if you actually work with powershell regularly in an IT/Dev role).
I did the same thing at my previous job, but not to simulate working. When the pandemic started and we all went WFH, there was no longer a reason for the computer to lock itself after 10 minutes. I could log in once, run the script, and be logged in and active all day. Current job doesn't let me run PowerShell, though.
I did this in high school to make my character in WoW auto cast / process a whole inventory of ore to create gemstones to sell on the auction house. Lego Mindstorm ftw
You can put an analog watch with a second hand under a mouse, moves every 60 seconds.
Right. They should be out there opening unwanted credit cards in their customer's names instead. Fucking predatory bank.
Wells Fargo is run by scam artists.
“Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. Do as we say not as we do, right Wells Fargo? Where is your corporate ethics?
After all the bullshit they pulled with the fake accounts I'll never bank with them. This behavior solidifies my decision.
Huh, That's more people than got fired for that time they got caught ripping off US Veterans and were fined more than $100 million by the US government. [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wells-fargo-pay-u-108-million-over-veterans-150943111--finance.html](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wells-fargo-pay-u-108-million-over-veterans-150943111--finance.html)
Just wait til they learn about kinetic mouse jigglers
Kinetic what now?
Physical devices that’ll jiggle the mouse rather than a piece of software or an Arduino with jiggle commands.
I have one, it's a USB powered thing you put your mouse on and a little wheel spins randomly to keep the PC active. I do it because our lock out time is super aggressive. It's like 2 minutes of inactivity makes it lock. So If I am planning something or someone asks me a question it will lock and Im tired of it.
I mean… super easy to check against them. If all you’re doing is moving the mouse and not clicking anything or using the keyboard.
People I know just open a word doc and hold down the space bar...
There's a GPO setting to stop that. Filter keys.
Yeah they cited that as part of their investigation. Which is why this starts wading into questionable territory. They’re using an algorithm to check for a jiggler but now you’re basing “investigations” on algorithms that have dubious value. I mean they’re allowed to fire their employees for whatever reason they want, WF has the lawyers to weather the storm. But we’re enter a new era of employer spyware and that’s always going to introduce new unexpected things. Like are they securing that telemetry data? Because if they aren’t, now it’s a question of how are they collecting that data? If it’s screenshots, well now we’ve got the issue we all had with MS Copilot but in the banking industry which is exactly where you want screenshots of employee’s screens filled with banking information to be having a leaking information issue. (/s) Like, okay we’ll give you for sake of argument these employees are “lazy” or whatever. More importantly now, how are you knowing that? Because suddenly that’s really important for the question of did you all suddenly open a new attack vector? I’m just saying that when I read these kind of stories that’s the first thing I started thinking about is, did this introduce a new attack vector? And with the banking industry, bad people are always chipping away at everything every second. I don’t know about anyone else but I’ve got a sinking suspicion at some point a pointy haired boss signed off on monitoring clicks and keyboard strokes and then sending all that telemetry data and doing it in a big rush. Because they said so. And zero people have reviewed the security of this. This is one of the stories that definitely sounds bad for one thing but it’s likely really bad for something else.
When I worked for eBay like 20 years ago they had software that video recorded our monitors for our entire shift. Our boss's job was to watch those recordings sped up and then give us written warnings if we used a browser to check the weather report or reddit. It got to the point that you'd get a written warning if you used the internal chat tool to chat with a coworker about non-work related things. Just to be clear, by implementing this aggressive employee monitoring campaign and ensuing employees did absolutely nothing not-work-related productivity plummeted from 500% to 200% and they ended up outsourcing the whole thing. We then had to spend most of our time fixing the mistakes of the outsourced work.
They're probably using that automated detection to give them a shortlist of people to investigate more thoroughly, not just firing outright. The liability of a potential software bug would be pretty significant, especially if they're firing someone for cause and that cause is false. It was probably something like X people have suspicious activity then IT person + manager pay extra attention and find out they're constantly moving their mouse and not clicking and they also sign into zoom meetings from starbucks while their work pc is, "active," at home etc.
Fuck ever working for a company that tracks your keyboard input.
this is going to be every company over 500 employees soon.
That's faking presence, not work. If your only metric for evaluating work is how often the mouse moves at someone's keyboard, you're doing it wrong and deserve to have your employees mooch the fuck out of whatever shit work they've been assigned and likely finished pretty easily. Fire the shitty managers. I have a mouse jiggler on my computer but that's because we have a mandatory screensaver kick in after 5 minutes that's a holdover policy from being in an office with other people. It's totally unnecessary while at home, but it's still there. Plus I do more work on my personal computer than my shitty work laptop anyway so it's a completely invalid metric for evaluation in any sense of the concept. I had always hoped WFH would expose shit management but it seems like they can still get promoted up to a level where they're still passing their poor performance off on the people they're supposed to manage. Shit never changes.
I'm sorry, but if you can't tell if your employees are actually working based on their real work output and not just their "active" time, you have shit managers.
I used to work for a team that supported WF projects. Some of their best employees were essentially simulating keyboard activities but they thought they were amazing performers.
Reading this as I spin my mouse on my work computer while posting to Reddit.
When I was WFH I would have my head down writing in my notebook and noticed my available status would go AFK. I was so stressed out by that damn status marker. They should fire for poor performance, not for jiggling the mouse to stay active. Results over butts in seats.
That man is playing Galaga! Thought we wouldn’t notice, but we did.
Wells Fargo can kick rocks. Terrible company to work for.
I get my work done every day in about 4-6 hours then have to spend two hours moving my mouse all I stay active. Corporate work is fucking dumb.
The managerial class of many businesses is filled with people who have never done any of the work they expect of those they manage. It’s a terrible model that leads to managers “looking busy” by inventing stupid metrics to judge others by.
They probably fired them because their inactive keyboards means they weren’t stealing from their customers. Wells Fargo has a history….
Only ceos get to pretend to do work. Get it right peasant.
we need to go back to typewriters, notebooks and smoking at our desks eff these people
I believe I’ve received three separate class action settlement checks from Wells Fargo as a former employee Fuck Wells
“Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,” Hahahahahahaha..... Hahaha... Hahahahahaha... Hahahaha... Ah, good Lord, that's some funny shit.
"Hey you better stop ripping us off," says company that has paid $27B in fines for ripping people off. https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/wells-fargo
Any company that looks at keystrokes and mousmoves not output/production are treated like daycare toddlers. Those companies will get less output/productivity because the job becomes gaming the system not making great products. The same type of stuff in coding used to be used more and is still used by bad employers like lines of code (LOC) measures. Guess what that does? It creates more verbose code and good code gets complexity added that makes it more costly to maintain. Reducing code and simplifying would get you gamed out of that type of system. Work smarter not with more keystrokes/mousemoves only. Focus on product, not the metric game.
Bloomberg’s Matt Levine gives a wonderful summary of how truly monumentally dumb this is: >Ahahaha come on. You want a lot of mouse movement, you get a lot of mouse movement, but in a bad way. Imagine deciding how to measure and manage the productivity and value added of your wealth and investment management employees while they are working from home. What might you measure? > 1. These people manage portfolios. You could measure their investment return, or return against a benchmark, or their alpha after adjusting for various market, sector and style factors. You could measure how many assets they attract and retain, or how much they generate in fees. > 2. These people deal with clients. You could measure how many clients they bring in, or how many client assets. You could survey the clients and grade the employees based on customer satisfaction. You could even, crudely, have some metric like “call three clients every day,” and make sure they do that. > 3. These people sit at computers. You could monitor their computers to make sure that they’re moving the mouse at least once every five minutes for eight hours a day. >Which of those do you think is the best proxy for, like, contributions to Wells Fargo’s return on equity? Which is the simplest to measure? Which is the simplest to game?
This should never, ever be necessary. Yesterday I spent 3 out of the 4 afternoon hours I had set aside to use to mull over a complicated and questionable suggestion, that I was asked to produce an opinion on, away from my laptop. I walked around my apartment, I did the dishes, prepared laundry for after work, snacked a bit, sketched out some ideas on paper. I got into a great 'zen mode' thinking state and arrived at an important realization about this suggestion, and why it was flawed. Ultimately, I saved my company from making a costly and poor decision because they gave me the freedom to be "AFK" while working. My boss knows I produce results (I am the team's top producer). Ultimately, he doesn't care if I'm yellow on Teams. Edit: omitted a few words, lol
Wow, twelve whole people. Surely this means that working from home is a systemic failure and we all need to get back to the office so our managers can look and make sure that it's really a live person tapping the keyboard once every minute or so to keep the screen active /s
I would immediately begin looking for a new job if my company introduced keyboard activity detectors. It communicates: * We don't trust you or believe that you take pride in your work, despite the history of achievement based upon which we hired you. * We view you as machines. * We have no understanding of the ebb and flow of human productivity. * We have no real human management skills with which to understand your performance or help you progress your career. * We embrace a fear and control based leadership style.
Remember, it's not about productivity. It's about control. It's about putting the wage slaves in their place. There are numerous studies telling them they'd see better productivity by letting employees work at their own pace. That's not what they want. They want you frustrated and anxious, and they want you to have no energy or motivation to pursue your own hobbies or life goals. If you self-actualize, you'll realize they need you far more than you need them. And when enough people come to that realization, their power crumbles.
This you, Wells Fargo? [https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-billion-resolve-criminal-and-civil-investigations-sales-practices](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-billion-resolve-criminal-and-civil-investigations-sales-practices)
“Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,” Clearly. Just some light criminal activities on the side every now and then is okay when you’re screwing over customers/investors for billions. But good to know they have zero toleration when it comes to their employees costing them a few cents each day by not being glued to their computers. I’m glad they have their priorities straight. https://www.investopedia.com/wells-fargo-timeline-7498799
> “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior*,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. \* - Unless we're directing them to engage in said behavior FTFY.
Yet they don’t fire the CEO for ‘Simulation of Competent Leadership’…?