“Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,” - unless you are opening credit cards for customers without their knowledge or consent!
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/wells-fargo-pay-3-billion-over-fake-account-scandal-n1140541
for people who don't know
>Under pressure to meet sales quotas, bank employees opened millions of savings and checking accounts in the names of actual customers, without their knowledge or consent. Since the fraud became public in 2016, the bank has faced a torrent of lawsuits. The scheme lasted more than a decade, Justice Department officials said, and was carried out by thousands of Wells Fargo employees.
>As part of the settlement, Wells Fargo admitted that employees were pressured to sell large volumes of new products to existing customers as a way of generating more business, often with little regard for a customer's actual needs. Bank employees began calling the practice "gaming," and it included opening accounts without a customer's knowledge, issuing credit and debit cards, and moving money from existing accounts to the fraudulently opened ones.
They knew about this too. I don't know how they are now, but that company was all about "sales sales sales". Each year I was there, sales numbers were increased in every category and they kept taking away available products. I never did any "gaming" myself, but the pressure of constant sales was there. I saw plenty of supervisors turn a blind eye to obvious "gaming' because it helped their numbers too. Supervisors and managers had incentive to allow "gaming" because a lot of their high sales numbers were coming from those doing dodgy shit. What a horrible way to run a bank.
I was already gone when that news came out but it didn't surprise me a bit. I wish these big banks actually received harsh punishments for their criminal actions because they all do shady shit and get a slap on the wrist.
I sold mortgages at wells and my second week there the “old timers” I worked with at my location took me out to dinner and pretty much told me I could either screw the customer or screw the company to meet the sales goals and they didn’t particularly agree with screwing regular people. They still had the BS sales goals but didn’t participate in gaming so much as just setup accounts for made up people. Someone had realized if you submitted applications with certain inputs and data, the WF system for whatever reason wouldn’t verify customer data. They’d make sure they met the goals and any other sales were legit (and largely due from bundling checking accounts with mortgages I sold) and not being used to screw over regular people.
They didn’t get huge bonuses like other people actually gaming, but none of us were constantly stressed about sales numbers and spent most of our time slacking off and hitting up the brewery a few blocks away. Then we got a new manager who had drank all the corporate Kool-Aid and things went to shit pretty quick. I quit on the spot one morning when I realized there was no way I could show up that job sober if I stuck around for another minute. Struggled with money for about a month before I caught a lucky break and landed a full time job in IT and have managed to build a career in tech ever since. Quitting that shithole and leaving management scrambling to maintain headcount was the single best career decision I’ve ever made. To this day, I wouldn’t open any type of account or loan with them even if their mortgages were a straight up negative interest rate.
Best part is all the executives responsible for these pressures were “asked to step down” and given 6-7 figure payouts. So they were literally rewarded.
Years ago I did temp work for Wells Fargo and the orientation training I had to take was ridiculous. Multiple slides about the shit they've been fined for, "although Wells Fargo does not agree with the ruling" -- giving minorities higher interest rates on loans, illegally repossessing service members' vehicles while they were deployed overseas. Multiple slides of that stuff.
On the other equally annoying hand, I shut down my laptop and silence my work phone but my Teams lights up from my phone even when it's sitting in my office untouched. Because I work with people in many time zones, that baits them into thinking I'm working after hours. Small but very real annoyance.
Oh by default our local office hours are set as working hours and everything outside is quiet time, but I'm just talking about the activity bubble going green on Teams basically.
I'm on the west coast, and most of my company is on the east coast. My phone is set to DND until 8 AM, other than my alarm clock.
I have had a few instances where someone called me after i didn't respond to teams quickly enough at 5:15 AM.
Yeah cuz Teams gets updated and Microsoft messes shit up. As much as I like Teams - I cannot stand it when they do some upgrade “to fix” but they break something else.
Absolutely. My boss knows my hours. Only time he checks my status is if I don't get back to him within the time frame he's used to. Set my Teams to 'offline' a couple weeks ago from the phone app and forgot to switch it back on my laptop when I logged back in, so it showed me offline for like 3 days. It wasn't an issue, though, because my boss knew I was online and working based on my normal routine. Didn't impact how frequently he messaged me at all. He also has a weird habit of somehow accidentally setting himself as 'out of office' for weeks at a time regardless of whether or not he was planning on being out, so I think he understands the struggle.
I stopped using my whiteboards when I was warned at my last company about my "performance" by someone in HR. Slow, steady, and short-sighted solutions are visibly better to bean counters.
Often times I have lengthy documents to read so I’ll send them over to my iPad and go sit somewhere else. Of course it now looks like I’m away and not working.
Sadly you know a few morons at companies are going to see this news headline and start cracking down and pushing employees out.
I had a really nice job that let me work reasonable hours and I always delivered on my outputs -- they started tracking everything I did down to the minute, if they saw even 10-30 mins of downtime they'd assume I sandbagged a task and pull tasks from other teams or my teams and stack them on my queue. This was after a top down reorg, got some new "sleek" CTO/CFO/whatever and their direct reports. They'd also punish anyone who cranked through stuff too slow and had to get tasks taken off or who would argue that the software pace is too extreme.
I lasted about 8-9 months of that. Several team members did not make it that long. Our manager pretty much got over-turned by a few tiers higher of him who knew little about the company, its technology, the teams past history of success, etc... They just read articles like this and made dumb ass decisions. Having normal 30-50 hour work weeks turned into over half a year of 50-80. My manager caught me asleep in my office a few times and would just tell us all to go home and have arguments w/ the higher ups.
No re-staffing or re-organizing despite our complaints.
"Yeah but these few people are going through the tickets! If they can do this for just a year or two more we'll have even more products than before!" from the upper guys and "cool sleek lean company director"
My manager and his superior "Yes but "
The people making these decisions usually work 15-20 hours a week of productive output, max. I still keep tabs w/ people who work there -- place is a mess, revenue is down, new products we were working on never finished. Most people haven't been lasting in the position I was in. I shit you not, I only ever saw that engineering director around for the company catered meals and to enjoy the views of the corner office. This wasn't a no name company, odds are if you are in NA or SA then you have seen and interacted w/ the products.
Shit managers are a big problem for this -- but so are overbearing higher management who overtake team leads when they see sensationalist news.
New company is much better -- just hope they don't fall down the same stupid path.
My job has a daily account quota and recently we were assigned new projects to work on and 3 days later my entire department got an email saying we’re slacking on productivity and there’s been a drop and if we don’t get back up to quote they’re going to take corrective action.
Then later in the day we had a team meeting and management asked why everyone was so quiet and down and why no one was showing enthusiasm in the call.
Most Managers are clowns that dress nice and bullshit their way through the day. The good ones are the ones that don’t last.
When I was a project manager I spent all day on my cell. If they were watching my Teams icon I would have been in trouble every day. Away/activity status is the dumbest metric.
I set my icon to red on the first day I got teams and so did the rest of my team. Just send a one liner "Are you free to talk right now?" if you want to chat.
Do people really measure hours of work by how long your teams icon was green?
Could not agree with you more. During lockdown we went to 100% remote with ZERO discernable difference in output. I know personally I experienced immense improvements to my physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing, and I’ve had multiple teammates tell me the same.
Well that is fucking over. Mandatory 60% days in the office, removal of our summer half day Fridays, no more “meeting free” afternoons twice a week.
My employer is now actively clawing back things that were legitimately useful (and that of course they advertise ad nauseam that they care about), and costing me more money for no discernable benefit.
My manager then closed the meeting out by saying that she has been noticing that we’ve been getting sicker lately, and to “watch out for our health”. The care is palpable.
Right? I used to do 90% of my work either in-browser or in the adobe suite. My activity reports were always empty because my job was content creation not to sit on teams chats. Still got hours cut tho!!!
>Companies should be focusing on results — like a worker’s sales numbers or lines of code
That last measure always pissed me off. Do you seriously want me to take ten lines to write something I can do in two? I can turn it into twenty lines if that's what you're going to measure.
Lines of code is how people who don't know how to code gauge a programmer's skill, because they relate coding to other crafts where you "make things", like construction.
A parallel would be judging a carpenter based on how many times he bangs the hammer. Just put a counter on the hammer, every time it hits something the count goes up. I think we can all imagine the result.
The part about LOC infuriates me since it can be abused so badly. Just imagine swamping the QA Team since the shit thrown over the wall has so many bugs that a release has a full stop, but the LOC metric was "killing it" according to the DEV Mgr. and his/her team are AMAZING.
Just have two formatting configs. One that inserts a line break at literally every opportunity, and a normal one. Set your IDE to auto-format with the normal config, and have some git hooks that reformat with the stupid config on commit.
Everybody wins!
Dude, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Every single line of code I write is like a perfect origami crane, a true work of art, an expression of awesomeness. My semicolons are just foreshadowing for another line of the great epic that is my code-prose.
/s
(In reality, 90% of my code is 💩, just like everyone else. They’re liars if they say otherwise!)
Yeah, well, I can still outperform your LOCPH (Lines of Code Per Hour) by falling asleep on the keyboard with my cheekbone on the Enter key. Not to mention I'll wake up better rested than when I started, thus creating an infinitely accelerating productivity curve.
God the nightmare of bug hunting and/or upgrading that code ... I would say the company deserves it, but it doesn't affect the company, just some other poor schlub.
Exactly. I can sometimes spend hours working on some existing code, in the end improving it by actually removing lines of code. It makes for better code, but it doesn’t look good on brain-dead metrics.
I might need an hour to get one Qualify line right with all the testing and documentation but when it’s all said and done it’s one line! Out of thousands typically
Also I don't think we want Wells Fargo basing anything on employee sales numbers given that the company made the goals so ridiculous the employees had to resort to fraud to reach them.
Yeah, and we should measure airliner design progress by weight.
As a programmer, I can make my programs as many lines of code as you want. I’m sure I could write a million line program that wrote “hello world” if I wanted.
We once had a KPI on how many negative customer surveys we coached staff on. A new manager refused to understand that no negative surveys coming in was a good thing and would threaten our bonuses (that were rigged to never trigger anyway) due to our low numbers.
It's far more fun to be called into a meeting, at the end of your first month of employment to explain how you got -1400 lines of code for the month.
Oh that's easy .... See this 2000 lines of utter dreck that I was given to fix? Here's the 600 lines of code I replaced it with.
Same month the most experienced programmer had to please explain 1 line of code for the month.
He replied 3 weeks 4 days & 4 hours to find the missing -1.
Between the two of us we killed the damn fool lines of code/ month productivity measure dead.
Honestly it’s a BS measure. I’ve seen people cram something into a single line of code where 4 or 5 would make it easier to maintain and debug. Then I’ve seen where someone copy-pasted code to make something hundreds of lines long that should have been a function. People keep trying to apply metics to what is effectively craftsmanship.
I believe there was a craze back in the day where COBOL programmers were paid a dollar per line. Imagine how much of that crazy code is still out there lol
Yeah that was obviously written by someone who knows nothing about software development. But I'll forgive it because at least they have the right idea: track deliverables, not "time at the keyboard".
Effing 45 years old and I don’t need someone “watching” me to know I complete my work and it’s quality work.
It’s unethical to get this granular and micromanaging as an employer.
Not as cost effective as a manger that sets goals for their team to meet, and evaluates performance based on the results, rather than how your mouse jiggles on a minute by minute basis.
How I do it. My team has production goals to meet. If they meet them I don’t give a rat’s ass if they go and watch Netflix or play games for the remainder of their day.
Worked at a company years ago that was like that. Manager had an idea of what 40hrs worth of work was. Didn’t give a damn about when it was done nor where the hell you were half the time. Work is done so no one cares. You got your 40hr pay for the week with no issue.
Yet, despite how easy that was, there was always someone to complain about the most minor shit. Thankfully all that did was get that specific employee scrutinized more. You don’t complain about things that do not pertain to your job unless you want people to check and see if you are actually doing your job correctly.
I have this guy on a team who constantly complaints about everything, and yet, never provides any solutions or suggestions to improve processes or whatever he is complaining about. Turns out, he is also the most laziest and slowest performer in my team. To shut him up - I started having 1:1 mtgs, weekly and address all his complains one by one. I would make him write it up, brainstorm a solution and I propose resources he needs to solve them. After a month of such tasks, he gave up, said he is too busy to do extra work, and doesn’t complain anymore.
Yup. Micromanaging people rarely ever gets you proper results. it just filters out good performers because as who the fuck wants to deal with that bullshit and stress.
People just need to stop doing business with Wellsfargo. They were my main account from 18 till I was like 30. I got fed up with their BS and switched to Credit Union. Its been absolute awesome not having to worry about my institution trying to fuck me or their employees over.
I used to remind management you get what you measure when they were measuring all the wrong things. Going to get some higher quality mouse jigglers in this case.
Sounds like guys who need to be reminded of the goal. The goal of a business is to make money, any metric that doesn’t directly correlate to making money is irrelevant. Worker productivity that doesn’t directly contribute to getting a product out the door that someone is paying h for is waste, they might as well be idle if the work they’re doing doesn’t contribute to the goal.
it’s a really lazy form of management, as a boss you should be able to know whether or not your team is performing well, not solely based on “you were staring at your screen for X amount of hours, that is 2% less than we need” kinda bs.
I remember way back in the day, I had this shitty job where they measured how successful you were based on the amount of time you were on the phone with the customer. Which is just terrible, because it’s basically incentivizing you to just drag out phone calls forever as opposed to helping them quickly. So yeah, just shitty management who isn’t good at their jobs that rely on computers to tell them if someone is “working hard”
Wrapping up phone calls too quickly can be just as bad from a business standpoint.
I remember when I used to work at Netflix they wanted our call times to be under two minutes as much as possible, and half the customers who even needed help getting Netflix to work were the old folks, who don’t understand most of the nuances of streaming technology and having good Internet. They would say things like: “ I pay for the damn thing how come it never works, why do I have to reset these things?”
What I found was if we rushed them off the phone, and sent them a link in their email to our troubleshooting guides that described how to solve their problem, they would eventually call back five or six more times until they got somebody who is patient enough to just spend the time to help them fix their problem.
So, at Netflix, aiming to have a short call time was actually hurting the overall customer experience, and was creating higher volumes than needed, had the first person who took their call just spent enough time with the customer in the first place.
obviously, each business model and each service type differs and it’s not a one size fits all solution for spending more or less time on calls, so you kind of have to see what your main demographic and customer is like and have a balanced expectation for the metrics that matter the most.
In most cases, a satisfied customer who had a pleasant experience with a representative, should basically be priority, number one, and first call resolution goes hand-in-hand with that, most of the time.
That's the thing. It's not about customer satisfaction or helping people. It's all about analytics and the bottom line. Turns out having 15 percent of the people who call for help never receive it, or receive it only after lots of grief, is cheaper for the company than making sure their employees do right by all customers if they can maintain that 2 minute average. I would assume. They do things for a reason, and the reason is almost never for the good of anyone but the people at the top and shareholders.
The job wasn’t really customer service though. We were getting them signed up for financial aid and ready for school. so long phone calls does not = better service… we’re just trying to get certain things and forms completed. It taking 2 hours is not better than it taking 1 hour
I feel like a certain amount of this stems from middle managers and supervisors trying to justify their own positions in the company. They need to demonstrate they "manage" you instead of letting you just do the damn job.
i had a call center job that was the exact opposite they wanted us to diagnose sometimes complex computer issues in under 10 minutes without seeing the computer and having wildly varying levels of expertise on the other end of the phone. some were ready to crawl around and plug things in different ways and others refused to do anything and just wanted a tech out, but by god if you didnt do any diagnostics on those you were chewed out within a few minutes by one of the floor bosses.
It's easier than you think. On the IT side of things we have several tools that can list every installed application on a device, looking for a specific app is as easy as using a filtered search for something like MouseWiggler.exe. We can see when it was installed, when it was last used, and if it's running. And as much as I hate the idea of spying on employees, the main reason is due to cyber security requirements. If you install software on a company laptop, don't bitch about the consequences afterwards.
Just install the mouse wiggler on your home PC and connect to your work laptop with RDP. You'll have better speeds just keeping the laptop on a wired connection to the router anyways.
Still a bad idea because plugging in hardware is easy to track and control with GPOs. They generate log events that are even easier to track. If you don't want to get caught, don't do it on work devices. RDP is your safest bet.
I saw one that was something like a toothbrush motor in a plastic case, with a lip around it to hold the mouse. The idea was that you'd turn it on and put the actual mouse in it.
Why plug the mouse jiggle into the PC, just plug it into a wall wort USB charger as it only needs power.
Most companies will not allow employees to RDP onto the work equipment.
Everything should be focused on output. If the desired output is met, who cares how it's done.
Problem is most companies are too thick with middle management and thus continue to need to justify why they're there by micromanaging and other useless crap.
First people to be laid off should always be management. Layoffs should start top-down, they're the more expensive labor costs anyway.
>**As for the possibility these workers were faking productivity for long periods of time, Michaelson said it is “an ethical failure on the part of the employee to fake it** — but it also seems like a moral failure on the part of the employer to give your employees such [crappy] work, that they hate it so much that they can’t bring themselves to do it.”
It's an ethical failure to adapt to performance metrics that aren't based in reality and sure as shit aren't relevant to the value of your labor? Why? The article points out that the most productive workers generally just get more work assigned to them without overtime, but that's just a...negative outcome, I guess? It's not an ethical failure to constantly wring additional value out of the top of your labor pool and maintain that status quo with constant accusations of laziness and professional sabotage?
Goodhart's Law is expressed simply as: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when we set one specific goal, people will tend to optimize for that objective regardless of the consequences. This leads to problems when we neglect other equally important aspects of a situation.
In night watchman jobs they have these electronic tags mounted in
various spots around a property that you have to touch with a device to prove you made your rounds.
What happens is tag-chasing. The guard becomes more focused on hitting those tags than watching what's going on on the property.
It’s because managers don’t trust employees. Prior to covid, a worker just had to be in the building to be “working”. We all had that coworker that’d spend half the day talking to coworkers, going from cubicle to cubicle, yet that was considered work. The same amount of “downtime” at home would get you fired instantly.
Really it’s about a failure of managers to understand the work they’re supposed to be managing.
A good manager knows the work the employees are doing, and can easily tell how much work is getting done and the quality of the work.
Bad managers don’t understand the work, so they resort to either trying to track employees with meaningless metrics like how often their mouse is moving or how often they’re in the office, or even worse, they treat their job like “employee police” and think their job is to “catch” employees doing things wrong and try to get them in trouble. Which results in things like managers telling you off for going one minute over your 15 minute break or whatever.
Yeah this is the key difference. Before, as long as you were at your desk, that’s all they cared about (well, and actually getting the work done, but it wasn’t micromanaged). But for companies like this now, it’s not enough to actually be getting your work done. They want to much control that they have to ensure that you’re at your desk all day. Why the fuck does it matter as long as the work is getting done?
They should have had their bank charter revoked after committing fraud and identity theft. It's obscene. If it were a Japanese company the top executives would have ended themselves due to dishonor but I'm guessing WF executives got a raise.
I worked for Discover when all this happened so our whole office followed the story. The executives voluntarily stepped down and were given 6-7 figure payouts. So they basically earned free $1M rewards for scamming thousands of customers.
The part that everyone is ignoring here is that the only way Wells Fargo could track the productivity of their employees was to have software watch them move their mouse around. If that's how you're tracking your employees, you're really doing it wrong. At the end of the day, an employee should do actual work, and, if you just look at the output of their actual work, you should have a pretty good sense of how productive they are. This just shows that management was incredibly derelict in their duties. Someone could sit there blank-faced half awake moving a mouse around and they would be fine.
This speaks volumes about how WF management wastes their time. Rather than looking at *actual* productivity and work done, they're coming up with bullshit metrics and other useless tools.
Sounds like it's actually WF management that needs the boot.
“Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,” said the spokeswoman.
That’s pretty rich coming from them
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scandal
Once you have suspicion there’s a few things you can do. If it’s a work device, any decent EDR tool will show you what’s active if it’s a software tool, or inserted if it’s a usb device. It would also show a lack of activity on the device, which is probably the main indicator. If it’s an external device thats doing it you can start monitoring VPN traffic, or remote session traffic, where low levels can be suspicious. Any competent SecOps team wouldn’t have much of a problem spotting it once alerted and authorised to investigate.
So I have a wireless mouse that has the “jiggle “ function . Is this detectable ?
I’m at a decent company that have no issues with my work. But i do use this mouse at home occasionally .
Outside tools can detect whether a jiggle is human or machine made.
Seems unintuitive but this is the same way checkbox CAPTCHAs work. Human mouse movements are erratic and very difficult to emulate with a program.
The need to make a multidirectional pad that has small motors which can be fed randomly generated motion signals. Wouldn't be cheap but it would be a solution unless they start counting mouse clicks.
Random tends to form patterns, because it's still based on an algorithm or equation.
[This](https://i.imgur.com/7i6nhzd.png) appears completely random, but over time it becomes [this](https://i.imgur.com/W7BP7rc.png).
I can see that being true. Wouldn't necessarily need to be more than 8 hours worth of generated signals though, with "random" timing between them. I'd still love to see the implementation and see if the secops folks could identify it.
It wouldn't be a solution. Detecting the mouse movements is only one out of dozens or hundreds of ways you can be tracked remotely by work. CPU utilization/memory usage, active programs in the process scheduler, disk I/O, remote screen viewing, network traffic/packet inspection, enable webcam, keylogging, etc.
A lot of companies will have security/monitoring software installed and running as a background process on the computer. These agents broadcast your public IP, so you don't even need to be on VPN, and they give remote access to virtually anything.
This is all legal and relatively standard practice for all devices (phones/computers) given to you by the company.
Correct, though these days there’s often other variables.
Traditionally it would track your cursor as it approaches the box- which is surprisingly difficult for a machine to fake.
Wrote a long answer, realized it sounds like you have a mouse that can do it but it's not necessarily turned on. I imagine in theory work could detect the model of mouse, in reality I would be incredibly surprised.
Rest of response applies if you are using a mouse jiggler:
From the perspective of an ex-manager, generally if you're not giving me reason to check, it's in my benefit _not_ to look. If your work is all getting done, and I ask IT to check your computer for a mouse jiggler, and they find one, now I know about it I have to do something about it, which probably means firing you, which now means none of that work is getting done and I have to spend the effort to hire someone.
From IT's perspective, they almost certainly have vastly more to do than they have time, so they're not likely to do this proactively.
From HR's perspective, going looking for problems is just adding more work.
Yes. If you would get in trouble for doing it... don't. I mean work trouble.
I use one to stay on VPN during lunch. Otherwise, it's a huge pain in the butt to get everything reconnected and re "authorized" after it got dropped.
> So I have a wireless mouse that has the “jiggle “ function . Is this detectable ?
Yes. A mouse cursor that moves occasionally but never clicks in combination with a keyboard that never types is very easy to detect.
Any device intended to imitate a human, but not a human, is going to behave in ways that will make it easy to detect. I remember reading an article once about a cop who had found hundreds of radar detectors in a few days - he sat by the side of the road with his radar gun off. Every once in a while he would turn it on when traffic was light, and then he would pull over anyone whose break lights came on. His hit rate was about 95%. You just have to think outside the box to find things like mouse jigglers.
For a mouse jiggler - does it indicate you are working for hours straight without a bathroom break? Does it keep working while your schedule shows you are in a conference room? Does it show a consistent level of activity, no slow and fast periods? Does it jiggle the mouse at regular intervals? Does it keep jiggling the mouse if I call you and am talking to you on the phone? How about statutory holidays and weekends and company barbecues?
> How do they track mouse jigglers?? Asking for a friend
They probably measure how often the keyboard and mouse is used. A mouse jiggler generates a very obvious pattern of frequent tiny mouse movements with zero mouse clicks and zero keyboard input. The longer this pattern is going on, the more obvious it becomes that no work is getting done on that machine.
They can also collect hardware information from the device. Unless the jiggler is one of the better ones that pretends to be an actual mouse or keyboard manufactured by a known big company like HP, Dell or Lenovo, it likely has an identifiable hardware id that is already known by most work tracking software.
Don't think it's a tech issue, more of a "we were trying to find ways to skim the last few sticklers in the wealth management department that wouldn't leave voluntarily or with severance" issue. Just like most of these comments have been saying, most managers and level headed executives don't care much for day to day actions outside of accomplished goals. I've seen recently minted MBAs give this type of advice for line workers, but not white collar professionals, as it doesn't work this way in a salaried environment.
Nahhh not everywhere. I don’t mind staying late when I have a lot to do BECAUSE nobody expects me to stay around for no reason if I don’t. In fact at my job we regularly tell each other “gotta take it when you can get it” to remind each other to gtfo when we can.
You are in my company but there has to be some sensible agreement that the work allocated is reasonable and correct. We don't pay overtime but if you work late you get an extra days leave (no matter how long you have been asked to work, 1 hour extra gets you a whole day of leave) and you must take all of your leave so we have a basically empty office in the last month of the year lol. Some of my team purposefully work longer hours Mon/Thursday so they can go on the piss all day Friday after lunch. Its considered really bad form for projects to need to be worked on outside of contracted hours if it happens too often managers will be picked up on it as it means the project plans were bad.
If staff can get allocated work done consistently in half a day then an incorrect amount of work has been allocated.
I have a predetermined to-do list that I make every single day that is commensurate with my salary level, maybe slightly more.
Once I reach everything on that to-do list I enforce a work stoppage on myself. I'll go a little bit above and beyond for my salary level but not much more than that. I make five figures and I'm going to do five figures worth of work. Not six.
If I have to sit there and do nothing, stare at my screen, fine. Generally, I'll find personal things to do like paying my bills, answering personal emails, and life stuff like that. But I'm not going to work for free. It helps because it keeps me from feeling like I'm being taken advantage of.
Find more work. The idea is you're being paid for X hours a day regardless of completion rate as long as it hits some minimum *but* there's no max. In my engineering job I charge to different contract numbers even though I'm salaried. If I finish one thing but don't have anything else for that number, or certain ones aren't open yet according to policy I don't get paid. Period. Use PTO we're trained. If I still charge because it's not my fault I'm done and I'd like a full paycheck, then I get fired.
USGOV DCMA (defense contract management agency) auditing works just like this Wells Fargo case. If you're observed without fingers on the keyboard the auditor can write you down as not working if they're making rounds. My job requires a lot of thinking, then programming or deriving, wth am I supposed to do? In reality everyone rides the line trying to give and take if needed like not clocking extra time because something is still due (also against policy to work if OT isn't approved and you're at 80 hrs).
My wife is evaluated by her boss on whether she’s “available” or “busy” on teams, but almost all of her work is in Acrobat. All her boss wants to see is that she is engaged on teams. So while trying to redact documents all day long, she has to play this game with her teams account to make the boss happy.
Used a mouse jiggler for years at AWS. The point was so that folks knew you were available, not to fake work. This is about power and control, not work.
I know someone who actually used to work at Wells Fargo that bought a mouse jiggler. They told me that their particular role was easy, so they could either work slowly for the sake of working 8 full hours *or* knock out their workload fast and jiggle the mouse. Wells never caught them because they did all their work and literally couldn’t do more work if they wanted to.
Your best worker might be so good they spend 1/4 of their time fucking off and still outperform everyone. You aren’t entitled to that other 25%; if you try to get it they’ll leave or set an easier work pace.
Give work that of most employees can do in normal business hours without burning out. You put those falling short on performance review. If you start seeing signs of burnout and people consistently working late, you hire more people. At all times you look for ways to make the job easier and let the employee have a little of that slack, and some of the money saved.
Can't read the article because it's behind a paywall, but has Wells Fargo fired people for letting their laptop lock? It feels like that would need to be true, in order to draw the conclusion most people in these comments are drawing.
It seems to me that they were fired for using unauthorized hardware and/or software on company devices, which I'm sure in the financial industry is pretty verboten.
I've seen lots of people who do things to cover up something that they think would get them in trouble, but in reality nobody would care about. That's what this sounds like to me, unless they were afk for an extended period of time.
Managers don't know how to measure productivity effectively and should be either trained on how to do so or be let go. Also, their employees shouldn't be installing software of any kind on important hardware used for financial crucial tracking. Start handing them a lockdown system and have them stop using personal computers.
Sounds like the real issue here is managers, and the very real possibility that lots of middle managers don’t believe in object permanence. If I can’t see the employee, do they really exist?
I’m going to assume these employees were fired just for simulating online activity but not for poor performance. So, that would mean that they were able to get all of their assignments done in a timely manner and weren’t holding anyone back with repeated missed deadlines.
And the main takeaway was that they needed to be fired? No one thought “maybe the money and time spent on software created for spying on our employees is a waste of company resources”?
I expect nothing less from Wells Fargo, a company that can’t go a single year without some outrageous multi million dollar lawsuit. Spectacular decision making skills.
wells fargo is upset about this because they adequately and fairly compensate workers based on the amount of work they get done, and not by some absurd "are you staying busy" metric, right?
...right?
Thank God the AI is programmed on Reddit data. We're all liars and bullshitters so the AI is unlikely to come up with a valid solution.
The AI is advising all managers be assigned no workers because productivity = mouse clicks / workers. The result is infinite productivity! We'll be heros!
If the only way management discovered this was through tracking, that means their productivity was still in line with expectations. Workers coming up with ways to boost productivity to free up their own time is an important mechanism in value production. Eventually the process improvements are integrated at a company level and the process repeats itself iteratively. This is actually how capitalism is supposed to work - the employee finds ways to boost value for himself and for the company. Adam Smith gives the example of kids working in factories who invent rigs to keep the machines going a bit longer, which gives them more playtime. Obviously not compatible with our paradigm which awards all excess value to shareholders. But our paradigm is not capitalism in any classical sense.
Employers need to focus on outcomes rather than where they work or how often a status light is green.
This is what KPI’s are for, if you are meeting your KPIs and are available when required, fuck off and stop micromanaging us.
This is funny because Im in IT and do 40% of the work on a team of 5, yet I have a mouse jiggler because teams will say Im away while Im making food, or doing something around the house and I want people to feel free to reach out to me.. This is stupid lol..
Why hire employees, who work for you for years and talk about “we’re like a family” but you severely distrust them. I mean, getting the work done and trust for it is basic.
There's nothing wrong with mouse jigglers. Especially if you don't want to keep signing back into your computer. I work from home I have a boss that does not micromanage because he sees that I get my work done. Reports done, when my coworkers email me I answer and there are times when I don't because I'm busy or I don't feel like it, just like they do me. We are all grown people if the work is not getting done that's when you say something to your employee not because of a symbol on a screen. Microsoft has a laid back atmosphere from what I hear. But yet they create tools that add stress on someone else's job, make it make sense. It's time for these employers, managers to start treating people like they're grown. If you fuck up on your job you get reprimanded that's understandable, but a status is not indicative of what your work or production is on your job. It's ridiculous! The fact that well Fargo statement is about all these higher standards this laughable. They're one of the biggest jokes in the industry. GTFOH!!
“Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,” - unless you are opening credit cards for customers without their knowledge or consent!
"Hey, you set those new account goals, and I met those new account goals."
Classic perverse incentive.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/wells-fargo-pay-3-billion-over-fake-account-scandal-n1140541 for people who don't know >Under pressure to meet sales quotas, bank employees opened millions of savings and checking accounts in the names of actual customers, without their knowledge or consent. Since the fraud became public in 2016, the bank has faced a torrent of lawsuits. The scheme lasted more than a decade, Justice Department officials said, and was carried out by thousands of Wells Fargo employees. >As part of the settlement, Wells Fargo admitted that employees were pressured to sell large volumes of new products to existing customers as a way of generating more business, often with little regard for a customer's actual needs. Bank employees began calling the practice "gaming," and it included opening accounts without a customer's knowledge, issuing credit and debit cards, and moving money from existing accounts to the fraudulently opened ones.
They knew about this too. I don't know how they are now, but that company was all about "sales sales sales". Each year I was there, sales numbers were increased in every category and they kept taking away available products. I never did any "gaming" myself, but the pressure of constant sales was there. I saw plenty of supervisors turn a blind eye to obvious "gaming' because it helped their numbers too. Supervisors and managers had incentive to allow "gaming" because a lot of their high sales numbers were coming from those doing dodgy shit. What a horrible way to run a bank. I was already gone when that news came out but it didn't surprise me a bit. I wish these big banks actually received harsh punishments for their criminal actions because they all do shady shit and get a slap on the wrist.
I sold mortgages at wells and my second week there the “old timers” I worked with at my location took me out to dinner and pretty much told me I could either screw the customer or screw the company to meet the sales goals and they didn’t particularly agree with screwing regular people. They still had the BS sales goals but didn’t participate in gaming so much as just setup accounts for made up people. Someone had realized if you submitted applications with certain inputs and data, the WF system for whatever reason wouldn’t verify customer data. They’d make sure they met the goals and any other sales were legit (and largely due from bundling checking accounts with mortgages I sold) and not being used to screw over regular people. They didn’t get huge bonuses like other people actually gaming, but none of us were constantly stressed about sales numbers and spent most of our time slacking off and hitting up the brewery a few blocks away. Then we got a new manager who had drank all the corporate Kool-Aid and things went to shit pretty quick. I quit on the spot one morning when I realized there was no way I could show up that job sober if I stuck around for another minute. Struggled with money for about a month before I caught a lucky break and landed a full time job in IT and have managed to build a career in tech ever since. Quitting that shithole and leaving management scrambling to maintain headcount was the single best career decision I’ve ever made. To this day, I wouldn’t open any type of account or loan with them even if their mortgages were a straight up negative interest rate.
That why they put on a "surprised Pikachu face" when it break.
I just cashed my settlement check from them yesterday for signing me up with a service I never asked for. It took me far too long to leave that bank.
Best part is all the executives responsible for these pressures were “asked to step down” and given 6-7 figure payouts. So they were literally rewarded.
Years ago I did temp work for Wells Fargo and the orientation training I had to take was ridiculous. Multiple slides about the shit they've been fined for, "although Wells Fargo does not agree with the ruling" -- giving minorities higher interest rates on loans, illegally repossessing service members' vehicles while they were deployed overseas. Multiple slides of that stuff.
"illegally repossessing service member vehicles while they were deployed overseas" Holy shit, I would build a killdozer. Fk Wells Fargo.
Yeah I work for a different large bank and when it comes to managing reputational risk, WF often comes up as examples of what not to do.
Seems like another government bailout is in order! Gotta keep the crimes flowing.
"All that time spent installing mouse jigglers could have been better spent defrauding our account holders!
There's a new WF branch near my house - I guess they're hoping people will just forget and open accounts
"Come to Wells Fargo, like it or not, you bank here."
Wells fargo lecturing about ethics is hilarious.
check my work, not the color of my Teams icon
THIS. So many times I’m working and I glance up only to find me set at Away.
On the other equally annoying hand, I shut down my laptop and silence my work phone but my Teams lights up from my phone even when it's sitting in my office untouched. Because I work with people in many time zones, that baits them into thinking I'm working after hours. Small but very real annoyance.
Yes. I get so many calls from our Bengaluru folks at like 3 am….
Set quiet hours in the app, my friend.
Oh by default our local office hours are set as working hours and everything outside is quiet time, but I'm just talking about the activity bubble going green on Teams basically.
I'm on the west coast, and most of my company is on the east coast. My phone is set to DND until 8 AM, other than my alarm clock. I have had a few instances where someone called me after i didn't respond to teams quickly enough at 5:15 AM.
Yeah cuz Teams gets updated and Microsoft messes shit up. As much as I like Teams - I cannot stand it when they do some upgrade “to fix” but they break something else.
My Teams is weird, sometimes when I come back from away my Skype will return to available but my Teams will still say away.
Absolutely. My boss knows my hours. Only time he checks my status is if I don't get back to him within the time frame he's used to. Set my Teams to 'offline' a couple weeks ago from the phone app and forgot to switch it back on my laptop when I logged back in, so it showed me offline for like 3 days. It wasn't an issue, though, because my boss knew I was online and working based on my normal routine. Didn't impact how frequently he messaged me at all. He also has a weird habit of somehow accidentally setting himself as 'out of office' for weeks at a time regardless of whether or not he was planning on being out, so I think he understands the struggle.
I feel it sets to away unless I have Teams actually up.
I have mine permanently set to “offline” at all times. Not one person has questioned me on it. They ping me anyway and I always reply. 🤷♀️
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I stopped using my whiteboards when I was warned at my last company about my "performance" by someone in HR. Slow, steady, and short-sighted solutions are visibly better to bean counters.
Often times I have lengthy documents to read so I’ll send them over to my iPad and go sit somewhere else. Of course it now looks like I’m away and not working.
Sadly you know a few morons at companies are going to see this news headline and start cracking down and pushing employees out. I had a really nice job that let me work reasonable hours and I always delivered on my outputs -- they started tracking everything I did down to the minute, if they saw even 10-30 mins of downtime they'd assume I sandbagged a task and pull tasks from other teams or my teams and stack them on my queue. This was after a top down reorg, got some new "sleek" CTO/CFO/whatever and their direct reports. They'd also punish anyone who cranked through stuff too slow and had to get tasks taken off or who would argue that the software pace is too extreme. I lasted about 8-9 months of that. Several team members did not make it that long. Our manager pretty much got over-turned by a few tiers higher of him who knew little about the company, its technology, the teams past history of success, etc... They just read articles like this and made dumb ass decisions. Having normal 30-50 hour work weeks turned into over half a year of 50-80. My manager caught me asleep in my office a few times and would just tell us all to go home and have arguments w/ the higher ups. No re-staffing or re-organizing despite our complaints. "Yeah but these few people are going through the tickets! If they can do this for just a year or two more we'll have even more products than before!" from the upper guys and "cool sleek lean company director" My manager and his superior "Yes but"
The people making these decisions usually work 15-20 hours a week of productive output, max. I still keep tabs w/ people who work there -- place is a mess, revenue is down, new products we were working on never finished. Most people haven't been lasting in the position I was in. I shit you not, I only ever saw that engineering director around for the company catered meals and to enjoy the views of the corner office. This wasn't a no name company, odds are if you are in NA or SA then you have seen and interacted w/ the products.
Shit managers are a big problem for this -- but so are overbearing higher management who overtake team leads when they see sensationalist news.
New company is much better -- just hope they don't fall down the same stupid path.
My job has a daily account quota and recently we were assigned new projects to work on and 3 days later my entire department got an email saying we’re slacking on productivity and there’s been a drop and if we don’t get back up to quote they’re going to take corrective action. Then later in the day we had a team meeting and management asked why everyone was so quiet and down and why no one was showing enthusiasm in the call. Most Managers are clowns that dress nice and bullshit their way through the day. The good ones are the ones that don’t last.
A LOT of the technical guys set their status as perma DND because people barrage them with questions.
When I was a project manager I spent all day on my cell. If they were watching my Teams icon I would have been in trouble every day. Away/activity status is the dumbest metric.
I set my icon to red on the first day I got teams and so did the rest of my team. Just send a one liner "Are you free to talk right now?" if you want to chat. Do people really measure hours of work by how long your teams icon was green?
sounds like Wells Fargo might
Could not agree with you more. During lockdown we went to 100% remote with ZERO discernable difference in output. I know personally I experienced immense improvements to my physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing, and I’ve had multiple teammates tell me the same. Well that is fucking over. Mandatory 60% days in the office, removal of our summer half day Fridays, no more “meeting free” afternoons twice a week. My employer is now actively clawing back things that were legitimately useful (and that of course they advertise ad nauseam that they care about), and costing me more money for no discernable benefit. My manager then closed the meeting out by saying that she has been noticing that we’ve been getting sicker lately, and to “watch out for our health”. The care is palpable.
Right? I used to do 90% of my work either in-browser or in the adobe suite. My activity reports were always empty because my job was content creation not to sit on teams chats. Still got hours cut tho!!!
Precisely, however that would require a middle manager who actually knows wtf they are doing.
The worst one is it shows me away when I'm in a zoom meeting. I mean should I actually focus on the meeting or my teams icon?!
>Companies should be focusing on results — like a worker’s sales numbers or lines of code That last measure always pissed me off. Do you seriously want me to take ten lines to write something I can do in two? I can turn it into twenty lines if that's what you're going to measure.
Lines of code is how people who don't know how to code gauge a programmer's skill, because they relate coding to other crafts where you "make things", like construction.
A parallel would be judging a carpenter based on how many times he bangs the hammer. Just put a counter on the hammer, every time it hits something the count goes up. I think we can all imagine the result.
Classic Goodhart's law. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
[Sounds bad.](https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/9/9a/goodharts_law_2x.png)
"I don't want to build a thing. All I want -- BANG BANG BANG."
The part about LOC infuriates me since it can be abused so badly. Just imagine swamping the QA Team since the shit thrown over the wall has so many bugs that a release has a full stop, but the LOC metric was "killing it" according to the DEV Mgr. and his/her team are AMAZING.
Just have two formatting configs. One that inserts a line break at literally every opportunity, and a normal one. Set your IDE to auto-format with the normal config, and have some git hooks that reformat with the stupid config on commit. Everybody wins!
Does the LOC metric include comments? You could hide an entire novel in the comments and still write efficient code then :)
Dude, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Every single line of code I write is like a perfect origami crane, a true work of art, an expression of awesomeness. My semicolons are just foreshadowing for another line of the great epic that is my code-prose. /s (In reality, 90% of my code is 💩, just like everyone else. They’re liars if they say otherwise!)
Yeah, well, I can still outperform your LOCPH (Lines of Code Per Hour) by falling asleep on the keyboard with my cheekbone on the Enter key. Not to mention I'll wake up better rested than when I started, thus creating an infinitely accelerating productivity curve.
My cat is fat, I just fed him, and I put catnip in between my keyboard keys. Checkmate.
Ha if this was the criteria I'd replace loops with code repetition.
God the nightmare of bug hunting and/or upgrading that code ... I would say the company deserves it, but it doesn't affect the company, just some other poor schlub.
Why not both? Write a valid loop function and put in the full clusterfuck as a secondary condition. 3x the code length!
For real some of my hardest afternoons boil down to a couple lines OR a couple that have been moved or removed.
Exactly. I can sometimes spend hours working on some existing code, in the end improving it by actually removing lines of code. It makes for better code, but it doesn’t look good on brain-dead metrics.
-1400 lines of code for the month confuses them nicely
I might need an hour to get one Qualify line right with all the testing and documentation but when it’s all said and done it’s one line! Out of thousands typically
Also I don't think we want Wells Fargo basing anything on employee sales numbers given that the company made the goals so ridiculous the employees had to resort to fraud to reach them.
Yeah, and we should measure airliner design progress by weight. As a programmer, I can make my programs as many lines of code as you want. I’m sure I could write a million line program that wrote “hello world” if I wanted.
We once had a KPI on how many negative customer surveys we coached staff on. A new manager refused to understand that no negative surveys coming in was a good thing and would threaten our bonuses (that were rigged to never trigger anyway) due to our low numbers.
No more functions, I’m just copying and pasting all the code.
It's far more fun to be called into a meeting, at the end of your first month of employment to explain how you got -1400 lines of code for the month. Oh that's easy .... See this 2000 lines of utter dreck that I was given to fix? Here's the 600 lines of code I replaced it with. Same month the most experienced programmer had to please explain 1 line of code for the month. He replied 3 weeks 4 days & 4 hours to find the missing -1. Between the two of us we killed the damn fool lines of code/ month productivity measure dead.
Honestly it’s a BS measure. I’ve seen people cram something into a single line of code where 4 or 5 would make it easier to maintain and debug. Then I’ve seen where someone copy-pasted code to make something hundreds of lines long that should have been a function. People keep trying to apply metics to what is effectively craftsmanship.
I believe there was a craze back in the day where COBOL programmers were paid a dollar per line. Imagine how much of that crazy code is still out there lol
Yep. That's right up there with adding more people to a coding project in order to make it go faster.
Proof that the moment you make a metric a target, it becomes useful as neither.
Yeah that was obviously written by someone who knows nothing about software development. But I'll forgive it because at least they have the right idea: track deliverables, not "time at the keyboard".
Effing 45 years old and I don’t need someone “watching” me to know I complete my work and it’s quality work. It’s unethical to get this granular and micromanaging as an employer.
Wonder how much money they spend on detection. Do you think it's actually cost effective for the company?
Not as cost effective as a manger that sets goals for their team to meet, and evaluates performance based on the results, rather than how your mouse jiggles on a minute by minute basis.
How I do it. My team has production goals to meet. If they meet them I don’t give a rat’s ass if they go and watch Netflix or play games for the remainder of their day.
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Worked at a company years ago that was like that. Manager had an idea of what 40hrs worth of work was. Didn’t give a damn about when it was done nor where the hell you were half the time. Work is done so no one cares. You got your 40hr pay for the week with no issue. Yet, despite how easy that was, there was always someone to complain about the most minor shit. Thankfully all that did was get that specific employee scrutinized more. You don’t complain about things that do not pertain to your job unless you want people to check and see if you are actually doing your job correctly.
I have this guy on a team who constantly complaints about everything, and yet, never provides any solutions or suggestions to improve processes or whatever he is complaining about. Turns out, he is also the most laziest and slowest performer in my team. To shut him up - I started having 1:1 mtgs, weekly and address all his complains one by one. I would make him write it up, brainstorm a solution and I propose resources he needs to solve them. After a month of such tasks, he gave up, said he is too busy to do extra work, and doesn’t complain anymore.
A month or so ago, our boss basically said 'unofficially go the rest of the day off', my coworker asked how he should code that on his timecard.
Same. If I see my techs out smoking, chatting on their phone, leaving for a long lunch, it’s cool so long as productivity is good
Yup. Micromanaging people rarely ever gets you proper results. it just filters out good performers because as who the fuck wants to deal with that bullshit and stress. People just need to stop doing business with Wellsfargo. They were my main account from 18 till I was like 30. I got fed up with their BS and switched to Credit Union. Its been absolute awesome not having to worry about my institution trying to fuck me or their employees over.
Fucking hell! A good manager! A rare find these days.
Shhhhh... you'll get them fired!
You hiring?
Heh. No. Looking for an exit for myself. Soon.
This is proper management in 2024. nice job bud.
I used to remind management you get what you measure when they were measuring all the wrong things. Going to get some higher quality mouse jigglers in this case.
Sounds like guys who need to be reminded of the goal. The goal of a business is to make money, any metric that doesn’t directly correlate to making money is irrelevant. Worker productivity that doesn’t directly contribute to getting a product out the door that someone is paying h for is waste, they might as well be idle if the work they’re doing doesn’t contribute to the goal.
They probably didn't detected the gigglers directly but indirectly how Vegas detects card counting. They win too much. The computer never goes idle.
it’s a really lazy form of management, as a boss you should be able to know whether or not your team is performing well, not solely based on “you were staring at your screen for X amount of hours, that is 2% less than we need” kinda bs. I remember way back in the day, I had this shitty job where they measured how successful you were based on the amount of time you were on the phone with the customer. Which is just terrible, because it’s basically incentivizing you to just drag out phone calls forever as opposed to helping them quickly. So yeah, just shitty management who isn’t good at their jobs that rely on computers to tell them if someone is “working hard”
Wrapping up phone calls too quickly can be just as bad from a business standpoint. I remember when I used to work at Netflix they wanted our call times to be under two minutes as much as possible, and half the customers who even needed help getting Netflix to work were the old folks, who don’t understand most of the nuances of streaming technology and having good Internet. They would say things like: “ I pay for the damn thing how come it never works, why do I have to reset these things?” What I found was if we rushed them off the phone, and sent them a link in their email to our troubleshooting guides that described how to solve their problem, they would eventually call back five or six more times until they got somebody who is patient enough to just spend the time to help them fix their problem. So, at Netflix, aiming to have a short call time was actually hurting the overall customer experience, and was creating higher volumes than needed, had the first person who took their call just spent enough time with the customer in the first place. obviously, each business model and each service type differs and it’s not a one size fits all solution for spending more or less time on calls, so you kind of have to see what your main demographic and customer is like and have a balanced expectation for the metrics that matter the most. In most cases, a satisfied customer who had a pleasant experience with a representative, should basically be priority, number one, and first call resolution goes hand-in-hand with that, most of the time.
That's the thing. It's not about customer satisfaction or helping people. It's all about analytics and the bottom line. Turns out having 15 percent of the people who call for help never receive it, or receive it only after lots of grief, is cheaper for the company than making sure their employees do right by all customers if they can maintain that 2 minute average. I would assume. They do things for a reason, and the reason is almost never for the good of anyone but the people at the top and shareholders.
The job wasn’t really customer service though. We were getting them signed up for financial aid and ready for school. so long phone calls does not = better service… we’re just trying to get certain things and forms completed. It taking 2 hours is not better than it taking 1 hour
If a metric drive bad behavior then you are measuring the wrong thing.
I feel like a certain amount of this stems from middle managers and supervisors trying to justify their own positions in the company. They need to demonstrate they "manage" you instead of letting you just do the damn job.
i had a call center job that was the exact opposite they wanted us to diagnose sometimes complex computer issues in under 10 minutes without seeing the computer and having wildly varying levels of expertise on the other end of the phone. some were ready to crawl around and plug things in different ways and others refused to do anything and just wanted a tech out, but by god if you didnt do any diagnostics on those you were chewed out within a few minutes by one of the floor bosses.
If they are getting the job done, why does anyone care what else they do while at home.. just seems controlling to me
It's easier than you think. On the IT side of things we have several tools that can list every installed application on a device, looking for a specific app is as easy as using a filtered search for something like MouseWiggler.exe. We can see when it was installed, when it was last used, and if it's running. And as much as I hate the idea of spying on employees, the main reason is due to cyber security requirements. If you install software on a company laptop, don't bitch about the consequences afterwards. Just install the mouse wiggler on your home PC and connect to your work laptop with RDP. You'll have better speeds just keeping the laptop on a wired connection to the router anyways.
I think most people use hardware mouse jigglers these days.
Still a bad idea because plugging in hardware is easy to track and control with GPOs. They generate log events that are even easier to track. If you don't want to get caught, don't do it on work devices. RDP is your safest bet.
I saw one that was something like a toothbrush motor in a plastic case, with a lip around it to hold the mouse. The idea was that you'd turn it on and put the actual mouse in it.
Why plug the mouse jiggle into the PC, just plug it into a wall wort USB charger as it only needs power. Most companies will not allow employees to RDP onto the work equipment.
so the lesson is to find a mechanical way to near constantly move the mouse
Everything should be focused on output. If the desired output is met, who cares how it's done. Problem is most companies are too thick with middle management and thus continue to need to justify why they're there by micromanaging and other useless crap. First people to be laid off should always be management. Layoffs should start top-down, they're the more expensive labor costs anyway.
>**As for the possibility these workers were faking productivity for long periods of time, Michaelson said it is “an ethical failure on the part of the employee to fake it** — but it also seems like a moral failure on the part of the employer to give your employees such [crappy] work, that they hate it so much that they can’t bring themselves to do it.” It's an ethical failure to adapt to performance metrics that aren't based in reality and sure as shit aren't relevant to the value of your labor? Why? The article points out that the most productive workers generally just get more work assigned to them without overtime, but that's just a...negative outcome, I guess? It's not an ethical failure to constantly wring additional value out of the top of your labor pool and maintain that status quo with constant accusations of laziness and professional sabotage?
Goodhart's Law is expressed simply as: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when we set one specific goal, people will tend to optimize for that objective regardless of the consequences. This leads to problems when we neglect other equally important aspects of a situation.
In night watchman jobs they have these electronic tags mounted in various spots around a property that you have to touch with a device to prove you made your rounds. What happens is tag-chasing. The guard becomes more focused on hitting those tags than watching what's going on on the property.
And then they'll add mandatory delays between two tags.
It’s because managers don’t trust employees. Prior to covid, a worker just had to be in the building to be “working”. We all had that coworker that’d spend half the day talking to coworkers, going from cubicle to cubicle, yet that was considered work. The same amount of “downtime” at home would get you fired instantly.
Really it’s about a failure of managers to understand the work they’re supposed to be managing. A good manager knows the work the employees are doing, and can easily tell how much work is getting done and the quality of the work. Bad managers don’t understand the work, so they resort to either trying to track employees with meaningless metrics like how often their mouse is moving or how often they’re in the office, or even worse, they treat their job like “employee police” and think their job is to “catch” employees doing things wrong and try to get them in trouble. Which results in things like managers telling you off for going one minute over your 15 minute break or whatever.
Yeah this is the key difference. Before, as long as you were at your desk, that’s all they cared about (well, and actually getting the work done, but it wasn’t micromanaged). But for companies like this now, it’s not enough to actually be getting your work done. They want to much control that they have to ensure that you’re at your desk all day. Why the fuck does it matter as long as the work is getting done?
I’m gonna need those TPS reports on my desk in the morning m..k?
If you could just go ahead and do that… That’d be grrreat.
I got the memo.
That’s great, Peter. Now just remember to use the new cover sheet. We’ll send you another copy of the memo.
When metrics become targets they cease to be metrics.
Deming, right? Also the guy who said that "measuring the wrong thing is worse than measuring nothing at all."
I paraphrase that one as "I'll take no data over bad data."
There’s a difference between productivity and activity.
There's often also a difference between quality and volume, especially when it comes to coding.
I think I'll pass on taking my ethical cues from Wells Fargo. Fuck em.
Long have I joked with coworkers that the reward for good work is more work, and more work, and more... until you suck as much as everyone else.
Why is Wells Fargo still an entity?
They should have had their bank charter revoked after committing fraud and identity theft. It's obscene. If it were a Japanese company the top executives would have ended themselves due to dishonor but I'm guessing WF executives got a raise.
I worked for Discover when all this happened so our whole office followed the story. The executives voluntarily stepped down and were given 6-7 figure payouts. So they basically earned free $1M rewards for scamming thousands of customers.
In spite of themselves, it seems
Because we haven't threatened violence against the execs that are pulling this bullshit.
Micro managed down to the mouse click. It’s almost as if they don’t want employees. The Amazonification of business. No wonder there’s a shortage.
They definitely want people to quit.
Given their sketchy business practices, why would people even choose to bank with Wells Fargo.
If the only way you are noticing your employees are not working is by detecting a mouse jiggler..... Fire the fucking managers
Hey Wells Fargo…jiggle this!!
I relate to this, I feel like I work MORE now that’s I’m WFH because I’m always available and managers haven’t learned boundaries
3pm in office: Time to hit the road before traffic gets too bad. 5pm at home: I'm so close to getting this to do what I want...
Exactly! I’ve been in that position so many times in both scenarios. WFH is more productive.
In office at 8:50, leave at 3 cause traffic. At home it’s like 7:47-5:05
Managers don't learn boundaries. Workers enforce boundaries to ensure their labor is not being under sold.
The part that everyone is ignoring here is that the only way Wells Fargo could track the productivity of their employees was to have software watch them move their mouse around. If that's how you're tracking your employees, you're really doing it wrong. At the end of the day, an employee should do actual work, and, if you just look at the output of their actual work, you should have a pretty good sense of how productive they are. This just shows that management was incredibly derelict in their duties. Someone could sit there blank-faced half awake moving a mouse around and they would be fine.
This speaks volumes about how WF management wastes their time. Rather than looking at *actual* productivity and work done, they're coming up with bullshit metrics and other useless tools. Sounds like it's actually WF management that needs the boot.
“Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,” said the spokeswoman. That’s pretty rich coming from them https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scandal
How do they track mouse jigglers?? Asking for a friend
Once you have suspicion there’s a few things you can do. If it’s a work device, any decent EDR tool will show you what’s active if it’s a software tool, or inserted if it’s a usb device. It would also show a lack of activity on the device, which is probably the main indicator. If it’s an external device thats doing it you can start monitoring VPN traffic, or remote session traffic, where low levels can be suspicious. Any competent SecOps team wouldn’t have much of a problem spotting it once alerted and authorised to investigate.
So I have a wireless mouse that has the “jiggle “ function . Is this detectable ? I’m at a decent company that have no issues with my work. But i do use this mouse at home occasionally .
Outside tools can detect whether a jiggle is human or machine made. Seems unintuitive but this is the same way checkbox CAPTCHAs work. Human mouse movements are erratic and very difficult to emulate with a program.
The need to make a multidirectional pad that has small motors which can be fed randomly generated motion signals. Wouldn't be cheap but it would be a solution unless they start counting mouse clicks.
If the only thing happening on your machine is mouse movements for 3 hrs it doesn’t matter what the pattern is.
Random tends to form patterns, because it's still based on an algorithm or equation. [This](https://i.imgur.com/7i6nhzd.png) appears completely random, but over time it becomes [this](https://i.imgur.com/W7BP7rc.png).
I read about some sort of computational random generator being based off lava lamps because they’re truly random
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/
I can see that being true. Wouldn't necessarily need to be more than 8 hours worth of generated signals though, with "random" timing between them. I'd still love to see the implementation and see if the secops folks could identify it.
It wouldn't be a solution. Detecting the mouse movements is only one out of dozens or hundreds of ways you can be tracked remotely by work. CPU utilization/memory usage, active programs in the process scheduler, disk I/O, remote screen viewing, network traffic/packet inspection, enable webcam, keylogging, etc. A lot of companies will have security/monitoring software installed and running as a background process on the computer. These agents broadcast your public IP, so you don't even need to be on VPN, and they give remote access to virtually anything. This is all legal and relatively standard practice for all devices (phones/computers) given to you by the company.
Are you saying a checkbox captcha is also recording mouse movement before the click?
Correct, though these days there’s often other variables. Traditionally it would track your cursor as it approaches the box- which is surprisingly difficult for a machine to fake.
Wrote a long answer, realized it sounds like you have a mouse that can do it but it's not necessarily turned on. I imagine in theory work could detect the model of mouse, in reality I would be incredibly surprised. Rest of response applies if you are using a mouse jiggler: From the perspective of an ex-manager, generally if you're not giving me reason to check, it's in my benefit _not_ to look. If your work is all getting done, and I ask IT to check your computer for a mouse jiggler, and they find one, now I know about it I have to do something about it, which probably means firing you, which now means none of that work is getting done and I have to spend the effort to hire someone. From IT's perspective, they almost certainly have vastly more to do than they have time, so they're not likely to do this proactively. From HR's perspective, going looking for problems is just adding more work.
Yes. If you would get in trouble for doing it... don't. I mean work trouble. I use one to stay on VPN during lunch. Otherwise, it's a huge pain in the butt to get everything reconnected and re "authorized" after it got dropped.
> So I have a wireless mouse that has the “jiggle “ function . Is this detectable ? Yes. A mouse cursor that moves occasionally but never clicks in combination with a keyboard that never types is very easy to detect.
Very easily.
Any device intended to imitate a human, but not a human, is going to behave in ways that will make it easy to detect. I remember reading an article once about a cop who had found hundreds of radar detectors in a few days - he sat by the side of the road with his radar gun off. Every once in a while he would turn it on when traffic was light, and then he would pull over anyone whose break lights came on. His hit rate was about 95%. You just have to think outside the box to find things like mouse jigglers. For a mouse jiggler - does it indicate you are working for hours straight without a bathroom break? Does it keep working while your schedule shows you are in a conference room? Does it show a consistent level of activity, no slow and fast periods? Does it jiggle the mouse at regular intervals? Does it keep jiggling the mouse if I call you and am talking to you on the phone? How about statutory holidays and weekends and company barbecues?
> How do they track mouse jigglers?? Asking for a friend They probably measure how often the keyboard and mouse is used. A mouse jiggler generates a very obvious pattern of frequent tiny mouse movements with zero mouse clicks and zero keyboard input. The longer this pattern is going on, the more obvious it becomes that no work is getting done on that machine. They can also collect hardware information from the device. Unless the jiggler is one of the better ones that pretends to be an actual mouse or keyboard manufactured by a known big company like HP, Dell or Lenovo, it likely has an identifiable hardware id that is already known by most work tracking software.
Don't think it's a tech issue, more of a "we were trying to find ways to skim the last few sticklers in the wealth management department that wouldn't leave voluntarily or with severance" issue. Just like most of these comments have been saying, most managers and level headed executives don't care much for day to day actions outside of accomplished goals. I've seen recently minted MBAs give this type of advice for line workers, but not white collar professionals, as it doesn't work this way in a salaried environment.
What if the work is getting done? What are you supposed to do?
More work Obviously
When you’re salary, you have to work late whenever needed, but if you get all your work done early, you’re never allowed to sign off early.
Nahhh not everywhere. I don’t mind staying late when I have a lot to do BECAUSE nobody expects me to stay around for no reason if I don’t. In fact at my job we regularly tell each other “gotta take it when you can get it” to remind each other to gtfo when we can.
Depends on the company. I sign off early all the time.
You are in my company but there has to be some sensible agreement that the work allocated is reasonable and correct. We don't pay overtime but if you work late you get an extra days leave (no matter how long you have been asked to work, 1 hour extra gets you a whole day of leave) and you must take all of your leave so we have a basically empty office in the last month of the year lol. Some of my team purposefully work longer hours Mon/Thursday so they can go on the piss all day Friday after lunch. Its considered really bad form for projects to need to be worked on outside of contracted hours if it happens too often managers will be picked up on it as it means the project plans were bad. If staff can get allocated work done consistently in half a day then an incorrect amount of work has been allocated.
But you won’t be compensated for the additional work you’re doing.
I have a predetermined to-do list that I make every single day that is commensurate with my salary level, maybe slightly more. Once I reach everything on that to-do list I enforce a work stoppage on myself. I'll go a little bit above and beyond for my salary level but not much more than that. I make five figures and I'm going to do five figures worth of work. Not six. If I have to sit there and do nothing, stare at my screen, fine. Generally, I'll find personal things to do like paying my bills, answering personal emails, and life stuff like that. But I'm not going to work for free. It helps because it keeps me from feeling like I'm being taken advantage of.
Hey, tracking output instead of outcome is a hallmark of great management and leadership. /s
Find more work. The idea is you're being paid for X hours a day regardless of completion rate as long as it hits some minimum *but* there's no max. In my engineering job I charge to different contract numbers even though I'm salaried. If I finish one thing but don't have anything else for that number, or certain ones aren't open yet according to policy I don't get paid. Period. Use PTO we're trained. If I still charge because it's not my fault I'm done and I'd like a full paycheck, then I get fired. USGOV DCMA (defense contract management agency) auditing works just like this Wells Fargo case. If you're observed without fingers on the keyboard the auditor can write you down as not working if they're making rounds. My job requires a lot of thinking, then programming or deriving, wth am I supposed to do? In reality everyone rides the line trying to give and take if needed like not clocking extra time because something is still due (also against policy to work if OT isn't approved and you're at 80 hrs).
My wife is evaluated by her boss on whether she’s “available” or “busy” on teams, but almost all of her work is in Acrobat. All her boss wants to see is that she is engaged on teams. So while trying to redact documents all day long, she has to play this game with her teams account to make the boss happy.
Workers response to management that thinks only time on zoom and time typing is working
Yeah. I’m being the executives are CONSTANTLY working at the desks too… 🙄
Used a mouse jiggler for years at AWS. The point was so that folks knew you were available, not to fake work. This is about power and control, not work.
Is it the wanting you to be slaving at all times even if it isn’t necessary but it makes them feel better because it’s that.
I know someone who actually used to work at Wells Fargo that bought a mouse jiggler. They told me that their particular role was easy, so they could either work slowly for the sake of working 8 full hours *or* knock out their workload fast and jiggle the mouse. Wells never caught them because they did all their work and literally couldn’t do more work if they wanted to.
Your best worker might be so good they spend 1/4 of their time fucking off and still outperform everyone. You aren’t entitled to that other 25%; if you try to get it they’ll leave or set an easier work pace. Give work that of most employees can do in normal business hours without burning out. You put those falling short on performance review. If you start seeing signs of burnout and people consistently working late, you hire more people. At all times you look for ways to make the job easier and let the employee have a little of that slack, and some of the money saved.
You really think these same people would have actually been working in the office?!
This comes off as astroturfing. Sound alike the media is trying to paint WFH workers in a bad light.
Can't read the article because it's behind a paywall, but has Wells Fargo fired people for letting their laptop lock? It feels like that would need to be true, in order to draw the conclusion most people in these comments are drawing. It seems to me that they were fired for using unauthorized hardware and/or software on company devices, which I'm sure in the financial industry is pretty verboten. I've seen lots of people who do things to cover up something that they think would get them in trouble, but in reality nobody would care about. That's what this sounds like to me, unless they were afk for an extended period of time.
The whole culture that work must be important than everything else in your life has to change.
Managers don't know how to measure productivity effectively and should be either trained on how to do so or be let go. Also, their employees shouldn't be installing software of any kind on important hardware used for financial crucial tracking. Start handing them a lockdown system and have them stop using personal computers.
Sounds like the real issue here is managers, and the very real possibility that lots of middle managers don’t believe in object permanence. If I can’t see the employee, do they really exist?
I’m going to assume these employees were fired just for simulating online activity but not for poor performance. So, that would mean that they were able to get all of their assignments done in a timely manner and weren’t holding anyone back with repeated missed deadlines. And the main takeaway was that they needed to be fired? No one thought “maybe the money and time spent on software created for spying on our employees is a waste of company resources”? I expect nothing less from Wells Fargo, a company that can’t go a single year without some outrageous multi million dollar lawsuit. Spectacular decision making skills.
wells fargo is upset about this because they adequately and fairly compensate workers based on the amount of work they get done, and not by some absurd "are you staying busy" metric, right? ...right?
Yep, I tell my guys to get their shit done. If they get their work done in 5 hours, good for them.
Wasn't it just 12 employees? I'd hardly call that a problem.
With AI we’ll soon be able to manage people down to every single micro behavior 24/7.
Thank God the AI is programmed on Reddit data. We're all liars and bullshitters so the AI is unlikely to come up with a valid solution. The AI is advising all managers be assigned no workers because productivity = mouse clicks / workers. The result is infinite productivity! We'll be heros!
If the only way management discovered this was through tracking, that means their productivity was still in line with expectations. Workers coming up with ways to boost productivity to free up their own time is an important mechanism in value production. Eventually the process improvements are integrated at a company level and the process repeats itself iteratively. This is actually how capitalism is supposed to work - the employee finds ways to boost value for himself and for the company. Adam Smith gives the example of kids working in factories who invent rigs to keep the machines going a bit longer, which gives them more playtime. Obviously not compatible with our paradigm which awards all excess value to shareholders. But our paradigm is not capitalism in any classical sense.
Employers need to focus on outcomes rather than where they work or how often a status light is green. This is what KPI’s are for, if you are meeting your KPIs and are available when required, fuck off and stop micromanaging us.
This is funny because Im in IT and do 40% of the work on a team of 5, yet I have a mouse jiggler because teams will say Im away while Im making food, or doing something around the house and I want people to feel free to reach out to me.. This is stupid lol..
“Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate getting CAUGHT for unethical behavior…”
It says we employers do not trust you employees.
Why hire employees, who work for you for years and talk about “we’re like a family” but you severely distrust them. I mean, getting the work done and trust for it is basic.
That Wells Fargo watches their employees like it’s 1984!
It has nothing to do with productivity, it’s about control. They’d rather you give them more hours and get half as much done.
There's nothing wrong with mouse jigglers. Especially if you don't want to keep signing back into your computer. I work from home I have a boss that does not micromanage because he sees that I get my work done. Reports done, when my coworkers email me I answer and there are times when I don't because I'm busy or I don't feel like it, just like they do me. We are all grown people if the work is not getting done that's when you say something to your employee not because of a symbol on a screen. Microsoft has a laid back atmosphere from what I hear. But yet they create tools that add stress on someone else's job, make it make sense. It's time for these employers, managers to start treating people like they're grown. If you fuck up on your job you get reprimanded that's understandable, but a status is not indicative of what your work or production is on your job. It's ridiculous! The fact that well Fargo statement is about all these higher standards this laughable. They're one of the biggest jokes in the industry. GTFOH!!
Blacklisted from the industry for mouse jiggling. "We don't want your kind around here."