So you did not notice that they didn’t actual do anything…? But were happy that their mouse was moving around…?
This is what I fail to get. You give people things to work on. Why do you want to spy on them instead of just looking at the results? Even if someone spends half the time watching YouTube, if all the work is done… who cares?
The lesson is to work really, really slow
This is actually exactly the lesson. If the issue in this case was the mouse jiggler, then just working slow would be perfectly fine?! Are they all stupid?
The problem is that companies have unrealistic expectation of how you spend your day. Everybody knows that most “white collar” jobs don’t actually have you working 8hrs every day with the only time you stop working being bathroom breaks and lunch. People take all kinds of informal breaks and get distracted throughout the day. So there is this weird thing where everybody knows that, but companies have to pretend like they don’t, which leads to asinine decisions like keyboard and mouse trackers to determine if people are actually working. Which then leads to people looking for solutions that earn them their little informal breaks back, which everybody takes and are perfectly fine. But again, we sort of pretend water cooler time doesn’t occur.
It’s some sort of perverse arms race built around a shared lie we all pretend we don’t know about.
It’s some sort of perverse arms race built around a shared lie we all pretend we don’t know about.
There’s a lot of that when it comes to work in general. It’s like it’s taboo to point out that the only reason people show up to their jobs is because they get paid for it.
Right?
“Nobody wants to work anymore!”
Like no shit man.
News Flash: nobody has wanted to work ever. They work because the compensation lets them live the lives they want outside of work. If nobody wants to work for you, it’s because you either aren’t willing to compensate them enough to do that, or your job makes them so miserable that it’s not worth it for them to trade away that much happiness for the compensation.
Or both. In lots of cases it’s both.
There are jobs I want to work, they just don’t pay a living wage.
But let’s say you could also make that living wage just by existing. In a world where you wake up each day and a day’s worth of your living wage was automatically deposited into your account whether you worked a job you liked or even if you went out for a walk in the park…would you still choose to work every day?
If you work in an office job you will find that it’s all a scam. You must work very slow. Otherwise, you get rewarded with MORE WORK.
I dont think wanting to use your free time effectively is stupid.
Finally. My low sensitivity for gaming is about to pay off.
“Did you see that email?”
“My cursor is on its way to check”
I know people who use the mouse jiggler. They get all their work done and are good employees.
I’m a manager at a large company and have employees who work mostly from home. I don’t bother checking if their picture has a green or yellow mark next to their name. If they respond to my emails quickly and get their overall work done, I’m happy.
Their productivity is naturally increased because they aren’t force to re-authenticate on their laptops because they were inactive for 5 minute while reading a report or going to the bathroom. Or worse, if they have multiple laptops because of security or compliance reasons, and one will inevitably be inactive forcing yet another sign in.
This is the real reason I have one of those damn mouse jigglers. The timeouts on our laptop are CRAZY short, like 5 minutes tops. Just stepping away for some coffee or to take a shit then I have to re-authenticate. Heaven forbid I make myself a toasted bagel or something!
It’s even worse as I work 95% inside multiple virtual machines in the cloud that also timeout (and in some cases shut down) so there are multiple layers of password +2fa just to get back to whatever I was doing.
So yeah, $10 USB device from Amazon allows me to not spend a hour a day just having to re-auth.
BAGELS ARE FORBIDDEN, WORK SLAVE!!! /s
Yup, I hate that Microsoft chat programs no longer give you the option of showing available whenever signed in. Has to force it’s own system of timeouts and away. So people will start emailing me thinking I’m away when I’m just waiting for a ping. Ended up installing Caffeine and having it press Shift so that the system will recognize that I’m actually alive and available.
I added 10% to my estimate for login and authentication issues. The manager was not amused.
Ah, a lower end manager I see. The higher ups wouldn’t be smart enough to get that.
Because it’s not about getting work done, it’s about having power over your employees.
Found the answer.
Slaves is what they want and we fail to provide it to them.
They don’t have a real job…
According to the disclosures, the terminated employees worked in Wells Fargo’s wealth- and investment-management unit.
Time and time again, these funds don’t really beat the average of an index fund.
But the Uber wealthy dont like being lumped together with regular people. So they pay commissions to get the same performance, resulting in less profits than an ind x when it’s all said and done.
But the company points to the small parts that do over perform, and downplays the bad parts.
Turn 1 million into 5 million, and it’s easy to forget there was another 10 million that’s worth 6 million now.
Sure you up a million, but you’re focused on that 5x gain and not the 4 million loss. So before commissions it’s a draw.
In real life there’s interest, inflation, and lots of other stuff that muddies the waters.
It’s like their version of horse racing, they bet on a bunch and hope one hits it big and pays off the losses on the others. It’s the same as gambling and just as addictive.
So if these employees were answering their phone when a big client calls and letting stuff sit, their performance was probably fine.
Because it’s not a real job.
But then you can’t fire them and not have to call it a re org.
That means you have to do actual management. Talk to people. Keep on top of workloads. Rebalance things. Build relationships. They don’t have time for that - they have their own tasks to do. So they rely on the green checkmark to mean that lil Davey is being a good busy bee.
I don’t know why things got to be this way.Exactly. I kind of don’t give a shit about how my employees manage their time. If they get the thing done when we both agreed it should reasonably be done by, and they’re reasonably available to support their coworkers during business hours, then they can play video games for half the day for all I care.
You measure the results, not the clicks.
One thing to keep in mind: with “knowledge work”, the work is never done - there’s always more to do.
So for middle management it’s really hard to measure productivity, so we get this nonsense.
This is also why Agile project management is so popular - it provides a daily metric of what’s going on, what people are doing. It forces a granularity of communication (which for those of us with lots to do, gets pretty fucking annoying).
Poor Wells Fargo. Maybe they should sign a bunch of customers up to loans they didn’t ask for about it to feel better.
After that fiasco I can’t believe anyone still uses Wells Fargo.
I’ve never used Wells Fargo, but I never heard about this fiasco you guys are talking about.
Banks like to think that branch employees (bank tellers) are sales people. Most of them give ‘goals’ to each employee requiring them to open a certain number of new accounts, land a certain number of loans, etc each week/month. It isn’t ethical since the only people you can really sell on those services are the ones who should least get them. Anyone who actually wants/needs the services will come to you.
Wells Fargo differed from the rest of the industry by setting completely impossible goals, not just unethical ones. This led to them developing a culture where signing people up for services they didn’t agree to became commonplace.
Turns out the employees didn’t actually do that. It was the mouse jigglers and clickers conspiring together.
Huh, I wondered how they detected it but it reads like the jiggling was mostly faked with software. Wild that Wells Fargo would issue computers that would allow people to install anything on them. Makes me feel not so confident about the security of my financial records.
I had a test computer that needed to stay awake for 6 hours but IT wouldn’t allow me to turn off screensaver/lock after 10 mins of inactivity. So we agreed to putting it in a room locked by badge access and using something to trigger the mouse. I got an analog clock with a second hand, taped a piece of paper to the second hand, laid it on its back, and put the optical mouse on top of it so the mouse would see the flag every 60s and stay on.
I wonder if Wells Fargo uses keystroke and mouse movement monitoring to detect that sort of thing. I expect it would be easy to design.
Also, lol at the whole thing.
My guess is these were underperforming problem employees that they wanted to drop. This provided an easy out to skip a PIP and severance. A company the size of wells fargo there are going to be way more people than 14 using a jiggler. If it were a blanket 1-strike, it would be a lot more folks gone.
More than 12!!! 14? Come on. It’s precious few people in a company that big.
How did they find out?
Installed applications can tell IT what software is installed on individual computers. IT usually doesn’t care unless something could harm the computer or network… or until some higher up with nothing better to do tells them to do a search for someone like this.
I’m in IT and even I use a mouse jiggle app just so Teams doesn’t show I’m away constantly. Even when I am working on another program, Teams can show the away status which annoys me.
Not everybody who uses it does it to goof off. Micro-managing is so stupid. There are other ways of knowing your employee is doing work.
If they’re firing people for this then the way they judge employee productivity is incorrect. What I want to know is what did these employees even do day to day? Sounds like a whole bunch of bullshit job positions to me. Wells Fargo is a shit leech corporation, drain on society, middle-man hell.
Know what the people I play world of warcraft with do, I’d say they’re busy playing world of warcraft
i work with a guy who used to play that at work until one day the big boss caught him
Did the boss drop any good loot?
It works like this. You work your ass off. Then when you’ve earned money, give it to them. Still with me? If you give them your money, they’ll figure out a way to give your money to someone else to make money off of them. You’ll get a small meaningless cut from the deal. They earn that money and pay shit to their employees who are wiggling mice around.
What’s the best Jiggle Billy to use at work?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
We cant use the same performance metrics used in other industries on IT. I could be struggling with a coding problem for hours but it doesn’t mean im not working.
The amount of times I’ve logged off work with a coding problem only to stew on it for 4 hrs including when I’m laying in bed. I’m not billing work for any minute of that nor would I be able to if I tried. Game is fucking rigged in favour of the employer.
Just because I’m not sitting at a keyboard doesn’t mean my brain isn’t working on the problem. I’ve had epiphanies taking a shit before. I’m a systems architect so not really a code monkey but I solved a DNS/networking issue the other day doing dishes. No idea why it hit me then but then again I have ADHD and my brain is fucking weird.
Eh, it’s pretty common for your subconscious to process things in the background. If I’m stuck on a problem at the end of the day, I leave early and I’ll have solved it 9/10 times by the time I get to work the next day. I don’t have ADHD AFAIK (never tested nor felt the need to be), so I’m pretty sure it’s a common experience for creative jobs.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/KUXb7do9C-w
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
A Wells Fargo spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company “holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior.”
Says an unethical piece of shit corporation that secretly opened millions of unauthorized accounts of their customers to collect bogus fees, appease their shareholders and financial status.
Were the executives fired? No. Were they jailed for financial fraud? No.
“Highest standards” my ass. My job provides service to Wells Fargo; their fraud claims department is full of the rudest, most condescending people I’ve had the displeasure to work with.
why though? Were they not getting enough done? And if its only like a dozen, does it justify the productiviry loss of hiring keyboard police?
Were they not getting enough done?
If not then fire them for that. Seems like a better metric that’s more related to how well they do their job than “how much has your mouse moved?”
Not defending them. But ill take their position for a second. I give x amount of work and expect you to finish it. And you do. But if that work takes you 2 hours and the rest of the day you do nothing it just means I can give you more work because 2 hours is just abysmal. So I wanna know about it.
So is my work measured by how much I move the mouse? In my job if I used an automatic mouse jiggler it would have zero effect on my employment, because I’m not being employed to move my mouse, I’m being employed to do productive work.
It’s insane that such a program was useful. If your boss doesn’t know the difference between you working or not, and only knows how much your mouse moves, that is a shit boss who is terrible at their job.
Having worked in the financial industry for many years, I’m betting this has more to do with security than performance. Timeout before your screen locks is ridiculously short - you could be reading something, therefore not moving your mouse, then your screen locks, and you have to put in your password to unlock it. Then there’s the nature of call center work, if you’re not super busy, you might have a few minutes between calls, but when one comes in, you have to be immediately ready for it, not sitting there typing an overly complex password while an impatient customer is trying to give you all their information right away before you can take it down … so I totally get the usefulness of a mouse jiggler. I wrote my own in Java way back when- actually it didn’t jiggle the mouse, it was simpler to simulate a benign keypress, but same effect. I wrote it myself because I couldn’t download one, any reputable site that I might get one from was blocked- but who knows, if I hadn’t had the knowledge to write it, I might have been more motivated to find one, any one, any way, and that of course is a big nono- that’s how keyloggers and shit like that end up compromising systems and leaking millions of passwords and/or credit card numbers… So I get why the company is concerned, even though I don’t care.
Honestly, the whole concept of locked down machines makes no sense to me. If you don’t trust your employees, why did you hire them? Let them configure their own machines and secure the edge network and physical premesis. Happy employees won’t steal from you, and they’ll be motivated to protect their workstations so they can keep their job.
I just… don’t understand any of it, and refuse to work anywhere that doesn’t give me admin/root access to my work machine. Just let me do my job and you’ll be happier with my performance…
How much the mouse moved is explicitly, pointedly NOT the metric they were fired for.
The reason is in the headline.
How much work they were getting done is explicitly, pointedly NOT the metric they were fired for.
Why would a mouse jiggler be effective for any reason unless it was a metric being measured?
I do this too. It’s called 'software development '.
I hate cheaters
Wells Fargo
I’ll allow it
When I worked there, they wouldn’t assign me tasks and then blamed me when nothing got done.
The way you phrased this could go either way: were you never taking on more work, no matter how obviously it needed to get done, just because you weren’t explicitly told to do that job? Because that would be a fair criticism in my estimation.
If you want me to make executive decisions then pay me like an executive.
Wells Fargo must think this is some sort of flex.
I think this is propaganda so other companies can say, “wells Fargo had an issue with this so we are going to start cracking down too”. Then they can lay off a bunch of people and not have to give severance.
