Huh, I wondered how they detected it but it reads like most were via software.
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.
Tossing a dozen employees they were anyways with a big headline about it being because of not constantly working is a net profit from how many other employees will now be scared into working constantly.
I am an AV tech and we use a mouse jiggler script to prevent computers from going into an inactive state for presentations during events at my company. The script doesn’t need to be installed, you just open the file by double clicking.
I use an rpi2040 with circuitpython and usbhid. Plug it into anything and it shows up as a mouse and moves the mouse in a tiny circle every few minutes. You can get one for $6.
Wild that Wells Fargo would issue computers that would allow people to install anything on them.
That’s a very common thing. I don’t know a single company or organization that prevents executables from running. You don’t have to install programs to use them, it’s just that most software ships installers
I’ve seen it done, can be a PITA to manage but worth it for the lack of stupid shit from custies IMO.
The software probably doesn’t need to actually be installed.
There is a device on Aliexpress that mimics the mouse usage
That’s what a mouse Jiggler is.
< mind blown >
Gee, I would think a company like Wells Fargo would want to promote these innovators to management positions.
Monitoring employees in this way is just the shittiest shit of all the shit. Surely they can assess output in a different way?
Right. Do they have a manager assigning them work? And then after a couple of weeks of mouse-juggling, no assignments done.
It sounds like poor management, too, aside from the mouse-jiggling.
Management is probably also mouse jiggling…
“More than a dozen employees” for Wells Fargo is basically no one.
Ah yes. Work that tracks you, not by your output, but by whether your mouse jiggles a statistically correct amount. Nice.
The jigglers keep you online status from changing to “away.”
Some jobs require you to be at your desk, and using mouse jigglers to fake being at work is the kind of thing that keeps more companies from allowing WFH.
If the job requires you to be at your desk then presumably that means you have work to complete. Judge people for what they get done, not how often they mindlessly move a mouse and this wouldn’t be a problem!
Some jobs necessarily include idle time when you’re waiting for work to come through even if there’s nothing to do in that specific moment. The flip side of that is that the employer is able to require that the worker be available instantly. If they’re leaving their work area because they’re bored then they’re not “at work.”
My Dad was a career firefighter, and he spent most of his time sitting in the station watching TV, cooking meals, or sleeping. He was paid for every minute of that time because at the drop of a hat he could be called to a wreck, fire, or medical emergency.
The reason he had to be paid is federal law requiring that all workers who are “engaged to wait” are on the clock. If someone is installing mouse-jiggler software so they can leave their workstation and do whatever they want, they’re no longer being engaged to wait.
My Dad was a career firefighter, and he spent most of his time sitting in the station watching TV, cooking meals, or sleeping. He was paid for every minute of that time because at the drop of a hat he could be called to a wreck, fire, or medical emergency.
So if I’m WFH and need to be available I can be watching TV or cooking a meal as long as I’m available at the drop of a hat if something comes in. This can be more usefully measured by how quickly I respond or my work output rather than how much my mouse moves.
Is that really true though? If I crank my volume for notifications and then read a book while waiting for my next call how is that less engaged than like reading an ebook on the same computer?
Frankly - it’s a lot harder to quantify. “Time at desk” is easy to track. Response times to tickets are much more variable and difficult to measure.
Even if you are at your desk and say waiting for a ticket to come in or a call, you’ll be set to away so it doesn’t make sense to moitor by that.
Worked in IT 9 years and never come across a company that monitors this.
Sure. Yes. I’m aware.
The point is, if an employee isn’t productive, the company should notice, because they should be running some kind of oversight over the work either being done or not being done.
If the work is being done, even if the employee isn’t always 100% focused, the company shouldn’t care.
If the work is not being done, the company should care, regardless of how active the mouse moves.
using mouse jigglers to fake being at work is the kind of thing that keeps more companies from allowing WFH.
No, companies don’t allow WFH because they don’t trust employees or can’t verify, employees doing their work from home. Most of the time, because the company people don’t understand that work and couldn’t judge if it’s being done correctly without adults in the room.
tldr: people should be hired and fired based on their performance. Crazy talk, I know.
It’s crazy how quickly
peopleBoomers, managers, executives and capitalists flip flop between “Salary is performance based you don’t have set hours” to “You didn’t work every hour from 9-5”. This hypocritical nonsense only drives more people to take on anti-work perspectives.
70 year old management member who came up with the idea of using this metric in the first place:
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“The system shows you haven’t touched your mouse for half an hour.”
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“Yes, I worked out a solution on paper, like back in the old days.”
[confused noises]
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When I worked there, they wouldn’t assign me tasks and then blamed me when nothing got done.
Did you try just staring at the screen and jiggling the mouse? This appears to be their only way of measuring productivity.
Ya really gotta click occasionally and maybe type a few things.
Getting blamed for their incompetence was the task.
Please
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.
the reality is that incompetent managers love to blame their employees for not doing shit they never told them to do.
Once had a manager repeatedly tell me I needed to “manage my time better” when I told them I didn’t have enough time in the day to get all my tasks done. So I logged my time one day (9-11 worked on task A, 11-1230 worked on task B, etc.) and went to my manager to show them. “This is how long I am spending on each task, can you tell me which ones I am spending too long on and how I can be more efficient?” Manager told me to give them the log and they’ll get back to me.
They never did get back to me, but they did end up reassigning my duties to other people who were also not given enough time to complete them.
If you want me to make executive decisions then pay me like an executive.
executive decisions
3 Wood or 9 Iron?
I’ll trade you a coal and 2 brick.
I wish executives were that cool.
I’m not sure how fair it is. How would you know what work there is if there aren’t any tickets being assigned for example?
I guess it depends on the employer. I don’t do office work myself, but according to what I’ve heard from my wife about her jobs in banking adjacent fields, she has a few different queues of things to do that everyone takes from.
were you never taking on more work, no matter how obviously it needed to get done
Bad management creates excess redundant and disorganized labor for the base worker.
If your boss is shitting this stuff out uncontrollably, perhaps that’s their problem more than yours.
Either way, sacking all those people won’t get the work done any faster.
Same actually
Management: we need to find ways to automate work using AI
The ai would also use mouse jigglers after a few Werks, its the work evvironment
maybe stop tracking people’s minute movements you fucking absolute creeps
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.
They fired 12 employees of a workforce numbering over 216,000. Looks like they fired 1000x more employees (literally…12000) last year just because “that’s business.” What a nothingburger.
Is the job to be interacting with a computer for the entire duration of your shift? Fuck this incentive structure that requires people to fake touching their computer parts to show that work is being done.
in my previous job i lost the privilege to work from home because my boss told me i am “tickling my girlfriend and not working”. when in reality my job was so easy i could do all of it in about 2 hours, so i left a magnet holding down space bar to keep the pc from sleeping. of course they had taken screenshots and could tell that pretty much nothing was being done for the whole day. so then i had to drive 40km every day to do the exact same thing in the office.
They let you tickle your girlfriend at the office? That’s pretty progressive!
i doubt they would’ve allowed tickling there either, but thats how we ended up together. she was my colleague.
Poor Wells Fargo. Maybe they should sign a bunch of customers up to loans they didn’t ask for about it to feel better.
Turns out the employees didn’t actually do that. It was the mouse jigglers and clickers conspiring together.
There’s a hallmark/lifetime movie about this. The bank isn’t WF but we all know who it is.
After his corporate rah-rah and disbelief his bank full of good ethical people would do such a thing, at the behest of the main character he finds out from some marketing chuds it is in fact true. Believing in the company to do the right thing he goes against the main character’s wishes and tells an exec who expectedly closes the accts of the vocal customers and sweeps it all under the rug - deleting all record.
The love interest finds out his company doesn’t actually care about their customers when he asks if they are going to do a full company investigation and the exec laughs and instead offers up a potential promotion instead.
I knew the whole plotline was bullshit when he quit to become a whistleblower. As he gave his first interview on the main character’s tv station, he gave his full name as he did a live interview and didn’t get murdered by the bank immediately.
Thanks to Boeing we all learned that whistleblower is a far more dangerous profession than police officer and the chance of dying is thousands of percent higher. You really have to suspend disbelief at the movie plot.
I’m trying to suspend my disbelief at you watching a hallmark movie and remembering it well enough to give a synopsis.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around suffering watching a Lifetime movie in purpose tbh… but yeah, their plots are unintentionally farcical every time.
e: suffering=someone but it still works so I’ll leave it
Lifetime movies are awesome because you can put them on in the background and they’re not at all distracting from the main task you’re working on.
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.
It isn’t ethical since the only people you can really sell on those services are the ones who should least get them.
Yes, all sales is essentially unethical unless all you do is provide info when asked.
You don’t have a choice where your loan ends up plus there are all the corporate contracts that aren’t going to change. They were stealing money from the elderly not businesses.
I have a company I deal with at work where the owner of that one cussed out and hung up the phone on the CEO of where I work. We still do business with them because it’s way too much money to walk away from.
Funnily enough an accounting teacher I had used Wells Fargo
After that crime spree I can’t believe Wells Fargo is still allowed to exist.
I use a mouse jiggler while I’m working because I often spend quite a bit of time just thinking through data structures and code composition and Teams is absolutely sure that I’m away from my desk if it’s more than 5 minutes.
Start a meeting. Then mark yourself as available.
Code up an F24 presser in Excels VBA macro editor, and run that between your work hours.
That is a good suggestion. Interesting. I’ll have to try it. Although if you’re in a meeting doesn’t that mark you as busy?
I just open notepad and put something on the enter key and lay the laptop lid on it.
That’s an interesting solution. What, may I ask, are you using on the enter key?
I set my pocket knife on mine
Try reading step 2. 😂
Which one is step 2? Is that the one after step 1?
Only downside with teams is that you can’t accept direct teams calls while in a meeting and they can see you are in a meeting. You always get the odd person who dials before asking via chat if you are available so you don’t get the chance to close your meeting first.
You can accept direct calls on teams while in a meeting. It puts your original meeting on hold
I’m simply always away. It’s less misleading than being randomly away because I do actual work and am not glued to the computer.
Same here. Also I sometimes think about these kinds of things when I’m off the clock too. I don’t want to but you can’t exactly tell your brain to stop thinking about work stuff at 5pm. Sometimes I’m just watching TV or whatever and a thought about how to solve a work problem pops into my head.
To me it says more about how bad the management is at a company that has to resort to try to detecting mouse jigglers. Do they know so little about what the employees do that they don’t simply notice that work isn’t getting done if an employee isn’t actually working?
Hilariously enough there’s tons of empirical data that shows people are far more productive in socializing environments where micromanaging doesn’t happen, and arbitrary rules are put on place. Give people an actual sense of community, they actually engage in work they have to get done.
Absolutely. If you have an adversarial relationship with your employees and why would you think they’d ever be loyal or go the extra mile?
I really don’t get employers like that…
If you join a private meeting with yourself it will show you busy
Just a heads-up, there are activity reports that can be run that will readily show this.
That explains my turbulent pubescence.
Friendly reminder that Wells Fargo is a criminal enterprise masquerading as a bank.
They’re the same picture.
That applies to all investment banks no? Or is Wells Fargo a special kind criminal?
No you’re right. It’s like Mitch Hedberg used to say about drinking though… Still does, but he used to too.
They are, but Wells Fargo too.
Wells Fargo specifically committed widespread, systemic fraud and identity theft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scandal?wprov=sfla1
A Wells Fargo spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company “holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior.”
I mean the jokes write themselves
The only two things higher than that are the fees they extract from overdraft and the money they pay their legal team.
The shareholders will be furious.
