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Having seen this article being picked up by multiple outlets now, and the fact that a dozen employees is an insignificant amount of their overall employee base, I have to wonder if this information is being pushed to us as a way to scare people into not utilizing mouse jugglers and such.
Because they are! How dare you sit in front of your computer at home doing nothing productive when you should be in the office surrounded by your coworkers sitting in front of your computer doing nothing productive?! And you lose respect and character by not commuting 2 hours everyday back and forth to work. Lazy sacks of shit.
>And you lose respect and character by not commuting 2 hours everyday back and forth to work. Lazy sacks of shit.
And won't someone please think of the oil companies! That's a lot of money that should be paying for gasoline but isn't! \#BringBackTheWorkers!
I agree - feels like WF is pushing the story. Makes me confident i should never work at WFC. Not because I’d want to use a mouse jiggler or whatever - but because I’d never want to work somewhere that micromanages like that.
Or maybe a competitor is boosting it to try and hurt Wells Fargo.
Not that I feel bad for them, just pointing out it how inorganic this stuff can be sometimes.
I worked for Wells Fargo from 2010-2011 in their call center (walked off the job after they told me to hang up on a lady who was having a stroke, because I’d be fired if I called 9-1-1 for her) and when I heard their bullshit excuse of “It was just a few bad apples” that was opening the fake accounts I couldn’t help but laugh.
Their training methods were literally get people to open new accounts no matter what, if they had an account, get them to open a new one, any way you can. They have a charge they don’t recognize on a card? Don’t just close the card, get them to open a new account entirely.
Fuck Wells Fargo
I called them for a car loan once after securing a decent paying job, i already had approval through my credit union but was shopping. I had a wells fargo bank account. This was in like maybe 09 right so the crash had happened. Anyhow i get to the agent and he just laughs in this condescending manner and made some rude comment and said it was rejected. As someone who worked in a call center once i found this just the worst of the worst way to trwat current or future customers and that doesnt happen once thats a cultural thing calls are monitored and when they are if the culture is right that behavior doesn’t stand. The next week i setup direct deposit to clmy credit union and went in and closed my WF account at a location in town. Manager asked why and i said i wasnt interested in doing business with a company that treats people like that. The one time since then i used them was for 0% tempurpedic mattress that i paid off early through the store. I wont be an account holder with them again too many other better options. My credit union has treated me well and ive been with them for about 20 years now
I hope you took down that Dicks name and explicitly said it was due to him when you mentioned why. Not that it would inspire any sortnof systemic change of course, but at least he'd get some comeuppance
I went to my WF bank (20 year customer) to try and buy a house in 2020. I was told I didn't qualify and couldn't re-apply for 6 months. I was already in a new house by then.
My wife and I were looking to finance a house and had and appointment with WF, took a long lunch for drive time and such. Yeah we were stood up. Waited in the lobby for a while, then asked someone - no record of any appointment.
Forgive my ignorance, not American, but what does it mean to open an account? Why would they want that?
Do they charge you just for opening an account or do they try to snake you into using their services which they then can charge for? Or does having more accounts lead to an increase in stock value?
I could open an account with every single bank here and nothing would happen unless I actively start using the accounts.
To add on to what was already answered, getting existing customers to open new accounts keeps their balances higher (more money on their books that can be loaned out at a profit) while also increasing the opportunities to take money through fees and fines.
Say I open an account for “free checking”, written in the fine print will be that I need to maintain a balance of something like $500 or pay a $25 monthly “account maintenance fee. If they trick me into opening another account, now I have to tie up another $500 to maintain the minimum balance. If have $1000 in one account but accidentally use $1 in the $500 account, then I get the $25 fee and might not notice for multiple months.
Since you’re not from the US, Wells Fargo is horrible. They are a predatory company and have had multiple scandals for committing fraud by opening up millions (no joke) of unauthorized accounts.
It boosts their numbers, makes the bank look bigger than they are, and newer accounts have different fee structures that usually result in more money earned for the bank. Say you opened a free account but that isn’t offered anymore, when they switch to a fee based account, their chances of getting money is higher
On a side note, I opened up a Micro Center card through Wells Fargo a couple years ago to buy a TV. Multiple times, I have gotten this sort of email from them:
“You’ve got spending power with your Micro Center Insider credit card
u/Xylamyla — Upcoming plans or expenses? Keep in mind, you’ve got $1,009 in available credit on your Micro Center Insider credit card.
Getting started is as simple as finding a location near you where you can use your card.
Thank you for your business.”
Never have I ever had a credit card company constantly remind me I have credit to spend and that I should go spend it.
Pretty much the same experience except I worked through their acquisition of Wachovia in ‘08-10. One of the worst jobs I ever had. My “numbers” sucked because I didn’t open unnecessary accounts and was berated for it multiple times. Way2Save and Wells Fargo as a whole can get fucked.
Their scripts were so insane I **still** have some memorized.
>> The advanced fee for direct deposit advance is one dollar and fifty cents for each twenty dollars advanced. This is an expensive form of short term credit intended for short term and emergency borrowing needs”
The only reward for doing work fast and well, is more work.
These were the people that were able to get their shit done and not be noticed except with a software audit. I’d imagine they were good at their jobs.
This
The culture of “I’m paying you to work 8hrs a day” vs “I’m paying for your skills/knowledge/experience to do this *job* correctly and efficiently” need to change
If I contract you to cut my grass for $60 a week and give you scissors, I’m expecting you to work full time to get it done, that’s the job
You use your previous experience to build a zero turn mower and then proceed to mow my grass in 20min
Hey, I got my yard cut, I got what I’m paying for…the proper thing to do would be, “hey if you want to make extra money, I’ll hire you out to other yards, we’ll charge $100, I’ll take $40 and you take your $60 for each yard” but no it’ll end up the employer taking $100 and assigning you a billion more yards to get done for that same $60 a week ….
The best bosses I’ve ever had only cared about getting the job done effectively, efficiently and on time…and didn’t care beyond that, managing your employees burn out is also a skill ….if I’m burned out from being forced to sit at a desk for 40hrs I am not gonna knock that drill log analysis out in a day last min.
Sorry for the rant, it wasn’t at you, I agree with you
There's a guy like that at my job now. There are guys getting paid over 1000 a week after taxes to do maintenance on a machine. He does the same job, and he's taken over as a general maintenance man, so he does his machine and works on other machines as well as some random things the supervisor has him doing, but he's getting paid 13-14 dollars an hour. I already know they aren't going to give him more money, even though I know they can, because the guy he is taking over for gets paid way more than he does.
In early January 2020, my wife and I took a leap of faith to buy a new house. I started looking for financing and considered just about everybody - except Wells Fargo, because I was still pissed off about what they had done with that whole fiasco of opening of bank accounts for people who didn’t know anything about it.
I thought that I should do a proper thing for the community, and try and give a local bank a chance to write our mortgage.
And then Covid hit. The local bank’ loan servicing rep worked tirelessly for the business, making sure everything got done as soon as possible, as we were all anticipating that the local registry of deeds was going to shut down indefinitely, (which-eventually happened).
The professionalism and efficiency was off the chart. And I know that I’m just a tiny minuscule part of the bank business, but it did feel good to throw some business to a local lender.
And then 45 days later after we had moved in, we got a letter that our mortgage had been sold to Wells freaking Fargo.
Not my favorite check to write every month. And every two weeks I get a credit card offer in the mail from them. I rip it up six times before I throw it away.
It could be a few things. It could be that it's a low risk mortgage, so it's good ballast in packages of mortgages that are traded. Or your high down payment and prepayments means that you're not maximizing the profit your lender could be earning, and so they're less incentivized to hold it.
You're part of a low risk debit package that is traded to help offset the risk of taking on poorly rated debt. You're in the groups that helps banks trade off their higher risk debt because they use that "good" debt as an enticement to others to take on bad debt packages.
This is an incentive problem. If you tell employees they aren't productive if they aren't moving their mouse they will find a way to move it so they can meet their objective.
How about just setting (ethical) goals in-line with the company's bottom line so that they are incentivized to meet them and not worry about whether they moved their mouse to do it?
“It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation?”
-Peter Gibbons, “Office Space”
Yes. Did their work get done? Okay then. Next question. If people are focused on micromanagement through shiat like this, then this is what they'll always get.
I work somewhere where the boss doesnt micromanage anyone, but he'll let us know if he notices something he would like us to improve. We all work really hard to get our work done and use the free time to browse the Internet or read ebooks. He's a good boss.
As a boss I can’t even imagine the motivation to micromanage. Like, why the fuck would I want to put in that kind of effort? If I gotta tell you how to do your job constantly then you really shouldn’t be here.
And do to the nature of what we do I also have to explain to new hires that there will be days where they essentially have absolutely nothing to do as everything on their plate will be waiting on other people.
There are people who become bosses because of pay and challenge. And there are people who become bosses because they want power over others. It’s as simple as that. They want to punch down and hurt people.
That's pretty much my job/boss situation. I work from home but get my work done. When things are really slow I and I'm done with work I just move my mouse and listen to sports talk radio dicking around on reddit. I can't really leave the house or go too far from my laptop in case something comes up. I will let him know when things are beyond slow and my plate's empty/if he needs anything. He just says you and I are in the same boat, work will catch up Monday. I'm like uhh... ok lol
I know that's a red flag being given nothing to do, but I've been with the company almost a decade and keep getting raises/promotions so...🤷♂️
I totally relate on both counts. When I had employees under me, I checked their numbers at the end of the day to make sure the work that needed to get done got done. I only nitpicked if I had to because we had a nitpicky customer or manager, and usually I was transparent about it because I hated it too.
My last job had a terrible micromanager. Absolutely nothing was ever good enough and minor mistakes or misunderstandings that would take two minutes to fix turned into half hour meetings. Then along with it, if we had work dealing with our legal department, he would get even worse and blame it on his imagined response from our contact there. “I just know Sally would say that!” Though often when we met with Sally, she was fine.
I took a $10k/year paycut to get away from the guy. He assumed I quit because of Sally after six months, just like the guy before me quit at eight months. He never noticed he was the common denominator.
Terrible bosses like him are a good reminder of how to act toward employees and of how much a bad boss can really affect an employee’s life beyond the workplace. My drinking shot up a lot under him.
Same for mine. A bunch of us started getting into D&D so we've used our 3D printer to make minis and paint them in our free time lol. It's honestly amazing how much nicer it is working for a company that treats it's employees like people instead of numbers.
Our group has a mini book club going on. We've been through the Mistborn Trilogy together, Cradle, Mother of Learning, Enders Game, Speaker for the Dead, and maybe a few Im forgetting. This resparked my love for reading that I lost when I got out of highschool.
Having something like that is better for team building and morale than any "corporate event" imo. Not gonna find something that everyone enjoys, but that just means maybe there's 2 or 3 groups that do their own thing with hopefully some overlap.
In my scenario I'm sure it helps that the CEO is fully on board with it and plays with us lol.
This nonsense is a sign of lazy management, if anything. Relying on bullshit metrics like mouse movement instead of properly overseeing whether work is being done.
My guess after reading a lot of threads at /r/sysadmin is that what they really got in trouble for was plugging in an unauthorized device, rather than the not doing of work.
That's what blows my mind. For mouse jiggles, there are any number of mechanical ways to do that. Gimme a fan, piece of paper and tape, there's all kinds of ways to do it. Same with keyboard stuff. If they're at the point where they're using keyloggers or something then it has really gotten dumb. Lol
I don’t disagree, but from the perspective of the suits in charge, their logic is going to be “ well if they can get their work done, they should be taking on more work”. It’s idiotic I know, but that’s exactly how these kind of people think.
Exactly this. I have no monitoring equipment because my boss can see either work is getting done or it isn’t. Clients are being helped or they’re complaining. I know what the bar is and trusted to get the work done. If I had someone making sure my mouse was moving, I’d feel like they didn’t actually trust me. I can get shit done without being tied to my laptop.
Had this happen at my job. Shipping company auditors, who audit the packages coming through for weight or other ’upcharges’. Employees just started meeting quotas by auditing random customers that were not legitimately upcharges. If customers disputed, the employees wouldn’t be found out until months later.
I just do everything involving weighing in the office of the place I’m shipping from. I know what it should be and their scale has always agreed, but it’s their fault and not mine if they undercharge at that point
Set bullshit goals, get bullshit results.
I used to work as a manager at Regal Cinemas, they averaged your transaction times for tickets and concessions. If you had too high of an average transaction time you would get a write up. However a transaction would not start until you start hitting the buttons and it ended when the receipt printed. The goals were 20 seconds for tickets and I believe 60 seconds for concessions, unrealistic especially if you have the indecisive stoned college kids, the large families, or old people who asked 50 questions. So when I trained employees I let them know not to start pressing buttons until the customers were done deciding so they wouldn’t get penalized unfairly. The transaction averages were bullshit expectations with bullshit penalties, so I trained my coworkers to avoid it and never had any real complaints from customers.
I worked at a grocery store a long time ago and while we didn't get penalized for slow transactions, the person with the fastest averages each week could pick their schedule.
I got really fast, because it was kind of fun. I would practically juggle (non-fragile) items to get them to land just so to scan quickly and even would do things like memorise the UPC of common large items people don't like to put on the belt (cases of soda primarily).
Times were measured from the first item scanned until you hit total. Of course, there was also times when you were delayed beyond your control, such as when something wouldn't scan, or an item was damaged and I would send someone back to get another one, but there was a trick some of us would use to stop the timer.
Hitting total would stop the timer, but you could still add more items to the bill after that. This normally would be fine, but you would get the total and tax printed on the receipt for each time you hit total, and occassionally people who are bad at math would look at it and think they got charged sales tax multiple times. A manager would have to explain things to them, which they didn't like, so we weren't supposed to do it. The number of complaints, however were vanishingly low compared to the number of times the clock would be running beyond your control. It was definitely better to ask for forgiveness after the fact, than mess up your numbers.
In any event, I think it was kind of a strange thing to incentivise, but at least it was mostly just for bragging rights (for the handful of us that were competing).
What's really bad here, maybe putting in the order as you go is a better method, yet you are penalized for doing it because someone in a BS C-suite saw 'transaction time' in an article in Fortune and decided to steal it and shove it into the round hole it didn't belong in.
The same applies at higher level jobs too. Time-accounting in 15-minute increments (outside of lawyers) or requiring that X% of your day's time is spent on projects which leaves you 5 minutes to accomplish everything else and use the restroom etc. Project times get inflated because that shitter time has to be allocated somewhere.... sigh.
You know what incentive my company gives us that really motivates me? Quarterly bonuses. No lie, we get quarterly bonuses if we are profitable and make the company money, then again, it's a small business started by one lady who has the biggest heart. But damn does it get me hype knowing in a few months I'll be potentially nabbing a grand and some hundos if everyone does their part, which in line helps me do my part and then some.
WF has been clear for a couple years now that they are over staffed and intend to make layoffs. But layoffs mean severance packages and unemployment claims. If you can find a reason to fire them with cause, no severance, no unemployment. It’s not necessarily micromanaging, it’s targeted to areas where they want to trim staff without having to pay to trim staff.
Okay, so hear me out. If the employees were faking mouse and keyboard activity, but they were still meeting their goals and deadlines, then who cares? Maybe I’m just fortunate, but my company doesn’t really give two shits about where I am or whether I’m actively working at every moment as long as what needs to get done gets done.
You don't even have to be on your pc to be actively working. What if you're taking calls from customers or coworkers, or you're on Teams walking them through steps verbally, watching training videos, studying for a cert for work from a book, reading dense documentation, etc. There's a lot of work stuff that doesn't just involve clicking around.
And you never know, the guy logging a ton of mouse movement could be playing fortnite or setting his fantasy football lineups. Mouse and keyboard activity is just not an accurate measure of anything.
Employers can remote in and spot check what is running on the device and take remote screenshots.
If it's not a device you own and installed from scratch, you have no control on what it's monitoring
I often take work calls on my phone. Study online documents from my personal PC or phone. I can be working and not using my work laptop. Maybe sitting down at a table designing something on paper.
I think their entire point is that his work computer would show him not moving his mouse and therefore “not working” even though they’re doing nothing wrong
That’s true in other industries. In the financial and medical industries the data privacy and protection regulations make remoting into a computer without warning and especially taking screenshots a much more legally complex issue.
Yep my company is the same way and we are fortunate, as long as the work gets done who cares what I'm doing every minute of every hour. I still use mouse movement software sometimes just so my coworkers know I'm around if they need me, no one would care even if they did know.
If the employees were faking mouse and keyboard activity but still meeting their deadlines and goals, then tracking mouse and keyboard activity isn’t tracking actual work. It’s a bad metric.
But everybody knew tracking mouse and keyboard activity was a bad metric. No expert has ever said it was a good way to measure anything except mouse and keyboard activity. It has no provable connection to work.
Which means, ironically, that tracking mouse and keyboard activity is actually a metric for measuring ***management*** performance. If a manager uses it as a metric, that manager is bad at their job.
And Wells-Fargo kept the managers who did this but fired the employees. That tells us that Wells-Fargo is a bad company that is being mismanaged. Nobody wants to put their money in a mismanaged bank.
So, in the end, what we learned from tracking mouse and keyboard activity is to stay away from Wells-Fargo/
To be fair, not every job has easily measurable goals and deadlines. It can be very subjective.
You might have to write a help-guide article that could take you 30 mins if you half-ass it and produce some thing that covers the bare bones but isn’t very useful, or you could spend 3 hours on and produce an article that has no errors and is very helpful.
But either way you met your workload of finishing off that help guide article.
Counterpoint…if a dozen employees have a task to do and only need half the time to complete that task, maybe you don’t need 12 employees doing that task?
It seems that they weren't fired for not using their computer. They were fired for using mouse jigglers and keyboard simulation. Using unapproved hardware or software can be a pretty big no-no in an organization the size of Wells Fargo, especially in an industry that deals with sensitive information, like the financial industry. Also, using stuff like that shows a willingness to deceive, that I personally wouldn't want to see in employees that work for me.
This is only going to get worse. Saw a story about “AI in the workplace” and it pissed me off.
Imagine Olga works at a coffee shop that uses AI performance tracking. Everyone refuses to ever clean the bathrooms except Olga because she’s a good, hard worker. This productivity monitor is only set up to see the numbers of coffees made by each employee. Somewhere a thousand miles away an accountant gets a report that Olga is making far fewer coffees than her coworkers.
But it doesn’t “know” she’s spending 2 hrs every shift cleaning the bathroom and lobby because nobody else will
I can’t remember the term for it, but there is an adage that “any metric used to measure efficiency ceases to be an effective measure of it.” In short, if you use a single metric for measuring performance, an organization will optimize to that metric rather than the actual goal.
Edit: Goodharts Law
My friend works there and says employees received warnings over several months that the company was employing software to detect it and were warned to stop. He said he was told he was better off just letting his computer go idle than to pretend to work. But I guess some people didn’t listen.
There's a real fear of people slacking off, and strictly monitoring stuff like Microsoft Teams. Luckily my current job uses Slack, but Teams would sometimes show me as away just from the time it'd take to read something before I scroll
Oh for sure. I have a separate work phone and I keep Teams open on it so that it always shows I’m online for that or on outlook. I’m not sure if my job actually cares or not, but it takes no effort from me to just open the app and leave it there.
Knew a guy who did this for his IT job. What was sad was he used that time to watch and take notes on the street construction workers outside his house and complained how they were sitting around seemingly not doing anything… >.>
I always love seeing people complain about the "1 guy digging while 10 guys watch" when they have zero idea about what's going on. The 1 guy digging is the Laborer. 2 electricians on standby in case electric lines are found or damaged. Plumber on standby for water/ sewer issues. Carpenter on site to build shoring to prevent collapse. Safety officer there to make sure rules are followed and safe practices are used to ensure everyone gets to go home to their families that night. General foreman to make sure the hole is in the right place and everyone knows what their job is once the hole is done. Utility reps in case an underground utility is damaged, it can be repaired quickly and minimize effect.
Meanwhile if it was just the one guy digging and he managed to knock out the power to someone's house, that person would be up in arms about "why isn't there someone here to fix this"
Ahaha interesting!
I actually saw like 7 people in NYC subway repairing a tile and it was exactly this situation!
They had one guy dig, then tag out for the tile, tag out again and another guy sweep it all up at the end. tbh I thought it was so funny.
Thanks for the context! Union splitting of labor?
It doesn't necessarily need to be union, but it's a split of trades. If you need specialty work done, call a specialist in that field. If you were having heart problems, you wouldn't go to a General Practitioner, you'd go to the cardiologist. If you've got an issue in the street that you're unsure of, you get all the necessary specialists on hand instead of hoping one guy with a general knowledge may get lucky and know how to fix the issue.
If your best metric for measuring productivity is mouse movement, you’re already in a world of shit. Clearing out a few deadbeats isn’t going to move the needle.
Though I'm not monitored in my job, tracking my mouse movement would be the best way to tell I'm doing one of my duties. I monitor phone and chat agents in real time. I don't have to use my keyboard unless I see something I need to report, but I do have to flip between different windows to monitor different activities.
It's entirely possible for an hour to go by with no adherence issues to report. Was I watching the whole time as I am paid to do or was I. looking at my phone instead?
There are other ways I could be caught not working - an agent might go into an unavailable status for a while and if my boss sees that she agent wasn't working and I didn't report it until a half hour later
Same Wells Fargo whose stench of financial impropriety and transgressions are legendary? Look in the mirror and you'll know why the employees fuck around
I can answer this, but I can't tell you *why* I can answer this.
EVERYONE who's not a C-level is monitored. There are people in WF who have "snitch" as a job description. You don't hear about it because it's one or two, here and there. A dozen at a time really is newsworthy.
Never use software for mouse jiggling - always use a mechanical device that can't be detected ([for example](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07VHBQQVG/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1)). I just use this to avoid the 5 minute time-out --> locked screen. Saves me the headache.
Manager here. I had someone try this. It’s very detectable when your screens are recorded as my teams are during calls. In my defense his job was taking inbound calls and he was transferring calls then pretending to hang up while just staying on the call then using the mechanic mouse jiggler to not appear away on teams.
I’m not against being away and doing whatever you want so long as your work is done. But inbound calls are never done. I manage a bunch of branches now. If you get 150 cases in a day and get them done in 4 hours without making errors, I don’t give a flying fuck what you do with the other 4 hours. Most jobs have down time. I don’t care what you do with it. It doesn’t change that there is only so much work to do. There is no need to pretend to be busy. Jiggle away.
This is just such a perfect synopsis of bullshit jobs. The folks who actually sat at their desk jiggling their mice with their actual hand got off scot free. No one even mentions whether anyone in the entire affair was doing anything productive. WF probably doesn’t even know. It’s all about control
To be fair, a lot of desk jobs are about availability and special knowledge. Some people are paid to be on hand when needed and they don't have work all the time. If you're at your desk jiggling your mouse, you're still available if someone needs you. If you're not at your desk and people can't reach you, you just aren't doing your job.
Totally agree. And if these folks had been missing when called upon, Wells Fargo would’ve been 100% justified in firing them. However, the metric they used (artificial mouse jiggling) has nothing to do with that. My point was simply that Wells Fargo may have no actual way of measuring these workers contributions or productivity. The thinking probably goes something like: “not really sure what these folks do, nor how to tell if they’re doing it really except if we know where they physically are”
EDIT: 2 words
Absolutely irresponsible cyber security, but f you are tracking your employees by mouse activity and not work done then you have a much bigger problem.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess they were caught using software jigglers that are USB devices connected to their laptops.
If the employees were dumb enough to use those instead of a mechanical jiggler connected to a different power source....not a whole lot I can say nice about either party.
As long as the device is only drawing power and the other USB pins aren't in use.
But do you want to chance that your Chinese Amazon device is only using the power pins? It's more of a CYA to use a separate power source. If you gonna try to avoid low level productivity checks.....at least put a whole ass effort into it instead of half ass. Using a separate power source requires very little effort.
As someone responsible for employee efficiency, if you’re worried about mouse movement you’ve seriously lost the plot. This is a management issue even if those employees had sucked
If a company is already examining remote mouse movements they're also going to notice that the mouse only moves every 60 seconds the exact same amount.
That’s not much difference than a jiggler though in practice. Your mouse is still just moving around the screen, in the same window, not clicking anything or switching programs.
They make mouse jigglers that do not plug into the PC. they plug into the wall. Basically a spinny pad that you put the mouse on. These guys get caught because they plugged devices into a work machine.
I did a small stint there as a contractor, they hired a bunch of us, left us with nothing to do for 6 months because they neglected to give us access to anything, my manager spoke to me once and then disappeared, then they laid us all off.
It was the most mismanaged, shit place I have ever worked. The executive team just seethed with used car salesmen vibes.
This kind of thing is nightmare fuel for someone like me with ADHD. I need breaks, sometimes for longer than my company would like if they knew, but my work is always completed on time. I can't do 50% effort all day, it's 100% or 0%.
Companies will do this kind of thing from time to time mostly just to scare their other employees into working harder, but it's not really the same motivator it used to be. I bet there's more wells Fargo employees currently on linked in because of this than employees working harder out of fear.
my company does this and I have ADHD. It is a nightmare. I work about 3x faster than my team, and in big spurts, then stare into space for idk how long, then speed burst, then stare. With the staring, I still finish my quota earlier, but my productivity is lower because I don't spend as much active time working even though my output is higher.
I do 150, everybody else does 85-100, their productivity is 90+, mine is 60-75. Lower productivity, but higher output, quality rate 100%
Our raises and promotions are based on these numbers. I feel like I'm being penalized for the neurophysiology of my brain and the actual output I do produce is irrelevant.
How in the hell did they get caught? Did they just stay away for too long? If you have incoming chats and aren't responding, that's going to eventually give it away.
Exactly, when the company culture is rotten from the top down there shouldn’t be any high expectations.
For what it’s worth (and anecdotally) the only time I’ve ever been robbed was after being followed home after making a deposit to a Well Fargo account. I’m pretty sure one of the employees knew my routine and told a buddy about my large deposits but failed to realize I never withdrew so when they robbed me in my own driveway they snatched the moneybag which only had a nickel in it.
This doesn't make sense to me. Were they doing their work or not? If not, obviously fire them for not doing their job. If they were doing their job, who cares?
Sounds like WF has "activity" confused with "productivity". As a manager, IDGAF if someone is green or yellow, but I do GAF if they aren't getting their work done.
Disgusting lack of leadership at WF to not value output and contribution. A few yrs back, I had a new hire out of high school getting flamed by peers that she was lazy and always seen sitting around chatting and socializing. She also had difficulty navigating conflict. When I examined her teams output, I found she had the highest support ticket close rate without reoccurrence. She also was the most requested tech by internal users. When I looked more closely, I found she collaborated with a peer in our automation team where she developed scripts to remotely fix issues and she had her own method of fine tuning to prevent reoccurrences too. What I actually unearthed was leadership wasn’t using nor reviewing the work stats beyond an aggregate number. The new hire got promoted, her solution was expanded across the dept hailed as a success, and she got enrolled in a mentoring program. Last I heard, she was a VP in IT in a global bank (not Wells Fargo). Based on this article, WF would have canned her.
I worked at Wells Fargo in the early 90's. Things we did back then. If you had a balance of more than $10K, we HAD to try and sell you a investment product. They were all high cost / fee products. People would close accounts because they just wanted to do quick banking and they had to hear a 5min pitch
about our products.
We targeted students and college kids with high interest credit cards. I hated working there. Only lasted 3 months.
These corporate employee monitoring suites just force anxious busywork at best. At worst, you get this.
What's funny is that Wells Fargo clearly wasn't even tracking *noninally* meaningful metrics. All it does is see if there us *some activity." They're doing the bad thing badly.
It's all for nothing. All that surveillance and anxiety for the sake of seeing if someone is using their mouse and keyboard.
From someone who works in banking: on day 1, they tell us not to leave our computer unattended, and to lock it down if you have to go away from it for any reason. And they repeat it over and over again. This is for security, and security is taken VERY seriously at all levels of a large bank.
If you’re using a mouse mover while you walk away from your computer, your computer never goes idle and never locks itself after a few minutes. Someone can have access to whatever they need through your computer.
This is not necessarily a productivity issue, but it damn sure is a major security risk.
You could just be using a mouse mover while sitting at your computer. I sit at my computer without moving the mouse at all for long stretches of time while at work. I like to work with a notepad and paper.
If my workplace had activity monitoring, it would look like I spend 50 minutes a day just not working while I'm actually doing my best work -- just not with my computer.
No one in here is wondering how egregious the slacking off time from the few that were fired was? With as many employees as WF has, to fire about a dozen for doing what so many others probably were doing to some extent as well shouts one of two things to me: They either wanted to get rid of these people for other reasons and this gave them as easy out or that these people were doing way too many hours of mouse jiggling compared to everyone else.
This was my thought. Definitely not on the WF side, but there is a difference between “I use a jiggler to round out my final hour or cover my breaks” vs “I wake up, turn on the jiggler, and go back to bed.”
Notice how this is everywhere? It's an attack on WFH. They're manufacturing consent. They are creating a rift between workers that perform tasks that cannot be done working from home and those that can.
This is how you cut employees and avoid bad headlines, avoid severance payouts, deny retirement benefits, revoke costly healthcare, and still appear responsible to stock holders. It’s always about “the money”.
So it’s ok for Wells Fargo to set up fake accounts, but their employees can’t have a little extra time to take a shit in the morning before they rush off to screw over the average Joe?
I didn’t read the article but I wouldn’t be surprised if an AI system caught them. If not, expect it to be used that way in the future. AI will help us tremendously, but don’t think it won’t be used against us.
I totally do this just to keep my laptop from locking. I have real bosses that only look at the work i did, not some weird tracking software to make assumptions
I mean severance in the US isn’t guaranteed, they do it so you don’t bad mouth them out the door. In this situation I don’t think they care…but I’m not familiar with any severance requirements.
I could be wrong but I would be shocked if we had some sort of protections. The working class has no protections in the “greatest country in the world” (if you’re rich).
I spend time doing zero obvious work. I want to stay logged in case I get an instant message or something. I then set myself to "Do Not Disturb" and work for a few hours solid. My work is measured by my output not by whether my mouse moves. I would hope that most employers do the same.
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Having seen this article being picked up by multiple outlets now, and the fact that a dozen employees is an insignificant amount of their overall employee base, I have to wonder if this information is being pushed to us as a way to scare people into not utilizing mouse jugglers and such.
I thought the same thing. How is this news unless they really wanted it to be?
It's meant to portray home workers as lazy cheats.
Because they are! How dare you sit in front of your computer at home doing nothing productive when you should be in the office surrounded by your coworkers sitting in front of your computer doing nothing productive?! And you lose respect and character by not commuting 2 hours everyday back and forth to work. Lazy sacks of shit.
>And you lose respect and character by not commuting 2 hours everyday back and forth to work. Lazy sacks of shit. And won't someone please think of the oil companies! That's a lot of money that should be paying for gasoline but isn't! \#BringBackTheWorkers!
Think of the IDEAS exchanged with your coworkers when you're in the office!!!
Yeah “more than a dozen” sounds like one of those phrases intended to sound like more people than it really is. Like just say 14 people…
It wasn’t even 24 because they would have said “dozens” 🤣
Or none at all and it's just a BS scare tactic
Asking the real questions here.
Literally just paid for by WF to scare others
I agree - feels like WF is pushing the story. Makes me confident i should never work at WFC. Not because I’d want to use a mouse jiggler or whatever - but because I’d never want to work somewhere that micromanages like that.
Or maybe a competitor is boosting it to try and hurt Wells Fargo. Not that I feel bad for them, just pointing out it how inorganic this stuff can be sometimes.
Should have kept them. They weren’t the ones setting up customers with fake accounts.
I worked for Wells Fargo from 2010-2011 in their call center (walked off the job after they told me to hang up on a lady who was having a stroke, because I’d be fired if I called 9-1-1 for her) and when I heard their bullshit excuse of “It was just a few bad apples” that was opening the fake accounts I couldn’t help but laugh. Their training methods were literally get people to open new accounts no matter what, if they had an account, get them to open a new one, any way you can. They have a charge they don’t recognize on a card? Don’t just close the card, get them to open a new account entirely. Fuck Wells Fargo
I financed my home thru well Fargo. Now that I’ve sold it I will NEVER do business with them again.
I called them for a car loan once after securing a decent paying job, i already had approval through my credit union but was shopping. I had a wells fargo bank account. This was in like maybe 09 right so the crash had happened. Anyhow i get to the agent and he just laughs in this condescending manner and made some rude comment and said it was rejected. As someone who worked in a call center once i found this just the worst of the worst way to trwat current or future customers and that doesnt happen once thats a cultural thing calls are monitored and when they are if the culture is right that behavior doesn’t stand. The next week i setup direct deposit to clmy credit union and went in and closed my WF account at a location in town. Manager asked why and i said i wasnt interested in doing business with a company that treats people like that. The one time since then i used them was for 0% tempurpedic mattress that i paid off early through the store. I wont be an account holder with them again too many other better options. My credit union has treated me well and ive been with them for about 20 years now
I hope you took down that Dicks name and explicitly said it was due to him when you mentioned why. Not that it would inspire any sortnof systemic change of course, but at least he'd get some comeuppance
I went to my WF bank (20 year customer) to try and buy a house in 2020. I was told I didn't qualify and couldn't re-apply for 6 months. I was already in a new house by then.
My wife and I were looking to finance a house and had and appointment with WF, took a long lunch for drive time and such. Yeah we were stood up. Waited in the lobby for a while, then asked someone - no record of any appointment.
Forgive my ignorance, not American, but what does it mean to open an account? Why would they want that? Do they charge you just for opening an account or do they try to snake you into using their services which they then can charge for? Or does having more accounts lead to an increase in stock value? I could open an account with every single bank here and nothing would happen unless I actively start using the accounts.
To add on to what was already answered, getting existing customers to open new accounts keeps their balances higher (more money on their books that can be loaned out at a profit) while also increasing the opportunities to take money through fees and fines. Say I open an account for “free checking”, written in the fine print will be that I need to maintain a balance of something like $500 or pay a $25 monthly “account maintenance fee. If they trick me into opening another account, now I have to tie up another $500 to maintain the minimum balance. If have $1000 in one account but accidentally use $1 in the $500 account, then I get the $25 fee and might not notice for multiple months. Since you’re not from the US, Wells Fargo is horrible. They are a predatory company and have had multiple scandals for committing fraud by opening up millions (no joke) of unauthorized accounts.
I'm also not from the US but have read numerous horror stories about Wells Fargo. Which begs the question - why does anyone use them?
> why does anyone use them? Ignorance.
It boosts their numbers, makes the bank look bigger than they are, and newer accounts have different fee structures that usually result in more money earned for the bank. Say you opened a free account but that isn’t offered anymore, when they switch to a fee based account, their chances of getting money is higher
On a side note, I opened up a Micro Center card through Wells Fargo a couple years ago to buy a TV. Multiple times, I have gotten this sort of email from them: “You’ve got spending power with your Micro Center Insider credit card u/Xylamyla — Upcoming plans or expenses? Keep in mind, you’ve got $1,009 in available credit on your Micro Center Insider credit card. Getting started is as simple as finding a location near you where you can use your card. Thank you for your business.” Never have I ever had a credit card company constantly remind me I have credit to spend and that I should go spend it.
You should make that story about them trying to get you to kill that lady much more public
Pretty much the same experience except I worked through their acquisition of Wachovia in ‘08-10. One of the worst jobs I ever had. My “numbers” sucked because I didn’t open unnecessary accounts and was berated for it multiple times. Way2Save and Wells Fargo as a whole can get fucked.
Their scripts were so insane I **still** have some memorized. >> The advanced fee for direct deposit advance is one dollar and fifty cents for each twenty dollars advanced. This is an expensive form of short term credit intended for short term and emergency borrowing needs”
But but but .... Warren Buffet says it such a nice company.
Well yes, because they were slacking off instead of committing financial crimes; that’s not compatible with Wells Fargo culture
The only reward for doing work fast and well, is more work. These were the people that were able to get their shit done and not be noticed except with a software audit. I’d imagine they were good at their jobs.
This The culture of “I’m paying you to work 8hrs a day” vs “I’m paying for your skills/knowledge/experience to do this *job* correctly and efficiently” need to change If I contract you to cut my grass for $60 a week and give you scissors, I’m expecting you to work full time to get it done, that’s the job You use your previous experience to build a zero turn mower and then proceed to mow my grass in 20min Hey, I got my yard cut, I got what I’m paying for…the proper thing to do would be, “hey if you want to make extra money, I’ll hire you out to other yards, we’ll charge $100, I’ll take $40 and you take your $60 for each yard” but no it’ll end up the employer taking $100 and assigning you a billion more yards to get done for that same $60 a week …. The best bosses I’ve ever had only cared about getting the job done effectively, efficiently and on time…and didn’t care beyond that, managing your employees burn out is also a skill ….if I’m burned out from being forced to sit at a desk for 40hrs I am not gonna knock that drill log analysis out in a day last min. Sorry for the rant, it wasn’t at you, I agree with you
There's a guy like that at my job now. There are guys getting paid over 1000 a week after taxes to do maintenance on a machine. He does the same job, and he's taken over as a general maintenance man, so he does his machine and works on other machines as well as some random things the supervisor has him doing, but he's getting paid 13-14 dollars an hour. I already know they aren't going to give him more money, even though I know they can, because the guy he is taking over for gets paid way more than he does.
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In early January 2020, my wife and I took a leap of faith to buy a new house. I started looking for financing and considered just about everybody - except Wells Fargo, because I was still pissed off about what they had done with that whole fiasco of opening of bank accounts for people who didn’t know anything about it. I thought that I should do a proper thing for the community, and try and give a local bank a chance to write our mortgage. And then Covid hit. The local bank’ loan servicing rep worked tirelessly for the business, making sure everything got done as soon as possible, as we were all anticipating that the local registry of deeds was going to shut down indefinitely, (which-eventually happened). The professionalism and efficiency was off the chart. And I know that I’m just a tiny minuscule part of the bank business, but it did feel good to throw some business to a local lender. And then 45 days later after we had moved in, we got a letter that our mortgage had been sold to Wells freaking Fargo. Not my favorite check to write every month. And every two weeks I get a credit card offer in the mail from them. I rip it up six times before I throw it away.
My house loan has gone to four different companies. So there's hops EF will sell it someone else.
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I mean, they aren't trading your mortgage specifically. It's likely bundled in with a bunch of mortgages at a similar risk portfolio.
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It could be a few things. It could be that it's a low risk mortgage, so it's good ballast in packages of mortgages that are traded. Or your high down payment and prepayments means that you're not maximizing the profit your lender could be earning, and so they're less incentivized to hold it.
You're part of a low risk debit package that is traded to help offset the risk of taking on poorly rated debt. You're in the groups that helps banks trade off their higher risk debt because they use that "good" debt as an enticement to others to take on bad debt packages.
Same. I imagine this is how most mortgages end up with them.
This is an incentive problem. If you tell employees they aren't productive if they aren't moving their mouse they will find a way to move it so they can meet their objective. How about just setting (ethical) goals in-line with the company's bottom line so that they are incentivized to meet them and not worry about whether they moved their mouse to do it?
“It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation?” -Peter Gibbons, “Office Space”
I work just herd enough to not get fired
Minimum viable product goes both ways
min wage min effort
I herd enough to eat
You get a pizza party and an eCard.
Yeaaah. I need you to come in on Saturday to file those TPS reports.
Yes. Did their work get done? Okay then. Next question. If people are focused on micromanagement through shiat like this, then this is what they'll always get.
I work somewhere where the boss doesnt micromanage anyone, but he'll let us know if he notices something he would like us to improve. We all work really hard to get our work done and use the free time to browse the Internet or read ebooks. He's a good boss.
As a boss I can’t even imagine the motivation to micromanage. Like, why the fuck would I want to put in that kind of effort? If I gotta tell you how to do your job constantly then you really shouldn’t be here. And do to the nature of what we do I also have to explain to new hires that there will be days where they essentially have absolutely nothing to do as everything on their plate will be waiting on other people.
There are people who become bosses because of pay and challenge. And there are people who become bosses because they want power over others. It’s as simple as that. They want to punch down and hurt people.
That's pretty much my job/boss situation. I work from home but get my work done. When things are really slow I and I'm done with work I just move my mouse and listen to sports talk radio dicking around on reddit. I can't really leave the house or go too far from my laptop in case something comes up. I will let him know when things are beyond slow and my plate's empty/if he needs anything. He just says you and I are in the same boat, work will catch up Monday. I'm like uhh... ok lol I know that's a red flag being given nothing to do, but I've been with the company almost a decade and keep getting raises/promotions so...🤷♂️
I totally relate on both counts. When I had employees under me, I checked their numbers at the end of the day to make sure the work that needed to get done got done. I only nitpicked if I had to because we had a nitpicky customer or manager, and usually I was transparent about it because I hated it too. My last job had a terrible micromanager. Absolutely nothing was ever good enough and minor mistakes or misunderstandings that would take two minutes to fix turned into half hour meetings. Then along with it, if we had work dealing with our legal department, he would get even worse and blame it on his imagined response from our contact there. “I just know Sally would say that!” Though often when we met with Sally, she was fine. I took a $10k/year paycut to get away from the guy. He assumed I quit because of Sally after six months, just like the guy before me quit at eight months. He never noticed he was the common denominator. Terrible bosses like him are a good reminder of how to act toward employees and of how much a bad boss can really affect an employee’s life beyond the workplace. My drinking shot up a lot under him.
Same for mine. A bunch of us started getting into D&D so we've used our 3D printer to make minis and paint them in our free time lol. It's honestly amazing how much nicer it is working for a company that treats it's employees like people instead of numbers.
Our group has a mini book club going on. We've been through the Mistborn Trilogy together, Cradle, Mother of Learning, Enders Game, Speaker for the Dead, and maybe a few Im forgetting. This resparked my love for reading that I lost when I got out of highschool.
Having something like that is better for team building and morale than any "corporate event" imo. Not gonna find something that everyone enjoys, but that just means maybe there's 2 or 3 groups that do their own thing with hopefully some overlap. In my scenario I'm sure it helps that the CEO is fully on board with it and plays with us lol.
The good kind of boss
Ahhh, but think about how much more work they could’ve done if they were *constantly engaged* with their pc
Does browsing Reddit count as work?
I hope so, otherwise I'm getting fired 😬
This nonsense is a sign of lazy management, if anything. Relying on bullshit metrics like mouse movement instead of properly overseeing whether work is being done.
My guess after reading a lot of threads at /r/sysadmin is that what they really got in trouble for was plugging in an unauthorized device, rather than the not doing of work.
That's what blows my mind. For mouse jiggles, there are any number of mechanical ways to do that. Gimme a fan, piece of paper and tape, there's all kinds of ways to do it. Same with keyboard stuff. If they're at the point where they're using keyloggers or something then it has really gotten dumb. Lol
I don’t disagree, but from the perspective of the suits in charge, their logic is going to be “ well if they can get their work done, they should be taking on more work”. It’s idiotic I know, but that’s exactly how these kind of people think.
No no, if you get your work done you're supposed to go ask for more work!
Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Exactly this. I have no monitoring equipment because my boss can see either work is getting done or it isn’t. Clients are being helped or they’re complaining. I know what the bar is and trusted to get the work done. If I had someone making sure my mouse was moving, I’d feel like they didn’t actually trust me. I can get shit done without being tied to my laptop.
[Well Bobs, it’s an issue of motivation…..](https://youtu.be/cgg9byUy-V4?si=R0V_0ulXXzLVu711)
Had this happen at my job. Shipping company auditors, who audit the packages coming through for weight or other ’upcharges’. Employees just started meeting quotas by auditing random customers that were not legitimately upcharges. If customers disputed, the employees wouldn’t be found out until months later.
So frustrating. I’ve been hit with these and the disputes take forever and go in circles. I take videos of all my shipments now on my shipping scales
I just do everything involving weighing in the office of the place I’m shipping from. I know what it should be and their scale has always agreed, but it’s their fault and not mine if they undercharge at that point
Set bullshit goals, get bullshit results. I used to work as a manager at Regal Cinemas, they averaged your transaction times for tickets and concessions. If you had too high of an average transaction time you would get a write up. However a transaction would not start until you start hitting the buttons and it ended when the receipt printed. The goals were 20 seconds for tickets and I believe 60 seconds for concessions, unrealistic especially if you have the indecisive stoned college kids, the large families, or old people who asked 50 questions. So when I trained employees I let them know not to start pressing buttons until the customers were done deciding so they wouldn’t get penalized unfairly. The transaction averages were bullshit expectations with bullshit penalties, so I trained my coworkers to avoid it and never had any real complaints from customers.
The bane of employees everywhere: metrics that don’t take into account the reality of the job or actually account for work being done
I worked at a grocery store a long time ago and while we didn't get penalized for slow transactions, the person with the fastest averages each week could pick their schedule. I got really fast, because it was kind of fun. I would practically juggle (non-fragile) items to get them to land just so to scan quickly and even would do things like memorise the UPC of common large items people don't like to put on the belt (cases of soda primarily). Times were measured from the first item scanned until you hit total. Of course, there was also times when you were delayed beyond your control, such as when something wouldn't scan, or an item was damaged and I would send someone back to get another one, but there was a trick some of us would use to stop the timer. Hitting total would stop the timer, but you could still add more items to the bill after that. This normally would be fine, but you would get the total and tax printed on the receipt for each time you hit total, and occassionally people who are bad at math would look at it and think they got charged sales tax multiple times. A manager would have to explain things to them, which they didn't like, so we weren't supposed to do it. The number of complaints, however were vanishingly low compared to the number of times the clock would be running beyond your control. It was definitely better to ask for forgiveness after the fact, than mess up your numbers. In any event, I think it was kind of a strange thing to incentivise, but at least it was mostly just for bragging rights (for the handful of us that were competing).
What's really bad here, maybe putting in the order as you go is a better method, yet you are penalized for doing it because someone in a BS C-suite saw 'transaction time' in an article in Fortune and decided to steal it and shove it into the round hole it didn't belong in. The same applies at higher level jobs too. Time-accounting in 15-minute increments (outside of lawyers) or requiring that X% of your day's time is spent on projects which leaves you 5 minutes to accomplish everything else and use the restroom etc. Project times get inflated because that shitter time has to be allocated somewhere.... sigh.
The metric becomes the goal.
This works but you have to pay employees well to put company goals ahead of their own.
You know what incentive my company gives us that really motivates me? Quarterly bonuses. No lie, we get quarterly bonuses if we are profitable and make the company money, then again, it's a small business started by one lady who has the biggest heart. But damn does it get me hype knowing in a few months I'll be potentially nabbing a grand and some hundos if everyone does their part, which in line helps me do my part and then some.
WF has been clear for a couple years now that they are over staffed and intend to make layoffs. But layoffs mean severance packages and unemployment claims. If you can find a reason to fire them with cause, no severance, no unemployment. It’s not necessarily micromanaging, it’s targeted to areas where they want to trim staff without having to pay to trim staff.
If you tie KPI's to pay you get cheating. It's as simple as that.
Okay, so hear me out. If the employees were faking mouse and keyboard activity, but they were still meeting their goals and deadlines, then who cares? Maybe I’m just fortunate, but my company doesn’t really give two shits about where I am or whether I’m actively working at every moment as long as what needs to get done gets done.
You don't even have to be on your pc to be actively working. What if you're taking calls from customers or coworkers, or you're on Teams walking them through steps verbally, watching training videos, studying for a cert for work from a book, reading dense documentation, etc. There's a lot of work stuff that doesn't just involve clicking around. And you never know, the guy logging a ton of mouse movement could be playing fortnite or setting his fantasy football lineups. Mouse and keyboard activity is just not an accurate measure of anything.
Employers can remote in and spot check what is running on the device and take remote screenshots. If it's not a device you own and installed from scratch, you have no control on what it's monitoring
I often take work calls on my phone. Study online documents from my personal PC or phone. I can be working and not using my work laptop. Maybe sitting down at a table designing something on paper.
That's different from using a work device for non-work purposes. I suppose it depends on the company and the work.
I think their entire point is that his work computer would show him not moving his mouse and therefore “not working” even though they’re doing nothing wrong
That’s true in other industries. In the financial and medical industries the data privacy and protection regulations make remoting into a computer without warning and especially taking screenshots a much more legally complex issue.
Same here. They look, see no fires, and move on
Yep my company is the same way and we are fortunate, as long as the work gets done who cares what I'm doing every minute of every hour. I still use mouse movement software sometimes just so my coworkers know I'm around if they need me, no one would care even if they did know.
If the employees were faking mouse and keyboard activity but still meeting their deadlines and goals, then tracking mouse and keyboard activity isn’t tracking actual work. It’s a bad metric. But everybody knew tracking mouse and keyboard activity was a bad metric. No expert has ever said it was a good way to measure anything except mouse and keyboard activity. It has no provable connection to work. Which means, ironically, that tracking mouse and keyboard activity is actually a metric for measuring ***management*** performance. If a manager uses it as a metric, that manager is bad at their job. And Wells-Fargo kept the managers who did this but fired the employees. That tells us that Wells-Fargo is a bad company that is being mismanaged. Nobody wants to put their money in a mismanaged bank. So, in the end, what we learned from tracking mouse and keyboard activity is to stay away from Wells-Fargo/
To be fair, not every job has easily measurable goals and deadlines. It can be very subjective. You might have to write a help-guide article that could take you 30 mins if you half-ass it and produce some thing that covers the bare bones but isn’t very useful, or you could spend 3 hours on and produce an article that has no errors and is very helpful. But either way you met your workload of finishing off that help guide article.
maybe they weren’t meeting their goals and deadlines
Counterpoint…if a dozen employees have a task to do and only need half the time to complete that task, maybe you don’t need 12 employees doing that task?
Counter counter point, you'll hemorrhage employees if you are understaffed during a period where there's a lot of work.
That’s why you find other low priority work for them to do to fill “empty” time.
It seems that they weren't fired for not using their computer. They were fired for using mouse jigglers and keyboard simulation. Using unapproved hardware or software can be a pretty big no-no in an organization the size of Wells Fargo, especially in an industry that deals with sensitive information, like the financial industry. Also, using stuff like that shows a willingness to deceive, that I personally wouldn't want to see in employees that work for me.
This is only going to get worse. Saw a story about “AI in the workplace” and it pissed me off. Imagine Olga works at a coffee shop that uses AI performance tracking. Everyone refuses to ever clean the bathrooms except Olga because she’s a good, hard worker. This productivity monitor is only set up to see the numbers of coffees made by each employee. Somewhere a thousand miles away an accountant gets a report that Olga is making far fewer coffees than her coworkers. But it doesn’t “know” she’s spending 2 hrs every shift cleaning the bathroom and lobby because nobody else will
I can’t remember the term for it, but there is an adage that “any metric used to measure efficiency ceases to be an effective measure of it.” In short, if you use a single metric for measuring performance, an organization will optimize to that metric rather than the actual goal. Edit: Goodharts Law
My friend works there and says employees received warnings over several months that the company was employing software to detect it and were warned to stop. He said he was told he was better off just letting his computer go idle than to pretend to work. But I guess some people didn’t listen.
Probably a security concern then. Kinda makes sense that a bank of all places shouldn’t have computers unlocked and potentially unattended.
There's a real fear of people slacking off, and strictly monitoring stuff like Microsoft Teams. Luckily my current job uses Slack, but Teams would sometimes show me as away just from the time it'd take to read something before I scroll
Oh for sure. I have a separate work phone and I keep Teams open on it so that it always shows I’m online for that or on outlook. I’m not sure if my job actually cares or not, but it takes no effort from me to just open the app and leave it there.
Probably didn't read the email lol
Knew a guy who did this for his IT job. What was sad was he used that time to watch and take notes on the street construction workers outside his house and complained how they were sitting around seemingly not doing anything… >.>
That’s some chefs kiss irony there
I always love seeing people complain about the "1 guy digging while 10 guys watch" when they have zero idea about what's going on. The 1 guy digging is the Laborer. 2 electricians on standby in case electric lines are found or damaged. Plumber on standby for water/ sewer issues. Carpenter on site to build shoring to prevent collapse. Safety officer there to make sure rules are followed and safe practices are used to ensure everyone gets to go home to their families that night. General foreman to make sure the hole is in the right place and everyone knows what their job is once the hole is done. Utility reps in case an underground utility is damaged, it can be repaired quickly and minimize effect. Meanwhile if it was just the one guy digging and he managed to knock out the power to someone's house, that person would be up in arms about "why isn't there someone here to fix this"
Ahaha interesting! I actually saw like 7 people in NYC subway repairing a tile and it was exactly this situation! They had one guy dig, then tag out for the tile, tag out again and another guy sweep it all up at the end. tbh I thought it was so funny. Thanks for the context! Union splitting of labor?
It doesn't necessarily need to be union, but it's a split of trades. If you need specialty work done, call a specialist in that field. If you were having heart problems, you wouldn't go to a General Practitioner, you'd go to the cardiologist. If you've got an issue in the street that you're unsure of, you get all the necessary specialists on hand instead of hoping one guy with a general knowledge may get lucky and know how to fix the issue.
Digging holes is also exhausting AF so they will rotate who's actually digging while the others rest
The people who do the least are always concerned with everyone else's work load.
If your best metric for measuring productivity is mouse movement, you’re already in a world of shit. Clearing out a few deadbeats isn’t going to move the needle.
Though I'm not monitored in my job, tracking my mouse movement would be the best way to tell I'm doing one of my duties. I monitor phone and chat agents in real time. I don't have to use my keyboard unless I see something I need to report, but I do have to flip between different windows to monitor different activities. It's entirely possible for an hour to go by with no adherence issues to report. Was I watching the whole time as I am paid to do or was I. looking at my phone instead? There are other ways I could be caught not working - an agent might go into an unavailable status for a while and if my boss sees that she agent wasn't working and I didn't report it until a half hour later
Same Wells Fargo whose stench of financial impropriety and transgressions are legendary? Look in the mirror and you'll know why the employees fuck around
Oh thank goodness they didn't look at my search history.
That’s next week.
Making people look at other peoples search history is a OSHA violation. Or should be.
Just start a teams meeting only for you and set yourself available. Keeps you green until mtg ends. No jiggler required
If all it takes to "fake work" at your company is to use a mouse jiggler, I have some bad news about the work done at your company...
I wonder if any of those fired were in management or if they conveniently decided management didn’t need to be monitored for such activity.
I can answer this, but I can't tell you *why* I can answer this. EVERYONE who's not a C-level is monitored. There are people in WF who have "snitch" as a job description. You don't hear about it because it's one or two, here and there. A dozen at a time really is newsworthy.
That was during the in office days. Now there is little need. These guys were fired for the defeat device they stacked to their computers to do this
Never use software for mouse jiggling - always use a mechanical device that can't be detected ([for example](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07VHBQQVG/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1)). I just use this to avoid the 5 minute time-out --> locked screen. Saves me the headache.
Manager here. I had someone try this. It’s very detectable when your screens are recorded as my teams are during calls. In my defense his job was taking inbound calls and he was transferring calls then pretending to hang up while just staying on the call then using the mechanic mouse jiggler to not appear away on teams. I’m not against being away and doing whatever you want so long as your work is done. But inbound calls are never done. I manage a bunch of branches now. If you get 150 cases in a day and get them done in 4 hours without making errors, I don’t give a flying fuck what you do with the other 4 hours. Most jobs have down time. I don’t care what you do with it. It doesn’t change that there is only so much work to do. There is no need to pretend to be busy. Jiggle away.
This is just such a perfect synopsis of bullshit jobs. The folks who actually sat at their desk jiggling their mice with their actual hand got off scot free. No one even mentions whether anyone in the entire affair was doing anything productive. WF probably doesn’t even know. It’s all about control
To be fair, a lot of desk jobs are about availability and special knowledge. Some people are paid to be on hand when needed and they don't have work all the time. If you're at your desk jiggling your mouse, you're still available if someone needs you. If you're not at your desk and people can't reach you, you just aren't doing your job.
Totally agree. And if these folks had been missing when called upon, Wells Fargo would’ve been 100% justified in firing them. However, the metric they used (artificial mouse jiggling) has nothing to do with that. My point was simply that Wells Fargo may have no actual way of measuring these workers contributions or productivity. The thinking probably goes something like: “not really sure what these folks do, nor how to tell if they’re doing it really except if we know where they physically are” EDIT: 2 words
You just summed up 85% of corporate tech jobs perfectly.
Pfft, some of us jiggle the mouse manually, like god intended
Seriously. Its not that hard
A dozen? How is this news?
Absolutely irresponsible cyber security, but f you are tracking your employees by mouse activity and not work done then you have a much bigger problem.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess they were caught using software jigglers that are USB devices connected to their laptops. If the employees were dumb enough to use those instead of a mechanical jiggler connected to a different power source....not a whole lot I can say nice about either party.
Companies can't tell you are powering it from the laptop usb.
As long as the device is only drawing power and the other USB pins aren't in use. But do you want to chance that your Chinese Amazon device is only using the power pins? It's more of a CYA to use a separate power source. If you gonna try to avoid low level productivity checks.....at least put a whole ass effort into it instead of half ass. Using a separate power source requires very little effort.
This guy gets it, the only other time this might cucj you up is if someone remotes in to see what's going on and you're just circling lmao.
...then don't monitor my activity.
As someone responsible for employee efficiency, if you’re worried about mouse movement you’ve seriously lost the plot. This is a management issue even if those employees had sucked
TBH if the managers are using keyboard clicks to determine work progress GET RID OF THE MANAGERS FFS.
Cool when do they fire the people opening accounts under customers names without consent
Just place your mouse on top of your wrist watch....rookies.
If they grew up botting runescape, they would have known better. Didn’t even incorporate anti-ban procedures
If a company is already examining remote mouse movements they're also going to notice that the mouse only moves every 60 seconds the exact same amount.
That’s not much difference than a jiggler though in practice. Your mouse is still just moving around the screen, in the same window, not clicking anything or switching programs.
If their job can be done by a jiggling mouse then the company set it up that way.
They make mouse jigglers that do not plug into the PC. they plug into the wall. Basically a spinny pad that you put the mouse on. These guys get caught because they plugged devices into a work machine.
I did a small stint there as a contractor, they hired a bunch of us, left us with nothing to do for 6 months because they neglected to give us access to anything, my manager spoke to me once and then disappeared, then they laid us all off. It was the most mismanaged, shit place I have ever worked. The executive team just seethed with used car salesmen vibes.
This kind of thing is nightmare fuel for someone like me with ADHD. I need breaks, sometimes for longer than my company would like if they knew, but my work is always completed on time. I can't do 50% effort all day, it's 100% or 0%. Companies will do this kind of thing from time to time mostly just to scare their other employees into working harder, but it's not really the same motivator it used to be. I bet there's more wells Fargo employees currently on linked in because of this than employees working harder out of fear.
my company does this and I have ADHD. It is a nightmare. I work about 3x faster than my team, and in big spurts, then stare into space for idk how long, then speed burst, then stare. With the staring, I still finish my quota earlier, but my productivity is lower because I don't spend as much active time working even though my output is higher. I do 150, everybody else does 85-100, their productivity is 90+, mine is 60-75. Lower productivity, but higher output, quality rate 100% Our raises and promotions are based on these numbers. I feel like I'm being penalized for the neurophysiology of my brain and the actual output I do produce is irrelevant.
Yet, this is somehow the least heinous thing Wells Fargo has done….
so they monitored keyboard strokes like a real keylogger?
You can't fake work with a mouse jiggler, you can only fake being at your desk.
Hasn't well fargo been setting up fake bank accounts?
WF cashed a fraudulent check for over $100,000 in my husband's name.
Fuck Wells Fargo. They screwed me over so much. Worst company I’ve ever dealt with.
I know a CIO who does this lmao, fucking banks.
If jiggling your mouse is wrong I don’t want to be right
How in the hell did they get caught? Did they just stay away for too long? If you have incoming chats and aren't responding, that's going to eventually give it away.
Cheater firing cheaters. Wells Fargo faked several accounts on my behalf. Not a good bank.
Exactly, when the company culture is rotten from the top down there shouldn’t be any high expectations. For what it’s worth (and anecdotally) the only time I’ve ever been robbed was after being followed home after making a deposit to a Well Fargo account. I’m pretty sure one of the employees knew my routine and told a buddy about my large deposits but failed to realize I never withdrew so when they robbed me in my own driveway they snatched the moneybag which only had a nickel in it.
Oh no! Did WF lose some pocket change while bilking millions? Good looking out!
Billions
If company tracks and judge your work by "usage" instead of jresults, you should absolutely look for another job asap.
This doesn't make sense to me. Were they doing their work or not? If not, obviously fire them for not doing their job. If they were doing their job, who cares?
Sounds like WF has "activity" confused with "productivity". As a manager, IDGAF if someone is green or yellow, but I do GAF if they aren't getting their work done.
Disgusting lack of leadership at WF to not value output and contribution. A few yrs back, I had a new hire out of high school getting flamed by peers that she was lazy and always seen sitting around chatting and socializing. She also had difficulty navigating conflict. When I examined her teams output, I found she had the highest support ticket close rate without reoccurrence. She also was the most requested tech by internal users. When I looked more closely, I found she collaborated with a peer in our automation team where she developed scripts to remotely fix issues and she had her own method of fine tuning to prevent reoccurrences too. What I actually unearthed was leadership wasn’t using nor reviewing the work stats beyond an aggregate number. The new hire got promoted, her solution was expanded across the dept hailed as a success, and she got enrolled in a mentoring program. Last I heard, she was a VP in IT in a global bank (not Wells Fargo). Based on this article, WF would have canned her.
I bet Wells Fargo fires more than a dozen ppl all the time lol
More than a dozen? So 13ish? Wells Fargo has 194,000 employees. How is the firing of 13/194,000 making the news?
Ironically, Wells Fargo does not appreciate being lied to.
If the way you track work can be defeated using a mouse jiggler, that's a problem with management.
Kodak energy
Do mouse jigglers work on body parts? Asking for a friend.
I worked at Wells Fargo in the early 90's. Things we did back then. If you had a balance of more than $10K, we HAD to try and sell you a investment product. They were all high cost / fee products. People would close accounts because they just wanted to do quick banking and they had to hear a 5min pitch about our products. We targeted students and college kids with high interest credit cards. I hated working there. Only lasted 3 months.
These corporate employee monitoring suites just force anxious busywork at best. At worst, you get this. What's funny is that Wells Fargo clearly wasn't even tracking *noninally* meaningful metrics. All it does is see if there us *some activity." They're doing the bad thing badly. It's all for nothing. All that surveillance and anxiety for the sake of seeing if someone is using their mouse and keyboard.
From someone who works in banking: on day 1, they tell us not to leave our computer unattended, and to lock it down if you have to go away from it for any reason. And they repeat it over and over again. This is for security, and security is taken VERY seriously at all levels of a large bank. If you’re using a mouse mover while you walk away from your computer, your computer never goes idle and never locks itself after a few minutes. Someone can have access to whatever they need through your computer. This is not necessarily a productivity issue, but it damn sure is a major security risk.
You could just be using a mouse mover while sitting at your computer. I sit at my computer without moving the mouse at all for long stretches of time while at work. I like to work with a notepad and paper. If my workplace had activity monitoring, it would look like I spend 50 minutes a day just not working while I'm actually doing my best work -- just not with my computer.
No one in here is wondering how egregious the slacking off time from the few that were fired was? With as many employees as WF has, to fire about a dozen for doing what so many others probably were doing to some extent as well shouts one of two things to me: They either wanted to get rid of these people for other reasons and this gave them as easy out or that these people were doing way too many hours of mouse jiggling compared to everyone else.
This was my thought. Definitely not on the WF side, but there is a difference between “I use a jiggler to round out my final hour or cover my breaks” vs “I wake up, turn on the jiggler, and go back to bed.”
I remember in 1998 guys in my dorms were getting paid to look at ads and they used jiggle software to fake that they were at their computer.
Sounds like a company I’d never work for
Notice how this is everywhere? It's an attack on WFH. They're manufacturing consent. They are creating a rift between workers that perform tasks that cannot be done working from home and those that can.
Simpsons did it first. Just made me think about the water drinking bird Homer used to press Y on his keyboard 😂
The company that faked a bunch of accounts has been struck by people doing fake work?! Oh no!
People seem pretty* ok with financial employees using outside software to make sure their computers don’t lock when they aren’t even at their desks
This is how you cut employees and avoid bad headlines, avoid severance payouts, deny retirement benefits, revoke costly healthcare, and still appear responsible to stock holders. It’s always about “the money”.
Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?
So it’s ok for Wells Fargo to set up fake accounts, but their employees can’t have a little extra time to take a shit in the morning before they rush off to screw over the average Joe?
Who cares where your employees are if their responsibilities are being met? It’s not about profitability with these corporations, it’s about control.
I didn’t read the article but I wouldn’t be surprised if an AI system caught them. If not, expect it to be used that way in the future. AI will help us tremendously, but don’t think it won’t be used against us.
I totally do this just to keep my laptop from locking. I have real bosses that only look at the work i did, not some weird tracking software to make assumptions
This from a Bank fined $1 billion for fake bank accounts/depositors? I wonder what else could be wrong at WF??
Since they're fired with cause, no severance pay etc.
I mean severance in the US isn’t guaranteed, they do it so you don’t bad mouth them out the door. In this situation I don’t think they care…but I’m not familiar with any severance requirements. I could be wrong but I would be shocked if we had some sort of protections. The working class has no protections in the “greatest country in the world” (if you’re rich).
I spend time doing zero obvious work. I want to stay logged in case I get an instant message or something. I then set myself to "Do Not Disturb" and work for a few hours solid. My work is measured by my output not by whether my mouse moves. I would hope that most employers do the same.