post malone ergo propter malone: if you have policies that incentivize employees in any way to use a mouse jiggler and you then run an audit that detects people using a mouse jiggler I think you kind of have to fire those people. you should really avoid the first two things though

if you have policies that incentivize employees in any way to use a mouse jiggler and you then run an audit that detects people using a mouse jiggler I think you kind of have to fire those people. you should really avoid the first two things though

Wells Fargo fired a dozen people accused of faking keyboard strokes | CNN Businesswww.cnn.com The pandemic may have released us from the tyranny of the five-day-a-week office schedule. But the grip of America’s busy-work culture is proving harder to shake.

this is also why you shouldn’t have a zero tolerance drug policy, and if you’ve already made the mistake of having a zero tolerance drug policy you definitely should try to avoid drug testing

This is true, but it's trivially true. The real problem here is that Wells Fargo's management and C-suite apparently do not believe that the purpose of work is to complete tasks to gain income, it's to have a timeshare in your employee's life.

Like, if your job is answering tech support chats or whatever, yes, it's important to keep close track of your employee's work on this scale. If you're doing accounting-type work, some "have the Zimmerman file on my desk by Friday" shit, the important thing is that the file's on the desk by Friday.

These sorts of policies are an attempt to standardize human beings beneath the level of usefulness and will end up fostering a work environment that's supremely toxic, with managers and workers having an adversarial relationship and the appearance of work being valued more than the work itself.

Productivity and morale will fall, but that's fine in the eyes of the people who make these policies because productivity isn't the goal, much less the health and satisfaction of their employees. The point is that they can control those ungrateful peons.

As someone else observed, this is treating salaried, white-collar employees like call-center workers who get told off for being 15 seconds over their approved time on the shitter, and unlike the latter a banker at Wells Fargo isn't a disadvantaged wretch.

All I'm saying is that I wouldn't be surprised First Citizens and Bank of America started sending Linkedin messages along the lines of "We don't treat you like you're an incompetent bum over here..."

From everything I know of Wells Fargo it reached "supremely toxic work environment" quite a few years ago

Can Confirm.

This is where any system that can be defeated by a mouse jiggler is obviously stupid. For a worker in a chat support role, the thing you care about is how long it takes them to respond. They can tell if someone is in multiple support chats, that may delay a response.

If they're inactive for 15 minutes, you can tell if they're trying to talk to someone else to get an answer. At the end of the day, you can see if they've resolved an expected number of tickets.

if they actually only fired half a dozen people I would guess that this was not the result of a universal audit

but yeah that’s what my last sentence was gesturing towards

I bet you dollars to donuts they're doing this hyper-controlling shit to everyone, they just sacked the ones that were obvious. The ones that were less obvious were probably sent a "you aren't working hard enough, work harder or you're out the door next" email.

I bet the policy is on the books for everyone (mistake but one which sounds pretty good) and they just started turning over rocks

tbqh I wonder how many of those fired were those people who were involved in some of the uh, unionization efforts because like, thing people don't seem to remember is that like, if I recall some person of there's died after working 100hr workweeks?

Ah, Karoshi, lovely.

Could have been a universal audit for detectable use of this particular hack, especially if they're less worried about workers sometimes going AFK than they're worried about employees who decide to use underhand means to lie to them, while being trusted with customers' money.

Wells Fargo has ~200k employees. I do not find it plausible that a universal audit for this would only hit six

I guess I just have no idea how many people might be using one particular type of hack.

Wonder if they suspected these people were working multiple jobs at once

I guess we don’t know for sure that this was mouse jiggler stuff but it seems like if you’re working multiple email jobs you probably don’t need a mouse jiggler?

You do if they’re on separate laptops. There’s no way someone was working another job from their Wells Fargo computer

People (correctly) trash talk business schools, but I swear to Cthulhu that we don't teach this stuff and it's absolutely everywhere. 100% of executives would rather make less money as long as they can be a petty tyrant and I don't want to understand.

For many, the money isn't about the money, the money is a proxy for what they really want- power over others. They'll give up the proxy if it means they get more of the real thing.

I will forever hold that the most honest depiction of the mindset of a millionaire in American pop-culture is The Million Dollar Man in good old WWE: youtu.be/4ke5eSys09g

youtu.be

What made DiBiase's heel work as the character so great wasn't merely that he was rich, but that he really drilled down into one of the great sicknesses of America- men with lots of money and a lust for humiliating others, who prey on those desperate enough to debase themselves for cash.

Mr Beast’s gentle progenitor.

The bits of management theory I've been exposed to suggest you spend a lot of time trying to talk people out of behaving like that

It turns out "greed is good" was goated business theory all along; for all the sociopathic behavior it leads to, at least it's predictable sociopathic behavior that mostly makes sense so we can try to plan around it Bosses are out there douche maxing instead of profit maxing and it's insane

Wrath can be mollified, avarice can be appeased, but the vain and arrogant know no bounds.

"The goddess could not always be reminding kings and queens of the folly of war so she invented tacticians." – Diane Duane Sometimes it seems to me that business schools exist to teach business people to do a halfway decent job.

I'm don't have an MBA, but I can think of ways to figure out whether remote workers are doing their job that wouldn't be defeated by a mouse jiggler. It starts with, "Are they doing their job?"

It always comes back to incompetent middle management. Return to office, companies doing bullshit like this, etc. Because they employ useless, incompetent middle management and are too blind to see it.

If they had competent middle managers they wouldn’t have to do this because the managers would know who wasn’t working because that’s what competent bosses are able to do. But they don’t. They have incompetents who suck up to *their* bosses enough.

Those folks don't run the company, but they do have sway on how top management perceives things.

should you fire them? probably. should you fire their managers? absolutely

policy writers like this are not ones you want to have

Same premise to me as why “random” drug tests in most fields are more likely to create problems than ever solve them.

yeah. don’t ask questions you don’t need to ask if those questions have plausible answers which will then force you into stupid actions

Almost completely unrelatedly: any Dear Abby question of the form "I think my spouse is cheating, should I" (read their email/spyware their phone/AirTag their car/whatever)? The answer is: if you have to ask the question, you already know the answer.

A "random" test was requested for a nuclear engineer I worked with at the power plant (80's) bcs his ex gf made accusations. he was escorted off site when he refused, he quit, and was hired that same day by someone that required a drug test, one that he passed easily.

Well, the other option is you run the audit, see the numbers, and very quietly sunset the policy.

the fact that we’re finding out about this from FINRA reporting suggests to me that in at least some cases quiet sunset was maybe not a live option

out of my wheelhouse but it would not surprise me if there’s a rule that you need to report a regulated employee doing fraud to FINRA, and that the consequences for systematically lying to FINRA are extremely unpleasant

sometimes the risk management on ONE side of the octopus doesn't ask the OTHER tentacles what they are required to grasp & that results in...outcomes

as a former middle manager, what I think is: mouse jiggling "fraud" is the refuge of the poorly managed & everyone who was 'supervising' someone who was fired should go think about their lives in a role that isn't management (I'm a lousy manager, is why I bailed on it, don't wanna get better)

I do find it kind of weird that that's the source come to think of it

Isnt Wells Fargo the one that had those scandals about secretly opening extra accounts for people? Feels like they have a deeper cultural problem of "cheat to hit targets" going on here

Also: if policy is "everything screensaver lockouts after 5 min inactivity"/"web-sessions terminate after 5 min inactivity'/etc, with no exception for things like NOC monitoring dashboards, unless you're paying a human to jiggle mice, don't be surprised by the jiggler and iframe with meta-refresh.

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