So you did not notice that they didn’t actual do anything…? But were happy that their mouse was moving around…?
This is what I fail to get. You give people things to work on. Why do you want to spy on them instead of just looking at the results? Even if someone spends half the time watching YouTube, if all the work is done… who cares?
This is actually exactly the lesson. If the issue in this case was the mouse jiggler, then just working slow would be perfectly fine?! Are they all stupid?
The problem is that companies have unrealistic expectation of how you spend your day. Everybody knows that most “white collar” jobs don’t actually have you working 8hrs every day with the only time you stop working being bathroom breaks and lunch. People take all kinds of informal breaks and get distracted throughout the day. So there is this weird thing where everybody knows that, but companies have to pretend like they don’t, which leads to asinine decisions like keyboard and mouse trackers to determine if people are actually working. Which then leads to people looking for solutions that earn them their little informal breaks back, which everybody takes and are perfectly fine. But again, we sort of pretend water cooler time doesn’t occur.
It’s some sort of perverse arms race built around a shared lie we all pretend we don’t know about.
If you work in an office job you will find that it’s all a scam. You must work very slow. Otherwise, you get rewarded with MORE WORK.
There fact that I have been told seriously, more than 0 times, to work more slowly in my life is insane to me.
It’s a rachet effect. If you do things quickly, often enough, it’ll just be expected. You won’t be rewarded for it.
And you better be able to keep up that pace constantly for the next ten years.
You can certainly deliver things early, just try to stay at a sustainable pace.
I know people who use the mouse jiggler. They get all their work done and are good employees.
I’m a manager at a large company and have employees who work mostly from home. I don’t bother checking if their picture has a green or yellow mark next to their name. If they respond to my emails quickly and get their overall work done, I’m happy.
Their productivity is naturally increased because they aren’t force to re-authenticate on their laptops because they were inactive for 5 minute while reading a report or going to the bathroom. Or worse, if they have multiple laptops because of security or compliance reasons, and one will inevitably be inactive forcing yet another sign in.
This is the real reason I have one of those damn mouse jigglers. The timeouts on our laptop are CRAZY short, like 5 minutes tops. Just stepping away for some coffee or to take a shit then I have to re-authenticate. Heaven forbid I make myself a toasted bagel or something!
It’s even worse as I work 95% inside multiple virtual machines in the cloud that also timeout (and in some cases shut down) so there are multiple layers of password +2fa just to get back to whatever I was doing.
So yeah, $10 USB device from Amazon allows me to not spend a hour a day just having to re-auth.
I have Teams installed on my phone (in a special work partition). A mouse jiggler let’s me move around the house, go on walks, change the laundry all while being able to immediately respond to anyone reaching out.
Management is pretty bad about actually doing their jobs to keep a steady stream of work coming my way. They’re too disorganized to actually plan effectively so there’s always one team under crunch while everyone else is waiting around for them to finish.
If I ever actually tell them I don’t have enough work to do, they’ll happily fill my time with extremely obvious bullshit busywork (like, why don’t you take yet another HR diversity survey?) So I just don’t say anything and let the work trickle in and everyone seems really happy with this setup (3 straight years of very positive reviews). A mouse jiggler letting me be ‘on call’ during the slow months has been huge for my sanity.
That’s what salaried positions are supposed to be like. You’re getting paid for the job, not the hours.
You’d like to think that, but the last several years have proven beyond a doubt that they’re much more concerned that we’re sitting at our desks during set hours than any actual outcomes.
The more the old lies are proven as lies, the closer we get to the truth:
Just as important as “getting the job done” is the notion among many employers that they truly believe that with their payroll they are buying human lives and happiness. That if they are paying a worker for their time and labor that they are entitled to also dictate how that person feels about it…and if that worker is not sufficiently miserable, then they can be squeezed further.
I used to think that it was purely about money…that the idea was that if a worker ever got “all caught up” and had free time, then they should be generating more wealth for their employer in some other way…but then we had the pandemic.
The pandemic where lots and lots of workers had to suddenly do the whole work from home thing. And in that time, these employers were thrilled to go along with it, since it meant continuing to make money. And in that time, most office workers eventually turned out to be happier and even more productive.
…yet in the wake of the pandemic, many of these employers have chosen less productivity in exchange for bringing their employees back to offices. The only explanation for bringing employees back in who were happier and more productive from home is that these employers value the image of control and the ability to make their workers unhappy more than they value productivity and money.
No, that’s not how employment works in this country. Employers pay people for the right to tell them what to do. You, as an employee, have sold your time to someone else. You are literally paid for the hours. Your employer is paid for the job. You are paid to do the things your employer tells you to do, which usually is part of the job they were paid to do.
Ofc all of this is subject to a whole mess of laws, regulations, policies, and whatever other horseshit HR decides to try. The important lesson is that you as an employee should NEVER put in work beyond the time you are paid to work.
Because it’s not about getting work done, it’s about having power over your employees.
Even if someone spends half the time watching YouTube, if all the work is done… who cares?
They care because it means you could be doing even more work in the time allotted.
It’s the “if you have time to lean you have time to clean” of the white collar world, why would they be paying the peasants if the toil isn’t visible
Another way of putting it is that it’s the “I paid for X, I want to use all of the X” of the upper management world.
They don’t have a real job…
According to the disclosures, the terminated employees worked in Wells Fargo’s wealth- and investment-management unit.
Time and time again, these funds don’t really beat the average of an index fund.
But the Uber wealthy dont like being lumped together with regular people. So they pay commissions to get the same performance, resulting in less profits than an ind x when it’s all said and done.
But the company points to the small parts that do over perform, and downplays the bad parts.
Turn 1 million into 5 million, and it’s easy to forget there was another 10 million that’s worth 6 million now.
Sure you up a million, but you’re focused on that 5x gain and not the 4 million loss. So before commissions it’s a draw.
In real life there’s interest, inflation, and lots of other stuff that muddies the waters.
It’s like their version of horse racing, they bet on a bunch and hope one hits it big and pays off the losses on the others. It’s the same as gambling and just as addictive.
So if these employees were answering their phone when a big client calls and letting stuff sit, their performance was probably fine.
Because it’s not a real job.
I’ve been the one identifying the people who use jigglers. Usually it was a manager coming to us to look for a reason to fire a poor employee or a contractor trying to bill a suspiciously large number of hours for the work produced. If it was just poor performance, HR would make us do a PIP and waste 3 months on them. Violating security procedures and falsifying time sheets was an immediate termination. And for the contractors, you need evidence in order to refuse payment.
Btw, if you want to get away with it, don’t use a software or USB one. Get one that interfaces with a regular mouse. Modern cybersecurity software logs every process executed and device connected.
But the USB one is going to be identified as a mouse (input device), you can even change the hardware id to be the same as the work mouse no?
USB devices have a hard coded vendor identifier and product identifier built into them that are issued from a central authority. The ones I saw were easily identifiable as not legitimate mice.
“because they might finish their work in 2 hours, which means they’re stealing 6 hours of pay from us!” - Idiots who spent dollars obsessing over pennies.
I mean, if you can do it in 2 hours I think it’s pretty fair to want you to do something else, but if it’s whole day thing and you finish an hour early you’re probably not going to be effective in that last hour anyway.
That’s not the best time to start something completely new
One thing to keep in mind: with “knowledge work”, the work is never done - there’s always more to do.
So for middle management it’s really hard to measure productivity, so we get this nonsense.
This is also why Agile project management is so popular - it provides a daily metric of what’s going on, what people are doing. It forces a granularity of communication (which for those of us with lots to do, gets pretty fucking annoying).
Exactly. I kind of don’t give a shit about how my employees manage their time. If they get the thing done when we both agreed it should reasonably be done by, and they’re reasonably available to support their coworkers during business hours, then they can play video games for half the day for all I care.
You measure the results, not the clicks.
That means you have to do actual management. Talk to people. Keep on top of workloads. Rebalance things. Build relationships. They don’t have time for that - they have their own tasks to do. So they rely on the green checkmark to mean that lil Davey is being a good busy bee.
I don’t know why things got to be this way.
