Workers Are Using ‘Mouse Movers’ So They Can Use the Bathroom in Peace
vice.com
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I stopped caring because the signal is so weak. I bought a whiteboard for my office, I go on walks in my neighborhood to think, I grab coffee and stare out the window. I watch work-related YouTube tutorials on my main TV or scroll work-related email and web content on my phone.
But in all this Microsoft Teams is the authoritative yellow light for my colleagues. Nope. Who cares.
Judge me by my sprint work. I am done, all my stories complete, no rework. Mr. Green Light is rolling the same 13 pointer he has had for 3 sprints and spends most the rest of his time resolving his own hydra-head bugs. But he is green.
Lol, no decent manager gives a shit about your away time indicator.
If they feel your output is weak and you are very often offline or away, it's just another data point they can use against you, however.
This. Part of HR's game is gathering stuff and keeping it until it can be weaponized against an employee. Small and futile things that, when added together, can support pretty much any story they make up on their favor. They somehow pride themselves on being "smart" for doing this stuff.
Very few professions require you to be as dishonest and immoral as HR is. I pity the people that have to become this so they can put some bread on their tables.
You leave traces, its normal thing to question retrospectively when you don't deliver and its a rule rather then a fluke. I couldn't care less when or how you work if you close tickets assigned to you, but when you don't for a prolonged time (which is not 7 days, but more like months), I will look into your daily commits, login times, IM activity etc. Its supportive material for decision, not blackmailing. Its wrong to misinterpret those facts, but taking them as a fact is normal.
Example, employee A with an average performance starts talking to their peers about unionizing. Board finds out about that and they want the employee out ASAP, so they call one of their HR servants to run the errand.
HR starts compiling trivial stuff about said employee (like "average distance traveled by your mouse pointer during work" /s) and when that's enough they set up a case to let go said employee because of "performance reasons" or whatever.
I am not saying this is the case everywhere, but my experience with HR was not the way you describe.
We had identified a poorly performing employee and went to HR to talk about progressive discipline. When we mentioned stats, they asked to see the same stats for all other employees on our team as well. This was not to prevent us from firing the employee but to protect the company from accusations of wrongful termination down the road. Even so, we had to enter into a several month progressive discipline process where the employee was aware of what metric was a problem, how to correct it and how we could be supportive. That was the role HR played. They gave us a framework to proceed with a safe and well thought-out termination.
The problem is that presence is easy to measure and so falls subject to the Streetlight Effect, or the Drunkard's Search Principle [0] — a type of observational bias where you look for the lost key under the streetlight because that is where the light is (so searching seems easy), but has nothing to do with where you actually lost the key.
I remember reading a study long ago in the early Internet days (I wish I could find it now) where the findings were that remote work made good managers better, and bad managers worse, as measured by the performance of their teams.
The reason this works now seems obvious, as good managers manage for actual productivity, whereas bad managers (or bad management systems) merely measure presence as if it equaled productivity, just as they'd look for their key under the streetlight like the apocryphal drunken dolt.
It is an arm's race now, at least for people under poor management. Next step, already happening, is facial recognition [1]. Good luck!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect [1] https://www.twinfm.com/article/pwcs-facial-recognition-tools...
About seven years ago, the IRS (U.S. tax agency) promoted "security summit" measures developed in cooperation with tax professional software vendors. One of the recommendations was to time out login sessions for tax preparation software after 30 minutes of inactivity on the computer. Some tax professionals, in complete disregard of their professional and ethical obligations to protect confidential taxpayer info, decided that mouse jigglers were the proper response to this.
https://www.taxprotalk.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=14176
Was there a rule that mouse jigleres are forbidden ? You change a game, I adapt to game, its normal behavior and its expected. You cant blame people for being creative. Companies do that kind of gray zone stuff all the time to optimize taxes and nobody seem to have a problem with it and consider immoral.
No, there was a strong suggestion (not a legal requirement) that the login session should time out after 30 minutes of inactivity, to help protect the confidential data from unauthorized access.
There is no equivalent on nix systems but one can use similar but way more limited tools like xdotool, sikuli etc. for the same effect.
> meanwhile with hardware it'd be harder cuz they'd have to analyse your mouse
U really think that random company has resources to check fakiness of mouse movements ? Besides, you can bring entire thing in the sandbox that leave 0 traces on local machine after it is turned off.
Physical Mouse movers mostly aren’t detected by work spyware. Yet.
With “anti-cheat” software here, it wouldn’t be about stopping auto-mouse-movers, but about making it hard enough that people reconsider. If I can just download a tool and be done with it, that’s a lot easier than registry hacks and whatnot. It’s an arms race, but it’s not like it’s useless effort.
(Before anyone accuses me of being pro-DRM or anti-auto-mouse-movers, I’m not. I’m just explaining the logic behind why they exist)
What else could it be, when you punish regular payers because some of the people use hacked version (and without it, they wouldn't pay it nevertheless, so hack is net positive for the company).
If I pay $60 for the game, I don't expect all kind of semi-malware shit installed on my computer, slowing it down even when I don't play the game, making it buggy and yet still having next to 0 effect on hacking groups. Its just madness.
To prevent theft from "regular people" because its easy, you have different much better and 0 intrusion methods to achieve that.
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=7212...