Wells Fargo Fires Over a Dozen for 'Simulation of Keyboard Activity'
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
a) the employees met all required KPIs and delivered well and were just meeting some dumb policy while actually being totally fine, and therefore shouldn't have been fired; or
b) the company has literally no way to tell if someone is actually useful and many of the people not using such devices could easily be far worse performaers.
In either case, firing someone based on this sort of monitoring or information should be illegal.
What would be a justifiable (won't get me in jail) firing in your mind?
At least in the companies I worked with, KPIs are manager/lead level items and it is divided into tasks that is handed out to individual team member.
I admire the folks who have such quality KPIs.
And, yes, I’ve been forced to deal with others’ decisions to let folks go as well (primarily missing growth targets), but very rarely.
History is full of outrageous "agreements" by the powerful applied to the powerless, so there have to be labor laws that set an even playing field. Distributed work across legal jurisdictions is an opportunity to push those labor agreements and avoid consequences. On the other hand, there have always been cheaters among workers and that wont go away, either.
Modern technology has opened a pandora's box of constant surveillance that was not practical or even possible previously. There have to be new agreements on labor practices. It is a political problem. Compounding the urgency of this situation in an advanced economy is the looming implementation of AI to replace workers, and to enable a few workers to do the work of many, many more of the past. This time around, middle-managers are included in those that are replaceable, or perhaps even mid-level leadership i.e. "your boss is an AI"
Ha! That's a funny joke you hid in the middle of your comment.
You say this like it's easy, but it's actually very hard for most white-collar jobs.
Is that guy who's closing lots of tickets just picking the easy ones - or fobbing off customers with unhelpful responses?
Is that guy who took two weeks to make a two-line change incredibly unproductive? Or did they explore hundreds of avenues to finally stamp out a bug that had stumped dozens of other engineers for months?
Is that guy who's overseeing an external project and hasn't raised any issues a veteran with the foresight and initiative to solve problems early, and the expertise not to need hand-holding? Or are they simply not looking for issues?
Is that guy reviewing grant proposals taking the time to carefully read through every last one and fully comprehend all the technical details? Or are they skimming a few then funding the famous researchers at the well known universities, same as last year?
For a great many jobs, the main form of monitoring is how productive the worker's line manager feels they are. An extremely flawed measure.
Between talking to your reports, auditing some small portion of their work, and reviewing historical data, you'd be able to answer all of your hypothetical situations with fairly high confidence. Certainly higher than just vibe-based feelings or how many keys were pressed per minute.
If the managers don't have super busy schedules, leaving them little time for "auditing work" and "reviewing historical data"
If the managers aren't managing workers who know much more than them, meaning they're poorly equipped to understand how hard a given task is.
If the managers have perfect vision into untracked work like prioritising tickets, helping people in other teams, interviewing, coaching new starters, performing code review, working on cross-team standardisation efforts and so on.
If the managers don't feel looking over people's shoulders or demanding webcams be turned on in meetings would seem distrustful and intrusive.
If the managers have time to keep track of everyone's health, wellbeing and equipment so when a spot check finds periods of low productivity it can't be explained away by a broken keyboard or wifi problems or having the flu that week.
If the managers think firing one person is guaranteed to let them hire someone better, with no hiring delays or freezes.
If the managers don't feel they're buddies with the people on their team, who they eat lunch with every day, and they have far greater affection for the corporation they work for.
And if the managers don't benefit from having a larger empire, incentivising them to respond schedule slips by hiring more people
Then yes, the manager could indeed address many of these scenarios.
Visit /r/overemployed on Reddit and you’ll find a large community of people teaching each other to do stuff like this so they can collect 2-3 full-time salaries.
But this is really the least of behavioral problems at Wells Fargo:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo#Lawsuits,_fines,_a...
The Feds could have a dedicated Wells Fargo Paddy-Wagon, running an express route for corporate HQ.
I know the answer is “they’re big and integrated into the financial system”, but still, how are they still in business?!?
Not "pretending" anything... just one pain over another.
edit: For clarity, it's a relatively locked down system, and even then, I'm generally connected to a remote Windows based VM for working "inside" a secured and more locked down environment. I can't use a software solution for this.
#!/usr/bin/swift
import Foundation
import AppKit
let source = CGEventSource(stateID: CGEventSourceStateID.hidSystemState)
CGEvent(keyboardEventSource: source, virtualKey: 0x37, keyDown: true)?.post(tap: .cghidEventTap)
CGEvent(keyboardEventSource: source, virtualKey: 0x37, keyDown: false)?.post(tap: .cghidEventTap)
Add it to a cron job or whatever.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winbase/...
It could be the display device through the thunderbolt dock I'm using...
If my well-done work is not good enough for an employer, than we are an impasse that will not be resolved, and there are plenty of other places to work.
What if the "proof of work" that companies use to "detect employee presence" was just... Actually accomplished work? That should solve the problem at the correct layer.
Unless, of course, objectives and goals are poorly defined, and requiring that would result in huge embarrassment to the management layers above the mouse wigglers.
At least I’ve been assuming that’s the main reason MS is making Recall. To issue spyware-reports on corporate workers.
I wish I could find it again, but I was impressed by a study of remote work around 2010 that showed that remote work improved the results of teams with good managers and (further) degraded the results of teams with bad managers.
A key difference between the good vs bad managers was that the good managers focused on specific tasks being accomplished whereas the bad managers focused on the usual indicators of work such as as time of butts being in seats, which has only an incidental and often inverse relation to quantity or quantity of work produced.
This 'tech' is simply attempting to enable bad management with remote workforces. A good sign that remote is winning the war and here to stay. A bad sign that bad mgt will make it suck more (at least until AI eliminates those jobs for good).
The problem is then, people get hired but there is no work for them, especially during lean times.
There is a wide chasm between well-run large companies and poorly-run ones. You can look at sector-level revenue/employee to get an idea of efficiency/waste.
That makes me wonder what would happen with an optical mouse atop a tablet, displaying a slowly-panning video of a texture. However, there are a few obstacles. First, Google tells me that optical mice have frame rates of 1.5 to 5 kHz. That's very fast. It probably makes the optical flow problem easier, since there's less change between frames. But it's also much faster than the, say, 60 Hz refresh of a tablet's screen. I don't know what a bunch of "stairsteps" in the position signal would look like to the mouse. Second, there's the issue of wavelength. Google brings me optical mouse sensors with sensitivities in the 832 - 865 nm range, i.e., in the infrared. Visible red is around 740 nm. Looking at this chart [1] and extrapolating just a tiny bit, it seems that LCDs have almost no emissivity around 850 nm. So this probably would not work. Whether an LCD with an infrared backlight would work is left as a question for another time.
What might be easier still, would be to somehow hack the USB device itself to spoof the vendor and product ID. I don't know how to do that myself, but it might be easy for anyone who's familiar with USB device development.
Of course, this is a silly arms race that it wouldn't actually be worth participating in, but it's amusing to consider what you could do.
I heard a story of an employee health plan that issued pedometers and issued cash rewards for higher step counts. In short order, one employee had put his on a clock pendulum, another had secured the thing to the collar of his hyperactive dog, and a third had hacked the thing to display all nines.
I would worry less about stair stepping and more about making the speed and acceleration distributions and auto-correlation look natural: a real human-powered mouse won’t be constantly moving (you have to stop the think about the next step, use the keyboard, etc) and when it is moving will tend to follow a rapid move-pause-move pattern.
Another telltale would be a mouse that moves naturally but never clicks.
Vendor and device ID are the lowest hanging fruit, but I think there are a lot of other giveaways that a mouse jiggler is being used.
I wonder if they also compensate them to the highest standards.
Archive.Today takes up to 5--10 minutes to fully complete an archive, as it's waiting for all of numerous related page requests to complete, as opposed to a local browser session which makes a best-guess effort at rendering a page with only partial completion of downloads. Capacity and queue length also seem to be factors here.
The !wayback bang will search or create Internet Archive pages, though this is less successful at byapassing paywalls, as with Bloomberg.
Ghostarchive doesn't seem to have a bang at this point.
I hate the macOS wakeup too, it's way too slow.
I'm definitely not for it, or agreeing with the choice, but I can understand how it might happen. It isn't necessarily that they were being entirely awful (predatory toward their employer).
I don't agree with measuring keyboard activity in the first place, but if some place is going to measure it and employees know that measurement is happening, then it's guaranteed that some of them will game it.