Wells Fargo Fires over a Dozen for 'Simulation of Keyboard Activity' | Hacker News Reader

Wells Fargo Fires over a Dozen for 'Simulation of Keyboard Activity'

finance.yahoo.com

36 pointsjmsflknr61 comments

Context: in the 2010s, Wells Fargo management looked the other way while its sales force scammed customers, creating millions of fraudulent accounts (with associated fees) to meet performance targets and quotas [1]. The Fed imposed an asset cap as punishment in 2018, and as of today, the asset cap remains in place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scan...

This isn't any context on the article - it may be context on Wells Fargo as a company, but you may want to specify that it is context on the company and not the article

I think that context about the company in the article is context about the article, but I understand your difference of opinion.

To see my point, consider this pull quote from Wells Fargo which is contained in the article:

> “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.

It is important to understand that this is coming from a company whose recent unethical behavior went far beyond what anyone really thought plausible.

That's appealing to emotion and outrage about something unrelated that happens to involve one of the parties, which is an organization made up of over 100,000 people. There could be bad food in their cafeteria as well, but it wouldn't make sense to invoke that here either.

Providing objective, accurate, relevant contextual information that reasonably makes people outraged is not in itself an appeal to emotion and outrage.

The information is relevant to how we view Wells Fargo as an ethical entity. Bad food in the cafeteria would not be relevant.

Is it reasonable to consider a group of many thousands of people as an ethical entity at all?

Additionally, should WF no longer have any internal ethical standards because some members of the organization acted in an unethical way?

You make a fair point on the relevance with that quote. I may have been being a bit pedantic on specifying what the context was for :)

I run a mouse jiggler app, because my company laptop has an org-level policy that if you're away from the keyboard for more than a minute, the computer locks and you have to log back in. It would activate when I leaned back in my chair to think about a problem. It would activate when I read a complex piece of documentation. I work at home and have no roommates, so this seems like overkill to me. I got sick of it, so I found a workaround. I think it's a bad policy on their part, and I can't tease out much ethical complexity to my decision to ignore it, though of course if they wanted to fire me for it I would have no basis for complaining.

As someone who is required to enforce GPOs and similar around this, I don’t blame you. Compliance checkbox.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. We need smarter policies not blaming employees for doing what they need to do to work around them.

Oh, I coded a mouse jiggler years ago just because I hated the corporate screen-saver. And distributed to lots of people that wanted the same.

Some time after it, they decided computers should hibernate when not actively used, so more people went after the jiggler so they could access their computers at random moments during meetings.

I refuse to accept that any of those (including your case) is an ethical violation.

i doubt wells fargo would fire you for that

the most likely scenario (in my mind) is that managers realized some people were not working anymore, checked what was going on, and ended up firing them for not working. the keyboard simulator was just a side thing.

now as regards to the focus of other people in this thread that wells fargo is to blame, my assumption is that the managers are not great either

If you have to monitor your employees’ keyboard activity, you have a hiring problem.

This monitoring is probably +EV for 80% of the US working force. It's not a hiring problem, it's misaligned incentives.

>it's misaligned incentives.

There's no magic solution to this, but more of a cause of a very wealthy country/economy full of bullshit jobs since there's more wealth to go around at that level than there are people needed to do the work which pays more than enough to ensure survival meaning people would rather not do their jobs if they could get away with it while still getting paid, which is basically a form of theft since you're not providing the service you agreed to do for money (imagine you paid plummers to fix your pipe and when you come home from work they didn't do shit but drink coffee and beer the whole day but still bill you)

The majority of the workforce don't like their jobs or the employer or the boss, but rent still has to be paid. Do you think people assembling cars for Henry Ford dreamt of assembling cars for a living in a factory in order for the incentive to align? Dom you think the garbage men picking up your trash had that as their life aspirations? No, but they do it for money. Or the pool cleaners? Or the bus drivers? Or toilet cleaners?

It would be cool if we all lived in some utopic society where everyone gets their dream job and does it for passion not money, and nobody ever does the shit jobs they don't want, but that's not where we ware.

We take jobs that aren't our passion because they pay rent and ensure our survival, and that's how our modern society functions. In exchange for the money, employers expect the jobs we sign up for get done. It's a fair trade that's the basis of our developed western society.

>We take jobs that aren't our passion because they pay rent. In exchange for the money, employers expect the jobs we sign up for get done.

Most employers also expect fake enthusiasm though, part of their game to squeeze free hours/OT out of everyone.

Yeah, that's a different issue though. I am talking purely on the exchange of money for services provided.

Is it a different issue? It's the employer trying to get more than what they are paying for, and I think it factors into the overall employer/employee relationship.

It's an extra issue. Not every workplace asks for faking enthusiasm.

"There's no magic solution to this."

Sure there is. It's called OKRs.

OKRs are a popular management philosophy and framework used by organizations to set and achieve goals. The concept was first developed by Andy Grove at Intel and later popularized by John Doerr, who introduced it to companies like Google.

Here’s a breakdown of the OKR framework:

Objectives: These are high-level, qualitative goals that the organization or team aims to achieve. Objectives should be ambitious, inspirational, and aligned with the overall vision and mission of the organization.

Key Results: These are specific, measurable, and time-bound outcomes that indicate the progress towards achieving the objective. Typically, each objective has 3-5 key results. Key results should be quantifiable, making it clear whether the objective has been met by the end of the evaluation period.

Let me stop you right there. Just because something worked for Google when they were a hot new start-up, doesn't mean it will work everywhere.

A lot of workers from many industries are sick and tired of consultants bulldozing by force down their throats various cargo-cult management techniques like SAFe Agile or the conjoined triangles of success into their jobs, but it's not a guarantee solution everywhere.

Every company is different, every org is different, every team is deferent, every employee is different.

Have you actually worked at an organization that used OKRs? Because I’ve worked at Meta and Google and the OKR process was a bunch of bookkeeping BS that never seemed to actually achieve the lofty goals set for it.

Yes. Also OKRs existed long before Google and Facebook ever existed.

Just because Google and Facebook didn't use them correctly doesn't mean they don't work. :-)

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectives_and_key_results

>Do you think the garbage men picking up your trash had that as their life aspirations? No, but they do it for money. Or the pool cleaners? Or the bus drivers? Or toilet cleaners?

Honestly, if I didn't have worry about paying "the rent" (or if those jobs paid enough to "pay my rent") I love to do those jobs. Maybe not full-time but I wouldn't mind occasionally doing them. In the utopic society you speak of, I'd be willing to share the responsibility of those jobs.

I predict in 10 years this type of surveillance will be standard and accepted in maybe 80% of knowledge worker jobs, especially as AI is integrated into their role.

Monitoring anything else than output is a lost cause.

How do you feel about code review for programmers? For some roles, the key presses are the output.

I expect the opposite.

Most folks I talk to outside of technology are getting increasingly frustrated by the state of the world; from retail employees to firefighters to middle managers.

Where you spend your time, and where you spend your money, is a vote for the future you want to live in. An increasing % of my social group is becoming hyper aware that they’re voting against their self-interest on a regular basis.

At the end of the day, they and their kids have to live in the world they build at their “job.”

Someone will build it, and people care about money (both income and cheap costs) too much for any sort of grassroots action against labor surveillance. It would only be prevented by labor regulations.

I believe your statements are hyperstitious.

You are assuming an outcome and giving everyone in the system an "excuse" for showing up and doing this. That excuse is sufficient for them to destroy their future one decision at a time.

I also believe my statement is hyperstitious.

It creates personal responsibility for every individual actor in the system, and makes them way their votes for the future against the short-term gains of their actions.

I've seen people respond well to my hyperstitious stance.

I've had a phone operator for my local hospital drop a 4-figure unjust surprise bill by reminding them that they and their children also need to go to hospitals, walking them through what the system was doing to me and my family, and asking them if they were comfortable with that knowing they'll be on the other side of this phone call at some point.

I'm using this same philosophy with my local school district to drive meaningful change for handling cases where a teacher is caught abusing a student - and seeing positive results (though I'm not counting my chickens quite yet).

I'm using this same philosophy with my HOA to bring back community building events like potlucks and lemonade stands, things that have disappeared because of the liability of organizing them. (In our current low-trust society, a child needs to procure event insurance to run a lemonade stand on HOA property in case someone fakes a fall in front of their stand).

Regulations like these are great for crony capitalists and lawyers - they're awful for small businesses and families.

People simply doing the right thing because they believe it is the right thing is good for small businesses and families - and awful for crony capitalists and lawyers.

When it comes to our current society and driving the meaningful change most of us would like to see... I believe throughout history people have died on a hill for far less.

I'm in the camp of helping people see a better path forward, and I'm seeing positive change around me in my life when I deploy my philosophy. Your mileage may vary.

tl;dr: I believe your pessimistic take is a self fulfilling prophecy that reinforces people voting against their own self-interest one decision at a time.

Ok Good luck, I believe a lot of the mechanisms that fostered those behaviors make sense in a small community, where reputations and community bonds were crucial for well being, but we now live in the age of global capitalism, and global labor forces, and global competition. Those mechanisms don't scale so to speak but do enable you to win some local battles, and hopefully gain some friends/respect.

Why hasn't it already been? The technology to do this has been around for a long time and doesn't require AI.

> you have a hiring problem

At the CEO level.

You don't believe that banks should maintain an audit trail of employee keyboard activity? Some jobs require a level of transparency beyond trust.

Do banks record every in-person voice interaction between their employees?

I don't think so, but do you think archiving digital conversations between remote employees and employees and customers doesn't show up on a number of regulatory compliance reports?

This seems like a silly solution to a silly problem. If you're tracking your employees' performance based on actual business metrics, who cares how many times their mouse jiggles in a given day?

This is the real story. Mouse Jiggles a Key Performance Indicator at Major US Bank.

It is definitely ironic that a company that was fined $100M for defrauding investors by faking performance (creating fake accounts) was itself a victim of fake performance.

If there’s any throughline here, it’s that apparently a lot of what counts as “work” at WF is fake.

You're insane if you plug a USB device like this into anything that can access your employer's private network. Just wildly reckless.

From a security perspective, you're right.

But most folk (not readers of HN) don't have that perspective. They've none of the requisite technical background, and they've less and less of anything like care for what's good for the enterprise in that regard.

I expect that HN readers would use Arduino Due instead.

Or an analog wristwatch on with a mouse on top of it.

Perhaps someone can clarify this for me, but would you actually need invasive monitoring to detect that they are trying to fake doing their work when working from home? I'm assuming this would show up at some point in the employee's individual performance at which point the low performance would eventually get them fired anyways?

It turns out for all the incredible amounts of money spent on adding “legibility” and “metrics” and a bunch of other bullshit that’s good at making graphs that make the C-suite go “ooh! Ahh!” we have basically no fucking clue how to measure individual productivity or value-add of entire categories of worker.

Including and especially all forms of management. Like, it’s an area of research, and the TL;DR for anyone attempting to actually apply the research is that we have no damn clue.

Well. You got a lot of bullshit jobs in a organization like Wells Fargo. Those bullshit jobs are sometimes in bullshit teams, managed by a bullshit manager, part of a bullshit division.

It is pretty hard to accurately measure Bullshit Output, because nobody ever agrees about what should be measured and how to measure it, so, the next best thing is counting keystrokes, mouse moves, and hopefully by the next quarter we will start measuring wakefullness, nods and hmmms uttered on zoom calls.

FTA:

> Wells Fargo & Co. fired more than a dozen employees last month after investigating claims that they were faking work.

Sounds to me like the employees sucked, they investigated, and found a fireable offense. No PIP, etc. necessary.

That being said, I did a stint in corporate for a large bank, and people spend most of their day trying to find a project to interject themselves into and stay relevant. Turns out, there's really not much to do when you're selling customers their own money. But, people have to justify their existence.

> San Francisco-based Wells Fargo started requiring employees to return to the office under a “hybrid flexible model” in early 2022. The bank now expects most staffers to be in the office at least three days a week, while members of management committee are in four days and many employees, such as branch workers, are in five days.

How is this a "flexible model"? This kind of newspeak is depressing.

It's flexible for them, not for you. It's the same in Austria.

Work from home any two days, and come in the other three days?

That is both hybrid and flexible. You may find it depressing but it's not 'newspeak'.

I'd be inclined it's more of newspeak as the more usual of flexibility involves choice and in this case you are required to sit in their building for at least 3 days. You might argue the flexibility lies in the fact that you don't have to do it for 5 days, but they should use another term for that - just hybrid would be enough.

If you get to choose which days, then that's the flexible part. Hybrid by itself would not necessarily let you choose.

If you could stay home the entire week, then it wouldn't be hybrid flexible, it would just be flexible.

So I don't see the issue.

Right, I see your point, it makes sense.

To be honest, they put this phrase in quotes.

I'm going to guess they scanned all company computers for a process named 'caffeine.exe' and people were dumb enough to use it.

There's something to be said for providing real physical input to a real physical HID.

possibly but the article mentions devices from Amazon that became popular during the pandemic, so I'm thinking it's those physical mouse cradle / movers. Probably low performers which got management's attention and led them to start doing screen caps and seeing the mouse moving but no work being done. I wonder how many of these are 2nd or 3rd jobs for people, I know someone personally who did that with Wells.

Or maybe they scanned the USB vendor ID's for those particular keystroke/mouse simulators off Amazon. Since usually on corporate machines you're not allowed to install software not whitelisted by IT without admin rights.

Good point. If that's what they did the employees should have taken the super low tech route, set your optical mouse on an analog clock.

In the heydays of Dark age of Camelot, a friend of mine hacked together a lego robot to craft all day long on their home computer while they were at work.

I'll ask them if they can open-source the design :)

I’ve seen this issue with younger workers, who try tactics like staying off camera nearly all the time to hide their overemployment setup. It’s harder to manage people in a remote world. And no it’s not a hiring problem because people can be good at interviews and still act like this. Unfortunately they are ruining remote work for everyone else.

While the law allows it, in my opinion there is no real moral basis for a company to lay claim to all of an employee's time. If the employee is sufficiently responsive and productive, there is no issue. If not, the company can dismiss the employee. There is no reason for the company to have more surveillance and control power over the employee than this.

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