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Businesses IT

Wells Fargo Fires Employees for Faking Work By Simulating Keyboard Activity (yahoo.com) 115

Wells Fargo fired more than a dozen employees last month after investigating claims that they were faking work. From a report: The staffers, all in the firm's wealth- and investment-management unit, were "discharged after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work," according to disclosures filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. "Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior," a company spokesperson said in a statement.

Devices and software to imitate employee activity, sometimes known as "mouse movers" or "mouse jigglers," took off during the pandemic-spurred work-from-home era, with people swapping tips for using them on social-media sites Reddit and TikTok. Such gadgets are available on Amazon.com for less than $20.

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Wells Fargo Fires Employees for Faking Work By Simulating Keyboard Activity

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  • Ah, Shit! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mister Transistor ( 259842 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @09:44AM (#64546377) Journal

    They found my drinking bird!

  • by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @09:48AM (#64546387) Journal
    Someone can be employed there and literally do nothing without being fired. If they were surfing the web instead of using a mouse mover they would still have a job.
    • by Smidge204 ( 605297 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @10:08AM (#64546449) Journal

      "Literally nothing" might be a bit of a stretch.

      It's entirely feasible to do an adequate amount of work in, say, 3-4 hours cumulative throughout the day, leaving the rest of that time as slack. It's also possible to be productive without using a computer at all!

      Chances are a manager using mouse/keyboard activity monitoring only cares about seeing 8 hours of laboring regardless of quality of that work or actual progress made, meaning employees can get by doing the minimum, rather than nothing, or be productive in ways that can't be tracked with simple activity monitors.

      God forbid the managers do their job and actually review the work their teams do...
      =Smidge=

      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        "Literally nothing" might be a bit of a stretch.

        It's entirely feasible to do an adequate amount of work in, say, 3-4 hours cumulative throughout the day, leaving the rest of that time as slack. It's also possible to be productive without using a computer at all!

        Chances are a manager using mouse/keyboard activity monitoring only cares about seeing 8 hours of laboring regardless of quality of that work or actual progress made, meaning employees can get by doing the minimum, rather than nothing, or be productive in ways that can't be tracked with simple activity monitors.

        God forbid the managers do their job and actually review the work their teams do...
        =Smidge=

        We've tried everything to get 12 hours of hard labour out of our serfs except for treating them with respect, good working conditions and reasonable wages... I give up.

    • by keltor ( 99721 ) * on Thursday June 13, 2024 @10:23AM (#64546501)
      This is probably a combination of things:

      1. Need to cut headcount without handing out blue slips.
      2. An effort to remove this kind of stuff because it presents likely lots of security and legal violations.
      3. Employees work jobs that can be hard to measure exactly "what" they are doing.

      Given the areas these people worked, probably a combination of all three.

      I work for banks and #2 is a big thing.  We had to basically send out a bunch of warnings about using these devices and despite this people still got fired for them - like you got warned ...
      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by KlomDark ( 6370 )
        #2 can be counteracted by using an external movement simulator that you place the mouse in, rather than some USB thing you plug into the machine. See https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B1... [amazon.com] and there are many others, I just went with the first I found.
        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Hahahah, yes. Was thinking the same thing.

        • 1. Take a laser mouse.
          2. Stick it in a transparent glass.
          3. Profit.

          The laser bounces off the glass, confusing the mouse software into jiggling.

        • They are probably harder to detect than a USB type of device, but the physical turntables can't simulate periodic clicking. Not sure if the software is simply looking for cursor movement or actual clicks being generated, but it might not be fooled unless you click on something once in a while, perhaps.

      • It would be interesting to know if they used hardware or software.

        IT isn't generally thrilled at being dragged into doing productivity metrics because managers and HR aren't up to the job; but it is generally pretty unhappy if you are running some random garbage you found on sensitive systems; and in touchier environments even unblessed USB HID devices will also be a problem.

        I suspect that, if you are a golden boy of productivity and/or too high placed to face little people rules, IT's objections can
        • if you are already suspected of being a slacker or HQ just wants a non-layoff way to do headcount reduction that would easily be enough to show you the door.

          This. If management wants you gone, or if they just want to reduce headcount, they will fire the easiest people to fire, for whatever violation is easiest to prove/hardest for the employee to dispute.

          Anyone on the list will have their web and email history pulled, because "violation of IT policy" is easy to prove, has a nice paper trail, and a big signature of agreement from the employee from their first day of work.

          If this particular mouse jiggler was hardware-based, not a software script, I'm guess the US

      • I was browsing around AliExpress the other day and found a whole marketplace full of various devices that you rest your mouse on to simulate mouse movement.It operates without needing any software so you can't detect it by looking at the running tasks. You'd have to analyze the mouse movements and somehow determine if it's actually doing anything useful.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Yes, looks very much like it. You would expect you can identify the slackers from their work results or absence thereof, but apparently Wells Fargo cares about them at least faking work in person and not via some device. Does not sound like a healthy workplace.

      • Wells Fargo is many, many different workplaces, get a good manager and you have a good workplace as for as long as that manager can protect you from the useless upper management.

    • If they were surfing the web instead of using a mouse mover they would still have a job.

      Possibly, yes. Wasting time and lying about it is worse than just wasting the time.

      • by Un-Thesis ( 700342 ) * on Thursday June 13, 2024 @11:42AM (#64546829) Homepage

        When I worked at this huge corp that uses MS Teams, my obnoxious manager would ALWAYS ping me about how my status showed Away.

        I mean, he’d ping me constantly. it’s like he anally obsessed over the color of circle next to my name.

        I asked him if I needed to do more work, he said, “No, you’re my top performer.”

        Then excuse me that it was my first tiem using MS Teams instead of Slack (which I default to Always-Green) and the software is obviously defective.

        Actually, I was working maybe 45 minutes a day, maybe an hour because of his incessant harranguing.

        SO after a month, I started putting my mouse in a clear glass and it would make it jiggle enough for MS Teams to always stay green

        Then he distrusted me more, so he wanted to “always see me” like were in an office. So I started recording myself a LOT just coding

        To be honest, I wasn’t even coding for this company. I was coding day and night for my own projects. But by the end of a week, I had a solid 60 day-light hours of me coding.

        Then I used an open source software that has a “virtual cam” feature and I share *that* with the MS Teams chat with my boss, and it shows me furiously typing away all day. He never noticed that 60+ hours, randomly played, was looping That plus the mouse ijggler

        then at the end of the month ,he caleld me and said “There’s something wrong with your computer, indeed. The metrics show that you had MS Teams focused over 90% of the time. But that is impossible, becuase I see you working constantly.”

        So I sent the computer back and got a new one. It too had the problem. I convinced the techs that it was because of minik8s (I figured very few people in the org needed that for their day-to-day). On the time that the 3rd laptop was sent out, I had already made a clone of the hard drive of the second one, and I was running it inside of a VM on my personal laptop. So I called their shipping department and changed the address back to the corporate headquarters. It took bout 2 weeks, but the laptop was successfully shipped nad then returned to them and marked as returned.

        Now I continued working there for 2 more years until they laid off 100% of US devs in 2023. When time came to return my laptop, I said I didn’t have a laptop. There was much hewing and hawing, and then after about 2 weeks after termination, they found the laptop. Then my ex-manager called me quite agitated: “I’m told you returned your work laptop back in early 2022. How is possible that you kept working for almost 2 more years without a laptop?”

        “I am not telling you. It’s a trade secret.”

        “Was it all deception?”

        “Not my deliverables. You were always satisfied with my work output. Just be happy about that.”

        • by Un-Thesis ( 700342 ) * on Thursday June 13, 2024 @11:49AM (#64546855) Homepage

          There are several reasons to clone your laptop and run it inside a VM:

          1. If you use NAT mode, it will block the vast majority of corporate spy trackers.
          2. If you configure the Virtualbox or VMWare NAT Firewall, you can block virtually everything. I would only allow the subdomains that I needed for work (primarily Jira and Git) and block everything else for fear of trackers.
          3. Your VM uses the corporate VPN, allowing you to use your own Internet outside unimpeded.
          4. You can use a normal VPN outside to mask your location permanently (though hardware VPN is ideal).
          5. You don’t need multiple laptops. At one point, I had consolidated 4 work laptops into my personal one, saving me some 20 lbs (9 kg).
          6. Ful system backup + snapshots.
          7. In any code ownership dispute, you didn’t work on corporate laptop, but your own laptop, so you have far more rights to code produced by yourself.
          8. If the corporate laptop has a hidden GPS tracker, you can leave it safely at home while you go elsewhere.

        • by trawg ( 308495 )

          were you recently employed by Wells Fargo by any chance

    • by Anonymous Coward

      If you’re a manager you can just schedule 8 hours of zoom meetings.

    • by drnb ( 2434720 )

      If they were surfing the web instead of using a mouse mover they would still have a job.

      Not necessarily. Some of their surfing may have involved non-trivial amounts of time where their hand was not on the mouse. :-)

    • by eneville ( 745111 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @12:39PM (#64547019) Homepage

      What bothers me about some of these places is that "work" is indistinguishable from an leonardo attached to the USB socket.

      How have we got to the point where actual work is hard to measure? What is the output of the company if someone not actually producing something is able to keep a seat warm?

      Some work is most of the day thinking about a problem, and not putting much pen to paper, creative sorts, if you will, who have a problem to solve, shouldn't be classed as button pressers, that's not right either.

      Two things wrong, some measured by button pressing, that's indistinguishable from work, and other people that shouldn't be measured by keyboard input.

      • Note that if you're using a Leonardo as a mouse jiggler, its bootloader will show up in your USB logs every time it is plugged in. It's basically a smoking gun showing that you are doing something naughty with your work computer. Unless you work as an AVR developer I guess.

        • Yes, that's a good point, and it sort of proves my work output point. Why measure this way - I don't care what employees have plugged in, so long as it doesn't break trust and doesn't affect real work output, sales conversions or delivering features.

          I don't care if they'd have $whatever attached to their computer if that's their way of stopping the monitor sleeping or spam clicking a browser game app - it doesn't matter. What matters is the company output, IMO.

          Killing off staff for stupid reasons ignores th

      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        What bothers me about some of these places is that "work" is indistinguishable from an leonardo attached to the USB socket.

        How have we got to the point where actual work is hard to measure? What is the output of the company if someone not actually producing something is able to keep a seat warm?

        Some work is most of the day thinking about a problem, and not putting much pen to paper, creative sorts, if you will, who have a problem to solve, shouldn't be classed as button pressers, that's not right either.

        Two things wrong, some measured by button pressing, that's indistinguishable from work, and other people that shouldn't be measured by keyboard input.

        Places that implement things like keystroke trackers are typically not the places where people want to work, they're places for people who can't find a better job than working there but still have bills to pay (or in the case of the US, have the temerity to require healthcare). They're putting it in because they can't get good staff and an MBA thinks that you can make people work harder by forcing them to jump through hoops.

        • Wells Fargo have guaranteed their place on that list. I'd hope to see more reports on glass door or similar sites to dissuade people working there. Eventually the MBA's will see that they have to offer better salaries so these decisions have a knock-on effect.

  • I've heard "productivity" monitoring at banks is pretty invasive, not surprising that if you enact policies that require you to wiggle a mouse every 5 minutes that people get tired of doing it manually
    • If part of your job is to be monitoring the news and the portfolio of stocks you are managing, yeah, it's pretty reasonable to expect that you are paying attention for your entire shift. If the person is manually wiggling the mouse every five minutes, they should get fired too. Have you ever been in a trading room at a financial company? It's pretty intense. Everybody has four monitors that they are very closely monitoring as well a large screens with news broadcasts. If you think the bank is going to
      • install an train dead mans switch system?

      • > the pilots absolutely aren't allowed to set the auto-pilot and go to sleep

        Acchshuallly... They can, not both at the same time ofcourse and it all depends on the length of flight and the company. Mentour Pilot on YT did an episode on sleeping on long haul flights.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Jared Vennett : LOOK AT HIM. THAT’S MY QUANT.

        Mark Baum: Your what?

        Jared Vennett: MY QUANTITATIVE. My math specialist. Look at him, you notice anything different about him? Look at his face.

        Mark Baum: That's pretty racist.

        Jared Vennett: Look at his eyes, I'll give you a hint, his name is Yang. He won a national math competition in China! He doesn’t even speak English! Yeah I'm sure of the math.

        Ted Jiang : [to camera] Actually, my name's Jiang and I do speak English. Jared likes to say I don't bec

      • by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

        The simple fact is that not all work is evenly distributed across the entire shift. Personally, I don't tolerate "busy work" because it isn't real work, and I won't do it. If any part of the job requires waiting on another party for something, there will be downtime. If monitoring something is my job, then I'm going to set alerts for anything and everything relevant and go do something else. I'm not going to sit there and watch the metaphorical paint dry just so I can tell someone else as it's ready.

        Any com

    • by kmoser ( 1469707 )
      What do they do about people who do everything via keyboard shortcuts, and are actually faster at getting work done as a result?
  • Outright admission that the managers themselves aren't doing their jobs.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Outright admission that the managers themselves aren't doing their jobs.

      So the manager was checking what his employee was doing and found out they weren't doing anything and were instead using a device to simulate activity, and the manager wasn't doing their job? I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

      I guess it never occurred to you the manager was wondering why this employee wasn't getting results yet had so much activity.
      • by Racemaniac ( 1099281 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @10:04AM (#64546439)

        If the only way you notice they're not doing their job is by discovering they have a device that simulates keyboard/mouse activity, then what are they supposed to be doing that's completely unmeasurable? That's what everyone here is wondering... Normally if someone is slacking, you notice their tasks are not getting done.

        • by xevioso ( 598654 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @10:16AM (#64546479)

          This is a misunderstanding of how work "works" in certain professions. In banking especially, there is always more work to be done. I've been in a bunch of those types of jobs, and there's always, always, always additional tasks you can be doing. If you are getting your assigned tasks done faster than expected, the only reward is more work.

        • by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @11:04AM (#64546665) Journal

          what are they supposed to be doing that's completely unmeasurable?

          Perhaps creating fake accounts [wikipedia.org]? It is not that it is unmeasureable it is that they don't want it measured. Although, I'm sure that can't possibly be the case because the summary says that "Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,", at least now at any rate. Maybe some employees are just finding it hard to adjust to the new "be ethical" requirement given how they were trained in the past?

        • Good management is invisible until needed. You can collect passive metrics on SOME stuff, but other parts of the job will either have to be based on trust or you'll have to shave off some productivity for reporting. It's easy to believe Wells Fargo has a similar setup to my company in that the employees are trusted to get on with their jobs, but then once some suspicious poor performance turns up in the passive stats, they have to more actively look into it and they discover shenanigans.

          I could tell you hun

        • Agile makes that hard though, right? In theory some tasks are easy/fast for one person, and not for another.

          I think employers are broken in how they manage. And have been for a while. This is just another symptom.

      • Managers aren't supposed to be work detectives. I mean at places worth working at.
        If your manager doesn't understand what you're doing for months at a time then fire the manager.

      • If they 'weren't doing anything,' that should show up in deliverables, not in how often you're tapping on your keyboard.

        They'd then be disciplined, PIPd or fired for not meeting their deliverables, not for 'using a mouse jiggler.'

        • If it wasn't a blatant security policy violation, I'd have one of those jigglers at work myself, and so would an awful lot of people who find it annoying to have to log back into their computer and all their applications after taking a phone call.

    • Outright admission that the managers themselves aren't doing their jobs.

      It may not be that they weren't working when they should have been; it may be that they lied about it. Kind of like how Martha Stewart wasn't convicted for the stock trade, but because she lied to the feds about it.

      • Lies don't happen in a vacuum. Wells Fargo doesn't seem like the kind of institution that would reward moral initiative.
    • You're reading too much into too little text. Quite frequently it's not a case of blindly monitoring activity and firing people. It's usually a case of looking at an underperforming group and then finding *reasons* to fire them. Or looking for reasons to cut people based on a requirement to cut staff.

      We're only hearing a small part of the story.

      • Underperforming is usually a good enough reason by itself. Unless management spent their whole lives under an Ivy League rock being taught MBA theory hogwash, they know that salaried employees generally have to find strategies to work around the unproductive demands made of them by useless and redundant superiors. Being poked and prodded to turn this way and that like a farm animal doesn't seem likely to produce the best work from skilled professionals.

        And Wells Fargo being an unkillable, "too big to f
  • by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @09:50AM (#64546397)

    same wells fargo that fake accounts and fired the low level people that did the work while upper management got bonus. But it was the upper guys who pushed the quotas that needed fake accounts to hit them.

    • Yep, seems like their going back to their old ways. Give it a few more years before the current "under the rug" scandal comes out.
  • by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @09:54AM (#64546409) Homepage
    I understand why some programmer who works from home 4 days a week and gets into a flow state can be super-productive and might think that return-to-office mandates are ridiculous. On the other hand there are a lot of tiktoks with employees being caught shopping or in a drivethru during work hours when their boss suddenly wants to have a zoom call with them when they were supposed to be at their computer doing their job. Or so called "lazy girl jobs." Stories like that or this one make me understand the frustration of managers who mandate return to office. Work from home works for some people, but some are clearly abusing it, and this is why we can't have nice things.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      As opposed to the office where everyone is working 100% on each of their paid working hours? You can fake work anywhere, at least during the realy active working hours people are a lot more productive working from home.

      Study after study has proven that working from home is more productive. You get better, more motivated workers, they are more rested, less stress, less sick days, and get more done.

      • what about people waiting for an call?

        like if an issue comes up it's your job to deal with if but their is lot's of dead time while waiting?

        Or in an project you can be waiting for TEAM B to do there part before TEAM A can move on to the next task.

        • Do you work single-threaded?

          Do you not have other tasks you can be doing if you are blocked on Task A?

          What's it like to act like you're a dumb ass FIFO queue with a blocking item in it?

    • Just lol at you if you're old enough to be on slashdot and haven't worked at a job where you can dip out to the drive through or order shit on amazon.

      • I do a mix of office and WFH. At the office, I can just take a break and walk to a nearby store if I want to unless I'm in the middle of something. That's been the case for me since I started white collar work.

        Obviously if I did that constantly and didn't get my job done I'd expect to be fired, but people do take breaks during work. And lunches. Depending on where you are and the length of time required, getting 'caught' not at your desk due to an IM or call is just you trying to stay connected when in

      • by RobinH ( 124750 )
        Not everyone works in a downtown office. I work in a factory and the nearest town is 16 minutes away and we get two 15-minute breaks and one 30-minute lunch. Nobody goes anywhere else to eat, and everyone packs a lunch. Humans have this bias where they assume everyone's life is just like theirs.
        • Why do you work in a factory? Why do you let yourself be treated this way?
          Sure there are shift and coverage issues but executives have been known to overcome bigger hurdles in pursuit of boats and in ground pools and pools for their boats and boats for their boats and trucks to haul their boats and sports cars to park on their boats.

          If I had to go back to that life I'd make sure whoever was responsible got to taste pieces of my brain and face when I checked out.

          • by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @01:24PM (#64547121) Homepage
            I'm a programmer. I've worked in two different offices where people would go out to lunch everyday. One was pretty cool, but the other was so full of corporate B.S. that I finally had to leave and that's when I changed jobs to work in this factory, which is a family-run business out in the middle of nowhere. There's no corporate B.S., the people are all focused on doing good work, and the family that runs it often hosts BBQs where they cook for us. We go home on-time every day and rarely ever have to get emergency call-ins. It's the most work/life balance I ever had. I look forward to coming to work everyday as much as I look forward to seeing my family every night. It's the way work should be.
    • by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @10:25AM (#64546515)
      and yet the opposite in-office problems exist. Managers suffer the ostrich syndrome a lot. If they dont see you then you arent working. This often means that the ass-kissers who spend more time shooting the shit with managers are seen as the hardest workers even though their workday includes 40% of the time talking about fantasy football. Smokers abuse this system as well. In a strict environment where managers insist on only allowing one 10-min break every 4 hrs as set forth by the labor board, somehow smokers still take 2 smoke breaks an hour. So why are they granted an extra bunch of time for breaks? Because they have an addiction? Are we going to give raging alcoholics a beer break every hour too? All of that shit adds up to lost productivity, so why target one group and not another if productivity is truly the goal.
    • by King_TJ ( 85913 )

      Exactly.... and again, I say the best compromise/solution for this whole thing is a hybrid scenario for any of these people. Unless you have a job where being physically present in their office is pretty much required for you to do the work needed? Everyone would be best-served having employees come in 2-3 days a week and to work from home the other days. This gives people the break of spending less on fuel and less time in commutes. It makes the office Internet circuit less congested. It gives people enou

    • by dirk ( 87083 )

      If you can go shopping and the boss doesn't notice because all of your work is getting done, what exactly is the issue?The idea of people need to be sitting at a desk moving a mouse doesn't say anything about the work they are getting done. It says they sat in a place for a time and that is all. As someone else pointed out, if these people were caught because they had a mouse jiggler and not because they were not getting their work done, then the issue is either 1) their manager has no idea what their job i

      • This. Exactly.

        If my responsibilities are being taken care of in acceptable or better fashion, on-time or early, and I'm salaried and not paid by unit time; what the fuck difference does it make how many hours I spent doing it?

  • by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @10:00AM (#64546425) Journal
    Came across this article [entrepreneur.com] coming from a CEO who fired one of his employees when he figured out the guy was doing a second job on company time.

    In short, this was a remote job, the person was missing meetings, wasn't producing work. After a bit of searching, and using company-provided time tracking software, the CEO figured out the guy was working a second job at the same time he was supposed to be working for the CEO's company.
    • I believe the term is overemployment - doing two full-time jobs at the same time.
    • Seems a little unfair when CEOs get celebrated for being on the board of multiple companies and patted on the back when they block out the middle of the day to do a paid keynote engagement.

    • Yeah this isnt really news. Someone who isnt doing their job gets fired. Why does this merit an article? And the double job thing is a byproduct of A combination of bad decision making and companies refusing to pay decent wages.
    • TBF the employee in question seemed like an idiot. They let Job B impact Job A, they were WARNED by Job A that they were underperforming, and they still kept letting Job B affect Job A.

      The REAL "overemployed" are those that are given (what is supposed to be) 40 hours worth of tasks and projects to do per week, but can get them done in under that amount of time - or can get some of it done outside of work hours. Either way, they have time during the business day to do a second full time job.

      • by khchung ( 462899 )

        TBF the employee in question seemed like an idiot. They let Job B impact Job A, they were WARNED by Job A that they were underperforming, and they still kept letting Job B affect Job A.

        Perhaps that's because what you called "Job B" was actually Job A, i.e. the primary job, and what you thought was "Job A" was really the side job that gave him some extra income. I.e. he just coast along with "Job A" for as long as he could, and after he got fired from "Job A", he would just go look for another one, all the while keeping his boss in "Job B" happy.

    • by mrfaithful ( 1212510 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @11:59AM (#64546905)
      One of my jobs had a clause in the contract that stated you could only take on a second job at your manager's discretion. I queried this because it seemed like none of their business what an employee does off the clock. The explanation was simple. You do an 8 hour shift with us, then go do some other job for 4 hours, it's not long before fatigue sets in, you start screwing up more in your morning job or missing shifts entirely. Instead of 1 full time employee we wind up with 0.8 of an employee or worse. It definitely seemed like a "we had so much experience of this happening now there's a rule" kind of clause rather than an overbearing preventative measure, but also I'm sure it's not legal to have such a clause. I suspect they were just hoping the presence of the rule was enough to dissuade the practice even if they could never legally enforce it.
  • by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @10:32AM (#64546547)

    When the company itself has a history of screwing over both clients [nytimes.com] and shareholders [cnn.com], is it any wonder that the entire company culture is rotten?

  • by The-Ixian ( 168184 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @10:41AM (#64546579)

    "...that doesn't make us money" is the un-printed end to that sentence.

  • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @10:50AM (#64546605)

    If an employee is able to stay on task and do 100% of their job, then what does it say about the management when they fire you for wiggling your mouse too much? What, were the look-busy CxOs afraid you were muscling in on their look-busy action? Only enough bullshitting-the-boss hours to go around or what?

    If my employees need to look busy, then I’m fucking up as a manager for not consolidating that time into a four-day workweek and giving them the day off while bragging as to my teams ability to be that efficient. Instead, lazy look-busy assholes in management decided to be hypocrites instead.

    I hope their best employees, quit.

  • by ebonum ( 830686 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @10:54AM (#64546613)

    "Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior"
    Wow. The reality distortion field is strong in this one.
    Can't Wells Fargo just tell the truth? "Wells Fargo will punish anyone who steals from us."
    If someone is making Wells Fargo lots of money (Say selling questionable MBS's), Wells Fargo isn't that particular about how they are making money. (As long as the risk of being caught is low, or Wells Fargo can argue, "My gosh! We didn't know THAT was happening!")

    • The "unethical" statement is overcompensation from when they enrolled customers into services without their knowledge. Because of this, WF is under heavy scrutiny by regulators.
  • by karlandtanya ( 601084 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @10:59AM (#64546641)

    "Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior"

    Wells-Fargo the Lessons of an Ethics Failure [nationalde...gazine.org]
    Wells Fargo: Fall from Great to Miserable: A Case Study on Corporate Governance Failures [sagepub.com]
    The Fish Rots From the Head: Why Fixing Wells Fargo's Culture Is Taking So Long [thinkadvisor.com]
    Wells Fargo Banking Scandal [scu.edu]
    Wells Fargo and the Slippery Slope of Sales Incentives [hbr.org]

    Would the appropriate meme be J. Jonah Jameson or Bender Bending Rodríguez?

  • I needed a good laugh. And that's very, very laughable.

  • Um, what? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @11:01AM (#64546651)

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

    Having met more than a few of the Wells Fargo execs a decade or so back? Uh, no. Unethical behavior drips off of them like water drips off a body as it leaves the ocean. They don't tolerate unethical behavior among the plebes, sure. But the executives are encourage to find whatever unethical behavior best helps maintain value / increase revenue. And it's not like there aren't plenty of sources for proof.

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Thursday June 13, 2024 @11:19AM (#64546733)

    ... and I (and many others) regularly argue with people here who think working from home is tantamount to goofing off, unproductive, etc.

    Yet here we have a story about employees shirking work (whether these are WFH or not is irrelevant) - and a ton of replies here basically are deflecting the blame and/or outright defending these people for deceiving their employer. It's no wonder management types get their panties in a twist over WFH! Right here we see a bunch of people who are announcing "you can't trust me to be honest in the workplace".

    Regardless of the crap culture and/or crap management in their group - these folks were intentionally deceiving their employer about work. There's no good defense - they really did deserve to be fired.

    • As with most things time reveals all flaws. Those few that are actually productive from home were very vocal while all the rest quietly using the 'from home' angle to game the system are now being revealed, and the 'goof off' count will be many times more than any of the 'productive people' counts.
    • ... and I (and many others) regularly argue with people here who think working from home is tantamount to goofing off, unproductive, etc.

      Yet here we have a story about employees shirking work (whether these are WFH or not is irrelevant) - and a ton of replies here basically are deflecting the blame and/or outright defending these people for deceiving their employer. It's no wonder management types get their panties in a twist over WFH! Right here we see a bunch of people who are announcing "you can't trust me to be honest in the workplace".

      Regardless of the crap culture and/or crap management in their group - these folks were intentionally deceiving their employer about work. There's no good defense - they really did deserve to be fired.

      I don't think we have enough info to make that call. As previous posters have pointed out, if the business wants to reduce headcount, they just find the easiest violations to prove and fire those employees. And as other posters have pointed out, Well Fargo is emphatically NOT an ethical business. There's nothing in TFA (yeah I have read the article) that tells us what is really happening here.

  • All you need is to stick a piece of paper to a mouse and hang it out the window to have the wind move it about.

    Or so I heard...

  • Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,"

    This coming from the bank that got their peepee whacked for fraudulently adding accounts/products to customers accounts.

  • The main character in GATACA worked flawlessly with many thousands of keystrokes without correction. He's to be the navigator for a mission to Neptune. He's also not the person on the company HR record.

  • They adapted to the employer's stupidity. If you need to find an excuse to fire someone, other than the job's function/goal isn't being met, maybe you're measuring things wrong.

  • by tracking their keypresses and mouse movements? No bathroom cameras?
  • The rest of the comments on this topic is about mouse jigglers and how it can often be difficult to measure performance. Personally, I can't get past this gem of a quote.

    Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,

    That's quite possibly the least true statement in the history of journalism. This is the same bank that was recently fined $3.7B USD for defrauding its customers. I banked with them for years and on four separate occasions I received money from them because the government had caught them doing something illegal with my accounts. And tho

  • And this simulated activity would be different than the average office worker's output how?
  • They use mouse and keyboard idle trackers instead of just LOOKING AT THE AMOUNT OF WORK THEY DO?! Come on, that is utterly ridiculous. Is it some job where there's no final documents, no ticket tracking, and no benchmark of any kind or what?
    • They use mouse and keyboard idle trackers instead of just LOOKING AT THE AMOUNT OF WORK THEY DO?! Come on, that is utterly ridiculous. Is it some job where there's no final documents, no ticket tracking, and no benchmark of any kind or what?

      My kingdom for some mod points! I'm surprised at how many comment there are defending Wells Fargo instead of asking why there aren't better metrics than "the employee's mouse is moving"

  • Wells Fargo bugs your keyboard and confuses the amount of key presses with useful activity.
  • If you fail to assign them work, or properly check progress, it is on you to be tricked by these devices.

    What is next? Someone will use an AI model, possibly even totally local, to entirely simulate working.

    Don't try to solve social problems with (only) technological solutions.

Hackers are just a migratory lifeform with a tropism for computers.

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