Wells Fargo has been in the news recently for firing a bunch of employees for using “mouse jigglers” and other tools to give the illusion that they are actively doing work when they are not.
Now I have a couple of thoughts on this.
Yes, if you work in a highly regulated company like a bank, using software to circumvent controls or intentionally misrepresent the work you do is pretty much asking to get fired.
Who at Wells Fargo is looking at reports on whether their 194,000 global employees are “typing fast enough”?
I was discussing this with my wife and she was saying they did stuff like this at the company she worked at like 20 years ago, but I’m suspicious. The way she thinks, she hears one example possibly out of context and hears stories about keystroke trackers and just accepts “that’s how it is”.
I’m more skeptical because I work in technology and a significant amount of that work is related to risk, compliance and controls, investigations, and just general banking systems and to be honest in 25+ years I have never come across anything like “we need to create a Tableau report to show who stopped moving their mouse”.
The one exception I can think of was when my firm was supporting a lawsuit related to overtime compensation and on bequest of a court order I was building reports based on badge swipe data. And that was a lot of one-off work, on a BAU banking process.
I’m also wondering a bit about what sort of jobs are these where the only way you can measure “productivity” is making sure people are physically at their desks typing something.
I’m doing some consulting at a big bank now and I am actually having trouble tracking down real work that people ACTUALLY DID, let along figuring out who isn’t doing anything.
And the reason cybersecurity hunts for these where I work is that using them leaves your computer unlocked beyond ten minutes of inactivity, when it’s supposed to lock to prevent someone else from using the computer while you’re still logged in.
Are these computers at a Wells Fargo office or are they work-from-home people?
In offices we had the computers locked down pretty tight so employees could not put their own whatever software on the computer.
If you are working from home I can’t see being fussed about it being unlocked.
The issue is companies will put activity trackers on home PCs to make sure you are at your desk so the employee uses a mouse jiggler. Personally, I think that is a bad practice for the company. The employee has X-job to do. Rate them based on that and not whether they are sitting at the computer for eight hours.
I don’t think (but don’t know for sure) my employer makes a distinction between onsite users and those working remotely, in terms of whether mouse jigglers are allowed; I think they’re just banned overall. Even at home, you’re leaving your screen unlocked, possible with confidential data displayed.
Also, note that there are hardware-based mouse jigglers, in the form of a USB dongle. Those may sidestep the restrictions on installing your own software.
My overall point is that computer security is another legitimate reason to ban mouse jigglers,
i’ve seen no further details about this. I’m guessing they didn’t detect mouse jigglers initially and had some other evidence that employees were not working when they claimed to be. Then they were tracking online activity and assumed mouse jigglers were being used once they knew the employees weren’t actually online.
OTOG it’s Wells Fargo, they might have just fired some people to make a point of it.
A decent mouse jiggler can avoid detection easily by recording actual mouse movements.
That works for a lot of jobs , but not all. I know people who are working from home but who do not qualify as exempt under FLSA - they are paid hourly and for some of them, the job consists of being available during specified hours. Doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with firing people for using mouse jigglers - but if you are a customer service rep , chances are good that your job is to be at your computer for a certain number of hours to answer phone calls.
You can go further and get a pad to put under your mouse which then moves a series of lines under it, simulating mouse movement. Nothing ever touches your PC though. There’s phone apps that do the same (if you want to blow though your battery displaying a screen of moving shapes all day).
I have a trashy old mouse where the sensor flips out if it’s on the edge of some papers and use it as a “jiggler” mainly because Teams will say I’m gone after two minutes of inactivity. I might be reading something or using my work phone or using my home PC to view PDFs that my work laptop can’t handle – or just stepping away for a moment to rest my brain. But I’m still “there” if someone calls, emails or pings me on Teams so I don’t feel about about faking it when I’m not actually faking anything, just avoiding that stupid yellow dot.
In some cases, it might be worse - given that the ‘home’ in ‘working from home’ could be a coffee shop or other public place - if the computer remains unlocked, unattended with remote access still open to workplace systems, there is potential for abuse.
I’ve also heard of someone opening a notepad document, then jamming an index card into the keyboard to press down some key(s). Garbage gets typed into the document, and the computer thinks it’s in use.
A legitimate use of a “mouse jiggler” is kind of hard to imagine. Maybe if I’m on a conference call where I truly do not need to use the computer, though normally I’d either be taking the call FROM the computer, or I’d be multitasking (listening to the call while doing something else).
Thanks. I wasn’t aware of that approach. That seems harder to detect, though they might be able to notice that the movement is simply side to side and nonsensical.
My daughter works for a place that outsources contractors for jobs called in by other companies, if that makes sense. They basically sit at a couple of rows of computers and answer phone calls or texts. They have an overseer who, if they spot someone who isn’t actively doing something on their computer, assigns “busy work” such as cleaning the break room. I could understand someone doing anything to avoid that sort of bullshit.
When I did call center work a few summers ago (not my specialty, but needed to fill in a couple months before my real project could onboard me), everything was routed through a computer, and it automatically tracked when we were on a call, when we were doing the post-call documentation, when we were on break, and so on.
A mouse jiggler would not have been useful, since as you suggest, it would show that we had not been answering calls.
There’s keyboards that let you store macros in on-device memory. I suppose someone would rig up a random keystroke macro in one of those that wouldn’t have to be installed on PC and would be more realistic than a string of HHHHHHH… when it comes to detection.
Ironically, when I set up my mouse to “jiggle”, it’s not to avoid work or to avoid detection (we don’t monitor that, AFAIK) but because I AM near my computer & available and don’t want to Teams to say I’m not, thus making someone less likely to contact me if they need me. I’m here, talk to me!
I use my home PC to connect to a PC at work. If I am on a Teams call (using the work PC), and not otherwise doing anything on the computer, my remote connection will time out and I’ll lose the Teams call.
So I wiggle my mouse from time to time; it seems unlikely that Jiggler detection software would be able to tell the difference between that and a well-written Jiggler. So I would likely get a write-up for doing nothing wrong.
Stuff like this is why I’m happy I’m a freelancer. Sure, I don’t have any benefits, or job security, or real prospects for advancement, but at least nobody’s looking over my shoulder when I work, which makes it all worth it. I’m not even joking.
They need to let it be known that software that is intended to be used to evade company oversight will not be tolerated. I do not agree that such oversight is the proper route but, sometimes, it is legally required (e.g. stock traders need oversight, healthcare needs oversight).
ETA: The oversight needed for traders and healthcare is not concerned with whether you are actually sitting at your PC. But, once the company is engaged in that oversight checking if you are at your PC is a small step.
While faking working when you’re not is definitely ethically questionable (I’m talking about the deliberate slackers, not the ones legitimately doing part of the job they’re being paid for while automated monitoring thinks they’re goofing off), Wells Fargo has very little room for commentary on someone’s ethics. I can just picture some stuffed shirt wailing “Oh no! They’re using mouse jigglers, which means they aren’t creating fake accounts or concocting bogus fees fast enough!”
Yep. I might have been as far away as 5 feet from my computer reading printed articles to rest my eyes. And my phone is near me so I can quickly see if a teams alert or email needs an immediate response or if it can wait.
But I work in an industry and at a level where I don’t need to be at my computer 100% of the time. At one point during the time we were all 100% at home during covid someone who was not a supervisor of me made a comment about my teams showing as idle/away. I did buy a hardware based mouse jiggler at that point because while I knew I was doing my work and my boss knew I was doing my work, I didn’t need this person who reports to the same person as my boss making comments about me being idle during work hours.
