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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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Ah yes. Work that tracks you, not by your output, but by whether your mouse jiggles a statistically correct amount. Nice.
70 year old management member who came up with the idea of using this metric in the first place:
"The system shows you haven't touched your mouse for half an hour."
"Yes, I worked out a solution on paper, like back in the old days."
[confused noises]
The jigglers keep you online status from changing to "away."
Some jobs require you to be at your desk, and using mouse jigglers to fake being at work is the kind of thing that keeps more companies from allowing WFH.
Sure. Yes. I'm aware.
The point is, if an employee isn't productive, the company should notice, because they should be running some kind of oversight over the work either being done or not being done.
If the work is being done, even if the employee isn't always 100% focused, the company shouldn't care.
If the work is not being done, the company should care, regardless of how active the mouse moves.
No, companies don't allow WFH because they don't trust employees or can't verify, employees doing their work from home. Most of the time, because the company people don't understand that work and couldn't judge if it's being done correctly without adults in the room.
tldr: people should be hired and fired based on their performance. Crazy talk, I know.
It's crazy how quickly ~~people~~ Boomers, managers, executives and capitalists flip flop between "Salary is performance based you don't have set hours" to "You didn't work every hour from 9-5". This hypocritical nonsense only drives more people to take on anti-work perspectives.
If the job requires you to be at your desk then presumably that means you have work to complete. Judge people for what they get done, not how often they mindlessly move a mouse and this wouldn't be a problem!
Some jobs necessarily include idle time when you're waiting for work to come through even if there's nothing to do in that specific moment. The flip side of that is that the employer is able to require that the worker be available instantly. If they're leaving their work area because they're bored then they're not "at work."
My Dad was a career firefighter, and he spent most of his time sitting in the station watching TV, cooking meals, or sleeping. He was paid for every minute of that time because at the drop of a hat he could be called to a wreck, fire, or medical emergency.
The reason he had to be paid is federal law requiring that all workers who are "engaged to wait" are on the clock. If someone is installing mouse-jiggler software so they can leave their workstation and do whatever they want, they're no longer being engaged to wait.
So if I'm WFH and need to be available I can be watching TV or cooking a meal as long as I'm available at the drop of a hat if something comes in. This can be more usefully measured by how quickly I respond or my work output rather than how much my mouse moves.
Is that really true though? If I crank my volume for notifications and then read a book while waiting for my next call how is that less engaged than like reading an ebook on the same computer?
Frankly - it's a lot harder to quantify. "Time at desk" is easy to track. Response times to tickets are much more variable and difficult to measure.
Even if you are at your desk and say waiting for a ticket to come in or a call, you'll be set to away so it doesn't make sense to moitor by that.
Worked in IT 9 years and never come across a company that monitors this.