US banking giant Wells Fargo has sacked a number of employees following claims that staff were faking keyboard activity to fool the company into thinking they were working when they were not.
It is not yet clear how the issue was discovered or whether it was specifically related to people working from home.
The US bank said staff had been fired or resigned “after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work”.
New rules recently came into effect in the US which mean that brokers working from home must be inspected every three years.
I’m not very pro-working but why not fire the manager that didn’t notice the employee’s lack of output? Seems suss that by just keeping a computing online, you can circumvent actually producing anything.
As always, measure output not the how or why something gets done.
Holy shit, I couldn’t have said it better.
“Butts in seats” is a hold-over from the industrial revolution, when productivity was measured by how many times a day you pulled the lever that made the widget. It’s a stupid metric for most white-collar jobs.
A good manager will have measurable metrics for performance that they’ve approved with their leaders. If an employee is meeting those objective metrics, they’re doing their job. If they’re meeting those objectives while climbing Half Dome, who the fuck cares? If they’re meeting those objectives by running everything through ChatGPT, well, maybe you need to re-evaluate whether you need those employees or if those jobs could be done by an LLM.
The idea that how many hours an employee works is a useful measure of success, of productivity, is inane and thoughtless, and any leader who thinks it is is unqualified for their job.
Fuck, if a burger-flipper figures out how to flip the number of burgers with the right quality without standing at the grill, it is absurd, irresponsible, and downright idiotic to insist that part of the job is physically standing in front of the grill. Likely, said employee has just put an entire workforce out of jobs and not benefited themselves, but the point stands.
Keyboard loggers, mouse movement trackers, web cam monitors: they’re all tools of incompetent managers who should be fired, all the way up the chain to the person who approved their use. Learn how to measure success, you fuckwits.
Monitoring software effectively does middle management’s job, so they have to figure out how to justify themselves. Hence the return to office mandates, etc., instead of strapping a vibrator to your mouse for the afternoon and getting your 8 hours of performative busywork done in the 3 productive hours it actually takes.
When two workers started working from home I heard a manager say “how am I supposed to know they’re getting work done?” as if he couldn’t see the results all appear on the server. And he never even really spoke to them when they were in the office anyway! Meanwhile I’m a “hard worker” while in my office watching four hours of Critical Role a day bored out of my skull because I finished all the work already. I tried to get more to do but my direct manager/senior coworker was too paranoid to let me touch anything else even though he was insanely overworked.
Oh and the dipshit manager spent at least an hour if his day talking conservative nonsense with another employee. Like, bro, get a fucking clue.
Of course lots of Wells Fargo previous PR disasters resulted from having meaningful metrics from management that just happened to be anti-consumer side effects.
Wells Fargo (and Boeing) largely illustrate Goodhart’s Law; they don’t use metrics correctly. But more than anything else, those companies are demonstrations of the risk of having only one metric that supersedes all others: short-term profit.
The fact that a company uses metrics doesn’t prove they’re doing the right thing. They have to use good metrics well, have good practices and processes around metrics, understand them, and not using them as targets. Wells Fargo’s troubles mainly stemmed from violating Goodhart’s Law.
True, having the right metric is important. But having no metric might be an overreaction to the crisis caused by bad metrics.
Exactly. You’re either paying me to do my job, or you’re paying me to type for 8hrs a day. Pick one.
Was there a claim of lack of output that I didn’t see? I admittedly skimmed this.
I was under the impression that the only issue was that they weren’t in their seats when they were supposed to be, which is so fucking stupid I struggle to find words to describe it.
I am a manager, people report to me. I judge if they’re working effectively based on their output, and as long as the output is what the job requires I could not care less when they’re at their desks. They’re being paid to get work done, not sit in their seats.
Some jobs do require that you sit in your seat for x hours a day, but we shouldn’t pretend all jobs do.
If they were actually able to get away with this, they weren’t producing anything already. This is just another example of how much of office work is just meaningless bullshit that doesn’t matter.
Maybe they were getting outputs? Just with less time sitting and staring at a monitor than expected.
Wells Fargo upset over some fake inputs?
Maybe they should have just created some fake employees to do this work like they opened fake accounts for people who never asked for them.
Hypocrisy is key at Wells Fargo. Rules for thee, not for me.
A spokeswoman for the firm said: “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behaviour.”
Wow, what a joke.
It’s uh… different when they do it bc uh…
Sure, don’t look at why that was happening, just fire people. It’ll all sort itself out.
A
happy worker is aproductive worker is required. Your performance will be evaluated based on words per minute.
Banks this dumb can’t hold my money
Good on them for getting free money out of a soulless corporate financial vampire.
New rules recently came into effect in the US which mean that brokers working from home must be inspected every three years.
A spokeswoman for the firm said: “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behaviour.”
If I had my druthers, Wells Fargo would have been parted out years ago. But I can’t blame them for firing unethical employees.
