I use a mouse jiggler while I'm working because I often spend quite a bit of time just thinking through data structures and code composition and Teams is absolutely sure that I'm away from my desk if it's more than 5 minutes.
Same here. Also I sometimes think about these kinds of things when I'm off the clock too. I don't want to but you can't exactly tell your brain to stop thinking about work stuff at 5pm. Sometimes I'm just watching TV or whatever and a thought about how to solve a work problem pops into my head.
To me it says more about how bad the management is at a company that has to resort to try to detecting mouse jigglers. Do they know so little about what the employees do that they don't simply notice that work isn't getting done if an employee isn't actually working?
Hilariously enough there's tons of empirical data that shows people are far more productive in socializing environments where micromanaging doesn't happen, and arbitrary rules aren't put in place. Give people an actual sense of community, they actually engage in work they have to get done.
So you did not notice that they didn't actual do anything...? But were happy that their mouse was moving around...?
This is what I fail to get. You give people things to work on. Why do you want to spy on them instead of just looking at the results? Even if someone spends half the time watching YouTube, if all the work is done... who cares?
This is actually exactly the lesson. If the issue in this case was the mouse jiggler, then just working slow would be perfectly fine?! Are they all stupid?
The problem is that companies have unrealistic expectation of how you spend your day. Everybody knows that most “white collar” jobs don’t actually have you working 8hrs every day with the only time you stop working being bathroom breaks and lunch. People take all kinds of informal breaks and get distracted throughout the day. So there is this weird thing where everybody knows that, but companies have to pretend like they don’t, which leads to asinine decisions like keyboard and mouse trackers to determine if people are actually working. Which then leads to people looking for solutions that earn them their little informal breaks back, which everybody takes and are perfectly fine. But again, we sort of pretend water cooler time doesn’t occur.
It’s some sort of perverse arms race built around a shared lie we all pretend we don’t know about.
It’s some sort of perverse arms race built around a shared lie we all pretend we don’t know about.
There's a lot of that when it comes to work in general. It's like it's taboo to point out that the only reason people show up to their jobs is because they get paid for it.
News Flash: nobody has wanted to work ever. They work because the compensation lets them live the lives they want outside of work. If nobody wants to work for you, it's because you either aren't willing to compensate them enough to do that, or your job makes them so miserable that it's not worth it for them to trade away that much happiness for the compensation.
I've been the one identifying the people who use jigglers. Usually it was a manager coming to us to look for a reason to fire a poor employee or a contractor trying to bill a suspiciously large number of hours for the work produced. If it was just poor performance, HR would make us do a PIP and waste 3 months on them. Violating security procedures and falsifying time sheets was an immediate termination. And for the contractors, you need evidence in order to refuse payment.
Btw, if you want to get away with it, don't use a software or USB one. Get one that interfaces with a regular mouse. Modern cybersecurity software logs every process executed and device connected.
USB devices have a hard coded vendor identifier and product identifier built into them that are issued from a central authority. The ones I saw were easily identifiable as not legitimate mice.
