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Wells Fargo fires workers over fake keyboard activity
(www.bbc.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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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.
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.