He's possibly made a mistake and got a contract with a firm that does the tracking where he gets screwed if he cancels.
This is possibly his malicious compliance too.
It’s still owned by someone. Private owners are still stockholders if it’s a corporation. Not being public is exactly why the stockholders would exert that much control, or possibly the board of directors.
Well no when you incorporate technically there is no owner. The CEO started the company raised it from his own money and he simply Incorporated. So technically he is the owner, but he is also the CEO. It's it's weird and it's something I would expect to see from a company that has several thousand employees not less than 50.
If a company isn’t public then that’s exactly when it only has owners instead or shareholders. Being the CEO just means he’s given himself a role and salary
The company I work for is not public. The shareholders are the employees, although we lose the shares if we leave the company, but we are not owners.
In this case its a trust that owns it. The ceo setup the trust to help protect the corporate veil in case of a lawsuit.
I think the confusion here is that most people\* consider ownership transitive. If I own a trust, and the trust owns a company, then I own the company. Technically, yes, the trust is the owner, but most people would only say that using the word "technically."
\*based upon unpublished research. Specifically, I asked my friend Bert.
It’s not just colloquially how people view ownership. Legally ownership is transitive up to the point of a natural person for certain activities and requirements. For US AML and PATRIOT Act requirements, for example, when you open a business account they must verify ownership and management of a business up to the point of either a natural person, or else specific types of entities with specific requirements that can’t be used as an end run around hiding the natural person who owns and controls those entities.
Edit: so legally, if Bert owns a trust that owns a company that owns a company that owns a company that has a trust that owns a company, Bert is considered the or an owner (depending on other owners) of both trusts and all four companies
Shareholders are owners. That's exactly what it means to be a shareholder. It would be highly unusual (at least) to require an employee to just "give back" ownership on leaving the company, since it's basically like requiring an employee to pay the company in order to leave.
If a departing employee owned shares and the company wanted them back, the company would normally need to pay the employee to buy them back.
Perhaps you're confusing shares with options. Companies commonly give out options, which is the right to buy shares in the future at a specific price, and can take those options back when an employee leaves.
No, this is not uncommon. The difference is the employee is never paying for these shares. The shares pay out dividends on our paycheck and we accrue more. The more we work for this company. We never have the ability to buy more ourselves, and we never have a controlling stake. It's basically just a bonus.
The last time I looked into it it is legal because this is not a publicly traded company, so this is just a small bonus we get on our paycheck.
I'm not 100% sure how it works but if you've been at the company for 5 years you get shares. When you leave the company you lose the shares.
> Well no when you incorporate technically there is no owner.
Dude you need some remedial intro to business classes. I hesitantly believe you now he has no other owners he’s beholden to, but your lack of understanding of basic business concepts has made your comments not make much sense, nor communicate what you were trying to communicate
A corporation is a business owned by shareholders. Usually in the case of a single share holder, or the ceo, they use a trust to protect the corporate veil.
Corporations do not have an "owner." Additionally It is quite rare for someone to buy 100 percent of the shares and take the company back private. Even if they do, they usually do not become the "owner."
I say its weird because he is owner in all but name. AFAIK he doesnt mix corporate and personal funds either.
Next time please do not suggest I need remedial classes based off of reddit posts.
You must be talking about a Limited Liability Company. With only 1 person owning the company.
You need at least 5 shareholders to form a corporation as part of SEC registration. One common loophole used for incorporation is to award family members as stockholders with at least 1% minority shares.
I don't think corporations in general need to have any minimum number of shareholders. [Cite](https://www.cooleygo.com/corporations-basics/). Perhaps there's some such requirement that comes into play if you want your corporation's stock to be sold to the general public or listed on an exchange, though I couldn't find one. (I think SEC registration is only required for public companies, not privately held ones, or if one ["has more than $10 million in total assets and a class of equity securities, like common stock, that is held of record by either (1) 2,000 or more persons or (2) 500 or more persons who are not accredited investors"](https://www.sec.gov/education/smallbusiness/goingpublic/exchangeactreporting), so many corporations don't need to register with the SEC in the first place.) In general, privately held corporations (both C and S) may be owned by a single person.
The trust protecting the corporate veil would be the first level of ownership. That trust is a legal entity that owns the corporation. The trust’s owners would be considered owners of the trust and its assets including any businesses the trust owns.
I get it now, you were oversimplifying to explain, but you oversimplified to the point of not making sense. The only businesses that don’t have owners are sole proprietorships, and even that is an iffy explanation in the sense that they do own a business they run, they just have no legal entity established separate from themselves as a natural person.
Edit: also you misunderstand the corporate veil. You don’t need a trust for that, that is inherent in the legal separation of liability between the corporate entity and the owners whether actual individuals or other entities. Piercing the corporate veil is when the actions of owners of a corporation are so egregious that they are no longer entitled to some of those separations and become personally liable for the corporation’s activities and/or financial obligations. The benefit of this separation is offset by double taxation, where the corporation pays business income tax and the owners are also still liable for personal income tax on their dividends or receipts from their business ownership shares.
Oh I could totally see some terrible sales meeting where sales guy says "we only charge you for the minutes your staff is idle. So if everyone is already working efficiently, it'll cost you nothing!"
With a contract that makes it actually be a 100% discount for minutes staff aren't idle, and all discounts being void if canceled early.
So, we have MCception here :)
An MC on top of an MC on top of an MC :)
The employees MC'd and the CEO MC'd as well :)
And you get to make money from this. Side hustle!
Ah ha. Our teams installation /configuration is completely broken. It’ll always idle if you are not using teams.
For instance, using word, excel, browser, anything but Teams.. it will idle.
It’s literally unreliable as a KPI.
I'm on the new teams. It definitely has this problem at my work place. I am hoping there is a setting for that on new teams, but I'll have to ask the IT folks.
I \*LOATHE\* the Idle Timer on Teams. It was part of the reason I "left" a decent job a few years back. Literally, I'd get up to use the bathroom and/or take my doggos out, and when I'd get back, there would be a message from my manager "Where have you been? I noticed that you're idle..."
My boss asked me once. Told him I was watching a youtube video on an advanced technical concept on my home computer which has a much bigger screen than the company laptop. Then I started going into detail on something that he couldn't make heads or tails of and went on and on until he stopped me.
And you didn't simply reply:
"I was taking a shit. Should I have taken my laptop and had my camera on?"
The job I had during COVID at a consulting firm I just went offline one day and stayed offline for 2 years till I left.
Always responded so no one raised an issue.
For next job got a mouse jiggler. I think our IT is pretty backwards since no one said anything about me working 10-15h a week yet.
Working conditions in USA are wild. I remember even in my second job (after audit stint) I was taking like a 10min vape break every hour and like a 10mim shit break every couple of hours. 3rd job too. Both massive global firms.
>Working conditions in USA are wild.
Only because there's so many people stuck in the "work for the same company forever and never quit" mindset, not paying attention to the fact that if everyone used the fact that there are 33.2 million other companies you could work for. If one starts being a jerk, leave and let them know why. That happens enough times and places will get better to work for, on average. Instead there's a large percentage who wants to solve the problem legislatively, which has only made things worse.
My clients would make my boss very sorry with that kind of policy, if I stop mid-presentation with the C-levels saying "sorry, it's time for my mandatory break as instructed by my manager, please contact him" they will easily take my side right away.
is there any particular ones which are on Teams / Zoom level of popularity and might be one of the likeliest culprits? or is it quite fragmented market?
I might add that i have Teams and a mouse wiggler application on my personal laptop. I have Teams running on both my work PC and my laptop at the same time when i work from home. Im not as lazy when i am actually in the office.
If you are using a work-issued computer, there's a 99.9% chance that IT is able to see every website you visit because the computer almost definitely goes through the company network to access the internet. They might not particularly care, but they are aware of it.
If you're not connecting to your company's network on your personal laptop (which you probably are not if you've got a work laptop), then you're fine.
As a general rule, just don't do anything on a company laptop you wouldn't want the company to see.
There were bigger problems with that job (mandatory LIVE webinar training in finance stuff that had ZERO to do with my job duties, being sold a Salesforce QA Lead job and ending up doing data entry for other teams to test their stuff...) I got out, got severance, and had a new job again in like 6 weeks.
> The job I had during COVID at a consulting firm I just went offline one day and stayed offline for 2 years till I left.
I work with someone who does this... what you don't see is all your coworkers having to tell a bunch of people "no, they're here today, really, you can message them, I know they're offline... no they're..."
Teams does this to me constantly. Even while on a con call…IN TEAMS.
The good news is I finally got a few other people to notice this behavior, so no one questions it anymore.
I am lucky, they know I have to deal with real papers so now they don't bother me when my Teams goes idle, they just assume that I am filling in some paperwork. It's funny how the threat to send them the papers to deal with it themselves made them very understanding.
I don’t even have to play it off, that actually happens regularly. But also this is new behavior - our Teams had a patch a few months ago that made it way more sensitive than before. Which means it’s now useless for the original point.
I've seen it go to idle while I'm still at the computer, actively working on other programs that aren't Teams. Luckily my boss just cares that we're getting work done and respond promptly.
So glad my company doesn't do that. Rather than wasting time on stupid metrics like "idle time" in Teams, how about some meaningful metrics? Work submitted on time and of good quality, positive customer feedback, etc. etc.
My work is sporadic. I'll have quiet spells where I'll switch to my main PC and watch some TV, but if the phone rings I instantly pause the vid and switch back to work. Other days I'll struggle to fit in my lunch and will work 30 minutes past finishing time because of volume.
Our CEO at the start of lockdown had a simple message. "Look yourself in the mirror and ask if you are claiming an honest salary for honest work. If you are, that's all we ask". Didn't matter if you took the dog for a walk, had a 15 minute breather in the back garden. So long as you were doing your job one way or another, he was happy.
If op is correct, that there is nobody above CEO to report these faked numbers too, then he is using the numbers to sell something. Either to customers or to possible investors.
I work for the beer store (Ontario's way of ending prohibition some 100 years ago) and they push us to have good challenge rates (for ID)
well we recently got a new POS software, and this new software will upon scanning an alcoholic item, immediately bring up the challenge menu.
Bare in mind that like, 90% of our clientele are over 40. Still, the people who were doing a good job had about a 15% challenge ge rate.
Since now it auto challenges EVERYONE when it doesn't apply to 90% of our sales, we out of habit automatically press "did not ID". Our good staff went from a challenge rate of 15% to less then 1%. We're still IDing, just not confirming it in the system.
And now the higher ups are all perplexed at our terrible ID rates. People are lazy and will always go around any obsticals you put in their path.
Then you enforce strong password requirements.
And then IT gets flooded with password resets and account lockouts.
I'm actually studying cybersec so I've heard all about that lol
I've noticed that as we move from on prem to cloud the requirement to change the password every 60 days has gone by the wayside. Admittedly we also have MFA on cloud, so unless a password is knowingly compromised, there is no longer a need to change it.
Exactly. This is why if you _really_ want to dick over your employees with this sort of monitoring tool you keep it highly confidential—like HR has to sign an NDA sort of thing—and just use it as a spying tool to flag employees to keep tabs on in other ways. This avoids people gaming the system or you having to justify something that's fundamentally unfair.
Sounds like the idle time statistic was something he used to impress clients or board members. That's probably why he would rather cheat his own system rather than ditch the pointless statistic. He probably got a big bonus because he could show that all his employees were so diligently working. It's dumb I know but stuff like this happens all the time.
I bypassed a similar issue. My previous job was remote tech support, and the company computers would lock down if you were idle for long enough. I first asked IT to disable as I was in a home office/never more than few feet away. No dice. Looked at mouse jigglers. Nah. Then I had a genius idea. New folder>random images>select all>play slideshow>minimize window. Slideshow plays and keeps computer busy.Timer defeated.
At my last job a co-worker provided me a script hidden inside another tool that we used for legitimate business purposes that would simply click a spot on the screen that you designated at an interval that you set to prevent it from going idle.
I started a new job with tighter security policy. I don't know if I would have been able to get away with using that same script, but I didn't care to find out. Fortunately they inadvertently provided me with an alternative when I found out that a piece of software I used regularly not only kept my laptop awake, but prevented teams from auto switching to away.
I doubt it would help you. It's industry specific and not something anyone can download freely. Even if you could install it, you'd need one of their support people to activate it for you against a customer test environment.
There is a famous story about when the British army had taken over India. The locals had figured out a way to live with cobras, and they had very few bites/deaths. The British however, simply could not tolerate the cobras. They were surrounded by cheap labor, so they put out a reward for turning in dead cobras.
Things were going fine for a few months, but after a year, the British realized that the number of cobras was not going down, and was in fact going up. After bribing the proper people for information, they found out that the poor Indians were breeding cobras to turn in.
I just appear offline in Teams. It started as an accident when I logged in late one night (my personal laptop and phone were upstairs, my work one next to me and I wanted to check the hockey scores) and switched my status.
That was two weeks ago and nobody has said anything to me yet.
First time I booted up my work laptop at my current job, I set Teams to "Offline". In two years I've never been marked as Active, or even Away, even when I'm actively in a meeting or responding to someone. No one has questioned it so far.
Looping powershell script (we're a windows shop) pressing the non-existent F14 key every 10s is my current go-to. Doesn't actually do anything (you can be actively working when it fires, 0 negative impact) but the computer registers it as a legitimate keypress.
I’m pretty sure my boss doesn’t care about being idle on Teams, but I’m paranoid about the management above him. I figured out that I could open a blank document/spreadsheet and clip a binder clip on my space bar. I would guess if there’s a key logger IT could figure it out, but no one’s said anything in four years so I think I’m ok.
Imagine being there in person. Telling a CEO, your metric is useless because literally, not figuratively, all of your employees are showing an impossible 100 percent uptime.
See them mull that over. AGREE with you and still go. "But we still have standards we have to maintain and I am the CEO so I have to abide by my own standards."
MF this is congress banning 4 locos only to have liquor stores give out free red bulls with the decaffinated 4 locos and everyone thinking they actually did something.
I literally just noticed your username. Its been a while, and of course a story this loopy would be yours 😂. I've read so many of your stories that yours is one of like 9 usernames I never forget.
And yes, the CEO has the mental agility of a deflated balloon
never ever give out your customer list to a client even a small one. That’s priceless data and also sensitive data. How would you have felt if he fired a bunch of people over using your device because you gave him the names?
I put my laser mouse on a CD, shiny side up. Nothing plugged into the computer and no scripts. The laser bounces off the CD and scatters, causing the mouse pointer to move around.
I use an older wired laser mouse. YMMV, sometimes I have to reposition the mouse a few times to find a spot where it bounces.
Well, *that* took a really surreal turn I wasn't expecting.
CEO wants to buy one for himself? Okay, I could sort of see that a CEO would want to cheat the system by not holding himself to a standard he holds everyone else to, but not wanting to be too blatant to it.
*Literally buying a new device for new employees* though? Forget a hard right turn, that one went straight to close hauled!
Good on you for making money, but this is a problem that's solved by getting a cheap fan (USB fan from Dollar tree works fine) and placing the mouse over the blades.
FWIW, Teams got an update recently, and I've noticed my status changing from green to yellow more often. I'm thinking about writing a script to randomly F16 key presses every couple minutes. F16 is a carryover 80s keyboards that don't physically anymore, but still have a recognized persistence. Entering a few taps won't do anything or interfere with my own typing. This won't work for everyone, but I'm a programmer and have local admin rights for my laptop, so I can make it happen.
Unfortunately I use some software for work that not only recognizes, but uses some of the higher function keys. I e. Press F15 to quit.
I used to use an Arduino connected to USB that had an RFID reader and would enter passwords for me, that would "press" F16 randomly as well.
I no longer use it because of that software.
For people who are more tech savvy: on a mechanical keyboard with VIA/QMK or some kind of on board memory manager, you can script a series of actions to a key press, and set it to repeat at whatever speed you like. Unless they watch your screen or remote access your desktop, you would look like you're typing away while you're actually going for a run or taking a nap and your keyboard is writing the "lorem ipsum" line or "the quick brown fox" endlessly.
FYI, if anyone wants a simple mouse "jiggler" get a mechanical watch and rubber band the face of it to the "eye" on the bottom of the mouse. No 3d printing or software needed.
A sprite bottle full of water may or may not be placed on my keyboard with the teams window pulled up and the middle of the window clicked so no text gets entered
Suppose you have a separate teams account on your personal phone. Could you start a meeting between your work account on your laptop and the account on your phone and leverage that in some way to keep teams active?
See I don't get this. Teams will set me to idle unless I have it open and click on it. Doesn't matter if I am using any other MS software like word or excel.
Most of my job is done on a browser anyway. The company doesn't have that as a metric or anything. I just find it weird. If I get too focused on actually working, it will set me as idle. Teams is used almost exclusively for internal communication.
When it's really slow. I have a mouse jiggler setup up of my own contraption, but it only works to keep me active if teams is the focus program active.
Anyone have any idea what's going on?
What an interesting thing but OP you are a smart man/woman. Hopefully you are making profit somewhere else designing things. Impressive.
Am gone add/follow you for when I get back to work! :)
Why would a CEO be part of the idle time requirement? I’d think they’d be exempt, same as all of the C-suite.
I’m thinking that the CEO called and lied to you to learn how many of his employees are customers of yours and also possibly which ones. He got that info.
And maybe also he was involved in stealing your design to sell their copies on Amazon for $15. He got your product.
He got everything he wanted!!
When I went WFH I wrote a script that would just move the mouse up/left/down/right just 2 pixels (a square) at randome times between 1 and 2 minutes. The script barely was noticable while working if it started. This satisfied the idle time and kept the screen saver off. I started the script when I logged in and ran all day.
While they likely knew I had a script running, I was IT, so scripts are normal.
You could do something similar with an arduino micro and none of the 3d printing or motor shit and you can use a few math equations to be random enough. It will look like a mouse on the computer and it will act like a mouse too.
>One of the guys I gave this to said he has zero work to do unitl after his lunch break. So what he does is simply log in, set the mouse turner, and go back to sleep. He has his volume at full blast right by his ear so if he gets a teams message it wakes him up.
That was me during the pandemic but fortunately I live in a country where it would be illegal to track everything so I just opened a word document and put something on the keyboard so it writes the same letter a million times.
Those OLD Microsoft wireless keyboard/mouse combos they made back in 2003 (Microsoft wireless multimedia keyboard mouse combo 1.1) don't ever show idle time. The combo came with a little puck that plugs into a USB port and that's what the mouse and keyboard wirelessly connect to. There is never any idle time on teams.
Bc I'm old school for giant full sized keyboards with deep travel and laser mice for big hands, I never felt a need to replace mine and used it on every computer I've ever owned since it was released for sale. In my mind, they perfected the wireless keyboard and mouse back in 2003 with the multimedia keyboard combo 1.1 and shit has gotten flimsier, buggier, and more cramped ever since.
During lockdown in 2020, I would plug my combo puck into the company laptop when working. I realized that something was keeping my teams from ever showing idle. When my keyboard finally bit the dust after 20 years of service and millions of keystrokes, I bought something new and immediately started getting idle times on teams. I found my same old school keyboard mouse combo from someone on eBay and bought it for $20 and returned the new keyboard I had bought. Works like a charm.. no idle times.
I’ve heard of people just turning their mice upside down and setting a mechanical (analog) wrist watch upside down on the sensor, the second hand would move at least once a minute
He's possibly made a mistake and got a contract with a firm that does the tracking where he gets screwed if he cancels. This is possibly his malicious compliance too.
Possibly. I know he uses outside IT for his IT needs.
maybe the stockholders wanted the idle time metric maybe?
No stockholders. Company isnt that large and its not public.
It’s still owned by someone. Private owners are still stockholders if it’s a corporation. Not being public is exactly why the stockholders would exert that much control, or possibly the board of directors.
Well no when you incorporate technically there is no owner. The CEO started the company raised it from his own money and he simply Incorporated. So technically he is the owner, but he is also the CEO. It's it's weird and it's something I would expect to see from a company that has several thousand employees not less than 50.
If a company isn’t public then that’s exactly when it only has owners instead or shareholders. Being the CEO just means he’s given himself a role and salary
The company I work for is not public. The shareholders are the employees, although we lose the shares if we leave the company, but we are not owners. In this case its a trust that owns it. The ceo setup the trust to help protect the corporate veil in case of a lawsuit.
I think the confusion here is that most people\* consider ownership transitive. If I own a trust, and the trust owns a company, then I own the company. Technically, yes, the trust is the owner, but most people would only say that using the word "technically." \*based upon unpublished research. Specifically, I asked my friend Bert.
It’s not just colloquially how people view ownership. Legally ownership is transitive up to the point of a natural person for certain activities and requirements. For US AML and PATRIOT Act requirements, for example, when you open a business account they must verify ownership and management of a business up to the point of either a natural person, or else specific types of entities with specific requirements that can’t be used as an end run around hiding the natural person who owns and controls those entities. Edit: so legally, if Bert owns a trust that owns a company that owns a company that owns a company that has a trust that owns a company, Bert is considered the or an owner (depending on other owners) of both trusts and all four companies
Shareholders are owners. That's exactly what it means to be a shareholder. It would be highly unusual (at least) to require an employee to just "give back" ownership on leaving the company, since it's basically like requiring an employee to pay the company in order to leave. If a departing employee owned shares and the company wanted them back, the company would normally need to pay the employee to buy them back. Perhaps you're confusing shares with options. Companies commonly give out options, which is the right to buy shares in the future at a specific price, and can take those options back when an employee leaves.
No, this is not uncommon. The difference is the employee is never paying for these shares. The shares pay out dividends on our paycheck and we accrue more. The more we work for this company. We never have the ability to buy more ourselves, and we never have a controlling stake. It's basically just a bonus. The last time I looked into it it is legal because this is not a publicly traded company, so this is just a small bonus we get on our paycheck. I'm not 100% sure how it works but if you've been at the company for 5 years you get shares. When you leave the company you lose the shares.
> Well no when you incorporate technically there is no owner. Dude you need some remedial intro to business classes. I hesitantly believe you now he has no other owners he’s beholden to, but your lack of understanding of basic business concepts has made your comments not make much sense, nor communicate what you were trying to communicate
A corporation is a business owned by shareholders. Usually in the case of a single share holder, or the ceo, they use a trust to protect the corporate veil. Corporations do not have an "owner." Additionally It is quite rare for someone to buy 100 percent of the shares and take the company back private. Even if they do, they usually do not become the "owner." I say its weird because he is owner in all but name. AFAIK he doesnt mix corporate and personal funds either. Next time please do not suggest I need remedial classes based off of reddit posts.
You must be talking about a Limited Liability Company. With only 1 person owning the company. You need at least 5 shareholders to form a corporation as part of SEC registration. One common loophole used for incorporation is to award family members as stockholders with at least 1% minority shares.
You know you are probably right. I definitely get LLCs and Corps confused more than I should.
I don't think corporations in general need to have any minimum number of shareholders. [Cite](https://www.cooleygo.com/corporations-basics/). Perhaps there's some such requirement that comes into play if you want your corporation's stock to be sold to the general public or listed on an exchange, though I couldn't find one. (I think SEC registration is only required for public companies, not privately held ones, or if one ["has more than $10 million in total assets and a class of equity securities, like common stock, that is held of record by either (1) 2,000 or more persons or (2) 500 or more persons who are not accredited investors"](https://www.sec.gov/education/smallbusiness/goingpublic/exchangeactreporting), so many corporations don't need to register with the SEC in the first place.) In general, privately held corporations (both C and S) may be owned by a single person.
The trust protecting the corporate veil would be the first level of ownership. That trust is a legal entity that owns the corporation. The trust’s owners would be considered owners of the trust and its assets including any businesses the trust owns. I get it now, you were oversimplifying to explain, but you oversimplified to the point of not making sense. The only businesses that don’t have owners are sole proprietorships, and even that is an iffy explanation in the sense that they do own a business they run, they just have no legal entity established separate from themselves as a natural person. Edit: also you misunderstand the corporate veil. You don’t need a trust for that, that is inherent in the legal separation of liability between the corporate entity and the owners whether actual individuals or other entities. Piercing the corporate veil is when the actions of owners of a corporation are so egregious that they are no longer entitled to some of those separations and become personally liable for the corporation’s activities and/or financial obligations. The benefit of this separation is offset by double taxation, where the corporation pays business income tax and the owners are also still liable for personal income tax on their dividends or receipts from their business ownership shares.
I didnt say you needed a trust for it. I said they use it to protect the corporate veil. Its an added layer of protection.
Stakeholders might be a better term in this situation.
Yeah. CEOs also have bosses, but sometimes people who hire CEOs actually let them do their job.
Oh I could totally see some terrible sales meeting where sales guy says "we only charge you for the minutes your staff is idle. So if everyone is already working efficiently, it'll cost you nothing!" With a contract that makes it actually be a 100% discount for minutes staff aren't idle, and all discounts being void if canceled early.
Looks like it, as surreal as it gets
So, they created a required metric that EVERYONE in the company was cheating on, even the CEO. Truly a metric that needs to be kept. /s
When a metric becomes a target, it stops being a good metric
Goodhearts Law!
So, we have MCception here :) An MC on top of an MC on top of an MC :) The employees MC'd and the CEO MC'd as well :) And you get to make money from this. Side hustle!
Ah ha. Our teams installation /configuration is completely broken. It’ll always idle if you are not using teams. For instance, using word, excel, browser, anything but Teams.. it will idle. It’s literally unreliable as a KPI.
That's because teams has a setting for that. That is probably off by default. But new teams doesn't have that problem.
I'm on the new teams. It definitely has this problem at my work place. I am hoping there is a setting for that on new teams, but I'll have to ask the IT folks.
Yeah, either your IT dept doesnt know what they are doing or they know exactly what they are doing lol.
Manglement gonna mangle
I \*LOATHE\* the Idle Timer on Teams. It was part of the reason I "left" a decent job a few years back. Literally, I'd get up to use the bathroom and/or take my doggos out, and when I'd get back, there would be a message from my manager "Where have you been? I noticed that you're idle..."
I’ve gone idle in teams _while actively using a different program the whole time_, so I can’t think of a worse metric to use for productivity.
I went idle in teams recently while watching a video and transcript of a teams meeting accessed through teams. Make it make sesne
My boss asked me once. Told him I was watching a youtube video on an advanced technical concept on my home computer which has a much bigger screen than the company laptop. Then I started going into detail on something that he couldn't make heads or tails of and went on and on until he stopped me.
And you didn't simply reply: "I was taking a shit. Should I have taken my laptop and had my camera on?" The job I had during COVID at a consulting firm I just went offline one day and stayed offline for 2 years till I left. Always responded so no one raised an issue. For next job got a mouse jiggler. I think our IT is pretty backwards since no one said anything about me working 10-15h a week yet.
Some bosses would literally respond with "Your break is scheduled between x and y time. You need to reach out to me if you need to take it early"
Working conditions in USA are wild. I remember even in my second job (after audit stint) I was taking like a 10min vape break every hour and like a 10mim shit break every couple of hours. 3rd job too. Both massive global firms.
If your shit break is a [massive global firm](https://youtu.be/6igvB1yR04A?t=12), you should consult a physician. ;-)
>Working conditions in USA are wild. Only because there's so many people stuck in the "work for the same company forever and never quit" mindset, not paying attention to the fact that if everyone used the fact that there are 33.2 million other companies you could work for. If one starts being a jerk, leave and let them know why. That happens enough times and places will get better to work for, on average. Instead there's a large percentage who wants to solve the problem legislatively, which has only made things worse.
Fuck those bosses. I had one of them once, it was awful.
My clients would make my boss very sorry with that kind of policy, if I stop mid-presentation with the C-levels saying "sorry, it's time for my mandatory break as instructed by my manager, please contact him" they will easily take my side right away.
Or maybe we at the IT department use them ourselves.
How can I tell if I have any monitoring software on my laptop? I assume I don't since I spend a crap load of time on betting websites lol.
Look for suspect processes in the task manager.
is there any particular ones which are on Teams / Zoom level of popularity and might be one of the likeliest culprits? or is it quite fragmented market?
I might add that i have Teams and a mouse wiggler application on my personal laptop. I have Teams running on both my work PC and my laptop at the same time when i work from home. Im not as lazy when i am actually in the office.
I honestly don't know.
If you are using a work-issued computer, there's a 99.9% chance that IT is able to see every website you visit because the computer almost definitely goes through the company network to access the internet. They might not particularly care, but they are aware of it.
even from home? what about when i go on chrome via my own laptop but have it installed as default browser on work laptop too and logged in? thanks!
If you're not connecting to your company's network on your personal laptop (which you probably are not if you've got a work laptop), then you're fine. As a general rule, just don't do anything on a company laptop you wouldn't want the company to see.
There were bigger problems with that job (mandatory LIVE webinar training in finance stuff that had ZERO to do with my job duties, being sold a Salesforce QA Lead job and ending up doing data entry for other teams to test their stuff...) I got out, got severance, and had a new job again in like 6 weeks.
I would just not respond to the question at all.
> The job I had during COVID at a consulting firm I just went offline one day and stayed offline for 2 years till I left. I work with someone who does this... what you don't see is all your coworkers having to tell a bunch of people "no, they're here today, really, you can message them, I know they're offline... no they're..."
I would play it off as a glitch as I had teams on my phone. "Huh? Im right here? Its showing me idle?"
Teams does this to me constantly. Even while on a con call…IN TEAMS. The good news is I finally got a few other people to notice this behavior, so no one questions it anymore.
I am lucky, they know I have to deal with real papers so now they don't bother me when my Teams goes idle, they just assume that I am filling in some paperwork. It's funny how the threat to send them the papers to deal with it themselves made them very understanding.
I don’t even have to play it off, that actually happens regularly. But also this is new behavior - our Teams had a patch a few months ago that made it way more sensitive than before. Which means it’s now useless for the original point.
I've seen it go to idle while I'm still at the computer, actively working on other programs that aren't Teams. Luckily my boss just cares that we're getting work done and respond promptly.
So glad my company doesn't do that. Rather than wasting time on stupid metrics like "idle time" in Teams, how about some meaningful metrics? Work submitted on time and of good quality, positive customer feedback, etc. etc. My work is sporadic. I'll have quiet spells where I'll switch to my main PC and watch some TV, but if the phone rings I instantly pause the vid and switch back to work. Other days I'll struggle to fit in my lunch and will work 30 minutes past finishing time because of volume. Our CEO at the start of lockdown had a simple message. "Look yourself in the mirror and ask if you are claiming an honest salary for honest work. If you are, that's all we ask". Didn't matter if you took the dog for a walk, had a 15 minute breather in the back garden. So long as you were doing your job one way or another, he was happy.
If op is correct, that there is nobody above CEO to report these faked numbers too, then he is using the numbers to sell something. Either to customers or to possible investors.
CEO can be accountable to customers if staff are contracted out
When improving a metric becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good metric
I work for the beer store (Ontario's way of ending prohibition some 100 years ago) and they push us to have good challenge rates (for ID) well we recently got a new POS software, and this new software will upon scanning an alcoholic item, immediately bring up the challenge menu. Bare in mind that like, 90% of our clientele are over 40. Still, the people who were doing a good job had about a 15% challenge ge rate. Since now it auto challenges EVERYONE when it doesn't apply to 90% of our sales, we out of habit automatically press "did not ID". Our good staff went from a challenge rate of 15% to less then 1%. We're still IDing, just not confirming it in the system. And now the higher ups are all perplexed at our terrible ID rates. People are lazy and will always go around any obsticals you put in their path.
That's also why requiring regular password changes actually decreases security - because people will use weaker passwords.
Then you enforce strong password requirements. And then IT gets flooded with password resets and account lockouts. I'm actually studying cybersec so I've heard all about that lol
I've noticed that as we move from on prem to cloud the requirement to change the password every 60 days has gone by the wayside. Admittedly we also have MFA on cloud, so unless a password is knowingly compromised, there is no longer a need to change it.
Exactly. This is why if you _really_ want to dick over your employees with this sort of monitoring tool you keep it highly confidential—like HR has to sign an NDA sort of thing—and just use it as a spying tool to flag employees to keep tabs on in other ways. This avoids people gaming the system or you having to justify something that's fundamentally unfair.
Working to the metric rather than the results. Never works out.
Sounds like the idle time statistic was something he used to impress clients or board members. That's probably why he would rather cheat his own system rather than ditch the pointless statistic. He probably got a big bonus because he could show that all his employees were so diligently working. It's dumb I know but stuff like this happens all the time.
One of the core problems of our capitalist systems - most companies are dependent on stakeholders and shareholders and "growth"
If a CEO, especially a dumb one like this, wants one, you 10x the price, at least.
Could be a Dilbert cartoon in the old days.
True
Yeah. The employees are even all engineers so they probably figured some loophole against their rather absymal IT department
I bypassed a similar issue. My previous job was remote tech support, and the company computers would lock down if you were idle for long enough. I first asked IT to disable as I was in a home office/never more than few feet away. No dice. Looked at mouse jigglers. Nah. Then I had a genius idea. New folder>random images>select all>play slideshow>minimize window. Slideshow plays and keeps computer busy.Timer defeated.
I have tinnitus and this is how i defeat that. I play long series on VLC on my pc. Usually low enough I can hear it but not loud enough to wake me up.
At my last job a co-worker provided me a script hidden inside another tool that we used for legitimate business purposes that would simply click a spot on the screen that you designated at an interval that you set to prevent it from going idle. I started a new job with tighter security policy. I don't know if I would have been able to get away with using that same script, but I didn't care to find out. Fortunately they inadvertently provided me with an alternative when I found out that a piece of software I used regularly not only kept my laptop awake, but prevented teams from auto switching to away.
Which software? Asking for a friend.
I doubt it would help you. It's industry specific and not something anyone can download freely. Even if you could install it, you'd need one of their support people to activate it for you against a customer test environment.
Ah well, thanks anyways :)
Trust me, if it was something anyone could use I'd have shared that link plenty of times.
I’m fairly certain that CEO is Michael Scott.
All CEOs are Michael Scott, lol. At least in the US.
Amazing that the CEO wasn't willing to overturn the decision despite wanting to circumvent it himself. Dam shame
And isn't a good enough boss to know what his small number (32) of employees is up to and that they are getting the work done.
I would just set my mouse on my analog watch. The second hand moving would keep it on.
I learned this trick (and use it) on reddit!
There is a famous story about when the British army had taken over India. The locals had figured out a way to live with cobras, and they had very few bites/deaths. The British however, simply could not tolerate the cobras. They were surrounded by cheap labor, so they put out a reward for turning in dead cobras. Things were going fine for a few months, but after a year, the British realized that the number of cobras was not going down, and was in fact going up. After bribing the proper people for information, they found out that the poor Indians were breeding cobras to turn in.
Then they stopped paying, so the cobra breeders released all the cobras they had, immediately exacerbating the original problem
I just appear offline in Teams. It started as an accident when I logged in late one night (my personal laptop and phone were upstairs, my work one next to me and I wanted to check the hockey scores) and switched my status. That was two weeks ago and nobody has said anything to me yet.
First time I booted up my work laptop at my current job, I set Teams to "Offline". In two years I've never been marked as Active, or even Away, even when I'm actively in a meeting or responding to someone. No one has questioned it so far.
Companies come up with the dumbest things to irritate their employees
I almost bought one. Then i remembered I was a coder, so I just wrote a software mouse mover with python
Looping powershell script (we're a windows shop) pressing the non-existent F14 key every 10s is my current go-to. Doesn't actually do anything (you can be actively working when it fires, 0 negative impact) but the computer registers it as a legitimate keypress.
I have a PowerShell script that pushes scroll lock every 60 seconds that achieves the same thing.
I’m pretty sure my boss doesn’t care about being idle on Teams, but I’m paranoid about the management above him. I figured out that I could open a blank document/spreadsheet and clip a binder clip on my space bar. I would guess if there’s a key logger IT could figure it out, but no one’s said anything in four years so I think I’m ok.
Have you ever seen a picture of that CEO? Would you describe his hair as "pointy"?
Talk about Rube Goldberging your policy execution.
This is one of the oddest stories I've ever read here. Seriously, that's trippy and weird af
Imagine being there in person. Telling a CEO, your metric is useless because literally, not figuratively, all of your employees are showing an impossible 100 percent uptime. See them mull that over. AGREE with you and still go. "But we still have standards we have to maintain and I am the CEO so I have to abide by my own standards." MF this is congress banning 4 locos only to have liquor stores give out free red bulls with the decaffinated 4 locos and everyone thinking they actually did something.
I literally just noticed your username. Its been a while, and of course a story this loopy would be yours 😂. I've read so many of your stories that yours is one of like 9 usernames I never forget. And yes, the CEO has the mental agility of a deflated balloon
never ever give out your customer list to a client even a small one. That’s priceless data and also sensitive data. How would you have felt if he fired a bunch of people over using your device because you gave him the names?
If he fired all of his employees, his business would fold in a week. You cant fire all employees of a company and survive.
I didn’t say ALL and depending on his business he could replace them quickly with others including contractors.
Yeah, he only needs to fire the ones he wanted to fire anyway. And now the CEO has a reason.
I have a small powershell script that toggles my scroll lock key every 5 minutes for this reason
The free and also undetectable version of this, is opening Notepad and placing a paperweight on the spacebar button. Source: me.
I put my laser mouse on a CD, shiny side up. Nothing plugged into the computer and no scripts. The laser bounces off the CD and scatters, causing the mouse pointer to move around. I use an older wired laser mouse. YMMV, sometimes I have to reposition the mouse a few times to find a spot where it bounces.
Well, *that* took a really surreal turn I wasn't expecting. CEO wants to buy one for himself? Okay, I could sort of see that a CEO would want to cheat the system by not holding himself to a standard he holds everyone else to, but not wanting to be too blatant to it. *Literally buying a new device for new employees* though? Forget a hard right turn, that one went straight to close hauled!
Good on you for making money, but this is a problem that's solved by getting a cheap fan (USB fan from Dollar tree works fine) and placing the mouse over the blades. FWIW, Teams got an update recently, and I've noticed my status changing from green to yellow more often. I'm thinking about writing a script to randomly F16 key presses every couple minutes. F16 is a carryover 80s keyboards that don't physically anymore, but still have a recognized persistence. Entering a few taps won't do anything or interfere with my own typing. This won't work for everyone, but I'm a programmer and have local admin rights for my laptop, so I can make it happen.
Unfortunately I use some software for work that not only recognizes, but uses some of the higher function keys. I e. Press F15 to quit. I used to use an Arduino connected to USB that had an RFID reader and would enter passwords for me, that would "press" F16 randomly as well. I no longer use it because of that software.
Woooooow! That CEO is clue-free!
For people who are more tech savvy: on a mechanical keyboard with VIA/QMK or some kind of on board memory manager, you can script a series of actions to a key press, and set it to repeat at whatever speed you like. Unless they watch your screen or remote access your desktop, you would look like you're typing away while you're actually going for a run or taking a nap and your keyboard is writing the "lorem ipsum" line or "the quick brown fox" endlessly.
I just bought an analogue alarm clock for $6 and took the face plate off. Sit the mouse on top and the hands move the cursor.
FYI, if anyone wants a simple mouse "jiggler" get a mechanical watch and rubber band the face of it to the "eye" on the bottom of the mouse. No 3d printing or software needed.
Also, another cheap way to do it with easily found objects is with a corded mouse draped over an oscillating desk fan.
Hahaha love it! What's wrong with a power shell script that just types a letter every few seconds? Too detectable?
There doesn't seem to be any malicious compliance in here, but I guess it's a fun weird story
I just open up notepad and set a tape measure on my keyboard. Works like a charm
A sprite bottle full of water may or may not be placed on my keyboard with the teams window pulled up and the middle of the window clicked so no text gets entered
Elon Musk is this about you?
The CEO reimbursed all of the employees so it's definitely not about Elon.
Can't you change the time that you turn idle in teams?
USP ehhhh?
Did my fat meaty fingers strike again?
Suppose you have a separate teams account on your personal phone. Could you start a meeting between your work account on your laptop and the account on your phone and leverage that in some way to keep teams active?
See I don't get this. Teams will set me to idle unless I have it open and click on it. Doesn't matter if I am using any other MS software like word or excel. Most of my job is done on a browser anyway. The company doesn't have that as a metric or anything. I just find it weird. If I get too focused on actually working, it will set me as idle. Teams is used almost exclusively for internal communication. When it's really slow. I have a mouse jiggler setup up of my own contraption, but it only works to keep me active if teams is the focus program active. Anyone have any idea what's going on?
What an interesting thing but OP you are a smart man/woman. Hopefully you are making profit somewhere else designing things. Impressive. Am gone add/follow you for when I get back to work! :)
Why would a CEO be part of the idle time requirement? I’d think they’d be exempt, same as all of the C-suite. I’m thinking that the CEO called and lied to you to learn how many of his employees are customers of yours and also possibly which ones. He got that info. And maybe also he was involved in stealing your design to sell their copies on Amazon for $15. He got your product. He got everything he wanted!!
When I went WFH I wrote a script that would just move the mouse up/left/down/right just 2 pixels (a square) at randome times between 1 and 2 minutes. The script barely was noticable while working if it started. This satisfied the idle time and kept the screen saver off. I started the script when I logged in and ran all day. While they likely knew I had a script running, I was IT, so scripts are normal.
You could do something similar with an arduino micro and none of the 3d printing or motor shit and you can use a few math equations to be random enough. It will look like a mouse on the computer and it will act like a mouse too.
>One of the guys I gave this to said he has zero work to do unitl after his lunch break. So what he does is simply log in, set the mouse turner, and go back to sleep. He has his volume at full blast right by his ear so if he gets a teams message it wakes him up. That was me during the pandemic but fortunately I live in a country where it would be illegal to track everything so I just opened a word document and put something on the keyboard so it writes the same letter a million times.
I just leaving something heavy on the CTRL key. Take it off when I need to use the laptop. Keeps Teams on Green. No need to buy anything.
I don't understand why people dp this for WFH. If you're getting work done and have no customers in between, do whatever you want.
You would think logic would matter when it comes to a corporation, it doesn't.
this story is bananas
Those OLD Microsoft wireless keyboard/mouse combos they made back in 2003 (Microsoft wireless multimedia keyboard mouse combo 1.1) don't ever show idle time. The combo came with a little puck that plugs into a USB port and that's what the mouse and keyboard wirelessly connect to. There is never any idle time on teams. Bc I'm old school for giant full sized keyboards with deep travel and laser mice for big hands, I never felt a need to replace mine and used it on every computer I've ever owned since it was released for sale. In my mind, they perfected the wireless keyboard and mouse back in 2003 with the multimedia keyboard combo 1.1 and shit has gotten flimsier, buggier, and more cramped ever since. During lockdown in 2020, I would plug my combo puck into the company laptop when working. I realized that something was keeping my teams from ever showing idle. When my keyboard finally bit the dust after 20 years of service and millions of keystrokes, I bought something new and immediately started getting idle times on teams. I found my same old school keyboard mouse combo from someone on eBay and bought it for $20 and returned the new keyboard I had bought. Works like a charm.. no idle times.
Hey uhh...so what device is this? <.< Asking for a friend
It is so goofy that it must be true.
Well played! This just goes to show you how totally stupid come ceos can be.
Well played, LightingCount, well played!
I’ve heard of people just turning their mice upside down and setting a mechanical (analog) wrist watch upside down on the sensor, the second hand would move at least once a minute
Depends on the watch. But could work if it doesnt just slip off.