Wells Fargo fires workers over fake keyboard activity ( www.bbc.com )

shalafi , 12 days ago

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.

garretble , 13 days ago

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.

captainjaneway , 13 days ago

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.

sxan , 13 days ago

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.

brianorca , 11 days ago

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.

sxan , 11 days ago

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.

brianorca , 10 days ago

True, having the right metric is important. But having no metric might be an overreaction to the crisis caused by bad metrics.