• wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish
    8·
    6 hours ago

    Boss on Teams: Why are you off-line?

    Me: I’m not. I’m talking to you.

    Boss: Oh…

    My cares about tracking vanished in that moment.

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
    22·
    1 day ago

    I stand by the belief that management that needs this level of surveillance software needs to be in trouble as well. Management should have reasonable expectations and expect you to achieve them in a reasonable amount of time.

    • Odo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      124·
      1 day ago

      Apparently a spoon left on your laptop trackpad can trick Teams into thinking you’re still there and never marking you as “away”.

      • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        42·
        1 day ago

        Lol, I got one of those cheap mouse wigglers (mini usb plug, shows up as a Bluetooth mouse) when I could have used a spoon 😁, I’d actually pay good money for one that only wiggles every now and then and not twice a second though.

        • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          10 hours ago

          i got one you put a mouse on and plugs into a socket so the mouse is always moving, and a device that clicks my ESC key - again mechanical, so they can’t detect any devices or software and there’s regular MnK activity.

          Although the real sneaky shit is to attack the staging directory that uploads the images and activity JSON with an OS chronjob with an identical name to the tracking software so it uploads corrupted files

        • UniversalBasicJustice@quokk.auEnglish
          32·
          1 day ago

          Buy a WeVibe and control it from your phone! As a bonus, after you’re done fucking your boss’s exploitation of your labor, you can fuck yourself!

      • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
        31·
        1 day ago

        Ah, I just tend to put my mouse upside down as the LED lighting in my room cause the mouse to move erratically.

      • CentipedeFarrier@piefed.socialEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        So can something heavy that depresses one of the directional keys.

        Or at least that used to work, been a few years since I tried it.

    • Sendaris@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      I assume you rest/wedge a spoon on your keyboard to hold down a key so Teams won’t mark you as away?

  • Evil_Shrubbery@lemmy.zipEnglish
    54·
    1 day ago

    Afaik Teams user activity went AI at the end of last year.

    Also

    xdotool mousemove $(echo $(( ${RANDOM} % 800 ))) $(echo $(( ${RANDOM} % 600 )))

    • Vupware@lemmy.zip
      17·
      1 day ago

      If you understandably don’t want to tamper with scripts or installations on your work computer, pull up your own chat, as if you were going to send yourself a message, then select the text box, then put something heavy on your down arrow key. Congrats, you’re now indefinitely free.

    • python@lemmy.world
      46·
      1 day ago

      I don’t like having the mouse actually wiggle for teams to stay active. Makes it really annoying to jump back in when you get an impromptu call and have to fiddle with things to get the wiggler back off.
      There’s a program called caffeine that instead simulates a button like F15 (so one that’s unlikely to show up on a real keyboard or be mapped to do anything) being pressed once a minute, so you can just set the program to run and it will never interfere with you actually using the computer.

      • ITGuyLevi@programming.dev
        27·
        1 day ago

        I’m a fan of scroll lock, not too useful but powershell is more than happy to turn it on and then back off 200ms later at random intervals… All while showing me a countdown to quitting time and a day counter until I’m out the door.

        • Haquer@lemmy.today
          13·
          1 day ago

          I have had a scroll lock vbscript that I have used for years that just turns it on/off every minute. This is the way.

          However, we are on Windows 10 still (I assume parent company is paying for LTS) and Microslop keeps breaking teams on Win 10 so we are all using the browser version right now which shows you away if you don’t have that specific window/tab active, so it just shows everyone as away nearly 24/7, so management can’t use it as a metric at the moment and it’s fantastic.

      • vatlark@lemmy.world
        8·
        1 day ago

        Yeah caffeine has been around a long time. I’m sure these simple solutions won’t last much longer. They will us AI to monitor the actions are meaningful so people will use AI to make the actions look meaningful and so on…

        • Evil_Shrubbery@lemmy.zipEnglish
          2·
          24 hours ago

          Microslop brought AI to Copilot or even just Teams to not only monitor minutes of activity but assess how active that activity was.

            • python@lemmy.world
              2·
              11 hours ago

              Basically any kind of employee surveillance is illegal (here in Germany) unless the employee is suspected of serious misconduct or a crime. An employer is only allowed to check whether an employee fulfills the tasks given to them, not how they spend their time at work.
              I make software that other companies use and we aren’t allowed to even build any user -> activity metrics, especially not if that users boss could access them. So i.e. for Datasets, we’re only allowed to show “This Dataset was last edited by User x” and not “User x has edited the following Datasets: […]”.
              Here’s a German article about some specifics. Basically these things are very explicitly illegal: Keyloggers, surveilling browser data, surveilling email or phone call contents (unless explicit consent is given) and recording any part or the employees screen or from their webcam. Surveilling an employee with AI would definitely fall into one of these categories. oh, and the fine is around 300k€ or 1-2 years in prison.

              I’m pretty sure other European countries have similar laws 😄

              • python@lemmy.world
                3·
                10 hours ago

                Random side tangent, my favourite coworker got fired last year. The real reason was that she was unhappy (manager has been promising a change to a team that isn’t as dogshit as mine, but not delivering on it) so her output of code was pretty low. It took a year for the company to actually go through with the firing, and since “not delivering enough output” is not a valid reason for firing someone here, they had to give “the company does not have enough money to pay for you” as a reason. They gave her 3 months of paid leave (that’s the agreed duration for notices of termination, anything less would have been illegal) and wanted her to sign something that says she’s okay with being fired. She was smart enough to not do that.

                Because she could prove that the company did have enough money to pay her (they re-filled her position almost instantly) she could have sued to be re-hired. Well, she went back to the company and was like “okay, how much severance will I get to not sue you?” and she got another 15k on top of her paid leave. It was a pretty good deal. Oh, and she also got an excellent recommendation letter, because you can also sue a company if they say anything negative about you in their recommendation letters (there are lawyers specialized in finding hidden dog whistles in those letters and suing accordingly).

                German worker’s rights really are pretty solid imo. My company isn’t even bound by a union, the protections are much stricter for companies that are. My husband works for a company that voluntarily follows IG Metall guidelines and he got a random 4k/year raise recently just because IG Metall adjusted their pay recommendations. And government jobs are even crazier than that, there are some where you literally cannot be fired whatever you do.

      • Evil_Shrubbery@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        24 hours ago

        Yes, Caffeine is staple, I’ve been using it for decades (under windows too)!

        (Also I’ve never actually noticed my mouse move by one pixel during work.)

  • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    22·
    1 day ago

    For me teams fails to track activity outside the chromium window because I haven’t enabled the permission for the web app to see activity outside teams…

    This causes me to go “away” when I’m not actively using teams, but honestly don’t care enough. People still write to me and I answer when I got time

    • luftruessel@feddit.orgEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      I don’t want to install it, so when I accidentally close the browser tab, it’s just silence for me. Really started to embrace the focus time I get from that.

  • ickplant@lemmy.world
    12·
    1 day ago

    I am so happy I decided to change careers and left corporate hell to start my own business. I never have to make sure my mouse moves ever again.

      • ickplant@lemmy.world
        9·
        1 day ago

        So far it’s done well for the past 5 years, but it is harder now to find clients because the economy sucks and everyone is struggling (I’m a psychotherapist in the US). I have to plan for periods of drought, and make sure I keep up with marketing and networking.

        Honestly, in my field, once you get a good reputation, you will be OK. It’s hard starting out, and I got lucky because I started out during COVID. Tons of demand back then, and some of those clients are still with me. Now I get referrals from clients and fellow therapists because I am established.