I think a lot of people would like to work from home precisely because they do not have enough to do at work. Having to sit at a computer all day pretending to have work you don't actually have is a form of torture imo. I've had jobs with too little to do and jobs with too much to do and I can't decide what's worse, honestly.

Firefighters hahahahahaha. I calculated my brother's pay once. He made about the same as me per hour but brought home almost thrice as much because he's paid in 24-hour shifts.

I don't get the morons calling this dude a "shi**y employee". He did his job and fulfilled his role. For the duration of his working hours. This is what he is paid for. It's not about reserving his time exclusively for work in that 8 hours. This is 2022 right? I cannot fathom why people would rather be treated like slaves for that 8 hours.

I spent the money on a mouse mover. I’m the same way. I am highly productive and get stuff done that it takes other workers all day to do. My boss isn’t a clock watcher but my coworkers are and so my mouse mover saves me drama when they think they are assigned more work than I am. If I were in the office, I’d just be playing on my phone or some other time waster. So what’s the difference between that and doing a load of laundry at home?

Companies that track these sorta of metrics are dumb. I had a company track number of bugs introduced. Indeed the total number of bugs went down. As did the number of new features. Another company based metrics on coffee coverage, and our code became overly complex, in order to increase coverage. It became mock city in that codebase. Metrics can be good, but as a view into a trend. Not as individual performance indicators. This chat idle nonsense is particularly stupid. What if they're in a meeting. When I'm on zoom, I go idle. When I'm on the phone, same. Do you know when I'm not idle. When I'm chatting on slack about movies or some other pointless nothing.

Im a project accountant. My monthly 'schedule' is essentially two weeks of frenzied work & overtime to meet my monthly revenue & cost recognition deadline & then two weeks of 'down' time where I only have a few required tasks but still deal with any manager and/or client questions, processing budget & cost estimate requests, etc. It's asinine to expect me to be at 100% capacity each & every day & with any position with similar requirements to mine. That's also with me being a team player by suggesting positive changes, taking on more responsibility & difficult accounts with no expectation of a pay adjustment. So if OP can complete their work in less than 8 hours a day, in what world is that not a good thing? They are fulfilling their obligations. Any issue should be with management & maybe load management, especially considering they state the main metric they're being judged on was 'idle' time & task completion doesn't seem to be an issue. Its sad when morons are anti-labor.

A few years ago I got in trouble for going idle/away in office chat AT work because I would be up away from my desk helping someone else, as my job required as team leader. They were mad because "what if we need to contact you?" Stand up and yell for me Tiffany is a g*d d*mn open room full of cubicles. My team constantly submitted me for these dumb corporate awards and we had this interoffice praise system that you could send a thank you for a coworker for helping them and at the end of the quarter for ever one you got your name was put in a drawing for a grand prize. My team loved me because I was always there for them and put them first. They were dealing with customers/general public and I was there to support and help them not sit around sucking corporates d*ck. My name was always removed because of my idle/away status. It's such a dumb metric.

And this is why I now work for myself! No more jiggling the mouse 😂

The biggest problem here is that someone is being paid to work 8 hours but only has 3 - 5 hours work a day. I wonder how many other people experience this. Why on earth are they hiring if the people they have don't have enough work?

Wow, you've managed to find a real-world example of the autohotkey script I use to keep myself from getting disconnected due to AFK in online games. (When it takes 2-4 hours to log in, you definitely don't want to have to do it all over again because of pesky things like eating)

Just a reminder that most managers, if they have degrees, have a degree in business...which I learned from rooming with business majors is the most half-assed, easy to pass curriculum in all of university.

I'd like to add the fact that it's not like he is "stealing" time to his company by working actively 3/5h during a 6/7h day. It is almost physically impossible to stay focus this long and is actually average office efficiency. Besides, he is matching his expectations so who cares ? You can't ask for both means and results. He gave them results, they asked for means, he showed them he could do that too, period. And for the "he could work more" people: maybe he can manage to successfully complete his work this fast because he has time to rest, change focus and anticipate. Charge him more and he will be slower and more prone to mistakes.

The company policy is just plain stupid....

Have to be careful with those mouse mover exe's depending on where you work because they can get flagged by corp security software. This script could get flagged too. I know they show up in our security events and are technically against corp policy because they are circumventing security policies. I know ppl who were using them to keep machines from locking while doing large, time consuming file copies because if it locked, it would drop the connection. I completely understood why they were using them but management still flipped out when they saw the exes on some reports. Also had to laugh at the person who talked about just adjusting the timeout settings. A good system admin will lock those settings through group policy so you can't change them.

Another solution is open notepad and place a weight on your keyboard to trigger keystrokes. I use an old Samsung dex device. Remove weight and close notepad when u need to work.

Hahahah all I kept thinking of was 1 of those red bird statue things with the top hat and monacles that people put on their desk that constantly dips down like its taking a drink and then up again, then down again every few seconds and how u could just put it over ur keyboard so it would be clicking a letter over and over all day lol but I agree with another comment on here where someone said they had jobs with 2 little 2 do and 2 much 2 do & cant decide what's worse. I used 2 lay on the floor of my bar wen I worked a very fancy country club & we had no closing time, it was wenever the last member decided 2 leave. Id b there alone 4 HOURS & the bar was tiny so id clean it 10 times & still have hrs left of nothing. Didnt kno if I'd leave at 8pm or 1 am if someone wanted a late dinner. Then id have nightmares at my office job of being buried alive under mortgage refinance orders.

I thank God I don't work in an Office.. What a horrible life it may be.. I am a contractor and make 2-3 times more then most and I mean MOST office workers but I get dirty.. People always look at us like we are fools who know nothing and just cuss and drink.. But guess what we don't have to jiggle a mouse or have someone telling me to type all day.. Most of the time I tell my guys if you finish early you get your 8.. That's most construction companies.. Office life is for the birds..

It's because boomers and old hierarchies don't understand what the concept of being paid to be available means 9 out of 10 you're there in case you need to do something okay something pops up you can handle it immediately they don't understand that nobody can be 100% busy 100% of the time burnout alone would take out someone this concept of there's always work is a lie and it's something that they tell themselves so they don't feel like they're wasting money paying a bunch of people to sit there when inevitably that's what they do with that's part of having a physical workforce and we need to stop allowing this wrong and stupid mindset to keep going

Imagine being mad at this. Imagine thinking ppl actually "work" for 7 hours a day. Ppl are stupid. Change the work day to be shorter TBH.

As an employer, I find this deceitful. WFH doesn't work with people that read books and watch TV on the employer's dime. That's stealing, imh.

You don't need a mouse jiggler and you don't need to program. Just put any weighted object on the control key. Done. You're welcome

This guy needs to read between the lines. His face doesn't fit in that company.

Lol honestly reading this article makes me laugh honestly and especially a comment where the person was putting a book on keyboard button to keep the laptop active and stopping it from into screen lock or idle mode. Shocked absolutely. I wish I could educate these people. I wouldn't even hire such naive people. Do one thing Google a tool called "mouse jiggler", run it and you won't have to deal with such a crap mentioned in this artile

WTF is with all of the trashy FN ads all of a sudden?

Company should raise his goals. If they are paying him a salary for full 8 hours and he is only working 5, his goals are not adjusted to his workload. If he were paid by task then yes, the idle thing doesn't matter. Otherwise it does

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Oh, the guy who watches TV, plays video games and reads books on company time is the hero in this story? Wtf is this entitled world coming to? You don't want to go back to work because the metrics prove you're more productive at home? Why the f**k would anyone want to pay for 8 hours of work when you only admit to actually doing 5? I hope they make you hourly and only pay you for work done. This type of mentality sickens me.

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If you only have 3-5 hours of work per day, then you should only be getting paid for those hours IMO.