Wells Fargo Layoffs

Sam Parr shares a story about recent layoffs at Wells Fargo related to employee productivity monitoring.

"Last week Wells Fargo made an announcement where a couple dozen of their employees, specifically ones who worked in the wealth management unit, were laid off. They laid them off because they found that they were using these devices that you put your mouse on top of and it's almost like a treadmill and it makes it seem like the mouse is constantly moving on their computer. They also did it with keypads where they had this device above their keyboard where it was typing stuff.

The reason they did that is because what has happened recently since the pandemic is there's been software that has absolutely exploded where it monitors employees' work. This has already existed in remote-first companies, but now many people are remote and this type of software has exploded to the point where something like 50% of all employers who have remote workers use some type of spy software.

There's a company called Hubstaff and Teramind, I think it's called. There's two of them, they have something like 5,000 companies amongst them and they are employee tracking software. They did this survey where they looked at a million of their customers or a million users using their spying tracking software and they found that roughly 7% of the million people who are using this software were using these mouse jigglers or something like it."