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I’m so glad my company a) has a “nobody wants teams” stance and even recommends against it to our clients, and b) doesn’t give a fuck if I go idle for hours because they hired me to do a job and if it’s getting done they’re happy.
Micromanaging culture needs to die. Fire employees who don’t do the job and be done with it.
Thankfully no one seems to care about teams status at work. If I’m on teams it means I’m not working.
I have teams open all day at my PC and on my work phone because that’s how I get contacted to fix things. Annoyingly domain accounts no longer log us into teams so I have to reauthentice it 3 times a week. Worse still is every few months they’ll reset the settings to default so that if I have teams open on my PC all notifications play there. My PC is always muted and I rely on my phone for notifications because I’m usually walking around the building and remoting back to the cube. So I’ll go through days where I’m pissed off because I’m not getting notifications only to remember to go check the settings on the PC to find out yup its set to only play notifications there.
With all these “IT can see when you connect a USB device” comments, I must ask has anyone ever actually worked for an IT department that made you micromanage/snitch on people like that? It all sounds like a bunch of hypothetical scare mongering to me. Granted, I’ve never been company IT for a fortune 500, but I’ve been outsourced IT for dozens and dozens of other companies all across the spectrum, and the notion that we were monitoring USB devices connected to each workstation is laughable. We monitor for the presence of malicious files, files with names like passwords.txt, and suspicious logins to your account. That’s pretty much it. People change mice all the time. I’ve used an arduino-based jiggler on my own work PC.
Furthermore, and this is the more important detail for myself, I’ve known many many different IT people working at every level and I don’t think I’ve ever met a single one who gives half a shit if employees aren’t being productive. Just don’t break your computer please, and if you do, for the love of God don’t try to fix it yourself. Personally, I’ve never seen any instance of any worker ever trying to circumvent arbitrary productivity metrics with easy workarounds because I’m not a fucking snitch. In IT, we also have bullshit “productivity” targets that are completely decoupled from actual productivity. We get that it’s bullshit. If there’s an IT department out there that’s full of snitches trying to catch workers slacking, that sounds like a genuinely awful place to work.
Generic USB HID Device driver on a microcontroller with commercial USB IDs and IT doesn’t see shit. Looks like an old USB mouse with no support.
We definitely do not look at any Teams activity data - SMB environment though
Your not working if it takes u more than 2 minutes to any thing
That’s the fucking point wtf
Mouse Jiggler with Adjustable Timer
It’s simple enough to just make one too.
FTTYI opened my email and it fucking defaulted to Copilot. Like, bitch I clicked my email. Not your half baked AI bullshit.
perfection
I’m going to give you a mega useful tip.
You need to create a group. You can kick the user later and say it was an accident. Then you start a meet inside of that group. You can be the only one in the call. Change your status from Busy to available again on top. Just leave yourself muted inside of that Teams call. Your Teams will never go inactive and neither will your laptop.
If anyone is wondering yes, it can see that you were in a meeting by yourself all day
who is “it” exactly?
Information technology. The department at your company who knows everything.
Pennywise is the character’s name, IIRC.
IT department probably
As a sysadmin I sometimes feel like an “it” when I’m forced to emerge from my cubicle.
When that one power user who writes their own scripts walks by the IT area: “Come play with us!”
I just always have mine set to show away. Management stops noticing when you are yellow in meetings regularly.
Hmm, I just open notepad and use a stack of coins or something similar to hold down a key to stay active if I need to.
It’s stupid we even have to care about our status on teams. Why should anyone give a fuck about your teams status as long as you’re getting to your work done properly and on time?
Although to be fair right now I’m using a client laptop so my employer basically sees me as offline all the time but I’m reachable by teams or email on my phone.
Anyways it’s just dumb. Fun trick though, I didn’t know you could do that.
There’s a tool for Windows called Caffeine that simulates pressing the F15 key, which is almost never used by any software being that most keyboards don’t have function keys that go that high.
From the webpage:
If you have problems with your PC locking or going to sleep, caffeine will keep it awake. It works by simulating a keypress once every 59 seconds, so your machine thinks you’re still working at the keyboard, so won’t lock the screen or activate the screensaver.
I can’t install unapproved software on my work laptop, probably like most others hence I ain’t messing with that.
The best is to get a physical mouse jiggler
Preferably one that moves your current mouse. The USB dongles all have the same hardware id and can be tracked.
For what it’s worth, with Caffeine, it’s a single, portable executable, so it doesn’t need to be installed in the conventional sense, but if your IT department monitors processes or whitelists what is allowed to run, this would still be a problem.
What’s does F15 does? My keyboard only goes to F12
F12 and F3
It’s up to application software to define what it does. I have never seen a keyboard with function keys beyond F12 in person, but they do exist. Software is very unlikely to respond to F15, which is why Caffeine uses it to keep the system awake. Notably, the program can also instruct Windows to stay awake using its native mechanism instead (possibly insufficient for something like MS Teams) or another virtual key code of the user’s specification.
I open notepad and shut the laptop lid halfway on the enter key. Always green, always working.
This is a good tip. I haven’t used it in a while but you can also log into it from web interfaces so i think it was possible to shutdown the desktop app and log into it from other places where it didn’t have the same kind of access.
It also eats up to 1,5gb of ram sitting idle as a chat program. So yeah it’s not running unless I need it and then it gets to shut down again. Luckily we don’t use it as our primary chat tool.
My boss loves sending me messages saying “Are you working today?” within 3 minutes of being idle on teams at any point in the day.
Other times if i’m idle he’ll call me just to give me some busy work or try and “catch me” not paying attention or something.
In the office I can be idle on teams for hours at a time and there’s never, ever random spot checks for productivity… and we have no objectives, goals or project management (because he doesn’t think any PM principles are effective.)
A bad boss can really make a job suck. If it was me I’d get a mouse wiggler, apparently there’s a surprisingly many physical ‘mouse movers’ out there nowadays.
People don’t quit jobs, they quit managers.
Back when my company was using teams I had a script that would press a button that’s not actually on my keyboard (something like F25) every minute, so my teams was always green and it was not noticeable from my point of view
My boss bills customers for his on-site visits (technical) wherein he goes on site, plugs in his laptop, and makes me remotely do all his work remotely. I can’t wait to burn this bridge when the time is right.
The saying is true for 95% of jobs. People don’t quit bad jobs, they quit bad bosses.
There’s a natural divot on my desk that does it for me.
But I also have my outlook calendar filled with my scheduled hours so my status shows I am always busy (working my schedules hours).
So hasn’t been a problem and it’s been years.
Mine tells me to take all appointments and do all errands i’d need to take off on my wfh days.
If i’m idle during those I still get the nasty grams, and 50/50 on any of them he asks if I took the day off because he doesn’t see it in the team calendar or HR’s PTO official system, even though there’s zero expectation for us to take PTO for a doctor’s appointment or other errand that takes a couple of hours at any point.
Guy has taken a day and a half this week to work on his own personal stuff without requesting PTO. I took 1.5 hours on one day and got nastygrams (the “I don’t see your pto in the pto calendar” (again, tells me in person not to put it in… but every time i’m remote and idle for an appointment there’s now a record in writing asking me where I am and why I didn’t take pto.)
Later, when I see the guy in person he totally understands and it’s not a problem… so what the fuck are you messaging me for like this asshole? Why? The fuck is your problem? It’s in my fucking calendar, and i’m not taking actual time off or a half day or something - so why would I put in the team wide calendar that i’m going to a doctor? They don’t need to know!
I’m not actually suggesting this is the case in your situation, but there definitely exist work environments in which employees are given contradictory directives so that non-compliance can be logged and used as justification later for lack of giving a raise or disciplinary measures.
Sounds like your boss has a boss and those checkin/nasty grams are how they measure their tasks.
That implies he is also sitting around watching Teams instead…being productive.
And at the end of the day, unless you’re working at a start-up, your business won’t fail because someone wasn’t nickle-and-dime-ing individual workers on their productivity time.
warm and moist…
Set up a solo meeting with yourself. During meeting it doesn’t change the status at all, so after you join that solo meeting in the morning set yourself to available and you will be available whole day.
That is a very Microsoft kind of behavior
This is also the way to put a real meeting your in on hold.
It makes it look like you got interrupted and had to step away.
I learned from my wife that you can start a meeting by yourself using the Meet Now button on the Teams calendar, and that will keep you flagged as Busy.
I have Java on my machine. So I wrote a small program that moves the mouse one pixel every minute. Forever green.
I went the other route: I set to away until 2030. Now they don’t know if I’m really away or not.
You are a fucking master mind! I wonder what other secret knowledge you possess, and I’m serious.
A buddy of mine at work refuses to ever accept or decline invites - even 1-on-1s with his boss.
That way it’s always a surprise if they are going to show up.
I know a guy like that. It’s infuriating because it’s a waste of everybody’s time when they don’t show up. Just decline for fucks sake! At least I can tell the PM that we tried unsuccessfully to schedule and that we have to delay and I can play some video games!
If I schedule a meeting and someone doesn’t accept that invite I just assume they’re not showing up and act accordingly. Might send them a ping a few minutes before hand but if they’re a stakeholder and needed for the meeting and choose to ignore the invite(s)/email … That meeting gonna get cancelled or rescheduled.
Not that that very often happens but I’d just start bothering said guy about it with pings or email follow ups until they get the picture. Or just cancel the meeting(s) if no response 24 hours before scheduled. Something like that.
Not even to be petty or annoying just because they should be accepting or declining for the simple fact that everyone else has schedules to keep too. Obviously this advice may be bad or not applicable but yeah that sucks.
I don’t schedule meetings with people I don’t actually interact with. Pretty simple. By the time we are doing synchronous communication, it’s because async has hit an effort limit and there’s good incentive for everyone to show up.
Unfortunately my PM will say “let’s meet and see if X joins otherwise we end earlier”. Which means wasting a lot of time. Because X won’t join, the PM will start talking about irrelevant stuff, and if we’re lucky we waste 15 minutes, or more.
I just hate this PM.
What you say is reasonable and is also how I would have handled it. But in this project I have no power and the PM is…just not very good at it.
That sucks. I feel like a lot of stuff is easier and just better without even dealing with a PM - good ones can be worth their weight in gold though if you’re dealing with multiple folks on a project and they do their job right.
Unfortunately, that’s very rare.
powershell script that toggles the scrolllock key every 3 minutes.
Powershell is locked down on our machines via AD policy. I used to run a tool from the Windows Store, but they locked that down too. They didn’t come for the JVM yet.
I was in a similar situation so I bought a usb mouse wiggler, shows up like a standard usb mouse once plugged in and costs like nothing on AliExpress.
It really baffled me though, shut down all tools, on a developer machine, why?
I used to hate it too but once you realize how clueless most devs are it becomes more and more understandable.
If you have Excel you can use VBA to send keycodes too. :-)
I just use teams-for-linux which has auto-online built-in.
Auto-online? 😯 I’m very curious: how do you know it has that? It hasn’t been working that great for me, Microsoft won’t always sign it in.
It’s listed as a feature and you can see it in action if you’re like me and keep displays on for 10+ mins of inactivity… I think the only conflict to it would be if your computer put itself to sleep for power saving.
I’ve had no issues with it; can’t even recall one. Sign-in issues could just be your company SSO being shit as Microsoft’s SSO so often is…
Much less resource intensive on your dev machine to just use an esp32 and write a program to pretend to be a mouse and wiggle itself. Benefit is it is completely undetectable on every platform as well.
For me it’d be better to just run the stupid Teams app on my work phone, but that’s always been a hassle because it locks itself and then I don’t always get the notifications. My primary work laptop only has 16 gigs of RAM, and having Teams eagerly gobble up a significant portion of that is highly frustrating.
There’s been several occasions where I’ve been building or debugging something, RAM being tight, and the OOM killer correctly deduces that Teams has to go. Makes me laugh every time I finally check back on Teams and realise it’s been dead for a while.
The whole “two minute timeout” is a stupid thing anyway. A non-trivial portion of my job is to read and write documentation. That takes time, and you will sit “idle” for a few minutes while reading and processing. My Windows machine would kill the BT connection to my mouse and keyboard, which would sometimes require re-pairing to get working again. For the longest time I thought the problem was the mouse and keyboard, but those problems vanished once I got a Linux dev machine.
I fucking hate everything Microsoft.
That sadly doesn’t work for my workstation, the VDI still locks after 5 mins and I need to 2 factor authenticate again. So I bought a physical mouse Jiggler for 7ish euros and I’m happy again.
I got roasted by friends calling me lazy because of it, fast forward 3 months and half of them asked me where I bought it. Now most of them have it, including several of my colleagues.
For the computer it’s an actual mouse since the input is external, so it just works. I’m always green baby ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
I’m so glad we use Matrix at work. Our IT department even tells us explicitly not to use Teams if we can avoid it.
Hire me please xD
Let me guess, you signed an NDA and can’t tell us where.
I’m trying not to dox myself, but it’s a university in Germany. :D
How is matrix as a discord/teams replacement for work?
It really depends on what you actually need, how much setup the IT department can manage and how well the change is communicated and managed, I guess.
We use it (i.e. the Element client) mostly for chatting and another open source solution (BigBlueButton) for online meetings, but voice and video calls are possible directly with Element. Matrix lacks the out of the box office product integration for collaborating on presentations, spreadsheets or text files that Teams has. It can be extended via widgets though, which includes at least etherpad and afaik there are options for nextcloud (which has collabora) integration as well, so with a bit of setup, even that could be emulated.
So that would of course require some setup and maintenance and if the company used Teams before, some training and help for the users as well.
Hope I can bring this kind of change to a company at some point. Matrix is the shit
- physical mouse “jiggler” (mine is a turntable) that isn’t connected to the work device
- physical key presser on a switch to press ESC every few seconds for when I’m pooping (this way the software shows both m n k activity)
I’ve even gone so far as to write a bash script that monitors the userdata folder that stores the JSON for activity and overwrite it with plausible but fake random activity data and screenshots, then name the process the same as the software so it’s virtually undetectable- logs will show “Productivity Software Name” writing to its userdata directory at the same time the actual software is writing to it.
…Have you considered finding a new job, perhaps?
I mean it took me all of 20 minutes. They have the screenshots saved in the folder, the JSON just is a time stamp and a list of urls I looked at in that time.
For sure, I just hate the idea of my employer spying on me constantly. I guess ones that don’t are few and far between these days.
