Funny you mention this specifically. I have always thought of plumbing as a job that won't be replaced by AI. It's a gross job, but we'll always need someone to unblock the toilets.

When I try to count them, I keep falling asleep.

What's wrong with multiple email accounts? Seems like sensible digital hygiene to me.

In my experience Google has got worse at this lately. Gmail will hide all the routine emails from linkedin or various loyalty accounts into the "promotions" or "social" tabs. So they never show up in your primary inbox, where they are more likely to be deleted. Gmail will also auto-move emails after some arbitrary amount of time, for example payal receipts disappear from my primary inbox after a few days, I think they get migrated to "shopping."

Google wants you to hit your storage limit, but to be so dependent on their ecosystem that you just pony up a subscription fee. Then they get money from the user, and money from mining all the user's data.

Good for you, and thanks for sharing your tips. I'm trying to leave Google too, though it's easier for me because pretty much all that's left is gmail. Google's calendar has always seemed too flaky for me, it never handles time zones properly. Though to be fair, the behaviour I want from international time zones is often subject to change :-) A paper diary is actually the best compromise for my current level of complexity.

In my experience Google deliberately tries to break this every couple of months. Google doesn't want people to look after their own data.

Almost 20 years ago, back when Gmail "only" offered a gigabyte, I remember reading right here on Slashdot about a software tool that used the storage as a (very slow) online disk drive. So this has been going on almost as long as Gmail has been around.

These days, Google encourages these uses, with Google Drive

Mouse jigglers have been A Thing for years now. I used one on my work laptop a decade ago to get around the damn screen lock that I couldn't turn off.

A decent Facebook engineer can probably make one in an afternoon with an Arduino. Bonus points if they disable the Arduino bootloader so it doesn't show up in the logs.

Or they could buy one of these and just plug it in: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/31...

It's an ATTiny85 so it can be customised pretty easily if necessary.

Ah, OK. I get it now. No, to the best of my knowledge Slashdot articles still come from users.

If I had a mod point, you'd get it.

I wasn't at Amazon, but I can confirm. 20 years ago I worked in a call centre and they used a similar metric, which was basically "calls per hour." There was another perverse incentive too - if you didn't actually solve a customer's problem, they'd probably need to call back again soon, further inflating your stats. I remember listening to the guy who had the best stats, all he ever said was "fix your firewall."

As other posters have stated, the way to fix this has two parts. First, better metrics. Second, better management who understand the work and can prevent their staff from gaming the metrics.

You're commenting on one right now.

Good for you. I got out when the carbon footprint became too big.

Hahahahaha!

Yeah, that's why the average member of the public has such great coding skills. And they are great at saving their work, and making backups, and adding attachments to emails, and and and....