I'm so glad that I don't know enough about teams to know what most of this means.

Unlike many others in this thread, I can't download any programs on my work laptop. I just don't have permissions.

So I found a much lower tech way of staying green. I go to the chat with yourself chat. Then I put a 3 pound weight on the backspace button. This keeps me green forever.

With my old work laptop, I was able to press backspace then wedge a set of tweezers in the key to hold it down.

Whatever works lol.

Why does it matter?

• a solo freelancer

Sometimes Teams doesn't even know if you're online during a video call

And slightly wet

I was getting marked as "away" in Microsoft Teams every day, even though I was working. I just wasn't using Microsoft Teams, so it marked me as idle.

I wrote this Autohotkey script after my boss started complaining. It clicks on Teams every 2 minutes:

global running := 0

^+1::
{
	global running := 1
	while running == 1
	{
        CoordMode("Mouse", "Screen")
        oldx := 0
        oldy := 0
        MouseGetPos(&oldx, &oldy)
        prev_active := WinActive("A")

        Try
        {
            WinActivate("ahk_class TeamsWebView")
        }
        Catch TargetError as e
        {
        }
        CoordMode("Mouse", "Window")
        Send("{Click 80 40 Left}")

        Try
        {
            WinActivate("ahk_id " prev_active)
        }
        Catch TargetError as e
        {
        }
        CoordMode("Mouse", "Screen")
        MouseMove(oldx, oldy, 0)

        sleep(115000)
	}
}

^+2::
{
	global running := 0
}

It has the side effect of preventing my computer from entering screensaver/lock screen when I really am away.

With a mouse jiggler, you can control your status manually, even from your phone while you're in bed. Away at five, Busy at nine, Available when I'm actually at the keyboard only if necessary.

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.

Wow we are all slaves. :( I type this between my Teams meetings.

I do get that this is the real differentiator to businesses in a chat app. how much it spies on employees. we need to unionize yesterday in tech

Just set the status to something other than active. If it says buy or away 100% of the time, even while on a call, then any crazy manager that's monitoring it will start to think it's bugged.

your job sucks

Your not working if it takes u more than 2 minutes to any thing

If you start a chat with yourself click the message textbox and hold down the left shift key the teams will think that your typing and it never changes the status. You don't need to make any changes to your system or install anything with this. Just place a heavy object on the shift key.