5 ms·

If it can be done in a productive and enjoyable way, that might not be bad. I am sure that's not how it is. If I had to work in sweatshop for whatever reason,

by sqeaky 10y ago

If it can be done in a productive and enjoyable way, that might not be bad. I am sure that's not how it is. If I had to work in sweatshop for whatever reason, it would make it suck just a little less if it were done in "events". For example get three people to have a race to build ten pairs of shoes. Take a breather, cheer on another group of employees, maybe a small prize for someone winning such a race. Have timed trials to build the fastest pair of shoes. Don't take away your employees freedom, encourage them to do what you want, presumably make shoes in this contrived example. If people come up with their own ways to do it fast and they want to do more of it, then just maybe it will actually happen faster. I think it works better with code. I like competing with my coworkers on optimizing things that pass our unit tests. We each try to optimize a given snippet of code in a unit test. Whichever is fastest and passes all the tests wins and gets committed. EDIT - I know its shitty in these sweat shops, clearly what I described wasn't happening. I figured phrasing like: > I am sure that's not how it is. and > it would make it suck just a little less No need to downvote a silly idea so aggressively. If someone needs to work in a sweat and if the person running it is decent they will try to make it not suck. That is why most sweatshops suck they aren't run by decent and this wouldn't work. Which is why I even contrasted it with software.

jacquesm 10y ago
This is not some kind of silly contest. Too slow by a little bit and you're out, also yesterdays 'peak' is tomorrows cut-off.
- scythe 10y ago
  >yesterdays 'peak' is tomorrows cut-off Obviously such a rule could not be applied for more than a few days. Humans have physiological limits no matter how hard you twist the psychological ones! I am guessing it is somewhere in between. What may have started as a clever manager's way to motivate employees became another bureaucratic hoop for people to jump through.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    It's not that much different from 'up or out'. There are always new entrants waiting to take over your job.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - krapp 10y ago
    > Humans have physiological limits no matter how hard you twist the psychological ones! People will push themselves to the brink of death (and beyond, sometimes) when given a choice between meeting a quota and not having a job. The quota can be unreasonable, as long as the company is constantly firing poor performers and training new people. The gamification is serious business. Any button the company can push, any knob they can twist, any game they can get you to play to get you to work faster, and shave another second off your time, they will push and twist and play.
    - scythe 10y ago
      I was questioning the seriousness of his comment. It is literally impossible to implement the system he described. You will never find talented enough people after, say, six days, regardless of who you hire. I am not claiming that working people to the bone does not happen at all.
      - FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago
        Even if the contrived example above is impossible that hasnt stopped people from doing it.... As I stated above, punishing workers/slaves who didnt meet the quota meant less rations, cutting off hands, etc..which of course made it harder to reach the quota. The Congo Free State is an example of thia
- sqeaky 10y ago
  I wasn't stating how it is, I was stating a silly hypothetical of how it could be and decent for everyone. Clearly it doesn't work if the owners don't respect human rights as seems so common.
aeontech 10y ago
You really don't think the workers would see the "competition" as a transparent ploy? FWIW, this was a well established practice in Soviet Union - top factory performers got prizes, medals and other rewards for beating expectations. [1][2][3] Of course, this also tends to tempt the management to raise the required quotas over time. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_emulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_emulation [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_worker_of_Communist_Labour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_worker_of_Communist_Labo... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement
- luca_ing 10y ago
  > You really don't think the workers would see the "competition" as a transparent ploy? Even well-trained engineers miss this "transparent ploy". Otherwise there wouldn't be such a culture of glorifying long working hours and almost no holidays in the US, or at least there would be much more push-back.
meddlepal 10y ago
Nobody really cares about whether work can be done in a "productive and enjoyable way". If your company or engineering manager thought they could get away with turning you into human machine because that's your only option then they most likely would or someone else would eventually. Be very thankful software developers are in such high demand because there will be a time when that little competition will not be viewed as some sort of team morale boosting exercise but just another bit of frivolous spending to be eliminated. It may not happen in mine or your working career, but it will happen eventually.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Funny, it's the software developers that are instrumental in implementing 'gamification' for all kinds of work related activities.
  - goldenkey 10y ago
    You mean the ones' who like programming too much and aren't even in academia. And don't realize it's a means to an end (it's a tool to build things.) Yeah those people suck.
FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago
I think you're being downvoted because you are somewhat making light of a horrible and brutish reality a great deal of the world's population has to endure so that developed nations can have widgets and experience growth. The reason that you can have such activities at work is because you are providing a service, software engineering, that has a high demand but is in short supply. Also, this usually isn't done with the goal of increasing productivity... it is done to maintain morale and make the company fun to work at so you dont leave. Not many experienced workers particularly enjoy these races, like employee of the month because it eventually becomes a way to abuse workers. In a former life, I was a claims rep for an auto insurance company. We had a competition to do the most claims per day at rhe lowest cost. It was terrible. We were mobile, so one component was driving through Los Angeles traffic to someone's car or body shop. It encouraged people to drive like maniacs, skip all their breaks, and to stiff the customer on auto claims, which was shortsighted because they lost customers from us stiffing them and evetually were sued because this competition essentially limited our breaks. These things almost always end in a race to the bottom once labor supply increases or demand for labor decreases. History is replete with horrific examples of competitions and quotas amongst low skilled. workers/slaves. In the oxymoronic(al) Congo Free State, colonial Belgium enacted a labor policy demanding a quota of rubber. If not met, workers, their wives, and their children would have their hands amputated. Article if you are interested :http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/35/181.html http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/35/181.html > That is why most sweatshops suck they aren't run by decent and this wouldn't work. It has little to do with the moral character of people running the sweatshops, although that does not absolve them from being pieces of shit. It has more to do with the economic system, its incentives, and consumers turning a blind eye to the origin of their products. The Stanford Prison experiment showed how normal people could turn into monsters given the right conditions.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  > I think you're being downvoted because you are somewhat making light of a horrible and brutish reality That is actually a good reason to be downvoted.

by sqeaky 10y ago

jacquesm 10y ago

This is not some kind of silly contest. Too slow by a little bit and you're out, also yesterdays 'peak' is tomorrows cut-off.

scythe 10y ago
>yesterdays 'peak' is tomorrows cut-off Obviously such a rule could not be applied for more than a few days. Humans have physiological limits no matter how hard you twist the psychological ones! I am guessing it is somewhere in between. What may have started as a clever manager's way to motivate employees became another bureaucratic hoop for people to jump through.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  It's not that much different from 'up or out'. There are always new entrants waiting to take over your job.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- krapp 10y ago
  > Humans have physiological limits no matter how hard you twist the psychological ones! People will push themselves to the brink of death (and beyond, sometimes) when given a choice between meeting a quota and not having a job. The quota can be unreasonable, as long as the company is constantly firing poor performers and training new people. The gamification is serious business. Any button the company can push, any knob they can twist, any game they can get you to play to get you to work faster, and shave another second off your time, they will push and twist and play.
  - scythe 10y ago
    I was questioning the seriousness of his comment. It is literally impossible to implement the system he described. You will never find talented enough people after, say, six days, regardless of who you hire. I am not claiming that working people to the bone does not happen at all.
    - FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago
      Even if the contrived example above is impossible that hasnt stopped people from doing it.... As I stated above, punishing workers/slaves who didnt meet the quota meant less rations, cutting off hands, etc..which of course made it harder to reach the quota. The Congo Free State is an example of thia
sqeaky 10y ago
I wasn't stating how it is, I was stating a silly hypothetical of how it could be and decent for everyone. Clearly it doesn't work if the owners don't respect human rights as seems so common.

aeontech 10y ago

You really don't think the workers would see the "competition" as a transparent ploy? FWIW, this was a well established practice in Soviet Union - top factory performers got prizes, medals and other rewards for beating expectations. [1][2][3] Of course, this also tends to tempt the management to raise the required quotas over time. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_emulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_emulation [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_worker_of_Communist_Labour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_worker_of_Communist_Labo... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement

luca_ing 10y ago
> You really don't think the workers would see the "competition" as a transparent ploy? Even well-trained engineers miss this "transparent ploy". Otherwise there wouldn't be such a culture of glorifying long working hours and almost no holidays in the US, or at least there would be much more push-back.

meddlepal 10y ago

Nobody really cares about whether work can be done in a "productive and enjoyable way". If your company or engineering manager thought they could get away with turning you into human machine because that's your only option then they most likely would or someone else would eventually. Be very thankful software developers are in such high demand because there will be a time when that little competition will not be viewed as some sort of team morale boosting exercise but just another bit of frivolous spending to be eliminated. It may not happen in mine or your working career, but it will happen eventually.

jacquesm 10y ago
Funny, it's the software developers that are instrumental in implementing 'gamification' for all kinds of work related activities.
- goldenkey 10y ago
  You mean the ones' who like programming too much and aren't even in academia. And don't realize it's a means to an end (it's a tool to build things.) Yeah those people suck.

FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago

I think you're being downvoted because you are somewhat making light of a horrible and brutish reality a great deal of the world's population has to endure so that developed nations can have widgets and experience growth. The reason that you can have such activities at work is because you are providing a service, software engineering, that has a high demand but is in short supply. Also, this usually isn't done with the goal of increasing productivity... it is done to maintain morale and make the company fun to work at so you dont leave. Not many experienced workers particularly enjoy these races, like employee of the month because it eventually becomes a way to abuse workers. In a former life, I was a claims rep for an auto insurance company. We had a competition to do the most claims per day at rhe lowest cost. It was terrible. We were mobile, so one component was driving through Los Angeles traffic to someone's car or body shop. It encouraged people to drive like maniacs, skip all their breaks, and to stiff the customer on auto claims, which was shortsighted because they lost customers from us stiffing them and evetually were sued because this competition essentially limited our breaks. These things almost always end in a race to the bottom once labor supply increases or demand for labor decreases. History is replete with horrific examples of competitions and quotas amongst low skilled. workers/slaves. In the oxymoronic(al) Congo Free State, colonial Belgium enacted a labor policy demanding a quota of rubber. If not met, workers, their wives, and their children would have their hands amputated. Article if you are interested :http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/35/181.html http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/35/181.html > That is why most sweatshops suck they aren't run by decent and this wouldn't work. It has little to do with the moral character of people running the sweatshops, although that does not absolve them from being pieces of shit. It has more to do with the economic system, its incentives, and consumers turning a blind eye to the origin of their products. The Stanford Prison experiment showed how normal people could turn into monsters given the right conditions.

sqeaky 10y ago
> I think you're being downvoted because you are somewhat making light of a horrible and brutish reality That is actually a good reason to be downvoted.