5 ms·

I've met a number of people working in various piece work [1] industries and I make it a point to ask them about their view of payments and how their work effor

by abtinf 9y ago

I've met a number of people working in various piece work [1] industries and I make it a point to ask them about their view of payments and how their work effort correlates with payment. What I've found is that with near certainty, these individuals suffer from a kind of economic myopia. They view every aspect of their work as something though should be charged for and they complain about every little bit they aren't paid for separately. They are almost never open to the idea that it doesn't matter how much they get paid for each action; what matters is their total income. They view anything they don't charge for as money that rightfully belongs to them. Note that this is not about education level either. Easily, the single most vocal group about piece work payments are the medical doctors I've talked to. I've met multiple doctors who think they should be able to bill for each question asked during a visit that concerns a different medical topic, and some go so far as to demand the patient leave and book a subsequent 15 minute appointment before they will discuss it. Edit: I'm not saying anything about how much truckers, or any other profession, should be paid. Instead, piece work professions would be better served (and would avoid potentially disastrous financial outcomes) by evaluating their business in terms of overall profitability. For example, drivers might negotiate a higher price per mile, but if one of the aspects the parent mentioned changes significantly (load/unload time, traffic conditions in a geograph), they should turn down the work or start transitioning to a new occupation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work

mentalhealth 9y ago
Easily, the single most vocal group about piece work payments are the medical doctors I've talked to. To be fair, there are unusual incentives in place here -- depending on the specific circumstances, each individual task or procedure a doctor performs may end up being coded differently for insurance reimbursement purposes. The focus of doctors on piece work is incentivized by the way insurance works.
ethbro 9y ago
As someone with truckers in the family, and who discusses it frequently with them, their biggest problems with the 14 hour rules are twofold. (1) It's immutable, and squeezes them between their dispatchers (who schedule them for 11 hour drives) and remaining legal. If you're running a day load (far better quality of life), then if you hit traffic you're spending the night on the road in your truck, parked wherever you happened to hit the time limit. There's no individual flexibility in terms of "I'll drive less tomorrow to make up for it." (2) Removal of individual agency. Imagine if someone showed up at your desk and told you that you couldn't write any more code because you'd already been coding X hours. Doesn't matter you were on a roll. Doesn't matter that the past 4 hours were lightweight commenting and code formatting. Doesn't matter you were in the middle of writing a solution that finally occurred to you. Just is. Oh, and here's a $500 DOT ticket for trying to jot down some code notes to yourself to salvage your work. I hear and agree that some people feel entitled to bill counter to market. But IMHO the combination of a per-mile-rate, dispatcher-driven scheduling, and absolute regulation is pretty sadistic to truckers. There's a lot more friendly ways the legislation could have been written: work hour cap per week, different classes of CDL / experience levels mean different caps, etc.
- s73ver 9y ago
  At the same time, without those hard rules, people get pressured to overwork.
- InitialLastName 9y ago
  > Imagine if someone showed up at your desk and told you that you couldn't write any more code because you'd already been coding X hours. If there were a decent moment-to-moment shot of somebody dying because I was coding tired (rather than a future chance with a barrier of code reviews), it would be totally reasonable to put a really sharp barrier on reducing that risk.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    Here's the problem I have with that line of logic: a huge number of trucking accidents are caused by non-trucking road traffic they have to share the road with. Which is completely unregulated with anything like the same strictness. I can only speak to the day trip side, not long-haul multi-day freight. But based on annectdotes, I would say there's (on average) at least one incident per month per driver where the truck has to be driven off the road to avoid a collision with physics-ignorant non-trucking traffic. A friend of a friend was involved in an older lady's death after she pulled out right in front of him (as in, "even the brakes can't slow a truck down that fast" close). Of course he survived in the larger vehicle, but now he has that on his conscience. I don't dispute that freight trucks are dangerous vehicles. But generally speaking, their drivers are far more experienced than you or I - they should be, they do it every day.
    - InitialLastName 9y ago
      That's all fair, and I don't blame truckers for the accidents caused by others. That doesn't change that they have a job involving long stretches of boredom punctuated by very rare, high-stakes, split-second reaction moments, so they shouldn't be allowed to operate past a certain point of fatigue.
      - 9y ago
Aloha 9y ago
I looked at it as a pay per task, each task came with a list of associated sub-tasks, which was often a bunch of sitting.
hencq 9y ago
When I was in high school, several of my classmates had jobs as tomato pickers. The interesting thing was that some of them got paid per tomato while others got paid by the hour. The ones that were paid per tomato definitely seemed to work a lot harder. So much so that they didn't want to waste time on bathroom breaks and just peed between the tomato plants instead. This essentially taught me two things: 1) performance pay really works and 2) always wash your vegetables.

by abtinf 9y ago

mentalhealth 9y ago

Easily, the single most vocal group about piece work payments are the medical doctors I've talked to. To be fair, there are unusual incentives in place here -- depending on the specific circumstances, each individual task or procedure a doctor performs may end up being coded differently for insurance reimbursement purposes. The focus of doctors on piece work is incentivized by the way insurance works.

ethbro 9y ago

As someone with truckers in the family, and who discusses it frequently with them, their biggest problems with the 14 hour rules are twofold. (1) It's immutable, and squeezes them between their dispatchers (who schedule them for 11 hour drives) and remaining legal. If you're running a day load (far better quality of life), then if you hit traffic you're spending the night on the road in your truck, parked wherever you happened to hit the time limit. There's no individual flexibility in terms of "I'll drive less tomorrow to make up for it." (2) Removal of individual agency. Imagine if someone showed up at your desk and told you that you couldn't write any more code because you'd already been coding X hours. Doesn't matter you were on a roll. Doesn't matter that the past 4 hours were lightweight commenting and code formatting. Doesn't matter you were in the middle of writing a solution that finally occurred to you. Just is. Oh, and here's a $500 DOT ticket for trying to jot down some code notes to yourself to salvage your work. I hear and agree that some people feel entitled to bill counter to market. But IMHO the combination of a per-mile-rate, dispatcher-driven scheduling, and absolute regulation is pretty sadistic to truckers. There's a lot more friendly ways the legislation could have been written: work hour cap per week, different classes of CDL / experience levels mean different caps, etc.

s73ver 9y ago
At the same time, without those hard rules, people get pressured to overwork.
InitialLastName 9y ago
> Imagine if someone showed up at your desk and told you that you couldn't write any more code because you'd already been coding X hours. If there were a decent moment-to-moment shot of somebody dying because I was coding tired (rather than a future chance with a barrier of code reviews), it would be totally reasonable to put a really sharp barrier on reducing that risk.
- ethbro 9y ago
  Here's the problem I have with that line of logic: a huge number of trucking accidents are caused by non-trucking road traffic they have to share the road with. Which is completely unregulated with anything like the same strictness. I can only speak to the day trip side, not long-haul multi-day freight. But based on annectdotes, I would say there's (on average) at least one incident per month per driver where the truck has to be driven off the road to avoid a collision with physics-ignorant non-trucking traffic. A friend of a friend was involved in an older lady's death after she pulled out right in front of him (as in, "even the brakes can't slow a truck down that fast" close). Of course he survived in the larger vehicle, but now he has that on his conscience. I don't dispute that freight trucks are dangerous vehicles. But generally speaking, their drivers are far more experienced than you or I - they should be, they do it every day.
  - InitialLastName 9y ago
    That's all fair, and I don't blame truckers for the accidents caused by others. That doesn't change that they have a job involving long stretches of boredom punctuated by very rare, high-stakes, split-second reaction moments, so they shouldn't be allowed to operate past a certain point of fatigue.
    - 9y ago

Aloha 9y ago

I looked at it as a pay per task, each task came with a list of associated sub-tasks, which was often a bunch of sitting.

hencq 9y ago

When I was in high school, several of my classmates had jobs as tomato pickers. The interesting thing was that some of them got paid per tomato while others got paid by the hour. The ones that were paid per tomato definitely seemed to work a lot harder. So much so that they didn't want to waste time on bathroom breaks and just peed between the tomato plants instead. This essentially taught me two things: 1) performance pay really works and 2) always wash your vegetables.