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If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoThey call this dystopian, but I don't get it. Why keep a slacker around when you have limited slots for workers? Why not measure and retain good workers? Somebody please try a little to see beyond the linkbait title of the OP. Knee-jerk anti-the-man comments aren't very helpful in digging into why this is a good or bad idea.
- Santosh83 9y agoAre you prepared to wear a bracelet when you work?
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoMillions of people wear a fitbit. I used to wear a watch (to regulate my work day). How many office workers wear a badge? Most of them. Not a problem
- Santosh83 9y agoA badge is not a monitoring device and a watch is not forced one you. You wear it voluntarily. Its not that monitoring employees is wrong, but there's a way to go about it. You can't force spy devices on a person's body or close to them constantly and win the approval/loyalty of your workers. Why not install CCTV in the loo while you're at it? Staying inordinately long in there is also a form of slacking. How about microphone to monitor the conversation between workers?
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoJust wrong. Badges are not voluntary at any corporate office I've ever seen or worked at.
- usdghkasdghk 9y agoDo the employers of these millions of people have access to the fitbit data? And use it to decide on keeping them employed?
- yorwba 9y agoFor athletes, I think that's likely. There all kinds of quantitative optimization of training regimes going on, and if someone can't adapt as desired it's likely that their career will be cut short.
- Clubber 9y agoYes, but the incentives are different. I would be more willing to wear one if: 1. The organization really has my best interests in mind. 2. The organization paid me millions of dollars to work for them. With Amazon, I suspect #1 isn't the case and we all know #2 isn't.
- yorwba 9y agoMost athletes aren't playing in the big leagues and aren't paid millions of dollars. Frequently they are pushed to perform past their limits or shortly after an injury, so their best interests aren't always considered. Pretty much the most significant difference to Amazon employees would be that they got into the job because they enjoyed it.
- 2323232123 9y agoCan you show us a repository that contains your output?
- wiz21c 9y agoYeah, one that strangles my wrist when it decides I slack too much or if I go the the WC too often...
- Clubber 9y agoElectric shock would be more effective.
- Clubber 9y agoBecause people aren't robots. That's not how the brain works. People can't concentrate 100% for 8-12 hours a day every day consistently. >What if your supervisor could identify every time you paused to scratch or fidget, and for how long you took a bathroom break? I certainly wouldn't want to work under those conditions.
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoSo the best workers will be people too. No worries; folks won't be judged or measured as robots. Not an issue.
- chris11 9y agoI think you have more faith in companies than I do. Jobs can have a lot of unreasonable expectations, especially if it is a low wage position with high turnover. And Amazon already has a poor reputation for it's low skilled positions.
- jdlyga 9y agoManagement won't have trackers on their every movement. You can take anything out of context to make the best worker look terrible if you look hard enough with that much data.
- Clubber 9y agoMy point being even the best workers will need a moment now and then.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoBut really... will they? If this technology was used to find the bottom 10% of workers and correct their behavior or fire them, it would probably be fine. But there are people who ARE able to maintain almost perfect efficiency for huge lengths of time. Everyone will be measured and everyone will be expected to preform. People in the "normal" range will be made to feel inadequate. Everyone will be getting prescriptions for ADHD meds to compete with the top performers. The top performers will then feel pressured to get the same medications in order to maintain their advantage. This technology could put a lot of pressure on the system. And it could lead to people eliminating small breaks that might be necessary to maintain their mental health. I guess time will tell. I'm hoping companies use the idea responsibly and think about the long term incentives they create. But that doesn't seem likely.
- xr4ti 9y agoBecause economy exists to sustain and enrich the lives of humans, not the other way around.
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoYet, capitalism and the free market. This is little different from a McDonalds shift manager watching over workers at the lunch rush.
- xr4ti 9y agoThere are qualitative and quantitative differences between requiring weekly progress meetings, daily updates, and microchipping employees.
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoBut not between a manager on the floor, looking you in the eye, and a bracelet doing the same.
- xr4ti 9y agoA manager can't follow each individual employee every moment of the day. To be a little more abstract, I'm talking about the degree of privacy and autonomy that workers are afforded. The reason people find the idea of wristband tracking objectionable is because it provides a means to reduce the autonomy of large numbers of workers beyond what was previously feasible.
- smacktoward 9y agoExcept for the part where they don't have to pay a shift manager and the lunch rush never ends.
- golergka 9y agoBecause, as usual, they're more interested in an emotionally charged image rather than overall effect.
- jkldsadfaf 9y agoBecause you're monitoring someone constantly. Imagine if your manager sat behind you breathing on your neck while you coded. He has a pack of tic-tacs so his breath is fine. He crushes the tic tacs with his teeth everytime he thinks you're not working
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoSo many, many workers are monitored by human supervisors already. Not shown to be significantly different.
- dictum 9y agoWhat's the difference between having a camera recording you for 1 hour a workday, in 8 blocks of 7-8 minutes, and having a camera recording your entire workday, or even a single hour with no breaks?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- at-fates-hands 9y agoI've worked in a few place like that. Micromanagement pushed people to do just enough to get by. They also created strategies to avoid the extreme oversight and inflate their metrics to stay off the managers bad list. All this does is push people to fight the system more.
- logfromblammo 9y agoI have never been less productive than at the job where every task was broken down into tiny chunks, and I had to use a software stopwatch to log my time spent working on each. And I have never been more productive than at the job where my weekly payroll timecard consisted of a radio button choice labeled "work week" and "vacation week", with a signature field. The micromanagement encouraged me to spend all my time gaming the stopwatches and work plan spreadsheets instead of doing anything useful. That whole operation was a budget-padding scam, and I bailed as soon as I could. I have better things to do with my life than sit on ass and help my supervisor lie to their supervisor in order to keep the checks coming in. "Oh, my gosh! Writing and maintaining this glorified CRUD app is so hard! We're gonna need a bit more budget next year, and here are exactly the metrics you will need to justify that." Every interview since has been influenced by that experience, because I'm not walking blind into a corrupt workplace again.
- ahoy 9y agoI really hope you're not in a position of management.
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoSure I've managed software crews, but programmers need down time. I'm sure these workers have breaks too.
- minikites 9y agoYou're far too trusting about how companies treat their workers: https://twitter.com/CollectableCat/status/932738863449214976 https://twitter.com/CollectableCat/status/932738863449214976 http://www.nelp.org/content/uploads/2015/03/BrokenLawsReport2009.pdf?nocdn=1 http://www.nelp.org/content/uploads/2015/03/BrokenLawsReport...
- minikites 9y agoWhat about people with physical or mental disabilities? Do they deserve to be fired because they're less efficient than an able-bodied worker?
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoAlready these folks have a different metric for success. Why would that be different here?
- krapp 9y ago> Already these folks have a different metric for success. Why would that be different here? No they don't. Amazon's metrics are the same for everyone.
- minikites 9y agoYou said it yourself: >Why keep a slacker around when you have limited slots for workers? Why not measure and retain good workers? This overall attitude doesn't distinguish between "slacker because they don't feel like working" and "slacker because they're unable to work to the degree an able-bodied person can". Your premise reduces someone to their profit-generating ability alone.
- usdghkasdghk 9y agoIt's a great idea, but I believe they should use a collar with a name tag attached. That would make it easier for managers to identify people.
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoGreat idea - just like the badges or nametags everybody in corporate wears? Like that?
- ballenf 9y agoNone of the attacks on your position really answer your question, which I think is a reasonable one. If I'm hiring someone to stack boxes, what's wrong with hiring and keeping the best box stackers? Why should I be limited in the non-discriminatory tools I use to measure such performance? The wristband isn't monitoring an employee's attitude or beliefs. If anything, the tool would make racism or favoritism generally less prevalent. I'd say it's the managers who are affected most by this, not the workers.
- harryf 9y agoI think the measure of anything like this is whether you as "the boss" are willing to wear one too and make that data available to those work for you without restrictions. If you're willing to do that then OK - let's try this thing and see what happens.
- king07828 9y agoInformation asymmetry is a key concern that you have hit upon. Will a manager release truthful aggregate information, such as averages and standard deviations so that individuals can see for themselves how they stack up against the group? Will this information also be correlated for height, weight, and other physiological parameters? Or will a manager selectively hoard and release specific pieces of information to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the minds of the workers in an attempt to squeeze out more productivity?
- krapp 9y ago>Will a manager release truthful aggregate information, such as averages and standard deviations so that individuals can see for themselves how they stack up against the group? At the FC where I work, managers printed metrics out from spreadsheets and posted them daily (ish) to encourage competition and productivity but there was no real way to verify numbers weren't being fudged, or that favoritism wasn't being shown. Workers often won't know their error rate or accurate stow rate until they generate enough errors to trigger a warning, because only managers are allowed to see a worker's metrics. Amazon's policy is that an employee who follows procedure will never generate errors, and therefore, giving employees access to their own metrics is unnecessary - good employees won't need them, bad employees will either become good, or be fired. It's only recently that they've been able to see their stow rates as reflected by Amazon's own system, rather than a vague and inaccurate estimate. >Or will a manager selectively hoard and release specific pieces of information to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the minds of the workers in an attempt to squeeze out more productivity? Yes.
- heymijo 9y agoThe perverse incentives this instills will be worse than any supposed "efficiency" gains it brings about.
- z0r 9y agoA lot of people have trouble with the idea that quantitative technological shifts over time can lead to a phase change. You boil water and it becomes steam, you measure someones work time at a fine enough grain (invading a privacy that some argue never was theirs but in practice has been) and suddenly you're in a dystopia.
- dictum 9y agoAs with all things in life, it depends on what you mean by slacking. (And the malleability of the definition of "slacking" after the practice of measuring it is established.)
- biesnecker 9y agoThe problem with this isn’t the tracking, as many have pointed out this isn’t _that_ much different than human supervisors, but rather the hugely limited scope of the tracking. There’s a lot more to what makes a human a valuable employee than can be tracked by a wristband, and while you can say all you want that this won’t cause humans to be treated like robots, if you entirely disincentivize the things that humans do well, then you already _are_ treating them like robots.
- sli 9y agoA similar argument is commonly used with red light cameras: they remove the discretion of the officer, and can remove important context. Especially if they only capture a single frame.
- yawgmoth 9y agoAs companies develop more ways to ensure consistency of behavior and performance of their human assets, humans need to develop more ways to collectively bargain for their welfare against companies.
- minikites 9y agoYou can only abuse people so much before they snap and out come the guillotines. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion
- simonsarris 9y agoHistorically almost all slave rebellions end poorly. > guillotines I just want to remind everybody that the French revolution was started by the professional class of the third estate: landlords, lawyers, magistrates, and professional tradesmen, who felt they were being taxed too onerously by the gov/king. It was not in any sense started by the peasants. Peasants are maybe good for harnessing when you need to break stuff, they are not very good at actually organizing or starting successful rebellions. As far as I know no successful revolution, except Haiti's slave revolution, has occurred without support from an elite class, though sometimes that elite class support is from the outside (like the French support in the American Revolution).
- TomK32 9y agoISO 9001 certifying the human condition.
- alphonsegaston 9y agoI often see debates here about how tech workers should or shouldn’t organize because they’re too highly paid, etc. But what if they organized to protect something more simple, like warehouse workers fundamental humanity? I understand that people have had different experiences working on the tech side of Amazon, some great, some terrible. And yet I would hope that we can all look at this and say “this isn’t something I’d want for myself, my family, or my friends. This isn’t how you should treat people.” Amazon is more likely to respond to people on the AWS team pushing pack in a concerted fashion than the warehouse workers they’ve already shown themselves to see as disposable
- wmeredith 9y agoI'm trying to think of a _less_ simple task than defining the humanity of a subset of people and I'm coming up short.
- logfromblammo 9y agoOrganizing to protect someone other than yourselves sounds more like a political party. That would be a reason to join the Democrats, Greens, Socialists, lefty Libertarians, or Communists, and a reason to avoid the righty Libertarians, Republicans, and Constitutionalists.
- gaius 9y agoThat would be a reason to join the Democrats Silly Valley is staunch Dem, and who do you think makes this kind of tech? It would have been different if they hadn’t stabbed Bernie in the back.
- a_bevin 9y agoIs it just me or does this sound like they're using the wristbands as a way to build up a better dataset to further optimize their warehouse robots? Externalities notwithstanding, these jobs surely won't exist in the very near future, right?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wozz 9y agoHeard this one second hand from an email directly from bezos. It's nothing that people don't already know. He said something along the lines of we don't have to worry about treating employees well as automation will be replacing most of them.
- crdoconnor 9y agoI noticed a flurry of Foxconn propaganda, reported in all the usual western media, that tried to make this argument about 7 years ago. They said that they had robots that would shortly render something like 800,000 factory workers obsolete. It coincided with a period of worker unrest in their factories. They didn't though. They now employ something like 400,000 more people than they did. It was just a ploy to terrify Shenzhen factory workers. The apparent abysmal failure of their "project" to replace all those people seems to have gone 100% unnoticed in the business press. Foxconn just forgot to issue that press release I guess. I think back to that story and subsequent non-story every time I read the latest news article about "the robot takeover of our jobs that's just around the corner".
- ericthor 9y agoThey already have scanners with countdown timers that track and enforce an average time to scan. http://amazonemancipatory.com/time-to-pick-countdown-timer http://amazonemancipatory.com/time-to-pick-countdown-timer This tracks pretty well with the beginning bit from the Manna short fiction. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm Next up Alexa headsets with an AI to direct and fire workers.
- booleandilemma 9y agoAccording to a quick Google search, this story is being run by The New York Times, The Daily News, The Guardian, Fox, The Verge, Gizmodo, Engadget, and Cnet, among others. I can’t help but notice it’s not on The Washington Post. Has anyone done an analysis of the post to see if the number of anti-amazon stories they publish went down after Bezos bought it?
- Clubber 9y agoI haven't done an analysis, but I noticed they do an Amazon critical article now and then to show they aren't biased.
- segmondy 9y agoIf Amazon can watch a grocery store with cameras and figure who bought what, I'm sure they can apply the same tech to figure out which worker is working without wristbands.
- gaius 9y agoFellow engineers, is this really the world we should be building?
- falcolas 9y agoNo, but it only takes a few people to create this world. And a lot of people care more about money and their life than a possible future for someone else.