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How Employers Have Gamified Work for Maximum Profit

21 points by eaguyhn 8y ago

concongo 8y ago
This is such a great concept. It is a win-win scenario. The employee wins a better place to work, motivation and fun. And the employer gets loyalty, productivity, commitment and a better performance.
- sharemywin 8y ago
  ‘It pushes you mentally to keep working. It doesn’t give you breathing space.’ The workers called this ‘the electronic whip’. We saw a higher incidence of injuries,’ Topete said. ‘Several people were injured on the job.’ The formerly collegial environment degenerated into a race. People started skipping bathroom breaks. Pregnant workers fell behind.
- mikestew 8y ago
  Welcome to HN! If you haven’t read the guidelines already, I’m sure you will soon. Contained in those guidelines it says not to question whether a commenter read the article or not. So I won’t. But, boy howdy, you sure walked away with a different impression from that article than I did, almost as if we were reading two different articles.
- truculent 8y ago
  The gamification of labour goes hand-in-hand with surveillance and subjugation of workers. It's techno-fascism.
mikestew 8y ago
Can we quit calling it “gamified”, please? It’s a stupid euphemism in this case. “Electronic whip”, I like that one.
commandlinefan 8y ago
In spite of an advanced degree and decades of experience, the best job I can find is one that pays well, but micromanages this way via the tyranny of JIRA – I spend an hour every week haggling over story points for the coming week and snivellingly excuse my “score” for the previous week. The funny thing about this is that it’s actually a lose-lose. I’m not motivated to work harder and produce better (or even faster) results: I’m actually motivated to exploit the system as best I can rather than just do actual good work. No matter how much they complain about my velocity, I’m hard (not impossible, but hard) to replace: I’m careful to manufacture some job security that way because I don’t have any choice. My boss is actually one of the better ones: he realizes that reality is more complicated than a JIRA report, so he overlooks a bit of gaming of the system so that our reports look good even though we’re actually doing work that advances the organization. I’ve worked, though, under mindless drones that took those reports completely seriously. The end result was somewhere between union (that’s not my job) and prison mentality, and you can see the results in the finished product.

21 points by eaguyhn 8y ago

This is such a great concept. It is a win-win scenario. The employee wins a better place to work, motivation and fun. And the employer gets loyalty, productivity, commitment and a better performance.

sharemywin 8y ago
‘It pushes you mentally to keep working. It doesn’t give you breathing space.’ The workers called this ‘the electronic whip’. We saw a higher incidence of injuries,’ Topete said. ‘Several people were injured on the job.’ The formerly collegial environment degenerated into a race. People started skipping bathroom breaks. Pregnant workers fell behind.
mikestew 8y ago
Welcome to HN! If you haven’t read the guidelines already, I’m sure you will soon. Contained in those guidelines it says not to question whether a commenter read the article or not. So I won’t. But, boy howdy, you sure walked away with a different impression from that article than I did, almost as if we were reading two different articles.
truculent 8y ago
The gamification of labour goes hand-in-hand with surveillance and subjugation of workers. It's techno-fascism.

mikestew 8y ago

Can we quit calling it “gamified”, please? It’s a stupid euphemism in this case. “Electronic whip”, I like that one.

commandlinefan 8y ago

In spite of an advanced degree and decades of experience, the best job I can find is one that pays well, but micromanages this way via the tyranny of JIRA – I spend an hour every week haggling over story points for the coming week and snivellingly excuse my “score” for the previous week. The funny thing about this is that it’s actually a lose-lose. I’m not motivated to work harder and produce better (or even faster) results: I’m actually motivated to exploit the system as best I can rather than just do actual good work. No matter how much they complain about my velocity, I’m hard (not impossible, but hard) to replace: I’m careful to manufacture some job security that way because I don’t have any choice. My boss is actually one of the better ones: he realizes that reality is more complicated than a JIRA report, so he overlooks a bit of gaming of the system so that our reports look good even though we’re actually doing work that advances the organization. I’ve worked, though, under mindless drones that took those reports completely seriously. The end result was somewhere between union (that’s not my job) and prison mentality, and you can see the results in the finished product.