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Getting fired from your job as an Amazon worker by an app
- sharemywin 5y ago... and then needing to order something and only finding it on amazon.
- lucioperca 5y agoProbably you do not need it.
- jstummbillig 5y agoWhy be sentimental about hiring or firing when tech is so fundamentally unsentimental about optimizing everything else?
- prower 5y agoI can accept "un-sentimentality" only in the case we're hiring and firing robots.
- JulianMorrison 5y agoWhy care about anything at all? Wouldn't it be simpler just to carve a wake of ruin and suffering through life in pursuit of ever more perfect optimization?
- glogla 5y agoI mean it is what the bilionaires do and look where it got them. Seems our ancestors built a society that rewards it - and maybe we're in a place where it is unfixable due to the inertia of power. So yeah.
- EveYoung 5y agoBecause it effects people's lives and mental health. I wouldn't want to live in a society or work for an organisation where a person's value is only measured by their output. If that means accepting (temporary) inefficiencies, so be it.
- Frost1x 5y agoIf you're in the US, you very likely already live in a society that only values lives based on their output as given to someone else (unless you're in the capital holder class and happen to be on the other side of the table). I think the tech industry is especially susceptible to arguments based on efficiency because after all, that's what technology provides at a fundamental basis. We need to realize, as with many aspects within technology itself, there are tradeoffs to efficiency itself. You still have educated people who will tout efficiency above all else. I'm all for progress and improving efficiency but it has costs (and benefits) on the human condition and we need to understand and factor those costs in instead of only looking at benefits from efficiency gains. As a kid I was naive and believed this same philosophy of efficiency and didn't understand why we didn't always push to technology to improve situations. As I've grown over the years I realize life is a lot more than obsessing over efficiency. Obsessing over efficiency only brought me misery while accepting a reasonable degree of inefficiency in my life in strategic areas brought me a lot of happiness. It's always important to think about what you're optimizing on and what the costs are. Imagine going to a restaurant and making your dinner purchase decision based on a metric like: $/calorie. It's probably the most economically efficient way to look at food (perhaps with a nutritional distribution factor as well), but who wants to live like that out of choice?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- trey-jones 5y agoI see your decision to accept "a reasonable degree of ineffiency... in strategic areas" as an optimization as well. I'm thinking that it could be seen as improving your long-term efficiency. I think we can distinguish between them: Long-term efficiency, where we get the most output over time by not burning anybody out, and by keeping morale high And short-term efficiency, which is what everybody focuses on, because that's all shareholders care about (gains now!) and it results in the kind of soul-sucking capitalist rat race that you seem to think the entire country lives in. I'm thinking also that this is a very city-minded view, or maybe a corporate-minded one, and if you were to make the decision to sacrifice some (a lot) of potential earnings and go found or work for a small business in a small town, you might find that not all parts of America value people only based on their contribution to the GDP.
- smcg 5y agoyeah turning a blind eye to suffering IS easier, wow!
- wcarss 5y agopretty consistent/simple line here: a matter impacting human lives -> sentimental, i.e. cognizant of human cost a matter impacting my program's performance -> not very sentimental, i.e no human cost to be cognizant of
- pjmorris 5y agoBut what if your program's performance is to 'determine when a worker has outlived their usefulness and needs to be let go?' (FTA)
- trey-jones 5y agoJust like any other program: How good it is will depend upon the quality of decisions that are made in designing it, starting with: What is the definition of "usefulness"? I definitely think there is a room here to design a program that is more just in firing than a person would be. I guess it depends a lot on the benevolence or malevolence of our new computer overlords.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gentleman11 5y agoThat unsentimental optimization created the depression and anxiety inducing pits of social media with all its manipulation of feelings and opinions and fake news leading to a mistaken attempt to overthrow the us government
- tomjen3 5y agoSame reason I don't care about eating meat, but wouldn't be able to kill a cow (or at least would feel bad about it): emotions are low-intelligence. I can visualize the unemployment caused by some optimization that I wrote, but emotions don't engage with abstractions. Until that means that Jared will have to go home and tell Laura that he has been fired and now they can't afford their house it doesn't engage emotions. And my logic says, why should I care about a person I have never met? I am strictly worse of for having them in the first place.
- swiley 5y agoSmartphones are the first communication technology where the primary feature is that it's easier for the other end to ignore you. IMO: you practically lose nothing by avoiding them.
- dvfjsdhgfv 5y agoIt's not clear if you talk about instant messaging or social networks - there is nothing in smartphones themselves that differentiates them from "dumb" phones as far as ignoring others is concerned.
- Frost1x 5y agoI think the main discerning function is that most smart phone communication mechanisms are asynchronous first. For traditional dumb phones, the only async feature was really voice-mail and message recorder systems which, from my experience, lead right back to synchronous communication ("call me back please"). With the advent of SMS, we slowly pushed more into the world of async and people learned how to find more and more socially acceptable ways to increase those time delays to the point of ignoring. For myself, almost all of my comms on my phone are async. Synchronous communication is now the exception instead of the norm. If you call me, unless you're my family or very close friends, you will go to voice mail and you will be screened.
- jpindar 5y agoIf you ignore the message that says you're fired, you lose the cost of going to work and going home once they fire you in person, plus you might waste a day or two that you could have spent job-hunting.
- denton-scratch 5y agoI take it that you are referring to the async messaging capability of a smartphone. For me, the primary feature of a smartphone is that it is a telephone. I also have a smartphone app to control a 'smart' device. I can't type more than a word or two on a smartphone without making mistakes; maybe my fingers are too fat and blunt. If it's just about async messaging: 25 years before the first smartphones, we had email. You could send a message when the recipient was asleep, in the bath, or at the pool. If someone sent you a message, you could read it when that was convenient, in the knowledge that the sender wasn't expecting you to leap to your keyboard to reply instantly. You could even send the same message to many people at once. And there was best-efforts delivery, which meant that the system would keep trying to deliver, even if your mailserver was pretending to be deaf and dumb, for at least 4 days. And if the message you received was spam, or simply didn't call for a reply, then you simply didn't reply. And if you 'did' email on a proper mains-powered computer, then the battery never ran out. I hate smartphones. I only own one to run this particular app. I never take mine with me when I go out - it stays on my desk.
- meh99 5y agoFrankly, the dystopia is an economy that forces me to be friends with randos who also passed through the filter, and not with people I would pick. The dystopia for HR is the burden these apps alleviate. Stop accepting contrived gate keeping and gifting unwarranted political privilege on corporations if you all are sick of this. It's public agency that’s the problem. Everyone hates the way the world works while they keep shuffling into that office or opening that laptop. I have little sympathy for smart people who fail to realize Bezos and the rest literally have no leash attached to them.
- stavros 5y agoI read this scifi story a few months ago, I didn't expect it to become reality so soon (well, at least the bad half of it): https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna
- sgarland 5y agoUpvote for Manna. I re-read it every few months; it's terrific, and a short read.
- spiritplumber 5y agoAlso, the patent taken by the author on the Manna system has expired.
- timmg 5y agoMaybe I’m naive or just dumb, but: isn’t this better? One of the big complaints about modern society is all the isms. Sexism, racism, homophobia (ism). Computers don’t know your skin color, gender, religion, sexual preference, etc. Not saying it will solve all problems, but wouldn’t algorithmic decisions be preferable to biased human judgement?
- TonyTrapp 5y agoAlgorithms are not free of -isms, they just represent the -isms of the person who came up with that algorithm.
- TheFreim 5y agoAre there people programming their "algorithms" with flags that say "if black, fire them"???
- TonyTrapp 5y agoThat's not even necessary. Some of those -isms creep in implicitly, because e.g. certain performance metrics assumed by the algorithm may be statistically less likely to be fulfilled by women, or stuff like that.
- NalNezumi 5y agoDoesn't this make it an intractable problem though? Attribute X is more common in group Y first require a population based study, which can be tampered left and right and doesn't always stay the same over time. (commonality of the attribute can shift with generations) Besides if the goal is "make an algorithm that only base its judgment on population studies" all human decision making algorithms will be the same, and you can endlessly cry wolf.
- lostcolony 5y agoProbably not, but so what? It happens all the time, because the non-racist logic still affects people unequally due to racial reasons. Here's the top result from "racist algorithms" in Google - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03228-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03228-6 TL;DR: One of the factors for referring people to treatment was doctor visits over the last year. Makes sense; unwell people go to the doctor, so those going to the doctor more often are more likely to be unwell. But, of course, due to historical segregation, generational wealth, etc, black people on average tended to go to the doctor less. So even if they exhibited the same risks, symptoms, etc, as white people, because they saw a doctor about it less often the algorithm was less likely to refer them for treatment.
- lurchedsawyer 5y agoIt would be interesting to see how Amazon would deal with an EU employee who invokes their GDPR art. 22. rights.
- relax88 5y agoThe whole concept of at-will employment and employees made to look like contractors is the issue here. This is a labour rights issue, not an “Amazon is evil” issue. I don’t see any problem with an algorithm that fires unproductive workers, provided it has real cause to do so. Instead of bellyaching about how evil Amazon is, perhaps we should be asking why it is so easy to classify someone as a contractor so that you can deny them benefits and terminate them without cause? Beyond that, why is at-will employment even a thing? For Canada and most of Europe, the idea that you can be fired for any reason on the spot just because your employer feels like it is ridiculous. They either have valid cause, or they should have to pay you severance. The courts should not by default side with the mega-corps.
- thefounder 5y ago>> For Canada and most of Europe, the idea that you can be fired for any reason on the spot just because your employer feels like it is ridiculous. As employer you may see it differently. e.g if you don't want to be fired make your own company and rule it as you like.
- vimacs2 5y agoClearly not a perspective born out of much empathy. Very few people have the requirements to even attempt to start a company and out of that limited pool, most fail within the first year, with luck playing a large role in which companies survive the first 3 years. It's also bullshit - they do not want anyone to take that advice because employers cannot achieve anything without their employees so if even 20% of their workforce took that advice, their company would implode.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago> For Canada and most of Europe, the idea that you can be fired for any reason on the spot just because your employer feels like it is ridiculous. The counterbalance is supposed be that you can quit whenever you want and aren't owned by your employer. Economic imbalances and capital having more power than labor affects that.
- aazaa 5y ago> According to a report by Bloomberg, Flex drivers, who are Amazon contract workers and not granted the protections reserved for full-time employees, are being hired and fired via an app. A software program monitors each worker to determine whether they are working quickly enough, whether they are driving safely enough, and whether they are efficiently meeting their delivery quotas. That this program is rife with errors and punishes workers for things that are not their fault, from traffic problems to incorrect delivery directions, does not seem to concern Amazon. Workers have often complained about the unfair monitoring and lack of human oversight, but Amazon has maintained its system. Three reactions: 1. The Bloomberg piece[1] interviews one of the drivers (63-year old Army vet), who had this to say: > “I’m an old-school kind of guy, and I give every job 110%,” he said. “This really upset me because we're talking about my reputation. They say I didn’t do the job when I know damn well I did.” I'm not sure we're ready for the kind of society that results when the Amazon way is universally adopted. 2. There's a fascinating and chilling exploration of how far something like Amazon's policy can go in the audio series The Program: https://www.programaudioseries.com https://www.programaudioseries.com 3. Marshall Brain was right[2]. Automation doesn't spell the end of the low-level worker. It spells the end of the middle manager. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-28/fired-by-bot-amazon-turns-to-machine-managers-and-workers-are-losing-out https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-28/fired-by-... [2] https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- doublejay1999 5y agoIt would interesting to surrender the whole process to AI. Let's have AI decide what the productivity requirement should be, given biological constraints of us meat sacks. Feed it all the data - churn, sick days, the Geneva convention, employment law, recruit & training costs, development goals....the whole fucking shebang. I'll have a sportsman's bet with any of you, that the targets for performance set by AI, would be easier to meet than those devised by mere human cruelty.