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If you don’t include some measure of employee satisfaction, retention, wellness, etc, then you will optimize the system at their expense. As awful as this sound

If you don’t include some measure of employee satisfaction, retention, wellness, etc, then you will optimize the system at their expense. As awful as this sounds, it’s no different than operating a piece of machinery above its capacity, or without adequate maintenance, because doing so improves some short term measure. If you can absorb the cost of doing so, then you might happily burn through lots of machines and that might be acceptable. But people aren’t machines, and you will either find yourself having retention issues, hiring issues, or like Amazon, literally running out of people willing to work for you even as they literally kill their employees. The most important thing I take from my reading of Deming, is that there comes a point when you have to put the charts aside and deal with people. If you push people over and over and over, eventually they’re going to snap. Even if they don’t, can you live with yourself at the end of the day? You also have to consider more factors than just P&L. If you push sales people to the point they start breaking the law, or you push machinery and operators to the point of a massive oil spill, you could jeopardize the whole business, or worse. You need to know where the limits are, and that only comes from understanding the people, and the process, beyond just the charts. Classic map v territory stuff.

Retric 3y ago
Some companies must treat their employees well in order to maximize profits, and others are better off doing the opposite. It’s more a question of the overall market than ‘core values’ or other such BS. Even within companies you can see both approaches used. Disney animators are treated well even as they’re worked to the bone because they can’t get away with actually mistreating them. Other employees aren’t nearly as lucky.
- dataangel 3y ago
  Was going to say they're clearly not thinking about monopolies and oligopolies. Oil spills are the classic example, deepwater horizon didn't kill BP.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Monopolies compete with workers outside of their industry/location. People working on oil rigs take serious risks, but they also make a lot of money relative to their skill set because otherwise they couldn’t get anyone to do the job.
- PragmaticPulp 3y ago
  > Even within companies you can see both approaches used. Every company I’ve worked for has been a great place to work for some categories of people. If you weren’t in one of those preferred categories, your treatment could be anything from okay to grueling overwork depending on how easily they thought they could replace you. As engineers we’re often lucky to be on the most generous end of this spectrum, especially in recent years. However, I made the mistake of joining a company where the CEO believed having engineers was an “unfortunate necessity” to run the business. It went about as well as you’d expect. Unreasonable expectations, demands, working hours, deadlines, and a constant groveling at our salaries. IT admins are an example of chronically under-appreciated employees. They keep things running and supported in an office, but I’ve seen them treated as disposable in too many offices.
  - eschneider 3y ago
    If a company is a terrible place to work for _some_ class of employees, it will eventually get around to being a terrible place for your class of employee. It's just a matter of time.
- heisenbit 3y ago
  Part of the rules of ‚the market‘ are set by the government in forms of regulation and laws.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- p1esk 3y ago
  Disney animators are treated well even as they’re worked to the bone because they can’t get away with actually mistreating them. I’m guessing that’s about to change with all the generative models being developed.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Training generative models for motion is much harder than independent static images. The training sets are smaller, and the output needs to be consistent over time. These models might be useful for generating character concept art, but that’s a tiny fraction of the overall workflow.
    - p1esk 3y ago
      Have you seen: https://youtu.be/_9LX9HSQkWo https://youtu.be/_9LX9HSQkWo
      - Retric 3y ago
        Yea, they used actors to maintain consistency while manually animating quite an bit, and it still looks janky. It’s an interesting process but more trying to include X in a workflow than a significant advantage. Imagine trying to do a flight scene where characters are tossing fireballs at each other with that workflow. That said, it’s very possible for this to be used on a specific movie. The pick a plot that works with the limitations and let the jank be part of the art stile…. I doubt you could watch it for an hour without getting headache, but used sparingly it could work.
        p1esk 3y ago
        I admit I don't know much about that field. But I don't see why video generation methods not follow similar rate of improvement as image generation. There's almost infinite amount of training data (e.g. YouTube), and the hardware keeps improving. I can easily imagine - in a couple of years - typing "generate a 30 seconds video in style X where characters are tossing fireballs at each other (optional description of the characters and the scene)" and getting professional looking results. And in another couple of years generating entire movies.
rcthompson 3y ago
I call it the Soylent Green Principle: companies and other organizations often try to pretend otherwise, but they're actually all made of people. I have to remind myself of this regularly.
- bnegreve 3y ago
  Do organizations really pretend they are not made of people? How/when?
  - dclowd9901 3y ago
    They might say they are, but I think whether they believe they are is a different animal.
    - bnegreve 3y ago
      Yes and that is my point: most organizations will pretend they are human centered, because it is good PR. Hence my surprised reaction to GGP.
  - Teever 3y ago
    Look at healthcare during covid. My province in Canada has treated healthcare workers like absolute shit and now the leaders and the people who voted for them are genuinely shocked that those healthcare workers are leaving the industry or finding jobs elsewhere. It's absolutely insane because you need these people to train the next generation of healthcare workers which isn't going to happen now because they're leaving.
    - eastbound 3y ago
      That makes healthcare cheap, though. We have the same in France, doctors have quite a low pay (of course in the top of the locals, but not as much as even a startup, and startups don’t advance humanity), nurses have a really low pay, some can’t afford living nearby. But on the upside, I barely pay 26€ to see a doctor. It’s the heart of convincing people to work hard for very little. If I were the most gruesome capitalist ever, I’d be a socialist. The TikTok dances are nice, though.
somsak2 3y ago
>literally kill their employees source?
- moring 3y ago
  Why was this downvoted? Amazon "literally killing their employees" was news to me too and a credible source would have been nice.
  - ornornor 3y ago
    See sibling comment: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/18/amazon-wrongful-death-lawsuit-illinois-tornado-warehouse https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/18/amazon-wr...
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/18/amazon-wrongful-death-lawsuit-illinois-tornado-warehouse https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/18/amazon-wr...
  - ornornor 3y ago
    Non AMP link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/18/amazon-wrongful-death-lawsuit-illinois-tornado-warehouse https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/18/amazon-wr...
  - moring 3y ago
    I could not find any evidence of Amazon literally killing an employee in that article. What I did find was this: > claims that Amazon failed to warn employees of dangerous weather or provide safe shelter before a tornado slammed the Edwardsville facility Such behaviour certainly warrants a lawsuit, and I hope Amazon gets into deep trouble for that, but what killed that employee was a tornado. Now the meaning of "kill" would probably include using force to have an employee being hit by that tornado, but the article doesn't seem to mention anything like that either. The details are left out, so what most likely happened is that the employee was threatened with being fired (explicitly, implied, or at a different time) if they don't continue to work, so they did, and then got hit by a tornado. So to clear this up: Are we actually talking about a case of manslaughter happening at Amazon, or is this a weird way of pointing out their abysmal workplace safety?
atoav 3y ago
> If you don’t include some measure of employee satisfaction, retention, wellness, etc, then you will optimize the system at their expense. I would go further and say: if your process cannot tolerate the things you should expect when working with humans (e.g. someone needing to go to the toilet, someone staying home sick), it is just a badly designed process. As you said the cost of overreaching will show somewhere else. Maybe not immediately, but it will. And if you are unlucky it will show up with a literal bang and blood on your hands.
Silverback_VII 3y ago
When I read this, I ask myself, why don't people usually work as hard for themselves as they do for these exploitative systems? Large companies may be like giant insects sucking out your life energy. However, I've noticed that people often manage to get up in the morning for these 'insects' but struggle to do so when it's about themselves.
- wizofaus 3y ago
  I don't think anyone would argue that having the resources of large corporation gives the average worker capacity to be significantly more economically productive than they would be working for themselves - meaning there's fairly few people who could earn enough to make a decent living self-employed. Even if that weren't the case, we're social creatures and a big part of our motivation stems from our wanting to be seen as contributing towards shared goals and working as part of a team: when that motivation isn't there on a regular basis a good many of us aren't likely to work nearly as industriously as we would otherwise. So yes, it's not hard to believe a company that generally treats its workers poorly is still able to make them more economically productive than they would be solo - what's more dismaying is when they seem able to sustain higher levels of productivity from their workers than other businesses that do in fact treat their workers well, enabling them to offer more in remuneration and various other perks. But not necessarily hard to understand why it happens - the former may simply have chanced upon a better business model or got a lucky early foothold in a market and continues to do well based on that. How sustainable that is in the longer term is open to question.
  - developer93 3y ago
    Do you have a source for the claim that companies that treat workers badly are able to extract more productivity from them? Or is it just that companies that are enjoyable places to work don't need to pay as much to retain workers? Or you mean that "worker oriented" companies don't prioritise productivity at worker's expense? Maybe I misunderstood your point there. Edit: you also have to take into account shareholders sucking the value out of companies, generally companies pay as little as they can get away with rather than the opposite
sanitycheck 3y ago
I like your analogy, though some companies don't treat employees like machinery which needs to be maintained but instead as consumables that just need replacing when they wear out. That's when there's no incentive to measure employee happiness, much as there's no incentive to monitor the mood of a ream of paper.
- masklinn 3y ago
  TBF lots of companies don’t do machinery maintenance either, at least not to recommended standards.
ajuc 3y ago
There's the business model of "hire people without experience, underpay and mistreat them for 1-2 years while they can't move (because bad CV), replace them with new ones".
mschuster91 3y ago
> You also have to consider more factors than just P&L. If you push sales people to the point they start breaking the law, or you push machinery and operators to the point of a massive oil spill, you could jeopardize the whole business, or worse. You need to know where the limits are, and that only comes from understanding the people, and the process, beyond just the charts. So what? Catastrophic, disastrous failure has long since been priced in. Remember the Exxon Valdez, one of the worst environmental disasters in history? Almost completely forgotten and to my knowledge no person was held accountable other than the captain who had to pay a 50.000$ fine. As long as C-level execs can drive a company to the ground with completely no personal repercussions, why should they not do anything to maximize their ROI (=their bonus payments)?
gymbeaux 3y ago
Don’t forget that it’s estimated a significant percentage of middle and upper managers are psychopaths, so quite literally YES they can live with themselves. I fear you’re giving an oral presentation at a deaf person’s conference.

Retric 3y ago

Some companies must treat their employees well in order to maximize profits, and others are better off doing the opposite. It’s more a question of the overall market than ‘core values’ or other such BS. Even within companies you can see both approaches used. Disney animators are treated well even as they’re worked to the bone because they can’t get away with actually mistreating them. Other employees aren’t nearly as lucky.

dataangel 3y ago
Was going to say they're clearly not thinking about monopolies and oligopolies. Oil spills are the classic example, deepwater horizon didn't kill BP.
- Retric 3y ago
  Monopolies compete with workers outside of their industry/location. People working on oil rigs take serious risks, but they also make a lot of money relative to their skill set because otherwise they couldn’t get anyone to do the job.
PragmaticPulp 3y ago
> Even within companies you can see both approaches used. Every company I’ve worked for has been a great place to work for some categories of people. If you weren’t in one of those preferred categories, your treatment could be anything from okay to grueling overwork depending on how easily they thought they could replace you. As engineers we’re often lucky to be on the most generous end of this spectrum, especially in recent years. However, I made the mistake of joining a company where the CEO believed having engineers was an “unfortunate necessity” to run the business. It went about as well as you’d expect. Unreasonable expectations, demands, working hours, deadlines, and a constant groveling at our salaries. IT admins are an example of chronically under-appreciated employees. They keep things running and supported in an office, but I’ve seen them treated as disposable in too many offices.
- eschneider 3y ago
  If a company is a terrible place to work for _some_ class of employees, it will eventually get around to being a terrible place for your class of employee. It's just a matter of time.
heisenbit 3y ago
Part of the rules of ‚the market‘ are set by the government in forms of regulation and laws.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
p1esk 3y ago
Disney animators are treated well even as they’re worked to the bone because they can’t get away with actually mistreating them. I’m guessing that’s about to change with all the generative models being developed.
- Retric 3y ago
  Training generative models for motion is much harder than independent static images. The training sets are smaller, and the output needs to be consistent over time. These models might be useful for generating character concept art, but that’s a tiny fraction of the overall workflow.
  - p1esk 3y ago
    Have you seen: https://youtu.be/_9LX9HSQkWo https://youtu.be/_9LX9HSQkWo
    - Retric 3y ago
      Yea, they used actors to maintain consistency while manually animating quite an bit, and it still looks janky. It’s an interesting process but more trying to include X in a workflow than a significant advantage. Imagine trying to do a flight scene where characters are tossing fireballs at each other with that workflow. That said, it’s very possible for this to be used on a specific movie. The pick a plot that works with the limitations and let the jank be part of the art stile…. I doubt you could watch it for an hour without getting headache, but used sparingly it could work.
      - p1esk 3y ago
        I admit I don't know much about that field. But I don't see why video generation methods not follow similar rate of improvement as image generation. There's almost infinite amount of training data (e.g. YouTube), and the hardware keeps improving. I can easily imagine - in a couple of years - typing "generate a 30 seconds video in style X where characters are tossing fireballs at each other (optional description of the characters and the scene)" and getting professional looking results. And in another couple of years generating entire movies.

rcthompson 3y ago

I call it the Soylent Green Principle: companies and other organizations often try to pretend otherwise, but they're actually all made of people. I have to remind myself of this regularly.

bnegreve 3y ago
Do organizations really pretend they are not made of people? How/when?
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  They might say they are, but I think whether they believe they are is a different animal.
  - bnegreve 3y ago
    Yes and that is my point: most organizations will pretend they are human centered, because it is good PR. Hence my surprised reaction to GGP.
- Teever 3y ago
  Look at healthcare during covid. My province in Canada has treated healthcare workers like absolute shit and now the leaders and the people who voted for them are genuinely shocked that those healthcare workers are leaving the industry or finding jobs elsewhere. It's absolutely insane because you need these people to train the next generation of healthcare workers which isn't going to happen now because they're leaving.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    That makes healthcare cheap, though. We have the same in France, doctors have quite a low pay (of course in the top of the locals, but not as much as even a startup, and startups don’t advance humanity), nurses have a really low pay, some can’t afford living nearby. But on the upside, I barely pay 26€ to see a doctor. It’s the heart of convincing people to work hard for very little. If I were the most gruesome capitalist ever, I’d be a socialist. The TikTok dances are nice, though.

somsak2 3y ago

>literally kill their employees source?

moring 3y ago
Why was this downvoted? Amazon "literally killing their employees" was news to me too and a credible source would have been nice.
- ornornor 3y ago
  See sibling comment: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/18/amazon-wrongful-death-lawsuit-illinois-tornado-warehouse https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/18/amazon-wr...
supriyo-biswas 3y ago
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/18/amazon-wrongful-death-lawsuit-illinois-tornado-warehouse https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/18/amazon-wr...
- ornornor 3y ago
  Non AMP link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/18/amazon-wrongful-death-lawsuit-illinois-tornado-warehouse https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/18/amazon-wr...
- moring 3y ago
  I could not find any evidence of Amazon literally killing an employee in that article. What I did find was this: > claims that Amazon failed to warn employees of dangerous weather or provide safe shelter before a tornado slammed the Edwardsville facility Such behaviour certainly warrants a lawsuit, and I hope Amazon gets into deep trouble for that, but what killed that employee was a tornado. Now the meaning of "kill" would probably include using force to have an employee being hit by that tornado, but the article doesn't seem to mention anything like that either. The details are left out, so what most likely happened is that the employee was threatened with being fired (explicitly, implied, or at a different time) if they don't continue to work, so they did, and then got hit by a tornado. So to clear this up: Are we actually talking about a case of manslaughter happening at Amazon, or is this a weird way of pointing out their abysmal workplace safety?

atoav 3y ago

> If you don’t include some measure of employee satisfaction, retention, wellness, etc, then you will optimize the system at their expense. I would go further and say: if your process cannot tolerate the things you should expect when working with humans (e.g. someone needing to go to the toilet, someone staying home sick), it is just a badly designed process. As you said the cost of overreaching will show somewhere else. Maybe not immediately, but it will. And if you are unlucky it will show up with a literal bang and blood on your hands.

Silverback_VII 3y ago

When I read this, I ask myself, why don't people usually work as hard for themselves as they do for these exploitative systems? Large companies may be like giant insects sucking out your life energy. However, I've noticed that people often manage to get up in the morning for these 'insects' but struggle to do so when it's about themselves.

wizofaus 3y ago
I don't think anyone would argue that having the resources of large corporation gives the average worker capacity to be significantly more economically productive than they would be working for themselves - meaning there's fairly few people who could earn enough to make a decent living self-employed. Even if that weren't the case, we're social creatures and a big part of our motivation stems from our wanting to be seen as contributing towards shared goals and working as part of a team: when that motivation isn't there on a regular basis a good many of us aren't likely to work nearly as industriously as we would otherwise. So yes, it's not hard to believe a company that generally treats its workers poorly is still able to make them more economically productive than they would be solo - what's more dismaying is when they seem able to sustain higher levels of productivity from their workers than other businesses that do in fact treat their workers well, enabling them to offer more in remuneration and various other perks. But not necessarily hard to understand why it happens - the former may simply have chanced upon a better business model or got a lucky early foothold in a market and continues to do well based on that. How sustainable that is in the longer term is open to question.
- developer93 3y ago
  Do you have a source for the claim that companies that treat workers badly are able to extract more productivity from them? Or is it just that companies that are enjoyable places to work don't need to pay as much to retain workers? Or you mean that "worker oriented" companies don't prioritise productivity at worker's expense? Maybe I misunderstood your point there. Edit: you also have to take into account shareholders sucking the value out of companies, generally companies pay as little as they can get away with rather than the opposite

sanitycheck 3y ago

I like your analogy, though some companies don't treat employees like machinery which needs to be maintained but instead as consumables that just need replacing when they wear out. That's when there's no incentive to measure employee happiness, much as there's no incentive to monitor the mood of a ream of paper.

masklinn 3y ago
TBF lots of companies don’t do machinery maintenance either, at least not to recommended standards.

ajuc 3y ago

There's the business model of "hire people without experience, underpay and mistreat them for 1-2 years while they can't move (because bad CV), replace them with new ones".

mschuster91 3y ago

> You also have to consider more factors than just P&L. If you push sales people to the point they start breaking the law, or you push machinery and operators to the point of a massive oil spill, you could jeopardize the whole business, or worse. You need to know where the limits are, and that only comes from understanding the people, and the process, beyond just the charts. So what? Catastrophic, disastrous failure has long since been priced in. Remember the Exxon Valdez, one of the worst environmental disasters in history? Almost completely forgotten and to my knowledge no person was held accountable other than the captain who had to pay a 50.000$ fine. As long as C-level execs can drive a company to the ground with completely no personal repercussions, why should they not do anything to maximize their ROI (=their bonus payments)?

gymbeaux 3y ago

Don’t forget that it’s estimated a significant percentage of middle and upper managers are psychopaths, so quite literally YES they can live with themselves. I fear you’re giving an oral presentation at a deaf person’s conference.