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The reaction here has been interesting. As someone with a heavier social-science and politics background than most HNers, I started reading the introduction bef

The reaction here has been interesting. As someone with a heavier social-science and politics background than most HNers, I started reading the introduction before there were any comments here and went “oh my god, of course this is a thing, why did it never occur to me both that this would/is happen/happening, and to put it in these terms“, and my mind started chasing down the mechanisms by which it must work. Bombshell is a word that came to mind as soon as it dawned on me what the paper’s getting at. Then I came back to this thread and had a similar experience to when I checked on the Internet’s reaction to The Last Jedi after I got out of the theater, and was surprised to find that my experience of it as the only almost-actually-good SW film since the original trilogy was, um, not what most others had taken away.

Etheryte 2y ago
It's always useful to keep in mind the wide variety of HN users. For certain cohorts, the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and such are considered the pinnacle of their aspirations, and abusing workers is viewed as business smarts.
- szundi 2y ago
  Who goes to work for Elon cannot really be so-called abused - already knew what is coming when applied
- vundercind 2y ago
  I think one thing going on is that the form of argument is unfamiliar to a lot of readers. Many seem to have taken away that the paper’s about the concerns the “Blueprint” it mentions sets out to address, or about traditional bonus structures or variable or productivity-based pay, because the intro covers both of those things in some detail—rather, the paper is laying those out as background. The paper is not about those. This is a common form for papers and arguments in the social sciences, but maybe a lot of HNers aren’t used to it. [edit] to be clear, the paper lays out plainly that this is the case, and a person unfamiliar with this way of writing could figure it out from the text per se, but if one is not looking out for this kind of structure I can see how one might overlook the parts where it straight-up says “that’s not what this is about: here is what this is about”
tbrownaw 2y ago
So, what is it getting at that's not obvious until it's pointed out and you haven't run across before (and how is that related to having a social-sciences background)? Before app work, unpredictable schedules were a problem for people juggling multiple part-time jobs. Presumably they still are and the news just has a new shiny to play with. Paying people more to cover undesirable shifts means that people with more flexibility or who choose to make more personal sacrifices will get paid more. I remember something about... pharmacists I think it was? and how these factors lined up with some of the traditional "group X gets paid more than group Y" groupings. A job that doesn't artificially limit available positions will tend to pay just slightly more than whatever job ranks next for having a wider pool of eligible workers. Something where the next thing in that ranking is panhandling or unemployment is never going to pay well unless prospective workers are turned away.
- vundercind 2y ago
  > Paying people more to cover undesirable shifts means that people with more flexibility or who choose to make more personal sacrifices will get paid more. I remember something about... pharmacists I think it was? and how these factors lined up with some of the traditional "group X gets paid more than group Y" groupings. This is key because it’s close to the thing that made me go “ah ha” reading the intro: modern surveillance and algorithmically-managed pricing (so, cheaply modified at arbitrarily-fine resolution based on arbitrarily-many quantifiable factors) open up the possibility of pushing this exact effect from groups of workers to individual workers. You can avoid (at least to some degree not previously achievable) addressing a pool of workers and instead only clear the rate for a particular worker. No human management input needed per-decision or in any part of the broader offer-decision process and surrounding data gathering and measuring, which is what makes it possible.
  - sweeter 2y ago
    In dumb people terms, corporate gig economy players are using algorithms to artificially depress wages of random workers for work that is very similar in scope, if not the exact same (they work similar hours, in a similar area, with similar vehicles and in some cases they are even getting offers for the exact same job with wildly varying wages)

Etheryte 2y ago

It's always useful to keep in mind the wide variety of HN users. For certain cohorts, the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and such are considered the pinnacle of their aspirations, and abusing workers is viewed as business smarts.

szundi 2y ago
Who goes to work for Elon cannot really be so-called abused - already knew what is coming when applied
vundercind 2y ago
I think one thing going on is that the form of argument is unfamiliar to a lot of readers. Many seem to have taken away that the paper’s about the concerns the “Blueprint” it mentions sets out to address, or about traditional bonus structures or variable or productivity-based pay, because the intro covers both of those things in some detail—rather, the paper is laying those out as background. The paper is not about those. This is a common form for papers and arguments in the social sciences, but maybe a lot of HNers aren’t used to it. [edit] to be clear, the paper lays out plainly that this is the case, and a person unfamiliar with this way of writing could figure it out from the text per se, but if one is not looking out for this kind of structure I can see how one might overlook the parts where it straight-up says “that’s not what this is about: here is what this is about”

tbrownaw 2y ago

So, what is it getting at that's not obvious until it's pointed out and you haven't run across before (and how is that related to having a social-sciences background)? Before app work, unpredictable schedules were a problem for people juggling multiple part-time jobs. Presumably they still are and the news just has a new shiny to play with. Paying people more to cover undesirable shifts means that people with more flexibility or who choose to make more personal sacrifices will get paid more. I remember something about... pharmacists I think it was? and how these factors lined up with some of the traditional "group X gets paid more than group Y" groupings. A job that doesn't artificially limit available positions will tend to pay just slightly more than whatever job ranks next for having a wider pool of eligible workers. Something where the next thing in that ranking is panhandling or unemployment is never going to pay well unless prospective workers are turned away.

vundercind 2y ago
> Paying people more to cover undesirable shifts means that people with more flexibility or who choose to make more personal sacrifices will get paid more. I remember something about... pharmacists I think it was? and how these factors lined up with some of the traditional "group X gets paid more than group Y" groupings. This is key because it’s close to the thing that made me go “ah ha” reading the intro: modern surveillance and algorithmically-managed pricing (so, cheaply modified at arbitrarily-fine resolution based on arbitrarily-many quantifiable factors) open up the possibility of pushing this exact effect from groups of workers to individual workers. You can avoid (at least to some degree not previously achievable) addressing a pool of workers and instead only clear the rate for a particular worker. No human management input needed per-decision or in any part of the broader offer-decision process and surrounding data gathering and measuring, which is what makes it possible.
- sweeter 2y ago
  In dumb people terms, corporate gig economy players are using algorithms to artificially depress wages of random workers for work that is very similar in scope, if not the exact same (they work similar hours, in a similar area, with similar vehicles and in some cases they are even getting offers for the exact same job with wildly varying wages)