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Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

631 points by latexr 2y ago

Optifye.ai is a dystopian company backed by Y Combinator. They’re using AI to further dehumanise and abuse individual factory workers and treat them like disposable automatons. See a now deleted post where they show how it works: https://hachyderm.io/@YvanDaSilva/114063748264591929 The founders look to be a couple of rich kids with little world and work experience: > We’re CS grads from Duke and because our families run manufacturing companies (…) They also display a profound lack of empathy by bragging about lowering stress for rich company owners, which they do by increasing the stress of everyone who works for them: > Know any manufacturing company owners? > Let us know at founders@optifye.ai, and we’ll help them drop their cortisol levels :) https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/optifye-ai This is the AI world we all know is coming, brought to you by Y Combinator investors and founders. It doesn’t “benefit humanity”, it just serves to “put you in your place”.

rideontime 2y ago
Thank you, I’ve been seeing the reaction to the announcement but hadn’t yet found the announcement itself.
oulipo 2y ago
This kind of product is really shameful, and peak capitalism... looking at people as mere robots to serve your, disgusting
- oulipo 2y ago
  Apparently on their website they're asking for comments/feedback, so... you can tell them yourself what you think of their disgusting tech > Let us know at founders@optifye.ai, and we’ll help them drop their cortisol levels :)
- 2099miles 2y ago
  Peak capitalism would have the employees holding their own value and not being crushed in trash power dynamics to allow this kind of stuff. Capitalism is about nonviolent voluntary exchanges between two parties, when one party has a power dynamic skewed in such a way they can use tools like this that employees hate, then that’s not capitalism anymore.
  - flyinglizard 2y ago
    That's approaching "real communism has never been tried".
    - hehbot 2y ago
      apologists everywhere are all the same
  - Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
    so this is more like peak feudalism huh? back to 1800's I suppose. There is no seperation b/w private entities , the state and the church , all trying to exploit the middle class / lower class was one of the gists that I think when I recall feudalism sounds familiar ? Guess what ? We are living at one right now.
  - yogurt-male 2y ago
    Funny that what you describe will never exist without heavy (extreme?) regulation and progressive taxation, which are anathema to most advocates of capitalism. Have you considered that maybe your definition of capitalism doesn't agree with the definition society has agreed upon?
  - snapcaster 2y ago
    yes yes true capitalism has never been tried. You realize you're doing the same thing hardline communists do right?
- Suzuran 2y ago
  Nobody looks at people as robots. Robots are cheaper, do not require food or sleep, and do not have to be murdered when they attempt to unionize. Robots are far superior.
  - Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
    But then if everyone is out of their job and unemployed ? who will buy the stuff if noone has the money. I think there is a balance. Otherwise its going to be 1984 in more than one way (the spying part is already there) (it would also do of that the countries are ready to produce things as much but they won't and limit it to create that constant mood of war to make people not question them / make them weak.) I think capitalism has fallen. Capitalism is a good system but to its degrees. If you push the accelerator too hard , you get fuedalism. and we are at feudalism. I am not sure if we can undo this. Let this sink in, the american dream , all our thinkng that capitalism being good and communism being bad fundamentally doesn't matter because we have entered a system where the lines of division are so blurry that they are practically nonexistent.
    - LinuxBender 2y ago
      CGP Grey did a video on this topic about 10 years ago. Curious if the video aged well. [1] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU [video][15 mins][Humans Need Not Apply]
      - latexr 2y ago
        > Curious if the video aged well. Just watched it, and I would say that it did age very well.
    - baq 2y ago
      > But then if everyone is out of their job and unemployed ? who will buy the stuff if noone has the money. Last time I tried to say something like that I got plenty comments calling me for reading too many sci-fi books... I guess some people just lack imagination and experience with exponentials.
dauertewigkeit 2y ago
I find the marketing interesting considering that this product already exists in other continents ... and it is NOT deployed in factories. It is deployed in office settings. If this our future? Lots of video evidence: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+Using+AI+to+monitor+employees%27+productivity+in+China https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+Using+AI+to+mo... Expect dishonest marketing by those aspiring to build these surveillance and anti-freedom systems in our western countries.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  Why not deploy it across every moment of everyone's life, with algorithmic prediction of economically unproductive deviance and BadThink? Maybe I'll pitch that to someone with money.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    Larry Ellison is already pitching this. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnipresent-ai-cameras-will-ensure-good-behavior-says-larry-ellison/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...
- lm28469 2y ago
  That's why we fight for social and worker's rights, try to pull that shit in germany But for that you need strong unions and I heard it basically is communism, and I heard communism basically is hell on earth, I guess it makes whatever this software is doing heaven
lm28469 2y ago
Science sans conscience... we haven't progressed one bit in the last 500 years
metacritic12 2y ago
Yeah it has terrible optics, yet it's clearly going to be normalized and come. The question is who does it and what is the organization of it. If this company doesn't do it, the next will. In certain roles, AI micromanagement clearly will create higher performance. Add the marketplace of capitalism and it'll all compete away. There are certain roles, like artists, where this is the wrong solution wholly: monitoring whether an artist is at her desk will create badly performing artists, and this will show. In these roles, these tools won't apply.
- cced 2y ago
  > Yeah it has terrible optics, yet it's clearly going to be normalized and come. The question is who does it and what is the organization of it. If this company doesn't do it, the next will. Where have we seen this before..
- onion2k 2y ago
  In these roles, these tools won't apply. There will be companies that will apply them regardless, even in roles where they'll make things worse. The incentive for managers to show 'a bias for action' often results in managers doing any action that they can think of rather than the right action backed by data.
- ratatoskrt 2y ago
  In the US? Sure. In more developed parts of the world? Doubtful. European labor laws are already much, much stronger than their US counterparts, and most countries outright ban using cameras to monitor employees.
thatjoeoverthr 2y ago
Imagine the features you could add to this. Like a robot that walks around behind the workers and gives well-timed corrective communications with a whip.
- p_ing 2y ago
  The whip is for the programmers. https://sierraclassicgaming.com/game/space-quest-iii/sq3_programmers/# https://sierraclassicgaming.com/game/space-quest-iii/sq3_pro...
- neuroticnews25 2y ago
  So it appears that automating managers is easier than automating "unskilled workers"
2099miles 2y ago
Tbh this isn’t that crazy. If you hire someone to do their job outputting 10 items per hour and that number is reasonable because a bunch of other workers you hired for the same job are doing it and 1 guy hits 1 per hour then that guys shouldn’t be doing that job. The outrage should be focused on the absolute meme of their ad video cuz they were like “lets literally have a convo with an individual but refer to them as a workspace and have them say human painful responses but then just shit on them anyway impersonally” The product is not crazy. The video is wild.
- 2099miles 2y ago
  Continued rant : It’s kinda like a ruler. If you measure workers so that one’s doing 10x less/worse output than the average that’s good. If you compare workers down to the .01% difference in output that’s stupid and inhumane.
  - yogurt-male 2y ago
    Yes, but many business owners/managers are stupid and inhumane.
  - Brendinooo 2y ago
    Yeah. I did new car prep for a dealership as a teen. Ask me how many cars I did per day: totally reasonable. Make me clock in and out for every car I work on: bad.
- ignoramous 2y ago
  > Tbh this isn’t that crazy. Yep, seems like a bog standard accountability / performance management. > The product is not crazy. The video is wild. This is how it all starts. Sane solutions wielded by madmen.
- trunch 2y ago
  Because this will definitely be used only to innocently tell off people doing 1/10 the work of everyone else, and not micromanage and hound people to increasingly unrealistic standards in already desperate conditions. Safe to say you aren't in any position where every move you make will be watched by AI and analysed for faults so that your boss can scream at you more efficiently whenever you don't meet standards for their pitiful wages.
saltserv 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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sixQuarks 2y ago
[flagged]
- pantalaimon 2y ago
  We?
  - sixQuarks 2y ago
    The US
oefrha 2y ago
Brought to you by the VC famous for InstallMonetizer? Make no mistake, it’ll basically back anything that makes money, there’s no moral high ground. And like it or not, this kind of AI (or should I say A-eye) is here to stay.
- tuukkah 2y ago
  Did YC fund (or otherwise back) InstallMonetizer? The way I understood it, they applied to YC with a different idea and worked on IM earlier/on the side/later. (In which case, the controversy was more whether YC works with people who make things like InstallMonetizer.)
  - latexr 2y ago
    > Did YC fund (or otherwise back) InstallMonetizer? Yes. Quoting Paul Graham: > Last week there was some controversy online about a company we funded called InstallMonetizer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711
    - tuukkah 2y ago
      Here's his clarification that followed, saying they didn't fund the product InstallMonetizer: > They're working on something new, and all the office hours I had with them were about that. They're not even in our database of companies as InstallMonetizer but as the new thing. (I'm not sure if I can say the name because it may not be launched yet.) I knew they had some previous product that was called a Windows installer, but I don't think we ever talked about what it did. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093047
- dang 2y ago
  That's deeply untrue and unfair, and the fact that you've reached back 12 years to find an example, when YC has funded thousands of startups since then, is evidence against what you're saying. YC has turned down many startups because they didn't think what the product was doing was right, and it has defunded and banned startups for ethical reasons over the years. It's not your fault that you didn't know this, since no one makes a big deal of it, but I think it's proper to bring it up when you say that the people at YC will "back anything that makes money".
deleted 2y ago
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danpalmer 2y ago
This sort of performance management is unfortunately necessary. The problem is that we need tools for it to be built by people who can empathise with those subjected to them, and who want to do the right thing, and not these sorts of folks who are too immature and inexperienced to get it right. My previous company ran a warehouse and there was a clear bell curve of productivity. Most people were fine, some were excellent, but some were below the level that was realistically achievable. We did careful and considerate analysis and it helped improve productivity. When done badly however you end up with management using productivity tracking as a lever to increase productivity across the curve. Amazon driver delivery quotas are a great example – people urinating in bottles is clearly a symptom of the quota being too high. Unfortunately software built naively to help bring up the bottom 10% can too easily be used to force up the productivity of the other 90%.
- seper8 2y ago
  Necessary according to who?
  - danpalmer 2y ago
    Colleagues, the business. The important things are that performance management is a) used to identify those performing far below what is possible, and b) that there is a good faith effort to support those people to perform better. Both of these things are mis-handled by many companies, who will use it to encourage more performance out of those who are already as productive as practically possible, and that the tools are used in bad faith or with no intention of helping people, only as an excuse to fire them.
    - sarchertech 2y ago
      You don’t need constant monitoring to find the bottom 10% though. People performing that badly are easy to pick out with spot checks. It’s the same with software. Your direct manager should know if their employee is in the bottom 10%. If they don’t, they aren’t doing their job or they have too many reports. What constant automated monitoring allows is cutting back on the number of managers and like you said, pushing high performers even further.
boruto 2y ago
The secondary school the founder went to is a dead giveaway. Ofcourse yc would fund them. Anyone would fund them infact.
klkvsk 2y ago
Software can not abuse workers. Managers can, with our without software. We've had automated KPI measuring tools since punch clocks. Nowadays it's OK in some companies to install remote access software to monitor employees' screens. It's nothing new. It's just collecting data. Question is, what will bosses do with this data, will they abuse or develop. I have no hate towards those guys. No love also. It's just business.
- lame-lexem 2y ago
  The famous it's ok if it's done with algorithm.
- latexr 2y ago
  > Software can not abuse workers. Managers can, with our without software. And guns cannot kill people. Other people can, with or without guns. It shouldn’t be hard to understand tools facilitate the task you’re using them for. > Nowadays it's OK in some companies to install remote access software to monitor employees' screens. No, it is not OK. It is done, but that doesn’t mean it is right or ethical. > It's nothing new. That’s not an excuse to not do better and revise practices. > It's just business. See the Nuremberg defence.
simonbarker87 2y ago
I used to run a small factory (two assembly lines 10 people) and something like this would have been useful, not to force people to work harder but to optimise movements and points of friction. I would actively encourage and reward people for making suggestions and we had a process in place to test if changes made things better (and not just faster - we included easier, simpler, more enjoyable etc in the test) Sadly it’s not about the tool in this case, it’s how it’s being promoted and positioned. The line “know who’s working and who’s not” on their website says it all sadly.
- mrtksn 2y ago
  Exactly my thoughts, if this was a European demonstration they would be talking about providing training to the worker on the line to improve the efficiency. I have no idea if that’s how they run factories in India but it definitely looks very off from Western perspective. In Europe the assumption would be that workers are trying their best, but they don’t know better. In the video, the assumption is that the workers are cheating or slacking and this tool can help you detect bad actors. The tool itself at core seems fine though. Any privacy or abuse risks would be up to the legislature and operators to consider but it’s nothing unusual to monitor production lines.
- devjab 2y ago
  I'm not convinced it's really that useful. If you have rows of people sewing the same piece of clothing or similar, then it's not exactly hard to track output without digital surveillance. If you have assembly lines where people perform different parts of a larger project digital surveillance is useless next to things like lean, and again, bottlenecks will show themselves extremely fast if a single station is slower than usual. I suspect the purpose of these systems is actually to create a horrible work environment. Not because that is a good thing, but because it'll drive away anyone who has other options and leave you with the most desperate people. Who will also be the cheapest people.
philipjoubert 2y ago
As someone who grew up in a 3rd world country and whose mother owned a clothing factory, this product seems...fine? The response is an indication of how little people know about how their t-shirts and shoes are made.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  It's nuanced. If it allows you to find outliers (low performers to manage and high performers to praise), that's fine. If you try to push everyone further and further to their breaking point and make them trade the same amount of money for more of their time and more importantly health, it's certainly not fine.
- lm28469 2y ago
  Ah ok, my bad then, it's a perfect product and we shouldn't change anything at all then. Let's continue to treat humans as machines, especially in 3rd world countries, who cares right ? Even they say it's fine.
  - computerthings 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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- oulipo 2y ago
  TBH I'd rather buy shirts where I know that people doing them have been well-treated
  - philipjoubert 2y ago
    The people who worked in these companies are usually incredibly grateful for the opportunity to do seated work indoors for reasonable wages. Applying Western labour practices to third world countries would prevent them from ever developing...hurting the very people we all want to help.
solumos 2y ago
Is it dystopian, or is it just real-time performance monitoring poorly marketed by inexperienced founders? There are tools like this for tracking git commits and velocity (that I’ve been on the receiving end of). It probably makes less sense in that context, but if your job is a repetitive task, I don’t think it’s necessarily abuse or dystopian to track it. Monitoring bottlenecks isn’t a bad thing. They probably could have chosen an example where the solution to the bottleneck didn’t involve berating a low performer (e.g. adjusting the line to add another station or similar)
- black_puppydog 2y ago
  You mean if they marketed it differently, managers would magically stop using it exactly the way it was advertised?
  - solumos 2y ago
    Assuming that this comment is made in good faith — I doubt that they have much usage currently. Better marketing would show how managers could use this tool to better support their staff rather than scolding them.
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  Perhaps real-time performance monitoring of people is wrong as well and marketing just made it sound less bad as it is? If your management tracks your commits/velocity, look for a better job. The market easily allows you to do this. It doesn't make sense anyway and anyone with some technical know-how knows this. This will escalate into something bad like publication metrics did to science. You end up with superfluous drivel that just pads real discovery. Although for code it is even more trivial. Bottlenecks are something entirely different. If you have a critical-path, there need to be resources to tackle the task at hand. Real-time monitoring is entirely useless here as well.
  - ukuina 2y ago
    > If your management tracks your commits/velocity, look for a better job. Don't most version-control systems support/automate this?
acc_297 2y ago
> Boost your assembly line efficiency by up to 30% Ethics of this aside the above claim must be dubious I would think the majority of manufacturing inefficiencies are due to down time as a result of raw material shipping delays or machine break down… of course I’m in no position to offer an informed opinion but just based on the product website I have a hard time taking this stuff seriously. Monitoring of factory workers isn’t hard to do with current surveillance and 1 or 2 humans in the loop
friendly_chap 2y ago
That post was pulled partly because of my comment. I commented this: "While I see the economical usefullness, this sounds like the worst possible application of AI. Using AI to surveil is building hell on earth. AI should be used to help people work less/easier, not whip them into working more." Which ended up on the top of the thread. Was surprised to wake up this morning and see it gone. LinkedIn post I made about this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crufter_today-y-combinator-deleted-this-announcement-activity-7300050840852086786-x6WH?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABcNA2MB_d5j-ofPyG8XDq4OUyAsV3UKRKw https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crufter_today-y-combinator-de...
astonex 2y ago
The product should be marketed as a tool for monitoring and highlighting bottlenecks in the manufacturing production line in order to help maintain peak output. This is a completely reasonable thing to want, it's no different to monitoring micro-services and their latencies/loads. The video they made however where they berate and meanly put-down an individual employee is so far from acceptable. That's not how personnel performance issues should be managed in the real world, completely void of human empathy. It shows the founders (and did YC view and approve this?) are lacking in areas
mattmaroon 2y ago
This seems like a tempest in a tea pot. You're automating doing what factory floor managers already do? Hitler! From the title I thought they had developed a robot that flogs 6 year old workers or something. If I were YC, though, I'd probably have a rule about startups not using "backed by Y Combinator" logos on their homepage like Optifye does. YC's a pretty low touch investor at the seed round level, their startups could do lots of things YC didn't expect, didn't know about, and couldn't prevent.
lokar 2y ago
Having been in this industry for a long time now, I see a disappointing trend in tech, and US society in general: viewing everything at zero sum. I’m probably naive, but I remember in the past tech focusing on innovation that would generate enough gains for everyone to get a share (or at least the gain to the tech company did not come at the expense of someone else) Now, more and more I see business plans that are zero sum. Using tech to take from someone else, not growing the pie. This matches a general trend in public life is the US to view everything as a zero sum contest
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  There was a time when US tech people would use this idea as a moral parable. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 But now we have current tech businesses basing their future growth strategies as much on better dark patterns as on actual value creation. Imagine a society using their best minds to figure out 'better' dark patterns, and counting the outcome from those patterns as GDP growth. That society is royally f'd on every level.
infecto 2y ago
The only thing truly embarrassing is that nobody at YC advised them that this ad is 1) terribly amateur and 2) has the chance to look extremely bad. Did not advise and in fact published to their feed. Weird optics, I am not familiar with what I presume to be Indian factories, other than the wild lack of safety (thanks youtube) but I cannot see how this video does anything positive. As for the product itself I don't think it is unusual, these types of measurement systems are not new and can be helpful for a factory, like all things, it boils down to the owner/managers of said factory not the tool.
- friendly_chap 2y ago
  If anyone is reading from YC, I'm happy to review their submissions, I was perhaps the first who raised concerns and was on top of the thread with my comment. (See this post I made on LinkedIn about this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crufter_today-y-combinator-deleted-this-announcement-activity-7300050840852086786-x6WH?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABcNA2MB_d5j-ofPyG8XDq4OUyAsV3UKRKw https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crufter_today-y-combinator-de...)
  - dang 2y ago
    I haven't read the details or watched the video, but it does sound like you noticed something that should not have been there. I noticed that your page says this: > New: the thread "Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers" on Hacker News got removed from the front page despite having 242 points. The thread fell in rank because it set off a software penalty called the flamewar detector. We haven't taken any moderator action or touched it in any way. Our usual practice is to downweight shallow outrage posts (because they're not what the site is for), but we haven't done so in this case, because we have a core rule of moderating less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is in a story. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) If you want to be fair, you could add that information. Otherwise, readers will assume you mean that we nefariously censor negative posts about YC, when the truth is the opposite. Edit: after I posted this, I noticed that the thread said [flagged] at the top. That's because users flagged it—as they usually do with shallow outrage threads. However, I've turned the flags off in keeping with the rule I just mentioned.
neuroticnews25 2y ago
I think people are scared this will increase the power of the companies over workers. But a worker’s negotiating position is based on their indispensability and productivity, and on average this won’t change that. I know in reality it's often the fog of war that makes the work bearable. And many good managers more or less consciously keep it that way. But fundamentally, how can more insight and more truth be bad? My resources are limited and I'd rather spend them on a good worker than a slightly worse one. I thought that was the whole point of meritocracy.
kundi 2y ago
It’s not the only company with low morale that YC is sponsoring. There have been a dozens of copycats shamelessly copying other products, some of them open source. It is disappointing to see YC going to new levels of bottom without any proper accountability, just greed.
anymouse123456 2y ago
No comment really, just came here to remind everyone about, "The Yes Men." NSFW warning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_bWAF-XxQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_bWAF-XxQM The video features a tear-away business suit to reveal a gold lame stretch suit with a giant, inflatable phallus that has a monitor at the end and controls to let a manager electrocute under performing factory workers from the beach. This was presented live and in person to an unwitting, but credulous breakout session at the WTO in 2003 to awkward applause.
leonheld 2y ago
The response here would be significantly different if this was about measuring the performance of software engineers in wealthy countries.
- gagik_co 2y ago
  I mean… yes, obviously? There’s a lot less room for exploitation of white collar workers in wealthy countries than sweatshops. Though performance quantifying software still deserves a lot of scrutiny for removing humanity from work in any context.
  - leonheld 2y ago
    It's obvious to you becase you seem like a decent human being, judging from this comment.
rimbo789 2y ago
This product should be banned and these guys should be forced to work a year at a textile mill for trying to build it
emorning3 2y ago
My first full-time job out of high school was unloading trucks of coffee and sugar, by hand. Trust me when I say that the motto on the loading dock is 'fuck me, fuck you'.
exsomet 2y ago
It seems like there’s been a rash of these instances lately where someone does something, says something, or builds something like this that’s not just offensive but unconscionable. And there’s always the predictable outcry and then usually that’s the end of it. It’s given me pause to think about why that pattern has been established and I think the simple answer is that there are no consequences. The people we see in the news doing horrific things for attention are doing it because there is no mechanism to hold them accountable. Product launches like this - where it’s explicit purpose is to degrade and exploit humans - happen, meme video and all, because these people will not face any consequences for it (and the potential benefit is massive to them if it takes off). Yelling and screaming about how horrible it is doesn’t really do anything and it’s not an effective use of time or energy. I wonder what society could do - not conceptually, but practically - to establish consequences for someone who launches a product like this.
pirate_solo9 2y ago
Can anyone share the vision models they might be using and how they might be tuning them?
pluto_modadic 2y ago
It's clear there's a large fragment of AI founder types that totally had nobody tell them and I hope they faceplant, hard.
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mzajc 2y ago
Has this been manually delisted from the frontpage? It doesn't say it's flagged, but it's no longer on there. EDIT: looks like it's #157 now, I think I just misunderstand the ranking mechanism.
- deleted 2y ago
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- dang 2y ago
  It set off the flamewar detector. Moderators haven't touched it, except that we turned off the user flags on the story. Otherwise it would be displaying [flagged] at the top. We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is part of the story (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). This doesn't mean we don't moderate at all, of course; that would be too large a loophole. But we do moderate less. For example, under normal circumstances our standard practice would be to downweight a thread like this one, because outrage posts (what we used to call riler-uppers*) are not normally on topic for Hacker News. We also might edit the title to be less sensational and more accurate and neutral. And we would leave the user flags on. In the present case, we've overriden all of that in order to follow the rule I just mentioned. * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=riler%20upper&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is part of the story I believe this because it makes sense to me. I think a habit of tempered reactions allows the understanding - that criticism is valuable in healthy doses. Adding this: Having HN's stance plainly said is valuable too.
  - latexr 2y ago
    I greatly value and respect your moderation work. That consideration made me temper my words in the title and the post’s description. I did not create the thread with the intent to cause a flamewar, and in fact didn’t even realise the scope of the story until the very first comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170866 Everything I wrote was the conclusion of original research based entirely on what I read from the founders’ words and what I saw in the video. Apart from the Mastodon post, I saw zero opinions on the matter before posting. The more I looked at it, the stronger I felt the criticism was warranted with those specific terms. I genuinely do not feel there is a more “accurate and neutral” title I could’ve written. From everything I found, the title looks accurate. As for neutrality, which could surely only amount in this instance to being apologetic, I don’t feel there would have been any point to making the original post if not for the criticism.
igleria 2y ago
An abhorrent product that no doubt will be have abhorrent customers and maybe one or two that will use it for good.
deleted 2y ago
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sub7 2y ago
Overpaid software engineers here please spend a moment to talk about your 3pm massage and free omakase Or just go work a real widget business and you will realize that optimizing worker efficiency is critical and useful
laidoffamazon 2y ago
I can't call this slavery but their attitude towards their workers who make $1 an hour is sadly extremely common for among wealthy Indian people. They just don't see the non-English speaking poor in India to be human, and very likely the people below their status in America to be human. It's disgusting and the reason why I can't identify with my ancestry
mythrwy 2y ago
I don't predict much success for their venture
rajnathani 2y ago
Just like how workplace software analyze white-collar work, such as this Microsoft product [1] (and many of those "bossware" which we saw during Covid), I don't see how this tool is any different but from a manual labor analysis standpoint? Their marketing might have been off, but I mean as long as the camera recordings are securely stored, what could be the issue? This solution is more like an automatic supervisor, and this could help as it could heavily reduce the need for supervisor roles (which also can come with biases and potential workplace-politics), and thus directly increase salaries for the workers actually performing the manual assembly. Also, there are already cameras in assemblies for monitoring the environment and also modern solutions to analyze workers and worker safety such as Invisible AI [2] and Rolloos [3]. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-viva/workplace-analytics-and-feedback#tabx7d1a78ca13c643c98554ef6a51e1b5a9 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-viva/workplace-ana... [2] https://www.invisible.ai/ https://www.invisible.ai/ [3] https://www.rolloos.com/en/about-us/mission-vision/ https://www.rolloos.com/en/about-us/mission-vision/
- rajnathani 2y ago
  Update: I just saw the part where the founder in the video refers to the person as "Number 17", this is pretty low even considering they might have wanted to anonymize a person's "John Doe" name for the example. I don't think such empathy-lacking individuals deserve any serious funding to build this out.
GroupNebula563 2y ago
the fact that they’re backing this is ridiculous.
asimpleusecase 2y ago
I worked in a factory during university- made playground equipment out of metal. Every task had a reporting system and the company knew exactly who was producing what. This was a long time ago - they still used desktop calculators with paper tape to do calculations. I was only there for a relatively short time, I just wanted to work and make money for school. We were promised productivity bonuses - my section of the factory achieved 147% of expected production. Another had done almost 180%, but when the bosses did the bonus talk they added in the trucking division and showed a 30% productivity due to excessive “dead heads” ( empty trucks ) returning from equipment delivery. It was a management issue- they were not very good at finding return loads for those trucks. So the production bonus was calculated on the total score of the enterprise- so we got almost nothing on the factory floor for bonus. When my time there was done a friend in accounting told me that I had rated as the most productive in the factory, he had seen the numbers as there was a ranking sheet that was calculated every week. ( remember paper tape calculators ) no one ever told me at the company, no real reward, no approach about coming back to the factory. The point of this post is that this type of thing - monitor the employees- has been a thing for a very long time. It is the humans running the factory that decide to reward, encourage , promote those who work hard - or not.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  And the humans are also machines, purpose built over time to maximize efficiency and ignore anything else. Good employers are evolutionarily suboptimal, thats the issue.
fraaancis 2y ago
It's too bad the AI can't just do the sewing.

631 points by latexr 2y ago

rideontime 2y ago

Thank you, I’ve been seeing the reaction to the announcement but hadn’t yet found the announcement itself.

oulipo 2y ago

This kind of product is really shameful, and peak capitalism... looking at people as mere robots to serve your, disgusting

oulipo 2y ago
Apparently on their website they're asking for comments/feedback, so... you can tell them yourself what you think of their disgusting tech > Let us know at founders@optifye.ai, and we’ll help them drop their cortisol levels :)
2099miles 2y ago
Peak capitalism would have the employees holding their own value and not being crushed in trash power dynamics to allow this kind of stuff. Capitalism is about nonviolent voluntary exchanges between two parties, when one party has a power dynamic skewed in such a way they can use tools like this that employees hate, then that’s not capitalism anymore.
- flyinglizard 2y ago
  That's approaching "real communism has never been tried".
  - hehbot 2y ago
    apologists everywhere are all the same
- Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
  so this is more like peak feudalism huh? back to 1800's I suppose. There is no seperation b/w private entities , the state and the church , all trying to exploit the middle class / lower class was one of the gists that I think when I recall feudalism sounds familiar ? Guess what ? We are living at one right now.
- yogurt-male 2y ago
  Funny that what you describe will never exist without heavy (extreme?) regulation and progressive taxation, which are anathema to most advocates of capitalism. Have you considered that maybe your definition of capitalism doesn't agree with the definition society has agreed upon?
- snapcaster 2y ago
  yes yes true capitalism has never been tried. You realize you're doing the same thing hardline communists do right?
Suzuran 2y ago
Nobody looks at people as robots. Robots are cheaper, do not require food or sleep, and do not have to be murdered when they attempt to unionize. Robots are far superior.
- Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
  But then if everyone is out of their job and unemployed ? who will buy the stuff if noone has the money. I think there is a balance. Otherwise its going to be 1984 in more than one way (the spying part is already there) (it would also do of that the countries are ready to produce things as much but they won't and limit it to create that constant mood of war to make people not question them / make them weak.) I think capitalism has fallen. Capitalism is a good system but to its degrees. If you push the accelerator too hard , you get fuedalism. and we are at feudalism. I am not sure if we can undo this. Let this sink in, the american dream , all our thinkng that capitalism being good and communism being bad fundamentally doesn't matter because we have entered a system where the lines of division are so blurry that they are practically nonexistent.
  - LinuxBender 2y ago
    CGP Grey did a video on this topic about 10 years ago. Curious if the video aged well. [1] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU [video][15 mins][Humans Need Not Apply]
    - latexr 2y ago
      > Curious if the video aged well. Just watched it, and I would say that it did age very well.
  - baq 2y ago
    > But then if everyone is out of their job and unemployed ? who will buy the stuff if noone has the money. Last time I tried to say something like that I got plenty comments calling me for reading too many sci-fi books... I guess some people just lack imagination and experience with exponentials.

dauertewigkeit 2y ago

I find the marketing interesting considering that this product already exists in other continents ... and it is NOT deployed in factories. It is deployed in office settings. If this our future? Lots of video evidence: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+Using+AI+to+monitor+employees%27+productivity+in+China https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+Using+AI+to+mo... Expect dishonest marketing by those aspiring to build these surveillance and anti-freedom systems in our western countries.

TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
Why not deploy it across every moment of everyone's life, with algorithmic prediction of economically unproductive deviance and BadThink? Maybe I'll pitch that to someone with money.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  Larry Ellison is already pitching this. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnipresent-ai-cameras-will-ensure-good-behavior-says-larry-ellison/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...
lm28469 2y ago
That's why we fight for social and worker's rights, try to pull that shit in germany But for that you need strong unions and I heard it basically is communism, and I heard communism basically is hell on earth, I guess it makes whatever this software is doing heaven

lm28469 2y ago

Science sans conscience... we haven't progressed one bit in the last 500 years

metacritic12 2y ago

Yeah it has terrible optics, yet it's clearly going to be normalized and come. The question is who does it and what is the organization of it. If this company doesn't do it, the next will. In certain roles, AI micromanagement clearly will create higher performance. Add the marketplace of capitalism and it'll all compete away. There are certain roles, like artists, where this is the wrong solution wholly: monitoring whether an artist is at her desk will create badly performing artists, and this will show. In these roles, these tools won't apply.

cced 2y ago
> Yeah it has terrible optics, yet it's clearly going to be normalized and come. The question is who does it and what is the organization of it. If this company doesn't do it, the next will. Where have we seen this before..
onion2k 2y ago
In these roles, these tools won't apply. There will be companies that will apply them regardless, even in roles where they'll make things worse. The incentive for managers to show 'a bias for action' often results in managers doing any action that they can think of rather than the right action backed by data.
ratatoskrt 2y ago
In the US? Sure. In more developed parts of the world? Doubtful. European labor laws are already much, much stronger than their US counterparts, and most countries outright ban using cameras to monitor employees.

thatjoeoverthr 2y ago

Imagine the features you could add to this. Like a robot that walks around behind the workers and gives well-timed corrective communications with a whip.

p_ing 2y ago
The whip is for the programmers. https://sierraclassicgaming.com/game/space-quest-iii/sq3_programmers/# https://sierraclassicgaming.com/game/space-quest-iii/sq3_pro...
neuroticnews25 2y ago
So it appears that automating managers is easier than automating "unskilled workers"

2099miles 2y ago

Tbh this isn’t that crazy. If you hire someone to do their job outputting 10 items per hour and that number is reasonable because a bunch of other workers you hired for the same job are doing it and 1 guy hits 1 per hour then that guys shouldn’t be doing that job. The outrage should be focused on the absolute meme of their ad video cuz they were like “lets literally have a convo with an individual but refer to them as a workspace and have them say human painful responses but then just shit on them anyway impersonally” The product is not crazy. The video is wild.

2099miles 2y ago
Continued rant : It’s kinda like a ruler. If you measure workers so that one’s doing 10x less/worse output than the average that’s good. If you compare workers down to the .01% difference in output that’s stupid and inhumane.
- yogurt-male 2y ago
  Yes, but many business owners/managers are stupid and inhumane.
- Brendinooo 2y ago
  Yeah. I did new car prep for a dealership as a teen. Ask me how many cars I did per day: totally reasonable. Make me clock in and out for every car I work on: bad.
ignoramous 2y ago
> Tbh this isn’t that crazy. Yep, seems like a bog standard accountability / performance management. > The product is not crazy. The video is wild. This is how it all starts. Sane solutions wielded by madmen.
trunch 2y ago
Because this will definitely be used only to innocently tell off people doing 1/10 the work of everyone else, and not micromanage and hound people to increasingly unrealistic standards in already desperate conditions. Safe to say you aren't in any position where every move you make will be watched by AI and analysed for faults so that your boss can scream at you more efficiently whenever you don't meet standards for their pitiful wages.

saltserv 2y ago

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sixQuarks 2y ago

[flagged]

pantalaimon 2y ago
We?
- sixQuarks 2y ago
  The US

oefrha 2y ago

Brought to you by the VC famous for InstallMonetizer? Make no mistake, it’ll basically back anything that makes money, there’s no moral high ground. And like it or not, this kind of AI (or should I say A-eye) is here to stay.

tuukkah 2y ago
Did YC fund (or otherwise back) InstallMonetizer? The way I understood it, they applied to YC with a different idea and worked on IM earlier/on the side/later. (In which case, the controversy was more whether YC works with people who make things like InstallMonetizer.)
- latexr 2y ago
  > Did YC fund (or otherwise back) InstallMonetizer? Yes. Quoting Paul Graham: > Last week there was some controversy online about a company we funded called InstallMonetizer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711
  - tuukkah 2y ago
    Here's his clarification that followed, saying they didn't fund the product InstallMonetizer: > They're working on something new, and all the office hours I had with them were about that. They're not even in our database of companies as InstallMonetizer but as the new thing. (I'm not sure if I can say the name because it may not be launched yet.) I knew they had some previous product that was called a Windows installer, but I don't think we ever talked about what it did. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093047
dang 2y ago
That's deeply untrue and unfair, and the fact that you've reached back 12 years to find an example, when YC has funded thousands of startups since then, is evidence against what you're saying. YC has turned down many startups because they didn't think what the product was doing was right, and it has defunded and banned startups for ethical reasons over the years. It's not your fault that you didn't know this, since no one makes a big deal of it, but I think it's proper to bring it up when you say that the people at YC will "back anything that makes money".

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danpalmer 2y ago

This sort of performance management is unfortunately necessary. The problem is that we need tools for it to be built by people who can empathise with those subjected to them, and who want to do the right thing, and not these sorts of folks who are too immature and inexperienced to get it right. My previous company ran a warehouse and there was a clear bell curve of productivity. Most people were fine, some were excellent, but some were below the level that was realistically achievable. We did careful and considerate analysis and it helped improve productivity. When done badly however you end up with management using productivity tracking as a lever to increase productivity across the curve. Amazon driver delivery quotas are a great example – people urinating in bottles is clearly a symptom of the quota being too high. Unfortunately software built naively to help bring up the bottom 10% can too easily be used to force up the productivity of the other 90%.

seper8 2y ago
Necessary according to who?
- danpalmer 2y ago
  Colleagues, the business. The important things are that performance management is a) used to identify those performing far below what is possible, and b) that there is a good faith effort to support those people to perform better. Both of these things are mis-handled by many companies, who will use it to encourage more performance out of those who are already as productive as practically possible, and that the tools are used in bad faith or with no intention of helping people, only as an excuse to fire them.
  - sarchertech 2y ago
    You don’t need constant monitoring to find the bottom 10% though. People performing that badly are easy to pick out with spot checks. It’s the same with software. Your direct manager should know if their employee is in the bottom 10%. If they don’t, they aren’t doing their job or they have too many reports. What constant automated monitoring allows is cutting back on the number of managers and like you said, pushing high performers even further.

boruto 2y ago

The secondary school the founder went to is a dead giveaway. Ofcourse yc would fund them. Anyone would fund them infact.

klkvsk 2y ago

Software can not abuse workers. Managers can, with our without software. We've had automated KPI measuring tools since punch clocks. Nowadays it's OK in some companies to install remote access software to monitor employees' screens. It's nothing new. It's just collecting data. Question is, what will bosses do with this data, will they abuse or develop. I have no hate towards those guys. No love also. It's just business.

lame-lexem 2y ago
The famous it's ok if it's done with algorithm.
latexr 2y ago
> Software can not abuse workers. Managers can, with our without software. And guns cannot kill people. Other people can, with or without guns. It shouldn’t be hard to understand tools facilitate the task you’re using them for. > Nowadays it's OK in some companies to install remote access software to monitor employees' screens. No, it is not OK. It is done, but that doesn’t mean it is right or ethical. > It's nothing new. That’s not an excuse to not do better and revise practices. > It's just business. See the Nuremberg defence.

simonbarker87 2y ago

I used to run a small factory (two assembly lines 10 people) and something like this would have been useful, not to force people to work harder but to optimise movements and points of friction. I would actively encourage and reward people for making suggestions and we had a process in place to test if changes made things better (and not just faster - we included easier, simpler, more enjoyable etc in the test) Sadly it’s not about the tool in this case, it’s how it’s being promoted and positioned. The line “know who’s working and who’s not” on their website says it all sadly.

mrtksn 2y ago
Exactly my thoughts, if this was a European demonstration they would be talking about providing training to the worker on the line to improve the efficiency. I have no idea if that’s how they run factories in India but it definitely looks very off from Western perspective. In Europe the assumption would be that workers are trying their best, but they don’t know better. In the video, the assumption is that the workers are cheating or slacking and this tool can help you detect bad actors. The tool itself at core seems fine though. Any privacy or abuse risks would be up to the legislature and operators to consider but it’s nothing unusual to monitor production lines.
devjab 2y ago
I'm not convinced it's really that useful. If you have rows of people sewing the same piece of clothing or similar, then it's not exactly hard to track output without digital surveillance. If you have assembly lines where people perform different parts of a larger project digital surveillance is useless next to things like lean, and again, bottlenecks will show themselves extremely fast if a single station is slower than usual. I suspect the purpose of these systems is actually to create a horrible work environment. Not because that is a good thing, but because it'll drive away anyone who has other options and leave you with the most desperate people. Who will also be the cheapest people.

philipjoubert 2y ago

As someone who grew up in a 3rd world country and whose mother owned a clothing factory, this product seems...fine? The response is an indication of how little people know about how their t-shirts and shoes are made.

bayindirh 2y ago
It's nuanced. If it allows you to find outliers (low performers to manage and high performers to praise), that's fine. If you try to push everyone further and further to their breaking point and make them trade the same amount of money for more of their time and more importantly health, it's certainly not fine.
lm28469 2y ago
Ah ok, my bad then, it's a perfect product and we shouldn't change anything at all then. Let's continue to treat humans as machines, especially in 3rd world countries, who cares right ? Even they say it's fine.
- computerthings 2y ago
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oulipo 2y ago
TBH I'd rather buy shirts where I know that people doing them have been well-treated
- philipjoubert 2y ago
  The people who worked in these companies are usually incredibly grateful for the opportunity to do seated work indoors for reasonable wages. Applying Western labour practices to third world countries would prevent them from ever developing...hurting the very people we all want to help.

solumos 2y ago

Is it dystopian, or is it just real-time performance monitoring poorly marketed by inexperienced founders? There are tools like this for tracking git commits and velocity (that I’ve been on the receiving end of). It probably makes less sense in that context, but if your job is a repetitive task, I don’t think it’s necessarily abuse or dystopian to track it. Monitoring bottlenecks isn’t a bad thing. They probably could have chosen an example where the solution to the bottleneck didn’t involve berating a low performer (e.g. adjusting the line to add another station or similar)

black_puppydog 2y ago
You mean if they marketed it differently, managers would magically stop using it exactly the way it was advertised?
- solumos 2y ago
  Assuming that this comment is made in good faith — I doubt that they have much usage currently. Better marketing would show how managers could use this tool to better support their staff rather than scolding them.
raxxorraxor 2y ago
Perhaps real-time performance monitoring of people is wrong as well and marketing just made it sound less bad as it is? If your management tracks your commits/velocity, look for a better job. The market easily allows you to do this. It doesn't make sense anyway and anyone with some technical know-how knows this. This will escalate into something bad like publication metrics did to science. You end up with superfluous drivel that just pads real discovery. Although for code it is even more trivial. Bottlenecks are something entirely different. If you have a critical-path, there need to be resources to tackle the task at hand. Real-time monitoring is entirely useless here as well.
- ukuina 2y ago
  > If your management tracks your commits/velocity, look for a better job. Don't most version-control systems support/automate this?

acc_297 2y ago

> Boost your assembly line efficiency by up to 30% Ethics of this aside the above claim must be dubious I would think the majority of manufacturing inefficiencies are due to down time as a result of raw material shipping delays or machine break down… of course I’m in no position to offer an informed opinion but just based on the product website I have a hard time taking this stuff seriously. Monitoring of factory workers isn’t hard to do with current surveillance and 1 or 2 humans in the loop

friendly_chap 2y ago

That post was pulled partly because of my comment. I commented this: "While I see the economical usefullness, this sounds like the worst possible application of AI. Using AI to surveil is building hell on earth. AI should be used to help people work less/easier, not whip them into working more." Which ended up on the top of the thread. Was surprised to wake up this morning and see it gone. LinkedIn post I made about this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crufter_today-y-combinator-deleted-this-announcement-activity-7300050840852086786-x6WH?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABcNA2MB_d5j-ofPyG8XDq4OUyAsV3UKRKw https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crufter_today-y-combinator-de...

astonex 2y ago

The product should be marketed as a tool for monitoring and highlighting bottlenecks in the manufacturing production line in order to help maintain peak output. This is a completely reasonable thing to want, it's no different to monitoring micro-services and their latencies/loads. The video they made however where they berate and meanly put-down an individual employee is so far from acceptable. That's not how personnel performance issues should be managed in the real world, completely void of human empathy. It shows the founders (and did YC view and approve this?) are lacking in areas

mattmaroon 2y ago

This seems like a tempest in a tea pot. You're automating doing what factory floor managers already do? Hitler! From the title I thought they had developed a robot that flogs 6 year old workers or something. If I were YC, though, I'd probably have a rule about startups not using "backed by Y Combinator" logos on their homepage like Optifye does. YC's a pretty low touch investor at the seed round level, their startups could do lots of things YC didn't expect, didn't know about, and couldn't prevent.

lokar 2y ago

Having been in this industry for a long time now, I see a disappointing trend in tech, and US society in general: viewing everything at zero sum. I’m probably naive, but I remember in the past tech focusing on innovation that would generate enough gains for everyone to get a share (or at least the gain to the tech company did not come at the expense of someone else) Now, more and more I see business plans that are zero sum. Using tech to take from someone else, not growing the pie. This matches a general trend in public life is the US to view everything as a zero sum contest

_DeadFred_ 2y ago
There was a time when US tech people would use this idea as a moral parable. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 But now we have current tech businesses basing their future growth strategies as much on better dark patterns as on actual value creation. Imagine a society using their best minds to figure out 'better' dark patterns, and counting the outcome from those patterns as GDP growth. That society is royally f'd on every level.

infecto 2y ago

The only thing truly embarrassing is that nobody at YC advised them that this ad is 1) terribly amateur and 2) has the chance to look extremely bad. Did not advise and in fact published to their feed. Weird optics, I am not familiar with what I presume to be Indian factories, other than the wild lack of safety (thanks youtube) but I cannot see how this video does anything positive. As for the product itself I don't think it is unusual, these types of measurement systems are not new and can be helpful for a factory, like all things, it boils down to the owner/managers of said factory not the tool.

friendly_chap 2y ago
If anyone is reading from YC, I'm happy to review their submissions, I was perhaps the first who raised concerns and was on top of the thread with my comment. (See this post I made on LinkedIn about this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crufter_today-y-combinator-deleted-this-announcement-activity-7300050840852086786-x6WH?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABcNA2MB_d5j-ofPyG8XDq4OUyAsV3UKRKw https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crufter_today-y-combinator-de...)
- dang 2y ago
  I haven't read the details or watched the video, but it does sound like you noticed something that should not have been there. I noticed that your page says this: > New: the thread "Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers" on Hacker News got removed from the front page despite having 242 points. The thread fell in rank because it set off a software penalty called the flamewar detector. We haven't taken any moderator action or touched it in any way. Our usual practice is to downweight shallow outrage posts (because they're not what the site is for), but we haven't done so in this case, because we have a core rule of moderating less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is in a story. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) If you want to be fair, you could add that information. Otherwise, readers will assume you mean that we nefariously censor negative posts about YC, when the truth is the opposite. Edit: after I posted this, I noticed that the thread said [flagged] at the top. That's because users flagged it—as they usually do with shallow outrage threads. However, I've turned the flags off in keeping with the rule I just mentioned.

neuroticnews25 2y ago

I think people are scared this will increase the power of the companies over workers. But a worker’s negotiating position is based on their indispensability and productivity, and on average this won’t change that. I know in reality it's often the fog of war that makes the work bearable. And many good managers more or less consciously keep it that way. But fundamentally, how can more insight and more truth be bad? My resources are limited and I'd rather spend them on a good worker than a slightly worse one. I thought that was the whole point of meritocracy.

kundi 2y ago

It’s not the only company with low morale that YC is sponsoring. There have been a dozens of copycats shamelessly copying other products, some of them open source. It is disappointing to see YC going to new levels of bottom without any proper accountability, just greed.

anymouse123456 2y ago

No comment really, just came here to remind everyone about, "The Yes Men." NSFW warning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_bWAF-XxQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_bWAF-XxQM The video features a tear-away business suit to reveal a gold lame stretch suit with a giant, inflatable phallus that has a monitor at the end and controls to let a manager electrocute under performing factory workers from the beach. This was presented live and in person to an unwitting, but credulous breakout session at the WTO in 2003 to awkward applause.

leonheld 2y ago

The response here would be significantly different if this was about measuring the performance of software engineers in wealthy countries.

gagik_co 2y ago
I mean… yes, obviously? There’s a lot less room for exploitation of white collar workers in wealthy countries than sweatshops. Though performance quantifying software still deserves a lot of scrutiny for removing humanity from work in any context.
- leonheld 2y ago
  It's obvious to you becase you seem like a decent human being, judging from this comment.

rimbo789 2y ago

This product should be banned and these guys should be forced to work a year at a textile mill for trying to build it

emorning3 2y ago

My first full-time job out of high school was unloading trucks of coffee and sugar, by hand. Trust me when I say that the motto on the loading dock is 'fuck me, fuck you'.

exsomet 2y ago

It seems like there’s been a rash of these instances lately where someone does something, says something, or builds something like this that’s not just offensive but unconscionable. And there’s always the predictable outcry and then usually that’s the end of it. It’s given me pause to think about why that pattern has been established and I think the simple answer is that there are no consequences. The people we see in the news doing horrific things for attention are doing it because there is no mechanism to hold them accountable. Product launches like this - where it’s explicit purpose is to degrade and exploit humans - happen, meme video and all, because these people will not face any consequences for it (and the potential benefit is massive to them if it takes off). Yelling and screaming about how horrible it is doesn’t really do anything and it’s not an effective use of time or energy. I wonder what society could do - not conceptually, but practically - to establish consequences for someone who launches a product like this.

pirate_solo9 2y ago

Can anyone share the vision models they might be using and how they might be tuning them?

pluto_modadic 2y ago

It's clear there's a large fragment of AI founder types that totally had nobody tell them and I hope they faceplant, hard.

deleted 2y ago

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mzajc 2y ago

Has this been manually delisted from the frontpage? It doesn't say it's flagged, but it's no longer on there. EDIT: looks like it's #157 now, I think I just misunderstand the ranking mechanism.

deleted 2y ago
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dang 2y ago
It set off the flamewar detector. Moderators haven't touched it, except that we turned off the user flags on the story. Otherwise it would be displaying [flagged] at the top. We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is part of the story (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). This doesn't mean we don't moderate at all, of course; that would be too large a loophole. But we do moderate less. For example, under normal circumstances our standard practice would be to downweight a thread like this one, because outrage posts (what we used to call riler-uppers*) are not normally on topic for Hacker News. We also might edit the title to be less sensational and more accurate and neutral. And we would leave the user flags on. In the present case, we've overriden all of that in order to follow the rule I just mentioned. * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=riler%20upper&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is part of the story I believe this because it makes sense to me. I think a habit of tempered reactions allows the understanding - that criticism is valuable in healthy doses. Adding this: Having HN's stance plainly said is valuable too.
- latexr 2y ago
  I greatly value and respect your moderation work. That consideration made me temper my words in the title and the post’s description. I did not create the thread with the intent to cause a flamewar, and in fact didn’t even realise the scope of the story until the very first comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170866 Everything I wrote was the conclusion of original research based entirely on what I read from the founders’ words and what I saw in the video. Apart from the Mastodon post, I saw zero opinions on the matter before posting. The more I looked at it, the stronger I felt the criticism was warranted with those specific terms. I genuinely do not feel there is a more “accurate and neutral” title I could’ve written. From everything I found, the title looks accurate. As for neutrality, which could surely only amount in this instance to being apologetic, I don’t feel there would have been any point to making the original post if not for the criticism.

igleria 2y ago

An abhorrent product that no doubt will be have abhorrent customers and maybe one or two that will use it for good.

deleted 2y ago

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sub7 2y ago

Overpaid software engineers here please spend a moment to talk about your 3pm massage and free omakase Or just go work a real widget business and you will realize that optimizing worker efficiency is critical and useful

laidoffamazon 2y ago

I can't call this slavery but their attitude towards their workers who make $1 an hour is sadly extremely common for among wealthy Indian people. They just don't see the non-English speaking poor in India to be human, and very likely the people below their status in America to be human. It's disgusting and the reason why I can't identify with my ancestry

mythrwy 2y ago

I don't predict much success for their venture

rajnathani 2y ago

Just like how workplace software analyze white-collar work, such as this Microsoft product [1] (and many of those "bossware" which we saw during Covid), I don't see how this tool is any different but from a manual labor analysis standpoint? Their marketing might have been off, but I mean as long as the camera recordings are securely stored, what could be the issue? This solution is more like an automatic supervisor, and this could help as it could heavily reduce the need for supervisor roles (which also can come with biases and potential workplace-politics), and thus directly increase salaries for the workers actually performing the manual assembly. Also, there are already cameras in assemblies for monitoring the environment and also modern solutions to analyze workers and worker safety such as Invisible AI [2] and Rolloos [3]. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-viva/workplace-analytics-and-feedback#tabx7d1a78ca13c643c98554ef6a51e1b5a9 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-viva/workplace-ana... [2] https://www.invisible.ai/ https://www.invisible.ai/ [3] https://www.rolloos.com/en/about-us/mission-vision/ https://www.rolloos.com/en/about-us/mission-vision/

rajnathani 2y ago
Update: I just saw the part where the founder in the video refers to the person as "Number 17", this is pretty low even considering they might have wanted to anonymize a person's "John Doe" name for the example. I don't think such empathy-lacking individuals deserve any serious funding to build this out.

GroupNebula563 2y ago

the fact that they’re backing this is ridiculous.

asimpleusecase 2y ago

I worked in a factory during university- made playground equipment out of metal. Every task had a reporting system and the company knew exactly who was producing what. This was a long time ago - they still used desktop calculators with paper tape to do calculations. I was only there for a relatively short time, I just wanted to work and make money for school. We were promised productivity bonuses - my section of the factory achieved 147% of expected production. Another had done almost 180%, but when the bosses did the bonus talk they added in the trucking division and showed a 30% productivity due to excessive “dead heads” ( empty trucks ) returning from equipment delivery. It was a management issue- they were not very good at finding return loads for those trucks. So the production bonus was calculated on the total score of the enterprise- so we got almost nothing on the factory floor for bonus. When my time there was done a friend in accounting told me that I had rated as the most productive in the factory, he had seen the numbers as there was a ranking sheet that was calculated every week. ( remember paper tape calculators ) no one ever told me at the company, no real reward, no approach about coming back to the factory. The point of this post is that this type of thing - monitor the employees- has been a thing for a very long time. It is the humans running the factory that decide to reward, encourage , promote those who work hard - or not.

BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
And the humans are also machines, purpose built over time to maximize efficiency and ignore anything else. Good employers are evolutionarily suboptimal, thats the issue.

fraaancis 2y ago

It's too bad the AI can't just do the sewing.