31–40 of 88 posts
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Because economy exists to sustain and enrich the lives of humans, not the other way around.
Yet, capitalism and the free market. This is little different from a McDonalds shift manager watching over workers at the lunch rush.
They call this dystopian, but I don't get it. Why keep a slacker around when you have limited slots for workers? Why not measure and retain good workers? Somebody please try a little to see beyond the linkbait title of the OP. Knee-jerk anti-the-man comments aren't very helpful in digging into why this is a good or bad idea.
Because people aren't robots. That's not how the brain works. People can't concentrate 100% for 8-12 hours a day every day consistently. >What if your supervisor could identify every time you paused to scratch or fidget, and for how long you took a bathroom break? I certainly wouldn't want to work under those conditions.
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Because people aren't robots. That's not how the brain works. People can't concentrate 100% for 8-12 hours a day every day consistently. >What if your supervisor could identify every time you paused to scratch or fidget, and for how long you took a bathroom break? I certainly wouldn't want to work under those conditions.
If you've ever worked in such an environment, good workers welcome such measurement tools. So often slackers can befriend management and push off work on others without detection. It is very difficult to monitor performance in a fair and equitable manner without taking into account nepotism, racism, etc.
I find that hard to believe, at least a full time monitoring wrist band. Good workers like metrics, but of course, every metric can be gamed. They aren't as valuable as you might think they are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because people aren't robots. That's not how the brain works. People can't concentrate 100% for 8-12 hours a day every day consistently. >What if your supervisor could identify every time you paused to scratch or fidget, and for how long you took a bathroom break? I certainly wouldn't want to work under those conditions.
So the best workers will be people too. No worries; folks won't be judged or measured as robots. Not an issue.
This is Amazon we're talking about... their warehouse workers are already "judged or measured as robots."
An efficiency metric based on tracking a worker's hand movements within standardized axes of freedom is totally something they would do if they felt there was money to be made.
They call this dystopian, but I don't get it. Why keep a slacker around when you have limited slots for workers? Why not measure and retain good workers? Somebody please try a little to see beyond the linkbait title of the OP. Knee-jerk anti-the-man comments aren't very helpful in digging into why this is a good or bad idea.
None of the attacks on your position really answer your question, which I think is a reasonable one. If I'm hiring someone to stack boxes, what's wrong with hiring and keeping the best box stackers? Why should I be limited in the non-discriminatory tools I use to measure such performance? The wristband isn't monitoring an employee's attitude or beliefs. If anything, the tool would make racism or favoritism generally…
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Because people aren't robots. That's not how the brain works. People can't concentrate 100% for 8-12 hours a day every day consistently. >What if your supervisor could identify every time you paused to scratch or fidget, and for how long you took a bathroom break? I certainly wouldn't want to work under those conditions.
So the best workers will be people too. No worries; folks won't be judged or measured as robots. Not an issue.
I understand that people have had different experiences working on the tech side of Amazon, some great, some terrible. And yet I would hope that we can all look at this and say “this isn’t something I’d want for myself, my family, or my friends. This isn’t how you should treat people.”
Amazon is more likely to respond to people on the AWS team pushing pack in a concerted fashion than the warehouse workers they’ve already shown themselves to see as disposable
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So the best workers will be people too. No worries; folks won't be judged or measured as robots. Not an issue.
My point being even the best workers will need a moment now and then.
If this technology was used to find the bottom 10% of workers and correct their behavior or fire them, it would probably be fine.
But there are people who ARE able to maintain almost perfect efficiency for huge lengths of time. Everyone will be measured and everyone will be expected to preform. People in the "normal" range will be made to feel inadequate. Everyone will be getting prescriptions for ADHD meds to compete with the top performers. The top performers will then feel pressured to get the same medications in order to maintain their advantage.
This technology could put a lot of pressure on the system. And it could lead to people eliminating small breaks that might be necessary to maintain their mental health. I guess time will tell. I'm hoping companies use the idea responsibly and think about the long term incentives they create. But that doesn't seem likely.
Externalities notwithstanding, these jobs surely won't exist in the very near future, right?
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Because you're monitoring someone constantly. Imagine if your manager sat behind you breathing on your neck while you coded. He has a pack of tic-tacs so his breath is fine. He crushes the tic tacs with his teeth everytime he thinks you're not working
So many, many workers are monitored by human supervisors already. Not shown to be significantly different.