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Instead, will they be the tools of our enslavement to The Man?
Imagine if they had read something like Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming. Instead of creating a digital whip for shallow (or even outright harmful) managers, they could have developed a QA tool grounded in real, deep thinking—one that respects proven principles of manufacturing. There’s still time to course-correct, and embracing some of the foundational literature on the topic could make the difference.
I don't think the issue is necessarily the tool, but rather the execution. I think everybody can agree that improving efficiency is a good thing, and tools to track/improve it are a net benefit, but the way they approached it was abhorrent. But seriously, who approved posting that (before it was deleted)?
>I think everybody can agree that improving efficiency is a good thing, and tools to track/improve it are a net benefit Well in a void, yes, but in reality, no: You pay prices to acquire things. Occasionally we increase efficiency with no downsides aside from investment cost or complexity, but much more commonly at least part of the price paid is increased pressure on those at the bottom (lower wages, unemployment, t…
It's worse than this, the product designers are marketing to the manufacturers that place the least possible value on the things that allow it to exist - workers and society.
At Optifye, I am using my expertise in computer vision to solve a manufacturing company owner's biggest problem: low labor productivity!
Consider nearly any professional sports team and the relative effort that athletes put in. There's very little disagreeing on objectives our outcomes (score/prevent points, win games) and incentives are directly tied to this (win more games, get more money). And yet when you listen to what some of the highest-performing athletes say, they'll readily admit they don't go 100% effort 100% of the time. In fact, that's of…
This easily could have been spun in a positive light, imagine a commercial where they use their technology to discover that an employee was using a broken machine or that there was a bottleneck farther up the assembly line that could improve rates! But no, it was a cold look into how sweatshop operators view their workers.
A few background thoughts...
I remember browsing angel.co, and most of the startup blurbs were just depressing -- either crypto scams, or people who sounded unaware that they were doing something bad for society. Many worse-sounding than this one. So depressing, that even LinkedIn was a more pleasant place to be scrolling job listings.
But there can't be that many sociopaths, as it appeared there were on angel.co; they're probably mostly just people with not much world experience, and perhaps too much techbro echo chamber time, now going through the motions they were taught about how to be a startup founder.
Also, there's modes based on context, and I'll embarrass myself here... I remember during the dotcom gold rush, when I'd already had wholesome values instilled in me, plus the usual Internet-before-it-went-corporate values, yet I found on occasion I got distracted from those, in a mode. I was a grad student with a research assistantship, in a lab that had sponsors and VIPs coming through every day. I recall one time some people from a particular huge music industry company came through. So, I start telling them something about the emerging democratization of creation and distribution of high-quality music... and how I thought their company can get ahead of that. Afterwards, I was, like, why did I go out of my way to do that, like an amoral hired gun? On any other day, I'd be trying to help people to be empowered, and encourage them to get rid of that same company.
Going back to this particular application domain, another thought... If you've worked with factory people, at least the ones I did (in a startup introducing a new factory station) were delightful, and I can't imagine imposing this system on people there. Maybe that's another reason to know your customers and users: not only understanding the problem domain and getting the MVP right, but also to engage our natural human empathy and caring.