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

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

#171

Post by tmpz22 »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #150
trunch wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's also dumb from a factory prospective. Our factories did time studies to understand things. What we learned: Certain lines are primarily made up of barely functioning older people. No one else sticks around in those jobs. Think barely functioning alcoholic or recovering alcoholics that have nothing. However we would also get a few 18 year olds with no idea how jobs/work works and or zero accountability (they just…

> From the numbers we should want to build our processes around the high performers. But we can't expand our base of high performers AND they are the most likely to just disappear and not easily have their productivity replaced.

You're failing to retain high performers? Are there perhaps methods for retaining high performers that you have not tried?

AI for Executive performance monitoring would be an interesting social experiment.

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

#172

Post by laidoffamazon »

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

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

#173

Post by cruffle_duffle »

carabiner wrote: post #152
infecto wrote: post #56

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 t…

I think people are thrown off by the Indian work culture shown in the video, which is very hierarchical and frequently involves parent-like scolding. That said, I think that culture is horrible and should be eliminated. I worked at an Indian consulting firm as the only American and experienced this firsthand.

It’s pretty wild when you witness that stuff after working in “traditional American tech companies” your entire career. That and the absolute abuse of metrics like story points for all kinds of things ranging from financial reporting to employee performance evaluation.

It’s fucking wild. Makes you really appreciate how good some places can be.

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

#174

Post by [deleted] »

latexr wrote: post #169
dang wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your reply so thanks for posting it! I'm biased of course, but when I read "$X is backing $Y to do $Z", I read $Z as what $X is specifically and intentionally backing $Y to do. In this case, that's not accurate. YC would never specifically back a startup to "abuse factory workers"—that would be absurd. Nor is the phrase neutral; it's obviously accusatory. HN titles aren't supposed to be used to build min…

> I'm biased of course, but when I read "$X is backing $Y to do $Z", I read $Z as what $X is specifically and intentionally backing $Y to do. Fair! I agree with you and I hadn’t realised the sentence as is was accusing Y Combinator in that sense. My intention was something along the lines of “Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company whose product aims to abuse factory workers” but it was too long and some nuance was…

[deleted]

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

#175

Post by BladeJogger »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #127
ren_engineer wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

saw someone point out how they could have framed it as a way to reward good workers, but instead they showed how they can go after people underperforming. Just bad framing and shows how out of touch they are

If we're being real here: it's excellent framing for their customers who very likely does this but slower (and with an equal amount of empathy). The framing is excellent in terms of the basics of pitching: know your audience identify bottlenecks, present a solution to remove bottlenecks, and clearly demonstrate how. The optics of presenting this in a public domain full of people who relate more to the factory worker…

Are factory managers that dumb that they can't figure out what its actually for?

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

#176

Post by mrtksn »

simonbarker87 wrote: post #31

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…

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.

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

#177

Post by BladeJogger »

philipjoubert wrote: post #35

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.

[flagged]

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

#179

Post by rajnathani »

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-ana...

[2] https://www.invisible.ai/

[3] https://www.rolloos.com/en/about-us/mission-vision/

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