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 a…
Shouldn't the manager of the 'bunch of workers' notice the guy is underperforming and understand why ? Maybe that manager is the one that shouldn't be doing that job
But that would increase their cortisol, according to the founders.
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…
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.
This is a strange view. Weapons development is at best helpful as it hopefully provides a deterrent to nefarious actors and at worst protects our interest as Americans if someone caused us to move beyond weapons as a "deterrent." Pretending like national defense and development of weapons is a bad thing is hiding your head in sand and pretending that there's nobody that wants to hurt you.
> protects our interest as Americans Whose? Not mine. To me, yours is the strange viewpoint. We have nukes and a massive air force. That is the bulk of the deterrence. Use good statesmanship and diplomacy and that covers the rest. Anything else being developed is for political suppression or fueling regional wars and imperial bullshit.
> We have nukes and a massive air force.
> YC is funding weapon manufacturers lol. Where are the ethics there?
Circular reasoning? The reason we have a massive and more importantly effective air force is because weapons development occurred. It would not take very long at all for China to surpass the US in terms of air effectiveness if the US stopped working on defense projects.
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 coul…
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.
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 excel…
We have a production line without individual performance tracking in a country with very high living standards and working costs.
If a line doesn't perform, you can solve it without it. Every single time.
Sure, there is not as much market pressure than in general logistics, but I still don't believe you would need these metrics at all.
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,…
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.
> protects our interest as Americans Whose? Not mine. To me, yours is the strange viewpoint. We have nukes and a massive air force. That is the bulk of the deterrence. Use good statesmanship and diplomacy and that covers the rest. Anything else being developed is for political suppression or fueling regional wars and imperial bullshit.
> We have nukes and a massive air force. > YC is funding weapon manufacturers lol. Where are the ethics there? Circular reasoning? The reason we have a massive and more importantly effective air force is because weapons development occurred. It would not take very long at all for China to surpass the US in terms of air effectiveness if the US stopped working on defense projects.
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.
Your point is mooted. I’m both cases, an invention has far more potential negative applications than positive ones.
How is it moot? TNT was a massive safety boost for the mining industry. The negative uses were developed/adopted after it was invented.
"an invention has far more potential negative applications than positive ones."
Emphasis mine. Do you mean to say all inventions have more potential negative uses? Even say a toothbrush? I suppose that could be true, but then you have to look at magnitude of impact and rate of occurrence to see that the potential negative uses like stabbing someone is low.