191–200 of 277 posts
> Workers are voting with their feet. Turnover is high at both Teleperformance, the largest call centre employer (around 80% annually) and Amazon, 150%. This is... a mistake. What did they mean by this?
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Here's my suggestion: change from an 8 hour work day into a 6 hour work day. Pretty simple really, I don't think we need to uproot society here...
So make it illegal to work for more than 6 hours? What if I actually want to work more and agree with a company to do so and get paid for it?
Reading this, I'm so glad that in all of the EU it is illegal to fire someone purely based on a software decision. There's a minimum level of humanity that we should extend to everyone. Letting a known faulty AI decide if someone will have money for food tomorrow is way across the line. I'm not surprised that treating humans like cattle on their way to slaughter is hugely profitable. But I'm not sure we want to opera…
Wow… a guy that directly employed almost 2 million people and indirectly improved the lives of tens of millions of dependents in the Amazon ecosystem is a dystopian person. Bezos is far from perfect, but do we really think that that was his primary consideration of building and growing Amazon? Pretty much every organization that gets large enough tends to rot from the inside and get dystopian, despite the efforts of…
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> People have historically complained a lot about firings not being based on an objective formula. Now the complaint is an objective formula is being used. Cute line, but obviously people have always wanted criteria to be objective and fair . If the rule was "take the ordinal value of each letter in employee's name, sum mod 365, and if the result matches the day of the year, they're fired!" -- that's completely objec…
>> objective and fair. You do understand that the is a logical impossibility, as "fairness" is a subjective standard... What is "fair" to me, likely will not be what you believe is "fair" thus something can not be objective and "fair" > "take the ordinal value of each letter in employee's name, sum mod 365, and if the result matches the day of the year, they're fired!" My Objection to this standard would not be "it i…
The goal isn’t to mistreat humans or even to provide them with jobs. The goal is to gather data, build models, and replace the human components over time.
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People have historically complained a lot about firings not being based on an objective formula. Now the complaint is an objective formula is being used. > WW2 prisoner camps For starters, those camps would shoot anyone who tried to leave. Not the same thing at all.
Just because there's an algorithm involved doesn't make it objective in any way. There is no objective answer to "How productive is this employee", it's not something you can measure empirically.
I don't know about most people but objectivity can fly out the window when it comes to my essential needs. I want another group of humans involved who have similar needs and may consider things an objective metric likely won't.
Some mixture of a utilitarian performance metric balanced with some empathy, morale, and ethical reasoning seems like a better blend to me. Either extreme leads to undesired outcomes in my opinion.
With pure human involvement you can have extremely biased no justifiable firings based on emotion, hatred, racism, sexism, ageism, whatever and in those cases, a metric is your friend. It can potentially show that undesired bias for what it is to others.
On the other hand, that bias may be a good bias. Perhaps your manager is a reasonable human being, they know data the algorithm doesn't like how many additional hours you put in unclocked or that you helped your coworker through a rough problem a few months back, perhaps that you saved the company at a critical junction. They also know your performance recently dropped because there's a pandemic and subequent emotional distress might be effecting you. Perhaps they also notice your performance dropped just like the metric identified, but they know the cause of this is because you just became a parent and have had to divert focus and time towards your family. Your manager has the ability here to step in and override the metric because they know better, have empathy, and understand the world isn't about constantly working at maximal efficiency. This is, to me, a desirable bias.
If we keep chasing and supporting utilitarianism pushed by corporations full-steam, we're going to create quite the hellscape that no one wants to live in.
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So how many large scale experiments with communism have we had during the last 100 years, and how many of them have ended in success? It's starting to get pretty ridiculous to argue against that kind of body of evidence. I have full respect for anyone trying to question and improve our society and economic system, but to just wind back the clock to 1968, pretend like nothing happened and start ranting about communism…
> So how many large scale experiments with communism have we had during the last 100 years To my knowledge, only a handful. Workers self-organization in Catalonia during the Spanish revolution (1936-1937) is one, Community-oriented democracy in Chiapas (since 1994) and Rojava (since 2011) is another. The other examples you think of (unless i'm mistaken) are precisely dictatorships of the proletariat that have nothing…
Haha, no comment..
Reading this, I'm so glad that in all of the EU it is illegal to fire someone purely based on a software decision. There's a minimum level of humanity that we should extend to everyone. Letting a known faulty AI decide if someone will have money for food tomorrow is way across the line. I'm not surprised that treating humans like cattle on their way to slaughter is hugely profitable. But I'm not sure we want to opera…
After 2 years she succeeded.
I admittedly didn't care because I got a higher paying job in a better field, but I'll take AI over office politics.
Reading this, I'm so glad that in all of the EU it is illegal to fire someone purely based on a software decision. There's a minimum level of humanity that we should extend to everyone. Letting a known faulty AI decide if someone will have money for food tomorrow is way across the line. I'm not surprised that treating humans like cattle on their way to slaughter is hugely profitable. But I'm not sure we want to opera…
>Letting a known faulty AI decide if someone will have money for food tomorrow is way across the line. So is the implication here that humans are less faulty, or that there's something intrinsically wrong about an AI making this decision rather than a human? If the former, then this is an issue that the technology will probably eventually solve. If the latter, well... that doesn't seem very justifiable, to say the le…