If Amazon can watch a grocery store with cameras and figure who bought what, I'm sure they can apply the same tech to figure out which worker is working without wristbands.
If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know
71–80 of 88 posts
Re: If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
So many, many workers are monitored by human supervisors already. Not shown to be significantly different.
I've worked in a few place like that. Micromanagement pushed people to do just enough to get by. They also created strategies to avoid the extreme oversight and inflate their metrics to stay off the managers bad list. All this does is push people to fight the system more.
I have never been less productive than at the job where every task was broken down into tiny chunks, and I had to use a software stopwatch to log my time spent working on each.
And I have never been more productive than at the job where my weekly payroll timecard consisted of a radio button choice labeled "work week" and "vacation week", with a signature field.
The micromanagement encouraged me to spend all my time gaming the stopwatches and work plan spreadsheets instead of doing anything useful. That whole operation was a budget-padding scam, and I bailed as soon as I could. I have better things to do with my life than sit on ass and help my supervisor lie to their supervisor in order to keep the checks coming in. "Oh, my gosh! Writing and maintaining this glorified CRUD app is so hard! We're gonna need a bit more budget next year, and here are exactly the metrics you will need to justify that."
Every interview since has been influenced by that experience, because I'm not walking blind into a corrupt workplace again.
Re: If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know
#73Fellow engineers, is this really the world we should be building?
Re: If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know
#74I often see debates here about how tech workers should or shouldn’t organize because they’re too highly paid, etc. But what if they organized to protect something more simple, like warehouse workers fundamental humanity? 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…
Organizing to protect someone other than yourselves sounds more like a political party. That would be a reason to join the Democrats, Greens, Socialists, lefty Libertarians, or Communists, and a reason to avoid the righty Libertarians, Republicans, and Constitutionalists.
That would be a reason to join the Democrats
Silly Valley is staunch Dem, and who do you think makes this kind of tech? It would have been different if they hadn’t stabbed Bernie in the back.
Re: If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know
#75Fellow engineers, is this really the world we should be building?
No, but it only takes a few people to create this world. And a lot of people care more about money and their life than a possible future for someone else.
Re: If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Millions of people wear a fitbit. I used to wear a watch (to regulate my work day). How many office workers wear a badge? Most of them. Not a problem
A badge is not a monitoring device and a watch is not forced one you. You wear it voluntarily. Its not that monitoring employees is wrong, but there's a way to go about it. You can't force spy devices on a person's body or close to them constantly and win the approval/loyalty of your workers. Why not install CCTV in the loo while you're at it? Staying inordinately long in there is also a form of slacking. How about m…
Just wrong. Badges are not voluntary at any corporate office I've ever seen or worked at.
Re: If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet, capitalism and the free market. This is little different from a McDonalds shift manager watching over workers at the lunch rush.
There are qualitative and quantitative differences between requiring weekly progress meetings, daily updates, and microchipping employees.
But not between a manager on the floor, looking you in the eye, and a bracelet doing the same.
Re: If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know
#78As companies develop more ways to ensure consistency of behavior and performance of their human assets, humans need to develop more ways to collectively bargain for their welfare against companies.
You can only abuse people so much before they snap and out come the guillotines. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion
Historically almost all slave rebellions end poorly.
> guillotines
I just want to remind everybody that the French revolution was started by the professional class of the third estate: landlords, lawyers, magistrates, and professional tradesmen, who felt they were being taxed too onerously by the gov/king. It was not in any sense started by the peasants.
Peasants are maybe good for harnessing when you need to break stuff, they are not very good at actually organizing or starting successful rebellions.
As far as I know no successful revolution, except Haiti's slave revolution, has occurred without support from an elite class, though sometimes that elite class support is from the outside (like the French support in the American Revolution).
Re: If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are qualitative and quantitative differences between requiring weekly progress meetings, daily updates, and microchipping employees.
But not between a manager on the floor, looking you in the eye, and a bracelet doing the same.
A manager can't follow each individual employee every moment of the day.
To be a little more abstract, I'm talking about the degree of privacy and autonomy that workers are afforded. The reason people find the idea of wristband tracking objectionable is because it provides a means to reduce the autonomy of large numbers of workers beyond what was previously feasible.
Re: If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If I bring you in to write code, what's wrong with hiring and keeping only people who write a certain amount of code every day? Are you having a bad day because you're distracted? Too bad, you're receiving a reprimand for not meeting your quota. Do you need to get up and walk around because your back is sore? Too bad, that's time you should be spending coding. Are you stuck in the resolution of a problem? Too bad, pr…
...assuming total failure by the supervisor to account for these things. Which can happen anyway. I don't see it changing the game, at least not for that reason.