Good. Age shouldn't be used as a means to discriminate against someone. Pay should be based on skill level and ability to provide value.
BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free
71–80 of 86 posts
Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re a cheap shopper and you want to go to the grocery store with the cheapest prices, the store is not going to pony up and pay for a bagger for you because that would drive their costs up. See the analogy now?
No, you can choose to not do work and not shop at a grocery store that doesn’t have a cashier (but then you’re taking about the Amazon Go stores where its a true win win because you just walk out) If you choose to not drive to a job that you signed up for knowing that your only option to get to work was driving, then you’ll just not earn income. The company won’t otherwise pay to transport you there.
So if you lived somewhere with no grocery stores that have self checkout then it doesn’t count as doing work for free because you have no alternatives?
Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free
#73For me, the real story here is that BF failed to take any action at all to retain a top five driver of traffic to their ad revenue - driven website. Let's say that quiz interactions from McMahon come out to 5% of ad impressions for all of BF. What would a site as big as BF pay to ensure that those 5% of impressions don't disappear overnight? At most companies, I'd imagine quite a bit. Even if we look at the low numbe…
People are sorted into different classes in companies. You’ll never get a company to pay six figures for someone they consider a free intern - regardless of whether it’s in their economic interest.
Sure, as irrational as that may be, you're right that it's a larger problem to fix that's probably out of scope here.
But the larger point is that economically productive employees in their early career are almost always exploited, so it wouldn't have been hard for Buzzfeed to throw some relatively token amount towards her and have her be over the moon with it. Most college students would love to get $20k for doing something they were procrastinating and doing for free, especially if you package it with an ego-boosting title.
Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree. Most people are much slower at scanning things than an actual cashier. Things like produce are especially annoying because you have to search for the item (of which there could be multiple I.e. organic vs non organic bananas). And the error rate is high (will lock up if you don’t immediately put a scanned item in the bag area).
The difference is that [at least at my supermarket], in the space of 2 manned registers, they fit 8 self-registers. So other people have to be 8 times slower for it to be a regression. [at my supermarket much of the produce is bagged and barcoded and the machines are quick and somewhat forgiving in the weighing, so it's not that bad either]
Wouldn’t that be 4x as slow (3 times slower), not 8?
Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Please place the item in the bag.” “Please remove the last scanned item from the bag and scan it before placing it in the bag.” “Please wait, help is on the way.”
Every damn time. I really wonder whether that system actually helps prevent theft, or if it was originally put in place because stores suspected that theft would be a problem, and we're just stuck with it now. Plus, in the couple stores I frequent, there's always an employee standing at the ready to clear out the errors. Which, I imagine, would go a long way toward reducing theft on its own. Either way, they seem to…
I know over the years at least some of the systems have either gotten better or more lenient.
With Walmart specifically I haven't gotten "Unexpected item in bagging area" in a couple of years at least. It's probably a combination of an improved system on Walmart's part and learning how to place items in the bagging area appropriately on my part.
There's obviously a long way to go to make these kind of systems ideal (the UX of entering in produce items is probably the most common frustration for me nowadays) but the all-too-common refrain that I hear that these systems are basically unusable without some employee to constantly babysit them is false, at least at the stores I frequent that have them.
Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free
#76So called “shadow work” is becoming more prevalent. When you choose to self checkout at a grocery store you’re essentially doing work for free (scanning and bagging your own groceries) in place of a paid cashier and bagger.
This is only "shadow work" relative to the status quo, and there's no principled reason to privilege the status quo over the alternative. You could just as easily say that tying your shoes is "shadow work" because you at one point could have paid a butler to do it for you (and still can, I suppose). This is true of any of a million things that you do for yourself that you could pay a taskrabbit to do instead.
So the claim that "shadow work" is becoming more prevalent doesn't make a ton of sense, especially when you net it out with the types of labor that are becoming newly salable (through taskrabbit and all the other forms of the gig economy).
Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But monetary “incentives” are in general quite a terrible system for eliciting good work. I'm glad I don't work for you.
I think what jacobolus is saying is after a certain point, more money won't necessarily lead to better quality of work. [0] https://hbr.org/1993/09/why-incentive-plans-cannot-work
That point, however, is a lot higher than zero, more so in areas with a high cost of living, and still more so for a 19 year old who doesn't have any savings to fall back on and has to establish his earning baseline.
Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One would assume I severely doubt it's the case. Besides, businesses aren't typically interested in having a competitive market anyways. It's probably more profitable to not lower prices at all and lobby to make it harder for competitors to lower prices . . . or just conspire with major competitors to keep them higher. Both actions have a strong historical precedent in US markets, at least.
Concur. I've always been puzzled why self-checkout isn't, say 1% cheaper, considering how much labor costs in supermarkets and razor-thin profit margins.
This seems clear to me: customers aren't remotely rational, and will generally complain about economically fair systems[1] that they feel are "taking away" things they're entitled to. I can't count how many times I heard people complain about baggage fees when they were introduced, and no one ever had a response to "I never fly with baggage, why should I subsidize your propensity to overpack?". Even people who knew way better and would default to an efficient market assumption in every other possible scenario would assume that it was a naked cash grab, the benefits of which accrued entirely to the airlines. The same is true of complaints about Spirit Airlines: how DARE they give me the voluntary option of a low-priced flight without a bunch of (useless, costly) amenities that I feel entitled to? I can go on and on: credit card fees at liquor stores, etc etc.
[1] In particular, rewarding consumers who reduce costs by passing on the cost savings.
Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
It gets passed on in the form of faster checkouts and shorter lines, resulting in less wasted time.
Disagree. Most people are much slower at scanning things than an actual cashier. Things like produce are especially annoying because you have to search for the item (of which there could be multiple I.e. organic vs non organic bananas). And the error rate is high (will lock up if you don’t immediately put a scanned item in the bag area).
It's absolutely more efficient for me to self-checkout, if I have the right number of items. For some reason, the store I go to has extremely slow cashiers. They have no sense of urgency, probably because it's a low paid job and they're going to be there for 8 hours regardless of speed.
Re: BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If someone is providing you a service for free that accounts for a very meaningful percentage of revenue, how much revenue could they be generating for you if you actually incentivized them to do that work? 1.25x? 1.5x? 2x? More? In some cases, it could be less output, or lower quality. Money (or other explicit rewards) changes the psychology of doing work vs. volunteering it. It adds pressure, makes the work feel…
>But monetary “incentives” are in general quite a terrible system for eliciting good work. I'm glad I don't work for you.
No, I think parts of this are very true. Apple Retail doesn't pay their staff commissions so there's no incentive to drive expensive sales that the staff personally profit from (partly I guess because of just how expensive and seasonal Apple product sales are?).
Myself, and a few other developers, refuse to monetise our third-party apps for the video game Destiny because doing it for free means we have no obligation to any customers. If I was being paid to do this, I would enjoy it a lot less.