They call this dystopian, but I don't get it. Why keep a slacker around when you have limited slots for workers? Why not measure and retain good workers?
Somebody please try a little to see beyond the linkbait title of the OP. Knee-jerk anti-the-man comments aren't very helpful in digging into why this is a good or bad idea.
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 microphone to monitor the conversation between workers?
For athletes, I think that's likely. There all kinds of quantitative optimization of training regimes going on, and if someone can't adapt as desired it's likely that their career will be cut short.
Most athletes aren't playing in the big leagues and aren't paid millions of dollars. Frequently they are pushed to perform past their limits or shortly after an injury, so their best interests aren't always considered. Pretty much the most significant difference to Amazon employees would be that they got into the job because they enjoyed it.
I think you have more faith in companies than I do. Jobs can have a lot of unreasonable expectations, especially if it is a low wage position with high turnover. And Amazon already has a poor reputation for it's low skilled positions.
Management won't have trackers on their every movement. You can take anything out of context to make the best worker look terrible if you look hard enough with that much data.
If this technology was used to find the bottom 10% of workers and correct their behavior or fire them, it would probably be fine.
But there are people who ARE able to maintain almost perfect efficiency for huge lengths of time. Everyone will be measured and everyone will be expected to preform. People in the "normal" range will be made to feel inadequate. Everyone will be getting prescriptions for ADHD meds to compete with the top performers. The top performers will then feel pressured to get the same medications in order to maintain their advantage.
This technology could put a lot of pressure on the system. And it could lead to people eliminating small breaks that might be necessary to maintain their mental health. I guess time will tell. I'm hoping companies use the idea responsibly and think about the long term incentives they create. But that doesn't seem likely.
This isn't just a way to find the slowest employees, this is a way to optimise the performance of all workers.
Consider if we have three employees. Person X is the fastest, Person Z is the slowest, and Person Y is somewhere in the middle. Consider how management will treat Person Y. For example, both of these sentiments are likely to be used by management to motivate/control Person Y:
"Person X is performing at a quicker rate than you, what can we do to close the gap"
"Don't be like Person Z or you're at risk of losing your job"
If you think that a company like Amazon will do nothing about mediocre performance, you're almost certainly mistaken.
To be honest, if these wristbands are introduced at Amazon, I will attempt to completely boycott Amazon until they're removed. I don't work at Amazon (nor do I ever intend to), but in my opinion the wristbands would be a step too far in reducing working conditions, and set a damaging precedent.
> No worries; folks won't be judged or measured as robots. Not an issue.
This is Amazon we're talking about... their warehouse workers are already "judged or measured as robots."
An efficiency metric based on tracking a worker's hand movements within standardized axes of freedom is totally something they would do if they felt there was money to be made.
If you've ever worked in such an environment, good workers welcome such measurement tools. So often slackers can befriend management and push off work on others without detection. It is very difficult to monitor performance in a fair and equitable manner without taking into account nepotism, racism, etc.
I find that hard to believe, at least a full time monitoring wrist band. Good workers like metrics, but of course, every metric can be gamed. They aren't as valuable as you might think they are.
Good workers expect to have good managers. Good managers can gauge the worth of their workers without resorting to rigid procedures with constant robotic surveillance.
If I am ordered to wear a monitoring wristband, I will naturally suspect that my manager is an idiot. The first test would likely to be to pair up with another worker and swap wristbands. Further along, try putting both wristbands on one wrist for short periods of time, such as when someone is using the bathroom.
I'd probably also try bracelets with magnets on them and wrapping the wristband in foil. If they are universally hated by the workers, spraying them all with histamine before the shift starts would result in visible skin irritation under the bands, and a video of said irritation posted to social media might get them withdrawn for a while.
Good workers like to be respected and valued as human beings. Treat them like fungible cogs at your own peril.
I get that this might be different in the US, but in Europe, there usually are minimum requirements for break time to ensure that workers aren't overly strained. E.g. screen workers should take regular short breaks to rest their eyes.
In that case, tracking could actually be beneficial by making sure that nobody sacrifices their break time to improve their quotas. It doesn't have to be used for detrimental purposes (although it's probably unrealistic to assume that Amazon will be so benevolent).
We have something like that in law at least (a certain time allotted after 4 hrs of work or some such, lunch) but rarely isn't ever that direct. People being people will get up, walk around, get coffee, take a piss, etc.
Beyond that, at least in office work, you'll regularly see folks eating lunch at their desk and working through it even though by law they're supposed to be 'relieved of all duties'. This isn't because some supervisor said so but because they feel obligated to do so.
Most places I've worked given an hour by default as part of company policy. My point was that a lot of folks will choose to work through their lunch instead of taking a walk outside or relaxing a little.
I recall when one coworker hopped on the Soylent train. They had this whole plan that it would free up their lunch to go do other stuff like go for a bike ride, check out a museum, etc. They essentially ended up chugging the Soylent at their desk and working their entire lunch.
Maybe I'm old school but I don't like giving my labor away for free. Work will always be there.
FWIW, I like working through lunch so I can leave an hour early. I'm happy to work extra hours because I'm usually into what I'm doing, but I do extra at home, and at will (unless a client is screaming because of something we did).
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.
What's the difference between having a camera recording you for 1 hour a workday, in 8 blocks of 7-8 minutes, and having a camera recording your entire workday, or even a single hour with no breaks?
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.
Supervisors can't monitor every worker every single minute that they are on shift. Supervisors also have their own work to do, which further limits the direct supervision each worker receives.
On the flip side, these bands can monitor every worker every minute of the day. And even the top 10% of workers are likely to receive reprimands for having a bad day, be it a sore knee or being distracted because their children are acting oddly. There's no judgment involved when its automated like this - just numbers that have to be kept above a certain line.
>Why keep a slacker around when you have limited slots for workers? Why not measure and retain good workers?
This overall attitude doesn't distinguish between "slacker because they don't feel like working" and "slacker because they're unable to work to the degree an able-bodied person can". Your premise reduces someone to their profit-generating ability alone.
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 less prevalent. I'd say it's the managers who are affected most by this, not the workers.
I think the measure of anything like this is whether you as "the boss" are willing to wear one too and make that data available to those work for you without restrictions. If you're willing to do that then OK - let's try this thing and see what happens.
Information asymmetry is a key concern that you have hit upon.
Will a manager release truthful aggregate information, such as averages and standard deviations so that individuals can see for themselves how they stack up against the group? Will this information also be correlated for height, weight, and other physiological parameters?
Or will a manager selectively hoard and release specific pieces of information to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the minds of the workers in an attempt to squeeze out more productivity?
>Will a manager release truthful aggregate information, such as averages and standard deviations so that individuals can see for themselves how they stack up against the group?
At the FC where I work, managers printed metrics out from spreadsheets and posted them daily (ish) to encourage competition and productivity but there was no real way to verify numbers weren't being fudged, or that favoritism wasn't being shown.
Workers often won't know their error rate or accurate stow rate until they generate enough errors to trigger a warning, because only managers are allowed to see a worker's metrics. Amazon's policy is that an employee who follows procedure will never generate errors, and therefore, giving employees access to their own metrics is unnecessary - good employees won't need them, bad employees will either become good, or be fired. It's only recently that they've been able to see their stow rates as reflected by Amazon's own system, rather than a vague and inaccurate estimate.
>Or will a manager selectively hoard and release specific pieces of information to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the minds of the workers in an attempt to squeeze out more productivity?
"I'm paying for their health insurance. Why shouldn't I be allowed to jam a device up their rectum that sends me a Slack notification whenever they drink alcohol?"
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, prepare to be canned for repeatedly missing your quotas.
Time spent refining your tools? Nope, not allocated. Time spent learning? Nope, not allowed. Fixing a security issue unrelated to your code? You missed your quotas. Training the FNG? Sorry, but you didn't meet quota.
I hired you to write code, after all, and if you don't want to do that, I have a few dozen applications on my desk of people who do want to.
On a more meta note - these wristbands and things like them remove all judgement from the equation. Someone recovering from a hurt back is only viewed as unproductive for an extended period of time, and thus someone to fire. No matter what other things they do for the company, or how they performed prior to the injury.
...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.
"I see you had ten underperformers that you have kept on. Didn't you know our company is working hard to save money? I've taken the liberty to fire them, consider this your first warning."
Even the best managers will have a hard time trying to convince upper management that people who miss quotas are worth keeping on.
Do you also hold the belief that it's OK for three letter government agencies to proactively collect intelligence on all US and foreign citizens, because they could do it previously using tails, phone taps, and cameras?
As you say, quotas have already decided many a employees fate. The difference now is the scale at which the lack of human judgement can be applied. Scale can only hurt affected employees; it can never help them.
You seem to have an unshakable belief in the people you have worked for and hired and their ability to treat their low-paid hires fairly. I've personally had that belief burned away by the realities of working in a minimum-wage job.
A lot of people have trouble with the idea that quantitative technological shifts over time can lead to a phase change. You boil water and it becomes steam, you measure someones work time at a fine enough grain (invading a privacy that some argue never was theirs but in practice has been) and suddenly you're in a dystopia.
The problem with this isn’t the tracking, as many have pointed out this isn’t _that_ much different than human supervisors, but rather the hugely limited scope of the tracking. There’s a lot more to what makes a human a valuable employee than can be tracked by a wristband, and while you can say all you want that this won’t cause humans to be treated like robots, if you entirely disincentivize the things that humans do well, then you already _are_ treating them like robots.
A similar argument is commonly used with red light cameras: they remove the discretion of the officer, and can remove important context. Especially if they only capture a single frame.
As 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.
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).
I 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 I’d want for myself, my family, or my friends. This isn’t how you should treat people.”
Amazon is more likely to respond to people on the AWS team pushing pack in a concerted fashion than the warehouse workers they’ve already shown themselves to see as disposable
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.
Heard this one second hand from an email directly from bezos. It's nothing that people don't already know. He said something along the lines of we don't have to worry about treating employees well as automation will be replacing most of them.
I noticed a flurry of Foxconn propaganda, reported in all the usual western media, that tried to make this argument about 7 years ago. They said that they had robots that would shortly render something like 800,000 factory workers obsolete.
It coincided with a period of worker unrest in their factories.
They didn't though. They now employ something like 400,000 more people than they did.
It was just a ploy to terrify Shenzhen factory workers.
The apparent abysmal failure of their "project" to replace all those people seems to have gone 100% unnoticed in the business press. Foxconn just forgot to issue that press release I guess.
I think back to that story and subsequent non-story every time I read the latest news article about "the robot takeover of our jobs that's just around the corner".
According to a quick Google search, this story is being run by The New York Times, The Daily News, The Guardian, Fox, The Verge, Gizmodo, Engadget, and Cnet, among others.
I can’t help but notice it’s not on The Washington Post.
Has anyone done an analysis of the post to see if the number of anti-amazon stories they publish went down after Bezos bought it?
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.
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadSomebody please try a little to see beyond the linkbait title of the OP. Knee-jerk anti-the-man comments aren't very helpful in digging into why this is a good or bad idea.
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 microphone to monitor the conversation between workers?
>What if your supervisor could identify every time you paused to scratch or fidget, and for how long you took a bathroom break?
I certainly wouldn't want to work under those conditions.
If this technology was used to find the bottom 10% of workers and correct their behavior or fire them, it would probably be fine.
But there are people who ARE able to maintain almost perfect efficiency for huge lengths of time. Everyone will be measured and everyone will be expected to preform. People in the "normal" range will be made to feel inadequate. Everyone will be getting prescriptions for ADHD meds to compete with the top performers. The top performers will then feel pressured to get the same medications in order to maintain their advantage.
This technology could put a lot of pressure on the system. And it could lead to people eliminating small breaks that might be necessary to maintain their mental health. I guess time will tell. I'm hoping companies use the idea responsibly and think about the long term incentives they create. But that doesn't seem likely.
We are already there and have been for years, for getting into elite universities. Perhaps not yet for warehouse or fast food positions.
Consider if we have three employees. Person X is the fastest, Person Z is the slowest, and Person Y is somewhere in the middle. Consider how management will treat Person Y. For example, both of these sentiments are likely to be used by management to motivate/control Person Y:
"Person X is performing at a quicker rate than you, what can we do to close the gap"
"Don't be like Person Z or you're at risk of losing your job"
If you think that a company like Amazon will do nothing about mediocre performance, you're almost certainly mistaken.
To be honest, if these wristbands are introduced at Amazon, I will attempt to completely boycott Amazon until they're removed. I don't work at Amazon (nor do I ever intend to), but in my opinion the wristbands would be a step too far in reducing working conditions, and set a damaging precedent.
This is Amazon we're talking about... their warehouse workers are already "judged or measured as robots."
An efficiency metric based on tracking a worker's hand movements within standardized axes of freedom is totally something they would do if they felt there was money to be made.
I find that hard to believe, at least a full time monitoring wrist band. Good workers like metrics, but of course, every metric can be gamed. They aren't as valuable as you might think they are.
If I am ordered to wear a monitoring wristband, I will naturally suspect that my manager is an idiot. The first test would likely to be to pair up with another worker and swap wristbands. Further along, try putting both wristbands on one wrist for short periods of time, such as when someone is using the bathroom.
I'd probably also try bracelets with magnets on them and wrapping the wristband in foil. If they are universally hated by the workers, spraying them all with histamine before the shift starts would result in visible skin irritation under the bands, and a video of said irritation posted to social media might get them withdrawn for a while.
Good workers like to be respected and valued as human beings. Treat them like fungible cogs at your own peril.
In that case, tracking could actually be beneficial by making sure that nobody sacrifices their break time to improve their quotas. It doesn't have to be used for detrimental purposes (although it's probably unrealistic to assume that Amazon will be so benevolent).
Beyond that, at least in office work, you'll regularly see folks eating lunch at their desk and working through it even though by law they're supposed to be 'relieved of all duties'. This isn't because some supervisor said so but because they feel obligated to do so.
https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_mealperiods.htm
Most places I've worked given an hour by default as part of company policy. My point was that a lot of folks will choose to work through their lunch instead of taking a walk outside or relaxing a little.
I recall when one coworker hopped on the Soylent train. They had this whole plan that it would free up their lunch to go do other stuff like go for a bike ride, check out a museum, etc. They essentially ended up chugging the Soylent at their desk and working their entire lunch.
Maybe I'm old school but I don't like giving my labor away for free. Work will always be there.
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.
Imagine if your manager sat behind you breathing on your neck while you coded. He has a pack of tic-tacs so his breath is fine.
He crushes the tic tacs with his teeth everytime he thinks you're not working
All this does is push people to fight the system more.
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.
On the flip side, these bands can monitor every worker every minute of the day. And even the top 10% of workers are likely to receive reprimands for having a bad day, be it a sore knee or being distracted because their children are acting oddly. There's no judgment involved when its automated like this - just numbers that have to be kept above a certain line.
https://twitter.com/CollectableCat/status/932738863449214976
http://www.nelp.org/content/uploads/2015/03/BrokenLawsReport...
No they don't. Amazon's metrics are the same for everyone.
>Why keep a slacker around when you have limited slots for workers? Why not measure and retain good workers?
This overall attitude doesn't distinguish between "slacker because they don't feel like working" and "slacker because they're unable to work to the degree an able-bodied person can". Your premise reduces someone to their profit-generating ability alone.
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 less prevalent. I'd say it's the managers who are affected most by this, not the workers.
Will a manager release truthful aggregate information, such as averages and standard deviations so that individuals can see for themselves how they stack up against the group? Will this information also be correlated for height, weight, and other physiological parameters?
Or will a manager selectively hoard and release specific pieces of information to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the minds of the workers in an attempt to squeeze out more productivity?
At the FC where I work, managers printed metrics out from spreadsheets and posted them daily (ish) to encourage competition and productivity but there was no real way to verify numbers weren't being fudged, or that favoritism wasn't being shown.
Workers often won't know their error rate or accurate stow rate until they generate enough errors to trigger a warning, because only managers are allowed to see a worker's metrics. Amazon's policy is that an employee who follows procedure will never generate errors, and therefore, giving employees access to their own metrics is unnecessary - good employees won't need them, bad employees will either become good, or be fired. It's only recently that they've been able to see their stow rates as reflected by Amazon's own system, rather than a vague and inaccurate estimate.
>Or will a manager selectively hoard and release specific pieces of information to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the minds of the workers in an attempt to squeeze out more productivity?
Yes.
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, prepare to be canned for repeatedly missing your quotas.
Time spent refining your tools? Nope, not allocated. Time spent learning? Nope, not allowed. Fixing a security issue unrelated to your code? You missed your quotas. Training the FNG? Sorry, but you didn't meet quota.
I hired you to write code, after all, and if you don't want to do that, I have a few dozen applications on my desk of people who do want to.
On a more meta note - these wristbands and things like them remove all judgement from the equation. Someone recovering from a hurt back is only viewed as unproductive for an extended period of time, and thus someone to fire. No matter what other things they do for the company, or how they performed prior to the injury.
"I see you had ten underperformers that you have kept on. Didn't you know our company is working hard to save money? I've taken the liberty to fire them, consider this your first warning."
Even the best managers will have a hard time trying to convince upper management that people who miss quotas are worth keeping on.
As you say, quotas have already decided many a employees fate. The difference now is the scale at which the lack of human judgement can be applied. Scale can only hurt affected employees; it can never help them.
You seem to have an unshakable belief in the people you have worked for and hired and their ability to treat their low-paid hires fairly. I've personally had that belief burned away by the realities of working in a minimum-wage job.
(And the malleability of the definition of "slacking" after the practice of measuring it is established.)
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion
> 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).
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 I’d want for myself, my family, or my friends. This isn’t how you should treat people.”
Amazon is more likely to respond to people on the AWS team pushing pack in a concerted fashion than the warehouse workers they’ve already shown themselves to see as disposable
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.
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.
Externalities notwithstanding, these jobs surely won't exist in the very near future, right?
It coincided with a period of worker unrest in their factories.
They didn't though. They now employ something like 400,000 more people than they did.
It was just a ploy to terrify Shenzhen factory workers.
The apparent abysmal failure of their "project" to replace all those people seems to have gone 100% unnoticed in the business press. Foxconn just forgot to issue that press release I guess.
I think back to that story and subsequent non-story every time I read the latest news article about "the robot takeover of our jobs that's just around the corner".
This tracks pretty well with the beginning bit from the Manna short fiction. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Next up Alexa headsets with an AI to direct and fire workers.
I can’t help but notice it’s not on The Washington Post.
Has anyone done an analysis of the post to see if the number of anti-amazon stories they publish went down after Bezos bought it?