
How Employers Have Gamified Work for Maximum Profit - eaguyhn
https://aeon.co/essays/how-employers-have-gamified-work-for-maximum-profit
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commandlinefan
In spite of an advanced degree and decades of experience, the best job I can
find is one that pays well, but micromanages this way via the tyranny of JIRA
– I spend an hour every week haggling over story points for the coming week
and snivellingly excuse my “score” for the previous week. The funny thing
about this is that it’s actually a lose-lose. I’m not motivated to work harder
and produce better (or even faster) results: I’m actually motivated to exploit
the system as best I can rather than just do actual good work. No matter how
much they complain about my velocity, I’m hard (not impossible, but hard) to
replace: I’m careful to manufacture some job security that way because I don’t
have any choice. My boss is actually one of the better ones: he realizes that
reality is more complicated than a JIRA report, so he overlooks a bit of
gaming of the system so that our reports look good even though we’re actually
doing work that advances the organization. I’ve worked, though, under mindless
drones that took those reports completely seriously. The end result was
somewhere between union (that’s not my job) and prison mentality, and you can
see the results in the finished product.

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mikestew
Can we quit calling it “gamified”, please? It’s a stupid euphemism in this
case. “Electronic whip”, I like that one.

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concongo
This is such a great concept. It is a win-win scenario. The employee wins a
better place to work, motivation and fun. And the employer gets loyalty,
productivity, commitment and a better performance.

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sharemywin
‘It pushes you mentally to keep working. It doesn’t give you breathing space.’

The workers called this ‘the electronic whip’.

We saw a higher incidence of injuries,’ Topete said. ‘Several people were
injured on the job.’ The formerly collegial environment degenerated into a
race.

People started skipping bathroom breaks. Pregnant workers fell behind.

