
Quantified Man: How an Obsolete Tech Guy Rebuilt Himself for the Future - iProject
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/quantified-work/
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WestCoastJustin
_"he thinks every white collar worker will need to adopt a similar regimen
soon"_

God, I hope not! I like the idea of recording metrics, but on a personal
level, it needs to be near seamless or it becomes an additional interrupt, and
ultimately a burden. Then you have to review all this crap and decided if it
means anything?! It's like going on a trip and taking 3000 photos and then
having to go through them. It's an additional job with unclear benefits. Sure,
I track my personal fitness, diet, and some sports activities but
_everything_! Seems like a make work activity to me.

~~~
IheartApplesDix
What's even worse is as this quantified personal data is leaked to profit
making ventures, there will be more and more pressure to assume "productive
habits" or strategies that work well for _most_ people. And then popular
wisdom will say that these are the _only_ or right ways to live and if you're
not using the methods that work for most people in some situations, you're
just stupid.

Then something shitty and unpredictable happens and popular wisdom will say
"well, that wouldn't have happened if you were logging all your calls in
Google Calendar and tying it to your passion index."

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CurtHagenlocher
I used to work in the supply chain industry, and this kind of thing has
existed in warehouses for decades under the name "engineered labor standards".
The armband aspect is just the latest incarnation of it.

One of our customers had come up with an interesting incentive program: you
were given "eight hours" of work and could go home whenever it was done. Many
of the time-saving tricks that the employees came up with would have been
frowned on by OSHA.

~~~
jiggy2011
I suppose the problem here that management realizes that the "8 hours" of work
are being done by most employees in 6. They then add an extra 2 hours of work
to make the new "8 hours".

Thus incentivising the workers to come up with gradually more and more
dangerous ways to save time if they want to go home early. And the workers who
stick to H&S guidelines have to stay for 10+ hours.

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invalidOrTaken
My prediction: this will take off at some point, perhaps in one of the big
consulting firms, like E & Y or Accenture. It will be justified with phrases
like, "Of course we trust our employees, we're just trying to optimize!" The
lie will come out when HR comes up with a "company temporal resource utility
maximization" metric. The exodus to startups will accelerate.

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analyst74
First, they introduced "productivity maximization protocol";

Then they added robots to do some of the work;

Then we all lost our jobs to robots;

...

Then we realize, living on publicly provided food and housing is actually not
that bad!

~~~
zem
you would think so, but this story is scarily plausible:
<http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm>

~~~
gizmo686
I wasn't able to read through the entire story, but I think Karl Marx was onto
something. What I suspect will happen is we will transition into a post-
scarcity economy. The only question for me is how long it will take, and how
painful the transition will be.

I also suspect (although with somewhat less confidence), that the transistion
will occur by a single individual having gradually diminishing works hours,
and a gradual increase in government 'welfare'.

~~~
zem
the "two visions" were how to screw up and how to embrace the post-scarcity
economy respectively. the problem is that the currently-rich will have first
crack at the cornucopia and they could easily feel they have somehow earned
the right to it, and need not share it with the currently-poor other than via
crumbs of charity.

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clevernapkins
There was a relevant article recently about monetizing tasks to see if it made
people more efficient. The idea was to give someone $X every time they
completed a task. The end result was that it made people more productive at
simple and easily repetitive tasks, and extremely counterproductive for any
task that required hard thinking or creativity.

As a developer I hope that software companies don't establish this type of
tracking but it would probably work at other types of jobs, at least in the
short run. I could see it having a negative effect on company morale as time
goes by.

~~~
dreamfactory
If you can categorise the tasks (which is a very big if), you can maintain an
index of the time taken for tasks of a given type to complete and value
accordingly in effort required. Allow employees to pick available tasks and
they will gravitate to where they can deliver most value.

~~~
walshemj
And will deliberately slow down when the time and motion guy comes round this
is old old school stuff thats been going on on the factory floor for hundreds
of years - if not thousands of years.

~~~
dreamfactory
Thought about this but it should be a self-regulating system to some extent.
The longer a task takes, the higher its value. If it becomes overvalued
(workers are deliberately doing it slowly and making less money than they
could, which is questionable), then it becomes more attractive to workers who
will complete it faster.

~~~
walshemj
MM ever worked in a traditional factory type setting? all the workers
collectively do this and if you not you would get sent to Coventry.

And this is tame compared to what used to happen back in the 70's in
engineering "go slows" and backhanders paid in brown paper envelopes - I was
told "even the tea boy got £900" about a 1/3 of the average wage at the time.

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bsg75
This level of monitoring is insane - an evil application of gamification.
People, unlike machines, do not always work in precise patterns.

The example of the effects on "score" in taking an unschedule bathroom break
tells me what I would do with such monitors in the bathroom.

~~~
kanzure
> People, unlike machines, do not always work in precise patterns.

Do you believe that biology is not understandable?

~~~
bsg75
I believe that biology introduces variables of the type that micromanagers are
often ill-educated to understand.

IOW - biologicals operate with more variation than machines.

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jonathanwallace
Ha, the subject in the article uses memolane which just announced its shutdown
yesterday, <http://blog.memolane.com/>.

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drucken
Surely the effect of importing technology into all workplaces and
globalization will result in the remaining jobs being precisely the ones that
are the most difficult to measure in-progress and for whom just the
measurement itself risks interfering with the job?

That said, the importance of such measurements along the way could stem from
the positive feedback loop it creates. Measuring enables you to identify what
you can eliminate/automate/outsource etc until you meet some "Creativity
Efficiency Frontier"...

Or, there could be other benefits from measurements to do with personal,
workplace or even business well-being - perhaps benefits that could be
inferred from statistical analysis.

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seanconaty
Reminds me of the Baltimore Police Department's use of Comstat in The Wire.

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michaelochurch
Ah, the things people will believe in a bubble.

The title is misleading. This has nothing to do with avoiding or overcoming
technical obsolescence.

~~~
wladimir
A jarring thing to me is that we're talking about technical obsolescence for
people at all... workers (especially in tech) can become obsolete so fast,
just like gadgets are outdated in a year and obsolete in a few years.

You can't just learn a skill and become really good at it. There's all these
"computer skills" and buzzwords that are hot one day then avoided like
yesterday's fashion.

On the other hand here in Europe they are trying to push people to work until
their 67th, or older, and pensions are reduced year after year. As if anyone
will hire you by that age. Heck by that age we'll be long been discarded like
an old iPod.

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nonamegiven
No.

