
The Spy Who Fired Me - signor_bosco
http://harpers.org/archive/2015/03/the-spy-who-fired-me/?single=1
======
bitwize
"Y.T.’s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The
estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-
day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00pm, she will see
the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading
this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like
this:

Less than 10 min.: Time for an employee conference and possible attitude
counseling.

10-14 min.: Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.

14-15.61 min.: Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important
details.

Exactly 15.62 min.: Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.

15.63-16 min.: Asswipe. Not to be trusted.

16-18 min.: Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on
minor details.

More than 18 min.: Check the security videotape, see just what this employee
was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).

Y.T.’s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the
memo. It’s better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they’re
careful, not cocky. It’s better for older workers to go a little fast, to show
good management potential. She’s pushing forty. She scans through the memo,
hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally
paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is
going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It’s a small thing, but
over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary."

\--Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

~~~
mercurial
One thing I fail to understand is, why don't these people unionize? That's
what organized labour is for: to protect a workforce from abusive conditions
in the workplace. Why let the sociopaths win?

~~~
rotten
To unionize you need to have time to interact with your co-workers. You have
to convince everyone that unions are not evil. And I'm not even sure unions
are legal in the US any more. In the article they feature UPS as an example,
yet UPS _has_ a union - the Teamsters. Does it do anything except feed off of
the workers it is suppose to represent? I'm not sure. I was in a union once
and it was worthless and expensive. We need something else with a new name
that actually does work.

~~~
anon4
How about "Labour Law"? Federally-mandated rules of employment, applying to
people who work as little as one hour per month up to 175 hours per week.

~~~
mercurial
How can you work 175 h a week? That's more than 24 hours a day.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's the proverbial 25 hours a day, times 7. But then again, you'd be
surprised how people sometimes have to work two jobs _at the same time_.

------
iandanforth
I'm always amazed when articles like this don't even mention the labor
protections that other countries provide. It is hard to imagine a better way
if you don't believe one exists, or haven't ever experienced it. It's not just
that some people have union protection, entire nations have banned practices
like these. Entire nations have guaranteed vacations that dwarf anything seen
in America. Whole peoples have collectively said that the needs of life are
more important than the needs of business and aligned their laws accordingly.

~~~
hueving
>Whole peoples have collectively said that the needs of life are more
important than the needs of business and aligned their laws accordingly.

While others with the capacity for critical thinking have realized that the
economy is what enables a good life. Greece has been pretty good about
guaranteeing 'the needs of life' for government employees and look what good
it did them.

~~~
acdha
This is the famous libertarian cognitive vice, assuming that the quality of
government is constant:

[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/08/the...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/08/the_libertarian.html)

Your theory needs to account for how e.g. Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark,
Sweden, Norway, etc. also provide “the needs of life” with economies which are
rather different than Greece. It's just possible that quality of
implementation matters as much as the original idea.

~~~
hueving
What are you talking about? I was showing how ridiculous the strawman is that
it's a simple 'people vs business' decision. People and business are
ultimately one and the same.

There is not one single country that has a terrible economy with a good life
for its citizens. Unless the country is just riding on massive natural
resources, the people have to work enough to sustain the lifestyle they live.
Other countries aren't going to support them indefinitely.

~~~
acdha
You haven't shown anything of the sort. iandanforth made the factual
observation that various countries define the worker:employer relationship
differently and you responded with a facile assertion that only foolish people
would fail to put economic interests over people and a single cherry-picked
example, which itself was too simplistic to be of use[1].

Now you're going on with some narrative about how people don't want to work
which is straight out of right-wing talk radio and which you've failed to
supported even with an anecdote this time. It's absurd to claim that poor
countries are poor because they provide too many benefits to workers at the
expense of business when we regularly hear reports about the brutally
unforgiving lifestyles of sweatshop workers, subsistence farmers, etc.
Conversely, you've failed to even show awareness that some countries have both
strong economies and significant social support – Germany provides
significantly more for workers than the United States but it would be absurd
to claim that this depends on other countries to “support them indefinitely”.

So … could you start over and explain precisely the principle you believe is
in effect here, and how it holds true across e.g. the G-10 countries?

1\. Greece's economy wasn't exactly great before but their immediate crisis
was caused by corruption aided by malfeasance by major banks, not
inefficiencies which they've had for generations. Absolutely none of it had to
do with benefits to workers or people being lazy.

------
unimpressive
"Many retail workers now clock in with a thumb scan. Nurses wear badges that
track how often they wash their hands. Warehouse workers carry devices that
assign them their next task and give them a time by which they must complete
it. Some may soon be outfitted with augmented-reality devices to more
efficiently locate products."

This is straight out of Manna.
[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

~~~
TeMPOraL
I have a problem with everything in this quote _except_ the nurses - washing
hands is something workers tend to not care about. Things that are directly
related to safety of third parties - like washing hands in hospitals, or like
driving regulations - should be enforced with a jackboot.

~~~
MaysonL
If only doctors also had to wear such badges…

------
chrissnell
Unreal. Recently at work, I've been having a problem with packages delivered
while we were out: the FedEx driver leaves them at random offices in our
building or even across the street but never leaves a delivery notice. I go to
the FedEx site and it will be signed for by "George" or whoever but there's no
clue where it is...so I walk door-to-door down the street to find it. I was
mostly just pissed at the driver until I read this article today. Now I think
I'm more pissed at FedEx and America's (and that includes me) insatiable
appetite for cheap shit bought on the Internet and delivered quickly. The end
result of all of this is injured delivery drivers, rich factory owners in
China, and piles of clutter in our garages and attics.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Rich business owners and well-rewarded management in the United States, you
mean. That was the source of most of the changes, including outsourcing to
China. Least Fedex did plenty of good things for its workers, too, at least in
Express and at the office. I know few people who don't brag about working
there. Used to pay people for whatever ideas made the company more money, too.
Recently they were doing cuts and I believe they paid people to leave rather
than spontaneous layoffs.

I hear UPS sucks across the board. My company sucks as badly. I can only
imagine it would be worse without the unions.

------
pcunite
"You can’t manage what you can’t measure"

If you don't want this software turned on and used against you, then stop the
creation of it before it gets started. We laughed at HAL 9000, yet people are
willing to treat each other like trash because, "the program told me too". The
dictators of the past and the ones to come are going to "love" your new
software!

Stand up and get this stopped. Where are the SOPA and PIPA blackout folks? We
need them now more than ever. Bloggers need to talk about this. People are
going to "hate" programmers if this is what we unleash on the world. Stop it,
just stop it.

To technologist who gather on this forum, I charge you to not create this
despicable future. Golden rule (Matthew 7:12), do unto others as you would
have them do unto you.

------
acdha
Anyone interested in the history of this school of management might be
interested in reading about Frederick Taylor and “Scientific Management”:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Winslow_Taylor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Winslow_Taylor)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management)

Although it's fallen out of favor the unwarranted contempt for workers has
been quite enduring.

------
vidarh
> “Anything you do with a piece of hardware that’s provided to you by the
> employer, every keystroke, is the property of the employer. Personal calls,
> private photos — if you put it on the company laptop, your company owns it.
> They may analyze any electronic record at any time for any purpose. It’s not
> your data.”

I simply can't imagine working under conditions like that. Or in an
environment where it is legal.

~~~
mrbill
Most companies will have a "reasonable personal use" clause (e.g., shopping
Amazon on your lunch break, etc) with regards to company PCs. I never assumed
that they weren't logging EVERYTHING, especially once everyone was forced to
switch to MS Lync for internal IM.

The last BigCo I worked for had a hard-coded login screen on the Windows
machines that stated the company use policy in large text and that user
activity on company equipment could be monitored at any time and no
expectation of privacy was to be assumed.

Being in IT, I was told by the security and proxy guys (who I worked closely
with) that they only usually had to pull up logs when it was necessary to fire
someone - stuff like oilfield workers browsing kiddie porn from drill sites
and such. It happened a lot more than you'd expect.

~~~
vidarh
A clause to the effect that "no expectation of privacy" is to assumed, would
be null and void most places in Europe. That does not mean monitoring it not
allowed, but there are substantial carve-outs.

E.g. in Norway (which does have some of the more extensive privacy
protections), the general rule is that surveillance of employees personal
e-mail etc. is outright illegal, there are substantial restrictions on
monitoring web usage, and that employers right to access an employees address
_on the employers mail server_ is also limited, and can easily violate privacy
laws.

Generally, for an employer to access employee e-mail addresses, there needs to
be a compelling need (this could be as simple as needing access during an
employees vacation, so it's not like it's safe to assume employer will never
have reason to access it), or suspicion of serious violations of employment
terms or laws (e.g. your child porn example would certainly qualify, as long
as there'd be some evidence to support the suspicion; as would e.g. collecting
evidence following claim of harassment of co-workers or similar).

In terms of web access, since most of these rules are based on privacy laws,
you can typically do generic monitoring e.g. of sites being accessed, but run
into problems if you tie them back to individuals. One place I worked they
dealt with extensive access of porn sites in working hours by publicly posting
a list, with a warning that it needed to stop on grounds of concerns over
harassment etc., without collecting any data on who accessed what, and access
dropped drastically, and that was that.

------
icanhackit
Hopefully this is the learning stage for how to handle detailed metrics. It
feels like customer satisfaction and worker satisfaction are isolated from
these metrics, so the picture they produce guides managers to focus on a gamut
of minute gains that are mostly uncontrollable or unrealistic rather than
produce long term sustainable practices. They also seem untethered from human
psychology.

Slight tangent from the article but related: when someone starts parroting
_fiduciary duty_ you know that business is in for the short haul. You can't
have a sustainable business if you don't complete the job wholly and
professionally, nor have workers who respect the organization they work for.
Like squeezing a stress ball, the bulk of the fluid will move from where your
grip is tight to where it is not. Grip it tight from all sides and it'll
eventually burst. Be firm but fair and always use the Golden Rule.

------
nickpsecurity
I've worked under several of these systems. They have the negative effects
mentioned in the article. Cheating, fraud, and intentionally not serving
customers were always pervasive while things looked good on paper. For that, I
don't trust the accounting or performance data in any company doing it. One
used Kronos, too, which I'll help the article by saying is utter BS:
predictive stuff doesn't work at all and managers + workers had to cheat it,
too, to prevent major damage to bottom line.

The shit should be used very carefully and with legal safeguards. I still
advocate embedding or realistic simulations to estimate true performance, spot
issues that throw it, etc. Then, combine that with data gathering and
predictions with humans in the loop to decide on staff allocation. One can
still keep labor down and flexible while not turning the situation into a
disaster for workers.

------
aws_ls
Reading this article made me really sad and pensive. This is slavery. “It’s
like when they whip animals. But this is a mental whip.”. We see lots of
articles on HN, on how AI is going to take over, reading this article it felt
like this is the first step towards that. Of course in those (overtly AI)
articles we discuss a super-human entity suddenly taking over humans. But over
here as well a significant portion of the workforce, is enslaved, by a
software, built by Kronos like companies, so it can be a first step.

I see the word 'Union' mentioned a lot of time, even in the comments to this
article on HN. I think that is a bit regressive and unmatching response. What
we need perhaps is a counter-culture software, may be titled worker dignity,
worker freedom, or something. Which can even start in a trivial (not so overt
conquering the world form). May be a small step to make physical workers feel
in control of their lives. Could just start by letting them keep a record of
their work life. Perhaps their productivity metric of income-generated/hours-
put. Provide them with competing metrics of brands of which offers a better
average metric for a worker. etc.

------
XorNot
Wow. So I guess this has already happened:
[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

What's funny is that a ton of the issues in this article are all classic
stupidity with numbers. Let's sample some metric every 15 minutes and react to
it then! Rather then average it out and say "right, what does this tell us in
aggregate?"

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yeah. I was going to say, that's what happens when you give data to people not
trained to understand it, but then again - some of them do understand it
perfectly. They just don't care about people under them. They can keep
literally torturing workers until they break, because there's always more to
replace those who were fired.

------
Zpalmtree
Really scary how little these managers view their employees as human,
constantly pushing for better margins even if it means unsafe practices.

~~~
gaius
Human "resources". My background is in engineering; a resource is something
you use up, discard and get a new one.

------
paulvs
We as a civilisation are evolving from human labour to automated labour, these
are the growing pains of that transition.

It is reasonable to expect that within a century, human physical labour for
reward will be considered such a backward practice. Humans are capable of so
much more than completing repetitive physical tasks, why not give such work to
machines?

Every time we choose to buy a hand-made garment instead of one produced by a
machine, because our conscious tells us that people need jobs, not machines,
we're only treating the symptoms and not the cause. It's an inevitable process
that automation will begin taking jobs, it already has as we already know. It
starts at the bottom, working its way towards ever increasingly difficult-to-
automate tasks. The only one safe is the programmer, he who works to put
himself out of a job.

The only question is, what do all the jobless people do?

For a good read, I recommend:
[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

------
cousin_it
If workers cooperating for better conditions is seen as evil, of course
businesses will squeeze workers with impunity. Look at other countries to see
that it doesn't have to be this way.

Libertarianism: the idea that the perfect society must run on unchecked
prisoner's dilemmas, and enforcing cooperation is a crime. "I'm sorry that
your vase broke, but we must put faith in the invisible hand of gravity."

The real question is where the left-wingers are in all this. Their job was
supposed to be helping the worker class, organizing strikes and unions and
such. I guess they stopped giving a fuck sometime in the 20th century, because
blue collar workers are too "socially backward".

~~~
wfo
The left wingers already lost because they don't have the money and power.
There's never been a lot to gain in making things better for the people who
need help (the goal of left wing ideology), and a lot to gain in making things
better for people who have money and power (the goal of right wing/libertarian
ideology). Large corporate interests are largely right wing and extremely
politically active. There's nothing comparable on the left (possibly the
copyright lobby which has aligned themselves with the democratic party
generally but is orthogonal to the whole debate really)

Corporate interests shape the political spectrum so we steadily move to a more
and more pro-corporate political scene.

The country has shifted so far over to the right that right-wingers from 20 30
years ago look like radical leftists of today, and the leftists from 20 or 30
years ago are laughed out of the political arena.

We are entering a new gilded age, which will be followed by a new great
depression (we narrowly dodged one recently), which will be followed by the
resurgence of progressive ideas until corporate interests wrest back control
of the political process and the cycle begins again. But given how
internationalized things are I suspect if we enter a great depression and
liberals take hold the rich will simply leave and move to a country willing to
bow to their interests.

~~~
gaius
_There 's never been a lot to gain in making things better for the people who
need help (the goal of left wing ideology)_

If you help them and they become middle class they might not vote for you
anymore. That's why left-wing politics fails, because of this paradox it can
never deliver. Whereas right-wing parties prosper when their supporters
prosper - the interests are aligned.

------
hwstar
The only solution working in this environment is to leave it as soon as
possible. I'd rather be homeless than work in such an environment.

What the MBA folk fail to understand is the driving the last gram of
productivity out of employees is a loosing game as the curve is gentle on one
side and falls off like a cliff on the other (I've been trying to find the
mathematical name for such a curve, if anyone knows the formal mathematical
name, please speak up). A lot of things in the world have curves similar to
this. You need to stay reasonably down the curve on the gently sloped side to
have a stable system.

------
Zigurd
UPS clearly hasn't got all their inputs hooked up to all their outputs. I have
repeatedly had packages reported as delivered, and the driver hadn't come up
my driveway, which is long enough to make it clear whether they were near my
house or not, never mind there are only a handful of properties along my road.
Amazon may want to offer UPS some help with their monitoring and delivery
reporting.

~~~
chris_wot
If you are relying on GPS positions, then with AGPS I believe it is accurate
to about 8 meters, and cellular GPS is about 600 meters and GPS itself is
about 10 meters.

So basically, a driver doesn't have to go up your driveway. He just needs to
pass by your house. And there is no way for UPS to ever know, unless they have
video but I'd never allow them to video on MY property.

UPS are stupid if they think that such micromanagement is good for their
business. There problems appear to be:

1\. They set unrealistic deadlines,

2\. They don't treat their workforce with much respect. This leads to
unintended consequences - like for example you not receiving your package, or
higher levels of car crashes, or people jay walking, or increased injuries
from strain and fatigued workers.

Honestly, in a system that tracks this many variables, it doesn't take much
for an employee to figure out how to game the system! An example is given in
the article - the employee who buckled the seatbelt and then sat with it
behind his back!

This is honestly a manifestation of an idea that Bruce Schneier made some time
back - the more you add restrictions or monitor someone, the more they will
attempt to bypass your systems in order to get their job done (or more likely
- meet your metrics). The employee does it because the risk of losing their
job for non-performing is less than the penalty for getting caught. [1]

3\. This is a great way to unionise your workforce and get strike action taken
against you. This level of micromanagement tends to be favoured by control
freaks and power crazed managers who misuse the data. It also causes problems
when the data is followed without knowing a more holistic view of the system.
I've seen thus in call centres - the best ones I've seen have had no KPIs, the
ones with strict call time KPIs have led to dreadful customer service as the
entire goal of the operator is to get you off the phone, not resolve your
problem. In that situation, they tell the customer literally anything in order
to keep them happy but make them hang up.

Giving this level of metrics to lower level managers is a bad idea, instead I
truly believe it should be kept with people who know how to handle data and
interpret the results correctly.

\---

Footnotes:

1\.
[https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2009/08/people_unde...](https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2009/08/people_understand_ri.html)

~~~
Zigurd
My house is more than 200M from the road, and the road is a lightly traveled
side road. It is unlikely the driver was within a mile or two of my house when
misreporting deliveries.

UPS's customers, the retailers depending on UPS to meet premium delivery
times, are being badly let down by UPS's failure to detect such misreporting.

~~~
EdwardDiego
> My house is more than 200M from the road

You expect UPS to have precise cöordinates for your actual dwelling building?
They will tie your address's location to the road your driveway departs from.

~~~
Zigurd
Yes. You can get the house, the lot lines, and my driveway in commercial
geospatial data.

~~~
chris_wot
In that case I stand corrected in the GPS issue.

------
stuaxo
Much like when the 1997 government in the UK added targets for everythning
people gamed the system in all sorts of ways.

------
markbnj
It's just a matter of time, and probably not too much more time, before those
same executives and supervisors will succeed in replacing all those human
drivers with machines. They don't really want messy, frail, undependable
humans having an impact on the size of their next bonus.

~~~
triplesec
of course those same execs aren't smart enough to realise that then their jobs
will be the next ones replaced

~~~
nickpsecurity
It won't happen. They're likely to be affected most by outsourcing and only
the less critical ones. The CEO's, COO's, board members, and so on use their
connections and clout to maintain both their jobs and high pay. They'll exempt
themselves from whatever trend exists just like they always have.

Middle and lower management, on the other hand, have plenty to worry about.

~~~
hobs
Dont be silly, the main reason you have legions of people is to manage other
legions of people, and to be local brains for you, which you then automate
out.

Really, why would a business need more than one person/idea nexus in a world
where robotics and true AI exist? So you can have a financial strategy?

To help advise you on something like a complicated financial instrument, which
a computer intelligence would find as simple as a toy?

To give you legal interpretations?

~~~
nickpsecurity
Only one of us is being silly suggesting that any existing or near-term AI can
replace C-level executive's skills. Those include management of scheming
managers, business analysis/strategy, bribing/wooing politicians, overseeing
negotiations like TPP, PR against the masses, and especially keeping Directors
happy on the golf courses.

Far as your financial instrument, computer intelligence wouldn't understand it
at all because it's not good enough. Instead, you'd likely have a system whose
inputs are curated by humans, using rules/algorithms made by humans, and whose
output is checked by humans. Like Blackstone's Aladdin. ;) So, keep dreaming
about this fictitious world where machines come close to the skills of big
boys on top or Wall St.

They're only useful if it's something expert systems or machine learning can
handle. That's really narrow. There's money in it, though, in case of HFT or
BPM consulting.

------
mercurial
I guess that puts the "slavery" into "wage slavery". It's funny how Zynga is
reviled on HN, while something like the Work Diary or UPS' management software
is considerably more dangerous. What kind of person do you have to be in order
to implement that?

------
pavornyoh
So after excessive background checks and such, it still looks like employers
don't trust their employees to do their daily jobs well hence such stringent
measures. A bit extreme and just not necessary. Really worrying.

~~~
csours
This would indicate to me that they don't trust their managers to manage.

~~~
a3n
Neither one of these is true. The software and systems are intended to do
exactly what they're doing, driving people to their limits until they break.
There will always be people coming up behind to replace them, and the broken
people do not cost the employer anything.

~~~
nickpsecurity
a3n is spot on. This is called an externality in capitalism: an effect of
something that benefits them which becomes someone else's problem. Businesses
focused on bottom line try to do anything they can to get more revenue or
reduce costs. They don't care about the impact unless it impacts them and for
more than the gains. Plus, with existing labor practices, there's plenty of
people desperate for a job to scrape by on their bills despite what they
endure on the job. Add the fact that many companies are doing it and it's like
a self-reinforcing system.

The companies peddling this surely know about this. They don't care: avoiding
it would hurt their sales pitch. And they too focus just on the bottom line.

------
Others
This is scary.

------
signor_bosco
Readable with incognito window.

~~~
detaro
works fine without for me?

~~~
pavornyoh
Works fine for me also..

~~~
TeMPOraL
Charitably, 'signor_bosco was just making a statement of fact.

------
packetized
Very L. Bob Rife of these employers.

