
Unblinking Eyes Track Employees - greenyoda
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/technology/workplace-surveillance-sees-good-and-bad.html
======
acangiano
Early in my career I worked in an environment where we were micromanaged and
closely monitored for everything (arrival time, breaks, time on non-intranet
sites, conversation with customers length, etc). It was hell on earth and I
still have occasional Vietnam-style flashbacks from it. It only made me more
productive in finding a new job.

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Spooky23
I worked in a sales environment like this for a summer break in college. I was
the number 2 sales dude that summer, hitting all of the BS metrics that they
fussed over. (ratio of premium to total sales, ratio of services to total
sales)

But... they lost a fair amount of money on me, because I abandoned profitable
sales that wouldn't hit my metrics, dumping them on others. Instead, I ended
up moving lots of stuff with high price concessions. But I never sold anything
without the metric-impacting accessory purchases. So I was #2 in gross sales,
#1 in hitting targets, but #28 in profit. I made a ton of money though... paid
for school the following year!

So, I'd say good luck, it's hard to know what to measure for when your
business leaders are busy tracking metrics instead of leading. If I owned a
restaurant, and the GM was fussing around with cameras and computers in the
back, I'd fire him. Service business management is about taking care of
customers and setting up systems to ensure that happens. Lead from the front.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The problem here is that they used stupid secondary metrics rather than a
single primary one. As you note, there is an obvious primary metric to use -
how much profit you made. It certainly appears measurable, based on the fact
that you know you didn't improve it.

~~~
pfortuny
But that only values short-term profit which is not necessarily the best for a
business. There is a problem in simplifying the value of a worker to a single
number. Always.

~~~
yummyfajitas
If you can't reduce your options to a single number each, your decisionmaking
process will be either inconsistent or subjective. This is elementary topology
- I sketch a proof here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7404964](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7404964)

So which are you advocating? Inconsistency, subjectivity or both?

It's certainly possible that Spooky is wrong, and the right metric might have
been a time-discounted approximation of long term profit, rather than simply
short term profit. I doubt that - most companies tend to overvalue the long
term. But that's a secondary point.

~~~
Avshalom
In terms of your sketched proof he's advocating that "<" ">" and "=" are not
defined over the set "business metrics" so you can't assume a total ordering.

~~~
yummyfajitas
If you don't have a total order then there are decisions you simply can't
make.

~~~
Avshalom
No there's just decisions that you can't make well.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The equation A < B holds anytime you would choose B over A (and vice versa).
If neither A < B nor B < A, that's the definition of making no decision.

If you advocate making an arbitrary choice, your decision process is either a
total order (if you don't break transitivity), inconsistent (if you do break
transitivity) or subjective (if the choice is nondeterministic).

~~~
Avshalom
Noticing that reality is under no particular obligation to be sortable is not
the same as advocating a particular strategy to deal with it. It's just
admitting that yeah sometimes subjective decisions (gasp?) will be made and
yeah sometimes inconsistent decisions (gasp?) will be made.

And as long as you aren't an evil computer in Star Trek:TOS that's not
actually a problem.

~~~
SamReidHughes
It doesn't mean subjective or inconsistent decisions have to be made, it just
means you need to learn to get comfortable with degrees of uncertainty.

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mafuyu
Reminds me of the sci-fi novel "Manna". It's worth a read:
[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm).

From Wikipedia:

"Manna is meant to be a thought-provoking read or conceptual prototype rather
than an entertaining novel (see exploratory engineering for more on such
writing). The novel shows two possible outcomes of the 'robotic revolution' in
the near future: one outcome is a dystopia based around US capitalism and the
other is a utopia based upon a communal and technological society in
Australia. Essentially, the two differ in that lower-class humans in the
dystopic society have been left unmodified and are controlled by AI "managers"
to the point of slavery, while humans in the utopian society more directly and
efficiently participate in the management of the society as a whole and most
or all willingly accept implanted AI aids."

~~~
purringmeow
I was pretty sad after reading this short novel.

 _SPOILER_

In the real world there won't be a thoughtful entrepreneur who saves
everybody. I can clearly see that bleak future happening and I am frightened
how we are going to deal with the consequences.

~~~
Retric
Historically, having a large and growing poor population is a recipie for
revolution. Which is not to say the poor will revolt just that as you
concentrate weath society becomes less stable and the poor are often used by
those with some power who want more power.

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jal278
The danger here is that technology is increasingly giving us nearly cost-free
methods (e.g. leveraging machine learning/ big data instead of human
supervisors) to oppressively optimize profitability at the expense of human
happiness.

While employers might always desire greater productivity out of their workers,
the ability to finely track productivity by simple metrics gives them new
leverage over workers, who have little recourse. While many jobs people do are
inherently not fun, when a grocery bagger's job depends on scans per hour [0],
the human element is drained.

There are also implicit costs that such metrics impose. "Scans per hour"
creates a perverse incentive to ignore or feign ignorance at customer
requests, call center quotas for conversions encourages lying to customers,
etc.

[0] [http://gawker.com/true-stories-from-wal-mart-workers-i-am-
no...](http://gawker.com/true-stories-from-wal-mart-workers-i-am-not-a-
slave-908554609)

~~~
zedadex
> to oppressively optimize profitability at the expense of human happiness

-

> Through these new means, companies have found, for example, that workers are
> more productive if they have more social interaction. So a bank’s call
> center introduced a shared 15-minute coffee break, and a pharmaceutical
> company replaced coffee makers used by a few marketing workers with a larger
> cafe area. The result? Increased sales and less turnover.

In that instance it sounds like adding a 15 minute break would make employees
happier, a possible contributing factor to reduced turnover. Optimizing
doesn't necessarily put them at odds with happiness - decreasing happiness
would increase turnover.

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ccvannorman
[paraphrased] "if you took 14 minutes to read the report and were over the age
of 50, you were clearly not taking your work seriously and needed an
intervention -- 16 minutes, and you were being too analytical and black-
flagged as an asshole" (sorry, I forget the exact quote from Neal Stephenson's
"The Diamond Age")

We'll probably get a few more Dilbert creators out of the ironic fiasco this
is going to become..

~~~
ipsin
I think that's YT's mom from Snow Crash.

~~~
angersock
Yep. Straight from Fedland.

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parennoob
This is full of quotes that show the Dilbertesque nature of some of these
metrics. It is true that they seem to be concentrated in the serving industry,
but there are traces of them in the tech industry as well, which could
conceivably increase a lot (after all, we just love the quantified self, don't
we?).

"At a tech company, his company found, workers who sat at larger tables in the
cafeteria, thus communicating more, were more productive than workers who sat
at smaller tables."

Is this effect statistically significant? Was it validated by forcing the
people at the larger tables to switch to smaller ones, and proving that their
productivity decreased as a result? Maybe a larger percentage of disgruntled
workers sat by themselves, along with a couple of really high performers?

Drawing broad strokes that appeal to higher management ("oh, they were
_communicating_ more, that's why they were more productive") is going to lead
to decisions that are not fully thought through, and tend to club everyone
into a single mould defined by broad conclusions from this data, ("Let's have
two team meetings every day, just to ensure that everyone communicates and is
on their toes all the time.")

So, If you are an employee or a manager, keep this in mind, and strongly
resist any of these nonsensical monitoring devices. It will lead to less
creative and disgruntled employees who are now trying to solve the problem of
how to beat these metrics instead of whatever problem they were supposed to
solve in the first place.

\---------------

"Servers, knowing they were being monitored, pushed customers to have that
dessert or a second beer."

On a tangential note, seeing how popular chain restaurants and takeout places
are in the US, this probably strongly contributes to the rising obesity
percentage.

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thewarrior
Someone always mentions Marshall Brain's short story "Manna" on such threads
but everyday it seems ever more prescient and relevant. I wonder how he saw it
all coming.

~~~
noir_lord
Image the absolute worst application of a technology that simultaneously
benefits the rich and powerful, then dial it back slightly.

Seems to work pretty well.

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sdott
I work in a software shop as a developer, and video cameras look over our
desks. Most of the day we are at the desks, coding or email etc. Please
comment if you also have video camera surveillance on your white-collar job. I
thought it might be quite common now, but the Times article didn't give such
an example, so maybe not?

~~~
zhte415
This is absolutely not common. What country are you in?

~~~
sdott
The US. Well, I work in an open office and there are frequently guests. It's
possible the cameras are for the guests.

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chillingeffect
> Servers, knowing they were being monitored, pushed customers to have that
> dessert or a second beer

Great example of something good for the restaurant owner being bad for the
visitors and potentially unsafer for other drivers.

Now I want to write software that offloads some aspect of quality-of-life into
making restaurant managers' lives unhealthier and riskier.

Also a great example of feature creep: Adveritsed as "Restaurant Guard,"
reducing theft, it made people have to perform better b/c they were being
watched. Good thing we have choices in life still. Honey, where are my
gardening gloves!

~~~
larrys
"Great example of something good for the restaurant owner"

You could also argue that pushing desert is bad as well (sugar, fats etc.)
Where do you draw the line though? What about the entire meal at the
restaurant - it's not exactly boiled potatoes and steamed green beans.

Separately, something that is "good for the restaurant" is not necessarily bad
for the patrons. The fact that people drink at a restaurant (or buy dessert
which I'm told has a high profit margin) adds to the profitability and allows
it to lower the price on food (in theory) and makes it a going concern. Also
the check is higher so the tip (which the server makes) is larger so someone
is earning a better living.

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m1sta_
The issue is not in the monitoring, it is in the creation and use of the wrong
metrics.

~~~
UweSchmidt
The issue is in the monitoring as well.

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larrys
"Yet the prospect of fine-grained, digital monitoring of workers’ behavior
worries privacy advocates. Companies, they say, have few legal obligations
other than informing employees. “Whether this kind of monitoring is effective
or not, it’s a concern,” said Lee Tien, a senior staff lawyer at the
Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco."

"worries privacy advocates"

You have to wonder how objective all these "advocates" really are.

I mean they most certainly must try pretty hard to insure they have a job and
a cause by finding any and all situations where they can rally around this
issue. Without respect for whether it is really a problem or not in a
particular case. (I'm not saying it is or isn't it just bothers me that they
pop up to make an issue out of everything).

~~~
jessaustin
You just have to look at where the money originates. If a charitable
organization is supported primarily by small donations, they will constantly
be hyping the new hot Chicken-Little bullshit to the media. If OTOH they get
big donations, they will ignore the media and spend all their time as sock-
puppets for industry before government panels and oversight boards.

This is a general observation, but unfortunately it's true even for
organizations I like and have supported, like EFF.

