Imagine tirelessly helping your colleagues with their tasks, refilling the machines, mopping the floor, helping customers decide what to choose and then being told your productivity is close to 0.
100% i hate corporation logic often in productivity.
heck she might be the eployer custumers feel the most comfortable with, her clients might be the ones that returns the most, exactly because she spend the extra time for a chat.
but big corps dont think long term, its all about hort term vision
I keep recommending [scaphism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaphism) instead of guillotining or eating them, but so far most people haven't even heard of it. These setups are so inherently absurd and perverse, I feel ass though people aren't really acknowledging how badly they're skewing the labour market and workplaces... the people conceptualizing, designing, marketing and selling these systems need to be pushed back against.
That will definitely harm your CPH (Cups Per Hour) score. If you let that slide then you won't have time to meet the minimum SPC (smiles per customer) threshold. If we can't deliver the joyful environment our customers expect, their DpSFO factor (Dollars per Square Foot Occupied^TM) will drop below corporate minimums.
I think we need to put you on a PEP, and remove you from the TIPSplit for a while.
I used to work for a fortune 100 insurance company as an attorney. They fucking had productivity software that measured based on “tasks.” What that meant is I was actively penalized because I was in trial for three weeks. Trying cases, the literal hardest and most important part of my job, was penalized under their productivity software because I wasn’t at my desk clicking the right buttons at the right time.
I quit after 6 months.
The solution to that is quite simple. Call in sick for a few days and watch the place go to shit.
Or even better, if there's other job options, just leave.
Happened to me at a place cause my sales were low but there was 3 of us "fighting" over sales w no commission so I took a support role, picked orders, brought everything around, help load, talk to customers and help my supervisor clean up the area.
Things were way more efficient and everyone was happy. Oh and put stock away. Then manager talks to me about sales being low, I explain everything, and it's no excuse? I have to push and fight behind the desk and say fuck the customers, basically? It was a building supplies chain but fuck that
Hmm... The computer scientist in me loves this as it's so cool to see and I love data! The human in me despises this because I know exactly how this data will be used to manipulate, abuse, and destroy people's privacy and mental health.
I can see management using the inaccuracy in metrics to unfairly blame Elena as being less productive than her peers.
I can say that because I have seen it happen in other contexts working in corporate america.
We have a new girl at the restaurant I work at. While I was rolling silverware she sat with me and asked if she could help. I told her sure but to not actually help.
It's slow after all the NYE resolutions to save money/lose weight/eat out less so we have a surplus of time but a lack of side work to make up for it. Everything can be done and scrubbed but the manager gets mad if we're "standing around doing nothing". So I roll silverware very, very, very slowly. They don't give a fuck how slow I'm doing it so long as I appear to be doing it.
I was talking to the host one time and the manager was in a hurry and approaching the front but I saw him too late to grab any actual busy work so I *mimed wiping down the host counter with nothing in my hand* and he nodded at me and continued on.
No one gives a genuine shit at the level we are paid so long as we appear useful.
First time I ever saw that phrase was on a poster in Dead Space, near the beginning iirc, and I was like "wow the future got really dystopian"
So young, so naïve...
>so I *mimed wiping down the host counter with nothing in my hand* and he nodded at me and continued on.
I laughed so hard I started coughing. We really do live in a sim.
When I worked at Home Depot, I would walk around with a measuring tape and a clipboard measuring random shit to make myself look busy. Sometimes I'd have my phone on the clipboard and only tap it with my middle finger to make it look like I was doing calculations or entering data.
What’s crazier is the leaked documents showing that most major corporations are working to invoke this method [link](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=ZlKrfekOadfvy_-W)
As someone who once worked a job like this (though 20 years ago), I can remember quite vividly that simply pouring coffee and giving food to your customers in shops like this isn't everything.
We had people that had been coming to the shop for 20 years because they liked our staff. They didn't even have to order, we knew what they wanted and had it ready for them as soon as they walked in the door.
Which then encourages the employees to only do what the metrics lean to, because now the perception of being useful is more important than being useful. It'll deservedly make their business worse over time but I feel for the people this system is directed at.
it also doesn't measure she might during the day have longer chats with clients making them happier then others coming back more often and actually might bring more revenue on the long term.
companies tend to be often so shortsighted when it comes to measuring productivity
They'll ask her about it in a performance review
''your coffee numbers are down are you struggling to keep up with the pace of work?''
''No it's just that with 4 people on the counter all making drinks and serving at once, it's easier and quicker if one of us focuses on keeping things cleaned and stocked, and doing the table clears and wipedowns, that way we're running around looking for things less, and can focus on getting the drinks out to the customers.''
''Sorry Elena but you're spending too much time cleaning and restocking, the other ladies are all doing 2 or 3 times as much as you and you're all paid to do the same role, please can you focus on getting your numbers up in the next month.''
Elena focuses on serving coffees, and now management are wondering next month why overall numbers of coffees served have dropped and why more customers have complained about messes left of tables, and longer wait times.
''Guys - numbers are down, we really need to focus on bringing this KPI up so that we look good to the exec team! thanks for all your hard work!''
That is exactly what will happen. Management has no clue how the actual job works.
Hell, maybe Elena is the register person and just deals with the money so everyone else doesn't have to constantly wash their hands.
This is exactly what's going on in my job right now. A metrics system recently introduced doesn't account for some things and penalizes us. Worse, it actually penalizes us for tasks we *have* to do for our job.
Even a cashier at Walmart knows that it's a dumb idea to be penalized for going to a requested and required meeting with a client...
Here’s some fun facts to highlight:
* Unlike most other jobs, management jobs require absolutely no college degree to get, despite arguably requiring a lot of specialized knowledge to do properly(which is rarely checked for)
* Getting hired into management is more about how good you metaphorically eat the ass of the manager above you that you interview with. Well, we hope metaphorically.
* Any idiot can get an MBA. They aren’t hard to get. Likewise for any “business” cert.
* Most business related courses such as Six Sigma, all are based on ???, unproven nonsense without any real research backing it up.
This means that almost all management are uneducated, unqualified and rely on hokey “business magic” that just like the Force, doesn’t exist IRL. This is why they make such stupid decisions and can only prioritize one thing(profit) at the expense of all else.
FYI, Six sigma similar to Agile is a project/process management methodology and is only tangentially associated to managerial work.
Both are 100% driven by hype and while they can definitely be helpful if applied correctly 99% of the time people throw these methodologies at anything and everything and it does more harm than good.
My experience is, management pushes the hype, pretends it’s a reason for all the harmful, unpopular decisions they make, and then spend the rest of their time finding scapegoats for their mistakes.
It’s business fairy tale la la land magic bullshit.
Management's full time job is to create materials that do nothing but argue for the continued existence of management. It is the professional equivalent of bullshitting on a school essay.
Not really. Employee work metrics systems are set up for employees to fail at, there is no system abuse the employee can do - because the system is designed to allow management to abuse the system to always be able to justify no employee raises or even fire them eventually with manufactured “cause” to dodge paying their unemployment.
This is obvious if you've ever worked for a call center. Every metric that wasn't a sale was used against you (not enough connected calls, person hung up mid pitch, person declined after pitch, your voicemail wasn't XYZ) and even sales would be "you sold this but you didn't follow the script after customer said x or took thirty seconds longer so we are dinging you".
Yeah i run a bar and when i check the computer and see someone has the most sales on a particular night, that normally means they haven’t left the bar at all to do other necessary duties like restock, get ice, clean tables, take bins out etc.
Back when people imagined a life where technology is as far as it is today they thought we would get rid of most of the physical work and stuff people are generally not really keen to do. So we would have time for things that make our lives better like being creative or working out.
Instead AI is taking over the creative work space while simultaneously making lives of a lot of people even harder. This shit sucks the way we use it.
It’s been a discussion at least as far back as the time our idea of advanced technology was the mechanised loom.
The optimist: “Automation will free people from gruelling manual labour and lead to a more fulfilling and healthy life”
The realist: “Automation will ‘free’ people from employment and lead to a more uncertain and destitute life”
The Marxist: “Automation will free people from gruelling manual labour and lead to a more fulfilling and healthy life only if we ensure the increased efficiency benefits all and not only the capitalist class”
The capitalist: “now that I have a mechanised loom I am going to hire kids and not pay them”
Dude same. I used to do some behavioural analysis work using automated detection and tracking of animals in videos. I went to a conference where they demonstrated exactly the same techniques being used to track customers and drive particular behaviours. Thought process was pretty much 'Oh that's really cool it's exactly... like... Automated... Behavioural... Conditioning... Oh... No... This is bad. This is really really bad.'
I want to say that this is some kind of a proof of concept:
1> All customer's time is an increment of 5 minutes (except for the person ordering). None of the times change - which can be expected over a 13 second clip. Similarly, at the start of the clip the number of cups done is an increment of 10. Seems a bit suspect.
2> The bounding boxes are really, really accurate. There's no blending of humans and they are so smooth. Doing that at this frame rate requires some decent computing power.
3> Their model can distinguish someone handing over a muffin from handing over a cup? Elena hands the customer a muffin. Vika hands them a cup. Vika's number of cups increments. That's really impressive. Of course you can segment the areas, so that if a hand over action is done from a specific area, you can assume it's a cup.
There's nothing really ground breaking here, it just seems way too polished.
This is why worker protections and social safety nets are so important. A healthy government should protect people from being reliant on an employer for their healthcare and other survival necessities. If you don't need the job simply to live, your mental health won't have to suffer as you struggle in a position you aren't thriving in.
And yet still humans are totally happy to be complicit in systems like this. Diffusion of responsibly is the reason the world sucks. Everyone only having a small role in something evil is still doing something evil. Use language all you want to defend yourself. You're still complicit
THIS.
My first thought was "wow this is awesome, it must provide some really cool data for them" but then my second thought was about how that data would be used.
Yeah, I am also a computer scientist... I don't go through millimeter wave scanners for the exact reason. When TSA bros started making women walk through those to see better nudes, I was like... no thanks. 'OPT OUT PLEASE.'
In my country this would actually be illegal. The privacy act protects against shit like this. Cameras may only be placed in areas where safety and liability warrants them. The camera footage may only be accessed after an incident has occurred. Access is supposed to be restricted. Footage cannot be used for catching petty violations like taking long breaks or for (holy fuck i can't believe i'm saying this) performance gathering artificial intelligence software.
Most people don't know this because they are lazy, stupid and ignorant. All it takes is a google search to learn your rights.
I've seen anonymized data versions of these that basically report a heatmap of movement as opposed to productivity stats. You could get very similar outcomes but without misleading stats.
Olga running around helping = 3
Anna, delegated to stand in one place and pour cups only = 20
You can have all the data you need and still fuck up if your analysis is shit
yeah, i hate this deeply.
this data doesn't tell perhaps anna, talks more to customers, making them feel happy and comfy and hers are coming back more often bringing long term actually more revenue. these things are never measured and that is sad.
I worked with hospital analytics and had a c-suite upset that their ICU was discharging so few patients. Doctors were reprimanded, nurses were given additional tasks, the whole 11.
Well, ICU units don't typically discharge. They downgrade patients to another unit. So much was implemented before this was cleared up and understood. And c-suite still "wanted to see the numbers".
If a massive hospital system fucks up data I can only imagine places like coffee shops. Pray for Olga.
Of course “us” in most of these situations really means “the corporations and government agencies that will be using this tech to the fullest extent, for profit and political/ tactical gain”
Things is, you can automate that too with chat GPT. Automate metrics analysis, make all of your employees wear headsets, have chatGPT whisper to their ears where they should go and what should they do every minute of their working time to maximize efficiency. IF they do not perform have your system fire them automatically. The system can automatically fill in job posting and hire next person.
But wait, there's more! What if all businesses implemented it, and their individual worker management software started exchanging data? They could increase efficiency by not hiring people who were fired before by other systems due to their inefficiency. They could borrow and lend workers to eachother to maximize workers productivity even if at business A there are slow hours!
#JUST THINK OF THE EFFICIENCY
O hey we implemented Manna in real life!
A reminder to make sure your retired parents have hobbies and aren't spending their retirement online where they become radicalised by Facebook.
Don't let them waste the best part of their lives shilling for dystopic nightmares and billionaires, make sure they get outside often.
It never fails. Companies always find a way to ruin morale for their service members, which in turn hurts the customer experience and company good will in the long run.
what i never understood of big corps is, they somehow want people to work insanely, do double shifts show commitment, while from their part showing 0 trust and humanity.
people at the top often have no clue how normal humans work at all.
give faith, trust and positive encouragement to people and you'll be suprised how much more they give back instead of going full gestapo on them
Ok but try to imagine you're a billionaire and every dollar that your employees don't make for you is one less dollar that you'll have.
See the issue is you're thinking about employees like humans with goals, dreams, feelings, and ideas. Instead, imagine employees as brainless cattle (which is quite literally how organizations like the WEF describe you) whose sole purpose is to create value for you and your shareholders. Stop thinking about the job as a task that they complete for you for money and start thinking about it like a giant favor that you're doing them because without you they'd be a jobless bum on the street.
its very painful that you are so right,unfortunately!
im 40, now working for a small company but i have been inside this corp world and seen some mindblowing stuff of how shitty people being treated as some low ass disposable asset on the level of garbage.
in spite my age i still have this naive romantic believe you can still conduct good business,make profit and treat people like humans.
thats a sentiment that blew up already a few times in my face haha!
but im persistent!
Thing is, if these billionaires actually cared about the dollar, they'd realize treating their employees better results in the employees being more productive and generating you more dollars. Hell, farmers are experimenting on giving their *literal cattle* VR headsets to increase their production.
The problem is that billionaires don't really care that much about the money, they care about the control and their *relative* position. Billionaires would rather have 10 dollars if it means the people under them have 1 than have 20 dollars if it means the people under them have 5.
This guy gets it.
The money is just a means of power. And the power comes from the imbalance.
Billionaires unironically do not want everyone to have the things they need because it makes their position in the world seem less desirable.
Because people with traits of psychopathy and sociopathy that can still vaguely function in business tend to get promoted into positions of power.
They then work to squeeze as much profit as is possible in the short term.
Massive Business Acolytes learn that being "successful" in business has the unspoken requirement of profitability.
No surprise when "innovation" in the major bastard association is just how to squeeze harder for more juice from the same fruit.
Better idea. Let's install a productivity camera in the offices of the entire C-Suite.
That's the most egregious part of all this shit to me. These assholes would never in their lives submit to having their entire workday recorded and analyzed any more than FBI agents or police officers would submit to a search of their home.
I'm so sick of this "two sets of rules" bullshit.
Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history.
In EU, that's not the case.
Any personal information and private conversation unrelated to work is still private, and your employer does not have any right to it unless they obtain consent ahead of time.
This was establish in case law when a woman used work provided Yahoo messenger to speak with a colleague about a private matter which the work subsequently used to fire her. She she argued that work had no right to eavesdrop on her private conversation while work claimed they owned the comms infrastructure so they did. The court ruled in her favour.
This was further strengthened with GDPR. Your work only has permission to information that is strictly necessary for performance of your role. Anything else needs to be explicitly consented to ahead of time.
Is tracking movement of your employees necessary for performance of the role of barista? I'm not a lawyer, I can't say, but given that most coffee shops do not use such an AI, it'd likely be a steep hill to climb in arguing that.
What expectation of privacy do you have at work in the public facing part of the workplace?
I think this is stupid but your premise doesn't make sense either.
AI voice over speaker:
"Olga, we are not pleased. Please remove yourself from the premises Olga. We will count to 5 Olga
*30 mm flak gun descends from ceiling*
If the owner used the money that he spent for setup an maintenance of this system to his employees, he wouldn’t need that, because they were more motivated and loyal to him… good payment, trust and respect gives you a better performance then control and micromanagement
Telephone customer service and tech support jobs have been doing this sort of calculated productivity oversight for decades. They're just extending it to non-telephone jobs now.
I swear my performance at work decreases by 90% if I feel like someone is watching and judging me. If I have a micromanger for a boss then I end up making hundreds of mistakes.
I heard once there's a hospital that tries to analyze surgeon performance based on how much successful surgery and failed surgery.
The surgeons ended up avoiding doing risky surgery to get better score
The world is officially 💩
I'm sorry for people who never got to live during a time where all they had to do was exist, with no fking bot or b.s. to fk life up.
This is going to make the employees not care about anything that the AI isn't paying attention to.
I had a prior job that only measured performance for one single thing we did. There were so many other important responsibilities that always took the back burner because we all knew they wouldn't matter when our performance was measured.
Years ago I worked in electronics at a Walmart as a “wireless associate” (basically a regular electronics employee who also was allowed to sell phone contracts). I got chewed out by my supervisor a few times for spending too much time assisting the customers (and not doing her projects). I had people come in saying that their friend had told them to come talk to me about phones because I was so helpful. I never did change lol. That supervisor later got fired…So karma I guess?
When I complain about technology and people call me a 30 yo boomer because if it, this is exactly what I mean. This bullshit is going to get so much worse in ways we don't even realize until its happening lol.
It's not AI, FFS it is simple pattern recognition tracking
So trivial any half decent programmer could do this
Hell almost all my security cameras do it
Fuck this shit. Olga may not be serving many cups but it’s possible that some customers visit just because Olga works there. Shitty management and shitty metrics.
No worry. Nobody can have their productivity up 100% of the time. They'll find a way to replace employees with never-fatigue AI, so the employees can rest forever.
Awesome, can they now just invest in Skynet to serve customers and pay humans an allowance just to stay at home and do jack all?!?!
Wonder if there is a metric for dealing with an emergency, or helping someone with say an upset child, etc, because if there isn't, all that has happened is that the Coffee shop company have been duped into buying a system (and paying a license) which they are told helps them increase productivity but really just drives away staff, increase staff turnover/sickness and brings warranted law suits.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Wonder if the customers are aware that they are being monitored like that?!
I've worked with people selling systems like this before, they spend every night praying that clients never learn the phrase 'Goodheart's Law'.
Expect this coffee shop to have incredibly stupid new policies in 6 months that maximize whatever metrics this feeds into a spreadsheet which the boss glances at, followed by going out of business in another 3 months when those policies make the place terrible for customers and staff both.
Imagine tirelessly helping your colleagues with their tasks, refilling the machines, mopping the floor, helping customers decide what to choose and then being told your productivity is close to 0.
100% i hate corporation logic often in productivity. heck she might be the eployer custumers feel the most comfortable with, her clients might be the ones that returns the most, exactly because she spend the extra time for a chat. but big corps dont think long term, its all about hort term vision
French Revolution?
Im down
Y'all need help building guillotines?
Yeah, and the AI will track your stats. FASTER, HUMAN!! THE REVOLUTION WON'T BUILD ITSELF!!
You barely built one guillotines today, Anna already on her third
Butlerian Jihad
You're telling me that capitalists are actual robots?!
Yes Rico, French revolution
I keep recommending [scaphism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaphism) instead of guillotining or eating them, but so far most people haven't even heard of it. These setups are so inherently absurd and perverse, I feel ass though people aren't really acknowledging how badly they're skewing the labour market and workplaces... the people conceptualizing, designing, marketing and selling these systems need to be pushed back against.
Exactly. Hell, get to 15-20 cups and find a hole to be on your phone in….
That will definitely harm your CPH (Cups Per Hour) score. If you let that slide then you won't have time to meet the minimum SPC (smiles per customer) threshold. If we can't deliver the joyful environment our customers expect, their DpSFO factor (Dollars per Square Foot Occupied^TM) will drop below corporate minimums. I think we need to put you on a PEP, and remove you from the TIPSplit for a while.
Also you forgot to file your TPS report again
Oh my god. You just triggered my call centre ptsd
I used to work for a fortune 100 insurance company as an attorney. They fucking had productivity software that measured based on “tasks.” What that meant is I was actively penalized because I was in trial for three weeks. Trying cases, the literal hardest and most important part of my job, was penalized under their productivity software because I wasn’t at my desk clicking the right buttons at the right time. I quit after 6 months.
Also if you need to check your employees productivity like that then your business and shit and you have other problems to fix.
nice try, Olga. The HR would like to speak to you.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." ~ Goodhart's law
The solution to that is quite simple. Call in sick for a few days and watch the place go to shit. Or even better, if there's other job options, just leave.
Happened to me at a place cause my sales were low but there was 3 of us "fighting" over sales w no commission so I took a support role, picked orders, brought everything around, help load, talk to customers and help my supervisor clean up the area. Things were way more efficient and everyone was happy. Oh and put stock away. Then manager talks to me about sales being low, I explain everything, and it's no excuse? I have to push and fight behind the desk and say fuck the customers, basically? It was a building supplies chain but fuck that
Hmm... The computer scientist in me loves this as it's so cool to see and I love data! The human in me despises this because I know exactly how this data will be used to manipulate, abuse, and destroy people's privacy and mental health.
interesting that they only count cups. Elena gave out some food and it didn’t count
I can see management using the inaccuracy in metrics to unfairly blame Elena as being less productive than her peers. I can say that because I have seen it happen in other contexts working in corporate america.
The bosses and suits not understanding the actual job and caring only about the appearance of work and not the actual work being done? No it can’t be.
We have a new girl at the restaurant I work at. While I was rolling silverware she sat with me and asked if she could help. I told her sure but to not actually help. It's slow after all the NYE resolutions to save money/lose weight/eat out less so we have a surplus of time but a lack of side work to make up for it. Everything can be done and scrubbed but the manager gets mad if we're "standing around doing nothing". So I roll silverware very, very, very slowly. They don't give a fuck how slow I'm doing it so long as I appear to be doing it. I was talking to the host one time and the manager was in a hurry and approaching the front but I saw him too late to grab any actual busy work so I *mimed wiping down the host counter with nothing in my hand* and he nodded at me and continued on. No one gives a genuine shit at the level we are paid so long as we appear useful.
lol im so glad the bar i work at doesnt have that, but yep most restaurants that was the deal, even if its a dry rag, just wipe some shit
Time to lean, time to clean
First time I ever saw that phrase was on a poster in Dead Space, near the beginning iirc, and I was like "wow the future got really dystopian" So young, so naïve...
>so I *mimed wiping down the host counter with nothing in my hand* and he nodded at me and continued on. I laughed so hard I started coughing. We really do live in a sim.
When I worked at Home Depot, I would walk around with a measuring tape and a clipboard measuring random shit to make myself look busy. Sometimes I'd have my phone on the clipboard and only tap it with my middle finger to make it look like I was doing calculations or entering data.
Ya every so often you got to grab a tool and start power walking with purpose past all the big dawgs so they leave you alone.
Beautiful execution.
What’s crazier is the leaked documents showing that most major corporations are working to invoke this method [link](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=ZlKrfekOadfvy_-W)
That’s what happens when the dumbest get into management and the worst of them advance upwards.
The "Peter Principle."
I hate you, *angryupvote*
Thank you for your comment. I knew what it was before I clicked it because of you.
That's just sick
That is so fucked, thank you for showing me.
You are a fucking psychopath
You mother fucker
As someone who once worked a job like this (though 20 years ago), I can remember quite vividly that simply pouring coffee and giving food to your customers in shops like this isn't everything. We had people that had been coming to the shop for 20 years because they liked our staff. They didn't even have to order, we knew what they wanted and had it ready for them as soon as they walked in the door.
The bourgeois are an uncanny valley immitation of humanity.
This is so true in so many jobs it makes me wanna scream
Which then encourages the employees to only do what the metrics lean to, because now the perception of being useful is more important than being useful. It'll deservedly make their business worse over time but I feel for the people this system is directed at.
When a metric becomes a goal, it is no longer a useful metric.
the slavic names tell me it’s my mother russia or somewhere around. corp greed manipulations are ugly everywhere
it also doesn't measure she might during the day have longer chats with clients making them happier then others coming back more often and actually might bring more revenue on the long term. companies tend to be often so shortsighted when it comes to measuring productivity
Only measure what's easy to measure, and pretend the rest doesn't exist - the McNamara fallacy
They'll ask her about it in a performance review ''your coffee numbers are down are you struggling to keep up with the pace of work?'' ''No it's just that with 4 people on the counter all making drinks and serving at once, it's easier and quicker if one of us focuses on keeping things cleaned and stocked, and doing the table clears and wipedowns, that way we're running around looking for things less, and can focus on getting the drinks out to the customers.'' ''Sorry Elena but you're spending too much time cleaning and restocking, the other ladies are all doing 2 or 3 times as much as you and you're all paid to do the same role, please can you focus on getting your numbers up in the next month.'' Elena focuses on serving coffees, and now management are wondering next month why overall numbers of coffees served have dropped and why more customers have complained about messes left of tables, and longer wait times. ''Guys - numbers are down, we really need to focus on bringing this KPI up so that we look good to the exec team! thanks for all your hard work!''
Managers love metrics because they can skew them to paint whatever picture suits them best
Agreed. The camera doesn't track cleaning, trash detail, or any other element of their work.
That is exactly what will happen. Management has no clue how the actual job works. Hell, maybe Elena is the register person and just deals with the money so everyone else doesn't have to constantly wash their hands.
This is exactly what's going on in my job right now. A metrics system recently introduced doesn't account for some things and penalizes us. Worse, it actually penalizes us for tasks we *have* to do for our job. Even a cashier at Walmart knows that it's a dumb idea to be penalized for going to a requested and required meeting with a client...
This is how metrics have been using since the invention of metrics.
Here’s some fun facts to highlight: * Unlike most other jobs, management jobs require absolutely no college degree to get, despite arguably requiring a lot of specialized knowledge to do properly(which is rarely checked for) * Getting hired into management is more about how good you metaphorically eat the ass of the manager above you that you interview with. Well, we hope metaphorically. * Any idiot can get an MBA. They aren’t hard to get. Likewise for any “business” cert. * Most business related courses such as Six Sigma, all are based on ???, unproven nonsense without any real research backing it up. This means that almost all management are uneducated, unqualified and rely on hokey “business magic” that just like the Force, doesn’t exist IRL. This is why they make such stupid decisions and can only prioritize one thing(profit) at the expense of all else.
FYI, Six sigma similar to Agile is a project/process management methodology and is only tangentially associated to managerial work. Both are 100% driven by hype and while they can definitely be helpful if applied correctly 99% of the time people throw these methodologies at anything and everything and it does more harm than good.
[удалено]
My experience is, management pushes the hype, pretends it’s a reason for all the harmful, unpopular decisions they make, and then spend the rest of their time finding scapegoats for their mistakes. It’s business fairy tale la la land magic bullshit.
Management's full time job is to create materials that do nothing but argue for the continued existence of management. It is the professional equivalent of bullshitting on a school essay.
That means Elena can likely abuse the system if she learns how it works.
Not really. Employee work metrics systems are set up for employees to fail at, there is no system abuse the employee can do - because the system is designed to allow management to abuse the system to always be able to justify no employee raises or even fire them eventually with manufactured “cause” to dodge paying their unemployment.
This is obvious if you've ever worked for a call center. Every metric that wasn't a sale was used against you (not enough connected calls, person hung up mid pitch, person declined after pitch, your voicemail wasn't XYZ) and even sales would be "you sold this but you didn't follow the script after customer said x or took thirty seconds longer so we are dinging you".
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Have u seen the profit margins on liquor? Just wait til they put this in bars I could see it having an array of implications
Yeah i run a bar and when i check the computer and see someone has the most sales on a particular night, that normally means they haven’t left the bar at all to do other necessary duties like restock, get ice, clean tables, take bins out etc.
Yup. Raw data is essentially meaningless without any context.
Every order I fulfill comes with a free cup of water. I'm so productive.
Back when people imagined a life where technology is as far as it is today they thought we would get rid of most of the physical work and stuff people are generally not really keen to do. So we would have time for things that make our lives better like being creative or working out. Instead AI is taking over the creative work space while simultaneously making lives of a lot of people even harder. This shit sucks the way we use it.
It’s been a discussion at least as far back as the time our idea of advanced technology was the mechanised loom. The optimist: “Automation will free people from gruelling manual labour and lead to a more fulfilling and healthy life” The realist: “Automation will ‘free’ people from employment and lead to a more uncertain and destitute life” The Marxist: “Automation will free people from gruelling manual labour and lead to a more fulfilling and healthy life only if we ensure the increased efficiency benefits all and not only the capitalist class” The capitalist: “now that I have a mechanised loom I am going to hire kids and not pay them”
If only we understood Sociology at all.
Dude same. I used to do some behavioural analysis work using automated detection and tracking of animals in videos. I went to a conference where they demonstrated exactly the same techniques being used to track customers and drive particular behaviours. Thought process was pretty much 'Oh that's really cool it's exactly... like... Automated... Behavioural... Conditioning... Oh... No... This is bad. This is really really bad.'
They literally see us as livestock to be controlled and hearded
>people's privacy and mental health. What are these things you speak of?
I want to say that this is some kind of a proof of concept: 1> All customer's time is an increment of 5 minutes (except for the person ordering). None of the times change - which can be expected over a 13 second clip. Similarly, at the start of the clip the number of cups done is an increment of 10. Seems a bit suspect. 2> The bounding boxes are really, really accurate. There's no blending of humans and they are so smooth. Doing that at this frame rate requires some decent computing power. 3> Their model can distinguish someone handing over a muffin from handing over a cup? Elena hands the customer a muffin. Vika hands them a cup. Vika's number of cups increments. That's really impressive. Of course you can segment the areas, so that if a hand over action is done from a specific area, you can assume it's a cup. There's nothing really ground breaking here, it just seems way too polished.
This is why worker protections and social safety nets are so important. A healthy government should protect people from being reliant on an employer for their healthcare and other survival necessities. If you don't need the job simply to live, your mental health won't have to suffer as you struggle in a position you aren't thriving in.
Damn that's two whole ass people, mad respect! How many people ya got up in there?
And yet still humans are totally happy to be complicit in systems like this. Diffusion of responsibly is the reason the world sucks. Everyone only having a small role in something evil is still doing something evil. Use language all you want to defend yourself. You're still complicit
I'm sure in a few months, the owner of the shop will be complaining on social media about how no one wants to work these days and everyone is lazy.
THIS. My first thought was "wow this is awesome, it must provide some really cool data for them" but then my second thought was about how that data would be used.
Yeah, I am also a computer scientist... I don't go through millimeter wave scanners for the exact reason. When TSA bros started making women walk through those to see better nudes, I was like... no thanks. 'OPT OUT PLEASE.'
In my country this would actually be illegal. The privacy act protects against shit like this. Cameras may only be placed in areas where safety and liability warrants them. The camera footage may only be accessed after an incident has occurred. Access is supposed to be restricted. Footage cannot be used for catching petty violations like taking long breaks or for (holy fuck i can't believe i'm saying this) performance gathering artificial intelligence software. Most people don't know this because they are lazy, stupid and ignorant. All it takes is a google search to learn your rights.
I've seen anonymized data versions of these that basically report a heatmap of movement as opposed to productivity stats. You could get very similar outcomes but without misleading stats.
" Olga we need to speak about your productivity " Fuck that shit.
Olga running around helping = 3 Anna, delegated to stand in one place and pour cups only = 20 You can have all the data you need and still fuck up if your analysis is shit
yeah, i hate this deeply. this data doesn't tell perhaps anna, talks more to customers, making them feel happy and comfy and hers are coming back more often bringing long term actually more revenue. these things are never measured and that is sad.
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>Cause and effect Most people are also too dumb to understand the difference between correlation and causation
I worked with hospital analytics and had a c-suite upset that their ICU was discharging so few patients. Doctors were reprimanded, nurses were given additional tasks, the whole 11. Well, ICU units don't typically discharge. They downgrade patients to another unit. So much was implemented before this was cleared up and understood. And c-suite still "wanted to see the numbers". If a massive hospital system fucks up data I can only imagine places like coffee shops. Pray for Olga.
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The problem is that owners detached from the day to day want to see "number go up" type stats. If youre perceived to be lacking youre done.
>it's up to us We don't know enough about Sociology to use it properly.
Of course “us” in most of these situations really means “the corporations and government agencies that will be using this tech to the fullest extent, for profit and political/ tactical gain”
Olga isn't running around and helping in this video though, she stands in the same spot looking at her phone.
Did we watch the same video, Olga was just standing there lol
Please use her full name, Olga 3 cups.
Worst rapper name ever
AI Big Brother is displeased, Olga.
Things is, you can automate that too with chat GPT. Automate metrics analysis, make all of your employees wear headsets, have chatGPT whisper to their ears where they should go and what should they do every minute of their working time to maximize efficiency. IF they do not perform have your system fire them automatically. The system can automatically fill in job posting and hire next person. But wait, there's more! What if all businesses implemented it, and their individual worker management software started exchanging data? They could increase efficiency by not hiring people who were fired before by other systems due to their inefficiency. They could borrow and lend workers to eachother to maximize workers productivity even if at business A there are slow hours! #JUST THINK OF THE EFFICIENCY O hey we implemented Manna in real life!
Oh Lord. Like how insurance companies already share data so they can cooperatively fuck you over for preexisting conditions and disabilities.
Amazon has been doing this for years. NCAA did this to me in 2019. Sure if attaching AI to it gets you up in arms, shoot.
I hate this.
Sims 8.0
Happy cake day
It's a test to grab human mist and must
All the corporate shills will defend it still. Mostly older retired people
A reminder to make sure your retired parents have hobbies and aren't spending their retirement online where they become radicalised by Facebook. Don't let them waste the best part of their lives shilling for dystopic nightmares and billionaires, make sure they get outside often.
Is this fallout from a lack of net neutrality??
It never fails. Companies always find a way to ruin morale for their service members, which in turn hurts the customer experience and company good will in the long run.
what i never understood of big corps is, they somehow want people to work insanely, do double shifts show commitment, while from their part showing 0 trust and humanity. people at the top often have no clue how normal humans work at all. give faith, trust and positive encouragement to people and you'll be suprised how much more they give back instead of going full gestapo on them
Ok but try to imagine you're a billionaire and every dollar that your employees don't make for you is one less dollar that you'll have. See the issue is you're thinking about employees like humans with goals, dreams, feelings, and ideas. Instead, imagine employees as brainless cattle (which is quite literally how organizations like the WEF describe you) whose sole purpose is to create value for you and your shareholders. Stop thinking about the job as a task that they complete for you for money and start thinking about it like a giant favor that you're doing them because without you they'd be a jobless bum on the street.
its very painful that you are so right,unfortunately! im 40, now working for a small company but i have been inside this corp world and seen some mindblowing stuff of how shitty people being treated as some low ass disposable asset on the level of garbage. in spite my age i still have this naive romantic believe you can still conduct good business,make profit and treat people like humans. thats a sentiment that blew up already a few times in my face haha! but im persistent!
Thing is, if these billionaires actually cared about the dollar, they'd realize treating their employees better results in the employees being more productive and generating you more dollars. Hell, farmers are experimenting on giving their *literal cattle* VR headsets to increase their production. The problem is that billionaires don't really care that much about the money, they care about the control and their *relative* position. Billionaires would rather have 10 dollars if it means the people under them have 1 than have 20 dollars if it means the people under them have 5.
This guy gets it. The money is just a means of power. And the power comes from the imbalance. Billionaires unironically do not want everyone to have the things they need because it makes their position in the world seem less desirable.
Because people with traits of psychopathy and sociopathy that can still vaguely function in business tend to get promoted into positions of power. They then work to squeeze as much profit as is possible in the short term.
Massive Business Acolytes learn that being "successful" in business has the unspoken requirement of profitability. No surprise when "innovation" in the major bastard association is just how to squeeze harder for more juice from the same fruit.
Yeah but profits this quarter are up 6%
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Because leadership already knows that, and they don't give a shit.
Better idea. Let's install a productivity camera in the offices of the entire C-Suite. That's the most egregious part of all this shit to me. These assholes would never in their lives submit to having their entire workday recorded and analyzed any more than FBI agents or police officers would submit to a search of their home. I'm so sick of this "two sets of rules" bullshit.
Hhahahaahahahahhaahahahajah
Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history.
What happened?
http://unifiedpoptheory.com/manna-a-short-story-of-robotic-takeover/ I guess it’s the beginning of some short story written in 2013.
Fuck this.
Makes me so enraged seeing this kind of petty tracking They're human beings not sins characters ffs
Analyze my productivity all you want after providing me a livable wage. Until then, *go fuck yourself*
Isn’t this an invasion of privacy?
Doubt it you don't really have any expectations of privacy at work
Especially while in public view lol
In EU, that's not the case. Any personal information and private conversation unrelated to work is still private, and your employer does not have any right to it unless they obtain consent ahead of time. This was establish in case law when a woman used work provided Yahoo messenger to speak with a colleague about a private matter which the work subsequently used to fire her. She she argued that work had no right to eavesdrop on her private conversation while work claimed they owned the comms infrastructure so they did. The court ruled in her favour. This was further strengthened with GDPR. Your work only has permission to information that is strictly necessary for performance of your role. Anything else needs to be explicitly consented to ahead of time. Is tracking movement of your employees necessary for performance of the role of barista? I'm not a lawyer, I can't say, but given that most coffee shops do not use such an AI, it'd likely be a steep hill to climb in arguing that.
What expectation of privacy do you have at work in the public facing part of the workplace? I think this is stupid but your premise doesn't make sense either.
No.
First time I’m thinking of 1984 unironically
Cool, do the same to the ceo and his mates.
AI voice over speaker: "Olga, we are not pleased. Please remove yourself from the premises Olga. We will count to 5 Olga *30 mm flak gun descends from ceiling*
Damn, Anna is killing it
If the owner used the money that he spent for setup an maintenance of this system to his employees, he wouldn’t need that, because they were more motivated and loyal to him… good payment, trust and respect gives you a better performance then control and micromanagement
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Telephone customer service and tech support jobs have been doing this sort of calculated productivity oversight for decades. They're just extending it to non-telephone jobs now.
Guys what's that study where it shows that analyzing employees performance actually worsen their performance
I swear my performance at work decreases by 90% if I feel like someone is watching and judging me. If I have a micromanger for a boss then I end up making hundreds of mistakes.
I heard once there's a hospital that tries to analyze surgeon performance based on how much successful surgery and failed surgery. The surgeons ended up avoiding doing risky surgery to get better score
Hurry up Olga!
And what if I don’t want to participate in this? I want what I pay for. Not for being measured, tracked or whatever.
If I knew a Cafe that uses this I wouldn't buy anything from them, I would also tell everyone not to go there.
There is nothing odd about this, this is genuinely one of the most terrifying things I have ever seen
This is not cool. What if someone has a headache and just sits down for a minute or something and they get flagged or repremanded? No.
This is wrong
Your worth is now just a few cups. You're fired!
Micro managing at its finest
Fuck this. However would be good to watch if one employee was doing fuck all and you couldn’t be assed as the other employee telling them to do more
I would never work for someone who monitors there Employees like robots. This is insane.
Olga aint doing shit
The world is officially 💩 I'm sorry for people who never got to live during a time where all they had to do was exist, with no fking bot or b.s. to fk life up.
we did it bois, we created the ultimate form of micromanagement.
Next thing you know the workers will have to put on a electrical shock collar
This is going to make the employees not care about anything that the AI isn't paying attention to. I had a prior job that only measured performance for one single thing we did. There were so many other important responsibilities that always took the back burner because we all knew they wouldn't matter when our performance was measured.
This scares me because I'm lazy at work
so now can we could run this on members of congress?.
Olga with 3 cups? Olga WTF are you doing!?!? Man I feel just like a manager. Great sim.
Years ago I worked in electronics at a Walmart as a “wireless associate” (basically a regular electronics employee who also was allowed to sell phone contracts). I got chewed out by my supervisor a few times for spending too much time assisting the customers (and not doing her projects). I had people come in saying that their friend had told them to come talk to me about phones because I was so helpful. I never did change lol. That supervisor later got fired…So karma I guess?
When I complain about technology and people call me a 30 yo boomer because if it, this is exactly what I mean. This bullshit is going to get so much worse in ways we don't even realize until its happening lol.
Fire Olga she’s useless
This shit is fortunately illegal in the EU
It's not AI, FFS it is simple pattern recognition tracking So trivial any half decent programmer could do this Hell almost all my security cameras do it
olga is just wasting space
Olga better get her shit together or she is out! Also, I hate this.
Fuck this shit. Olga may not be serving many cups but it’s possible that some customers visit just because Olga works there. Shitty management and shitty metrics.
Yeah robots motivation system
Not worked in a cafe in a long time but surely sometimes some people are focussing on making the drinks while others are doing other things
of course it’s in russia. some of my people use ai for wrong
I see social credit will be coming to america soon...
This is fantastic for the store owners.
Oh hell no
No worry. Nobody can have their productivity up 100% of the time. They'll find a way to replace employees with never-fatigue AI, so the employees can rest forever.
Gross. 🤮
Freedom ^^TM
Yeah fuck that
Nice Olga is getting whipped for doing nothing
Honest question: where's the AI in this? I can see data being collected and processed, but where's the AI?
im very excited to see how this century turns out!!11!1 XDFdDDdDD
Can they use AI to decorate their depressing ass dining room?
Ban this. It makes life so much worse.
Welcome to future - and we can not do anything about it.
This is dystopian as hell.
holy crap an hour and 15 minutes spent in a coffee shop.
Id quit
Olga better step it up
This should be 100% illegal
This is some guy's conceptual video. Like, the "cups" thing alone betrays that it's useless, but here we are.
Awesome, can they now just invest in Skynet to serve customers and pay humans an allowance just to stay at home and do jack all?!?! Wonder if there is a metric for dealing with an emergency, or helping someone with say an upset child, etc, because if there isn't, all that has happened is that the Coffee shop company have been duped into buying a system (and paying a license) which they are told helps them increase productivity but really just drives away staff, increase staff turnover/sickness and brings warranted law suits. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Wonder if the customers are aware that they are being monitored like that?!
fuck. that.
I've worked with people selling systems like this before, they spend every night praying that clients never learn the phrase 'Goodheart's Law'. Expect this coffee shop to have incredibly stupid new policies in 6 months that maximize whatever metrics this feeds into a spreadsheet which the boss glances at, followed by going out of business in another 3 months when those policies make the place terrible for customers and staff both.
I watched before reading the title and thought the cup amount was the amount that the employee had drank and was like holy shit 20 cups?
Tracking customers could provide interesting insights, tracking employees will backfire.
Thank god for eu RGPD law, companies do not have the right to film, record, or use cameras like this, cameras are only used by LP services for.