The Spy Who Fired Me | Hacker News Reader

The Spy Who Fired Me

harpers.org

113 pointssignor_bosco76 comments

"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

Prophetical.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

Unionization is difficult in much of the United States, particularly since businesses have successfully spread the image of union workers as lazy sponges to lower voter support. Businesses whose workers are unionizing run PR campaigns claiming all sorts of scary downsides and threaten to or actually do close stores if a union actually wins the vote. Since many of the most exploitative conditions happen where workers are low-status and have great reasons to fear unemployment or reduced hours, this is a powerful message unless the local economy is booming.

The Atlantic had a piece about how Walmart handles this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/how-walm...

If you remember the news in August about the NLRB allowing franchise workers to unionize with a parent company rather than each franchisee, this is why that was a big deal: currently, if the workers in Podunk unionize and the local franchisee decides to close the business instead of negotiating, it's a minor write-off for the parent company. After that ruling, e.g. McDonald's would have to take the heat for any retaliatory action.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/business/labor-board-says-...

That kind of system would be pretty sweet if it also rated the manager and let each employee review what they were doing during the day. Full transparency and ratings both ways.

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.

>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.

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

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/08/the...

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.

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.

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.

Greece is an outlier. You'd be better off looking at Australia.

The economy (although I'm not sure exactly what you mean b/c the definition can be pretty wide, but assuming you mean economic productivity) is one tool in service of a good life. And like others, it works well in certain dosages -- not too little, but not too much, either, and, as usual in social constructs, there are always competing interests at play. That's why other people with the capacity for critical thinking have decided to offset the interests of those who most benefit from maximal productivity with that of those whose lives it affects the most by ensuring that power stemming from control of resources is balanced with power in numbers, thus ensuring that some types of freedom do not so overwhelmingly crush other types of freedom.

North Korea also doesn't have vacations.

On a more philosophical note, what good is an economy if you can't enjoy it?

Certainly these telematics are problematic, from a social perspective. They drive the last ounce of productivity out of people. I find them somewhat repulsive because they are a top down authoritarian way to drive up productivity and squeeze out the last pockets of air in inefficient systems --the problem is people were not built to perform at 100% all the time. You need BS time. Time to relax a bit.

That said, these jobs will be on their way out, once automated cars get here. There is no reason they can't have delivery vans 24 hrs a day with people self-servicing the receiving process. They could deliver at the workplace, at home, wherever you choose.

In the end, as dehumanizing as this telemetric supervising is, these jobs are on their way out.

PS. Key stroke monitoring has been a thing at some tech companies for a very long time. Also, many of the current tech darlings have monitoring built in to their internal tools. Or, wonder why we don't see more non sanctioned internal substantiated product leaks?

Interesting point of view. These people submit to dehumanizing surveillance to avoid getting fired. But good news - they're gonna get fired anyway!

Apart from that's obviously not going to happen because of this:

self-servicing the receiving process.

We don't tend to actually pay for delivery costs any more, so when a company suddenly starts asking me to come down to the street to pick up the delivery, where's my benefit?

You're just going to lose business, for a saving of a couple of $.

"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

First thing I thought of too. One can only hope that the later chapters aren't as prescient as the first.

Other than wishful thinking, any reasons for thinking they wont be?

I live in Australia and cannot see the later chapters coming into reality.

Never read them. Cool stuff. Thanks for the link.

Thank you, I read that long ago then lost the link. Nice to track it down again

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.

If only doctors also had to wear such badges…

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.

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.

"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.

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/Scientific_management

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

> “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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wow. So I guess this has already happened: 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?"

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.

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

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

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

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".

Yeah, this is what I don't get about libertarianism & anarcho-capitalism. All it takes is one bad actor to ruin it for everyone else. Just a single one. And in a country with 300 million people, how can there not be one person who will take advantage and become that bad actor? If the past 5 thousand years of human history has shown us anything, it's that corruption is inherent to human nature. Therefor, libertarianism runs contrary to human nature.

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.

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.

Interesting. In what ways do you feel the US has shifted to the right? (I'm more familiar with the right wing narrative saying the country has shifted to the left - gay marriage, black president, etc. But it's very possible that I'm getting a biased sample of the rhetoric.)

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.

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.

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...

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.

> 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.

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

In that case I stand corrected in the GPS issue.

GPS spoofing then?

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

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.

Why do you say this like it's a bad thing?

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

The people that do these things have this thought in common: "won't happen to me and not in my lifetime"

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

Sorry for the late reply. So, for this to be true, these systems would have to drive training costs (and other hiring costs) to 0. Is this your contention? I'm not disagreeing, just looking for more discussion.

This is scary.

Readable with incognito window.

works fine without for me?

Works fine for me also..

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

Very L. Bob Rife of these employers.

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