[sam_goody]

You know, this exact same idea could be done in such a way that doesn't dehumanize the, uh, humans.

In fact, I bet your mileage would even increase if you could figure out a way to actually respect even the grunt laborers.

That is, I like the idea of streamlining your workflow, of compartmentalizing, of assembly lining. I like the ideas of integrating that which can be fully automated with what cannot. And of making tools to increase these objectives

But your teams will see the labels on the tools, and the sites that vend them. If they feel they are being "cogged", they will work like cogs. The site should mix the terms that describe their goal, with terms that respect humans as humans. It would sell better to the workers, and I suspect that in smaller companies and companies that have smaller teams, would sell better to the managers as well.

[fny]

> If they feel they are being "cogged", they will work like cogs

Most people who get into Turking know they're going to be cogs, and honestly, the only thing they care about is getting paid properly for it.

No pie-in-the-sky marketing BS is going to make up for sub minimum wage compensation.

[raddan]

Some of our prior work, AutoMan, (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2927928, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/voxpl-p...) which developed this very idea (almost a decade ago!), explicitly addresses many of the issues around exploitative practices. By default the system pays the minimum wage. We usually paid workers quite a bit more than minimum wage while developing the system. You can read more about it in our CACM letter response (http://www.cs.williams.edu/~dbarowy/acknowledge_crowdworkers... scroll down the the bit titled "Acknowledge Crowdworkers in Crowdwork Research".

Also, while it does not have the convenience of being a web service, you can download and use AutoMan now (https://docs.automanlang.org/). Most importantly, AutoMan provides statistical quality guarantees. It looks like Human Lambdas uses a manual auditing approach, which does not scale. It's surprisingly common for some crowdsourcing tasks to be as hard to audit as it is to do them in the first place. For the kinds of tasks that AutoMan supports, this is basically a non-issue.

I still actively maintain the library, and I am always happy to talk to people about use cases.

[raddan]

I should also add that the requester ratings site, Turkopticon (https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/), rated our jobs highly. I can't seem to find our reviews now (probably because we haven't run any jobs in awhile), but if someone can figure that out, you should see that workers were pretty happy with our system. I often got emails from workers asking for more work! Also, the throughput on a good job when using a properly designed system is insane. If I recall correctly, our case study on estimating calorie content from photos gathered thousands of labels in about 45 minutes.

[prepend]

> No pie-in-the-sky marketing BS is going to make up for sub minimum wage compensation.

Comically marketing BS is frequently created by consultants who cost money. Money that doesn’t go towards higher wages, or worker bonuses, or coffee in the beak room, etc

[brobdingnagians]

I think their biggest concern is getting paid. But I don't think it's good for people to accept dehumanisation, even if they seem to be okay with it. Subconscious acceptance of things like that can mess people up. They are free to accept it, but I think we should carefully consider what we are doing to people's self image.

People with a feeling of creative control and ownership or having a stake in success tend to do a better job too. Self esteem definitely helps productivity.

[ath92]

Getting paid properly is important of course, but intrinsic motivation (of which a sense of autonomy is an important driver) is very important to keep workers happy, independent of whether they're doing crowdsourcing work or just a regular job.

I find it hard to believe that this platform will be competing against Amazon Mechanical Turk on price, so they'll have to compete in other dimensions. Increasing worker motivation to improve the quality of the output is a win-win for all the stakeholders, so IMO it's worth pursuing.

[Closi]

Good luck convincing workers that they are self-actualising while transcribing financial records from hard-to-read receipts.

If you are running a team doing this sort of work, it's better to be straight up with them and say "you know, this work is boring and repetitive, but we have a good team, look after each other, and you can listen to a podcast at the same time".

[skinnymuch]

This sounds..not good. You know how I know how much of a cog some one is? How much they are being paid.

Putting a bow on top of work that pays peanuts is worse in my opinion than being honest. Your tactics appear to try to manipulate underpaid or lowly paid cogs into not believing they are what the company and managers truly see them as - just that.

[brobdingnagians]

I think the name is clever and a bit cute, though perhaps easy to misinterpret. But on point of principle:

No matter what someone is paid (or whether they are paid at all), they are a person, with hopes, dreams, feelings, and dignity.

I know you probably already believe that, but it's worth stating anyway.

Our society does tend to treat people like cogs, but that is a problem with our society.

Words influence how we feel about others. We should use words that affirm the dignity of others, then work to make that a reality. Just because most people treat other people like cogs doesn't mean that we should throw in the towel and accept it; much less start doing it ourselves.

I agree that putting a bow on nastiness is messed up, but the root problem is the jerks. If we stop even thinking in terms of people having dignity, the jerks have won one more step. We should spread kindness and dignity wherever we can, and try to get people to name things that imply dignity.

I agree there is a major problem of people with less pay being treated poorly. It seems respect is only given to the high paid, but that is messed up when you stop to think about it. Our real worth isn't determined by our financial status. What if we lose the financial status? Would our friends desert us, our rights be removed, and we end up forgotten?

I for one want to work against the world becoming more like that.

[skinnymuch]

I don’t want “respect” or whatever other ways things are being framed if I’m being paid a low wage. I always found it insulting when done. When I was treated more like a cog in line with my pay, I don’t remember having any specific consistent resentment or annoyance.

This is my own personal life anecdote.

—

It also isn’t just pay. Being all cute and “nice” and “respectful” but on top of low pay, not being flexible with something like taking half a day off or coming in late or leaving early because of life stuff, shows how the company and higher ups truly feel about you.

Most of the time lower wages correlates with the loss of the above flexibility. There are major exceptions like when the job is interchangeable and you can swap shifts with others.

At that point. The company knows you’re a cog. Treats you as a cog, but sometimes spins things as if you’re a person that matters to them.

—

Edit: I do agree jerks suck. I guess I see putting a bow on stuff as jerk material as it is generally done with cogs.

[brobdingnagians]

True I agree with that. It can feel like a cynical slap if they cover up your low status and try to make you feel good about it. I try to coach and mentor my employees and see what they value. I totally recognize that isn't common in management.

[skinnymuch]

Def depends on the job too. I was referring to jobs that paid under $20 an hour in 2021 dollars.

Even though I haven’t begun turning my life around until I passed my 20s. Still, my next job will be as a developer. In that case, a lot of the issues won’t be the same. Even though I’ll be a “lowly web dev cog”, I’ll hopefully be paid decently enough, and be either remote or in the high flying New York area, or some other major metro area.

It is a lot easier to swallow a lot of the issues if my salary is above the median and mean average and on pace to be six figures in a few years.

I think I’d like you as a manager, haha. If it is fine, could you email me at the address in my profile? Assuming you manage tech employees, I’d like to ask about a thing or two. No pressure.

[fny]

You can call people "sanitation engineers", "sandwich artists", or whatever (these are real titles by the way) and for as long as you treat them as replaceable, interchangeable, and cheap, they will be cogs.

Also are "production worker", "factory worker", "shipping clerk", or "driver" any better or worse than "human lambda"?

[bckr]

I was a "Dish Machine Operator" for a few months, and it actually did make me feel cooler than being a "Dishwasher".

"Human Lambda" being the name of the company, perhaps the workers are "Lambda Operators".

[pessimizer]

Horses for courses; my favorite job title ever was as a "3602 Clerk." Such an anonymous title for such a crazy job.

[prepend]

My office took the DISC [0] personality profile and it revealed that there are some people who love compliments, just love them. Even if they aren’t genuine, they like hearing “You’re a rock star, I’m so grateful you’re here today” even if the person is completely unable to evaluate rockstar vs. non-rockstar. Even if they say it every day to everyone.

And there are people who hate compliments.

So it’s funny how within an org there are cogs (and non-cogs) who hate that they aren’t recognized and then there’s cogs who hate when they are recognized.

Not sure the distribution in the population but it seems like the default mode is to shower complements that mean nothing other than the complimenter has some process for complimenting people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DISC_assessment

[skinnymuch]

Haha this is a point I didn’t bring up but loosely in my opinion lends credence to why obfuscating cogs as cogs is morally wrong.

The opposing view on here appears to be if you can compliment the cogs who enjoy that and keep them happy that way, things are better. This view is self serving and for the benefit of the higher ups. Not the cog.

Thanks for this though. Interesting to think about. I’ve added your comment and the link to my DEVONthink wiki on status quo :)

[prepend]

I’ve been a cog before and had hippie managers and asshole managers. Honestly, I prefer the occasional whip from the asshole than the constant stream of bullshit from hippies trying to tell me every day how my data entry was “awesome.” The weird thing is sometimes I think they convinced themself that our cog work was awesome.

If I’m a commodity, I’d rather be straight about it and have a shared reality since businesses will actually treat me like a commodity when it’s important.

[skinnymuch]

Yes I responded very similarly in a nearby comment. Haven’t had such divergent managers. But have had asshole and normal enough ones. I know I didn’t like it when they thought my work was “awesome”. It would be miserable if they ended up actually believing that.

Your last sentence is key. Worded better than I have been able to word it throughout this entire thread

[text70]

At that level, abstract logic becomes more important. Is it better to think of a flower in a field as part of a larger ecosystem, or characterize your company as a machine composed of cogs?

[skinnymuch]

Characterizing the company and cogs as flowers as part of a larger ecosystem sounds and feels better. However if the treatment is the same as the cogs. Or worse with the platitudes, then it’s better for the company and higher ups. Worse for the flowers or cogs.

[ramraj07]

This is the same kind of bs that companies like Uber (and professors) pull to glorify low wages with phrases that glorify below minimum wage work. I like OPs approach let’s be honest about what this work is, make sure you pay what they deserve and don’t try to deceive anyone with fancy accounting.

[BrianOnHN]

Sounds like a lot of work. Instead, let's just keep maximizing income inequality. This way there will always be someone in the position to treat humans like the cogs they are!

[rob74]

...and a steady supply of humans willing to be treated like cogs, because they desperately need the money.

[BrianOnHN]

Spot on. Welcome to the world of problems by design.

[skinnymuch]

Which position are you taking? The OPs comment isn’t going to make income inequality any better. Does “respecting” people by not saying they are a cog when it is not true help or hurt income? I’m sure your sarcastic comment is pointing to one of these.

I personally don’t enjoy giving some one no additional money or perks but pretending they are not cogs like OP is saying. You’re treating them like cogs by not paying them much.

[BrianOnHN]

The OPs comment does affect income inequality when implemented at scale.

As easy as the implementation is for you and your team, those results have relatively little affect in the scheme of things. In order to make the suggestion a paradigm shift, money would be moved from the top to the bottom in an "at scale" implementation.

Edit: paying your workers less per output has essentially been the last major management paradigm to drive growth over the past 20+ years. The counter examples (Costco) are the exception.

[skinnymuch]

Ah right. Agreed. Good points.