[sdedovic]

I wonder if this will be a net-loss. I'm not discussing whether or not Amazon's system has merit, nor if algorithmic performance evaluation is inherently bad.

Look at standardized testing in the USA (SAT, ACT) - there is tons of coaching and preparation specific to the test that isn't training anyone on the material. Instead, we know how much time to spend per question, how to quickly eliminate possible answers on a multiple choice to improve odds when guessing, what patterns in the language a question exist, etc.

I think this is so so similar to customer support and that issue big corporations (and especially us, as their customers, face) which is that quality evaluation is not something that can be boiled down to quantitative measurement. Sure, it can weed out many common problems, but it's just not worth it.

Judging workers solely based on some rubric will create a class of people who min-max the system and will lower the overall quality of the service provided, while disenfranchising the best employees.

On the other hand, maybe this will help move these opaque and (almost certainly) biased processes towards some better baseline.

[advael]

Sure, you're going to get some people gaming the metrics, (as happens with all metrics). Currently, by keeping the metrics opaque, Amazon (et al) prevents people from explicitly doing this, although it is using said metrics as a strong selection pressure on their employees, which has kind of a similar effect.

But this misses the point entirely. Because these metrics and criteria are not transparent, the people affected by them have no recourse. There is no specific thing they can point to that is unreasonable about the standards by which they are judged, because there is nothing specific accessible to them at all. With no transparency, the "algorithm" could be some stupid nonsense, or something highly illegal, or something boring and human like managers playing favorites by up/downvoting employees on a secret app. The intention of this regulation is to shine a light on these practices, so that both the people affected and regulators can see how stupid and unethical they probably are - instead of speculating - and do specific things about it

[Applejinx]

Very much this. One of the dark patterns of Silicon Valley is the working out of how to take behavior that would be a big problem if you had humans directly doing it, and delegate it to an algorithm.

There are a lot of things in society where you can gain an edge and/or profit by doing crime: either straight up stealing, or extorting/assault/bullying, or subtler things like playing into long-standing biases for your own benefit through hiring (say, for a sales force?) only the demographic that people most expect to see in positions of power, and refusing anyone who wouldn't fit that image on the behalf of your most prejudiced customers. They're all variations on crimes to the extent that they're coded into current law.

If you plausibly build these crimes into the algorithms in any way, you benefit from committing them while being able to pretend you're not doing it. Stands to reason that the law-makers are interested.

In the absence of regulation it's a race to see who can commit the most profitable crimes the most enthusiastically, with much hiring competition for whoever is the best at doing it. With regulation, it's more about competition for whoever is the best at HIDING it :)

If it wasn't somewhat (or very) adversarial by nature, we wouldn't need to have regulators in the first place… they're a natural part of a system that inherently tries to grow by any means necessary and can't regulate itself in any meaningful sense. Sounds like things are proceeding as they have to proceed.

[raxxorrax]

You make it sound that this is the lesser evil, but I don't think so. No warehouse manage could even come close to this form of surveillance.

I would take my chances with someone playing favorites compared to a shithead developing KPI analysis for workspeed metrics. And it doesn't even come close.

[advael]

Duh. My point isn't that someone designing some awful kafkaesque "performance algorithm" is somehow better than some human manager voting on which employees they like the most, it's that you couldn't even tell the difference in absence of any transparency

[mabbo]

> quality evaluation is not something that can be boiled down to quantitative measurement.

It absolutely can. For the majority of workers inside an Amazon FC, the job has no decision making in it. Decisions take time, take thinking, and can be made wrong. All of the apps driving work do not offer branches, choices. They direct the associate: do this thing.

The entire job is "do the thing as many times as you can per hour, without doing it wrong". It's almost always the same thing, over and over. The metric they are judged on is their overall rate of doing that job. And mistakes from doing it wrong are found, identified, and tracked back to who did it.

> Judging workers solely based on some rubric will create a class of people who min-max the system and will lower the overall quality of the service provided, while disenfranchising the best employees.

The cases where people have 'gamed' this system usually make the news: people peeing in bottles rather than walking to the bathroom, so that they can keep their rates high. Apart from that kind of insanity, there aren't really any ways to improve the metric except to go faster. And either way. it's a net win for Amazon.

[908B64B197]

> Look at standardized testing in the USA (SAT, ACT) - there is tons of coaching and preparation specific to the test that isn't training anyone on the material. Instead, we know how much time to spend per question, how to quickly eliminate possible answers on a multiple choice to improve odds when guessing, what patterns in the language a question exist, etc.

I wonder what's the value of all that coaching. How many extra points can someone score thanks to coaching?

Also, the SAT is extremely well documented, especially when test prep books are available for almost free.

[mabub24]

> quality evaluation is not something that can be boiled down to quantitative measurement.

It can be, but the question then is should it be? And is that a safe and humane relationship between employers and employees?

If Amazon could get away with it, they would probably do worse; but the role of regulation in this regard is to represent the employees. In the absence of a strong union, the employees rely on the government to push back against the unreasonable demands of employers on their employees. The entire use of an algo is a larger move in sidestepping previous regulations.

[raxxorrax]

I think there is a huge difference if you are subjected to a test once or twice and permanently working under such surveillance.

[JohnFen]

I agree. What's clear to me is that these systems are being used to try to make people into robots. People are not robots, and shouldn't be treated as such.