[neilv]

I think this didn't age well, for HN, and it prompts some serious questions about our techbro startup culture.

> Obvious but necessary: to incentivize productive work, we tie compensation to the number of characters transcribed, and assess financial penalties for failed tests (more on tests below). Penalties are priced such that subpar performance will result in little to no earnings for the labeller.

So, these aren't employees? The writeup talks about not trusting gig workers, but it sounds like they have gig workers, and a particularly questionable kind.

Not like independent contractors with the usual freedoms. But rather, under a punishing set of Kafkaesque rules, like someone was thinking only of computer programs, oops. "Gamified", with huge negative points penalties and everything. To be under threat of not getting paid at all.

I see that this article is dated the 16th, so it's before the HN outrage last week, over the founders who demoed a system for monitoring factory worker performance, and were ripped a new one online for dehumanizing employees.

Despite the factory system being not as invasive, dehumanizing, and potentially labor law-violating as what's described in this article: about whip-cracking of gig workers, moment-to-moment, and even not paying them.

I'm not even sure you'd get away with calling them "independent contractors", under these conditions, when workers save copies of this blog post, to show to labor lawyers and state regulators.

(Incidentally, I wasn't aware that a company working in aviation gets skilled workers this way. The usual way I've seen is to hire someone, with all the respect, rights, and benefits that entails. Or to hire a consultant who is decidedly not treated like a gig worker in a techno-dystopian sweatshop.)

I don't want Internet mob justice here, but I want to ask who is advising these startups regarding how they think of their place in the world, relative to other humans?

I can understand getting as far as VC pitches while overwhelmed with fixating on other aspects of the business problems, and still passing the "does this person have a good enough chance to have a big exit" gut feel test of the VCs. But are there no ongoing checks and advising, so that people don't miss everything else?

[anon373839]

> To be under threat of not getting paid at all.

If they are operating as described, it’s almost certainly illegal. They deserve to be hit with a nice, fat PAGA lawsuit. These workers would have to satisfy the “ABC test” to be exempt from minimum wage obligations, and it’s a difficult standard to meet: https://www.labor.ca.gov/employmentstatus/abctest/

> I want to ask who is advising these startups regarding how they think of their place in the world, relative to other humans?

To me, this has been one of the most dispiriting things to witness in the last few years: not just the normalization, but the outright glorification, of indecency. Shameful.

[michaelt]

> But rather, under a punishing set of Kafkaesque rules, like someone was thinking only of computer programs, oops. "Gamified", with huge negative points penalties and everything. To be under threat of not getting paid at all.

I'm not defending these practices, but to share some context:

One of the problems with getting workers to review ML output is it's incredibly, unbelievably boring. When the task is to review model output you're going to hit the 'approve' button 99% of the time - and when you're being paid for speed, nothing's faster than hitting the approve button.

So understandably a decent number of folks will just zone out, maybe put youtube on in another window, and sit there hitting approve 100% of the time. That's just human nature when dealing with such an incredibly dull task - I know I don't pay attention when I have to do my annual refresher training on how to sit in a chair.

This sort of thing is a big problem for things like airport baggage scanner operators; pilots with their planes on autopilot; lifeguards; casino CCTV operators; and suchlike. There are loads of studies about this kind of stuff.

This makes getting good quality ML output reviews quite tricky. There are ways to do it, though, and you don't have to resort to negative income!

[robertlagrant]

Stack Overflow does this by sometimes prompting you with known bad changes that you shouldn't approve. But then they're managing volunteers, not paying for bad reviews, so they have no money to waste.

[stevage]

I honestly still have trouble believing there are people willing to moderate SO content for free. Do a boring job to make a rich company richer, get paid nothing and occasionally get yelled at.

[Aeolun]

It attracts a lot of petty tyrants, that’s for sure.

[pglevy]

Seems like some of the techniques described here could be part of a larger "accuracy-based commission" form of compensation (as opposed to what is apparently presented).

[wodenokoto]

What do you mean “didn’t age well”, its a brand new article. It hasn’t aged at all.

[neilv]

The article is dated the 16th, before the HN outrage around the 25th, over the video skit about some YC factory worker surveillance startup.

If the writer had the benefit of seeing the few-post outrage on the 25th, they probably would've written the article differently, and maybe also reflected on the dynamic with the workers.

In a startup, when you have to do all the things, and you're constantly learning, it's easy to miss some things. Also, a lot of the funded tech startups are of founders of rich parents and sheltered upbringings, for various reasons. So (like all humans) they often have little understanding of the situations of people who are not them, and therefore little automatic empathy for the not understood. Often (this can also be normal human reaction), they will implicitly imagine themselves as deserving whatever privileges they have, and therefore having superior merit over others who don't have that. So, without reflection, one might accept the situation of one person calling themselves CEO at 20, and taking the lion's share of the entire effort's wealth, while another person is belittled and treated like shit, since (the implicit belief goes) they both must merit their lots in life.

Unless and until we stop and think about it. I think that most people here on HN, when we're distracted from empathy, by all the commotion of all things we have to pay attention to, will care once it's pointed out. We stop and reflect, and then we try to learn and do better.

[wodenokoto]

I don’t think HN being discontented about the gig economy is anything new, at least not if you are counting new in weeks and not years.

[robertlagrant]

> I'm not even sure you'd get away with calling them "independent contractors", under these conditions, when workers save copies of this blog post, to show to labor lawyers and state regulators.

An independent contractor is more likely to not be paid for meeting mutually agreed terms, not less likely.

[tbrownaw]

Some of the big-dollar contracts $employer has involve financial penalties if performance metrics aren't up to standard.

[michaelt]

At the same time, many organisations getting work done through platforms like Mechanical Turk set their piece rate to make sure all but the worst workers will make at least minimum wage.

[totetsu]

Anyone have the link to that thread?

[neilv]

The posts last week about the factory worker monitoring startup? There were at least 3 posts (and I think dang let the dupes through, since some mentioned YC, and HN moderates less in such cases):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43175023

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170850

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43180133

[rrr_oh_man]

How else would you do this?