greytdepression

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@greytdepression

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sirocyl
@sirocyl
NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

the Mechanical Turk strikes again

geckonori
@geckonori

Many years ago, a few biiiig companies started to have this really neat automated phone tree system. You called in, the robot said you were allowed to ask for whatever you wanted, and then it shut up. If you said some long sentence explaining what you wanted, it somehow knew where to direct your call. Background noise? No problem. Not sure what department you need? No problem, it just knows! What a cool robot, right?

Anyway, they accomplished this using cheap human labor. Not sure if they still do this stuff today, but it seems likely, right? I worked at one of these facilities. It was a sad little office building, unlabeled and hidden between a bunch of warehouses. There was one pathetic break room and then The Computer Zone that looked like a middle school computer lab.

You sit at a computer, log in, and put on a headset. A "call" comes in. When someone tells one of those phone tree robots "Hey I need to know how to buy a ____", it sends that audio clip to your headset while simultaneously showing a bespoke array of buttons on your computer screen. The buttons represent different parts of the phone tree. "Billing", "Repairs", etc. As you listen to the audio, you click one of the buttons to direct the call to the correct part of the tree. In order to help with accuracy, 2-3 people receive the same audio clip at the same time. Whichever phone tree button got the most "votes" is where the call went.

The truly disgusting part of it all is they turned this into a competition. You could see your answer speed scores as you went through your shift. You were trying your best to direct a call before the other two people hearing the same clip as you. But if you were TOO quick on the draw and directed a call before the audio clip finished (and it was revealed the caller actually wanted something else at the last second), you were punished for rushing. FAST but not too fast. Those with higher scores on the honest-to-god leaderboard would get a slightly higher hourly wage for a given paycheck. Of course, this leaderboard constantly reset. There was no way to do well and then coast on a higher wage. You were fighting a bunch of other disgraced souls for the chance at maybe getting a few more scraps that week.

Humans crammed in a gray room getting carpal tunnel at lightning speed, all racing in the hopes of getting a bit more than minimum wage. You were listening to audio clips NON-STOP your entire shift. Rapid fire. Pain, suffering, torture, with no way to listen to music or look at your phone or talk to another human being.

And then you went home. Another day of a job well done, helping these massive corporations get a bit more wealth by talking up their cool "artificial intelligence".

I quit that job after a month. It really broke something inside me. When I walked up to the desk where the Computer Lab Warden sat, I just said "Hey I don't think I can do this anymore. I wanna quit." And no shit, the guy was like "Oh sure. Thanks for coming up to say something, most people just stop coming in one day."

I have to imagine every big innovation is like this.

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

(okay I know full well I'll be telling on myself here, so: no, I have not worked corporate retail. I've done retail, but not at a huge chain, so I'm sure the following was only news to me - but also take my word for it that i assumed this existed, I just didn't know what it was called, or that it was quite this stark)

I was at Fred Meyer today and as the cashier rang me up, I happened to notice a big red exclamation at the bottom of the register screen next to a number and the letters "IPM." i immediately guessed this was "items (scanned) per minute," because of course that would be printed on the screen in order to keep the staff continuously scared, and yes that is what it means, and yes she was failing to meet the threshold

i googled it and the first results were exactly what i expected: people saying that their bosses didn't even fucking care if the cash drawer balanced at the end of the day, nothing mattered except ipm. which is of course because their bosses don't care about anything else, because this is the KPI of the week. sometimes i wonder whose sanity suffers more from this shit, the front liners or the fucking managers

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in reply to @stu's post:

authorx
@authorx

I was thinking about this and I think part of the reason is that self-checkout already exists in stores, so it wouldn't have gotten them press coverage about how "weird" it is to shop there if you had to stop and tap your bag/items on an NFC tag reader, but I bet another part is that people steal from self-checkout all the time. If you know how the system works, you can figure out how to get around it, but a "magic" system that just knows what you're carrying out of the store and you don't know how, then you can't figure out how to trick it.

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bootjack
@bootjack

i'd never been to one of these places so i always just assumed it was like, scanning things as you go along and getting it charged to your card when you leave or something. the reality of it being some guys in india watching you on cctv and tallying it up by hand is such a uniquely dystopian and stone age solution to the tech magic sales pitch we got you can't help but laugh at just how absurdly bleak it is

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kylelabriola
@kylelabriola

yeah i also assumed it was something like "self-scanning as you go", which according to the article is apparently the backup plan for stores who want to use something like this in the future. Insane that this wasn't the idea from the get-go.

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coldpie
@coldpie

"Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped."

Oh my god just end me

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in reply to @geckonori's post:

Ackart
@Ackart

Mmhm mmhm, I didn’t work there but I had two friends that did. The part that always stuck out to me was the wage they advertised in all the job postings was the highest wage possible with the IVR leaderboard and only a couple of people could get that a month. And I might be misremembering this - there were multiple locations and the leaderboard was spread across all of them?

Not allowed to have your phone or anything on your person either, gotta put all your personal effects in a locker before beginning your menial button pushing job.

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geckonori
@geckonori

Yeah, the fact that it was so effective more than validated the (minimal) cost to these companies. One of the voice clips I remember hearing was some old guy saying "Yeaaaah, my [product] shit the bed." and we knew to send him to Repairs. The caller probably took it for granted, but can you imagine an actual computer knowing how to route that? Impossible.

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finalgamerjames
@finalgamerjames

This reminds me how a lot of "ai-generated" text stuff is just outsourced to a centre in Africa that gets paid $2 a week to edit out slurs that a search engine "accidentally" uses.

Shocking no one once again, a lot of techbros are just trying to reinvent slave labour, it's disgusting.

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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

sirocyl
@sirocyl

god this fucking sucks

I've worked small-chain grocery, and I've never seen this. balancing the till (to the cent!) was the most important metric, that and line length, to our management.

and they were at least somewhat understanding of the latter. sometimes you just have six or ten people show up with full carts. or one person with six carts full of bleach. or a nonprofit or B2B order. or a couponer. or you have a WIC transaction.

(which I've mentioned elsewhere - in NYS at least, WIC is engineered for maximal embarrassment and frustration on the part of the customer; and the average six-item WIC transaction takes ten minutes to perform, assuming they have the correct items. also it is illegal to direct them to a dedicated till, or the supervisors' desk (which can ring up and has a till), and you cannot close the light on your lane while working a WIC transaction, or do anything that indicates or gives preferential or different treatment to a WIC transaction. for comparison: 10 minutes on a till is three transactions of full wagons with $400 of groceries (including a lot of weird produce! fennel and yuca and bok choy and romanesco broccoli!) each, bagged, and paid with a check, endorsed. that is, unusually time-consuming orders.)

but your till being not a penny under or over was your performance metric for the purposes of HR management.

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sirocyl
@sirocyl

Yep.

WIC is a nutrition safety net program intended primarily for families with young or nursing children. Here, transactions with that come in the form of a WIC check, which outlines specific foods - specific brands, sizes, shapes, down to the UPC number - of food products acceptable under the program, with few or no substitutions permitted.
The checks are one per item, and come in a stack usually, here. They are entered as a WIC transaction, all sorts of information is copied off of the check into the point-of-service/cash register for each one, and then the item is scanned. They have to be done in multiple transactions, usually, but rarely sometimes a check has either more than one item on it, or a rule to combine it with another serial number of check. They are then endorsed and run through the check processing workflow, and kept in the file in the drawer.

B2B transactions are fun, and somewhat ceremonial - we get out a big book with all of our service contracts (same one gets used for nonprofits, though less ceremoniously) from the back office, and three or four signatures - the cashier, the customer, and two supervisors, or the store manager - are logged with the date, time, and receipt on file number, and the whole thing is handled on a tab and wire account system. They usually involve a large volume of items, and we usually know about them beforehand, so that we can prepare stock and/or order.
The "six carts of bleaches" example I mentioned before would have been the type of scale you'd see on a B2B, but this was an individual who needed a lot of bleach.
I hope whatever hypochlorite science experiment and/or cleaning of a scene, happened without incident...!

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ann-arcana
@ann-arcana

I remember resorting to shouting at a previous tech job because management wanted me to modify the hours tracking app I worked on to show a running total at the top of the screen of "how much money did you make the company this month" and I absolutely refused on the grounds that it is a terrible idea from every possible direction.

It's demoralizing for the employees because it treats them as a walking dollar sign, but it's also bad optics for management, because now a bunch of tech consultants no how much their real fee is, and how much they could make if they just quit and went independent (which happened a LOT in Finland.)

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Geight
@Geight

It's always the front-liners because becoming a manager necessitates turning the parts of your brain off that are repulsed by this stuff. I don't mean that as a pithy one-off, it's a genuine observation I have having worked for over seven years at The Big Coffee Chain. The managers who put themselves on the line to try and shield their workers from the worst of the company's greed are the ones who are passed up for promotion, and will either quit or burn out and be fired. The ones who say yes no matter what, who are completely disconnected from the actual conditions on the floor so long as the metrics are good enough, are the ones who stick around.

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