High score, low pay: why the gig economy loves gamification | Hacker News Reader

High score, low pay: why the gig economy loves gamification

theguardian.com

70 pointspseudolus60 comments

Could complex gamification of payment structures amount to worker misclassification?

i.e. if an Uber/Lyft driver must meet a complex set of job requirements in order to earn a reasonable wage, e.g. driving at particular times, in particular places, accepting certain minimum percentages of tasks assigned, etc...

...might it not be more appropriate to call these folks employees than contractors?

The counterargument could be that if they are allowed to participate in the platform without "playing the games" so to speak, then they aren't "job requirements", but if it's only possible to earn a reasonable wage by playing, could it be argued that they should be considered as such?

EDIT: I see a couple of comments in this thread stating that they are employees and not contractors however I believe that is not the case (i.e. that Uber has fought to maintain the contractor classification and won so far) ?

EDIT2: Ah, I now see that there have been some recent court cases going the other way, at least in California (https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/1/17308178/uber-lyft-drivers...)...not sure if any change has actually been effected yet?

yes, if payment is not tied directly to services rendered, it gets harder to argue that the platform is simply a pass-through middleman to contractors. this is related to a similar revenue recognition problem with uber pool/lyft line, where recognizing the revenue up front makes the drivers seem less like contractors and more like workers.

I hesitated in writing this comment as I can see that the majority of commenters have a negative view of the 'gamification' presented by the article, but I don't see this as inherently evil or immoral at all.

The 'gamification' described by the author in their driving for Lyft is simply quantifying, tracking, and incentivizing performance at a given activity. It's in the best interest of both the driver and the company to achieve a high driver rating. Why wouldn't they track and display this statistic to the drivers? It's in the best interest of the company for drivers to log more rides, so they offer an optional incentive to complete x drives in y time. The driver receives additional compensation that they wouldn't otherwise if they achieve the goal. Both sides benefit.

The scary side of performance tracking comes when more and more is expected of the worker, their performance being able to be measured accurately isn't the issue. It's management's decision to get as much blood out of their workers as possible.

I bet Lyft gives the drivers only the information that's profitable for Lyft and not the big picture. It's very one-sided.

Isn't there an incentive for the company to make sure that driver pay is unbearably low without chasing these "incentives"? If so, it seem to just be a scheme to ensure loyalty for the same price.

> Why wouldn't they track and display this statistic to the drivers?

It's not done for the benefit of the employees, it's done for the benefit of the employer. I suspect that a rating is anxiety inducing more than anything. For instance:

https://www.ridester.com/uberx-drivers-stop-obsessing-rating...

> It's management's decision to get as much blood out of their workers as possible.

Isn't this why the majority of SaaS products these days are about delivering ultra-granular analytics? We already use them to maximize purchasing behaviour from consumers, so why wouldn't we use it to maximize worker productivity, aka squeeze as much output out of the workers per unit of input as possible?

I don't know if gamification is the enemy here. I don't think this would be an issue if driver incomes hadn't taken such a massive hit in the past year or so with Uber / Lyft.

I worked as a checkout operator at a supermarket for four years while in High School / College and really enjoyed it - I used to play a game where I'd see how many items I could scan per minute (we needed to do 15, my average was between 22-25 from memory). I did the same thing when I worked a paper run before that, challenging myself to see how quickly I could get it done.

Gamifying tedious activities is good and we should be doing more of it.

There's a happy medium somewhere between gamification to make the somewhat monotonous job of a checkout operator more enjoyable, and metrics-driven employment where you're peeing in the corner of an Amazon warehouse because if you drop below the equivalent of 22 items per minute you're fired without the chance for appeal.

I agree that it's not the enemy, and can at times be a useful thing to have as an ally within a healthy business relationship, but it disproportionately gives ammunition to management strategies that don't respect the human.

Checkout operators are graded (ie performance assessment) on their speed in some supermarkets. I can confirm Aldi does this, can't speak for other orgs.

"Gamification" is the application of several of many mechanics of games[1] by your employer, not simply you keeping score of your own performance.

[1] https://www.gamified.uk/user-types/gamification-mechanics-el...

Gamification is a new form of employee abuse that people haven't yet recognized as abuse. It's only a matter of time before we all acknowledge it and ban its use in a work setting.

Unfortunately I don't foresee it being recognized or fought against. Especially in high turnover work forces such as ride sharing and "part time" low-income jobs. The gamification may engage the employees for just enough time to provide more profit than the turnover would cost.

Coal mines have safety regulations where once they did not. The same is true of logging, construction, manufacturing, child labor, etc. These are safety regulations, which are not the same. It took over 100 years to put those in place. I hope we'll see gamification for the evil that it is in less time than that.

please back up such a bold declaration with some rationale. any tool can be taken too far and become abusive, but you've made no attempt to make that connection.

humans are competitive (and also cooperative). we like to know how we are doing, and gamification facilitates that while also relieving boredom from an otherwise tedious task (something i do often just for myself).

> humans are competitive (and also cooperative). we like to know how we are doing, and gamification facilitates that

That was already known via driver ratings. No one considered that "gamification" because it's a basic KPI.

The "lab rat" aspect of this comes into play with some computer-generated BS "challenge" like "“Complete 34 rides between the hours of 5am on Monday and 5am on Sunday to receive a $63 bonus.”

In videogames, this is called "grinding", aka gaining experience points doing tedious, repetitive tasks, in order to proceed to the next experience level. The difference is, video game players aren't doing something that requires the same level of attention and duty of care as a car driver.

see, that's why i asked for details. your last point about safety is an interesting wrinkle to consider.

but i view your example (a $63 bonus for 34 rides) to be more an incentive than a gamification because it involves real money, not simply "meaningless" points.

ratings are more akin to gamification in my view because (1) they're not directly tied to an incentive, and (2) it takes advantage of our human nature of wanting to do well, especially when it involves how other people view us.

Would you be against your employer rewarding you with an IV injection of dopamine? I know this is a bit of a stretch but bare with me. Rewarding someone with gamification, either audibly or visually, or thought other gamification systems releases dopamine in the system. The medium of communication is different but the effect it the same: is a synthetic boost of dopamine and it's similar to injecting it directly into the body, albeit to a lesser degree.

you seem to want to make a distinction between the dopamine hit you get from driving for uber/lyft and from the pat on the back or the kind word your boss gives you every now and then. but our whole lives are contained in the vast quantities of neurotransmitters thrown around by our brain by such actions, and it's difficult to single out one manipulative instance from another.

what i would suggest is better is to bridge the information asymmetry between contractor and contractee in ways that meaningfully allow people to make considered decisions about work. so instead of trying to protect the worker from a dopamine hit (you can't), demonstrate to them how gamification really works (from both sides). in addition, let's create a real liquid labor market so that the worker can legitimately evaluate and choose a different job if this one sucks.

then, if they choose to drive for uber/lyft, it's a considered and affirmative decision made on a level playing field. yes, this is really hard, but we can do it.

I have a hard time understanding why employees can't figure this out.

Maybe for children who don't know of future opportunities and what job expectations are, but anyone with a past job can easily compare.

Also, those 'rewards' that make noises and tell you 'GREAT JOB', get old. Seeing 10 unread notifications on facebook does not get me to click like it used to.

The concern is that a simple 'ban it', is a dangerously simple approach.

Decent read as the manipulative uses of game design are often overlooked. Think about how "fun" it feels to scan your own items at the checkout and hear those nice tones. Uber and Lyft drivers have Pavlovian response when they hear a new ride beacon ready to accept.

I scan my own items at the checkout because it's faster, not because of how fun it is for a machine to boop at me.

(that said if I have a lot of produce the human cashier is faster)

It's bizarre when people suggest it's some sort of capitalist scam that we can check ourselves out at the grocery store.

Surely all of the upsides of self-checkout have a higher weight than the machine beeping at you.

Also, they beep because your attention is spent rotating each product to let the scanner find the barcode, and you might not notice that it scanned otherwise, and accidental multiple scans cost the customer money.

Self-checkout shifts the physical and mental labor traditionally done by a worker onto the consumer to save money. Instead, I'm paying for the product _and_ performing the labor traditionally done by someone else chiefly to save the company money in labor costs. Opinions may vary about the convenience, efficiency or "upsides" of that, but in a sense it is the quintessential capitalist scam.

Standing in line waiting for someone else to scan my groceries is just as much of a waste of time.

The faster I can be out of there, the happier I am. And, less labor spent on scanning items means the store can be open for longer hours, have more organized shelves and be cleaner, etc. All in all, this is automation that increases the efficiency of the operation. Yes, you pay some cost in that you have to place your items into bags (with the current iteration of the technology) but I think you the customer get something out of that work, even if it's just a slightly lower rate of price increases.

It is time to think seriously about how we are going to deal with fewer jobs available. Will the increased corporate profits that result be spent on giving cashiers education to become knowledge workers to further increase these profits and the efficiency of society? Will the money be fed into basic income or public services, so that everyone in society will be taken care of even if there are no low-skill jobs for them to do? We are already seeing what happens when we don't think about these things in certain industries, and it's not great. Someone will have to step up and say, we will be the country that takes care of everyone, because the "work 8 hours a day and you get a house" era is long over.

Employees usually are much faster than customers to scan groceries - thousands hours of practice make perfect. Plus, those anti-theft machines that give you instructions "scan next item, put item in the bag, take the last item out of the bag" - they slow things down considerably.

Also, the number of labor required stays the same, just now it's unpaid labor.

As I said,

> Opinions may vary about the convenience, efficiency or "upsides" of that

I highly doubt that the savings on labor cost will translate to "longer open hours, more organized shelves and cleaner, etc", I would guess the savings translate to more profit and more concentration of wealth at the top.

Look, I'm not so much of a luddite that I _refuse_ to use self-checkout lines, I'm just realistic about what the motivations are: maximizing profit.

I feel like the motivation of any business is to maximize profit. Even if there is a side goal of improving society, in the end, you can't do that if they turn off your electricity for non-payment.

That was already done with the supermarket in the first place and nobody minded - old school stores had everything grabbed by the clerk from behind the counter and totaled on your bill of goods. It had longer wait times and you couldn't just pick the best apples for your bushel.

Like everything in capitalism it is just a strategy - if shrinkage or other issues are more of a concern they would keep it behind the counter like jewelry stores or if people reacted negatively enough it would fail.

you must love buying gas in new jersey.

Oh I must be thinking about Target self checkouts specifically. They have a nice ringtone when you use it compared to the normal beep from the cashier.

Gamification is overt and transparent psychological manipulation. I had friends in Sociology etc. who had to conform to elaborate ethics compliance guidelines before launching surveys etc. Why is gamification not similarly controlled?

If we were able to enact ethics compliance regulation, I'm pretty sure gamification would be pretty far down our list of things to regulate.

Sociology had their high profile scandals already for one with the Stanford Prison Experiment among with others that people were concerned about being treated like lab rats.

Look at everything not controlled with manipulation already even in the relatively restriction friendly commercial advertising space. If we go down that rabbit hole we'll have to mandate package colors and store layouts. No more milk in the back of the grocery store or using attractive people to sell products.

Even putting aside practicality altogether many people would probably choose manipulation that left them feeling more fulfilled over unhappy bland truth that their job is tedious repeated trips and waiting that is wearing out their car since they know they need something to help make ends meet.

It is accepted that good management is to make your workers motivated - not even the most radical of labor would complain that their boss is making work too engaging. One could argue the status quo is messed up but it is accepted.

It might even have good outcomes and be ethically consistent to establish a strong precedent against manipulation but it would be completely outside the overton window and look like trying to swat flies with backhoes even if it was completely right.

as social animals, we manipulate each other constantly. all it takes is a word, a grunt, a glance, a micro-aggression, even an unwitnessed action. are you suggesting we regulate all human behavior?

I'm sure you understand that there's a difference between normal, personal human interactions, as you've just described, and a complex technological system designed and implemented for use in a business setting?

yes, but the original question made a broad statement about regulating human manipulation. my rebuttal was to ask where we draw the line.

note that historically we've allowed all kinds of manipulations (like basically lying in advertisements, caveat emptor), in an abundance of caution to avoid infringing our 1st amendment rights (in the US).

I'm becoming more and more convinced as time goes on that our new technologies only look at one side of the equation: cost. They seem to be doing little or nothing to increase incomes. So I must ask myself, are these really technologies if they don't provide utility to all players?

Across almost all industries, people used to be able to provide for their families, or at the very least support themselves on a 40 hour work week. Now we have Uber and Lyft decreasing the cost of taxi rides to perhaps half their previous levels. That's nice for clients, but they're also lowering wages to perhaps half or even a quarter of their previous levels. That missing quarter is where executive and corporate profits come from.

Is there a term for a company that focuses on incomes first? Is there a way to program that into a corporate charter, to encourage gig companies like Upwork to maximize incomes? Could we use private means to optimize the economy for incomes?

For a lot of reasons, the federal government has been crippled in its ability to do the simplest things like raise the minimum wage or even give unions equal legal footing with corporations. That worked to pump debt into the economy for a decade or three but now we're seeing strife in the forms of increasing addiction, suicide rates, delayed marriage and childbirth, etc. It's one thing to be against unions and another to be against the general working population, which is what this wealth inequality is becoming. We're reaching an endgame here that is not sustainable - that may lead to widespread civil disobedience at the very least, and probably violence or even revolution eventually. What can be done?

> Is there a term for a company that focuses on incomes first?

perhaps a worker coop? [0] such an organization is not explicitly focused on maximizing worker incomes, but it seems like a likely outcome.

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

China is going all-in on this with their social credit system. That's being rolled out in Beijing. All Beijing residents will be judged on a point system by the end of 2020.[1] "Those with better so-called social credit will get 'green channel' benefits while those who violate laws will find life more difficult. Those deemed untrustworthy will be 'unable to move even a single step.'"[2]

""For example, when we drive, now we always stop in front of crosswalks. If you don't stop, you will lose your points."

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-21/beijing-t... [2] http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-06/06/c_137235486.htm

Gamification reaches beyond the gig economy.

Things like home grown versions of Shark Tank or other judging-panel game shows are becomming pretty common in companies

That’s interesting. Perhaps the intention is to completely ruin the employee’s dignity and will (and render them more compliant) by forcing them to beg several fat middle managers for the privilege of doing their own job.

Ah. Now we understand what "agile" is really about.

There's nothing particularly wrong with incentives via gamification to retain and encourage usage of their platform. Drivers drive more, riders have more rides, Uber and Lyft make money, drivers sign up more drivers for rewards. It's a classic viral loop

Seems like Ebay was one of the original online "gamifiers" which used seller and buyer ratings to elevate the overall quality of the "service workers" on their platform.

Amazon followed suite.

I wonder if we should consider both as part or as leaders in the "gig economy".

I think if we can build a proper network we can make local economies complete with the global giants by using gamification. Nudge consumers of products or services to buy local with a sort of consumer rating or something.

4.75 stars means they get get deeper local discounts, etc. Local network marketing.

I don't understand why drivers can't charge different rates.

Because they're employees, not contractors, and thus don't get to negotiate their own compensation.

The point of the rates is to drive labor supply vs demand. If things are underserved raise the rates. A more complex model could be used but that had costs in processing and interfaces. Plus time vs cost trade offs could make it easier to game and make them look extra bad. Stupid tricks like trying to get there first in a desolate area charging obscene rates. A shared area up/down ticker algorithm would be harder to cheat and outliers more excusable.

The easiest solution I can see is essentially setting alert thresholds "tell me when it reaches $30/hr and I will consider it on the weekend".

I never used either side so I don't know their implementation.

Tried something similar recently (contentfly.co) where we have writers set a minimum rate and the market anchors around that.

It’s been pretty interesting.... the rates have gone up but not as high as we thought.

Any further info on that?

Employees do not set their own rates, independent contractors do.

They can... if they don't use the Uber/Lyft marketplaces.

I know an independent limo driver who negotiates his own rates. It's not an efficient system and he has very little visibility into the supply/demand curve. And it's hard for him to drum up new business.

Unified customer experience.

You _could_ make this have an indistinguishable customer experience. Uber now gives you a quote _after_ you've entered both origin and destination, and said quote expires after some time. Given that, they could look at all locally available drivers, assess their "bid" prices and make an assessment of what they can choose to quote the customer.

They would probably take _some_ pricing risk, since they might not want to "lock" drivers that they've used as the price basis, but that seems like a minor problem: Uber employs lots of engineers and I'm sure a few of them can figure out a way to safely manage this pricing risk.

> You _could_ make this have an indistinguishable customer experience.

I don't really see how this could work. the first issue is getting the pricing information from the drivers. are they willing to set a flat per mile rate, or are they going tailor fares on an individual basis, after browsing the currently requested rides? the latter would make it impossible to just compute a price from querying a db; there might need to be multiple rounds of bidding before the rider and driver could settle on a price. the former case would not be quite as complex, but uber would still have to ask the customer how they value wait time vs. price or decide for the customer.

i personally like the model of bidding on rides, but most people use uber/lyft because it's as simple as opening up the app, committing to a ride, and hopping in after a few minutes. i don't think it can work that seamlessly if every driver sets their own (possibly complex) fare scheme.

^ Startup idea?

Because then it would be a bidding system and thus likely no better for anyone.

Isn't money a form of gamification, especially once you get beyond the most straightforward types of transactions and economic relationships?

Wall St is full of click farms where people grind for gold and hidden power ups.

What we may be seeing is more like an explosion of alternative currencies. I'm not saying this is good. These are mostly "company tokens" or domain specific lock-in tokens that are not fungible.

I don't know about "company tokens" -- that reminds me of "company towns" of the early industrial revolution era where workers weren't paid in fungible currency, but in company vouchers.

That said, I think most of the commenters here don't recognize how many of the gamification mechanics[1] have long been built into office work. "Employee of the month" plaque = leaderboard. Sales team progress bars. Perks like corner offices with great views for the most valuable employees.

[1] https://www.gamified.uk/user-types/gamification-mechanics-el...

Giving out money is a real cost for the company and the receiver can use it in whatever way he wants. Company tokens and other awards cost the company nothing so in my view they are worthless.

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