The day FedEx delivered its promise | Hacker News Reader

The day FedEx delivered its promise

anaeo.com

19 pointsbhag206617 comments

This is a nice story but without sources, I’m calling BS. There is no information I can find online that supports the claims made.

It’s also a pretty low value story, aside from being a bit of a slice of MBA pro capitalist feel gooderism. If the brilliant insight here was that things work out better when incentives are aligned, well, great I guess, but that kind of powerful analysis won’t win you a Pulitzer

Screams placement and early voting | early insipid comments.

I'm with you on the low value low content call.

The closest to a citation I could find is that this is an anecdote from a speech that Charlie Munger have at Harvard in 1995.

https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/psychology-of-human-mi...

The 6th paragraph has the anecdote.

This is written like a circa 2000 email forward.

Aside from the dubious story and assertions that this was the reason Fedex had reliability problems, and assumptions that workers are inherently lazy and must be manipulated to put in their full effort... extracting the maximum amount of effort possible out of low-level employees is not something we should blindly applaud. Here's a propublica story about FedEx workers dying and being maimed because they were pushed to work too quickly to do it safely: https://www.propublica.org/article/fedex-prioritizes-package...

Also, paying laborers salary without having a defined end to their work day invites abuses by employers— it's one of the disgusting ways restaurants squeeze hours of unpaid time out of kitchen staff. Maybe they needed to hire more people because night work was more difficult for some logistical reason, or even just more tiring because the world is at odds with their life schedules. Lots of companies pay significantly more for third shift work for that reason. Did they?

This whole thing is just propaganda and justification for shitty, manipulative management practices.

What happens if they don't meet their targets? Do they have to stay back and work more hours without compensation, or do they go home and leave it for the next shift to finish?

I imagine when it comes to loading planes, the targets are probably pretty consistent with few opportunities for surprises.

You can only load so much volume in, you can only load so much mass in.

There’s probably some buffer for callouts and employees who get injured, and it probably would make sense to offer a little OT to individuals who offer to work extra and plug those gaps.

I would be curious to know exactly how they keep the it running smoothly, but it can’t be worse than what they had before.

Not long ago, something similar happened in my country with garbage collection. They noticed that the staff completed all the assigned areas much faster than predicted so... they assigned almost twice the workload to each of the trucks. The result? A massive strike because workers were able to prove that the new schedule was impossible to follow without rushing.

Twice the workload is a pretty extreme example. They could likely have boiled the frog - You're doing 25% longer routes this year, then another 25% the next, gotten real efficiency gains, and gotten reasonable pushback when they did.

A strike is the right option, but strikes are good for nobody. It's crazy how often management these days has just zero clue.

I’m no MBA, but it seems like somewhere, this way of looking at problems and solutions is fundamentally flawed, in that it looks to be an all-in-one solution-for-all and never-fail for the sacred and almighty, “The Company,” which refuses to ever take a compromise. What about more sophisticated solutions, like employee insurance? Or the predatory, perverse practices of a rogue HR that once installed, can never be uninstalled!

What about the general anti-social behavior that not only exists, but is flourishing today in the workforce, everywhere you go?

Workers have hardly any rights to begin with. What about that?

Are there any sources for this? I'd love to read more about it

This anecdote and some others are covered here: https://fs.blog/bias-incentives-reinforcement/

The correct solution for perverse incentives is, believe it or not, more perverse incentives. And if by some unfortunate circumstance those have unwanted side effects, those too can be fixed with more perverse incentives.

Folks, I'll be running for US Senate next year, be sure to vote.

I think there's a whole book about this: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

Similar (reverse) principle often applies when converting metrics to goals. Be mindful of not incentivizing a paperclip manufacturing robot.

LOL this is just business school porn, not only is there no citation but they don't even claim to know when this happened.

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