Quantified Man: How an Obsolete Tech Guy Rebuilt Himself for the Future | Hacker News Reader

Quantified Man: How an Obsolete Tech Guy Rebuilt Himself for the Future

wired.com

54 pointsiProject28 comments

"he thinks every white collar worker will need to adopt a similar regimen soon"

God, I hope not! I like the idea of recording metrics, but on a personal level, it needs to be near seamless or it becomes an additional interrupt, and ultimately a burden. Then you have to review all this crap and decided if it means anything?! It's like going on a trip and taking 3000 photos and then having to go through them. It's an additional job with unclear benefits. Sure, I track my personal fitness, diet, and some sports activities but everything! Seems like a make work activity to me.

What's even worse is as this quantified personal data is leaked to profit making ventures, there will be more and more pressure to assume "productive habits" or strategies that work well for most people. And then popular wisdom will say that these are the only or right ways to live and if you're not using the methods that work for most people in some situations, you're just stupid.

Then something shitty and unpredictable happens and popular wisdom will say "well, that wouldn't have happened if you were logging all your calls in Google Calendar and tying it to your passion index."

I used to work in the supply chain industry, and this kind of thing has existed in warehouses for decades under the name "engineered labor standards". The armband aspect is just the latest incarnation of it.

One of our customers had come up with an interesting incentive program: you were given "eight hours" of work and could go home whenever it was done. Many of the time-saving tricks that the employees came up with would have been frowned on by OSHA.

I suppose the problem here that management realizes that the "8 hours" of work are being done by most employees in 6. They then add an extra 2 hours of work to make the new "8 hours".

Thus incentivising the workers to come up with gradually more and more dangerous ways to save time if they want to go home early. And the workers who stick to H&S guidelines have to stay for 10+ hours.

My prediction: this will take off at some point, perhaps in one of the big consulting firms, like E & Y or Accenture. It will be justified with phrases like, "Of course we trust our employees, we're just trying to optimize!" The lie will come out when HR comes up with a "company temporal resource utility maximization" metric. The exodus to startups will accelerate.

First, they introduced "productivity maximization protocol";

Then they added robots to do some of the work;

Then we all lost our jobs to robots;

...

Then we realize, living on publicly provided food and housing is actually not that bad!

you would think so, but this story is scarily plausible: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

I wasn't able to read through the entire story, but I think Karl Marx was onto something. What I suspect will happen is we will transition into a post-scarcity economy. The only question for me is how long it will take, and how painful the transition will be.

I also suspect (although with somewhat less confidence), that the transistion will occur by a single individual having gradually diminishing works hours, and a gradual increase in government 'welfare'.

the "two visions" were how to screw up and how to embrace the post-scarcity economy respectively. the problem is that the currently-rich will have first crack at the cornucopia and they could easily feel they have somehow earned the right to it, and need not share it with the currently-poor other than via crumbs of charity.

Maybe not, as Shamus Young related: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=13695

I read this story, Manna, a few weeks ago. Disturbing (and thought-provoking, at the end) stuff.

I was reminded of it in this OP when they mentioned armbands tracking worker productivity. It has begun!

I presume you mean the ”how the technology takes over most employment” part, rather than either of the dystopias (one poorly masquerading as a utopia) that are presented as a resulting false dichotomy?

no, i mean how rich people will obtain the free "means of production" ahead of poor people, and then see to it that the fruits of said means of production flow mainly to them, even though there is no real need to.

There was a relevant article recently about monetizing tasks to see if it made people more efficient. The idea was to give someone $X every time they completed a task. The end result was that it made people more productive at simple and easily repetitive tasks, and extremely counterproductive for any task that required hard thinking or creativity.

As a developer I hope that software companies don't establish this type of tracking but it would probably work at other types of jobs, at least in the short run. I could see it having a negative effect on company morale as time goes by.

If you can categorise the tasks (which is a very big if), you can maintain an index of the time taken for tasks of a given type to complete and value accordingly in effort required. Allow employees to pick available tasks and they will gravitate to where they can deliver most value.

And will deliberately slow down when the time and motion guy comes round this is old old school stuff thats been going on on the factory floor for hundreds of years - if not thousands of years.

Thought about this but it should be a self-regulating system to some extent. The longer a task takes, the higher its value. If it becomes overvalued (workers are deliberately doing it slowly and making less money than they could, which is questionable), then it becomes more attractive to workers who will complete it faster.

MM ever worked in a traditional factory type setting? all the workers collectively do this and if you not you would get sent to Coventry.

And this is tame compared to what used to happen back in the 70's in engineering "go slows" and backhanders paid in brown paper envelopes - I was told "even the tea boy got £900" about a 1/3 of the average wage at the time.

This level of monitoring is insane - an evil application of gamification. People, unlike machines, do not always work in precise patterns.

The example of the effects on "score" in taking an unschedule bathroom break tells me what I would do with such monitors in the bathroom.

> People, unlike machines, do not always work in precise patterns.

Do you believe that biology is not understandable?

I believe that biology introduces variables of the type that micromanagers are often ill-educated to understand.

IOW - biologicals operate with more variation than machines.

Are you trying to make some roundabout assertion that people do always work in precise patterns? If so, come out and say it. Otherwise carry on with what might be an interesting aside.

Ha, the subject in the article uses memolane which just announced its shutdown yesterday, http://blog.memolane.com/.

Surely the effect of importing technology into all workplaces and globalization will result in the remaining jobs being precisely the ones that are the most difficult to measure in-progress and for whom just the measurement itself risks interfering with the job?

That said, the importance of such measurements along the way could stem from the positive feedback loop it creates. Measuring enables you to identify what you can eliminate/automate/outsource etc until you meet some "Creativity Efficiency Frontier"...

Or, there could be other benefits from measurements to do with personal, workplace or even business well-being - perhaps benefits that could be inferred from statistical analysis.

Reminds me of the Baltimore Police Department's use of Comstat in The Wire.

Ah, the things people will believe in a bubble.

The title is misleading. This has nothing to do with avoiding or overcoming technical obsolescence.

A jarring thing to me is that we're talking about technical obsolescence for people at all... workers (especially in tech) can become obsolete so fast, just like gadgets are outdated in a year and obsolete in a few years.

You can't just learn a skill and become really good at it. There's all these "computer skills" and buzzwords that are hot one day then avoided like yesterday's fashion.

On the other hand here in Europe they are trying to push people to work until their 67th, or older, and pensions are reduced year after year. As if anyone will hire you by that age. Heck by that age we'll be long been discarded like an old iPod.

No.

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