Unblinking Eyes Track Employees

But... they lost a fair amount of money on me, because I abandoned profitable sales that wouldn't hit my metrics, dumping them on others. Instead, I ended up moving lots of stuff with high price concessions. But I never sold anything without the metric-impacting accessory purchases. So I was #2 in gross sales, #1 in hitting targets, but #28 in profit. I made a ton of money though... paid for school the following year!

So, I'd say good luck, it's hard to know what to measure for when your business leaders are busy tracking metrics instead of leading. If I owned a restaurant, and the GM was fussing around with cameras and computers in the back, I'd fire him. Service business management is about taking care of customers and setting up systems to ensure that happens. Lead from the front.

From Wikipedia:

"Manna is meant to be a thought-provoking read or conceptual prototype rather than an entertaining novel (see exploratory engineering for more on such writing). The novel shows two possible outcomes of the 'robotic revolution' in the near future: one outcome is a dystopia based around US capitalism and the other is a utopia based upon a communal and technological society in Australia. Essentially, the two differ in that lower-class humans in the dystopic society have been left unmodified and are controlled by AI "managers" to the point of slavery, while humans in the utopian society more directly and efficiently participate in the management of the society as a whole and most or all willingly accept implanted AI aids."

While employers might always desire greater productivity out of their workers, the ability to finely track productivity by simple metrics gives them new leverage over workers, who have little recourse. While many jobs people do are inherently not fun, when a grocery bagger's job depends on scans per hour [0], the human element is drained.

There are also implicit costs that such metrics impose. "Scans per hour" creates a perverse incentive to ignore or feign ignorance at customer requests, call center quotas for conversions encourages lying to customers, etc.

[0] http://gawker.com/true-stories-from-wal-mart-workers-i-am-no...

We'll probably get a few more Dilbert creators out of the ironic fiasco this is going to become..

"At a tech company, his company found, workers who sat at larger tables in the cafeteria, thus communicating more, were more productive than workers who sat at smaller tables."

Is this effect statistically significant? Was it validated by forcing the people at the larger tables to switch to smaller ones, and proving that their productivity decreased as a result? Maybe a larger percentage of disgruntled workers sat by themselves, along with a couple of really high performers?

Drawing broad strokes that appeal to higher management ("oh, they were communicating more, that's why they were more productive") is going to lead to decisions that are not fully thought through, and tend to club everyone into a single mould defined by broad conclusions from this data, ("Let's have two team meetings every day, just to ensure that everyone communicates and is on their toes all the time.")

So, If you are an employee or a manager, keep this in mind, and strongly resist any of these nonsensical monitoring devices. It will lead to less creative and disgruntled employees who are now trying to solve the problem of how to beat these metrics instead of whatever problem they were supposed to solve in the first place.

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"Servers, knowing they were being monitored, pushed customers to have that dessert or a second beer."

On a tangential note, seeing how popular chain restaurants and takeout places are in the US, this probably strongly contributes to the rising obesity percentage.

Great example of something good for the restaurant owner being bad for the visitors and potentially unsafer for other drivers.

Now I want to write software that offloads some aspect of quality-of-life into making restaurant managers' lives unhealthier and riskier.

Also a great example of feature creep: Adveritsed as "Restaurant Guard," reducing theft, it made people have to perform better b/c they were being watched. Good thing we have choices in life still. Honey, where are my gardening gloves!

"worries privacy advocates"

You have to wonder how objective all these "advocates" really are.

I mean they most certainly must try pretty hard to insure they have a job and a cause by finding any and all situations where they can rally around this issue. Without respect for whether it is really a problem or not in a particular case. (I'm not saying it is or isn't it just bothers me that they pop up to make an issue out of everything).