Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

John Deere's “fully autonomous tractor" requires a "a call center of third-party contractors"

The Verge:
Agricultural equipment maker John Deere has announced its latest piece of autonomous farming kit: a package of hardware and software that combines machine learning with the company’s GPS-powered auto-steer features to create a “fully autonomous tractor.”

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“We’re not going from no tech all the way up to an autonomous machine,” says [a John Deere vice president]. 

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Although John Deere is presenting this as an autonomous system, it’s worth noting that there are humans in the loop, and not just farmers. When the company’s algorithms spot something unexpected, images from the cameras will be sent to “tele-operators” — essentially a call center of third-party contractors
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Saturday, November 20, 2021

Great series of anecdotes by someone that got hired as an interpreter on a fishing boat like on Deadliest Catch

A Redditor:

I saw an ad for a “Japanese interpreter wanted on a boat”. “Perfect”, I thought. “I can probably speak Japanese well enough to do basic translation work on a boat! Sounds like fun and maybe even get to see some exotic spots?”

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Saturday, October 9, 2021

Coal miners use a skilift to enter the mine?

@cyclemoonchallenge

#fyp #coalworker #work

♬ original sound - cyclemoonchallenge


@cyclemoonchallenge

#fyp #coalworker #work

♬ original sound - cyclemoonchallenge


@cyclemoonchallenge

#fyp #coalworker #work

♬ original sound - cyclemoonchallenge


@cyclemoonchallenge

#fyp #coalworker #work

♬ original sound - cyclemoonchallenge


@cyclemoonchallenge

#fyp #coalworker #work

♬ original sound - cyclemoonchallenge


@cyclemoonchallenge

#fyp #coalworker #work

♬ original sound - cyclemoonchallenge


@cyclemoonchallenge

#fyp #coalworker #work

♬ original sound - cyclemoonchallenge


@cyclemoonchallenge

#fyp #coalworker #work

♬ original sound - cyclemoonchallenge
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Sunday, September 19, 2021

Good thread about a day in the life of a grocery truck driver

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Thursday, April 1, 2021

Menacing logo for the woodworker's union; Olivia Jaimes swapped comic strips for April Fools; Eco-friendly landscaping in California












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Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Zine vending machine; Clever design for a resume; Drone explores a bowling alley and chases a motorcycle through a mall












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Tuesday, March 9, 2021

Lawsuit alleges that Panda Express workers were "forced to strip in 'cult-like' team-building seminar"

Here's the write-up, here's a Reddit thread with people discussing the article and their own experiences with similar seminars, here's a Quora thread from a few years ago, and here's an excerpt from a glowing LA Magazine profile from 2015:
[The company's CEO] has a confident chin, a white crew cut that achieves a halo effect in the right light, and dark, expressive eyes that can let you know in a glance what a great job you’re doing or how much you still need to improve. His voice has a quiet intensity that demands you listen to him carefully. 
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The company actively encourages its employees to join Toastmasters International and attend personal-improvement seminars as retro as Dale Carnegie Training and as New Agey as the Landmark Forum (which seems a likely source for Cherng’s integrity lingo). On Saturday mornings the grand auditorium fills with hundreds of employees, ranging from servers to members of the Panda Group’s PR and legal teams as well as many of their children. They gather together for inspiring speeches, team-building activities, and plenty of group hugs.
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Saturday, February 20, 2021

"Weeping paths" and other secrets of the office

From an essay by Paul Ford for Wired:

I think of those as “weeping paths,” part of the secret map of every office. You cannot sob at your desk, so you must go on a journey, smiling at the floor, until you find a place where emotion can flow. Offices have their own mental maps.

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If you don’t believe me, try making a map of your office. See what you remember. Where do people go when they are rewarded, punished? Where is power concentrated, and where do you sit? What paths do people take to accomplish their goals? Are some emotions possible in one space and not another? (Take a picture and send it to me. I want to see.)

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an office is basically a big clock with humans for hands

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Now make a map of your “digital office.” It will be a bunch of squares and a screenshot of a web browser. I like working at home. It’s efficient and I’m glad for the time I get back. But digital work has a lousy clock. Hours blur.

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Thursday, February 4, 2021

Microsoft announces employee-monitoring software that includes "virtual commutes"; Amazon demands employees agree to "megacycle" graveyard shifts

Microsoft:

To help people achieve balance, collaborate smartly, and find focus wherever and whenever they need it, we’re excited to announce insights and experiences that are part of Microsoft Viva, the employee experience platform built on Microsoft 365 that empowers people and teams to be their best from wherever they work. 

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Leaders will be able to more accurately identify where teams may be struggling, proactively adjust work norms, and then quantify the impact of those changes over time. 

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In the coming months, updates to Viva Insights will bring additional personal wellbeing experiences, such as a virtual commute 

Vice:

On January 25, hundreds of workers at an Amazon warehouse in Chicago were presented with a baffling choice: sign up for a ten-and-a-half-hour graveyard shift, or lose your job.

Management informed workers that their warehouse, known as DCH1, would be shut down, and they were being offered a shift that runs from 1:20am to 11:50am, which is known as "megacycle," at a new Chicago warehouse. 

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Workers at DCH1 were previously offered several different shift options, including an eight-hour overnight shift that ends at 4:45 am, a five-hour morning shift, and a four-hour morning shift. Going forward, rank-and-file DCH1 workers will only have the megacycle option at a new facility

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Saturday, January 23, 2021

Lyft "priority mode" promises more work for drivers that agree to a 10% pay cut

CNET:

"We launched Priority Mode at the beginning of the pandemic to help drivers stabilize their earnings and give them another option around how to make the best use of their time," a Lyft spokesman said in an email. "It's one of the many ways we are continually working to improve the platform so drivers can reach their personal goals."

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Both Lyft and Uber have consistently cut drivers' pay over the years. About a decade ago, when the companies first started out, drivers could reportedly expect to make roughly $20 per hour after expenses. Now that number is believed to have dropped by half. 

Meanwhile, in Brexit news:

the government is looking at scrapping some EU labour laws now it is no longer bound by the bloc's rules.

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Confirming the review on Tuesday, [Business Secretary Kwasi] Kwarteng told MPs there would be no "bonfire of rights".

"I think the view was that we wanted to look at the whole range of issues relating to our EU membership and examine what we wanted to keep, if you like," he said.

But he said "the idea that we are trying to whittle down standards, that's not at all plausible or true".

But a labor victory in New York:

A weeklong strike at the nation’s largest wholesale produce market ended Saturday after workers overwhelmingly approved a deal that includes their largest pay increase in decades and more money for health coverage.

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The market remained open during the strike, with management bringing in temporary workers and using police and private security to safeguard delivery trucks. 

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Sunday, July 26, 2020

"Our remote work future is going to suck"

From a long post by Sean Blanda:
remote work makes you vulnerable to outsourcing, reduces your job to a metric, creates frustrating change-averse bureaucracies, and stifles your career growth.

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It’s baffling to me that American workers would cheer an acceleration of this trend that would place downward pressure on their wages.

When you, the American worker, share this belief you are being blinded by an erroneous belief in American exceptionalism. When your company goes all-remote, it is starting a clock that ends in you eventually competing with the global talent market

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With the removed context of a real-life office, your team’s output is difficult to individualize for your manager — especially if work is done in private DMs or one-on-one Zoom calls. The manager sees the end product with no visibility as to who did what, who pulled their weight, who made tough choices, and who made things more difficult. This has a nasty side effect of the leader viewing you less as a person who they have to empathize with and understand — and more as a talking head on a Zoom call or Slack who does things for them.

This will cause your work to “flatten.” Whatever soft skills you bring to the table will be minimized when working remotely. This will lead to companies and processes relying less on things like creativity and collaboration and more on simple inputs and outputs. Which, again, makes your work easier to outsource.

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Much of the language used around remote work (and remote events) assumes that one is in the mid-to-late stages of their career. When you’re young, you don’t need “focus” or to “get things done.” You need exposure to new ideas and people. You need the serendipitous fortune of sitting in on the right meeting, attending the right happy hour, or earning the respect of the right observer.
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Thursday, August 15, 2019

Today, in worshiping the algorithm









Vice:
TikTok Users Are Inventing Wild Theories to Explain Its Mysterious Algorithm

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Probably half of the videos I see on TikTok include one of the following hashtags: #fyp, #foryou, or #foryoupage.

The hashtaggers’ theory is that if they use these tags in their captions, their posts are more likely to surface on more people’s For You pages. The For You page is TikTok’s recommendation feed, which is personalized to each user based on how that user interacts with videos on TikTok, according to the company.

There’s absolutely no proof that using these hashtags does anything, but it seems like they do. Because so many people use these hashtags, it looks like they actually get videos on people’s For You pages.

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Other users have theorized that TikTok has no intelligent algorithm and just surfaces content randomly to each user. This user says that even when her views have a good “interaction per view” ratio—or, the ratio of likes, comments, and shares to total views—her videos still top off with very few views.


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“If you scroll past these little TikToks with like five likes, they’re probably going to die soon,” she says, with ironic melodrama. “So in conclusion, it is your civic duty as a member of the TikTok community to like and comment on this video, because if you don’t do it, no one else will.”



NYT:
On Wednesday evening, a phalanx of Amazon employees known as “FC ambassadors” began tweeting again about how great it is to work at Amazon.

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The accounts have provoked suspicion. In January, it appeared that the accounts had changed hands; one that had belonged to a “Leo” had changed its display name and handle to Ciera. A “Rick” had become a “James,” and a “Michelle” had transformed into a “Sarah.” (Critics of the account occasionally call them the “Borg,” a reference to an alien race in Star Trek who operate as a collective hive mind.)

Tweets from the ambassador accounts suggest that workers shift in and out of their social media roles. In May, for instance, an account that now uses the handle @AmazonFCBrianDJ tweeted a picture of a smiling man holding an Amazon package and announced that, after four months of tweeting, it would be his last day as an ambassador. About a week later, the account posted a picture of a different man who introduced himself as Brian D.J., an outbound picker at a fulfillment center in Jacksonville. The next month, an account using the name Mary Kate announced that she was returning to her role as a “picker and learning ambassador on the weekdays and modern dancer on the weekends.”





Splinter:
The future of the “gig economy” is on the table in California, where the legislature is considering a bill that would make it much harder to categorize workers as independent contractors, rather than actual employees. Needless to say, companies are going all out to oppose it. Postmates even got 1,600 of its own workers to speak out against it.

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I find it interesting that so many gig workers—people who work for Postmates, which is not the world’s easiest or most lucrative job—would enthusiastically volunteer to lend their names to a public request to keep themselves classified as second-class workers, ensuring they will never get things like a union or real company health insurance. Odd passion to have! I asked Postmates how they found all these names. A spokesperson responded
LAT:
Purdue Pharma sought to divert online readers from critical L.A. Times series on opioid crisis, records show

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Internal documents from 2016 show company officials discussed diverting online traffic away from a series of stories published by the Los Angeles Times that detailed the company’s marketing of OxyContin and its links to the deadly opioid crisis.

“If Purdue doesn’t fill this vacuum, someone else will — and it won’t be Purdue’s narrative,” a member of the company’s digital support team wrote in a memo to Purdue officials, laying out a strategy to drive traffic to a friendly website, PurduePharmaFacts.com.
Recode:
A new study shows that leading AI models are 1.5 times more likely to flag tweets written by African Americans as “offensive” compared to other tweets.

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This is in large part because what is considered offensive depends on social context. Terms that are slurs when used in some settings — like the “n-word” or “queer” — may not be in others. But algorithms — and content moderators who grade the test data that teaches these algorithms how to do their job — don’t usually know the context of the comments they’re reviewing.






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Monday, August 12, 2019

"some said the automated tedium is getting to them. The robots have taken away some simple pleasures, such as walking the store, and pigeonholed them into some smaller, mind-numbing tasks"

WaPo about robots at Walmart:
The nation’s largest private employer has unleashed an army of robots into more than 1,500 of its jumbo stores, with thousands of automated shelf-scanners, box-unloaders, artificial-intelligence cameras and other machines doing the jobs once left to human employees.

The swarm is already remaking how the retailer’s more than 1 million U.S. “associates” go about their daily work. Given the chain’s ubiquity across the country, the local Walmart store also is likely to become the first place millions of Americans meet a real-life, working robot.

Walmart executives have promised the all-hours robot workhorses will let employees endure less drudgery and enjoy “more satisfying jobs,” while also ensuring shoppers see cleaner stores, fuller shelves and faster checkouts.

But the rise of the machines has had an unexpected side effect: Their jobs, some workers said, have never felt more robotic. By incentivizing hyper-efficiency, the machines have deprived the employees of tasks they used to find enjoyable. Some also feel like their most important assignment now is to train and babysit their often inscrutable robot colleagues.

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Martin Hitch, the chief business officer of Bossa Nova Robotics, which makes Walmart’s inventory-scanning robots, said the company has spent years teaching its machines to be as human-friendly as possible. But there’s no agreed-upon etiquette for how robots and people should communicate.

Engineers did not, for instance, want the robot to silently skulk up and scare anyone — but how exactly should it announce itself? They tested a wide range of noises, from Road Runner-style “beep-beeps” to the honks of reversing forklifts before settling on a pleasant yet insistent chirp they mixed from a clip of birdsong.

“The last thing you want it to do is talk,” Hitch said. “Because if you talk, people think they can talk back.”
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Saturday, September 15, 2018

Ten funny tweets




























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Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Signs




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