Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers

It set off the flamewar detector. Moderators haven't touched it, except that we turned off the user flags on the story. Otherwise it would be displaying [flagged] at the top.

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Exactly my thoughts, if this was a European demonstration they would be talking about providing training to the worker on the line to improve the efficiency.

I have no idea if that’s how they run factories in India but it definitely looks very off from Western perspective. In Europe the assumption would be that workers are trying their best, but they don’t know better. In the video, the assumption is that the workers are cheating or slacking and this tool can help you detect bad actors.

The tool itself at core seems fine though. Any privacy or abuse risks would be up to the legislature and operators to consider but it’s nothing unusual to monitor production lines.

I'm not convinced it's really that useful. If you have rows of people sewing the same piece of clothing or similar, then it's not exactly hard to track output without digital surveillance. If you have assembly lines where people perform different parts of a larger project digital surveillance is useless next to things like lean, and again, bottlenecks will show themselves extremely fast if a single station is slower than usual.

I suspect the purpose of these systems is actually to create a horrible work environment. Not because that is a good thing, but because it'll drive away anyone who has other options and leave you with the most desperate people. Who will also be the cheapest people.

> like all things, it boils down to the owner/managers of said factory not the tool.

Tools are created and optimised for a purpose. If you gouge someone’s eye out with chopsticks or a spoon, their inventors are hardly at fault. If you kill a bunch of people with an AK-47, its inventor doesn’t get a free pass.¹

These guys clearly built this tool to crack down on factory workers. They aren’t excused when managers use their tool for the thing it was made for.

¹ https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/13/262096410...

I think people are thrown off by the Indian work culture shown in the video, which is very hierarchical and frequently involves parent-like scolding. That said, I think that culture is horrible and should be eliminated.

I worked at an Indian consulting firm as the only American and experienced this firsthand.

saw someone point out how they could have framed it as a way to reward good workers, but instead they showed how they can go after people underperforming. Just bad framing and shows how out of touch they are

If anyone is reading from YC, I'm happy to review their submissions, I was perhaps the first who raised concerns and was on top of the thread with my comment.

(See this post I made on LinkedIn about this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crufter_today-y-combinator-de...)

Believe it or not, founders don't run every single thing they do by the YC partners!

Because this will definitely be used only to innocently tell off people doing 1/10 the work of everyone else, and not micromanage and hound people to increasingly unrealistic standards in already desperate conditions.

Safe to say you aren't in any position where every move you make will be watched by AI and analysed for faults so that your boss can scream at you more efficiently whenever you don't meet standards for their pitiful wages.

Shouldn't the manager of the 'bunch of workers' notice the guy is underperforming and understand why ? Maybe that manager is the one that shouldn't be doing that job

> Tbh this isn’t that crazy.

Yep, seems like a bog standard accountability / performance management.

> The product is not crazy. The video is wild.

This is how it all starts. Sane solutions wielded by madmen.

We already advanced beyond Taylorism's myopic time-motion glorification. This isn't a tool to improve the process, but to push the employee towards the meat grinder rather than look for a more intelligent approach (matching an employee's tasks and abilities rather than just giving him a red rating and ugly performance numbers)

Continued rant :

It’s kinda like a ruler. If you measure workers so that one’s doing 10x less/worse output than the average that’s good.

If you compare workers down to the .01% difference in output that’s stupid and inhumane.

This is normal Indian work culture. You can also guess in most cases, the factory workers are a different caste from the managers.

So you’d be ok with this AI being applied to other industries? Maybe lines of code?

The product is shit. At some point we have to put human decency first, and not lock people in AI-surveilled setups.

If you're worried about some guy slacking, then hire some supervisors, ask them to chat with the employees, understand what their issues come from, if they had a rough week and they need some slack, etc.

But doing it impersonally through an AI is inhumane.

Imagine if you have kids and we replace all their teachers with just a camera and an AI, that "teaches them to write" and then nag them if they're not "as good as their classmates" or whatever... that would be insane. Kids are meant to be loved and grow with care.

Well, guess what, grown ups too. Job or no job. We're not here "in order to make money for the bosses", but just to all contribute in a just and useful manner to society. And so workers need to do their part of the job, but bosses need also to respect the humanity and decency of workers. It goes both ways.

Perhaps real-time performance monitoring of people is wrong as well and marketing just made it sound less bad as it is?

If your management tracks your commits/velocity, look for a better job. The market easily allows you to do this. It doesn't make sense anyway and anyone with some technical know-how knows this.

This will escalate into something bad like publication metrics did to science. You end up with superfluous drivel that just pads real discovery. Although for code it is even more trivial.

Bottlenecks are something entirely different. If you have a critical-path, there need to be resources to tackle the task at hand. Real-time monitoring is entirely useless here as well.

You mean if they marketed it differently, managers would magically stop using it exactly the way it was advertised?

The video shows two people whose full-time job is watching an automated dashboard and who have failed to spot an issue for at least a month.

Quite apart from anything else, this isn't a good argument that this type of performance management is necessary, it's a great argument for firing all the managers in that factory.

We have a production line without individual performance tracking in a country with very high living standards and working costs.

If a line doesn't perform, you can solve it without it. Every single time.

Sure, there is not as much market pressure than in general logistics, but I still don't believe you would need these metrics at all.

Necessary according to who?

Did YC fund (or otherwise back) InstallMonetizer? The way I understood it, they applied to YC with a different idea and worked on IM earlier/on the side/later. (In which case, the controversy was more whether YC works with people who make things like InstallMonetizer.)

That's deeply untrue and unfair, and the fact that you've reached back 12 years to find an example, when YC has funded thousands of startups since then, is evidence against what you're saying.

YC has turned down many startups because they didn't think what the product was doing was right, and it has defunded and banned startups for ethical reasons over the years. It's not your fault that you didn't know this, since no one makes a big deal of it, but I think it's proper to bring it up when you say that the people at YC will "back anything that makes money".

I mean… yes, obviously? There’s a lot less room for exploitation of white collar workers in wealthy countries than sweatshops. Though performance quantifying software still deserves a lot of scrutiny for removing humanity from work in any context.

It's nuanced. If it allows you to find outliers (low performers to manage and high performers to praise), that's fine. If you try to push everyone further and further to their breaking point and make them trade the same amount of money for more of their time and more importantly health, it's certainly not fine.

>As someone who grew up in a 3rd world country and whose mother owned a clothing factory, this product seems...fine?

People in western countries find things like sweatshops to be objectionable.

>The response is an indication of how little people know about how their t-shirts and shoes are made.

People in western countries are well aware of how their shirts are made, and don't like it, and try to avoid it when possible specifically because they find sweatshop conditions objectionable.

I wonder if you'd think differently if your mother was a worker rather than an owner?

Ah ok, my bad then, it's a perfect product and we shouldn't change anything at all then. Let's continue to treat humans as machines, especially in 3rd world countries, who cares right ? Even they say it's fine.

TBH I'd rather buy shirts where I know that people doing them have been well-treated

No, we know, and we're not okay with it either. I understand it's often an improvement over other options for employment. That makes it understandable and even supportable to some extent, not okay.

Here in the US, we spent centuries fighting and dying for better options. Tools like this are used to launder the dismantling of the results of all that work through a fantasy of objective metrics.

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And the humans are also machines, purpose built over time to maximize efficiency and ignore anything else. Good employers are evolutionarily suboptimal, thats the issue.