Tell HN: Y Combinator backing AI company to abuse factory workers
103 comments
·February 25, 20252099miles
Tbh this isn’t that crazy. If you hire someone to do their job outputting 10 items per hour and that number is reasonable because a bunch of other workers you hired for the same job are doing it and 1 guy hits 1 per hour then that guys shouldn’t be doing that job.
The outrage should be focused on the absolute meme of their ad video cuz they were like “lets literally have a convo with an individual but refer to them as a workspace and have them say human painful responses but then just shit on them anyway impersonally”
The product is not crazy. The video is wild.
pera
Your example sounds reasonable but it's not realistic: The actual use of this type of tools is to intimidate those workers who have outputted 9.8 items instead of the average 9.9 over the past week.
This is how our society ended up making Amazon delivery workers urinating in fucking bottles inside their trucks.
solardev
You've spent 32.8 seconds urinating this shift, 1.3 seconds longer than average. Your bonus has been reduced until performance meets standards. At Amazon, the customer comes first!
Congratulations! This week your urination schedule has improved. Enjoy a Kindle credit on us, good for any ebook license under $2.99. At Amazon, our partners come first!
trunch
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.
infecto
Do you really think this tool is making folks micromanage and abuse employees or perhaps they already would be doing that and this tool helps it?
There can be real value in these types of tools, its ultimately up to the implementation and I don't believe this tool will somehow make a happy work environment into an abusive one, the abuse will have most likely already existed.
latexr
> and this tool helps it
And that is bad.
> the abuse will have most likely already existed.
The abuse will get worse. The correct ethical answer to “the conditions are bad” is “improve the conditions” not “make them worse”.
rimbo789
Absolutely I expect it to be used to micromanage and abuse. Yes those behaviours already exist that’s why I know a tool that enables them will amphifly them
fvdessen
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
hnthrow90348765
And they do that by either looking over your shoulder (1 person at a time) or collecting metrics on the entire team and the output. Both of these have different downsides.
The biggest issue is leadership or managers always wanting the number to go up from the individual. "We need 12 widgets per hour instead of 10 for just this one quarter bro" but then that becomes the new norm and eventually "We need 14/16/18/20 widgets per hour..."
It's boiling frog management that makes people distrust managers doing any kind of performance monitoring
froh
yah this is exactly what labor law says in some countries: a manager standing behind your desk? ok. a machine surveilling you? not ok.
sarchertech
Yeah it’s a matter of scale. The manager can’t stand behind your desk and watch you all day every day. AI can.
2099miles
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.
yogurt-male
Yes, but many business owners/managers are stupid and inhumane.
bargainbin
So you’d be ok with this AI being applied to other industries? Maybe lines of code?
kissgyorgy
It's clear you never worked in a factory and you have just as much empathy as these CS grads. This kind of thinking why I hate capitalism so much.
I worked in a factory multiple times and I can tell from experience nobody needs a stupid performance measurement like this. Your manager will make sure you work you ass off. Or you work with a big dangerous machine so you have to pay very much attention all day. Of course not every factory is the same, but putting even more pressure to factory workers like this is just inhumane and the most capitalist move I can imagine. Next step is to put robotic whips next to the lines and when their productivity goes below a specific value hit them automatically... Literal slavery.
yogurt-male
Looking for 10x discrepancies is not how this will be used, and you know it. Adoption of this sort of tech is going to lead to Amazon "peeing in bottles" situations. It's wild how much faith people have in the ethics of business owners, especially the ultra-wealthy.
ignoramous
> 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.
infecto
The only thing truly embarrassing is that nobody at YC advised them that this ad is 1) terribly amateur and 2) has the chance to look extremely bad. Did not advise and in fact published to their feed. Weird optics, I am not familiar with what I presume to be Indian factories, other than the wild lack of safety (thanks youtube) but I cannot see how this video does anything positive.
As for the product itself I don't think it is unusual, these types of measurement systems are not new and can be helpful for a factory, like all things, it boils down to the owner/managers of said factory not the tool.
latexr
> 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...
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mattmaroon
Believe it or not, founders don't run every single thing they do by the YC partners!
infecto
> Believe it or not, nobody suggested you need to run everything by a partner!
Believe it or not, nobody suggested you need to run everything by a partner! I would expect someone to at least watch a video once before posting it in a congratulatory post on YC's feed. It is not a criticism of startup culture but watching that video I genuinely question how far quality has fallen?
stetrain
Sure, but it seems like this was posted to (and now deleted from) the @ycombinator X account with a "Congrats on the launch!" message.
friendly_chap
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...)
simonbarker87
I used to run a small factory (two assembly lines 10 people) and something like this would have been useful, not to force people to work harder but to optimise movements and points of friction. I would actively encourage and reward people for making suggestions and we had a process in place to test if changes made things better (and not just faster - we included easier, simpler, more enjoyable etc in the test)
Sadly it’s not about the tool in this case, it’s how it’s being promoted and positioned. The line “know who’s working and who’s not” on their website says it all sadly.
oefrha
Brought to you by the VC famous for InstallMonetizer? Make no mistake, it’ll basically back anything that makes money, there’s no moral high ground. And like it or not, this kind of AI (or should I say A-eye) is here to stay.
tuukkah
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.)
latexr
> Did YC fund (or otherwise back) InstallMonetizer?
Yes. Quoting Paul Graham:
> Last week there was some controversy online about a company we funded called InstallMonetizer.
tuukkah
Here's his clarification that followed, saying they didn't fund the product InstallMonetizer:
> They're working on something new, and all the office hours I had with them were about that. They're not even in our database of companies as InstallMonetizer but as the new thing. (I'm not sure if I can say the name because it may not be launched yet.) I knew they had some previous product that was called a Windows installer, but I don't think we ever talked about what it did. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093047
danpalmer
This sort of performance management is unfortunately necessary. The problem is that we need tools for it to be built by people who can empathise with those subjected to them, and who want to do the right thing, and not these sorts of folks who are too immature and inexperienced to get it right.
My previous company ran a warehouse and there was a clear bell curve of productivity. Most people were fine, some were excellent, but some were below the level that was realistically achievable. We did careful and considerate analysis and it helped improve productivity.
When done badly however you end up with management using productivity tracking as a lever to increase productivity across the curve. Amazon driver delivery quotas are a great example – people urinating in bottles is clearly a symptom of the quota being too high. Unfortunately software built naively to help bring up the bottom 10% can too easily be used to force up the productivity of the other 90%.
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seper8
Necessary according to who?
danpalmer
Colleagues, the business. The important things are that performance management is a) used to identify those performing far below what is possible, and b) that there is a good faith effort to support those people to perform better.
Both of these things are mis-handled by many companies, who will use it to encourage more performance out of those who are already as productive as practically possible, and that the tools are used in bad faith or with no intention of helping people, only as an excuse to fire them.
sarchertech
You don’t need constant monitoring to find the bottom 10% though. People performing that badly are easy to pick out with spot checks.
It’s the same with software. Your direct manager should know if their employee is in the bottom 10%. If they don’t, they aren’t doing their job or they have too many reports.
What constant automated monitoring allows is cutting back on the number of managers and like you said, pushing high performers even further.
jagger27
Investors.
leonheld
The response here would be significantly different if this was about measuring the performance of software engineers in wealthy countries.
gagik_co
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.
philipjoubert
As someone who grew up in a 3rd world country and whose mother owned a clothing factory, this product seems...fine? The response is an indication of how little people know about how their t-shirts and shoes are made.
bayindirh
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.
lm28469
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.
computerthings
[dead]
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Kye
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.
philipjoubert
I watched my mother spend 30 years building her company...it's hard enough to build a manufacturing company in 3rd world country. Applying Western labour standards would make it impossible.
The way out of poverty is to through. You need to create enough value to be able to afford the airconed offices where everyone sits on an Aeron with a macbook pro.
lm28469
I'm sitting on a $70 ikea chair, in a flat reconverted to an office, right under the roof, with no AC and I have 1st gen base model m1
FAANG is an exception, even in the west
oulipo
TBH I'd rather buy shirts where I know that people doing them have been well-treated
philipjoubert
The people who worked in these companies are usually incredibly grateful for the opportunity to do seated work indoors for reasonable wages.
Applying Western labour practices to third world countries would prevent them from ever developing...hurting the very people we all want to help.
bayindirh
But the lack of the practices shouldn't give the owners free reign to better themselves more while depleting others in the name of "wanting to help".
Kye
Applying those practices to western employment will mean no one can afford what those grateful people make.
solumos
Is it dystopian, or is it just real-time performance monitoring poorly marketed by inexperienced founders?
There are tools like this for tracking git commits and velocity (that I’ve been on the receiving end of). It probably makes less sense in that context, but if your job is a repetitive task, I don’t think it’s necessarily abuse or dystopian to track it.
Monitoring bottlenecks isn’t a bad thing. They probably could have chosen an example where the solution to the bottleneck didn’t involve berating a low performer (e.g. adjusting the line to add another station or similar)
black_puppydog
You mean if they marketed it differently, managers would magically stop using it exactly the way it was advertised?
astonex
The product should be marketed as a tool for monitoring and highlighting bottlenecks in the manufacturing production line in order to help maintain peak output. This is a completely reasonable thing to want, it's no different to monitoring micro-services and their latencies/loads.
The video they made however where they berate and meanly put-down an individual employee is so far from acceptable. That's not how personnel performance issues should be managed in the real world, completely void of human empathy. It shows the founders (and did YC view and approve this?) are lacking in areas
lm28469
Science sans conscience... we haven't progressed one bit in the last 500 years
acc_297
> Boost your assembly line efficiency by up to 30%
Ethics of this aside the above claim must be dubious I would think the majority of manufacturing inefficiencies are due to down time as a result of raw material shipping delays or machine break down… of course I’m in no position to offer an informed opinion but just based on the product website I have a hard time taking this stuff seriously.
Monitoring of factory workers isn’t hard to do with current surveillance and 1 or 2 humans in the loop
rimbo789
This product should be banned and these guys should be forced to work a year at a textile mill for trying to build it
Optifye.ai is a dystopian company backed by Y Combinator. They’re using AI to further dehumanise and abuse individual factory workers and treat them like disposable automatons.
See a now deleted post where they show how it works:
https://hachyderm.io/@YvanDaSilva/114063748264591929
The founders look to be a couple of rich kids with little world and work experience:
> We’re CS grads from Duke and because our families run manufacturing companies (…)
They also display a profound lack of empathy by bragging about lowering stress for rich company owners, which they do by increasing the stress of everyone who works for them:
> Know any manufacturing company owners?
> Let us know at founders@optifye.ai, and we’ll help them drop their cortisol levels :)
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/optifye-ai
This is the AI world we all know is coming, brought to you by Y Combinator investors and founders. It doesn’t “benefit humanity”, it just serves to “put you in your place”.