Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Every beating worker may have experienced the sense of suffocation of being suddenly "grabbed".

When you go to school, it is the parents who open the door of your room or the head teacher who appears by the window; after work, you may be standing quietly behind you to lead. Now, technology companies are telling you that the algorithm will not only perform the "supervision" work for them, but will now play the role of "judge" to determine whether you can continue to work at the company as a qualified employee.

Recently, Meta joined the ranks, announcing that it had fired 60 contractors using the algorithm. In the email about the layoffs, Meta did not give a specific reason this time, saying only that these people were selected by the algorithm evaluation.

Meta is not the only company that has tried to use algorithms to implement layoffs. In recent years, some technology companies, including Amazon, have begun to use algorithms as an important tool to assess employees, and gradually developed to decide whether employees should stay or not.

Although the Meta layoffs only involve contract workers, more workers also feel a "crisis" brought about by invisible and cold algorithms.

Meta layoffs the first shot, from the algorithm to cut contract workers actually as early as a few months ago, in Blind and other major workplace forums, rumors about Meta to start layoffs began to spread among the community. Some people say that the management of various Meta departments are already evaluating the performance of employees and starting to draw lists, some say the layoffs will be in the form of an enhanced version of PIP, and some say the proportion of layoffs in Meta will reach 10% this year.

The picture is taken from the BusinessInsider report.

Recently, Meta did fire the first shot at layoffs-firing contractors and using algorithms.

Previously, Meta signed a $500 million annual contract with Accenture to contract outsourced staff to provide content review and business integrity services to Meta. Since then, about 500 contract workers have been resident in Meta's Austin office.

The main job of these contractors is to help Meta review posts on its various social platforms, identify violent images and trademark infringement and mark them. Although they are hired outsourced, they also enjoy most of the benefits of Meta and can use the company's internal platform in the same way as regular employees.

But in recent months, contractors have found that Meta has begun to eliminate their various subsidies, including fuel and meal subsidies, and, more importantly, their performance management has become more and more stringent.

According to a fired contractor, as long as their computers are inactive for more than 8 minutes, they will be automatically judged to be in "rest" and counted in all their 30-minute lunches and 30-minute breaks every day. If the rest time is excessive, it will be automatically warned by the system and included in the performance improvement plan. In addition, they are required to start work strictly at 08:30, and being late will be counted as substandard performance.

Under the sudden increase in this "performance improvement plan", many contractors felt vaguely uneasy at that time. Sure enough, 60 contract workers received layoff notices earlier this month, and they were told that they would terminate the contract immediately on September 2, that is, more than ten days later, and only pay an extra month's salary. When asked why he was laid off, Accenture only said it was a list of algorithms.

Meta's use of algorithms for layoffs has also sparked a lot of discussion online recently, and many people think it is too "rude" to use algorithms to lay off staff. Some people say, see, how the algorithm recruited you in those years, how it will get you out now.

The picture is from Reddit

Some people satirize that the algorithm used by Meta this time may be "employee, which has not been sucking up to the leader recently, all fire!"

The picture is from Reddit

Others say that the company may be taken over by machines in the future, and the company's executives just need to take money crazily in the dark.

The picture is from Reddit

Meta is far from alone in the cold algorithm, which has become the best "person" to implement layoffs and treat the algorithm program as a workplace police.

In fact, as early as before 2015, Amazon began to build a set of artificial intelligence efficiency monitoring and evaluation system to track the efficiency of warehouse employees, logistics and distribution personnel, and automatically issue layoffs.

This system can monitor the packing speed and working status of warehouse staff at any time, and has strict regulations on the time interval for workers to pick up goods on the shelf, rest time, time to go to the bathroom, and so on. Once the time is exceeded, you will be automatically labeled as "inefficient". Some Amazon workers have previously said they have to hold back and run back and forth to go to the bathroom in order not to be warned by the system.

Amazon's Flex "gig driver" logistics distribution project is also basically controlled by the algorithm. The algorithm will monitor the daily work and route of drivers, including whether they deliver the goods to the station, whether they have completed the delivery at the specified time, whether the package is in the right place, and so on. According to the performance of these drivers, the algorithm will automatically divide them into different levels, and unqualified employees will directly receive an automatic dismissal email from Amazon.

In more than a year from 2017 to 2018, about 300 full-time employees at one Amazon sorting center alone were fired for being judged inefficient by the system, accounting for 12 per cent of the center's total staff, according to The Verge. On this basis, it is estimated that Amazon uses the algorithm to lay off as many as 10,000 warehouse employees each year.

Last year, a 63-year-old distribution driver who worked for four years was fired in cold blood by the algorithm for making an uncontrollable error, and set off a huge public debate about "human-machine confrontation." everyone is denouncing Amazon for directly using the algorithm to lay off staff is too cold-blooded.

The picture is from Bloomberg.

It is worth noting that in addition to relatively basic jobs such as warehouses and logistics in the past, with the wave of telecommuting brought about by the epidemic, many technology companies have also begun to use algorithms to fire engineers and other office workers.

For example, Xsolla, a Russian online payment service, used algorithms to fire 150 employees, including engineers, accounting for about 1/3 of the company's total.

In order to ensure the efficiency of employees' online work after the epidemic, Xsolla began to implement a new artificial intelligence-driven performance evaluation system in early 2021, allowing AI to automatically grade employees on a percentile basis by setting more than 30 indicators in different dimensions.

Xsolla said that the algorithm to determine layoffs is mainly based on the employee's digital footprint (Digital Footprint). Including whether to read and reply to the email received in time, whether to actively speak in the internal software, whether to actively edit documents online, whether to create and complete tasks, and whether to participate in internal online meetings on time are the key indicators to judge their work efficiency.

In the second half of 2021, Xsolla encountered difficulties in business expansion and had to make large-scale layoffs to ease the operating pressure. And this set of AI performance evaluation system plays an important role in their layoffs.

In an email sent to laid-off employees, its CEO Aleksandr Agapitov coldly said that AI tracked their activities on various office software and found that they did not keep working all the time, identifying them as "undedicated" or "inefficient", so they were not suitable to stay in the company, and finally attached a full list of layoffs pulled by the algorithm.

Your every move is under the control of the algorithm? Although at present, there are not many companies that really use algorithms to carry out layoffs, but since the epidemic, it is a very obvious trend that more and more companies begin to use algorithms to manage and evaluate the working status of their employees.

At the end of last year, Coworker.org, an American employee non-profit organization, released a report summarizing more than 550 labor-centric technology products used by major companies since 2018, and produced a detailed data query system according to the company of the technology, the type of technology tool, the object of use, and whether it appeared during the epidemic. These technical tools include not only office efficiency software, behavior monitoring software but also payroll automation software and so on. Among them, the tools that account for the highest proportion are performance and work goal management.

In this database, according to Amazon as the technology owner, there are more than a dozen office efficiency / monitoring / auxiliary and incentive software or platforms in use, half of which have long been implemented. The other half has only been released since the epidemic, mainly focusing on employee performance management and work safety management.

The picture is taken from Coworker.org online database.

Unexpectedly, even Microsoft, a famous "pension" company, is using at least ten labor technology tools. Seven of them were released after the outbreak, and most of them were related to employee efficiency management.

The picture is taken from Coworker.org online database.

As technology companies apply more and more technology to performance and goal management, there is a growing controversy over the use of algorithms to manage and even fire employees.

According to the Coworker.org report, many companies are using tools that run without employees' knowledge, and some are even tempted on the brink of invading employees' privacy. For example, some software will GPS the home address of employees and automatically warn them if they have been away for too long. For example, they will automatically turn on the camera to record their behavior at home during working hours. For example, they will save the keyboard input of employees, record and analyze all kinds of messages typed by employees and work response speed, and so on.

In addition, although the algorithm can provide a reference for monitoring employee activity to some extent, the criteria for determining right and wrong are very simple. Some special cases are reasonable and understandable from the point of view of humanized management, but the machine only decides that 0 or 1 will not leave any leeway.

After Meta uses the algorithm to cut jobs, many people begin to worry that more companies will join the ranks, thus opening a new era of algorithmic layoffs.

Referenc

Coworker.org report and database https://home.coworker.org/ worktech/

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Silicon Man (ID:guixingren123), author: Juny Editor: VickyXiao

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.