Technology

I remember the grocery store I worked at started posting the rate for each cashier of items scanned per minute logged into a register. They didn’t say anything about it, but I now realize they were probably leading into using that data as justification for something.

My dumbass 16 year old self thought “I’m going to get that number so high it breaks the system.” I would lock my station after the previous customer, and take a little time to face all of the UPC codes and look up produce codes and make a general strategy. Then, I would unlock the register, scan like a madman, then lock it and casually start bagging. The customers would get concerned they needed to hurry up based on my fervor, so I would tell them “Take all the time you need, see that show yesterday?”

Next time they posted the rankings, my number was 20x as high as second place. After a few weeks of getting my number a little higher each time, my boss’ boss came by and told me to knock it off since I was polluting their metrics. Next week no new rankings.

I like to think I inadvertently helped prevent KPI nonsense.

The justification they give for the figure is that it's the lowest performing 10%

But that would be turnover rate, not cuts. Cuts have no replacement.

I think we are already seeing that with Microsoft. Another 2-3 rounds of AI and they forget how to build windows.

It also fosters a culture of non-cooperation with colleagues (because they are now your competition), where workers and teams try to sabotage each other, or at least not help, and throw each other under the bus. So there's mutual mistrust too. And no one wants to take a risk and innovate, leading to further stagnation.

The justification they give for the figure is that it’s the lowest performing 10% according to internal key performance indicator (KPI) metrics

The thing is, that's not what layoffs are supposed to be. That's effectively firing someone for cause. Maybe in America the difference doesn't matter, but in the civilised world, at least in theory, it does. But in reality they can somehow get away with this and call it "layoffs".

If a company does layoffs, they should not be allowed to hire any staff in the same or similar roles for 12 months.

With Meta it very much looks like overhiring. What are those 8000 workers even doing, designing CSS for each individual ad on Facebook?

Nah, not even the basic "its capitalism" excuse works anymore for that idiocracy. Capitalism may force companies to increase earnings, which is already stupid enough in itself, but the timeframe that's measured in got reduced so much in the last few years that even short term goals are impossible without cutting costs.

Ten years ago monthly earnings were at most an indicator, what mattered most were fiscal years. It slowly evolved to quarterly earnings and now we are at a point were a single "bad" (as in, not as much profit as last month) can plunge your stock prices by 10+%.

Yes capitalism always fucked over the working class, bit it wasn't made to force big, profitable companies to self destruct for 0.5% higher monthly profits.

They don't get paid commission. Since people continue to work for companies like this and are OK being paid so little, nothing will change.