The We Company S-1

Re:The We Company S-1 by wpietri on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @10:32AM (#20695923)

Yeah, I don't see that providing the outsized gains they're hoping for. I've talked to a number of entrepreneurs who business plan is basically

    1. Collect data
    2. ???
    3. Profit

And every time I quiz them on point 2, they get squirrely. They can never explain exactly how it works; at best I get hazy references to Google making lots from data, which is at best a partial truth.

In this case, I doubt having that data will do much; humans are already natural optimizers. Really, the things workplaces should be optimized for are unlikely to be easily measurable, so at best these systems will optimize for the wrong thing.

And really, the reason workplaces aren't particularly optimal now is that most decisions are made not for maximizing business value, but for maximizing the power and comfort of those high up. As an example, when businesses relocate their headquarters, it is generally to move closer to the CEO's home. Or we can look at all the decisions made to optimize a visible metric, like cost, to the harm of invisible ones. E.g., the open office plan, which is cheap and lets managers supervise by looking out their office window, but significantly harms productivity and employee happiness.

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Re:The We Company S-1 by wickedsight on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @10:58AM (#20696201)

> And every time I quiz them on point 2, they get squirrely.

Well, sure, but all they're being told is that data is the new gold. [0] And gold is valuable, so data must also be valuable. They tend to forget that not all data is gold, because 'some data is gold' isn't what they were told and also isn't fun.

0: https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/data-analytics/article...

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Re:The We Company S-1 by jedberg on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @12:50PM (#20697358)

> humans are already natural optimizers

This right here. Most humans will do whatever they can to achieve minimal work. However, they aren't great at gathering all the necessary data and often find local maxima, so there is still some value in "AI augmentation".

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Re:The We Company S-1 by nabnob on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @03:46PM (#20699231)

Yeah, I don't think tracking this type of data would improve worker productivity, and I think it could actually have the opposite effect of demoralizing employees.

However, I can definitely see some unethical companies being interested in this type of tracking, so I'm guessing there's a market for it.

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Re:The We Company S-1 by cosmodisk on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @05:58PM (#20700439)

I'm sitting in a very similar situation.The company I work for provides relatively basic service, however the operational( we are brokers) model is challenging. We have tons of reports and dashboards measuring things from A to Z, sometimes it feels like we are some sort of analytics company. While some metrics are useful and help steer the ship either way,the rest simply becomes noise. Also a lot of data is not being interpreted correctly because of lack of statistics/math skills within the company.

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Re:The We Company S-1 by raywu on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @09:17PM (#20701728)

Always great to run into your comment on HN

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