Today's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

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BDFL - Memuneh
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#3110132 31-Jul-2023 15:14

Rikkitic:

According to this item from RNZ, AI can be (is already) used to weed out employees who are thinking of moving on. It is presented as a good thing as it spares employers being blindsided by someone who isn't 100% committed to their job. But the first thing that struck me when I read it is that in most cases it would just cause employers to sideline employees targeted by the AI in favour of others designated more likely to stick around. A self-fulfilling prophecy, in other words. This seems like a pretty stupid and short-sided use of AI to me.

Here is the actual press release:

New Zealand corporations will soon be able to use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify employees who are thinking about resigning, according to an industry expert.

The technology will allow managers to anticipate career movements in their workforce before they happen and proactively approach staff to address any issues they have.

She says her firm is in discussions with developers of the technology to investigate how it could be implemented within New Zealand workplaces.

The bold bits are mine. Note the "will". It's not something out there to catch you - at least not yet.

But I agree with you. What a stupid thing to do.

Eva888

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#3110165 31-Jul-2023 17:10

We can expect a lot of false positives and negatives. I don’t believe it’s plausible.

Tinkerisk

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#3110177 31-Jul-2023 18:20

Eva888: We can expect a lot of false positives and negatives. I don’t believe it’s plausible.

The more AI is "optimised" with regard to certain (or supposed) groups of people, the more the quality of life for all people is reduced.

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eracode

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#3110294 1-Aug-2023 08:52

Mrs Code is a retired former employee of the Ministry of Health. MoH has been remediating holiday pay errors made over the period 2013 to 2021 and existing employees received their adjustment payouts last week. Former employees get their chance to apply starting today.

Some of Mrs Code’s colleagues who are still working received amounts like $20k, $44k and $55k. The last amount was received by a Nurse Practitioner working as a Transplant Coordinator i.e. not a specialist or surgeon earning relative megabucks.

My Whiskey Tango on this has nothing to do with criticising the payout amounts per se - if these amounts are due, then the employees are irrefutably entitled to them. My beef is with the fact that the MoH got it so wrong for so long.

This is a correction to earlier holiday payments - so the earlier payments must have been grossly wrong. If those employees had received the correct payments, it would have been of great benefit to them at the time. If the recipient of the $55k was working for the whole eight-year period, that would have been $7k pa. IMO MoH should have been made to also pay a bonus along the lines of a use-of-money reimbursement - stretching back up to 10 years. A very rough estimate of the total amount involved in this debacle across the country is in the billions of $.

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#3110311 1-Aug-2023 10:13

I'm surprised that something worth $7k pa to some employees went on for so long. Did it spend years in court?

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#3110330 1-Aug-2023 11:15

Bung: I'm surprised that something worth $7k pa to some employees went on for so long. Did it spend years in court?

Pretty sure there was a common issue across all Govt Depts as I recall something similar being resolved a few years ago for us.

I think (from memory) it was to do with how holiday pay was calculated for days you were on leave or something. For most of us, well outside our knowledge of how to calculate it. So we didn't know any different. Possibly the MoH issue is a different one.

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#3110340 1-Aug-2023 11:51

Yeah, I think it's an issue of how 'normal working day' is calculated in the context of mondayised holidays, similar to the issues with fast food chains.

eracode

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#3110398 1-Aug-2023 12:30

geoffwnz:

Bung: I'm surprised that something worth $7k pa to some employees went on for so long. Did it spend years in court?

Pretty sure there was a common issue across all Govt Depts as I recall something similar being resolved a few years ago for us.

I think (from memory) it was to do with how holiday pay was calculated for days you were on leave or something. For most of us, well outside our knowledge of how to calculate it. So we didn't know any different. Possibly the MoH issue is a different one.

My basic understanding is that you’re spot on. I believe there were several (edit: maybe all?) government departments involved and that the teachers were settled last year. MoH is one part of the overall deal.

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PolicyGuy

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#3110561 1-Aug-2023 15:49

eracode:

My basic understanding is that you’re spot on. I believe there were several (edit: maybe all?) government departments involved and that the teachers were settled last year. MoH is one part of the overall deal.

It wasn't just government departments, a number of non-government employers were also affected.
Neither was it all government departments - certainly the one for which I led the HR/payroll software team managed to get it right.
I think that one (or more) of the major payroll software / payroll service suppliers just got it horribly wrong and must also have been extremely resistant to either admitting the problem or putting it right.

I'm actually baffled as to how this happened: the Holidays Act 2013 is not rocket science, the concepts of Current Daily Pay and Relevant Daily Pay are not really all that complicated. I can see that calculating RDP might get a bit tricky if the payroll doesn't keep a rolling year's worth (53 weeks, 28 fortnights or 13 months as appropriate) of fully broken down pay elements - if all you've got is YTD Gross, YTD Taxable and YTD Nett Pay you're probably stuffed - but a tiny amount of design and testing would have shown that up before 'go live' in April 2014.

What is equally incomprehensible is why it took so long to recognise the problem and why it's taken so long to fix it.
This problem arose out of the Holidays Act 2013, it has been an entire decade and they still haven't fixed it 🤯

neb

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#3110572 1-Aug-2023 16:46

PolicyGuy:
I'm actually baffled as to how this happened: the Holidays Act 2013 is not rocket science,

Someone once tried to explain all the corner cases and exceptions to me in the context of the Novopay mess. It makes achieving peace in the Middle East look trivial in comparison. I can't remember all the details because they were too complicated without taking pages of notes, maybe someone else can give concrete examples.

eracode

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#3110667 1-Aug-2023 17:20

Bung: I'm surprised that something worth $7k pa to some employees went on for so long. Did it spend years in court?

I have no detailed knowledge of this but I believe it did not go through a court process. A very quick google doesn’t seem to reference courts.

Mrs Code has just heard from a non-official but very well-informed source that payments to former employees (like her) will not be made until May 2024 - because the government wants to avoid two big payouts in one financial year.

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eracode

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#3110775 1-Aug-2023 17:52

For those who are interested, here’s a good coverage of the Holiday Pay Remediation debacle:

https://www.politik.co.nz/pay-bungle-to-cost-government-2-billion-and-counting/

At one point the author says the cost to MoH had been earlier estimated at $1.654 million. He means billion.

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Bung

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#3110777 1-Aug-2023 17:54

PolicyGuy:
What is equally incomprehensible is why it took so long to recognise the problem and why it's taken so long to fix it.
This problem arose out of the Holidays Act 2013, it has been an entire decade and they still haven't fixed it 🤯

It's worse than that. The Holidays Act was 2003. The mistakes in implementation were discovered years later.

This is MFAT's statement "We are required to go back six years from the date of a claim or six years from the date the Ministry became aware of the Holidays Act issues. The Ministry became aware of potential issues in mid-2016. Therefore, calculations will start from the beginning of the first pay period in July 2010. Other agencies with similar issues have also gone back six years. "

Chances are that the mistakes also affected payments between 2004 and 2010 but that's out of time.

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#3110786 1-Aug-2023 18:49

Private companies made exactly similar mistakes. Some have publically announced payouts. Countdown for example - probably pushed by various employee unions but good on Countdown anyway for sorting it out for everyone affected there.

I have the impression it mostly affects people who have shift hours, public holiday work, things like that. There's an overview here.

I'm interested to know how this may have affected 9-5ers.

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#3110793 1-Aug-2023 19:03

SomeoneSomewhere: If the WiFi drops out mid download, it might change whether it cancels the download, or moves to mobile data.

Otherwise... I guess it doesn't really know whether the cellular or WiFi is faster or more stable.

It could also split the download over both connections, but that's unlikely.

I suppose the main "problem" I have with it is that there's already a system-wide setting for whether to do this. I say "system-wide", but it's apparently actually "system-wide apart from Software Update, which ignores your previously-set preference and asks you every time".

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