Google PAC-MAN Cost 4.8M Person-Hours 332
The folks at Rescue-Time, who make software that helps you (and companies) figure out how you spend your online time, did a modest calculation based on their user base and concluded that Google's playable PAC-MAN doodle cost the world over 4.8 million person-hours of productivity last Friday. "Google PAC-MAN consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6M daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day). $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, if the average Google user has a cost of $25/hr. (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate). For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get six weeks of their time."
Also, Google made the doodle permanent.
Yum, numbers are tasty (Score:5, Funny)
Now the real question is, how many more hours will it consume talking about how many hours it consumed?
Begs the question doesn't it?
Re:Yum, numbers are tasty (Score:5, Insightful)
They're assuming 36 extra seconds per visit, too. If you "count to 11" like they suggest, counting to 47 will demonstrate that they're guestimating far too much time was spent on GoogleMan.
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I was on vacation also, and all 4 family members tried it.
How many kids played this?
Re:Yum, numbers are tasty (Score:5, Funny)
These numbers are tasty, but they also are misleading and jump to conclusions. They're assuming everyone who tried GoogleMan was at work?
That's irrelevant if you're a salaried worker. Instead of playing Google Pac-Man at home, you could have spent that extra time at work getting work done for your employer. Wasting your time playing a game like that is like stealing from your employer!
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also you would need to assume these people were really going to do something worthwhile had they not been playing google pac-man.
Thats a big assumption, multiplied by 4.8 million.
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Begs the question doesn't it?
No, it doesn't!
http://begthequestion.info/ [begthequestion.info]
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So, some people* essentially made up a load of numbers to generate a catchy headline, throwing in some "back of the envelope" calculations to make it look real. That's never happened before...
But, oh look, it worked. Even the BBC [bbc.co.uk] bought the story and they generally try to be factually accurate. So, before long it will probably be included as an amusing anecdote in every story about loss-of-productivity-at-work, or the dangers-of-being-on-the-Internet and that sort of rubbish.
It is amazing how far one made-u
Competition (Score:5, Interesting)
Still pales in comparison to the average Slashdot Idle story...
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Yeah, I think most people would have been faffing off at work regardless of Pac-Man. Plenty of good Flash games!
Re:Competition (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that, "person-hours" is one of the stupidest phrases I've run across in a while.
Look, there's nothing wrong with "man". It referred to "human" long before it referred to "male human". Just live with it: the word is man-hours!
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While I don't disagree with the sentiment...
What the hell was wrong with "x hours of productivity" which came long before "man-hour"? Why do we even need a term that refers to gender at all?
Now get off my lawn. :)
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It fails simple dimensional analysis. N hours of operation of a facility employing M persons obviously is NM person-hours of work, not NM hours of work.
Re:Competition (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe it should fail simple dimensional analysis because, hey, smashing people and hours together doesn't always generate productivity, unlike how force and distance always generate work.
It's more subtle, needs certain assumptions, and it's not at all clear what the scaling law should be. Kind of like how in some cases but not all, the effective distance travelled is proportional to the square root of time spent travelling.
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The poster above you was making that point that "man" in man-hour DOESN'T refer to gender. Man in that context refers to human, as in our species.
Re:Competition (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Competition (Score:5, Interesting)
Look, there's nothing wrong with "man". It referred to "human" long before it referred to "male human". Just live with it: the word is man-hours!
Unfortunately, there's a fair bit of evidence that small differences in wording can have a lot of impact. For example, if little children are asked to draw a picture of a "firefighter" they will be more likely to draw a female than if they are asked to draw a picture of a "fireman." So even if "man" can be used to mean person, subtle human irrationality still has an impact.
Re:Competition (Score:5, Insightful)
I would say the irrational thing is to draw a female fireman, whatever the reason.
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I would say the irrational thing is to draw a female fireman, whatever the reason.
You are missing the point. Sometimes the kids draw an obviously female or obviously male individual. The ratio of that changes when one uses "firefighter" as opposed to "fireman." This occurs for a variety of similar examples (police officer v. policeman for example). So the use of the man ending substantially alters thinking about sex and gender at a very subtle level.
Ok, we brought this up... (Score:4, Interesting)
Can I just say that I *love* firefighting work, cause it's the last bastion of objective capability over affirmative action?
That unconscious guy in the burning building doesn't *care* that you're female, and can only drag 150 pounds; he still weighs 200.
And amazingly enough: the exams recognize this.
Re:Competition (Score:4, Insightful)
You fall into the tired old trap of the left in thinking that children are mindless automatons that will do whatever adults program them to do.
I have three robust defiant boys with opposing personalities and beliefs that proves you wrong. If you tell my youngest to draw a fireman/firefigher he'll just as likely draw a car with a clown driving it (who incidentally will more than likely also be a man, perhaps you could give us the gender neutral term for clown..or your argument is a bit of BS).
Children aren't computers to be manipulated to your own creepy ends of making them not see reality- that firemen are 90% men - into what you want them to see - that you wish fire fighters were equal parts men and women (not reality). Something that is of course never going to happen as there's simply not an equal number of physically strong females on planet (oops there's that reality thing again).
So what if they draw a firefighter as a man...90% of firefighters in the world ARE MEN and no, it's not because of the tired old "oppression/inequality" drek trotted out day in day out by academia, it's simply because of boring old physics: women don't have as much muscle as men.
No amount of manipulation of the language and childrens minds is ever going to change that. Also there was a time where if your political beliefs required messing with kids heads your beliefs were seen as evil.
Cheers
Twostix
Re:Competition (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you tell my youngest to draw a fireman/firefigher he'll just as likely draw a car with a clown driving it
... and will go on to explain that the clown *is* actually a fireman, but he's a clown as well and isn't on fireman duty today. Yeah, sounds a bit familiar.
Re:Competition (Score:4, Funny)
Pac-person - a gender neutral abstract object of a neutral colour moves around a maze not eating vegan dots (or stripes) while not antagonising the neutral "ghosts" (or any ethereal creature) who wish only to have lunch with Pac-person and not harm them in any way. Game does not include a "score" function as scores are considered "competitive" and detract from the non-judgmental attitude of the Pac-person game.
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I thought, knowing Microsoft, that they would instead make a unique game featuring Clippy or Bob or that little dog. And the object of the game would be to defeat the evil free-software hordes.
Hah! (Score:3, Funny)
Simon.
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I can't believe they're discriminating against ghosts like that. I mean, they were people, too!
Slashdot manages that every day (Score:5, Funny)
You should be ashamed of yourselves for reading my post when you should be off curing cancer or saving orphans or something useful!
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Well, the fix for both is to kill them all. That's already been handled by the fine corporations around the world. It'll just take a little while for it to finish the job.
Come on, if one company can single handedly set up to kill all life in the Gulf of Mexico with a single event, what'll happen when more of them have "accidents"?
Re:Slashdot manages that every day (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, the hyper inflated concept of the unflinching, tireless, resolute worker is best left as a relic of the industrial revolution. Never in the course of human history, outside of the industrial revolution, has a human being been expected to produce "something" for 8 straight hours a day, 5 days a week (and for some more than that). Such simple minded focus strips the mind of creativity; creativity which has dramatically advanced and improved the human condition.
I am a hard core capitalist and stalwart industrialist, but I am also a pragmatist. Non stop, widget production, should be left to the factory worker who needs to follow a standard script. Expecting an IT professional, a researcher, or an engineer to simply keep producing something measurable with each minute of the day shows a complete lack of understanding of your resources. I forget what the name of the study was, but it took three sports teams and show the level of performance improvements over a team that 1) vacationed for a week, thinking about the upcoming game, 2) team that unceasingly trained for the upcoming game, 3) team that sporadically trained for the upcoming game. turns out the vacationing team that spent some time visualizing the upcoming game, produced the greatest results, with the team that trained too hard had the smallest improvements.
Long story short, expecting factory worker performance from skilled workers, is as foolish as expecting a successful heart transplant surgery from a line backer.
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Never in the course of human history, outside of the industrial revolution, has a human being been expected to produce "something" for 8 straight hours a day, 5 days a week (and for some more than that).
The human body just isn't built for it either. Hunter-gathers that were able to survive to the modern era (i.e. in infertile lands where agriculture isn't possible) only spent about 15 - 25 hours per week gathering food. That's what our ancestors did for probably 100,000 years, and a contributing factor to why life expectancy dropped with agriculture (~100 hours per week). Unsurprisingly, it turns out we're almost all deficient in Vitamin D (lack of sunlight), get sub-optimal sleep (ditto sunlight), and
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I was doing the responsible thing by reading your post to make sure you hadn't already found the cure for cancer or saved the orphans. I don't want to duplicate work, now that would be wasteful!
Totally not evil (Score:2)
In other words (Score:5, Interesting)
People spent 4.8 million hours enjoying life rather than slaving away for the man :P
Re:In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
The free market can't exist without government regulations.
You earned your +1 Indignant mod though. Congrats! :-)
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Insane the mindless sound bites that go for +5 around here these days.
The "free market" is just two people exchanging one thing for another thing so of course it can exist outside of government regulation. Unless you're going to try and say it requires laws to compel people to trade. In which case I cite the last 20,000 years of human history.
The problem with the free market is that it's just that it's too rough and ready so some government regulation can smooth it out (or completely ruin it, or be used t
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So, your hypothetical (utopian?) free market can't exist without the regulatory _protection_ of a government? Talk about mindless sound bites... Let me know when you found your perfect country where anarchy rules, and everyone sings in harmony with their side-arms at the ready.
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Now if we could only find two libertarians who agree on a coherent system or theory of what constitutes fraud...
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A lot of it is due to the government pushing for more control in other areas, or where irrationality has taken hold or because the government has taken upon themselves to print worthless money.
With hard currency, low regulation and a rational population you have a recipe for economic sustainability and wealth.
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and a rational population
well, fuck. any other ideas?
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The problem is these laws that do not involve fraud and force are violating the sovereignty of the individual: to do whatever they want so long as it doesn't harm others. By definition, this is freedom without resor
Ah yes, Rescue Time... (Score:5, Insightful)
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A little bit of down time boosts productivity!
Re:Ah yes, Rescue Time... (Score:4, Funny)
hour of pac-man != hour of lost productivity (Score:5, Insightful)
This is like all those bogus RIAA/MPAA/etc.-funded studies that assume a pirated copy is a lost sale. Much of the time spent on Google's PAC-MAN would otherwise have been spent on other internet time-wasting, not on productivity.
Re:hour of pac-man != hour of lost productivity (Score:5, Funny)
This is like all those bogus RIAA/MPAA/etc.-funded studies that assume a pirated copy is a lost sale. Much of the time spent on Google's PAC-MAN would otherwise have been spent on other internet time-wasting, not on productivity.
Great. Now some *AA is busy working on a study to show how much Google PAC-MAN cost them in sales. Way to go (don't expect to get paid for the idea though).
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And you know that to be a fact... how exactly?
Probably true. (Score:4, Insightful)
If your company is concerned with this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ban the use of Google at work.
Because, I'm sure Google doesn't give back in terms of productivity.
But really. This is hard to quantify. Half of my dev team was looking under the hood to see how it worked. Directly lost productivity? Maybe, but I think over-all it netted positive for the team. I would argue that this sort of thing is good for productivity.
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Because, I'm sure Google doesn't give back in terms of productivity.
I'm sure it does. Just think about everything that would need to be looked up without Google. Want to know the currency conversion between US and Canadian dollars for an estimate? Need to know Pound to Kilogram conversions? Etc.
Google lets you make much more accurate decisions without wasting time.
Re:If your company is concerned with this... (Score:4, Insightful)
All a human -really- needs to know is how to read/speak a popular language and critical thinking skills. The rest, in the 21st century will fall into place.
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Quick, how many grams in an ounce, or how many mL in a fluid ounce?
I know the kg/pound and inch/cm conversions offhand, but I certainly don't have all the other ones memorized.
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Oh. I see what you did there.
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
It was on a Friday, it's not like anything gets done on Fridays anyway.
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It was on a Friday, it's not like anything gets done on Fridays anyway.
You need to hang around my hospital's ER a little more on a Friday night. You will see that quite a lot gets done. I usually find myself wondering why people don't just stay home... there's never a rush during the football game.
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And Jeans.
Humans are not engines (Score:5, Insightful)
What HR departments don't seem to understand is that we are not robots or programs. Put anyone and have them do a repetitive task, they will quickly get mental numbness and their productivity will suffer. Now take the person and give them some mental stimulation now and then and they won't make those errors.
If you want something that will turn out the same quality of work 24/7, get a robot or program. Humans aren't like that. And saying that it "cost" $4.8 million just isn't understanding humanity.
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And saying that it "cost" $4.8 million just isn't understanding humanity.
It says 4.8 million hours and $120 million. Not that I think there can be any real validity to their guesstimate, but they could well be closer then 25x out.
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"... but they could well be closer then 25x out."
And apples could well be closer than 25x better than oranges ?
The criticism isnt on the result of the measurement, its on the premise underlying it.
If the 4.8 million hours where all time that employee and worked themselves to exhaustion (mental or physical), then 4.8 million hours weren't lost, the workers had already given 100%.
Some employers in the IT field at least say to take a 5min break every hour to relax and help keep them fresh, thats not a wasted 5
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Re:Humans are not engines (Score:4, Insightful)
Even worse, the HR departments are the biggest offenders at wasting time. Those people don't do anything productive all day. They just sit around talking to people, contracting for inane "training" courses about workplace harassment and other common-sense stuff, putting up roadblocks for hiring managers trying to find good employees, etc. Most companies would be better off if they eliminated HR departments altogether. W. Edwards Deming was a fan of this idea.
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And saying that it "cost" $4.8 million just isn't understanding humanity.
and applying this to you, you have been reading /. too long and are also making errors.
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Wasted? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wasted? - RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the article, the person who wrote it preemptively replies to the assessment with exactly that observation, except even better since it's backed up by data.
cost calculation? (Score:2, Funny)
OK, so I'm just a really dumb C programmer, but I'm having a hard time parsing "cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate" and coming up with a value of $25/hr for any value of "pay rate". And I've wasted more time on this than I did futzing with Google's PacMan...
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c=1.3-2.0*r
c-1.3=-2.0*r
(c-1.3)/-2.0=r
c=25
(25-1.3)/-2.0=r
-11.85=r
They pay $11.85 per hour to work at google.
To be serious though, I suspect they meant "1.3-2.0" to be a range.
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Nonsense figure (Score:4, Interesting)
There's all sorts of incorrect presumptions by the original article author, like all the time spent playing Google pac-man was necessarily at work. Like nobody is playing it in their own time.
Another one is that people would do work if it wasn't for pac-man. Hell I'd just find a different distraction to avoid work if the pac-man game wasn't around.
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Indeed, I simply cannot believe how much of lag there is in human resource and management education.
Yes, we came from an industrial age where if you were play pacman, taking a piss, chatting in the coffee room.... then you weren't screwing the bolts on the car or sewing tshirts.
You were definitely losing productivity.
Yet, when it comes to 'thinking' jobs, there is little to measure in terms of productivity. Most of what you pay for is the person being in the job, knowing the environment...
I'm not programmi
Wait... (Score:4, Informative)
What about urination? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, the folks at http://www.workpoop.com/ [workpoop.com] will calculate how much your company pays you to poop
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How long before toilets are installed at workstations?
All time not doing work is wasted time, don'tchaknow.
--
BMO
What about "Lost"? (Score:2)
10 significant digits. (Score:5, Insightful)
I suggest that Mr. Tony Wright learn a thing or two about significant digits. What a glorious heap of bull to take input like "if we assume our userbase is representative", "if we take Wolfram Alpha at its word","approximate cost of", "about 11,000" and then assert a figure like $298,803,988. 10 significant digits?!? Right.
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We can't cure it because the perception of 10^8 plus or minus about fifty percent sounds very unsure versus the marketing lies of picking a number in that range and doubling it unless you've had at least a basic level of education in maths, which the majority is not going to get until funding improves.
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I don't think so. (Score:4, Insightful)
Fortunately (Score:4, Insightful)
Life isn't all about productivity, or it would be boring as shit.
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It doesn't matter if your life is boring. Wasting time on games, or anything non-work-related, is stealing from your employer. Get back to work!
-- Management
Updated Synopsis (Score:4, Funny)
The first thing I said (Score:5, Funny)
Wish somebody told me earlier (Score:3, Funny)
I kept wondering how the fuck a Google banner could be responsible for lost productivity. I am on Google all the time searching for stuff and saw it once and thought cool and moved on....
Till today when I found out it was fucking playable.
So yeah, there is going to be some lost productivity due to this, but it will take decades for Google to get anywhere near the records set by Minesweeper and Solitaire.
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but it will take decades for Google to get anywhere near the records set by Minesweeper and Solitaire
Don't forget Hearts. As a kid, I used to work during the summer at the office where my dad used to work. Every single time I launched MS Hearts, I could easily find a few people on the network to play with without ever inviting anyone. Actually, now that I think about it, because it was the pre-YouTube days and all, I'm guessing Hearts was probably a considerable portion of daily network traffic.
That was predictable, wasn't it? (Score:2)
I have to imagine everyone saw that coming, since even an idiot in one of my IRC channels said "inb4 corporate firewalls block google for lost productivity!" when he first heard about it. Hehe.
Muh-wah-hah-hah-hah... (Score:3, Funny)
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Thats nothing- how much time to dissasemble it? (Score:5, Informative)
Someone seems to have taken a pac man rom and figured out how the game works. How the different ghosts move and follow you to why you can sometimes "miss" a ghost.
Facinating read... oddly hosted on someone's personal comcast account.
http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html [comcast.net]
Take your time...
In Soviet Russia . . . (Score:2)
A better estimate: $0 person hours (Score:3, Insightful)
This game only costs person hours if that time would have been spent towards labor if the game didn't exist.
People find distractions all throughout their daily lives, and it is silly to think that the existence of 1 more distraction is going to make a difference. Those people who felt like working kept working, and those people who were looking for a distraction found one, but they would have found one anyway.
Not mentioned in the statistics... (Score:3, Insightful)
...is the additional 100 million hours of productivity lost from all of the imagination-less people posting, blogging, tweeting, and re-tweeting the same inane comment, "wow, Google's Pac-Man logo just ruined millions of dollars of productivity today."
Makes same wrong assumptions as MPAA/RIAA/SPA (Score:4, Insightful)
The RIAA/MPAA/SPA make the assumption that every pirated copy is a lost sale, and then complain loudly to government and in the media about their "lost revenue", even though they have no data (that they are willing to share...) that says those people with the pirated copies would have bought a legitimate copy if a pirated copy was not available.
This is the same problem with the Pac Man "lost productivity" argument; it assumes the time spent playing Pac Man would have otherwise been spent productively. At least as insane a judgment as the piracy claimants, if not more so, since it's easily reasonable to assume that people who fuck around, fuck around regardless and that some people may have played Pac Man instead of some other form of fucking off like 20 minute cigarette breaks, long lunches, bullshitting around the coffee maker, etc.
But it's a great publicity stunt on their part; there are a ton of companies out there with obsessive, micromanaging and dictatorial bosses who would love to hire them to help "find" all the unproductive employees and systems that they just know are costing them money.
And what about the gains ? (Score:3, Insightful)
that's not so easy to calculate is it.
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So you're saying pacman turns you on.
And it wasn't Mrs. Pacman.
It was Mr. Pacman.
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player 2 was ms. pacman.
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Stop being a dick and let people access whatever sites they please, if they don't keep up with the work load, have management fire them. But seriously, don't think you know