Firing Barry:VR programs help with employee training

Afriend sent me a text message taking issue with a hot take position someone else has written in this newspaper—something like how many Beatles might dance on the head of a pin or whether Pete Rose could have made it as a college halfback.

I don’t have any particular opinion about this position, but I understand my friend feels strongly about it; far too strongly given the objective inconsequentiality of the argument. Still, I find it amusing to wind him up, so we go back and forth for a while. I understand he understands it’s all silly, but at the same time it’s something he cares deeply about. He wonders how we can tolerate such idiocracy in our ranks.

Finally, because I have to work sometime, I sent him a message to the effect that I will relay his concerns to whatever higher powers may be, though of course I had no intention of doing so. And then, after an appropriate interval, I sent him back an apologetic message saying that while I was surprised, greater minds had convened and decided he was right. So they had fired the offender.

A few long moments passed. The ellipsis bubbled on my phone, then resolved:

Oh, I didn’t mean for that to happen. I think, not unkindly: My friend is an idiot.

Before I can send him a message telling him I’m kidding, my phone bubbles again:

You’re kidding, he typed. Then he—or his auto-correct—called me a “doughnut.”

. . .

I probably deserved being called a doughnut. (Could have been worse; he could have called me “cocksure.”) Because I am a jerk for having made him feel bad, if only for the microseconds he might have seriously considered that his grousing over something trivial might have caused some other person to lose a job.

While we all understand there are some people who revel in causing others pain, most of us aren’t like that most of the time.

Even Donald Trump, who made “you’re fired” his catchphrase, once admitted to Oprah Winfrey he doesn’t like firing “good, hard-working people who maybe don’t have it”—who “tried, and it just doesn’t work.” Which, in my experience, encompasses most people who get fired—as opposed to “laid off,” which implies a certain blamelessness on the part of the separated.

Firing is traumatic, both for the person being fired and the person doing the firing. When I was very young, I fired people I didn’t have the authority to fire in the heat of heavy deadline pressure. (One of them stayed fired and later thanked me for it.) Later I left the highest paying job I ever had because I hated firing people who deserved it; I turned down a chance to interview for a very high-profile job because I knew it would entail having to fire some people who didn’t deserve it.

Maybe I’m not tough enough for big boy business. Maybe I’m fine with that.

But technology could make me better, according to a story I saw in the Los Angeles Times last week.

Reporter Sam Dean wrote about the virtual reality startup Talespin, which is developing the technology as a tool businesses might use to train managers and human resources officers. Dean wrote about his experience playing through a scenario where he was assigned to fire an employee in his early 60s named Barry, not for poor job performance but for some unspecified “inappropriate behavior”—six reported incidents over the past year.

At first Dean handled the situation badly—the virtual character broke down sobbing. He rebooted and ran the scenario again. Barry got mad; in attempting to smooth over the situation Dean pointed out that the character had “a ton of experience, and plenty of time left to make [his] mark.” This caused the program to generate a warning to “be careful with comments that can be misconstrued as ageism.”

As he went along, Dean discovered he was getting better at firing Barry.

“By letting you experience the pain of others over and over again, [these VR programs] train you to shrug it off,” Dean wrote. “After confronting a thorny HR problem like Barry in the safety of the goggles, I could more effectively stick to the script in real life.”

I don’t doubt that mimicking and rehearsing the act of firing someone would desensitize you to the act of firing someone in real life. Part of military training is mimicking and rehearsing the act of killing an enemy.

It’s interesting that virtual reality—which only a few years ago was touted as a revolutionary technology that was going to irrevocably change the way all of us live and maybe entice more than a few of us to spend most of our waking lives in the alternative world of cyber-dreams—seems to have leveled off into a way to train us to care less about each other.

Our brave new world will have its Barrys, those who can’t quite keep up with the ever-evolving expectations of our society. They will need to be dealt with; dealing with them is a marketable skill. It’s easier to do so with your empathy turned off. Here’s a program that can do that for you; you get an accreditation when you pass the class.

At one point in his story, Dean finds that to get through the training simulation, it’s helpful to “be the robot.” I suppose it is, in a lot of situations. I don’t imagine I’m the only one who is frustrated by people who seem uninterested in or unsuited for the jobs that they’ve been hired to do. And no one should have to put up with a Barry who makes them feel unsafe or uncomfortable; there is anxiety enough in most workplaces these days without having to tolerate boorish or bullying comments. But pain has a purpose.

Pain exists to remind us damage is being done. Barry might deserve his termination, his pain, but should the process of severing Barry from whatever his job represents to him—a revenue stream, a means of self-identification, the sum of his life—be a painless operation for the executioner?

I want to feel bad when something bad happens, even if that bad thing is a necessary thing, or even in the longer run a good thing. The only useful things the robots can do for me is wash my car and vacuum my floors, and I’m not sure I want them to do that. I sure don’t want them editing my prose. If you want to fire Barry—if you have to fire Barry—it still should cost you something.