Gaming the Bots!

As podcasters, @carolinabigblue and @michaelrowe01 have been pretty lucky.  We’ve been doing this between different shows since 2006.  I guess that makes us old timers in the world of podcasting.  In that time we’ve had the pleasure of having @Veronica Belmont on our show, and meeting her in person at least twice.  This has been a challenge given that the epicenter of podcasting appears to be San Francisco, and we are located in RTP, NC.

When we heard that she was moving into the world bots as a product manager for growbot, we just had to check it out.  Growbot monitors slack channels that you invite it to and captures metrics about employee performance.  As drones in the corporate world, our three co-hosts all have to deal with the periodic rankings and appraisals, and I for one am really bad at keeping track of all the positive things people tell me about work I am doing.   Imagine if Growbot could do that for me?

Of course, systems like this do have a challenge, people can game the system.  I tested this when I sent a “kudos” message as a repsonse to “kudos” I had received.  And growbot was smart enough to see what I was doing.

This was a fun test, and I loved the emoji that they are using for NO!

The other thought I had while playing with Growbot over the last few weeks is all about Flair.  If you’ve seen the movie “Office Space”, Jennifer Aniston’s character works at a theme restaurant where the servers are required to have buttons on their vests.  The buttons are considered “flair”.  She get’s a dressing down for not having enough flair on her vest.  I worry that if there is large corporate adoption of bots like growbot, we will end up with competitive situations where managers give you a dressing down for not having enough “kudos” this week.

In the mean time, I am enjoying playing with growbot on our podcast slack.  And I am sure that as they enhance the bot it will be more fun to figure out what makes a positive comment and what makes a negative.

What bots are you playing with lately?