Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Xsolla fires 150 employees using analysis of chat and email activity

gameworldobserver.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 154 posts

Re: Xsolla fires 150 employees using analysis of chat and email activity

#111

Post by aahortwwy »

908B64B197 wrote: post #60
hncurious wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Result: git committing, excessively.

Reminds me of someone. Long ago, he joined a company fresh out of college that pretty much measured dev productivity with number of lines written. He quickly realized that it was a red-flag, but jumping ship so soon was going to be hard to explain on a resume. So he basically started writing code in two stages using a codegen tool: something high level not under source control that would generate extremely verbose co…

> So he basically started writing code in two stages using a codegen tool: something high level not under source control that would generate extremely verbose code that would be checked-in.

I do this unironically. Mostly for producing unit tests from more sophisticated testing tools. I'm not silly enough to tell my coworkers that's what I'm doing, though.

Re: Xsolla fires 150 employees using analysis of chat and email activity

#112

Post by Clewza313 »

dxf wrote: post #102
skeeter2020 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still a red flag that needs to be explained. Unfortunately most employees will assume they did not leave voluntarily. The OP's reticence to jump is understandable

But that's my point. It shouldn't be a red flag on the candidate, and shouldn't need to be explained.

That's the way it ought to be, but unfortunately that's not the way it is considered by many in reality, so it's rational for a candidate to want to avoid that situation.

Re: Xsolla fires 150 employees using analysis of chat and email activity

#113

Post by hulitu »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #69
hncurious wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Result: git committing, excessively.

I’ve worked with a guy who made lots of small commits with the same commit text. You’d look at a pull request with 30 very minor changes possibly in many places with the same message.

"Bug fixes and performance improvements." Why blame the poor guy when even big companies do this.

Re: Xsolla fires 150 employees using analysis of chat and email activity

#114

Post by higeorge13 »

I know that all corporate data are owned by the companies, but i would leave any company that regularly checks my communication activities to “measure” my performance. Jira, confluence, git commits, etc. is acceptable and can be quantified somehow, but slack dms or emails? Do you also want my camera footage? This is toxic.

Re: Xsolla fires 150 employees using analysis of chat and email activity

#115

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

The translation of the letter has lost some of its undertones, which betray some psychological disorders of the author.

For example, "... If you want to stay in contact with me, please write me a long letter..." should be better translated as "... If you want to remain my acquaintance, please write me a long letter..."

(source: I'm russian)

Re: Xsolla fires 150 employees using analysis of chat and email activity

#116

Post by smsm42 »

trhway wrote: post #81

A bit of Russian color. The CEO FB posts in Russian: - the 1st, sounding great in Russian, yet hard to translate, is "work energetically like f&cking or f&ck off" - the 2nd is "looking for a great PR professional in Russia" https://vc.ru/hr/277765-glava-xsolla-obyasnil-massovye-uvoln... While without directly offensive words, not like the FB posts above, his message firing the people is still written in a very insult…

Speaking of which, the Russian in the firing post is atrocious. It's ungrammatical, full of typos and jargon, and gives an impression that the author can not express himself properly in any language. Which is kinda bad for a CEO :) Really, English translation is a much more coherent text than the Russian original.

Re: Xsolla fires 150 employees using analysis of chat and email activity

#120

Post by trhway »

smsm42 wrote: post #116
trhway wrote: post #81

A bit of Russian color. The CEO FB posts in Russian: - the 1st, sounding great in Russian, yet hard to translate, is "work energetically like f&cking or f&ck off" - the 2nd is "looking for a great PR professional in Russia" https://vc.ru/hr/277765-glava-xsolla-obyasnil-massovye-uvoln... While without directly offensive words, not like the FB posts above, his message firing the people is still written in a very insult…

Speaking of which, the Russian in the firing post is atrocious. It's ungrammatical, full of typos and jargon, and gives an impression that the author can not express himself properly in any language. Which is kinda bad for a CEO :) Really, English translation is a much more coherent text than the Russian original.

the guy is probably having a bout of hysteria. As already been mentioned there seems to be issues with growth and revenue (and that is in the year when gaming industry surged due to the pandemic), and that most probably threatens the would be otherwise $3B IPO, and thus such a nervous breakdown.

He comes as a tremendous jerk. I mean kicking out 150 people in your hometown where job market is much worse than say in Moscow or St.Petersburg, and with such a spite making sure that they publicly got that "fired for performance reason" black label on resume.

My limited understanding though is that such easy firing doesn't work in Russia. The fired employees probably have a case, and while it probably makes sense just to move on, some of them may decide to drag the company a bit through it with related publicity/etc.

Post reply on HN