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Xsolla fires 150 employees using analysis of chat and email activity

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

#141

Post by xsmasher »

_tom_ wrote: post #71
gricardo99 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, some SCM metrics could be used to reach exactly the wrong conclusion: lines-of-code add/removed. Oh my gosh! Jonny coder over there has been deleting, deleting! our code. Fire him immediately! Many years ago there was a discussion on HN about that same topic[1] (And since then many more I'm sure). 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10734815

Dilbert is relevant: https://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=Write%20Minivan Metrics are frequently inaccurate and easy to game.

A decade earlier, this story at Apple

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

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

#142

Post by roussanoff »

Agapitov later gave a long interview to Meduza explaining the decision. It's surprisingly honest. Here is an interesting quote:

In America, in recent years, both in our company and in the media, various minorities have been actively protected and people are very cautious about the dismissal of gays, blacks, and more recently, Asians. But in Xsolla, we did not give immunity to these groups, because all decisions that a human makes, from the point of view of Americans, have a risk of being biased, and our algorithmic solution is as unbiased as possible. Therefore, from the point of view of American media and American civil society, for us it is much better and more indisputable than if some manager fired someone.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=https:/... (In Russian, Google translated)

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

#143

Post by bonzini »

bgro wrote: post #87
TimSchumann wrote: post #7

Reminds me of a story I heard from a friend. Some consulting firm came in to the company and decided, based on number of commits (or some such metric), that one particular engineer was the lowest performing engineer on the team. So, management fired them. Turns out that engineer was the one who everyone side-channeled with to get help when blocked. They were the one who knew the system best and were enabling everyone…

I was the go-to on almost every team at my last job when there was a hotfix, major risk change, security fix, etc. I knew the whole system pretty well and knew how to find and match up our awful logging to actual code and find the flaw far faster than anybody. I'd develop and test a fix and quietly discuss with that team's tech lead about risk vs reward concerns to see if they agree or want to discuss changes, then I…

Sometimes I have seen the opposite problem, where people look like they do not have enough engagement in customer cases, because most of the bugs are ironed out before the new release is announced.

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

#144

Post by Snawoot »

duxup wrote: post #129
bmn__ wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your sarcasm detector is broken/not calibrated for Russian.

That kinda 'sarcasm' for folks you just laid off is pretty harsh ... you sure that's sarcasm?

I'm Russian, I'm aware about context. "Work less and earn more" is sort of idiom. Not exactly, but close to that. Yes, that was a sarcasm, and yes it's pretty harsh.

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

#145

Post by hashkb »

MathYouF wrote: post #40
hashkb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flip side: engineers who curry favor without delivering value can't hide it quite as easily. Those who do their jobs without sucking up have a chance for recognition.

It's pretty cynical to view the person who is helping others get unstuck as "currying favor". In every place I've worked, the person who has helped me get unstuck has always been one of the most productive and talented members of the team. If they weren't, why would I need their help?

Not what I'm saying. I'm saying there are plenty of terrible engineers coasting and this will catch them.

Edit: I've been top of regular productivity charts AND the unanimous answer to "who do you go to to get unstuck?" at at least one company you've heard of. Management regularly promoted the suck ups. Read something like Blind and you'll know how prevalent this is.

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

#146

Post by hashkb »

planet-and-halo wrote: post #85
MathYouF wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty cynical to view the person who is helping others get unstuck as "currying favor". In every place I've worked, the person who has helped me get unstuck has always been one of the most productive and talented members of the team. If they weren't, why would I need their help?

A guy at my job is a gamer and describes it as "buffing the group." Just as in a game, the healer could be the team MVP, but if you measure DPS you are never going to realize it.

The healers are usually the best players. They'd be better at DPS but everyone wants to be DPS and demands heals constantly.

Source: was a priest in WoW back in the day. Because nobody else wanted to, not because my warlock sucked.

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

#147

Post by underseacables »

Gunax wrote: post #79

Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo... Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better…

This, and the futures of Daemon and Freedom(TM) absolutely terrify me. It makes the banging sound in my brain of creating additional income streams, improving retirement, and security, louder and louder.

Each and every one of us are expendable.

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

#148

Post by croes »

gricardo99 wrote: post #41
TimSchumann wrote: post #7

Reminds me of a story I heard from a friend. Some consulting firm came in to the company and decided, based on number of commits (or some such metric), that one particular engineer was the lowest performing engineer on the team. So, management fired them. Turns out that engineer was the one who everyone side-channeled with to get help when blocked. They were the one who knew the system best and were enabling everyone…

Indeed, some SCM metrics could be used to reach exactly the wrong conclusion: lines-of-code add/removed. Oh my gosh! Jonny coder over there has been deleting, deleting! our code. Fire him immediately! Many years ago there was a discussion on HN about that same topic[1] (And since then many more I'm sure). 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10734815

Maybe that's the reason why programmer using spaces instead of tabs earn more money. They get payed by file size

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

#149

Post by Tempest1981 »

simonw wrote: post #63
a012 wrote: post #54

This reminds me some people who open Jira tickets for every tiny things, then have fixes for these tickets.

I think that's an excellent practice - not as a way of gaming the system, but for maintaining useful documentation about what happened and why. A bug fix without an associated ticket is missing context: who spotted the bug? When? What were the steps to reproduce? Even a ticket with no content is valuable - it gives me somewhere I can post additional comments and screenshots later, or link to other related tickets.

And an area that QA should be aware of, during testing. and maybe to update automated tests.

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

#150

Post by throwaway675309 »

trhway wrote: post #139
ironMonkey wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- the 1st, sounding great in Russian, yet hard to translate, is "work energetically like f&cking or f&ck off" it is a simple "work your ass out or walk your ass out" without the unnecessary slavic macho-bravade of foul words.

thanks, it is definitely good translation, and i'll add it to my English. In this case I intentionally tried (and looks like i succeeded :) to deliver the "slavic macho-bravade of foul words" (well put, you definitely have a way with words) as expressed by the CEO as it is a directly related to that harsh firing and very illustrative of the CEO part of the picture.

Speaking as a former ESL teacher, I wouldn't. I've never heard such an English saying and it sounds rather unnatural. A more idiomatic equivalent would be, "shape up or ship out."
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