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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

#21

Post by jodrellblank »

lpd1 wrote: post #6

"You received this email because my big data team analyzed your activities in Jira, Confluence, Gmail, chats, documents, dashboards and tagged you as unengaged and unproductive employees. In other words, you were not always present at the workplace when you worked remotely." Sweet. Maybe we are hitting the day when all of your code commits, all communication, location in the building, telecommute meetings, etc. etc.…

We are already at that day: https://www.zdnet.com/article/i-looked-at-all-the-ways-micro... discussed on HN here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25816297 and the linked https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-365s-productivity-sc...

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

#22

Post by hashkb »

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…

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.

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

#23

Post by robertwt7 »

Wow that's crazy. 150 at the same time? I'm not sure how long did it took him to review all of those before taking that kind of decision.

But again not sure if that's the whole reason behind the action, maybe the company is not doing so well at the same time? That's why they needed to change.

Regardless of the reason, I'm sure firing 150 people at the same time will give you some backslash in any way. Good luck to all those 150 employee for their future

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

#24

Post by hncurious »

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…

Result: git committing, excessively.

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

#25

Post by matheusmoreira »

lpd1 wrote: post #6

"You received this email because my big data team analyzed your activities in Jira, Confluence, Gmail, chats, documents, dashboards and tagged you as unengaged and unproductive employees. In other words, you were not always present at the workplace when you worked remotely." Sweet. Maybe we are hitting the day when all of your code commits, all communication, location in the building, telecommute meetings, etc. etc.…

Every single day the world gets closer to the cyberpunk dystopias of science fiction. It's eerie to watch this sort of thing happening in real life.

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

#26

Post by cratermoon »

ncann wrote: post #12
lpd1 wrote: post #6

"You received this email because my big data team analyzed your activities in Jira, Confluence, Gmail, chats, documents, dashboards and tagged you as unengaged and unproductive employees. In other words, you were not always present at the workplace when you worked remotely." Sweet. Maybe we are hitting the day when all of your code commits, all communication, location in the building, telecommute meetings, etc. etc.…

Can't wait for that day, so that I can write some scripts to check JIRA every minute, scroll through my Gmail inbox at random interval and add likes to my boss's messages on Teams. I'll have the top score in no time. Obligatory Dilbert https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13

I got someone to cover for me. https://youtu.be/R_rF4kcqLkI?t=174

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

#27

Post by ComputerGuru »

sokoloff wrote: post #3

Want to bet that there was a round of human review applied after the algorithm ran where, at a minimum, employees judged to be high-performing (or otherwise favored) were saved even though they were initially flagged by the AI/data analysis?

I mean, that’s better than no second, human round, no?

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

#28

Post by ComputerGuru »

bluediscussy22 wrote: post #4

I am often surprised how often email and slack chat volume corresponds to how productive an employee is. I’ve often had employees I’ve had to fire or resigned that after the fact I check their activity and they basically aren’t doing anything. But using this data without the context is pretty foolish.

And I’ve seen employees that would stun you with how productive they seem based on how much they post in the corporate chat and email, but on actual review did absolutely nothing besides add to the noise?

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

#29

Post by dilyevsky »

kasey_junk wrote: post #8

The only thing surprising about this is it happened in a tight labor market. Perhaps it isn’t tight for this industry/market? I was in the room one time when HR decided to let go of 250 people based on the sq footage rate of the office they worked in. It’s not at all odd that in the post office world they are looking at other dumb metrics for these decisions.

I don’t think labor market is as tight in the rest of the world rn as it is in the us. The immigration halt over last two years as well as insane equity growth really put upward pressure on comp and so some folks are in a bit of denial here. Not so much in eastern europe

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

#30

Post by cratermoon »

haswell wrote: post #11

Depending on the nature of the employee’s role, looking at hard metrics gathered from the systems the employee works in seems like something every line manager already does. One could argue that a system capable of essentially automating part of the manager’s job is a net positive and could increase productivity and possibly even fairness in evaluating some aspects of performance. But at most, this should be suppleme…

> One could argue that a system capable of essentially automating part of the manager’s job

But not a system that could automate a regular workers' job so they don't have to be constantly checking Jira, Confluence, Slack, mail, etc, etc?

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