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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

#41

Post by gricardo99 »

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

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

#43

Post by MattGaiser »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #36
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.…

I suspect this will be an unpopular opinion here, but I think that if you set the thresholds conservatively enough, a tool like this could be useful in identifying people who are not contributing. Where I work there are searchable tool invocation logs and there have been cases where someone is only compiling code one or twice a month, who not too long after I discovered this made an exit. If you're enough sigmas belo…

I think the problem is this can only work once before you set off a ton of system gaming.

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

#44

Post by MattGaiser »

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?

That would require management to be a lot more critical of metrics presented to them than I have ever seen.

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

#45

Post by akg_67 »

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…

LOL, reminded me of my own case. I had the fewest issues closed and longest time to close owned issues. But my boss knew the reasons and was very understanding that I was acting as escalation point for the team. It was the upper management, who was lead by a bean counter CEO, couldn't understand why I was still around with such low productivity. Saving grace was my boss and sales people who kept hearing good things about me from customers.

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

#46

Post by TeeMassive »

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…

At a company I used to work the manager of our next money cow project promoted the 2-4 people who committed features the fastest. They were "10 times as fast" as the others and therefore it made sense for him to give them the title of "architects" and give them veto power.

Turns out they spewed out the most ugly, over-engineered and unmaintainable code that all the others had to fix/maintain/understand their mess.

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

#47

Post by combatentropy »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #38
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…

An old boss of mine used to acknowledge people that had contributed excessively high LoCs at the weekly standup. Typically it used to be an indicator that somebody had completed a large portion of work. Then a new guy started topping the LoC charts every week, and it was discovered that he was reformatting every file he touched to use his preferred indentation scheme. It was a pretty lighthearted thing to begin with,…

In 1982 Apple was having programmers report lines of code. Bill Atkinson refactored Quickdraw and put down a negative number, -2000 lines of code. Then they stopped asking him to fill out the form. https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

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

#48

Post by 6nf »

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.…

My employer went this route. Gamified all the developers' output. I quit on the spot and I was not alone.

We will see how it turns out but I still believe that gamifying everything is a bad idea. There's no way to align the incentives with company profits using stupid metrics.

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

#49

Post by DevKoala »

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.

The labor market isn’t tight when it comes to software. The overseas talent is incredible abroad and easy to work with once you have the experience.

As someone who works with multiple teams overseas (Belarus and Ukraine), I have certainly not experienced any issue replacing key team members here in the USA with members abroad. Yeah, sometimes I have to wake up at weird hours, but we get things done.

This approach has been so successful, that lately we only hire architect level engineers in the USA. For all other roles we prefer to hire abroad through specific consulting firms.

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