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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

#51

Post by 908B64B197 »

akg_67 wrote: post #45
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 a…

> 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.

Career red flag right here.

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

#52

Post by lumost »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #32
hncurious wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Result: git committing, excessively.

And stop squashing.

I work at a company where code activity is reviewed from time to time by individuals who are at least somewhat familiar with the breadth of activity an Engineer does.

Curiously, it's desirable to both have many PRs and few revisions - but also large ambiguous and difficult PRs. Obviously this can thus be gamed.

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

#53

Post by combatentropy »

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.…

> Jira, Confluence, Gmail, chats, documents, dashboards

The top users of these pieces of software have all been canned, since they obviously were doing no real work.

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

#55

Post by uncomputation »

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…

The problem with any metric is that old quote about “when a metric becomes a measurement it’s useless.” How do you recognize someone who commits the same “amount” of code but which is consistently shitty and has to be reworked later from someone who commits a lesser “amount” but guides the project overall to a better place? Or someone who is spinning gears all the time: compiling code, spinning up VMs, in meetings all the time, and yet whose absence would be unnoticed?

Even a system of assigning a certain number of tasks. Sounds reasonable enough, right? But in my experience if you need X tasks per Y, the tasks will soon begin to conform to the metric. “Oh I need 8 gold doubloons this week, let me assign all of those to fixing the white space in this file.”

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

#56

Post by codespin »

This looks like the inverse of "everyone needs to come back to the office so that we know you are working".

I doubt this will go well since if it keeps happening unproductive people will become the best at gaming the system.

But at the same time, there has to be a better way than being observed by a boss in a physical office. I don't want to commute just because people on my team who were unproductive in the office are now just as unproductive at home and not seeing their face daily makes it hard to tell if they took another job and just haven't told anyone.

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

#57

Post by blululu »

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…

Reminds me of a classic story about Bill Atkinson back in the 80's: TLDR; Management was counting lines of code as their metric of productivity. Which was great until someone actually cleaned up the code base and added -2000 lines of code. https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

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

#58

Post by duxup »

>Nadia and her care team partnered with seven leading HR agencies, as we will help you find a good place, where you will earn more and work even less.

Earn more and work less?

That's weird.

Those poor folks who still work for him will be working more and earning less than those he fired.

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

#60

Post by 908B64B197 »

hncurious wrote: post #24
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.

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 code that would be checked-in.

Inheritance? Polymorphism? Interfaces? Not in the generated code for sure. Duplicated code all over. Other engineers were furious but management kept defending him "he's just a junior and his metrics are off the charts, you guys just can't keep up with him".

Three promotions in 18 months and jumped to a FAANG not long after.

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