Xsolla fires 150 employees using analysis of chat and email activity • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by kasey_junk » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:10 AM UTC

DevKoala wrote: post #49

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…

Is that new? I’ve been involved with teams like that going back 20 years but when it gets hard to hire USA based devs it trickles down to those contractors too.

I’m not in a position to hire Eastern European contractors currently but do see how tight the market is otherwise and my experience would suggest increased contractor billing rates and/or more constraints on when you can dip into the contractor pool?

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

#62

Post by 908B64B197 » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:12 AM UTC

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…

Spoken from the man himself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHI7RTKhlz0

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

#63

Post by simonw » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:13 AM UTC

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.

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

#64

Post by toofy » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:16 AM UTC

We’re still incredibly limited in what behaviors do and don’t increase a teams productivity. I’ve worked in groups where some of the least productive people were also maybe the most valuable. Very strong in keeping cohesion and moral up inside the team. Whether it was the way they smiled or greeted people when they saw them or the way they just knew how to spot someone who was tangling with a problem and instinctively knew how to nudge that person away from the edge. I still cant even slightly pin down precisely what people like this bring, but I know I know this …thing… exists and it’s something important.

And when given the choice I’ve seen teams almost battle to get these “low producers” into the group even though their output wasn’t top-tier.

I don’t know how we measure for these slippery traits without falling into woo traps but until we figure out what to look for, great team building will remain an art.

We’re nowhere near a point where we can accurately measure the weird and chaotic quirks that make up a top-tier team. Building a team is still far more of an art more than a science.

I get letting a person or two go who have clearly demonstrated they’re not a good fit, but I can’t help but wonder how much of the kool-aid this company has drank to think firing this many people based on weird data measurements was at all a good idea.

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

#65

Post by sam0x17 » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:17 AM UTC

And it's funny because in my experience the people not chatting and checking email all the time are the ones actually getting work done.

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

#66

Post by abledon » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:17 AM UTC

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…

sounds like hell, but at the same time, he is a legend.

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

#67

Post by mmh0000 » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:23 AM UTC

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.

Thankfully, someone has already create a tool [0] for just this scenario!

[0] https://github.com/artiebits/fake-git-history

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

#68

Post by geoduck14 » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:24 AM UTC

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…

If getting a promotion really is as easy as committing lots of lines of code, and you are THE ONLY one to figure it out, then you deserve a promotion

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

#69

Post by 2muchcoffeeman » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:24 AM UTC

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.

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.

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

#70

Post by opinion-is-bad » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:28 AM UTC

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

Simpson’s Paradox takes many forms. If your sampling or measurement criteria are wrong, even subtlety, then the results are nonsense without anyone knowing. Practicing statistics in an area for which you are not an expert is almost always a bad idea.