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

#71

Post by _tom_ » 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

Dilbert is relevant: https://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=Write%20Minivan

Metrics are frequently inaccurate and easy to game.

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

#72

Post by oh_sigh » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:29 AM UTC

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…

Funny, where I work, someone saying "I haven't 'prod accessed' in 3 weeks" is a humble-brag about being so important that they are only writing design docs and doing high level reviews.

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

#73

Post by _tom_ » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:30 AM UTC

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #69

hncurious wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess I should stop squashing my commits when I merge!

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

#74

Post by oh_sigh » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:30 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 do that (1 commit = 1 bug). Mostly to have a nice nested structure of bugs at the end of the quarter to help write my performance reviews. The bugs are linked in a parent-child relationship going from high-level 'user journey' bugs, to mid-level feature planning bugs, to individual commit bugs.

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

#75

Post by xpe » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:33 AM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #31

darkstar999 wrote: post #15

> we will help you find a good place, where you will earn more and work even less Wow you're really selling it for us. PR nightmare.

It sounds great, honestly. Sounds like his employees are working more for less pay. I know he's insulting his employees but still pretty awesome if he actually found a better position for his people. Who doesn't want to make more and work less? I wish I could make money while doing nothing.

> It sounds great, honestly. Sounds like his employees are working more for less pay. I know he's insulting his employees but still pretty awesome if he actually found a better position for his people.

You believe the CEO's claims?

I bet he has a bridge he'll see you too...

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

#76

Post by theamk » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:33 AM UTC

ComputerGuru wrote: post #28

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?

A lot of corporate chat/email traffic is the very specific technical questions. For those, you can tell if the person is giving good technical advice or generating noise by reading just a dozen messages.

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

#77

Post by dxf » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:35 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…

>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.

Sorry to hijack your comment, but I would like to say:

There are many, many good reasons why someone would want to quit a job after only a short period of time at a company (harassment being an obvious one). It took me a long time to realize this fact, and stop viewing a quick departure as a potential red flag and also stop asking questions like "Why are you looking for a new role?"

Someone leaving a toxic environment really doesn't want to spend any part of the interview talking about the past; they want to show you they will be a valuable member of your team, while also learning if your company is one they want to work for. We should all consider that the next time we are reviewing resumes and interviewing candidates.

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

#78

Post by jfrunyon » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:37 AM UTC

cratermoon wrote: post #39

Busyness is not productivity. But organizations have a history of using metrics that measure 'busyness' when they say they are measuring productivity. Things like how often you are seen at the water cooler or chatting with a co-worker, how quickly you respond to communications, how quickly can you be reached, any time, anywhere, whenever someone wants to reach you. https://maxfrenzel.medium.com/in-praise-of-deep-work…

The best part is how many places expect you to be both constantly busy and also constantly immediately available.

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

#79

Post by Gunax » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:38 AM UTC

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 for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.

--Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson.

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

#80

Post by MattGaiser » Thu, Aug 05, 2021, 3:42 AM UTC

geoduck14 wrote: post #68

908B64B197 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not only that, but other engineers apparently pointed out the gaming and management didn’t care.