Xsolla fires 150 employees using analysis of chat and email activity

https://gameworldobserver.com/2021/08/04/xsolla-fires-150-employees-using-big-data-and-ai-analysis-ceos-letter-causes-controversy

by roussanoff • 5 years ago

199 150 5 years ago

gameworldobserver.com

sbarre• 5 years ago

I guess that beats doing Pulse Check surveys.

I mean obviously there are internal problems if that many people are disengaged to the point of needing to be let go, but after reading the letter, if the company follows through on helping everyone find a new job, it could have been worse?

coder-3• 5 years ago

obviously there are internal problems

Exactly. If 150 employees are not productive I hesitate to conclude that that's entirely the fault of the employees. Maybe it's not that those people are wholly unproductive, rather that they're culling the worst ones as a weird way of boosting productivity (also scares the others into working harder, I guess)

sokoloff• 5 years ago

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?

ComputerGuru2• 5 years ago

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

ari__• 5 years ago

I believe the implication there was that low-performers favored by upper management (for reasons like nepotism) were kept as opposed to productive employees whose performance is not reflected in "tick the box" KPIs.

MattGaiser5• 5 years ago

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

dasil003• 5 years ago

I'm sorry you've only ever worked for incompetent management. I assure you that is not universally the case.

x0x0• 5 years ago

I'd bet your right. This is close to a termination for cause. If someone fired my reports for cause (rather than a we need to lower burn layoff) without my signoff, I'd be right out the door with them.

bluediscussy22• 5 years ago

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.

sjg0072• 5 years ago

That’s a gooood reason.

ComputerGuru2• 5 years ago

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?

theamk• 5 years ago

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.

owlbynight• 5 years ago

They probably let go some valuable employees, given that things like this lack nuance entirely. All of the services listed could be considered distractions from work in several situations depending on the engineer.

cratermoon6• 5 years ago

Maybe, but as another comment[1] notes, there was probably a human in the loop at some point who was able to "save" people they thought should be kept, regardless of what the data said. Either that, or the process was seeded with an "ignore list" of exceptions.

1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28069040

lpd1• 5 years ago

"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. could be run through the Big Machine and give you a grade. All automated.

A parrot could be trained to fire people in a special HR chamber.

ncann• 5 years ago

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

cratermoon6• 5 years ago

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

derwiki• 5 years ago

Everything about their employees is monitored and tracked, down to individual finger and eye movements, to prevent waste and track performance. All emails that are sent out include an estimate of how long they should take to read. Go to fast, you get scolded for not paying attention. Go too slow, you get scolded for inefficiency. Get it just right? You get scolded for being a smartass.

—- Snowcrash

D-Coder• 5 years ago

Communist logic:

Three prisoners in communist East Germany were talking about their crimes.

1: "I always got to work five minutes early. They convicted me of spying."

2: "I always got to work five minutes late. They convicted me of sabotage."

3: "I always got to work exactly on time. They convicted me of owning a Western watch."

jodrellblank• 5 years ago

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...

matheusmoreira2• 5 years ago

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.

asdfasgasdgasdg2• 5 years ago

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 below the median, it might be worth a closer look at least. Human review would be necessary of course. There are a plethora of ways to contribute. But it doesn't seem controversial that there must be some signal to be extracted from logs like those described in TFA.

MattGaiser5• 5 years ago

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

uncomputation• 5 years ago

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.”

oh_sigh3• 5 years ago

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.

6nf• 5 years ago

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.

planet-and-halo3• 5 years ago

The problem with "gamifying" work is well-known to anyone who actually studies human motivation. Any exercise of control, and especially anything that makes people focus on their performance rather than the actual task they are doing, is bound to decrease motivation and quality. When kids worry about the test and their grade, they learn less. When professional athletes start worrying about the score instead of trusting their bodies, they do worse. This is a pretty basic feature of human psychology, but for some silly reason we think we can outwit it if we make our methods of control "fun" enough.

combatentropy2• 5 years ago

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.

TimSchumann• 5 years ago

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's productivity, it just didn't show up in the metrics.

I wonder how many false positives they got here.

hashkb4• 5 years ago

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.

MathYouF2• 5 years ago

It's pretty cynical to view the person who is helping others get unstuck as "currying favor".

In every place I've worked, the person who has helped me get unstuck has always been one of the most productive and talented members of the team. If they weren't, why would I need their help?

hncurious• 5 years ago

Result: git committing, excessively.

ARandomerDude• 5 years ago

And stop squashing.

908B64B1974• 5 years ago

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.

mmh0000• 5 years ago

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

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

2muchcoffeeman• 5 years ago

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.

AmericanChopper• 5 years ago

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, but they stopped mentioning it entirely after that.

combatentropy2• 5 years ago

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...

gricardo99• 5 years ago

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

opinion-is-bad• 5 years ago

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.

_tom_2• 5 years ago

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

Metrics are frequently inaccurate and easy to game.

croes• 5 years ago

Maybe that's the reason why programmer using spaces instead of tabs earn more money. They get payed by file size

akg_67• 5 years ago

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.

908B64B1974• 5 years ago

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.

TeeMassive2• 5 years ago

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.

blululu• 5 years ago

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...

908B64B1974• 5 years ago

Spoken from the man himself

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

bgro• 5 years ago

I was the go-to on almost every team at my last job when there was a hotfix, major risk change, security fix, etc. I knew the whole system pretty well and knew how to find and match up our awful logging to actual code and find the flaw far faster than anybody. I'd develop and test a fix and quietly discuss with that team's tech lead about risk vs reward concerns to see if they agree or want to discuss changes, then I'd get a pull request out there.

The management / executive team would always hear about major crisis hotfixes, then immediately see my name on the high visibility pull request. Thus, they think I personally must have been the cause of the problem. Somehow I was on every team and responsible for every feature, every hotfix, and the poor work every team developed that irritated clients. (Funny how I was never responsible for the positive things, though.)

Then there'd be companywide meeting / email to cover what happened with a screenshot with my name by a hotfix with comments like "Let's not have to do things like this going forward." "Some of us have to actually work for a living, and heh I don't know about you guys but _I_ don't appreciate having to panic review things like THIS!"

pts_2• 5 years ago

Career management enters the chat. Play blame game nothing gets done.

bonzini• 5 years ago

Sometimes I have seen the opposite problem, where people look like they do not have enough engagement in customer cases, because most of the bugs are ironed out before the new release is announced.

ssss11• 5 years ago

Similar to an experience I had in my first job - repairing electronics (pcb’s, components, tuning radios and lasers) for supply chain environments and we were (loosely) reported on via how many jobs were completed per day and the average for a technician was somewhere around 5, so 25 per week.

The experienced technicians would leave the base stations though as they took a long time to troubleshoot and repair, so customers would get upset that the turnaround was slow. But these repairs were also profitable because extra labour and parts margin. So I would take them on - win/win I thought - happy customers and billing the expensive jobs, heck someone has to do these jobs. The problem was that you couldn’t complete more than about 1.5 of these jobs per day on average.

Anyway, new lab manager comes in, crunches numbers and they decide my work rate is too low and I’m no longer required…

I still wonder to this day if it had an impact on turnaround of those devices.. I would like to think they realised what they did. I also learnt not to get too far from the herd even if you have the best of intentions.

pts_2• 5 years ago

Reminds me of a CEO who proudly thought technically knowledgeable friends are good to get ideas from but not hire.

kasey_junk2• 5 years ago

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.

dilyevsky2• 5 years ago

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

DevKoala• 5 years ago

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.

kasey_junk2• 5 years ago

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?

haswell• 5 years ago

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 supplemental information considered in a proper evaluation process, not the sole source.

Things quickly go south when they start to involve “softer” signals like email activity.

And further still that the direct outcome was immediate termination and not some kind of performance improvement period.

Perhaps this last part is not present in the Russian workplace, I’m not familiar.

I can’t help but feel like this is a real life slippery slope that came fully to fruition.

cratermoon6• 5 years ago

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?

darkstar9992• 5 years ago

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.

matheusmoreira2• 5 years ago

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.

xpe• 5 years ago

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...

smlss_sftwr• 5 years ago

Given the tone of the rest of the letter I don't think that statement can be taken at face value, it comes across much more like a backhanded jibe adding insult to injury

stkdump• 5 years ago

What about this:

If you want to stay in contact with me, please write me a long letter about all your observations, injustice, and gratitude.

Still nothing on your sarcasm detector?

gtirloni• 5 years ago

I wouldn't take this at face value. It's more likely that they already wanted to do the layoffs and just put the burden on the employees.

darkstar9992• 5 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking. Pure speculation, but they needed to do a big layoff so they come up with a "process" instead of making the news "we're not doing well so we had to lay off 150 people".

ConfusedDog• 5 years ago

This reminds me of Ted Talks about the original thinkers by Adam Grant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxbCHn6gE3U Just because these people are not behaving or contributing the same way like others, it doesn't mean they are worthless.

If company design the work "game" like such, people will try to cheat the game like automatically producing whole bunch of crap on daily basis - is that productive? Then, they will have to figure out an anti-cheat, on and on. Play stupid game, get stupid prizes.

For people who might want to work for them, this really a turn off. What kind of potential metrics they could be looking for next? If a person made a 2000 line code that impacted the whole company, but that's all the code that person produced, should he/she get fired for being unproductive? What a rabbit hole!

SN76477• 5 years ago

Adam Grant is a gem @AdamMGrant is insightful and full of wit.

katbyte2• 5 years ago

“Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome”

cm2012• 5 years ago

The letter is so unprofessional it makes me question the validity of the decision making more than I otherwise would. An email dripping with sarcasm has no purpose here except to make the CEO feel tickled inside, it's masturbatory.

ben-gy3• 5 years ago

Also - what’s the deal with exactly 150 employees being laid off - clearly not trying to identify problematic employees, but instead finding an excuse/methodology to lay off a specific quantity of workforce.

robertwt7• 5 years ago

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

sdwvit• 5 years ago

The letter screenshot has a lot of grammatical errors. Seems like it is google translated from english to russian.

smsm422• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, it's not a translation, I know people who speak (write) like that. It's very irritating.

MattGaiser5• 5 years ago

In my first job, I took standup to be a pace keeping device, so for a while I would hack together something to have it ready, or if I did two things in a day, I would withhold one to have something to report the next day.

I did not continue to do that as when a task carried over into the next day I wasn’t hassled about it, but whenever things like this occur I have to wonder if there are places where this strategy would be required.

cratermoon6• 5 years ago

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-full-di...

jfrunyon• 5 years ago

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

cratermoon6• 5 years ago

constantly busy and also constantly immediately available

It sort of makes sense when you realize that "busy", in that context, just refers to the kind of busywork that can be interrupted without loss.

mgh22• 5 years ago

I hope remote work fixes this by getting rid of the bs.

cratermoon6• 5 years ago

Pretty sure that this story is about exactly the opposite.

jszymborski• 5 years ago

I'm not entirely surprised considering their reputation

https://mmos.com/news/chronicles-of-elyria-class-action-laws...

TeeMassive2• 5 years ago

I know employers can see your internal "private" communications, but it is also illegal, at least in most Western countries, to actively watch and spy on your employees. Would they have some recourse if it was say the US?

a012• 5 years ago

This reminds me some people who open Jira tickets for every tiny things, then have fixes for these tickets.

simonw• 5 years ago

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.

Tempest1981• 5 years ago

And an area that QA should be aware of, during testing. and maybe to update automated tests.

oh_sigh3• 5 years ago

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.

astura• 5 years ago

Eh, are you allowed to just change code without opening a ticket? Every job I worked at every commit had to be against a ticket.

ben-gy3• 5 years ago

Uh yeah… that’s how it’s supposed to happen. Every code change should have a ticket/issue, a bit branch, and a pull request attached - no matter how small.

What’s not supposed to happen is have those analysed to be used as some dumb proxy for productivity/output.

codespin• 5 years ago

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.

duxup2• 5 years ago

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.

bmn__• 5 years ago

Your sarcasm detector is broken/not calibrated for Russian.

duxup2• 5 years ago

That kinda 'sarcasm' for folks you just laid off is pretty harsh ... you sure that's sarcasm?

makecheck• 5 years ago

Funny, I can draw a pretty substantial parallel between “getting stuff done” and “hours of time to work on a problem uninterrupted by pointless chat and E-mail”.

toofy• 5 years ago

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.

kthejoker2• 5 years ago

Agree, high performing teams are a mixture, not a solution.

sam0x17• 5 years ago

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.

Gunax• 5 years ago

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.

underseacables• 5 years ago

This, and the futures of Daemon and Freedom(TM) absolutely terrify me. It makes the banging sound in my brain of creating additional income streams, improving retirement, and security, louder and louder.

Each and every one of us are expendable.

RobRivera• 5 years ago

Glad Im not the only one with this terror, I suppose

trhway4• 5 years ago

A bit of Russian color. The CEO FB posts in Russian:

- the 1st, sounding great in Russian, yet hard to translate, is "work energetically like f&cking or f&ck off"

- the 2nd is "looking for a great PR professional in Russia"

https://vc.ru/hr/277765-glava-xsolla-obyasnil-massovye-uvoln...

While without directly offensive words, not like the FB posts above, his message firing the people is still written in a very insulting disrespectful tone. "Write me a long letter". Russian term is "izdevka". The message is written with a lot of mistypes and Russian language mistakes. It doesn't look to me like it was written in a rational and/or sober state.

Some points from https://app2top.ru/industry/xsolla-ob-yasnila-uvol-neniya-za...

- slowdown of growth is the reason for layoffs, and thus decision to cut 10% of salary budget

- primarily firing rank-and-file, not management

- time spend in git/IDE wasn't considered in the evaluating employee efficiency

- most layoffs in Perm is because salaries there are lower than in US

I get a feeling that he is losing it, like he probably got teared a new one by the investors or something like this, got drunk and got that epiphany ... The metrics collection was probably going for some time, and finally they found a use for them.

dilyevsky2• 5 years ago

The comment about twitch revamping their regional pay structure and gutting xsolla revenue stream in the process seems quite insightful

smsm422• 5 years ago

Speaking of which, the Russian in the firing post is atrocious. It's ungrammatical, full of typos and jargon, and gives an impression that the author can not express himself properly in any language. Which is kinda bad for a CEO :) Really, English translation is a much more coherent text than the Russian original.

trhway4• 5 years ago

the guy is probably having a bout of hysteria. As already been mentioned there seems to be issues with growth and revenue (and that is in the year when gaming industry surged due to the pandemic), and that most probably threatens the would be otherwise $3B IPO, and thus such a nervous breakdown.

He comes as a tremendous jerk. I mean kicking out 150 people in your hometown where job market is much worse than say in Moscow or St.Petersburg, and with such a spite making sure that they publicly got that "fired for performance reason" black label on resume.

My limited understanding though is that such easy firing doesn't work in Russia. The fired employees probably have a case, and while it probably makes sense just to move on, some of them may decide to drag the company a bit through it with related publicity/etc.

ironMonkey• 5 years ago

- the 1st, sounding great in Russian, yet hard to translate, is "work energetically like f&cking or f&ck off"

it is a simple "work your ass out or walk your ass out" without the unnecessary slavic macho-bravade of foul words.

trhway4• 5 years ago

thanks, it is definitely good translation, and i'll add it to my English.

In this case I intentionally tried (and looks like i succeeded :) to deliver the "slavic macho-bravade of foul words" (well put, you definitely have a way with words) as expressed by the CEO as it is a directly related to that harsh firing and very illustrative of the CEO part of the picture.

irjustin• 5 years ago

We're having a field day with this one!

I know it's rare relatively speaking, but between this, Blizzard and others, it seems insane how disconnected a CEO is from their company.

While short sighted, thankfully this doesn't represent the norm of companies.

jti107• 5 years ago

speaking from experience this isnt going to end well. the employees that didn't get fired will feel betrayed and you will lose alot of good people with the institutional knowledge of your systems. some people that remain will figure out how to game the system while contributing as little as possible.

honkycat• 5 years ago

I know everyone will think I am crazy, but I actually like to get work done at work, and I am so fucking sick of everyone bunking off and never being available with the change to remote work!

It is a real problem! People are just bunking off and not working!

I also saw this when people were in office, however. Eventually, some people just stop doing work completely and coast until they are noticed or find a new org to be a parasite of, a surprisingly rare occurrence.

And I say this as an extremely lazy employee who often checks out at 4pm. It gets BAD with some people.

MattGaiser5• 5 years ago

and never being available with the change to remote work!

Were they more available in the office? In my last job, the senior developer was rarely available and people complained about that while remote.

But because he was always in meetings or explaining things to management or fixing things that nobody else understood, he wasn't more available in the office either.

People just understood that he was probably in a meeting if not at his desk, but didn't make that connection with Slack.

topkai22• 5 years ago

There was a round of layoffs I went through at a consulting company where we are pretty sure some pure overhead MBAs pulled a report of who was missing "cloud" skills from an internal skills tool and had had anything less than a top box review laat year. Without consulting even the GM dozens of senior/principle people were let go.

This naturally ended up a disaster because A) those people weren't updating their skills in the tool because they were high demand rock stars and B) they had deep customer relationships, to the point where many customers threatened to (and I'm some cases did) cancel their contracts and stop doing business with us. My understanding is somewhere between 1\3 and 1\2 of everyone let go was hired back at higher pay after keeping all their secerence pay, and many of the rest just refused to do so.

darthrupert• 5 years ago

Hello new Russia, fundamentally quite similar to old Russia. Things like this strengthen my conviction that it probably wasn't communism that wrecked Russia, bur vice versa.

cycomanic• 5 years ago

“We want all our employees to think daily about how their actions and decisions affect the company’s fate and success because we have very ambitious goals in the coming years; it is one of Xsolla’s values and it is reflected in everything — from operating standards to compensation system,”

Oh the irony

higeorge13• 5 years ago

I know that all corporate data are owned by the companies, but i would leave any company that regularly checks my communication activities to “measure” my performance. Jira, confluence, git commits, etc. is acceptable and can be quantified somehow, but slack dms or emails? Do you also want my camera footage? This is toxic.

Andrew_nenakhov• 5 years ago

The translation of the letter has lost some of its undertones, which betray some psychological disorders of the author.

For example, "... If you want to stay in contact with me, please write me a long letter..." should be better translated as "... If you want to remain my acquaintance, please write me a long letter..."

(source: I'm russian)

Arech• 5 years ago

Absolutely. Original wording is so bad that those fired should actually be happy to stop dealing with such...person. (and note: that is forgetting that the reason to fire was a score of some unknown ML-model, not a real performance on the workplace; which is by itself a great reason to flee from such an employer)

tpoacher• 5 years ago

That's 150 employees that just dodged a bullet.

I feel more sorry for the 151st.

aristofun• 5 years ago

For me this whole story sounds like an excuse to fire bad developers.

It’s a bit easier to delegate to some authority (data) than just say “you’re bad, we dont want you”.

cannabis_sam• 5 years ago

In post-soviet russia, correlation IS causation, apparently…

roussanoff• 5 years ago

Agapitov later gave a long interview to Meduza explaining the decision. It's surprisingly honest. Here is an interesting quote:

In America, in recent years, both in our company and in the media, various minorities have been actively protected and people are very cautious about the dismissal of gays, blacks, and more recently, Asians. But in Xsolla, we did not give immunity to these groups, because all decisions that a human makes, from the point of view of Americans, have a risk of being biased, and our algorithmic solution is as unbiased as possible. Therefore, from the point of view of American media and American civil society, for us it is much better and more indisputable than if some manager fired someone.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=https:/... (In Russian, Google translated)

justinclift• 5 years ago

Wonder if what they really did was tap employee webcams, then measure the employees attendance that way? Similar to what's done for student attendance measurement in remote classes.

It kind of sounds like it from the description:

  ... you were not always present at the workplace when
  you worked remotely.

Xsolla fires 150 employees using analysis of chat and email activity

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