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Only 70 employees took this survey! From the article: > About 500 Blizzard employees are members of Blind's community for the company, Blind co-founder Kyum Ki
by kirbs 7y ago
Only 70 employees took this survey! From the article:
> About 500 Blizzard employees are members of Blind's community for the company, Blind co-founder Kyum Kim tells me. Of that 500, fifty to seventy Blizzard employees took the two question survey, along with hundreds of staffers from many other tech companies -- raw data on the right.
This is less than 1% of Blizzard's workforce. Also from the article:
> To be sure, this survey attracted only 50-70 Blizzard employee respondents, a small sample from a total staff count of about 4,700 people.
Even if all 500 Blizzard employees on Blind responded in the same proportions it would still be less than a quarter of the company.
- icebraining 7y ago1% is not that low, a typical poll has much less than that. E.g. a Gallup poll generally interviews about 1000 individuals to represent the whole of the US. Selection bias is a much larger problem here.
- kirbs 7y agoAn important point - at least Gallup publishes some details on its methodologies.
- morpheuskafka 7y agoBecause it wouldn't be economical to hire hundreds of thousands of call takers to reach everyone in the US in a single week. There's no reason a company could not send out a one-question survey link to all of it's employees with one click if they wanted to get reliable data.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoHow do they know these weren't 499 shills claiming to be employees?
- wutbrodo 7y agoBlind requires verification with a work email.
- outworlder 7y ago> Blind requires verification with a work email. Thankfully corporations are unable to control their own email addresses, right?
- wutbrodo 7y agoHuh? Is your suggestion that these are not employees, but "people paid by a company to perform work for them"? I suppose the FTE/contractor distinction is relevant here, but otherwise I don't get your point
- icebraining 7y agoI think the suggestion is that they may not be individual employees stating their personal opinion, but accounts created by even just one employee (who can create multiple accounts) under company direction.
- taborj 7y agoWhich then introduces some doubt that this is truly anonymous. In other words, if the respondents feel that there's a chance that their answers could be linked back to themselves as employees, they're probably more likely to toe the company line.
- tzs 7y ago70 people polled out of a population of 4700 would have a 12% margin of error at a 95% confidence level, if it was a random sample. 500 people polled lowers that to about 4%. If Blizzard were a lot bigger--say 100k people, a random poll of 70 would still be 12% and a random poll of 500 would still be 4%. You can play around with the numbers here [1]. The margin of error on a poll, if the population is large compared to the sample size, depends mostly only on the absolute sample size, not on how big a fraction of the population is sampled. The flaws in this poll are how the sample was selected, not the size of the sample. It's not a random sample. [1] https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/margin-of-error-calculator/ https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/margin-of-error-calculator/
- outworlder 7y ago> if it was a random sample And here lies the problem. How do we know that those people were not ahem, "selected"?