4 ms·

Xsolla CEO says firing using an algorithm-based solution protect minorities

42 points by logronoide 5y ago

sailorganymede 5y ago
It’s going to be interesting to see if this gets used elsewhere. Something tells me we’ll probably see a lot more of this happening in the future.
- iamcreasy 5y ago
  From the article: 'The company’s decision regarding layoffs was inspired by Netflix, Harward, and other organizations that lay off 10% of the most unengaged and ineffective employees on a regular basis.'
  - colde 5y ago
    That's the claim by Xsolla. But Netflix specifically say they don't do that: "We have no bell curves or rankings or quotas such as “cut the bottom 10% every year.” That would be detrimental to fostering collaboration, and is a simplistic, rules-based approach we would never support" from https://jobs.netflix.com/culture https://jobs.netflix.com/culture
    - victorbstan 5y ago
      Say they don’t do that. Amazon also say they don’t do that. But it do.
      - bombcar 5y ago
        We don’t cut the bottom 10% each year. We just ask managers to identify 10% as eligible for layoffs.
    - dagmx 5y ago
      I've interviewed a couple times at Netflix, and they mentioned they do cut aggressively cut under performers every year, but not by a percentage.
Negitivefrags 5y ago
This article doesn’t capture the flavour of what happened here. Here is the letter sent to staff. 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. Many of you might be shocked, but I truly believe that Xsolla is not for you. 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. Sasha will help you get a recommendation, including the one from myself. And Natalia will read you your rights. Once again, thank you for your contribution. If you want to stay in contact with me, please write me a long letter about all your observations, injustice, and gratitude.
- cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
  From the interview and this letter the CEO sounds like a really scary and entitled person. Stuff like this isn't just bad for business but when you see this kind of instability and recklessness in the leadership the company often fails down the line.
  - bobiny 5y ago
    I gathered that he finds his business special and lucrative, especially by his native city standards. I think he presumes that even a "bad" employee at his company will find a nice spot in a more ordinary one.
  - bodge5000 5y ago
    He struck me as the kind of people who makes management errors, sees the company suffer for them, and blames anyone and everyone but himself for it, usually for extremely vague reasons like "not working hard enough"
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- iamcreasy 5y ago
  Is there any study on what could be the false positive rate for models of this kind?
Hamuko 5y ago
>The list includes writing and reading articles in the internal Wiki, creating and closing task tickets, as well as dashboard activity and participation in internal meetings. >He claimed that if a person’s “digital footprint” is not visible, they shouldn’t work at Xsolla. Sucks to be the sysadmin I guess.
- PicassoCTs 5y ago
  Why? Optimal position to gamble such a system. Everyone else needs browser addons to create fake activity with macros :D https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/selenium-ide/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/selenium-ide/... This is the "Lines of Code" metric of IBM reincarnated as social activity.
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    Servers working and being well setup doesn't look great in Jira statistics.
- hhjj 5y ago
  First step of resolving a ticket should be to create 10 tickets... now for each ticket create a new ticket to verify the other ticket has been done correctly... So work at Xsolla will become very slow but hopefully very predictable.
LegitGandalf 5y ago
“Tell me how you will measure me, and then I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way, don't complain about illogical behavior.” – Eli Goldratt
tehjoker 5y ago
Imagine this same kind of person the master of a plantation or 1800s factory or as a Dickensian villain. It fits.
PicassoCTs 5y ago
Wow, usually unpopular decisions were outsourced to consultants who then would give back what the CEO wants to hear and do the deed. Now, that can be done for cheap via something mysterious called "the Algo-rythm" ;) . Bad times for consultant firms incoming.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Firing people based on algorithms or arbitrary statistics doesn’t protect minorities. It protects the people who know how to game the system. Those who understand how the metrics are calculated actually love these systems because they can use that insider information to make themselves look disproportionately good by going through the right motions. If they know they’re being ranked by the number of Jira tickets being closed, they might create 5 tickets for every piece of a task instead of 1 ticket with a checklist. Or if they’re being measured on lines of code committed, they’re going to be doing a lot of unnecessary refactoring and rewriting to keep those numbers up. Indeed, apparently the developers of this big data employee ranking system are internally opposed to letting employees see their own scores. From the article: > The company also planned to implement the so-called “digital mirror,” so every employee could learn what AI thinks of their work and engagement. However, the development team wasn’t enthusiastic about this idea, so its rollout is pending. Of course the development team wouldn’t want other people to be able to see their AI ranking score or be given a chance to learn how to change it. That privilege is reserved for the developers of the AI ranking system, who no doubt score very well on the system. It’s also bizarre that the CEO would publicly admit that his planned feature to let employees know their score was being held up because some employees didn’t want to release it. Why air internal drama like this? Why blame the employees? This CEO sounds like he’s trying to wash his hands of every CEO responsibility at every chance he gets.
erhk 5y ago
Ite actually quite the contrary. Using AI as a tool to discriminate and then defer to a magic blackbox is one of the most profitable AI areas. Look at automated moderation for example.
- bobiny 5y ago
  I bet they have some visualization to show in court in case of a discrimination lawsuit. Also why bother with discrimination if your goal is profit increase?
crackercrews 5y ago
Where does it say the algorithm protects minorities? Sounds like it does the opposite. Unlike humans, it is not "overly cautious" about firing minorities. > Agapitov went on to say how companies nowadays protect minorities and can be overly cautios if they have to fire their representatives, which can make these employees almost immune to layoffs. “Our algorithm-based solution is as unbiased as possible.
- bobiny 5y ago
  It protects the company when you fire minorities, because you do it base on data. It's like proving that you've bought stock fairly (not according to insider information) by showing research.
TheChaplain 5y ago
I see a lot of comments about 'gaming the algorithms', but how is that different from a person? Doing shady commits/tickets in a way that satisfies the algorithms, or play best-buddies with my supervisor would still result in the same outcome; I don't get fired.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  A human could catch on. A algorithm has to be double-checked by a human in order for someone to catch on, and in generally people just trust machines to be right. Even if they initially double-check them, they do that less and less over time. And if the person doesn't understand the algorithm, it's even worse.
carlchenet 5y ago
It seems to me this guy should be fired. But good for him if he can disguise his inabilities to manage the transition to full remote. As a employee I would flee such a company.

42 points by logronoide 5y ago

It’s going to be interesting to see if this gets used elsewhere. Something tells me we’ll probably see a lot more of this happening in the future.

iamcreasy 5y ago
From the article: 'The company’s decision regarding layoffs was inspired by Netflix, Harward, and other organizations that lay off 10% of the most unengaged and ineffective employees on a regular basis.'
- colde 5y ago
  That's the claim by Xsolla. But Netflix specifically say they don't do that: "We have no bell curves or rankings or quotas such as “cut the bottom 10% every year.” That would be detrimental to fostering collaboration, and is a simplistic, rules-based approach we would never support" from https://jobs.netflix.com/culture https://jobs.netflix.com/culture
  - victorbstan 5y ago
    Say they don’t do that. Amazon also say they don’t do that. But it do.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      We don’t cut the bottom 10% each year. We just ask managers to identify 10% as eligible for layoffs.
  - dagmx 5y ago
    I've interviewed a couple times at Netflix, and they mentioned they do cut aggressively cut under performers every year, but not by a percentage.

Negitivefrags 5y ago

This article doesn’t capture the flavour of what happened here. Here is the letter sent to staff. 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. Many of you might be shocked, but I truly believe that Xsolla is not for you. 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. Sasha will help you get a recommendation, including the one from myself. And Natalia will read you your rights. Once again, thank you for your contribution. If you want to stay in contact with me, please write me a long letter about all your observations, injustice, and gratitude.

cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
From the interview and this letter the CEO sounds like a really scary and entitled person. Stuff like this isn't just bad for business but when you see this kind of instability and recklessness in the leadership the company often fails down the line.
- bobiny 5y ago
  I gathered that he finds his business special and lucrative, especially by his native city standards. I think he presumes that even a "bad" employee at his company will find a nice spot in a more ordinary one.
- bodge5000 5y ago
  He struck me as the kind of people who makes management errors, sees the company suffer for them, and blames anyone and everyone but himself for it, usually for extremely vague reasons like "not working hard enough"
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
iamcreasy 5y ago
Is there any study on what could be the false positive rate for models of this kind?

Hamuko 5y ago

>The list includes writing and reading articles in the internal Wiki, creating and closing task tickets, as well as dashboard activity and participation in internal meetings. >He claimed that if a person’s “digital footprint” is not visible, they shouldn’t work at Xsolla. Sucks to be the sysadmin I guess.

PicassoCTs 5y ago
Why? Optimal position to gamble such a system. Everyone else needs browser addons to create fake activity with macros :D https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/selenium-ide/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/selenium-ide/... This is the "Lines of Code" metric of IBM reincarnated as social activity.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  Servers working and being well setup doesn't look great in Jira statistics.
hhjj 5y ago
First step of resolving a ticket should be to create 10 tickets... now for each ticket create a new ticket to verify the other ticket has been done correctly... So work at Xsolla will become very slow but hopefully very predictable.

LegitGandalf 5y ago

“Tell me how you will measure me, and then I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way, don't complain about illogical behavior.” – Eli Goldratt

tehjoker 5y ago

Imagine this same kind of person the master of a plantation or 1800s factory or as a Dickensian villain. It fits.

PicassoCTs 5y ago

Wow, usually unpopular decisions were outsourced to consultants who then would give back what the CEO wants to hear and do the deed. Now, that can be done for cheap via something mysterious called "the Algo-rythm" ;) . Bad times for consultant firms incoming.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Firing people based on algorithms or arbitrary statistics doesn’t protect minorities. It protects the people who know how to game the system. Those who understand how the metrics are calculated actually love these systems because they can use that insider information to make themselves look disproportionately good by going through the right motions. If they know they’re being ranked by the number of Jira tickets being closed, they might create 5 tickets for every piece of a task instead of 1 ticket with a checklist. Or if they’re being measured on lines of code committed, they’re going to be doing a lot of unnecessary refactoring and rewriting to keep those numbers up. Indeed, apparently the developers of this big data employee ranking system are internally opposed to letting employees see their own scores. From the article: > The company also planned to implement the so-called “digital mirror,” so every employee could learn what AI thinks of their work and engagement. However, the development team wasn’t enthusiastic about this idea, so its rollout is pending. Of course the development team wouldn’t want other people to be able to see their AI ranking score or be given a chance to learn how to change it. That privilege is reserved for the developers of the AI ranking system, who no doubt score very well on the system. It’s also bizarre that the CEO would publicly admit that his planned feature to let employees know their score was being held up because some employees didn’t want to release it. Why air internal drama like this? Why blame the employees? This CEO sounds like he’s trying to wash his hands of every CEO responsibility at every chance he gets.

erhk 5y ago

Ite actually quite the contrary. Using AI as a tool to discriminate and then defer to a magic blackbox is one of the most profitable AI areas. Look at automated moderation for example.

bobiny 5y ago
I bet they have some visualization to show in court in case of a discrimination lawsuit. Also why bother with discrimination if your goal is profit increase?

crackercrews 5y ago

Where does it say the algorithm protects minorities? Sounds like it does the opposite. Unlike humans, it is not "overly cautious" about firing minorities. > Agapitov went on to say how companies nowadays protect minorities and can be overly cautios if they have to fire their representatives, which can make these employees almost immune to layoffs. “Our algorithm-based solution is as unbiased as possible.

bobiny 5y ago
It protects the company when you fire minorities, because you do it base on data. It's like proving that you've bought stock fairly (not according to insider information) by showing research.

TheChaplain 5y ago

I see a lot of comments about 'gaming the algorithms', but how is that different from a person? Doing shady commits/tickets in a way that satisfies the algorithms, or play best-buddies with my supervisor would still result in the same outcome; I don't get fired.

wccrawford 5y ago
A human could catch on. A algorithm has to be double-checked by a human in order for someone to catch on, and in generally people just trust machines to be right. Even if they initially double-check them, they do that less and less over time. And if the person doesn't understand the algorithm, it's even worse.

carlchenet 5y ago

It seems to me this guy should be fired. But good for him if he can disguise his inabilities to manage the transition to full remote. As a employee I would flee such a company.