10 ms·

Xsolla lays off 150 after an algorithm ruled staff 'unengaged and unproductive'

119 points by Audiophilip 5y ago

jfk13 5y ago
There's also some discussion a few days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28108432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28108432.
hatchnyc 5y ago
This email sounds as though it were written by a child.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  It was.
BFLpL0QNek 5y 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 What a terrible place to work and measure of productivity.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  And let's be clear: those are all the things that productive employees avoid like the plague. What are you producing which is correlated with using any of those services? If more information comes out, it'll be a useful case study in using measures anti-correlated with your actual business objectives. This seems an extremely common practice by middle-management, whose activity is largely anti-correlated with aggregate business production. (Ie., middle-management activity should be operating at a minimum necessary for production; increasing it will cause productivity to drop).
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    There’s an inflection point as a manager where you realize that your employees are better than you at a thing you used to do really well. So your new job is to put them on assignments that will help them grow, provide a safety net if anything goes wrong, and get out of the way. The flip side is that you have to trust people. I’ve certainly had employees who basically didn’t show up to work. Their team members complained because it was more work on them. That’s a situation where I stepped in, tried to figure out what was wrong, but ultimately had to let the person go because they hadn’t made a pull request in months and didn’t have a good explanation as to why.
    - magicalhippo 5y ago
      > So your new job is to put them on assignments that will help them grow, provide a safety net if anything goes wrong, and get out of the way. I talk to my boss about once a week, social hallway chats excluded. Rest of the week I just do what needs to be done. He mentioned to me soon after joining that he had learned that the less he's in the way of us developers, the more productive we are. So he trusts us to do what we're assigned to do and handle issues that come up. Once in a while he'll come and ask me to handle some specific case ASAP or make sure I know some deadlines, but it's very rare.
  - that_guy_iain 5y ago
    My chats at times would be full of activity but I would have been complaining to co-workers about how crap things are. In certain roles documents and emails may show how much work you're doing.
- ssss11 5y ago
  Absolute dystopia
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Sounds like a caricature. I imagine there will be alot of "+1" posts and mention rings in Jira at Xsolla from now on ...
- swiley 5y ago
  At that point why bother being an employee? You might as well just go make YouTube videos or whatever since the job security is the same.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  Just watch as employees everywhere start using bots to keep their engagement stats up. Boards will start to have GPT generated fluff that drowns out any residual use those tools had.
  - throwaway14356 5y ago
    the age of the 9000x developer
- chippy 5y ago
  a terrible place unless you work in the big data team!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dncornholio 5y ago
  I'm known for high productivity but I'm also known for not checking my mail, am always behind in my hours log, etc..
coldtea 5y ago
Now, if customers could obliterate and boycott Xsolla that would be a great message against such shenanigans...
- Macha 5y ago
  Twitch is the biggest customer I know of, if you subscribe to a Twitch channel, the only option for payments is Xsolla. Maybe a bit of motivation for them to move to their parent company's payment system.
  - Workaccount2 5y ago
    It absolutely blows my mind that Twitch still uses Xsolla. It's literally amazon using a third party to do what they are experts in.
MikeUt 5y ago
Even if the algorithm was correct, the remaining staff will now focus on gaming the perceived productivity metrics. We all know what that means for actual productivity.
- anothernewdude 5y ago
  One of the bad managers I've recently shifted jobs away from, achieved tons of "productivity" by shifting Confluence pages written by others, so he appears as the author.
  - ssss11 5y ago
    He’s being “innovative”
    - WJW 5y ago
      System works as designed, though not as intended.
  - voakbasda 5y ago
    I had a coworker cherry pick my commits for a new feature and recommit them with their own name. Which reminds me to ask, anyone looking to hire a 10x embedded engineer w/ 30yrs experience?
    - verall 5y ago
      Yes! The group I'm in is hiring for C/C++ systems. Experience with safety is a huge plus. If you give an email address I can send you some job listings. If you're interested we can go from there. I'm just an engineer so I can't bring you straight to an interview but I know we're having trouble hiring systems engineers; I could at least pass your resume on directly.
- _ph_ 5y ago
  Reminds me when I was teasing my coworker in the project that 75% of our source code was written by me - I had committed a bunch of icons as XPM files to our source code :) (I can't remember whether he consequently reindented all those files...)
anothernewdude 5y ago
> you were not always present at the workplace when you worked remotely. no duh.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  The thing about that is there's plenty of opportunity to not work at a physical workplace as well. Coffee breaks with the boss, trading floor eating contests, browsing some orange website...
carlchenet 5y ago
I'm supposed faking activity is the game when you work for a large company.
the-dude 5y ago
Manna : https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 ( I am trying to find the year, but haven't so far )
paulie4542 5y ago
There are some developers somewhere that wrote this code! Are there no mirrors anywhere?
- a3n 5y ago
  They're working at one of those places where you work less and earn more.
mast22 5y ago
Welcome to business in Russia
- JackPoach 5y ago
  Similar things happen in US on a much larger scale. Simply search for 'Amazon hire to fire' 'GE Neutron Jack' or 'Microsoft annual review system'
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rcurry 5y ago
Was the algorithm also able to identify the senior executive who was responsible for his firm hiring 150 unengaged and unproductive people, or is their big data team still working on that one?
- coldcode 5y ago
  150 other unengaged and unproductive people are making sure it never works.
someelephant 5y ago
Will be a case study in how to build a toxic culture.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
blinkingled 5y ago
Idiocracy predictions sadly keep coming true. In this case partially - doesn't look like the CEO got laid off.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>Later, he adds that Xsolla plans to continue to reduce its budget by 10 percent until things pick back up and the company starts seeing at least 40 percent growth. The flogging will continue until morale improves.
lostsoul8282 5y ago
This sets a very bad precedent within this company. If the remaining employees realize that to stay employeed they can I suspect this decision has wider implications for the remaining employees than 150 who were laid off. Remaining people may start faking productivity to stay employeed.
me_me_me 5y ago
All of the quotes in the article read like a robot said them. Imagine being that guy... ouch.
__s 5y ago
> He suggests that the layoffs were the result of Xsolla's slowing growth during the past six months, which he appears to blame in part on reduced productivity due to remote work measures. According to that interview, Xsolla increased its revenue by 80 percent last year (likely related to the pandemic-driven growth many game companies saw in 2020) but within the last six months, Xsolla's growth has dipped below 40 percent year-over-year. Does it make sense to expect growth to return to the previous growth rate after a growth spurt? Either way, seems a bit unengaged as an executive to rely on algorithms for lay offs. But maybe the vague wording is avoiding liability & the input data includes things like performance reviews, meanwhile they were looking to downsize for whatever reason. Some of the remarks come off as rather jejune tho, so there's a definite lack of tact here edit: seems they're expecting consistent 40% growth.. a bit unrealistic
- shostack 5y ago
  Also completely ignoring that engagement and productivity drops may be quite real and expected given burnout from being full remote from people who do not do well in that environment for a variety of reasons (too isolated, distracting or unsafe home environment, covid-related depression, etc). What has this company done to address that with this exercise? What precedent does that set? If you lose a family member and are disengaged as might be expected, will you be canned "because the AI said so" without your context being considered?
noasaservice 5y ago
All managerial metrics account for the appearance of work, and not work itself.
nsonha 5y ago
It's the game industry what do you expect. People love to trash talk Google & Facebook for monetizing attention but the game industry does it blatantly and even charges money.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
This story is somehow even worse than the headline. The CEO wanted to create an elaborate system to rank employees based on their engagement in certain tools like Jira, Confluence, and company chat. Don’t chat enough? Your ranking is low and you might get laid off. Should have chatted more, sorry. Even stranger, the CEO claims he wanted to let employees view their own engagement scores so they at least had a chance to pump up their numbers (time to spam more e-mails and refresh more Confluence pages so I don’t get fired!) but he went on record in another article blaming the development team for not releasing that feature: > 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. That’s right, the development team who works on the employee ranking tool “wasn’t enthusiastic” about letting other employees see their ranking or how it works, so they’re withholding it from the company supposedly against the wishes of the CEO. The CEO is then going on record, in public, blaming those developers for not letting these other people see their own scores before they get fired. This CEO sounds like the type of person who wants to be in charge but also wants to dodge as much responsibility as possible. Create an algorithm to fire people, then send them an impersonal e-mail letting them know the algorithm has chosen them for firing. Then explain that he wanted to let them see their score and have a chance to react, but those mean developers weren’t enthusiastic about the idea so, sorry, you can’t see it. I’m sure the developers of the secret employee ranking system have high scores for themselves, somehow.
- daggersandscars 5y ago
  If your firm is using Office 365 / Microsoft Azure products, your managers have similar capabilities available to them. This is one of the marketed uses of Office 365 and other Microsoft products - monitoring "productivity" via metrics such as Teams posts and responses, Azure DevOps activity, etc. I mention this because it doesn't require bringing together disparate systems to monitor your employees. This includes monitoring what files you opened on OneDrive, when you opened them, etc. If you are using Office 365 at work, I highly recommend going to delve.office.com and taking a look. Edited to clarify Office 365 + Microsoft Azure products
throwawaycuriou 5y ago
Incredibly naive tone, to the point I cannot see how a CEO would see this action as beneficial to the company. Is this corporate sabotage from the top? Plenty of history to see what happens next. Remaining employees of value will now put all of their efforts into finding a new role. The ones that stay will struggle to keep the lights on. Both will actively game these preposterous algorithms. Some might even sabotage from below.
trollied 5y ago
Discussed a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068959
ransom1538 5y ago
I would fear a mistake in these engagement metrics. When I tried doing this on different teams the amount of "gotchas" made it useless. EG: a) Jim has the most slack messages. Reason: Jim has a bot that slacks different team members on the status of the build. b) Larry attends the most gcalendar events. Reason: Larry auto accepts all events. However, Ryan auto cancels all events after 4pm but attends them anyway. c) Sally has the least amount of PRs to the main repro. Reason: Sally works on a differet git repro dealing with a different microservice. d) Jeff contributed the most new lines of code. Reason: Jeff added a package under a vendor/ folder. Also! Remember Mark changed from his personal github account to a company github account 3 months ago. e) Linda is "online" the most on slack. Reason: Linda's ubuntu workspace does not autolog her out correctly when the system is idle. f) Mike has the most PRs. Reason: Mike has an auto merge bot to merge release into production. on and on....
- throwaway14356 5y ago
  it all depends on how they measured it before - if at all. vlad didnt open any applications for 6 days olga puts in a lot of "activity" 3.5 hours per day 4 days per week those places exist!
jasonladuke0311 5y ago
I don't know what to take away from this except that this CEO is evidently a complete fucking idiot. Those metrics are so easily gamed; how could someone not understand that?
- rchaud 5y ago
  Seems like they plan on cutting costs regardless. Today it was "not enough Jira comments", next time it'll be something else. It's not like anyone's going to ask to audit the algorithm.
m45t3r 5y ago
> The letter goes on to note that Xsolla has partnered with multiple HR agencies to "help you find a good place where you will earn more and work even less". Sure, if I worked on this company I would like this option even if I was considered a "engaged employee" by their own classification.
lupire 5y ago
Please ready the article! It is absolutely stuffed with absurd comments by the CEO. The only explanation I can fathom is that in the remote-work world someone impersonated the CEO as a troll. How did the company grow to pay 500employee's wages? Low Russian salaries and rich American customers?
- rchaud 5y ago
  Seems like a company that makes mobile games. The culture around those companies seems built around hiring a lot when a game takes off, then slashing headcount when growth tails off and ad dollars fall.
jakearmitage 5y ago
What if this is, in fact, a good thing? This AI-obsession allows employees to game the system, play around the rules and optimize for the metrics that can be easily discovered. That is terrible, but is it any worse than the current state of corporate politics, where privileged people form their own clubs and prevent anyone else from joining? The AI, at least, doesn't see color, gender, sexual orientation, what hobbies you like or you don't like. The machine, as long as you play by its rules, is fair. And I seem to prefer the machine rules, than the rules at the boys club.
throwaway14356 5y ago
i for one respect the hard core management formula presented here. New jobs will be found where you earn more an do even less! I would love to work there. Im tired of people not doing any work. I dont mean people who dont work most of the day. Simple asset tracking would reveal how they never get near work but then a human had to decide and jim is such a nice guy blablabla
Shadonototro 5y ago
Well, i'm glad Stripe is a thing(even thought i'm not a fan of the company either, but it's the least terrible, i guess), along with PayPal, Xsolla will be now in my list of tools to avoid
fnordfnordfnord 5y ago
I have some questions as to whether things are going well at Xsolla. They handle payments for Roblox, and I constantly have problems giving them money. I have three kids playing Roblox who each spend money there at least a couple of times per month.
a3n 5y ago
As a new algorithm, the algorithm clearly wanted to make a splash and have an impact. This also makes room for the algorithm to bring in its own people. Best strategy for a remaining employee is to suck up to the algorithm and try to transfer in to its team.

119 points by Audiophilip 5y ago

There's also some discussion a few days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28108432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28108432.

hatchnyc 5y ago

This email sounds as though it were written by a child.

Mikeb85 5y ago
It was.

BFLpL0QNek 5y 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 What a terrible place to work and measure of productivity.

mjburgess 5y ago
And let's be clear: those are all the things that productive employees avoid like the plague. What are you producing which is correlated with using any of those services? If more information comes out, it'll be a useful case study in using measures anti-correlated with your actual business objectives. This seems an extremely common practice by middle-management, whose activity is largely anti-correlated with aggregate business production. (Ie., middle-management activity should be operating at a minimum necessary for production; increasing it will cause productivity to drop).
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  There’s an inflection point as a manager where you realize that your employees are better than you at a thing you used to do really well. So your new job is to put them on assignments that will help them grow, provide a safety net if anything goes wrong, and get out of the way. The flip side is that you have to trust people. I’ve certainly had employees who basically didn’t show up to work. Their team members complained because it was more work on them. That’s a situation where I stepped in, tried to figure out what was wrong, but ultimately had to let the person go because they hadn’t made a pull request in months and didn’t have a good explanation as to why.
  - magicalhippo 5y ago
    > So your new job is to put them on assignments that will help them grow, provide a safety net if anything goes wrong, and get out of the way. I talk to my boss about once a week, social hallway chats excluded. Rest of the week I just do what needs to be done. He mentioned to me soon after joining that he had learned that the less he's in the way of us developers, the more productive we are. So he trusts us to do what we're assigned to do and handle issues that come up. Once in a while he'll come and ask me to handle some specific case ASAP or make sure I know some deadlines, but it's very rare.
- that_guy_iain 5y ago
  My chats at times would be full of activity but I would have been complaining to co-workers about how crap things are. In certain roles documents and emails may show how much work you're doing.
ssss11 5y ago
Absolute dystopia
- rightbyte 5y ago
  Sounds like a caricature. I imagine there will be alot of "+1" posts and mention rings in Jira at Xsolla from now on ...
swiley 5y ago
At that point why bother being an employee? You might as well just go make YouTube videos or whatever since the job security is the same.
lordnacho 5y ago
Just watch as employees everywhere start using bots to keep their engagement stats up. Boards will start to have GPT generated fluff that drowns out any residual use those tools had.
- throwaway14356 5y ago
  the age of the 9000x developer
chippy 5y ago
a terrible place unless you work in the big data team!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dncornholio 5y ago
I'm known for high productivity but I'm also known for not checking my mail, am always behind in my hours log, etc..

coldtea 5y ago

Now, if customers could obliterate and boycott Xsolla that would be a great message against such shenanigans...

Macha 5y ago
Twitch is the biggest customer I know of, if you subscribe to a Twitch channel, the only option for payments is Xsolla. Maybe a bit of motivation for them to move to their parent company's payment system.
- Workaccount2 5y ago
  It absolutely blows my mind that Twitch still uses Xsolla. It's literally amazon using a third party to do what they are experts in.

MikeUt 5y ago

Even if the algorithm was correct, the remaining staff will now focus on gaming the perceived productivity metrics. We all know what that means for actual productivity.

anothernewdude 5y ago
One of the bad managers I've recently shifted jobs away from, achieved tons of "productivity" by shifting Confluence pages written by others, so he appears as the author.
- ssss11 5y ago
  He’s being “innovative”
  - WJW 5y ago
    System works as designed, though not as intended.
- voakbasda 5y ago
  I had a coworker cherry pick my commits for a new feature and recommit them with their own name. Which reminds me to ask, anyone looking to hire a 10x embedded engineer w/ 30yrs experience?
  - verall 5y ago
    Yes! The group I'm in is hiring for C/C++ systems. Experience with safety is a huge plus. If you give an email address I can send you some job listings. If you're interested we can go from there. I'm just an engineer so I can't bring you straight to an interview but I know we're having trouble hiring systems engineers; I could at least pass your resume on directly.
_ph_ 5y ago
Reminds me when I was teasing my coworker in the project that 75% of our source code was written by me - I had committed a bunch of icons as XPM files to our source code :) (I can't remember whether he consequently reindented all those files...)

anothernewdude 5y ago

> you were not always present at the workplace when you worked remotely. no duh.

lordnacho 5y ago
The thing about that is there's plenty of opportunity to not work at a physical workplace as well. Coffee breaks with the boss, trading floor eating contests, browsing some orange website...

carlchenet 5y ago

I'm supposed faking activity is the game when you work for a large company.

the-dude 5y ago

Manna : https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 ( I am trying to find the year, but haven't so far )

paulie4542 5y ago

There are some developers somewhere that wrote this code! Are there no mirrors anywhere?

a3n 5y ago
They're working at one of those places where you work less and earn more.

mast22 5y ago

Welcome to business in Russia

JackPoach 5y ago
Similar things happen in US on a much larger scale. Simply search for 'Amazon hire to fire' 'GE Neutron Jack' or 'Microsoft annual review system'
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

rcurry 5y ago

Was the algorithm also able to identify the senior executive who was responsible for his firm hiring 150 unengaged and unproductive people, or is their big data team still working on that one?

coldcode 5y ago
150 other unengaged and unproductive people are making sure it never works.

someelephant 5y ago

Will be a case study in how to build a toxic culture.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

blinkingled 5y ago

Idiocracy predictions sadly keep coming true. In this case partially - doesn't look like the CEO got laid off.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

>Later, he adds that Xsolla plans to continue to reduce its budget by 10 percent until things pick back up and the company starts seeing at least 40 percent growth. The flogging will continue until morale improves.

lostsoul8282 5y ago

This sets a very bad precedent within this company. If the remaining employees realize that to stay employeed they can I suspect this decision has wider implications for the remaining employees than 150 who were laid off. Remaining people may start faking productivity to stay employeed.

me_me_me 5y ago

All of the quotes in the article read like a robot said them. Imagine being that guy... ouch.

__s 5y ago

> He suggests that the layoffs were the result of Xsolla's slowing growth during the past six months, which he appears to blame in part on reduced productivity due to remote work measures. According to that interview, Xsolla increased its revenue by 80 percent last year (likely related to the pandemic-driven growth many game companies saw in 2020) but within the last six months, Xsolla's growth has dipped below 40 percent year-over-year. Does it make sense to expect growth to return to the previous growth rate after a growth spurt? Either way, seems a bit unengaged as an executive to rely on algorithms for lay offs. But maybe the vague wording is avoiding liability & the input data includes things like performance reviews, meanwhile they were looking to downsize for whatever reason. Some of the remarks come off as rather jejune tho, so there's a definite lack of tact here edit: seems they're expecting consistent 40% growth.. a bit unrealistic

shostack 5y ago
Also completely ignoring that engagement and productivity drops may be quite real and expected given burnout from being full remote from people who do not do well in that environment for a variety of reasons (too isolated, distracting or unsafe home environment, covid-related depression, etc). What has this company done to address that with this exercise? What precedent does that set? If you lose a family member and are disengaged as might be expected, will you be canned "because the AI said so" without your context being considered?

noasaservice 5y ago

All managerial metrics account for the appearance of work, and not work itself.

nsonha 5y ago

It's the game industry what do you expect. People love to trash talk Google & Facebook for monetizing attention but the game industry does it blatantly and even charges money.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

This story is somehow even worse than the headline. The CEO wanted to create an elaborate system to rank employees based on their engagement in certain tools like Jira, Confluence, and company chat. Don’t chat enough? Your ranking is low and you might get laid off. Should have chatted more, sorry. Even stranger, the CEO claims he wanted to let employees view their own engagement scores so they at least had a chance to pump up their numbers (time to spam more e-mails and refresh more Confluence pages so I don’t get fired!) but he went on record in another article blaming the development team for not releasing that feature: > 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. That’s right, the development team who works on the employee ranking tool “wasn’t enthusiastic” about letting other employees see their ranking or how it works, so they’re withholding it from the company supposedly against the wishes of the CEO. The CEO is then going on record, in public, blaming those developers for not letting these other people see their own scores before they get fired. This CEO sounds like the type of person who wants to be in charge but also wants to dodge as much responsibility as possible. Create an algorithm to fire people, then send them an impersonal e-mail letting them know the algorithm has chosen them for firing. Then explain that he wanted to let them see their score and have a chance to react, but those mean developers weren’t enthusiastic about the idea so, sorry, you can’t see it. I’m sure the developers of the secret employee ranking system have high scores for themselves, somehow.

daggersandscars 5y ago
If your firm is using Office 365 / Microsoft Azure products, your managers have similar capabilities available to them. This is one of the marketed uses of Office 365 and other Microsoft products - monitoring "productivity" via metrics such as Teams posts and responses, Azure DevOps activity, etc. I mention this because it doesn't require bringing together disparate systems to monitor your employees. This includes monitoring what files you opened on OneDrive, when you opened them, etc. If you are using Office 365 at work, I highly recommend going to delve.office.com and taking a look. Edited to clarify Office 365 + Microsoft Azure products

throwawaycuriou 5y ago

Incredibly naive tone, to the point I cannot see how a CEO would see this action as beneficial to the company. Is this corporate sabotage from the top? Plenty of history to see what happens next. Remaining employees of value will now put all of their efforts into finding a new role. The ones that stay will struggle to keep the lights on. Both will actively game these preposterous algorithms. Some might even sabotage from below.

trollied 5y ago

Discussed a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068959

ransom1538 5y ago

I would fear a mistake in these engagement metrics. When I tried doing this on different teams the amount of "gotchas" made it useless. EG: a) Jim has the most slack messages. Reason: Jim has a bot that slacks different team members on the status of the build. b) Larry attends the most gcalendar events. Reason: Larry auto accepts all events. However, Ryan auto cancels all events after 4pm but attends them anyway. c) Sally has the least amount of PRs to the main repro. Reason: Sally works on a differet git repro dealing with a different microservice. d) Jeff contributed the most new lines of code. Reason: Jeff added a package under a vendor/ folder. Also! Remember Mark changed from his personal github account to a company github account 3 months ago. e) Linda is "online" the most on slack. Reason: Linda's ubuntu workspace does not autolog her out correctly when the system is idle. f) Mike has the most PRs. Reason: Mike has an auto merge bot to merge release into production. on and on....

throwaway14356 5y ago
it all depends on how they measured it before - if at all. vlad didnt open any applications for 6 days olga puts in a lot of "activity" 3.5 hours per day 4 days per week those places exist!

jasonladuke0311 5y ago

I don't know what to take away from this except that this CEO is evidently a complete fucking idiot. Those metrics are so easily gamed; how could someone not understand that?

rchaud 5y ago
Seems like they plan on cutting costs regardless. Today it was "not enough Jira comments", next time it'll be something else. It's not like anyone's going to ask to audit the algorithm.

m45t3r 5y ago

> The letter goes on to note that Xsolla has partnered with multiple HR agencies to "help you find a good place where you will earn more and work even less". Sure, if I worked on this company I would like this option even if I was considered a "engaged employee" by their own classification.

lupire 5y ago

Please ready the article! It is absolutely stuffed with absurd comments by the CEO. The only explanation I can fathom is that in the remote-work world someone impersonated the CEO as a troll. How did the company grow to pay 500employee's wages? Low Russian salaries and rich American customers?

rchaud 5y ago
Seems like a company that makes mobile games. The culture around those companies seems built around hiring a lot when a game takes off, then slashing headcount when growth tails off and ad dollars fall.

jakearmitage 5y ago

What if this is, in fact, a good thing? This AI-obsession allows employees to game the system, play around the rules and optimize for the metrics that can be easily discovered. That is terrible, but is it any worse than the current state of corporate politics, where privileged people form their own clubs and prevent anyone else from joining? The AI, at least, doesn't see color, gender, sexual orientation, what hobbies you like or you don't like. The machine, as long as you play by its rules, is fair. And I seem to prefer the machine rules, than the rules at the boys club.

throwaway14356 5y ago

i for one respect the hard core management formula presented here. New jobs will be found where you earn more an do even less! I would love to work there. Im tired of people not doing any work. I dont mean people who dont work most of the day. Simple asset tracking would reveal how they never get near work but then a human had to decide and jim is such a nice guy blablabla

Shadonototro 5y ago

Well, i'm glad Stripe is a thing(even thought i'm not a fan of the company either, but it's the least terrible, i guess), along with PayPal, Xsolla will be now in my list of tools to avoid

fnordfnordfnord 5y ago

I have some questions as to whether things are going well at Xsolla. They handle payments for Roblox, and I constantly have problems giving them money. I have three kids playing Roblox who each spend money there at least a couple of times per month.

a3n 5y ago

As a new algorithm, the algorithm clearly wanted to make a splash and have an impact. This also makes room for the algorithm to bring in its own people. Best strategy for a remaining employee is to suck up to the algorithm and try to transfer in to its team.