6 ms·
Tech CEOs Want Every Worker to Have a Permanent, Public Job Performance File
- anm89 4y agoPeople are missing the point here. No one is seriously advocating for this. It's just Vice rage baiting because that's what Vice does. It's two people with very little influence discussing a scenario on a podcast.
- alphabettsy 4y agoDid you read the article? Didn’t seem like rage bait. It seemed like they laid out the context of this discussion with the rise of employee surveillance. Do we have to wait for a startup to exist with this product before we can say it’s a bad idea?
- vba616 4y agoIf people are talking about "bait", I assume they mean the title is bait for the article. Don't see how the article can rebut the title being designed to enrage by misleading.
- jacksonmary5699 4y ago
- jeffwask 4y agoSounds great. They can go first by providing every candidate with a CEO profile detailing average turn over, NPS score, compensation management strategy, etc
- alephxyz 4y ago>In the podcast, Youakim provides a seemingly harmless anecdote that illustrates how this works in practice. In response to Hoffman’s question about how he identifies outstanding candidates, Youakim recalled asking one interviewee to meet him for coffee at 7 a.m. on a Saturday as a test for “entitlement.” To decline to meet at such a time would, in Youakim’s mind, illustrate a lack of “going above and beyond.” The person who not only agreed to meet him then but showed up early is now one of Sezzle’s “superstars,” as Youakim put it, apparent confirmation his 7 a.m. coffee test is a good one. He would definitely get high scores in the psychopathy and entitlement categories.
- short_sells_poo 4y agoHe'll also get a bunch of bootlickers and yes-men who'll do and say whatever the boss wants to hear. This kind of mindset beggars belief. I feel like some people escaped from a Lord of the Flies novel.
- blitzar 4y agoSounds a bit like the "test" Gary has to face to win back the trust of his boss in Team America. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xVk9nqmQGc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xVk9nqmQGc
- dghlsakjg 4y agoI can't believe this guy. Asking someone to do something useless just to see if they'll do it is TERRIBLE leadership. Meeting a superior at 7 AM in your free time as a test to 1. see if you'll do something that is nakedly irrational and wasteful and 2. because a superior told you to is a very negative signal for companies that want to actually get shit done. So yeah, I want to work for a company of people that are "entitled". Entitled to ask questions about what they are doing and why/if it is necessary. Entitled to say no to unexplained requests from superiors.
- zzgo 4y agoI once scored a phone screen with GitLab. They scheduled the screen with a manager for midnight. I asked for a different time more in line with my sleep schedule. They scheduled _that_ screen with an intern. I never heard back from the company after that.
- bhahn 4y agoThe title is a bit sensationalist. Looks like two CEOs of smaller tech companies talked about this casually on a podcast, while the title implies a _much_ larger number of people.
- boeingUH60 4y agoIt’s typical Vice Media and many other news sites whose revenues are dependent on drawing page views. Take a very minor issue and amplify it loudly to make it seem much bigger than it is…draw in page views and make money. I loathe this type of click-baiting…but on the bright side, the media companies that specialize in this stuff (Vice Media, BuzzFeed, et al) are often failing ones looking to salvage what’s left of their existence. For example, Vice is drowning in debt to the tune of $1.1 billion[1]and is finding it impossible to sell for a price that’ll leave anything on the table for equity investors. They tried the SPAC scam route [2] but I guess that didn’t work out for them. 1 - https://www.theinformation.com/articles/vice-media-makes-cost-cutting-push-as-it-eyes-sale-options https://www.theinformation.com/articles/vice-media-makes-cos... 2 - https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/vice-media-raises-85-million-132615471.html https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/vice-media-raises-85-mil...
- killingtime74 4y agoIndeed, two CEOs of companies with a total of only about 500 employees combined most of us had to look up.
- phendrenad2 4y agoCan this really work though? You can't crowdsource the data anonymously, because anonymous data is useless. You can't crowdsource it with verified profiles, because no one wants to make an enemy by publicly giving a coworker a bad rating. Lastly, you can't get the data from an impartial source (like company HR departments) because they have no reason to share which of their employees are valuable.
- cestith 4y agoSo a CEO hires a VP who hires a senior director who hires a director who hires a manager who changes specs and deadlines in the middle of projects all the time, and all the rank and file have that follow them as a black mark when they try to leave for a more sane company? No thanks.
- gitfan86 4y agoDon't worry someone will create fake companies with the sole purpose of selling good reviews.
- joshmarlow 4y agoReputation Laundering for Fun and Profit? I can dig it.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoEven worse, what happens when things go off the rails? My former boss *used to* be good.
- heisenbit 4y agoAnd I would like to have a public file on each tech HR organization, complaint log, lawsuits and arbitration, feedback to CEO from investors and C suite payments and contract details.
- xmodem 4y agonot to mention salary ranges per team and per role
- spacemanmatt 4y agoI want a permanent, public job performance profile on every tech CEO.
- gnicholas 4y agoMaybe update the title in light of this subhed? > Two CEOs on a podcast casually proposed a shareable database of worker performance that would follow them between companies, forever, and encouraged listeners to create one. It's two tech CEOs, not tech CEOs in general.
- SwSwinger 4y agoThat's essentially what GitHub is doing. You have your entire contribution history and they have a product to help managers analyze contributions across teams. I worked at a couple startups that used this to evaluate their employees in manager-only meeting.
- manuelabeledo 4y ago> You have your entire contribution history and they have a product to help managers analyze contributions across teams. So any contribution not logged in their system, doesn't exist. Yeah, terrible still.
- methehack 4y agoI think if you get a bad performance review, they should probably just send you to prison.
- matrix12 4y agoI have to agree with Meth e-hack
- ultrarunner 4y agoOur HR director (still literally in school to become an HR director) implemented performance reviews on a goal-based platform. Practically, this meant that since everyone needed a goal, management needed to find faults for even competent employees in order to have goals to attain. Effectually, every performance review was then tainted and came across negatively. I felt so bad conducting mine for my team, and strongly considered resigning. Stupid well-meaning decisions like these get carried out every day in business. These nuanced mistakes becoming permanent in some way would be the dystopic icing on a cake of bureaucratic nightmares.
- kcplate 4y agoIt’s my opinion that the sole purpose of HR is to try and find creative ways to justify their own existence.
- VirusNewbie 4y agoAs someone doing interviews now, I would actually prefer a 'bar' type test that employees can take every so often to show their technical skills. It could have all kinds of algorithmic questions, system design, practical application building and whatever else. It would be administered in person to prevent cheating (as much as possible), and companies could choose which scores to pay attention to. Meta doesn't find dynamic programming questions useful for hiring but likes all the other algo questions. Stripe doesn't like algo questions but wants to see people bootstrap stuff. So let me just do that once (or per decade or what) so I can get over answering the same damn algorithm question at four different companies. Conversely, this would save me from having to 'fail' the same type of DP questions I keep getting stumped on. Let's just save everyone time.
- CogitoCogito 4y agoOr just hire fast and fire for fast. It’s too bad the US social net is so tied to jobs making that practically unviable. I would much prefer such a system to a long song and dance of any interviews.
- twox2 4y agoHire fast / fire fast has worked for some relatively lean teams that I've been on, but I can see it being hard to implement at mid-size and bigger companies where there's all kinds of red tape.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoThe real problem is still the moral one they indicated. If someone leaves a stable job where they perform adequately and you fire them from the new one, you've removed their source of income and probably healthcare. With no knowledge of who they're supporting or what resources they have access to, this could be a very damaging thing to do. If you limit your hiring only to people whose resources can handle that risk, you're limiting your pool to only financially stable individuals who don't have eg a child or spouse with an expensive medical condition. Morally treacherous territory either way in the absence of a trustworthy economic safety net that the US absolutely doesn't have.
- unstatusthequo 4y agoIncluding themselves I hope. After all, they are just a “worker” to equity holders.
- TrackerFF 4y agoSounds like a no, with regard to GDPR.
- blitzar 4y agoCharlie Youakim, the CEO of buy now pay later (BNPL) firm Sezzle so a loan shark, I mean thats pretty much the lowest of the low ... Auren Hoffman, the CEO of Safegraph, a large location data broker oh shit, spoke too soon.
- advisedwang 4y agoMakes sense from a CEO perspective. If you have the power to blacklist your employees, they're going to work harder, for less and never dissent.
- stillbourne 4y ago
- FooBarBizBazz 4y agoMany companies already use third party platforms to manage performance reviews. Who's to say that this isn't already happening?
- wutbrodo 4y agoCould we stop posting clickbait garbage like Vice? The CEOs of "Sezzle" and "Safegraph" said something on a podcast, and the headline loudly proclaims that "Tech CEOs" desire this. Two CEOs, one of whom has 500 employees and one who has 100,said something on a podcast, and through the magic of strategically leaving off qualifiers for plural nouns, it's been transmuted into a newsworthy report with a headline that implies something broader than two relative nobodies throwing an idea out. I get that there are too many wannabe journalists and not enough news, so in some sense I don't blame the author; he's grinding out a living in a morally-questionable field like many, many people do. But why do we have to infect HN with this nonsense?
- givemeethekeys 4y agoThis sort of stuff screams, "misdirection" to me. Whats the real trick?