18 ms·

If I understand the statement below right, 27 of the union members received offers > “Of those laid off, 40 were in the union bargaining unit out of a total 67

by 0xpgm 3y ago

If I understand the statement below right, 27 of the union members received offers > “Of those laid off, 40 were in the union bargaining unit out of a total 67 members. None of the eight (8) democratically elected bargaining team members received a job offer.”

extraduder_ire 3y ago
Seeing the headline, and remembering that 50% of employees were laid off, my first thought was: "what're the odds?" I assume I'd have to use NCR or something to calculate that. I know the upper (rarest) bound is 1/2^40, but it's likely much more likely, and not random.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  You want the binomial distribution. ( https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/binom-dist-function-c5ae37b6-f39c-4be2-94c2-509a1480770c https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/binom-dist-functi... , https://help.libreoffice.org/6.2/en-US/text/scalc/01/04060181.html https://help.libreoffice.org/6.2/en-US/text/scalc/01/0406018... if you want to use Excel; https://help.libreoffice.org/6.2/en-US/text/scalc/01/04060181.html https://help.libreoffice.org/6.2/en-US/text/scalc/01/0406018... ("B") for LibreOffice Calc.) 1/2^40 doesn't come into it. There are 67 relevant employees. Given that 50% of all employees were laid off, what were the odds of at least 40 employees out of 67 randomly-selected employees getting laid off? =B(67;0.5;40;67) > 0.07103569 [This is the LibreOffice formula: "in 67 trials which each have a 0.5 chance of success, what is the probability of seeing between 40 and 67 successes?"] One-tailed p-value of 0.07, two-tailed p-value of 0.14. So the odds are about 1 in 7, or 1 in 14. You might want to ask yourself "Do I really believe that, if I thought I might be about to get fired, that would have no influence on whether I tried to join a union?" [Answering this question in the negative means you can justify using the one-tailed p-value, but it also means the odds of getting fired should be substantially above 50%.] Note also that this number shifts substantially as you move the odds of getting laid off away from 50%. At 53%, you have a one-tailed value of 16.44%. At 47%, it's 2.5%.
  - freeAgent 3y ago
    There’s an implicit assumption that the layoffs were evenly distributed and that the union bargaining team was also evenly distributed within the organization. If those aren’t true, this analysis is going to give deceiving results (could be either direction).
    - mjburgess 3y ago
      And also that the union employees were identical to others -- which is kinda demonstrably false. People who self-select as union leaders are likely to be different from the other employees in various relevant ways. Modelling any of these assumptions yields an arbitrary probability of your own choosing.
    - vanderZwan 3y ago
      Isn't this a statistical catch-22? If being in a union increases the odds of getting fired… well, then there's nothing to discuss because that's illegal. And if it should decrease it because of fear of legal retaliation, wouldn't that make it less likely that this happened randomly. This feels like the wrong conclusion to draw (especially the second part), but I suck at statistics so someone please explain where I'm off.
      - eru 3y ago
        > Isn't this a statistical catch-22? If being in a union increases the odds of getting fired… well, then there's nothing to discuss because that's illegal. Extreme example: suppose a company has 100 employees. Four of them are in the union bargaining team and they just happen to all work for the widgets department because of an accident of history or randomness etc. The widgets department has 10 people overall. Now the company decides for business reasons entirely unrelated to unions, that thanks to GPT they don't need so many people in the widgets department. So they fire 8 people from widgets. Assume further that they went out of their way to protect the union bargainers: of those 8 people fired, only 2 are in the union bargaining team. (That means that the remaining 2 widgets people are both union bargainers.) Even though the company went out of their way to protect the union bargainers, statistically they only laid off 8% of the company, but 50% of union bargainers. Would that be illegal or even unfair? (In the real world, I am fairly sure that union bargainers are concentrated in some departments. Mostly because it attracts certain kinds of people, and different departments also attract certain kinds of people. But, of course, I have no clue what the reality inside of Bandcamp was like. I'm just speculating about hypothetical examples.)
- bananaquant 3y ago
  As an HR would say, those people are "a bad cultural fit", which legitimately raises the probability of them being laid off to 100%. Simple.
  - hkt 3y ago
    "legitimately"? I'd be surprised..
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - banannaise 3y ago
      That's the argument HR would make, as a means of laundering the actual reason.
  - pastacacioepepe 3y ago
    You might need an /s, this is a perfectly plausible comment on HN.
    - taejavu 3y ago
      I believe it’s a sincere comment actually.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        The fact that you're not 100% sure is what worries me.
  - dathinab 3y ago
    still not legitimate, because then any laying of on union members/leaders could be legitimized that way in any country which properly enforces labor protection law laying of any union leaders without the agreement of the union is extremely hard and requires missteps of the members like e.g. stealing. Or really unusual situations like you lay of half of the members and over half of the members have young children (or e.g. are disabled, project leaders etc.) but non of the union members have any of that. The likelihood of which is basically 0 in practice.
- hatsix 3y ago
  It clearly wasn't random, in fact, they said as much. It's a cost-cutting effort, and US salaries are generally much higher than non-US salaries. If you want to know the odds, you'd have to know their criteria. You can't assume that it was random, because it definitely wasn't. (Though, I've seen the aftermath of a random layoff, I'd take criteria'd layoff every day, even if I'm the one with the pink slip.)

by 0xpgm 3y ago

extraduder_ire 3y ago

Seeing the headline, and remembering that 50% of employees were laid off, my first thought was: "what're the odds?" I assume I'd have to use NCR or something to calculate that. I know the upper (rarest) bound is 1/2^40, but it's likely much more likely, and not random.

thaumasiotes 3y ago
You want the binomial distribution. ( https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/binom-dist-function-c5ae37b6-f39c-4be2-94c2-509a1480770c https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/binom-dist-functi... , https://help.libreoffice.org/6.2/en-US/text/scalc/01/04060181.html https://help.libreoffice.org/6.2/en-US/text/scalc/01/0406018... if you want to use Excel; https://help.libreoffice.org/6.2/en-US/text/scalc/01/04060181.html https://help.libreoffice.org/6.2/en-US/text/scalc/01/0406018... ("B") for LibreOffice Calc.) 1/2^40 doesn't come into it. There are 67 relevant employees. Given that 50% of all employees were laid off, what were the odds of at least 40 employees out of 67 randomly-selected employees getting laid off? =B(67;0.5;40;67) > 0.07103569 [This is the LibreOffice formula: "in 67 trials which each have a 0.5 chance of success, what is the probability of seeing between 40 and 67 successes?"] One-tailed p-value of 0.07, two-tailed p-value of 0.14. So the odds are about 1 in 7, or 1 in 14. You might want to ask yourself "Do I really believe that, if I thought I might be about to get fired, that would have no influence on whether I tried to join a union?" [Answering this question in the negative means you can justify using the one-tailed p-value, but it also means the odds of getting fired should be substantially above 50%.] Note also that this number shifts substantially as you move the odds of getting laid off away from 50%. At 53%, you have a one-tailed value of 16.44%. At 47%, it's 2.5%.
- freeAgent 3y ago
  There’s an implicit assumption that the layoffs were evenly distributed and that the union bargaining team was also evenly distributed within the organization. If those aren’t true, this analysis is going to give deceiving results (could be either direction).
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    And also that the union employees were identical to others -- which is kinda demonstrably false. People who self-select as union leaders are likely to be different from the other employees in various relevant ways. Modelling any of these assumptions yields an arbitrary probability of your own choosing.
  - vanderZwan 3y ago
    Isn't this a statistical catch-22? If being in a union increases the odds of getting fired… well, then there's nothing to discuss because that's illegal. And if it should decrease it because of fear of legal retaliation, wouldn't that make it less likely that this happened randomly. This feels like the wrong conclusion to draw (especially the second part), but I suck at statistics so someone please explain where I'm off.
    - eru 3y ago
      > Isn't this a statistical catch-22? If being in a union increases the odds of getting fired… well, then there's nothing to discuss because that's illegal. Extreme example: suppose a company has 100 employees. Four of them are in the union bargaining team and they just happen to all work for the widgets department because of an accident of history or randomness etc. The widgets department has 10 people overall. Now the company decides for business reasons entirely unrelated to unions, that thanks to GPT they don't need so many people in the widgets department. So they fire 8 people from widgets. Assume further that they went out of their way to protect the union bargainers: of those 8 people fired, only 2 are in the union bargaining team. (That means that the remaining 2 widgets people are both union bargainers.) Even though the company went out of their way to protect the union bargainers, statistically they only laid off 8% of the company, but 50% of union bargainers. Would that be illegal or even unfair? (In the real world, I am fairly sure that union bargainers are concentrated in some departments. Mostly because it attracts certain kinds of people, and different departments also attract certain kinds of people. But, of course, I have no clue what the reality inside of Bandcamp was like. I'm just speculating about hypothetical examples.)
bananaquant 3y ago
As an HR would say, those people are "a bad cultural fit", which legitimately raises the probability of them being laid off to 100%. Simple.
- hkt 3y ago
  "legitimately"? I'd be surprised..
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - banannaise 3y ago
    That's the argument HR would make, as a means of laundering the actual reason.
- pastacacioepepe 3y ago
  You might need an /s, this is a perfectly plausible comment on HN.
  - taejavu 3y ago
    I believe it’s a sincere comment actually.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      The fact that you're not 100% sure is what worries me.
- dathinab 3y ago
  still not legitimate, because then any laying of on union members/leaders could be legitimized that way in any country which properly enforces labor protection law laying of any union leaders without the agreement of the union is extremely hard and requires missteps of the members like e.g. stealing. Or really unusual situations like you lay of half of the members and over half of the members have young children (or e.g. are disabled, project leaders etc.) but non of the union members have any of that. The likelihood of which is basically 0 in practice.
hatsix 3y ago
It clearly wasn't random, in fact, they said as much. It's a cost-cutting effort, and US salaries are generally much higher than non-US salaries. If you want to know the odds, you'd have to know their criteria. You can't assume that it was random, because it definitely wasn't. (Though, I've seen the aftermath of a random layoff, I'd take criteria'd layoff every day, even if I'm the one with the pink slip.)