4 ms·

My personal favorite tidbit about a company which gave surveys years ago was that they claimed they were anonymous but when I was late to submit mine one year,

by emeril 2y ago

My personal favorite tidbit about a company which gave surveys years ago was that they claimed they were anonymous but when I was late to submit mine one year, the CFO called me and asked me to do my survey since it was late...

HeavyStorm 2y ago
Vote in my country is mandatory. If I don't vote, I lose lots of rights and need to pay a fine(very cheap, token value). Are elections rigged?
- Clubber 2y ago
  He didn't say they were rigged, he just said they were not anonymous as was claimed. Also, voting records in the US indicate whether you voted or not, but not who you voted for; that part is anonymous. Perhaps his company was similar.
- codr7 2y ago
  Does it make any difference in practice who wins? Or is it the same money pulling the strings of whoever takes the seat? The illusion of choice is a very effective method for controlling people.
try_the_bass 2y ago
It's entirely possible the survey is anonymous, but they can still see who hasn't responded. Depending on the survey software, these aren't exactly mutually-exclusive things?
- addaon 2y ago
  > It's entirely possible the survey is anonymous, but they can still see who hasn't responded. Sure —- but then you know the exact answers of the last person to respond; it’s just the delta between the results before they responded and after, and you know who they are. So they’re fully de-anonymized. And of course that means you can de-anonymize the second-to-last respondent… and so on.
  - try_the_bass 2y ago
    Cool, so it could be exploited by someone who makes a hard effort to exploit it (polling the answers and comparing them to the non-respondents, I guess?). How many of these "executives" or "HR people" who contract these kinds of surveys actually have the a) time, b) interest, or c) acuity to perform this kind of exploit? Not many that I could think of. The bar for exploiting this is high for non-technical people, and I don't think it's rational to conclude that it would be exploited in the majority of cases, much less a significant minority. I think the default usage of surveys like this is approximately: 1) come up with some questions, 2) put these into some survey software, 3) put in the employee email list, 4) blast everyone with a link and a deadline, then 5) check back in on the results when the deadline is near. Ain't nobody got time to watch every result come in and do some computation to figure out everyone's exact answers. If that's what they were really after, they'd probably just remove the option to respond anonymously. There are far easier ways to achieve the same end than by some circuitous exploit, right?
- rrrx3 2y ago
  I'll take a whack at this since I have some relative experience from playing at a functional exec in my last role we used Lattice in an organization of ~150 people. We had roughly 10 leaders (exec and non-exec), responsible for various functions. The most any one leader had in their reporting tree was ~40 (one of the Eng leaders) For Lattice, at least from what I was exposed to, the surveys ARE anonymous. They know who has and hasn't submitted a survey because everyone gets a personalized link, but that is not aggregated up into some dashboard where UUIDs are mapped back to respondents. It's something like "Bill in finance has 4 directs, and 2 of those haven't pressed submit on their unique survey." But as you can figure, that does not matter AT ALL. Anyone with a modicum of attention can figure out who wrote what when you have a reporting tree that small. You will see the responses broken out by leader, by function (say, Sales for example), and then division, whole company. The only people who had access to all the results AFAIK were the CEO, the head of IT, and HR. In short, it's anonymity theater if your leadership has any inkling of how you communicate. I knew exactly who wrote what from my teams, and so did my leadership peers.
  - try_the_bass 2y ago
    > In short, it's anonymity theater if your leadership has any inkling of how you communicate. I knew exactly who wrote what from my teams, and so did my leadership peers. You might be able to identify your direct reports based on communication style alone, but I don't really find it believable that this is a property that naturally transfers to your leadership, and from them up the chain to executives. If that is true, then the "anonymity theater" only really extends to direct leadership, and not much further. This means that you, as a leader, would have to be complicit in any attempts to deanonymize any specific respondents. So to rephrase: your ability to deanonymize your direct reports' responses does not extrapolate to the entire exercise being "anonymity theater", because your ability to deanonymize any given respondent only extends as far as your direct reports and maybe a free others. This becomes increasingly less true the larger the set of total employees surveyed.
    - avidiax 2y ago
      > You might be able to identify your direct reports based on communication style alone, but I don't really find it believable that this is a property that naturally transfers to your leadership, and from them up the chain to executives. And when your leadership says that we should help whoever "isn't a good fit" to exit the company, will you use your knowledge of who wrote what to make the right choice of who to fire?

by emeril 2y ago

HeavyStorm 2y ago

Vote in my country is mandatory. If I don't vote, I lose lots of rights and need to pay a fine(very cheap, token value). Are elections rigged?

Clubber 2y ago
He didn't say they were rigged, he just said they were not anonymous as was claimed. Also, voting records in the US indicate whether you voted or not, but not who you voted for; that part is anonymous. Perhaps his company was similar.
codr7 2y ago
Does it make any difference in practice who wins? Or is it the same money pulling the strings of whoever takes the seat? The illusion of choice is a very effective method for controlling people.

try_the_bass 2y ago

It's entirely possible the survey is anonymous, but they can still see who hasn't responded. Depending on the survey software, these aren't exactly mutually-exclusive things?

addaon 2y ago
> It's entirely possible the survey is anonymous, but they can still see who hasn't responded. Sure —- but then you know the exact answers of the last person to respond; it’s just the delta between the results before they responded and after, and you know who they are. So they’re fully de-anonymized. And of course that means you can de-anonymize the second-to-last respondent… and so on.
- try_the_bass 2y ago
  Cool, so it could be exploited by someone who makes a hard effort to exploit it (polling the answers and comparing them to the non-respondents, I guess?). How many of these "executives" or "HR people" who contract these kinds of surveys actually have the a) time, b) interest, or c) acuity to perform this kind of exploit? Not many that I could think of. The bar for exploiting this is high for non-technical people, and I don't think it's rational to conclude that it would be exploited in the majority of cases, much less a significant minority. I think the default usage of surveys like this is approximately: 1) come up with some questions, 2) put these into some survey software, 3) put in the employee email list, 4) blast everyone with a link and a deadline, then 5) check back in on the results when the deadline is near. Ain't nobody got time to watch every result come in and do some computation to figure out everyone's exact answers. If that's what they were really after, they'd probably just remove the option to respond anonymously. There are far easier ways to achieve the same end than by some circuitous exploit, right?
rrrx3 2y ago
I'll take a whack at this since I have some relative experience from playing at a functional exec in my last role we used Lattice in an organization of ~150 people. We had roughly 10 leaders (exec and non-exec), responsible for various functions. The most any one leader had in their reporting tree was ~40 (one of the Eng leaders) For Lattice, at least from what I was exposed to, the surveys ARE anonymous. They know who has and hasn't submitted a survey because everyone gets a personalized link, but that is not aggregated up into some dashboard where UUIDs are mapped back to respondents. It's something like "Bill in finance has 4 directs, and 2 of those haven't pressed submit on their unique survey." But as you can figure, that does not matter AT ALL. Anyone with a modicum of attention can figure out who wrote what when you have a reporting tree that small. You will see the responses broken out by leader, by function (say, Sales for example), and then division, whole company. The only people who had access to all the results AFAIK were the CEO, the head of IT, and HR. In short, it's anonymity theater if your leadership has any inkling of how you communicate. I knew exactly who wrote what from my teams, and so did my leadership peers.
- try_the_bass 2y ago
  > In short, it's anonymity theater if your leadership has any inkling of how you communicate. I knew exactly who wrote what from my teams, and so did my leadership peers. You might be able to identify your direct reports based on communication style alone, but I don't really find it believable that this is a property that naturally transfers to your leadership, and from them up the chain to executives. If that is true, then the "anonymity theater" only really extends to direct leadership, and not much further. This means that you, as a leader, would have to be complicit in any attempts to deanonymize any specific respondents. So to rephrase: your ability to deanonymize your direct reports' responses does not extrapolate to the entire exercise being "anonymity theater", because your ability to deanonymize any given respondent only extends as far as your direct reports and maybe a free others. This becomes increasingly less true the larger the set of total employees surveyed.
  - avidiax 2y ago
    > You might be able to identify your direct reports based on communication style alone, but I don't really find it believable that this is a property that naturally transfers to your leadership, and from them up the chain to executives. And when your leadership says that we should help whoever "isn't a good fit" to exit the company, will you use your knowledge of who wrote what to make the right choice of who to fire?