5 ms·

Pointy-haired boss: "According to the anonymous online employee survey, you don't trust management. What's up with that?" <Dilbert looks back with a blank sta

Pointy-haired boss: "According to the anonymous online employee survey, you don't trust management. What's up with that?" <Dilbert looks back with a blank stare> --- Godspeed Scott. Thank you for all the laughs.

al_borland 1y ago
I actually had this happen back in high school. The teacher gave us “anonymous” surveys to gauge her performance. She analyzed the handwriting to determine which one was mine. I actively tried to change my handwriting as well, but I guess not well enough. I’ve never trusted a survey was actually anonymous after that.
- yegle 1y ago
  A simple trick is to write with your non-dominant hand :-)
  - ikiris 1y ago
    Incomprehensible hen-scratch is pretty anonymous.
- JohnFen 1y ago
  Yes, 100% this. I learned a similar lesson and will never risk trusting that any survey is anonymous again. I've seen the pattern repeat with other data collection as well -- "anonymous" data collection or "anonymized" data almost never is.
- atonse 1y ago
  We've been tasked by a client for 2 years to create an anonymized survey, and my mind has gone to great lengths to devise a survey where even our own employees (or superusers with full DB access) cannot figure out who a respondent is. It's been a fun exercise in software architecture. Because I actually care about this. But we keep pushing this annual survey another year since we never seem to be ready to actually implement it (due to other priorities)
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    There's commercial service providers and open-source projects doing that already. The thing is, as soon as you allow free-text entry, the exercise becomes moot assuming you got a solid training corpus of emails to train an AI on - basically the same approach that Wikipedia activists used to do two decades ago to determine "sockpuppet" accounts.
    - nightshift1 1y ago
      unless you add a step where you ask an ai to paraphrase what this message is about.
      - mschuster91 1y ago
        Good point, but also liable to get crucial informations and details lost or, worse, completely misunderstood by an AI which by definition lacks contextual knowledge.
    - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
      Just run it through encheferizer.
      - WalterBright 1y ago
        Zee theeng is, es suun es yuoo elloo free-a-text intry, zee ixerceese-a becumes muut essoomeeng yuoo gut a suleed treeening curpoos ooff imeeels tu treeen un EI oon - beseecelly zee seme-a eppruech thet Veekipedia ecteefists used tu du tvu decedes egu tu determeene-a "suckpooppet" eccuoonts. Bork Bork Bork!
  - al_borland 1y ago
    I built a suggestion box for a team at work like this. It was pretty basic. The page had no login, and no tracking of any kind. The DB only had an index, the date, and the suggestion. The source was available to everyone who would use it, and if they wanted I would have shown them the DB. These people also had root access to the server it ran on, so if they were really paranoid they could clear any system logs. The site was also heavily used for the day to day work, so the noise from everyone on the page would obscure any ability to tie a single IP to a time stamp without a lot of effort and a large chance for error. Over the course of 4 years I think it was only used 3 times. Most people assumed it was some kind of trap. It wasn’t, I genuinely wanted honest feedback, and thought some people were too shy to speak up in a group setting, so wanted to give options.
- dpc_01234 1y ago
  Great teacher gave you an invaluable life lesson.
  - kirubakaran 1y ago
    In the same way that pickpockets give you a great lesson in not keeping your wallet in your back pocket
- protocolture 1y ago
  When I was in grade 2 we had a secret santa, but it was the competitive variant, where the "winners" were able to guess who gave them the gift. So on the card I provided with my gift, I signed off the name of someone else in class, and partially erased it. Made sure it was still somewhat legible and then wrote "From your secret santa" beneath it. They didn't believe the gift was from me even after the teacher provided them with the original draw, and their supposed gift giver identified someone else as their recipient.
- ashdksnndck 1y ago
  When I quit a unicorn tech startup several years ago, they sent me an anonymous exit survey. It was was on a name-brand survey platform and the platform’s UI indicated the survey was anonymous. In my later in-person exit interview with a guy from HR, he had us go over a copy of my answers! Based on his demeanor, I don’t think he knew it was presented as anonymous.
- spacechild1 1y ago
  The same thing happened to a friend of mind in junior highschool. The teacher even called him out in front of the whole class for giving her bad ratings. We all did, but she recognized his handwriting in particular:-D
- bemmu 1y ago
  I personally knew someone who gave a course, and handed out anonymous feedback forms. All subtly unique.
- madcaptenor 1y ago
  In college once I took a course that was being offered for the first time. They gave a midterm survey (usually we only had final surveys). I filled it out honestly, saying that my partner for our group projects was not pulling his weight. I had forgotten that I was in the only group of two (all the other groups were of three). The professor actually pulled me aside to let me know that he was aware our group wasn't working out - unfortunately there wasn't anything he could do.
- ornornor 1y ago
  I worked at a startup (that is still a startup going nowhere 12 years later) where the ceo and cto made a big show of the town hall and in particular the “open questions” part. Anyone could go on a little internal app, ask an “anonymous” question, and they’d answer all of this week’s questions each week. In reality, they cherry picked the questions that they wanted to talk about and ignored the hard ones. We could tell because all asked questions were publicly visible in the app. But not all answered “ah we’re out of time” So I once posted a question about why were the interns unpaid while writing code we shipped in production. I posted this question just after the previous town hall so that it would stay visible in the app for the longest time until the next town hall and would also be top of the list of pending questions. For a couple weeks they said they wanted to answer it but needed to ask clarification questions to make sure they understood correctly, so could please the asker reveal themselves as it’s only fair. I never said it was me and nobody said it was them either. They couldn’t just delete the question like they usually did with unanswered questions before as this had stirred quite a little storm between employees. And it would clash with the “we’re open and fair” koolaid they were serving us. Eventually, they deleted the question without annswering it “since the asker doesn’t have the courage to reveal themselves” and I was laid off which was “totally unrelated to the question you asked”. Before leaving I dumped the database for that app out of curiosity. You bet that every single question also had an entry of who asked which question. They knew all along.
teddyh 1y ago
Link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2010-09-01 https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2010-09-01>
bsimpson 1y ago
I try to be careful about e.g. changing punctuation and spacing if I want anonymous feedback to stay anonymous. After some shuffling at work, I ended up spending some time under an awful manager. She approached me after an anonymous round of feedback and said "I noticed you wrote _____." I had, in fact, not written that. On some level, having her guess wrong seemed even worse, but it also felt nice to be able to honestly say "I did not." Hopefully taught her to respect anonymity next time.
- wombatpm 1y ago
  I routinely steal quotes from coworkers in meetings and use them in my surveys I never express my sentiments, just the sentiments of others.
rcarmo 1y ago
My absolute fave is somewhere along the lines of “I hope to someday solve a problem that isn’t caused by leadership”.

al_borland 1y ago

I actually had this happen back in high school. The teacher gave us “anonymous” surveys to gauge her performance. She analyzed the handwriting to determine which one was mine. I actively tried to change my handwriting as well, but I guess not well enough. I’ve never trusted a survey was actually anonymous after that.

yegle 1y ago
A simple trick is to write with your non-dominant hand :-)
- ikiris 1y ago
  Incomprehensible hen-scratch is pretty anonymous.
JohnFen 1y ago
Yes, 100% this. I learned a similar lesson and will never risk trusting that any survey is anonymous again. I've seen the pattern repeat with other data collection as well -- "anonymous" data collection or "anonymized" data almost never is.
atonse 1y ago
We've been tasked by a client for 2 years to create an anonymized survey, and my mind has gone to great lengths to devise a survey where even our own employees (or superusers with full DB access) cannot figure out who a respondent is. It's been a fun exercise in software architecture. Because I actually care about this. But we keep pushing this annual survey another year since we never seem to be ready to actually implement it (due to other priorities)
- mschuster91 1y ago
  There's commercial service providers and open-source projects doing that already. The thing is, as soon as you allow free-text entry, the exercise becomes moot assuming you got a solid training corpus of emails to train an AI on - basically the same approach that Wikipedia activists used to do two decades ago to determine "sockpuppet" accounts.
  - nightshift1 1y ago
    unless you add a step where you ask an ai to paraphrase what this message is about.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      Good point, but also liable to get crucial informations and details lost or, worse, completely misunderstood by an AI which by definition lacks contextual knowledge.
  - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
    Just run it through encheferizer.
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      Zee theeng is, es suun es yuoo elloo free-a-text intry, zee ixerceese-a becumes muut essoomeeng yuoo gut a suleed treeening curpoos ooff imeeels tu treeen un EI oon - beseecelly zee seme-a eppruech thet Veekipedia ecteefists used tu du tvu decedes egu tu determeene-a "suckpooppet" eccuoonts. Bork Bork Bork!
- al_borland 1y ago
  I built a suggestion box for a team at work like this. It was pretty basic. The page had no login, and no tracking of any kind. The DB only had an index, the date, and the suggestion. The source was available to everyone who would use it, and if they wanted I would have shown them the DB. These people also had root access to the server it ran on, so if they were really paranoid they could clear any system logs. The site was also heavily used for the day to day work, so the noise from everyone on the page would obscure any ability to tie a single IP to a time stamp without a lot of effort and a large chance for error. Over the course of 4 years I think it was only used 3 times. Most people assumed it was some kind of trap. It wasn’t, I genuinely wanted honest feedback, and thought some people were too shy to speak up in a group setting, so wanted to give options.
dpc_01234 1y ago
Great teacher gave you an invaluable life lesson.
- kirubakaran 1y ago
  In the same way that pickpockets give you a great lesson in not keeping your wallet in your back pocket
protocolture 1y ago
When I was in grade 2 we had a secret santa, but it was the competitive variant, where the "winners" were able to guess who gave them the gift. So on the card I provided with my gift, I signed off the name of someone else in class, and partially erased it. Made sure it was still somewhat legible and then wrote "From your secret santa" beneath it. They didn't believe the gift was from me even after the teacher provided them with the original draw, and their supposed gift giver identified someone else as their recipient.
ashdksnndck 1y ago
When I quit a unicorn tech startup several years ago, they sent me an anonymous exit survey. It was was on a name-brand survey platform and the platform’s UI indicated the survey was anonymous. In my later in-person exit interview with a guy from HR, he had us go over a copy of my answers! Based on his demeanor, I don’t think he knew it was presented as anonymous.
spacechild1 1y ago
The same thing happened to a friend of mind in junior highschool. The teacher even called him out in front of the whole class for giving her bad ratings. We all did, but she recognized his handwriting in particular:-D
bemmu 1y ago
I personally knew someone who gave a course, and handed out anonymous feedback forms. All subtly unique.
madcaptenor 1y ago
In college once I took a course that was being offered for the first time. They gave a midterm survey (usually we only had final surveys). I filled it out honestly, saying that my partner for our group projects was not pulling his weight. I had forgotten that I was in the only group of two (all the other groups were of three). The professor actually pulled me aside to let me know that he was aware our group wasn't working out - unfortunately there wasn't anything he could do.
ornornor 1y ago
I worked at a startup (that is still a startup going nowhere 12 years later) where the ceo and cto made a big show of the town hall and in particular the “open questions” part. Anyone could go on a little internal app, ask an “anonymous” question, and they’d answer all of this week’s questions each week. In reality, they cherry picked the questions that they wanted to talk about and ignored the hard ones. We could tell because all asked questions were publicly visible in the app. But not all answered “ah we’re out of time” So I once posted a question about why were the interns unpaid while writing code we shipped in production. I posted this question just after the previous town hall so that it would stay visible in the app for the longest time until the next town hall and would also be top of the list of pending questions. For a couple weeks they said they wanted to answer it but needed to ask clarification questions to make sure they understood correctly, so could please the asker reveal themselves as it’s only fair. I never said it was me and nobody said it was them either. They couldn’t just delete the question like they usually did with unanswered questions before as this had stirred quite a little storm between employees. And it would clash with the “we’re open and fair” koolaid they were serving us. Eventually, they deleted the question without annswering it “since the asker doesn’t have the courage to reveal themselves” and I was laid off which was “totally unrelated to the question you asked”. Before leaving I dumped the database for that app out of curiosity. You bet that every single question also had an entry of who asked which question. They knew all along.

teddyh 1y ago

Link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2010-09-01 https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2010-09-01>

bsimpson 1y ago

I try to be careful about e.g. changing punctuation and spacing if I want anonymous feedback to stay anonymous. After some shuffling at work, I ended up spending some time under an awful manager. She approached me after an anonymous round of feedback and said "I noticed you wrote _____." I had, in fact, not written that. On some level, having her guess wrong seemed even worse, but it also felt nice to be able to honestly say "I did not." Hopefully taught her to respect anonymity next time.

wombatpm 1y ago
I routinely steal quotes from coworkers in meetings and use them in my surveys I never express my sentiments, just the sentiments of others.

rcarmo 1y ago

My absolute fave is somewhere along the lines of “I hope to someday solve a problem that isn’t caused by leadership”.