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Comment by hkai | Hacker News Reader

> But they couldn’t fire most of them. The workers were state employees — employees for life — and therefore protected.

It would be interesting to see research that shows whether being an "employee for life" in an office environment (as opposed to judges) leads to more productivity or other benefits.

35 out 22,000 employees committing suicide is a very high number. If that started in 2007 and happened let's say over 5 years, that would be double of the average Paris suicide rate among adults, or the same as in the worst regions of France (Normandie and the north of France in general).

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Except you're measuring a population of France Télécom employees, not the average population of Normandie. Suicide may be high in Normandie because of unemployment, something that employees of France Télécom are not affacted by. Other things like educational achievement matter: e.g. in the US, "men and women aged ≥25 years with at least a college degree exhibited the lowest suicide rates" [0]. I don't have references for France but there are likely to be similar skews.

In this case there is a real question of if this is a clear phenomenon of workplace conditions induced suicide, as harassment, lack of proper training, and other poor conditions were widely reported, so while statistics are a useful tool they don't give all the pieces of the puzzle.

As a French person with family members who've worked at France Télécom, I can vouch that there are factors at play here involving perception of status and employment in French culture that may be novel to e.g. Americans. Japanese culture exhibits similar phenomena. The article summarizes it well:

“These companies were considered family,” Mr. Ledoux told the court. To be mistreated by one is extremely transgressive,” he said.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28756896

> “These companies were considered family,” Mr. Ledoux told the court. To be mistreated by one is extremely transgressive,” he said.

Reminds me of the very high suicide rate among divorced men. Also friend of mine who's new boss was working to get rid of him. He shot himself rather than accept being fired.

Measuring office worker productivity/output is very difficult. If it was possible to measure company culture would be very different.

22k is a small sample for such a rare event. The relatively high rate might just be an artifact of statistics.

Reminds me of this part from Taleb:

"Assume that a coin is fair, i.e., has an equal probability of coming up heads or tails when flipped. I flip it ninety-nine times and get heads each time. What are the odds of my getting tails on my next throw? 2

Dr. John refers to the question as trivial and gives the mathematically correct answer of one half. Fat Tony calls Dr. John a sucker and says, “no more than 1 percent, of course … the coin gotta be loaded.”"

The point being, what are the odds of getting an artifact of statistics precisely when management is harrassing employees to get rid of them from payroll?

The interesting thing is that you can't bias a real coin (unless it's allowed to bounce around after falling). As long as you catch the coin after flipping, you're going to get 50/50 chances, no matter how the coin is weighted. https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~nolan/Papers/dice.pdf

The mind-twisting part of statistics is that Fat Tony is partially right. Because although each independent throw has the probability of one half, the total resulting series is very unlikely.

So you could simultaneously be at awe of the incredible improbability of throwing another heads while proclaiming meh over the 50% chance of the last throw.

It's all a matter of perspective.

The point is this: "Assume that a coin is fair" ... "the coin gotta be loaded"

In the example, Fat Tony is wrong because he contradicts the initial assumption. However, the example is unrealistic because, initially, you don't know if the coin is fair or loaded. You just flip it, see 99 heads and then conclude, with probability very close to 1, that the coin is loaded. (You could still be wrong, but likely aren't).

So in a realistic scenario, Fat Tony would be right, except that the scenario was intentionally set up to be unrealistic.

(edit: typo)

Tony knows the chance of head 99 times in a row is enormously smaller than the chance he's being played for a sucker.

Well the answer of 50% is not just mathematically correct, it's simply correct, because the question said we must assume that the coin is fair.

If this was a real life situation, we would assume a reasonable prior for the probability of heads, perhaps with a spike around 0.5 and a small value everywhere else. The posterior would be centered near 1.

Someone committed suicide by hanging themself with an ethernet cable, it wasn't an "artifact"

I am not saying it was, just that doubling of the rate means little by itself.

If the suicide rate is 17 per 22000, then natural variance alone will push about 14% of random 22k samples into "more than double the base rate" area.

In other words, if you take this indicator alone, then you'll have a false positive about 14% of the time. Obviously, the key word is "alone". With more data about bullying as the cause of suicide you might get better estimations.

> natural variance alone will push about 14% of random 22k samples into "more than double the base rate" area.

Is this true? Can you show the math on this? I'm not seeing it.

Nevermind, I made a mistake in my original calculations - used variance instead of standard deviation.

Actually (from approximating the binomial distribution with n=22k and p=17/22000 with normal one) getting the rate over 30 per 22k has p<0.001.

"Rémy set himself on fire in 2011 in front of a France Télécom office near Bordeaux"

GP doesn't seem to have read the article and is throwing some statistics gimmicks.

How does this compare to the notorious Foxconn?

that kind of research is impossible to do imo.

also i don't think productivity should be the main focus

> But they couldn’t fire most of them. The workers were state employees — employees for life — and therefore protected.

Excessive worker protection is what's wrong with France's economy.

I'm confused. Can you justify your claim? What is wrong with the French economy and how is it related to worker protection? France is, e.g., behind Germany in term of employer protection according to the OECD [1].

[1] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=EPL_R

Here: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-36152571

> The view of many, including the OECD and the European Commission, is that the labour market is at the heart of the problem, though it's not the only factor.

> That reflects a persistent complaint from business: that it's too expensive to hire workers and to fire them or lay them off if they need to.

> The OECD says in its assessment of the French economy: "To reduce the duality of the labour market, the procedures for laying off employees, particularly those on permanent contracts, need to be simplified and shortened….

Perhaps, yet when you are there you are there the lifestyle seems rather attractive. You win some and lose some.

> Excessive worker protection is what's wrong with France's economy.

Excessive billionaires protection is what is wrong with the US economy.

I don't disagree.

you should see the management protection..

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