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Comment by rubidium | Hacker News Reader

Make a script to send out @ mentions across multiple channels, start sending automated "project update" status emails daily, and generally add to useless chatter.

"Look Boss, I'm a good employee. Office 365 spy says so."

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Facebook employees are evaluated on many things, including number of reviews that they participate in. My friend said that lead to a lot of engineers adding "+1" comments to as many reviews as possible, or requesting "Thank you"s for responding to emails.

> [...] requesting "Thank you"s for responding to emails.

What does this mean?

It sounds like if employee A sends an email to employee B and employee B sends a response to A, employee B expects (implied or explicitly stated in their response) a "thank you for your time/response" email from employee A. Just a guess though.

I’d love to know as well. Thank you @rubidium for starting this comment tree and also @ping_pong for additional insights. Clarifications and/or corrections are totally welcome as this my comment is based on pure speculation.

Facebook has an internal tool called thanksbot that you can use to “send thanks” to people, and these are recorded and can be discussed at performance review time. Ideally only in situation where it actually matters (thanks for the refactor that made our service use 50% less gCPU!) but obviously anything can be gamed.

LMAO that's the funniest thing I heard all day, primarily because where I work that's not evaluated at all.

More power to the managers, but all good when your managers are likable people.

Sounds like the comment section of LinkedIn posts

Congrats

Congratulations

Congrats

Give the script to everyone you know as well.

Automated metrics deserve automated data.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Only the finest hand-collected artisanal metrics are worthy of MY data.

this, but unironically

I suppose you could hand-craft some of the script-generated responses if you want.

Why not use GPT-3 or some other GAN and train it on stuff you have actually written?

Then you can have high-quality, automated data to feed the metrics machine.

> Automated metrics deserve automated data.

Exactly this. And remember that it applies to any automated data collection. (After all, automated data collection is automated data collection.)

So, this would only work if you use basic vbscript and not powershell which is enabled =per account, regardless if admin or not. But it does not take into account browser clicks, refreshing pages and general browsing.

This was a very brought up topic at MSFT.

Couldn't you just use browser automation tools for this? It wouldn't really make sense to use the tools that are watching the behavior to automate the behavior

Yes, you could, but that wouldn't be as fun.

That was my first thought.

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