Xsolla fires 150 employees using analysis of chat and email activity

Some consulting firm came in to the company and decided, based on number of commits (or some such metric), that one particular engineer was the lowest performing engineer on the team. So, management fired them.

Turns out that engineer was the one who everyone side-channeled with to get help when blocked. They were the one who knew the system best and were enabling everyone's productivity, it just didn't show up in the metrics.

I wonder how many false positives they got here.

Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.

--Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson.

If company design the work "game" like such, people will try to cheat the game like automatically producing whole bunch of crap on daily basis - is that productive? Then, they will have to figure out an anti-cheat, on and on. Play stupid game, get stupid prizes.

For people who might want to work for them, this really a turn off. What kind of potential metrics they could be looking for next? If a person made a 2000 line code that impacted the whole company, but that's all the code that person produced, should he/she get fired for being unproductive? What a rabbit hole!

https://maxfrenzel.medium.com/in-praise-of-deep-work-full-di...

And when given the choice I’ve seen teams almost battle to get these “low producers” into the group even though their output wasn’t top-tier.

I don’t know how we measure for these slippery traits without falling into woo traps but until we figure out what to look for, great team building will remain an art.

We’re nowhere near a point where we can accurately measure the weird and chaotic quirks that make up a top-tier team. Building a team is still far more of an art more than a science.

I get letting a person or two go who have clearly demonstrated they’re not a good fit, but I can’t help but wonder how much of the kool-aid this company has drank to think firing this many people based on weird data measurements was at all a good idea.

- the 1st, sounding great in Russian, yet hard to translate, is "work energetically like f&cking or f&ck off"

- the 2nd is "looking for a great PR professional in Russia"

https://vc.ru/hr/277765-glava-xsolla-obyasnil-massovye-uvoln...

While without directly offensive words, not like the FB posts above, his message firing the people is still written in a very insulting disrespectful tone. "Write me a long letter". Russian term is "izdevka". The message is written with a lot of mistypes and Russian language mistakes. It doesn't look to me like it was written in a rational and/or sober state.

Some points from https://app2top.ru/industry/xsolla-ob-yasnila-uvol-neniya-za...

- slowdown of growth is the reason for layoffs, and thus decision to cut 10% of salary budget

- primarily firing rank-and-file, not management

- time spend in git/IDE wasn't considered in the evaluating employee efficiency

- most layoffs in Perm is because salaries there are lower than in US

I get a feeling that he is losing it, like he probably got teared a new one by the investors or something like this, got drunk and got that epiphany ... The metrics collection was probably going for some time, and finally they found a use for them.

In America, in recent years, both in our company and in the media, various minorities have been actively protected and people are very cautious about the dismissal of gays, blacks, and more recently, Asians. But in Xsolla, we did not give immunity to these groups, because all decisions that a human makes, from the point of view of Americans, have a risk of being biased, and our algorithmic solution is as unbiased as possible. Therefore, from the point of view of American media and American civil society, for us it is much better and more indisputable than if some manager fired someone.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=https:/... (In Russian, Google translated)

For example, "... If you want to stay in contact with me, please write me a long letter..." should be better translated as "... If you want to remain my acquaintance, please write me a long letter..."

(source: I'm russian)

I did not continue to do that as when a task carried over into the next day I wasn’t hassled about it, but whenever things like this occur I have to wonder if there are places where this strategy would be required.

This naturally ended up a disaster because A) those people weren't updating their skills in the tool because they were high demand rock stars and B) they had deep customer relationships, to the point where many customers threatened to (and I'm some cases did) cancel their contracts and stop doing business with us. My understanding is somewhere between 1\3 and 1\2 of everyone let go was hired back at higher pay after keeping all their secerence pay, and many of the rest just refused to do so.

It is a real problem! People are just bunking off and not working!

I also saw this when people were in office, however. Eventually, some people just stop doing work completely and coast until they are noticed or find a new org to be a parasite of, a surprisingly rare occurrence.

And I say this as an extremely lazy employee who often checks out at 4pm. It gets BAD with some people.

Wow you're really selling it for us. PR nightmare.

But using this data without the context is pretty foolish.

I was in the room one time when HR decided to let go of 250 people based on the sq footage rate of the office they worked in. It’s not at all odd that in the post office world they are looking at other dumb metrics for these decisions.

But at most, this should be supplemental information considered in a proper evaluation process, not the sole source.

Things quickly go south when they start to involve “softer” signals like email activity.

And further still that the direct outcome was immediate termination and not some kind of performance improvement period.

Perhaps this last part is not present in the Russian workplace, I’m not familiar.

I can’t help but feel like this is a real life slippery slope that came fully to fruition.

Earn more and work less?

That's weird.

Those poor folks who still work for him will be working more and earning less than those he fired.

I know it's rare relatively speaking, but between this, Blizzard and others, it seems insane how disconnected a CEO is from their company.

While short sighted, thankfully this doesn't represent the norm of companies.

I doubt this will go well since if it keeps happening unproductive people will become the best at gaming the system.

But at the same time, there has to be a better way than being observed by a boss in a physical office. I don't want to commute just because people on my team who were unproductive in the office are now just as unproductive at home and not seeing their face daily makes it hard to tell if they took another job and just haven't told anyone.

But again not sure if that's the whole reason behind the action, maybe the company is not doing so well at the same time? That's why they needed to change.

Regardless of the reason, I'm sure firing 150 people at the same time will give you some backslash in any way. Good luck to all those 150 employee for their future

It’s a bit easier to delegate to some authority (data) than just say “you’re bad, we dont want you”.

It kind of sounds like it from the description:

  ... you were not always present at the workplace when
  you worked remotely.

Oh the irony

https://mmos.com/news/chronicles-of-elyria-class-action-laws...

I mean obviously there are internal problems if that many people are disengaged to the point of needing to be let go, but after reading the letter, if the company follows through on helping everyone find a new job, it could have been worse?

I feel more sorry for the 151st.

Sweet.

Maybe we are hitting the day when all of your code commits, all communication, location in the building, telecommute meetings, etc. etc. could be run through the Big Machine and give you a grade. All automated.

A parrot could be trained to fire people in a special HR chamber.