Xsolla lays off 150 after an algorithm ruled staff 'unengaged and unproductive' | Hacker News Reader

Xsolla lays off 150 after an algorithm ruled staff 'unengaged and unproductive'

gamasutra.com

119 pointsAudiophilip69 comments

There's also some discussion a few days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28108432.

Discussed a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068959

This story is somehow even worse than the headline.

The CEO wanted to create an elaborate system to rank employees based on their engagement in certain tools like Jira, Confluence, and company chat. Don’t chat enough? Your ranking is low and you might get laid off. Should have chatted more, sorry.

Even stranger, the CEO claims he wanted to let employees view their own engagement scores so they at least had a chance to pump up their numbers (time to spam more e-mails and refresh more Confluence pages so I don’t get fired!) but he went on record in another article blaming the development team for not releasing that feature:

> The company also planned to implement the so-called “digital mirror,” so every employee could learn what AI thinks of their work and engagement. However, the development team wasn’t enthusiastic about this idea, so its rollout is pending.

That’s right, the development team who works on the employee ranking tool “wasn’t enthusiastic” about letting other employees see their ranking or how it works, so they’re withholding it from the company supposedly against the wishes of the CEO. The CEO is then going on record, in public, blaming those developers for not letting these other people see their own scores before they get fired.

This CEO sounds like the type of person who wants to be in charge but also wants to dodge as much responsibility as possible. Create an algorithm to fire people, then send them an impersonal e-mail letting them know the algorithm has chosen them for firing. Then explain that he wanted to let them see their score and have a chance to react, but those mean developers weren’t enthusiastic about the idea so, sorry, you can’t see it.

I’m sure the developers of the secret employee ranking system have high scores for themselves, somehow.

If your firm is using Office 365 / Microsoft Azure products, your managers have similar capabilities available to them. This is one of the marketed uses of Office 365 and other Microsoft products - monitoring "productivity" via metrics such as Teams posts and responses, Azure DevOps activity, etc.

I mention this because it doesn't require bringing together disparate systems to monitor your employees.

This includes monitoring what files you opened on OneDrive, when you opened them, etc.

If you are using Office 365 at work, I highly recommend going to delve.office.com and taking a look.

Edited to clarify Office 365 + Microsoft Azure products

Slack also has employee statistics tools that rank employees by number of messages sent.

I worked at a company where the CEO once shared a slide with the top Slack users and praised them for being engaged. Suddenly, everyone started spamming Slack to get their Slack numbers up.

My least favorite technique was the people who pressed enter every few words as an easy way to get more lines. After the CEO publicly praised the top Slack users, I started getting a lot of messages like this:

> hey

> you there

> ??

> quick question

> for you

> I’ll keep it quick

> :)

I would some times leave for lunch and come back to over 100 Slack notifications that could have been replaced by a few e-mails, but that wouldn't have earned anyone Slack points. Slack basically became useless after that.

you are now a progamer

this function must be weakened where I work. At delve.office.com I only see a couple dozen office documents and how often they were opened. I'm not surprised that I don't see it all (as I work in Germany) but I'm surprised that there's basically nothing (of value) there. Well, I should be happy about that.

You have to enable the more intrusive metrics in the back-end.

Just to add to this - he went to Facebook and wrote a post about this that can be translated as: "Fucking work hard or get the fuck out"

Yet he didn't fire the unengaged and unproductive metrics team.

Apparently he has never heard of Goodhart's Law.

> This story is somehow even worse than the headline.

These days, that's quite an accomplishment.

> You received this email because my big data team analyzed your activities in Jira, Confluence, Gmail, chats, documents, dashboards and tagged you as unengaged and unproductive employees

What a terrible place to work and measure of productivity.

And let's be clear: those are all the things that productive employees avoid like the plague.

What are you producing which is correlated with using any of those services?

If more information comes out, it'll be a useful case study in using measures anti-correlated with your actual business objectives.

This seems an extremely common practice by middle-management, whose activity is largely anti-correlated with aggregate business production. (Ie., middle-management activity should be operating at a minimum necessary for production; increasing it will cause productivity to drop).

There’s an inflection point as a manager where you realize that your employees are better than you at a thing you used to do really well. So your new job is to put them on assignments that will help them grow, provide a safety net if anything goes wrong, and get out of the way.

The flip side is that you have to trust people. I’ve certainly had employees who basically didn’t show up to work. Their team members complained because it was more work on them. That’s a situation where I stepped in, tried to figure out what was wrong, but ultimately had to let the person go because they hadn’t made a pull request in months and didn’t have a good explanation as to why.

> So your new job is to put them on assignments that will help them grow, provide a safety net if anything goes wrong, and get out of the way.

I talk to my boss about once a week, social hallway chats excluded. Rest of the week I just do what needs to be done.

He mentioned to me soon after joining that he had learned that the less he's in the way of us developers, the more productive we are. So he trusts us to do what we're assigned to do and handle issues that come up. Once in a while he'll come and ask me to handle some specific case ASAP or make sure I know some deadlines, but it's very rare.

My chats at times would be full of activity but I would have been complaining to co-workers about how crap things are.

In certain roles documents and emails may show how much work you're doing.

Absolute dystopia

Sounds like a caricature.

I imagine there will be alot of "+1" posts and mention rings in Jira at Xsolla from now on ...

At that point why bother being an employee? You might as well just go make YouTube videos or whatever since the job security is the same.

Just watch as employees everywhere start using bots to keep their engagement stats up. Boards will start to have GPT generated fluff that drowns out any residual use those tools had.

the age of the 9000x developer

a terrible place unless you work in the big data team!

I'm known for high productivity but I'm also known for not checking my mail, am always behind in my hours log, etc..

>Later, he adds that Xsolla plans to continue to reduce its budget by 10 percent until things pick back up and the company starts seeing at least 40 percent growth.

The flogging will continue until morale improves.

> He suggests that the layoffs were the result of Xsolla's slowing growth during the past six months, which he appears to blame in part on reduced productivity due to remote work measures. According to that interview, Xsolla increased its revenue by 80 percent last year (likely related to the pandemic-driven growth many game companies saw in 2020) but within the last six months, Xsolla's growth has dipped below 40 percent year-over-year.

Does it make sense to expect growth to return to the previous growth rate after a growth spurt?

Either way, seems a bit unengaged as an executive to rely on algorithms for lay offs. But maybe the vague wording is avoiding liability & the input data includes things like performance reviews, meanwhile they were looking to downsize for whatever reason. Some of the remarks come off as rather jejune tho, so there's a definite lack of tact here

edit: seems they're expecting consistent 40% growth.. a bit unrealistic

Also completely ignoring that engagement and productivity drops may be quite real and expected given burnout from being full remote from people who do not do well in that environment for a variety of reasons (too isolated, distracting or unsafe home environment, covid-related depression, etc).

What has this company done to address that with this exercise? What precedent does that set? If you lose a family member and are disengaged as might be expected, will you be canned "because the AI said so" without your context being considered?

Was the algorithm also able to identify the senior executive who was responsible for his firm hiring 150 unengaged and unproductive people, or is their big data team still working on that one?

150 other unengaged and unproductive people are making sure it never works.

Incredibly naive tone, to the point I cannot see how a CEO would see this action as beneficial to the company. Is this corporate sabotage from the top?

Plenty of history to see what happens next. Remaining employees of value will now put all of their efforts into finding a new role. The ones that stay will struggle to keep the lights on. Both will actively game these preposterous algorithms. Some might even sabotage from below.

I would fear a mistake in these engagement metrics. When I tried doing this on different teams the amount of "gotchas" made it useless.

EG:

a) Jim has the most slack messages. Reason: Jim has a bot that slacks different team members on the status of the build.

b) Larry attends the most gcalendar events. Reason: Larry auto accepts all events. However, Ryan auto cancels all events after 4pm but attends them anyway.

c) Sally has the least amount of PRs to the main repro. Reason: Sally works on a differet git repro dealing with a different microservice.

d) Jeff contributed the most new lines of code. Reason: Jeff added a package under a vendor/ folder. Also! Remember Mark changed from his personal github account to a company github account 3 months ago.

e) Linda is "online" the most on slack. Reason: Linda's ubuntu workspace does not autolog her out correctly when the system is idle.

f) Mike has the most PRs. Reason: Mike has an auto merge bot to merge release into production.

on and on....

it all depends on how they measured it before - if at all.

vlad didnt open any applications for 6 days

olga puts in a lot of "activity" 3.5 hours per day 4 days per week

those places exist!

I don't know what to take away from this except that this CEO is evidently a complete fucking idiot. Those metrics are so easily gamed; how could someone not understand that?

Seems like they plan on cutting costs regardless. Today it was "not enough Jira comments", next time it'll be something else. It's not like anyone's going to ask to audit the algorithm.

Now, if customers could obliterate and boycott Xsolla that would be a great message against such shenanigans...

Twitch is the biggest customer I know of, if you subscribe to a Twitch channel, the only option for payments is Xsolla.

Maybe a bit of motivation for them to move to their parent company's payment system.

It absolutely blows my mind that Twitch still uses Xsolla. It's literally amazon using a third party to do what they are experts in.

Will be a case study in how to build a toxic culture.

> The letter goes on to note that Xsolla has partnered with multiple HR agencies to "help you find a good place where you will earn more and work even less".

Sure, if I worked on this company I would like this option even if I was considered a "engaged employee" by their own classification.

This email sounds as though it were written by a child.

It was.

What if this is, in fact, a good thing? This AI-obsession allows employees to game the system, play around the rules and optimize for the metrics that can be easily discovered. That is terrible, but is it any worse than the current state of corporate politics, where privileged people form their own clubs and prevent anyone else from joining?

The AI, at least, doesn't see color, gender, sexual orientation, what hobbies you like or you don't like. The machine, as long as you play by its rules, is fair. And I seem to prefer the machine rules, than the rules at the boys club.

All managerial metrics account for the appearance of work, and not work itself.

Manna : https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 ( I am trying to find the year, but haven't so far )

Please ready the article! It is absolutely stuffed with absurd comments by the CEO. The only explanation I can fathom is that in the remote-work world someone impersonated the CEO as a troll.

How did the company grow to pay 500employee's wages? Low Russian salaries and rich American customers?

Seems like a company that makes mobile games. The culture around those companies seems built around hiring a lot when a game takes off, then slashing headcount when growth tails off and ad dollars fall.

I have some questions as to whether things are going well at Xsolla. They handle payments for Roblox, and I constantly have problems giving them money. I have three kids playing Roblox who each spend money there at least a couple of times per month.

As a new algorithm, the algorithm clearly wanted to make a splash and have an impact.

This also makes room for the algorithm to bring in its own people.

Best strategy for a remaining employee is to suck up to the algorithm and try to transfer in to its team.

Well, i'm glad Stripe is a thing(even thought i'm not a fan of the company either, but it's the least terrible, i guess), along with PayPal, Xsolla will be now in my list of tools to avoid

All of the quotes in the article read like a robot said them.

Imagine being that guy... ouch.

It's the game industry what do you expect. People love to trash talk Google & Facebook for monetizing attention but the game industry does it blatantly and even charges money.

i for one respect the hard core management formula presented here. New jobs will be found where you earn more an do even less!

I would love to work there. Im tired of people not doing any work. I dont mean people who dont work most of the day. Simple asset tracking would reveal how they never get near work but then a human had to decide and jim is such a nice guy blablabla

Idiocracy predictions sadly keep coming true. In this case partially - doesn't look like the CEO got laid off.

This sets a very bad precedent within this company. If the remaining employees realize that to stay employeed they can I suspect this decision has wider implications for the remaining employees than 150 who were laid off. Remaining people may start faking productivity to stay employeed.

There are some developers somewhere that wrote this code!

Are there no mirrors anywhere?

They're working at one of those places where you work less and earn more.

Welcome to business in Russia

Similar things happen in US on a much larger scale. Simply search for 'Amazon hire to fire' 'GE Neutron Jack' or 'Microsoft annual review system'

I'm supposed faking activity is the game when you work for a large company.

Even if the algorithm was correct, the remaining staff will now focus on gaming the perceived productivity metrics. We all know what that means for actual productivity.

One of the bad managers I've recently shifted jobs away from, achieved tons of "productivity" by shifting Confluence pages written by others, so he appears as the author.

He’s being “innovative”

System works as designed, though not as intended.

I had a coworker cherry pick my commits for a new feature and recommit them with their own name.

Which reminds me to ask, anyone looking to hire a 10x embedded engineer w/ 30yrs experience?

Yes!

The group I'm in is hiring for C/C++ systems. Experience with safety is a huge plus. If you give an email address I can send you some job listings. If you're interested we can go from there. I'm just an engineer so I can't bring you straight to an interview but I know we're having trouble hiring systems engineers; I could at least pass your resume on directly.

Reminds me when I was teasing my coworker in the project that 75% of our source code was written by me - I had committed a bunch of icons as XPM files to our source code :)

(I can't remember whether he consequently reindented all those files...)

I once had a boss who measured productivity in lines of code. We had two developers. A changed line counted, as did a new line.

So... every week, I'd fire up the code formatter and change a setting for indents (2 spaces or 4, new line for curley braces, etc) and reformat all the code. My parter would refactor the most common function names. We were amazingly productive.

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

no duh.

The thing about that is there's plenty of opportunity to not work at a physical workplace as well. Coffee breaks with the boss, trading floor eating contests, browsing some orange website...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com