Netflix algorithm tells you when your best employee is about to leave you | Hacker News Reader

Netflix algorithm tells you when your best employee is about to leave you

thestack.com

Walnut paneling syndrome. When you need an algorithm to tell you what your employees want, the problem is you. People will tell you if you ask and listen fairly. If you screw one employee, the rest learn to shut up, or if you hide in your office and don't interact with them. I've not had a single employee leave without me knowing it was coming, and sometimes advising them on their jump. Work isn't a social club, keeping in touch, and in tune, with your employees is your job as a manager. Go do it.

What is "walnut paneling syndrome"? Nothing is coming up in google.

Yeah, that's what I call executives who are isolated in their walnut paneled office complex, too removed from the manufacturing floor. Too many layers of management, and too much reliance on MBA business models; not enough walking the floor, paying attention.

"ivory tower"

"Ivory tower" usually refers to academia.

An example of executive isolation:

Cargill's execs are located in a mansion near the company's HQ:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill#/media/File:2009-0612-0...

It overlooks the home's original pool, which is a large cement pond. You can walk between it and the company's HQ, but being that it's in Minnesota, it's not always a pleasant walk.

https://goo.gl/maps/FQ9oV

There's an underground tunnel between the original mansion and the nearest atrium, if I'm not mistaken, so the walk isn't too bad. But the isolation is still fairly obvious.

Oh, I didn't know about that. Grew up nearby and I used to bike all around the Cargill HQ property (a really nice bit of real estate) on the weekends, but never entered any of the buildings. So I was trespassing, but it was kind of a lower grade of trespassing.

They used to have some interesting things to poke around at, like a couple of big satellite dishes on the south side of the property, which are now gone.

The original article this is almost all ripped from is here: http://www.businessinsider.com/workday-talent-insights-can-p...

They probably both copy/pasted the same press release.

The article on thestack.com did link to the Business Insider article, but you're right, this is content marketing (previously known as press release regurgitation) by Workday.

Oddly, I cannot use Mac OS X Safari to copy the linked article's text to the clipboard. I intended to quote a bit in an HN comment but no, it was not to be.

That's done was some javascript, the easiest approach is simply to disable JS. That doesn't work as sometimes a script is used to fetch the text with ajax or so.

If someone is taking great pains to prevent the GUI Clipboard from working in any way, then no doubt their own text was lifted from someone who took no such pains.

:-/

Works fine for me in Chrome on Windows. Maybe it's just a misbehaving event handler, or some bug in Safari?

I guess it's possible it's a bug/feature in Chrome on Windows preventing horrible behavior, but I imagine Chrome+Windows is more likely to be a default test case than Safari+Mac.

What I expected:

if ( isEmployeeWatchingNetflixAtWorkAllDay() ) { employeeIsAboutToLeave(); }

I work from home and watch Netflix all day, which is exactly why I won't be leaving. :)

I've seen tech support watching netflix between calls. Though this was at a university and these were students, so they also did homework when they weren't assisting people.

If you've got time to stream, you've got time to clean…

hands you a mop

I was a developer nearby, I never had such opportunities :P

return isEmployeeWatchingNetflixAtWorkAllDay();

An easier way to tell:

Look at the software your company is producing, both internal and external. If it's stale, your best developers are about to leave.

I'm not sure what you're driving at. What do you mean by stale? If the top people haven't committed in n days? Or if the tech isn't a new framework or something?

Basically, if you're maintaining that old Silverlight app with no roadmap to modernize it.

I built a tool that let you track your teams mood (with an anonymous daily email). Just looking at some old data, it's pretty good at revealing someone is likely to leave a team/company.

Here's an example: http://i.imgur.com/alv97GJ.png (Q1 2013 was not a good time)

(https://www.moraleapp.com if you want to try it out)

This is part of a broader societal discussion we are having about how much to trust data/machine-learning when it comes to human insight. We strive to improve on human fallibility, but we are deeply mistrustful of the mistakes that algorithms can and do make.

http://www.npr.org/2015/02/03/383454933/why-we-judge-algorit...

How about collect the names and sell them to headhunter?

If you want to know whether your employees will resign, whether you yourself will fire them, whether anyone will accept your offers of employment, or even respond to your job board posts, then read "The Social Animal" by UCSC Social Psychologist Elliott Aronson.

That's a rather pricey book, but the vast majority of what it discusses are phenomena that I commonly find in the workplace. While strictly speaking it doesn't name The Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field, it does discuss the Nixon Whitehouse.

The "creepiness factor" of targeted advertising.

I am completely cool with advertising, as well as Real Life targeted advertising such as direct mail.

However I am profoundly offended by targeted online advertising. For example a few days ago I was scouting around for a book on purely conceptual mobile website design. I like APress' books on conceptual iOS App design, so I wandered around APress' site, eventually to come up empty-handed.

Now, when I log into facebook, absolutely the whole fucking time is an ad for APress books.

Look I think APress is a right chap but I don't want him following me home from the WiFi spot late at night!

However I realize now that I have a realistic method to make A Compleat Clusterfuque of Facebook's ad tracking:

I have so far avoided entering any of my favorite books or movies. I also - from time to time - advise my FB friends to avoid it themselves. Few of them were previously aware such tracking was possible.

Here Are A Few Of My Favorite Things:

Movies:

   The President's Analyst
   2001: A Space Oddyssey
   Logan's Run
   (all those comedy flicks that star Leslie Nielsen)
   Bound For Glory
   Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
   Tora! Tora! Tora!
   Most but not all the James Bond flicks
   Very few of the sequels to anything

Books

   Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
   All Quiet On The Western Front
   The Hobbit (but not Lord of the Rings)
   2001: A Space Oddyssey (quite different from the movie)
   (most but not all of Kurt Vonnegut's novels)
   Amateur Telescope Making
   Foundation Trilogy
   Stranger In A Strange Land
   Time Enough For Love

I need to catch some ZZZs soon so I'll cut this short.

More or less what I'd do is list a bunch of favorites, as being a whole bunch of completely unrelated books and movies, absolutely none of which I'd actually seen nor read, generally having to do with topics that either do not interest me or even offend me.

Daniel Steel is quite popular. I read a few pages of one of her novels it was well-written but I could not conceive of actually reading the whole book.

While this wouldn't stop FB from showing me ads, it would result in a lot of wasted time and effort showing them to me.

What really gets me down, though, is that the vast majority of ads that I see, are offering me attractive women of my own age.

I am fifty-one years old. The one small comfort I take form my divorce, is that Bonita did not want to have children.

As yet, Facebook has yet to offer me a woman who might bear my child. Figure That One Out: many if not most of my FB friends have kids, they are always posting their photos, singing their praises &c.

I always "Like" their posts, commonly reply, sometimes share yet FB has yet to clue in to flogging a way for me to continue the non-quite Eternal swim in the gene pool.

:-(

Changing your preferences in movies and books likely won't stop the ads you disliked from APress. If the ads showed after you browsed on that companies website this is likely due to Personalized Retargeting[1] One possible way of preventing this from happening is surfing in 'private mode' in your browser.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting

What are you talking about?

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