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Xsolla fires 150 employees based on big data analysis of their activity
- PaulHoule 5y agoFire 40% of the people you don’t want and you could lose 40% or more of the people you do want.
- agilob 5y agoOne company I worked for decided to drastically change their product direction, meaning no more backend and frontend devs. They fired (made redundant) 50% of devs, devops, dbadmin and some automation testers. 45% left voluntarily in the next 3 months. That was the plan.
- chronic2703 5y ago> Fire 40% of the people you don’t want and you could lose 40% or more of the people you do want. Let the market decide. If this leads to even a 1% increase in profits, expect all companies to follow. After all, the buy-and-hold index fund investors on HN will fight day-and-night for a 1% increased return for their personal portfolios.
- cududa 5y ago“Tell me you’ve never managed an organization long term without telling me you’ve never managed an organization long term”
- cableshaft 5y agoYeah, you initiate significant layoffs in any department, especially in a hot market like this one, for any reason, and you can expect most of your real talent you kept to start looking elsewhere and start resigning, which will lead to more people looking and leaving, which leads to more people looking and leaving, until you've lost most of your good employees. I've seen exactly this happen on a couple of occasions (and stupidly stayed longer than I should have myself).
- rossdavidh 5y agoThis is absolutely the typical result, and it may well be the result here. However, I wonder if it is going to change now that more people are working remotely. If you never saw those people in the office anyway, will it bother the typical person as much that they don't see them at work anymore? It may be that "survivor guilt" is less a rational response (if they're laying people off, maybe I should look for somewhere else before they get to me), and more an emotional response to the empty desk next to yours. If you're not even at the desk, you're at home, and it all looks the same as it did before the layoff, maybe the emotional response is not the same. Or, maybe not. Just a thought. I guess we will find out soon.
- softwaredoug 5y ago> we will help you find a good place, where you will earn more and work even less Wow what an underhanded insult. “We can help you be the lazy, unmotivated slacker you secretly aspire to be”
- spoonjim 5y agoBut if there are jobs paying more and asking less than xSolla then why does anyone work at xSolla?
- monkpit 5y agoSo you’re saying that anyone can just get any job they want? At any time? Sign me up :)
- PhasmaFelis 5y agoMany founders are that unusual sort of person who likes working more than anything else, and a lot of them get the idea that this makes them virtuous and everyone else ought to feel the same way. "Sure, we don't pay as much as some, but look at all this work you get to do!" I've interviewed with people like this. They honestly think that's an incentive (if you're a "good" employee).
- hinkley 5y agoIt’s the flip side of something that can actually be good, which is not asking people to do something you’re not willing to do, like work weekends for a deadline or take a pay cut. But your relationship to the company is different than ours. A pay cut still leaves you with a 40% stake in the company, while we get nothing in a fire sale (your preferred stock doesn’t get diluted nearly as much or as frequently as ours does). Equally or perhaps more importantly, this was your dumb idea/baby in the first place, we just showed up to work. You had better be more invested than the rest of us our why are we even here?
- a_t48 5y agoI failed an interview once when a founder started bragging about how his wife is sad that he doesn't come home to see her and their young children enough, and he was proud because it meant he was working hard enough. He asked me if I was a hard worker and I told him I preferred to "work smarter not harder" and gave some lines about being efficient and not burning out. I gather that he was not impressed, given I got no offer after appearing to pass the technical screen, getting along great with the engineering team as a whole, and applying to a team where I had direct (uncommon) experience and knew every member of.
- nathanaldensr 5y agoDupe (discussed four days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068959
- jsnell 5y agoDupe (142 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068959
- underseacables 5y agoThis may seem horrible but this, I fear, will become the norm. If the boss can’t see you, then they may suspect employees are slacking off at home. So out of caution (or CYA) managers and CEOs will start monitoring all activity available, and transform WFH employees into metrics on a spreadsheet. If there is a cost savings argument the stock market might even start the drive.
- beprogrammed 5y agoAnd if it's an effective method of selection, then those companies will thrive, if instead it's a poor method those companies will fill up with busy workers and sink under there own weight. I look forward to seeing which it is.
- tmpz22 5y agoRegardless of the outcome it will be spun as a success for the executive team, or if positive spin is impossible they will find a scapegoat or other mechanism to downplay their own responsibility.
- polotics 5y agoRight on... Time spent reflecting, taking a walk to think things through... Running with headphones to keep the blood oxygenated while listening to the latest rambles from higher ups...
- dkarl 5y agoYou're too optimistic. Companies that are big enough will inevitably do this because it appeals to management, which forms a cohesive and insular culture inside them, and because it can be sold as a cost savings. These companies will inevitably find ways to survive by exploiting their size and power, and so they will be held up as models, and everyone smaller than them will be under pressure to follow their example. The only way it will someday "fail" is if it falls out of favor with management, maybe because some celebrity CEO bashes it in a bestselling book. But after that CEO and his book pass out of the limelight, it will come back, until it falls out of favor again, and so on.
- anonuser123456 5y agoI probably look like one of these employees. Honestly I don’t ‘work’ that hard. But I also have a shit ton of institutional knowledge that cost a good decade+ to acquire. And I got there by working hard. My value add is to break bottlenecks for my teammates. I dig through hard problems that they find intractable. But I don’t grind through the daily drudgery. I’m lucky in that my manager understands this and values people based on how they fit with the team and I have something valuable to add.
- hinkley 5y agoBroadly speaking my job as a programmer is to turn repetitive activities into processes and code. If I’m still “working hard” a year in you should really wonder about my capabilities. I probably spend half of my time and way more than half of my energy on removing work we shouldn’t even have to do ourselves, first the random sources (machine bookkeeping beats human bookkeeping almost every time) and then persistent drudge work that steals resources from more important matters. One job where I was mad about not getting any credit for this, I sat and did math and in six months I had saved us one head count, and I don’t know how much stress (seriously bullshit things). I joked that I could not show up to work and still provide as much value as people who they liked.
- tomc1985 5y ago> Broadly speaking my job as a programmer is to turn repetitive activities into processes and code. If I’m still “working hard” a year in you should really wonder about my capabilities. As much as I want to agree with this, what I've found happens if I do a particularly good job is... more work. More projects. I have "bandwidth" available to help out in new areas. When I left my last job my manager and I put together a spreadsheet listing all the projects I headed, and it was something like two pages long in excel. Everyone who saw it had their eyes bulge at the size, and I left because I was being really overworked. But god damn it, the only reason I want to work hard is so that I don't have to in the future! I'm seriously considering leaving tech because of this.
- 5y ago
- djohnston 5y ago"This prompted immediate and predictable backlash: both for the layoffs themselves and for the tone of the email. According to ProPerm.ru, the company is investigating to find the employee who leaked the email." Lol them not expecting such a tone deaf email to get leaked really cements my suspicion that any idiot can find himself in the captain's chair.
- H8crilA 5y agoI actually respect this email for honesty. Corpspeak gets really tiring after years upon years of hearing it. Here's the corpspeak version of the title: "Sharpening our focus on core principles". Or "Doubling down on X". Would you like to read that instead?
- Nullabillity 5y agoYou don't see a third option they could've taken instead?
- 1123581321 5y agoWhat are you referring to? Keep in mind this thread is about how to write the email, given the action they took.
- cududa 5y agoHow about talking to the employees. How about managers having input on if arbitrary performance metrics were reflective of the value of their contributions? How about not shifting blame on a reduction in growth/ necessity to do layoffs on perf metrics? How about not asking the people you just fired to write you a “long letter” expressing their gratitude?
- 1123581321 5y agoI agree with all that. This is specifically about the style of writing, not the actions taken.
- sunshineforever 5y agoWatch it just be the employees who went on VK on their work computer instead of using their private phone.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rossdavidh 5y agoSo, conflicting thoughts: 1) "keep their medical insurance and receive medical pay equal to four to six monthly salaries"...is pretty good. Better than the severance package of most companies in the U.S. However... 2) "we will help you find a good place, where you will earn more and work even less. Sasha will help you get a recommendation, including the one from myself..." is not going to be worth much, since he just very publicly said "these people who we laid off are all slackers". Which was totally unnecessary, not even a mercenary business reason to do that. Looks like a rookie mistake. You should not screw people over, but you especially should not screw people over for no reason that benefits you or anyone else.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y agoIf you were an employee of this company who left, would you resign and look for a new place or would you stay?
- iso1210 5y agoLook for a new place then resign
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y agoIn any order ... question is would you stay in company that measures engagement by the key stroke
- okareaman 5y ago> we will help you find a good place, where you will earn more and work even less. LOL what?
- ashtonkem 5y ago> Agapitov held a press conference in which he explained that the mass layoffs were caused by the fact that the company has stopped showing 40% growth. There’s the real story. Everything else is just a polite fiction to rationalize who got laid off.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago"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." I hope they mean spending too much time in Jira/Confluence/Gmail/chats instead of actually working, but I'm afraid it was the opposite...
- jhgb 5y agoI just don't understand why they need to do all this "activity analysis" stuff instead of just looking at whether the employees complete assigned tasks or not.
- lettergram 5y ago1. I’ve built systems that can do this https://insideropinion.com/ https://insideropinion.com/ 2. If anyone has worked in a corporate environment you know a large portion of the team is slacking. That’s not to say they should be fired. I always recommend rehabilitation, as those people already have institutional knowledge AND if they can be rehabilitated are more energetic. 3. If you only now realize their activity, you had bad metrics for success. Activity does not mean results, and results should be the end goal. Case in point, an expert developer may like to take talks to consider a problem. Their activity will be lower, while their delivery will be higher. 4. My system monitors morale as well, because firing someone impacts morale. In this case morale will likely drop, but overall work may improve (I don’t know). 5. In the end, “data analysis” probably didn’t need to be done. People who don’t do work are left alone, if you surveyed the company you’d probably find a lot of those people single out by coworkers as people they don’t want to work with. Anyway, I always have mixed feelings on this. Personally, I think it’s good to cut weight, but better to focus on making the team fit (and reducing attrition).
- wintermutestwin 5y agoI am sure that this kind of analysis has been going on for a long time at some large tech companies. I'd guess that they were smart enough to not announce the methodology. Just like layoffs hitting the pushing 50 crowd, "up or out" mindsets, etc...
- eplanit 5y agoThey're wanting "busy" employees, which is not necessarily the same as productive ones. It's like the old "Jesus is coming ... look busy!". https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Coming-Look-Busy-T-Shirt/dp/B07P8C18C2 https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Coming-Look-Busy-T-Shirt/dp/B07...
- anarazel 5y agoIstm that often enough digital activity is inversely correlated with productivity. Some of my most productive days are spent between walking for a bit, staring at a paper, walking some more, staring at code,... Followed next day writing a few lines of code. How will any tool measure that?
- dmje 5y agoNew SaaS idea: a busyness simulator that sits on your home pc clicking between emails, running semantically correct work-based searches and sending occasional high value Slack responses. I'd imagine the AI ability to do this would be pretty high already. Beat big data with big data, why not.
- ed_elliott_asc 5y agoI know someone who keeps his msteams saying he is active by using a paper clip jammed into the insert key - that’s probably a good start :)
- hosh 5y agoThe article said this layoff started after Xsolla was no longer showing 40% growth. Having implemented Xsolla, I think they stopped showing 40% growth because the products Xsolla offers sucks. Their value proposition is that payment systems are hard, so game developers should let them do the hard work and focus on making games. They pull this off by being the merchant of record. They take care of payment integrations and customer service, and take a percentage of the gross revenue on top of the merchant fees. Their API is not as good as Stripe. And you also depend upon the quality of customer service. When I was Google searching about technical issues with integrating with Xsolla, I keep finding gamers complaining about Xsolla. If your customer service is better than their’s, there is little point in going with Xsolla, especially if a terrible payment experience will sour any goodwill from fans. You can fire almost half of your team based on big data analysis, but I doubt it would save your company if your product suck. Customer service people will get demoralized when the issues they hear from the users are not getting fixed by the product and engineering team.
- oconnore 5y agoWhere were the managers? If you have to use company wide data analytics to know whether your employees are productive, you should fire your managers first. Then with better managers, those unproductive employees might start being challenged and engaged appropriately.
- kktkti9 5y agoXsolla is another payment platform for merchants? Why not fire the CEO for being disengaged from coming up with a novel idea? The meme is these people work so…much…harder. But none of them built the patterns and infra that enable these companies to spin up in days, on their own. Without a society capitulating to behave this way, these guys wouldn’t have anything. I see no reason to believe they should be respected for grifting.
- 123pie123 5y agoI suspect once people know how these algorithms work, the cat and mouse games begin - making the whole thing pointless - eg the first thing that has come to mind is an arduino set up as a usb keyboard and/ or mouse doing scipted work? never underestimate people with too much time to hand
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- HomeDeLaPot 5y agoI bet the remaining employees' metrics will see a marked increase even as actual productivity drops.