If there is a cost savings argument the stock market might even start the drive.
I look forward to seeing which it is.
The correct answer is to wait things out. After they've tried outsourcing for 3 months, they'll be ecstatic that with me, they only have to explain things once.
Metrics almost as bad as “butts in chairs”, “physically in the office” and my all time favourite “spending 4hrs a day responding to emails”.
I mean it’s possible that these 150 people were doing absolutely nothing… in which case these metrics can be a decent yardstick I suppose, but you can also generate a ton of activity in collaboration tools and contribute very little actual value.
It’s like the help desk tech who just closes the easy tickets because that is the metric they are evaluated on.
If I worked at a company like this I would spend my time doing visible work that bumps up the metrics regardless of whether that was what really brought value to the company.
If they think employees can't slack off while they're watching, they're probably making too much money for what little management skills they bring to the job.
Wow what an underhanded insult. “We can help you be the lazy, unmotivated slacker you secretly aspire to be”
Actually, he just signaled why the firings happened. People were claiming to do work, and there was not proof they actually did work in their email, documents or the systems they were supposed to do work in.
Any worker who has carried tons of (usually "rockstar", "bad-ass" or "pedigreed") people who don't even understand the work they are pretending to do (or worse, supervise) knows this is a rampant anti-pattern in business and in many cases has the potential to transform the business. When I was younger and worked for a boss, I used to really hate watching 80% of the others disappear at 4:30PM without regard to customer expectations and come in in the morning, only to start working around 10:30 after making the morning rounds (coffee, chit-chat) the next morning... only to hit a critical lunch with the team at 11:45-1:30pm.
In every company I've managed or started one of the facts I try to be on top of is "actual work done per day". I've found that if I look at productivity and use that to inform who gets invited to help make decisions. It makes a profound difference. People who work hard tend to come to meetings prepared, are respectful of everyone's time and most importantly know the facts about their work. You end up with better decisions.
The person who cleans up the mess should get some say in how big and the kind of messes that get made. The rest of you all fuckers disappear when the going gets tough.
I don’t entirely recall how we solved that problem but I believe it involved less transparency, which sucks, but so does burnout.
"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).
Or, maybe not. Just a thought. I guess we will find out soon.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You should always be "trying". The idea that you corner some obscure but vital part of your company's infra and then just coast is pretty abhorrent to me. Instead, if you find something difficult, complicated and manual, you should make it easy, simple and automated.
I do believe that firing people based on big data analysis is pretty dumb as some tasks require lots of deliberation and thought without much output initially. But the idea of working hard = being dumb, seems like a pretty creative way of justifying being lazy.
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.
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...
Beat big data with big data, why not.
There’s the real story. Everything else is just a polite fiction to rationalize who got laid off.
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.
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.
It's like the old "Jesus is coming ... look busy!".
https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Coming-Look-Busy-T-Shirt/dp/B07...
never underestimate people with too much time to hand
LOL what?
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.
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).
