This article doesn’t capture the flavour of what happened here.<p>Here is the letter sent to staff.<p><i>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. In other words, you were not always present at the workplace when you worked remotely.<p>Many of you might be shocked, but I truly believe that Xsolla is not for you. Nadia and her care team partnered with seven leading HR agencies, as 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. And Natalia will read you your rights.<p>Once again, thank you for your contribution. If you want to stay in contact with me, please write me a long letter about all your observations, injustice, and gratitude.</i>
Firing people based on algorithms or arbitrary statistics doesn’t protect minorities.<p>It protects the people who know how to game the system. Those who understand how the metrics are calculated actually love these systems because they can use that insider information to make themselves look disproportionately good by going through the right motions. If they know they’re being ranked by the number of Jira tickets being closed, they might create 5 tickets for every piece of a task instead of 1 ticket with a checklist. Or if they’re being measured on lines of code committed, they’re going to be doing a lot of unnecessary refactoring and rewriting to keep those numbers up.<p>Indeed, apparently the developers of this big data employee ranking system are internally opposed to letting employees see their own scores. From the article:<p>> 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.<p>Of course the development team wouldn’t want other people to be able to see their AI ranking score or be given a chance to learn how to change it. That privilege is reserved for the developers of the AI ranking system, who no doubt score very well on the system.<p>It’s also bizarre that the CEO would publicly admit that his planned feature to let employees know their score was being held up because some employees didn’t want to release it. Why air internal drama like this? Why blame the employees? This CEO sounds like he’s trying to wash his hands of every CEO responsibility at every chance he gets.
“Tell me how you will measure me, and then I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way, don't complain about illogical behavior.” – Eli Goldratt
Ite actually quite the contrary. Using AI as a tool to discriminate and then defer to a magic blackbox is one of the most profitable AI areas. Look at automated moderation for example.
It seems to me this guy should be fired. But good for him if he can disguise his inabilities to manage the transition to full remote. As a employee I would flee such a company.
Wow, usually unpopular decisions were outsourced to consultants who then would give back what the CEO wants to hear and do the deed. Now, that can be done for cheap via something mysterious called "the Algo-rythm" ;) . Bad times for consultant firms incoming.
Where does it say the algorithm protects minorities? Sounds like it does the opposite. Unlike humans, it is not "overly cautious" about firing minorities.<p>> Agapitov went on to say how companies nowadays protect minorities and can be overly cautios if they have to fire their representatives, which can make these employees almost immune to layoffs. “Our algorithm-based solution is as unbiased as possible.
><i>The list includes writing and reading articles in the internal Wiki, creating and closing task tickets, as well as dashboard activity and participation in internal meetings.</i><p>><i>He claimed that if a person’s “digital footprint” is not visible, they shouldn’t work at Xsolla.</i><p>Sucks to be the sysadmin I guess.
I see a lot of comments about 'gaming the algorithms', but how is that different from a person?<p>Doing shady commits/tickets in a way that satisfies the algorithms, or play best-buddies with my supervisor would still result in the same outcome; I don't get fired.