Xsolla fires 150 employees based on big data analysis of their activity

Dupe (discussed four days ago): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28068959" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28068959</a>

I probably look like one of these employees. Honestly I don’t ‘work’ that hard.<p>But I also have a shit ton of institutional knowledge that cost a good decade+ to acquire. And I got there by working hard.<p>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.<p>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.

This 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.<p>If there is a cost savings argument the stock market might even start the drive.

&gt; 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.<p>There’s the real story. Everything else is just a polite fiction to rationalize who got laid off.

&quot;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.&quot;<p>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&#x27;s chair.

The article said this layoff started after Xsolla was no longer showing 40% growth.<p>Having implemented Xsolla, I think they stopped showing 40% growth because the products Xsolla offers sucks.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

Istm 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?

Fire 40% of the people you don’t want and you could lose 40% or more of the people you do want.

&quot;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.&quot;<p>I hope they mean spending <i>too much</i> time in Jira&#x2F;Confluence&#x2F;Gmail&#x2F;chats instead of actually working, but I&#x27;m afraid it was the opposite...

&gt; we will help you find a good place, where you will earn more and work even less<p>Wow what an underhanded insult. “We can help you be the lazy, unmotivated slacker you secretly aspire to be”

So, conflicting thoughts:<p>1) &quot;keep their medical insurance and receive medical pay equal to four to six monthly salaries&quot;...is pretty good. Better than the severance package of most companies in the U.S. However...<p>2) &quot;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...&quot; is not going to be worth much, since he just very publicly said &quot;these people who we laid off are all slackers&quot;. 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.

They&#x27;re wanting &quot;busy&quot; employees, which is not necessarily the same as productive ones.<p>It&#x27;s like the old &quot;Jesus is coming ... look busy!&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Jesus-Coming-Look-Busy-T-Shirt&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B07P8C18C2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Jesus-Coming-Look-Busy-T-Shirt&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B07...</a>

Dupe (142 comments): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28068959" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28068959</a>

New 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&#x27;d imagine the AI ability to do this would be pretty high already.<p>Beat big data with big data, why not.

Watch it just be the employees who went on VK on their work computer instead of using their private phone.

I 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&#x2F; or mouse doing scipted work?<p>never underestimate people with too much time to hand

Where 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.

I am sure that this kind of analysis has been going on for a long time at some large tech companies. I&#x27;d guess that they were smart enough to not announce the methodology. Just like layoffs hitting the pushing 50 crowd, &quot;up or out&quot; mindsets, etc...

&gt; we will help you find a good place, where you will earn more and work even less.<p>LOL what?

If you were an employee of this company who left, would you resign and look for a new place or would you stay?

I bet the remaining employees&#x27; metrics will see a marked increase even as actual productivity drops.

Xsolla is another payment platform for merchants?<p>Why not fire the CEO for being disengaged from coming up with a novel idea?<p>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.<p>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.

1. I’ve built systems that can do this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insideropinion.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insideropinion.com&#x2F;</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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).