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Big Data Knows When You Are About To Quit Your Job
HughPickens.com writes Quentin Hardy reports at the NYT that a leading maker of cloud-based software for running corporate human resources and financial operations has announced new products that provide the kind of data analysis that Netflix uses to recommend movies, LinkedIn has to suggest people you might know, or Facebook needs to put a likely ad in front of you. One version of the software, called Insight Applications, predicts which high-performing employees are likely to leave a company in the next year; it then offers possible actions (more money, new job) that might make them stay. In another instance, expense reporting software can predict which employee populations are most likely to exceed their budgets. "We've applied machine learning to affect consumer tastes," says Mohammad Sabah, director of data science at Workday. "Putting it to career choices, to pay and employment, have a huge upside if we do it right." Already, Sabah says, "we're surprised how accurately we can predict someone will leave a job." The goal is to predict future business outcomes to take advantage of opportunities and cut risk levels. One future product may be the ability to predict who will and won't make their sales quotas, and suggest who should be hired to improve the outcome. "Making an employee happy, improving the efficiency of a company these are hard problems that affect corporations."
Lump of coal?
When managers and supervisors know you're probably going to quit, it's a different story from "I hear he's gotten an offer from other companies". Data like this gets trusted implicitly, and if you weren't planning to leave this year, your new and improved toxic environment will make damn sure of it.
More likely though this software will be used to maximize everyone's ability to treat low level employees like machines.
I never quit, I just go bankrupt ; ).
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
So now we can let machines do the hiring, firing, promoting & fluffing of employees.
Nothing will go wrong with this.
Be seeing you...
"Putting it to career choices, to pay and employment, have a huge upside if we do it right."
Yea especially the "if we do it right" part. Because if you do it wrong it could have very damaging personal consequences. Machine learning by definition generalizes across the population, so if you don't behave like others have before you, you are screwed. Especially in the USA where employers have very little power this will be used against people and cause serious career damage.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
A commercial entity CLAIMS it "knows" stuff about stuff...
All this software does is make predictions based on averages. It explicitly does not recognize outliers. This is the road to tyranny. It looks great, and offers us much better efficiency than before. We use it to get things done, there is no time lost with needless discussions. If it's wrong 10% of the time, then so what! We consider 90% to be acceptable.
And then, people start altering their behavior because they know they're being watched. Articles start appearing about how to conform to the mandarins' idea of a model citizen. Viewing these articles is, of course, a black mark against you. And on and on it goes, led by society's best shouting the battle cry, "it's for your own good!"
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
A: Top performers usually leave because they are top performers.
Know the sun will rise does not give one a means to prevent it. Nor death or taxes or progress. It has never been hard to predict top performers leaving.
B: Sabah says, "we're surprised how accurately we can predict someone will leave a job." Never, ever buy prediction software from a place that is surprised with the result. Quality prediction is the result of hard work and statistical analysis, results should almost NEVER come as a surprise to anyone working in the field statistics or data-modelling. This is one field where "surprise" is a sign of incompetence.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
It's amazing how actually we can, after installing or software, predict that purple will quit â¦
I take it the algorithm looks something like this:
If EMPLOYEE WEBSURFING equals EMPLOYMENT WEBSITE then output "Employee is thinking of leaving" else output "All good, nothing to see here"?
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
if (subjective.IsActiveOnLinkedInLastThirtyDays()){ThinkingOfLeaving = true};
...I think that we should study the algorithm, and adopt behaviours that can deliver us more money from our employer :-)
Clearly it was written to find who isn't going to leave and therefore doesn't need an incentive to stay. You have to make a fuss to be noticed, doubly so if you work for a company which uses this software.
There is software that automatically processes your motivation letter and derives statistics from that, like how long you will stay with the complany, how good you will perform, how motivated you are, ...
Someone in HR told me the results are almost uncorrelated with the real performance, but companies still want to use it because it is high tech :)
I have a degree from a Top 25 school.
I have maxed out my annual merit raise, annual bonus, and have received 2 small performance bonuses.
My performance reviews are near perfect.
I make slightly less than median for my title and location, mostly because my peers have a few more years experience than I do.
I work for an employer that is widely known and respected in the industry that I work.
For the past 6 months:
I've been vocal about my displeasure for the working environment.
I've posted publicly viewable resumes on all the big hiring boards.
I've added dozens of recruiters to my LinkedIn connections.
I've been on numerous call screens and interviews.
I've been so brazen as to upload resumes and cruise job listings FROM MY WORKSTATION
Today I turned in my 2 week notice.
I've not once heard from HR or a manager about my career path.
Management is split between angry and befuddled about this.
Big Data seems legit
Why can't you just talk to the people that work at a company? They might just tell you what you want to know.
Here are some of the problems that affect corporations.
-Indirect Communication
-Gossip
-Immaturity
If employees happiness and company efficiency are really important than why do you need the cloud and some software?
Let's all become the slaves of our machines and human overlords!
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
So, yeah, as soon as people figure out what it is that is being measured, expect them to alter their behavior to make that measure useless.
I wait next releases, something predicting:
- how long will your romantic relationship go on
- when you are about to change your life
and so on ... ;-)
If you're taking a dump in the morning and it's not voluntary, you should see a doctor.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm guessing that their "algorithm" is more like:
X% change jobs after 1 year.
Y% change jobs after 2 years.
Z% change jobs after 3 years.
etc.
In my experience, people tend to change jobs because of something happening at their current job (or a personal/family situation change). And that's not something that can be predicted with any degree of accuracy.
I've been a top performer at several companies. I before leaving each of them, I discussed my issues with a manager more than once, which were usually pay + one other issue.
In each time before I left, neither were addressed.
In each time after I left, management was either "shocked" or angry, and made attempts to keep me. I flatly refuse to accept offers after I have accepted a job elsewhere, I should be taken at my word and not forced to demonstrate that I am leaving to be taken seriously.
I have no idea why any company would waste money on this. Either they care, and they'll know when someone is leaving without software, or they don't care, and the software will be ignored as well.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Yeah, the program will probably just generate another daily email blast to management/HR that will get lost or ignored
I suppose your first thought will be to shutdown your facebook etc profiles and get rid of .. but that is not going to help you.
all those unnecessary apps on your phone
IF we don't have enough data on you we will simply automatically rank you as unemployable.
In fact in the future we are building not participating in social media may even get you arrested
and detained while you are under investigation and you will also receive an (automatic)
mental health evaluation.
In that glorious tomorrow that is just around the corner you will be standing in a wide open space
under sunny blue skies, no handcuffs, no shackles, no fences no barbed wire. However you
will be too afraid to even look up from the pavement as you quietly shuffle along. You will walk
with even strides while breathing carefully in and out as you marshal both your body and your thoughts out
of fear. Out of fear that an algorithm behind all those cameras and sensors will pick up on your that rage you
have been carefully hiding.
Your prison walls will be red lines on a map and your phone will be your prison guard and be sure to
answer immediately when that phone rings and the computer on the other end asks you why you have
stopped eating at a certain restaurant or if you are feeling sexual arousal in the mornings. Or else.
For PR reasons, the sellers of this system pretend it's about highlighting certain employees to get raises, but HR meetings are much more often about the problem of cutting costs than about the problem of how to give out more raises, so it's easy to see how this will really be used.
When a company wants to cut its workforce, they will use this software to find which low- or medium-productivity employees are most likely to leave and then make some policy change they know will frustrate those employees so that some of them quit and the company doesn't have to pay any severance packages etc. This will generally lower employees' quality of life, but the company doesn't care because those employees were leaving anyway.
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
"I make slightly less than median for my title and location, mostly because my peers have a few more years experience than I do."
Stop accepting this bullshit line when you hear it. If you regularly out perform your peers that have more experience, then you get more pay than those slackers.
I really hate it when people buy that bullshit line when managers trot it out.
Also, giving you a 10-20% raise is NOTHING to the company. And honestly it's almost nothing to you when you look at your paycheck. Yet they act like you are asking hem to cut off their legs when you demand to be fairly compensated for your work.
Understand that Paying you an additional $10,000 a year is absolutely nothing to a stable and healthy company. Now understand why no company deserves any loyalty from an employee.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This silly software assumes companies want to keep employees. What I want is software that tells you the day you're going to get fired, taking into account management-by-spreadsheet decision making, executive bonuses, and so on. Employee performance seems to be irrelevant these days.
Sounds like he stopped accepting that line and found a new job
Why have public relationships? Public internet relationships are a fad of fake, self-destructive behavior, like the way women dressed in the 1950's.
All of the LinkedIn requests I've ever received have been attempts to pretend that a relationship exists that is more meaningful than in reality.
Sometimes a large percentage of people do crazy things. Don't follow them. I have friends, customers, and business contacts who sometimes read and reply to only the first paragraph of an email, and don't read the rest. It's part of the nonsense of the times.
I told a dentist with a Facebook page that Facebook was showing an ad for another dental clinic on his Facebook page. The dentist just accepted the abuse.
The free open source diaspora* social network software allows privacy.
This book is about the development of Diaspora: More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook. The book is poorly written by someone with no programming experience and no interest in learning, but it does tend to show the difficulties of developing software.
Are you too happy? Is it uncomfortable being happier than everyone else? Facebook is the answer. Read Facebook use predicts declines in happiness, new study finds. Or download the scientific paper.
The first result in a Google search for 50's clothing and hairstyles says, "Ever ready to suffer for the cause of soft feminine looking Fifties styles, after the perm, we still had to roll, curl our hair." A Wikipedia article says, "One ingredient in 1950s hair spray was vinyl chloride monomer; used as an alternative to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), it was subsequently found to be both toxic and flammable."
Avoid the craziness you see around you.
Every top performer I have seen leave my project has been because managers repeat the company vesper about how 'people are our greatest asset' and then they turn around and have contempt for everybody. The big problem is, I think, that the business world promotes people who exhibit bad management behaviors. The worse the behaviors, the higher they go.
Well, I mean, now they do. But they didn't before!
I've done the same thing to Comcast/Uverse/WideOpenWest lots of times for the last ten years. They never take me seriously until I call for the disconnect! TOO LATE! The new service is installed. Damn I am happy to have three providers!
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
but hey... it is easy to get brag posts of my erstwhile "friends" vacations - so why not.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The logical next step is to figure out how to convince the software that you are planning to leave your job (even if you aren't) so your employer will offer you incentives to stay.
But if you miss them and they do quit, sue them. That's the Silicon Valley way.
>it then offers possible actions (more money, new job) Most companies would just preemptively fire the employee. Out of spite...? Something like that...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
"This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace."
Full lecture here: http://www.thersa.org/events/v...
Don't need a fancy algorithm to tell you that. Fix the cultural setting in a company and retention fixes itself...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I had a similar experience at my last job a few years back. When I left they called me the next day asking me if I would come back and they were very surprised I even quit. Of course I didn't go back since where I work pays more and is a pretty good place to work.
I just recently took a new job after 10 years with the same company, and the only two reasons I did was because they were offering me 40% more money than I was making before, and the opportunity to spread out into a new field and away from what was getting stale.
How's "Big Data" gonna find that one?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Ask everyone 2 questions: are you getting paid enough and do you work under or with complete morons?
The site that recommends strangers I have 1-2 ppl in common with 5-10 pages ahead of people I worked with for years and have 10-50 in common with?
I'm not sure how you came to your conclusions, but they certainly aren't universally true.
If you regularly out perform your peers that have more experience, then you get more pay than those slackers.
Some places don't give significant merit raises. Instead, they give bonuses or long-term-incentives that vest. That means that if you have been there for 5 years, and someone else has been there for 30 years, they might make more money than you do even if you perform better. This might depend on your location and vocation. What is the difference in profit between a top performer and a low performer? That is really really hard to calculate, and varies a lot.
Understand that Paying you an additional $10,000 a year is absolutely nothing to a stable and healthy company.
LinkedIn has $5,312 revenue per employee. That's revenue, not profit. So giving a $10,000 raise to an employee means that employee puts the company in the negative. Dreamworks makes $25,045 per employee. So I don't know if a $10,000 pay hike would make an employee no longer profitable or not, it depends on the actual profit per employee. Microsoft makes $221,212 per employee, so yes, all their employees could make $10,000 more and the company would still have revenue, but I cannot say about profit.
And honestly it's almost nothing to you when you look at your paycheck.
That can depend a lot. If you are in a position where 90% of your income goes to basic living expenses, then a 10% pay increase might double the amount of spending money you have.
Personally, I am opposed to the very idea behind big data.
We already knew that.
I want to run my own experiments on the data I am in school for Cs and specifically machine Learning right now if you guys have a link to the data they used that would be a lot of fun to work on!!???
Property taxes are voluntary because you don't live in a cave in the woods.
Bad example. Anti-vagrancy laws have tended to make it illegal to "live in a cave in the woods."
Accurate? They never make mistakes? Remember when Google claimed they could accurately track and predict pandemics like colds and flu? Their algorithms are secret and the processes and results opaque. When the outcomes of algorithm generated analyses are high-stakes, e.g. employment, health, and legal, they should be subjected to public scrutiny and accountability. How else can we ensure that the algorithms actually do what their vendors claim?
BTW, was that Buttle or Tuttle? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
use cash, and put your phone in aluminum foil sleeve when not using
from the wiki on hopi - ... ...
In 1894, a group of Hopi parents announced that they were against the ideas of Washington and did not want their children to be exposed to the culture of the white American people. The government sent in troops to arrest the 19 parents and sent them to Alcatraz Prison, where they stayed for a year.
yeah - those centuries of success were a fluke - you need walmart and credit card debt to survive
The real use of this software is so that companies can monitor the likelihood of a departure of their critical employees as they slowly cut benefits and stagnate wages across the board.
I've gotten that line before, I was the lead on the team making less than some of the older sloth like team members. Told my boss it was bullshit, actually horseshit, used those exact words and asked honestly who else do you have working for you that you'd rather have than me, and I can get a new job in 2 weeks if I'm not happy and you'll have egg on your face telling explaining why saving some pennies caused your deliverable not to be met. I got my 35k raise, it all depends on your boss, some will go to bat to keep high performers because they understand it is usually cheaper and easier to not derail a project by keeping key people. Find out what people are paid for the job you are doing and then ask for it, if your employer doesn't give it find someone who will and if you can do what others cannot you will be rewarded. I also am willing to give my employers opportunity to counter, I view the relationship in very simple terms, I am a mercenary, a hired gun, they would discard me at anytime, I know this is the reality of who funding works in most organizations, I treat them the same way, it's numbers, it's business, someone offers me more, the market says I'm worth X? If you aren't paying me X I'm not valued in the organization. My last boss was shocked and dismayed when I resigned, I wasn't even looking for a job, I got an unsolicited offer, told them as much and I was not looking to leave, they didn't counter said they were sad to see me go, seems I was not valued enough. Companies all have stupid policies, etc, you need to work for someone who will go to bat for you to get you what you need, the loyalty is to people and it is a two way street. You should never be loyal to a company it is foolish and you will get burned.
LinkedIn has $5,312 revenue per employee. That's revenue, not profit. So giving a $10,000 raise to an employee means that employee puts the company in the negative.
If they had a revenue of $5k per employee they'd be bankrupt. They've got a profit of about that. From http://investors.linkedin.com/financials-statements.cfm the revenue in 2013 was about $1.5 billion, profit about $27 million. From http://press.linkedin.com/about they have about 6,000 employes. So profit of about $4,500 per head, revenue about $250,000
If you find it hilarious, you've been fortunate. I tried opening a online CD with Nationwide Bank by calling them, and they asked me questions about my background which they believed the "real" me could answer, and I couldn't. I later realized that the questions were based on Trans Union's error years earlier, when they were incorrectly convinced I had a certain second name and address several states away. I (after much willful stupidity and/or incompetence on TU's part) had gotten that sorted out, but the error had apparently propagated (with further garbling) to whatever source Nationwide was using and unwisely treating as gospel.
I'm always disappointed and not surprised by the points taken by debaters here on slashdot.
It's the same f*CK1ng thing every time...Black and White - either/or - up or down.
There is really no such thing as:
"I'm going to volunteer EVERYTHING and firehose my datasets everywhere..."
VS
"I live in a cave in the Yukon with a picture of the unibomber on the wall"
Give me a break people, WE ALL to varying degrees share things, whether with financial, government or online entities.
We've been doing it for years, just like here on slashdot.
I really get sick of the "Oh, you want privacy, what's wrong with you? Why aren't you posting to FB every ten minutes like "normal" people"
VS
"I change my route to work every other day, only pay for food with gold bullion and hack my neighbors wifi to connect to Tor" etc;
We can pretty much assume that groups like the NSA, with their vast resources and ability to pretty much data mine whatever they want, have the goods on most Americans, and have the nefarious ability to blackmail anyone they want. Why else would they datamine? Their mandate about terrorism is really just a facade for the concentration of power through knowledge.
With that being said, I sure as f*ck don't give out my info readily to Target, FB, Wal-Mart, or the vast array of businesses trying to datamine the f*ck out of every peon they sell a widget to.
It's bad enough knowing the NSA is doing that already.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
"Making an employee happy, improving the efficiency of a company these are hard problems that affect corporations"
Bullshit. This will be used to preemptively fire employees, and deny them unemployment claims based on "they were going to quit anyhow."
The worst part is that it is a fact of life for companies. Happy or not, people quit jobs. Sometimes its out of everyone's hands. Sometimes a person does not want to quit, but due to economics there is no upward mobility for the employee, forcing them to seek another job. Having proper succession plans and not alienating past employees is the key here. The companies gain nothing by being dicks here, but shitty managers will try to screw over outgoing employees, even when the company policy is to do nothing.
My favorite is the promise of "lots lots more money" when I put in my notice. Hey, if you wanted me to stick around, you should have either paid me more before i was quitting, or at least treated me like a human being. Both would be better, but lets not be unrealistic.
Alex Papadimoulis at The Daily WTF summed it up nicely in an article about having alumni instead of ex-employees. Perfectly succinct analysis from someone that has been in the industry. And the mentality change it would take will never happen in a company bigger than a few dozen people.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
> Also, giving you a 10-20% raise is NOTHING to the company.
I see us waste literally millions of dollars a year--just flushed right down the drain--but raises are rare as hen's teeth. Promotions, too. They apologetically explain that there are policies which must be followed.
They can't promote you from a Level X to Level X+1 until you have enough direct reports. It's policy! Oh, your group is small enough that you will never have any direct reports? Unfortunately, you can therefore never be promoted. So sorry... but it's policy.
I assume it is made this way to reap the same benefits of "zero tolerance" policies in schools. When there is a policy, no matter how toxic, you just follow it, and you are protected.
Meanwhile the rules are different for new hires. We must attract top talent! Big titles for everyone new! There are policies in place for this too, and a budgetary structure which explicitly supports this divisive system.
Create a few fake Facebook or LinkedIn profiles. Make yourself a few lucrative job offers and your present employer will pour cash on you.
Back in the old days, I used to ask for the afternoon off every once in a while and then show up for work that day in a nice suit. Everybody figured it was for a job interview and I got another raise.
Have gnu, will travel.
It knows when you are sleeping
It knows when you're awake
It knows when you've been bad or good,
So be good for goodness sake...
Therefore, Big Data is Santa Claus.
I wouldn't have guessed; but the clues were there all along. He's a communist, which explains the red suit and giving away stuff that kids should be earning; but it still doesn't explain the flying reindeer. We're working on it though. We'll get back to you...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I work for a 25 person company.
I'm apparently integral because nobody else would put up with the shit I do.
I have to walk out every other year merely to keep up with the cost of living. This causes horror and whining and drama.
I wish I didn't have an overdeveloped sense of empathy. But at least I've got job security.
I'd like some software that will tell me how likely my company is to give me a raise vs tell me to get lost. This would be especially nice when it comes to companies I'm considering applying to.
As for the software under discussion, it is obvious that it will be used to deny raises to anyone except those who are both marked as willing to leave the company and whom the company sufficiently values (and by values I mean that it would cost the company more to replace them than to give them a raise).
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Policy is only there for lying to the employees.
The job offer for my current job, I shot back that I wanted to start at the MAX vacation time on day 1. Yes, A new hire starts with 5 weeks of vacation every year, the audacity! I have 20 years of experience, I'm not a newbie, I get full vacation.
I had a response that it was against policy to do that, so I responded with "then I decline your job offer."
Suddenly they were able to "break policy" and make that change for me.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The most likely application of this software is not to maximize the retention of top performers. Rather they will seek to minimize the amount of benefits paid for a given level of quit risk for the employee population. In other words, how much can we squeeze them without them doing anything about it? Not that this is new, but now they'll be able to do it more efficiently! Ahh, progress, how much we love thee.
5 dollars is nothing to you... why not give it to me and everyone who responds to your post?
What's this goddamn supply and demand thing? Lumpy says everyone should get 10K more from their company and from the government, and 5 dollars from him.
This is a company trying to sell their product.
This needs to be independently evaluated. This big data shit is almost always some sort of logical optical illusion. Something that looks some way from the right angle but when actually examined is just smoke and mirrors.
I trust this not at all until they get it evaluated.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Nice work, but it just validates the point that the company could NOT, in fact, give a $10k raise to all the employees.
It's not exactly hard to find either. However, I'd say they know more when you're *looking* for a new job as opposed to when you're actually ready to quit. Extra hits from job-postings, google searches on how to update your resume, monster, etc etc paint a pretty obvious picture here.