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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."
"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!
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
Why would you be opposed to big data finding out when you take a dump in the morning, as long as its voluntary?
Voluntary to what extent? If privacy becomes insanely expensive to have (because all major appliances start violating your privacy in some way or another, and the one's that don't come at a premium), then it doesn't seem so voluntary anymore.
Not using Facebook, Google, etc. is easy, so at least for now, I don't think we're at that point in most cases.
It won't keep you safe from the NSA
To some extent, it will. If you avoid giving out data, then they have less to work with.
but big business isn't holding a gun to your head (yet).
Maybe not directly, but big business hands over tons of information to the government. If big business has your information, the government likely does too.
...I think that we should study the algorithm, and adopt behaviours that can deliver us more money from our employer :-)
If you do all your internet activity through tor, and don't subscribe to cable TV, and find non-identifiable ways to obtain your video entertainment [...]
Then you're one of those unemployable privacy-obsessed nutjobs. You've probably got heaps to hide, and NSA suspicion algorithms mark you as suspicious.
Thanks for playing!
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?
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'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.
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
If your work knows you are about to leave, it's because you were broadcasting it. Every time I left a company I broadsided them.
Boss: "I though you were happy here"
Me:"I have asked for a raise 3 times, you said no"
Boss: " but we are paying you market rate"
Me: "I'm getting 30% more with XYZ corp, so it seems you are not"
Boss: " You know there is more to life than money"
Me: " Yup, but I can not do any of that with the incredibly low pay you are giving me here"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"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.
So you don't think that a combination of factors such as where you live, how much you get paid, relative market rates, current job market conditions, your recent payrises, your recent year end appraisal scores, where your partner works, your age, your time since last promotion or anything else the company has or can easily gain access to would be an indicator of how likely you are to leave?
Remind me not to ask you for data driven insights.
When anyone talks about "Putting it to career choices, to pay and employment, have a huge upside if we do it right" wrt people's pay, it's more like "they won't quit even if you tell them they're going to have to take a cut in pay" than "offering a raise to keep them happy." Anyone who thinks it won't be sold as a cost reduction method is a fool.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It's because our economic system originates from before Industrial Revolution, and was designed to get everyone to "bust their ass" working. It was designed to maximize production in a situation where labour was the limiting factor, and breaks down spectacularly when raw materials (including energy) are.
Total demand = (demand of labour of previous timestep) * (fraction of GDP paid as wages) + min((fraction of GDP paid as profits), constant)
Demand of labour = (avg((total demand), (total demand of previous timestep)) / productivity
As long as productivity stays low, production is limited by workforce, and economy tends towards full employment. If productivity increases faster than wages, as has happened, you eventually hit a situation where total wages of all workers can no longer create enough demand to buy the entire supply. Market prices fall, and companies need to invest on increasing efficiency rather than increasing production to keep their profits up. Since a physical product will always require a certain amount of raw materials, eventually they reach the point where the only thing they can cut is workforce. This causes demand to fall (you can only spend money you have), and thus the economy enters a stall.
This is also why stimulus isn't working: investment now goes to cutting workforce - and thus demand - further, not expanding production. The only way to actually fix the economy would be to increase the buying power of Joe Average. This, in practice, means drastically increasing wages and unemployment benefit, in other words, to move income from the rich to the poor. That seems unlikely to happen, especially under a Republican government, so I guess we're seeing the twilight of capitalism.
Of course, it's also possible to keep demand up and economy working by giving credit with reckless abandon and hope you can keep juggling an ever more complex web of financial instruments to obfuscate that. But who would be stupid enough to risk the fate of their country - and their own golden goose, and possibly the entire Western civilization - for that, rather than just ensure people are paid enough?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
So you don't think that a combination of factors such as where you live, how much you get paid, relative market rates, current job market conditions, your recent payrises, your recent year end appraisal scores, where your partner works, your age, your time since last promotion or anything else the company has or can easily gain access to would be an indicator of how likely you are to leave?
Not for some jobs. In a lot of the tech world, the algorithm would be pretty much exactly as the GP listed, at least for talented people who are desired by employers.
And, what does the company do when "big data" says somebody is or isn't going to leave in the next year? If they use just that metric, the will find out that a lot of people who they thought weren't going to leave end up gone..."we don't need to give him that big of a raise...the computer says he won't leave anyway". Or, "hey, we better find a cheaper replacement for this guy, because he's leaving in the next year" will be a lot more likely than giving the guy what it takes to keep him.
Then, too, there's a lot of employees who won't ever leave their existing job because they can't do any better anywhere else. Sadly, many of those people are the ones that you might want to encourage to leave.
I love how asking you to change your behaviors or else pay what you are really costing everyone else is "fucking you over". In some ways I think insurance is a horrid thing as it has made a nation unable to understand cause and effect.
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.
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 way to fix the economy is for the government to stop meddling with it by picking winners and losers.
Oh, you mean like the current practice of taxing capital gains and dividends at a lower rate than income?