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Netflix Algorithm Tells You When Your Best Employee Is About To Leave You
An anonymous reader writes "Former Netflix data scientist Mohammad Sabah has used the basis of the video-streaming company's movie-recommendation engine to create a new system to predict when valuable employees are likely to leave your company for pastures new. The new application 'Workday Talent Insights' uses the basis of the engine to correlate diverse factors such as interval between promotions and current length of tenure with equivalent job opportunities at employment websites, in order to gauge 'corporate restlessness', and provide options for employers who identify potential leavers."
Has the employee been watching Office Space on repeat? He's about to leave.
Can these algorithms be adapted to predict when tech editors are going to turn on the industry? That would be a useful metric to have.
- Have they turned up in a suit one day when they normally where jeans and t-shirt and disappear off for an extra long lunchbreak?
- Have they started arriving late and leaving early?
- Do they skip meetings more often?
- Have they hinted about a payrise in the last assessment?
- Has their work quality gone off a cliff and they spend most of the day on social media or youtube?
If YES is the answer to 2 or more of those then yes, probably they're looking to leave.
He/she is about to leave this plane of existence.
This type of monitoring makes me nervous.
I have a job where a few years ago I looked at some job opportunities on a Job Site. The very next day my manager came to me asking if I was happy with my job, which in general I was, but I was unnerved that they knew I was looking at the other options. I suspect they used a honey pot job listing. I decided my job security at that time was more important than looking for other opportunities so I stopped looking altogether. If I was to job hunt to today I would do so much more surreptitiously and under a pseudonym, at least initially.
I am well compensated at my job, but dislike the idea that they are aware of my activities outside of work.
Letter To Iran
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The Netflix recommendations I'm watched were out of my range of likes and/or taste.
So, based upon my experience with the Netflix recommendation algorithm, I'd be wary of this new application.
Human interaction? Why bother?! You can sit at your desk and rain fire and brimstone on your peon subordinates, especially the ones who are about to leave! Fire them before they can quit!
The only valuable employee is one that owns a share in the business. Everyone else is substitutable.
Of course what will happen in reality is companies will use this to maximize the amount of shit and abuse they can heap on employees before they actually leave, and ensure that by the time they do you no longer need to care.
The sociopaths who run corporations don't give a crap about employee retention or loyalty, just grinding them down into compliance.
There's no fucking way corporations will use this in some enlightened, self-aware attempt to keep employees happy.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Combine this with Googles new automated interview techniques and you can have people being moved automatically from company to company!
Imagine waking up and getting a message saying
Dear OzPeter,
We are sorry to hear that ABC Widget company has let you go. But don't worry, overnight you details were submitted to 14 different companies in your area who subscribe to Googles "Match Me" recruiting service. Based on information automatically provided by ABC Widget co through their Netflix firing algorithm, 9 of those companies bid on you, and we are happy to announce that you are now employed by XYZ Financial services.
Congratulations on your new position!
Please see the attached map to find your way to your new place of work.
Would you like us to update your:
Facebook status y/n?
Linked In profile: y/n?
Twitter account: y/n?
MySpace page: y/n?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
funny how we treasure the children of privilege while we discard the children of poverty
Question 1) are you taking them for granted? --> Yes - oh no, they are leaving soon!
|
No - goto Question 1
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
ON Netflix their application (MAX) to help you choose something to watch , has a voice actor and general humor and feel of the old CD game (and later online too I think) "You Don't Know Jack".
Has anyone else noticed this? I wonder if this is by the old YDKJ folks? Those quizzes were funny and fun I always thought. MAX on Netflix sure seems a lot like You Don't Know Jack.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Really? When they throw away people over 40 and over 50% of the population is considered unqualified due to being the wrong gender there is no talent shortage, but management myopia. You have to wonder how many 'restless employees' are looking because they know they will soon be thrown away.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Im sure an easy algorythm can be generated for when management is about to push a valuable employee out the door:
1. have you turned every change or alteration into a mindless bureaucratic rats nest of meetings and superfluous documentation that could best be handled through email?
2. Have you allowed the most vocal customers and users to continuously abuse his talent and divert his attention to helpdesk issues that make you look good at his expense?
3. Have you refused to consider his technical opinion on the design or development of a product or solution and instead just done what the sales rep told you or what would cause the least number of meetings or beurocratic effort?
4. Have you placed overwhelming reliance on him to micromanage his coworkers changes and projects instead of working to ensure they properly document and communicate instead? did he receive a silent promotion to assitant management?
Good people go to bed earlier.
No one is going to spend money on this nonsense. Even if it worked, management is looking to get rid of people, not retain them. This algorithm is filling a need which no one has.
This system may obscure the obvious retention problems of a company.
For example, I left my job about one year ago. I was in the position for less than three years. I was promoted twice in that period. The pay and benefits were good for the area. By most metrics that the story listed, I should have stayed, but I left! The company was consistently creating policies to discourage innovation, limiting job flexibility, and removing vacation/holidays. The company instituted a policy that an employee had to give a presentation and write a 20-50 document arguing why they should be promoted.
How can a dumb algorithm predict future behavior from these company-wide and difficult-to-quantify problems?
Employees - Am I in the united states and an At-Will employment state, you are about to be let go
Am I in any G8 country other than USA, your country protects its citizens, and the corporation is required to notify you, and provide a reason if you will be let go.
After a 25+ year employee quit we looked at her e-mails. The outgoing ones to another former employee stated that she hated the new employees, they wouldn't listen to her at all even though she was their supervisor, and the company was still in crap shape and run poorly. If you read between the lines, or even just the lines, you might suspect she was about to leave. Also I think she mentioned that she was about to leave.
If you give an employee an awesome review, but tell him that due to your budget, you can only give a cost of living increase.
Or here's one the really pissed me off. I was working for a body shop and coming off a contract. The sales/recruiter/commissioned guy asks what kind of rate would I like for the next contract. OK.
So, I go up to computerjobs, type in my skills, experience, area and find that other W-2 contractors/temps were getting at least $5/hr more than I was. So, that's what I told the sales/recruiter/commissioned guy.
"That's a pretty big increase."
Excuse me. THEY are going to bill at market rates so why shouldn't I get market rates? My next contract was with another company that gave me $11/hr more. Yeah, this was in the late nineties - so, keep that in mind.
Here's another one that kills me.
You're working 12 hour days and ask your boss about getting more help - and entry level guy. And you explain that it will also develop more talent for the company.
He says, "No, see we can't get anyone qualified."
Now, I like getting my ego stroked as well the next guy, but frankly what I was doing wasn't rocket science. Then I overheard the stuff about the minimum ROI they have to make on a developer. That's right, they need to make 45% over your total compensation (salary, benefits, SS payments, etc ...). Some companies it's even more. So, they work you to death, tell you your awesome and that everyone else is too stupid to do what you're doing so, keep working hard you genius. Why hire two developers for when you can get one guy to kill himself?
All of us were eventually canned and the work sent overseas.
My company allots bonuses based on the performance of the division you are in. Roughly Base_salary * responsibility% * personal_perf * division_perf = bonus amount. So $50k * 20% * 1 * 1 = $10k. If you change divisions during the year, your bonus is calculated as the # of days in each division
My division is engineers, product design and innovation. We didn't make a profit, but we hit our targets, inspite of headcount reductions. We were assigned a much below 1x multiplier on the bonus.
Corporate division is accountants and execs, whose only target was to reduce ongoing costs (ie. slash headcount):. They got a much greater than 1x bonus multiplier. I assume that's because they "took the hard decision of laying folks (in other divisions) off"
I know, because due to a snafu during an internal transfer I was briefly in the corporate division and a few days of the payout is at the corporate rate.
What a load of bollocks. Anything to extract money out of dumb HR people and anything to give managers another excuse to avoid being human.
I pretty much know when cow-irkers are leaving by paying attention to their activity on Linkedin. Employees that are happy aren't polishing up their online resume and padding their community involvement and awards.
Make this work for you.
1. Once in a while, casually mention to your boss how tired you are of recruiters emailing/calling/texting you all the time.
2. Tell a coworker your going to be a little late coming back from lunch with your buddy from $Your_biggest_competitor.
3. Tell your boss you have an "appointment" tomorrow, and you need to take an hour off. Show up the next day wearing your best suit and tie.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
about to leave. What about the valueless employees? You know, the ones who actually do the work and can be replaced with a phone call...
"Talk to your staff and treat them like fucking humans"
You can have that algorithm for free, you soul-sucking corporate bastards.
This. My last boss was a jeckyl and hyde type and he only tried to act like a person after i quit. He sent me an email letting me know how much extra stress i cause him and his business.
Haircut, beard trim
I worked at a computer repair/sales/Business IT solutions provider/Systems Integrator for 4 years as a service technician. It was my first job in the field. In those 4 years I became the soul (read: SENIOR) technician ( usually had 2 or 3 of us at any given time.) After my supervisor was fired for writing death threats on company email, I became the senior/lead technician. A title upgrade only. No pay increase. They hired another tech part time to help, he ended up getting promoted after a few months (he teaches karate to some of the other employee's kids, and is thus really far up their asses) to the Business Solutions team, got a nice pay raise, and became "one of the bros". I said "fuck it" and quit after the business moved to a new building that added another 15-20 minutes to my commute, where my desk was gently placed into a steam pipe junction/broom closet area. They also changed hours of operation without telling me, so I was late on the reopening day, and woke up to a phone call from HR, I called back and quit on a voicemail. Treat me bad once, shame on you, treat me bad for four years...I later was inboxed by the owner of the company to tell me how he always treated me fairly based solely on the fact that we got a good discount on computer parts. He then blamed me for adding undue stress on the rest of the company. He then sent me a bill for the last few products that I purchased at a discount for the full balance sans discount. They are now in the process of working with netflix to build a data center, so I bet he'll take advantage of this algorithm as well. One of the things he said that really sticks with me is "why do i go through so much staff" HAVE YOU TALKED TO YOUR THERAPIST LATELY/?????
They're looking at it from a "observable attributes" vs "desired attributes" and assessing "grass is greener" probabilities.
The problem is that how do they really determine things like "number of job functions".. By reading the HR description of the person's job, or actually looking at what they do. You might have someone who's official function is fairly limited, but because they have wide experience, wind up doing lots of things that are technically outside their scope.
IN any case, there are better ways. As other posters commented, a perceptive manager will notice some things (and maybe not be able to do anything about it.. pay raises, for instance)..
But even better, it turns out that by analyzing an employee's email/messaging traffic, there are statistically significant changes in some of the metrics that are highly correlated to future job changes. There a variety of strategies that have been used, ranging from simple (word count, sentence length, word size) to more sophisticated such as lexical and stylometric analysis.. is the person usually a "We need to do X" person and changes to "You need to do X" or "I need to do X". Changes between active and passive voice. usage in emails to peers vs subordinates vs superiors.
This is something that every manager should be aware of: subordinates promotions, salary increases, job functions, etc. So now an important function of management is being replaced by a small shell script.
This will be the basis of my algorithm for timing a divestiture from a corportion. When the boss' function can be replaced by a laptop.
Have gnu, will travel.
The article summary is, if not inaccurate, misleading. Sabah left Netflix almost three years ago, and now works for Workday.
This is an important distinction because A) Workday can make a reasonable case for this being a valuable product to offer their customers; and B) Netflix cannot (and, speaking as a hiring manager at Netflix, we get a little antsy when it comes to monitoring employees -- it's a pretty laissez faire environment here).
My home computer.
To clarify. It was HR that alerted my Manager. I said the next day, but I may have been looking a few days, a week at the most, though I had probably posted inquiries the night before. It was quite sudden, unexpected, and intimidating. This was probably 5-6 years ago. As stated I am with the same company, outside this incident they have treated me well. I don't consider myself a star employee, their concern seemed more of the "Oh my gosh, we really hope you are happy here" kind. Still it caused me to stop looking. I have been coasting on my skills for several years now. I worry that should I leave this job I might find myself under-qualified for what comes next, that and that fact I am well over 50. So yes, I have let fear rule me in this instance. For those who would fault me for this, I am a family man, and at this stage in my life security and stability are greatly valued.,
Letter To Iran
Firewall log shows employee spends all day on dice, Monster, and the like? HAs there been recent browsing of suits and professional dress?
Employee is about to leave.
My guess is that many managers will be surprised someone is considered a valuable employee by this algorithm. I mean, he doesn't participate in fantasy football, how can he be valuable?
What if they've been streaming Venture Bros. from Adult Swim for more than a week?
What we have here is the situation when corporate power, and the power of the financial elite, takes over all aspects of government policy. It transforms the entire consumer market based economy into the Tragedy of the Commons.
Every corporation aims to to fatten its bottom line, stock price, and C-Suite compensation package by reducing the wages of its labor force. It is a rational micro-decision, just as grazing as many sheep as possible on the commons is rational for the individual farmer, but it destroys in the long run the basis of the whole economy - a nation full of consumers with lots of money to spend on products. The majority of the increases in corporate profitability, and the source of the exploding CEO paychecks, over the last quarter century have come from holding wage payouts flat (or reducing them. Increased productivity stopped being linked to worker compensation a full 45 years ago, an entire working lifetime. As the proportion of wages that make up the economy fall to the lowest level since the Great Depression the engine that drives the growth of the U.S. economy is running out of fuel, now an anemic 2.38%, compared to the long term mean of 4.41%.
But hey, the CEOs are happy!
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Overlooking the gross inequity of the premise (where's the algorithm that shows when an employer is about to hose you?), what happens when there is a false positive? Employers in my experience aren't the exemplars of honorable conduct, so what will they *do* with this information? What's so bad about moving on to a new job? I can't help but think that this problem wouldn't merit any attention if employers were better behaved.
Netflix updated their algorithm at some point in the past year or so, and now the VAST majority of films I browse come up recommended as 4-5 stars. That's mighty bold considering all of the bullshit B-movies they recommend.
Yeah, I'm not about to trust netflix algs on anything except delivering movies reliably, which they do amazingly well.
does it work with girlfriends?
How about an algorithm which tells you if it is time to leave your current job and where there might be greener pastures.
The factors involved might be:
Your salary compared to those around you.
Contracts landed or performance of competitors and market.
Your performance relative to others.
Your leverage (favors).
Ability to relo.