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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."
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes indeed. That's what happened to me. A "safety violation" when you get back from a work trip leaves you jobless and without benefits... Don't spend a lot of time thinking about getting a new job. When you decide it isn't working out, find something else, don't do what I did and make an elaborate plan to quit on a certain day next year and then take a nice vacation.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
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.
Haircut, beard trim
... not replenishing their Hot Pockets supply in the break-room freezer.
Communism has the workers owning the means of production, while the only "attempts" have involved the government owning the means of production. Those are only compatible if the workers own the government, and I don't think that's ever been the case of any government in the history of human civilization. *Certainly* it wasn't the case in any of the so-called "communist" countries.
The irony here is that capitalism actually provides the most direct way for workers to own the means of production - through holding equity in the company. The ownership of any individual is miniscule (other than founders, executives, etc.) but there are numerous examples of "employee-owned" companies in which the Marxist ideal has been more fully realized than in any Communist nation to date.
There is also an inherent contradiction in every attempt to date to implement a Communist government. As you point out, if the government owns the means of production, the workers don't own it in turn unless they have control of the government, which can only be accomplished through Democracy. Every Communist government established during the 20th century was a single-party or totalitarian state, but arguably that's unavoidable because you will never find a Communist government (not talking about Socialist, but Communist) that is freely elected by a majority of its citizens because many aspects of Communism involve taking away property, land, etc. from the people who currently own it in order to "share" it among the population. Communism has historically always come to power through revolution or outside imposition, and human nature makes it highly unlikely for those who have won power in that way to ever risk losing it through enabling Democracy.
So I think history tends to prove for us that the ideal of a Communist state on a large scale achieving its original goal of worker ownership of the means of production to be inherently flawed. Then again, it can also be argued that the Marxist idea of Communism was a response to an Industrial Revolution status quo which has changed dramatically in the past 150 years and needs to be largely rethought to have modern relevance anyway...
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