It's entirely possible that Yahoo has a serious management problem as well. If the company has a productivity problem, there's nothing wrong with solving that problem using a variety of (reversible) solutions. There's no reason the "low productivity from WFH employees" problem has to wait until you've solved the "managers don't effectively measure or resolve poor employee performance" problem. Use a variety of tools and solutions to solve all of the problems you see. Once you're back on track, reconsider some of the changes and possibly bring back a WFH program that still allows you to gauge productivity.
I suspect the data show that WFH in its current form is a net drain on the company. Once they have their productivity and management problems sorted, it's likely a future WFH program might not be a net drain. But if today it is, then it seems quite reasonable to eliminate it.
I could be a top performer in less than a week by stint of a simple script.;)
Yes, now that you know the metric exists and how it's being used. What's being discussed here is the use of a metric to justify a decision that's already been made. Gaming the system now isn't going to change it, and I'm sure if they wanted to make use of that metric again, they'd want to factor in the likelihood that it's being gamed.
But even if it is being gamed, you're just creating a false negative and making it harder to use that signal to conclude "likely productive", without changing the signal for "likely nonproductive". If nothing changes and there's still a sizable group "WFH" that never logs in to VPN, that's still likely* a good indication that people are abusing it, whether people game it or not.
* - assuming the typical engineer would need to use VPN to be productive
I think this depends entirely on how your VPN is set up. It is possible to create a VPN solution that is well-provisioned, targeted just to the resources available on the VPN network, etc. From the user's perspective, requests to the public Internet are just as fast (not routed over the VPN), while you now have access to company resources (routed over the VPN).
As a software engineer for a Yahoo!-like company, I'm struggling to understand how someone could effectively design and implement software there without occasionally needing to make use of internal company resources (VPN). The prospect of storing source code and documentation on my laptop, allowing me to code without a VPN, is also slightly scary to me, even if my laptop were encrypted, but I suppose it's possible if you don't need to integrate much with other services.
I'd simply fire up the VPN, then have some small program randomly open and close certain binaries on the remote servers, etc.
Once you know the metric exists and is being used for a specific purpose, people will start to game it. I don't think they're suggesting that they continue to use VPN metrics, just that they used them, and seemed to find a reasonable basis in the data to support the hypothesis that eliminating WFH would be a net positive to the company. If you didn't know they were doing that, you probably weren't gaming the metrics and the data probably has a decent signal.
If everyone working from home, without VPN, were being super productive, I expect that would have appeared in their data. More likely, they saw a broad correlation between those WFH, and those failing to accomplish much. That doesn't mean some people don't perform quite well in this situation (or better than they would working at the office), just that they have a policy that seems to be a net drain.
Are you saying that most people not connecting to VPN are being super productive, "heads down"? Or just that some of them could be? If they were certain that everyone failing to connect to the VPN were failing to be productive, wouldn't they just fire them all and get it over with? It looks to me like they're focusing on making simple changes likely to have a large positive impact. It may have a negative impact for a small set of individuals (like your hypothetical case of someone that seems to work best from home, without using VPN), but my guess is that they expect this to have an overall net positive effect on employee productivity. If their data seems to suggest a good correlation between failing to use VPN and not being productive, this seems entirely reasonable.
If you don't know that measuring VPN use is being used as a metric for productivity, I imagine low VPN usage will correlate quite well to poor performers. The reverse may not be true (your hypothetical case), and correlation doesn't imply causation, but that's probably why they're not stating that they're firing people based on VPN metrics, and instead, are pointing out that the correlation exists and are trying to make broad changes to the company that are likely to have large impacts quickly. It seems quite reasonable to me. Once they have their performance problems under control they can reintroduce WFH programs like this.
It's interesting that nobody is pointing out that you can opt out of Google "rifling" through your e-mail (i.e., using the e-mail to determine ad relevancy in Gmail): https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/preferences/
I'm not sure I understand. Are you talking about the Old World? I think Google has better things to do than get speech recognition working for fictional places and people.
Plus, as soon as the manual drive is done, the car now has an updated map and can drive the modified route automatically again. If cars can share maps, that one person's manual drive can then be re-used by others and nobody else needs to manually drive it.
Why the fuck would I ever want to buy one of these cars?
Clearly the car is intended for people that would not have a problem with three one-hour charging stops for a 600-mile trip. Clearly you are not one of those people, so I don't think we can answer your question.
Many people rarely take 600-mile trips. Of those that do, many would be fine with three one-hour charging stops. You can plan one or two stops around meals, for instance, to minimize the inconvenience. Those that need to make those trips and can't wait to charge will need to buy a different kind of car. No one is suggesting this type of electric car is appropriate for all purposes.
Many households with two working adults end up with two cars: a long-range large-capacity family vehicle and a smaller commuting vehicle. Electrics will dominate the latter use case before the former, for these reasons.
The market economy is a tool, not a way of life. Beyond a certain point, monetary rewards do not cause people to aspire to be more productive, so what's the point in letting that wealth accumulate in their hands? Power? You can have a tax system that is far more progressive than it is today while still rewarding hard work.
I'm saying ISP supplied email has been allowed to wither on the vine as people have taken up GMail and Hotmail. That they've traded privacy for convenience. And as a result ISPs haven't had the pressure to keep their email services up with the times.
So it sounds like you agree with the OP in that, no, you can't point to a service comparable in quality to Gmail that is "free" and not ad supported, because ISP e-mail service was outcompeted by third party webmail providers. For some reason it sounded like you were trying to make a different point, sorry.
The subtext of my question should be read as "please explain". Sorry if my confused interpretation confused you.
AC said:
Why would you want ads when reading your email at all?
Responder said it's not that we want to, but it's a fair trade given the quality of service:
no free lunch... If you can point towards an e-mail service with as good uptime and accessibility as GMail and one which doesn't require payments nor shows any ads then go ahead!
You said:
There was a time before GMail. Email came as part of the services of the ISP. And it wasn't data-mined.
You seem to be pointing out that free, non-"data-mined" e-mail used to exist, both Back In My Day, and as a bundled add-on product. If I give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you've read and understood the entirety of the post, your point would seem to either be nostalgic, or you're trying to imply that the bundled e-mail services that existed before Gmail (or even today) are comparable in quality to Gmail. Please explain or correct my misinterpretation of your comment.
when tuning their algorithms, ie all the time, they have to look at individual emails and see if a manual person would come to the same conclusion that their bot does
What conclusion? That the reader of the e-mail is more or less likely to click on ad A instead of ad B? Why not just present both ads and see which one the user clicks on? And then repeat this for a million different users. It seems more useful to train their system statistically rather than by literally reading e-mails.
If you're talking about spam in particular (since you mention this later in your post), they DO have people manually reviewing misclassified e-mails. That person is YOU, via the "Report as spam" and "Not spam" buttons. You could even argue that "report" in "report spam" is rather explicit authorization for them to pass that e-mail off to an engineer to read. This is all quite different from what Microsoft is accusing Google of doing.
At Google's scale, it's almost certainly more useful to train statistically than with any one individual message or user. You make a change in the algorithm and watch how the change affects click rates on the ads. I can't imagine a situation where having someone read an e-mail is likely to get you any useful information. If your goal is just to better learn how to discover meaning from text, they have the entirety of the Internet to use for training.
AIUI, the idea is to identify what ads you'd be most likely to click on given the content of the message you're looking at. I don't think this quite rises to the level of identifying your likes and dislikes from the content of the e-mail. I'm not even sure such a thing is even possible.
Done by every e-mail system in existence, especially e-mail providers that scan your e-mails for spam, viruses, malware, etc. So this can't really be the problem.
and storing the information in a persistent database entry that corresponds specifically to me
Isn't the entire e-mail in question stored in a persistent database entry that corresponds specifically to you? So this seems unlikely to be the problem also.
to target ads not just next to the email
So you don't have a problem with the ads, just that the choice of ads is influenced by the e-mail you're reading. Did you know you can opt out of ad personalization?
but every time I visit any service that uses Google advertising
[citation needed]. AIUI, Gmail ad personalization is based on the e-mails you're looking at, and that relevance information isn't used anywhere else. I've never seen anyone assert that before. If you have a citation here I'd be really interested in reading more about this.
There are two schools of thought: (A) its acceptable, and (B) its unacceptable. Thats it. Thats all there is. Notice that there is no (C) they arent spying, because thats a fucking lie.
I think I see the problem. You seem to be under the impression that your beliefs about privacy are somehow universal and objective. I find (C) to be the most accurate. Would you say that makes me a liar, or that perhaps there is a subjective element to our respective viewpoints that you aren't considering?
Both Google and Microsoft scan the contents of e-mails in order to do spam classification, and to detect viruses and malware. Microsoft suggests Google reads everyone's e-mails, and Microsoft does not. Ergo, Microsoft isn't talking about "read" system calls and is trying to imply something sinister above and beyond mere machine "reading".
The "input" you supply is your privacy. You sell your (and your contacts) privacy to google for access to their services.
Privacy is a concept. In fact, it's a subjective concept. I am selling information to Google in exchange for the use of their service. Some of that information is not terribly private to me (though others may consider similar information private to them). For the information that I consider private, I am not destroying that privacy, I am expanding the circle of trust to include Google, because I trust them to be responsible with that information. In exchange, the ads I see are more relevant to me. Possibly, there's a higher risk that my private information will end up in the hands of law enforcement or hackers. Possibly, someone at Google will "go rogue" and misuse my data. IMO, the likelihood of any of that seems pretty low to me.
You are welcome to your own concept of privacy, and you are absolutely free to opt out of Google's advertising relevance thing, or to stop using Google entirely.
I don't see why everyone is so intent on preventing Google from doing what they're doing, or suggesting that people should all be sharing the same objective idea of what privacy means. You have a choice. I have a choice. I know what I'm doing and I'm happy with the arrangement.
It seems like most of the people upset here are people that desperately want to keep using Gmail for free, but don't want Google knowing what's in their e-mail (except they do want Google to read their e-mail when it's spam, or has a virus or malware attached to it), and don't realize that you can opt out of personalized ads: https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/preferences/#general
Sorry, are you suggesting that we start using Eudora again, or are you saying that the free extras that get bundled with something we buy are always high quality products that nobody would ever want to replace? My phone company and PC manufacturer give me free software too. That should be good enough for everyone?
Corporations immorally worked in the worst interests of their locations to change the law to something immoral.
I would wager that most of the companies people are upset at today had no hand whatsoever in influencing these laws. And really, when we're talking about ulterior motives like that, we're talking about the leaders of those companies, IMO, since companies have no motives.
The moral solution is to work to the betterment of all, and force that on the immoral ones if there is sufficient justification to do so.
Agreed.
Nah, we do so through laws. But calling them names helps get people to realize their actions are detrimental to everyone to help pass the regulations necessary
OK, so it sounds like we're in agreement then: the solution is to fix the laws and regulations so that rational actors become moral actors. The name-calling is just subterfuge: it looks like you're mad at the companies, but what you're really doing is rallying people to fix the problem with the tax code. I guess I see the logic behind that, but I don't really approve of demonizing corporations for doing what they're "supposed" to do. Nobody donates extra taxes to their government.
You say my post "would be correct" as if to say that it's incorrect in reality. Could you elaborate on that? Are you saying that it's impossible to change the tax system to align its rational incentives with your moral beliefs because there will always be someone immoral on the other side working harder to keep things the way they are? And, therefore, our goal should be to instead convince companies to behave irrationally by calling them names?
Slashdot Mirror
It's entirely possible that Yahoo has a serious management problem as well. If the company has a productivity problem, there's nothing wrong with solving that problem using a variety of (reversible) solutions. There's no reason the "low productivity from WFH employees" problem has to wait until you've solved the "managers don't effectively measure or resolve poor employee performance" problem. Use a variety of tools and solutions to solve all of the problems you see. Once you're back on track, reconsider some of the changes and possibly bring back a WFH program that still allows you to gauge productivity.
I suspect the data show that WFH in its current form is a net drain on the company. Once they have their productivity and management problems sorted, it's likely a future WFH program might not be a net drain. But if today it is, then it seems quite reasonable to eliminate it.
I could be a top performer in less than a week by stint of a simple script. ;)
Yes, now that you know the metric exists and how it's being used. What's being discussed here is the use of a metric to justify a decision that's already been made. Gaming the system now isn't going to change it, and I'm sure if they wanted to make use of that metric again, they'd want to factor in the likelihood that it's being gamed.
But even if it is being gamed, you're just creating a false negative and making it harder to use that signal to conclude "likely productive", without changing the signal for "likely nonproductive". If nothing changes and there's still a sizable group "WFH" that never logs in to VPN, that's still likely* a good indication that people are abusing it, whether people game it or not.
* - assuming the typical engineer would need to use VPN to be productive
I think this depends entirely on how your VPN is set up. It is possible to create a VPN solution that is well-provisioned, targeted just to the resources available on the VPN network, etc. From the user's perspective, requests to the public Internet are just as fast (not routed over the VPN), while you now have access to company resources (routed over the VPN).
As a software engineer for a Yahoo!-like company, I'm struggling to understand how someone could effectively design and implement software there without occasionally needing to make use of internal company resources (VPN). The prospect of storing source code and documentation on my laptop, allowing me to code without a VPN, is also slightly scary to me, even if my laptop were encrypted, but I suppose it's possible if you don't need to integrate much with other services.
I'd simply fire up the VPN, then have some small program randomly open and close certain binaries on the remote servers, etc.
Once you know the metric exists and is being used for a specific purpose, people will start to game it. I don't think they're suggesting that they continue to use VPN metrics, just that they used them, and seemed to find a reasonable basis in the data to support the hypothesis that eliminating WFH would be a net positive to the company. If you didn't know they were doing that, you probably weren't gaming the metrics and the data probably has a decent signal.
If everyone working from home, without VPN, were being super productive, I expect that would have appeared in their data. More likely, they saw a broad correlation between those WFH, and those failing to accomplish much. That doesn't mean some people don't perform quite well in this situation (or better than they would working at the office), just that they have a policy that seems to be a net drain.
Are you saying that most people not connecting to VPN are being super productive, "heads down"? Or just that some of them could be? If they were certain that everyone failing to connect to the VPN were failing to be productive, wouldn't they just fire them all and get it over with? It looks to me like they're focusing on making simple changes likely to have a large positive impact. It may have a negative impact for a small set of individuals (like your hypothetical case of someone that seems to work best from home, without using VPN), but my guess is that they expect this to have an overall net positive effect on employee productivity. If their data seems to suggest a good correlation between failing to use VPN and not being productive, this seems entirely reasonable.
If you don't know that measuring VPN use is being used as a metric for productivity, I imagine low VPN usage will correlate quite well to poor performers. The reverse may not be true (your hypothetical case), and correlation doesn't imply causation, but that's probably why they're not stating that they're firing people based on VPN metrics, and instead, are pointing out that the correlation exists and are trying to make broad changes to the company that are likely to have large impacts quickly. It seems quite reasonable to me. Once they have their performance problems under control they can reintroduce WFH programs like this.
If, however, I'm not OK with algorithms parsing the email, I can just stop using the free service. Simple.
You can also simply opt out:
https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/preferences/
It's interesting that nobody is pointing out that you can opt out of Google "rifling" through your e-mail (i.e., using the e-mail to determine ad relevancy in Gmail):
https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/preferences/
Google seems to imply that Gmail signals are only used within Gmail:
https://support.google.com/ads/answer/1634057?p=aboutads&rd=1
Even if they aren't doing it for mail, they're certainly doing it for search. What's scarier?
I'm not sure I understand. Are you talking about the Old World? I think Google has better things to do than get speech recognition working for fictional places and people.
Plus, as soon as the manual drive is done, the car now has an updated map and can drive the modified route automatically again. If cars can share maps, that one person's manual drive can then be re-used by others and nobody else needs to manually drive it.
Why the fuck would I ever want to buy one of these cars?
Clearly the car is intended for people that would not have a problem with three one-hour charging stops for a 600-mile trip. Clearly you are not one of those people, so I don't think we can answer your question.
Many people rarely take 600-mile trips. Of those that do, many would be fine with three one-hour charging stops. You can plan one or two stops around meals, for instance, to minimize the inconvenience. Those that need to make those trips and can't wait to charge will need to buy a different kind of car. No one is suggesting this type of electric car is appropriate for all purposes.
Many households with two working adults end up with two cars: a long-range large-capacity family vehicle and a smaller commuting vehicle. Electrics will dominate the latter use case before the former, for these reasons.
The market economy is a tool, not a way of life. Beyond a certain point, monetary rewards do not cause people to aspire to be more productive, so what's the point in letting that wealth accumulate in their hands? Power? You can have a tax system that is far more progressive than it is today while still rewarding hard work.
I'm saying ISP supplied email has been allowed to wither on the vine as people have taken up GMail and Hotmail. That they've traded privacy for convenience. And as a result ISPs haven't had the pressure to keep their email services up with the times.
So it sounds like you agree with the OP in that, no, you can't point to a service comparable in quality to Gmail that is "free" and not ad supported, because ISP e-mail service was outcompeted by third party webmail providers. For some reason it sounded like you were trying to make a different point, sorry.
The subtext of my question should be read as "please explain". Sorry if my confused interpretation confused you.
AC said:
Why would you want ads when reading your email at all?
Responder said it's not that we want to, but it's a fair trade given the quality of service:
no free lunch ... If you can point towards an e-mail service with as good uptime and accessibility as GMail and one which doesn't require payments nor shows any ads then go ahead!
You said:
There was a time before GMail. Email came as part of the services of the ISP. And it wasn't data-mined.
You seem to be pointing out that free, non-"data-mined" e-mail used to exist, both Back In My Day, and as a bundled add-on product. If I give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you've read and understood the entirety of the post, your point would seem to either be nostalgic, or you're trying to imply that the bundled e-mail services that existed before Gmail (or even today) are comparable in quality to Gmail. Please explain or correct my misinterpretation of your comment.
when tuning their algorithms, ie all the time, they have to look at individual emails and see if a manual person would come to the same conclusion that their bot does
What conclusion? That the reader of the e-mail is more or less likely to click on ad A instead of ad B? Why not just present both ads and see which one the user clicks on? And then repeat this for a million different users. It seems more useful to train their system statistically rather than by literally reading e-mails.
If you're talking about spam in particular (since you mention this later in your post), they DO have people manually reviewing misclassified e-mails. That person is YOU, via the "Report as spam" and "Not spam" buttons. You could even argue that "report" in "report spam" is rather explicit authorization for them to pass that e-mail off to an engineer to read. This is all quite different from what Microsoft is accusing Google of doing.
At Google's scale, it's almost certainly more useful to train statistically than with any one individual message or user. You make a change in the algorithm and watch how the change affects click rates on the ads. I can't imagine a situation where having someone read an e-mail is likely to get you any useful information. If your goal is just to better learn how to discover meaning from text, they have the entirety of the Internet to use for training.
formulate your likes and dislikes
AIUI, the idea is to identify what ads you'd be most likely to click on given the content of the message you're looking at. I don't think this quite rises to the level of identifying your likes and dislikes from the content of the e-mail. I'm not even sure such a thing is even possible.
No, but I think automated parsing of an email
Done by every e-mail system in existence, especially e-mail providers that scan your e-mails for spam, viruses, malware, etc. So this can't really be the problem.
and storing the information in a persistent database entry that corresponds specifically to me
Isn't the entire e-mail in question stored in a persistent database entry that corresponds specifically to you? So this seems unlikely to be the problem also.
to target ads not just next to the email
So you don't have a problem with the ads, just that the choice of ads is influenced by the e-mail you're reading. Did you know you can opt out of ad personalization?
but every time I visit any service that uses Google advertising
[citation needed]. AIUI, Gmail ad personalization is based on the e-mails you're looking at, and that relevance information isn't used anywhere else. I've never seen anyone assert that before. If you have a citation here I'd be really interested in reading more about this.
There are two schools of thought: (A) its acceptable, and (B) its unacceptable. Thats it. Thats all there is.
Notice that there is no (C) they arent spying, because thats a fucking lie.
I think I see the problem. You seem to be under the impression that your beliefs about privacy are somehow universal and objective. I find (C) to be the most accurate. Would you say that makes me a liar, or that perhaps there is a subjective element to our respective viewpoints that you aren't considering?
Both Google and Microsoft scan the contents of e-mails in order to do spam classification, and to detect viruses and malware. Microsoft suggests Google reads everyone's e-mails, and Microsoft does not. Ergo, Microsoft isn't talking about "read" system calls and is trying to imply something sinister above and beyond mere machine "reading".
The "input" you supply is your privacy. You sell your (and your contacts) privacy to google for access to their services.
Privacy is a concept. In fact, it's a subjective concept. I am selling information to Google in exchange for the use of their service. Some of that information is not terribly private to me (though others may consider similar information private to them). For the information that I consider private, I am not destroying that privacy, I am expanding the circle of trust to include Google, because I trust them to be responsible with that information. In exchange, the ads I see are more relevant to me. Possibly, there's a higher risk that my private information will end up in the hands of law enforcement or hackers. Possibly, someone at Google will "go rogue" and misuse my data. IMO, the likelihood of any of that seems pretty low to me.
You are welcome to your own concept of privacy, and you are absolutely free to opt out of Google's advertising relevance thing, or to stop using Google entirely.
I don't see why everyone is so intent on preventing Google from doing what they're doing, or suggesting that people should all be sharing the same objective idea of what privacy means. You have a choice. I have a choice. I know what I'm doing and I'm happy with the arrangement.
It seems like most of the people upset here are people that desperately want to keep using Gmail for free, but don't want Google knowing what's in their e-mail (except they do want Google to read their e-mail when it's spam, or has a virus or malware attached to it), and don't realize that you can opt out of personalized ads: https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/preferences/#general
Sorry, are you suggesting that we start using Eudora again, or are you saying that the free extras that get bundled with something we buy are always high quality products that nobody would ever want to replace? My phone company and PC manufacturer give me free software too. That should be good enough for everyone?
Corporations immorally worked in the worst interests of their locations to change the law to something immoral.
I would wager that most of the companies people are upset at today had no hand whatsoever in influencing these laws. And really, when we're talking about ulterior motives like that, we're talking about the leaders of those companies, IMO, since companies have no motives.
The moral solution is to work to the betterment of all, and force that on the immoral ones if there is sufficient justification to do so.
Agreed.
Nah, we do so through laws. But calling them names helps get people to realize their actions are detrimental to everyone to help pass the regulations necessary
OK, so it sounds like we're in agreement then: the solution is to fix the laws and regulations so that rational actors become moral actors. The name-calling is just subterfuge: it looks like you're mad at the companies, but what you're really doing is rallying people to fix the problem with the tax code. I guess I see the logic behind that, but I don't really approve of demonizing corporations for doing what they're "supposed" to do. Nobody donates extra taxes to their government.
You say my post "would be correct" as if to say that it's incorrect in reality. Could you elaborate on that? Are you saying that it's impossible to change the tax system to align its rational incentives with your moral beliefs because there will always be someone immoral on the other side working harder to keep things the way they are? And, therefore, our goal should be to instead convince companies to behave irrationally by calling them names?