The CEO wanted to create an elaborate system to rank employees based on their engagement in certain tools like Jira, Confluence, and company chat. Don’t chat enough? Your ranking is low and you might get laid off. Should have chatted more, sorry.
Even stranger, the CEO claims he wanted to let employees view their own engagement scores so they at least had a chance to pump up their numbers (time to spam more e-mails and refresh more Confluence pages so I don’t get fired!) but he went on record in another article blaming the development team for not releasing that feature:
> The company also planned to implement the so-called “digital mirror,” so every employee could learn what AI thinks of their work and engagement. However, the development team wasn’t enthusiastic about this idea, so its rollout is pending.
That’s right, the development team who works on the employee ranking tool “wasn’t enthusiastic” about letting other employees see their ranking or how it works, so they’re withholding it from the company supposedly against the wishes of the CEO. The CEO is then going on record, in public, blaming those developers for not letting these other people see their own scores before they get fired.
This CEO sounds like the type of person who wants to be in charge but also wants to dodge as much responsibility as possible. Create an algorithm to fire people, then send them an impersonal e-mail letting them know the algorithm has chosen them for firing. Then explain that he wanted to let them see their score and have a chance to react, but those mean developers weren’t enthusiastic about the idea so, sorry, you can’t see it.
I’m sure the developers of the secret employee ranking system have high scores for themselves, somehow.