Tech CEOs Want Every Worker to Have a Permanent, Public Job Performance File | Hacker News Reader

Tech CEOs Want Every Worker to Have a Permanent, Public Job Performance File

vice.com

41 pointsgrawprog47 comments

Charlie Youakim, the CEO of buy now pay later (BNPL) firm Sezzle

so a loan shark, I mean thats pretty much the lowest of the low ...

Auren Hoffman, the CEO of Safegraph, a large location data broker

oh shit, spoke too soon.

maybe they can get into a partnership with a rent-to-own furniture store, a payday loan company and a buy here pay here used car sales lot

And with a Software as a service company. Or food as a service.

So a CEO hires a VP who hires a senior director who hires a director who hires a manager who changes specs and deadlines in the middle of projects all the time, and all the rank and file have that follow them as a black mark when they try to leave for a more sane company? No thanks.

Don't worry someone will create fake companies with the sole purpose of selling good reviews.

Reputation Laundering for Fun and Profit? I can dig it.

Even worse, what happens when things go off the rails?

My former boss *used to* be good.

The title is a bit sensationalist. Looks like two CEOs of smaller tech companies talked about this casually on a podcast, while the title implies a _much_ larger number of people.

It’s typical Vice Media and many other news sites whose revenues are dependent on drawing page views.

Take a very minor issue and amplify it loudly to make it seem much bigger than it is…draw in page views and make money.

I loathe this type of click-baiting…but on the bright side, the media companies that specialize in this stuff (Vice Media, BuzzFeed, et al) are often failing ones looking to salvage what’s left of their existence.

For example, Vice is drowning in debt to the tune of $1.1 billion[1]and is finding it impossible to sell for a price that’ll leave anything on the table for equity investors.

They tried the SPAC scam route [2] but I guess that didn’t work out for them.

1 - https://www.theinformation.com/articles/vice-media-makes-cos...

2 - https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/vice-media-raises-85-mil...

Indeed, two CEOs of companies with a total of only about 500 employees combined most of us had to look up.

Sounds great. They can go first by providing every candidate with a CEO profile detailing average turn over, NPS score, compensation management strategy, etc

>In the podcast, Youakim provides a seemingly harmless anecdote that illustrates how this works in practice. In response to Hoffman’s question about how he identifies outstanding candidates, Youakim recalled asking one interviewee to meet him for coffee at 7 a.m. on a Saturday as a test for “entitlement.” To decline to meet at such a time would, in Youakim’s mind, illustrate a lack of “going above and beyond.” The person who not only agreed to meet him then but showed up early is now one of Sezzle’s “superstars,” as Youakim put it, apparent confirmation his 7 a.m. coffee test is a good one.

He would definitely get high scores in the psychopathy and entitlement categories.

He'll also get a bunch of bootlickers and yes-men who'll do and say whatever the boss wants to hear.

This kind of mindset beggars belief. I feel like some people escaped from a Lord of the Flies novel.

If you have no talent, sucking up is a great way to succeed if you find the right ego manic. Over the decades many leeches have rode this train to wealth.

Sounds a bit like the "test" Gary has to face to win back the trust of his boss in Team America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xVk9nqmQGc

I can't believe this guy. Asking someone to do something useless just to see if they'll do it is TERRIBLE leadership.

Meeting a superior at 7 AM in your free time as a test to 1. see if you'll do something that is nakedly irrational and wasteful and 2. because a superior told you to is a very negative signal for companies that want to actually get shit done.

So yeah, I want to work for a company of people that are "entitled". Entitled to ask questions about what they are doing and why/if it is necessary. Entitled to say no to unexplained requests from superiors.

I once scored a phone screen with GitLab. They scheduled the screen with a manager for midnight. I asked for a different time more in line with my sleep schedule. They scheduled _that_ screen with an intern. I never heard back from the company after that.

How could you expect anything different from a remote only company?

I think maybe there's a cultural aspect at play here.

I'm not sure how the business culture is in his home country but there are a lot of cultures where that type of blind obedience is extremely valued and expected.

The thing is, in SV where flat organizations and working smart not hard are valued, it might filter for the wrong type of employees.

Especially at a tech company. Most 10x I know would flat out laugh at such a request.

And I would like to have a public file on each tech HR organization, complaint log, lawsuits and arbitration, feedback to CEO from investors and C suite payments and contract details.

not to mention salary ranges per team and per role

As someone doing interviews now, I would actually prefer a 'bar' type test that employees can take every so often to show their technical skills.

It could have all kinds of algorithmic questions, system design, practical application building and whatever else. It would be administered in person to prevent cheating (as much as possible), and companies could choose which scores to pay attention to.

Meta doesn't find dynamic programming questions useful for hiring but likes all the other algo questions.

Stripe doesn't like algo questions but wants to see people bootstrap stuff. So let me just do that once (or per decade or what) so I can get over answering the same damn algorithm question at four different companies.

Conversely, this would save me from having to 'fail' the same type of DP questions I keep getting stumped on. Let's just save everyone time.

Or just hire fast and fire for fast. It’s too bad the US social net is so tied to jobs making that practically unviable. I would much prefer such a system to a long song and dance of any interviews.

Hire fast / fire fast has worked for some relatively lean teams that I've been on, but I can see it being hard to implement at mid-size and bigger companies where there's all kinds of red tape.

The real problem is still the moral one they indicated. If someone leaves a stable job where they perform adequately and you fire them from the new one, you've removed their source of income and probably healthcare. With no knowledge of who they're supporting or what resources they have access to, this could be a very damaging thing to do.

If you limit your hiring only to people whose resources can handle that risk, you're limiting your pool to only financially stable individuals who don't have eg a child or spouse with an expensive medical condition.

Morally treacherous territory either way in the absence of a trustworthy economic safety net that the US absolutely doesn't have.

Temping is a thing that exists, doesn't it? Is it immoral because some people are stuck with commitments that preclude it?

I understand where you're coming from, but I don't see how that's the employer's problem. This risk is ALWAYS there when taking on a new job. Fire fast doesn't really mean one week either, but it can be evident in the first 2-3 months if someone is a bad fit.

I'd love that. Make the test broad, but companies *must* provide a filter for what they are interested in that is limited to seeing perhaps 30% of your score--they have to pick what's actually important to them, not "everything". You can see how you would score against what they want. (They put a link to the testing site's website that sends the filter as a parameter. If you're logged in this is resolved as a score and shows you where you're strong/weak against their criteria.)

A fair test by competent testers, blinded against most discrimination. Of course they would hate it--they can't pretend it's not age discrimination anymore.

Isn't that what certification is? COMPTIA etc?

I think if you get a bad performance review, they should probably just send you to prison.

I have to agree with Meth e-hack

Our HR director (still literally in school to become an HR director) implemented performance reviews on a goal-based platform. Practically, this meant that since everyone needed a goal, management needed to find faults for even competent employees in order to have goals to attain. Effectually, every performance review was then tainted and came across negatively. I felt so bad conducting mine for my team, and strongly considered resigning.

Stupid well-meaning decisions like these get carried out every day in business. These nuanced mistakes becoming permanent in some way would be the dystopic icing on a cake of bureaucratic nightmares.

It’s my opinion that the sole purpose of HR is to try and find creative ways to justify their own existence.

Can this really work though? You can't crowdsource the data anonymously, because anonymous data is useless. You can't crowdsource it with verified profiles, because no one wants to make an enemy by publicly giving a coworker a bad rating. Lastly, you can't get the data from an impartial source (like company HR departments) because they have no reason to share which of their employees are valuable.

Could we stop posting clickbait garbage like Vice? The CEOs of "Sezzle" and "Safegraph" said something on a podcast, and the headline loudly proclaims that "Tech CEOs" desire this.

Two CEOs, one of whom has 500 employees and one who has 100,said something on a podcast, and through the magic of strategically leaving off qualifiers for plural nouns, it's been transmuted into a newsworthy report with a headline that implies something broader than two relative nobodies throwing an idea out.

I get that there are too many wannabe journalists and not enough news, so in some sense I don't blame the author; he's grinding out a living in a morally-questionable field like many, many people do. But why do we have to infect HN with this nonsense?

Makes sense from a CEO perspective. If you have the power to blacklist your employees, they're going to work harder, for less and never dissent.

That's essentially what GitHub is doing. You have your entire contribution history and they have a product to help managers analyze contributions across teams. I worked at a couple startups that used this to evaluate their employees in manager-only meeting.

> You have your entire contribution history and they have a product to help managers analyze contributions across teams.

So any contribution not logged in their system, doesn't exist.

Yeah, terrible still.

Many companies already use third party platforms to manage performance reviews. Who's to say that this isn't already happening?

Maybe update the title in light of this subhed?

> Two CEOs on a podcast casually proposed a shareable database of worker performance that would follow them between companies, forever, and encouraged listeners to create one.

It's two tech CEOs, not tech CEOs in general.

People are missing the point here. No one is seriously advocating for this. It's just Vice rage baiting because that's what Vice does.

It's two people with very little influence discussing a scenario on a podcast.

Did you read the article?

Didn’t seem like rage bait. It seemed like they laid out the context of this discussion with the rise of employee surveillance.

Do we have to wait for a startup to exist with this product before we can say it’s a bad idea?

If people are talking about "bait", I assume they mean the title is bait for the article. Don't see how the article can rebut the title being designed to enrage by misleading.

I want a permanent, public job performance profile on every tech CEO.

This sort of stuff screams, "misdirection" to me. Whats the real trick?

Including themselves I hope. After all, they are just a “worker” to equity holders.

Sounds like a no, with regard to GDPR.

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