
Analytics used to predict who will leave a job - narad
http://frobertjacobs.wordpress.com/2013/03/15/analytics-used-to-predict-who-will-leave-a-job/
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memset
I think this is neat, though I wish the article had more details!

At first my reaction was obvious: "Well of _course_ you can tell which
employees are going to quit! If they're not getting paid well, don't feel like
they have mobility, and don't have flexibility, they will move on!"

But so much of what you read about "what employees want" is both anecdotal and
highly-personalized. Some employees want to work from home and others prefer
face-time. Some folks want a decent salary, whereas others (like myself)
choose something less lucrative in order to work at a startup. For some,
upward mobility equates to a track to management, and for others a tech lead,
and yet others just want to be left alone to write some darn code.

But if we can try and predict, using actual real data, what kinds of corporate
knobs (raises, promotions, job rotations, etc) can decrease attrition, then
that also means a company would be increasing job satisfaction _in the ways
which are important to employees_. Why haven't we been doing more of this all
along?

~~~
jaimebuelta
Trying to predict that with data and algorithms is bollocks...

There is someone, called manager. I know, I know, it has a bad reputation. But
is supposed to talk from time to time and keep an eye about how things are
going. If talk is done properly, can be very useful to know if someone is not
happy.

I know that we are engineers, we love data, and talking to someone is awkward
and out of the comfort zone. But this is ridiculous...

~~~
memset
How do we evaluate whether a one-on-one is productive? How can a business, in
aggregate, learn from the hundreds of independent weekly manager-employee
meetings to see what kinds of issues keep cropping up?

This of course presumes both a good manager _and_ an employee who is willing
to speak candidly with them. This may not always be the case. (How often is it
not the case? Let's examine the data and see! Maybe there is a systemic
problem with trust between managers and their employees that needs work?)

It is not uncommon for businesses to periodically do "employee satisfaction
surveys." I don't think crunching data to measure the effectiveness of
management (which affects employee attrition) is ridiculous at all.

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Eliezer
Boss: We've predicted you're going to leave, so you're fired.

Analysts: See, they're no longer employed! Another successful prediction for
the algorithm!

~~~
BSachse
Just another poor implementation of tech into enterprise really. Why not vet
employees rather than chastise them? The top down approach is a failure at all
levels.

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blindhippo
And this is why I'll never work for a company run by MBA driven bull-crap.

Any properly managed business group will have this covered because they treat
their human "resources" like actual humans - not variables in a spreadsheet. A
GOOD manager would know an employee was at risk as a result of doing their god
damn job properly. You do not need a team of data scientists to figure this
out.

Advice for younger engineers: if a company has grown past 100 employees, stay
away from it. It's inevitably laden down by morons who would forego talking to
you on a personal level in favor of a mechanical system with as little
interaction as possible (liability and all).

~~~
wsc981
I believe these kind of systems are implemented in much smaller companies as
well. The last company I worked at started implementing mechanics to determine
roles and payment when the company grew to 40 people or so.

The system that was introduced annoyed me, since it seemed to favor people in
a management roles and also with a Masters. The system was created by
consultants on behalf of my employer. To me the system felt like me being a
horse with a carrot held in front of me. I guess it's true what's being said
about engineers and herding cats. Engineers do want a personal treatment.

This rewarding system was one of the reasons I decided to leave later that
year. It seems the turnover inside said company has increased shortly after I
left, perhaps other people felt the same.

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hkmurakami
> _An analysis of which factors made employees more likely to quit yielded
> some surprising results: “Those employees who had been promoted more times
> were more likely to quit, unless a more significant pay hike had gone along
> with the promotion,” Mr. Siegel wrote._

Sounds like it's just a simple case of disparity "hey, I know I can get a much
higher salary elsewhere given my experience and title. HP hasn't given it to
me over the last few years, so it's time to go."

~~~
greenyoda
Also, as you get promoted, you acquire additional responsibilities which bring
with them additional stress and frequently longer hours. Plus tedious or
painful stuff like endless meetings and doing performance reviews and firing
people. It can get old rather quickly, so you need to give people lots of
money to convince them to keep doing it. If a company needs big data and guys
with PhDs to figure this out, they're not paying attention to what's going on
around them.

Some people say they'd write code even if they didn't get paid, but I haven't
heard anybody say they'd be a manager for free.

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karterk
Very similar analytics work takes places in the telecom industry with respect
to customer churn. However, this typically requires a large data size for it
to be accurate. So, I wonder how many companies are large enough to benefit
from it.

On a larger note, I wish "managers" used other simple means like talking to
people openly about their aspirations, instead of blindly following the
processes laid out by the company. Thankfully I don't work in such a place -
but most big corps could just do better on the attrition rate if they made
their appraisal process more employee friendly, focussed on encouraging a open
culture and reduced needless hierarchy.

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gingerlime
If I was going to run such a program (whilst stroking my white cat[1]...), I'd
correlate website access to attrition. This could uncover not only active job
searching, but general boredom and dissatisfaction surfing patterns...

I'm guessing obvious websites like linkedin would pop up, but I wouldn't be
surprised if other patterns would emerge.

[1] Companies, especially of this size, already do this kind of spying on
their staff. Not necessarily with cats.

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shubb
This is a sales pitch by HP - they are trying to sell 'big data analytics' to
huge clients, like General Electric. Oracle and IBM are also trying to sell
this stuff. It's supposed to be the next big thing.

I think there is some doubt here that it is valuable, which fails to
appreciate scale.

If someone said to you 'I don't know why Twitter need all these engineers - I
made a site like twitter in 2 hours in an introduction to rails tutorial',
you'd explain that scale was the problem.

The CEO of Toshiba oversees business units that do nuclear power plants, LCD
screens, and business systems. His understanding of any of these units is
fairly shallow - he knows less about nuclear power plants than the CEO of that
unit, who knows less than his chief engineer. The chief engineer knows less
about the workstation login page than the junior who implemented it.

When you are working at that scale, your tools and information are limited and
broad. You can set budgets, issue directives, and try to create culture.

On the other hand, because you are working with large numbers of people (data
points), it makes sense to make decisions statistically.

When N is 1, you need to make decisions subjectively - it doesn't matter that
taking Statins after 50 slightly reduces the chance of heart disease for some
people (possibly including you). You decide if you want to take a pill every
day, and broadly if you want to do things that are healthy vs things that are
enjoyable.

For the guy deciding whether to spend millions on Statins as part of your
health insurance, it makes total sense - he can model how much heart disease
costs, and how much statins reduce that, along with some value placed on an
extra year of life, plus something about cost to acquire customers and policy
retention, and decide if it's worth the money. So the British NHS decided to
give everyone over 50 Statins.

The guy in charge of HP can model how much staff churn costs, and assign
budgets that are sub divided down by business units. Using this data he can
target that budget where it will help the most.

And that is all he can do.

Another thing is that it doesn't matter if it's a good idea, it matters if
someone will pay for it. If HP can demonstrate measurable financial advantage
to doing this they can land clients. That's a lot easier to measure = sell
than 'not being a douche' training for managers.

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evan_
just watch who's updating LinkedIn.

~~~
wslh
You wrote it first!

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bpyne
I should probably follow some of the links referenced in the article. The
article itself is a little irritating. It seems like the goal is askew:
predict who will leave so you can keep them. In every organization I've been
in, some people should leave. Perhaps they're at a bad point in their lives;
perhaps they're just not a good organizational fit. Whatever the reason,
keeping them poisons the team they work with.

The approach is seriously lacking in the factors it looks at for flight-risk.
Every organization has a culture: a way of going about getting work done,
dealing with petty administrative tasks, behaving, talking, etc. These factors
are extremely difficult to convey when hiring someone. Unfortunately, some
individuals aren't always a good fit for a culture.

Over time, I've found out from experience that I don't like large
organizations. Large organizations have a certain bureaucracy and formality
that I find irritating. I left one particular organization just for that
reason. My current employer is still too large for my tastes. They treat me
well, the pay is fine, the benefits are unheard of nowadays. I just don't like
the bureaucracy and formality.

One more point is that the reasons for leaving may be different in our current
era of entrepreneurship. People may simply leave to follow their own ideas
about a business.

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jared314
I remember Google doing this back in 2009.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=617533>

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gwbas1c
Geez, I'd think it was kind of obvious! Promoting someone by adding more
responsibility but no pay is a sure-fire way to get employees to leave.

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malux85
Analysts: Analysis shows that if you treat your employees like crap and pay
them badly, they're likely to leave!

This is only a preliminary result though, we need more funding to back up this
radical hypothesis.

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frazerb
People don't leave jobs, they leave bosses.

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narad
Here is an another one from IBM [http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/01/29/ibm-
security-tool-can-fl...](http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/01/29/ibm-security-
tool-can-flag-disgruntled-employees/)

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coditor
I predict people who work for HP are likely to leave. No software required.

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Aloha
this seem dangerous.

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goggles99
We need analytics for that now? Wow... Next, lets automate lungs to breathe.

