

Netflix algorithm tells you when your best employee is about to leave you - twoshedsmcginty
http://thestack.com/workday-netflix-algorithm-employee-leave-090415

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CapitalistCartr
Walnut paneling syndrome. When you need an algorithm to tell you what your
employees want, the problem is you. People will tell you if you ask and listen
fairly. If you screw one employee, the rest learn to shut up, or if you hide
in your office and don't interact with them. I've not had a single employee
leave without me knowing it was coming, and sometimes advising them on their
jump. Work isn't a social club, keeping in touch, and in tune, with your
employees is your job as a manager. Go do it.

~~~
steveeq1
What is "walnut paneling syndrome"? Nothing is coming up in google.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
Yeah, that's what I call executives who are isolated in their walnut paneled
office complex, too removed from the manufacturing floor. Too many layers of
management, and too much reliance on MBA business models; not enough walking
the floor, paying attention.

~~~
strictnein
An example of executive isolation:

Cargill's execs are located in a mansion near the company's HQ:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill#/media/File:2009-0612-0...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill#/media/File:2009-0612-07-CargillLakeOffice.jpg)

It overlooks the home's original pool, which is a large cement pond. You can
walk between it and the company's HQ, but being that it's in Minnesota, it's
not always a pleasant walk.

[https://goo.gl/maps/FQ9oV](https://goo.gl/maps/FQ9oV)

~~~
PotamousAcheron
There's an underground tunnel between the original mansion and the nearest
atrium, if I'm not mistaken, so the walk isn't too bad. But the isolation is
still fairly obvious.

~~~
strictnein
Oh, I didn't know about that. Grew up nearby and I used to bike all around the
Cargill HQ property (a really nice bit of real estate) on the weekends, but
never entered any of the buildings. So I was trespassing, but it was kind of a
lower grade of trespassing.

They used to have some interesting things to poke around at, like a couple of
big satellite dishes on the south side of the property, which are now gone.

------
MichaelCrawford
If you want to know whether your employees will resign, whether you yourself
will fire them, whether anyone will accept your offers of employment, or even
respond to your job board posts, then read "The Social Animal" by UCSC Social
Psychologist Elliott Aronson.

That's a rather pricey book, but the vast majority of what it discusses are
phenomena that I commonly find in the workplace. While strictly speaking it
doesn't name The Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field, it does discuss the
Nixon Whitehouse.

------
strictnein
The original article this is almost all ripped from is here:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/workday-talent-insights-
can-p...](http://www.businessinsider.com/workday-talent-insights-can-predict-
when-employees-will-leave-2015-4)

~~~
MichaelCrawford
Oddly, I cannot use Mac OS X Safari to copy the linked article's text to the
clipboard. I intended to quote a bit in an HN comment but no, it was not to
be.

That's done was some javascript, the easiest approach is simply to disable JS.
That doesn't work as sometimes a script is used to fetch the text with ajax or
so.

If someone is taking great pains to prevent the GUI Clipboard from working in
any way, then no doubt their own text was lifted from someone who took no such
pains.

:-/

~~~
kbenson
Works fine for me in Chrome on Windows. Maybe it's just a misbehaving event
handler, or some bug in Safari?

I guess it's possible it's a bug/feature in Chrome on Windows preventing
horrible behavior, but I imagine Chrome+Windows is more likely to be a default
test case than Safari+Mac.

------
kenj0418
What I expected:

if ( isEmployeeWatchingNetflixAtWorkAllDay() ) { employeeIsAboutToLeave(); }

~~~
Touche
I work from home and watch Netflix all day, which is exactly why I won't be
leaving. :)

~~~
cordite
I've seen tech support watching netflix between calls. Though this was at a
university and these were students, so they also did homework when they
weren't assisting people.

~~~
err4nt
If you've got time to stream, you've got time to clean…

 _hands you a mop_

~~~
cordite
I was a developer nearby, I never had such opportunities :P

------
JustSomeNobody
An easier way to tell:

Look at the software your company is producing, both internal and external. If
it's stale, your best developers are about to leave.

~~~
pc86
I'm not sure what you're driving at. What do you mean by stale? If the top
people haven't committed in _n_ days? Or if the tech isn't a new framework or
something?

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Basically, if you're maintaining that old Silverlight app with no roadmap to
modernize it.

------
swanson
I built a tool that let you track your teams mood (with an anonymous daily
email). Just looking at some old data, it's pretty good at revealing someone
is likely to leave a team/company.

Here's an example:
[http://i.imgur.com/alv97GJ.png](http://i.imgur.com/alv97GJ.png) (Q1 2013 was
not a good time)

([https://www.moraleapp.com](https://www.moraleapp.com) if you want to try it
out)

------
cspence
This is part of a broader societal discussion we are having about how much to
trust data/machine-learning when it comes to human insight. We strive to
improve on human fallibility, but we are deeply mistrustful of the mistakes
that algorithms can and do make.

[http://www.npr.org/2015/02/03/383454933/why-we-judge-
algorit...](http://www.npr.org/2015/02/03/383454933/why-we-judge-algorithmic-
mistakes-more-harsley-than-human-mistakes)

------
madcocomo
How about collect the names and sell them to headhunter?

------
MichaelCrawford
The "creepiness factor" of targeted advertising.

I am completely cool with advertising, as well as Real Life targeted
advertising such as direct mail.

However I am profoundly offended by targeted online advertising. For example a
few days ago I was scouting around for a book on purely conceptual mobile
website design. I like APress' books on conceptual iOS App design, so I
wandered around APress' site, eventually to come up empty-handed.

Now, when I log into facebook, absolutely the whole fucking time is an ad for
APress books.

Look I think APress is a right chap but I don't want him following me home
from the WiFi spot late at night!

However I realize now that I have a realistic method to make A Compleat
Clusterfuque of Facebook's ad tracking:

I have so far avoided entering any of my favorite books or movies. I also -
from time to time - advise my FB friends to avoid it themselves. Few of them
were previously aware such tracking was possible.

Here Are A Few Of My Favorite Things:

Movies:

    
    
       The President's Analyst
       2001: A Space Oddyssey
       Logan's Run
       (all those comedy flicks that star Leslie Nielsen)
       Bound For Glory
       Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
       Tora! Tora! Tora!
       Most but not all the James Bond flicks
       Very few of the sequels to anything
    

Books

    
    
       Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
       All Quiet On The Western Front
       The Hobbit (but not Lord of the Rings)
       2001: A Space Oddyssey (quite different from the movie)
       (most but not all of Kurt Vonnegut's novels)
       Amateur Telescope Making
       Foundation Trilogy
       Stranger In A Strange Land
       Time Enough For Love
    

I need to catch some ZZZs soon so I'll cut this short.

More or less what I'd do is list a bunch of favorites, as being a whole bunch
of completely unrelated books and movies, absolutely none of which I'd
actually seen nor read, generally having to do with topics that either do not
interest me or even offend me.

Daniel Steel is quite popular. I read a few pages of one of her novels it was
well-written but I could not conceive of actually reading the whole book.

While this wouldn't stop FB from showing me ads, it would result in a lot of
wasted time and effort showing them to me.

What really gets me down, though, is that the vast majority of ads that I see,
are offering me attractive women of my own age.

I am fifty-one years old. The one small comfort I take form my divorce, is
that Bonita did not want to have children.

As yet, Facebook has yet to offer me a woman who might bear my child. Figure
That One Out: many if not most of my FB friends have kids, they are always
posting their photos, singing their praises &c.

I always "Like" their posts, commonly reply, sometimes share yet FB has yet to
clue in to flogging a way for me to continue the non-quite Eternal swim in the
gene pool.

:-(

~~~
jklein11
Changing your preferences in movies and books likely won't stop the ads you
disliked from APress. If the ads showed after you browsed on that companies
website this is likely due to Personalized Retargeting[1] One possible way of
preventing this from happening is surfing in 'private mode' in your browser.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting)

