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

[blitzar]

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.

[walrus01]

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

[cestith]

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.

[gitfan86]

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

[LorenPechtel]

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

My former boss *used to* be good.

[bhahn]

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.

[boeingUH60]

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...

[killingtime74]

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

[jeffwask]

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

[alephxyz]

>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.

[heisenbit]

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.

[xmodem]

not to mention salary ranges per team and per role

[VirusNewbie]

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.

[CogitoCogito]

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.

[LorenPechtel]

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.

[lin83]

Isn't that what certification is? COMPTIA etc?

[methehack]

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

[ultrarunner]

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.

[matrix12]

I have to agree with Meth e-hack

[phendrenad2]

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.

[wutbrodo]

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?

[advisedwang]

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.

[SwSwinger]

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.

[manuelabeledo]

> 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.

[FooBarBizBazz]

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

[gnicholas]

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.

[anm89]

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.

[alphabettsy]

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?

[spacemanmatt]

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

[givemeethekeys]

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

[unstatusthequo]

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

[TrackerFF]

Sounds like a no, with regard to GDPR.