You don't give your time to an employer, you trade it, and in our modern society we have a gap in the market power of labor. Only way to get it is to reclaim it.

The risk here isn't that your snooping boss feels a bit uncomfortable.

The risk is that your snooping boss now thinks they'd better not send you on that expensive training course or assign you that big, important project where success could get you promoted. And that you'll never get a chance to address their fears, as they want to keep the snooping secret.

"Could" is such a big word. It means nothing, but it is intended to be very valuable. Get that promotion in writing. Otherwise it's a carrot to dangle upon you.

> they'd better not send you on that expensive training course

You know what's worse than training people and then these people leaving? Not training them and then these people staying.

You insist on giving me reasons to stay away from that company.

Get it in writting? When in the history of the mankind it ever happened? Not to anyone I know, and I would never make such promises as well. Promotion depends on a lot of things, and promising something like that in writing is stupid.

And once you're tagged as someone who might be leaving, some employers really may prefer no to invest in you. Why should they? You might leave.

The whole argument of "the risk of training and they staying" depends entirely on how you gauge risk. In this case, if you have positive evidence that they are unhappy, then you know that the risk of leaving higher than staying.

There's a reason that so many people now get prompted by moving "horizontally" between companies, very few companies today properly reward loyalty, if anything most actively incentivize individualism and disloyalty.

There is always "we fired 20% of the people, now their workload is on your shoulders or you will also be fired".

There is always "here is a book titled 'use agile to deliver twice as fast' now the deadline is in 3 months instead of 6 or else".

The only defense against that is having more options.

Wheels gotta move I guess, it's in their nature after all.

What a great reason to encourage employees at the margin to job hop! Better pay, negotiation of those expensive training courses and/or big important projects.

What's the downside here, exactly, to a more fluid labor supply/supplier's market?

Big Tech started with a lot of power in labor due to the knowledge economy, and is losing a lot of their core power. Thus wages will start slipping more and more and converge to general market rate for talent. Reclaim that power!

If you're working for a company that actively monitors this sort of thing, I don't think that management's response will be "let's make our employees; lives better."

Some findings show as low as 3.5%

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35...

Some managers are just a--holes, granted.

I don't want people creeping any kind of "profile" of me. Ever.

Let them creep all over my profile: so far the only downside is that I have a pile of messages to sort through and say "no, thanks" to.

As soon as I would even touch one word in my profile, a pile of recruiters would be triggered instantly. From experience I know that these recruiters have zero added value for me and often even their customer. On the contrary even, they have a tendency to try to fill any job with any qualification, because when they succeed, they hit a jackpot.

Job vacancies are present on job sites like 'Indeed'. It is very easy to set an appropriate filter and just start sending out your CV to companies.

The majority of job leads I got from maybe the start of LinkedIn to about 8 years ago were crap.

These days, most job leads are not crap, they just are not competitive with my current job. Much improved! Granted, I just updated a couple months ago my profile to say, "Not open to opportunities" and because my profile is recently updated, I get people contacting me daily - even on the weekend.

I got my current job because a recruiter cold-called me about my Linked-In profile. It was a perfect match for a position she was trying to fill.

I wasn't looking, but it wasn't hard to persuade me to switch either.

But... every other recruiting email I've gotten has been at best something I just wasn't interested in, while the vast majority of them are so poorly targeted, I'm embarrassed for the recruiter for clearly not having a clue how to evaluate if a candidate is a good fit in even the most basic ways. All promising job prospects I've had (whether they worked out or not) came through connections, or active work on my part to seek out positions that interested me.

(Obviously everyone's experience differs; I see you mention downthread that you once found a great match from a cold recruiter call.)

So... did that one life-changing job come to me because of a privacy-minefield site like LinkedIn? I'm not sure how that in-house recruiter found me: it was a cold email to an address that I hadn't used in years, and it was just dumb luck that I signed into it a week after it was sent, which seems at odds with the usual way to get in touch with someone you've found through a job-network site.

I'm at a point where I don't think I really need to maintain a LinkedIn profile in order to achieve my employment goals... but a part of me is too afraid it'll be useful (or even critical) to something in the future, so I haven't deleted it. Meh.

About an hour later she called me again with an invitation for a job interview.

I don't really know what LinkedIn would change here...

I learn so little from a persons bullet pointed resume that when I don't have those the interviews feel like I'm pretty much walking in completely ignorant to this persons interests and skills over and over again.

When I can go "oh neat, jbob99 worked on a foss project I used a few years ago!" it's nice.

But I also couldn't care less about being "creeped" on. Half of my career was built because I'm not an anonymous random software guy and companies know my work.

You're using a completely random throwaway nick to stay anonymous on here, while I've literally gotten jobs from hn and grown my career from it. Just like I did on IRC when I was 13. It's an interesting difference of use.

I don't mean one is better or worse at all and I totally get wanting to be anonymous.

All kidding aside I totally get it. I was lucky and taken under under the wing of a very generous group of people who have pretty much followed one another around to various jobs/projects over the last decade and our skills have just grown non-stop. I WISH I'd gotten into FOSS projects way sooner, like when I was a kid instead of just learning linux and crawling up the sysadmin route.

Like, junior help desk tech support to principal architects nowadays, etc. I try to get my friends who want to level up or change careers to hop into foss projects, #goodfirstissue sort of things. A lot of people just have no idea where to start, and they don't think they're skilled enough to join a project like kubernetes or what not, but those projects actually have Contributor Experience people/teams to help bring new people in comfortably and they need all sorts of help, not just go developers, etc.

Hell, those contributor experience people are absolute diamonds and really make certain communities so inclusive and great to be in. There is a lot of cool ancillary work to be done and everyone has something in their wheelhouse they can contribute.

https://goodfirstissue.dev/

I think this is a really important point. Most companies aren't going to hire some anonymous person on the internet with no track record or verifiable background. Most companies can't even legally put someone on their payroll without knowing a lot more about a person.

People without a real-name presence on the internet are only going to get a pretty limited amount of unsolicited job-opening contact. And that might be what people like that prefer, which is fine. The minimal cold emails that come in may even be of much much higher quality and relevance. But ultimately they're still leaving a lot on the table, even if much of what's on the table is probably poorly-targeted crap. (Again, that's fine if that's what they want.)

All the other recruiters just make chat and email spam easily ignored and they never bother me.

Companies already tried to get rights to software created in your free time. Why even allow any attack surface here?

I've worked in management at companies with risk-based retention tools, and I've always seen them used as just that... retention tools. If anything, getting a high risk score as a high performer would usually be greatly in an employee's best interest, as it would be another justification to the higher-ups for a raise or better job assignment.

To be clear, I'm personally generally against these kind of panopticon data-slurp initiatives overall, I'm just surprised that the initial reaction is so strongly "my manager will use this to fire me" when I've only ever seen the opposite.

For me it is more like: "my manager sees that I'm looking for a job", and I really rather tell him that I will be leaving, as soon as I'm certain of a new job. It's none of his business before that point.

You better believe that if databrokers will buy information on whether you updated linked in that they'd also buy information on whether you gave the company a 1 star review.

Heck, you can even post your salary to glassdoor, so maybe your next employer would buy that information so they know the least they could offer you.

I remember reading a blog post by an employee that had gotten on the wrong side of google. When he came in their crosshairs, he said all his google machines forcibly updated themselves, and it became clear he was closely monitored.

I think the idea is that decent relationships have good boundaries, and proactively maintaining them is a worthwhile endeavor. This is especially important when there is a power relationship.

I've seen similar insights, derived from a person's social-graph through email exchanges, and it was decided to not be used by managers as it could be a liability.

Companies try to keep employees happy and committed, and part of that is making sure they see a potential future / growth for themselves. As a manager I try to both make sure this is based in reality and that employees are picking up the message.

I like to think I am good at this but it's a difficult skill, and external signal to "hey, you might want to check in with Bob a bit more carefully next time to make sure he's feeling as good as we think he is" could always be valuable.

So even from Bob's perspective it's positive - he may get the extra conversation that increases his options where he stays. On the flip side, what's the malicious use case? "You updated your linkedIn so I am going to fire you" doesn't sound like company policy that's going to be implemented anywhere because it makes no sense.

You might be close to quitting (via perceived signal) so I’m going to give the high visibility project to someone “loyal”.

You may be perceived as a quitter so I’m going to give discretionary budget for the next raise to the employee who is more loyal.

You might be perceived as quitting, and my company requires me to stack rank employees. The lowest gets fired. I put you there to keep the rest of my team. You become a “sacrifice” since you were going to quit anyways.

And these are just the examples my friends at Amazon talk about. I’m sure there’s more.

Now consider all of the above, but now you’re on a visa. Losing your job means you have a few weeks to replace it or get deported.

It’s more like a roll-up metric that can be looked at globally, by role, department, location, etc. yes, it can also be used at the individual level but again, HR is the buyer and they are the most fearfully bureaucratic department in most companies .

From a data and capability perspective, I agree it’s a little scary. But in practice I doubt it’s used this way and if so, there’s your retention problem.

To me it's no different than a company hiring a PI to follow me around so they can report back how many drinks I have on the weekend at a barbecue. Or following me around to find out if I bought a new suit and tie (oh no, might indicate I'm going for an interview!). Just because it's being done digitally doesn't make it any less invasive.

What's next? Grocery stores start selling my buying habits to my employer? That would definitely give them more insight into whether I'm happy and committed. Banks/Credit card companies selling my purchase history?

As far as I am aware, almost every credit card company already does this. They tell you they are doing it too.

Hmmm, why not together? You might be on to something there...

A customer asked if it could be used internally (we already had their ATS/HRIS data) so a new feature was born.

Yes money was a motive but this particular feature didn’t seem like an evil idea to be used to increase employee misery.

That said, We did build some things that I do regret now.

I always said “at least we’re not building weapons we are trying to get people jobs (or keep them in jobs)”

But aside from weapons, if you think building a retention tool for HR is bad, you certainly should not ever look at AdTech or the types of things insurance companies are doing from a data perspective.

Or ah hem… Palatir for example.

One is like a hammer, it was envisioned for and can be used for good, like building free houses for the poor. But it also makes a great bludgeon.

The other is like building a weapon that is used as a weapon.

And then there’s AdTech.. lol

If everyone in my country decided to stop working in or sponsoring the arms industry, we'd be invaded by an authoritarian dictatorship tomorrow.

If in contrast we all summarily banned these aspiring social credit tools, the negative side effects would be negligible to nonexistent.

People are working for evil companies like Facebook or Purdue Pharma without moral issues.

Job is just a job, people needs money...

The unspoken part of that phrase is the second half of "so since it will happen anyway, it's not wrong for me to reap the rewards of doing the bad thing"

I hope you understand how inherently wrong that is.

The certificate is only valid for the following names: *.allegisgroup.com, allegisgroup.com

hiring solved

Also GDPR/CCPA has hamstrung a lot of this and HR depts are fairly petrified about it. Talent Acquisition, not so much…

I mean the data part is a little scary. Look up People Data Labs. There are lots of these data aggregators and that data can be used for a lot of scary things. HR in practice is probably the least scary.

So there's that.

I believe we did do that by showing the HR world that data driven insights could be a better indicator than what school someone went to or whether they played Ultimate Frisbee (a real hiring signal used by a Fortune 500 tech co).

We didn’t solve hiring. It’s a tough problem with many strange human biases and rituals. But I do think we made it better even if only a little.

I'm not convinced this is always an ultimately bad outcome if someone finds that.

If you're good at your job and highly rated there should be obvious signs when they're trying to preemptively backfill you and at that point you can just communicate about how excited you are about your growth at the company or something to make them take a step back.

What I've learned is if you plan to change jobs assume everyone at your current job will find out the minute you have an interview booked. Only applies to big companies that pay 3rd parties to monitor their employees like that though.

Sometimes I wish we had germany's privacy laws for employees in the US.