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'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

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Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#3
Either these CEOs are insanely incompetent leaders who have gone on obviously unnecessary hiring sprees as late as a few months ago, or something else is up. Either way, it takes a particularly dishonest leaders to suggest that the main problem is low employee productivity.

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#4
Google would have been a lot more productive if it had hired people to work on one good messaging app instead of 13+ bad messaging apps.

Google has long had an attitude of "we hire the best so we can afford to have them stand on one leg and balance on a ball while holding a cane in their mouth and balancing a bunch of dishes on the end of the cane while typing with one hand on a chorded keyboard and looking at a monitor through a mirror." I've heard stories that range from "of course I am productive, I am shooting the s--t all day with the smartest people to" to "I have no idea of how what I'm doing impacts the bottom line".

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#5
I see this as more or less a ruse to justify ridding the companies of all the now remote people who moved away to live in Cheap Town during the pandemic. This is a pretext for the typical Corporate House Cleaning/Reduction In Force scenario. Some people do well working remote (Im one of them in fact) but I suspect and from what I've seen the majority of people simply cant handle the responsibility/self management of working remote.

Alternatively, the economic forecasters at these companies see trouble on the horizon economically and know that layoffs to boost stock price will be necessary. In such case, best develop a pretext for these layoffs thats not "We're having financial trouble so we're laying people off". Instead it's "Nope, nothing to see here, THIS IS FINE - we're just cutting dead weight!".

I don't work for either of these companies nor do I know anyone personally who does, but I have to wonder if a sort of entitled, country club culture developed there and this an effort to reign in that behavior. Maybe someone with some inside insight can comment here?

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#6

I see this as more or less a ruse to justify ridding the companies of all the now remote people who moved away to live in Cheap Town during the pandemic. This is a pretext for the typical Corporate House Cleaning/Reduction In Force scenario. Some people do well working remote (Im one of them in fact) but I suspect and from what I've seen the majority of people simply cant handle the responsibility/self management of…

"I suspect and from what I've seen the majority of people simply cant handle the responsibility/self management of working remote." While this may be true, if this has to be solved by forcing everyone to move to SF/NY - then couldn't you just save more money by firing their managers?

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#7
They're right, but they aren't getting to the root of the issue. Most dev teams don't communicate anymore, and people just work on their siloed projects and "throw it over the fence" to the code reviewer when done. There's very little collaboration or ad-hoc knowledge transfer. This leads to a disjointed, unworkable codebase. If I'm seeing this at the piddly little startups I have worked for during the pandemic, then I'm sure the effect is amplified at the most exclusive development teams in the world.

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#8
What's wrong with taking a break to run necessary errands or pick your kids up from school? As long as you're meeting performance expectations, it should be fine.

Is Zuck really slaving away at his desk 9-5 everyday? I don't think so.

Sounds like another case of "One rule for thee and another for me"

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#9
post #3

Either these CEOs are insanely incompetent leaders who have gone on obviously unnecessary hiring sprees as late as a few months ago, or something else is up. Either way, it takes a particularly dishonest leaders to suggest that the main problem is low employee productivity.

It’s no secret that most people at Google hardly work. It’s been like this for years but you’re right it’s management’s fault for allowing this culture.

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#10
post #3

Either these CEOs are insanely incompetent leaders who have gone on obviously unnecessary hiring sprees as late as a few months ago, or something else is up. Either way, it takes a particularly dishonest leaders to suggest that the main problem is low employee productivity.

Doubtless those honest, selfless CEO's were completely duped by evil conspiracies of rotten & incompetent middle managers, who've spent the last decade or two building ever-larger pyramids of bloat to set their golden thrones on top of...
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