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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

#21

Post by mikhael28 »

Maybe it’s not the employees fault, but the management who hired them… or maybe it’s the fact that it takes forever to get anything done at FAANG nowadays.

Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders.. but a great way of identifying people who can hack a process to secure maximal reward.

Look, if I can ‘crack the coding interview’, then I can certainly crack ‘how to do as little work as possible and stack paper to the ceiling while my stock vests’.

I wonder when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod.

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

#22

Post by tpmoney »

This seems like something that should be expected? Every time the WFH battle has come up over the last few years, there are always people talking about how they’re able to do all their days work in 4 hours and spend the rest of the time idle “pretending to work”. Is it really surprising that as a result of this companies are reevaluating how much slack time their employees have? Especially as wages and demand for wages due to inflation have spiked, you can probably shore up some of that demand just by dropping some of those 4 hour employees and using their wages to pay others to become 6 hour or 8 hour employees. Sure it’s unrealistic for a company to expect every employee is 100% engaged 40 hours a week, especially in knowledge / creative work we’re sometimes unplugging and downtime is exactly what the job requires. But it seems equally unrealistic to crow about how the pandemic has demonstrated that WFH is perfectly fine and had no negative impacts because everyone was already only putting in 20 hours a week and not expect that to have caused companies to make a shift.

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

#23

Post by [deleted] »

SavageBeast wrote: post #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…

[deleted]

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

#24

Post by senttoschool »

dev_0 wrote: post #16
senttoschool wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, just have no meetings at all. Just send you tickets with perfect specs. You'll never have to talk to anyone.

I mean the middle men meeting where someone translate business requirements to technical solutions. Engineers should be treated as problem solver and not code monkey

You mean a product manager?

You do realize that most engineers would hate to have to do the work of a PM? Talking to users. Analyzing data. Coming up with solutions. Convincing executives. Convincing designers. Convincing dev managers. Convincing devs. Writing specs. Handholding the project through the finish line.

You told me you don't want more meetings. But you realize that you'd have to have a ton of meetings to do the above? You think a spec just magically shows up and a ton of work was not done before it ever makes it to your queue?

>Engineers should be treated as problem solver and not code monkey

Engineers solve technical problems. Some engineers want to solve business problems too. Those might be good candidates to become product managers.

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

#25

Post by galdosdi »

mikhael28 wrote: post #21

Maybe it’s not the employees fault, but the management who hired them… or maybe it’s the fact that it takes forever to get anything done at FAANG nowadays. Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders.. but a great way of identifying people who can hack a process to secure maximal reward. Look, if I can ‘crack the coding intervi…

> Look, if I can ‘crack the coding interview’, then I can certainly crack ‘how to do as little work as possible and stack paper to the ceiling while my stock vests’.

What's worse, many of the jaded people going through the motions probably started out gung-ho but then got frustrated to see how little impact they were really able to have and eventually became checked out. These kinds of things are self fulfilling prophecies in organizations.

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

#27

Post by torginus »

I think all successful companies' products have already been built - and have been built for quite a while, most of the work that gets done is just polishing, window dressing, adventures and reorganizing things for the sake of it.

Most of the software and libraries I use nowadays have existed a decade ago, and truth be told, weren't that much different.

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

#28

Post by lanstin »

acdha wrote: post #20
fred_is_fred wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

Exactly. You can’t make this claim without saying that your managers are incompetent all the way up to the C level because it means nobody was measuring performance even though that’s a core job requirement.

It is extremely rare for management, especially higher levels, to have any method of distinguishing smart and hard working people from duffers or from “managing upwards” big talkers. Git logs sort of help much interpretation is so context sensitive that the signal is blurry.

So while measuring performance might seems like a core job function, de facto it is not.

Also people that find this thread interesting should join Blind.

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

#29

Post by laichzeit0 »

leishman wrote: post #9
arkitaip wrote: 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.

As an end user of Google Ads/Analytics what frustrates me the most is every time I have some question it’s like at least 3 meetings with different people explaining the same problem and the answer is always to pass the buck down to some “specialist”. It’s like no one even understands their products anymore. You have a “measurement specialist” and like three layers of specialists in that layer. You actually can’t get your questions answered because no one person seems to know how everything fits together. Just passing the problem from one so called specialist to the next.

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

#30

Post by nrmitchi »

I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working for current-or-potential competitors.

Purposely over-hiring to prevent work being done elsewhere, and then claiming there is not enough work to be done, feels like it shouldn't be surprising to anyone.

Hell, Google has created ~18 (I think?) different messenger/chat apps at this point. If you wanted a clue that there wasn't enough work to go around (and that your promotion incentives may not be aligned with the business), this should have been the first clue.

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