If there was slacking, who’d write all those chat apps?
'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
71–80 of 1001 posts
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#72Why is Netflix part of FAANG? Isn’t all the other ones much larger corporations?
Because without Netflix, it would be a bit awkward.
I've always felt that leaving Microsoft out was a bit problematic. But FAAMG does not sound very threatening.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#73> Zuckerberg noticed that it was getting harder to get all the employees to attend a meeting as they were sometimes taking time out in a day for personal work.
> “There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have. [We need to] create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer-focused,
Ohhh! Two declarations based in unfounded evidence that will instill fear in employees and prevent them to ask for raises.
What a shitty piece of journalism.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#74I 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 ~…
That's not a conspiracy theory,
I work for Amazon - for a decade. I love it - best job I've ever had. And historically, while it's been a tough place to work, we've always been able to attract top talent. Partially - impactful work. Partially - stock doubles every year.
Well guess what happened in 2020/2021? Despite incredible perseverance through the Pandemic, the stock stopped doubling.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, Meta, and others figured out that they can poach our engineers with a promise of way more base salary, and a less intense work environment.
We've had SDE1s (Juniors) leave Amazon for Meta because they got more money than our SDE3s (Seniors) were getting.
SDE2s (Intermediate) looked at their status quo thought "I COULD bust my ass and get promoted to Senior...or I could go to Microsoft TODAY, get a Senior offer for what I'm already doing, and for more money than my raise would be". (No offense to any of my friends at Microsoft, but https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Microsoft&track=Softw... doesn't lie)
I've talked to a few acquaintances that have left and the universal responses is: "My job is so boring now. I miss Amazon. But It's not stressful (because there is no pressure on me), and I get paid more money".
How can anyone think there is anything wrong with that? You can't. You can speak about Mission and Impact, and some engineers will be attracted to that - I work on building Forever APIs in the AWS Cloud that gets millions of transactions per second. That to me is WAY more interesting than working on Chat app 15/18.
But for most people they just want to make money and live their lives. Fair enough!
The result? Even though Amazon has adapted somewhat by bumping salaries, they've still lost an ocean of people to nothing particularly ambitious or interesting. They're being parked by Microsoft/Google/Facebook to work on boring unimpactful projects so they can't help Amazon kick their asses.
Sometimes one way to make your house nicer is by breaking the windows in the neighbor's house.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#75I 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 ~…
>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. I've heard this claimed but not sourced, and it doesn't really make sense - there are millions of software engineers out there and Google or Meta only employ a tiny fraction of them.
> Google or Meta only employ a tiny fraction of them
Yes, but they are competing for the same tiny fraction.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#76This is not surprising to anybody that ever worked at a sufficiently large organization. Once you get a large number of employees, then layer in HR, legal, compliance, etc. considerations it creates quite a lot of opportunities for low performers to get in the door and never leave.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#77I 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 ~…
I personally don't believe this at all. I think it's almost entirely bureaucratic inertia, and a prisoner's dilemma among the management. One who bloats, floats.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#78This 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 wag…
There’s no way you can sustain 8 hours/day of productive work 5 days a week as a developer. It’s not working a field or packing boxes, there’s a mental component that gets exhausted over time.
Biglaw attorneys routinely bill 2200 hours a year in 6 minute increments.
Add in nonbillable work and self-written off time, and many of these attorneys work 60+ hour weeks. Plus, they do this into their 50’s.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#79[deleted]
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#80Maybe zuck expected 10x engineers