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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

#81

Post by robotnikman »

metadat wrote: post #46
itsdrewmiller wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

You are mistaken. 100,000 of the best out of a pool of approximately 10 million professional software engineers worldwide is a sizeable portion. Additionally, not all 10 million are even close to being up to BigCorps peculiar standards (perhaps the standard is "someone competent enough that they could potentially build a competing product line"). Goog, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Oracle.. all have huge rosters and it adds u…

Well, Google's and Facebooks definition of 'the best' engineers.

I don't think grinding leetcode for an interview is the best indicator of a good engineer, and graduating from a prestigious university is not always an indicator either. imho it seems like the best engineers now are the ones doing their own thing outside of the large companies, or are at smaller startups.

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

#82

Post by marcus_holmes »

tpmoney wrote: post #22

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 wag…

The difference between working from home and working in the office is not how many hours of productive work you do, it's in what you do with the rest of the day.

Every single study done on it shows that creative staff (including engineers) are more productive working where they are less disturbed, that open-plan offices are the least productive environment, etc. So it's utterly unsurprising that people get more productive working from home and can do 8 hour's office work in 5 hours at home.

But even aside from that, if you can complete your work in 6 hours, but can't leave the office for another 2-4 hours because of the office culture, then you'll spend those 2-4 hours doing random stuff in the office. If you're at home, you can leave Slack on and go do something useful. It's not only that WFH gives people more time, it's that it removes the "you must pretend to be busy for 25% of your workday" restriction.

As always, a negative reaction to WFH is a sign of bad management culture. Good managers are happy that their people are getting more done and happier about it. Bad managers see "they're only doing 20 hours a week if they work from home!" and are angry about it.

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

#83

Post by emptyparadise »

sn41 wrote: post #72
waspight wrote: post #34

Why 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.

MANGA

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

#85

Post by cosmotic »

metadat wrote: post #46
itsdrewmiller wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

You are mistaken. 100,000 of the best out of a pool of approximately 10 million professional software engineers worldwide is a sizeable portion. Additionally, not all 10 million are even close to being up to BigCorps peculiar standards (perhaps the standard is "someone competent enough that they could potentially build a competing product line"). Goog, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Oracle.. all have huge rosters and it adds u…

Everyone claims they hire the best. For a long time Google and others had atypical hiring practices which they have since abandoned. I suspect this is because they discovered the techniques were less effective than originally thought. So 'best' by what measure?

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

#87

Post by mytailorisrich »

nrmitchi wrote: post #30

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 ~…

That does not make sense.

On the other hand, if no-one stops it, there are always incentives to grow your team as much as possible.

As leader this increases your status both in absolute terms (100 vs 10 people under you makes a difference on your CV and on the title you can claim) and in relative terms (your team is larger than the teams of your peers and you can get ahead that way).

And so every leader at every level tries to expand their team.

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

#88

Post by 202206241203 »

robotnikman wrote: post #81
metadat wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are mistaken. 100,000 of the best out of a pool of approximately 10 million professional software engineers worldwide is a sizeable portion. Additionally, not all 10 million are even close to being up to BigCorps peculiar standards (perhaps the standard is "someone competent enough that they could potentially build a competing product line"). Goog, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Oracle.. all have huge rosters and it adds u…

Well, Google's and Facebooks definition of 'the best' engineers. I don't think grinding leetcode for an interview is the best indicator of a good engineer, and graduating from a prestigious university is not always an indicator either. imho it seems like the best engineers now are the ones doing their own thing outside of the large companies, or are at smaller startups.

Some engineers see themselves as merely tools, so they "sharpen" themselves to be used effectively. Why would MAANAM (FAANG is a bit outdated) want more creative ones? They will get bored and leave.

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

#89

Post by buildbot »

vbezhenar wrote: post #53
syntaxing wrote: post #39

Yeah you lazy fucks, how dare you work so little that we only have an annual NET INCOME of 39B (39B for Meta, 76B for Alphabet).

I guess they measure some KPIs and observe big difference between peers.

How would they get that comparable info from other companies? Do the CEOs all have a secret slack channel were Satya is bragging that one MS dev equals 3 googles programmers?
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