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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

#131

Post by clusterhacks »

potatolicious wrote: post #111

It's frustrating that this thread seems to be focused so heavily on people sitting around resting and vesting. Having been inside Google (and multiple other FAANGs) this is generally untrue, and focusing on this element of the problem misses a much larger productivity problem: Most engineers at Google aren't "sitting around doing nothing", they are very busy shipping projects that do not matter. Their days are filled…

>Their days are filled with doing work that will not move the needle on any metric that matters to the company

This, 100%. I think this simple observation reverberates across the entire software engineering field and at many (most?) non-FAANG companies as well.

I am not confident there is a real solution to the problem of making sure people only work on things that matter. Medium to small organizations seem to struggle with having management even understand what "good" product looks like or how to optimize for that outcome.

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

#132

Post by mikhael28 »

Yes. Yes they are. On some teams.

On other teams, they put out revolutionary products/developer tools.

It comes back to management, and talent self-selecting itself. Truly talented people won't be content to waste their career, and will leave poor performing teams to join high performing ones.

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

#133

Post by treis »

MAGZine wrote: post #48
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…

I think we've built companies and cultures that are incompatible with long-term employment and happiness. Anyone who joins a company can crank full 8+ hours a day for a while to establish themselves (and a reputation). The "problem" is, as people establish themselves, the problem domain becomes less exciting. There's less urgency to crank indefinitely. They settle into a pattern that involves fewer hours, though thos…

I think there's plenty of people that would crank out code* given a sane supporting organization. The issue is that most organizations aren't sane and there's little incentive to crank out code. Incentives are generally (1) finish 5 points of stories per week and (2) build a resume/promotion package. Both of those sound okay but tend to be wrought with perverse incentives.

(1) leads you down the path of padding estimates so you don't miss. It also means if you finish early you don't really want to pull in more stories. That tells people you're padding estimates and they'll push you to lower estimates or take on more stories. Then when you need that padding it's not there. So if you finish your work on Wednesday it's better to chill and look busy instead of doing more.

(2) is just obviously bad. Delivering complicated projects and supervising other employees makes you look better. So projects get complicated and teams get bloated.

*Crank out code should probably be "build functionality according to good practices" but doesn't really change the point.

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

#134

Post by sauruk »

tiahura wrote: post #78
akmarinov wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And everyone likes biglaw attorneys and thinks that they’re well adjusted people too

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

#135

Post by mc32 »

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 ~…

Google et al. cargo culted SGI culture -maybe it works for a class of geeks. Anyway they often coddled employees and treated them "like family" as they like to say and tell them they are special and the lucky few. You can bring your pet to work (if no one has allergies to it), you can waltz in late, go get a snack, log in, chat with your friends, play with new gizmos, then go to a meeting, get lunch, then work out, then have another snack and then the last meeting of the day before you cut out early to get in the (Co.)-bus home before traffic gets bad.

Where the hell did they think productivity would go?

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

#136

Post by plonk »

tiahura wrote: post #78
akmarinov wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does that job involve constant creativity, or is it more about applying existing knowledge? I have no idea, but the amount of knowledge that law students need to cram in a few years makes me think it's a lot of the latter.

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

#137

Post by gretch »

buildbot wrote: post #89
vbezhenar wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

All you have to do is take the company's rev/profit and divide it by the number of employees (factoring in how much you pay an employee)

So yeah if MSFT can make 3 billion dollars with 1000 engineers, and Google makes 1 billion dollars with 1000 engineers, then 1 MSFT eng is worth 3 of Googles (simplified - obv business involves sales, marketing, etc)

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

#138

Post by bell-cot »

lovelearning wrote: post #54
Kaze404 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this sarcasm? I honestly can't tell

I believe so, based on the phrase "honest selfless CEOs."

Fair point - "evil conspiracies of rotten & incompetent..." is often a simple & obvious truth.

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

#139

Post by sylens »

Why don't the boards of these companies hold the CEOs and management teams responsible for overhiring and not having the right ways to track productivity and route resources accordingly? This is essentially Pichai and Zuckerberg admitting that they made colossal mistakes

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

#140

Post by [deleted] »

amzn-throw wrote: post #74
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'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,…

[deleted]
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