'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by onlyrealcuzzo » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 6:24 PM UTC

bobobob420 wrote: post #190

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money. Your standup meeting could've been an email. Their immovable basketball game (quality of life) is…

This is exactly the mindset of failure. The team standup has 10x more priority than some dumb basketball league

Agree to disagree.

A team standup has close to no value.

Having a high quality of life has a lot of value (including increased work productivity).

As the California Milk Campaign went - happy cows make quality cheese, and happy workers make quality work...

Again - one can be moved, the other cannot.

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

#212

Post by naravara » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 6:24 PM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #172

jjslocum3 wrote: post #91

Glad these guys seem to finally be noticing. I was a software engineering manager at a lean, high-margin, profitable start-up based in the NYC area starting in the late 2000s. We were acquired in 2014 by a very typical (for the time) SV-based competitor that had raised hundreds of millions in an IPO a few years earlier. Our acquirers had yet to see a single quarter of profit, of course. I and my team had so many good…

> I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money. Your standup meeting could've been an email. Their immovable basketball game (quality of life) is…

Of all the types of meetings that could be emails, stand-ups are at the very bottom of the list. A well run, efficient stand-up can head off a day's worth of productivity sucking emails and Slack messages with a 10 min conversation.

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

#213

Post by daenz » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 6:24 PM UTC

z9znz wrote: post #170

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…

> when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod That would be a surpreme waste of company money, and probably they have engineers working for them who are far better developers than they are.

Would it? I understand your point, but the counterpoint is that the leaders are in a position to make big changes if something is broken. They could attempt to push some simple change and see glaring process and onboarding problems, which nobody has been interested in prioritizing, and then make them top priority, saving everyone time.

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

#214

Post by onlyrealcuzzo » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 6:26 PM UTC

naravara wrote: post #212

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money. Your standup meeting could've been an email. Their immovable basketball game (quality of life) is…

Of all the types of meetings that could be emails, stand-ups are at the very bottom of the list. A well run, efficient stand-up can head off a day's worth of productivity sucking emails and Slack messages with a 10 min conversation.

I've been in MANY different standups. The vast majority of them are not well run.

Standups are also (rarely) recorded, and therefore unsearchable.

Have you ever thought - maybe an email process can also be done well?

Maybe the majority of your email threads are terrible. That doesn't mean they have to be. Maybe you think all of your meetings are well run - it doesn't mean everyone else thinks they are...

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

#215

Post by paganel » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

bobobob420 wrote: post #190

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money. Your standup meeting could've been an email. Their immovable basketball game (quality of life) is…

This is exactly the mindset of failure. The team standup has 10x more priority than some dumb basketball league

As it happens the last The Office episode I saw a couple of months ago involved Michael Scott organizing a basketball match during work hours, even though corporate had just been complaining about low numbers from him and his team (if I remember right).

Related to a comment further up the thread about fruits, a close friend of mine told me some time ago how one of his colleagues was complaining in the company chat about the kiwi fruits that were being given by the company as free perks having too much of that “hairy” stuff on them (I’m on my phone, too lazy to search for the exact English term), and how he preferred to be served “lean” and “shiny” kiwi fruits instead. Said friend works at the local subsidiary of a big US tech company of which everyone on this forum has heard about.

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

#216

Post by gorgoiler » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

It’s knives out time, I’m afraid, for any activist or negative employee. I am flabbergasted by the number of people I’ve worked with who are flat out ungrateful when it comes to their relationship with their employer either being outright miserable and surly, or constantly virtue signalling about hypothetical problems that just drag everyone down the purity spiral.

They get paid and they push code but they seem to think that’s the be all and end all of the relationship. It would be like living with a partner who takes out the bins and cooks every other night but never gives you a birthday card and constantly complains about your behaviour.

I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with wanting to have good social relationships between staff because the flip side is that every Eeyore, loner, and whiner chips away at morale bit by bit until they are the only people left.

How have you rewarded camaraderie, positive attitude, leadership, and goodwill today?

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

#217

Post by catlifeonmars » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

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.

Any idea why six minutes and not some other?

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

#218

Post by dekhn » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

ipsum2 wrote: post #186

dekhn wrote: post #165

By the end of my employment at Google I was not working very hard. Probably a few hours a day, mostly doing whatever I felt like doing. My managers consistently gave me "meets expectations" regardless of how much I achieved or how hard I worked. However, any time there was an emergency related to my function, I had everything required to jump in, fix serious problems, and then get out of the way during the cleanup th…

Were you an SRE? What you described sounds very similar to what I experienced.

I started as a test engineer on an SRE team (ads database, which I think no longer exists), did a mission control rotation, and then sort of found a way to be a software engineer (non-SRE, which pissed off the SRE leadership) and run my own projects in prod without any real oversight (that was exacycle- using all the idle cycles in prod). I used my knowledge of SRE and my good connections with SRE to run my service with minimal impacts on the $MONEY$ services.

Later I did stuff that involved working closely with SRE and hwops but always SRE-adjacent, not part of SRE. I had a standing offer to join multiple SRE groups but chose not to because I can't do oncalls while my kids are still at home.

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

#219

Post by shtopointo » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

If anything, that might be the best way to identify someone that fits in a large corp like Google. Someone that doesn't mind going thru the drudge of studying esoteric CS problems probably will be more attuned to go thru the drudge of working for a large company like Google.

I'm thinking most of the time spent at Large Corp. Inc. is doing menial work, rather than hot projects where you learn and get to work on the cutting edge.

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

#220

Post by summerlight » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 6:28 PM UTC

It's weird to say, but there's a genuine lack of headcount all over the company while Pichai (and probably Zukerberg) also does a correct assessment on the situation. This seems a contradiction, but if you take a deeper look into mid level managements there are a good number of teams responsible for billions of users/revenue and driving their growth but screaming for more headcounts. (Yeah, I'm in one of those teams) # increases to hundreds (or thousands?) at smaller scale. IMO, they deserve more headcounts for their scope. But it's also clear that the overall productivity of those companies begins to plateau.

Why does this happen? Of course I don't know. I've seen some clues on bigger structural issues but cannot say for sure. But the famous "I just want to serve 5TB" video gives us some hints... Most of the particular issues mentioned in the video have been solved but its spirit hasn't gone away. And now back with a good reason. Which makes it much harder to solve.

Think about launching non-trivial but small features in their major products. At a small company, a competent junior engineer can usually do that within a quarter. In Google it's not that simple. There are so many stakeholders. Privacy and security. Legal. Downstream dependencies. Infrastructure team. PA wide modeling and quality review. They're also busy and might not like your launch. At least PM will likely be your side but they may have a different priority than yours. To navigate this organizational complexity, you probably want to have a good manager/tech lead. If you don't care? You're going to piss off them for sure and if the things go very wrong then you could get indivisible attention from the VP level...

And you're now dealing with several hundreds of millions of users so a minimum level of engineering quality should be ensured. You gotta deal with resource planners who also need to allocate finite hardware resources among unlimited demands. The service should have some level of reliability, scalability and redundancy. Thanks to all the works done by core and technical infrastructure team, this is easier than other places but the inherent complexities don't go away. Oh, did I mention that most of the complex infrastructures have integration tests that run over 1~2 hours with a good level of flakiness? If the build dashboard doesn't go green, you might miss your launch by 1 week. It's just a tip of iceberg for productionization, multiply the work by 10x. This is a death by thousand cuts and I don't see a silver bullet to solve everything at once.