This is such an embarrassment for these two... Aren't YOU the CEO of your company? Didn't YOU approve hiring plans and corporate goals? If there's not enough work, why don't you find something for them to work on, or replace your managers with folks that will. Instead, it's the employee's fault for being so unproductive.
'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
231–240 of 1001 posts
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#232It would be nice to work in a relaxed environment like that
I'm stuck in the agency life - I have to log seven hours a day and I'm at roughly 80% billable hours on average a week (to clients)
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I've been in many different companies and the majority of all processes are not well run. That just means things are being badly run, not that you shouldn't do the right things and run them well.
And no, email processes cannot be well done. You may think your's are, but that doesn't mean everyone else does.
If I had my druthers I would ban email for all in-house communication and do everything verbally, via chat apps, or workflow management tools. Anything that needs more thorough elaboration should be written down as a thoughtfully articulated memo. If you feel the need to record the contents of a 20 minute group conversation to search it later that probably means you need to focus and take better notes.
I will say it is truly a wild claim to assert that an intramural basketball game is more conducive to team productivity than a stand-up meeting though.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#234Maybe 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. I see this argument all the time, but I can't find any other place that it comes from other than disappointment from those that didn't or can't pass those interviews. (Disclaimer, outside of col…
> I can't find any other place that it comes from other than disappointment from those that didn't or can't pass those interviews.
Oh, the macro is that these companies are oligopolies. About 15–20 years ago one of them realized that poaching entire teams from the others to enter new LOBs was cheaper than competing. So headcount grew.
Outside of strategic hires it doesn’t really matter who they pick up. E.g. LinkedIn isn’t going to go out of biz if they don’t find productive places for their army of level 3.5 software engineers or whatever. LinkedIn doesn’t have any competition.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#235> 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…
An IRL meeting with 100 participants, you can't tell who is there or not. You can audit online meeting attendees.
> as they were sometimes taking time out in a day for personal work.
People have been going to the dentist during work hours since forever. I used to have a dentist down the street from my office for just this reason. Now I have a dentist just down the street from my house, for the exact same reason.
Heck Microsoft used to encourage people to go to the gym during the work day, a shuttle would come by, pick you up, and take you to the gym! Possibly something about all those research studies showing high levels improvement in mental tasks for hours after exercise.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#236Glad 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…
Sure but the big faang stocks literally print more money than every other company (idk maybe aramco or berkshire can compete, but nothing else). So something's working there.
I think you have it backwards. Highly profitable companies with high growth can afford to be wasteful. Being wasteful isn't what made them successful.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#237Earlier 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.
American lawyers, as a profession, have one of the highest rates of alcohol abuse and mental illness in the country.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#238Earlier 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
A team building activity has 10x the priority than some standup. If you need a standup to get stuff done or to motivate people then you’ve already lost.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#239This is such an embarrassment for these two... Aren't YOU the CEO of your company? Didn't YOU approve hiring plans and corporate goals? If there's not enough work, why don't you find something for them to work on, or replace your managers with folks that will. Instead, it's the employee's fault for being so unproductive.
Not to defend either of them as CEOs but isn't that what they're doing? Part of addressing a problem is surfacing it in the first place.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
At one point Waffle House required all of its senior executives to spend time each year working on the line. (They probably still do I just haven't checked in a few years). They feel this is important for their management team to more viscerally understand the lived experiences of the people working, identify issues in their processes and technology, and generally foster team spirit among their staff.
This is about empathy more than contribution, same thing with Quantas right now getting executives to handle baggage. It looks good (see how much we care?), and can be actually positive if it makes senior leadership understand what employees go through, so I think it is valuable for Zuckerberg to do an on call rotation or try and push a documentation change for these reasons