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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

#241

Post by vecter »

peyton wrote: post #234
vecter wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I might not be connecting the dots, but I don't see how this is related to the GP's gripe that these interview questions aren't good tools for hiring engineers.

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

#242

Post by jeffreyrogers »

mgfist wrote: post #161
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…

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.

Casinos print money too and farms don't. The amount of cash a business throws off is only somewhat related to how much work it requires and how useful it is.

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

#243

Post by metabagel »

rootusrootus wrote: post #109
racl101 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money. Yes, that's how it usually works out. By the way, 'perqs' is a peculiar word. English is my second language but I'm used to seeing the word 'perks'.

The full word is perquisite. Perk is slang.

There is no such word as "perq" in American English.

https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=perq

Perhaps, it is British English.

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

#244

Post by EddySchauHai »

dekhn wrote: post #218
ipsum2 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

What are test engineer roles like at Google? I’ve basically only spent my time in startups on critical systems (defense, finance) so have no idea what it’d be like at a larger company or team.

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

#245

Post by fefe23 »

As a consultant, I come around a bit.

I have seen many companies with very poor productivity, and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees. In fact they usually would have loved to be more productive. Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight.

But as companies grow they install more and more rules and regulations that end up making sure nothing ever gets done. It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done!

Also remember that this is only half the problem. The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. I wouldn't be surprised if of the productivity that is left, more than half gets wasted on crufty software structures and writing code before you understood the problem.

And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need. Wasting yet more productivity on working around bad decisions from before we knew what we are actually building.

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

#246

Post by mathgladiator »

A key challenge at Meta is limited scope. There are many unification projects rather than expansion projects, and this is one of the reasons I left as it was just too hard to push new businesses.

So, here they are bitching about people not doing enough work when it is really a reflection of an inability to overcome the innovators dilemma.

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

#247

Post by AzzieElbab »

yibg wrote: post #239
alexk307 wrote: post #231

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.

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.

Well, there’s is a lot of room to wiggle with ~1M revenue per employee. I’d be curious to hear about working habits of people at Apple :)

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

#248

Post by winphone1974 »

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.

10 minutes x everyone on the team x scheduled time for all x disruption and context switch loss

I like in person updates myself, but it's not as obvious of a cost calc as you present. There is definitely a place for async, written updates

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

#249

Post by timwaagh »

I've kinda noticed it too. It's one of the downsides of working from home. Personally my productivity has only gone up but I'm worried about my colleagues. Sometimes it's hard to get a hold of them for hours. It's incredibly sad to say but maybe they should introduce some kind of bossware to check that people at least aren't afk for hours.
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