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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

#251

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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…

If you have time to faff around at a FAANG, you have time to be cultivating your network to include some very influential people, you have time to be taking advantage of training resources or learning from the experts there that are completely free that most ordinary developers would have to pay thousands to get access to, you have time to work on side projects either for the company or, if you dare, for your own personal benefit, you have time to be hunting around for internal transfers that will boost your career, etc.

If you want to rest and vest, hey, more power to you but the smart ones are taking advantage of the gigantic cornucopia of opportunity presented to them by merely getting in the door of an obscenely wealthy FAANG to catapult their careers ahead.

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

#252

Post by telchior »

Which companies with similar concerns have actually managed to increase productivity in a way that satisfies the C-suite?

A much older anecdote: I had a friend who worked at Yahoo around the time Marissa Mayer was coming on as CEO. At the time, they were allowing semi-WFH for certain positions.

I literally never saw this guy go to work, or actually do any work. He was part of a stand-up comedy workshop and spent 100% of his time there. He'd figured out how to keep his manager happy enough, pass performance reviews, collect a huge paycheck, and do exactly squat. Somehow during all the "clean house" reviews, he passed. Everyone, including him, were shocked that somehow, nobody seemed to be able to figure out that he was essentially a ghost employee. What finally got him was a "return to office" directive -- no more WFH, which he couldn't comply with.

This all took place a decade ago, and I've thought of it several times post-Covid as all these companies that "discovered" WFH suddenly decided that employees need to return. But none of the extensive attempts to fix Yahoo's culture, management etc came to anything, the company continued to backslide despite all efforts and now basically no longer exists. Mark Zuckerberg's aggressive "some people shouldn't be here" statements feel like a repeat of that whole Yahoo debacle (although I suppose Facebook probably isn't yet as dysfunctional as Yahoo was in 2012).

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

#253

Post by winphone1974 »

naravara wrote: post #233
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You haven't convinced me there's a good substitute for email when it comes to threaded, easy, async, thoughtful communication. Your suggestions all fail one of these.

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

#254

Post by nitwit005 »

> 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

The last time I was at a larger company, I just asked someone else on the team to attend the all hands and let me know if anything interesting was mentioned.

I did bring up not caring about some of the content, and the head of the department even said he appreciated the feedback, but didn't seem to change the content at all.

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

#255

Post by winphone1974 »

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

Not for the participants apparently.

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

#256

Post by aliasxneo »

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…

I have a feeling this extends to several areas in Google. I come from the GDC side of things and have the exact same experience. To keep my job requires very minimal effort on my part. In fact, nowadays I'm punishing myself by trying to do anything "above and beyond." This is mostly due to the rapid growth of committees and the struggle for power that has come out of it (i.e., I'm more likely to be denied by a change control board over political reasons).

Regardless, I'm on my way out despite people's shock that I would leave such a "cushy" job. The fact of the matter is that the lack of challenge has actually caused me to spiral into a deep depression and the best decision for me personally is to move on.

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

#257

Post by shagie »

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…

> The explanation I arrived at was that such perqs were the necessary counterpart to an expectation that your employees have no life other than work.

{soapbox}

I believe a lot of companies are trying to establish a third place ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place and https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/02/28/20030228/ ) to help transition new grads and young adults from a college atmosphere to a professional atmosphere... but putting a lot of emphasis on having that third place. Having it _also_ means that employees tend to stay later at work.

Things like https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/custom-woodworking/cabine...

These are ways to use excess money in a way that rewards employees and makes some of the aspects hard to leave ("I could switch companies but then I'd lose the woodshop!") but it also sets up another set of problems in the nature of the third place - that its not work. The coffee shop that you show up to outside of work shouldn't have a manager / employee relationship between the patrons, but the coffee shop on the campus of a big company - that's harder.

It is those third space encroachments where the company is sponsoring it and yet the company wanting to not be political / social / getting into those HR issues, but yet the invariably show up there that lead to articles about how the company is going to be not political, or that half the staff is leaving because the company took a certain stance in a not-3rd space.

These third space encroachments where company life is used as a substitute for one's own hobbies and stepping beyond the college life atmosphere is where companies have social problems.

{/soapbox}

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

#258

Post by zmgsabst »

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 software is just an immature profession — so we don’t have a good idea of what a day looks like.

Looking at my day as a carpenter, then:

- 30 minutes break

- 30 minutes startup/cleanup

- 1 hour moving stuff/between jobs

- 6 hours ostensibly working; 4-5 hours focused

And what I expect of SDEs, now:

- 1 hour breaks

- 1-2 hours communicate (email, CRs, meetings, etc)

- 1 hour continuing education/corporate overhead

- 4-5 hours writing code/tasks

I’m always skeptical when I hear people are doing more than around 4 hours of coding a day — and start to wonder what’s being skipped.

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

#260

Post by CobrastanJorji »

shtopointo wrote: post #219
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…

I'm not sure I understand the comparison. CS interview problems are interesting, well-constrained math riddles with endless variety. As far as I can tell, they're nearly the opposite of menial drudgery.

I don't think they're great for interviewing, on account of how they don't resemble what programmers actually do, but I do think they're a heck of a lot more fun than menial labor, especially when job offers aren't riding on it.

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