'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

#301

Post by becquerel » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 7:10 PM UTC

gorgoiler wrote: post #216

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 th…

Uh... why should employees have a friendly relationship with their work? We don't work because we want to make friends. We work because otherwise we don't have money to buy food or clothe ourselves. This is not a voluntary arrangement. Expecting us to be grateful for it is absurd.

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

#302

Post by abledon » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 7:11 PM UTC

fefe23 wrote: post #245

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 "develo…

> Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight.

Have you worked in Government?

edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26727803 for an example

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

#303

Post by toss1 » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 7:11 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #273

fefe23 wrote: post #245

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 "develo…

Not getting rid of "legacy" stuff that doesn't work is a, IMHO, a version of throwing good moneybafter bad money. Instead of acknowledging that the unusable code, or whatever, was a crucial part of understanding the problem, and throw it out once the problem was understood, people tend to build upon those not fit for purpose things...

YES!!

Even coming from an attitude of being big on abstractions and generalized/scaled solutions, I cannot overstate the importance of writing a throw-away version at the outset. Hit the highlights, write it fast & dirty, use it, extend it a bit as you start to understand the system — then throw it away. Use that knowledge to design and build your real system, from scratch, but informed by your earned knowledge.

>>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.

And to this in the GP post, I think he identified a fundamental problem with Agile. Its entire bias is to write code fast, when the bias should be to avoid writing code — code is slow and habitat for bugs. Obviously everything requires code, but it should be minimized, not maximized. Of course, writing code quickly and seeing it run is satisfying, but developers' dopamine hits shouldn't be the primary driver of design & mgt - end performance should be, and that takes careful thought of what can be eliminated, and basing that thought on knowledge of a throw-away-version-1 is very useful, and pays benefits to both the dev team and to users for years.

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

#304

Post by colechristensen » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 7:12 PM UTC

codegeek wrote: post #287

fefe23 wrote: post #245

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 "develo…

"Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight." I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. The larger the team/company, the more chances of those people being around. They pretend to be always busy and doing something but don't actually get anything done. Seen it all for 18+ years. Having said that, there are plenty of people as well who would LOVE…

If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. As long as that's the actual acknowledged situation and not "most of your job is pretending to work and making people think you're important".

I wonder how successful a lot of companies would be if they openly cut required hours in half.

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

#305

Post by inglor_cz » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 7:13 PM UTC

naravara wrote: post #199

z9znz wrote: post #170

Earlier 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.

I hope no one will try this out in a brain surgery clinic.

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

#306

Post by jrockway » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 7:14 PM UTC

EddySchauHai wrote: post #244

dekhn wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's varied. Some posts below describe the standard software test engineering. Test engineers on Google Fiber would buy every microwave and 2.4GHz cordless phone and baby monitor, and see if our changes to interference mitigation algorithms improved or regressed between releases. So you're basically in a lab trying to break Wifi algorithms, probably not writing much code. (Also things like "does our change to move iPhone 6 to 5GHz when it's closer to the 5GHz access point also work with and iPhone 5?")

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

#307

Post by beachy » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 7:15 PM UTC

toss1 wrote: post #303

hef19898 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not getting rid of "legacy" stuff that doesn't work is a, IMHO, a version of throwing good moneybafter bad money. Instead of acknowledging that the unusable code, or whatever, was a crucial part of understanding the problem, and throw it out once the problem was understood, people tend to build upon those not fit for purpose things...

YES!! Even coming from an attitude of being big on abstractions and generalized/scaled solutions, I cannot overstate the importance of writing a throw-away version at the outset. Hit the highlights, write it fast & dirty, use it, extend it a bit as you start to understand the system — then throw it away . Use that knowledge to design and build your real system, from scratch, but informed by your earned knowledge. >>a…

> The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers.

Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

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

#308

Post by colechristensen » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 7:15 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #273

fefe23 wrote: post #245

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 "develo…

Not getting rid of "legacy" stuff that doesn't work is a, IMHO, a version of throwing good moneybafter bad money. Instead of acknowledging that the unusable code, or whatever, was a crucial part of understanding the problem, and throw it out once the problem was understood, people tend to build upon those not fit for purpose things...

Some of the most valuable work I've ever done was spending a month creating something, throwing every byte away, and then spending two weeks creating the same thing, much improved.

The key to rework like this is you have to actually be able to finish it and get rid of the old, instead of spending months or years maintaining two half-baked versions of something instead of just one.

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

#309

Post by russellbeattie » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 7:15 PM UTC

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…

> My managers consistently gave me "meets expectations"

That's because his bonus was probably tied to your performance. By making sure all his subordinates receive meets or exceeds expectations, then he looks good. His manager does the same, all the way up the chain.

They played the same game when I worked at Amazon. What's more, it became automated. They introduced non-optional surveys that popped up on your computer daily. At first I assume it was a well intentioned system to gauge general employee sentiment. It was annoying and stupid HR bullshit, so of course I immediately went in and disabled it. After a year or so, my manager finally notices and orders me to enable it again. I soon guessed why. Within a few months, we start having quarterly group meetings going over graphs of the answers. And of course, the surveys aren't anonymous, so he would call out the people who gave bad answers and start grilling them about their issue in front of everyone, if they didn't immediately recant, then they would "schedule a meeting". I assume his performance bonus had become tied to the results and everyone needed to tow the line. It was amusing to me how many of the younger employees didn't understand the game they were playing and would continue to answer honestly. I just glanced at the options, picked whatever made my manager look good and went on with my day.

You'd think those idiots in charge at the upper management levels would have heard of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." But apparently not.

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

#310

Post by bartread » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 7:15 PM UTC

codegeek wrote: post #287

fefe23 wrote: post #245

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 "develo…

"Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight." I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. The larger the team/company, the more chances of those people being around. They pretend to be always busy and doing something but don't actually get anything done. Seen it all for 18+ years. Having said that, there are plenty of people as well who would LOVE…

Sure those people exist: but there are plenty of people who aren't that way.

I've worked a couple of different places where the systems, processes and structures in place effectively rendered me as deadweight. In both cases it was incredibly stressful and had a profoundly negative impact on my mental health. In the first case I hung around for quite a while hoping things would get better (because they had been better in the past) but, actually, they got worse, so eventually I left. In the second case I stuck it out for only a few months before leaving. Not soon enough unfortunately: I think it was a significant contributor to losing a relationship.

For a lot of people I've worked with over the course of my 20-odd year career not being able to make a meaningful contribution is intolerable over the medium to long term, and not much fun in the short term either. Of course, there have been useless layabouts, but they've been vastly in the minority, and tend to be spotted and managed out.