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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

#461

Post by doitLP »

FearlessNebula wrote: post #452
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…

Did Sundar ever write code? Wasn’t he a PM? I wouldn’t be surprised if Mark still writes some code, he’s a hacker at heart

I think parent means has Mark experienced how difficult it is get code to prod these days, not can he still code

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

#462

Post by ren_engineer »

akmarinov wrote: post #61
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…

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.

burnout only happens if you are working on something you hate and actively have to force yourself to work on it or have external stress from bad coworkers, managers, or general life stuff. I've worked 12+ hour days on side projects for fun and felt fresh and mentally sharp because I enjoyed what I was doing.

The idea that the human brain hits some brick wall at the scheduled 40 hour work week and can't do anymore thinking is comical

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

#463

Post by depereo »

fefe23 wrote: post #317
codegeek wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I have met a few of those people, but every single one of them needed a justification. Some told me they felt wronged by the company somehow. For example they had experienced bullying, or didn't get promoted when they felt they should have been, or they had contributed something and then it got cut from the product, something like that in most cases. Now didn't feel they owed the company anything. Yet others said the…

I turned into dead weight once during a hostile takeover of the company I was working for. It was pretty shit, and I'm glad I moved on after a few months of being unproductive. Management removed our ability to move forward on any existing work, and allocated no new work, and rejected any proposals from anyone from the 'old' company.

Wound up spending most of my (remote) work day occasionally checking my work laptop for emails, working on personal projects on my personal laptop and gardening or doing some DIY fixes on our old house.

Felt bad the entire time and finding a new job was a huge weight off my shoulders.

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

#464

Post by lliamander »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #333
abledon wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I’ve personally never witnessed this, and I’ve worked in government and know people who work in government in other contexts, and I haven’t ever heard of an actual anecdote to that effect either. I’m sure it exists, but the meme seems overblown. From what I’ve seen, government is more frugal than the private sector day to day, the main difference is that the government ends up supporting unprofitable programs and has…

I definitely saw a lot of dead weight and waste in government work, more than I have ever seen in the private sector.

Part of it comes down to fact that it's harder to fire people.

Another part of it is that bureaucracies end up becoming dominated by people who serve the survival of the bureau (and it's budget) at the expense of its actual mission.

Another part is that government agencies are just not as easy to hold to account - with a private business your customer can often take their business elsewhere (and if they can't, well, the government just might be the reason for that). In theory the democratic process should hold these agencies accountable, but the democratic process is more indirect than voting with your feet. And there is generally a tendency to resist democratic influence (otherwise the agency would become political).

There are probably many other reasons as well.

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

#465

Post by unicornmama »

PaulHoule wrote: post #4

Google would have been a lot more productive if it had hired people to work on one good messaging app instead of 13+ bad messaging apps. Google has long had an attitude of "we hire the best so we can afford to have them stand on one leg and balance on a ball while holding a cane in their mouth and balancing a bunch of dishes on the end of the cane while typing with one hand on a chorded keyboard and looking at a moni…

Writing a messaging app is a fool's errand. You either build a chat app with someone elses money, invest in all chat apps (1/n) and hope you score a big one - e.g. like textbook publisher, or you wait and M&A the successful ones.

The barrier to entry to write a chat app is zero. Even if you are brilliant you will compete against hundreds other chat apps one of which will beat out with pure luck. Never compete against luck.

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

#466

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx »

ccn0p wrote: post #277

There's a lot of pointing fingers here. At the risk of sounding crass, any company with more than 1000 employees (pick a number) has high performers and low performers. Yes, culture, management, and process all basically move the sides of the bell curve, but nothing "fixes" human nature and organizational inefficiencies as companies grow. This is why companies rate and rank employees and low performers find their way…

It's also around that point where you start to get low and high performers that, in my opinion, the burden of productivity should shift quite a bit to managers rather than individual employees. Once a company gets to a certain size, certain bureaucratic workflows and systems become far more necessary and entrenched as "the way we do business". Some "low performers" at that point, as a result of this internal dynamic and internal limitations in a business, often just have less work to do or they are limited in sign-offs to work on other projects/coordinate with other teams. At that point, the role of managing teams and individuals becomes much more important and consequential. What you often get though, is management that defers accountability as problems with individual performance with employees below them. This is, essentially, a way of ignoring how the way the company operates has changed.

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

#467

Post by ken47 »

I see other people's points that these quotes aren't the best reflection of these leaders, but I'd give them some benefit of the doubt in that we're lacking context. We're just getting the sensational headlines and quotes. There is something to be said for managing company morale, so we'll see how FB's employees handle the very blunt message they received...

That being said, even though the message itself is bitter, I would strongly prefer that leadership communicate such difficulties openly rather than surprising the company out of the blue with layoffs, pay cuts, etc. Then, employees have an opportunity to make a decision about how much harder they want to work, or whether they want to leave for different pastures.

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

#468

Post by osigurdson »

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…

The sad part about excessive meetings is often they are not enough on their own. In between all of the the pointless meetings, smaller, less formal, often unscheduled, real meetings where actual decisions are made still need to happen.

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

#469

Post by senttoschool »

spookthesunset wrote: post #432
senttoschool wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agreed with you. I found much greater joy going to the office everyday, working, meeting with my coworkers, doing things after work like grabbing a beer in the kitchen, etc. I really missed those things. Now I'm just staring at a screen for 10 hours a day. Two extra hours because I feel like I need to prove that I'm working while I'm remote. It sucks. I feel way less energy and less passion for the company.

Completely agree. There is no more banter. No sharing of ideas. No creativity. It's all just zoom bullshit. I keep wondering when this crap is gonna end and people will realize that this "pure remote" shit absolutely kills innovation and creativity. But man... it's super depressing. I used to love my work. Now it sucks. I think it will take many years before this shakes out. I think companies that are in-person will…

>I dunno. It's exhausting though. I feel very trapped by all this crap. I could only imagine being a new-hire or some fresh college grad...

Imagine trying to build a relationship over Slack and Zoom as a new hire. I'd be lost and frustrated.

It's just not the same.

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

#470

Post by kortilla »

matsemann wrote: post #318
abledon wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I hate this take of "gobernment bad, capitalism good". As a consultant having worked for both large government agencies and large corporations, they are all the same.

That’s not the take, that’s just how you read it in a knee jerk reaction. It’s a comment about government employee productivity, not whether the government is bad.

You can both believe that government employees are extremely inefficient and that the government is good to run certain things.

>As a consultant having worked for both large government agencies and large corporations, they are all the same.

Absolutely not. Apart from catastrophic budget crises, a government doesn’t risk bankruptcy and a department has no need to bring in more than it costs. There is no real floor for how slow employees can be because the agency is getting its money either way.

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