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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

#481

Post by [deleted] »

wizofaus wrote: post #338
Scoundreller wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think yahoo found something like 35% of its wfh staff hadn’t logged in for weeks or months. (I can’t find a source for the number, so maybe I’m off, but vpn logs were used to justify ending wfh, which is… an imperfect approach for many reasons). Overall, I don’t think the plan at yahoo was to fix anything, but just asset-strip it, which worked well for stockholders.

It baffles me how that's possible - in 25+ years working for software companies all my co-workers have been people I interact with basically daily (certainly more than once a week) - so how could someone not log in for weeks and it not be an issue?

[deleted]

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

#482

Post by lliamander »

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.

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

Large corporations are often indistinguishable from government agencies in part because all large, centralized organizations suffer similar problems, and in part because they become intertwined. The only difference is often whether your prison walls are gray or beige.

But capitalism is not just "large corporations". Capitalism is also startups, freelancers, small businesses, "mittlestand", cooperatives, family farms, etc. It is respecting property rights, and managing behavior through contracts and social norms rather than reams of regulations. Those things definitely are superior to government.

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

#483

Post by coffeeisyummy »

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…

This iteration through pseudo productivity comes from management's real world problem of demonstrating progress on their projects. The promises of visibility on your development team's productivity always turns Agile into a steaming pile of burn-downs and story points.

"No one has done true Agile" is the "No one has done true Communism" for software engineering. Because, in the real world, no one uses Agile in an ideal environment free of pressures like deadlines or budgets.

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

#484

Post by rubiquity »

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…

I'm surprised to see this is the top voted comment because it is completely off the mark in this case and anyone that has spent any amount of time reading Blind (a website dedicated to... I'm not sure what exactly) knows it.

While Facebook/Meta, Google, and others have always paid comparatively well, in the past 2-3 years the pay shot up even higher and the only price of admission is supreme obedience to "grinding LeetCode." This hysteria created an entire culture of pay chasers that congregate on that Blind website with little regard for anyhing other than compensation. These people, who I consider to be among the most toxic people in tech, have a singular focus on pay and it is not at all surprising that when put in minimal supervision environments they choose to merely exist and collect said paycheck. CEOs lamenting this are merely reaping what they sow.

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

#485

Post by diordiderot »

devwastaken wrote: post #289
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…

Large corps are propped up by intellectual property law and economies of scale. They do not hold their market positions on their own merit. If we remove IP laws, we will have another golden age of tech innovation tomorrow.

Yeah but then no one would invent anything because that's the only reason anyone does anything!

_glances nervously at FOSS, science, art, & philosophy_

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

#486

Post by badpun »

lumost wrote: post #454
shtopointo wrote: post #219

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. 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…

It was only 4-5 years ago that Google was considered the pinnacle of Engineering centric culture. It was still considered top up until last year. Something is going off the rails in the big tech firms if people now view big-tech work as menial. These were the same companies that pioneered CI/CD, Services, cloud, scalable web services, and myriad other technologies.

Many of the top engineering companies (Boeing etc.) are also objectively crappy places to work at. When you're doing things at the scale of Boeing or Google, you need a lot of process, and it's just no fun to do engineering this way.

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

#487

Post by touisteur »

What this sounds like:

1) let's hire like mad, make every graduate engineer do the dance, and suck up every talent that might appear, and raise comp so high that no one can hire. Also acquihire like crazy, take it all in! Hey, now it's strange how we haven't had serious competition for years.

2) now that times are getting hard, let's say that the people we're dumping on the market are deadweights, bad contributors, lazy. Don't hire them, they're the worst, they dragged us down!

I thought they hired only the best! Weeks of interviews!

I'm sad for the people getting canned soon. I hope they got some money away. And that they're ready to accept -50% because I don't think there's a market for all the people Google and Facebook are preparing to get rid of, at faang comp.

We'll see but this all seems very unethical, from two unethical companies. Good luck everyone.

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

#488

Post by abledon »

lliamander wrote: post #464
wbsss4412 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Yes, what I was getting at! Developers can coast and never be forced to improve or learn new skills. very very difficult to be fired.

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

#489

Post by gorgoiler »

spamizbad wrote: post #375
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…

Man, where have you worked? It sounds awful. Is this a SV specific type of personality? I feel like a low output dev who complains constantly wouldn't last 6 months before landing on a PIP. My experience, most "dead weight" employees tend to be quiet types who never rock the boat. They want to just keep flying under the radar. They say please and thank you, they show up to company events, but just.... don't produce.…

Thanks. It has been awful at times. On the whole though my career has been really positive, but every so often a disgruntled employee has dragged me and many others down. You’re right that engineering prowess makes up for it a lot of the time but there is a limit to everyone’s tolerance for difficult assholes.

A lot of the time the people that needed weeding out are the ones who are vocally stepping out of their core role to agitate in company forums. They are easier to identify because they at least do you the courtesy of sucking at their core competency, making them much easier to manage out. Still, it can take months to complete that process, and all the while they will be stirring about how policy X is institutionally Y-ist and a micro aggression against minority Z.

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

#490

Post by jimjimjim »

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…

replacing the prototype is important, but you need enough power in your org to be able to throw it away. 'nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution'
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