That's because we all have the equivalent of a TV-set on our office desks.
And Zuck is part of the problem here.
'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
571–580 of 1001 posts
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#572As 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…
What I noticed is it is not employee laziness but the FAANG companies have ton of dead weight in terms of future projects or project features which never get released. One of my co-workers was working on a feature which was shelved after working 2+ years on it. He lost motivation after that and coasted the rest of the time doing minimum work. I think FAANG companies have lot of PMs and top management who are as cluel…
Let me guess- the management that ultimately nuked the project paraded it around to get promoted before moving to another org and doing the same thing?
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't think of any work to be done for a Meta company that I'd find meaningful in any way. I imagine there are plenty of people who only figured this out for themselves after coming on board.
Creating a VR game that your friends and family can play? Adding an API to React that shapes the course of frontend development for millions of people?
> React
How come that FB is inventing the most sophisticated, cutting-edge web technologies, but at the same time their core products (Facebook app, Messenger & Instagram) are an absolute mess both in terms of performance and usability, not to mention a ton of bugs that haven't been fixed for years?
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I noticed is it is not employee laziness but the FAANG companies have ton of dead weight in terms of future projects or project features which never get released. One of my co-workers was working on a feature which was shelved after working 2+ years on it. He lost motivation after that and coasted the rest of the time doing minimum work. I think FAANG companies have lot of PMs and top management who are as cluel…
ah, yes...six years at MSFT, only one year working on code that eventually shipped
MSFT is hardly a FAANG
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#575Google 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…
The "while balancing on a ball while holding a cane in their mouth..." thing really resonates with me. Something that really surprised me at Google is how many core services had very thin test suites. I'm the kind of person that sees 100% code coverage and thinks "that's a good starting point". If I don't have that, I'll definitely break something important in 6 months. There were a lot of people at Google, though, t…
This rings true to me as well.
> The entire team could read a changelist and know exactly what the consequences are; they could just read the diff and run the complete test suite in their head. So there was no need for them to spend the time actually typing in a test suite.
I think testing at Google is excessively complicated for a myriad of reasons, and the unit-test-style "coverage" doesn't really map well to how things work together in a larger system. That system-wide thinking is where the "read a code change and know exactly what's wrong" intuition becomes invaluable. *Integration* testing is especially hard for some reason (probably complexity in the serving stack, at least for many teams I've worked with), so you end up getting this pattern where people get better at other production health stuff like canary systems, release management, etc.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#576Earlier 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…
Until your boss doesn't understand this concept and thinks your prototype is a finished system, even after explaining the fact it's just a demo that you made to help gather requirements time-and-time-again.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#577Quoth Zuck: > “And part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.” Wow. Just. Wow. Why not inject some more dysfunction into an already strained relationship with employees and callously but passively aggressively deal with a s…
I've been at places where I would love to hear the CEO say that. Being forced to work with poor performers, lazy people, and people who deliver poor quality results is frustrating and demoralizing. Those kinds of people can stick around for years, especially in good times when the company is making so much money that leadership doesn't need to care. Netflix is one of the few large companies that has a culture of cull…
Yes, a very powerful move of Zuckerberg.
Many people get offended by an aggressive CEO, but these CEO's end up with many more applications of ambitious candidates than they can employ.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. Would you take that over $300k to work 40 hours doing something you actually care about? I don't think I would.
Few people understand how much of a golden ticket this would be…
Do you have any aspirations to build something of your own at all, whether profitable or not? Well you’ve now been given 300k/year of funding without giving up any equity, with the only condition that you put in 4hrs/week for your “job”
Or maybe you like fixing houses? Same thing, etc etc
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#579As 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've seen companies where the leaders will only trust the opinions of the consultants. Even if they are the same conclusions of existing employees.
Hired talent isn't magical but for some businesses the consultant workers have an glow about them. The result is the business effectively making their own workforce redundant because they fear relying on them. And then morale tanks, and people leave.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#580Wasn't the whole point of showing off "Unlimited PTO" was the ability to run errands? Seems like that facade is dropping fast
Laughs. How does "Unlimited PTO" even work?
Mystery of the universe.
For me it's "Unlimited PTO" right up to being let go.