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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

#601

Post by booleandilemma »

racl101 wrote: post #101
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…

> Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money. Yes, that's how it usually works out. By the way, 'perqs' is a peculiar word. English is my second language but I'm used to seeing the word 'perks'.

That misspelling made me realize OP is not a native english speaker and he's trying to import the slave-driving work culture from whatever country he's from into the US.

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

#602

Post by zmmmmm »

logicchains wrote: post #558
badpun wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>When you're doing things at the scale of Boeing or Google, you need a lot of process Are you sure "need" is the right word here? Whatever Boeing's been doing recently hasn't been working very well for them or 737 Max passengers.

you really do

At large scale you can't hire enough competent people. And scale x low tolerance for error means you can't rely on humans even if they are competent. To fix that you basically have to introduce process. Things are checked and controlled at numerous points, using blanket processes that often don't make any sense for the specific scenario at hand but are needed for something superficially similar. People end up in hierarchies of approval. And that's without even considering regulatory compliance which often simply mandates things at a blanket level because micro-auditing each individual part of a big company is essentially an impossible proposition.

Engineers have the best chance because we have it in our hands to automate so much, but still, we just haven't figured out a better way to do it I think.

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

#603

Post by hef19898 »

ok123456 wrote: post #576
toss1 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also goes the other way, developers believing something is good while totally ignoring user feedback stating otherwise.

Admittesly so, you example so much more frequent.

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

#604

Post by dekhn »

soperj wrote: post #542
dekhn wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can answer this- at the time I joined GOogle, my goal was to use their resources to enhance my future career as a researcher. Google gave me access to world class hardware, software, and employees, which I could use in ways that never would have been available at any other location. It helped me build and achieve a system that academia would not have allowed, that I could not have done on my own time and money. But…

Is that what you ended up doing? Are you happy with how it turned out?

No, I would never return to academia now. i handle IT stuff for a large biotech, and looking at what scientist (both PIs and staff) have to put up with in academia, I don't think I'd be happy. Also, I just didn't boost my scientific creds enough to make a strong return.

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

#605

Post by lmarcos »

curiousgal wrote: post #443
aliasxneo wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do you look to your job for challenges. Why not simply look at it as a way to put food on the table and use the rest of your time and resources to seek out other challenges?

Usually, jobs with challenges pay more. I switch jobs if both of these conditions are met: a) good enough challenges, b) pays more than current job

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

#606

Post by jrh206 »

chasebank wrote: post #406
outworlder wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company Not really. Even they will carve out some niche and pretend (even to themselves) to be doing useful work. Middle managers love to schedule irrelevant meetings, but they will provide some business justification to themselves and to others. You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves. It'…

I probably know north of 30 people in sales, all in my somewhat close friend circle. They all brag about not working and making money. I think it's part of the sales culture. It's like a badge of honor to not work hard and make money. Hell, I don't blame them. Visit any golf course since covid and you'll see tee time and tee time stacked with people 'working from home'.

I usually assume that I can't take sales people at face value. If it's a badge of honour, they're incentivised to say that they don't work hard even if they are in fact actually working hard (this includes pretending to enjoy golf).

Having said that, 30 people is a lot of people, so I'm inclined to accept your assessment at face value.

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

#607

Post by iainmerrick »

onion2k wrote: post #403
colechristensen wrote: post #304

Earlier 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.

In addition to the good points made in other replies, there just aren’t many jobs like that available! “Something you actually care about”, I mean, rather than just “something that’s reasonably interesting to work on and not actively bad”.

And not many pay $300K.

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

#609

Post by kibwen »

yalogin wrote: post #565

The speed at which the tone of these is changing is amazing. Just a few weeks ago everyone said its getting impossible to hire and so they need to expand to other tech hubs, pay exorbitant salaries and offer lot of perks to attract candidates. All of a sudden now, just in the span of a few weeks, these executives started realizing their headcount is too high, productivity too low and that employees should self select…

> Doesn't this show incompetence on the executive part?

Sure, but since when has an executive ever faced consequences for incompetence?

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

#610

Post by pradn »

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…

As a Google employee, the profusion of chat apps is caused by:

* a genuine interest in trying new things and trying to see if they'd stick, without the baggage of established UX & customers - Allo/Duo are like this. I don't think people give the company enough credit for this.

* leadership downplaying the cost to the Google brand of shutting things down all the time. When brought up internally, execs shrug saying that we must be willing to try and see if things stick. This makes sense, but why are people particularly mad at Google for doing this? It must be for a good reason, not merely a meme.

* org silos. The org behind Google Docs / Chat has a different reason for a chat app (chat as a checkbox for enterprise office suite sales) than the one behind Google Maps (you can chat with restaurants or whatnot)

* a lack of a good "design dictator", meaning our chat apps, as with other apps, falter for lack of great UX and don't gain traction. The biggest example I can think of is how Google Chat has a loading spinner for the emoji picker - this simple thing should be lightning quick, but it took a year for someone to even prioritize it.

* faulty marketing / branding. Taking the simple, beloved "GChat", which was the dominant chat app between AIM and FB Messenger, and wringing it though "Hangouts" and "Allo/Duo" and "Chat" - that's no fun for users.

I think the lesson here is that people want a simple, hyper-fast app that gets out of their way and slowly adds nice things on top. I'd say the apps that are most fun and fast to use are Messenger and iMessage. (I have plenty of problems with both - unremovable stories on Messenger, lack of archiving chats and general slowness on iMessage).

All these are my opinions.

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