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Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

businessinsider.com

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Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#91

Post by cmrdporcupine »

ProfMeowsworth wrote: post #74
snide wrote: post #19

Maybe I'm missing a core piece from this article, but it leaves out quite a bit of agency from the employee. I never understand pieces like this that rail against employers, but also seem to cast the employees in such a helpless light. If you're stuck in a situation where you're not getting great feedback on what to work on, that seems like a great time to just build things and experiment on your own. Do it within th…

I’d expect from someone making 300kUSD a year to come up with their own ideas instead of spinning their wheels. Reading the article and some of the comments here, that seems to be an unpopular opinion, at least in tech.

Consider that companies like these can afford to pay $300k USD precisely to just spin their wheels, because they simply don't want them going elsewhere where they might compete...

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#92

Post by 11101010001100 »

ryoshu wrote: post #27
wahnfrieden wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managers usually fire team members rather than take the fall for the team.

Bad managers do that. Good managers accept accountability for the failures of their teams. Delegation makes a leader more accountable, not less.

If you need your job to live, and taking accountability means any non-zero probability of losing your job, would you take accountability? Of course it is easy to answer an hypothetical.

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#93

Post by cs702 »

The real culprit is actually make-busy work, the main use of human labor in bullshit jobs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_job

Producing new documents that get passed around in enterprises but which no human being reads may well be the most suitable application for LLMs.

If you feel like you're drowning in corporate bullshit, I hate to tell you: It looks like it's going to get worse.

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#94

Post by antipaul »

GreedClarifies wrote: post #75
eysquared wrote: post #32

I’m seeing a lot of comments that seem to point to first line management as the problem here. In my own anecdotal experience, I’ve seen a lot more “fake work” come from listless leadership that lacks a true vision for the product. That rolls down to Product Managers that can’t prioritize features and don’t really understand what they’re building or why. Ultimately this leads to engineers and members of the team worki…

“ The blame there lies solely in upper level leadership ” Not what I saw. Leadership was shockingly hard working. I have never seen a person who works harder than Calder at GOOG. Urs never stopped as well. Lower level VPs were always “on” as well. But VPs can’t do everything, they can’t peer into everyday lives of the lower levels, the orgs are too big. I think you want something superhuman from them. The problem in…

Were they "working hard" on individual-contributor-style work, or on management?

"They can’t peer into everyday lives of the lower levels" - I'd imagine this is exactly what management should work "hard at".

If you're not keen to do that, then maybe be a high-level IC?

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#95

Post by rs999gti »

juve1996 wrote: post #72
rs999gti wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what managers are bringing to the table What I noticed in my org, are the senior managers are the ones who get to talk to the business people and get to muddle the waters and do a lot of repetitive work. Sometimes things do not get done until a project manager or senior dev actually talks to the business person and gets the correct requirements out. I don't know why it is this way at my org, but the IT director doe…

> I don't know why it is this way at my org, but the IT director does not want to talk to PMs, Devs, or Analysts. He would rather have a top level circle of senior managers who insulate him from the actual work. To me this makes...sense. A general doesn't meet each individual field soldier, it's not feasible and doesn't scale. Not sure what kind of firms people on here work for, but most of my managers all the way up…

It makes sense to me with 3/5 senior managers. They came from working IT backgrounds as developers, network admins, or SAP developers/senior admins.

2/5 of these senior managers have zero IT experience either in role or outside of this company. Yet they make very technical decisions, which either need to be corrected or clarified.

Complaints to the director about this have fallen on deaf ears.

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#96

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #6
harimau777 wrote: post #2

Why do we expect to have good managers when we promote based on technical competency rather than leadership ability? Sure, a certain basic level of technical competency is needed, but after that management and development require different skills.

Do we? I was under the impression that we promote based on who games the promotion system best.

It’s easy to over-focus on gaming the promotion system because that’s the part that’s under your control. If someone comes to ask me for advice on how to get promoted, I can’t exactly say “try being smarter and delivering results faster”, even though those factors have a lot more impact than micro-optimizing the promotion review committees.

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#97

Post by antipaul »

JamesHinnek wrote: post #16

Just a reminder that lazy managers are the source of burnout for those who are under them. As a manager I can say, there is no easier job than just forwarding requests from directors directly to developers, not planning, and promising crazy deadlines to avoid conflict with higher management. If someone is being paid more, this person has to work more, I have seen so many people becoming managers just to actually avoi…

"Management" definitely seems easier, than having to do technical work, without proper accountability.

But it seems it's hard to hold management accountable.

For an IC such as an engineer, if you don't deliver code for the deadline or check-in, it's clear you haven't delivered.

But how do you judge the performance of managers? Oh, right, by the size of the "empire"...

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#98

Post by potatolicious »

endtime wrote: post #57
eysquared wrote: post #32

I’m seeing a lot of comments that seem to point to first line management as the problem here. In my own anecdotal experience, I’ve seen a lot more “fake work” come from listless leadership that lacks a true vision for the product. That rolls down to Product Managers that can’t prioritize features and don’t really understand what they’re building or why. Ultimately this leads to engineers and members of the team worki…

Part of why I left Google was poor leadership at the VP level. The org wasn't set up for success and - as far as I could tell - the vision was myopic and incoherent. VP performance was more or less opaque to me for most of my career there, but eventually I got senior and experienced enough to have a real opinion. Really liked my direct manager, but we were in it together, and there was nothing he could have done abou…

+1 on this. Spent 4 years at Google including spending time as a TLM. Left around 2020 so my impressions may be a bit out of date. I spent time in both the Geo and Search PAs, and IMO Google's biggest problem is listless senior leadership.

Google's orgs tend to lack product vision - there's a lot of abdication to front-line teams to ideate, come up with their own ideas, and ship features. My VP-levels were AFAIK only dimly aware of what we were shipping and largely seemed only concerned with the people-management side of the org. There was a lot of focus on morale, promo tracks, effective team composition, and other topics to the near-total exclusion of anything about the products we owned.

Contrast with where I am now where the VP-levels I meet with on a regular basis have nearly encyclopedic knowledge about the products they own. What a breath of fresh air.

The net result at Google was that we shipped a lot of features ourselves with little guidance from upper management. A lot of stuff would get killed opaquely because senior management changed their minds about some overarching strategy. The level of high-level turnover at Google didn't help matters - every incoming new VP or Director would wipe the slate clean for their own multi-year plan, and then get promoted/demoted out of the position before it went anywhere. Rinse and repeat with the next senior leader.

Senior leadership was also naive and credulous when it came to major new initiatives. To get any kind of product idea past leadership (to the extent they engaged in the product process) the PMs would have to project wild metrics that didn't stand up to one iota of scrutiny, but was frequently just accepted. I strongly suspect this is part of why Google kills so many projects - it demands insane metrics to approve major initiatives, PMs dutifully submit said ludicrous projections, upper management credulously accepts it, and then of course the real numbers are nowhere close, and whole projects die as a result.

I feel very firmly that Google as a company needs a reckoning at the top levels if it wants to be a company that has any product credibility.

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#99

Post by kevinventullo »

codesnik wrote: post #34
ryoshu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad managers do that. Good managers accept accountability for the failures of their teams. Delegation makes a leader more accountable, not less.

I'd love to see an example of such an accepted accountability at least once in my life.

Next time there’s a re-org, look around for managers who net lost reports, or even “decided to move on”.

Re: Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

#100

Post by kevinventullo »

i_k_k wrote: post #35
harimau777 wrote: post #2

Why do we expect to have good managers when we promote based on technical competency rather than leadership ability? Sure, a certain basic level of technical competency is needed, but after that management and development require different skills.

Another problem is that much of the industry sees getting into management as a promotion. This is something that Microsoft tried, at least, to get right: pay/rank was mostly divorced from job function.

Facebook and Google also have parallel tracks up to very senior levels.
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