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

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

#141
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.

One doesn't get paid $300k/year to fuck around and choose what you work on yourself. Very often you will get punished for making management decisions above your pay grade at this level.

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly wouldn't dispute the existence of those managers- I'm thankful to have had some good managers who go to bat for their direct reports.

You had managers who "took the fall" for the team? The thread is about accepting blame and sacrifice, not about advocating for people under you

> You had managers who "took the fall" for the team?

Correct. In addition, sometimes advocating for those under you is a sacrificial act, because you're putting your reputation on the line.

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

#143
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded and thirded. Nothing is more soul draining then doing nothing for 8 hours a day, the idea that devs are lazy and don't want to code is like the antithesis of our whole profession. Most of us do it in our free time. When you actually have a real actionable thing to work on that gives the line workers meaningful "wins" the management pyramid flips and they all become "servant managers" trying to direct the exc…

>Laziness is the natural response to the work you're doing not mattering There's a lot of meaningful tech work out there that pays way less than Google. Why don't the Googlers bored from idling take it?

For the same reason lots of people don't move and change jobs at the drop of a hat: responsibilities outside work. Kids in school, a mortgage, debts, friends, community participation. Once your lifestyle has lined up with a certain pay scale, cutting back is difficult. Upending the lives of your family to go for a more meaningful job that pays ways less? It happens. It's not pretty.

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

#144

I subscribe to that. I left my previous job just after two months because I was put into a chair as a developer and then ... nothing for two months. I literally got paid to do nothing. Manager? Product Manager? Team leader? They were all pretending that newly hired people does not exist. But they went great lengths to poach me from a previous job, to do nothing? I am perplexed by this behavior until today. I have qui…

I got poached from a job once to a) punish a manager in a different department, and to b) serve as a check on someone else who the new manager didn't trust. People can just use you and discard you. Our industry is awful right now.

I'm glad you got out and started your own company. Good for you.

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

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Laziness is the natural response to the work you're doing not mattering There's a lot of meaningful tech work out there that pays way less than Google. Why don't the Googlers bored from idling take it?

For the same reason lots of people don't move and change jobs at the drop of a hat: responsibilities outside work. Kids in school, a mortgage, debts, friends, community participation. Once your lifestyle has lined up with a certain pay scale, cutting back is difficult. Upending the lives of your family to go for a more meaningful job that pays ways less? It happens. It's not pretty.

I wasn't only referring to just people who are tied down to one place and one lifestyle. There's plenty of tech people who are in a stage of their lives when they are easily mobile and still live a frugal lifestyle, yet almost everyone chooses the same wealthy and least ethical companies, while complaining their jobs are boring and unethical.

Not judging people who take well paying jobs at unethical companies, but they should at least stop moaning about it. Some people I know would suck d*ck behind a Wendy's to get paid FAANG money and be bored for 8h/day instead of do backbreaking work for peanuts.

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

#146
Nothing for an engineer is more satisfying than seeing your code be used to solve real problems for customers. Positive (and negative) feedback from people actually using the product you built is the lifeblood of those who really care about making a difference.

Conversely, there is nothing more 'soul-sucking' than to realize that something you have devoted months or years of work, effort, and thought into is thrown in the dustbin because there was just no business support for it. This can happen when your company is bought out by a competitor just so they could kill your project. This can happen because a SVP decided on a whim to suddenly change the whole direction of the company. It can happen because someone in the management chain just doesn't have a clue what they are doing.

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

#147

This is sloppy and lazy in its generalizations from Google and Amazon to "tech companies" in general. They should really say something like "monopolistic tech behemoths that are in the top 10 of the S&P 500". I've worked in tech before, during, and after the hiring boom; but not for any of these companies. I have seen very little of the sort of make-work that is described in the article. Sure, there is no guarantee t…

I too have worked in tech before, during, and after the hiring boom; but not for any of these companies. I have seen very much of the sort of make-work that is described in the article.

It seems our anecdotes might cancel each other out.

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had managers who "took the fall" for the team? The thread is about accepting blame and sacrifice, not about advocating for people under you

> You had managers who "took the fall" for the team? Correct. In addition, sometimes advocating for those under you is a sacrificial act, because you're putting your reputation on the line.

Sounds performative rather than anything real at stake. Managers are expected to lay down rhetoric about accountability and contextualizing their team's failure.

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

#149
post #56

Middle management (above first line manager) in large organizations is hard to do well. I think it is difficult to understand if you have never done it, and it is even difficult to articulate why. I find it much much harder than working as an engineer or Eng Mgr. Fundamentally, I think it is an incentive and systematic issue: what is expected of middle managers, and incentivized, requires almost complete dedication t…

What is the gestalt of middle management that makes things worse?

It seems like there's a negative synergy that develops whenever a company grows large enough to need 2-3 layers of middle management.

I expect that it has multiple causes, but several of them are various kinds of lack of accountability. Imbalances where risk of action or inaction rewards/punishes a manager individually, while the negative consequences socialize to the team or the company. Lack of accountability (both positive and negative) if something isn't changed. Lower rewards for positive synergy (i.e. cooperating with other teams) than for defecting (working on your own thing only).

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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…

The thing is, I don't think that the basic idea there—senior management being primarily concerned with making the organization work well for the people in it, with the people further down the ladder being the ones directly in charge of the products—is inherently a bad or unworkable one. It just requires the senior leadership to openly acknowledge that it means they don't own the products , and shouldn't be the ones m…

I pretty fundamentally disagree, though of course I don't think your argument is unreasonable for a smaller product.

For companies where products are relatively small and largely disconnected from one another I think your approach can work - senior leadership is largely concerned about maintaining the organization while explicitly delegating product ownership to team leads below.

The problem is that this falls part really quickly once the products reach a certain feature scale, and in fact attempts to do this is IMO responsible for a lot of the product incoherency in a company like Google.

For example, when I was there, there were multiple features that launched on Android Maps but never on iOS Maps. This was an example of shipping the org chart - the Android Maps team came up with the feature and shipped it, and the iOS team was separate and uninvolved.

Of course shipping one's org chart is not an exclusively Google problem and is very common - but it's a fundamental consequence of delegating product ownership downwards. The ownership of the Android and iOS apps were necessarily separate because of the sheer size of these products and their teams, and there is no effective way to coordinate between them.

Sure, theoretically everyone can play nicely and talk to each other and sell each other on how great of a feature it is - but realistically that just doesn't work. The coordination overhead between teams when there is no high-level forcing function is extreme and grinds work to a halt. In reality what you need is a VP or Director-level to say "we need this on both OSes, prioritize shipping this feature on both ends".

And that... definitionally breaks the notion of downward product delegation.

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