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VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

businessinsider.com

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Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#101

Post by spamizbad »

jvanderbot wrote: post #38

There's a few types of "non workers" I've encountered, that for all extents and purposes are worthless .... until they very much aren't. 1. "former" engineers and non-specialists - they tend to sit in meetings, try to sound important, pontificate about "better ways" but never seem to do real work. Then when SHTF they seem to have all the knowledge to make the problem go away super fast. Maybe SHTF never happens to yo…

This has largely been my experience. Obviously, there are people in these roles that can be "dead weight" just like any other job, but overall the net contribution is beneficial.

I feel like the tech industry has spend the last year or so over-correcting and is now burning the furniture to heat the cabin. Slashing headcount is fine if you're also willing to scale back the things that headcount was expected to build/maintain. Now you have teams that are stretched thin just keeping the lights on. It's not an environment that's going to be conducive to innovation.

The only positive I see in all this is that many of these big companies are now much more vulnerable to competition. Unfortunately I feel like the appetite to take on the big guys just isn't there right now - it's definitely a muscle that's atrophied in the startup space over the last decade.

Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#102

Post by srj »

TideAd wrote: post #24

> "I don't think it's crazy to believe that half the white-collar staff at Google probably does no real work," he said. "The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade, and all that money could have been returned to shareholders who have retirement accounts." So, he doesn't really understand Google's dysfunction and is just guessing at the causes?

Yeah for all the possible criticism of Google he's seriously arguing it's that there's too much speculative R&D? Generally companies become irrelevant by trying to hold onto their cash cow and not trying to reinvent / find new revenue streams.

I can think of ways I would have approached some specific instances differently (e.g Waymo), but the existence of speculative projects isn't evidence of waste. The specific callout of retirement accounts is strange too. I'm sure many institutional investors are backed by 401ks but is that actually representative? As a wealthy investor I'm guessing he's thinking more about himself and his dividend than other's retirement accounts.

Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#103

Post by nullc »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #50
jvanderbot wrote: post #38

There's a few types of "non workers" I've encountered, that for all extents and purposes are worthless .... until they very much aren't. 1. "former" engineers and non-specialists - they tend to sit in meetings, try to sound important, pontificate about "better ways" but never seem to do real work. Then when SHTF they seem to have all the knowledge to make the problem go away super fast. Maybe SHTF never happens to yo…

They're very much like firefighters. Firefighters spend the vast majority of their working hours either literally doing nothing or else doing somewhat pointless make work, like washing the fire truck. If your firefighters are spending more than ~10% of their time doing their actual job, then the odds of them needing to be in two places at once reaches unacceptable levels. Old fashioned secretaries are similar, if les…

When I worked at a muni the firefighters seemed to have a knack for setting the firestations on fire.

That might also fit into your model of corporate participation pretty well.

Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#104

Post by roncesvalles »

TideAd wrote: post #24

> "I don't think it's crazy to believe that half the white-collar staff at Google probably does no real work," he said. "The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade, and all that money could have been returned to shareholders who have retirement accounts." So, he doesn't really understand Google's dysfunction and is just guessing at the causes?

>The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade

Also, the supreme irony of a VC saying this.

Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#105

Post by dfadsadsf »

bdcravens wrote: post #36

I know this is an against the grain (for HN at least) take, but I don't disagree. If you're not working on, or supporting, the company's product, you MAY have a BS job. Good example: Twitter, which functioned well after layoffs of 80% or so (the owner's persona has damaged the revenue and reputation extensively, but the product itself has been fine). They're maybe the boldest, but hardly the only company in the past…

Twitter is not great example because revenue collapsed while rest of the industry revenue is up 20% and Meta revenue is up 35%. Besides his personal antics, he fired a lot of sales, safety/trust and support people. He also did it in very public way which worried brands a lot. It’s unclear what contributed the most but final result is not great.

Very few people work on weekend which tells you you need way less people to keep lights on - so keeping lights on with 20% of eng is not surprising.

Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#106

Post by justinclift »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #59
bryanlarsen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're very much like firefighters. Firefighters spend the vast majority of their working hours either literally doing nothing or else doing somewhat pointless make work, like washing the fire truck. If your firefighters are spending more than ~10% of their time doing their actual job, then the odds of them needing to be in two places at once reaches unacceptable levels. Old fashioned secretaries are similar, if les…

> If your firefighters are spending more than ~10% of their time doing their actual job Firefighters do a lot more than just fight fires.

Cats up trees aren't just a meme, right? :)

Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#107

Post by hot_gril »

candiodari wrote: post #94
hot_gril wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With no incoming work, we SWEs will make ourselves "100% utilized" just rearranging things. We might be sincerely trying to clean up the software, but still, it'll never end until you give us a real task.

And the alternative is to have managers who do nothing but rearrange the chairs in the company. Which doesn't even achieve good uptime or code cleanup, plus, in the case that your company does find something to do, those engineers CAN do it. The managers can't.

I've heard they're laying off managers too.

Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#108

Post by sudosysgen »

nzzn wrote: post #49
pseudosavant wrote: post #5

Whereas VC and private equity staff all "work"...

VC’s, hedge funds, etc. all run lean—none have 10k+ employees or anything close. Employees are under a much brighter spotlight by the owners all the time. Groups might lose focus for an interval but once they their score is down it’s goodbye & the score is P&L calculated in very short intervals.

Not 10k+, but a lot of leading hedge funds, especially tech focused ones, have 2-3k employees with a similar to lower revenue/employee to big tech. Doesn't seem to me that they run much leaner.

Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#109

Post by eureka-belief »

jvanderbot wrote: post #38

There's a few types of "non workers" I've encountered, that for all extents and purposes are worthless .... until they very much aren't. 1. "former" engineers and non-specialists - they tend to sit in meetings, try to sound important, pontificate about "better ways" but never seem to do real work. Then when SHTF they seem to have all the knowledge to make the problem go away super fast. Maybe SHTF never happens to yo…

I agree that these archetypes exist generally speaking. And any team will inevitably have a certain degree of waste. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not very important for director level and above management to continually be looking for ways to restructure the system so that skilled and motivated employees can do their magic without BS. When I look back on my career, there were definitely some teams that were much better at this than others and it seemed to be correlated with how much original critical thinking managers were doing, as opposed to just executing industry playbooks by rote. It’s easier to do this on small teams. Harder to do this at scale. But that’s the game to be played even if it’s difficult.

Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#110

Post by StuntPope »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #92

Advertising-supported nerds using the media to attack each other. The person making this coment about "BS jobs" is the one who started EasyDNS and OpenDNS and tried to compete with the pre-Chrome "Google toolbar" and later Chrome and eventually the "omnibox" for the privilege of injecting ads into the "user experience", and/or collecting data to support ad services. Google, with its control over being "default search…

easyDNS and OpenDNS have completely different founders. You are probably confused with EveryDNS - was founded by the same person who started OpenDNS.
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