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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

#141

Post by VirusNewbie »

metadat wrote: post #8

What's wrong with taking a break to run necessary errands or pick your kids up from school? As long as you're meeting performance expectations, it should be fine. Is Zuck really slaving away at his desk 9-5 everyday? I don't think so. Sounds like another case of "One rule for thee and another for me"

I agree 100%. However, if someone schedules a meeting for work hours and 50% of the people can't make it because they are grocery shopping I can understand the frustration. These aren't low paid employees. Meta is paying 300k+ for mid level engineers.

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

#142

Post by Salgat »

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…

A lot of companies use those perks as an excuse to get their workers to stick around an extra 4+ hours at the office. Of course this doesn't actually help productivity (they simply drag their day and work out longer), but to simple minded managers it sure seems like a huge win.

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

#143

Post by rockbruno »

This is the standard for any FAANG company.

There are multiple reasons why this is the case, with over-hiring being the one that annoys the most. I can't understand why some of these companies keep hiring several hundred engineers every year to work on shitty stuff nobody asked for.

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

#144

Post by potatolicious »

clusterhacks wrote: post #131
potatolicious wrote: post #111

It's frustrating that this thread seems to be focused so heavily on people sitting around resting and vesting. Having been inside Google (and multiple other FAANGs) this is generally untrue, and focusing on this element of the problem misses a much larger productivity problem: Most engineers at Google aren't "sitting around doing nothing", they are very busy shipping projects that do not matter. Their days are filled…

>Their days are filled with doing work that will not move the needle on any metric that matters to the company This, 100%. I think this simple observation reverberates across the entire software engineering field and at many (most?) non-FAANG companies as well. I am not confident there is a real solution to the problem of making sure people only work on things that matter. Medium to small organizations seem to strugg…

Yeah, I think it's massively under-discussed that product management quality across the industry is generally very poor.

There are multiple manifestations of this but the main factors IMO are: how involved is management in the product? How good is your product definition process and talent?

For big companies the problem tends to be more the former. Product management talent tends to be solid, but upper management is checked out of the process and instead overly focused on non-product areas of the company. Product management functions (PMs + engineers) tend to be flying alone with low external guidance.

For small companies the problem tends to be the latter. Product management is deeply enmeshed with upper management (because what else would upper management be doing at that scale?) but they are bad at it.

Both result in shipping the wrong product. For startups shipping the wrong product is deadly, but for large profitable companies they can keep shipping bad product for years. IMO this is where Google is at - they fundamentally do not have the institutional capacity to ship great product.

My impression (which is a few years old now since I left Goog) is that management understands the problem exists, but seem to believe that they can fix it by iterating on the product management process, but in a way that does not require SVPs and VPs to directly engage with product. I fundamentally disagree with this premise - it is not possible to ship product in a coherent manner with a surface area this large unless the most senior levels of management directly engage with product management.

And ultimately poor product definition and prioritization is an order of magnitude greater source of low labor productivity than any kind of individual-level slackage.

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

#145

Post by Ekaros »

Work is not equally distributed. I'm sure there is plenty of Engineers everywhere that have way too much on their plates. And on other hand there is also plenty of those who do little or have little to do.

And then there is question of how much of the work is actually even needed. Specially in companies with too much money.

Also why should all employees attend to the meetings? Certainly to some, but it clearly is job that can afford certain level of flexibility in most teams.

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

#147

Post by moomoo11 »

senttoschool wrote: post #11

This is inherently a problem with full-remote or hybrid work. People will point to "studies" showing how remote work improves productivity. Maybe it did initially but eventually, people will check out, feeling isolated, feeling less motivated. Some people who worked remotely before covid swears that it helped their productivity. But these people are biased because they were probably one of the few who were discipline…

I’d agree with this. Anecdotally speaking I have never met anyone on my team and I honestly can say that I feel like I’m a mercenary whose job is to just destroy tickets and keep a lookout at our monitoring. It feels so impersonal and is it really my fault or my colleagues that they don’t feel as invested?

Messing with k8s, looking at logs, or occasionally hopping into a zoom to discuss architecture for an upcoming project that I don’t find any interest in beyond ensuring the stock goes up, it feels like I’m a cog and I just do things and somehow we keep going.

Three years ago I would be super engaged and going to conferences to show off our latest work. Maybe it’s the combination of doing boring (to me) infrastructure and dev ops work along with zoom culture. Back in the day I was a mobile application developer so that was quite a different lifestyle compared to this. Idk man, I’m doing my best to do a good job but honestly it is the worst experience of my life so far. I’ve been spending my time outside of work in evenings and weekends hacking away on side projects. They give me far greater joy, which I used to find previously at work.

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

#148

Post by pipeline_peak »

I wonder if Zuckerberg realizes how undesirable of a place to work he’s creating, or there’s some big picture I’m not getting.

Either way, a lot of silicon valley roles outside of SWE are absolute fluff. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s now becoming increasingly obvious as he can no longer afford it.

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

#149

Post by nvarsj »

yuan43 wrote: post #32

> To be sure, the Covid-induced pandemic saw Meta embark on a massive hiring spree, growing its number of full-time staff from 48,000 at the end of 2019 to more than 77,800 — a 62 per cent jump. But now the firm must “prioritise more ruthlessly” and “operate leaner, meaner, better executing teams,” Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox wrote in a memo, which appeared on the company’s internal discussion forum Workplac…

It already recalibrated, didn't it? Much of that compensation is stock - of which its value dropped 50% for Meta.

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

#150

Post by YmiYugy »

itsdrewmiller wrote: post #52
metadat wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are mistaken. 100,000 of the best out of a pool of approximately 10 million professional software engineers worldwide is a sizeable portion. Additionally, not all 10 million are even close to being up to BigCorps peculiar standards (perhaps the standard is "someone competent enough that they could potentially build a competing product line"). Goog, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Oracle.. all have huge rosters and it adds u…

Closer to (edit: 13mm professional) developers - https://www.future-processing.com/blog/how-many-developers-a... Most of those companies have less than 30k SWEs, not 100k - https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1527004655540133888?... (feel free to google the others) So for each company they represent at most around (edit: 0.3%) of all professional devs, and presumably the "overhired for anti-competitive reasons" p…

I think it's plausible that the superfluous hirings are caused by hirings of key individuals. It's quite common for these big tech companies to poach each others department heads and other key personnel. This can cause significant damage to a company so can be an attractive tactic. The downside is that in order to retain these people you don't just have to pay them a lot of money you also have to give them big projects and resources to implement them, i.e. lot's of people get hired. This can a problem when these projects aren't supported by the wider company but are just someones pet project.
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