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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

#161

Post by mgfist »

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…

Sure but the big faang stocks literally print more money than every other company (idk maybe aramco or berkshire can compete, but nothing else). So something's working there.

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

#162

Post by cma »

metadat wrote: post #46
itsdrewmiller wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working for current-or-potential competitors. I've heard this claimed but not sourced, and it doesn't really make sense - there are millions of software engineers out there and Google or Meta only employ a tiny fraction of them.

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…

Hording talent could be a leftover Chesterton's fence from when they had an illegal agreement between Google, Apple, etc. to not recruit each other's employees, but Facebook was never found to be part of that.

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

#163

Post by roflyear »

fdr wrote: post #77
nrmitchi wrote: post #30

I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working for current-or-potential competitors. Purposely over-hiring to prevent work being done elsewhere, and then claiming there is not enough work to be done, feels like it shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Hell, Google has created ~…

I personally don't believe this at all. I think it's almost entirely bureaucratic inertia, and a prisoner's dilemma among the management. One who bloats, floats.

This is the truth. Many managers are valued on how large they can grow their team. Also, if you have 10, 20, 100 direct reports .... how can they fire you?

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

#164

Post by roflyear »

api wrote: post #44
nrmitchi wrote: post #30

I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working for current-or-potential competitors. Purposely over-hiring to prevent work being done elsewhere, and then claiming there is not enough work to be done, feels like it shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Hell, Google has created ~…

> I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working for current-or-potential competitors. Wow, I've suspected this for many years and people told me it was nutty.

It is insane. If this was a strategy it would not be some top secret thing.

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

#165

Post by dekhn »

By the end of my employment at Google I was not working very hard. Probably a few hours a day, mostly doing whatever I felt like doing. My managers consistently gave me "meets expectations" regardless of how much I achieved or how hard I worked. However, any time there was an emergency related to my function, I had everything required to jump in, fix serious problems, and then get out of the way during the cleanup then contributing my bit to the postmortem. I could tell there were very few (fewer all the time) people who truly understand google prod, and in that sense, the company seems to be OK with paying top salaries to people who can prevent the company losing lots of money, or other critical prod issues.

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

#166

Post by quantumsequoia »

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…

I am very curious which company this can be, can't think of any companies in Redwood City that match that description

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

#167

Post by senttoschool »

moomoo11 wrote: post #147
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 p…

Totally agreed with you.

I found much greater joy going to the office everyday, working, meeting with my coworkers, doing things after work like grabbing a beer in the kitchen, etc. I really missed those things. Now I'm just staring at a screen for 10 hours a day. Two extra hours because I feel like I need to prove that I'm working while I'm remote.

It sucks. I feel way less energy and less passion for the company.

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

#168

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

nrmitchi wrote: post #30

I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working for current-or-potential competitors. Purposely over-hiring to prevent work being done elsewhere, and then claiming there is not enough work to be done, feels like it shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Hell, Google has created ~…

> If you wanted a clue that there wasn't enough work to go around (and that your promotion incentives may not be aligned with the business), this should have been the first clue.

There is definitely enough work to go around at Google, Amazon, and Apple.

Whether promotion makes any sense, and whether people are working on the things that actually move the needle is a different question.

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

#169

Post by esoterica »

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…

Unless you got paid more money than your lazy peers it seems like they got a much better deal than you did. Why are you bragging about working harder and getting treated worse than your coworkers?

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

#170

Post by z9znz »

mikhael28 wrote: post #21

Maybe it’s not the employees fault, but the management who hired them… or maybe it’s the fact that it takes forever to get anything done at FAANG nowadays. Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders.. but a great way of identifying people who can hack a process to secure maximal reward. Look, if I can ‘crack the coding intervi…

> when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod

That would be a surpreme waste of company money, and probably they have engineers working for them who are far better developers than they are.

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