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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

#171

Post by Rayhem »

lordleft wrote: post #42

I'm a bit worried that this will trigger some kind of move to measure productivity in increasingly crude ways -- i.e. exhaustive, invasive telemetry that tracks every mouse click and keypress.

Technical people often believe using more/new tools will solve people problems. "If only we could measure more by better decomposing tasks in Jira, then we'd know how to be more efficient! If only we could add micro-specific tags to or documentation, then anyone can search for what they want and find the resource! We just need to put every single process anyone has ever heard of into confluence; then anyone can look them up and follow them!"

Tools don't solve people problems because at the scale of people problems everyone has a different philosophy about the tool (and the problem). Communication is what solves people problems.

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

#172

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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 remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money.

Your standup meeting could've been an email. Their immovable basketball game (quality of life) is far more important than a meeting that can happen at any time - and probably doesn't even need to exist in the first place.

Other than that, your points stand.

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

#173

Post by FactualActuals »

Ekaros wrote: post #145

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…

I am running into this problem where I currently work. I'm not a rockstar developer but I can finish my tasks pretty quickly. But when management won't allow me to help take over some tasks to alleviate my coworker's growing backlog, I can't do anything but twiddle my thumbs waiting for more tasks.

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

#174

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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."

It's widely known among the sort of person who tends to believe in conspiracy theories, I suppose. The oppressive bureaucracy and misaligned incentives that allow senior leaders to destructively compete among themselves is more than enough to explain why ill-conceived and ill-run projects are common at FAANG-level megacorporations without resorting to making things up.

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

#175

Post by subsubzero »

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…

Where are you getting the 10M number? Just curious not a criticism. I was thinking it would be around half of that(5M), with a tenth decent enough to work at most tech companies 500k, I think the bay area has 1M tech workers so half of them are engineers and thats one of the largest cluster of engineering on the planet.

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

#176

Post by bdcravens »

This may not apply to Facebook necessarily, but for many companies, look at their GitHub accounts. So many companies have so many side projects not related to their core business. Hand-waving it away as “attracting developers” can only go so far if you’re not massively profitable.

I wonder how many of us built a large part of careers atop of projects paid for by others? When that spending tightens up, I wonder what the overall picture will look like then.

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

#177

Post by Ferrotin »

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 ~…

That’s just something people said on the internet with no sound basis for it.

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

#178

Post by treis »

smueller1234 wrote: post #159
api wrote: post #44

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. Wow, I've suspected this for many years and people told me it was nutty.

That's because it is. It makes no sense whatsoever to think that could be a deliberate strategy. Managers are happy when they get their hands on a new role to hire into because they all have more projects than they (think that they) can deliver at good quality with the people they have.

It doesn't even make a little sense. Giving a bunch of money and free time to someone makes it easier for them to start a company. Not harder.

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

#179

Post by TheCoelacanth »

gretch wrote: post #137
buildbot wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would they get that comparable info from other companies? Do the CEOs all have a secret slack channel were Satya is bragging that one MS dev equals 3 googles programmers?

All you have to do is take the company's rev/profit and divide it by the number of employees (factoring in how much you pay an employee) So yeah if MSFT can make 3 billion dollars with 1000 engineers, and Google makes 1 billion dollars with 1000 engineers, then 1 MSFT eng is worth 3 of Googles (simplified - obv business involves sales, marketing, etc)

That's not a measure of how much work engineers are doing. It's a measure of how effective the company is at making money from the work their engineers are doing.
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