Maybe zuck expected 10x engineers
Instead he added 10 times the amount of 1x engineers.
'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
201–210 of 1001 posts
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#202Earlier 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…
Well, Google's and Facebooks definition of 'the best' engineers. I don't think grinding leetcode for an interview is the best indicator of a good engineer, and graduating from a prestigious university is not always an indicator either. imho it seems like the best engineers now are the ones doing their own thing outside of the large companies, or are at smaller startups.
> Well, Google's and Facebooks definition of 'the best' engineers. don't think grinding leetcode for an interview is the best indicator of a good engineer
Their employees are also the subset of those who can get to a location where they have offices and have the relevant work permits. Those who do not object to and specifically want to work at those companies. Those who find their technical challenges of interest. Those who do not already have a satisfactory job elsewhere and are actually in the market for a job.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
This is exactly the mindset of failure. The team standup has 10x more priority than some dumb basketball league
Show me the studies on the effectiveness of a daily 10 min standup and I’d be happy to listen. Otherwise I’d be happy to make up some other rituals that sound good on paper and then rationalize them with buzzwords.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#204A haircut (10-20%?) would be good for all involved. There are great employees and there are slackers in all fields.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#205> Zuckerberg noticed that it was getting harder to get all the employees to attend a meeting as they were sometimes taking time out in a day for personal work. > “There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have. [We need to] create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer-focused, Ohhh! Two declarations based in…
Honestly, I'd be pissed too if I was Zuck. I'm a goddamn billionaire - if I invite you to the meeting, idgaf what you are doing unless someone died - get on this goddamn Zoom call. And even then, they better have been important! Dogs, cats, idgaf, get on this goddamn Zoom call! Then, because I'm a genius who singlehandedly started Facebook by myself, I extrapolate this thought to its logical extreme and start intimid…
That's a great reason why Meta employees who are content with making, oh, a nice $200k a year are in a position of wonderful power.
Even if Zuck personally fires you, you can go get a job elsewhere in a week, making a comparable amount of money. And you don't need demean yourself for some billionare who wants you to dance because he says so.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#206Now they notice:0 Weren't they they ones responsible for hiring all those employees? It never ceases to amaze how productivity is mis-measured. When the company is making money hand over fist there are never enough people. When the macro economy changes somehow there are way too many employees. I guess it all sounds better than just saying we never really cared about you as people. Employees are a means to and ends. The ends are changing so must the means:)
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#207A reasonable test of 'productivity': if you fire large swaths of employees and 'productivity' remains the same, was it a failure of management, or of the employees?
I'm just kidding. Measuring employee 'productivity' is one of the biggest hand-waving magical misdirection performances in business. The mistake is employees think it means 'working hard' or 'smart', or whatever. The truth is it doesn't really mean anything, but too many people are heavily invested in it being a thing.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#208Maybe 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…
> Look, if I can ‘crack the coding interview’, then I can certainly crack ‘how to do as little work as possible and stack paper to the ceiling while my stock vests’. What's worse, many of the jaded people going through the motions probably started out gung-ho but then got frustrated to see how little impact they were really able to have and eventually became checked out. These kinds of things are self fulfilling prop…
Motivation is finite. By the time you get the through red tape to get approvals, permissions, and a million of other things, you have nothing left in the tank to code.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#209Who would be motivated to work hard for Zuckerberg? He seems like a total jerk who has only made society worse. I'd do the bare minimum for him.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#210Glad 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 work for a large company (2 letter name) that has none of those perks, and never really did (at least at most sites). I just perceive the company as being cheap rather than forward looking.
So you work for Baskin Robbins :-)
https://designbro.com/blog/inspiration/epic-two-letter-logos...