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

This!

Far too often middle managers are incentivized to build the largest team possible.

While the message from the top may be "lean and mean" but you compensate middle managers based on team size...

Perverse incentive certainly comes to mind.

The translation is a legitimate skill that should not be underestimated. Especially when you add in that there ought to be flow the other way as well. As an engineer, I want to be involved early in the business processes, because as we all know sometimes business people assume that very hard things are easy, but sometimes there is something I can offer them that they don't have any idea is easy. It's best to work through the cost/benefit process together, rather than the business people huddling in a corner before flinging over a set of requirements to engineering as Holy Writ.

(Kinda struggling with that now; I'm peripherally involved in a project with big monetary implications. The "solution" is to build a big system as quickly as possible and run around making super-high-priority requests across a whole lot of teams, almost all of which need to be in place before any value is obtained, and which consequently is behind schedule and dragging out. On the other hand, a week, some database queries, and a reasonable amount of manual labor could get about 50-75% of the value now. But none of the project managers are interested in that fact, which frankly boggles my mind. I'm not sure if they just don't understand what I'm saying, or are just so stuck on the solution they designed that they've lost all ability to think outside it. One thing I have confirmed is that it isn't just that I don't have a full picture of the problem, which is the usual situation; I'm quite confident what I'm thinking would work.)

However, while that skill is not necessarily something you need a graduate degree for and 20 years dedicated experience, and engineers can pick it up, there are engineers who don't have it yet, or even won't pick it up because they despise it. The list of skills required to be an engineer is already pretty long, requiring this to be added as well raises the bar even higher.

Allowing? They've encouraged it by creating a system where there is very little relationship between what gets you promoted and what is good for your business unit. That's why you have 13 failed exciting messaging apps, all of which got lots of ICs promoted, instead of 1 successful boring messaging app that just kept getting maintained in a wise manner, getting very few people promoted.

Blaming the employees smells like a smokescreen for poor management IMO.

Who's to blame for lowered employee productivity: employees who are disconnecting from work more to avoid burnout thanks to corporate BS like paperwork and constant report filing? Or the managers who impose those requirements on employees but fail to empower the individual contributors beneath them in the org chart?

I recently left a large-medium sized tech company that failed to address massive structural issues in my department for years. It's not like these were a secret -- I brought them up constantly in my 1on1s, and tried to brainstorm solutions with my management chain.

When I left, the head honcho begged me to stay, and when I brought up those issues... told me he had no idea that was such a problem! But also refused to address it because he had to "gather information" about the issue.

I'm much happier at a smaller company without so much bureaucracy. At some point, managers are so disconnected from their underlings that they are completely incapable of improving work conditions. And when you need high-level approval to make a big decision... more often than not, the big decision just never gets made.

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

Yeah you lazy fucks, how dare you work so little that we only have an annual NET INCOME of 39B (39B for Meta, 76B for Alphabet).