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Google wants employees to move faster

cnbc.com

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Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#31

Post by Rinzler89 »

tyingq wrote: post #28
Rinzler89 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we continue to make 10s of millions a year while you miss your child's birthday Out of curiosity, are there many Googlers out there the have to miss their kids' birthday? Because from all the stories and anecdotes from Google employees, there's not much pressure at Google for overtime, quite the contrary, employees who want to work like crazy to "change the world" can do it, but most employees choose to go to Google…

In the story, he calls out a team working 120 hours a week, after first ramping to 100 hours/week for a while...in what seems like a example he's wanting people to follow.

Oh for sure, there are always some, like the original Android team who was working like crazy to catch up to Apple after they unveiled their first iPhone, but Google is such a big and diverse company now with several monopolist positions, I doubt all teams at Google are in wartime mode crunching like crazy like their Gemini team is.

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#32

Post by paxys »

rdtsc wrote: post #18

> Raghavan clarified that the failure in image generation wasn’t due to a lack of effort. > “I want to be clear, this wasn’t some case of somebody slacking off and dropping the ball,” he said. So what is he saying then? Is he indicating they were sabotaged on purpose or that stuff just happened randomly - “an algorithm error”?

"Our problems aren't due to lack of effort. But you all have to put in more time and effort to fix our problems."

Makes perfect sense.

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#33

Post by hawkice »

frob wrote: post #23

> "He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner" Either Prabhakar Raghavan is abusing his employees or spewing bullshit. Given that working 120 hours in a week is working 17 hours a day, I'm calling bullshit. But even if it's not, the idea that a multi-billion company like Google wants their employees to "step up" and work 17 hour…

It's probably also worth clarifying that workload necessarily excludes anyone who observes the Sabbath.

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#34

Post by khendron »

paxys wrote: post #6

Meaningless executive speak. How should employees move faster exactly? Unless you are sharing exact guidelines, cutting down pointless projects and reducing work load, removing red tape etc. how do you expect everyone to magically ship quicker? If startups are beating you at your game with a tiny fraction of the employees, funding and resources, it should be obvious that the number of hours put into the job isn't the…

This reminds me of the time at my work when the CTO gathered all the devs together, and told us "We have to innovate more". With no real further instructions. He even showed us a graph (without any numbers) that had Profit on the Y axis and Innovation on the X axis, with line line going up to the right.

When asked when we were supposed to work on this innovation, he told us it was important to still work on our current projects, but do it more innovatively. When pressed about what this actually meant, he just showed us the graph again.

I resigned shortly after.

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#35

Post by aikinai »

rdtsc wrote: post #18

> Raghavan clarified that the failure in image generation wasn’t due to a lack of effort. > “I want to be clear, this wasn’t some case of somebody slacking off and dropping the ball,” he said. So what is he saying then? Is he indicating they were sabotaged on purpose or that stuff just happened randomly - “an algorithm error”?

The article drops that quote with no context, but presumably he's admitting in this case it was an error of judgement/design, not execution.

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#36

Post by jinushaun »

Executives need to realize that startups move faster not because they work more hours. They move faster because there is less red tape, less bureaucracy and less process than large companies. Individual employees have more freedom to make their own choices, instead of being restrained by top down OKRs.

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#37

Post by philk10 »

frob wrote: post #23

> "He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner" Either Prabhakar Raghavan is abusing his employees or spewing bullshit. Given that working 120 hours in a week is working 17 hours a day, I'm calling bullshit. But even if it's not, the idea that a multi-billion company like Google wants their employees to "step up" and work 17 hour…

"Wearing a hoodie with the words “We use Math” " - well, use Math to work out that people working 100-120 hours a week is not productive

Re: Google wants employees to move faster

#38

Post by CuriouslyC »

frob wrote: post #23

> "He said they’ve stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to correct Google’s image recognition tool in a timely manner" Either Prabhakar Raghavan is abusing his employees or spewing bullshit. Given that working 120 hours in a week is working 17 hours a day, I'm calling bullshit. But even if it's not, the idea that a multi-billion company like Google wants their employees to "step up" and work 17 hour…

Prabhakar has been enabled by Sundar at every step. The two are in alignment. If you are disgusted by Prabhakar, you should be disgusted by Sundar too, he has just as much contempt for the workers, he just hides his cards better.
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