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VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
31–40 of 113 posts
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#32This attitude is why private equity is destroying US companies. The hubris and ignorance of investors routinely gets translated into a cull of workers whose jobs they don't understand, leaving behind "lean" organizations that retain only whatever bits are currently most profitable but are less functional, resilient, sustainable, and humane.
Investors routinely make big mistakes, but they also routinely get wiped out and replaced by someone with a more long-term vision.
Think how much money all the day-traders put together make (probably less than zero) versus someone like Warren Buffett (a lot more than zero!), or the many successful owner-operated or founder-owned companies out there.
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#33This attitude is why private equity is destroying US companies. The hubris and ignorance of investors routinely gets translated into a cull of workers whose jobs they don't understand, leaving behind "lean" organizations that retain only whatever bits are currently most profitable but are less functional, resilient, sustainable, and humane.
I would agree, except for the fact that I read Graeber's Bullshit Jobs and was quite convinced by his research showing that anything between 15-50% of employees across many surveys believe that their role is useless.
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#34One time I saw a high-paid google engineer stocking a fridge in the hallway with drinks and snacks. A nearby office with accountants in it also saw this, and when I mentioned it they took it upon themselves to calculate exactly how much money it was costing the company for him to do that. It was $250/hr.
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#35Pure ragebait. Ignore this clown VC and move on.
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#36I know this is an against the grain (for HN at least) take, but I don't disagree.
If you're not working on, or supporting, the company's product, you MAY have a BS job.
Good example: Twitter, which functioned well after layoffs of 80% or so (the owner's persona has damaged the revenue and reputation extensively, but the product itself has been fine). They're maybe the boldest, but hardly the only company in the past couple of years to do mass layoffs and not collapse at the core.
With Google of course, many projects are at some point considered core, to be dismissed later, so the line between "product" and "BS" is blurry and changing.
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#37Title doesn't reflect the article's title (emphasis mine): "Andreessen Horowitz investor says half of Google's white-collar staff probably do 'no real work'" Without "probably", it sounds like he has insider information and can say it as a fact. With "probably", it shows that this is an educated, yet falsifiable opinion.
How do we seperate that from for example the pareto principal where it may be the case that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people or a night security guard who works maybe 5% of the time and the rest is spent watching TV yet still an invaluable part of the company in terms of insurance box checking and PCI compliance etc.
Seems like a common fallacy to just jump in like Elon Musk and start trimming out the perceived false jobs and end up with a company that is weaker than it was originally. I've no doubt the VC is has a case but it's a lot hairer than a simple sentence alludes to. I feel like I end up back where I started -- in that I simply don't know or lack the info to make that call -- many jobs could simply be redundant but redundancy isn't always a bad thing -- espeically in massive tech companies with staff leaving for greener pastures on a whim.
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#38There's a few types of "non workers" I've encountered, that for all extents and purposes are worthless .... until they very much aren't.
1. "former" engineers and non-specialists - they tend to sit in meetings, try to sound important, pontificate about "better ways" but never seem to do real work. Then when SHTF they seem to have all the knowledge to make the problem go away super fast. Maybe SHTF never happens to you.
2. Middle managers and HR abstraction layers - again, more meetings, demanding reports, passing down all this make-work, etc etc. Then when an audit, leadership change, layoff, or program collapse happens, they magically have all the context in mind to pivot the team into a new area so they aren't butchered.
3. Project management / systems engineers. My god do they cause headaches with their overly-complicated, under-knowledgeable "designs" and cross-functional requirements. And they'll sit in standups / scrums without any contributions and just nod along half the time. Or worse, they'll pass along 3rd party statements of what the system should do from "product" that make no sense, get feedback, dissapear, and repeat. Then you realize that your execs, investors, and customers are seeing a totally different view of the system, and thank god you don't have to try to talk to those troublemakers.
Over the last 10 years I've realized a lot of the bullshit jobs that you can do without - you probably could, until you can't. "Cut the fat" is a great corporate euphemism, but the biological analogy fails if there's a corporate version of "famine".
Let's be honest, if we're judging people by tangible improvements, process cranking, or institutional knowledge, the most valuable people are the admins, not even the engineers. Half the time an engineer is sitting around thinking or drinking all the coffee.
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#39This attitude is why private equity is destroying US companies. The hubris and ignorance of investors routinely gets translated into a cull of workers whose jobs they don't understand, leaving behind "lean" organizations that retain only whatever bits are currently most profitable but are less functional, resilient, sustainable, and humane.
Perhaps, but how many Assistant Directors of Tech Conference Swag Acquisition is too many?
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#40The ideological bullshit here is hilarious. We have a VC here whining that a business with one of the most exceptional margins in modern capitalism is… not returning enough to shareholders? And those pesky workers are to blame? The buck here stops with management. If the people with power in your organisation are powerless to ship features, innovation and value… aren’t they the problem? Get leadership that works. Hir…
> They spend other people’s money on other people’s businesses and help themselves to profits other people have generated
I mean this is quite common even without VC involved... the only thing is you have to make sure to spend that money on the _right_ other businesses to get things done properly.