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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

#331

Post by karthikb »

metabagel wrote: post #227
naravara wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the types of meetings that could be emails, stand-ups are at the very bottom of the list. A well run, efficient stand-up can head off a day's worth of productivity sucking emails and Slack messages with a 10 min conversation.

A 10 minute conversation can be had outside of a stand-up meeting, and without wasting the time of the people who don't need to be part of it.

> without wasting the time of the people who don't need to be part of it

In my experience, the very people who think these cross-team sync meetings are a waste that they don't need to be a part of are the first to make noise that they weren't consulted or included in a discussion that actually doesn't impact them.

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

#332

Post by borroka »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #251
mikhael28 wrote: post #21

Maybe 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…

If you have time to faff around at a FAANG, you have time to be cultivating your network to include some very influential people, you have time to be taking advantage of training resources or learning from the experts there that are completely free that most ordinary developers would have to pay thousands to get access to, you have time to work on side projects either for the company or, if you dare, for your own per…

This is fair in theory, and I imagine that some smart, high-agency people take advantage of the situation, but as is often the case, “down time" leads to more down time rather than more time to devote to career advancement, networking, and so on.

In fact, one might think that one day, when free of obligations and with plenty of gas in the tank that is currently used for work, one will pick up the barbell, take long bike rides, and build the body one has always dreamed of showing to their partner. But they are much more likely, instead, to spend more time watching the latest horrible Netflix TV series or eating burritos. The right analogy for mental and physical energy is not the tank, but the flywheel.

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

#333

Post by wbsss4412 »

abledon wrote: post #302
fefe23 wrote: post #245

As a consultant, I come around a bit. I have seen many companies with very poor productivity, and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees. In fact they usually would have loved to be more productive. Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight. But as companies grow they install more and more rules and regulations that end up making sure nothing ever gets done. It is not unusual to meet "develo…

> Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight. Have you worked in Government? edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26727803 for an example

I’ve personally never witnessed this, and I’ve worked in government and know people who work in government in other contexts, and I haven’t ever heard of an actual anecdote to that effect either.

I’m sure it exists, but the meme seems overblown. From what I’ve seen, government is more frugal than the private sector day to day, the main difference is that the government ends up supporting unprofitable programs and has additional burdensome regulations that drive up costs (eg buy American)

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

#334

Post by matsemann »

yibg wrote: post #268
z9znz wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod That would be a surpreme waste of company money, and probably they have engineers working for them who are far better developers than they are.

Yea, as an engineer I would not be happy with my CEO swooping in to commit some code then bugger off.

The point isn't that they commit some useful code. It could be something as simple as just fixing a typo. But force them to go through the motions, so they can see the inefficiency in the processes.

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

#335

Post by [deleted] »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #217
tiahura wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biglaw attorneys routinely bill 2200 hours a year in 6 minute increments. Add in nonbillable work and self-written off time, and many of these attorneys work 60+ hour weeks. Plus, they do this into their 50’s.

Any idea why six minutes and not some other?

[deleted]

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

#336

Post by outworlder »

dekhn wrote: post #218
ipsum2 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you an SRE? What you described sounds very similar to what I experienced.

I started as a test engineer on an SRE team (ads database, which I think no longer exists), did a mission control rotation, and then sort of found a way to be a software engineer (non-SRE, which pissed off the SRE leadership) and run my own projects in prod without any real oversight (that was exacycle- using all the idle cycles in prod). I used my knowledge of SRE and my good connections with SRE to run my service w…

> which pissed off the SRE leadership

Really? I thought Googlers could move internally with little friction and yada yada. Is that just propaganda?

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

#337

Post by fooster »

akmarinov wrote: post #61
tpmoney wrote: post #22

This seems like something that should be expected? Every time the WFH battle has come up over the last few years, there are always people talking about how they’re able to do all their days work in 4 hours and spend the rest of the time idle “pretending to work”. Is it really surprising that as a result of this companies are reevaluating how much slack time their employees have? Especially as wages and demand for wag…

There’s no way you can sustain 8 hours/day of productive work 5 days a week as a developer. It’s not working a field or packing boxes, there’s a mental component that gets exhausted over time.

speak for yourself?

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

#338

Post by wizofaus »

Scoundreller wrote: post #269
telchior wrote: post #252

Which companies with similar concerns have actually managed to increase productivity in a way that satisfies the C-suite? A much older anecdote: I had a friend who worked at Yahoo around the time Marissa Mayer was coming on as CEO. At the time, they were allowing semi-WFH for certain positions. I literally never saw this guy go to work, or actually do any work. He was part of a stand-up comedy workshop and spent 100%…

I think yahoo found something like 35% of its wfh staff hadn’t logged in for weeks or months. (I can’t find a source for the number, so maybe I’m off, but vpn logs were used to justify ending wfh, which is… an imperfect approach for many reasons). Overall, I don’t think the plan at yahoo was to fix anything, but just asset-strip it, which worked well for stockholders.

It baffles me how that's possible - in 25+ years working for software companies all my co-workers have been people I interact with basically daily (certainly more than once a week) - so how could someone not log in for weeks and it not be an issue?

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

#339

Post by danaris »

codefreeordie wrote: post #17
SavageBeast wrote: post #5

I see this as more or less a ruse to justify ridding the companies of all the now remote people who moved away to live in Cheap Town during the pandemic. This is a pretext for the typical Corporate House Cleaning/Reduction In Force scenario. Some people do well working remote (Im one of them in fact) but I suspect and from what I've seen the majority of people simply cant handle the responsibility/self management of…

"Rest and vest" is a phrase that gets bandied about often -- including by people who are trying to do it. I couldn't tell you what fraction of employees, but there are folks hiding in all of the big tech companies that are happy with their comp, aren't trying to advance, and have adopted the "do the minimum to not get fired" approach to their work. If too many of these get together in one org or on one team, the whol…

> that are happy with their comp, aren't trying to advance

Why does this

> and have adopted the "do the minimum to not get fired" approach to their work

necessarily have to go with this?

What's wrong with deciding "I don't need to advance further; I like the work I do, I make enough money; I don't need to be hustling anymore"?

It seems to me the concept of "enough" is hard to grasp for a lot of people, especially those who are deep in any high-paying field (not just SV tech types, but certain kinds of doctors, lawyers, etc).

If there's no place in Silicon Valley for people who know what "comfortable" feels like, then it's definitely a place I'd prefer to stay away from.

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

#340

Post by outworlder »

mikhael28 wrote: post #21

Maybe 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…

> maybe it’s the fact that it takes forever to get anything done at FAANG nowadays.

At any large company. Tiny changes that should take an afternoon end up taking 6 months once all the red tape is done and all involved stakeholders have signed off.

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