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

> To me, quality of life is working hard and smart during the 8h, and keeping the rest of the day for you and your family

Mate, I browsed your profile and you live in Australia. Why would you want to spend the better, sunnier part of the day inside of an office? How is that "quality of life" better than spending an hour or so to play some basketball with some friends?

> Of course we still do team building activities, but these are occastional off sites. Or optional after work things (drinks, workouts, indoor football etc)

So it's not okay to intrude on "work" by playing an occasional basketball game, but it is okay to push mandatory work activities that eat up one's personal time? Also, if you think those activities are not work, you are deluding yourself -- no one likes to hang out with their boss or coworkers for "fun" after work hours.

1/10 of an hour.

Not sure if this is changing with all the time tracking software now but it's easier to bill by tenths than it is to track/calculate exact minutes and any larger unit might involve too much rounding up. e.g. .1 for a quick email reply is more palatable than a .25 (1/4 hour, 15min) minimum.

"Plenty" is not a good measure, and often seems more based on role and type of firm than just related to a lack of drive.

I've observed whole teams that are effectively 'dead weight' and ones where there is all killer, no filler. Of the DWs I've seen, many are DW not always by choice, but because other factors shove them into odd corners and they can't figure out (or are too constrained by other factors)

You are never going to 100% all-in motivation even from top performers in perpetuity, and even anecdotally most people don't want to be moribund for decades on end, and certainly not the majority of workers.

They’re probably seeing the natural result of Agile - you get nice planned deadlines and schedules but your employees have no incentive to work once they’re done with their items (and it’s not like the deadline is going to be moved up). Is that a problem though? As long as the work is getting done and can be used to plan things out, what’s the complaint?

Of course, this “not showing up to meetings” garbage is something I don’t condone. That kind of behavior would have resulted in getting fired everywhere I’ve worked.

I die inside when I hear people talk about "productivity" in the economic sense.

At least in the US, everything is already over-optimized for human beings. I have to pay extra to interact with a human being to book a flight or do banking. Every nontrivial business I interact with tries like hell to keep me from talking to a human, not trusting me to figure out when I can resolve my problem with their web site (yes I f-ing know about companyname.com, now let me talk to a representative, I called for a reason).

Companies love their metrics, and do shitty things to humans to make their metrics just a little better. Ever have a CS rep hang up on you (accidentally "disconnected")? Maybe you asked one too many questions and were bumping up their average call time for that shift, putting them at risk of disciplinary action.

Or, your company is a "meritocracy" and you have to spend hours and hours writing a review doc in a system desperately trying to objectively measure humans but failing down to the subjective- how hard is your manager willing to fight for you? Also, nobody except legal and HR care about the review doc anyway because the stack rank meeting happened three weeks ago. Even legal and HR only care to the extent that they can use it to cover their asses. And, you're screwed because your teammate is buddies with your manager and takes him boating or water skiing every weekend. You know who's getting the "exceeds" review, and btw there's only room for one because "bell curve". Only a few stock awards for you this time.

Or, your job just went away because paying western native English speakers is way more expensive than outsourcing your job. By the way, would you please train your replacement before you go? Don't forget your non-compete and assignment of inventions, and sign this exit agreement that you won't write or say anything bad about the company or we'll sue you for your severance!

But don't worry, we've driven down the cost of trinkets built overseas by slave labor, so you can watch a nice TV while you're unemployed.

F--- optimization. F--- productivity.

I love technology, and I love capitalism, but "optimization" and "productivity" are euphemisms/excuses that companies hide behind when they're going to do shady shit so that the share price will go up and the executives will get a bigger bonus.