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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

#361

Post by travisd »

granshaw wrote: post #348
colechristensen wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. As long as that's the actual acknowledged situation and not "most of your job is pretending to work and making people think you're important". I wonder how successful a lot of companies would be if they openly cut required hours in half.

Yeah it’s the “pretending to work” part that’s soul crushing. If you could be explicit that “this is what I need to do this week, it’ll only take 4 hours. The rest of the time I’ll be available but I won’t do make-work”, that’d be awesome. Also a lot of people don’t realize that being available for questions or if something comes up IS work - it severely limits what you can do with that time even if working remotely.…

Required reading on this subject should be "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber.

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

#362

Post by zht »

what I've found is that the % of deadweight at the company is proportional to the number of "tech influencers" at the company

these are the kinds of people who, at least what I've generally found, do very little work, spend a lot of time "asking questions", shitposting on blind, and making "tech influencers" on tiktok that are "a day in the life of" or those youtube videos with the clickbait thumbnails like "HOW I MADE 3 MILLION DOLLARS BY AGE 25 AT META"

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

#363

Post by borroka »

aeternum wrote: post #63
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…

Yes, it's pretty clear that humans were overfitting to their interview objective function: comp-sci algo problems. For companies with such strong ML backgrounds, in addition to the sheer amount of content dedicated to discussing and solving tech interview questions hosted on their own platform, one would think they would have noticed earlier.

There is a human component to consider: in the case of a change in the interview process, with the new process perceived as easier than the past and current ones, I imagine the bitter protests from the currently employed engineers who would vocally complain that the quality of new hires is much worse than it used to be, and that they have had to pass much more stringent interviews than the new ones, which even a junior SWE employed in an unnamed company would be able to pass.

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

#364

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

z9znz wrote: post #170
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…

> 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.

There is some value in technical leadership familiarizing themselves with internal processes. They could take on a small side project (do Google execs get 20% time?) using libraries and APIs with the goal of providing some feedback on what direction those tools should pursue. BillG did something like this with a measure of success.

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

#365

Post by olau »

aliasxneo wrote: post #256
dekhn wrote: post #165

By the end of my employment at Google I was not working very hard. Probably a few hours a day, mostly doing whatever I felt like doing. My managers consistently gave me "meets expectations" regardless of how much I achieved or how hard I worked. However, any time there was an emergency related to my function, I had everything required to jump in, fix serious problems, and then get out of the way during the cleanup th…

I have a feeling this extends to several areas in Google. I come from the GDC side of things and have the exact same experience. To keep my job requires very minimal effort on my part. In fact, nowadays I'm punishing myself by trying to do anything "above and beyond." This is mostly due to the rapid growth of committees and the struggle for power that has come out of it (i.e., I'm more likely to be denied by a change…

I don't know if you're familiar with the book but "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber examined this phenomenon. He found that many people with bullshit jobs are struggling with deep unhappiness. Quit as soon as possible.

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

#366

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#367

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

afro88 wrote: post #278
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money. Your standup meeting could've been an email. Their immovable basketball game (quality of life) is…

This seems crazy to me, but I don't work in FAANG. A basketball game (I'm assuming recurring) during work hours? Quality of life from inside work? Are you all at campus for most of your day (ie, longer than 8h?) 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. Quality of life comes from outside work, and the company respects and encourages that b…

You can work any hours of the day.

Intramural stuff is usually scheduled DURING work hours - so people are at work for this stuff to happen.

If you schedule an intramural basketball game for 5:00 a.m. in the morning or 8:00 p.m. at night - nobody is going to make it - just like if you schedule a standup during those hours - no one is going to make it.

It's expected that you either can do your job in less than 8 hours on some days - or you work extra hours to make up for enjoying your life doing things like playing basketball.

Most adults can be adults.

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

#368

Post by lifeisstillgood »

z9znz wrote: post #170
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…

> 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.

I am actually writing a book saying exactly the opposite to this.

I think we are seeing the development of "Programmable Companies" - where all aspects of the company and its data are accessible (imagine a code API that reaches down to some sane mix of data structure).

So while it is crazy for Zuckerberg to try and optimise some Ad server, what should / could exist is a Jupyter-like notebook with something like

for minion in mycompany: if minion.timeatwork This is mostly done with crappy spreadsheets, but it does not get to the feedback that this sort of platform (I think) enables.

Anyway. The point is CEOs should code. the reason they have stopped is because their job has not been "disrupted" ... yet

Edit: I think there is a further point here. Managers used to (Drucker?) design and build the systems, the factory floor was a battleground of Kanban and command and control. But automation won out. And now the "systems of production" are designed by coders.

All the managers have left is shuffling around people from project to project. But one lever does not a effective d means of control make.

We have learnt from communism that command and control economy falls over at scale. And what is a company but a command and control economy.

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

#369

Post by Spoom »

powerhour wrote: post #155
BobbyJo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience at Google (which matched other large companies I've been at) was more that the "smartest" (I.E. earliest) members of a team laid down so many road blocks for later members, in the form of tech-debt and undocumented knowledge, that the output difference between coasting and working yourself to death was pretty small. It's an easy environment to get discouraged in.

My fear is that is what I'm doing right now. I've been writing code alone for a while, it's very possible it will be hard for new hires to understand or update. I know there is tech debt but I don't have time to fix it (because I'm alone, natch). Oh well. Maybe they can spend their time replacing my work.

No worries, inevitably whatever framework you're using right now will be deprecated and replaced within a few years anyway.

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

#370

Post by vecter »

jmalicki wrote: post #329
vecter wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might not be connecting the dots, but I don't see how this is related to the GP's gripe that these interview questions aren't good tools for hiring engineers.

"If you really think it's suboptimal, then other companies who have "better" interviewing practices should be better at identifying undiscovered talent and hiring them. Better for you if you're hiring in those cases. Let FAANG fail on their own hiring practices." The GGP is using an argument that if these techniques don't work, then the companies will fail, because that's how capitalism works. The GP is saying that b…

I see, thanks for clarifying that. Makes sense.

Relatedly, I still don't understand why people are upset at these companies' hiring practices.

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