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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

#371

Post by colechristensen »

tomuli38 wrote: post #357
granshaw wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Not only is the availability, but so is the image. I had a CEO who loved the image of an office full of people all day, all week. I've been working remotely since then. I think he just wanted to feel important.

Happens a lot.

It's also a problem with the Navy.

More, smaller, near-coast ("littoral") ships would be much more effective tools for wartime and for maintaining peace on the seas. There are some. Acquisitions has been fraught with problems and weighty opinions of captains and admirals who want to feel important on enormous ships. Enormous ships which aren't as useful in the day to day operations in the Navy and would be extremely vulnerable at war with modern weaponry.

A lot of what gets done around the world is heavily influenced by how a decision will influence the feelings of people in power.

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

#372

Post by commandlinefan »

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…

> company calendar is 80% filled with meetings

The typical expectation on salaried employees is that you spend your 8-5 in meetings and then you 5-midnight actually doing programming work.

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

#373

Post by refulgentis »

colechristensen wrote: post #304
codegeek wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight." I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. The larger the team/company, the more chances of those people being around. They pretend to be always busy and doing something but don't actually get anything done. Seen it all for 18+ years. Having said that, there are plenty of people as well who would LOVE…

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.

At a FAANG and I can tell you it's not nearly so positive as this.

It was shocking coming from startup world.

It's not so much "gee I only have 4 hours of work to do this week"

It's...well, it's impossible to say how long it takes to do anything in particular, so I shouldn't feel stressed trying to get it done...

oh there's actually no real management style/pressure to get things done here?

Promo is seniority-based?

There's silly unspoken rules like after you get promoted, you're _guaranteed_ a middling performance rating because its an easy horsetrade to do?

Your manager doesn't have to argue $X was super important and strategic and this newly promoted character needs a better rating, and the other manager doesn't need to argue $Y needs to keep a high rating to show continued momentum in his growth, they just do it.

There's no way to rebel against this system, or work within it, other than transfer companies?

It's a rather horrific situation and I don't think it's helping anyone or anyone is particularly satisfied with it. The problem is, any other solution is worse and will hurt The Vibes in the short run. Interesting to see Zuck move towards Dark Zuck and say things I've never heard at FAANG

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

#374

Post by cjrd »

First, is productivity really the issue here? It makes for a great sound bite, but I imagine we've all spent a lot of time and effort working really, really hard...on the wrong thing.

Second, for large companies that want to weather the "impending recession," how is it that working harder will allow them to do this? What specific results will this yield? More product launches/improvements? Happier customers because of these launches (heh - when was the last time this happened for these companies) that translates into more revenue?

What I would love to see are execs that say something like "We really want to focus on listening more to our customers and improving our relationship with them. While others are shouting 'build! build! build!', we're saying 'listen, build, repeat.' Here's some specific ways we are going to do this: ..."

Then, sure, turn up the heat internally around this mission. Great - a rally cry around an objective. But right now, the rally cry is the rally cry is the rally cry. Work hard to work harder so that we work harder, and oh yeah, we'll fire people who don't because they're lazy and not 1337 enough to be here. You know, because recession.

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

#375

Post by spamizbad »

gorgoiler wrote: post #216

It’s knives out time, I’m afraid, for any activist or negative employee. I am flabbergasted by the number of people I’ve worked with who are flat out ungrateful when it comes to their relationship with their employer either being outright miserable and surly, or constantly virtue signalling about hypothetical problems that just drag everyone down the purity spiral. They get paid and they push code but they seem to th…

Man, where have you worked? It sounds awful. Is this a SV specific type of personality? I feel like a low output dev who complains constantly wouldn't last 6 months before landing on a PIP.

My experience, most "dead weight" employees tend to be quiet types who never rock the boat. They want to just keep flying under the radar. They say please and thank you, they show up to company events, but just.... don't produce. Which can make putting them in a PIP extremely awkward because you feel like the bad guy.

Meanwhile, the most proactive "complainers" I've worked with have all been median to high output engineers. As a manager, I find my approach for them is to try and get them is to mature socially inside the org and work to break them of their bad habits. Results are mixed, but I've had some success.

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

#376

Post by chocolatemario »

potatolicious wrote: post #111

It's frustrating that this thread seems to be focused so heavily on people sitting around resting and vesting. Having been inside Google (and multiple other FAANGs) this is generally untrue, and focusing on this element of the problem misses a much larger productivity problem: Most engineers at Google aren't "sitting around doing nothing", they are very busy shipping projects that do not matter. Their days are filled…

I feel that in real terms, you are absolutely correct. Big tech companies consciously over-hire and throw away work with impunity knowing it will not hurt their bottom line. Denouncing employee productivity like this just seems like an excuse to trim some fat indiscriminately during economic downturn instead of attacking the root of the problem as you suggest they should. They obviously should try to fix the wasted work problem, but that is undoubtedly more difficult than overprovisioning your workforce and dialing back during times of economic duress.

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

#377

Post by abledon »

dev_0 wrote: post #18

I have seen colleagues working long hours because they take 2 hours of lunch break and 1 hour of teabreak. And management think they are hardworking.

tbf, 1 persons 2 hours of coding is equivalent to another persons 8 or 16 hours of coding. Work smart, not Hard

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

#378

Post by scarmig »

This is nothing new. Google and Facebook are pretty much planned economies that have a lot of resources. There are no real existential competitive pressures, either externally or internally. This leads to politics (of all sorts) instead of economics or productivity driving employees. In some ways it parallels the resource curse of countries that develop their economy on a bunch of oil, which makes people rich but leads to lots of social and governance dysfunction.

Things like the Amazon "stack rank and then fire the worst performer on every team regularly, even if they actually are good enough" is one way to handle it, but that has its own obvious downsides. It does appear to simultaneously increase productivity and decrease overall employee happiness.

This is a problem inherent to all large organizations.

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

#379

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx »

wizofaus wrote: post #338
Scoundreller wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've heard from some people in tech companies/remote first companies that once the company gets to a certain size (by employee #) it becomes extremely easy to float through. I know of people that have essentially outsourced their entire job by just hiring cheap freelancers to do their work for them. Those roles include designers, SWEs, marketers, etc... And throughout it all managers and finance and payroll and any sort of checks on employees all approved them all the way through and never.

Find yourself with the right manager/employer and you can get away with a remarkable amount of coasting.

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

#380

Post by bobobob420 »

jackblemming wrote: post #203
bobobob420 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the mindset of failure. The team standup has 10x more priority than some dumb basketball league

Show me the studies on the effectiveness of a daily 10 min standup and I’d be happy to listen. Otherwise I’d be happy to make up some other rituals that sound good on paper and then rationalize them with buzzwords.

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