It is amusing how the article says "employees" but everyone in the comments are talking about developer productivity and laziness. It is shocking how no one points out about the laziness of PMs and management. I have seen PMs and managers taking generous time off and lazying around. Don't forget lot of hiring happens because managers and PMs do planning roadmaps and hire based on that. Some managers also hire more than necessary just cos they want to manage more people. In my previous company our manager hired 3x more engineers than available projects. He jumped ship recently and moved to another FAANG company while the team is now clueless and feeling scared that team might see layoffs.
'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
#392Maybe 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…
+1, why blame employees? blame the management. In my previous job, our manager quickly grew team and hired 3x more people just cos he wanted to manage a larger team and get to hire managers under him so that he gets promoted to Sr. Manager.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#393In a world where more and more work gets automated anyway, those people just managed to get a private version of UBI before everybody else.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#394By 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…
That's how I think of it. You pay firemen for their ability to solve a problem quickly and efficiently, and for being able to execute when called upon. Giant companies making money hand over fist pay a lot of "don't fuck this up" salaries. The primary goal for everyone is to keep the money printer running smoothly; everything else is secondary.
It's worth noting that the beginning, the end and the middle of Scrum and what most companies laughably call "Agile" is to prevent exactly this: the entire structure is there to force every developer to interview for their job every morning and prove they're making "contributions" (it doesn't matter if they're good contributions, they just have to be completed by the deadlines).
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#395They increased their headcount by 62% during the pandemic and now are like - these people are deadweight and not productive? Really? There are a lot of logistics you have to have in place to hire that many people, especially when you're already a LARGE company, and keep them all working. It seems to me their hiring process is completely broken - hire everybody, see who works out, can the rest. This just confirms the horror stories I hear from people working at FAANGs. It's not anywhere I want to be.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#396By 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…
That's how I think of it. You pay firemen for their ability to solve a problem quickly and efficiently, and for being able to execute when called upon. Giant companies making money hand over fist pay a lot of "don't fuck this up" salaries. The primary goal for everyone is to keep the money printer running smoothly; everything else is secondary.
The key difference is people understand you’re paying the firemen for the emergencies- but a lot of SREs are actually firemen but paid like developers.
When everyone is quietly pretending you’re not a fireman but you are it leads do a disconnect where everyone is playing charades.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have met a few of those people, but every single one of them needed a justification. Some told me they felt wronged by the company somehow. For example they had experienced bullying, or didn't get promoted when they felt they should have been, or they had contributed something and then it got cut from the product, something like that in most cases. Now didn't feel they owed the company anything. Yet others said the…
My millage is that it's not absolute "dead weight". It's more wanting limited responsibility and tasks that require limited scope/time spent, but does actually contribute, just a much smaller scale than others. > The fact that they needed these excuses tells me they felt what they did to be morally wrong and didn't really want to be dead weight. My guess from your comment is that you judge them for being slackers, an…
Do you feel the same way about people who put effort in but are not skilled enough to contribute (or make things worse by trying)?
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
That very much to me sounds like the wrong manager/employer! I just can't imagine working in an environment coworkers aren't genuinely keen on actively contributing towards building/ maintaining products and features. It's surely the reason you get into software development in the first place.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#399Earlier 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.
At one point Waffle House required all of its senior executives to spend time each year working on the line. (They probably still do I just haven't checked in a few years). They feel this is important for their management team to more viscerally understand the lived experiences of the people working, identify issues in their processes and technology, and generally foster team spirit among their staff.
I seem to recall reading that every Disney employee is required to spend a week working in one of the parks for the same reason.