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VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

businessinsider.com

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Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#41

Post by jvanderbot »

falcor84 wrote: post #33
adonovan wrote: post #18

This attitude is why private equity is destroying US companies. The hubris and ignorance of investors routinely gets translated into a cull of workers whose jobs they don't understand, leaving behind "lean" organizations that retain only whatever bits are currently most profitable but are less functional, resilient, sustainable, and humane.

I would agree, except for the fact that I read Graeber's Bullshit Jobs and was quite convinced by his research showing that anything between 15-50% of employees across many surveys believe that their role is useless.

You can believe your role is useless and be wrong. It may be that the processes were grown in a time when the needs were different, and hopefully those needs were for a worse version of today - a kind of bad situation that might just come back around again.

A system in which every resource is 100% utilized has no slack or adaptability.

Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#42

Post by bdcravens »

gresrun wrote: post #22

"Rich asshole makes demeaning comments about situations they don't know" More at 11. Seriously though, how out-of-touch do you have to be to think that entire organizations full of smart people are so incompetent as to have 100% bloat? Could you lay off 50% of Google today and still have a functional, competitive product tomorrow? Yes. Would you still have a functional, competitive product in 2 years? No. Engineers a…

How much does the Google+ or Stadia codebase contribute to today's product?

Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#44

Post by sharpshadow »

TideAd wrote: post #24

> "I don't think it's crazy to believe that half the white-collar staff at Google probably does no real work," he said. "The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade, and all that money could have been returned to shareholders who have retirement accounts." So, he doesn't really understand Google's dysfunction and is just guessing at the causes?

It’s like the famous quote:“Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

In my opinion the money is better placed in the pockets of workers not investors.

Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#45

Post by hot_gril »

MattGaiser wrote: post #15

> The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade Isn’t Google pretty open that it doesn’t expect most of these to succeed? This statement has “shut down the R&D as it doesn’t make money” vibes.

If you mean the moonshots, Google killed most of them and hasn't announced new ones. I do think Google was mistaken that it could detach parts of itself to act like startups. Too much red tape and not enough grit.

What bothers me more is how they fumbled repeatedly on conventional projects like chat apps.

Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#46

Post by bdcravens »

hot_gril wrote: post #30
FredPret wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's ... basically every old person and everyone with some savings. Even if you don't own Google stock (or even any stock) directly, you likely have exposure to it because it's in the S&P 500, which is used as foundational financial product in many contexts.

True, but it's weird how many times he mentions retirement in particular.

Stockholders are the owners.

Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#47

Post by tech_ken »

Things going well: all these engineers are just wasting salary dollars and not contributing anything, layoffs for everyone! Things going badly: all these engineers are incompetent and just wasting salary dollars, layoffs for everyone! Now where's my 7 figure consulting fee...

Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#49

Post by nzzn »

pseudosavant wrote: post #5

Whereas VC and private equity staff all "work"...

VC’s, hedge funds, etc. all run lean—none have 10k+ employees or anything close. Employees are under a much brighter spotlight by the owners all the time. Groups might lose focus for an interval but once they their score is down it’s goodbye & the score is P&L calculated in very short intervals.

Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'

#50

Post by bryanlarsen »

jvanderbot wrote: post #38

There's a few types of "non workers" I've encountered, that for all extents and purposes are worthless .... until they very much aren't. 1. "former" engineers and non-specialists - they tend to sit in meetings, try to sound important, pontificate about "better ways" but never seem to do real work. Then when SHTF they seem to have all the knowledge to make the problem go away super fast. Maybe SHTF never happens to yo…

They're very much like firefighters. Firefighters spend the vast majority of their working hours either literally doing nothing or else doing somewhat pointless make work, like washing the fire truck.

If your firefighters are spending more than ~10% of their time doing their actual job, then the odds of them needing to be in two places at once reaches unacceptable levels.

Old fashioned secretaries are similar, if less extreme. An executive secretary's main job is not to do secretarial work, but to be available at a moment's notice. If they're busy, they're not generally available.

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