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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

#411

Post by daviddever23box »

commandlinefan wrote: post #372
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.

Except that's not a reasonable ask when you have a global presence and meetings into the evening. Saying no to an over-scheduled calendar is the mechanism by which you gain control of your life.

My measure of a meeting's worth is: if you were shackled to a chair for the scheduled duration of this meeting, would you get anything useful done, from a discussion perspective? If not, simply decline the invite; your brain is not important enough to have been productive in that context.

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

#413

Post by koverda »

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…

managers are employees too

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

#414

Post by BeetleB »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #251
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…

If you have time to faff around at a FAANG, you have time to be cultivating your network to include some very influential people, you have time to be taking advantage of training resources or learning from the experts there that are completely free that most ordinary developers would have to pay thousands to get access to, you have time to work on side projects either for the company or, if you dare, for your own per…

Not at a FAANG but at a large company that has its fair share of world experts in various technical disciplines.

At least in my company, the path you suggest will make you miserable (it did me). You are not seen to be at their level, and you will more likely become a pawn and someone to offload grunt labor to. Yes, you will learn, but you have less than a 10% chance they'll let you use that knowledge to do work at their level: They need grunt laborers, and you are more valuable to them as one because you've gained that knowledge.

Oh, and they always had more pathological behavior amongst them. Very poor at teamwork, etc.

There are exceptions, which is why I said "10% chance" instead of "0%" :-)

The good news is whenever I went through this and switched to a less sexy team, I was seen as "the really smart guy who worked with the smart people" and the new team would value more than they should.

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

#415

Post by colinmhayes »

taylodl wrote: post #395

They 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…

I mean it’s not unreasonable to think they needed those people then, but now they don’t. If you’ve got 40,000 people worth of work and 70,000 people some of them aren’t going to be productive. Just because you had 70,000 people worth of work last year doesn’t mean they’re still productive this year.

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

#416

Post by naravara »

inglor_cz wrote: post #305
naravara wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hope no one will try this out in a brain surgery clinic.

I'll tell you one thing though, EHRM user interfaces would almost certainly be less dogshit if the hospital admins who procure them had to actually use them.

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

#417

Post by nso95 »

antonymy wrote: post #120

Weird how Zuckerberg's red flag for low productivity was employees avoiding meetings to work on personal projects. In the first place, I was under the impression FAANG companies encouraged employees to pursue personal projects for the benefit of the company.

Sounded more like errands than personal projects

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

#418

Post by mrazomor »

jrockway wrote: post #266
jjslocum3 wrote: post #91

Glad these guys seem to finally be noticing. I was a software engineering manager at a lean, high-margin, profitable start-up based in the NYC area starting in the late 2000s. We were acquired in 2014 by a very typical (for the time) SV-based competitor that had raised hundreds of millions in an IPO a few years earlier. Our acquirers had yet to see a single quarter of profit, of course. I and my team had so many good…

I see where you're coming from. One of the pieces of cognitive dissonance I had at Google was that I always had so much work to do, and there were just so many people around the office chilling out; waiting in long lines for free food, playing ping pong, making themselves an espresso. I never really felt like I had time for that; I got a grab and go sandwich and drip coffee and then hung out at my desk for 8 hours. I…

The first paragraph resonates with me so well. I'm sorry that you went through a burnout.

+1 to the rest of the post. Very well said.

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

#419

Post by lazyasciiart »

refulgentis wrote: post #373
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.

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?…

I have a bad habit of working on important things that don't actually glitter, unblocking other teams and people constantly and recommending against shiny cool solutions, so promotions this year went to my two colleagues who took a glittery project, recommended a shiny shit idea, and have now delivered shit covered in glitter that is immediately getting sales/support feedback like um but it doesn't do what we needed and it is missing what we asked for.

I complained about a bug that blocked our CI for a week, which I'd shepherded around; that the company needs people to be prepared to work on things that they "don't own" because surprise, we don't have anyone assigned to owning the interaction of those six systems! Actual response: well, you didn't have to do that work.

Now let me go back to waiting for anyone to respond to any of the EIGHT CRs I have out, just as well I'm working from home so I can use the time to clean the toilet.

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

#420

Post by jrockway »

mrazomor wrote: post #418
jrockway wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see where you're coming from. One of the pieces of cognitive dissonance I had at Google was that I always had so much work to do, and there were just so many people around the office chilling out; waiting in long lines for free food, playing ping pong, making themselves an espresso. I never really felt like I had time for that; I got a grab and go sandwich and drip coffee and then hung out at my desk for 8 hours. I…

The first paragraph resonates with me so well. I'm sorry that you went through a burnout. +1 to the rest of the post. Very well said.

It's a good life experience. Now I can recognize it and fix it.
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