Would these two meet their own criteria? because freeing up their salaries would sure go a long way.
'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
431–440 of 1001 posts
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d agree with this. Anecdotally speaking I have never met anyone on my team and I honestly can say that I feel like I’m a mercenary whose job is to just destroy tickets and keep a lookout at our monitoring. It feels so impersonal and is it really my fault or my colleagues that they don’t feel as invested? Messing with k8s, looking at logs, or occasionally hopping into a zoom to discuss architecture for an upcoming p…
Totally agreed with you. I found much greater joy going to the office everyday, working, meeting with my coworkers, doing things after work like grabbing a beer in the kitchen, etc. I really missed those things. Now I'm just staring at a screen for 10 hours a day. Two extra hours because I feel like I need to prove that I'm working while I'm remote. It sucks. I feel way less energy and less passion for the company.
Completely agree. There is no more banter. No sharing of ideas. No creativity. It's all just zoom bullshit.
I keep wondering when this crap is gonna end and people will realize that this "pure remote" shit absolutely kills innovation and creativity. But man... it's super depressing. I used to love my work. Now it sucks.
I think it will take many years before this shakes out. I think companies that are in-person will out-compete and out-innovate those who aren't. I think the pendulum will start swinging back to in-person.
I dunno. It's exhausting though. I feel very trapped by all this crap. I could only imagine being a new-hire or some fresh college grad...
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#433By 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 think it’s actually a good thing to just have a pool of people who know how stuff actually works.
Otherwise there could be very key infra that only one or two people fully understand since the code is “mature”, doesn’t need modifications, and nobody wants to work on it.
In theory of course, I’m sure in reality the digital world isn’t at the mercy of <200 SWEs who gave up on promo and live in the basement.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#434Earlier 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…
You reach a certain kafkaesque threshold where making any move at all requires coordination outside your team with at least four other teams, you end up in gridlock. That said when i've been in such a position I have sometimes just fallen into gold-plating the hell out of whatever I was working on. Far beyond what was useful, just too keep myself sane.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#435It'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…
This resonates strongly with my experience at Google as well. Specifically in ads, you got the feelings that none of the product leadership used the product or tried to drive a direction for where the product should be going. The end-result was full-on Conway’s law (every team having their own separate pages), weird overlaps between a bunch of things (P-Max, Smart and App campaigns) and no real goals except maximizin…
It must be a different eponymous law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#436As 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…
I just know of at least 20 people left my previous company because we had nothing to do. Every meeting was trying to figure out what the direction was. As an engineer when the company gets to the size of 1000+ you are largely not at all empowered to solve this problem but have to rely on your manager or in some cases your managers manager.
But come time for performance review you get bad marks. If you think that many people are just lazy for no reason you have no right to be managing or running a business.
Sitting around pretending to work all day is a recipe for depression and burnout. No one wants that.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#437You get what you reward. Large corps reward “increase in scope”. This is hard for people on other teams to evaluate fairly, so most companies end up with “scope = number of people involved”. That’s vaguely equivalent to deploying an O(n^2) algo into prod. Looks good at small sizes but breaks down as everyone talks to everyone else to add collaborators to pad scope.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#438Hasn't Zuckerberg in particular been a bit irrationally down on the economy for quite some time now? He's had strong YouTube economist energy for awhile now.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#439Quoth Zuck: > “And part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.” Wow. Just. Wow. Why not inject some more dysfunction into an already strained relationship with employees and callously but passively aggressively deal with a s…
I don't think you can infer from this article that Meta isn't setting new, measurable and actionable performance expectations internally.
Though you could be inferring that from working there or from all the other news about them.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#440As 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…
> agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem
This kind of "development process theater" causes terrible cognitive dissonance.