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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

#451

Post by ryneandal »

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.

Typical where? I've _never_ had to deal with such a schedule.

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

#452

Post by FearlessNebula »

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…

Did Sundar ever write code? Wasn’t he a PM? I wouldn’t be surprised if Mark still writes some code, he’s a hacker at heart

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

#453

Post by wsc981 »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #322
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…

> The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. I wouldn't be surprised if of the productivity that is left, more than half gets wasted on crufty software structures and writing code before you understood the problem. I've seen this increase proportional to the number of emplo…

Managers also seem to love these proxy metrics, so delivering these metrics to management (as a dev) can be a good way to get noticed.

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

#454

Post by lumost »

shtopointo wrote: post #219
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…

> 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. If anything, that might be the best way to identify someone that fits in a large corp like Google. Someone that doesn't mind going thru the drudge of studying esoteric CS problems probably will…

It was only 4-5 years ago that Google was considered the pinnacle of Engineering centric culture. It was still considered top up until last year. Something is going off the rails in the big tech firms if people now view big-tech work as menial. These were the same companies that pioneered CI/CD, Services, cloud, scalable web services, and myriad other technologies.

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

#455

Post by ken47 »

alexk307 wrote: post #231

This is such an embarrassment for these two... Aren't YOU the CEO of your company? Didn't YOU approve hiring plans and corporate goals? If there's not enough work, why don't you find something for them to work on, or replace your managers with folks that will. Instead, it's the employee's fault for being so unproductive.

Well, we're viewing these messages without context. Absent of context, I would say that Zuckerberg's messaging is too aggressive, and many otherwise decent employees would find it toxic. Now, if there was a proper build-up of messaging to this level of aggression, perhaps that context justifies it to a certain extent. But it looks quite bad in isolation.

Pichai's messaging is more reasonable, even without context. He's just saying the company needs people to work harder. I'm fine with that.

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

#456

Post by MisterBastahrd »

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…

What the hell does that have to do with being employed?

My employer gives me money. I give them labor. I am friendly with my co-workers because I am generally a friendly person, but I don't owe the company any more than I give and I don't deserve any more than I demand for myself.

There's no "grateful" to be had here. I'm not grateful to have a job. I have a job because I earn it.

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

#457

Post by db1234 »

stickfigure wrote: post #285
qqtt wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are surfacing it in a weaselly way which absolves them of personal responsibility. In reality, they approved the strategic direction of the company and signed off on the outrageous hiring plans. They were responsible for fostering a culture of execution and measuring the results of their teams. They were responsible for ensuring their investments were paying off. Instead of messaging that "As CEO, we did not inv…

I'm not sure how you expect the process to go? As the CEO of a big company you aren't personally involved in hiring or managing line engineers. Your input is to tell underlings to tell their underlings to hire more or work more or whatnot. Feedback is just as slow moving up the chain. Basically, "memo to employees" is the process.

The CEO may not be involved in hiring line engineers sure, but the buck still stops with the CEO. The least they can do is be sensitive in messaging. "Some of you don't belong here" just comes across as crass and insensitive. Given how FB is doing may be Zuck himself doesn't belong there anymore? Did he think about that before making the comment?

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

#459

Post by dekhn »

curiousgal wrote: post #443
aliasxneo wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling this extends to several areas in Google. I come from the GDC side of things and have the exact same experience. To keep my job requires very minimal effort on my part. In fact, nowadays I'm punishing myself by trying to do anything "above and beyond." This is mostly due to the rapid growth of committees and the struggle for power that has come out of it (i.e., I'm more likely to be denied by a change…

Why do you look to your job for challenges. Why not simply look at it as a way to put food on the table and use the rest of your time and resources to seek out other challenges?

I can answer this- at the time I joined GOogle, my goal was to use their resources to enhance my future career as a researcher. Google gave me access to world class hardware, software, and employees, which I could use in ways that never would have been available at any other location. It helped me build and achieve a system that academia would not have allowed, that I could not have done on my own time and money.

But my goal was always to take that newly learned skill and credibility and use it to go back to academia with a stronger hiring position. I mean, that's the mental model nearly all scientists have: couple your job with your interests to maximize your impact using other people's money and time.

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

#460

Post by quest88 »

stickfigure wrote: post #285
qqtt wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are surfacing it in a weaselly way which absolves them of personal responsibility. In reality, they approved the strategic direction of the company and signed off on the outrageous hiring plans. They were responsible for fostering a culture of execution and measuring the results of their teams. They were responsible for ensuring their investments were paying off. Instead of messaging that "As CEO, we did not inv…

I'm not sure how you expect the process to go? As the CEO of a big company you aren't personally involved in hiring or managing line engineers. Your input is to tell underlings to tell their underlings to hire more or work more or whatnot. Feedback is just as slow moving up the chain. Basically, "memo to employees" is the process.

I think the spirit of the comment is that the CEOs aren't taking responsibility for something they created. They should write a postmortem.
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