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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

#471

Post by carom »

I think a lot of this comes from organizational bureaucracy. I love to program. I write code on personal projects every single night. It is so difficult to get tickets at work though.

Want to build something new? Well, we will have to maintain it forever, so we need to make sure it is worth it.

Want to build on another team's infra? You need open a ticket to get someone assigned to review your code, that ticket will take 3 weeks to be triaged. This is for a 2 line change.

Ok, you're building something. Design doc, stories, epics, meetings most days of the week, code reviews, tests.

On calls, you're going to do the builds. You're going to watch the nodes deploy 1 by 1. You're going to keep an eye on query latency.

I'm not saying these things are all bad, but in total, they absolutely kill productivity. The more of this bureaucracy, the less you're getting out of me in regards to what I am really good at (designing and building systems). When I can build complex web apps in my spare time and end up making a 50 line change at work every 2 weeks there is a horrible disconnect. I write code every day, just not for my employer, and not because I am lazy or don't want to.

Yes, I should be fired. Yes, you should hire someone at 50% my rate to watch the code deploy. Hire me back when you have work for me to do that matches my skillset.

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

#472

Post by senttoschool »

DharmaPolice wrote: post #291
senttoschool wrote: post #11

This is inherently a problem with full-remote or hybrid work. People will point to "studies" showing how remote work improves productivity. Maybe it did initially but eventually, people will check out, feeling isolated, feeling less motivated. Some people who worked remotely before covid swears that it helped their productivity. But these people are biased because they were probably one of the few who were discipline…

>Clearly, these CEOs aren't just making decisions on a whim and they have real data on productivity rather than some 3rd party studies. Asking people to 100% return to the office is unpopular (or at least controversial) to some, right? If there was "real data", why wouldn't they mention that in their communications to staff? Instead, it's full of wooly statements like "there's something missing" and vague stuff about…

>Asking people to 100% return to the office is unpopular (or at least controversial) to some, right? If there was "real data", why wouldn't they mention that in their communications to staff? Instead, it's full of wooly statements like "there's something missing" and vague stuff about collaboration.

FYI, Facebook and Google CEOs both said productivity is down and they expect more out of their workers. They said so to their employees which obviously got leaked because there are tens of thousands of them. I'm guessing that they don't want to specifically blame remote/hybrid work because it might offend a lot of people and get bad PR. Instead, they're slowly nudging their workers back into the office.

Apple never said anything publicly or to their employees about the lack of productivity and they never will. They will never do so because it'd be a huge PR hit. It's not Apple's style.

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

#473

Post by twblalock »

titzer wrote: post #299

Quoth 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've been at places where I would love to hear the CEO say that. Being forced to work with poor performers, lazy people, and people who deliver poor quality results is frustrating and demoralizing.

Those kinds of people can stick around for years, especially in good times when the company is making so much money that leadership doesn't need to care. Netflix is one of the few large companies that has a culture of culling the herd even in good times, and I wish more large companies would take that approach.

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

#474

Post by sbierwagen »

dam_broke_it wrote: post #112
SavageBeast wrote: post #5

I see this as more or less a ruse to justify ridding the companies of all the now remote people who moved away to live in Cheap Town during the pandemic. This is a pretext for the typical Corporate House Cleaning/Reduction In Force scenario. Some people do well working remote (Im one of them in fact) but I suspect and from what I've seen the majority of people simply cant handle the responsibility/self management of…

> Corporate House Cleaning/Reduction In Force scenario HP did this back in 2013; be in the office or resign.

And it made HP the dynamic, fast growing company it is today.

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

#475

Post by thefourthchime »

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.

There is a disease where people add lots of people to meetings that don't really have to be there. Then people have a compulsion to go to every meeting they are invited to.

One of the best decisions I ever made was deciding to stop going to meetings unless I knew I had to. Turns out, nobody really cared, and if they really needed me they could also message me on slack and I can pop in.

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

#476

Post by lazyasciiart »

rajeshp1986 wrote: post #381
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…

What I noticed is it is not employee laziness but the FAANG companies have ton of dead weight in terms of future projects or project features which never get released. One of my co-workers was working on a feature which was shelved after working 2+ years on it. He lost motivation after that and coasted the rest of the time doing minimum work. I think FAANG companies have lot of PMs and top management who are as cluel…

ah, yes...six years at MSFT, only one year working on code that eventually shipped

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

#477

Post by nokeya »

When I click “Select all” in Gmail my browser hangs for several seconds at least. And now they say there is too much people. Hello! There is not too much people, there is is misutilization of your workforce! Instead of doing 100500+ chat app that will not do it to production, maybe focus on real customer problems and not on metrics? There is a lot comments now and before from people saying they seeing no impact from their work in FAANG. Of course, when your code means nothing and changes nothing - you will loose all motivation to do something useful

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

#478

Post by 999900000999 »

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…

>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 "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done!

As long as you're not mean, you can hang out at most companies for at least 6 months just doing nothing.

I've been reprimanded before , when I took the initiative to try and start building out a framework. I literally had nothing else to do, but I was later told I should have waited until a committee could be formed.

Even if you barely do anything, at least you're not causing trouble. In my career. I've worked with several abrasive angry people, I've seen folks confront C level employees.

Developers who cry about having to use a PC to write some.net code and throw a temper tantrum. Threaten to just walk out because some legacy code needed updating and they're so used to having a precious Mac to code on.

That said, I actually really like him how limited social interactions are with remote work. I don't need to know your political beliefs, I don't need to be your friend, I don't want to get drinks with you, I want to do what is necessary for my job.

Corporate fluff plays a role. I imagine Google develops products that will never be profitable just so they can look at their shareholders and say, looky we do stuff aside from search.

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

#479

Post by dom96 »

dekhn wrote: post #450
outworlder wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which pissed off the SRE leadership Really? I thought Googlers could move internally with little friction and yada yada. Is that just propaganda?

At the time (2009 or so) it was hard to leave SRE and be a SWE because SRE had a hard time keeping employees given the oncall and nature of the role. My mistake was to tell people it was easy to leave SRE, which the head of SRE didn't like. He called my new manager and chewed him out. To his credit, my new manager told me I wasn't in trouble, but to be more circumspect when dealing with predatory leadership.

I wonder if it's still that way. At Meta it is not, you need to go through an interview loop to move from Production Engineering to SWE (even though the culture at Meta makes PE far more similar to SWE than SRE is to SWE). I bet the reasoning is the same: they don't want to make it easy for folks to move from PE to SWE.

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

#480

Post by gorgoiler »

dron57 wrote: post #343
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…

Your employer is not your partner, come on. The employee - employer relationship is just business. Why should you feel grateful for getting your market based compensation?

I would argue that deep-thinking technical work, with unpredictable hours where new ideas that compel you to bust our vim and make a diff can come at any moment, alongside a group of people who are similarly motivated to not just keep revenue ticking over but who want to completely change an whole market sector — that very much is an emotionally embedded relationship akin to a partnership.

It’s not for everyone. It certainly induces ageism when people have kids and start to find their work/life balance no longer aligns with daytime/nighttime. It’s also exhausting and requires physical and mental stamina that provably is lacking the older you get.

These things are real but it just because you don’t align with this kind of business, it doesn’t make it wrong. Perhaps you think these startupesque workers are being exploited? Their graduate salaries suggest otherwise.

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