'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm • Hacker News Board

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

#491

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:03 PM UTC

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.

Certainly not in most European countries.

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

#492

Post by weard_beard » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:04 PM UTC

dboreham wrote: post #440

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…

> agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem This kind of "development process theater" causes terrible cognitive dissonance.

I'm intrigued by this statement. Maybe we run an unorthodox version of Agile, but I'm a solutions architect with imposter syndrome (which is why I clicked this link) and I spend about 3/4 of each day in meetings with PMs and SSTs (Business Analyst) generating a backlog and acceptance criteria that's structured and detailed enough that our developers are generally happy if they get to choose the variable names.

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

#493

Post by sunnyps » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:05 PM UTC

catlifeonmars wrote: post #217

tiahura wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biglaw attorneys routinely bill 2200 hours a year in 6 minute increments. Add in nonbillable work and self-written off time, and many of these attorneys work 60+ hour weeks. Plus, they do this into their 50’s.

Any idea why six minutes and not some other?

0.1 hours?

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

#494

Post by michaelt » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:05 PM UTC

symlinkk wrote: post #328

bashinator wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of any work to be done for a Meta company that I'd find meaningful in any way. I imagine there are plenty of people who only figured this out for themselves after coming on board.

Creating a VR game that your friends and family can play? Adding an API to React that shapes the course of frontend development for millions of people?

And in this photo, grandson, you can see where your grandpa spent 2 years running into walls at different angles, as part of the daily regression test for players being able to clip outside the world.

Of course in the end it turned out you could clip out of the world by summoning your horse in a doorway - but not by running into a wall, no siree not on my watch.

Did you know it was the first ever game where the in-game billboards for each player were auctioned dynamically? A complete auction took place in less than the time it took to draw one frame on the screen! I wish I could show you the game itself - such a pity they decommissioned the servers 15 years before you were born.

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

#495

Post by tomgp » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:05 PM UTC

Looking at Meta’s product line at the moment it’s easy to see how people might not be motivated to give their all. Facebook and Instagram are so markedly driven by numbers rather than any kind of product vision, i can imagine it being pretty depressing.

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

#496

Post by gorgoiler » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:06 PM UTC

becquerel wrote: post #301

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…

Uh... why should employees have a friendly relationship with their work? We don't work because we want to make friends. We work because otherwise we don't have money to buy food or clothe ourselves. This is not a voluntary arrangement. Expecting us to be grateful for it is absurd.

Your employer — and particularly your hiring manager when they become your line manager — is grateful for your time, I can assure you of that. You didn’t have to work there and a large part of accepting a role is wanting to work for / with someone.

It’s uncharitable to not bring at least some level of social pleasantry to the office every day.

I mean unless you work for Walmart or something. I assume we are both talking about senior, highly remunerated, creative and specialist technical work here, not breaking rocks.

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

#497

Post by bambataa » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:06 PM UTC

lazyasciiart wrote: post #419

refulgentis wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was in a team like that. One person in particular would pick ambitious tasks, do a completely inadequate implementation, reject all feedback and then leave everyone else to deal with the production outages.

Unfortunately management only saw the “picks ambitious tasks” and were blind to everything else.

You can’t really blame people for responding to absurd incentives in absurd ways.

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

#498

Post by closeparen » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:07 PM UTC

codegeek wrote: post #287

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…

"Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight." I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. The larger the team/company, the more chances of those people being around. They pretend to be always busy and doing something but don't actually get anything done. Seen it all for 18+ years. Having said that, there are plenty of people as well who would LOVE…

In particular, people who never really figured out how to do more than bare minimum technical work tend to fail upwards into primarily "collaborative" roles.

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

#499

Post by jimjimjim » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:08 PM UTC

coffeeisyummy wrote: post #483

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…

This iteration through pseudo productivity comes from management's real world problem of demonstrating progress on their projects. The promises of visibility on your development team's productivity always turns Agile into a steaming pile of burn-downs and story points. "No one has done true Agile" is the "No one has done true Communism" for software engineering. Because, in the real world, no one uses Agile in an ide…

exactly. the sales department has targets for the quarter and they won't give 2 damns about how many story points your team got through this sprint. They want on this date or else.

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

#500

Post by tomuli38 » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:08 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #473

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 cull…

From what I understand, Netflix doesn't cull the herd — they get rid of good (but not excellent) performers too. The article is talking about actually cullung the herd and getting rid of the mediocre performers who previously could skate by.