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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

#521

Post by nkrisc »

depereo wrote: post #463
fefe23 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have met a few of those people, but every single one of them needed a justification. Some told me they felt wronged by the company somehow. For example they had experienced bullying, or didn't get promoted when they felt they should have been, or they had contributed something and then it got cut from the product, something like that in most cases. Now didn't feel they owed the company anything. Yet others said the…

I turned into dead weight once during a hostile takeover of the company I was working for. It was pretty shit, and I'm glad I moved on after a few months of being unproductive. Management removed our ability to move forward on any existing work, and allocated no new work, and rejected any proposals from anyone from the 'old' company. Wound up spending most of my (remote) work day occasionally checking my work laptop…

I had a coworker who ended up in a similar situation. At one point they were almost literally being paid to do nothing. They eventually stopped even going in to the office all while collecting a pay check. As nice as that sounds, it was still not a great situation because they didn't know how long it would last and figured eventually, without warning, they'd be dropped. They ended up leaving on their own to actually do something and have a more stable job.

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

#522

Post by trombone5000 »

bombcar wrote: post #396
rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how I think of it. You pay firemen for their ability to solve a problem quickly and efficiently, and for being able to execute when called upon. Giant companies making money hand over fist pay a lot of "don't fuck this up" salaries. The primary goal for everyone is to keep the money printer running smoothly; everything else is secondary.

The key difference is people understand you’re paying the firemen for the emergencies- but a lot of SREs are actually firemen but paid like developers. When everyone is quietly pretending you’re not a fireman but you are it leads do a disconnect where everyone is playing charades.

The people handling the emergencies should get paid considerably more than developers - when they system is down, the real, actual, company-sustaining money stops coming in.

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

#523

Post by [deleted] »

potatolicious wrote: post #111

It'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…

[deleted]

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

#524

Post by Negitivefrags »

vecter wrote: post #226
daenz wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it? I understand your point, but the counterpoint is that the leaders are in a position to make big changes if something is broken. They could attempt to push some simple change and see glaring process and onboarding problems, which nobody has been interested in prioritizing, and then make them top priority, saving everyone time.

That sounds good in theory but most leaders are so removed from engineering that it would take them a week ramp up to produce even the most basic tiny change/feature to push to production. A VP should not be spending one week of his or her time doing that. They should rely on engineers to identify and fix whatever is broken at that level. That's why we have staff+ engineers. But that's also pretty divorced from the t…

If it takes a week to "ramp up" to produce a tiny change, then that itself is probably a broken process that needs to be improved.

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

#525

Post by closeparen »

codefreeordie wrote: post #17
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…

"Rest and vest" is a phrase that gets bandied about often -- including by people who are trying to do it. I couldn't tell you what fraction of employees, but there are folks hiding in all of the big tech companies that are happy with their comp, aren't trying to advance, and have adopted the "do the minimum to not get fired" approach to their work. If too many of these get together in one org or on one team, the whol…

Doing work is a low status activity. If too many people in your team or org are trying to get ahead, you will be drowning in project management and recurring cross-team syncs and grand plans but with hardly anyone writing code.

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

#526

Post by zmgsabst »

nr2x wrote: post #433
dekhn wrote: post #165

By 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.

This is an interesting question to me — do software engineers follow a Pareto distribution on their impact?

That would imply that around 1,000 SDEs are delivering 38% of the impact in the field.

A change in culture which drove out that 0.1% would potentially noticeably drop the UX of “tech”, across the US.

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

#527

Post by deeptote »

BeetleB wrote: post #402
fefe23 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have met a few of those people, but every single one of them needed a justification. Some told me they felt wronged by the company somehow. For example they had experienced bullying, or didn't get promoted when they felt they should have been, or they had contributed something and then it got cut from the product, something like that in most cases. Now didn't feel they owed the company anything. Yet others said the…

> or didn't get promoted when they felt they should have been, or they had contributed something and then it got cut from the product, something like that in most cases Can definitely speak to these cases - especially where you do great work and have a narrative that it was unappreciated - and clearly see lesser performing or less impressive colleagues getting ahead. For a lot of people, it takes only a few instances…

> Can definitely speak to these cases - especially where you do great work and have a narrative that it was unappreciated - and clearly see lesser performing or less impressive colleagues getting ahead.

I did great work for a company and got fired... because I took a freelance w2 contract in my spare time. The company didn't even know that I'd taken on the role, and the role had actually finished, when they somehow did find out and I got my marching papers.

FUCK working hard and FUCK doing "good" work.

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

#528

Post by jeffwask »

Robber barons don't like worker's gaining rights, news at 11.

All those tech campuses with barbershops, laundries, etc weren't built for the employees benefit. They were built to trap you and keep you working long hours.

It's sucks when your employee can just log off after 8 hours and be in their yard with their kids minutes later.

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

#529

Post by carom »

vecter wrote: post #226
daenz wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it? I understand your point, but the counterpoint is that the leaders are in a position to make big changes if something is broken. They could attempt to push some simple change and see glaring process and onboarding problems, which nobody has been interested in prioritizing, and then make them top priority, saving everyone time.

That sounds good in theory but most leaders are so removed from engineering that it would take them a week ramp up to produce even the most basic tiny change/feature to push to production. A VP should not be spending one week of his or her time doing that. They should rely on engineers to identify and fix whatever is broken at that level. That's why we have staff+ engineers. But that's also pretty divorced from the t…

They absolutely should be spending their time doing that. They are in the position to say "I have to do X, Y, and Z to push 2 lines of code??" and actually get it fixed. That week could save the company years of developer hours lost to overhead.

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

#530

Post by lhorie »

fefe23 wrote: post #317
codegeek wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I have met a few of those people, but every single one of them needed a justification. Some told me they felt wronged by the company somehow. For example they had experienced bullying, or didn't get promoted when they felt they should have been, or they had contributed something and then it got cut from the product, something like that in most cases. Now didn't feel they owed the company anything. Yet others said the…

People will always make up reasons if the tone of the conversation feels adversarial, but just spend a week in r/cscareerquestions to see the unfiltered sentiment: lots of people literally bragging about working 30 or even 20 hours per week as a full time employee, or who explicitly call out "slacking off" as a reason for preferring WFH. "Rest and vest". Etc.
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