'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

#531

Post by Spivak » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:31 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #498

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…

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.

Unless I actually have substantive impact — like truly meaningful like people not one bacon distance away from me really feel it you’re getting the bare minimum.

This is the downside of trying to make knowledge workers a commodity and replaceable — work gets coasting and my side projects get my real creativity.

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

#532

Post by deeptote » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:31 PM UTC

tomuli38 wrote: post #500

twblalock wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah true, but this coming from the likes of Facebook and Google, two companies well known for warehousing talent... it mostly just comes across as tone deaf and naive.

For years they've literally hired very smart and capable people, and then shoehorned them into working on some ad-tech engine that an intern could do, just so they didn't work for a competitor. And now they're angry that their employees "don't work hard?"

Holy fuck, for being Google, they sure have some idiots in leadership.

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

#533

Post by neves » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:33 PM UTC

mikhael28 wrote: post #113

neves wrote: post #73

> Zuckerberg noticed that it was getting harder to get all the employees to attend a meeting as they were sometimes taking time out in a day for personal work. > “There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have. [We need to] create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer-focused, Ohhh! Two declarations based in…

Honestly, I'd be pissed too if I was Zuck. I'm a goddamn billionaire - if I invite you to the meeting, idgaf what you are doing unless someone died - get on this goddamn Zoom call. And even then, they better have been important! Dogs, cats, idgaf, get on this goddamn Zoom call! Then, because I'm a genius who singlehandedly started Facebook by myself, I extrapolate this thought to its logical extreme and start intimid…

Yes, the inflation is eating the wages of my employees, now they are asking for raises to maintain their standard of living. Let's call them slackers so I won't decrease my now extra profits. A shitty report of a enterprise magazine will take my words in face value and publish.

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

#534

Post by nemo44x » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:33 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #390

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 heard from former, recently departed Facebookers that their standards for hiring dropped quite a bit during the pandemic. If I had to guess why Zuck isn't happy, it's that the new hires plus the increased organisational bloat of such a massive amount of new hires didn't materalize into spreadsheet numbers that looked good.

No post body was provided.

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

#535

Post by nr2x » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

zmgsabst wrote: post #526

nr2x wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Impact is hard to define, I’m just talking about sprawling code bases, decades of reorgs, title changes, corporate priorities, and the very important little bits that just kinda make it all run.

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

#536

Post by Valakas_ » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

mgfist wrote: post #161

jjslocum3 wrote: post #91

Glad these guys seem to finally be noticing. I was a software engineering manager at a lean, high-margin, profitable start-up based in the NYC area starting in the late 2000s. We were acquired in 2014 by a very typical (for the time) SV-based competitor that had raised hundreds of millions in an IPO a few years earlier. Our acquirers had yet to see a single quarter of profit, of course. I and my team had so many good…

Sure but the big faang stocks literally print more money than every other company (idk maybe aramco or berkshire can compete, but nothing else). So something's working there.

What's working is that they have basically monopolies. Hard not to make money when there's no competition.

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

#537

Post by chaosbutters314 » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

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…

chrome is still buggy, the search bar moves my plugins a little after loading and I end up favoriting an empty page by clicking the star on the search bar. I think Google engineers are highly overrated for such a simple problem to still exist

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

#538

Post by wins32767 » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:36 PM UTC

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…

> That should also be left up to the engineers themselves to decide.

I agree with the rest, but I don't agree with this part. Engineers should have a lot of input into the hiring process, but fundamentally management is accountable for business performance and one of the biggest drivers of success is getting the right people in the door rather than just more people like the ones you already have (which is what happens almost always if you don't deliberately shape the hiring process).

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

#539

Post by BeetleB » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:36 PM UTC

deeptote wrote: post #527

BeetleB wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

Personally, I think disallowing other work should be illegal. Having said that: What was the policy at your workplace for other work? In my company it's clearly allowed if it's in a different industry - although they've not given clear guidance on whether I need to disclose it in those cases.

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

#540

Post by dominotw » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:37 PM UTC

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…

> I have met a few of those people, but every single one of them needed a justification.

Nah man. They just want to chillax. I know because i was one of them at some of my jobs. I don't get any satisfaction from crud/etl type jobs at all. I just want to a paycheck to fund my lifestyle and hobbies. I know tons of people like me , like 50% of my friend circle. Ppl just don't give a shit.