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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

#541

Post by debug-desperado »

russellbeattie wrote: post #309
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…

> My managers consistently gave me "meets expectations" That's because his bonus was probably tied to your performance. By making sure all his subordinates receive meets or exceeds expectations, then he looks good. His manager does the same, all the way up the chain. They played the same game when I worked at Amazon. What's more, it became automated. They introduced non-optional surveys that popped up on your compute…

Seems like the feedback would need to be reviewable in a "skip level" fashion for that to work.

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

#542

Post by soperj »

dekhn wrote: post #459
curiousgal wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is that what you ended up doing? Are you happy with how it turned out?

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

#543

Post by Spivak »

Silverback_VII wrote: post #351
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 seen it in many places. It's like you can watch the emergence of Orwell's Animal Farm in every human setting. A small fraction doing more and more, which in turn let the others do less and less.

> which in turn let the others do less and less.

Force the others to do less and less. I’ve seen this a million times, you have one dev going absolutely buck wild building a cathedral of abstractions that only they can understand. The rest of the devs struggle to implement basic features because, and I can’t overstate this enough because it’s true every time the code is a horribly written tightly coupled shoddily architected ball of chewing gum of twine spooky action at a distance with no isolation between components (usually because “DRY”) which is impossible to reason about unless you wrote it.

That dev becomes insanely productive in that codebase, the hero of to all managers, and everyone grinds to a halt gets demotivated because they can’t tackle anything ambitious.

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

#544

Post by eftychis »

afro88 wrote: post #278
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money. Your standup meeting could've been an email. Their immovable basketball game (quality of life) is…

This seems crazy to me, but I don't work in FAANG. A basketball game (I'm assuming recurring) during work hours? Quality of life from inside work? Are you all at campus for most of your day (ie, longer than 8h?) To me, quality of life is working hard and smart during the 8h, and keeping the rest of the day for you and your family. Quality of life comes from outside work, and the company respects and encourages that b…

Team building. A lot of great stuff and camaraderie have been built over a coffee and walk, or some beer after hours with colleagues.

To the grandfather commenter: I still agree that you weren't missing anything about your parent company. Work needs to happen and it needs to be aligned with a market and be profitable or have a strategic advantage (to make the company desirable).

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

#545

Post by logicchains »

Silverback_VII wrote: post #351
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 seen it in many places. It's like you can watch the emergence of Orwell's Animal Farm in every human setting. A small fraction doing more and more, which in turn let the others do less and less.

Animal Farm was an allegory for communist dictatorships, and most large organisations are internally run like communist dictatorships.

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

#546

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#547

Post by closeparen »

Spivak wrote: post #531
closeparen wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not talking about people who have technical side projects.

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

#548

Post by tomuli38 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #415
taylodl wrote: post #395

They increased their headcount by 62% during the pandemic and now are like - these people are deadweight and not productive? Really? There are a lot of logistics you have to have in place to hire that many people, especially when you're already a LARGE company, and keep them all working. It seems to me their hiring process is completely broken - hire everybody, see who works out, can the rest. This just confirms the…

I mean it’s not unreasonable to think they needed those people then, but now they don’t. If you’ve got 40,000 people worth of work and 70,000 people some of them aren’t going to be productive. Just because you had 70,000 people worth of work last year doesn’t mean they’re still productive this year.

Then say that and don't blame employee laziness for poor planning.

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

#549

Post by excitom »

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…

I remember a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an Austin-based startup that crashed in 2000. At the company meeting where layoffs were announced, the floor was opened for questions. Someone asked "does this mean the rock climbing wall in the cafeteria won't be completed?"

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

#550

Post by jerglingu »

rubiquity wrote: post #484
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…

I'm surprised to see this is the top voted comment because it is completely off the mark in this case and anyone that has spent any amount of time reading Blind (a website dedicated to... I'm not sure what exactly) knows it. While Facebook/Meta, Google, and others have always paid comparatively well, in the past 2-3 years the pay shot up even higher and the only price of admission is supreme obedience to "grinding Le…

Blind is interesting. I'm grateful for the insights into total compensation it granted me, and Blind combined with a managerial stint gave me a very solid feel for both industry and company-specific bands. I also got notice of an impending reorg that was coming my way, and started early in looking for another home.

On the other hand, it only exacerbated the cynicism and burnout covid and WFH brought. Trolls are rewarded with attention through "engagement" with their incendiary posts, misinformation and speculation passed as dogma are rampant, and as you mentioned the collective priority in "the community" is this egocentric worship of money. It reminds me of the subreddit /r/relationships, where the number one piece of advice is to obviously break up or divorce because you're getting screwed over. Blind's number one piece of advice is to obviously grind leetcode and start interviewing because you're getting screwed over.

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