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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

#551

Post by treis »

zhengyi13 wrote: post #514
ryneandal wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typical where? I've _never_ had to deal with such a schedule.

When I've shoulder-surfed my managers and PMs for roughly the last ten years, they're all like that: wall-to-wall meetings. Any technical work they do (and here at least, (T)PMs are expected to potentially contribute technical work) is done outside 9-5. Certainly there are techniques to mitigate this, but I see it, at least.

A former coworker called these people professional meeters. Had an EM like that. Either he was in a meeting or he was walking around and talking the ear off of whichever unfortunate soul he bumped into. Tangible output was basically 0.

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

#552

Post by notyourday »

I don't understand why this is a surprise. Is it that no one from FAANG upper management visited HN? HN general position is:

* get a job at FAANG

* do nothing, other than show up and do some minimal work

* collect mad money

* when bored go to another FAANG

Compared this to startups:

* get a job at startup

* work work work work work

* collect OK money

* go back to work

HN advice? Get a job at FAANG!

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

#553

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#554

Post by dyingkneepad »

wizofaus wrote: post #338
Scoundreller wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think yahoo found something like 35% of its wfh staff hadn’t logged in for weeks or months. (I can’t find a source for the number, so maybe I’m off, but vpn logs were used to justify ending wfh, which is… an imperfect approach for many reasons). Overall, I don’t think the plan at yahoo was to fix anything, but just asset-strip it, which worked well for stockholders.

It baffles me how that's possible - in 25+ years working for software companies all my co-workers have been people I interact with basically daily (certainly more than once a week) - so how could someone not log in for weeks and it not be an issue?

I work for a company where the VPN sucks so much that we find ways to work outside it. Shadow IT is a thing here. I'd say some of our most productive and value-creating employees may go months without logging in internal systems, because things that are inside the company are able to pull their work that they do outside, so they don't have to deal with the shitty Windows-centric IT.

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

#555

Post by OkayPhysicist »

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 isn't your partner, they're your John. They get what they pay for, and that's it. If they want you to perform gratitude to stroke their egos, then they can pay extra for it.

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

#556

Post by rr888 »

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…

TC or GTFO.

Honestly I've been in markets where this worked out. You pay a lot of money to get someone good who's motivated and does great work. Tech recently though has been a game where you get a high paying job and you just spend a year trying to get the next one rather than working.

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

#557

Post by komadori »

badpun wrote: post #486
lumost wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was only 4-5 years ago that Google was considered the pinnacle of Engineering centric culture. It was still considered top up until last year. Something is going off the rails in the big tech firms if people now view big-tech work as menial. These were the same companies that pioneered CI/CD, Services, cloud, scalable web services, and myriad other technologies.

Many of the top engineering companies (Boeing etc.) are also objectively crappy places to work at. When you're doing things at the scale of Boeing or Google, you need a lot of process, and it's just no fun to do engineering this way.

That's probably true. Not that there aren't bits of Google doing fun and interesting work, it's a massive company after all. I've worked at a few, what I would consider to be large orgs, but my experience of Google was that it's truly on a different scale when it comes to bureaucracy and company politics.

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

#558

Post by logicchains »

badpun wrote: post #486
lumost wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was only 4-5 years ago that Google was considered the pinnacle of Engineering centric culture. It was still considered top up until last year. Something is going off the rails in the big tech firms if people now view big-tech work as menial. These were the same companies that pioneered CI/CD, Services, cloud, scalable web services, and myriad other technologies.

Many of the top engineering companies (Boeing etc.) are also objectively crappy places to work at. When you're doing things at the scale of Boeing or Google, you need a lot of process, and it's just no fun to do engineering this way.

>When you're doing things at the scale of Boeing or Google, you need a lot of process

Are you sure "need" is the right word here? Whatever Boeing's been doing recently hasn't been working very well for them or 737 Max passengers.

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

#559

Post by rednerrus »

michaelt wrote: post #494
symlinkk wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-ga…

Submitting my 2 weeks after reading this comment.

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

#560

Post by cletus »

Once again, companies blaming strategic problems on ICs rather than real culprit: leadership. Or, rather, the lack thereof.

Having worked at both Google and Facebook I can tell you it's contradictory because in some cases you have an embarrassment of riches, hundreds or even thousands of heads, virtually unlimited resources (CPU, storage, networking), etc. Some make sense like Google+. I mean it was a failure and probably came way too late to succeed no matter what Google did but I understand trying. Maps, Docs, Youtube, Photos, Drive, Chrome, Android... all of these make sense.

I also understand you can't necessarily predict "winners" so to a certain extent you have to try things and expect failures.

Interestingly though every project I listed there (apart from Drive and Photos) was an acquisition.

On the other hand, you have projects desperate for people that turn into abandonware because they don't get sufficiently funded, even when they have PMF.

There are a ton of middle managers at big tech companies who exist only to get promoted and to empire build. You could, in my opinion, take everyone from L7 (M3 at Google, M2 at Facebook) to VP and fire 75% of them and be perfectly fine.

Both of these companies are now in what I call permanent reorg churn. Every few months you'll get an email saying your mananger's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager as part of a broad reorg. You've never met any of these people. This is a meme internally.

But what you have to understand is that reorgs are a way of avoiding the appearance of failure while appearing to be doing something. Don't get me wrong. Bad organizational structure can set you up for failure and a good org structure can help you succeed but reorg churn is none of this.

Reorg churn is simply changing the structure every 6 months. Nothing is ever in place long enough to determine if it succeeded or failed. People responsible for those decisions have probably moved on.

Additionally, at Google in particular, the amount of process required to do anything is insane. But don't worry. Bureaucracy busters has another 3 surveys for you to fill out to improve things. I once spent a quarter just babysitting a launch calendar entry.

The checklist to launch anything is insanely long. Even getting a small amount of resources requires Machiavellian machinations.

But sure, there are too many employees. Got it.

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