Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

business-standard.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 1001 posts

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

#581

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

deeptote wrote: post #532
tomuli38 wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

This sounds plausible, but I'd love to hear if others agree with this claim.

Isn't this a failure of the free market? This leads to the obvious question, which is: what could be done to improve optimal talent distribution?

It seems bad to society if rich companies can monopolize talent to control development and output in order to ensure greater political power and control.

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

#582

Post by vehementi »

feet wrote: post #566
lhorie wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or maybe those are just the people who spend time on reddit disproportionately, it could be sampling error

Yeah, but the claim was that nobody was like this, while there are obviously a bunch of people explicitly doing this

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

#583

Post by MisterBastahrd »

galdosdi wrote: post #25
mikhael28 wrote: post #21

Maybe it’s not the employees fault, but the management who hired them… or maybe it’s the fact that it takes forever to get anything done at FAANG nowadays. Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders.. but a great way of identifying people who can hack a process to secure maximal reward. Look, if I can ‘crack the coding intervi…

> Look, if I can ‘crack the coding interview’, then I can certainly crack ‘how to do as little work as possible and stack paper to the ceiling while my stock vests’. What's worse, many of the jaded people going through the motions probably started out gung-ho but then got frustrated to see how little impact they were really able to have and eventually became checked out. These kinds of things are self fulfilling prop…

If I'm being honest, I'd probably be happier at a place where my contribution was a small drop in a giant bucket than a place where we were much smaller but my input was being largely ignored.

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

#584

Post by Willish42 »

cletus wrote: post #560

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 pro…

> 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.

So many nails being hit on heads. Bravo. I see a lot of discussion in these threads around how hard it is to measure IC productivity, but nearly nothing about how to measure middle manager productivity (spoiler: you can't because their credit is based on work done by the people below them). In the middle of this hiring freeze stuff I got yet another reorg email from my company about my great-great-grand-boss, who I've never met, switching around to add a new layer of middle management new hires. Each of these is worth at least 5 IC headcount, probably more. I don't see a lot of criticism aimed at how _that_ band of the headcount doesn't match productivity...

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

#585

Post by agluszak »

z9znz wrote: post #170
mikhael28 wrote: post #21

Maybe it’s not the employees fault, but the management who hired them… or maybe it’s the fact that it takes forever to get anything done at FAANG nowadays. Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders.. but a great way of identifying people who can hack a process to secure maximal reward. Look, if I can ‘crack the coding intervi…

> when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod That would be a surpreme waste of company money, and probably they have engineers working for them who are far better developers than they are.

> a waste of company money Well, I wonder how the CEOs, VPs, and other top level people actually spend their time at work. I get that they obviously must be doing something Very Important And Useful[1], because otherwise it would be a supreme waste of company money to pay them for eating Business Lunches...

1 - https://nypost.com/2022/07/01/rotterdam-wont-dismantle-bridg...

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

#586

Post by selimthegrim »

sn41 wrote: post #72
waspight wrote: post #34

Why is Netflix part of FAANG? Isn’t all the other ones much larger corporations?

Because without Netflix, it would be a bit awkward. I've always felt that leaving Microsoft out was a bit problematic. But FAAMG does not sound very threatening.

I guess the French have GAFAM?

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

#587

Post by electromech »

TL;DR, Zuck & Pichai demonstrating how NOT to lead.

I can see the Cheyenne Dialysis commercial now...

---

Narrator: "Do your employees seem disengaged? Is it 'getting harder to get all the employees to attend a meeting'¹?"

Zuck: Then COME ON DOWN to Cheyenne Dialysis for a copy of my hot new leadership book: "This Place Isn’t For You!"¹

Zuck: Check out what Microsoft's own dear leader, Pichai, had to say about the new book...

"Pichai": "When I said we needed to 'create a culture that is more mission-focused'¹, I knew my employees needed 'more hunger'¹. This book taught me to squash those pesky 'personal projects'¹, so we can focus on our core values as a company: 'leaner, meaner'¹.

Zuck: COME ON DOWN or call today to reserve your copy of "This Place Isn’t For You!"¹ On sale for only $19.99! err... only $24.99! err... only $29.99!

---

¹ LMAO that these are actual quotes from the article. Parody can't hold a candle to the absurdity of real life.

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

#588

Post by icedchai »

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 worked at a company where I'd have at least 2 or 3 days a week where we had 4 hours of meetings. It was pure hell. Half the time I wouldn't even pay attention. I'd be browsing reddit or HN.

You hit the nail on the head with agile. I remember writing some code only to have the whole thing ripped out "next sprint" because nobody bothered to think a couple weeks ahead. Or starting an integration project with a third party, only to find out they're not ready, so we have no API that actually works. So we waste time mocking it out, only to find out the docs they gave us don't match reality.

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

#589

Post by rr888 »

015a wrote: post #182
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…

You know; there are two sides to view this coin from: either "those tech people are insane with all their beautiful buildings, great perks, and fantastic work-life balance" or "those tech people are forward-looking with how we could just make work less shitty for everyone, if only other industries would catch on". I'm sad that even many on here seem to be opting for the "insane" line of thinking, and not recognizing…

I agree, but FAANG developers also get paid huge amounts at the same time. A relaxed job with great perks should pay 50-100k. If you earn half a mil in RSUs you really should be grinding, or someone else will take your place.

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

#590

Post by ceras »

curiousgal wrote: post #443
aliasxneo wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling this extends to several areas in Google. I come from the GDC side of things and have the exact same experience. To keep my job requires very minimal effort on my part. In fact, nowadays I'm punishing myself by trying to do anything "above and beyond." This is mostly due to the rapid growth of committees and the struggle for power that has come out of it (i.e., I'm more likely to be denied by a change…

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?

Why not both? Work is ~40hrs a week, so it's nicer if you have the option to enjoy it. There are other software jobs with similar pay to Google, but with more rewarding work. Win-win to switch, if that's what you're looking for.

Personally, the type of problems I solve at work are more interesting than I could realistically come up with and work on on my own. Ymmv.

Post reply on HN