'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

#591

Post by aliasxneo » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:23 PM UTC

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?

The short answer is I tried - for about three years. Meanwhile, I had the onset of depression, panic attacks, and numerous other physical ailments. It's taken about two years of therapy, but I've finally realized that I am just not the person that can do that.

Funny enough, I have a co-worker who is able to perform in this way and he appears to have no issues with the current status quo. As much as I might wish I could be more tolerant, I've accepted that I'm just built different and I need my job to provide a challenging environment.

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

#592

Post by wizofaus » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:25 PM UTC

dyingkneepad wrote: post #554

wizofaus wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But are you talking software development? And if so, is that because key systems like source control/ticketing/chat/meetings etc. are all cloud-hosted and don't require logging into the domain/VPN etc.? If so, I'd still count that as "logging in", in the sense, they're online and interacting with other co-workers.

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

#593

Post by FridgeSeal » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:26 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #403

colechristensen wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. As long as that's the actual acknowledged situation and not "most of your job is pretending to work and making people think you're important". I wonder how successful a lot of companies would be if they openly cut required hours in half.

If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. Would you take that over $300k to work 40 hours doing something you actually care about? I don't think I would.

Maybe? But not until I’ve spent a while doing the whole 4-hours thing.

If I’m working 4-hours a week, that’s a 4-days a week I can be skiing. And reading, and hanging out with friends, and working on actually interesting code projects that aren’t beholden to the whims and timelines of a company. I’d absolutely do that for a while.

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

#594

Post by aliasxneo » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:26 PM UTC

tomgp wrote: post #503

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 imagine because you’re required to be present in some sense for ~8 hours a day 5 days a week. that doesn’t leave much time for anything else, especially if you have caring responsibilities or any other life commitments. once you’re in a depressive state getting out of that hole can be a real struggle

Exactly, and it can turn into a horrible snowball effect if left unchecked. That is what happened to me and it wasn't until I started getting help in therapy that I was more able to understand the situation.

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

#595

Post by lowercased » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:26 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #543

Silverback_VII wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 arc…

I've been that person in a couple of projects, and it wasn't just because I went off and did my own thing. In at least one case the other people on the team were simply not very capable. As in... I've been building web applications for 25 years, and some of the other folks on the team came out of a bootcamp. And... they don't talk.

"Please, joe, let's connect and you can follow along with what I'm doing". Silence.

"Hey, dave, I see the PR is only a few days late. We still have some time left, can you write a test for it?"

I can get stuff done or I can 'corral and build up' the others, but I can't do both. If you want stuff done by a deadline, and you will not discipline the non-contributors (discipline doesn't mean fire, but it might mean "you have to come to these meetings and pair and follow along and document and write tests")... what's left?

FWIW, I know the difference between decent teams and non-decent teams. The non-decent ones were poorly managed, largely because management could not determine who was skilled and who wasn't. The decent teams I've been on were situations where I still generally had more overall experience (function of age) but the other less-experienced people will still good, engaged, and already contributing, and were measurably improving month to month.

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

#596

Post by agluszak » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:27 PM UTC

koverda wrote: post #413

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…

managers are employees too

We have a very nice phrase in Polish describing what kind of employees they are, literally it goes like: "there are those who are equal and those who are equaler".

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

#597

Post by PostOnce » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:28 PM UTC

Adtech companies being more "productive" than they already are is a terrifying thought.

How much worse could they make our world?

It's not just the ads, its the search result / timeline / suggestion bubble echo chamber that may bring about a new Dark Age. Let's hope they fail.

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

#598

Post by Tehdasi » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:30 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #330

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…

> There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company Not really. Even they will carve out some niche and pretend (even to themselves) to be doing useful work. Middle managers love to schedule irrelevant meetings, but they will provide some business justification to themselves and to others. You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves. It'…

> Even they will carve out some niche and pretend (even to themselves) to be doing useful work. ... You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves.

In my experience, internal apps need far more love. Maintaining internal apps is far more useful than most 'real' work, just because it can be a multiplier on so much other 'real' work.

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

#599

Post by paganel » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:30 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #313

telchior wrote: post #252

Which companies with similar concerns have actually managed to increase productivity in a way that satisfies the C-suite? A much older anecdote: I had a friend who worked at Yahoo around the time Marissa Mayer was coming on as CEO. At the time, they were allowing semi-WFH for certain positions. I literally never saw this guy go to work, or actually do any work. He was part of a stand-up comedy workshop and spent 100%…

I think Yahoo was a special case though. At that point in the company's life, they attracted the kinds of people that wanted a job they could phone in. I knew a bunch of Ex-Yahoos, and they all cited this fact as one of the main reasons they left. I also knew some Yahoos at that time, who were not like that, but were frustrated so many of their coworkers were, especially since they had to carry the load. But they lik…

> I knew a bunch of Ex-Yahoos, and they all cited this fact as one of the main reasons they left.

Which was a shame, because they had built something really interesting and nice when it came to the web. Between 2006 and 2008 (give or take) I'd say Yahoo was neck and neck with Google when it came to bringing "cool stuff" to the web. Yahoo! Pipes is still something I think of from time to time after all these years.

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

#600

Post by AmericanChopper » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:32 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.

This isn’t true at all in my experience. I’ve contracted at many places that simply had a culture of avoiding work. Where a majority of the permanent employees hardly do any work, their main focus is coming up with reasons why problems are somebody else’s problems to solve, and avoiding accountability for anything that goes wrong. The pandemic and WFH has made this a lot worse in many companies. Out of the dozens of large orgs I’ve contracted to, far more of them had these problems than didn’t.