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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

#61

Post by akmarinov »

tpmoney wrote: post #22

This seems like something that should be expected? Every time the WFH battle has come up over the last few years, there are always people talking about how they’re able to do all their days work in 4 hours and spend the rest of the time idle “pretending to work”. Is it really surprising that as a result of this companies are reevaluating how much slack time their employees have? Especially as wages and demand for wag…

There’s no way you can sustain 8 hours/day of productive work 5 days a week as a developer. It’s not working a field or packing boxes, there’s a mental component that gets exhausted over time.

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

#63

Post by aeternum »

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…

Yes, it's pretty clear that humans were overfitting to their interview objective function: comp-sci algo problems.

For companies with such strong ML backgrounds, in addition to the sheer amount of content dedicated to discussing and solving tech interview questions hosted on their own platform, one would think they would have noticed earlier.

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

#64

Post by sn41 »

lordleft wrote: post #42

I'm a bit worried that this will trigger some kind of move to measure productivity in increasingly crude ways -- i.e. exhaustive, invasive telemetry that tracks every mouse click and keypress.

Snowcrash vibes. If you read an email too fast or too slow, you could be fired.

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

#66

Post by BlargMcLarg »

MAGZine wrote: post #48
tpmoney wrote: post #22

This seems like something that should be expected? Every time the WFH battle has come up over the last few years, there are always people talking about how they’re able to do all their days work in 4 hours and spend the rest of the time idle “pretending to work”. Is it really surprising that as a result of this companies are reevaluating how much slack time their employees have? Especially as wages and demand for wag…

I think we've built companies and cultures that are incompatible with long-term employment and happiness. Anyone who joins a company can crank full 8+ hours a day for a while to establish themselves (and a reputation). The "problem" is, as people establish themselves, the problem domain becomes less exciting. There's less urgency to crank indefinitely. They settle into a pattern that involves fewer hours, though thos…

Here's the real challenge: stop thinking in hours, limit upper bounds so employees don't inevitably fall into a race to the bottom (like what is happening now).

If your 3-hour-could-be-8 made adequate contribution, whatever that is, that's enough. If it takes them 8 to get to where the other is, incentives will push them to do so.

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

#67

Post by falcolas »

lordleft wrote: post #42

I'm a bit worried that this will trigger some kind of move to measure productivity in increasingly crude ways -- i.e. exhaustive, invasive telemetry that tracks every mouse click and keypress.

Probably. For every hard problem, there’s a bad technological solution.

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

#68

Post by [deleted] »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #29
leishman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s no secret that most people at Google hardly work. It’s been like this for years but you’re right it’s management’s fault for allowing this culture.

As an end user of Google Ads/Analytics what frustrates me the most is every time I have some question it’s like at least 3 meetings with different people explaining the same problem and the answer is always to pass the buck down to some “specialist”. It’s like no one even understands their products anymore. You have a “measurement specialist” and like three layers of specialists in that layer. You actually can’t get…

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by bluedino »

SavageBeast wrote: post #5

I see this as more or less a ruse to justify ridding the companies of all the now remote people who moved away to live in Cheap Town during the pandemic. This is a pretext for the typical Corporate House Cleaning/Reduction In Force scenario. Some people do well working remote (Im one of them in fact) but I suspect and from what I've seen the majority of people simply cant handle the responsibility/self management of…

“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said on the call, according to a Reuters report. “And part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.”
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