'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

#611

Post by MichaelMoser123 » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:38 PM UTC

yalogin wrote: post #565

The speed at which the tone of these is changing is amazing. Just a few weeks ago everyone said its getting impossible to hire and so they need to expand to other tech hubs, pay exorbitant salaries and offer lot of perks to attract candidates. All of a sudden now, just in the span of a few weeks, these executives started realizing their headcount is too high, productivity too low and that employees should self select…

Management is just reacting to a changed financial environment. But they can't admit that, so that they make it look as if it is about someones incompetence.

I think its the war of Russia against Ukraine. All of a sudden there is less money to go around, interest rates go up and it got harder to raise money. I think they are just putting up a straight face, as they respond to the changing circumstances.

And they probably changed their plans as well, now it is less about 'new features' and more about 'maintenance of existing systems'. But that didn't get into the article, so it's all the fault of the people who will have to look for a new job...

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

#612

Post by paganel » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:38 PM UTC

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #581

deeptote wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> but I'd love to hear if others agree with this claim.

I'm one of those that agree with that claim, I've said something similar a couple of times during the last few years on this forum (I remember that once I even used the term "golden handcuffs" in order to describe the whole situation).

As to why and how this came to happen in relation to the free market? The short answer is that both Google and FB are de-facto monopolies. In a way that can also be extended to Apple and MS. Of course that these companies will make tons and tons of a money during a period when software is eating the world (I know it sounds marketing-ish, but it's the reality). As such, they can use that money to "park" the best developers available among their ranks, so that no real competitor can emerge.

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

#613

Post by noirbot » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:40 PM UTC

bcrosby95 wrote: post #519

weard_beard wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm intrigued by this statement. Maybe we run an unorthodox version of Agile, but I'm a solutions architect with imposter syndrome (which is why I clicked this link) and I spend about 3/4 of each day in meetings with PMs and SSTs (Business Analyst) generating a backlog and acceptance criteria that's structured and detailed enough that our developers are generally happy if they get to choose the variable names.

This isn't anything like how a place like Google or Facebook works. I would guess that the vast majority of developers (I daresay 100% of them) posting on HN would not like to work at a place like that.

I think it's a mix of both - I'd kill for anyone at my current job to spend more than a bare minimum of time on their acceptance criterion so I don't just feel like I'm writing code and hoping it does vaguely what the person wants. What the GP is describing feels a bit too far in the other direction, but I'd almost rather it trend towards having an over-prescriptive ticket I can push back on then playing telephone with another department because they gave me 3 sentences of writeup for a month/quarter long project.

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

#614

Post by dasil003 » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:41 PM UTC

trombone5000 wrote: post #522

bombcar wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key difference is people understand you’re paying the firemen for the emergencies- but a lot of SREs are actually firemen but paid like developers. When everyone is quietly pretending you’re not a fireman but you are it leads do a disconnect where everyone is playing charades.

The people handling the emergencies should get paid considerably more than developers - when they system is down, the real, actual, company-sustaining money stops coming in.

But on the other hand they don't add new features or push product forward in any way.

Maybe this is okay for a late stage company that is in the value extraction mode. In that case the private equity playbook is to lay off the app developers, and they can throw more money at ops to increase efficiency of the shrinking pie.

On the other hand if you're in a highly competitive growth industry then you need to innovate, and if you optimize for SRE talent, you won't have sufficiently senior engineering talent to find the right balance between innovation and stability.

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

#615

Post by danaris » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:41 PM UTC

mirker wrote: post #423

danaris wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that are happy with their comp, aren't trying to advance Why does this > and have adopted the "do the minimum to not get fired" approach to their work necessarily have to go with this? What's wrong with deciding "I don't need to advance further; I like the work I do, I make enough money; I don't need to be hustling anymore"? It seems to me the concept of "enough" is hard to grasp for a lot of people, especially tho…

A rational actor will notice they get either a promotion or less work in the high/low work instances. If you work in between those boundaries, you get nothing extra.

In some cases, yes.

In others, as implied by the post I was replying to, people think that if you're not constantly Striving, you're not good enough.

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

#616

Post by MichaelMoser123 » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:42 PM UTC

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…

>Maybe it’s not the employees fault, but the management who hired them…

I think the managers are just putting up a straight face, as they need to respond to the changing circumstances.

I think it has more to do with the economy and the war of Russia against Ukraine. All of a sudden there is less money to go around, interest rates are rising and it got harder to raise money.

And they probably changed their plans, now it is less about 'new features' and more about 'maintenance of existing systems'. But that didn't get into the article, so it's all the fault of the people who will have to look for a new job.

Searching for a new job isn't a pleasant experience, if you ask me.

(I am not working at google or facebook, but I will probably get to feel the implications as well...)

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

#617

Post by endtime » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:42 PM UTC

refulgentis wrote: post #373

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.

At a FAANG and I can tell you it's not nearly so positive as this. It was shocking coming from startup world. It's not so much "gee I only have 4 hours of work to do this week" It's...well, it's impossible to say how long it takes to do anything in particular, so I shouldn't feel stressed trying to get it done... oh there's actually no real management style/pressure to get things done here? Promo is seniority-based?…

Sounds like Google, specifically. I don't think Amazon or Meta or Netflix is like this. Don't know about Apple.

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

#618

Post by ianbutler » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:43 PM UTC

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…

As opposed to other office jobs that are so interesting? “Let me show you the insurance papers I shuffled for 40 years.”

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

#619

Post by mlword » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:43 PM UTC

lowercased wrote: post #595

Spivak wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. "H…

It is one thing if they don't talk. It is even worse if they have no experience but thousands of suggestions that don't work. And you have to debunk every of these suggestions to management while keeping the progress going.

Often, if the work horse leaves, no one is able to keep the project going or rewrite the project from scratch. They should be able to do the latter if their suggestions are so great and they have been kept back. But they cannot.

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

#620

Post by wbsss4412 » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 10:44 PM UTC

abledon wrote: post #302

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…

> Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight. Have you worked in Government? edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26727803 for an example

RE: your example, what exactly does that example have to do with the federal government? The guy threatened to sue, those laws apply the same in the private sector.