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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

#621

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

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 not sure why you needed to come around.

Leadership signs off on hiring. Leadership signs off on installing far reaching processes that inhibit devs from making contributions.

I'm sure some people try to find ways to cheat the system. But I find it hard to believe that it's a wide spread problem. Even people doing the minimum work possible probably have a ton of other interests or ideas and would rather be engaged with their work somewhat and learning things than idling.

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

#622

Post by dontblink »

outworlder wrote: post #346
alexk307 wrote: post #231

This is such an embarrassment for these two... Aren't YOU the CEO of your company? Didn't YOU approve hiring plans and corporate goals? If there's not enough work, why don't you find something for them to work on, or replace your managers with folks that will. Instead, it's the employee's fault for being so unproductive.

> If there's not enough work, why don't you find something for them to work on Or why don't they bring back the 20% rule and let the smart folks they have hired to come up with new projects? Some of them may end up bringing revenue.

This doesn't work in a company of large size. There is a reason it's called 120% rule at Google.

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

#623

Post by rr888 »

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

I read loads of blogs and posts where people are loving WFH, doing very little and openly recommending tech career to others because its so great. They might not think they're a dead weight, they just think thats what modern working is like.

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

#624

Post by jedberg »

paganel wrote: post #599
jedberg wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. The ex-Yahoos I worked with were some of the best most talented engineers I've worked with, and the managers were all fantastic too. In its prime Yahoo was a real powerhouse.

I'm not exactly sure where it went wrong.

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

#625

Post by WalterBright »

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…

People who do things they know are wrong will always conjure up an explanation that absolves them of any culpability. They'll even believe it themselves.

For example, people who steal office supplies from work always have a good reason they tell themselves.

For another, all the people who post on Hackernews justifying cheating in college. My favorite bullshit excuse was cheating was justified because the professor didn't expend much effort with countermeasures.

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

#626

Post by sokoloff »

depereo wrote: post #463
fefe23 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 turned into dead weight once during a hostile takeover of the company I was working for. It was pretty shit, and I'm glad I moved on after a few months of being unproductive. Management removed our ability to move forward on any existing work, and allocated no new work, and rejected any proposals from anyone from the 'old' company. Wound up spending most of my (remote) work day occasionally checking my work laptop…

Through a weird sequence of events, a group of us ended up working through a consulting company re-billing arrangement for a large financial services company that was closing our office. The “suits” needed us on payroll to feel secure that our code would keep working, so we got promised our annual bonus (substantial) if we worked until X date. The tech leaders at HQ hated that we existed at all and so gave us no work. We might have worked 40 hours in 4.5 months (total, not per week).

Bonuses eventually hit our account and we all resigned serially; literally a line outside the manager’s door waiting to resign.

It sucked; was so bad that one colleague didn’t want to Google something one evening “because he needed something to do tomorrow at work”.

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

#627

Post by aydyn »

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…

Or did a huge amount of work on a project, didn't get properly credited or worse, had their credit stolen by some other employee.

When there's little correlation between amount of effort and advancement as is very often the case, it's justified to just cruise.

I don't see it as "morally wrong but they didn't really want to be dead weight" when it is a justified response.

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

#628

Post by rconti »

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #114
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…

A lot of SV engineers in the last 10 years have had it good. Like how people born in America have it good compared to people born in Africa (irrespective of intelligence, hard work, talent etc...). I think that will change.

They also said that in the previous 10 years.

... and the 10 years before that...

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

#629

Post by mlword »

titzer wrote: post #299

Quoth Zuck: > “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.” Wow. Just. Wow. Why not inject some more dysfunction into an already strained relationship with employees and callously but passively aggressively deal with a s…

I don't understand this either. He has to trust entire layers of useless middle management to get accurate performance numbers. All he'll get are invented numbers on a piece of paper (metaphorically speaking).

The ones who leave may be dissatisfied with the artificial goals.

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

#630

Post by ipaddr »

deeptote wrote: post #527
BeetleB wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Can definitely speak to these cases - especially where you do great work and have a narrative that it was unappreciated - and clearly see lesser performing or less impressive colleagues getting ahead. For a lot of people, it takes only a few instances…

> Can definitely speak to these cases - especially where you do great work and have a narrative that it was unappreciated - and clearly see lesser performing or less impressive colleagues getting ahead. I did great work for a company and got fired... because I took a freelance w2 contract in my spare time. The company didn't even know that I'd taken on the role, and the role had actually finished, when they somehow d…

How did they find out?
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