C-suite needs to blame something other than themselves for not hitting quarters.
'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
631–640 of 1001 posts
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> I was told by our HR department that we could get rid of him, or at least demote him, if he failed two annual reviews in a row. Eventually he did, but we were then told by HR that he had to fail two annual reviews in a row in the same way; if he failed twice, but differently in the second year, that didn't count
Government HR processes make it _very_ difficult to be fired.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#633As 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…
Material affluence for the majority has gradually shifted people’s orientation toward work—from what Daniel Yankelovich called an “instrumental” view of work, where work was a means to an end, to a more “sacred” view, where people seek the “intrinsic” benefits of work. “Our grandfathers worked six days a week to earn what most of us now earn by Tuesday afternoon,” says Bill O’Brien, former CEO of Hanover Insurance. “The ferment in management will continue until we build organizations that are more consistent with man’s higher aspirations beyond food, shelter and belonging.”
Senge, Peter M.. The Fifth Discipline (p. 16). Crown. Kindle Edition.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#634As 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…
Some company cultures will punish people for taking the initiative too.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
ah, yes...six years at MSFT, only one year working on code that eventually shipped
MSFT is hardly a FAANG
Why? Their stock performs just as well, and they pay better than Amazon, better benefits, all with a reputation for legendary good WLB.
Amazon is hardly a FAANG
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#636Quoth 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've been at places where I would love to hear the CEO say that. Being forced to work with poor performers, lazy people, and people who deliver poor quality results is frustrating and demoralizing. Those kinds of people can stick around for years, especially in good times when the company is making so much money that leadership doesn't need to care. Netflix is one of the few large companies that has a culture of cull…
It depresses me no end that someone can see poor performance, laziness etc only as a trait others possess, and not as a reaction to circumstance that they themselves might experience one day.
I guarantee that anyone -- anyone -- can find themselves viewed as substandard.
It's truly disturbing when Zuckerberg says something so dystopian, and people 'in the trenches' call for more.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have time to faff around at a FAANG, you have time to be cultivating your network to include some very influential people, you have time to be taking advantage of training resources or learning from the experts there that are completely free that most ordinary developers would have to pay thousands to get access to, you have time to work on side projects either for the company or, if you dare, for your own per…
Snap. I, for my sins, am new at a WITCH company (please don't throw rotten fruit at me), and there is an obscene amount of dead time in my calendar and will be for the foreseeable. I'm rinsing their training and development resources and should have the full suite of certs I want within 6 months completely free. Certs that would literally cost thousands to acquire privately. If they want me to do some actual work I'd…
TIL: "W- Wipro I- Infosys T- TCS C- Cognizant H- HCL A- Accenture India."
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#638Earlier 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 am not a dead weight and I’ll never be, but I also do absolutely bare minimum to not get fired. And by bare minimum, I mean, I will always finish my work in the time it is expected to be finished. And if the expectations are higher, I’ll move on to another job. I do this as a way to get back at corporate America. Too many companies get away with sucking out their employees dry and firing them once they can’t meet t…
Hell of a way to go through life though. "Corporate America" doesn't care in the slightest bit. It's an unthinking unfeeling machine.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of the top engineering companies (Boeing etc.) are also objectively crappy places to work at. When you're doing things at the scale of Boeing or Google, you need a lot of process, and it's just no fun to do engineering this way.
>When you're doing things at the scale of Boeing or Google, you need a lot of process Are you sure "need" is the right word here? Whatever Boeing's been doing recently hasn't been working very well for them or 737 Max passengers.
I was on a 737 Max the other day, it's a nice plane
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#640The joke here is that many companies parroted a lot of "cool" stuff from FB/GOOG like open office, Agile, etc. without understanding that such stuff actually decreases productivity, and that hasn't been an issue for FB/GOOG only because they take in top performers from top universities and have business model to print money at $1.5M+/employee/year. The parroting companies don't have such employees and don't have such business model, and for them those parroted things cause very noticeable harm, and to mentally reconcile that situation they conclude that they "aren't doing those things right" and thus double-down on that parroting thus increasing the harm even further.