'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

#641

Post by pojzon » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:03 PM UTC

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 really have trouble understanding why ppl should dream about labor / fulfilment at work.

There are so many ways to find a real meaning.

Be a great person, help others, read a book, do yoga, help kids with homework, plant a tree, build something with own hands, grow food, clean-up trash.

So many things to keep you busy. Work is just a necessity to do something that actually matters in the longer run (for majority at least).

Ppl that deeply care about the company and product are such a tiny minority.

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

#642

Post by iainmerrick » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:04 PM UTC

I always wondered what all those tens of thousands of people at these megacompanies actually do -- even after working at one myself! (and never managing to get a lot done)

So it’s amusing and interesting to hear that even the CEOs don’t really know either.

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

#643

Post by data-ottawa » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:06 PM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #304

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…

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.

From my experience with a temporary 4 day work week: the people who want to appear busy will still find a way to schedule in the same amount of pointless meetings into the fewer hours.

If those people have control over the schedules of other workers, then those workers lose their focus time.

You need guardrails to prevent org & overhead from overwhelming everything else.

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

#644

Post by ipaddr » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:07 PM UTC

nkrisc wrote: post #521

depereo wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had a coworker who ended up in a similar situation. At one point they were almost literally being paid to do nothing . They eventually stopped even going in to the office all while collecting a pay check. As nice as that sounds, it was still not a great situation because they didn't know how long it would last and figured eventually, without warning, they'd be dropped. They ended up leaving on their own to actually…

I've been in this situation. Not knowing is the hard part. Don't waste this time, start a project and work like crazy on it because it never lasts.

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

#645

Post by csa » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:08 PM UTC

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…

> you can probably shore up some of that demand just by dropping some of those 4 hour employees and using their wages to pay others to become 6 hour or 8 hour employees.

Sure. Do this if you want to kill morale and be chronically understaffed (either not enough bodies or not enough qualified bodies) for the rest of your existence.

This type of mentality breeds mediocrity for a number of reasons, the main one being that A-players will run away from teams/companies structured around these heuristics. Furthermore, they will make sure all of their A-player friends are aware of this environment.

Good managers and good management teams have no issues with productivity of in-office or remote workers. If your team or company is actually having productivity issues (rather than using productivity as a precursor to a rif), then point that finger at the management and management culture.

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

#646

Post by deckard1 » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:08 PM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #402

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…

> 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…

> Amusingly enough, Leetcode style interviews are effective at ensuring deadweights remain so.

yep. They also ensure that anyone wanting to move on will probably be doing most of their day Leetcoding. Because you're going to stay at a tech job 1-2 years max and it takes most people probably 6+ months (kids, family, etc.) to ramp up from nothing. Once you have LC down and did the hard part, you need to retain it. Which means constantly doing problems.

Our industry is a burnout treadmill.

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

#647

Post by groffee » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:08 PM UTC

darth_avocado wrote: post #567

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 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…

> I am not a dead weight and I’ll never be, but I also do absolutely bare minimum to not get fired.

That's the literal definition of dead weight.

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

#648

Post by lovich » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:09 PM UTC

jackblemming wrote: post #203

bobobob420 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the mindset of failure. The team standup has 10x more priority than some dumb basketball league

Show me the studies on the effectiveness of a daily 10 min standup and I’d be happy to listen. Otherwise I’d be happy to make up some other rituals that sound good on paper and then rationalize them with buzzwords.

Speaking as a manager who at least _thinks_ I run stand ups well, I have them run for 5-10 minutes max for 5 people and treat them as an update so that I can run interference on any “status updates” other parts of the company demand across a day, and as the time for the team to tell me what problems I need to go fix for the team to be productive.

I usually leave a standup with a list of 1-3 people I need to go talk to, to either move the code through bureaucratic processes, or an actual decision to make on which projects we’ll take on based on information found while engineering.

That said I also don’t care if my people say they have nothing of note and skip the meeting

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

#649

Post by jollybean » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:09 PM UTC

codegeek wrote: post #287

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 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…

They are not 'pretending' in most cases. They are busy, and think they are adding value.

So do their managers.

Also - sometimes the inverse! I've caught myself feeling 'useless' at BigTech until some feedback/situation made me realize 'OMG this matters' kind of things.

It's hard.

That is maybe Management's #1 job is to get people focused on things that matter.

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

#650

Post by biztos » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:10 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #251

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…

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…

I posit there is another category: people who don't accept or can't deal with being idle, but are not careerists and so instead of following your advice or resting-vesting, they find ways to spend their time helping solve actual problems in the company.

My theory is that these people keep many companies afloat, because they go proactively solve the problems the resters are not solving because work, and the job-optimizers won't touch because not promotion-track.