'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

#661

Post by lowbloodsugar » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:15 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #473

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'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…

Oh sweet summer child, they aren't saying that they are going to get rid of the poor performers. They've said they are going to turn up the heat. That means that the people, like yourself, who actually do the work, are going to face the heat. The poor performers have a skill: and that skill is keeping their jobs without doing any work. So you're the one that is going to have to do more work, and it is people like you who are going to get a clue and go work somewhere else. If you stay, you'll have an even bigger portion of the work to do.

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

#662

Post by rgblambda » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:16 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…

>And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need.

I once spent two months trying to get my technical lead to do a code review for a PR I raised. Eventually the business informed us they didn't actually need the feature that the PR implemented. At that point, my technical lead immediately approved the PR so it wouldn't be (seen as) a waste.

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

#663

Post by wonderwonder » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:16 PM UTC

deckard1 wrote: post #646

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…

> 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. Whic…

I agree. I would argue that a large portion of those meeting the "dead weight" definition are just truly burnt out.

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

#664

Post by fcatalan » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:16 PM UTC

groffee wrote: post #647

darth_avocado wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dead weight would be people doing nothing. After those come the negative contributors: they do stuff but is all politicking and scheming, or just waste others time. Doing strictly what you are really paid for is bad now?

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

#665

Post by titzer » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:16 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #473

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'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…

Poor performers are demotivating, yep. The challenge of a manager, and really, the whole management system, is making reasonable efforts to get employees back on track, if that's possible. I mentioned the life events thing because it's real. Sometimes a PIP (performance improvement plan) gives people a jolt and gets them back on track, sometimes not. It's the job of management to separate true under-performers from temporary ones and to find the best roles for members of the team.

What Zuck wrote had none of the nuance or understanding that one would expect of someone with even a moderate amount of experience managing people. It's true that firing people is hard, which is probably why these companies should not have focused on eating the world so voraciously for the past N years.

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

#666

Post by spacedcowboy » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:17 PM UTC

metabagel wrote: post #243

rootusrootus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The full word is perquisite. Perk is slang.

There is no such word as "perq" in American English. https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=perq Perhaps, it is British English.

It is not.

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

#667

Post by zz20220810 » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:17 PM UTC

aliasxneo wrote: post #256

dekhn wrote: post #165

By the end of my employment at Google I was not working very hard. Probably a few hours a day, mostly doing whatever I felt like doing. My managers consistently gave me "meets expectations" regardless of how much I achieved or how hard I worked. However, any time there was an emergency related to my function, I had everything required to jump in, fix serious problems, and then get out of the way during the cleanup th…

I have a feeling this extends to several areas in Google. I come from the GDC side of things and have the exact same experience. To keep my job requires very minimal effort on my part. In fact, nowadays I'm punishing myself by trying to do anything "above and beyond." This is mostly due to the rapid growth of committees and the struggle for power that has come out of it (i.e., I'm more likely to be denied by a change…

I went through a similar struggle to how I read your story. I had a cushy job that paid more than ever, my manager was great, and the work was easy, but I was struggling with depression. I ended up quitting and crashing on a friend's couch for a while, and despite making that change to be able to pursue more meaningful work, my depression didn't abate. I ended up crashing and burning in a pretty significant way, and it was rough.

The point I wanted to make in sharing this story is that I wish I had taken the depression more seriously by itself and hadn't assumed that it was solely or maybe even largely caused by my job situation. Both from my experience with mental illness and from the scientific literature I've read, sometimes the big external issues are masks or plausible excuses for your body & mind to go into a depression because it makes sense that you have a big change outside, and so you get a big change inside. Sometimes those external changes do definitely cause big psychological struggles, but other times the depression kind of comes out because your psychological defenses feel comfortable enough that you will avoid addressing the root of the problem, and only address the external circumstances which you are able to reasonably enough blame your depression on. It's like a release valve in some way, but whose function is to avoid real psychological change at all costs, because the status quo is the safest place to be for our psyches.

I'm not a scientist and you might describe this as some kind of "just so" explanation or too much into psychoanalysis, and that's certainly a possibility. But with this stuff I've found that often times our psyches are very cagey and difficult to really understand in a straightforward way. If my explaining this pattern I've observed in my own history is beneficial to you or anyone else reading this, or at the very least interesting, that's good enough for me.

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

#668

Post by wildrhythms » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:17 PM UTC

summerlight wrote: post #220

It's weird to say, but there's a genuine lack of headcount all over the company while Pichai (and probably Zukerberg) also does a correct assessment on the situation. This seems a contradiction, but if you take a deeper look into mid level managements there are a good number of teams responsible for billions of users/revenue and driving their growth but screaming for more headcounts. (Yeah, I'm in one of those teams)…

>Why does this happen? Of course I don't know.

Let me make an observation... eventually every manager gets to a point where the only way to get promoted is to grow their reports. So they beg for additional headcount for their team with little (but important) work, hire a bunch of people who are better suited working in other areas, and repeat for 10+ years until the CEO notices.

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

#669

Post by jbjbjbjb » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:17 PM UTC

clusterhacks wrote: post #131

potatolicious wrote: post #111

It's frustrating that this thread seems to be focused so heavily on people sitting around resting and vesting. Having been inside Google (and multiple other FAANGs) this is generally untrue, and focusing on this element of the problem misses a much larger productivity problem: Most engineers at Google aren't "sitting around doing nothing", they are very busy shipping projects that do not matter. Their days are filled…

>Their days are filled with doing work that will not move the needle on any metric that matters to the company This, 100%. I think this simple observation reverberates across the entire software engineering field and at many (most?) non-FAANG companies as well. I am not confident there is a real solution to the problem of making sure people only work on things that matter. Medium to small organizations seem to strugg…

Founder led companies or where the staff includes some product visionary seems to solve that. It’s not common though at all and not long lasting. In my experience when the non technical or accountant types inevitably start calling the shots effort can get grossly misallocated but utilisation will be high.

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

#670

Post by throw8383833jj » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 11:18 PM UTC

Productivity is limited by the scope of your products. If you have 100 Work years of work available to do but have 500 employees then each employee can only do 0.2 work years worth of work per year. People want to be productive but if there's not enough productive work do then people start doing unproductive work because it's all that is available.

Solution: You need to either increase the scope of products: get into new industrys like Tesla and Amazon are doing OR cut head count massively.