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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

#671

Post by KerrAvon »

pradn wrote: post #610
PaulHoule wrote: post #4

Google would have been a lot more productive if it had hired people to work on one good messaging app instead of 13+ bad messaging apps. Google has long had an attitude of "we hire the best so we can afford to have them stand on one leg and balance on a ball while holding a cane in their mouth and balancing a bunch of dishes on the end of the cane while typing with one hand on a chorded keyboard and looking at a moni…

As a Google employee, the profusion of chat apps is caused by: * a genuine interest in trying new things and trying to see if they'd stick, without the baggage of established UX & customers - Allo/Duo are like this. I don't think people give the company enough credit for this. * leadership downplaying the cost to the Google brand of shutting things down all the time. When brought up internally, execs shrug saying tha…

> leadership downplaying the cost to the Google brand of shutting things down all the time. When brought up internally, execs shrug saying that we must be willing to try and see if things stick. This makes sense, but why are people particularly mad at Google for doing this? It must be for a good reason, not merely a meme.

Because it doesn't actually make sense.

* Google has an audience. I suspect everything Google does is a good enough idea for a small subset of people -- or solves a problem for a lot of people but isn't profitable, like Google Reader -- and because it's Google doing it, a lot of people hear about it and use it. So the shutdown of Google's random ideas affects more people than the shutdown of some random startup.

* Google just kills the products completely instead of spinning them off or selling them to interested parties as earlier incarnations of Silicon Valley tech companies would have done. A company not bloated from search advertising revenue would have happily sold something like Google Reader for some money instead of just killing it.

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

#672

Post by wildrhythms »

rajeshp1986 wrote: post #391

It is amusing how the article says "employees" but everyone in the comments are talking about developer productivity and laziness. It is shocking how no one points out about the laziness of PMs and management. I have seen PMs and managers taking generous time off and lazying around. Don't forget lot of hiring happens because managers and PMs do planning roadmaps and hire based on that. Some managers also hire more th…

My favorite is the PMs who I've never met in my life, apparently they work in my product area, I only hear from them 2x per year only when they're planning some crucial 'team summit' far away from their usual work location (and spouse/children) where they get shitfaced drunk at the company's expense. Nothing actionable ever comes from these 'summits' in case that's not obvious.

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

#673

Post by kelnos »

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.

No, dead weight is someone who does little or no work, should be fired, but manages to fly under the radar somehow in order to keep their job.

Someone who does the bare minimum in order to buy get fired is just a... satisfactory employee. Never gonna get big raises, never gonna get promoted, but gets their work done and doesn't go above or beyond.

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

#674

Post by luckydata »

throw8383833jj wrote: post #670

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…

There's tons of stuff to do, the problem is management creates enormous hurdles for anyone to do anything within Google. The amount of red tape and disorganization is hard to believe if not witnessed first hand.

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

#675

Post by carom »

vecter wrote: post #197
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…

> 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. I see this argument all the time, but I can't find any other place that it comes from other than disappointment from those that didn't or can't pass those interviews. (Disclaimer, outside of col…

>I see this argument all the time, but I can't find any other place that it comes from other than disappointment from those that didn't or can't pass those interviews.

I have passed these interviews. Had offers from multiple FAANGs, worked at G. The algorithms interview is idiotic. It is a way for them to gate the jobs to people who have CS degrees while being able to say they do not require CS degrees.

I rarely come to the to the optimal solution on my own for a leetcode problem. It is about learning the techniques so you know how to speak about the solutions, then basically learning (by reading) the right answers to different problem types.

This isn't from being hurt, I pass these interviews. I've worked there. It is a horrible selection criteria for what you actually do at the jobs - design docs, meetings, tickets, tests, and code reviews. It creates a ton of false expectations too, you do not need to know advanced algorithms to work on some internal user interface, close maintenance tickets, or to write 10 lines of test code for a 2 line change. You get in there and realize none of the work you are doing is as clever as the interview.

The tasks described above are the reality of working in a large organization. They shouldn't be, but they are. The interview should more closely match that.

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

#676

Post by gowld »

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…

> pay exorbitant salaries

Did you miss the Covid-inspired pay cuts for remote workers? The expansion into lower-cost tech hubs like North Carolina?

> falling revenue

Yet still huge profits

> blaming the employees.

Bad play, since employees make the revenues.

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

#677

Post by geekbird »

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.

"If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal."

Oh, you're bucking for CEO!

A lot of companies could have cut out four to eight hours of meetings a week and still maintained the same level of productivity.

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

#678

Post by wildrhythms »

nokeya wrote: post #477

When I click “Select all” in Gmail my browser hangs for several seconds at least. And now they say there is too much people. Hello! There is not too much people, there is is misutilization of your workforce! Instead of doing 100500+ chat app that will not do it to production, maybe focus on real customer problems and not on metrics? There is a lot comments now and before from people saying they seeing no impact from…

Fixing the 'select all' hang doesn't get anyone promoted, and managers can't parade it around as a win before they springboard to some other org.

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

#679

Post by geekbird »

endtime wrote: post #617
refulgentis wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IIRC Amazon does stack ranking too.

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

#680

Post by wkdneidbwf »

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…

a well paying job with low expectations sounds great, but actually sucks after a while. i’ve been there a couple times. it’s just not fulfilling. it brought out a weird mixture of guilt and sadness in me. i was getting great reviews, and by every measure was doing my job well.

when i’ve moved on from those jobs i’ve been happier, grown more, and it’s led to more money.

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