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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

#681

Post by bergenty »

PaulHoule wrote: post #192
bergenty wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ll a lot of their products come out if individual side projects, Google is an incubator of sorts so I’m not surprised that’s how their product gets made.

... There was that time that top management thought reverse imperialism was a good idea so they dumped a perfectly good Google Wallet in the U.S. for something that was big in India... No thought of cultural sensitivity. A few years later they reversed the decision, with no consequence for the people who made it. If you are doing that for your products though you are never going to get long-term traction no matter ho…

I don’t know what you’re trying to say? Are you saying they discontinued a product that was big in India? How is this reverse imperialism? What is reverse imperialism?

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

#682

Post by baka367 »

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…

Another concern that is very prevailing is rewards. I could work 2 times harder in my current position, however what is that going to bring me?

Promotion or bigger bonus - it’s the same as playing stock options with your time, you are better off playing office politics for a much better RoI.

Self value? Senior engineer in FAANG is almost never going to have REAL impact, so I can only enjoy thinking that someone cares about that tiny piece of software that I work with. Again, getting drunk is a better RoI. Same with self improvement… where side project usually allows one to grow more

So, what is the benefit of working harder?

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

#683

Post by rgblambda »

thefourthchime wrote: post #475
commandlinefan wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> company calendar is 80% filled with meetings The typical expectation on salaried employees is that you spend your 8-5 in meetings and then you 5-midnight actually doing programming work.

There is a disease where people add lots of people to meetings that don't really have to be there. Then people have a compulsion to go to every meeting they are invited to. One of the best decisions I ever made was deciding to stop going to meetings unless I knew I had to. Turns out, nobody really cared, and if they really needed me they could also message me on slack and I can pop in.

I moved jobs recently and this has been a minor issue for me. I get invited to all the meetings, including those where neither my input nor attendance is required, but I don't know that until a few minutes in. At that point I either sit and listen to something barely related to my role or awkwardly drop off.

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

#684

Post by [deleted] »

spamizbad wrote: post #375
gorgoiler wrote: post #216

It’s knives out time, I’m afraid, for any activist or negative employee. I am flabbergasted by the number of people I’ve worked with who are flat out ungrateful when it comes to their relationship with their employer either being outright miserable and surly, or constantly virtue signalling about hypothetical problems that just drag everyone down the purity spiral. They get paid and they push code but they seem to th…

Man, where have you worked? It sounds awful. Is this a SV specific type of personality? I feel like a low output dev who complains constantly wouldn't last 6 months before landing on a PIP. My experience, most "dead weight" employees tend to be quiet types who never rock the boat. They want to just keep flying under the radar. They say please and thank you, they show up to company events, but just.... don't produce.…

[deleted]

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

#685

Post by SkipperCat »

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…

You call that dead weight? If you're finishing your work on time then you may (gasp) be a decent employee.

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

#686

Post by endtime »

nr2x wrote: post #405
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?…

I don’t see how giving an up-leveled employee time to adjust to a new responsibility scope is a bad thing. Working under conditions of pressure and stress provides few long term benefits and is the refuge of those who don’t have the smarts to perform well and need to look like they do.

At Google, which I'm pretty confident the parent comment was describing, promotion is supposed to be recognition that you've already been consistently performing at that level for a long time. So someone newly promoted is not actually up-leveled, they're just no longer down-leveled.

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

#688

Post by deckard1 »

Spivak wrote: post #543
Silverback_VII wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen it in many places. It's like you can watch the emergence of Orwell's Animal Farm in every human setting. A small fraction doing more and more, which in turn let the others do less and less.

> which in turn let the others do less and less. Force the others to do less and less. I’ve seen this a million times, you have one dev going absolutely buck wild building a cathedral of abstractions that only they can understand. The rest of the devs struggle to implement basic features because, and I can’t overstate this enough because it’s true every time the code is a horribly written tightly coupled shoddily arc…

ah yeah, the mythical 10x dev. He, who has the permission and authority of management, to completely eviscerate any and all process to get whatever management wants done. I know a guy like that. He recently commit a massive code change without so much as a code review or a Jira ticket. 100s of new files. No one knows what the fuck they do. Wonder of wonders.

People still believe in 10x. People also believe in agile. It's amazing. If you're doing code reviews, proper unit tests, Jira micromanagement bullshit, it's an impossibility to get a 10x dev. We have WIP limits for fucks sake! WIP!! You literally cannot merge enough code to be a 10x without management favoritism.

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

#689

Post by raincom »

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.

It's like a bull market, where 70% of the value of shitty companies is driven by the bull market and the vertical they are in. Same goes for employment: during good(bullish) times, one doesn't need to deliver much and still can coast.

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

#690

Post by MisterBastahrd »

gorgoiler wrote: post #505
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell does that have to do with being employed? My employer gives me money. I give them labor. I am friendly with my co-workers because I am generally a friendly person, but I don't owe the company any more than I give and I don't deserve any more than I demand for myself. There's no "grateful" to be had here. I'm not grateful to have a job. I have a job because I earn it.

Tech work isn’t just labor though. It’s about deciding what to do, influencing others to agree, and getting other people on board to the extent where they are enthused and compelled to want to see through a new idea you’ve brought to the table. Regardless of your feelings towards the abstract entity that is The Company, all these day to day issues are to do with relationships with people . The art of alignment and pe…

It's still just a job. And at the end of the day, unless the company is giving me stock, the only thing that matters to me is whether the company still exists tomorrow. If I'm learning new tech on my own time, that's for MY personal enrichment, not theirs. Sure, I could spend my personal time dreaming up new ideas for the company, but I'm not inclined to spend a second of my time prioritizing them over my own personal interests.

I've built multimillion dollar success stories online and still been laid off as the only developer because they thought they could go into a "maintenance phase." Nobody ever again will ever get more of my time than I am compensated for.

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