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'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
691–700 of 1001 posts
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#692Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
Yeah, I think it's massively under-discussed that product management quality across the industry is generally very poor . There are multiple manifestations of this but the main factors IMO are: how involved is management in the product? How good is your product definition process and talent? For big companies the problem tends to be more the former. Product management talent tends to be solid, but upper management is…
FWIW, I don't think this is the case at Apple. I sit in with the product manager as they get grilled by VPs and SVPs. They get damned hard questions - mainly the short ones ("why", "what if" and "how", and to a lesser extent "when" and who") and part of my job there is to provide data for their cover. I've given demos to SVPs before, and it's not a pleasant experience, I'm very happy to leave it to the PM.
Sometimes my job is to gently point out to an SVP that his/her assumptions are wrong, but most of the time I stay out of the way. The PM puts together the slide-deck (usually with help from engineering management) and the PM presents it, though (s)he can call on others for expertise for specific sections.
PM's have to be very good at defending the direction they want to take the company in, and the top brass are scarily good at coming up with the hard questions, even when those questions are very domain-specific.
In any event, (S)VPs at Apple are very invested in what the company does, when it will happen, what the consequences are, and why we're doing X. Directors and Managers are the ones responsible for execution, and the concept of a DRI is very very important in Apple culture.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#693Earlier 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…
Got news for ya, that’s dead weight. Competent management would make getting rid of you a priority, as that behavior drags everyone else down.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#694As 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…
Corporate dead weight aka corporate welfare. It happens a lot more often than you think.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#695Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typical where? I've _never_ had to deal with such a schedule.
When I've shoulder-surfed my managers and PMs for roughly the last ten years, they're all like that: wall-to-wall meetings. Any technical work they do (and here at least, (T)PMs are expected to potentially contribute technical work) is done outside 9-5. Certainly there are techniques to mitigate this, but I see it, at least.
Incredible. I haven't seen a PM that does technical work in years, maybe well over a decade.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#696Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight I read loads of blogs and posts where people are loving WFH, doing very little and openly recommending tech career to others because its so great. They might not think they're a dead weight, they just think thats what modern working is like.
There were coffee-mug-carriers and hall-wanderers back in the office as well. I don’t think it’s new in WFH, but at least now they bother fewer people with their “checking in”. I swear one guy must have gotten 15K steps/day in just wandering around the building.
Seriously.
One job I was at had four of us working in one room. A guy from a completely different department would wander in with his cup of whatever and talk at us for at least an hour. He was both dodging actual work and interrupting us. Since he didn't report to our manager there was nothing we could do. His boss was a piece of work as well.
It's these useless people that make open plans so toxic. It's bad enough that the general noise and visual distraction decreases your ability to concentrate and get anything done, but the wandering trolls of gossip and sports talk just add an extra booger icing on the shit cake.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#697Yea right. Zuckerberg probably means not enough people are overworking themselves. I feel this whole not working then is newspeak for we arn't getting employees to work 80 hr weeks any more.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#698As 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…
> There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company.
Very true. It's an unfortunate occurrence at many larger companies (not just in tech).
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#699As 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…
> agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity In most companies agile/scrum meetings are make-believe work.
And, IMO, a total waste of time for a bunch of cargo cult nonsense.
Scrum is waterfall micromanagement dressed in the verbiage of worker empowerment, and merely shortens the time between death marches.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#700Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company Not really. Even they will carve out some niche and pretend (even to themselves) to be doing useful work. Middle managers love to schedule irrelevant meetings, but they will provide some business justification to themselves and to others. You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves. It'…
> Even they will carve out some niche and pretend (even to themselves) to be doing useful work. ... You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves. In my experience, internal apps need far more love. Maintaining internal apps is far more useful than most 'real' work, just because it can be a multiplier on so much other 'real' work.
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