Glad to learn we're gonna see this top tier talent hit the market in the coming future. Having perfected ad slinging web tech who knows what they'll solve next. Climate change, interstellar travel, or the cure for cancer? Bright future ahead for us all.
'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
701–710 of 1001 posts
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#702> “There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have. [We need to] create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer-focused,” [Pichai] said.
When you direct a huge amount of your company’s resources toward ESG initiatives, should you be surprised when your employees are not particularly focused on the real work at hand? Are these CEOs really so blind?
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#703As 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 just know of at least 20 people left my previous company because we had nothing to do. Every meeting was trying to figure out what the direction was. As an engineer when the company gets to the size of 1000+ you are largely not at all empowered to solve this problem but have to rely on your manager or in some cases your managers manager. But come time for performance review you get bad marks. If you think that many…
The biggest lie I ever got told at work was "all teams have equal opportunity for impact". They don't, and team+org is about 80% of your potential performance.
At the time my org had a "mission & building" group and a "maintenance & operations" group. I was placed in the maintenance group.
Every single project in the maintenance group went the same: good idea, planning & initial prototype, gets noticed by management, you get permanently blocked or management pilfers your star players and you start again or scope down. All our projects were tiny or failures. Meanwhile the people in the mission group got showered with raises and promotions.
It was soul crushing, I had never been so unhappy. I had no (opportunity for) impact on the business, so my reviews were always that I was technically strong but didn't demonstrate impact. You can get stuck in a real feedback loop there, you get burned out at constant failure.
I'm sure we all looked lazy from above, I certainly felt lazy, but the org structure simply quashed any attempts at progress and we were all powerless against it.
I ended up leaving that role, it gave me a strong focus on impact only roles which was the best career move I ever made.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#704As 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…
That's one take, but if you hang around on Blind (which is an anonymous forum heavily populated by FAANG), you will find many who gloat about how little they work.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#705Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
That's a great perspective, thanks for sharing that. What would you like to see as the best interview questions then? I'll probably adapt my future interviews based on your ideas (not that I ask any real algorithm questions anyway).
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#706Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds good in theory but most leaders are so removed from engineering that it would take them a week ramp up to produce even the most basic tiny change/feature to push to production. A VP should not be spending one week of his or her time doing that. They should rely on engineers to identify and fix whatever is broken at that level. That's why we have staff+ engineers. But that's also pretty divorced from the t…
If it takes a week to "ramp up" to produce a tiny change, then that itself is probably a broken process that needs to be improved.
That's about the time I'd expect for a new hire to ramp up on the codebase and submit a PR behind a feature flag and probably experiment that makes it to production. It takes a day to even set up the environment and be able to start looking at and running the code locally. Four days to read through a brand new codebase, identify the changes that are necessary, write a small tech spec (optional based on how small the change is), submit the PRs, get them reviewed and approved, and then merged sounds reasonable to someone who's never worked in the codebase before.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#707Maybe 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…
You just have to use this to push your ideology that leetcode style of interviews don't work, don't you.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#708I blame managers.
In my (middling-long) career I have noticed the following cycles:
Company grows and takes on new projects. Workers start getting stretched thin.
Work starts to suffer as people are thrashing, there's no more concrete focus.
Company responds by hiring (or making) more managers.
Each manager now thinks they have to justify their existence by inserting themselves into every possible process, gatekeeping, etc.
Decisions start to be made by committee, as nobody wants to stick their neck out.
Now decision-making suffers; productivity declines even more.
Company responds by shuttering entire divisions, firing employees, etc.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#709Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Facebook has regular, systematic performance reviews and a PIP process like most large companies. Nobody is talking about firing people for temporary performance lapses.
Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
#710Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree -- but it is remarkable how many Americans have bought into this idea that "government is bad".
We'll, it is true that our "ownership class" and its media and political mouthpieces have spent the better part of the last two generations drilling this notion into people's skulls will all the considerable power at their disposal.
I’ve held a job ever since I was 12 years old. And I worked before that under the table to pay for my things as a child. I’ve worked at many multinationals now that I’m middle aged. Yes, I’m American. And my view on this is completely contrary to conventional wisdom. Private enterprise is not only less efficient than government, it’s destructive.
Private enterprise doesn’t care about doing a good job or delivering quality product. It only cares about making money. It’s a perverse incentive that drives everything down to the bottom almost every time. The only way to circumvent that perverse incentive system is to have someone in charge that cares about something other than profits. And there just are not enough Steve Jobs or similar characters out there that cared about quality and legacy enough to make blind participation as a buyer in your favor.
Of course someone will say, that’s how you make money is by delivering quality. But that’s not true. You deliver money by monopolizing, putting in barriers to entry, or simply by cutting costs. By definition, if something you buy was cheaper to produce than the price you paid, you’re getting a bad deal. People just don’t see this because they have no other choice.
Now all that said, I also believe that it is the worst system, except for all the others. I think with sensible regulation to counterbalance abuse, the system is as good of one as I’ve seen.