711–720 of 1001 posts
This is a faliure of some management to not motivate/correct employees who are not meeting expectations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
They ask the manager, "If you want twenty tickets, just ask me for twenty tickets. Why do you set fifteen as the standard, and then try to use cheap psychological tricks to get me to do twenty tickets?"
I have managed teams going back to the nineties. If I want fifteen tickets, I ask for fifteen tickets. If someone just does the minimum, they just get paid the minimum, but I have set my expectations such that their work is a net benefit to the company, so they keep their job.
If things change and I need twenty tickets, I will ask for twenty tickets. It's not complicated. The "bare minimum" is still enough to keep a job. If it isn't, it's on me to establish a different minimum such that the "minimum" is exactly that: The minimum needed to remain employed.
"Dead weight" is someone whose work is not a net benefit to the company. If I as a manager set a minimum, and someone does the minimum, and they are not a net benefit, WTF am I doing as a a manager setting fifteen tickets as the minimum?
Employees meeting expectations but not being a net benefit? That's a management problem. And if it's across the org, that's a SYSTEMIC management problem.
So if this person is meeting the minimum, either they are NOT dead weight, or there is a management problem. Either way, they are not the problem.
> Zuckerberg noticed that it was getting harder to get all the employees to attend a meeting as they were sometimes taking time out in a day for personal work. > “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, Ohhh! Two declarations based in…
An IRL meeting with 100 participants, you can't tell who is there or not. You can audit online meeting attendees. > as they were sometimes taking time out in a day for personal work. People have been going to the dentist during work hours since forever. I used to have a dentist down the street from my office for just this reason. Now I have a dentist just down the street from my house, for the exact same reason. Heck…
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…
> 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. I did great work for a company and got fired... because I took a freelance w2 contract in my spare time. The company didn't even know that I'd taken on the role, and the role had actually finished, when they somehow d…
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…
Why does this have to be at work? Google might not offer you challenges but you can go rock climbing at Yosemite every other week if you wanted to (or whatever other challenging things you like)? Especially if you only need minimal effort to hang around.
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…
The "while balancing on a ball while holding a cane in their mouth..." thing really resonates with me. Something that really surprised me at Google is how many core services had very thin test suites. I'm the kind of person that sees 100% code coverage and thinks "that's a good starting point". If I don't have that, I'll definitely break something important in 6 months. There were a lot of people at Google, though, t…
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 never worked for Google and likely never will. Stories like these make me wonder why we put X-Googlers on such a high pedestal. I don't mean that personally in an offence to anyone. It's just a general observation.
They will look upon the greed and the ego of Zuck, Bezos, Gates and Musk the same way we look back upon J.P. Morgan, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Carnegie.
This statement will sound as bad to people in 2100 as arguing against 8 hour works days sounds to us now. How many generations folly have to be blamed on the working class before we can come to our senses and regulate those who would amass wealth beyond measure but cannot hold a single drop of responsibility, humility, or honesty without it burning their skin or slipping between their fingers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Creating a VR game that your friends and family can play? Adding an API to React that shapes the course of frontend development for millions of people?
> React How come that FB is inventing the most sophisticated, cutting-edge web technologies, but at the same time their core products (Facebook app, Messenger & Instagram) are an absolute mess both in terms of performance and usability, not to mention a ton of bugs that haven't been fixed for years?