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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

#731

Post by casey_lang »

russellbeattie wrote: post #309
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…

> My managers consistently gave me "meets expectations" That's because his bonus was probably tied to your performance. By making sure all his subordinates receive meets or exceeds expectations, then he looks good. His manager does the same, all the way up the chain. They played the same game when I worked at Amazon. What's more, it became automated. They introduced non-optional surveys that popped up on your compute…

> That's because his bonus was probably tied to your performance

Or they just don't want to take on the burden of getting you to improve. PIPs are a pain for everyone involved. If a manger hands out anything lower than "Meets Expectations", their next step is to help you get there, or gather enough data points for HR to safely see you out the door

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

#732

Post by ironman1478 »

koverda wrote: post #413
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…

managers are employees too

You're getting downvoted but you're right. Managers generally start out as ICs and bring along with them all their biases.

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

#733

Post by potatolicious »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #692
potatolicious wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fully agreed re: Apple from first-hand knowledge, and IMO this is a large part of the company's "secret sauce".

Which is both a high compliment to Apple and a damning indictment of other companies like Google: the secret sauce is having your senior leadership and executives live and breathe product! Huh. It seems like an obvious observation, but clearly not obvious enough because most large tech cos do not do this!

Your senior leadership should have encyclopedic knowledge about the product and its roadmap. They should be able to describe, in detail, the major features that will be shipping and why the company is pursuing them. They should also relentlessly question product proposals because most product proposals are absolutely not good enough at inception to be worth building, and refuse to greenlight projects until they pass muster.

This is how you ship good products in big companies.

[edit] Another salient point worth bringing up: there is a deeply-held belief at Google (and from what I hear, also at FB) that product viability cannot be tested except with the public via rigorous A/B testing. The result of this poorly substantiated belief is that trying new ideas requires building out (at minimum) a full MVP. The execution costs for trying new ideas is extraordinarily high, and more than that requires commitments to the public.

This is distinctly unlike more functional product orgs where ideas can be validated in a number of ways short of building the actual thing (user research, focus groups, simplified prototypes tested with selected members of the public under observation, etc.) and are much faster and much cheaper. You can get a lot of understanding of what products and features work without committing to a full buildout.

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

#734

Post by seizethecheese »

austinjp wrote: post #636
twblalock wrote: post #473

Earlier 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…

It depresses me no end that someone can see poor performance, laziness etc only as a trait others possess, and not as a reaction to circumstance that they themselves might experience one day. I guarantee that anyone -- anyone -- can find themselves viewed as substandard. It's truly disturbing when Zuckerberg says something so dystopian, and people 'in the trenches' call for more.

Okay, so you think it’s all circumstantial? What’s the mix? Are there no people that just like to skate by?

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

#735

Post by jsemrau »

Aperocky wrote: post #718
jsemrau wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did not come away with anything from the story that would make me have a negative opinion on author's technical capability.

I didn't see it as negative as well. Rather, it's not special. Not exceptional. It's just a job. It sounds like all the other jobs out there.

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

#736

Post by carom »

vecter wrote: post #705
carom wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

Use them to measure how well people will perform in the tasks that you need them to do. For coding interviews, Square's is really good. [1] I am not sure if they have sample questions written anywhere in the linked blog posts, but very simple things with added complexity.

Example - Write a rate limiter that takes in a timestamp (integer) and returns true if it hasn't hit a rate limit. Ok, now what if we make the rate limiter per user. Just simple things to see how you represent data, store it, create interfaces to it, and how you refactor to deal with change.

Most likely, you want to be having someone write tests for some code and review some code. Then speak to them about their experience. Depends on your organization though, maybe you are small and people need to produce a lot more than the large tech companies.

1. https://developer.squareup.com/blog/ace-the-square-pairing-i...

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

#737

Post by nullc »

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…

Forget the compan(y/ies) for a moment. In a decade or two when you look back will you feel your time was well spent?

The companies, much less corporate America in aggregate, will have assuredly not noticed your protest. But will you notice your lack of professional accomplishment?

Being wronged extracts a price, through vengeance you can pay it twice.

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

#738

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Perhaps this is mainly to try to please Wall Street. But I think the jig is up, so to speak. It should now be painfully obvious if you are a "tech" worker for an advertising-supported "tech" company that this "business" relies, indirectly, on the abundance of cheap capital, i.e., super low cost debt. To me, that does not signify "essential" services. It signifies "optional". The web will not die if these companies disappear, but these companies _will_ die without sufficient web traffic. In the absence of "venture capital", Facebook could vanish and people would still find ways to use the internet to stay in touch. That is what I think. The only way to know for sure is to let them fade away and see what happens. To argue otherwise is to underestimate human ingenuity, not to mention how much bandwidth, storage and CPU consumers today have at their disposal. The "tech" worker who argues "You need us" to the public is, IMO, now much less convincing when their employers are admitting they really do not need most of you.

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

#740

Post by sibeliuss »

fefe23 wrote: post #245

As 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…

> "and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees"

Come on! This is straight up impossible. Anyone who has worked for any length of time in the tech industry has come across people that simply don't do anything, and are totally fine with that. It is *very common* and its borderline dishonest to say otherwise.

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