'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm • Hacker News Board

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

#751

Post by fathrowaway12 » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 1:01 AM UTC

I have been working for about 4.5 years now across 3 big tech companies (Google included).

I would consider myself a hardworking and ambitious person who loves computer science. I graduated top of my class at a state school. I've gotten promoted, consistently "exceed expectations", lots of positive feedback, etc. But I have not actually accomplished a damn thing or written a single interesting or useful component in my professional work.

The thing is, it's becoming clearer and clearer that so much of what goes on is bullshit. A pattern I have seen 3 times now is managers significantly over-hiring to build their little management moat of mediocre junior devs, then leaving on to brighter pastures with their shinier resume or promotion.

Most of the work is dealing with other people's code messes, operational gruntwork, and ticket grinding that will have little to no impact and is a complete waste of smart people's time. It has little to do with building software or solving hard problems, just maintaining and tweaking the existing systems. It does absolutely nothing for your career. You could be Jeff Dean stuck on worthless legacy grunt crap with no upside and I doubt you would get noticed.

On the flip side, people who actually get interesting, promotable work are the luckiest in the world. It is the difference between a rocket ship advance of career and skill or stagnation and frustration. But this is rare IMO.

And it's so hard to tell going in which you're going to get. I've now taken a gamble on three teams that looked good on paper but turned out to be legacy management empire crap. It pisses me off that once you choose you're basically stuck there for a year or two before you can try again. I don't want to waste any more of my life on this merry go round.

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

#752

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 1:04 AM UTC

debug-desperado wrote: post #541

russellbeattie wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Seems like the feedback would need to be reviewable in a "skip level" fashion for that to work.

[deleted]

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

#753

Post by robomartin » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 1:06 AM UTC

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…

Remote working has been around forever. The pandemic opened the doors to a larger set of candidates. None if it changed human nature. There are people who do well on their own. I think most don’t.

I know someone who has had remote jobs for probably 35 years. How does he spend his time? Re-roofing his home, upgrading his bathrooms, fixing his cars, etc. Not working. And these are six figure jobs. Watching this first hand —for decades— has not made me a huge believer in remote work for everyone. Not sure how to define who does well and who does not.

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

#754

Post by paulcole » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 1:08 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #403

colechristensen wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. As long as that's the actual acknowledged situation and not "most of your job is pretending to work and making people think you're important". I wonder how successful a lot of companies would be if they openly cut required hours in half.

If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. Would you take that over $300k to work 40 hours doing something you actually care about? I don't think I would.

I would take virtually any job that paid what I make now (nowhere close to $300k) and required 4 hours a week over the very best job that paid what I make now and required 40 hours a week. Don't even have to think about it.

I can fill 36 hours a week of my time better than anyone else can. If the money's equal and the time difference is that steep, I'll take the shorter time commitment.

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

#755

Post by SnowHill9902 » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 1:13 AM UTC

999900000999 wrote: post #478

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…

>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 "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done! As long as you're not mean, you can hang out at most companies for at least 6 months just doing nothing. I've been reprimanded before , when I took the initiative t…

I was with you until that part. Having to write .NET and on Windows is just too much.

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

#756

Post by amzn-throw » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 1:13 AM UTC

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 bullshit and you're gonna scare the shit out of any junior Amazonian reading this unnecessarily. Obviously nothing is TRULY anonymous - at the end of the day there is a super secured database that HR can go into if there is a need. The data is there much in the same way that every email you send is discoverable in a lawsuit. Or if you get fired and bring a USB key and copy all your data they'll get it. Nothing you do on a work computer is truly private.

But that doesn't mean anyone's manager has access to some secret dashboard to get any of this data or is able to view it on demand. Short of a serious legal case it just won't be relevant.

Noone's manager has access to individual answers and neither does anyone in their org chart.By default, week-over-week, that connections information is private.

What actually (probably) happened is your team's scores were shitty and somewhere up in your org chart noticed and started giving your manager shit to improve them. Then they went in and decided to use their best guesses about who voted for what to start harassing people to figure out how to improve things.

They absolutely epitomized Goodhart's law and they got the result they wanted - you stopped giving a shit and voted for whatever got them off your back.

That sucks but thats not how it is on most teams. Every team I've been on used this data bi-weekly or monthly to have an honest review of what we're doing well and where we need to improve. Nobody gets picked on. If there is a clear outlier where one person was unhappy we don't try to find out why but I (as a senior leader) try to be vocally self-critical and try to come up with multiple guesses and/or reasons for why they might have said that, and what could be done about different root causes. (TO not force whoever was the outlier to speak up).

Your manager sounds like an idiot/asshole, but the least I can say from looking up your name is at least your former manager isn't managing anyone anymore!

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

#757

Post by beowulfey » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 1:16 AM UTC

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #661

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…

Oh sweet summer child, they aren't saying that they are going to get rid of the poor performers. They've said they are going to turn up the heat. That means that the people, like yourself, who actually do the work, are going to face the heat. The poor performers have a skill: and that skill is keeping their jobs without doing any work. So you're the one that is going to have to do more work, and it is people like you…

100% this. The only people who will leave when things get harder are those who respect themselves enough to not want to waste their time anymore (as they should)

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

#758

Post by boredtofears » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 1:21 AM UTC

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…

Getting back at corporate america by sacrificing your own ambition seems like a pretty unfulfilling and ineffective strategy.

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

#759

Post by daniel_iversen » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 1:24 AM UTC

codegeek wrote: post #287

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…

"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 seen the “floaters” but it’s rare. What is worse are the occasional people (and some companies have lots more of this than others) that are a net negative impact to the productivity. There are different reasons but sometimes they believe that their work adds value but in the end it’s really just creating inefficiencies (like creating processes for process sake, work about work etc). That’s how large companies with everything going for them can easily start loosing their edge - when there’s more “no” people than “yes” people!

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

#760

Post by iroh2727 » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 1:25 AM UTC

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…

Yeah at least several years ago I had an explanation for this (though I’m not sure if it still applies). Basically, I think one reason for this weird type of interview is that it was an indirect way to bias towards young hires.

Young people have that energy and naïveté to do a lot of the grunt work. And most work at any established company is kind’ve grunt work. Anyways, just a random theory but nowadays it may be backfiring.