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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

#781

Post by kart23 »

hyperbovine wrote: post #763
rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how I think of it. You pay firemen for their ability to solve a problem quickly and efficiently, and for being able to execute when called upon. Giant companies making money hand over fist pay a lot of "don't fuck this up" salaries. The primary goal for everyone is to keep the money printer running smoothly; everything else is secondary.

Reading this caused the following factoid bubbled up in my mind: the leading cause of death for firefighters is now heart disease. The 98% of their time that’s not responding to calls is evidently spent napping and eating lasagna. I’m not naysaying this arrangement, it’s how it has to be. I don’t see why it should be too different at Google, for some employees anyways.

Isn't the #1 cause of death for everyone heart disease?

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

#782

Post by throwaway6734 »

paulcole wrote: post #754
onion2k wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even over doing something awesome like trying to land people on Mars?

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

#783

Post by gofreddygo »

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…

Measure the product before measuring productivity.

across the board execs complaining about productivity turn out to be poor at defining product ("its just a website, how long could it take to build, Jeez").

Any productivity comparisons between software and other manufacturing processes should begin with a few minutes spent to compare software specs and the said product's spec, see how hard it is to change its spec ("add a button to accept payments" v/s. "add a knob on the car's dashboard")

provide a technical spec first, then we can talk about productivity.

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

#784

Post by darth_avocado »

Spooky23 wrote: post #693
darth_avocado wrote: post #567

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…

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.

That is the exact propaganda I don’t buy. My 20 year long career that pays quite well would think either you’re wrong or most of corporate America’s management is not “Competent Management”.

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

#785

Post by clarle »

jedberg wrote: post #624
paganel wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I knew a bunch of Ex-Yahoos, and they all cited this fact as one of the main reasons they left. Which was a shame, because they had built something really interesting and nice when it came to the web. Between 2006 and 2008 (give or take) I'd say Yahoo was neck and neck with Google when it came to bringing "cool stuff" to the web. Yahoo! Pipes is still something I think of from time to time after all these years.

Indeed. The ex-Yahoos I worked with were some of the best most talented engineers I've worked with, and the managers were all fantastic too. In its prime Yahoo was a real powerhouse. I'm not exactly sure where it went wrong.

I was at Yahoo during the Marissa Mayer era.

I think the thing with Yahoo was that it tried do too much, and it never really had any focus on any particular vertical. Its legacy has always been that it was the place you would go for anything, and I think that hurt it more later on because the company itself was unfocused, and it didn't have a money-printing machine like Google's ads to fund the experimental work.

When Marissa Mayer was on board, the focus was "mobile and emerging products", which was absolutely the right call in 2012, but it was still too general to rally a company around. It had a lot of great small things, but none of them had enough investment to turn into a multi-billion dollar business on its own, as well as a lot of legacy things that still needed to be maintained.

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

#786

Post by Invictus0 »

amzn-throw wrote: post #756
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…

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…

"But that's not how it is on my team!" is the dumbest and yet most common response you hear from Amazon employees when they hear about Amazon's horrible business practices. The whole company is in fact a team. You are part of the exact same team.

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

#787

Post by dasil003 »

jsemrau wrote: post #657
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…

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.

If you were early at Google it means more as going through that hypergrowth was very difficult and there was less dead weight. But for the last 10 years Google means essentially two things from a hiring manager's perspective: 1) you have decent floor of basic technical ability as no one stupid or a complete faker makes it through the technical interviews (but note it's a low floor as anybody with 100 IQ and reasonably technical mind can probably brute force their way to passing if they want it bad enough) and 2) if you were successful there you can deal well with large-scale system complexity and (likely) the politics of working with many partner teams and stakeholders. It's not foolproof as any given individual, role or team could get lucky in terms of having relatively high agency and fewer dependencies, but on balance anyone L5+ is going to have to deal with a fair amount of that.

Given the 15 years of essentially unconstrained growth and moats from any real competition, I think your assessment is largely correct though. The name brand reputation of Google far outweighs the likely strength of any given candidate, especially if you expect execution without limitless resources and industry-leading technical mentors/gatekeepers at every critical juncture.

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

#788

Post by 29athrowaway »

Issue trackers create an alternate reality where code quality and organization doesn't matter. This makes leaders seek for insights in the issue tracker instead of diving into the code base.

The result? all developers try to game the system by closing tickets faster at the expense of burying the project into tech debt. The endgame of late JIRA-based development is having an army of thousands of developers checking 2 lines of code per month.

Meanwhile the competition clones the best selling aspects of your product and before you know it nobody wants to buy your bloated, slow, unstable and expensive solution is slowly replaced by cheaper alternatives.

Product managers as owners of project backlogs is the ruin of software.

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

#789

Post by hot_gril »

dividefuel wrote: post #160
SavageBeast wrote: post #5

I see this as more or less a ruse to justify ridding the companies of all the now remote people who moved away to live in Cheap Town during the pandemic. This is a pretext for the typical Corporate House Cleaning/Reduction In Force scenario. Some people do well working remote (Im one of them in fact) but I suspect and from what I've seen the majority of people simply cant handle the responsibility/self management of…

For companies that adjust salary for remote workers, those employees who moved to Cheap Town are now cheaper for the company to pay than those who work in Silicon Valley.

But do they adjust down to market rate? Hard to tell if they aren't hiring new people in Cheap Town.

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

#790

Post by creativemonkeys »

dividefuel wrote: post #160
SavageBeast wrote: post #5

I see this as more or less a ruse to justify ridding the companies of all the now remote people who moved away to live in Cheap Town during the pandemic. This is a pretext for the typical Corporate House Cleaning/Reduction In Force scenario. Some people do well working remote (Im one of them in fact) but I suspect and from what I've seen the majority of people simply cant handle the responsibility/self management of…

For companies that adjust salary for remote workers, those employees who moved to Cheap Town are now cheaper for the company to pay than those who work in Silicon Valley.

Last time I checked how much I'd lose, it was between 10k and 15k, which is not much compared to my total comp.
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