'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

#791

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 2:05 AM UTC

i_have_an_idea wrote: post #352

afro88 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems crazy to me, but I don't work in FAANG. A basketball game (I'm assuming recurring) during work hours? Quality of life from inside work? Are you all at campus for most of your day (ie, longer than 8h?) To me, quality of life is working hard and smart during the 8h, and keeping the rest of the day for you and your family. Quality of life comes from outside work, and the company respects and encourages that b…

> To me, quality of life is working hard and smart during the 8h, and keeping the rest of the day for you and your family Mate, I browsed your profile and you live in Australia. Why would you want to spend the better, sunnier part of the day inside of an office? How is that "quality of life" better than spending an hour or so to play some basketball with some friends? > Of course we still do team building activities,…

[deleted]

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

#792

Post by boringg » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 2:05 AM UTC

groffee wrote: post #647

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…

> 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.

No that's not dead weight. Dead weight is people who don't contribute and don't get their work done.

Going above and beyond requirements is a personal decision.

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

#793

Post by darth_avocado » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 2:06 AM UTC

nullc wrote: post #737

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…

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.

My argument is that professional accomplishment can be achieved while just meeting expectations. I’ve seen people who are at the same level, work harder (read longer) than I do and yet get paid less and not get the promotions they were trying for. The system isn’t a perpetual growth machine, otherwise all of us would be VPs and CEOs. I never said I don’t do any work, I still work on things I want to and take great pride in every single thing I do. I just don’t do it for free or at the expense of other parts of my life. Ambition needs to be checked with reality.

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

#794

Post by bytelines » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 2:07 AM UTC

andyferris wrote: post #772

i_have_an_idea wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me, quality of life is working hard and smart during the 8h, and keeping the rest of the day for you and your family Mate, I browsed your profile and you live in Australia. Why would you want to spend the better, sunnier part of the day inside of an office? How is that "quality of life" better than spending an hour or so to play some basketball with some friends? > Of course we still do team building activities,…

You’ve honestly never made friends with any of your teammates at work? (A friend being someone you’d choose to spend some of your time off with).

It's a troll. "Optional activities" gets translated to "mandatory" and a game is "far more important" yet apparently in such a game nobody really likes each other, too.

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

#795

Post by cmrdporcupine » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 2:09 AM UTC

pradn wrote: post #610

PaulHoule wrote: post #4

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…

As a Google employee, the profusion of chat apps is caused by: * a genuine interest in trying new things and trying to see if they'd stick, without the baggage of established UX & customers - Allo/Duo are like this. I don't think people give the company enough credit for this. * leadership downplaying the cost to the Google brand of shutting things down all the time. When brought up internally, execs shrug saying tha…

Most of the problems with product @ today's Google come from "shipping the org chart." You touched on this in your third point.

This was one of the major factors that led to me walking away from there after a decade.

That, and it's just a slow boring place to work most of the time. One spends the bulk of one's time basically seeking permission to do the thing that needs to be done -- by this I mean: get in the right MDB groups, get the right sign off on design docs, be sure to be in the right team, be sure to have gotten the right people on your code reviews, made sure there's visibility to the right stakeholders -- and hope to god the thing you're working on isn't sexy enough that somebody better connected won't just steal it from you when you're halfway through it anyways. Or just take credit for it.

And the perf process and the culture around it produces terrible results on top of that.

Paid well, but was a terrible place to work. Especially once COVID hit and the free gourmet food and subsidized massages were a thing of the past.

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

#796

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 2:10 AM UTC

casey_lang wrote: post #731

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 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

[deleted]

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

#797

Post by spc476 » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 2:12 AM UTC

coffeeisyummy wrote: post #483

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…

This iteration through pseudo productivity comes from management's real world problem of demonstrating progress on their projects. The promises of visibility on your development team's productivity always turns Agile into a steaming pile of burn-downs and story points. "No one has done true Agile" is the "No one has done true Communism" for software engineering. Because, in the real world, no one uses Agile in an ide…

I think my department was Agile, doing the stuff on the left (good) side of the Agile Manifesto [1], even as we didn't think we were doing Agile. We made deadlines, had smooth deployments, and any bugs in production were not that bad. Then new management came in (company was bought) and started pushing "Agile" on us, which is doing the stuff on the right [bad] side of the Agile Manifesto. Now we've missed deadlines, rarely have a smooth deployment, and are now constantly finding bugs in production. When pressed, upper management has stated that "Agile" is to make it possible to work faster than we were.

Yeah.

[1] https://agilemanifesto.org/

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

#798

Post by confidantlake » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 2:12 AM UTC

sibeliuss wrote: post #740

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.

Is it really? I haven't worked at that many companies but I've seen it maybe once or twice out of hundreds of workers. I have see devs that were incompetent but tried. I see a lot of pms, managers, business analysts etc who seemed to always be collaborating with each other but contribute very little to the actual product. But the truly lazy dgaf dev is very rare in my experience.

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

#799

Post by hackerlight » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 2:17 AM UTC

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.

Even if it is due to circumstances, I've never seen a lazy person become unlazy after intervention from management. Sample size .. perhaps 20? The best solution is to terminate them quickly. Zuck's attitude here is what I look for in leaders when considering whether to join a company. There is little that's more demoralizing than pulling someone's weight for years while management is too disorganized to fire them, or worse yet when management thinks that half of your output is actually the output of the person you've been carrying.

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

#800

Post by periphrasis » Thu, Aug 11, 2022, 2:18 AM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #251

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…

If you have time to faff around at a FAANG, you have time to be cultivating your network to include some very influential people, you have time to be taking advantage of training resources or learning from the experts there that are completely free that most ordinary developers would have to pay thousands to get access to, you have time to work on side projects either for the company or, if you dare, for your own per…

> to catapult their careers ahead.

What is the value of one’s career? To make more money? Why is it smart to devote so much effort to moving up when you’ll be dead and your work completely forgotten much sooner than anyone cares to admit? If you’re seeking lasting glory then the well trod path there is politics, war, or art: technologists generally are not remembered outside their time (with maybe literally a half dozen exceptions since antiquity).

I ask this honestly, because at this point in my own career the only answer I can come up with is the personal satisfaction of getting better and more knowledgeable about something I at one time enjoyed.