Live data from Hacker News

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

business-standard.com

801–810 of 1001 posts

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

#801

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…

Why do you look to your job for challenges. Why not simply look at it as a way to put food on the table and use the rest of your time and resources to seek out other challenges?

It's exhausting being mentally present while knowing you're not doing anything useful. Using that time to actually work on side projects feels very unethical, so it's kind of just going with the tide for 8 hours a day then being exhausted at night. So the challenges I found were usually in games, not anything productive.

I have far more energy now that I'm actually productively working in a new job and seem to have lost a lot of interest in games as a side effect.

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

#802

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…

Just wanted to say that you've hit on a real problem: the rich-get-richer feedback cycle in which all the good projects are taken by high ranking engineers. On my teams, including at Google, we intentional counteracted that by giving the interesting work to the person just barely qualified to do it, and biasing the crud toward the senior team members.

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

#803

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.

> It's truly disturbing when Zuckerberg says something so dystopian, and people 'in the trenches' call for more.

Or maybe people here on HN are sick of finding --in team after team-- those 1 or 2 people who take forever to finish their work and drag the whole team down.

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

#805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

After 3 months at Google I've come to realize the high hiring bar is there because you need to be particularly smart just to get basic shit done in their environment. I spent 3 hours the other day trying to authenticate to one of Google's own internal APIs from within the Google network using their bespoke IDE . In the end the code necessary was pretty simple. But I'd tried many incorrect solutions before that. The A…

Yep, that sounds about right.

My two tips are:

1) Treat services you call like your own code. Familiarize yourself with the server code. Try running it locally and poke at it. If you run into problems in staging/production, go look at their logs and monitoring dashboards (if that's still allowed; I have a feeling that things have changed around permissions since I left). What I learned that there was never an error I needed help with as soon as I read the code and error logs of the app I was trying to call. "Oh, this deprecated field is actually still required, it's just IGNORED now", that sort of thing. In the real world, it really helps with open source libraries. There is never any useful documentation. So get used to reading the code, and you'll never notice it's missing. As you get good at it, it really becomes a productivity superpower.

2) Fill out all available forms. I wrote and maintained a monitoring system at Google. I remember going to some tech talk about how the network worked, and realized that I could be using a high network priority instead of Best Effort, just by filling out some form. In the unlikely event of a network problem, we'd probably still have monitoring! Fill out the form I did. And one day there was some network incident where a lot of consumer-facing apps were slow/down, and my service didn't miss any messages. No unnecessary outages or pages or a long night, all because I filled out a form that anyone could fill out. I honestly felt a little bad because I guess we could have lived without the monitoring if it would have saved GMail. But hey, victory goes to the team that's willing to fill out the form and maybe have a quick meeting about it. Not everything in software engineering is programming.

There is quite the ramp up time, and there is a lot of learning to do, but once you get a handle on it, you can really do great things at high speed. If you ever leave, you will miss it. As much as people complain about the tools/systems/libraries, it is all really top notch. The "real world" is a hodgepodge of half-baked systems that all cost $30,000 a year. (Whoever wrote Prometheus left too early and cloned varz instead of Monarch. Hurts my soul every single day.)

I most miss D, Spanner, Blaze, and Monarch. Spanner you can buy from Google, but I can't afford it. Bazel is open-source. The rest... you just have to settle for something not as good.

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

#806

It's weird to say, but there's a genuine lack of headcount all over the company while Pichai (and probably Zukerberg) also does a correct assessment on the situation. This seems a contradiction, but if you take a deeper look into mid level managements there are a good number of teams responsible for billions of users/revenue and driving their growth but screaming for more headcounts. (Yeah, I'm in one of those teams)…

Having worked inside and outside Google I just want to say how happy I am that products can't be launched without privacy and security review. I've seen some outright garbage launched at other companies with obvious, gaping holes in their privacy and user-data security stories and it's completely terrifying.

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

#807
post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just know of at least 20 people left my previous company because we had nothing to do. Every meeting was trying to figure out what the direction was. As an engineer when the company gets to the size of 1000+ you are largely not at all empowered to solve this problem but have to rely on your manager or in some cases your managers manager. But come time for performance review you get bad marks. If you think that many…

The biggest lie I ever got told at work was "all teams have equal opportunity for impact". They don't, and team+org is about 80% of your potential performance. At the time my org had a "mission & building" group and a "maintenance & operations" group. I was placed in the maintenance group. Every single project in the maintenance group went the same: good idea, planning & initial prototype, gets noticed by management,…

That sounds like a dysfunctional organization and a good example why trying to measure "impact" in the sense you're describing is not a good idea. Let's say you're on an internal tools team that's building tools that others in the organization rely on to build whatever products your company is making money of. You might say your direct "impact" [edit: is small/zero] but your indirect impact is definitely not. In a well run company those people would be highly valued for their indirect contribution.

You're absolutely right that how a company is organized, and its culture, is directly linked to those outcomes. The ability of individuals to make impact is also very related to their being in the right position to utilize their strengths aka role fit. In a well run company managers try to optimize for all these things. Ofcourse the best intentioned managers can't always place everyone in the perfect spot and lots of projects have work that isn't super shiny but is still important.

Sounds like you made the right decision in leaving.

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

#808

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…

I stand corrected about the anonymity of the surveys. I wasn't a manager and I can't say I paid much attention during the meetings. But there are a lot of sub-managers who have just a couple of reports and it can't be particularly hard to figure out. Still, I shouldn't have stated it as fact. I'd edit the post if I could.

You didn't confirm or deny that manager performance was tied to those connections data. Care to clarify this? As I said, it was a guess on my part.

My manager was actually a great guy and our group was productive. He only got that way after the surveys became a thing and - I'm guessing - his superiors started getting uptight.

Heh, I like how you checked up on me, but use amzn-throw for your comment. Comms is watching you Wazowski, always watching. Anyways, I still stand by my general sentiment.

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

#809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I noticed is it is not employee laziness but the FAANG companies have ton of dead weight in terms of future projects or project features which never get released. One of my co-workers was working on a feature which was shelved after working 2+ years on it. He lost motivation after that and coasted the rest of the time doing minimum work. I think FAANG companies have lot of PMs and top management who are as cluel…

Let me guess- the management that ultimately nuked the project paraded it around to get promoted before moving to another org and doing the same thing?

^This guy has worked at FAANG.

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

#810
In every other HN thread, people slam FAANGs for being so bloated, and we praise the small startup where everyone on the team gets shit done fast. And in every other thread, people ask "What the hell does need 10,000 engineers for??"

And now Zuck says "We've gotten complacent as a company, and we have to turn up the heat and sense of urgency, and get rid of people who aren't contributing"... and HN freaks out at this 'dystopian' missive.

Pick a lane, people.

Post reply on HN