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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

#831

Post by smashah »

Not to be holier than thou or anything but if you're at FAANG/high paying job with enough of a nest egg and working on something that does not impact the bottom line or make any difference please quit your job and do something useful with your life, time and skill.

Open a shawarma shop or something, at least it will make people happy unlike another Google chat app.

You can discuss ad infinitum whose fault all this is (middle management, metric-first strategy, execs etc.) but it's your life being wasted at the end of the day.

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

#833

Post by titzer »

twblalock wrote: post #709
titzer wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor performers are demotivating, yep. The challenge of a manager, and really, the whole management system, is making reasonable efforts to get employees back on track, if that's possible. I mentioned the life events thing because it's real. Sometimes a PIP (performance improvement plan) gives people a jolt and gets them back on track, sometimes not. It's the job of management to separate true under-performers from t…

Facebook has regular, systematic performance reviews and a PIP process like most large companies. Nobody is talking about firing people for temporary performance lapses.

Zuckerberg could have said some stuff like "I have confidence our existing performance evaluation processes will be able to handle productivity issues, with some adjustments", or some other bland but reassuring words, but he chose what he said.

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

#834

Post by dilyevsky »

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…

Not sure about Mark wouldn’t be surprised if he still hacks php on the side but Pichai joined google as a manager I think from mckinsey of all places… so Im going with “never”

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

#835

Post by anothernewdude »

Work? No, in the article he was talking about an all-hands meeting. Those meetings are content-less, can be replaced by an email and serve only to stroke the ego of the presenter. "Look at how many people I can command as an audience".

How much actual information needs to go to all employees in a synchronous fashion? If you're broadcasting information, then it doesn't need to happen synchronously.

The real information revealed here is how poorly these CEOs conceive of how work is happening in their companies. They aren't tracking the performance of their employees in a sane fashion. This is a massive red flag for Facebook and Google.

Are there people there that shouldn't be? I can think of at least one name that should leave to improve the business.

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

#836

Post by anothernewdude »

weard_beard wrote: post #492
dboreham wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem This kind of "development process theater" causes terrible cognitive dissonance.

I'm intrigued by this statement. Maybe we run an unorthodox version of Agile, but I'm a solutions architect with imposter syndrome (which is why I clicked this link) and I spend about 3/4 of each day in meetings with PMs and SSTs (Business Analyst) generating a backlog and acceptance criteria that's structured and detailed enough that our developers are generally happy if they get to choose the variable names.

That's horrific.

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

#837

Post by pta2 »

As someone who is working in a very large tech company, I see one of the strong reasons as why employees are not motivated is because the returns for working hard and delivering results is not there. Things like promotions, pay rises are always not explained and the expectations for promotion is never clearly communicated, intentionally kept vague and consequently the individual is not clear what more to do and is frustrated. Once these large companies find out you are good in one thing, they really want you to keep doing that one thing day in and day out.

Add immigration related uncertainty on top of this, wherein people on H1B, and awaiting Green Card cannot easily quit and change job, it directly correlates to lot of burnt out people just waiting for their immigration situation to change to get out and that wait can take years.

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

#838

Post by yowlingcat »

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…

This isn't an irrational reaction, but it also isn't always as clever as it seems. Working this way can suck the soul out of your life in the same way that failing to exercise yourself mentally or physically will eventually eat away at your fitness. Is it terminal? Of course not. But it does take a toll on you. And it eats away at your sense of fulfillment and happiness.

Could it be something like diabetes, where it won't kill you today but it will kill you tomorrow? Maybe. Only you can figure out the answer for that for yourself. I know the answer for myself by now, which is yes. I'd much rather work for a company that gives me the opportunities to stretch myself, do work in a space I actually find interesting, and mostly get rewarded and advance even if they extract an absolute larger percentage of my surplus labor than other companies, than vice versa. And that is because I am getting a worse deal in today terms, and a better deal in tomorrow terms. I've been burned by this attitude before, but I've also had exceptional outcomes I'd never take back or redo any other way. YMMV.

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

#839

Post by bagacrap »

I work at one of the two mentioned companies. 20% of the employees do 80% of the work, and another 60% do maybe 50%. the last 20% account for -30%. It's demoralizing how incapable management seems to be at jettisoning the chaf, however it was explained to me once thusly: good engineers are hard to find and also very valuable. An unmotivated/lazy engineer is one step away from being a valuable engineer. It's worthwhile spending a lot of effort trying to find what motivates them.

Also, if you look at revenue and divide by employees, you will see that the strategy of "employee 5 engineers and hope at least one is good" is still profitable.

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

#840

Post by bagacrap »

fefe23 wrote: post #317
codegeek wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 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…

or, they felt being a dead weight was wrong, but wanted to be one, so came up with a justification. If they actually didn't want to be dead weight they'd work in spite of their situation.
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