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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

#861

Post by nandhinianand »

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 is what has become the default that our current system works to incentivize in real terms, but with a lot of marketing to discourage following this path. I work in India, but with a corporate American client atm, and have seen this in operation,(luckily it's a fairly small/medium company so not too much). Having worked in a few startups(with ESOPs) from India before this, I really, really wonder how a global/multi-national company can work with equity based incentives at this point, and if it will help a bit to improve the incentives.

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

#862

Post by vegetablepotpie »

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…

It’s really sad when people who want to be meaningful, are stymied by the floaters.

The floaters stick around by inserting themselves into an essential process that needs non-advocate reviewers infrequently, this is usually supply chain, quality assurance, and security. Then they collude by scheduling meetings for each other, which is really just socializing.

When meaningful people need to use a process, and engage the floaters. They find that they are impossible to engage because they are in meetings. And if there’s special considerations that need to happen in a process, which is a given when you’re innovating, it means that the floaters have more opportunities to schedule more meetings, and sap the productivity of the meaningful people.

Not only do the floaters succeed in slowing down the productivity of the meaningful people, they also impose an opportunity cost, which is that the meaningful people cannot engage in another activity while the former activity is going through process. They have to also spend time engaging the floaters in meetings for the process to continue.

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

#863

Post by grog454 »

Beldin wrote: post #656
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.

Unlike sibling comments, I completely agree. $300k is (around here) over 7x the mode of income [1]. That's a significant amount (basically the yearly income of 7 "regular joes") and raises (to me) the ethical question of whether I'd deserve it. For a full 40-hour workload, perhaps a case could be made. But for a 4-hour workload? The only way I'm getting that sort of compensation for so little work is if I'm a parasit…

> But for a 4-hour workload? The only way I'm getting that sort of compensation for so little work is if I'm a parasite on society.

That isn't the case with the power of scaling. If the product you happen to be working on 4 hrs a week happens to have X billion users, your tiny contribution gets multiplied by 9 orders of magnitude.

There's still something arbitrary and random about it, but it's not accurate to say you aren't producing net value for your employer/users/society/whatever.

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

#864

Post by robbintt »

borroka wrote: post #332
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is fair in theory, and I imagine that some smart, high-agency people take advantage of the situation, but as is often the case, “down time" leads to more down time rather than more time to devote to career advancement, networking, and so on. In fact, one might think that one day, when free of obligations and with plenty of gas in the tank that is currently used for work, one will pick up the barbell, take long b…

Can you expand on the flywheel analogy?

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

#865

Post by jrsj »

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…

I wish this were true but most of the people I have worked with in the past 3 years are just lazy and will pretend to be doing a days worth of work for 2 weeks whenever they can get away with it

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

#867

Post by okdood64 »

bombcar wrote: post #396
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.

The key difference is people understand you’re paying the firemen for the emergencies- but a lot of SREs are actually firemen but paid like developers. When everyone is quietly pretending you’re not a fireman but you are it leads do a disconnect where everyone is playing charades.

> SREs are actually firemen but paid like developer

Firefighters who also do development work to reduce fires and make their firefighting easier.

That said developers also do firefighting. They can be an escalation point for deeper system issues that may elude SREs.

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

#868

Post by flomo »

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…

Was going to disagree, because you portrayed this as as "unjust personal affront". I mean like everyone who ever got fired from McDonalds thinks "my boss irrationally hates me."

But on reflection this happens frequently, not due to personal reasons, but due to corporate politics. Side A won the war, so side B just punches the clock until whenever they get around to layoffs. In any big company, there's going to be a bunh of teams where "they know, but we haven't told them yet".

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

#869

Post by closedloop129 »

Looking at all the things that can be improved in various Google or Facebook products, there is not too few work for developers. The problem is that the classical management structure is not suited for developer companies.

Google and Facebook have cheated when at the beginning, the management and development were two, respectively one person. Management understood what development was doing. Nowadays, when those roles are split into many people, it takes much more management to understand what some code is doing.

Code is a very dense notation. If the same knowledge has to be communicated in normal language, it requires far more people.

So if Google and Facebook don't want to leave decisions to developers, they have to increasing their management overhead. They could introduce various committees to manage all aspects of a product. That would require a massive cultural shift because management wouldn't be a hierarchy anymore.

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