871–880 of 1001 posts
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…
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…
> when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod That would be a surpreme waste of company money, and probably they have engineers working for them who are far better developers than they are.
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 thi…
Proper onboarding attention and tenure impacts productivity.
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> when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod That would be a surpreme waste of company money, and probably they have engineers working for them who are far better developers than they are.
At one point Waffle House required all of its senior executives to spend time each year working on the line. (They probably still do I just haven't checked in a few years). They feel this is important for their management team to more viscerally understand the lived experiences of the people working, identify issues in their processes and technology, and generally foster team spirit among their staff.
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…
A pretty well known ticketing company bought our startup a few years ago, and after the first week of parties, raising salaries and hyping us the reality struck us very hard. It was impossible to do any work at all. Anything you wanted to do would require tons of meetings, there was always a few people blocking any initiative you could have.
And then the freaking Agile By The book (with agile coaches and all!) I couldn't stand for the life of me. We'd have like 10 ritual meetings a week and the joke was that those meetings were to discuss "What we're going to do, what we're not doing, and what we didn't do".
Worst part, is that *everything* pushed you to just stay at your desk watching online courses or reading stuff on the internet and do nothing, and as long as you showed up to your scheduled meetings, all was good. You'd even get promotions by just smiling around and being nice to others.
I left that and now I'm at a company about 3 times as big. The difference is that here we're 100% remote and 100% async, written communication. Literally ZERO work meetings a week, just one "hang out" to not forget about the faces of your coworkers. No Agile, no Jira, no bullshit. A shared "to do" list to show others what you're on and weekly reports of your progress. I just can't believe how well this works.
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Many of the top engineering companies (Boeing etc.) are also objectively crappy places to work at. When you're doing things at the scale of Boeing or Google, you need a lot of process, and it's just no fun to do engineering this way.
Most of the time when I see a heavy process at work, it's a good question to ask who does it serve? Most of the time, the answer is that it keeps someone important entrenched in work. It's very rare that I see altruistic processes that benefit the customer.
I'm not saying that adding additional layers of process is always the right answer--there's obviously a cost to adding more process so there needs to be a balance and a continual reassessment of which processes are worth keeping. But in my experience, the intention has always been good: to avoid mistakes, problems, and failures that we've experienced in the past.
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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.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deadweight
Examples of literal in a Sentence:
" The literal meaning of “know your ropes” is “to know a lot about ropes,” while figuratively it means “to know a lot about how to do something.”
I was using the word in its literal sense.
The story he told was basically true, even if it wasn't the literal truth. "
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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.
You must not have worked in companies with actual dead weight.
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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…
Amen, once upon a time I worked for a company and I didn't miss a single day for almost 3 years. Then at the moment I needed to work remote due to a family member's terminal cancer, I got oh so sorry to hear that, but by the way you f*** something up last week.
You sure you really need to work remote, can you work remote like one day a week. Are you sure, it's like terminal terminal.
Eventually they agreed to let me work remote but then they hired a replacement behind my back .
Luckily my childhood taught me not to trust people. When someone shows you who they really are, believe them. So I already had a better paying job lined up.
Hell, I nearly doubled my pay too!
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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…
Blaze seems very nice. I'm deep in a special domain far from g3 - so I only came across it this week. But it has worked exactly how I want it to and has given me no trouble, only a good experience so far. Much better than the terrible world of whatever build system NodeJS is using this week.
And the perks are pretty nice. Not enough to make me never go back to startups. But I appreciate them. Extra days off that no one else would get. Free trips to amusement parks. Days off to go sailing. Good free food. Good free cappuccinos. Good free snacks. Free car charging. I'm shocked so many people living in Mountain View refuse to commute in after working from home for two years.