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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

#881

Post by fiveyearsinarow »

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…

As a current FANNG employee, I have seen so many dead weights here, especially the new-hires after COVID. They took advantage of the lenient WFH policy. Some travels around the world for a year; some becomes a social media influencer; some comes up with all sorts of excuse like wife/kids/parents being sick to take unlimited sick day.

It pains me to see how a great company gets abused like this. The cycle to put people on PIP is so long that they can coast at least a year before anything can be done.

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

#882

Post by onion2k »

ummonk wrote: post #564
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.

Are you incapable of doing something you actually care about with the freed up 36 hours?

People working 4 hours a week still have to pretend to be productive for the other 36 hours though. They still have to sit through meetings, and justify their time, and answer Slack messages, and have reviews. They're not free to work on their own projects - they're just 'not working'. That sounds far worse than spending time working on something you actually care about even if it's not your own idea.

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

#883

Post by wizofaus »

fiveyearsinarow wrote: post #881
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…

As a current FANNG employee, I have seen so many dead weights here, especially the new-hires after COVID. They took advantage of the lenient WFH policy. Some travels around the world for a year; some becomes a social media influencer; some comes up with all sorts of excuse like wife/kids/parents being sick to take unlimited sick day. It pains me to see how a great company gets abused like this. The cycle to put peopl…

What level are they hired at though, and are you talking developers?

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

#884

Post by morty16 »

robbintt wrote: post #864
borroka wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

what I took from that is that inertia is more significant than total energy.

if you've got a tank of gas you can go a long way slowly, a short way quickly.

a flywheel takes a lot of effort to spin up or spin down. once it's going at a certain speed it tends to stay there.

so if you tend to get home, eat burritos, and watch netflix, you'll keep doing that.

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

#885

Post by fiveyearsinarow »

titzer wrote: post #299

Quoth Zuck: > “And part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.” Wow. Just. Wow. Why not inject some more dysfunction into an already strained relationship with employees and callously but passively aggressively deal with a s…

There are people who were performing well but had temporary setbacks due to circumstances, and there are people who wanted to coast from day one. It's easy to tell them apart if you have worked with them closely.

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

#886

Post by temp20160423 »

jedberg wrote: post #325
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…

Pre-pandemic, Google stopped serving breakfast at 8 and started dinner at 7. A lot of the younger folks were there for 11 hours every day so they could get all three meals. If you're there that long, you need to take breaks once in a while, which they of course provided plenty of options. They even had laundry machines on site so that you could do laundry between meetings.

Breakfast stopped 9:30 or 10am, depending on cafe in mountain view. Dinner mostly started 6:30pm. There were some cafes that provided food continuously, so some folks grabbed dinner at 5pm and left.

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

#889

Post by abdabab »

faangiq wrote: post #809
wildrhythms wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you meant, “This guy FAANGs”.

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

#890

Post by shagie »

dpedu wrote: post #726
shagie wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The explanation I arrived at was that such perqs were the necessary counterpart to an expectation that your employees have no life other than work. {soapbox} I believe a lot of companies are trying to establish a third place ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place and https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/02/28/20030228/ ) to help transition new grads and young adults from a college atmosphere to a professional a…

I don't think the Facebook woodshop fits the definition of a Third place. It's just another room at your employer's office. People using this facility are still AT work, just not working and anything that happens there is going to happen by your employer's rules. Perhaps this view is affected by my personal stance of never ever ever using employer-owned perks like this because it's just a trick to keep you there long…

Its that it is competing with the hackerspace and blurring the lines between the third place and the work place for the employees. If you are in the wood workshop at Facebook and are a practiced craftsman hobbiest and see your manager messing up an expensive piece of wood - do you treat him as a novice? or as a manager?

Next, these things are to try to encourage the retaining of the college mindset. Aside form the "play hard" there's the "work hard" - the all night cramming that you had with college gets translated to working all night to meet some project target date.

Additionally, by establishing these pseudo-third places, it encourages the people who use them to be part of the work "community" rather than the civic community (where the hacker space or coffee shop is). This in turn makes the people who work there more isolated from the people in the community and has an impact on the third places there as there are fewer people in the civic community who use them (when they are provided free at work). Yes, you would rather use the local hacker space than the one that FB has for a woodshop - but that isn't true of a fair number of people.

Lastly, these perks aren't things that the company values too highly and thus is apt to remove them when times get tighter. Establishing those perks as the norm (see Basecamp with its combination of company forum pseudo-third places and perks) and then changing how they're done or making them location specific (FB employee in SV gets a woodshop, while the remote worker doesn't) will create discontent later down the road.

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I believe that companies that are offering these perks and pseudo-third places (as perks) are finding that the trouble that they cause is more than the value they provide to their employees from the employer perspective but are having trouble withdrawing.

The SV style perk - I believe - is a liability to a company. While it may improve employe retention a bit while it is active (and I really question that in as junior dev tenure has been dropping combined with an increase in remote work), removing it can result in singicant discontent and hosting it increases the issues that HR has with maintaining it.

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