Well most VCs loose money ...
They "lose" money, not "loose" money.
You are right but in a sense they do both
VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
91–100 of 113 posts
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#92Advertising-supported nerds using the media to attack each other. The person making this coment about "BS jobs" is the one who started EasyDNS and OpenDNS and tried to compete with the pre-Chrome "Google toolbar" and later Chrome and eventually the "omnibox" for the privilege of injecting ads into the "user experience", and/or collecting data to support ad services. Google, with its control over being "default search engine", through any means possible (e.g., bribe/payola, etc.), felt threatened by OpenDNS and claimed OpenDNS was "intercepting Google queries" (because users involuntarily "chose" to send them to Google?) This is what lead to "Google Public DNS". It's another case of two companies fighting over who gets to annoy computer users with ads. Two companies that wanted to hijack NXDOMAIN for profit. Verisign had earlier tried it at the registry level.
Thought experiment: What if all "jobs" that aim to annoy computer users with ads, and provide "services" to do that, are BS. What if VC that fund these surveillance companies are BS, too. What does the computer user not funded by advertising and doing real work think of Google staff.
https://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/ietf/verisign-abuse.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_toolbar
https://www.wired.com/2008/02/webmasters-accuse-the-google-t...
https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2007/05/google-stashing-a...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/1566104/google-dell-br...
http://umbrella.cisco.com/blog/opendns-google-dns
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#93There's a few types of "non workers" I've encountered, that for all extents and purposes are worthless .... until they very much aren't. 1. "former" engineers and non-specialists - they tend to sit in meetings, try to sound important, pontificate about "better ways" but never seem to do real work. Then when SHTF they seem to have all the knowledge to make the problem go away super fast. Maybe SHTF never happens to yo…
They're very much like firefighters. Firefighters spend the vast majority of their working hours either literally doing nothing or else doing somewhat pointless make work, like washing the fire truck. If your firefighters are spending more than ~10% of their time doing their actual job, then the odds of them needing to be in two places at once reaches unacceptable levels. Old fashioned secretaries are similar, if les…
In other words, we don't pay them to put out fires; we pay them to be trained and available to put out fires
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Management is really good at keeping themselves in a job, and don't care about sacrificing the bottom. Engineers are also good at explaining why their system or feature needs to be three times more complex than it really needs to be. Or why last year's tool or framework needs to be replaced with a new one. As an engineer I've seen this bullshit my whole career.
With no incoming work, we SWEs will make ourselves "100% utilized" just rearranging things. We might be sincerely trying to clean up the software, but still, it'll never end until you give us a real task.
And the alternative is to have managers who do nothing but rearrange the chairs in the company. Which doesn't even achieve good uptime or code cleanup, plus, in the case that your company does find something to do, those engineers CAN do it. The managers can't.
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're very much like firefighters. Firefighters spend the vast majority of their working hours either literally doing nothing or else doing somewhat pointless make work, like washing the fire truck. If your firefighters are spending more than ~10% of their time doing their actual job, then the odds of them needing to be in two places at once reaches unacceptable levels. Old fashioned secretaries are similar, if les…
In other words, we don't pay them to put out fires; we pay them to be trained and available to put out fires
Which of course leads to the parable of the old engineer with the hammer
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Management is really good at keeping themselves in a job, and don't care about sacrificing the bottom. Engineers are also good at explaining why their system or feature needs to be three times more complex than it really needs to be. Or why last year's tool or framework needs to be replaced with a new one. As an engineer I've seen this bullshit my whole career.
With no incoming work, we SWEs will make ourselves "100% utilized" just rearranging things. We might be sincerely trying to clean up the software, but still, it'll never end until you give us a real task.
Maybe there are no more tasks to be done. But layoffs aren't liked by either those being laid off, or by managers with shrinking headcounts.
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#97If engineers are doing fake work, it's because managers are doing fake managing.
Engineers generally like to work on meaningful projects. Sometimes we do get sidetracked on pet projects like building a better database design or whatnot, but the time spent on things like that pales in comparison to the scale of pet projects imposed from above.
Or projects, or entire product divisions, that were just badly researched, badly planned, and never should have been signed off in the first place.
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#98There's a few types of "non workers" I've encountered, that for all extents and purposes are worthless .... until they very much aren't. 1. "former" engineers and non-specialists - they tend to sit in meetings, try to sound important, pontificate about "better ways" but never seem to do real work. Then when SHTF they seem to have all the knowledge to make the problem go away super fast. Maybe SHTF never happens to yo…
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Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#99There's a few types of "non workers" I've encountered, that for all extents and purposes are worthless .... until they very much aren't. 1. "former" engineers and non-specialists - they tend to sit in meetings, try to sound important, pontificate about "better ways" but never seem to do real work. Then when SHTF they seem to have all the knowledge to make the problem go away super fast. Maybe SHTF never happens to yo…
> Half the time an engineer is sitting around thinking or drinking all the coffee.
Is that supposed to sound like a bad thing?
> tangible improvements, process cranking, or institutional knowledge, the most valuable people are the admins
Valuable like a splinter in your big toe. "It hurts when I move it!"
Re: VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
#100I know this is an against the grain (for HN at least) take, but I don't disagree. If you're not working on, or supporting, the company's product, you MAY have a BS job. Good example: Twitter, which functioned well after layoffs of 80% or so (the owner's persona has damaged the revenue and reputation extensively, but the product itself has been fine). They're maybe the boldest, but hardly the only company in the past…
The Twitter example is the exact nearsighted reason a lot of comments like the one we're all talking about come up.
A lot of smart people spent years trying to make a resilient system and then everyone claims they aren't needed when it doesn't immediately crumble.
There are also many examples of huge gaps in content moderation, customer reps, and other "useless" functions that has lead to it's decay other than just it's unhinged CEO.
Twitter swallowed a poison pill, and we're just seeing some of the onset of sickness.