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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

#931

Post by horns4lyfe »

rr888 wrote: post #589
015a wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know; there are two sides to view this coin from: either "those tech people are insane with all their beautiful buildings, great perks, and fantastic work-life balance" or "those tech people are forward-looking with how we could just make work less shitty for everyone, if only other industries would catch on". I'm sad that even many on here seem to be opting for the "insane" line of thinking, and not recognizing…

I agree, but FAANG developers also get paid huge amounts at the same time. A relaxed job with great perks should pay 50-100k. If you earn half a mil in RSUs you really should be grinding, or someone else will take your place.

Who convinced you of these arbitrary numbers?

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

#932

Post by michaelcampbell »

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…

> And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need.

Not entirely true. I don't mind that one bit. I can voice my opinion on what "we need", but ultimately that's not my decision and there are people hired to do that. I get paid to write it, I'm happy in that spot, and if I end up not having to deploy it, go through whatever baroque testing cycles are in place, or do the job of 3 with the salary of 1 by having to do sysadmin, DevOps, or whatever other fad du jour is sweeping the industry with fancy terms just trying to keep the CEO's in their millions, fine with me.

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

#934

Post by lowercased »

deckard1 wrote: post #688
Spivak wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which in turn let the others do less and less. Force the others to do less and less. I’ve seen this a million times, you have one dev going absolutely buck wild building a cathedral of abstractions that only they can understand. The rest of the devs struggle to implement basic features because, and I can’t overstate this enough because it’s true every time the code is a horribly written tightly coupled shoddily arc…

ah yeah, the mythical 10x dev. He, who has the permission and authority of management, to completely eviscerate any and all process to get whatever management wants done. I know a guy like that. He recently commit a massive code change without so much as a code review or a Jira ticket. 100s of new files. No one knows what the fuck they do. Wonder of wonders. People still believe in 10x. People also believe in agile.…

> People still believe in 10x. People also believe in agile. It's amazing.

I'm not sure it's the same people who 'believe' in both, or... there's more nuance.

I 'believe' in the '10x' thing, because... at times, I've been the 10x person, by many metrics (bugs closed, docs written, tests written, lines of code, tickets addressed, etc). And yes, I'm aware that metrics like that can be gamed in some fashion. I never did, mostly because it's not really apparent at the time there's an output imbalance, but looking back at some numbers like those, I was the '10x' person on a team. It said as much or more about the rest of the team than it did me personally. I've been on other teams where I was decidedly not a 10x, and do have memories of being the -2x person a few times.

I 'believe' in agile, but only to the extent that it supports and enhances an already functioning team. I've seen it played out in a team from a few years ago, and it was as much of a 'well-oiled machine' as you could get while being a growing startup expanding and hiring a lot. That said, the skills and people together would have worked decently and productively together absent any formal process. Obviously just 'imo', but after decades in software, you sort of get a sense of skill levels and ability. We/they were a decent team, and would have been without 'agile' - that was some extra layers of process and ceremony which no doubt helped some people with visibility. That benefit was largely ancillary to the delivery of working software. One could argue the 'repeatability' and 'onboarding' benefits of 'agile', but I've not seen it be a huge boon in most teams I've seen adopt 'agile'.

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

#937

Post by lowercased »

deckard1 wrote: post #688
Spivak wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which in turn let the others do less and less. Force the others to do less and less. I’ve seen this a million times, you have one dev going absolutely buck wild building a cathedral of abstractions that only they can understand. The rest of the devs struggle to implement basic features because, and I can’t overstate this enough because it’s true every time the code is a horribly written tightly coupled shoddily arc…

ah yeah, the mythical 10x dev. He, who has the permission and authority of management, to completely eviscerate any and all process to get whatever management wants done. I know a guy like that. He recently commit a massive code change without so much as a code review or a Jira ticket. 100s of new files. No one knows what the fuck they do. Wonder of wonders. People still believe in 10x. People also believe in agile.…

Separately, what you described in the first paragraph isn't a "10x" dev, that's a "loose cannon".

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

#938

Post by Zvez »

Spivak wrote: post #543
Silverback_VII wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen it in many places. It's like you can watch the emergence of Orwell's Animal Farm in every human setting. A small fraction doing more and more, which in turn let the others do less and less.

> which in turn let the others do less and less. Force the others to do less and less. I’ve seen this a million times, you have one dev going absolutely buck wild building a cathedral of abstractions that only they can understand. The rest of the devs struggle to implement basic features because, and I can’t overstate this enough because it’s true every time the code is a horribly written tightly coupled shoddily arc…

I did such thing at least twice (unintentionally). Usually there is a quite simple way to overcome this - cultivate review process and some some of tech meetings, where your '10x dev' can talk about their approach and others have chance to criticise it. If other devs don't care enough to challenge 10x and just roll with it, well then they have it coming.

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

#939

Post by shubb »

r00fus wrote: post #264

Looks like some cuts are coming to the FAANG workforce - perhaps it's a good time to poach people for your upcoming initiative. Not necessarily just those who will be laid off, but the ones who don't like their coworkers getting laid off so they can do 1.5x the work for the same money. Fire up those LinkedIn contacts!

Do we want FAANG employees? From what I'm reading here great people started these companies and we've had 20 years of sleepy civil service style meeting people. They sound like they might fit at a bank but not at any company that needs to produce?

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

#940

Post by Shocka1 »

idontwantthis wrote: post #841
aliasxneo wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling this extends to several areas in Google. I come from the GDC side of things and have the exact same experience. To keep my job requires very minimal effort on my part. In fact, nowadays I'm punishing myself by trying to do anything "above and beyond." This is mostly due to the rapid growth of committees and the struggle for power that has come out of it (i.e., I'm more likely to be denied by a change…

What if you keep the he cushy job, and use the money and freedom to find more meaning outside of work? Learn music, art, woodworking, a new language… It’s a lot harder to find meaning with less money and more work hours.

Yeah this seems obvious to me. So many people have trained their minds to rely on their professional career to be happy. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with finding something you can stand, and then devoting yourself 100% elsewhere to something you love or want to learn/explore.
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