[HN Gopher] 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerbe... ___________________________________________________________________ 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm Author : quaffapint Score : 418 points Date : 2022-08-10 14:06 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.business-standard.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.business-standard.com) | tonioab wrote: | The job market for top engineers is supply-constrained, as | demonstrated by the rapid increase in SWE wages in the past 15 | years. If you agree that top engineers are the primary input to | these companies' success, then it makes sense for them to adopt a | "hoarding" behavior. | | In other words, these companies have over-hired as a way to | prevent competitors from hiring these same engineers. Although | this has created a situation where the company has hired past the | theoretical "productive" point, it was still a rational behavior. | | Now that the tide is turning, the productivity goal becomes | relatively more important than the competitive goal. In the long | run though, I don't think the job market will fundamentally | change - there is still a shortage of top engineering talent in | the US. | [deleted] | rockbruno wrote: | This is the standard for any FAANG company. | | There are multiple reasons why this is the case, with over-hiring | being the one that annoys the most. I can't understand why some | of these companies keep hiring several hundred engineers every | year to work on shitty stuff nobody asked for. | jimbob45 wrote: | They're probably seeing the natural result of Agile - you get | nice planned deadlines and schedules but your employees have no | incentive to work once they're done with their items (and it's | not like the deadline is going to be moved up). Is that a problem | though? As long as the work is getting done and can be used to | plan things out, what's the complaint? | | Of course, this "not showing up to meetings" garbage is something | I don't condone. That kind of behavior would have resulted in | getting fired everywhere I've worked. | mcguire wrote: | Fancy way of saying Meta is cutting head-count. | wrinkl3 wrote: | The quote in the title doesn't appear in the body of the article, | I can't tell if either of these CEOs actually said that. | efitz wrote: | I die inside when I hear people talk about "productivity" in the | economic sense. | | At least in the US, everything is already over-optimized for | human beings. I have to pay extra to interact with a human being | to book a flight or do banking. Every nontrivial business I | interact with tries like hell to keep me from talking to a human, | not trusting me to figure out when I can resolve my problem with | their web site (yes I f-ing know about companyname.com, now let | me talk to a representative, I called for a reason). | | Companies love their metrics, and do shitty things to humans to | make their metrics just a little better. Ever have a CS rep hang | up on you (accidentally "disconnected")? Maybe you asked one too | many questions and were bumping up their average call time for | that shift, putting them at risk of disciplinary action. | | Or, your company is a "meritocracy" and you have to spend hours | and hours writing a review doc in a system desperately trying to | objectively measure humans but failing down to the subjective- | how hard is your manager willing to fight for you? Also, nobody | except legal and HR care about the review doc anyway because the | stack rank meeting happened three weeks ago. Even legal and HR | only care to the extent that they can use it to cover their | asses. And, you're screwed because your teammate is buddies with | your manager and takes him boating or water skiing every weekend. | You know who's getting the "exceeds" review, and btw there's only | room for one because "bell curve". Only a few stock awards for | you this time. | | Or, your job just went away because paying western native English | speakers is way more expensive than outsourcing your job. By the | way, would you please train your replacement before you go? Don't | forget your non-compete and assignment of inventions, and sign | this exit agreement that you won't write or say anything bad | about the company or we'll sue you for your severance! | | But don't worry, we've driven down the cost of trinkets built | overseas by slave labor, so you can watch a nice TV while you're | unemployed. | | F--- optimization. F--- productivity. | | I love technology, and I love capitalism, but "optimization" and | "productivity" are euphemisms/excuses that companies hide behind | when they're going to do shady shit so that the share price will | go up and the executives will get a bigger bonus. | nickstewart wrote: | It would be nice to work in a relaxed environment like that | | I'm stuck in the agency life - I have to log seven hours a day | and I'm at roughly 80% billable hours on average a week (to | clients) | zht wrote: | what I've found is that the % of deadweight at the company is | proportional to the number of "tech influencers" at the company | | these are the kinds of people who, at least what I've generally | found, do very little work, spend a lot of time "asking | questions", shitposting on blind, and making "tech influencers" | on tiktok that are "a day in the life of" or those youtube videos | with the clickbait thumbnails like "HOW I MADE 3 MILLION DOLLARS | BY AGE 25 AT META" | gfosco wrote: | "Too many employees, but very few of them supported or utilized | correctly." is how I'd put it. I worked at Facebook for over 7 | years, and I would've worked myself to death for the company. I | was making a small fortune, and living a nice life, and I greatly | appreciated it. (in hindsight, lol, so glad I left.) | | The real problems, imo, were the organizational rules, the | expectation that basically everyone in a role is the same... the | red tape, the ridiculously gamed review cycles, the little | empires that reject change... the fear & the blame. This all on | top of bad managers, of which I had a fair mixture, those who | were helpful and those who actively worked to hurt me. | | Regardless, the downsizing is coming, and it's all leaderships | fault. | nokeya wrote: | When I click "Select all" in Gmail my browser hangs for several | seconds at least. And now they say there is too much people. | Hello! There is not too much people, there is is misutilization | of your workforce! Instead of doing 100500+ chat app that will | not do it to production, maybe focus on real customer problems | and not on metrics? There is a lot comments now and before from | people saying they seeing no impact from their work in FAANG. Of | course, when your code means nothing and changes nothing - you | will loose all motivation to do something useful | Ekaros wrote: | Work is not equally distributed. I'm sure there is plenty of | Engineers everywhere that have way too much on their plates. And | on other hand there is also plenty of those who do little or have | little to do. | | And then there is question of how much of the work is actually | even needed. Specially in companies with too much money. | | Also why should all employees attend to the meetings? Certainly | to some, but it clearly is job that can afford certain level of | flexibility in most teams. | FactualActuals wrote: | I am running into this problem where I currently work. I'm not | a rockstar developer but I can finish my tasks pretty quickly. | But when management won't allow me to help take over some tasks | to alleviate my coworker's growing backlog, I can't do anything | but twiddle my thumbs waiting for more tasks. | anigbrowl wrote: | When management starts blaming the employees for the lack of | direction, it's over. Both FB and Google are as disruptable now | as they have ever been. FB's main competition is Telegram, imho. | Google has more of an incumbent advantage but less of a strategic | vision. | [deleted] | cartweheel wrote: | I worked at a place where the VP of engineering didn't understand | anything about engineering nor his department. Lifers who shunned | any type of responsibility were given free reign to continue | their ways and made sure to spread their attitude to new hires in | their teams. The VP promoted a total whack to be the overall | architect which came up with one stupid idea after another | disrupting all operations. A complete overflowed influx of fresh | product managers and mid-level people managers with zero | engineering experience created an even worse hierarchical | political mess where it was now impossible to give any sort of | proper feedback. Orders would come through several layers before | it reached some low level grunt without a fancy title who would | finally recognize that the orders made absolutely no fucking | sense, yet had no way to resist them. Many of the actually | talented but overworked doers left. All the problems in this | organization lay squarely with the leadership and their | inaptitude with regards to engineering. When a nice image of an | organization is valued more than actually valuable work, this is | what you get. | | I've heard similar stories from other places as well, because I | went looking, and I really wanted to know if what I had seen was | unique. It unfortunately wasn't, although I couldn't find an | example as bad as mine. Similar types of stories and situations | existed in most places, but not in an as concentrated fashion it | seemed. | | So when I hear anyone complaining like Zuck or Pichai, I know | where to look for the problem. The non-engineer managers who | provide no value themselves, don't understand what makes | engineering tick, and prevent those that do to get their ideas | through, unless they can take credit for them and with low risk. | Elon Musk is right on this point. Unfortunately they've already | infested themselves so tightly in the fabric of the organization, | patting each others backs, that it is impossible to get them out. | These same people are now going to be put in charge of throwing | the "garbage" out. Ha ha ha. | torginus wrote: | I think all successful companies' products have already been | built - and have been built for quite a while, most of the work | that gets done is just polishing, window dressing, adventures and | reorganizing things for the sake of it. | | Most of the software and libraries I use nowadays have existed a | decade ago, and truth be told, weren't that much different. | potatolicious wrote: | It's frustrating that this thread seems to be focused so heavily | on people sitting around resting and vesting. | | Having been inside Google (and multiple other FAANGs) this is | generally untrue, and focusing on this element of the problem | misses a much larger productivity problem: | | Most engineers at Google aren't "sitting around doing nothing", | they are very busy shipping projects that do not matter. Their | days are filled with doing work that will not move the needle on | any metric that matters to the company, but they are far from | idle. | | The misallocation of labor is a far bigger problem than said | labor slacking off, and management must own it. | | Google doesn't _need_ their engineers to fly into startup mode, | work 12 hour days, or never surf Reddit on company time. Their | labor is severely under-utilized because they are assigned to | zero /negative-impact projects or duplicative projects (hey, | somehow you gotta ship 5 chat apps at the same time, right?) | | Part of the problem is that Google's upper management refuses to | engage with the product at all. Entire orgs are given very broad | OKRs like "increase DAUs by 10%" without virtually no guidance as | to what features management is interested in. Authority to ship | features also rests close to the leaf nodes of direct line- | managed teams. The expectation is that teams are entrepreneurial | and invent features, implement them, and ship them all without | direct upper management involvement. | | The result is a bunch of bad product that doesn't do anything | positive for the company, were never soberly evaluated by upper | management prior to building, and would never have passed the | smell test if it did. This, above all other factors, is why | Google produces so much product that it then has to scrap. _This_ | is the main cause of Google 's low labor productivity - not | because people are sitting around drinking coffee and eating free | food - but because they are assigned to projects that do not pass | muster, and there is an almost-comical aversion to validating | product ideas before they are implemented. | | The single biggest thing Google can do to improve its labor | productivity isn't cracking down on slackers, it's forcing its | management to actually engage with product definition so entire | orgs don't burn years on things that don't matter. | [deleted] | chocolatemario wrote: | I feel that in real terms, you are absolutely correct. Big tech | companies consciously over-hire and throw away work with | impunity knowing it will not hurt their bottom line. Denouncing | employee productivity like this just seems like an excuse to | trim some fat indiscriminately during economic downturn instead | of attacking the root of the problem as you suggest they | should. They obviously should try to fix the wasted work | problem, but that is undoubtedly more difficult than | overprovisioning your workforce and dialing back during times | of economic duress. | clusterhacks wrote: | >Their days are filled with doing work that will not move the | needle on any metric that matters to the company | | This, 100%. I think this simple observation reverberates across | the entire software engineering field and at many (most?) non- | FAANG companies as well. | | I am not confident there is a real solution to the problem of | making sure people only work on things that matter. Medium to | small organizations seem to struggle with having management | even understand what "good" product looks like or how to | optimize for that outcome. | hbrn wrote: | > Medium to small organizations seem to struggle with having | management even understand what "good" product looks like | | The ones that struggle are the ones that die in a year or | two, thus learning the lesson the hard way. Google on the | other hand has unlimited money, so people just get moved | elsewhere and don't learn from failure. | potatolicious wrote: | Yeah, I think it's massively under-discussed that _product | management quality across the industry is generally very | poor_. | | There are multiple manifestations of this but the main | factors IMO are: how involved is management in the product? | How good is your product definition process and talent? | | For big companies the problem tends to be more the former. | Product management talent tends to be solid, but upper | management is checked out of the process and instead overly | focused on non-product areas of the company. Product | management functions (PMs + engineers) tend to be flying | alone with low external guidance. | | For small companies the problem tends to be the latter. | Product management is deeply enmeshed with upper management | (because what else would upper management be doing at that | scale?) but _they are bad at it_. | | Both result in shipping the wrong product. For startups | shipping the wrong product is deadly, but for large | profitable companies they can keep shipping bad product for | _years_. IMO this is where Google is at - they fundamentally | do not have the institutional capacity to ship great product. | | My impression (which is a few years old now since I left | Goog) is that management understands the problem exists, but | seem to believe that they can fix it by iterating on the | product management process, but in a way that does not | require SVPs and VPs to directly engage with product. I | fundamentally disagree with this premise - it is not possible | to ship product in a coherent manner with a surface area this | large unless the most senior levels of management directly | engage with product management. | | And ultimately poor product definition and prioritization is | an _order of magnitude_ greater source of low labor | productivity than any kind of individual-level slackage. | strongpigeon wrote: | This resonates strongly with my experience at Google as well. | Specifically in ads, you got the feelings that none of the | product leadership used the product or tried to drive a | direction for where the product should be going. The end-result | was full-on Conway's law (every team having their own separate | pages), weird overlaps between a bunch of things (P-Max, Smart | and App campaigns) and no real goals except maximizing metrics | such as $$$ and # of campaigns using automation. | | Of course, when Google Ads is the only way to buy ads on Google | Search, revenue will go up regardless of whether Google Ads is | a good product. Advertiser will go through any hoops if those | ads make them money. | | But then revenue goes up, the leadership pats themselves on the | back for a job well done, plays musical chair a bit and let the | product turn into an even bigger pile of mush. | UweSchmidt wrote: | It must be a different eponymous law: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law | strongpigeon wrote: | Hah, my bad. I meant Conways' law | seydor wrote: | Hint: You don't need to work (anymore) when you 're a monopoly or | two | dev_0 wrote: | I have seen colleagues working long hours because they take 2 | hours of lunch break and 1 hour of teabreak. And management think | they are hardworking. | abledon wrote: | tbf, 1 persons 2 hours of coding is equivalent to another | persons 8 or 16 hours of coding. Work smart, not Hard | [deleted] | bdcravens wrote: | This may not apply to Facebook necessarily, but for many | companies, look at their GitHub accounts. So many companies have | so many side projects not related to their core business. Hand- | waving it away as "attracting developers" can only go so far if | you're not massively profitable. | | I wonder how many of us built a large part of careers atop of | projects paid for by others? When that spending tightens up, I | wonder what the overall picture will look like then. | ccn0p wrote: | There's a lot of pointing fingers here. At the risk of sounding | crass, any company with more than 1000 employees (pick a number) | has high performers and low performers. Yes, culture, management, | and process all basically move the sides of the bell curve, but | nothing "fixes" human nature and organizational inefficiencies as | companies grow. | | This is why companies rate and rank employees and low performers | find their way to the door and/or go through [bi]annual RIF | processes to clean up the org. It's the natural growth process. | beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: | It's also around that point where you start to get low and high | performers that, in my opinion, the burden of productivity | should shift quite a bit to managers rather than individual | employees. Once a company gets to a certain size, certain | bureaucratic workflows and systems become far more necessary | and entrenched as "the way we do business". Some "low | performers" at that point, as a result of this internal dynamic | and internal limitations in a business, often just have less | work to do or they are limited in sign-offs to work on other | projects/coordinate with other teams. At that point, the role | of managing teams and individuals becomes much more important | and consequential. What you often get though, is management | that defers accountability as problems with individual | performance with employees below them. This is, essentially, a | way of ignoring how the way the company operates has changed. | phendrenad2 wrote: | They're right, but they aren't getting to the root of the issue. | Most dev teams don't communicate anymore, and people just work on | their siloed projects and "throw it over the fence" to the code | reviewer when done. There's very little collaboration or ad-hoc | knowledge transfer. This leads to a disjointed, unworkable | codebase. If I'm seeing this at the piddly little startups I have | worked for during the pandemic, then I'm sure the effect is | amplified at the most exclusive development teams in the world. | satisfice wrote: | You can't really tell from a distance if engineers are | productive. The key to success is having a culture where people | are motivated and principled so that they manage their own | productivity. That culture requires respect. Zuckerberg isn't | showing that to his people, and he is paying the price for that. | alkonaut wrote: | How do they conclude that "few work", other than through some | expectation of productivity compared to head count or payroll? Do | they have a problem with employees literally _not working_? How | do they conclude that? | wnolens wrote: | This has always been the case (source: I've worked at 2 FANGetc | companies over last 10y) but they've just had the economic | climate to brush it off. | | It's the tax they pay for offering such high salaries regardless | of team, and having so much grunt work because they are too big | to care that they're paying some people 300k to click "deploy" | (source: getting paid right now to manually roll out changes at a | FANGetc and silence alarms that have been red forever because | backlog) | tomatotomato37 wrote: | Wasn't the whole point of showing off "Unlimited PTO" was the | ability to run errands? Seems like that facade is dropping fast | bobharris wrote: | Laughs. How does "Unlimited PTO" even work? Mystery of the | universe. For me it's "Unlimited PTO" right up to being let go. | Flankk wrote: | Meta is half white and half ethnic minorities. I guess they only | embrace diversity until it comes to work ethic. Get woke go | broke. | PaulHoule wrote: | Google would have been a lot more productive if it had hired | people to work on one good messaging app instead of 13+ bad | messaging apps. | | Google has long had an attitude of "we hire the best so we can | afford to have them stand on one leg and balance on a ball while | holding a cane in their mouth and balancing a bunch of dishes on | the end of the cane while typing with one hand on a chorded | keyboard and looking at a monitor through a mirror." I've heard | stories that range from "of course I am productive, I am shooting | the s--t all day with the smartest people to" to "I have no idea | of how what I'm doing impacts the bottom line". | unicornmama wrote: | Writing a messaging app is a fool's errand. You either build a | chat app with someone elses money, invest in all chat apps | (1/n) and hope you score a big one - e.g. like textbook | publisher, or you wait and M&A the successful ones. | | The barrier to entry to write a chat app is zero. Even if you | are brilliant you will compete against hundreds other chat apps | one of which will beat out with pure luck. Never compete | against luck. | dont__panic wrote: | Blaming the employees smells like a smokescreen for poor | management IMO. | | Who's to blame for lowered employee productivity: employees who | are disconnecting from work more to avoid burnout thanks to | corporate BS like paperwork and constant report filing? Or the | managers who impose those requirements on employees but fail to | empower the individual contributors beneath them in the org | chart? | | I recently left a large-medium sized tech company that failed | to address massive structural issues in my department for | _years_. It 's not like these were a secret -- I brought them | up constantly in my 1on1s, and tried to brainstorm solutions | with my management chain. | | When I left, the head honcho begged me to stay, and when I | brought up those issues... told me he had no idea that was such | a problem! But also refused to address it because he had to | "gather information" about the issue. | | I'm much happier at a smaller company without so much | bureaucracy. At some point, managers are so disconnected from | their underlings that they are completely incapable of | improving work conditions. And when you need high-level | approval to make a big decision... more often than not, the big | decision just never gets made. | | If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. | jrockway wrote: | The "while balancing on a ball while holding a cane in their | mouth..." thing really resonates with me. | | Something that really surprised me at Google is how many core | services had very thin test suites. I'm the kind of person that | sees 100% code coverage and thinks "that's a good starting | point". If I don't have that, I'll definitely break something | important in 6 months. There were a lot of people at Google, | though, that definitely didn't need those guard rails. The | entire team could read a changelist and know exactly what the | consequences are; they could just read the diff and run the | complete test suite in their head. So there was no need for | them to spend the time actually typing in a test suite. | | It wouldn't work for me but there were a lot of people at | Google that absolutely didn't need to follow "good engineering | practices" to do good engineering. I was impressed. A lot of | people less smart than them try this and fail, but they made it | work. | Willish42 wrote: | This rings true to me as well. | | > The entire team could read a changelist and know exactly | what the consequences are; they could just read the diff and | run the complete test suite in their head. So there was no | need for them to spend the time actually typing in a test | suite. | | I think testing at Google is excessively complicated for a | myriad of reasons, and the unit-test-style "coverage" doesn't | really map well to how things work together in a larger | system. That system-wide thinking is where the "read a code | change and know exactly what's wrong" intuition becomes | invaluable. *Integration* testing is especially hard for some | reason (probably complexity in the serving stack, at least | for many teams I've worked with), so you end up getting this | pattern where people get better at other production health | stuff like canary systems, release management, etc. | bergenty wrote: | We'll a lot of their products come out if individual side | projects, Google is an incubator of sorts so I'm not surprised | that's how their product gets made. | PaulHoule wrote: | ... There was that time that top management thought reverse | imperialism was a good idea so they dumped a perfectly good | Google Wallet in the U.S. for something that was big in | India... No thought of cultural sensitivity. A few years | later they reversed the decision, with no consequence for the | people who made it. | | If you are doing that for your products though you are never | going to get long-term traction no matter how good or bad | your engineers or marketing people are. | pradn wrote: | As a Google employee, the profusion of chat apps is caused by: | | * a genuine interest in trying new things and trying to see if | they'd stick, without the baggage of established UX & customers | - Allo/Duo are like this. I don't think people give the company | enough credit for this. | | * leadership downplaying the cost to the Google brand of | shutting things down all the time. When brought up internally, | execs shrug saying that we must be willing to try and see if | things stick. This makes sense, but why are people particularly | mad at Google for doing this? It must be for a good reason, not | merely a meme. | | * org silos. The org behind Google Docs / Chat has a different | reason for a chat app (chat as a checkbox for enterprise office | suite sales) than the one behind Google Maps (you can chat with | restaurants or whatnot) | | * a lack of a good "design dictator", meaning our chat apps, as | with other apps, falter for lack of great UX and don't gain | traction. The biggest example I can think of is how Google Chat | has a loading spinner for the emoji picker - this simple thing | should be lightning quick, but it took a year for someone to | even prioritize it. | | * faulty marketing / branding. Taking the simple, beloved | "GChat", which was the dominant chat app between AIM and FB | Messenger, and wringing it though "Hangouts" and "Allo/Duo" and | "Chat" - that's no fun for users. | | I think the lesson here is that people want a simple, hyper- | fast app that gets out of their way and slowly adds nice things | on top. I'd say the apps that are most fun and fast to use are | Messenger and iMessage. (I have plenty of problems with both - | unremovable stories on Messenger, lack of archiving chats and | general slowness on iMessage). | | All these are my opinions. | metadat wrote: | What's wrong with taking a break to run necessary errands or pick | your kids up from school? As long as you're meeting performance | expectations, it should be fine. | | Is Zuck really slaving away at his desk 9-5 everyday? I don't | think so. | | Sounds like another case of "One rule for thee and another for | me" | VirusNewbie wrote: | I agree 100%. However, if someone schedules a meeting for work | hours and 50% of the people can't make it because they are | grocery shopping I can understand the frustration. These aren't | low paid employees. Meta is paying 300k+ for mid level | engineers. | wilde wrote: | You get what you reward. Large corps reward "increase in scope". | This is hard for people on other teams to evaluate fairly, so | most companies end up with "scope = number of people involved". | That's vaguely equivalent to deploying an O(n^2) algo into prod. | Looks good at small sizes but breaks down as everyone talks to | everyone else to add collaborators to pad scope. | touisteur wrote: | What this sounds like: | | 1) let's hire like mad, make every graduate engineer do the | dance, and suck up every talent that might appear, and raise comp | so high that no one can hire. Also acquihire like crazy, take it | all in! Hey, now it's strange how we haven't had serious | competition for years. | | 2) now that times are getting hard, let's say that the people | we're dumping on the market are deadweights, bad contributors, | lazy. Don't hire them, they're the worst, they dragged us down! | | I _thought_ they hired only the best! Weeks of interviews! | | I'm sad for the people getting canned soon. I hope they got some | money away. And that they're ready to accept -50% because I don't | think there's a market for all the people Google and Facebook are | preparing to get rid of, at faang comp. | | We'll see but this all seems very unethical, from two unethical | companies. Good luck everyone. | electromech wrote: | TL;DR, Zuck & Pichai demonstrating how NOT to lead. | | I can see the Cheyenne Dialysis commercial now... | | --- | | <a black-and-white screen portrays a boss screaming at employees> | | Narrator: "Do your employees seem disengaged? Is it 'getting | harder to get all the employees to attend a meeting'1?" | | <a wild Zuck appears in full color> | | Zuck: Then COME ON DOWN to Cheyenne Dialysis for a copy of my hot | new leadership book: "This Place Isn't For You!"1 | | <dramatic pause to let that sink in> | | Zuck: Check out what Microsoft's own dear leader, Pichai, had to | say about the new book... | | <Zuck clears throat to prepare to impersonate Pichai> | | "Pichai": "When I said we needed to 'create a culture that is | more mission-focused'1, I knew my employees needed 'more | hunger'1. This book taught me to squash those pesky 'personal | projects'1, so we can focus on our core values as a company: | 'leaner, meaner'1. | | <phone number appears on screen> | | Zuck: COME ON DOWN or call today to reserve your copy of "This | Place Isn't For You!"1 On sale for only $19.99! err... only | $24.99! err... only $29.99! | | --- | | 1 LMAO that these are actual quotes from the article. Parody | can't hold a candle to the absurdity of real life. | unicornmama wrote: | Pichai and Zuckerberg's PR departments are doing their job to | "position" them ahead of layoffs. | mikhael28 wrote: | 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 interview', then I can certainly | crack 'how to do as little work as possible and stack paper to | the ceiling while my stock vests'. | | I wonder when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually | wrote any code they pushed to prod. | MichaelMoser123 wrote: | I think it has more to do with the economy and the war of | Russia against Ukraine. All of a sudden there is less money to | go around, interest rates are rising and it got harder to raise | money. I think they are just putting up a straight face, as | they respond to the changing circumstances. | | And they probably changed their plans, now it is less about | 'new features' and more about 'maintenance of existing | systems'. But that didn't get into the article, so it's all the | fault of the people who will have to look for a new job. | | Searching for a new job isn't a pleasant experience, if you ask | me. | FearlessNebula wrote: | Did Sundar ever write code? Wasn't he a PM? I wouldn't be | surprised if Mark still writes some code, he's a hacker at | heart | doitLP wrote: | I think parent means has Mark experienced how difficult it is | get code to prod these days, not can he still code | Aunche wrote: | >Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer | science problems isn't the best way to identify high performing | builders | | The interview process at FAANGs isn't designed to hire the | "best" people. It's designed to hire people who are "good | enough" in a consistent manner. Any form of standardized | interview can be gamed. More personalized interviews can be | better in theory, but they also open the door to nepotism and | discrimination. | | Admittedly, I'm biased because I'm unusually good at Leetcode | and a rather lousy in terms of development velocity. With that | disclaimer out of the way, I think the last thing that FAANGs | need are more "high performing builders". In my experience, a | lot of them tend to create a lot of useless passion projects | that work their way into being dependencies and end up causing | more harm than good. I may be a rest'n'vester, but at least I | make sure the work I get done creates positive value for the | company. | aeternum wrote: | Yes, it's pretty clear that humans were overfitting to their | interview objective function: comp-sci algo problems. | | For companies with such strong ML backgrounds, in addition to | the sheer amount of content dedicated to discussing and solving | tech interview questions hosted on their own platform, one | would think they would have noticed earlier. | borroka wrote: | There is a human component to consider: in the case of a | change in the interview process, with the new process | perceived as easier than the past and current ones, I imagine | the bitter protests from the currently employed engineers who | would vocally complain that the quality of new hires is much | worse than it used to be, and that they have had to pass much | more stringent interviews than the new ones, which even a | junior SWE employed in an unnamed company would be able to | pass. | Ensorceled wrote: | > Yes, it's pretty clear that humans were overfitting to | their interview objective function: comp-sci algo problems. | | Worse, it's often over-fitted to memorized specific solutions | to esoteric comp-sci algo problems. | | So you end up with a bunch of, admittedly smart, developers | who all have the spare time to memorize an entire suite of | algo problems and solutions. | | Some of those developers are going to have copious amounts of | spare time while working at your organization as well. | vecter wrote: | > _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._ | | I see this argument all the time, but I can't find any other | place that it comes from other than disappointment from those | that didn't or can't pass those interviews. (Disclaimer, | outside of college internships I've never interviewed for a | FAANG SWE position nor have I ever worked for one). | | Is it an objectively good measure of being a software engineer? | Hard to say honestly. I doubt you'll ever find a truly great | measure that you can test for in an interview. When I was | interviewing candidates for my company, did I ask those | leetcode algorithm questions? Not really. Maybe at most one | basic tree traversal question (probably would fall under | leetcode "easy" if I had to guess, but honestly the kind of | thing a student would learn in AP computer science in high | school). Most questions were system design and problem solving | with a coding challenge (building something simple, not solving | algorithmic puzzles). So by evidence of my own actions, I don't | believe that they're the optimal questions for screening | engineers. | | That having been said, I don't understand why people are upset | by these interviews. Who cares? If you really think it's | suboptimal, then other companies who have "better" interviewing | practices should be better at identifying undiscovered talent | and hiring them. Better for you if you're hiring in those | cases. Let FAANG fail on their own hiring practices. FTR I | don't think they're that bad either, they just filter for a | bunch of left-brained people who are good at math. Maybe they | do make good engineers also. And if results are anything, | clearly it's been working for FAANG for the past decade so | who's to say that they shouldn't keep doing it? | | > _Look, if I can 'crack the coding interview', then I can | certainly crack 'how to do as little work as possible and stack | paper to the ceiling while my stock vests'._ | | This is a reach (to put it mildly) and unfairly paints people | who are good at algorithms as inherently unmotivated and whose | primary goal is to cheat the system without any evidence. Are | you saying another talented developer who isn't good at | algorithms could not or would not hack the system as such? I | don't see any reason to expect either to be the case. Hacking | said system does not require you to be able to prove the | runtimes of a Van Emde Boas queue, it just requires some common | sense that any human being has. | | > _I wonder when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually | wrote any code they pushed to prod._ | | This is pure ad hominem and unrelated to whether or not these | questions are good screening questions. I certainly hope that | Mark or Sundar are not wasting even a millisecond of their time | writing code and trying to get a PR out to production. It's one | of the absolute worst uses of their time. But while we're on | the topic, Mark literally built the first version of Facebook | (to be fair, probably in a bad hacky way) and Sundar was a | product manager so I certainly don't expect him to write code. | peyton wrote: | > I can't find any other place that it comes from other than | disappointment from those that didn't or can't pass those | interviews. | | Oh, the macro is that these companies are oligopolies. About | 15-20 years ago one of them realized that poaching entire | teams from the others to enter new LOBs was cheaper than | competing. So headcount grew. | | Outside of strategic hires it doesn't really matter who they | pick up. E.g. LinkedIn isn't going to go out of biz if they | don't find productive places for their army of level 3.5 | software engineers or whatever. LinkedIn doesn't have any | competition. | vecter wrote: | I might not be connecting the dots, but I don't see how | this is related to the GP's gripe that these interview | questions aren't good tools for hiring engineers. | jmalicki wrote: | "If you really think it's suboptimal, then other | companies who have "better" interviewing practices should | be better at identifying undiscovered talent and hiring | them. Better for you if you're hiring in those cases. Let | FAANG fail on their own hiring practices." | | The GGP is using an argument that if these techniques | don't work, then the companies will fail, because that's | how capitalism works. | | The GP is saying that because these companies are | oligopolies, they can do a lot of very inefficient things | that don't work and distort the market, yet not fail and | not be punished for it, thus that's why we should care. | vecter wrote: | I see, thanks for clarifying that. Makes sense. | | Relatedly, I still don't understand why people are upset | at these companies' hiring practices. | mikhael28 wrote: | Algorithm-puzzle computer science interviews are hard to | prep for. They take a long time to learn. Then, most of | the time, when people get hired for engineering roles | that use them for interviewing - you find that you spend | exactly 0% of your time working on those kinds of | problems. Kind of a rug pull. | | Lots of people are busy. They don't want to spend time | prepping for puzzles they will never solve in their job. | They feel like they are qualified for the job, and have | great work experience in many cases (let's leave jr devs | out of this), but feel like they are being asked to jump | through completely unnecessary hoops. | | Meanwhile, someone who does have a lot of time on their | hands (young, single, no kids, more energy) preps for the | tests, and gets paid more money than someone who is | older, who has more responsibilities, and who frankly | needs the money more. | | It feels unfair, in the same way that it feels unfair | when rich people get away with crimes poorer people | wouldn't. | | Well, the rich people used the legal system you say - | they paid for attorneys. You could do the same thing, if | you had the money. | | Well, you don't have the money. And in the case of this | analogy, you don't have the time to prep for random CS | problems. You don't have the energy, because after work | and family obligations - you just want to sleep. Or work | out. Or do anything but write and think about code. | | To be clear - if you are young, single and have lots of | time on your hands - I have no sympathy for you. If you | want to work in FAANG, fuck it, grind leetcode. You don't | have any responsibilities. | | But for those older professionals, with work experience | and a track record of success - you shouldn't need to | prove competence to write software at a FAANG company. It | should come from track record, recommendations, open- | source work and other artifacts of your career besides a | thirty minute whiteboard session. Depending on the day, | the time of day, what food you ate, how much water you | drank, you might be absolute trash at coding. And it | would be a mistake to sum up someones competency in such | a small sample size. | | When they interview lawyers, they don't ask them to | perform a mock trial. Surgeons aren't asked to 'get their | hands dirty' during an interview. Mechanical engineers | don't get asked to whip up a CAD diagram in 30 minutes | for a part (or maybe they do, what the hell do I know). | | Small sample sizes are misleading, large sample sizes | (open source work audit, multiple references, perhaps a | paid take home project for one of your open source | packages) give a much better understanding of a persons | skillset than a 30 minute exercise in stress management. | koverda wrote: | managers are employees too | agluszak wrote: | We have a very nice phrase in Polish describing what kind of | employees they are, literally it goes like: "there are those | who are equal and those who are equaler". | ThrowawayR2 wrote: | 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 | personal benefit, you have time to be hunting around for | internal transfers that will boost your career, etc. | | If you want to rest and vest, hey, more power to you but the | smart ones are taking advantage of the gigantic cornucopia of | opportunity presented to them by merely getting in the door of | an obscenely wealthy FAANG to catapult their careers ahead. | mr_gibbins wrote: | Snap. I, for my sins, am new at a WITCH company (please don't | throw rotten fruit at me), and there is an obscene amount of | dead time in my calendar and will be for the foreseeable. I'm | rinsing their training and development resources and should | have the full suite of certs I want within 6 months | completely free. Certs that would literally cost thousands to | acquire privately. If they want me to do some actual work I'd | be delighted but I've worked at multinationals before and I'm | not holding my breath. What I won't do is sit around doing | nothing. | biztos wrote: | TIL: "W- Wipro I- Infosys T- TCS C- Cognizant H- HCL A- | Accenture India." | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707 | borroka wrote: | 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 bike rides, and build the body one has always dreamed of | showing to their partner. But they are much more likely, | instead, to spend more time watching the latest horrible | Netflix TV series or eating burritos. The right analogy for | mental and physical energy is not the tank, but the flywheel. | BeetleB wrote: | Not at a FAANG but at a large company that has its fair share | of world experts in various technical disciplines. | | At least in my company, the path you suggest will make you | miserable (it did me). You are not seen to be at their level, | and you will more likely become a pawn and someone to offload | grunt labor to. Yes, you _will_ learn, but you have less than | a 10% chance they 'll let you use that knowledge to do work | at their level: They need grunt laborers, and you are more | valuable to them as one _because_ you 've gained that | knowledge. | | Oh, and they always had more pathological behavior amongst | them. Very poor at teamwork, etc. | | There are exceptions, which is why I said "10% chance" | instead of "0%" :-) | | The good news is whenever I went through this and switched to | a less sexy team, I was seen as "the really smart guy who | worked with the smart people" and the new team would value | more than they should. | outworlder wrote: | > maybe it's the fact that it takes forever to get anything | done at FAANG nowadays. | | At any large company. Tiny changes that should take an | afternoon end up taking 6 months once all the red tape is done | and all involved stakeholders have signed off. | shtopointo wrote: | > 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. | | If anything, that might be the best way to identify someone | that fits in a large corp like Google. Someone that doesn't | mind going thru the drudge of studying esoteric CS problems | probably will be more attuned to go thru the drudge of working | for a large company like Google. | | I'm thinking most of the time spent at Large Corp. Inc. is | doing menial work, rather than hot projects where you learn and | get to work on the cutting edge. | lumost wrote: | It was only 4-5 years ago that Google was considered the | pinnacle of Engineering centric culture. It was still | considered top up until last year. Something is going off the | rails in the big tech firms if people now view big-tech work | as menial. These were the same companies that pioneered | CI/CD, Services, cloud, scalable web services, and myriad | other technologies. | badpun wrote: | 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. | komadori wrote: | That's probably true. Not that there aren't bits of | Google doing fun and interesting work, it's a massive | company after all. I've worked at a few, what I would | consider to be large orgs, but my experience of Google | was that it's truly on a different scale when it comes to | bureaucracy and company politics. | logicchains wrote: | >When you're doing things at the scale of Boeing or | Google, you need a lot of process | | Are you sure "need" is the right word here? Whatever | Boeing's been doing recently hasn't been working very | well for them or 737 Max passengers. | zmmmmm wrote: | you really do | | At large scale you can't hire enough competent people. | And scale x low tolerance for error means you can't rely | on humans even if they are competent. To fix that you | basically have to introduce process. Things are checked | and controlled at numerous points, using blanket | processes that often don't make any sense for the | specific scenario at hand but are needed for something | superficially similar. People end up in hierarchies of | approval. And that's without even considering regulatory | compliance which often simply mandates things at a | blanket level because micro-auditing each individual part | of a big company is essentially an impossible | proposition. | | Engineers have the best chance because we have it in our | hands to automate so much, but still, we just haven't | figured out a better way to do it I think. | lumost wrote: | 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. | CobrastanJorji wrote: | I'm not sure I understand the comparison. CS interview | problems are interesting, well-constrained math riddles with | endless variety. As far as I can tell, they're nearly the | opposite of menial drudgery. | | I don't think they're great for interviewing, on account of | how they don't resemble what programmers actually do, but I | do think they're a heck of a lot more fun than menial labor, | especially when job offers aren't riding on it. | mikhael28 wrote: | You might find them interesting, but I guarantee you many | people do not. Many find them... well, something like | programming trivia. | | Some people love going to trivia night! Get some friends, | get quizzed on some stuff, feel smart. | | Lots of people are not interested. | ironman1478 wrote: | The CS interview problems that are asked are a very | specific view of CS that not everybody finds interesting or | works on. There is a lot more variety to CS and software | engineering than string and graph algorithms, which is all | I've ever been asked at Google (where is numerical | optimization, statistics beyond basic counting, all of | graphics, etc). I also never get asked anything with | regards to actually engineering software by them, whereas I | have been asked that at Apple for example. | QuadmasterXLII wrote: | You'd be shocked how many people plan to crack the coding | interview by memorizing every problem on leetcode letter | for letter without ever trying to solve one without looking | up the answer. | DmitryOlshansky wrote: | I got hired by Google in 2016 and I could tell you the | interview was a series of interesting tasks all having to do | with what I was hired for - working on compilers and related | tools. | | Though after that I was asked for additional interviews on | basic algorithmic stuff cause Google thought original | interviews to be too narrow in the scope, anyway hardly any | esoteric stuff. | z9znz wrote: | > 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. | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | There is some value in technical leadership familiarizing | themselves with internal processes. They could take on a | small side project (do Google execs get 20% time?) using | libraries and APIs with the goal of providing some feedback | on what direction those tools should pursue. BillG did | something like this with a measure of success. | lifeisstillgood wrote: | I am actually writing a book saying exactly the opposite to | this. | | I think we are seeing the development of "Programmable | Companies" - where all aspects of the company and its data | are accessible (imagine a code API that reaches down to some | sane mix of data structure). | | So while it is crazy for Zuckerberg to try and optimise some | Ad server, what should / could exist is a Jupyter-like | notebook with something like | | for minion in mycompany: if minion.timeatwork < 40: | crapminions+= 1 | | This is mostly done with crappy spreadsheets, but it does not | get to the feedback that this sort of platform (I think) | enables. | | Anyway. The point is CEOs should code. the reason they have | stopped is because their job has not been "disrupted" ... yet | | Edit: I think there is a further point here. Managers used to | (Drucker?) design and build the systems, the factory floor | was a battleground of Kanban and command and control. But | automation won out. And now the "systems of production" are | designed by coders. | | All the managers have left is shuffling around people from | project to project. But one lever does not a effective d | means of control make. | | We have learnt from communism that command and control | economy falls over at scale. And what is a company but a | command and control economy. | agluszak wrote: | > a waste of company money Well, I wonder how the CEOs, VPs, | and other top level people actually spend their time at work. | I get that they obviously must be doing something Very | Important And Useful[1], because otherwise it would be a | supreme waste of company money to pay them for eating | Business Lunches... | | 1 - https://nypost.com/2022/07/01/rotterdam-wont-dismantle- | bridg... | naravara wrote: | 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. | inglor_cz wrote: | I hope no one will try this out in a brain surgery clinic. | naravara wrote: | I'll tell you one thing though, EHRM user interfaces | would almost certainly be less dogshit if the hospital | admins who procure them had to actually use them. | commandlinefan wrote: | I seem to recall reading that every Disney employee is | required to spend a week working in one of the parks for | the same reason. | winphone1974 wrote: | This is about empathy more than contribution, same thing | with Quantas right now getting executives to handle | baggage. It looks good (see how much we care?), and can be | actually positive if it makes senior leadership understand | what employees go through, so I think it is valuable for | Zuckerberg to do an on call rotation or try and push a | documentation change for these reasons | sleepybrett wrote: | I worked for a national us clothing retailer that didn't | require but encouraged their 'corporate' employees to spend | time in the stores mostly doing reshelves/reracks, tidying | the sales floor, etc. Mostly around holidays/sales. | | I worked in software for them but 'close to the store' for | a bunch of my time there, so I was often in a store | somewhere and always would help out as I had time | permitting. It was useful for me, it was maybe useful for | some of the buyers, I'm not sure it was useful for anyone | else. | telchior wrote: | I think there's a story in the news today about Taco Bell | doing the same thing. | | More relevant to tech -- Automattic, Klaviyo and probably a | lot of other companies require people in certain positions | to do customer service rotations. Including C-level execs. | | I haven't heard of a version of that for coding, though. | wepple wrote: | Door dash gets their employees to do 3 deliveries a year | sleepybrett wrote: | I'm pretty sure that's more to remind their corporate | employees what life outside the tower is like. 'See how | much better your job is than being a courier who barely | makes enough to survive!' | daenz wrote: | Would it? I understand your point, but the counterpoint is | that the leaders are in a position to make big changes if | something is broken. They could attempt to push some simple | change and see glaring process and onboarding problems, which | nobody has been interested in prioritizing, and then make | them top priority, saving everyone time. | vecter wrote: | That sounds good in theory but most leaders are so removed | from engineering that it would take them a week ramp up to | produce even the most basic tiny change/feature to push to | production. A VP should not be spending one week of his or | her time doing that. They should rely on engineers to | identify and fix whatever is broken at that level. That's | why we have staff+ engineers. | | But that's also pretty divorced from the topic of what | makes good interview questions. There's no way that a VP | who spent a week to push out a color change to a button in | prod would have any meaningful insight into how to change | the coding interviews. That should also be left up to the | engineers themselves to decide. | Negitivefrags wrote: | If it takes a week to "ramp up" to produce a tiny change, | then that itself is probably a broken process that needs | to be improved. | carom wrote: | They absolutely should be spending their time doing that. | They are in the position to say "I have to do X, Y, and Z | to push 2 lines of code??" and actually get it fixed. | That week could save the company years of developer hours | lost to overhead. | wins32767 wrote: | > That should also be left up to the engineers themselves | to decide. | | I agree with the rest, but I don't agree with this part. | Engineers should have a lot of input into the hiring | process, but fundamentally management is accountable for | business performance and one of the biggest drivers of | success is getting the right people in the door rather | than just more people like the ones you already have | (which is what happens almost always if you don't | deliberately shape the hiring process). | _jal wrote: | The goal of that would not be to get functional code and a | decent price, of course. The goal would be to ensure | leadership has an accurate view of what that process is | today. | | Now, that may or many not achieve what the GP thinks it will. | But, if you believe the leadership of your org is out-of- | touch, it is a natural thing to suggest. | yibg wrote: | Yea, as an engineer I would not be happy with my CEO swooping | in to commit some code then bugger off. | matsemann wrote: | The point isn't that they commit some useful code. It could | be something as simple as just fixing a typo. But force | them to go through the motions, so they can see the | inefficiency in the processes. | rajeshp1986 wrote: | +1, why blame employees? blame the management. In my previous | job, our manager quickly grew team and hired 3x more people | just cos he wanted to manage a larger team and get to hire | managers under him so that he gets promoted to Sr. Manager. | galdosdi wrote: | > Look, if I can 'crack the coding interview', then I can | certainly crack 'how to do as little work as possible and stack | paper to the ceiling while my stock vests'. | | What's worse, many of the jaded people going through the | motions probably started out gung-ho but then got frustrated to | see how little impact they were really able to have and | eventually became checked out. These kinds of things are self | fulfilling prophecies in organizations. | MisterBastahrd wrote: | If I'm being honest, I'd probably be happier at a place where | my contribution was a small drop in a giant bucket than a | place where we were much smaller but my input was being | largely ignored. | llaolleh wrote: | Motivation is finite. By the time you get the through red | tape to get approvals, permissions, and a million of other | things, you have nothing left in the tank to code. | bashinator wrote: | I can't think of any work to be done for a Meta company that | I'd find meaningful in any way. I imagine there are plenty of | people who only figured this out for themselves after coming | on board. | symlinkk wrote: | Creating a VR game that your friends and family can play? | Adding an API to React that shapes the course of frontend | development for millions of people? | michaelt wrote: | And in this photo, grandson, you can see where your | grandpa spent 2 years running into walls at different | angles, as part of the daily regression test for players | being able to clip outside the world. | | Of course in the end it turned out you could clip out of | the world by summoning your horse in a doorway - but not | by running into a wall, no siree not on my watch. | | Did you know it was the first ever game where the in-game | billboards for each player were auctioned dynamically? A | complete auction took place in less than the time it took | to draw one frame on the screen! I wish I could show you | the game itself - such a pity they decommissioned the | servers 15 years before you were born. | ianbutler wrote: | As opposed to other office jobs that are so interesting? | "Let me show you the insurance papers I shuffled for 40 | years." | rednerrus wrote: | Submitting my 2 weeks after reading this comment. | agluszak wrote: | > React How come that FB is inventing the most | sophisticated, cutting-edge web technologies, but at the | same time their core products (Facebook app, Messenger & | Instagram) are an absolute mess both in terms of | performance and usability, not to mention a ton of bugs | that haven't been fixed for years? | birdyrooster wrote: | They see blood in the water for startups and know they don't | have to subsidize employment to keep them from being able to | hire. | notyourday wrote: | I don't understand why this is a surprise. Is it that no one from | FAANG upper management visited HN? HN general position is: | | * get a job at FAANG | | * do nothing, other than show up and do some minimal work | | * collect mad money | | * when bored go to another FAANG | | Compared this to startups: | | * get a job at startup | | * work work work work work | | * collect OK money | | * go back to work | | HN advice? Get a job at FAANG! | weeblewobble wrote: | Easy to blame lazy overpaid ICs, but really this is an | organizational problem. When I was at a big tech company I was on | not one but two different teams that were created to build a | poorly-thought-out product with no plan and no serious executive | backing. Both teams accomplished ~nothing and were re-orged into | non-existence within a year or so. We did work hard though, at | least until it was obvious that we were going nowhere. | | I never quite could figure out why they did this. Are these | moonshots where they "fund" a bunch of "startups" and hope | someone knocks it out of the park and produces enough revenue to | justify all the failures? Or is this make-work for some executive | to justify their headcount? Or maybe the company was so | profitable that they were willing to fund non-profitable | enterprises for PR or customer goodwill reasons? | wsinks wrote: | It's OKR season | DubiousPusher wrote: | Hasn't Zuckerberg in particular been a bit irrationally down on | the economy for quite some time now? He's had strong YouTube | economist energy for awhile now. | micromacrofoot wrote: | Same old "no one wants to work anymore" bullshit from the ruling | class. They've been saying this for over 100 years. | cryptodan wrote: | Could it be that meetings can often happen in email, and if the | meeting is important use Skype or another in office messenger app | so that employees don't need to leave their desks? | jjslocum3 wrote: | Glad these guys seem to finally be noticing. | | I was a software engineering manager at a lean, high-margin, | profitable start-up based in the NYC area starting in the late | 2000s. We were acquired in 2014 by a very typical (for the time) | SV-based competitor that had raised hundreds of millions in an | IPO a few years earlier. Our acquirers had yet to see a single | quarter of profit, of course. | | I and my team had so many good laughs at the attitudes of our CA | counterparts. One especially strong memory is when, a week after | a particularly dismal quarterly earnings report, a junior | engineer based in the HQ of our new corporate overlords sent out | a team-wide email complaining about the corporate decision to no | longer stock the refrigerators with free fresh blueberries. They | bemoaned the lack of respect for the "talent," and tossed in | gratis the ubiquitous pseudo-threat "if you don't treat us right, | we can always go down the road to an employer who will." | | On visits to HQ in Redwood City, I marveled at the paradisaical | campus-like setting (several buildings around a "quad," with | parks, a tennis court, swimming pool, gyms, etc. etc.) and noted | the amount of time the local staff spent taking advantage of | these amenities. I remember the engineers on my team from HQ | explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule | wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league | scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs | atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was | high. We also all made money. | | Since that was Silicon Valley during one of the many gold rushes, | I thought that I must have been "missing something." What seemed | like common sense to me was clearly heresy to the golden people | there. 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. | | I came to realize I wasn't missing anything, they were. That | company did end up burning through their cash stockpile, and had | to sell a few years later for less than 1/4 of what they paid to | acquire us. | mikhael28 wrote: | Ironically, they were smart to acquihire you. | | It seems like management was aware their employees were bums, | and needed your companies energy to infuse some productivity | into their lifestyle. | | Looks like it failed though. | excitom wrote: | I remember a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an Austin-based | startup that crashed in 2000. At the company meeting where | layoffs were announced, the floor was opened for questions. | Someone asked "does this mean the rock climbing wall in the | cafeteria won't be completed?" | strikelaserclaw wrote: | A lot of SV engineers in the last 10 years have had it good. | Like how people born in America have it good compared to people | born in Africa (irrespective of intelligence, hard work, talent | etc...). I think that will change. | rconti wrote: | They also said that in the previous 10 years. | | ... and the 10 years before that... | compiler-guy wrote: | re: No more blueberries: | | https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear... | 015a wrote: | 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 that Work Should | Be This Way For Everyone. Its not insane to want to work 20 | hour weeks. Its not insane to think working in a concrete | windowless office building is uninspiring (our species built | twenty story cathedrals to celebrate God; architecture matters; | outdoor space matters). Its not insane to want some snacks & | drinks throughout the 8+ hour work day (at least until we | solve, you know, that pesky human drive called Hunger). | | Some of y'all would rather wrestle with pigs in the mud than | recognize that, maybe, there shouldn't be any mud at all. But, | after all, capitalism is brain worms which convince you the | system is optimal when everything sucks for the very people who | keep it going. Rest assured, the CEO has a secretary who will | go buy fresh blueberries on the company card the moment he | desires them. | buildbot wrote: | Right? Like WTF are people so happy about, unless they are | looking forward to exploiting workers more... | | It is telling when small perks that don't effect the bottom | line are cut. | rr888 wrote: | 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. | ceeplusplus wrote: | That's how you lose to hungrier competitors. TikTok engineers | don't work 4 hours a day. Back in the day when Google Plus | was coming out, FB engineers didn't work 4 hours a day either | [1]. That's how they killed it in the cradle. | | If you want a chill work life balance, 20 hour weeks, etc. | then you can have that. But maybe you won't have the $400k | salary that big tech pays anymore. | | [1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/how-mark- | zuckerberg-... | qazwse_ wrote: | Yeah, they're probably working some gruelling 996 schedule, | I guess we'll all need to go back to accepting 12 hours a | day, 6 days a week to compete. | | https://www.ft.com/content/174ed2e2-f88e-4759-9a7f-133629aa | b... | mgfist wrote: | Sure but the big faang stocks literally print more money than | every other company (idk maybe aramco or berkshire can compete, | but nothing else). So something's working there. | metabagel wrote: | I think you have it backwards. Highly profitable companies | with high growth can afford to be wasteful. Being wasteful | isn't what made them successful. | jeffreyrogers wrote: | Casinos print money too and farms don't. The amount of cash a | business throws off is only somewhat related to how much work | it requires and how useful it is. | Valakas_ wrote: | What's working is that they have basically monopolies. Hard | not to make money when there's no competition. | shagie wrote: | > 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 atmosphere... but putting a lot of emphasis | on having that third place. Having it _also_ means that | employees tend to stay later at work. | | Things like https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/custom- | woodworking/cabine... | | These are ways to use excess money in a way that rewards | employees and makes some of the aspects hard to leave ("I could | switch companies but then I'd lose the woodshop!") but it | _also_ sets up another set of problems in the nature of the | third place - that its not work. The coffee shop that you show | up to outside of work _shouldn 't_ have a manager / employee | relationship between the patrons, but the coffee shop on the | campus of a big company - that's harder. | | It is those third space encroachments where the company is | sponsoring it and yet the company wanting to _not_ be political | / social / getting into those HR issues, but yet the invariably | show up there that lead to articles about how the company is | going to be not political, or that half the staff is leaving | because the company took a certain stance in a not-3rd space. | | These third space encroachments where company life is used as a | substitute for one's own hobbies and stepping beyond the | college life atmosphere is where companies have social | problems. | | {/soapbox} | racl101 wrote: | > Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions | were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money. | | Yes, that's how it usually works out. | | By the way, 'perqs' is a peculiar word. English is my second | language but I'm used to seeing the word 'perks'. | rootusrootus wrote: | The full word is perquisite. Perk is slang. | brundolf wrote: | Huh. I'm a native English speaker and I've never seen that | word in my life. I thought it was a typo for a moment | HeyLaughingBoy wrote: | Literally the only other time I've ever seen it spelled | out was in a 11th-grade Economics class when I told the | teacher that she misspelled "prerequisite" and she | explained what a perk was. | metabagel wrote: | There is no such word as "perq" in American English. | | https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=perq | | Perhaps, it is British English. | wyclif wrote: | I don't think so. Garner's is an American English usage | guide, and they define it (see above). | trebbble wrote: | _Garner 's Modern English Usage_ covers "perquisite" in | order to call out confusion between that word and | "prerequisite", but notes in passing that perquisite is | "often shortened to _perk_ ". No mention of "perq" which, | as with other posters, I've personally never seen. | | In general, if you chose a usage that generates discussion | about your language choices, and there was another option | that would convey the exact same thing and _not_ generate | discussion, it 's best to regard that as a mistake. | booleandilemma wrote: | That misspelling made me realize OP is not a native english | speaker and he's trying to import the slave-driving work | culture from whatever country he's from into the US. | JimDabell wrote: | You have it right, "perq" is non-standard: | | https://grammarist.com/usage/perk-vs-perq/ | quantumsequoia wrote: | I am very curious which company this can be, can't think of any | companies in Redwood City that match that description | esoterica wrote: | Unless you got paid more money than your lazy peers it seems | like they got a much better deal than you did. Why are you | bragging about working harder and getting treated worse than | your coworkers? | pugworthy wrote: | I work for a large company (2 letter name) that has none of | those perks, and never really did (at least at most sites). I | just perceive the company as being cheap rather than forward | looking. | ninju wrote: | So you work for Baskin Robbins :-) | | https://designbro.com/blog/inspiration/epic-two-letter- | logos... | jrockway wrote: | I see where you're coming from. One of the pieces of cognitive | dissonance I had at Google was that I always had so much work | to do, and there were just so many people around the office | chilling out; waiting in long lines for free food, playing ping | pong, making themselves an espresso. I never really felt like I | had time for that; I got a grab and go sandwich and drip coffee | and then hung out at my desk for 8 hours. I started the day | with an infinite amount of work, and ended the day with an | infinite amount of work. The melancholy of a good idea is that | working on it just yields more good ideas; no matter how much | work you get done, you'll always be making more. | | The downside to my approach is that I super burned out. I had | "strongly exceeding expectations" for 2 quarters, then my | project was cancelled so I switched teams and went on a PIP. | Indeed, I flat up stopped showing up to work. (I was so bitter | about the fact that I lined up a new job immediately, but | people that didn't do that got 6 months of paid vacation to | explore other teams. I got nothing, and I needed it bad. The | company doctor did give me antidepressants and some unpaid | leave though. Thanks for that, turns out antidepressants don't | treat burnout.) | | I didn't even know that burnout was a thing back then, but if I | did, I would know that making sure that you jam in 40 hours of | programming and meetings into every week without taking a break | isn't that healthy or productive over the long term. All these | people chatting in the lunch line or playing ping pong or doing | an aggressive workout and then showering in the middle of the | day were optimizing for their long-term productivity. 1 hour | less task-doing today, 10 extra years in their career. Not a | bad tradeoff at all. | | At a startup, you might not be able to afford that; by the time | you're burned out, you've already sold your company and are | retired, so it's all good. But at a big company, it makes a lot | of sense; talent acquisition is expensive and if you can get 10 | years out of someone instead of 6 months, you're going to be a | lot more successful. And there's that uncomfortable medium | where that extreme productivity didn't actually make a business | that can afford to not burn people out, but now everyone's | burned out. A lot of companies are in that state, and there | isn't an easy way out of that without a time machine. | | Engineers that call you out on you burning them out are | absolutely right to complain. The basketball game is a much | better use of their time than the standup. Standups only matter | to people organizing the project; the meeting is only for your | benefit. It saves you the time of reading their commits and | design docs, sitting in on their engineering discussions, | soliciting feedback when writing performance reviews, etc. The | actual creative work of software engineering is done when your | head is free from distractions and anything you don't need to | know about. A walk around the quad or a basketball game is a | great way to chew on the ideas, discard all that's unnecessary, | and set you up for the 4 hours where you physically translate a | quarter's worth of thinking into code that can be checked in. | | At the end of the day, it's not really the software engineer's | fault for the company losing money. Businesses fail because | there is not a plan for making money and the actual engineering | tasks are irrelevant. "Sprint 12323: rearrange the deck chairs | on the Titanic." is what 90% of software engineers are doing | right now. They are right to go elsewhere when your business | plan is so bad that the company can't even afford blueberries. | Do you really think that if people just sat in front of their | computer for 30 more minutes a day, or provided better updates | in their standup, that the bad idea of a company would be | saved? Some companies just weren't meant to be. VCs are very | bad at not giving these companies money, though, so there are a | lot of people running in circles doing nothing as they slowly | realize they never should have started the company. Ultimately, | you can't blame the nice campus or intramural basketball league | for that. | mrazomor wrote: | The first paragraph resonates with me so well. I'm sorry that | you went through a burnout. | | +1 to the rest of the post. Very well said. | jrockway wrote: | It's a good life experience. Now I can recognize it and fix | it. | Salgat wrote: | A lot of companies use those perks as an excuse to get their | workers to stick around an extra 4+ hours at the office. Of | course this doesn't actually help productivity (they simply | drag their day and work out longer), but to simple minded | managers it sure seems like a huge win. | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | > I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me | that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work | beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their | games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in | NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We | also all made money. | | Your standup meeting could've been an email. Their immovable | basketball game (quality of life) is far more important than a | meeting that can happen at any time - and probably doesn't even | need to exist in the first place. | | Other than that, your points stand. | afro88 wrote: | 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 boundary. Of course we still do | team building activities, but these are occastional off | sites. Or optional after work things (drinks, workouts, | indoor football etc) | eftychis wrote: | Team building. A lot of great stuff and camaraderie have | been built over a coffee and walk, or some beer after hours | with colleagues. | | To the grandfather commenter: I still agree that you | weren't missing anything about your parent company. Work | needs to happen and it needs to be aligned with a market | and be profitable or have a strategic advantage (to make | the company desirable). | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | You can work any hours of the day. | | Intramural stuff is usually scheduled DURING work hours - | so people are at work for this stuff to happen. | | If you schedule an intramural basketball game for 5:00 a.m. | in the morning or 8:00 p.m. at night - nobody is going to | make it - just like if you schedule a standup during those | hours - no one is going to make it. | | It's expected that you either can do your job in less than | 8 hours on some days - or you work extra hours to make up | for enjoying your life doing things like playing | basketball. | | Most adults can be adults. | [deleted] | jedberg wrote: | 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. | giraffe_lady wrote: | The freedom to schedule things during the day is very | powerful and a huge factor in my wellbeing. Being able to | for example spontaneously drop work for a few hours to | enjoy the first beautiful weather of the year is worth more | a lot to me psychologically. | | Being able to _schedule_ out of work things during "work" | hours is amazing too! I've been able to have a level of | involvement in volunteer and community projects that is not | really possible on a nights & weekends basis. Maintain | relationships with my friends and family who don't work | 9-5s, watch their kids regularly. Go to those odd-hours | sparsely attended religious services and grow different | connections in that community too. | | To me this is all much more sustainable than having a | relationship to work where I grind away at it waiting for | it to be over so I can live my life. There are risks here | too, specifically boundaries as you mentioned. But when | managed well it feels like work is just one of my | obligations among several, rather than the time I suffer | through so I can do worthwhile things instead. | jrockway wrote: | What studies show that 5 days x 8 hours is the optimal | point for productivity? | | We picked those numbers based on tradition (and complaints | from unions about the 7x12 schedule) well before software | engineering was a career. Companies that do 5x6 or 4x8 seem | to be doing fine. | i_have_an_idea wrote: | > 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 | | Mate, I browsed your profile and you live in Australia. Why | would you want to spend the better, sunnier part of the day | inside of an office? How is that "quality of life" better | than spending an hour or so to play some basketball with | some friends? | | > Of course we still do team building activities, but these | are occastional off sites. Or optional after work things | (drinks, workouts, indoor football etc) | | So it's not okay to intrude on "work" by playing an | occasional basketball game, but it is okay to push | mandatory work activities that eat up one's personal time? | Also, if you think those activities are not work, you are | deluding yourself -- no one likes to hang out with their | boss or coworkers for "fun" after work hours. | naravara wrote: | Of all the types of meetings that could be emails, stand-ups | are at the very bottom of the list. A well run, efficient | stand-up can head off a day's worth of productivity sucking | emails and Slack messages with a 10 min conversation. | winphone1974 wrote: | 10 minutes x everyone on the team x scheduled time for all | x disruption and context switch loss | | I like in person updates myself, but it's not as obvious of | a cost calc as you present. There is definitely a place for | async, written updates | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | I've been in MANY different standups. The vast majority of | them are not well run. | | Standups are also (rarely) recorded, and therefore | unsearchable. | | Have you ever thought - maybe an email process can also be | done well? | | Maybe the majority of your email threads are terrible. That | doesn't mean they have to be. Maybe you think all of your | meetings are well run - it doesn't mean everyone else | thinks they are... | naravara wrote: | I've been in many different companies and the majority of | all processes are not well run. That just means things | are being badly run, not that you shouldn't do the right | things and run them well. | | And no, email processes cannot be well done. You may | think your's are, but that doesn't mean everyone else | does. | | If I had my druthers I would ban email for all in-house | communication and do everything verbally, via chat apps, | or workflow management tools. Anything that needs more | thorough elaboration should be written down as a | thoughtfully articulated memo. If you feel the need to | record the contents of a 20 minute group conversation to | search it later that probably means you need to focus and | take better notes. | | I will say it is truly a wild claim to assert that an | intramural basketball game is more conducive to team | productivity than a stand-up meeting though. | winphone1974 wrote: | You haven't convinced me there's a good substitute for | email when it comes to threaded, easy, async, thoughtful | communication. Your suggestions all fail one of these. | naravara wrote: | There is no reason threaded, async, or easy need to be | requirements for all types of communication. | [deleted] | [deleted] | metabagel wrote: | A 10 minute conversation can be had outside of a stand-up | meeting, and without wasting the time of the people who | don't need to be part of it. | karthikb wrote: | > without wasting the time of the people who don't need | to be part of it | | In my experience, the very people who think these cross- | team sync meetings are a waste that they don't need to be | a part of are the first to make noise that they weren't | consulted or included in a discussion that _actually_ | doesn 't impact them. | [deleted] | llaolleh wrote: | I would go to the office to play basketball with my team. I'd | think that it'd build team chemistry and cross team | collaboration. | bobobob420 wrote: | This is exactly the mindset of failure. The team standup has | 10x more priority than some dumb basketball league | isatty wrote: | A team building activity has 10x the priority than some | standup. If you need a standup to get stuff done or to | motivate people then you've already lost. | jackblemming wrote: | Show me the studies on the effectiveness of a daily 10 min | standup and I'd be happy to listen. Otherwise I'd be happy | to make up some other rituals that sound good on paper and | then rationalize them with buzzwords. | bobobob420 wrote: | 8note wrote: | The only particularly useful standup I've been in is when | our VP was joining to see if we needed any quick | escalations each day for about a week | | Everything else is fun for memorizing what everyone's | doing so I can respond immediately to random questions, | but the value is questionable. Everyone else on my team | would be better off if I didn't know everything off hand, | and instead relied on the proper sources of truth | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | Agree to disagree. | | A team standup has close to no value. | | Having a high quality of life has a lot of value (including | increased work productivity). | | As the California Milk Campaign went - happy cows make | quality cheese, and happy workers make quality work... | | Again - one can be moved, the other cannot. | lmeyerov wrote: | If team happiness comes from basketball, that's | (probably) not the team driving revenue. I've mostly only | seen that tied to results in professional basketball | teams. | | (Not to hate on balls: it was great playing volleyball in | grad school. After 5pm. A couple of $B companies came out | of that group.) | hbrn wrote: | Getting a bunch of introverts to talk to each other every | day can have tremendous value for the company. | | But in most companies standups are just agile cargo cult. | Nobody knows why they are doing standups, so naturally | they turn into "I publicly report to my manager and | pretend I work really hard, because everybody else is | doing that". | | People forgot (or never realized?) that standups are not | for the manager, they are for the team. | metabagel wrote: | It has value to a single person - the person running the | meeting. Everyone else zones out until it's their time to | speak. | winphone1974 wrote: | Not for the participants apparently. | jimbob45 wrote: | I guess you and I are in the minority now because I | absolutely agree. To me, the hypothetical was akin to | skipping school to go hang out with your friends. | paganel wrote: | As it happens the last The Office episode I saw a couple of | months ago involved Michael Scott organizing a basketball | match during work hours, even though corporate had just | been complaining about low numbers from him and his team | (if I remember right). | | Related to a comment further up the thread about fruits, a | close friend of mine told me some time ago how one of his | colleagues was complaining in the company chat about the | kiwi fruits that were being given by the company as free | perks having too much of that "hairy" stuff on them (I'm on | my phone, too lazy to search for the exact English term), | and how he preferred to be served "lean" and "shiny" kiwi | fruits instead. Said friend works at the local subsidiary | of a big US tech company of which everyone on this forum | has heard about. | 8note wrote: | High intensity physical activity keeps you in shape both | physically and mentally. | | Standup everyday with people burnt out and depressed due to | a lack of excercise and poor nutrition is a recipe for | failure too. | nrmitchi wrote: | I thought it was a widely-known-secret that _at least part_ of | the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc | for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working | for current-or-potential competitors. | | Purposely over-hiring to prevent work being done elsewhere, and | then claiming there is not enough work to be done, feels like it | shouldn't be surprising to anyone. | | Hell, Google has created ~18 (I think?) different messenger/chat | apps at this point. If you wanted a clue that there wasn't enough | work to go around (and that your promotion incentives may not be | aligned with the business), this should have been the first clue. | ThrowawayR2 wrote: | > " _I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part | of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, | projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent | individuals working for current-or-potential competitors._ " | | It's widely known among the sort of person who tends to believe | in conspiracy theories, I suppose. The oppressive bureaucracy | and misaligned incentives that allow senior leaders to | destructively compete among themselves is more than enough to | explain why ill-conceived and ill-run projects are common at | FAANG-level megacorporations without resorting to making things | up. | afiori wrote: | Your theory and the theory you are replying to are | indistinguishable for an outside observer: big player with | hiring power and hubris compete for employees; in one case it | is companies and in the other it is managers. | | Even if I admit yours sounds more likely (companies choosing | to spend more of their own money vs managers choosing to | waste the company's money) | mytailorisrich wrote: | That does not make sense. | | On the other hand, if no-one stops it, there are always | incentives to grow your team as much as possible. | | As leader this increases your status both in absolute terms | (100 vs 10 people under you makes a difference on your CV and | on the title you can claim) and in relative terms (your team is | larger than the teams of your peers and you can get ahead that | way). | | And so every leader at every level tries to expand their team. | mc32 wrote: | Google et al. cargo culted SGI culture -maybe it works for a | class of geeks. Anyway they often coddled employees and treated | them "like family" as they like to say and tell them they are | special and the lucky few. You can bring your pet to work (if | no one has allergies to it), you can waltz in late, go get a | snack, log in, chat with your friends, play with new gizmos, | then go to a meeting, get lunch, then work out, then have | another snack and then the last meeting of the day before you | cut out early to get in the (Co.)-bus home before traffic gets | bad. | | Where the hell did they think productivity would go? | crote wrote: | Easy: it goes both ways. Keeping employees happy means they | are willing to voluntarily spend more time at work. "Chatting | with friends" is more often than not informally discussing | work projects. Going home before traffic gets bad and working | a few hours from home is the sane thing to do. | | My current employer is very lenient, and as a result I am | very happy working here and put in more than I am required | to. If they were very strict, I would work _exactly_ 9 to 5 | and not a second longer - if I even wanted to work there at | all. | | Fact is, you simply can't be 100% effective 100% of the time. | So you either end up with people _pretending_ to be busy, or | people who are free to openly de-stress and are way happier | employees. | mc32 wrote: | I don't disagree with you there, but also companies that | have to be mindful of their cashflows can't afford to have | people work for them who think it's a club-med for work. | I'm not advocating that employees have to work it to the | bone to be productive as we need long term productivity, | but at the same time we need conscientious contribution and | productivity. | Ferrotin wrote: | That's just something people said on the internet with no sound | basis for it. | [deleted] | amzn-throw wrote: | That's not a conspiracy theory, | | I work for Amazon - for a decade. I love it - best job I've | ever had. And historically, while it's been a tough place to | work, we've always been able to attract top talent. Partially - | impactful work. Partially - stock doubles every year. | | Well guess what happened in 2020/2021? Despite incredible | perseverance through the Pandemic, the stock stopped doubling. | | Meanwhile, Microsoft, Meta, and others figured out that they | can poach our engineers with a promise of way more base salary, | and a less intense work environment. | | We've had SDE1s (Juniors) leave Amazon for Meta because they | got more money than our SDE3s (Seniors) were getting. | | SDE2s (Intermediate) looked at their status quo thought "I | COULD bust my ass and get promoted to Senior...or I could go to | Microsoft TODAY, get a Senior offer for what I'm already doing, | and for more money than my raise would be". (No offense to any | of my friends at Microsoft, but | https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Microsoft&track=Softw... | doesn't lie) | | I've talked to a few acquaintances that have left and the | universal responses is: "My job is so boring now. I miss | Amazon. But It's not stressful (because there is no pressure on | me), and I get paid more money". | | How can anyone think there is anything wrong with that? You | can't. You can speak about Mission and Impact, and some | engineers will be attracted to that - I work on building | Forever APIs in the AWS Cloud that gets millions of | transactions per second. That to me is WAY more interesting | than working on Chat app 15/18. | | But for most people they just want to make money and live their | lives. Fair enough! | | The result? Even though Amazon has adapted somewhat by bumping | salaries, they've still lost an ocean of people to nothing | particularly ambitious or interesting. They're being parked by | Microsoft/Google/Facebook to work on boring unimpactful | projects so they can't help Amazon kick their asses. | | Sometimes one way to make your house nicer is by breaking the | windows in the neighbor's house. | golly_ned wrote: | When I left Amazon, I never thought I'd miss it, but I'm | finding this true for me as well: | | "My job is so boring now. I miss Amazon. But It's not | stressful (because there is no pressure on me), and I get | paid more money" | q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: | I definitely empathize. | | I worked for a while at another company also known for being | hyper-aggressive and a brutally difficult work environment -- | probably the poster-child for that sort of thing, back then. | I burned out hard after a couple years and ended up | prioritizing "work-life balance" in my next job searches. | | I landed at a 40-hour/week place where I usually work less | than that. There's a strong appeal to working so little for a | solidly decent salary. I have to remind myself often how good | I have it, especially when others don't have jobs at all -- | or they have to do back-breaking labor for table scraps. | | But I agree it's also undeniably boring. I constantly find | myself fantasizing about being back in the adrenaline-fueled | environment of my last job. A large part of why I burned out | was my own poor stress-management skills, and I like to | imagine that I could probably perform well -- and excel -- in | that sort of boiler-room environment now. (Especially if the | comp could be what it was, too!) | | On the other hand, I think all companies that have tried that | aggressive approach have _not_ made it sustainable. People | burn out, or the whole company burns out, or both. It 's | tough to keep it going without lots of support and motivation | (financial and otherwise). | | The idealistic part of me likes to imagine it's theoretically | _possible_ to sustain such a thing, though -- a healthy, | psychologically-safe place where people could work on | ridiculously impactful things at a velocity and scale not | available anywhere else. But it doesn 't seem like anyone's | cracked the code -- not my former employer, who faded away in | a blaze of toxicity, and certainly not Amazon. | anonporridge wrote: | Makes me wonder if junior developers are getting bait and | switched. | | They get pulled away by the lure of money into an environment | that causes them to stagnate in their skill and career | development, then companies pull the rug after only a few | years of this high pay with layoffs. Now you've got hoards of | developers with junior/mid skills who expect senior salaries | and can't find jobs. Amazon doesn't want them anymore, | because the new grad pipeline has plenty of people nearly as | technically capable and much hungrier. | | Only those who manage to recognize this short term period of | plenty and rapidly stack investments toward financial | independence will be alright in the end. Those who thought | the raining cash would never end are in for a world of hurt. | | On the bright side for Amazon, they get to trim off the | employees who a) aren't paranoid enough about the viciousness | of the business world, and b) are looking for a way to cruise | and do minimal work. | com2kid wrote: | > They get pulled away by the lure of money into an | environment that causes them to stagnate in their skill and | career development | | Microsoft is in an insane number of markets, far more than | Amazon. While at Microsoft I did everything from compilers | to robots to wearables, and if I talk to 10 Microsoft | alumni they will have a job history of working on a | completely disparate set of amazing technologies. | | If you are bored at Microsoft change teams. You can find | teams writing assembly, or C++, or C#, or Rust, or | JavaScript, or Typescript. You can find teams working on | browser engines, on ISO standards, or consumer tech. | | Get bored with all of that, go work on video games for | awhile. | Brystephor wrote: | People are typically ranked by influence at companies as | well. If you want to increase your influence, hire more | people beneath you. Amazon managers specifically will be | looked at for how good they are at hiring and how many people | are beneath them to see if they're ready for the next level. | At least this is what an Amazon EM told me. | [deleted] | thenightcrawler wrote: | I think Amazon would have a better rep if they didn't have a | stack ranking system. | fdr wrote: | I personally don't believe this at all. I think it's almost | entirely bureaucratic inertia, and a prisoner's dilemma among | the management. One who bloats, floats. | roflyear wrote: | This is the truth. Many managers are valued on how large they | can grow their team. Also, if you have 10, 20, 100 direct | reports .... how can they fire you? | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | > If you wanted a clue that there wasn't enough work to go | around (and that your promotion incentives may not be aligned | with the business), this should have been the first clue. | | There is definitely enough work to go around at Google, Amazon, | and Apple. | | Whether promotion makes any sense, and whether people are | working on the things that actually move the needle is a | different question. | BobbyJo wrote: | 100% this. The clearest basis on which to measure productivity | is product, and Google's scattershot approach is obviously not | efficient. | api wrote: | > I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of | the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, | etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals | working for current-or-potential competitors. | | Wow, I've suspected this for many years and people told me it | was nutty. | smueller1234 wrote: | That's because it is. It makes no sense whatsoever to think | that could be a deliberate strategy. | | Managers are happy when they get their hands on a new role to | hire into because they all have more projects than they | (think that they) can deliver at good quality with the people | they have. | treis wrote: | It doesn't even make a little sense. Giving a bunch of | money and free time to someone makes it easier for them to | start a company. Not harder. | roflyear wrote: | It is insane. If this was a strategy it would not be some top | secret thing. | itsdrewmiller wrote: | >I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of | the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, | etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals | working for current-or-potential competitors. | | I've heard this claimed but not sourced, and it doesn't really | make sense - there are millions of software engineers out there | and Google or Meta only employ a tiny fraction of them. | metadat wrote: | You are mistaken. | | 100,000 of the best out of a pool of approximately 10 million | professional software engineers worldwide is a sizeable | portion. Additionally, not all 10 million are even close to | being up to BigCorps peculiar standards (perhaps the standard | is "someone competent enough that they could potentially | build a competing product line"). | | Goog, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Oracle.. all have huge rosters and | it adds up to a significant portion of the market. There is | also a huge amount of medium sized whales such as SAP and | PayPal who in total end up also consuming a lot of the | talent. | cosmotic wrote: | Everyone claims they hire the best. For a long time Google | and others had atypical hiring practices which they have | since abandoned. I suspect this is because they discovered | the techniques were less effective than originally thought. | So 'best' by what measure? | tedivm wrote: | I've worked with some really good engineers who came out | of google, but I've worked with far more that were | extremely arrogant but could not actually get anything | done. One of the startups I worked at got an "advisor" | from Google (as part of a startup program) that probably | set us further back than it ever helped. Anytime this guy | didn't understand something he just got extremely | belligerent instead of actually trying to get the | problem. In general his advice was ignored because it | didn't make sense, and he never delivered on any of the | promises he made. Not to harp on this guy, as he's just | one example amongst many, but it's reached the point | where if I see google engineers on the founding team for | a company I typically won't consider working for them. | | It turns out that being able to solve cute little puzzles | while interviewing doesn't really help with systems level | thinking. | dominotw wrote: | > Anytime this guy didn't understand something he just | got extremely belligerent | | I think he might have backed himself into a corner by | coming in as an 'advisor'. How can I be an advisor if I | look like i don't even understand what is going. That | must have been his mindset. So the only escape is being | arrogant and belligerent. | subsubzero wrote: | Where are you getting the 10M number? Just curious not a | criticism. I was thinking it would be around half of | that(5M), with a tenth decent enough to work at most tech | companies 500k, I think the bay area has 1M tech workers so | half of them are engineers and thats one of the largest | cluster of engineering on the planet. | metadat wrote: | A few years ago I was super curious how we stack up | numbers-wise compared to doctors and attorneys | (quantities artificially limited in the USA because of | licenses). I did the research to calculate based on the | number of CS graduates being produced by universities, | combining it with average number of years worked before | retiring. Unfortunately I don't have the references handy | at this point. | sushid wrote: | Arguably that's Google and Meta's strategy (maybe even | Apple) but that's certainly not Amazon's. They just mass | hire anyone without a care in the world. Not sure if Oracle | even belongs in this group. | disgruntledphd2 wrote: | It definitely wasn't Meta's strategy when I was there in | 2018. They hired a lot of junior software engineers but | all other positions had relatively limited headcount | (which I mostly think is a good thing). | ravenstine wrote: | I believe it. Every single day I get emails from various | Amazon recruiters. Often it's for positions I'm barely | qualified for. As much as I think AWS is a great service, | I'd be terrified to learn what lies beneath given how low | their recruitment standards are. | filoleg wrote: | Their recruiting reach is high, but it doesn't have that | much to do with desperation, and their actual | interviewing standards aren't low. | | The recruiting reach is high because every single sub- | group of teams within amazon has their own recruiters, | and none of them communicate with recruiters from outside | of that. Sometimes i get multiple emails from different | AWS sub-group recruiters per day, but it isn't because | AWS is desperate for me. It is simply because for them, | the existence of the other ones reaching out at the same | time is completely immaterial, just like if they were | recruiters from other companies. | | And while yes, Amazon's interviewing bar might not be as | high as Meta/Google/Dropbox/etc, it isn't far behind at | all, and it is pretty much on par with Microsoft. | | Disclosure: never worked at Amazon, but interviewed with | them and the rest of the companies mentioned, and worked | at (or got offers from) some of them. | Ancapistani wrote: | Based on what I've seen from the outside about their | corporate culture, I'm not in any way interested in | working for Amazon/AWS. | | That said, the interactions I've had with the people | working on AWS have been uniformly positive. They're easy | to work with and obviously very skilled engineers. | wyclif wrote: | The level of churn at Amazon is incredibly high. They | turnover a lot of their workforce and they're famous for | "hire to fire." | MisterBastahrd wrote: | I keep hearing that, but I know an absolute meathead who | is a senior architect over there. Maybe he's just good at | playing the "bro" game? | itsdrewmiller wrote: | Closer to (edit: 13mm professional) developers - | https://www.future-processing.com/blog/how-many- | developers-a... | | Most of those companies have less than 30k SWEs, not 100k - | https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1527004655540133888 | ?... (feel free to google the others) | | So for each company they represent at most around (edit: | 0.3%) of all professional devs, and presumably the | "overhired for anti-competitive reasons" portion is a small | fraction of that. | YmiYugy wrote: | I think it's plausible that the superfluous hirings are | caused by hirings of key individuals. It's quite common | for these big tech companies to poach each others | department heads and other key personnel. This can cause | significant damage to a company so can be an attractive | tactic. The downside is that in order to retain these | people you don't just have to pay them a lot of money you | also have to give them big projects and resources to | implement them, i.e. lot's of people get hired. This can | a problem when these projects aren't supported by the | wider company but are just someones pet project. | metadat wrote: | (edit: parent originally claimed 30 million professional | software engineers worldwide, then edited in a revised | estimate of 13 million.. which is in the ballpark of my | original figure? :) | | Just because someone "uses JavaScript" doesn't mean they | are a full-time professional. In fact, most are dabblers. | The number depends entirely on the definition - are all | IT professionals considered software engineers? If so, | that's about 24 million. | | I am talking about full-time SWEs. | | In any case Drew, it sounds like we're mostly in | agreement. What a relief! :D | | We can't really know what is in the minds of Zuckerfk and | Pikaichu, in the end it's all speculation. | cma wrote: | Hording talent could be a leftover Chesterton's fence from | when they had an illegal agreement between Google, Apple, | etc. to not recruit each other's employees, but Facebook | was never found to be part of that. | ehnto wrote: | > being up to BigCorps peculiar standards | | I'm glad you put it that way. It's not necessarily smarts | or talent, but it does take a particular willingness for | the institutional peculiarities to integrate with a big | organization. I'm not one of those people, I tried it, and | I will never do it again. I did note, you either had people | who had just joined, or people who had been there for | nearly a decade or more. I think of the word | "institutionalized", as in, they had bought into the | institution lifestyle, and were so full of it's arbitrary | knowledge that moving on would be like starting over. | robotnikman wrote: | Well, Google's and Facebooks definition of 'the best' | engineers. | | I don't think grinding leetcode for an interview is the | best indicator of a good engineer, and graduating from a | prestigious university is not always an indicator either. | imho it seems like the best engineers now are the ones | doing their own thing outside of the large companies, or | are at smaller startups. | 202206241203 wrote: | Some engineers see themselves as merely tools, so they | "sharpen" themselves to be used effectively. Why would | MAANAM (FAANG is a bit outdated) want more creative ones? | They will get bored and leave. | IMSAI8080 wrote: | > Well, Google's and Facebooks definition of 'the best' | engineers. don't think grinding leetcode for an interview | is the best indicator of a good engineer | | Their employees are also the subset of those who can get | to a location where they have offices and have the | relevant work permits. Those who do not object to and | specifically want to work at those companies. Those who | find their technical challenges of interest. Those who do | not already have a satisfactory job elsewhere and are | actually in the market for a job. | throwawaymaths wrote: | No, but if all of FAANG are hiring by that criteria, it | still works; startups can hire good talent because they | break the pareto equilibrium, but that's ok for FAANG | because they obtain that tech through acquisition after | the idea and execution are derisked. The system works! | tomuli38 wrote: | Aren't the best engineers generally at national labs and | NIST and NASA? FAANG is known to be full of money/status | chasers. | tbihl wrote: | That would surprise me. I have attended targeted career | fairs with both FAANGs and national labs recruiting, and | the national labs give off way more 'work-life balance' | vibes. Plus, as the largest bureaucracy in the history of | the world, the federal government isn't a good place to | get a high return on brain damage when you want to | actually get something done. | | Having said that, the national labs do seem like good | places to go geek out in your own advanced intellectual | cul-de-sac. | r00fus wrote: | > national labs give off way more 'work-life balance' | vibes | | Seriously - why does this not mean they're the best | engineers (as opposed to the most prolific). | tomuli38 wrote: | The implication that smart people don't desire the | balance to be with their families every day is bizarre. | phpisthebest wrote: | FAANG's currently have a problem with ideological mono- | culture. I dont know if recruitment has exactly suffered | because of that, $$$$$ can allow for a lot of suppression | of personal beliefs, but I do know a few people that have | outright refused to work in those companies because of | that, who are pretty excellent programmers | sgtnoodle wrote: | No, I don't think that's the case. There's enough | bureaucracy in those organizations that the best folk get | frustrated and move on. | WJW wrote: | That question is pretty meaningless unless you can | somehow measure the quality of an engineer. Is it the | engineer who can build systems nobody else can, the one | who can build the cheapest system that performs to spec, | the one that can work well in a team, the one that is | always available, the one that can teach others, etc etc | etc etc. I'm sure anyone can think of many more aspects | to being a good engineer. | | I bet NASA and NIST have a great bunch of quality all- | round engineers, but I'd be surprised if they were better | at leetcode than the average FAANG dev. After all, FAANG | devs have literally been filtered through an "are they | good at leetcode" process. FAANG may be full of money | chasers, but if the way to get more money there is by | "being a good engineer" that does not mean much. | mxkopy wrote: | Government work sometimes has the most stringent | standards | WJW wrote: | Indeed, but "works to the highest (quality) standards" is | only one of the many aspects of being a good engineer. | For example: government engineers are often not as good | at completing projects within budget. | mxkopy wrote: | I think that dilutes the meaning of "quality" to nothing. | Like if someone says "that's quality work" or a "quality | engineer" I think of something specific. | | For example I'd call a BMW a quality car. I wouldn't call | a Lada a quality car, though it's much cheaper and has a | much higher bang-to-buck ratio than a BMW. | | In that sense sometimes government work has to be the | highest quality, especially when it concerns security or | safety. Sure it could end up being magnitudes more | expensive but I'd say that's a question of efficiency not | quality | FactualActuals wrote: | As someone who was a government worker, a lot of the | issues why projects go over budget is because management | believes that a single developer can do the workload of | 4. So the product never gets delivered and that developer | leaves to work somewhere else. | rhexs wrote: | Feds have some of the most useless engineers/bureaucrats | in the world. They do have a very, very tiny amount of | mission motivated folks who are the best of the best, but | that number is a rounding error. Ask anyone who has left. | | Not firing folks, low pay, focus on the best work life | balance in history, heavy affirmative action, politics, | and having to work hard to carry the coasters isn't an | environment that naturally attracts skill and competence. | Work 500% harder than the next guy and get the same | promotion. No thanks. | | The gov and contractors, like it or not, are jobs | programs first and foremost. A remarkably effective jobs | program if you just measure folks employed and not | output. | prepend wrote: | I would not expect the best software engineers to be at | nist or nasa as evidenced by their lack of amazing open | source projects. | | Maybe there are some super great private projects but I | expect those amazing capabilities would still be evident | in the stuff that is put out. | | Note, there's some good stuff out of NIST and NASA (check | out open.nasa.gov) but I don't see things being handed | off to Apache and stuff. | ak217 wrote: | NIST and other government institutes are not known for | open source work mainly because most of their work is a | combination of science and technology communication. They | deal in publications, conferences, and reference | datasets. In my industry, NIST and the NIH produce the | most important R&D reference datasets in the world, and | everyone else looks to them for guidance. With that said, | the NIH also occasionally produces world class software | too (NCBI BLAST, etc.) although they do have some issues | with parts of their software engineering culture being a | bit out of date. | tayo42 wrote: | Using open source to judge quality seems wild. Maybe | people just have no interest in maintaining an open | source project. Looking from the outside at some of the | stuff people put up with, it doesn't look worth it at | all. I'll just work privately | 0xffff2 wrote: | As the sole maintainer of a popular open source NASA | project (and contributor to several others), I can say | that my open source work reflects very poorly on my work | overall. We have a real problem in that there is a drive | to open source things, but there is no money at all to | support open sourced work. As soon as the open sourced | work is no longer something I use day to day, I have to | either maintain it on my personal time or it gets | abandoned. | naveen99 wrote: | Maybe one day there will be futures for software engineer | contracts. the contracts are almost standardized on | levels.fyi | nix0n wrote: | > Google or Meta only employ a tiny fraction of them | | Yes, but they are competing for the same tiny fraction. | 202206241203 wrote: | Fighting for scraps that algotrading funds and seed-level | start-ups left :). | tagami wrote: | A haircut (10-20%?) would be good for all involved. There are | great employees and there are slackers in all fields. | tpmoney wrote: | This seems like something that should be expected? Every time the | WFH battle has come up over the last few years, there are always | people talking about how they're able to do all their days work | in 4 hours and spend the rest of the time idle "pretending to | work". Is it really surprising that as a result of this companies | are reevaluating how much slack time their employees have? | Especially as wages and demand for wages due to inflation have | spiked, you can probably shore up some of that demand just by | dropping some of those 4 hour employees and using their wages to | pay others to become 6 hour or 8 hour employees. Sure it's | unrealistic for a company to expect every employee is 100% | engaged 40 hours a week, especially in knowledge / creative work | we're sometimes unplugging and downtime is exactly what the job | requires. But it seems equally unrealistic to crow about how the | pandemic has demonstrated that WFH is perfectly fine and had no | negative impacts because everyone was already only putting in 20 | hours a week and not expect that to have caused companies to make | a shift. | MAGZine wrote: | I think we've built companies and cultures that are | incompatible with long-term employment and happiness. | | Anyone who joins a company can crank full 8+ hours a day for a | while to establish themselves (and a reputation). | | The "problem" is, as people establish themselves, the problem | domain becomes less exciting. There's less urgency to crank | indefinitely. They settle into a pattern that involves fewer | hours, though those hours are more productive because they know | the ropes. | | There is a sweet spot where someone knows enough to be | productive but isn't yet complacent. This is the spot that | every employer dreams of: employees cranking, full speed, | productively, for 8 hours. | | It's just not sustainable. You can fire people and try and keep | turning over staff such that everyone stays in that sweet spot, | but you'll eventually end up with a different sort of headache | when your staff has no organizational memory for why decisions | were made. The people who built things and have the long-term | visions have left, and those who pick up the torch try will | never have the same big-picture in their head. | | The challenging bit is how do you separate someone who works 3h | a day because that's all they can sustain (and they're just | being realistic), and those who work 3h a day, could work more, | but chooses not to? I'm not sure you want to force either out, | but can you incentivize the latter to produce more? | BlargMcLarg wrote: | Here's the real challenge: stop thinking in hours, limit | upper bounds so employees don't inevitably fall into a race | to the bottom (like what is happening now). | | If your 3-hour-could-be-8 made adequate contribution, | whatever that is, that's enough. If it takes them 8 to get to | where the other is, incentives will push them to do so. | zmgsabst wrote: | I think software is just an immature profession -- so we | don't have a good idea of what a day looks like. | | Looking at my day as a carpenter, then: | | - 30 minutes break | | - 30 minutes startup/cleanup | | - 1 hour moving stuff/between jobs | | - 6 hours ostensibly working; 4-5 hours focused | | And what I expect of SDEs, now: | | - 1 hour breaks | | - 1-2 hours communicate (email, CRs, meetings, etc) | | - 1 hour continuing education/corporate overhead | | - 4-5 hours writing code/tasks | | I'm always skeptical when I hear people are doing more than | around 4 hours of coding a day -- and start to wonder what's | being skipped. | treis wrote: | I think there's plenty of people that would crank out code* | given a sane supporting organization. The issue is that most | organizations aren't sane and there's little incentive to | crank out code. Incentives are generally (1) finish 5 points | of stories per week and (2) build a resume/promotion package. | Both of those sound okay but tend to be wrought with perverse | incentives. | | (1) leads you down the path of padding estimates so you don't | miss. It also means if you finish early you don't really want | to pull in more stories. That tells people you're padding | estimates and they'll push you to lower estimates or take on | more stories. Then when you need that padding it's not there. | So if you finish your work on Wednesday it's better to chill | and look busy instead of doing more. | | (2) is just obviously bad. Delivering complicated projects | and supervising other employees makes you look better. So | projects get complicated and teams get bloated. | | *Crank out code should probably be "build functionality | according to good practices" but doesn't really change the | point. | akmarinov wrote: | There's no way you can sustain 8 hours/day of productive work 5 | days a week as a developer. It's not working a field or packing | boxes, there's a mental component that gets exhausted over | time. | ren_engineer wrote: | burnout only happens if you are working on something you hate | and actively have to force yourself to work on it or have | external stress from bad coworkers, managers, or general life | stuff. I've worked 12+ hour days on side projects for fun and | felt fresh and mentally sharp because I enjoyed what I was | doing. | | The idea that the human brain hits some brick wall at the | scheduled 40 hour work week and can't do anymore thinking is | comical | fooster wrote: | speak for yourself? | akmarinov wrote: | Then you're not really doing software development, just | copying code off of google ;) | whateveracct wrote: | And more than that - it's abstract problem solving. Sometimes | the problem is never gonna have an answer until I am washing | my dishes after breakfast tomorrow. My subconscious & | creativity can't be sped up. | | It's this idiocy that you can convert time into software at a | fixed rate that got us into this mess. | jonny_eh wrote: | aka "The Mythical Man Month" [0] | | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month | whateveracct wrote: | I recently read through that book and it's nuts both how | prescient it is and how different some of the suggestions | are than what anyone now would consider. | | For instance, there was talk of a team structure with one | programmer and everyone else in specialized, supporting | roles. That wouldn't fly today because everyone is | obsessed with employee fungibility and bus factor. | twblalock wrote: | > That wouldn't fly today because everyone is obsessed | with employee fungibility and bus factor. | | Rightly so. Job hopping is much easier in the software | industry now than it was when that book was written. | Average tenure in software jobs is significantly lower | than the average for all professions, and even that | general average is only around 4 years. | tiahura wrote: | Biglaw attorneys routinely bill 2200 hours a year in 6 minute | increments. | | Add in nonbillable work and self-written off time, and many | of these attorneys work 60+ hour weeks. Plus, they do this | into their 50's. | sauruk wrote: | And everyone likes biglaw attorneys and thinks that they're | well adjusted people too | a_techwriter_00 wrote: | American lawyers, as a profession, have one of the highest | rates of alcohol abuse and mental illness in the country. | jcdavis wrote: | IANAL, but have family & friends in biglaw | | > Biglaw attorneys routinely bill 2200 hours a year in 6 | minute increments. | | A surprising portion of that work is random menial stuff, | they don't actually end up doing 40hr/week of mentally | demanding work. | | > Plus, they do this into their 50's. | | The ones that survive to make partner do. But its well- | known that BigLaw absolutely burns through associates. Very | few BigLaw associates make it past 35, most eventually | leave for saner pastures of corporate | counsel/government/etc jobs. | kongolongo wrote: | This analogy is interesting do you think there are some | lawyers that consider themselves 10xlawyers haha. It make | sense that a lot of it would be similar to documentation | and meetings and various agile ceremonies and not just | 2200 hours of straight legal argumentation and writing. | tiahura wrote: | Biglaw clients aren't suckers. They don't pay $800/hr for | agile ceremonies. They go over their bills with a fine | tooth comb and have ML systems to detect padding. | plonk wrote: | Does that job involve constant creativity, or is it more | about applying existing knowledge? I have no idea, but the | amount of knowledge that law students need to cram in a few | years makes me think it's a lot of the latter. | jelled wrote: | 6 minutes billed is rarely the same thing as 6 minutes | worked. | tiahura wrote: | Correct. It's usually like 30. | | You have to open the file, find the email you were going | to respond to, double check with whoever that the answer | is "yes", look up the other attorney's phone number, | double check your calendar to make sure the date works, | call you spouse to make sure they can pick up the kids | that day, and then call the other attorney. | | If you think Biglaw clients, with in house counsel that | used to be at biglaw, blindly pay padded bills at | $800/hr, you are mistaken. | catlifeonmars wrote: | Any idea why six minutes and not some other? | [deleted] | tiahura wrote: | It varies, but 6 min = 1/10th of an hour so it's pretty | common. | [deleted] | sunnyps wrote: | 0.1 hours? | molsongolden wrote: | 1/10 of an hour. | | Not sure if this is changing with all the time tracking | software now but it's easier to bill by tenths than it is | to track/calculate exact minutes and any larger unit | might involve too much rounding up. e.g. .1 for a quick | email reply is more palatable than a .25 (1/4 hour, | 15min) minimum. | bluefirebrand wrote: | Sure. I could do that too as a software engineer. | | How much you bill and how much you work aren't necessarily | the same. Why would you think they are? | tiahura wrote: | They're not the same. In addition to the 40-60 hours a | week of billable work, they do 10-20 hours of nonbillable | work as well. | [deleted] | marcus_holmes wrote: | The difference between working from home and working in the | office is not how many hours of productive work you do, it's in | what you do with the rest of the day. | | Every single study done on it shows that creative staff | (including engineers) are more productive working where they | are less disturbed, that open-plan offices are the least | productive environment, etc. So it's utterly unsurprising that | people get more productive working from home and can do 8 | hour's office work in 5 hours at home. | | But even aside from that, if you can complete your work in 6 | hours, but can't leave the office for another 2-4 hours because | of the office culture, then you'll spend those 2-4 hours doing | random stuff in the office. If you're at home, you can leave | Slack on and go do something useful. It's not only that WFH | gives people more time, it's that it removes the "you must | pretend to be busy for 25% of your workday" restriction. | | As always, a negative reaction to WFH is a sign of bad | management culture. Good managers are happy that their people | are getting more done and happier about it. Bad managers see | "they're only doing 20 hours a week if they work from home!" | and are angry about it. | jollyllama wrote: | So is it a question of the work day or where you work from? | frenchyatwork wrote: | > Every single study done on it shows that creative staff | (including engineers) are more productive working where they | are less disturbed, that open-plan offices are the least | productive environment, etc. | | Do you have any specific sources on hand (preferably a good | meta-study)? I've heard this claim a lot, and I'd like it to | be true, but I've never seen it sourced. Also, I feel like it | could depend a lot on the individual, but anecdote is not | data. | | And yes, open-plan offices truly suck. | dmitrygr wrote: | If there was slacking, who'd write all those chat apps? | fefe23 wrote: | 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 "developers" whose company calendar is 80% | filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything | done! | | Also remember that this is only half the problem. The other half | is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity | before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft | that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. I wouldn't be | surprised if of the productivity that is left, more than half | gets wasted on crufty software structures and writing code before | you understood the problem. | | And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be | not what we need. Wasting yet more productivity on working around | bad decisions from before we knew what we are actually building. | [deleted] | gonzo41 wrote: | I've seen companies where the leaders will only trust the | opinions of the consultants. Even if they are the same | conclusions of existing employees. | | Hired talent isn't magical but for some businesses the | consultant workers have an glow about them. The result is the | business effectively making their own workforce redundant | because they fear relying on them. And then morale tanks, and | people leave. | 999900000999 wrote: | >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 "developers" whose company calendar is | 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get | anything done! | | As long as you're not mean, you can hang out at most companies | for at least 6 months just doing nothing. | | I've been reprimanded before , when I took the initiative to | try and start building out a framework. I literally had nothing | else to do, but I was later told I should have waited until a | committee could be formed. | | Even if you barely do anything, at least you're not causing | trouble. In my career. I've worked with several abrasive angry | people, I've seen folks confront C level employees. | | Developers who cry about having to use a PC to write some.net | code and throw a temper tantrum. Threaten to just walk out | because some legacy code needed updating and they're so used to | having a precious Mac to code on. | | That said, I actually really like him how limited social | interactions are with remote work. I don't need to know your | political beliefs, I don't need to be your friend, I don't want | to get drinks with you, I want to do what is necessary for my | job. | | Corporate fluff plays a role. I imagine Google develops | products that will never be profitable just so they can look at | their shareholders and say, looky we do stuff aside from | search. | hef19898 wrote: | Not getting rid of "legacy" stuff that doesn't work is a, IMHO, | a version of throwing good moneybafter bad money. Instead of | acknowledging that the unusable code, or whatever, was a | crucial part of understanding the problem, and throw it out | once the problem was understood, people tend to build _upon_ | those not fit for purpose things... | colechristensen wrote: | Some of the most valuable work I've ever done was spending a | month creating something, throwing every byte away, and then | spending two weeks creating the same thing, much improved. | | The key to rework like this is you have to actually be able | to finish it and get rid of the old, instead of spending | months or years maintaining two half-baked versions of | something instead of just one. | stouset wrote: | Almost every single thing I build I throw away at least one | of them, sometimes two. | | The finished projects tend to stick around forever and, if | they need maintenance, it's adding a feature or two or | updating dependencies. | | I do backend work so this kind of workflow probably doesn't | work for customer-facing projects that need to iterate on | finding traction. But for something where the problem is | generally well defined and not likely to change drastically | in the short or medium term, it's amazing. I have | _multiple_ projects I've written that run on virtually | every machine (server and workstation) at my company | (former unicorn, current Fortune 500) that are effectively | "done" and only need to be redeployed a couple times a year | for dependency updates and preventing bitrot in general. | | Having worked like this, I can confidently say I will never | again remain on a team where this isn't the normal state of | affairs. | toss1 wrote: | YES!! | | Even coming from an attitude of being big on abstractions and | generalized/scaled solutions, I cannot overstate the | importance of writing a throw-away version at the outset. Hit | the highlights, write it fast & dirty, use it, extend it a | bit as you start to understand the system -- _then throw it | away_. Use _that_ knowledge to design and build your real | system, from scratch, but informed by your earned knowledge. | | >>agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before | you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that | you need to maintain and extend as you go on. | | And to this in the GP post, I think he identified a | fundamental problem with Agile. Its entire bias is to write | code fast, when the bias should be to avoid writing code -- | code is slow and habitat for bugs. Obviously everything | requires code, but it should be minimized, not maximized. Of | course, writing code quickly and seeing it run is satisfying, | but developers' dopamine hits shouldn't be the primary driver | of design & mgt - end performance should be, and that takes | careful thought of what can be eliminated, and basing that | thought on knowledge of a throw-away-version-1 is very | useful, and pays benefits to both the dev team and to users | for years. | ok123456 wrote: | Until your boss doesn't understand this concept and thinks | your prototype is a finished system, even after explaining | the fact it's just a demo that you made to help gather | requirements time-and-time-again. | hef19898 wrote: | Also goes the other way, developers believing something | is good while totally ignoring user feedback stating | otherwise. | | Admittesly so, you example so much more frequent. | abraae wrote: | > The management question, therefore, is not whether to | build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. | The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a | throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to | customers. | | Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on | Software Engineering | cassianoleal wrote: | Code is Liability, the Less the Better | | https://www.infoq.com/news/2011/05/less-code-is-better/ | jimjimjim wrote: | replacing the prototype is important, but you need enough | power in your org to be able to throw it away. 'nothing is | as permanent as a temporary solution' | [deleted] | coffeeisyummy wrote: | This iteration through pseudo productivity comes from | management's real world problem of demonstrating progress on | their projects. The promises of visibility on your development | team's productivity always turns Agile into a steaming pile of | burn-downs and story points. | | "No one has done true Agile" is the "No one has done true | Communism" for software engineering. Because, in the real | world, no one uses Agile in an ideal environment free of | pressures like deadlines or budgets. | jimjimjim wrote: | exactly. the sales department has targets for the quarter and | they won't give 2 damns about how many story points your team | got through this sprint. They want on this date or else. | bogota wrote: | I just know of at least 20 people left my previous company | because we had nothing to do. Every meeting was trying to | figure out what the direction was. As an engineer when the | company gets to the size of 1000+ you are largely not at all | empowered to solve this problem but have to rely on your | manager or in some cases your managers manager. | | But come time for performance review you get bad marks. If you | think that many people are just lazy for no reason you have no | right to be managing or running a business. | | Sitting around pretending to work all day is a recipe for | depression and burnout. No one wants that. | 2muchcoffeeman wrote: | I'm not sure why you needed to come around. | | Leadership signs off on hiring. Leadership signs off on | installing far reaching processes that inhibit devs from making | contributions. | | I'm sure some people try to find ways to cheat the system. But | I find it hard to believe that it's a wide spread problem. Even | people doing the minimum work possible probably have a ton of | other interests or ideas and would rather be engaged with their | work somewhat and learning things than idling. | rubiquity wrote: | I'm surprised to see this is the top voted comment because it | is completely off the mark in this case and anyone that has | spent any amount of time reading Blind (a website dedicated | to... I'm not sure what exactly) knows it. | | While Facebook/Meta, Google, and others have always paid | comparatively well, in the past 2-3 years the pay shot up even | higher and the only price of admission is supreme obedience to | "grinding LeetCode." This hysteria created an entire culture of | pay chasers that congregate on that Blind website with little | regard for anyhing other than compensation. These people, who I | consider to be among the most toxic people in tech, have a | singular focus on pay and it is not at all surprising that when | put in minimal supervision environments they choose to merely | exist and collect said paycheck. CEOs lamenting this are merely | reaping what they sow. | jerglingu wrote: | Blind is interesting. I'm grateful for the insights into | total compensation it granted me, and Blind combined with a | managerial stint gave me a very solid feel for both industry | and company-specific bands. I also got notice of an impending | reorg that was coming my way, and started early in looking | for another home. | | On the other hand, it only exacerbated the cynicism and | burnout covid and WFH brought. Trolls are rewarded with | attention through "engagement" with their incendiary posts, | misinformation and speculation passed as dogma are rampant, | and as you mentioned the collective priority in "the | community" is this egocentric worship of money. It reminds me | of the subreddit /r/relationships, where the number one piece | of advice is to obviously break up or divorce because you're | getting screwed over. Blind's number one piece of advice is | to obviously grind leetcode and start interviewing because | you're getting screwed over. | rr888 wrote: | TC or GTFO. | | Honestly I've been in markets where this worked out. You pay | a lot of money to get someone good who's motivated and does | great work. Tech recently though has been a game where you | get a high paying job and you just spend a year trying to get | the next one rather than working. | harpiaharpyja wrote: | I thought the point of iterating early is that sometimes | writing code is the best way to gain understanding of the | problem (depending on the kind of problem). You're supposed to | throw that stuff away... it's iteration... | rr888 wrote: | > Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight | | I read loads of blogs and posts where people are loving WFH, | doing very little and openly recommending tech career to others | because its so great. They might not think they're a dead | weight, they just think thats what modern working is like. | hcarvalhoalves wrote: | > The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo | productivity before you actually understood the problem, | accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you | go on. I wouldn't be surprised if of the productivity that is | left, more than half gets wasted on crufty software structures | and writing code before you understood the problem. | | I've seen this increase proportional to the number of | employees. People start trying to worry more about perception | of progress by tracking proxy metrics, because the large the | company, the harder it is to prove how each one contributes | directly to the bottom line. | wsc981 wrote: | Managers also seem to love these proxy metrics, so delivering | these metrics to management (as a dev) can be a good way to | get noticed. | icedchai wrote: | I worked at a company where I'd have at least 2 or 3 days a | week where we had 4 hours of meetings. It was pure hell. Half | the time I wouldn't even pay attention. I'd be browsing reddit | or HN. | | You hit the nail on the head with agile. I remember writing | some code only to have the whole thing ripped out "next sprint" | because nobody bothered to think a couple weeks ahead. Or | starting an integration project with a third party, only to | find out they're not ready, so we have no API that actually | works. So we waste time mocking it out, only to find out the | docs they gave us don't match reality. | commandlinefan wrote: | > company calendar is 80% filled with meetings | | The typical expectation on salaried employees is that you spend | your 8-5 in meetings and then you 5-midnight actually doing | programming work. | thefourthchime wrote: | There is a disease where people add lots of people to | meetings that don't really have to be there. Then people have | a compulsion to go to every meeting they are invited to. | | One of the best decisions I ever made was deciding to stop | going to meetings unless I knew I had to. Turns out, nobody | really cared, and if they really needed me they could also | message me on slack and I can pop in. | ryneandal wrote: | Typical where? I've _never_ had to deal with such a schedule. | zhengyi13 wrote: | When I've shoulder-surfed my managers and PMs for roughly | the last ten years, they're all like that: wall-to-wall | meetings. Any technical work they do (and here at least, | (T)PMs are expected to potentially contribute technical | work) is done outside 9-5. | | Certainly there are techniques to mitigate this, but I see | it, at least. | treis wrote: | A former coworker called these people professional | meeters. Had an EM like that. Either he was in a meeting | or he was walking around and talking the ear off of | whichever unfortunate soul he bumped into. Tangible | output was basically 0. | daviddever23box wrote: | Except that's not a reasonable ask when you have a global | presence and meetings into the evening. Saying no to an over- | scheduled calendar is the mechanism by which you gain control | of your life. | | My measure of a meeting's worth is: if you were shackled to a | chair for the scheduled duration of this meeting, would you | get anything useful done, from a discussion perspective? If | not, simply decline the invite; your brain is not important | enough to have been productive in that context. | pjmlp wrote: | Certainly not in most European countries. | dboreham wrote: | > agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before | you actually understood the problem | | This kind of "development process theater" causes terrible | cognitive dissonance. | weard_beard wrote: | I'm intrigued by this statement. Maybe we run an unorthodox | version of Agile, but I'm a solutions architect with imposter | syndrome (which is why I clicked this link) and I spend about | 3/4 of each day in meetings with PMs and SSTs (Business | Analyst) generating a backlog and acceptance criteria that's | structured and detailed enough that our developers are | generally happy if they get to choose the variable names. | bcrosby95 wrote: | This isn't anything like how a place like Google or | Facebook works. | | I would guess that the vast majority of developers (I | daresay 100% of them) posting on HN would not like to work | at a place like that. | noirbot wrote: | I think it's a mix of both - I'd kill for anyone at my | current job to spend more than a bare minimum of time on | their acceptance criterion so I don't just feel like I'm | writing code and hoping it does vaguely what the person | wants. What the GP is describing feels a bit too far in | the other direction, but I'd almost rather it trend | towards having an over-prescriptive ticket I can push | back on then playing telephone with another department | because they gave me 3 sentences of writeup for a | month/quarter long project. | codegeek wrote: | "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 to do something meaningful but are stuck with red tape. I | was one of those and quit my high paying Investment Bank Tech | Job to start my own thing. I was getting paid big as a | consultant and once my main project finished, they just wanted | me around because traders loved me. I literally had to find | things to do every day otherwise it was soooo boring unless | something broke. | bartread wrote: | Sure those people exist: but there are plenty of people who | aren't that way. | | I've worked a couple of different places where the systems, | processes and structures in place effectively rendered me as | deadweight. In both cases it was incredibly stressful and had | a profoundly negative impact on my mental health. In the | first case I hung around for quite a while hoping things | would get better (because they had been better in the past) | but, actually, they got worse, so eventually I left. In the | second case I stuck it out for only a few months before | leaving. Not soon enough unfortunately: I think it was a | significant contributor to losing a relationship. | | For a lot of people I've worked with over the course of my | 20-odd year career not being able to make a meaningful | contribution is intolerable over the medium to long term, and | not much fun in the short term either. Of course, there have | been useless layabouts, but they've been vastly in the | minority, and tend to be spotted and managed out. | codegeek wrote: | Agreed. I edited my comment to talk about the ones who do | want to do something (I was one of those at my last | corporate job) | goodpoint wrote: | >> "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. | | No, the parent is right. Psychological research shows clearly | that people don't want to be dead weights. They lose | motivation and become burned out for many reasons. | | And it's entirely the company responsibility to address the | problem. | mortenjorck wrote: | The two types you describe can also be the same person at | different times. | | At my last company, my workload started to thin out | considerably. Initially, it was pretty great having so much | free time, even as I made my extra bandwidth clear to my | manager (while being careful not to overstate the case!). | There was a period of novelty to coasting, but after a few | months, it began to wear off. | | My ideal workload may not be being plugged in a full 40+ | hours a week, but I learned I also need something far north | of 4 hours a week. When a combination acquisition and spinoff | took even more off my plate, it looked like I'd have months | ahead of very nearly nothing at all. With a promise of no | layoffs post-transaction, it looked like a coaster's dream. | | Instead, I left. | e40 wrote: | I think it varies widely by job. I've met few programmers, | percentages wise, that want to be dead weight. At generic | office jobs (where my SO works) it seems to be the norm, and | it's a problem for her because she's not like that and people | load her up with work because they know it will be done right | and on time. | flybrand wrote: | 100% | | Working in a +200 yr old manufacturer, and some entire teams | may fit that definition. | fefe23 wrote: | 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 pay is not enough to | really get them invested in the work. | | The fact that they needed these excuses tells me they felt | what they did to be morally wrong and didn't really want to | be dead weight. | | I personally have done a few projects that turned out to be | purely compliance based, and had no merit whatsoever. I | remember the feeling of wasting my life to be absolutely soul | crushing and I have been avoiding that kind of project as if | my life depended on it. | | Your mileage may vary. | BeetleB wrote: | > 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 | | Can definitely speak to these cases - especially where you | do great work and have a narrative that it was | unappreciated - and clearly see lesser performing or less | impressive colleagues getting ahead. For a lot of people, | it takes only a few instances of this to switch to "I'll do | the bare minimum not to get fired - why sacrifice much of | my life and mental energy for this?" | | I've been there a few times, and to speak to your point: I | decided that instead of being a dead weight I should just | look for another job where I don't feel this way. I can say | that amongst my peers, that behavior is an exception. Most | people who become deadweights will remain that way. It's | work to find a new job, and you may have to move, etc. | Amusingly enough, Leetcode style interviews are effective | at ensuring deadweights remain so. | deeptote wrote: | > Can definitely speak to these cases - especially where | you do great work and have a narrative that it was | unappreciated - and clearly see lesser performing or less | impressive colleagues getting ahead. | | I did great work for a company and got fired... because I | took a freelance w2 contract in my spare time. The | company didn't even know that I'd taken on the role, and | the role had actually finished, when they somehow did | find out and I got my marching papers. | | FUCK working hard and FUCK doing "good" work. | ipaddr wrote: | How did they find out? | BeetleB wrote: | Personally, I think disallowing other work should be | illegal. Having said that: What was the policy at your | workplace for other work? In my company it's clearly | allowed if it's in a different industry - although | they've not given clear guidance on whether I need to | _disclose_ it in those cases. | WalterBright wrote: | People who do things they know are wrong will always | conjure up an explanation that absolves them of any | culpability. They'll even believe it themselves. | | For example, people who steal office supplies from work | always have a good reason they tell themselves. | aydyn wrote: | Or did a huge amount of work on a project, didn't get | properly credited or worse, had their credit stolen by some | other employee. | | When there's little correlation between amount of effort | and advancement as is very often the case, it's justified | to just cruise. | | I don't see it as "morally wrong but they didn't really | want to be dead weight" when it is a justified response. | depereo wrote: | I turned into dead weight once during a hostile takeover of | the company I was working for. It was pretty shit, and I'm | glad I moved on after a few months of being unproductive. | Management removed our ability to move forward on any | existing work, and allocated no new work, and rejected any | proposals from anyone from the 'old' company. | | Wound up spending most of my (remote) work day occasionally | checking my work laptop for emails, working on personal | projects on my personal laptop and gardening or doing some | DIY fixes on our old house. | | Felt bad the entire time and finding a new job was a huge | weight off my shoulders. | nkrisc wrote: | I had a coworker who ended up in a similar situation. At | one point they were almost literally being paid to do | _nothing_. They eventually stopped even going in to the | office all while collecting a pay check. As nice as that | sounds, it was still not a great situation because they | didn 't know how long it would last and figured | eventually, without warning, they'd be dropped. They | ended up leaving on their own to actually _do something_ | and have a more stable job. | tmaly wrote: | If you thing about what limited time we have on this | earth, it seems like to better choice to find something | you enjoy in the shortest amount of time. | sokoloff wrote: | Through a weird sequence of events, a group of us ended | up working through a consulting company re-billing | arrangement for a large financial services company that | was closing our office. The "suits" needed us on payroll | to feel secure that our code would keep working, so we | got promised our annual bonus (substantial) if we worked | until X date. The tech leaders hated that we existed at | all and so gave us no work. We might have worked 40 hours | in 4.5 months (total, not per week). | | Bonuses eventually hit our account and we all resigned | serially; literally a line outside the manager's door | waiting to resign. | | It sucked; was so bad that one colleague didn't want to | Google something one evening "because he needed something | to do tomorrow at work". | lhorie wrote: | People will always make up reasons if the tone of the | conversation feels adversarial, but just spend a week in | r/cscareerquestions to see the unfiltered sentiment: lots | of people literally bragging about working 30 or even 20 | hours per week as a full time employee, or who explicitly | call out "slacking off" as a reason for preferring WFH. | "Rest and vest". Etc. | feet wrote: | Or maybe those are just the people who spend time on | reddit disproportionately, it could be sampling error | vehementi wrote: | Yeah, but the claim was that nobody was like this, while | there are obviously a bunch of people _explicitly_ doing | this | feet wrote: | What percentage of the population is that person's cutoff | for saying "nobody"? My assumption is that it likely was | not literal | | If 3/80000 people do something, is the behavior | significant or relevant? | Beldin wrote: | ...explicitly _claiming_ to do this. | | I don't know that subreddit; in general this sort of | thing could become the thing being bragged about in a | community, irrespective of reality. | darth_avocado wrote: | 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 the unreasonable | expectations that are set for them. You could be dying of | cancer or have lost a child, and they will get rid of you | the moment they can do so without breaking the law, and in | some cases even break the law in the hopes that you'd not | pursue any legal action. Nah don't work hard, work smart, | for yourself. | AmericanChopper wrote: | > I have met a few of those people, but every single one of | them needed a justification. | | This isn't true at all in my experience. I've contracted at | many places that simply had a culture of avoiding work. | Where a majority of the permanent employees hardly do any | work, their main focus is coming up with reasons why | problems are somebody else's problems to solve, and | avoiding accountability for anything that goes wrong. The | pandemic and WFH has made this a lot worse in many | companies. Out of the dozens of large orgs I've contracted | to, far more of them had these problems than didn't. | my_usernam3 wrote: | My millage is that it's not absolute "dead weight". It's | more wanting limited responsibility and tasks that require | limited scope/time spent, but does actually contribute, | just a much smaller scale than others. | | > The fact that they needed these excuses tells me they | felt what they did to be morally wrong and didn't really | want to be dead weight. | | My guess from your comment is that you judge them for being | slackers, and the feel obligated to explain to YOU that its | not morally correct. Personally, I have no qualm with those | that want to drift around megacorps while collecting a nice | paycheck. | throw_nbvc1234 wrote: | Do you feel the same way about people who put effort in | but are not skilled enough to contribute (or make things | worse by trying)? | cutemonster wrote: | > people who put effort in ... make things worse | | Dead weight? Sounds more like friendly antimatter | | GP: | | > > I have no qualm with those that want to drift around | megacorps | | For me, that depends on what the company is doing. Let's | say it's mobile games or quant trading -- then, slacking | at work in a way just gives people more time away from | the computer (fewer games to play?). And changes which | ones of the rich people, get richer. | | Then what does it matter. | | Whilst if one is working for a hospital or a stopping- | online-manipulation department, then, in such cases, | slacking is sad, not good for society, right | my_usernam3 wrote: | > Whilst if one is working for a hos, pital or a | stopping-online-manipulation department, not good for | society, right | | Oh definitely. I'm under the (maybe wrong) assumption | that the majority of people are not doing this. I believe | most my peers in the silicon valley bubble I live in | aren't really moving needles that benefit humanity. | dominotw wrote: | > I have met a few of those people, but every single one of | them needed a justification. | | Nah man. They just want to chillax. I know because i was | one of them at some of my jobs. I don't get any | satisfaction from crud/etl type jobs at all. I just want to | a paycheck to fund my lifestyle and hobbies. | outworlder wrote: | > There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight | just to float around in a company | | Not really. Even they will carve out some niche and pretend | (even to themselves) to be doing useful work. Middle managers | love to schedule irrelevant meetings, but they will provide | some business justification to themselves and to others. | You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some | internal app by themselves. | | It's very rare that employees are just twiddling their thumbs | and doing nothing all day. Specially if we are talking about | a highly skilled workforce. I've seen that more often on | boring entry level jobs - because the jobs are already boring | by nature, so doing nothing and doing something is not much | of a difference anyway. | chasebank wrote: | I probably know north of 30 people in sales, all in my | somewhat close friend circle. They all brag about not | working and making money. I think it's part of the sales | culture. It's like a badge of honor to not work hard and | make money. Hell, I don't blame them. Visit any golf course | since covid and you'll see tee time and tee time stacked | with people 'working from home'. | jrh206 wrote: | I usually assume that I can't take sales people at face | value. If it's a badge of honour, they're incentivised to | say that they don't work hard even if they are in fact | actually working hard (this includes pretending to enjoy | golf). | | Having said that, 30 people is a lot of people, so I'm | inclined to accept your assessment at face value. | Tehdasi wrote: | > Even they will carve out some niche and pretend (even to | themselves) to be doing useful work. ... You'll find the | odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by | themselves. | | In my experience, internal apps need far more love. | Maintaining internal apps is far more useful than most | 'real' work, just because it can be a multiplier on so much | other 'real' work. | barking_biscuit wrote: | >You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some | internal app by themselves | | This. | closeparen wrote: | In particular, people who never really figured out how to do | more than bare minimum technical work tend to fail upwards | into primarily "collaborative" roles. | Spivak wrote: | Unless I actually have substantive impact -- like truly | meaningful like people not one bacon distance away from me | really feel it you're getting the bare minimum. | | This is the downside of trying to make knowledge workers a | commodity and replaceable -- work gets coasting and my side | projects get my real creativity. | closeparen wrote: | I'm not talking about people who have technical side | projects. | Silverback_VII wrote: | 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. | Spivak wrote: | > 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 architected ball of | chewing gum of twine spooky action at a distance with no | isolation between components (usually because "DRY") which | is impossible to reason about unless you wrote it. | | That dev becomes insanely productive in that codebase, the | hero of to all managers, and everyone grinds to a halt gets | demotivated because they can't tackle anything ambitious. | lowercased wrote: | I've _been_ that person in a couple of projects, and it | wasn 't _just_ because I went off and did my own thing. | In at least one case the other people on the team were | simply _not_ very capable. As in... I 've been building | web applications for 25 years, and some of the other | folks on the team came out of a bootcamp. And... they | don't talk. | | "Please, joe, let's connect and you can follow along with | what I'm doing". Silence. | | "Hey, dave, I see the PR is only a few days late. We | still have some time left, can you write a test for it?" | | I can _get stuff done_ or I can 'corral and build up' | the others, but I can't do both. If you want stuff _done_ | by a deadline, and you will not discipline the non- | contributors (discipline doesn 't mean fire, but it might | mean "you have to come to these meetings and pair and | follow along and document and write tests")... what's | left? | | FWIW, I know the difference between decent teams and non- | decent teams. The non-decent ones were poorly managed, | largely because management could not determine who was | skilled and who wasn't. The decent teams I've been on | were situations where I still generally had more overall | experience (function of age) but the other less- | experienced people will still good, engaged, and already | contributing, and were measurably improving month to | month. | mlword wrote: | It is one thing if they don't talk. It is even worse if | they have no experience but thousands of suggestions that | don't work. And you have to debunk every of these | suggestions to management while keeping the progress | going. | | Often, if the work horse leaves, no one is able to keep | the project going or rewrite the project from scratch. | They should be able to do the latter if their suggestions | are so great and they have been kept back. But they | cannot. | logicchains wrote: | Animal Farm was an allegory for communist dictatorships, | and most large organisations are internally run like | communist dictatorships. | zeruch wrote: | "Plenty" is not a good measure, and often seems more based on | role and type of firm than just related to a lack of drive. | | I've observed whole teams that are effectively 'dead weight' | and ones where there is all killer, no filler. Of the DWs | I've seen, many are DW not always by choice, but because | other factors shove them into odd corners and they can't | figure out (or are too constrained by other factors) | | You are never going to 100% all-in motivation even from top | performers in perpetuity, and even anecdotally most people | don't want to be moribund for decades on end, and certainly | not the majority of workers. | colechristensen wrote: | If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, | I'll happily take the deal. As long as that's the actual | acknowledged situation and not "most of your job is | pretending to work and making people think you're important". | | I wonder how successful a lot of companies would be if they | openly cut required hours in half. | onion2k wrote: | _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. | granshaw wrote: | Few people understand how much of a golden ticket this | would be... | | Do you have any aspirations to build something of your | own at all, whether profitable or not? Well you've now | been given 300k/year of funding without giving up any | equity, with the only condition that you put in 4hrs/week | for your "job" | | Or maybe you like fixing houses? Same thing, etc etc | colechristensen wrote: | I am more than capable of finding other things I value to | do with my time. Not everyone is that way, especially | when peoples lives are set up from a very young age to | "work" for a third of the hours in their life. | FridgeSeal wrote: | Maybe? But not until I've spent a while doing the whole | 4-hours thing. | | If I'm working 4-hours a week, that's a 4-days a week I | can be skiing. And reading, and hanging out with friends, | and working on actually interesting code projects that | aren't beholden to the whims and timelines of a company. | I'd absolutely do that for a while. | ummonk wrote: | Are you incapable of doing something you actually care | about with the freed up 36 hours? | feet wrote: | Why can't it be a job you care about 4 days per week? | malermeister wrote: | I've come to enjoy doing things other than coding more | than I enjoy writing code, but they don't pay nearly as | well when done professionally. I'd rather code for four | hours and then do those things with the free time. | iainmerrick wrote: | In addition to the good points made in other replies, | there just aren't many jobs like that available! | "Something you actually care about", I mean, rather than | just "something that's reasonably interesting to work on | and not actively bad". | | And not many pay $300K. | refulgentis wrote: | At a FAANG and I can tell you it's not nearly so positive | as this. | | It was shocking coming from startup world. | | It's not so much "gee I only have 4 hours of work to do | this week" | | It's...well, it's impossible to say how long it takes to do | anything in particular, so I shouldn't feel stressed trying | to get it done... | | oh there's actually no real management style/pressure to | get things done here? | | Promo is seniority-based? | | There's silly unspoken rules like after you get promoted, | you're _guaranteed_ a middling performance rating because | its an easy horsetrade to do? | | Your manager doesn't have to argue $X was super important | and strategic and this newly promoted character needs a | better rating, and the other manager doesn't need to argue | $Y needs to keep a high rating to show continued momentum | in his growth, they just do it. | | There's no way to rebel against this system, or work within | it, other than transfer companies? | | It's a rather horrific situation and I don't think it's | helping anyone or anyone is particularly satisfied with it. | The problem is, any other solution is worse and will hurt | The Vibes in the short run. Interesting to see Zuck move | towards Dark Zuck and say things I've never heard at FAANG | endtime wrote: | Sounds like Google, specifically. I don't think Amazon or | Meta or Netflix is like this. Don't know about Apple. | nr2x wrote: | I don't see how giving an up-leveled employee time to | adjust to a new responsibility scope is a bad thing. | | Working under conditions of pressure and stress provides | few long term benefits and is the refuge of those who | don't have the smarts to perform well and need to look | like they do. | [deleted] | baobabKoodaa wrote: | > I don't see how giving an up-leveled employee time to | adjust to a new responsibility scope is a bad thing. | | It's not a bad thing, but the parent you are replying to | never said otherwise. They were talking about a _fake_ | performance rating that is given for political reasons. | Spivak wrote: | Anyone who thinks that performance ratings aren't dog and | pony shows have drunk the corporate Kool-Aid. Either you | have a manager that likes you and will play the game to | give you the best politically feasable ratings because | it's the tool they have as middle management to keep you | around or you will toil to meet whatever arbitrary | expectations someone with authority but no power has and | you should run. | lazyasciiart wrote: | I have a bad habit of working on important things that | don't actually glitter, unblocking other teams and people | constantly and recommending against shiny cool solutions, | so promotions this year went to my two colleagues who | took a glittery project, recommended a shiny shit idea, | and have now delivered shit covered in glitter that is | immediately getting sales/support feedback like um but it | doesn't do what we needed and it is missing what we asked | for. | | I complained about a bug that blocked our CI for a week, | which I'd shepherded around; that the company needs | people to be prepared to work on things that they "don't | own" because surprise, we don't have anyone assigned to | owning the interaction of those six systems! _Actual | response_ : well, you didn't have to do that work. | | Now let me go back to waiting for anyone to respond to | any of the _EIGHT_ CRs I have out, just as well I 'm | working from home so I can use the time to clean the | toilet. | bambataa wrote: | I was in a team like that. One person in particular would | pick ambitious tasks, do a completely inadequate | implementation, reject all feedback and then leave | everyone else to deal with the production outages. | | Unfortunately management only saw the "picks ambitious | tasks" and were blind to everything else. | | You can't really blame people for responding to absurd | incentives in absurd ways. | Spivak wrote: | Ya know what sitting in the manager chair other than not | taking feedback I would probably give them kudos too. | | Being the person who comes up with mediocre solutions to | hard problems is way more impressive than the guy who has | expertly designed solutions to easy problems. One of the | devs on my team is like that. Everything he writes is | like 30% broken from the get go but all his stuff ships | and nobody else has the moxy to blindly charge into the | unknown and not get stuck because their afraid to cut | themselves on edge cases. | artificial wrote: | Just curious, what kind of software is this? Is it ETL | stuff or what? | colechristensen wrote: | >Now let me go back to waiting for anyone to respond to | any of the EIGHT CRs I have out, just as well I'm working | from home so I can use the time to clean the toilet. | | There's nothing like being annoyed at waiting for a | blocker to motivate me to do the dishes. Second best | motivation is being in a boring meeting I'm not really | needed in. | granshaw wrote: | Yeah it's the "pretending to work" part that's soul | crushing. If you could be explicit that "this is what I | need to do this week, it'll only take 4 hours. The rest of | the time I'll be available but I won't do make-work", | that'd be awesome. | | Also a lot of people don't realize that being available for | questions or if something comes up IS work - it severely | limits what you can do with that time even if working | remotely. | | So were you near your computer 9-5 today and could respond | on short notice? Well then you worked 8 hours basically. | And that availability itself is hugely valuable to | employers. | travisd wrote: | Required reading on this subject should be "Bullshit | Jobs" by David Graeber. | tomuli38 wrote: | Not only is the availability, but so is the image. I had | a CEO who loved the image of an office full of people all | day, all week. I've been working remotely since then. I | think he just wanted to feel important. | colechristensen wrote: | Happens a lot. | | It's also a problem with the Navy. | | More, smaller, near-coast ("littoral") ships would be | much more effective tools for wartime and for maintaining | peace on the seas. There are some. Acquisitions has been | fraught with problems and weighty opinions of captains | and admirals who want to feel important on enormous | ships. Enormous ships which aren't as useful in the day | to day operations in the Navy and would be extremely | vulnerable at war with modern weaponry. | | A lot of what gets done around the world is heavily | influenced by how a decision will influence the feelings | of people in power. | trhway wrote: | >would be extremely vulnerable at war with modern | weaponry. | | the point of those enormous ships is to minimize the | chances of war happening. | | >More, smaller, near-coast ("littoral") ships would be | much more effective tools for wartime | | Russia lost the big ship on the Black Sea and have the | situation you're describing - ie. their fleet is several | missile frigates, and such their situation is very weak. | The fleet can't really operate. (And with recent | successful attack on a Russian airfield in Crimea the air | support for those remaining ships is expected to dwindle | which will be a clear show case of how [in]capable fleet | without air support (which we do actually know since WWII | really), and that air support usually, until you operate | near your shores, can only come from aircraft carriers) | adolph wrote: | _Material affluence for the majority has gradually shifted | people's orientation toward work--from what Daniel Yankelovich | called an "instrumental" view of work, where work was a means | to an end, to a more "sacred" view, where people seek the | "intrinsic" benefits of work. "Our grandfathers worked six days | a week to earn what most of us now earn by Tuesday afternoon," | says Bill O'Brien, former CEO of Hanover Insurance. "The | ferment in management will continue until we build | organizations that are more consistent with man's higher | aspirations beyond food, shelter and belonging."_ | | Senge, Peter M.. The Fifth Discipline (p. 16). Crown. Kindle | Edition. | giantg2 wrote: | Some company cultures will punish people for taking the | initiative too. | devwastaken wrote: | Large corps are propped up by intellectual property law and | economies of scale. They do not hold their market positions on | their own merit. If we remove IP laws, we will have another | golden age of tech innovation tomorrow. | diordiderot wrote: | Yeah but then no one would invent anything because that's the | only reason anyone does anything! | | _glances nervously at FOSS, science, art, & philosophy_ | rajeshp1986 wrote: | What I noticed is it is not employee laziness but the FAANG | companies have ton of dead weight in terms of future projects | or project features which never get released. One of my co- | workers was working on a feature which was shelved after | working 2+ years on it. He lost motivation after that and | coasted the rest of the time doing minimum work. I think FAANG | companies have lot of PMs and top management who are as | clueless and lazy as engineers. | lazyasciiart wrote: | ah, yes...six years at MSFT, only one year working on code | that eventually shipped | goodpoint wrote: | MSFT is hardly a FAANG | Der_Einzige wrote: | Why? Their stock performs just as well, and they pay | better than Amazon, better benefits, all with a | reputation for legendary good WLB. | | Amazon is hardly a FAANG | wildrhythms wrote: | 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? | osigurdson wrote: | The sad part about excessive meetings is often they are not | enough on their own. In between all of the the pointless | meetings, smaller, less formal, often unscheduled, real | meetings where actual decisions are made still need to happen. | dleslie wrote: | > It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar | is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get | anything done! | | IMHO, if you're a developer and have more than 8h of meetings a | week then you are no longer a developer. In the worst case, you | are a body to fill a seat in a meeting to fluff the self- | importance of your management. In the best case, you're on | track to being management yourself. | asdjjsvnn wrote: | Part of the problem is also the incentives and performance axes | that are defined to evaluate work/productivity. | | At a higher experience level, you are expected not just to | churn out code but also to demonstrate performance on axes such | as influence, scope, leadership etc. In fact, if you just churn | out code and not perform on other axes, you are under | performing under other axes. So, I could solve a particular | problem for my team quickly with no dependencies with other | teams/people, but I am now forced to go to other teams and look | if they have similar problems to solve and then work on getting | alignment on a common solution which would work as a common | framework for both team's use cases. While this in theory is | good to have one generic solution for a set of similar | problems, once a huge company has incentivized this, lot of | people are trying to build the next standard/framework and as | you'd expect adoption becomes a problem because everyone is | trying to evangelize their own framework. The end result, you | suddenly have to work with x number of people and let everyone | align with what you are doing, that takes time, then you | implement something and now have to convince others to use your | framework, which again takes time. Add these dependencies and | you have what you currently have, a mechanism that moves slowly | with most people involved feel helpless and think if it was | just up to them they would have it all done in a few days. | PKop wrote: | >Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight. | | Of course this isn't true. | g051051 wrote: | > The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo | productivity before you actually understood the problem, | accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you | go on. | | Well said! | commandlinefan wrote: | As Dilbert says: "our boss can't judge the quality of our | work, but he knows when it's late". | cm2187 wrote: | It's not just meetings. I spend 80% of my energy fighting | internal resistance, in the form of moronic decision, moronic | policies, short signtedness and incompetence. It's not even bad | will or people deliberately sabotaging the business. Just | frictions grinding the organisation to a quasi standstill, | people taking principled approaches to cover their own ass | irrespective of the consequences, or being so far remote from | the ground that they have no idea of the consequences of their | decisions. And in the middle of that you have some courgageous | busy bees trying to make things happen despite this internal | resistance. Many have given up. I am somewhere in the middle. | goodpoint wrote: | > agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity | | In most companies agile/scrum meetings are make-believe work. | barrenko wrote: | The exact point of a big company is that nothing gets done. | abledon wrote: | > Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight. | | Have you worked in Government? | | edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26727803 for an | example | wbsss4412 wrote: | RE: your example, what exactly does that example have to do | with the federal government? The guy threatened to sue, those | laws apply the same in the private sector. | abledon wrote: | > I was told by our HR department that we could get rid of | him, or at least demote him, if he failed two annual | reviews in a row. Eventually he did, but we were then told | by HR that he had to fail two annual reviews in a row in | the same way; if he failed twice, but differently in the | second year, that didn't count | | Government HR processes make it _very_ difficult to be | fired. | matsemann wrote: | I hate this take of "gobernment bad, capitalism good". As a | consultant having worked for both large government agencies | and large corporations, they are all the same. | lliamander wrote: | > As a consultant having worked for both large government | agencies and large corporations, they are all the same. | | Large corporations are often indistinguishable from | government agencies in part because all large, centralized | organizations suffer similar problems, and in part because | they become intertwined. The only difference is often | whether your prison walls are gray or beige. | | But capitalism is not just "large corporations". Capitalism | is also startups, freelancers, small businesses, | "mittlestand", cooperatives, family farms, etc. It is | respecting property rights, and managing behavior through | contracts and social norms rather than reams of | regulations. Those things definitely are superior to | government. | jononomo wrote: | I completely agree -- but it is remarkable how many | Americans have bought into this idea that "government is | bad". | just_steve_h wrote: | We'll, it is true that our "ownership class" and its | media and political mouthpieces have spent the better | part of the last two generations drilling this notion | into people's skulls will all the considerable power at | their disposal. | kortilla wrote: | That's not the take, that's just how you read it in a knee | jerk reaction. It's a comment about government employee | productivity, not whether the government is bad. | | You can both believe that government employees are | extremely inefficient and that the government is good to | run certain things. | | >As a consultant having worked for both large government | agencies and large corporations, they are all the same. | | Absolutely not. Apart from catastrophic budget crises, a | government doesn't risk bankruptcy and a department has no | need to bring in more than it costs. There is no real floor | for how slow employees can be because the agency is getting | its money either way. | wbsss4412 wrote: | I've personally never witnessed this, and I've worked in | government and know people who work in government in other | contexts, and I haven't ever heard of an actual anecdote to | that effect either. | | I'm sure it exists, but the meme seems overblown. From what | I've seen, government is more frugal than the private sector | day to day, the main difference is that the government ends | up supporting unprofitable programs and has additional | burdensome regulations that drive up costs (eg buy American) | lliamander wrote: | I _definitely_ saw a lot of dead weight and waste in | government work, more than I have ever seen in the private | sector. | | Part of it comes down to fact that it's harder to fire | people. | | Another part of it is that bureaucracies end up becoming | dominated by people who serve the survival of the bureau | (and it's budget) at the expense of its actual mission. | | Another part is that government agencies are just not as | easy to hold to account - with a private business your | customer can often take their business elsewhere (and if | they can't, well, the government just might be the reason | for that). In theory the democratic process should hold | these agencies accountable, but the democratic process is | more indirect than voting with your feet. And there is | generally a tendency to resist democratic influence | (otherwise the agency would become _political_ ). | | There are probably many other reasons as well. | abledon wrote: | > Part of it comes down to fact that it's harder to fire | people | | Yes, what I was getting at! Developers can coast and | never be forced to improve or learn new skills. very very | difficult to be fired. | yuan43 wrote: | > To be sure, the Covid-induced pandemic saw Meta embark on a | massive hiring spree, growing its number of full-time staff from | 48,000 at the end of 2019 to more than 77,800 -- a 62 per cent | jump. But now the firm must "prioritise more ruthlessly" and | "operate leaner, meaner, better executing teams," Meta Chief | Product Officer Chris Cox wrote in a memo, which appeared on the | company's internal discussion forum Workplace before the Q&A. | | The article doesn't mention a different problem. Those new hires | entered at extremely inflated salary levels due to literally | every other company doing the same thing at the same time. | Righting that ship means not just layoffs, but recalibrating | salary expectations. The process is just starting. | nvarsj wrote: | It already recalibrated, didn't it? Much of that compensation | is stock - of which its value dropped 50% for Meta. | strangattractor wrote: | Now they notice:0 Weren't they they ones responsible for hiring | all those employees? It never ceases to amaze how productivity is | mis-measured. When the company is making money hand over fist | there are never enough people. When the macro economy changes | somehow there are way too many employees. I guess it all sounds | better than just saying we never really cared about you as | people. Employees are a means to and ends. The ends are changing | so must the means:) | pipeline_peak wrote: | I wonder if Zuckerberg realizes how undesirable of a place to | work he's creating, or there's some big picture I'm not getting. | | Either way, a lot of silicon valley roles outside of SWE are | absolute fluff. It wouldn't surprise me if it's now becoming | increasingly obvious as he can no longer afford it. | mola wrote: | He wants ppl to quit. He said it. He wants other ppl to pay for | his mistakes | mathgladiator wrote: | A key challenge at Meta is limited scope. There are many | unification projects rather than expansion projects, and this is | one of the reasons I left as it was just too hard to push new | businesses. | | So, here they are bitching about people not doing enough work | when it is really a reflection of an inability to overcome the | innovators dilemma. | waspight wrote: | Why is Netflix part of FAANG? Isn't all the other ones much | larger corporations? | sn41 wrote: | Because without Netflix, it would be a bit awkward. | | I've always felt that leaving Microsoft out was a bit | problematic. But FAAMG does not sound very threatening. | selimthegrim wrote: | I guess the French have GAFAM? | emptyparadise wrote: | MANGA | truffdog wrote: | Their top tier compensation packages and stock performance over | the past 15 years | bombcar wrote: | That's the story, but I feel the acronym was "unfortunate" | without them, so they were added. | inkcapmushroom wrote: | Leaving Netflix out would have been a GAAF. | ajross wrote: | When the acronym was coined, Netflix was in the process of | disrupting the entire entertainment industry and it looked for | all the world like it was going to eat them all. As it | happened, the industry (well, Disney and HBO at least) figured | things out faster than expected, so much of the speculation on | Netflix turned out to be wrong. But they absolutely were a Top | of the World tech innovator for a while there. | | But it's just an acronym, it's not perfect. The other big error | is that, obviously, Microsoft needs to be in that list given | their pay scale and hiring process. | 202206241203 wrote: | _> Top of the World tech innovator_ | | Yes, top reason an average enterprise developer has to deal | with a distributed mess as opposed to a more manageable | monolithic one: "we will do microservices despite being | nothing like Netflix". On the upside, more developers are now | required. | saos wrote: | big tech been sounding the alarm lately lol. They are all | realising that they are funding early retirements for majority of | their employee who usually come hacker news to post a blog about | how they quit their job to fly solo. | cjrd wrote: | First, is productivity really the issue here? It makes for a | great sound bite, but I imagine we've all spent a lot of time and | effort working really, really hard...on the wrong thing. | | Second, for large companies that want to weather the "impending | recession," how is it that working harder will allow them to do | this? What _specific_ results will this yield? More product | launches /improvements? Happier customers because of these | launches (heh - when was the last time this happened for these | companies) that translates into more revenue? | | What I would love to see are execs that say something like "We | really want to focus on listening more to our customers and | improving our relationship with them. While others are shouting | 'build! build! build!', we're saying 'listen, build, repeat.' | Here's some specific ways we are going to do this: ..." | | Then, sure, turn up the heat internally around this mission. | Great - a rally cry _around an objective._ But right now, the | rally cry is the rally cry is the rally cry. Work hard to work | harder so that we work harder, and oh yeah, we 'll fire people | who don't because they're lazy and not 1337 enough to be here. | You know, because recession. | bastardoperator wrote: | I'm reading this as "Executive leadership makes hiring and | planning mistakes and punishes employees opposed to taking | personal responsibility" | | Also, I block everything Facebook at the router level with | unbound. | tra3 wrote: | Not a Facebook or a google fan or an apologist. | | But isn't this a business decision? "Punishment" implies a | fault, but the employees are not at fault here. | | What would "taking personal responsibility" look like for | management? | pessimizer wrote: | > What would "taking personal responsibility" look like for | management? | | The lowest bar would be not putting the blame on other, | unnamed people. | colinmhayes wrote: | Mistake is a big word here. Maybe they figured the pandemic | would provide the company opportunities it hadn't foreseen and | in order to be the first to capitalize they need to hire 30,000 | people. Now those extra employees aren't necessary, but that | doesn't mean they didn't provide value earlier. I guess it's a | bit rude to hire someone knowing that their position will be | eliminated in a few years, but that doesn't make it a mistake, | just ruthless. | stakkur wrote: | A reasonable test of 'productivity': if you fire large swaths of | employees and 'productivity' remains the same, was it a failure | of management, or of the employees? | | I'm just kidding. Measuring employee 'productivity' is one of the | biggest hand-waving magical misdirection performances in | business. The mistake is employees think it means 'working hard' | or 'smart', or whatever. The truth is it doesn't really mean | _anything_ , but too many people are heavily invested in it being | a thing. | throw7 wrote: | C-suite needs to blame something other than themselves for not | hitting quarters. | timwaagh wrote: | I've kinda noticed it too. It's one of the downsides of working | from home. Personally my productivity has only gone up but I'm | worried about my colleagues. Sometimes it's hard to get a hold of | them for hours. It's incredibly sad to say but maybe they should | introduce some kind of bossware to check that people at least | aren't afk for hours. | senttoschool wrote: | This is inherently a problem with full-remote or hybrid work. | | People will point to "studies" showing how remote work improves | productivity. Maybe it did initially but eventually, people will | check out, feeling isolated, feeling less motivated. | | Some people who worked remotely before covid swears that it | helped their productivity. But these people are biased because | they were probably one of the few who were disciplined enough to | make it work and they gained the employer's trust over time. | | There were a lot of reports of Zuckerberg bemoaning about | productivity. Tim Cook wanted everyone back in the office full- | time before Delta. Google also wanted everyone back in the | office. Clearly, these CEOs aren't just making decisions on a | whim and they have real data on productivity rather than some 3rd | party studies. | | This opinion is not popular here but this is how I see it. | matt_s wrote: | I disagree personally but voted up because this is a valid | opinion and I suspect this is the reason why it feels like we | get less done. Personally I feel like I thrive remotely, | probably work too much but I like it so there's that. | | It comes down to some people thrive working remotely and some | don't. At any level higher in mgmt than a single team there | isn't really any way to determine who can thrive and who can't. | Pretend its a 50/50 split across 100 people, the only way upper | mgmt can see to get pre-covid productivity is to go back to the | office. | | I will say another unpopular related point on this: people with | young children are more than likely to not thrive working | remotely. Or at least they've probably never had the chance to | see if working remotely is good for them because they may have | had their kids home with them these past couple years. You know | how we don't like distractions when trying to do focus work? I | can't imagine trying to do focus work with a child or two under | the age of 5 there with you all day. | prionassembly wrote: | We're thriving, just in a different work/life balance | proposition. Of course, sterilizing entry-level engineers | would lead to much higher overall productivity + zuckerbucks | for shareholders. Maybe we need to have _that_ conversation. | moomoo11 wrote: | I'd agree with this. Anecdotally speaking I have never met | anyone on my team and I honestly can say that I feel like I'm a | mercenary whose job is to just destroy tickets and keep a | lookout at our monitoring. It feels so impersonal and is it | really my fault or my colleagues that they don't feel as | invested? | | Messing with k8s, looking at logs, or occasionally hopping into | a zoom to discuss architecture for an upcoming project that I | don't find any interest in beyond ensuring the stock goes up, | it feels like I'm a cog and I just do things and somehow we | keep going. | | Three years ago I would be super engaged and going to | conferences to show off our latest work. Maybe it's the | combination of doing boring (to me) infrastructure and dev ops | work along with zoom culture. Back in the day I was a mobile | application developer so that was quite a different lifestyle | compared to this. Idk man, I'm doing my best to do a good job | but honestly it is the worst experience of my life so far. I've | been spending my time outside of work in evenings and weekends | hacking away on side projects. They give me far greater joy, | which I used to find previously at work. | senttoschool wrote: | Totally agreed with you. | | I found much greater joy going to the office everyday, | working, meeting with my coworkers, doing things after work | like grabbing a beer in the kitchen, etc. I really missed | those things. Now I'm just staring at a screen for 10 hours a | day. Two extra hours because I feel like I need to prove that | I'm working while I'm remote. | | It sucks. I feel way less energy and less passion for the | company. | spookthesunset wrote: | Completely agree. There is no more banter. No sharing of | ideas. No creativity. It's all just zoom bullshit. | | I keep wondering when this crap is gonna end and people | will realize that this "pure remote" shit absolutely kills | innovation and creativity. But man... it's super | depressing. I used to love my work. Now it sucks. | | I think it will take many years before this shakes out. I | think companies that are in-person will out-compete and | out-innovate those who aren't. I think the pendulum will | start swinging back to in-person. | | I dunno. It's exhausting though. I feel very trapped by all | this crap. I could only imagine being a new-hire or some | fresh college grad... | senttoschool wrote: | >I dunno. It's exhausting though. I feel very trapped by | all this crap. I could only imagine being a new-hire or | some fresh college grad... | | Imagine trying to build a relationship over Slack and | Zoom as a new hire. I'd be lost and frustrated. | | It's just not the same. | DharmaPolice wrote: | >Clearly, these CEOs aren't just making decisions on a whim and | they have real data on productivity rather than some 3rd party | studies. | | Asking people to 100% return to the office is unpopular (or at | least controversial) to some, right? If there was "real data", | why wouldn't they mention that in their communications to | staff? Instead, it's full of wooly statements like "there's | something missing" and vague stuff about collaboration. | | This seems to be a more generalised fallacy - "The | <government/CEO/authority figure> don't do things on a whim, | therefore they must have additional (secret) information on | <controversial decision>. Based on this, they're obviously | correct - after all, they've got that secret info!". | senttoschool wrote: | >Asking people to 100% return to the office is unpopular (or | at least controversial) to some, right? If there was "real | data", why wouldn't they mention that in their communications | to staff? Instead, it's full of wooly statements like | "there's something missing" and vague stuff about | collaboration. | | FYI, Facebook and Google CEOs both said productivity is down | and they expect more out of their workers. They said so to | their employees which obviously got leaked because there are | tens of thousands of them. I'm guessing that they don't want | to specifically blame remote/hybrid work because it might | offend a lot of people and get bad PR. Instead, they're | slowly nudging their workers back into the office. | | Apple never said anything publicly or to their employees | about the lack of productivity and they never will. They will | never do so because it'd be a huge PR hit. It's not Apple's | style. | dev_0 wrote: | The amount of meetings need to be cut down for engineers... | senttoschool wrote: | Sure, just have no meetings at all. Just send you tickets | with perfect specs. You'll never have to talk to anyone. | dev_0 wrote: | I mean the middle men meeting where someone translate | business requirements to technical solutions. Engineers | should be treated as problem solver and not code monkey | jerf wrote: | The translation is a legitimate skill that should not be | underestimated. Especially when you add in that there | ought to be flow the other way as well. As an engineer, I | want to be involved early in the business processes, | because as we all know sometimes business people assume | that very hard things are easy, but sometimes there is | something I can offer them that they don't have any idea | is easy. It's best to work through the cost/benefit | process together, rather than the business people | huddling in a corner before flinging over a set of | requirements to engineering as Holy Writ. | | (Kinda struggling with that now; I'm peripherally | involved in a project with big monetary implications. The | "solution" is to build a big system as quickly as | possible and run around making super-high-priority | requests across a whole lot of teams, almost all of which | need to be in place before any value is obtained, and | which consequently is behind schedule and dragging out. | On the other hand, a week, some database queries, and a | reasonable amount of manual labor could get about 50-75% | of the value _now_. But none of the project managers are | interested in that fact, which frankly boggles my mind. I | 'm not sure if they just don't understand what I'm | saying, or are just so stuck on the solution they | designed that they've lost all ability to think outside | it. One thing I have confirmed is that it isn't just that | I don't have a full picture of the problem, which is the | usual situation; I'm quite confident what I'm thinking | would work.) | | However, while that skill is not necessarily something | you need a graduate degree for and 20 years dedicated | experience, and engineers _can_ pick it up, there are | engineers who don 't have it yet, or even _won 't_ pick | it up because they despise it. The list of skills | required to be an engineer is already pretty long, | requiring this to be added as well raises the bar even | higher. | senttoschool wrote: | You mean a product manager? | | You do realize that most engineers would hate to have to | do the work of a PM? Talking to users. Analyzing data. | Coming up with solutions. Convincing executives. | Convincing designers. Convincing dev managers. Convincing | devs. Writing specs. Handholding the project through the | finish line. | | You told me you don't want more meetings. But you realize | that you'd have to have a ton of meetings to do the | above? You think a spec just magically shows up and a ton | of work was not done before it ever makes it to your | queue? | | >Engineers should be treated as problem solver and not | code monkey | | Engineers solve technical problems. Some engineers want | to solve business problems too. Those might be good | candidates to become product managers. | joshAg wrote: | Sounds like they're finding out why most companies won't fuck | around with outbidding competitors for talented employees just so | that they can't work for a competitor. | cletus wrote: | Once again, companies blaming strategic problems on ICs rather | than real culprit: leadership. Or, rather, the lack thereof. | | Having worked at both Google and Facebook I can tell you it's | contradictory because in some cases you have an embarrassment of | riches, hundreds or even thousands of heads, virtually unlimited | resources (CPU, storage, networking), etc. Some make sense like | Google+. I mean it was a failure and probably came way too late | to succeed no matter what Google did but I understand trying. | Maps, Docs, Youtube, Photos, Drive, Chrome, Android... all of | these make sense. | | I also understand you can't necessarily predict "winners" so to a | certain extent you have to try things and expect failures. | | Interestingly though every project I listed there (apart from | Drive and Photos) was an acquisition. | | On the other hand, you have projects desperate for people that | turn into abandonware because they don't get sufficiently funded, | even when they have PMF. | | There are a ton of middle managers at big tech companies who | exist only to get promoted and to empire build. You could, in my | opinion, take everyone from L7 (M3 at Google, M2 at Facebook) to | VP and fire 75% of them and be perfectly fine. | | Both of these companies are now in what I call permanent reorg | churn. Every few months you'll get an email saying your | mananger's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new | manager as part of a broad reorg. You've never met any of these | people. This is a meme internally. | | But what you have to understand is that reorgs are a way of | avoiding the appearance of failure while appearing to be doing | something. Don't get me wrong. Bad organizational structure can | set you up for failure and a good org structure can help you | succeed but reorg churn is none of this. | | Reorg churn is simply changing the structure every 6 months. | Nothing is ever in place long enough to determine if it succeeded | or failed. People responsible for those decisions have probably | moved on. | | Additionally, at Google in particular, the amount of process | required to do anything is insane. But don't worry. Bureaucracy | busters has another 3 surveys for you to fill out to improve | things. I once spent a quarter just babysitting a launch calendar | entry. | | The checklist to launch anything is insanely long. Even getting a | small amount of resources requires Machiavellian machinations. | | But sure, there are too many employees. Got it. | Willish42 wrote: | > There are a ton of middle managers at big tech companies who | exist only to get promoted and to empire build. You could, in | my opinion, take everyone from L7 (M3 at Google, M2 at | Facebook) to VP and fire 75% of them and be perfectly fine. | | > Both of these companies are now in what I call permanent | reorg churn. Every few months you'll get an email saying your | mananger's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new | manager as part of a broad reorg. You've never met any of these | people. This is a meme internally. | | > But what you have to understand is that reorgs are a way of | avoiding the appearance of failure while appearing to be doing | something. Don't get me wrong. Bad organizational structure can | set you up for failure and a good org structure can help you | succeed but reorg churn is none of this. | | So many nails being hit on heads. Bravo. I see a lot of | discussion in these threads around how hard it is to measure IC | productivity, but nearly nothing about how to measure middle | manager productivity (spoiler: you can't because their credit | is based on work done by the people below them). In the middle | of this hiring freeze stuff I got yet another reorg email from | my company about my great-great-grand-boss, who I've never met, | switching around to add a new layer of middle management new | hires. Each of these is worth at least 5 IC headcount, probably | more. I don't see a lot of criticism aimed at how _that_ band | of the headcount doesn't match productivity... | diogenescynic wrote: | Who would be motivated to work hard for Zuckerberg? He seems like | a total jerk who has only made society worse. I'd do the bare | minimum for him. | neves wrote: | > Zuckerberg noticed that it was getting harder to get all the | employees to attend a meeting as they were sometimes taking time | out in a day for personal work. | | > "There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is | not where it needs to be for the head count we have. [We need to] | create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on | our products, more customer-focused, | | Ohhh! Two declarations based in unfounded evidence that will | instill fear in employees and prevent them to ask for raises. | | What a shitty piece of journalism. | com2kid wrote: | An IRL meeting with 100 participants, you can't tell who is | there or not. You can audit online meeting attendees. | | > as they were sometimes taking time out in a day for personal | work. | | People have been going to the dentist during work hours since | forever. I used to have a dentist down the street from my | office for just this reason. Now I have a dentist just down the | street from my house, for the exact same reason. | | Heck Microsoft used to encourage people to go to the gym during | the work day, a shuttle would come by, pick you up, and take | you to the gym! Possibly something about all those research | studies showing high levels improvement in mental tasks for | hours after exercise. | mikhael28 wrote: | Honestly, I'd be pissed too if I was Zuck. | | I'm a goddamn billionaire - if I invite you to the meeting, | idgaf what you are doing unless someone died - get on this | goddamn Zoom call. And even then, they better have been | important! Dogs, cats, idgaf, get on this goddamn Zoom call! | | Then, because I'm a genius who singlehandedly started Facebook | by myself, I extrapolate this thought to its logical extreme | and start intimidating my employees based on this intensely | personal feeling. | | I'm Mark fucking Zuckerberg. Get on this goddamn Zoom call. | dymk wrote: | That's a great reason why Meta employees who are content with | making, oh, a nice $200k a year are in a position of | wonderful power. | | Even if Zuck personally fires you, you can go get a job | elsewhere in a week, making a comparable amount of money. And | you don't need demean yourself for some billionare who wants | you to dance because he says so. | neves wrote: | Yes, the inflation is eating the wages of my employees, now | they are asking for raises to maintain their standard of | living. Let's call them slackers so I won't decrease my now | extra profits. A shitty report of a enterprise magazine will | take my words in face value and publish. | HomeDeLaPot wrote: | I didn't expect to ever find a news site that labeled itself | "B.S."! | scarmig wrote: | This is nothing new. Google and Facebook are pretty much planned | economies that have a lot of resources. There are no real | existential competitive pressures, either externally or | internally. This leads to politics (of all sorts) instead of | economics or productivity driving employees. In some ways it | parallels the resource curse of countries that develop their | economy on a bunch of oil, which makes people rich but leads to | lots of social and governance dysfunction. | | Things like the Amazon "stack rank and then fire the worst | performer on every team regularly, even if they actually are good | enough" is one way to handle it, but that has its own obvious | downsides. It does appear to simultaneously increase productivity | and decrease overall employee happiness. | | This is a problem inherent to all large organizations. | telchior wrote: | Which companies with similar concerns have actually managed to | increase productivity in a way that satisfies the C-suite? | | A much older anecdote: I had a friend who worked at Yahoo around | the time Marissa Mayer was coming on as CEO. At the time, they | were allowing semi-WFH for certain positions. | | I literally never saw this guy go to work, or actually do any | work. He was part of a stand-up comedy workshop and spent 100% of | his time there. He'd figured out how to keep his manager happy | enough, pass performance reviews, collect a huge paycheck, and do | exactly squat. Somehow during all the "clean house" reviews, he | passed. Everyone, including him, were shocked that somehow, | nobody seemed to be able to figure out that he was essentially a | ghost employee. What finally got him was a "return to office" | directive -- no more WFH, which he couldn't comply with. | | This all took place a decade ago, and I've thought of it several | times post-Covid as all these companies that "discovered" WFH | suddenly decided that employees need to return. But none of the | extensive attempts to fix Yahoo's culture, management etc came to | anything, the company continued to backslide despite all efforts | and now basically no longer exists. Mark Zuckerberg's aggressive | "some people shouldn't be here" statements feel like a repeat of | that whole Yahoo debacle (although I suppose Facebook probably | isn't yet as dysfunctional as Yahoo was in 2012). | underdeserver wrote: | Given her attitude toward WFH, I'd say Marissa Mayer knew. | Maybe not about this specific person, but then he was likely | not a special case. | jedberg wrote: | I think Yahoo was a special case though. At that point in the | company's life, they attracted the kinds of people that wanted | a job they could phone in. I knew a bunch of Ex-Yahoos, and | they all cited this fact as one of the main reasons they left. | | I also knew some Yahoos at that time, who were not like that, | but were frustrated so many of their coworkers were, especially | since they had to carry the load. But they liked their job so | they stayed anyway. | | Marissa came into a terrible situation, and tried to make some | big changes to fix it. She wasn't successful, but she did try. | paganel wrote: | > I knew a bunch of Ex-Yahoos, and they all cited this fact | as one of the main reasons they left. | | Which was a shame, because they had built something really | interesting and nice when it came to the web. Between 2006 | and 2008 (give or take) I'd say Yahoo was neck and neck with | Google when it came to bringing "cool stuff" to the web. | Yahoo! Pipes is still something I think of from time to time | after all these years. | jedberg wrote: | Indeed. The ex-Yahoos I worked with were some of the best | most talented engineers I've worked with, and the managers | were all fantastic too. In its prime Yahoo was a real | powerhouse. | | I'm not exactly sure where it went wrong. | Scoundreller wrote: | I think yahoo found something like 35% of its wfh staff hadn't | logged in for weeks or months. (I can't find a source for the | number, so maybe I'm off, but vpn logs were used to justify | ending wfh, which is... an imperfect approach for many | reasons). | | Overall, I don't think the plan at yahoo was to fix anything, | but just asset-strip it, which worked well for stockholders. | wizofaus wrote: | It baffles me how that's possible - in 25+ years working for | software companies all my co-workers have been people I | interact with basically daily (certainly more than once a | week) - so how could someone not log in for weeks and it not | be an issue? | [deleted] | dyingkneepad wrote: | I work for a company where the VPN sucks so much that we | find ways to work outside it. Shadow IT is a thing here. | I'd say some of our most productive and value-creating | employees may go months without logging in internal | systems, because things that are inside the company are | able to pull their work that they do outside, so they don't | have to deal with the shitty Windows-centric IT. | wizofaus wrote: | But are you talking software development? And if so, is | that because key systems like source | control/ticketing/chat/meetings etc. are all cloud-hosted | and don't require logging into the domain/VPN etc.? If | so, I'd still count that as "logging in", in the sense, | they're online and interacting with other co-workers. | beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: | I've heard from some people in tech companies/remote first | companies that once the company gets to a certain size (by | employee #) it becomes extremely easy to float through. I | know of people that have essentially outsourced their | entire job by just hiring cheap freelancers to do their | work for them. Those roles include designers, SWEs, | marketers, etc... And throughout it all managers and | finance and payroll and any sort of checks on employees all | approved them all the way through and never. | | Find yourself with the right manager/employer and you can | get away with a remarkable amount of coasting. | sleepybrett wrote: | You reach a certain kafkaesque threshold where making any | move at all requires coordination outside your team with | at least four other teams, you end up in gridlock. That | said when i've been in such a position I have sometimes | just fallen into gold-plating the hell out of whatever I | was working on. Far beyond what was useful, just too keep | myself sane. | wizofaus wrote: | That very much to me sounds like the _wrong_ manager | /employer! I just can't imagine working in an environment | coworkers aren't genuinely keen on actively contributing | towards building/ maintaining products and features. It's | surely the reason you get into software development in | the first place. | fleddr wrote: | If employees can get away with doing little work, that's a | management problem. That still doesn't make it an easy problem to | solve though. | | To take the typical scrum/agile method as our context... | | First and foremost, you're supposed to deliver things that have | value. In most cases though, this is very much a "soft science". | You can have an incredibly full backlog of items with things | nobody asked for, as the feedback loop after a release is often | non-existing and the team is working on the next thing already. | | Likewise, issues (due to laziness or incompetence) are super easy | to mask. The engineer can call out some unexpected dependencies, | setbacks, unclarities in the story (shifting blame), hardware | issues, the list of excuses is endless. It's not like the PM | understands any of it, so "it is what it is". The story is moved | to the next sprint, or is split in two. | | Same for task estimation. In particular with a dynamic where the | PM is technically clueless, which is common as a team holds a | wide variety of tech skills nobody can understand in total, it's | easy to inflate estimates. There's little to no incentive to | stretch your productivity, in fact it's a type of self-harm. | Because next you'd be expected to deliver at that stretch level | forever. Better to under-perform a little, create some breathing | room. | | Quality: often unmanaged, as amount of story points delivered is | typically a primary metric. | | Now combine all this and you can have a team looking | busy/productive whilst it's delivering nothing of value, too | late, and with poor quality. Without setting of any alarm bells. | The lack of value, productivity and quality is close to | invisible. | | Now imagine having dozens if not hundreds of such teams, lol. | stuckinhell wrote: | It feels like the dotcom bubble bursting again. Good luck | everyone! | Sevii wrote: | Facebook hired too many people during the pandemic and then got | hit by the iPhone privacy change that killed their revenues. | Facebook's stock is roughly 1/2 what it was a year ago. Also if | increase your headcount by 62% obviously people won't have enough | work to do. | | "To be sure, the Covid-induced pandemic saw Meta embark on a | massive hiring spree, growing its number of full-time staff from | 48,000 at the end of 2019 to more than 77,800 -- a 62 per cent | jump." | jeffwask wrote: | Robber barons don't like worker's gaining rights, news at 11. | | All those tech campuses with barbershops, laundries, etc weren't | built for the employees benefit. They were built to trap you and | keep you working long hours. | | It's sucks when your employee can just log off after 8 hours and | be in their yard with their kids minutes later. | ken47 wrote: | I see other people's points that these quotes aren't the best | reflection of these leaders, but I'd give them some benefit of | the doubt in that we're lacking context. We're just getting the | sensational headlines and quotes. There is something to be said | for managing company morale, so we'll see how FB's employees | handle the very blunt message they received... | | That being said, even though the message itself is bitter, I | would strongly prefer that leadership communicate such | difficulties openly rather than surprising the company out of the | blue with layoffs, pay cuts, etc. Then, employees have an | opportunity to make a decision about how much harder they want to | work, or whether they want to leave for different pastures. | akmarinov wrote: | Uber's apps alone can probably be maintained comfortably with | about 30-50 people these days | nitwit005 wrote: | > Zuckerberg noticed that it was getting harder to get all the | employees to attend a meeting as they were sometimes taking time | out in a day for personal work | | The last time I was at a larger company, I just asked someone | else on the team to attend the all hands and let me know if | anything interesting was mentioned. | | I did bring up not caring about some of the content, and the head | of the department even said he appreciated the feedback, but | didn't seem to change the content at all. | tomgp wrote: | Looking at Meta's product line at the moment it's easy to see how | people might not be motivated to give their all. Facebook and | Instagram are so markedly driven by numbers rather than any kind | of product vision, i can imagine it being pretty depressing. | PostOnce wrote: | Adtech companies being more "productive" than they already are is | a terrifying thought. | | How much worse could they make our world? | | It's not just the ads, its the search result / timeline / | suggestion bubble echo chamber that may bring about a new Dark | Age. Let's hope they fail. | ur-whale wrote: | Few work, mostly because the desire to get stuff done gets nixed | from day one by process, bureaucracy and business drones. Also, | the prospect to make an actual fuckton of money is completely | unlikely these days. | | Google can't get anything done for a very simple reason: | | a) comps are way too high. why bother doing anything when gold | rains from the sky every day of the year. | | b) you're never going to make it to 50 Million at Google however | hard you work, unless you make it to SVP, which is a 15 year | endeavor. In other words, strictly no incentives to do amazing | stuff when compared to a startup. | | c) the environment is highly political, actual entrepreneur | spirit is long gone and/or smothered by product type folks. | | If what you're looking for in life is a civil servant type of | highly paid cushy job, Google is the perfect place to be. If you | want to innovate and change the world, flee this godforsaken | place as soon as you can. | syntaxing wrote: | Yeah you lazy fucks, how dare you work so little that we only | have an annual NET INCOME of 39B (39B for Meta, 76B for | Alphabet). | vbezhenar wrote: | I guess they measure some KPIs and observe big difference | between peers. | buildbot wrote: | How would they get that comparable info from other companies? | Do the CEOs all have a secret slack channel were Satya is | bragging that one MS dev equals 3 googles programmers? | gretch wrote: | All you have to do is take the company's rev/profit and | divide it by the number of employees (factoring in how much | you pay an employee) | | So yeah if MSFT can make 3 billion dollars with 1000 | engineers, and Google makes 1 billion dollars with 1000 | engineers, then 1 MSFT eng is worth 3 of Googles | (simplified - obv business involves sales, marketing, etc) | jackling wrote: | Is that really an accurate way of measuring anyways? | Company A may just have a more complex product and need | more developers. Doesn't mean Company A should just | remove developers since Company B doesn't need that | amount for their unrelated product. | TheCoelacanth wrote: | That's not a measure of how much work engineers are | doing. It's a measure of how effective the company is at | making money from the work their engineers are doing. | trebbble wrote: | Right. Consider how different the profit of a company | hiring $300,000/yr software engineers to mow lawns 8 | hours per day might be, compared with another company | hiring them to... write extremely valuable software 4 | hours per day. | | The company with (let's say) identically-skilled | employees putting in twice as many hours probably won't | be the more profitable of the two. | | Replace "mow lawns" with "write pointless, doomed-from- | the-start messaging apps" and the actual problem starts | to become clear. | Ekaros wrote: | Or more exactly how much work the engineers have done in | past and how big moat the management or luck have | build... Sometimes I really wonder how much the current | employees contribute in companies like MS, Google and | Meta... | mberning wrote: | This is not surprising to anybody that ever worked at a | sufficiently large organization. Once you get a large number of | employees, then layer in HR, legal, compliance, etc. | considerations it creates quite a lot of opportunities for low | performers to get in the door and never leave. | yalogin wrote: | The speed at which the tone of these is changing is amazing. Just | a few weeks ago everyone said its getting impossible to hire and | so they need to expand to other tech hubs, pay exorbitant | salaries and offer lot of perks to attract candidates. All of a | sudden now, just in the span of a few weeks, these executives | started realizing their headcount is too high, productivity too | low and that employees should self select out of the company. | Doesn't this show incompetence on the executive part? They just | didn't see this till the recession flags were raised, it's almost | as if they need to cut costs to cover up falling revenue and so | blaming the employees. | kibwen wrote: | _> Doesn 't this show incompetence on the executive part?_ | | Sure, but since when has an executive ever faced consequences | for incompetence? | MichaelMoser123 wrote: | I think its the war of Russia against Ukraine. All of a sudden | there is less money to go around, interest rates go up and it | got harder to raise money. I think they are just putting up a | straight face, as they respond to the changing circumstances. | | And they probably changed their plans, now it is less about | 'new features' and more about 'maintenance of existing | systems'. But that didn't get into the article, so it's all the | fault of the people who will have to look for a new job... | gorgoiler wrote: | It's knives out time, I'm afraid, for any activist or negative | employee. I am flabbergasted by the number of people I've worked | with who are flat out ungrateful when it comes to their | relationship with their employer either being outright miserable | and surly, or constantly virtue signalling about hypothetical | problems that just drag everyone down the purity spiral. | | They get paid and they push code but they seem to think that's | the be all and end all of the relationship. It would be like | living with a partner who takes out the bins and cooks every | other night but never gives you a birthday card and constantly | complains about your behaviour. | | I don't think there's anything at all wrong with wanting to have | good social relationships between staff because the flip side is | that every Eeyore, loner, and whiner chips away at morale bit by | bit until they are the only people left. | | How have you rewarded camaraderie, positive attitude, leadership, | and goodwill today? | MisterBastahrd wrote: | What the hell does that have to do with being employed? | | My employer gives me money. I give them labor. I am friendly | with my co-workers because I am generally a friendly person, | but I don't owe the company any more than I give and I don't | deserve any more than I demand for myself. | | There's no "grateful" to be had here. I'm not grateful to have | a job. I have a job because I earn it. | gorgoiler wrote: | Tech work isn't just labor though. It's about deciding what | to do, influencing others to agree, and getting other people | on board to the extent where they are enthused and compelled | to want to see through a new idea you've brought to the | table. | | Regardless of your feelings towards the abstract entity that | is The Company, all these day to day issues are to do with | _relationships with people_. | | The art of alignment and persuasion is so much more than just | showing up to Slack / your desk, cranking out three more UI | PRs based on tasks assigned to you, then clocking off at 5pm. | OkayPhysicist wrote: | Your employer isn't your partner, they're your John. They get | what they pay for, and that's it. If they want you to perform | gratitude to stroke their egos, then they can pay extra for it. | spamizbad wrote: | Man, where have you worked? It sounds awful. Is this a SV | specific type of personality? I feel like a low output dev who | complains constantly wouldn't last 6 months before landing on a | PIP. | | My experience, most "dead weight" employees tend to be quiet | types who never rock the boat. They want to just keep flying | under the radar. They say please and thank you, they show up to | company events, but just.... don't produce. Which can make | putting them in a PIP extremely awkward because _you_ feel like | the bad guy. | | Meanwhile, the most proactive "complainers" I've worked with | have all been median to high output engineers. As a manager, I | find my approach for them is to try and get them is to mature | socially inside the org and work to break them of their bad | habits. Results are mixed, but I've had some success. | gorgoiler wrote: | Thanks. It has been awful at times. On the whole though my | career has been really positive, but every so often a | disgruntled employee has dragged me and many others down. | You're right that engineering prowess makes up for it a lot | of the time but there is a limit to everyone's tolerance for | difficult assholes. | | A lot of the time the people that needed weeding out are the | ones who are vocally stepping out of their core role to | agitate in company forums. They are easier to identify | because they at least do you the courtesy of sucking at their | core competency, making them much easier to manage out. | Still, it can take months to complete that process, and all | the while they will be stirring about how policy X is | institutionally Y-ist and a micro aggression against minority | Z. | dron57 wrote: | Your employer is not your partner, come on. The employee - | employer relationship is just business. Why should you feel | grateful for getting your market based compensation? | gorgoiler wrote: | I would argue that deep-thinking technical work, with | unpredictable hours where new ideas that compel you to bust | our vim and make a diff can come at any moment, alongside a | group of people who are similarly motivated to not just keep | revenue ticking over but who want to completely change an | whole market sector -- that very much is an emotionally | embedded relationship akin to a partnership. | | It's not for everyone. It certainly induces ageism when | people have kids and start to find their work/life balance no | longer aligns with daytime/nighttime. It's also exhausting | and requires physical and mental stamina that provably is | lacking the older you get. | | These things are _real_ but it just because you don't align | with this kind of business, it doesn't make it wrong. Perhaps | you think these startupesque workers are being exploited? | Their graduate salaries suggest otherwise. | becquerel wrote: | Uh... why _should_ employees have a friendly relationship with | their work? We don 't work because we want to make friends. We | work because otherwise we don't have money to buy food or | clothe ourselves. This is not a voluntary arrangement. | Expecting us to be grateful for it is absurd. | sn0w_crash wrote: | This seems a very hostile attitude towards your employer. If | they treat you poorly, you are able to complain and voice | discontent. | | Is there no inverse to that? | | If they treat you well, is there no reason to show gratitude? | | I imagine coworkers would feel uncomfortable in such a | hostile environment. | gorgoiler wrote: | Your employer -- and particularly your hiring manager when | they become your line manager -- is grateful for your time, I | can assure you of that. You didn't have to work there and a | large part of accepting a role is wanting to work for / with | someone. | | It's uncharitable to not bring at least some level of social | pleasantry to the office every day. | | I mean unless you work for Walmart or something. I assume we | are both talking about senior, highly remunerated, creative | and specialist technical work here, not breaking rocks. | TrevorFSmith wrote: | "When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat | the rich". - J.J.R. | summerlight wrote: | It's weird to say, but there's a genuine lack of headcount all | over the company while Pichai (and probably Zukerberg) also does | a correct assessment on the situation. This seems a | contradiction, but if you take a deeper look into mid level | managements there are a good number of teams responsible for | billions of users/revenue and driving their growth but screaming | for more headcounts. (Yeah, I'm in one of those teams) # | increases to hundreds (or thousands?) at smaller scale. IMO, they | deserve more headcounts for their scope. But it's also clear that | the overall productivity of those companies begins to plateau. | | Why does this happen? Of course I don't know. I've seen some | clues on bigger structural issues but cannot say for sure. But | the famous "I just want to serve 5TB" video gives us some | hints... Most of the particular issues mentioned in the video | have been solved but its spirit hasn't gone away. And now back | with a good reason. Which makes it much harder to solve. | | Think about launching non-trivial but small features in their | major products. At a small company, a competent junior engineer | can usually do that within a quarter. In Google it's not that | simple. There are so many stakeholders. Privacy and security. | Legal. Downstream dependencies. Infrastructure team. PA wide | modeling and quality review. They're also busy and might not like | your launch. At least PM will likely be your side but they may | have a different priority than yours. To navigate this | organizational complexity, you probably want to have a good | manager/tech lead. If you don't care? You're going to piss off | them for sure and if the things go very wrong then you could get | indivisible attention from the VP level... | | And you're now dealing with several hundreds of millions of users | so a minimum level of engineering quality should be ensured. You | gotta deal with resource planners who also need to allocate | finite hardware resources among unlimited demands. The service | should have some level of reliability, scalability and | redundancy. Thanks to all the works done by core and technical | infrastructure team, this is easier than other places but the | inherent complexities don't go away. Oh, did I mention that most | of the complex infrastructures have integration tests that run | over 1~2 hours with a good level of flakiness? If the build | dashboard doesn't go green, you might miss your launch by 1 week. | It's just a tip of iceberg for productionization, multiply the | work by 10x. This is a death by thousand cuts and I don't see a | silver bullet to solve everything at once. | newaccount2021 wrote: | iroh2727 wrote: | Yeah this is definitely a problem, but I blame the companies. On | the one hand, yes, for a long time there have been a lot of | people that don't do much work. They should've been firing those | people long ago, but they I guess were too scared/defensive. They | felt it was better for business to just keep them. | | But now there is a big uptick in employees not working much, and | I think the cause is just that companies are so disconnected from | _people_. For example, Sundar wants people to be more "customer- | focused" but everywhere at Google, all anyone talks about is this | metric and that metric. Customers are just treated as a number to | be aggregated into a metric. They're really not talking about | _specific customer problems_. And they 're not empowering | employees to have vision for how to solve _specific customer | problems_ overall imo. | | Also, speaking of their own employees as people, they're | similarly disconnected. They just treat employees as part of a | metric too to a large extent. And what does that lead to? | Employees that also care mostly about that metrics ($) and not | building cool, assistive/helpful products. | | I mean it all comes back to incentives of companies trying to | grow their stock value. So it's really that and not out-of-touch | CEOs. But although a recession is heartbreaking, we do need to | regain some sense of reality imo. Perhaps return to technology | that's actually trying to assist people or fix things in the | world. One can hope. | GingerBoats wrote: | I feel this has more to do with unrealistic expectations and | improper management of engineers at these firms. | | All of these major companies hired like crazy to meet the demand | on their products as the pandemic hit. | | Most large companies will have a manager that understands an | entry-level and mid-level contributor will take six to twelve | months to ramp up and actually be productive on a team. | | Coupled the above with improper time management skills on remote | teams, and you get a distributed work force that sometimes just | doesn't produce as well as when they were forced to do the grind | in the office. | dekhn wrote: | By the end of my employment at Google I was not working very | hard. Probably a few hours a day, mostly doing whatever I felt | like doing. My managers consistently gave me "meets expectations" | regardless of how much I achieved or how hard I worked. However, | any time there was an emergency related to my function, I had | everything required to jump in, fix serious problems, and then | get out of the way during the cleanup then contributing my bit to | the postmortem. I could tell there were very few (fewer all the | time) people who truly understand google prod, and in that sense, | the company seems to be OK with paying top salaries to people who | can prevent the company losing lots of money, or other critical | prod issues. | nr2x wrote: | I think it's actually a good thing to just have a pool of | people who know how stuff actually works. | | Otherwise there could be very key infra that only one or two | people fully understand since the code is "mature", doesn't | need modifications, and nobody wants to work on it. | | In theory of course, I'm sure in reality the digital world | isn't at the mercy of <200 SWEs who gave up on promo and live | in the basement. | zmgsabst wrote: | This is an interesting question to me -- do software | engineers follow a Pareto distribution on their impact? | | That would imply that around 1,000 SDEs are delivering 38% of | the impact in the field. | | A change in culture which drove out that 0.1% would | potentially noticeably drop the UX of "tech", across the US. | nr2x wrote: | Impact is hard to define, I'm just talking about sprawling | code bases, decades of reorgs, title changes, corporate | priorities, and the very important little bits that just | kinda make it all run. | russellbeattie wrote: | > _My managers consistently gave me "meets expectations"_ | | That's because his bonus was probably tied to your performance. | By making sure all his subordinates receive meets or exceeds | expectations, then he looks good. His manager does the same, | all the way up the chain. | | They played the same game when I worked at Amazon. What's more, | it became automated. They introduced non-optional surveys that | popped up on your computer _daily_. At first I assume it was a | well intentioned system to gauge general employee sentiment. It | was annoying and stupid HR bullshit, so of course I immediately | went in and disabled it. After a year or so, my manager finally | notices and _orders_ me to enable it again. I soon guessed why. | Within a few months, we start having quarterly group meetings | going over graphs of the answers. And of course, the surveys | aren 't anonymous, so he would call out the people who gave bad | answers and start grilling them about their issue in front of | everyone, if they didn't immediately recant, then they would | "schedule a meeting". I assume his performance bonus had become | tied to the results and everyone needed to tow the line. It was | amusing to me how many of the younger employees didn't | understand the game they were playing and would continue to | answer honestly. I just glanced at the options, picked whatever | made my manager look good and went on with my day. | | You'd think those idiots in charge at the upper management | levels would have heard of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure | becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." But | apparently not. | debug-desperado wrote: | Seems like the feedback would need to be reviewable in a | "skip level" fashion for that to work. | rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: | 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. | z3t4 wrote: | Firefighting used to be very lucrative as people was willing | to pay a lot to "solve the problem" when their house was on | fire. Also one house on fire could possibly mean the whole | city could burn down. | commandlinefan wrote: | It's worth noting that the beginning, the end and the middle | of Scrum and what most companies laughably call "Agile" is to | prevent exactly this: the entire structure is there to force | every developer to interview for their job every morning and | prove they're making "contributions" (it doesn't matter if | they're good contributions, they just have to be completed by | the deadlines). | djkivi wrote: | Such a beautiful metaphor for the daily standup! | bombcar wrote: | 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. | trombone5000 wrote: | The people handling the emergencies should get paid | considerably more than developers - when they system is | down, the real, actual, company-sustaining money stops | coming in. | dasil003 wrote: | But on the other hand they don't add new features or push | product forward in any way. | | Maybe this is okay for a late stage company that is in | the value extraction mode. In that case the private | equity playbook is to lay off the app developers, and | they can throw more money at ops to increase efficiency | of the shrinking pie. | | On the other hand if you're in a highly competitive | growth industry then you need to innovate, and if you | optimize for SRE talent, you won't have sufficiently | senior engineering talent to find the right balance of | innovation. | aliasxneo wrote: | 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 | control board over political reasons). | | Regardless, I'm on my way out despite people's shock that I | would leave such a "cushy" job. The fact of the matter is that | the lack of challenge has actually caused me to spiral into a | deep depression and the best decision for me personally is to | move on. | olau wrote: | I don't know if you're familiar with the book but "Bullshit | Jobs" by David Graeber examined this phenomenon. He found | that many people with bullshit jobs are struggling with deep | unhappiness. Quit as soon as possible. | tfandango wrote: | You post strikes a chord with me. I have found over time that | I personally require some mental challenge and some physical | challenge to remain mentally healthy. Some days, work | provides the mental challenge, the feeling you get by solving | difficult problems. If we get too far into the weeds and end | up in a constant state of talking about work instead of doing | it, things begin to turn depressing until I need to | supplement on the side by learning something new or whatever. | Same goes physically for me, I keep pretty regular on working | out but if I take a week or two off I start feeling sort of | sad. Best of luck to you wherever you land! | hluska wrote: | I hope you're okay pal. But good on you for recognizing a | problem and working hard for a solution! | curiousgal wrote: | Why do you look to your job for challenges. Why not simply | look at it as a way to put food on the table and use the rest | of your time and resources to seek out other challenges? | dekhn wrote: | I can answer this- at the time I joined GOogle, my goal was | to use their resources to enhance my future career as a | researcher. Google gave me access to world class hardware, | software, and employees, which I could use in ways that | never would have been available at any other location. It | helped me build and achieve a system that academia would | not have allowed, that I could not have done on my own time | and money. | | But my goal was always to take that newly learned skill and | credibility and use it to go back to academia with a | stronger hiring position. I mean, that's the mental model | nearly all scientists have: couple your job with your | interests to maximize your impact using other people's | money and time. | soperj wrote: | Is that what you ended up doing? Are you happy with how | it turned out? | dekhn wrote: | No, I would never return to academia now. i handle IT | stuff for a large biotech, and looking at what scientist | (both PIs and staff) have to put up with in academia, I | don't think I'd be happy. Also, I just didn't boost my | scientific creds enough to make a strong return. | ceras wrote: | Why not both? Work is ~40hrs a week, so it's nicer if you | have the option to enjoy it. There are other software jobs | with similar pay to Google, but with more rewarding work. | Win-win to switch, if that's what you're looking for. | | Personally, the type of problems I solve at work are more | interesting than I could realistically come up with and | work on on my own. Ymmv. | aliasxneo wrote: | The short answer is I tried - for about three years. | Meanwhile, I had the onset of depression, panic attacks, | and numerous other physical ailments. It's taken about two | years of therapy, but I've finally realized that I am just | _not_ the person that can do that. | | Funny enough, I have a co-worker who is able to perform in | this way and he appears to have no issues with the current | status quo. As much as I might wish I could be more | tolerant, I've accepted that I'm just built different and I | need my job to provide a challenging environment. | raincom wrote: | This is how govt employees treat their jobs in various | countries. In the private sector, there is no job security. | What happens when one gets laid off with rusty skills? | That's why folks want to use the existing job to improve | skills. That explains why people want to use new | frameworks, tools, languages at work. | tomgp wrote: | i imagine because you're required to be present in some | sense for ~8 hours a day 5 days a week. that doesn't leave | much time for anything else, especially if you have caring | responsibilities or any other life commitments. once you're | in a depressive state getting out of that hole can be a | real struggle | aliasxneo wrote: | Exactly, and it can turn into a horrible snowball effect | if left unchecked. That is what happened to me and it | wasn't until I started getting help in therapy that I was | more able to understand the situation. | lmarcos wrote: | Usually, jobs with challenges pay more. I switch jobs if | both of these conditions are met: a) good enough | challenges, b) pays more than current job | ipsum2 wrote: | Were you an SRE? What you described sounds very similar to what | I experienced. | dekhn wrote: | I started as a test engineer on an SRE team (ads database, | which I think no longer exists), did a mission control | rotation, and then sort of found a way to be a software | engineer (non-SRE, which pissed off the SRE leadership) and | run my own projects in prod without any real oversight (that | was exacycle- using all the idle cycles in prod). I used my | knowledge of SRE and my good connections with SRE to run my | service with minimal impacts on the $MONEY$ services. | | Later I did stuff that involved working closely with SRE and | hwops but always SRE-adjacent, not part of SRE. I had a | standing offer to join multiple SRE groups but chose not to | because I can't do oncalls while my kids are still at home. | EddySchauHai wrote: | What are test engineer roles like at Google? I've basically | only spent my time in startups on critical systems | (defense, finance) so have no idea what it'd be like at a | larger company or team. | jrockway wrote: | It's varied. Some posts below describe the standard | software test engineering. Test engineers on Google Fiber | would buy every microwave and 2.4GHz cordless phone and | baby monitor, and see if our changes to interference | mitigation algorithms improved or regressed between | releases. So you're basically in a lab trying to break | Wifi algorithms, probably not writing much code. (Also | things like "does our change to move iPhone 6 to 5GHz | when it's closer to the 5GHz access point also work with | and iPhone 5?") | dekhn wrote: | This was a long time ago and it was a "bespoke" position | created by the SRE team. I set up a continuous build and | then fixed bugs until it went green. | | Test engineers at Google at the time (~2008) were | expected to build test infrastructure, rather than | writing unit tests (SWEs were expected to write unit | tests and integration tests), or to build complex system | tests. | EddySchauHai wrote: | Yeah that sounds pretty familiar to my experience! Right | now I'm in an infra team and work on the CI pipelines, | testing frameworks for devs, testing infra, etc... So | more time dealing with docker/k8s than a unit testing | framework that's for sure! | outworlder wrote: | > which pissed off the SRE leadership | | Really? I thought Googlers could move internally with | little friction and yada yada. Is that just propaganda? | izacus wrote: | No, you can move easily, which is why he could piss off | his current leadership without consequence. | | Being able to move doesn't mean your current manager will | be happy about you moving. The "easy" part of the process | means that they just can't do much to sabotage you or | your future. | carom wrote: | Often times the interesting teams knew who they wanted to | fill headcount with. They would say "stop by for an | informal chat", then in that chat they would interview | you on (e.g.) very niche terminology. After that they | would tell you it is not a good fit. Tried to go to 3 | different teams on my way out of Google and none of them | were interested. I think it is a bit of a status game, | like they are looking for a PhD or to justify a visa. | | Specific examples, an Android static analysis team and | Fuchsia security both passed after informal chats | (unprepared interviews). I've spent a ton of time in | reverse engineering frameworks, malware, and building | automated code analysis solutions (with tons of bugs | found to my name). When you have that experience, and | they bring you on to do front end dev on some internal | tool, like there is just such a disconnect. | dekhn wrote: | At the time (2009 or so) it was hard to leave SRE and be | a SWE because SRE had a hard time keeping employees given | the oncall and nature of the role. My mistake was to tell | people it was easy to leave SRE, which the head of SRE | didn't like. He called my new manager and chewed him out. | To his credit, my new manager told me I wasn't in | trouble, but to be more circumspect when dealing with | predatory leadership. | dom96 wrote: | I wonder if it's still that way. At Meta it is not, you | need to go through an interview loop to move from | Production Engineering to SWE (even though the culture at | Meta makes PE far more similar to SWE than SRE is to | SWE). I bet the reasoning is the same: they don't want to | make it easy for folks to move from PE to SWE. | chaosbutters314 wrote: | chrome is still buggy, the search bar moves my plugins a little | after loading and I end up favoriting an empty page by clicking | the star on the search bar. I think Google engineers are highly | overrated for such a simple problem to still exist | SavageBeast wrote: | I see this as more or less a ruse to justify ridding the | companies of all the now remote people who moved away to live in | Cheap Town during the pandemic. This is a pretext for the typical | Corporate House Cleaning/Reduction In Force scenario. Some people | do well working remote (Im one of them in fact) but I suspect and | from what I've seen the majority of people simply cant handle the | responsibility/self management of working remote. | | Alternatively, the economic forecasters at these companies see | trouble on the horizon economically and know that layoffs to | boost stock price will be necessary. In such case, best develop a | pretext for these layoffs thats not "We're having financial | trouble so we're laying people off". Instead it's "Nope, nothing | to see here, THIS IS FINE - we're just cutting dead weight!". | | I don't work for either of these companies nor do I know anyone | personally who does, but I have to wonder if a sort of entitled, | country club culture developed there and this an effort to reign | in that behavior. Maybe someone with some inside insight can | comment here? | codefreeordie wrote: | "Rest and vest" is a phrase that gets bandied about often -- | including by people who are trying to do it. | | I couldn't tell you what fraction of employees, but there are | folks hiding in all of the big tech companies that are happy | with their comp, aren't trying to advance, and have adopted the | "do the minimum to not get fired" approach to their work. | | If too many of these get together in one org or on one team, | the whole thing gets poisoned and everyone starts barely | getting anything done. | closeparen wrote: | Doing work is a low status activity. If too many people in | your team or org are trying to get ahead, you will be | drowning in project management and recurring cross-team syncs | and grand plans but with hardly anyone writing code. | danaris wrote: | > that are happy with their comp, aren't trying to advance | | Why does this | | > and have adopted the "do the minimum to not get fired" | approach to their work | | necessarily have to go with this? | | What's wrong with deciding "I don't need to _advance_ | further; I like the work I do, I make enough money; I don 't | need to be hustling anymore"? | | It seems to me the concept of "enough" is hard to grasp for a | lot of people, especially those who are deep in any high- | paying field (not just SV tech types, but certain kinds of | doctors, lawyers, etc). | | If there's no place in Silicon Valley for people who know | what "comfortable" feels like, then it's definitely a place | I'd prefer to stay away from. | mirker wrote: | A rational actor will notice they get either a promotion or | less work in the high/low work instances. If you work in | between those boundaries, you get nothing extra. | danaris wrote: | In some cases, yes. | | In others, as implied by the post I was replying to, | people think that if you're not _constantly_ Striving, | you 're not good enough. | BobbyJo wrote: | My experience at Google (which matched other large companies | I've been at) was more that the "smartest" (I.E. earliest) | members of a team laid down so many road blocks for later | members, in the form of tech-debt and undocumented knowledge, | that the output difference between coasting and working | yourself to death was pretty small. It's an easy environment | to get discouraged in. | powerhour wrote: | My fear is that is what I'm doing right now. I've been | writing code alone for a while, it's very possible it will | be hard for new hires to understand or update. I know there | is tech debt but I don't have time to fix it (because I'm | alone, natch). | | Oh well. Maybe they can spend their time replacing my work. | Spoom wrote: | No worries, inevitably whatever framework you're using | right now will be deprecated and replaced within a few | years anyway. | dam_broke_it wrote: | > Corporate House Cleaning/Reduction In Force scenario | | HP did this back in 2013; be in the office or resign. | sbierwagen wrote: | And it made HP the dynamic, fast growing company it is today. | fred_is_fred wrote: | "I suspect and from what I've seen the majority of people | simply cant handle the responsibility/self management of | working remote." While this may be true, if this has to be | solved by forcing everyone to move to SF/NY - then couldn't you | just save more money by firing their managers? | acdha wrote: | Exactly. You can't make this claim without saying that your | managers are incompetent all the way up to the C level | because it means nobody was measuring performance even though | that's a core job requirement. | lanstin wrote: | It is extremely rare for management, especially higher | levels, to have any method of distinguishing smart and hard | working people from duffers or from "managing upwards" big | talkers. Git logs sort of help much interpretation is so | context sensitive that the signal is blurry. | | So while measuring performance might seems like a core job | function, de facto it is not. | | Also people that find this thread interesting should join | Blind. | acdha wrote: | Would you say that software engineering and architecture | aren't core job functions because they require skills and | experience to do? It's not effortless but these people | are being paid top salaries so it doesn't seem | unreasonable to expect them to have at least a rough idea | of what the people who report to them are doing. | | This goes double for the other concerns you mentioned: if | you've created an incentive system where people commonly | BS their way into promotions, that's a major management | failure. | jeffdn wrote: | From the engineer's perspective, it's hard to take | seriously a manager that is completely ignorant of any of | your day-to-day work. | z3t4 wrote: | > Also people that find this thread interesting should | join Blind. | | What is "Blind" ? Is it some sort of think-tank ? | | If the manager has done a good job he/she has hired | people that are more knowledge and experienced in their | specialization fields then the manager. This is only true | for "intellectual" work though, if the employees do | physical work, like laying bricks, you can measure | performance on how many bricks where laid. | | For example, one employee might have spent 3 weeks | carefully reading code to find a bug. Not a single code | push for a whole month. And might not even have found the | bug. But likely found lots of unused code that everyone | been too scared to touch. So if you're measuring | performance by LOC written, that person could end up on | the nagive. | bluedino wrote: | "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the | company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said on the call, | according to a Reuters report. "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." | [deleted] | dividefuel wrote: | For companies that adjust salary for remote workers, those | employees who moved to Cheap Town are now cheaper for the | company to pay than those who work in Silicon Valley. | GoldenMonkey wrote: | The reason FANG needs to retain unproductive but very smart ppl. | | Is to suck up all the TALENT that would compete with their tech | monopolies. | | This is FANG's competitive edge. Having the excess cash and | profits to do so. | lordleft wrote: | I'm a bit worried that this will trigger some kind of move to | measure productivity in increasingly crude ways -- i.e. | exhaustive, invasive telemetry that tracks every mouse click and | keypress. | dymk wrote: | Companies are welcome to do that, and see just how fast their | staff quit. | gjvc wrote: | google for "employee monitoring software" to see how hard this | is being pushed | sn41 wrote: | Snowcrash vibes. If you read an email too fast or too slow, you | could be fired. | falcolas wrote: | Probably. For every hard problem, there's a bad technological | solution. | jollyllama wrote: | IMO In-person five days a week is preferable to dystopian | tracking automation, not that they're mutually exclusive. | dymk wrote: | Why give an inch? Meta is struggling because they put all | their eggs in one basket, and turns out that was probably not | a good bet. And now they're struggling for it. That's | leadership's problem. | | FAANG employees make up a group of some of the most hire-able | employees I can think of. If leadership makes work hard, they | will quit. | | (Baring H1B employees, they just get the shit stick all | around, but that's not unique to this particular issue) | Rayhem wrote: | Technical people often believe using more/new tools will solve | people problems. "If only we could _measure_ more by better | decomposing tasks in Jira, then we 'd know how to be more | efficient! If only we could add micro-specific tags to or | documentation, then anyone can search for what they want and | find the resource! We just need to put every single process | anyone has ever heard of into confluence; then anyone can look | them up and follow them!" | | Tools don't solve people problems because at the scale of | people problems everyone has a different philosophy about the | tool (and the problem). Communication is what solves people | problems. | kache_ wrote: | There's actually a clear solution to this problem. It's called | URA. I think what's actually happening is that URA goals are | falling short, because managers are failing to meet them. | | It's war time, managers. Time to sharpen those axes... | sylens wrote: | Why don't the boards of these companies hold the CEOs and | management teams responsible for overhiring and not having the | right ways to track productivity and route resources accordingly? | This is essentially Pichai and Zuckerberg admitting that they | made colossal mistakes | [deleted] | dev_0 wrote: | Developers should be "lazy"? Hardworking developers tend to | create tedious solution that are not optimized | macawfish wrote: | Seriously, and it can sometimes make for frustrating amounts of | tech debt and tangles. | [deleted] | carom wrote: | I think a lot of this comes from organizational bureaucracy. I | love to program. I write code on personal projects every single | night. It is so difficult to get tickets at work though. | | Want to build something new? Well, we will have to maintain it | forever, so we need to make sure it is worth it. | | Want to build on another team's infra? You need open a ticket to | get someone assigned to review your code, that ticket will take 3 | weeks to be triaged. This is for a 2 line change. | | Ok, you're building something. Design doc, stories, epics, | meetings most days of the week, code reviews, tests. | | On calls, you're going to do the builds. You're going to watch | the nodes deploy 1 by 1. You're going to keep an eye on query | latency. | | I'm not saying these things are all bad, but in total, they | absolutely kill productivity. The more of this bureaucracy, the | less you're getting out of me in regards to what I am really good | at (designing and building systems). When I can build complex web | apps in my spare time and end up making a 50 line change at work | every 2 weeks there is a horrible disconnect. I write code every | day, just not for my employer, and not because I am lazy or don't | want to. | | Yes, I should be fired. Yes, you should hire someone at 50% my | rate to watch the code deploy. Hire me back when you have work | for me to do that matches my skillset. | luckydata wrote: | I honestly don't understand what Sundar is talking about as | everyone I know at google is covered in work and struggling to | get through enormous amounts of red tape, but change would be a | lot easier if leadership decided to, you know, lead for a change. | renewiltord wrote: | Everyone in the Bay Area knows Google is a retirement home and FB | is where you go to join a team that is 20% high-performance, 40% | normal, and 40% low-performance-never-fired. It's like the | standard story of a group project in university (though all my | group projects had hotshots I'd gladly work with). | | But this seems like it's inevitable at larger companies. I recall | at one such company someone told a friend of mine that one | project was going to take 29 months or something to execute. That | company had a realistic 6 months to justify their stock price at | the time. It cratered 75% - and this was not a COVID boost | situation. | cheriot wrote: | > Zuckerberg noticed that it was getting harder to get all the | employees to attend a meeting as they were sometimes taking time | out in a day for personal work. So the Meta boss said that, in an | effort to be "cost-conscious," he was freezing or reducing | staffing for low-priority projects and slashing engineer-hiring | plans for the year by 30 per cent, reports added. | | As we all know, the most productive hackers prioritize all-hands | meetings. I hope this is misattribution from the author. | mikhael28 wrote: | Yes. Yes they are. On some teams. | | On other teams, they put out revolutionary products/developer | tools. | | It comes back to management, and talent self-selecting itself. | Truly talented people won't be content to waste their career, and | will leave poor performing teams to join high performing ones. | daenz wrote: | >Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the | company who shouldn't be here. 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. | | He might realize that nobody cares about Facebook, they just care | about their fat compensations for relatively little work | (according to him). Honestly, aside from the experience of | working with technology at that scale, are there a lot of other | reasons to work at Facebook? I think we all are recognizing its | had its time in the spotlight and its on its way out. | arkitaip wrote: | Either these CEOs are insanely incompetent leaders who have gone | on obviously unnecessary hiring sprees as late as a few months | ago, or something else is up. Either way, it takes a particularly | dishonest leaders to suggest that the main problem is low | employee productivity. | leishman wrote: | It's no secret that most people at Google hardly work. It's | been like this for years but you're right it's management's | fault for allowing this culture. | laichzeit0 wrote: | As an end user of Google Ads/Analytics what frustrates me the | most is every time I have some question it's like at least 3 | meetings with different people explaining the same problem | and the answer is always to pass the buck down to some | "specialist". It's like no one even understands their | products anymore. You have a "measurement specialist" and | like three layers of specialists in that layer. You actually | can't get your questions answered because no one person seems | to know how everything fits together. Just passing the | problem from one so called specialist to the next. | [deleted] | galdosdi wrote: | Allowing? They've encouraged it by creating a system where | there is very little relationship between what gets you | promoted and what is good for your business unit. That's why | you have 13 failed exciting messaging apps, all of which got | lots of ICs promoted, instead of 1 successful boring | messaging app that just kept getting maintained in a wise | manner, getting very few people promoted. | bell-cot wrote: | Doubtless those honest, selfless CEO's were completely duped by | evil conspiracies of rotten & incompetent middle managers, | who've spent the last decade or two building ever-larger | pyramids of bloat to set their golden thrones on top of... | kennend3 wrote: | This! | | Far too often middle managers are incentivized to build the | largest team possible. | | While the message from the top may be "lean and mean" but you | compensate middle managers based on team size... | | Perverse incentive certainly comes to mind. | metadat wrote: | "We can only promote you to director if your team size is | 15+" | Kaze404 wrote: | Is this sarcasm? I honestly can't tell | lovelearning wrote: | I believe so, based on the phrase "honest selfless CEOs." | Kaze404 wrote: | That was my inclination as well, but the grand parent | comment being said unironically wouldn't be the weirdest | thing I've seen on this website :p | bell-cot wrote: | Fair point - "evil conspiracies of rotten & | incompetent..." is often a simple & obvious truth. | 202206241203 wrote: | I have heard that "young people are just smarter", will we | see a new CEO of Meta any day now? | titzer wrote: | 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 seriously broken hiring pipeline in the | laziest way possible? If a company can't be bothered to set | performance expectations that are measurable and actionable, but | just expects to push people out by "turning up the heat", that's | an abject failure of a workplace. There used to be things like | quarterly/yearly performance reviews, ratings, even "performance | improvement plans" for under-performing employees--you know, | clear expectations, clear communications, criteria and steps and | timelines put forward when someone is not meeting expectations. | | You know, sometimes _life happens to people_ and they slow down a | quarter or two, maybe because of a family crisis, divorce, child, | death in the family, traumatic event. Global pandemic? 2 years of | isolation WFH? Yeah, there might be reasons... | | But, from _the top_ , the message "these people will find their | way to the door if we make work suck enough"--I couldn't imagine | anything more demoralizing. | mlword wrote: | I don't understand this either. He has to trust entire layers | of useless middle management to get accurate performance | numbers. All he'll get are invented numbers on a piece of paper | (metaphorically speaking). | | The ones who leave may be dissatisfied with the artificial | goals. | frogpelt wrote: | I don't think you can infer from this article that Meta isn't | setting new, measurable and actionable performance expectations | internally. | | Though you could be inferring that from working there or from | all the other news about them. | cmollis wrote: | 'too many employees, but few work'.. this is misleading.. given | the spin, you might think this indicates that they hired these | people to do specific line-of-business things, and they didn't | get done. However, what actually happened was they hired a | bunch of people to do.. something.. but they weren't sure | what.. all they were told is that they need to hire them.. then | they realized they might have 'a down quarter or two'.. apple's | killing their advertising business, and they're thinking.. 'hey | wait a minute.. our headcount's gone up.. no one in middle- | management seems to know what they're doing (which is actually | our fault.. but we can't say that), so we'll call the people we | hired lazy unmotivated clowns and get rid them that way.' Cue | the high-fives. | twblalock wrote: | I've been at places where I would love to hear the CEO say | that. Being forced to work with poor performers, lazy people, | and people who deliver poor quality results is frustrating and | demoralizing. | | Those kinds of people can stick around for years, especially in | good times when the company is making so much money that | leadership doesn't need to care. Netflix is one of the few | large companies that has a culture of culling the herd even in | good times, and I wish more large companies would take that | approach. | intrestingstuff wrote: | Yes, a very powerful move of Zuckerberg. Many people get | offended by an aggressive CEO, but these CEO's end up with | many more applications of ambitious candidates than they can | employ. | austinjp wrote: | It depresses me no end that someone can see poor performance, | laziness etc only as a trait others possess, and not as a | reaction to circumstance that they themselves might | experience one day. | | I guarantee that anyone -- anyone -- can find themselves | viewed as substandard. | | It's truly disturbing when Zuckerberg says something so | dystopian, and people 'in the trenches' call for more. | tomuli38 wrote: | From what I understand, Netflix doesn't cull the herd -- they | get rid of good (but not excellent) performers too. The | article is talking about actually cullung the herd and | getting rid of the mediocre performers who previously could | skate by. | deeptote wrote: | Yeah true, but this coming from the likes of Facebook and | Google, two companies well known for warehousing talent... | it mostly just comes across as tone deaf and naive. | | For years they've literally hired very smart and capable | people, and then shoehorned them into working on some ad- | tech engine that an intern could do, just so they didn't | work for a competitor. And now they're angry that their | employees "don't work hard?" | | Holy fuck, for being Google, they sure have some idiots in | leadership. | TheAceOfHearts wrote: | This sounds plausible, but I'd love to hear if others | agree with this claim. | | Isn't this a failure of the free market? This leads to | the obvious question, which is: what could be done to | improve optimal talent distribution? | | It seems bad to society if rich companies can monopolize | talent to control development and output in order to | ensure greater political power and control. | paganel wrote: | > but I'd love to hear if others agree with this claim. | | I'm one of those that agree with that claim, I've said | something similar a couple of times during the last few | years on this forum (I remember that once I even used the | term "golden handcuffs" in order to describe the whole | situation). | | As to why and how this came to happen in relation to the | free market? The short answer is that both Google and FB | are de-facto monopolies. In a way that can also be | extended to Apple and MS. Of course that these companies | will make tons and tons of a money during a period when | software is eating the world (I know it sounds marketing- | ish, but it's the reality). As such, they can use that | money to "park" the best developers available among their | ranks, so that no real competitor can emerge. | antonymy wrote: | Weird how Zuckerberg's red flag for low productivity was | employees avoiding meetings to work on personal projects. In the | first place, I was under the impression FAANG companies | encouraged employees to pursue personal projects for the benefit | of the company. | nso95 wrote: | Sounded more like errands than personal projects | scarmig wrote: | Oh sweet summer child. | rajeshp1986 wrote: | It is amusing how the article says "employees" but everyone in | the comments are talking about developer productivity and | laziness. It is shocking how no one points out about the laziness | of PMs and management. I have seen PMs and managers taking | generous time off and lazying around. Don't forget lot of hiring | happens because managers and PMs do planning roadmaps and hire | based on that. Some managers also hire more than necessary just | cos they want to manage more people. In my previous company our | manager hired 3x more engineers than available projects. He | jumped ship recently and moved to another FAANG company while the | team is now clueless and feeling scared that team might see | layoffs. | mola wrote: | Go on a hiring spree inflate salaries, kill startups while having | no infrastructure to actually manage this newly aquired | workforce, then claim it's their fault for not being hungry | enough. Bah these guys are such psychos | jbverschoor wrote: | Maybe zuck expected 10x engineers | sgt wrote: | Instead he added 10 times the amount of 1x engineers. | jbverschoor wrote: | Still not the same people | victor9000 wrote: | This sounds more like WFH is being used to scapegoat a decade of | bad management, business, and product decisions. | jeffbee wrote: | Hopefully they are planning to start the productivity witch hunt | at the top, not at the bottom. I mean, what the hell does Urs | even do, from New Zealand? Cut the fat at the top, save billions. | jstx1 wrote: | I don't think that this is about anyone's slacking off. If you're | going to reduce staff, you make yourself look better by dressing | it up as improved productivity and efficiency, that's why | Zuckerberg is making these statements. | galdosdi wrote: | Bingo. Nothing about a "recession" makes it easier or harder | for upper management to manage performance. If they were good | at it before they're good at it now and if they were bad at it | before, they're not going to suddenly get any better at | identifying poor performers. But if layoffs are going to have | to happen for unrelated reason, might as well try to spin it so | that those that are left behind feel grateful and prideful | rather than resentful and worried. | supernova87a wrote: | All I can say is, thank god there seems to be some conserved (or | marginally decreasing) quantity of output with increasing size of | the company. (i.e. even as you grow bigger your efficiency and | effectiveness drops in opposition to the number of people you | accrete) | | Otherwise we'd all be living under our corporate overlords for | sure. | amelius wrote: | That's because we all have the equivalent of a TV-set on our | office desks. | | And Zuck is part of the problem here. | elcapitan wrote: | In a world where more and more work gets automated anyway, those | people just managed to get a private version of UBI before | everybody else. | taylodl wrote: | They increased their headcount by 62% during the pandemic and now | are like - these people are deadweight and not productive? | Really? There are a lot of logistics you have to have in place to | hire that many people, especially when you're already a LARGE | company, and keep them all working. It seems to me their hiring | process is completely broken - hire everybody, see who works out, | can the rest. This just confirms the horror stories I hear from | people working at FAANGs. It's not anywhere I want to be. | colinmhayes wrote: | I mean it's not unreasonable to think they needed those people | then, but now they don't. If you've got 40,000 people worth of | work and 70,000 people some of them aren't going to be | productive. Just because you had 70,000 people worth of work | last year doesn't mean they're still productive this year. | tomuli38 wrote: | Then say that and don't blame employee laziness for poor | planning. | r00fus wrote: | 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! | dqpb wrote: | Let's look at the flip side. If an engineer saves Google/Meta $10 | million annually by better resource utilization, is this | reflected in their salary or bonus? Answer: fuck no, it is not. | | Maybe engineers should turn up the heat a little. Maybe they | should leave and start their own businesses. Haven't we made | Zuck, Pichai, Page, Brin, etc. rich enough? | | Answer: yes, we have made them rich enough. | DubiousPusher wrote: | American corporations post record profits for several years and | then one quarter of decreased revenue, their conclusion, their | workers aren't productive enough. | chadlavi wrote: | Would these two meet their own criteria? because freeing up their | salaries would sure go a long way. | alexk307 wrote: | This is such an embarrassment for these two... Aren't YOU the CEO | of your company? Didn't YOU approve hiring plans and corporate | goals? If there's not enough work, why don't you find something | for them to work on, or replace your managers with folks that | will. Instead, it's the employee's fault for being so | unproductive. | yibg wrote: | Not to defend either of them as CEOs but isn't that what | they're doing? Part of addressing a problem is surfacing it in | the first place. | AzzieElbab wrote: | Well, there's is a lot of room to wiggle with ~1M revenue per | employee. I'd be curious to hear about working habits of | people at Apple :) | qqtt wrote: | They are surfacing it in a weaselly way which absolves them | of personal responsibility. | | In reality, they approved the strategic direction of the | company and signed off on the outrageous hiring plans. They | were responsible for fostering a culture of execution and | measuring the results of their teams. They were responsible | for ensuring their investments were paying off. | | Instead of messaging that "As CEO, we did not invest in the | correct strategic direction of the company with the | associated supporting culture to execute on our plans and as | a result need to re-calibrate our investments" - they instead | say "Too many employees aren't working, it's all the fault of | the low performers!" or a variation of that message. | stickfigure wrote: | I'm not sure how you expect the process to go? As the CEO | of a big company you aren't personally involved in hiring | or managing line engineers. Your input is to tell | underlings to tell their underlings to hire more or work | more or whatnot. Feedback is just as slow moving up the | chain. | | Basically, "memo to employees" _is_ the process. | db1234 wrote: | The CEO may not be involved in hiring line engineers | sure, but the buck still stops with the CEO. The least | they can do is be sensitive in messaging. "Some of you | don't belong here" just comes across as crass and | insensitive. Given how FB is doing may be Zuck himself | doesn't belong there anymore? Did he think about that | before making the comment? | quest88 wrote: | I think the spirit of the comment is that the CEOs aren't | taking responsibility for something they created. They | should write a postmortem. | 3pt14159 wrote: | I heard from former, recently departed Facebookers that | their standards for hiring dropped quite a bit during the | pandemic. | | If I had to guess why Zuck isn't happy, it's that the new | hires plus the increased organisational bloat of such a | massive amount of new hires didn't materalize into | spreadsheet numbers that looked good. | nemo44x wrote: | However, the DEI team goals are making significant | progress fortunately! | ken47 wrote: | Well, we're viewing these messages without context. Absent of | context, I would say that Zuckerberg's messaging is too | aggressive, and many otherwise decent employees would find it | toxic. Now, if there was a proper build-up of messaging to this | level of aggression, perhaps that context justifies it to a | certain extent. But it looks quite bad in isolation. | | Pichai's messaging is more reasonable, even without context. | He's just saying the company needs people to work harder. I'm | fine with that. | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: | They lack creativity and vision. The biggest cash cows at these | companies are already built. | | Ads and app stores | danschuller wrote: | It just seems like setting a frame for upcoming layoffs nothing | more or less than that. | outworlder wrote: | > If there's not enough work, why don't you find something for | them to work on | | Or why don't they bring back the 20% rule and let the smart | folks they have hired to come up with new projects? Some of | them may end up bringing revenue. | dontblink wrote: | This doesn't work in a company of large size. There is a | reason it's called 120% rule at Google. | hgomersall wrote: | I'm convinced that much of this hand wringing is about self | justification. I think the role of the CEO is essentially to | pretend to be in charge so everyone actually doing the work | doesn't lose faith. | entropicgravity wrote: | Not working is better than working and being a liability. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-10 23:00 UTC)