[HN Gopher] 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerbe...
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'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.
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