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.
"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.
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.
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.
>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.
Amen, once upon a time I worked for a company and I didn't miss a single day for almost 3 years. Then at the moment I needed to work remote due to a family member's terminal cancer, I got oh so sorry to hear that, but by the way you f*** something up last week.
You sure you really need to work remote, can you work remote like one day a week. Are you sure, it's like terminal terminal.
Eventually they agreed to let me work remote but then they hired a replacement behind my back .
Luckily my childhood taught me not to trust people. When someone shows you who they really are, believe them. So I already had a better paying job lined up.
Yep, I lived this and it really woke me up. The day my dad died my boss called to ask "your going to be in tomorrow right, since you don't have to take care of him anymore"
Not to mention things like "are you sure its terminal" "Do you know what terminal means? just checking maybe you didn't understand the doctor"
To a company you are a number and nothing more,treat them the same. The people in charge got there by ruthlessly focusing on that fact. Trying to get sympathy from work is like trying to explain to a debt collector why you can't pay. They don't care at all and never will, everything you say will be used against you and they are hoping you will slip up.
Its as pointless as a mouse trying to debate a hungry cat as to why he should not eat him.
I don't care about my employees at all. Their family lives are meaningless to me, distracting and dull.
However I always pretend to care, always make sure they're well paid, have clear growth in development and pay, feel looked after, that they don't need to hesitate to ask if they need a cash advance or time off for an emergency, etc.
You can be ruthlessly focused and unempathetic whilst also being sympathetic and helping people love what they do. They're not mutually exclusive.
To be fair, I have had some compassionate employers offer me a couple of extra days of PTO after an emergency.
But this is offset by the fact that since I never took PTO, I had stopped accumulating it almost a year ago.
Something I love about remote work, is it encourages people to actually build real social circles.
I make my friends at bars, concerts, and industry meetups. I don't make work friends, I'm not trying to be buddy buddy with my manager
Because that same manager who was like. Yeah good job. You just saved the company $30,000, here's a $400 bonus
The moment something happens, like you know your dad dying, is going to tell you. If you don't get back in shape they'll have to look hiring someone else.
Work to maximize your income, try not to be mean to people at work, but you should never treat work as anything but a transaction.
My wife had a Big Crunch at her job so I needed to leave early every day to pick up my son instead of my wife doing it. My job gave zero fucks and wanted my butt-in-seat until 5pm. I still left 30 minutes early every day and got fired for it, but not before lining up another job. Some work places seem great, until real life hits you in the face. I wish there was some way to detect empathy of a workplace before joining, without coming across as sketchy.
A family business is worse. You will always be considered an outsider.
The idea of greater sympathy is a fallacy. You are simply closer to the people with power, they don't want to seem cruel because that drives away talented/hard workers, they have to make concessions. They don't have the resources to make people expendable yet. They don't get the luxury of having 6 layers of mgmt to shield them from being remorselessly cruel. As soon as they have those layers you will see what they really are. Ask me how I know...
You get the added bonus of some borderline mentally challenged family member will be put in a position of power. The other family members know but don't want to hurt their feelings. Then you get to be drawn into awkward family squabbles when you have to appeal to the other family members that their actions are hurting the business and need to be corrected, basically babysitting your own boss for them. Without the benefit of ever being in charge yourself.
I get back at it by getting paid as much as I can for as little work I can do. Like I said, I’m not doing nothing, but I’ll never sell my soul for marginal increases in wages and that occasional promotion.
I get back by having a life after 5 pm, Never going in to work on a weekend, taking time off to spend it with family and never letting stress and bs from corporate world affect my private life.
Yeah, that's how corporate America works, buddy. You give up on finding fulfillment at work or striking it rich, and just do what they tell you without thinking too much about it. In return, you get to clock out at 5 and take a nice vacation every year.
As oppose to what? Spending 20hr of unpaid overtime in hopes to get noticed? Or starting a company and betting your (and your family) whole future to be next facebook?
They are doing 9-5 and then do whatever they want with their life. Maybe they are working on a side to break from corpo world, maybe they have no other choice or wants.
Oh, I'm definitely not saying they should do otherwise. One of the great things about large corporations is that they can provide a stable work environment that doesn't interfere with the rest of your life.
But to suggest that this is how you "get back at corporate America" is laughable. In fact, it's the opposite.
That’s nonsense. It’s extremely hard to fire people in many corps. I’ve personally seen it take years even when everyone agreed (including management) someone needed to go. And often the paperwork threshold is so high that even people producing negative work aren’t fired; you just hope they eventually move on since you’re not giving them raises etc.
That’s when an org really starts to collect dead weight (actual dead weight).
Don’t get me wrong, shitty managers need checks and balances, but when an org loses so much trust in itself that it makes it impossible to remove pretty much anyone (except those trying to improve things usually, despite the rules), it’s going to get pretty bad soon.
I dislike that framing. It seems disingenuous to call "doing what I'm required to do by my employer" any variant on "quitting". It's explicitly not quitting, after all. If the employer expects that you do more, it should require it.
The only way your claim of "as little work I can do" is accurate is that if you spent one minute less working, it becomes the trigger point where you'll get fired.
But it sounds like you're just a normal corporate worker who does exactly what is stated in your employment contract and no more (and no less) -- but I suppose you should know that there are many people who do much less work than is formally required and get to keep their job.
There is a pain threshold for most managers to fire an employee. They have to spend time and money on recruiting and training a new replacement, so in theory if the cost of you slacking off is lower than the cost of finding a replacement, they might not actually fire you.
“Ambition” is tricky. New grads become a “Senior Engineer” or a “manager” in 5 years these days. And most people don’t climb corporate ladder beyond a Senior Staff Engineer or a director. So you have almost 40 years worth of career left to climb two more levels.
Working your ass off continuously in pursuit of that ambition is pointless. If that’s the only thing in your life, then maybe it’s not, but ambition can be found outside of corporate America.
Forget the compan(y/ies) for a moment. In a decade or two when you look back will you feel your time was well spent?
The companies, much less corporate America in aggregate, will have assuredly not noticed your protest. But will you notice your lack of professional accomplishment?
Being wronged extracts a price, through vengeance you can pay it twice.
My argument is that professional accomplishment can be achieved while just meeting expectations. I’ve seen people who are at the same level, work harder (read longer) than I do and yet get paid less and not get the promotions they were trying for. The system isn’t a perpetual growth machine, otherwise all of us would be VPs and CEOs. I never said I don’t do any work, I still work on things I want to and take great pride in every single thing I do. I just don’t do it for free or at the expense of other parts of my life. Ambition needs to be checked with reality.
This isn't an irrational reaction, but it also isn't always as clever as it seems. Working this way can suck the soul out of your life in the same way that failing to exercise yourself mentally or physically will eventually eat away at your fitness. Is it terminal? Of course not. But it does take a toll on you. And it eats away at your sense of fulfillment and happiness.
Could it be something like diabetes, where it won't kill you today but it will kill you tomorrow? Maybe. Only you can figure out the answer for that for yourself. I know the answer for myself by now, which is yes. I'd much rather work for a company that gives me the opportunities to stretch myself, do work in a space I actually find interesting, and mostly get rewarded and advance even if they extract an absolute larger percentage of my surplus labor than other companies, than vice versa. And that is because I am getting a worse deal in today terms, and a better deal in tomorrow terms. I've been burned by this attitude before, but I've also had exceptional outcomes I'd never take back or redo any other way. YMMV.
agree with this. have been trying to get to this point for a few months. I usually am a friendly person but I’ve learned to limit to personal relations and not let it flow into my work ethic. I have some other issues to be ironed out though like overzealous colleagues, and some flexibility needs
This is what has become the default that our current system works to incentivize in real terms, but with a lot of marketing to discourage following this path. I work in India, but with a corporate American client atm, and have seen this in operation,(luckily it's a fairly small/medium company so not too much). Having worked in a few startups(with ESOPs) from India before this, I really, really wonder how a global/multi-national company can work with equity based incentives at this point, and if it will help a bit to improve the incentives.
This is the "pieces of flair" debate. If their manager asks for fifteen tickets a month, and they do exactly fifteen, the manager sits them down and asks why they don't do twenty, like their colleague over there.
They ask the manager, "If you want twenty tickets, just ask me for twenty tickets. Why do you set fifteen as the standard, and then try to use cheap psychological tricks to get me to do twenty tickets?"
I have managed teams going back to the nineties. If I want fifteen tickets, I ask for fifteen tickets. If someone just does the minimum, they just get paid the minimum, but I have set my expectations such that their work is a net benefit to the company, so they keep their job.
If things change and I need twenty tickets, I will ask for twenty tickets. It's not complicated. The "bare minimum" is still enough to keep a job. If it isn't, it's on me to establish a different minimum such that the "minimum" is exactly that: The minimum needed to remain employed.
"Dead weight" is someone whose work is not a net benefit to the company. If I as a manager set a minimum, and someone does the minimum, and they are not a net benefit, WTF am I doing as a a manager setting fifteen tickets as the minimum?
Employees meeting expectations but not being a net benefit? That's a management problem. And if it's across the org, that's a SYSTEMIC management problem.
So if this person is meeting the minimum, either they are NOT dead weight, or there is a management problem. Either way, they are not the problem.
As a manager myself, here is the problem I see in what you're saying: Most often, the time estimates are set by engineers themselves. I don't tell them "Do this task in 3 days" -- I ask them how many days/week it will take, and we track against that. This relies on my trust that they are working hard and not half-assing it.
The "minimum expectation" is therefore hard to concretely define. It's not "everyone should fix 3 bugs a week" or "everyone must implement 2 features a month," because the work is always going to vary depending on the specific issues and project needs.
The variability of coding work can make it hard to explain to under-performers that they're falling behind their peers.
If you're a manager and are not capable of seeing an overestimated timeline for what it is, you have one or more problems: 1) you do not know your employees, 2) you do not understand the work they're supposed to be doing, 3) you do not understand your product. Either of these or all of them or any combination in between still means you're the problem.
If you look at a problem and you estimate a timeline, you'll underestimate sometimes. so when an engineer brings you a significantly longer timeline, ask them to justify it, ask them to show you what they mean. This will eat a few extra minutes out of your day, but it will help you separate the bullshitters from the genuine people, and it will help you understand what they do better. And if you just can't add those extra minutes to your schedule without causing trouble, then the problem lies with your boss, not you. It's your job to know your people and understand what they do, and if you're not given the leeway to do that you'll never be effective.
You're describing a scenario where an incompetent manager is both clueless about the technology and doesn't spare even a few minutes to do their job. I'm sure that happens, unfortunately.
But, the point that I was making was simply that trust is an essential part of software work, and people who pride themselves on doing only the minimal amount of work, risk messing up this system of trust for everyone else. We all want a manager who trusts us when we say a problem is hard and it will take time. And managers want engineers who when they say they're working on a problem, they're actually putting time and effort into it.
In the (hopefully very rare) case where an engineer puts in a measly amount of effort during the week but pretends they're hard at work, this trust is broken, and in the worst outcome, the manager or company overcorrects and it becomes a shitty place to work.
Yeah, but this is where knowing your people comes in. If you've got a bullshitter on your team and you know it, you need to be figuring out how to get them not just off your team, but out of the company. If you don't know it, you're not doing your job.
This can be hard I know with the way contracts are, labor laws, severances, and often times it is easier to just offload the employee to another team, which compounds these problems and makes them systemic. That's the only sticking point I think that takes the blame off management. It should be easier to fire bullshitters.
If you don’t trust their estimates, Look up estimation poker. The whole team plays. It’s a good way to keep everyone honest with regards to estimation and allows everyone to learn hidden things that someone else may see.
Is this comment section to devolve into a discussion about software engineering practices? We could now write thousands of pages on that topic or we can cut down to the chase. If the manager can't tell whether his project is on track or not, remember nobody gives a damn whether it takes 50000 lines of code or 500 or that you closed X tickets, then the project has either already failed or the project manager is taking a huge risk with a greenfield project where he is just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.
I've been lucky to only ever work at places with very technical managers, who don't blindly accept estimates, and actively work with the developers to figure out how to work faster.
But, the usual pattern for people who work slow, is that some new complication always comes up. And it's not easy to know when the complication is legitimate and will take time to figure out, or something that could easily be dispatched in an hour's time.
Currently a manager, you wrote exactly what I would say, only in a much more robust manner. "Meeting standards" should not be cause for alarm. If it is, there are many things wrong with the company.
The problem with this line of reasoning is you’re assuming everything required to keep a company going can be reduced to a job description, but there’s millions of small, impactful ways employees can contribute that fall through the cracks. Being pleasant to your coworkers is rarely part of the job description, but it can make or break that coworker’s productivity for a whole day.
If you aren’t willing to do these extra tasks, that’s fine, but you’re doing nothing to keep the company surviving and someone else will have to pick up your slack. It’s in everyone’s best interests to keep the company surviving as long as possible so it can keep paying salaries.
Of course the C level has a lot more to gain, but everyone has to work somewhere so why not do your reasonable best to make a positive impact.
True; I see your point and mostly agree with you, with the caveat that I'd file those traits as "being a decent human being with a reasonable level of emotional maturity" - things that I personally filter for in the interview stage.
Since when is a software engineer's output measured in "tickets" per month?
That said I agree with the idea that someone that adds value that is some reasonable multiple of their salary gets to keep their job. If they're not adding value because they can't perform their job or don't care they should not keep their job. If they're not adding value because of how they're managed their manager should not keep his job. If this issue is endemic in the company that probably means the CEO shouldn't keep their job... In an ideal world anyways.
This is the best response. I used "tickets" as a rhetorical device because it maps very neatly to pieces of flair from Office Space.
In reality, trying to measure software development productivity objectively always makes me whip out a little venn diagram that shows that what matters and what can be measured have but a small intersection.
But abstracting away from tickets, as a manager you set some kind of expectation for "the minimum." However it is you rate people from "not meeting expectations" to "meeting expectations" to "exceeding expectations," my contention is that it's the job of a manager to make sure that "meeting expectations" means that an employee's work is a net benefit to the company.
Whereas, "dead weight" describes someone who is a net loss to the company. So to me, someone who just meets expectations should not be "dead weight." If they are, I suggest there is a management problem.
I got reprimanded for not posting enough comments on issues and then was compared to another engineer.. who didn’t post timely comments on issues. At some point it’s not about trying to determine if you’re an underperformer but just that they want you out. Lots more tales from that crypt but I’m happy where I am at the moment
Finally saw "Office Space" recently! Now I know about "flair". 15 is the bare minimum. Look at <dedicated-employee> - he has what, 35 pieces of flair! Don't you feel like a slacker, barely achieving minimum expectations?
As to the parent thread: I make about half what I would be making if I had gone the FAANG route -- but I get to choose what I work on. That is a fair deal in my mind. Working on things that fascinate & inspire me make me a 10x rockstar. But if I'm asked to keep dead code limping along zombie-like, I need to work harder and longer because in that scenario I am a 0.5x sleeper. YMMV
Exactly, most employees aren't in a position to allocate their own tasks. The entire point of management is to algin what happens in the company with the interests of the owners of the company. If management makes a mistake in allocating work and there is no flaw in execution by the employees the real dead weight lies in management.
Dead weight would be people doing nothing. After those come the negative contributors: they do stuff but is all politicking and scheming, or just waste others time. Doing strictly what you are really paid for is bad now?
“Enough” is not in the vocabulary of corporate vampires. Doing your job to the requirements should be acceptable, and that only works if your org is run by empathetic, reasonable leadership, you don’t tolerate the abuse of being squeezed, or you have a union. If the bar is never enough, you’re being gaslit, and that’s psychological abuse.
And I think that's exactly the original commenter's point: if the company he works for ever decides that "enough" isn't sufficient to satisfy his boss, he's he'll move on.
Working to rule involves malicious compliance, which may very well be harder work than actually being productive. Just being unenthusiastic is not the same thing.
No, dead weight is someone who does little or no work, should be fired, but manages to fly under the radar somehow in order to keep their job.
Someone who does the bare minimum in order to buy get fired is just a... satisfactory employee. Never gonna get big raises, never gonna get promoted, but gets their work done and doesn't go above or beyond.
Apparently you have never continually excelled at your job and been rewarded with zero raises, zero promotions, zero added trust, and zero added authority or influence.
Every place I have ever worked has taken advantage of anyone who does more than they are asked. None of those individuals were ever rewarded for going above or beyond. Not a single time.
Doing the bare minimum is what employers do. Why should employees do any more?
I believe it is our moral duty to improve ourselves. I do not believe it is our moral duty to donate effort to an unthankful entity.
The problem is when you tell your manager it'll take you X number of weeks to finish a task, and your manager trusts that you're working hard and that the task simply requires X weeks of work... but in reality you're barely spending any time on it every day, and could easily have done it in a few days. Meanwhile, the rest of the project is moving slowly because they need your piece to complete.
If, on the other hand, the manager's trust has no relevance here, because you are not setting your own time-work estimates, then have at it!
This is kind of a wild take. Estimates should be reviewed like anything else on a team, and if the estimate doesn’t fit the timeline, the team should try to either split up / parallelize the work, drop scope, or look for a creative solution (usually involving taking on some strategic tech debt).
This is completely consistent with what I said. Even as a team effort, you want your manager to trust when you say something has some non-obvious complexity. And the manager wants to trust their team members.
But my comment stems from someone above who said they do the minimum amount of work possible. This sucks for the team, who is working hard and trying to make progress, meanwhile this person is barely doing any work every day in between gaming or reddit or whatever, but (presumably) still joins stand-ups and Slack to chime in with whatever "complication" he's having to work through that day, and always gives the impression that their work is super tricky.
You might be misunderstanding what "minimum amount of work" means. The OP might simply be referring the minimum amount of work achievable without overexerting oneself via extra hours, working weekends, under stress, etc. Someone's minimum amount of work can be hard work. They literally said "I will always finish my work in the time it is expected to be finished." So if that amount of time is not satisfactory, it is up to the manager to ask for the time to be shortened- and then that becomes the new minimum.
It’s also a problem when the manager can’t tell if an estimate is bogus or not. It could be exaggerated. It could also be overly optimistic. To be a decent dev manager you need a feel for whether it’s in the right ball park. Or know when to bring in someone else who does.
IMHO (having managed small teams) a manager of technical team members needs to be able to accurately estimate how long something will take and the variance on that estimate. This is a core part of the manager's job. If a manager isn't technical enough to know how to do the tasks themselves if they had to, that manager should not have a job IMHO. This is part of what sets engineer-led companies like SpaceX apart from their "dinosaur" competitors and why SpaceX seems to be 10x better in output.
No, the LITERAL definition of dead weight is "
1: the unrelieved weight of an inert mass
2: DEAD LOAD
3: a ship's load including the total weight of cargo, fuel, stores, crew, and passengers"
Sometimes it’s the even worse folks - the people who do things that are net negatives and need to be drug around by everyone else like they’re an anchor around the companies throat.
Is it? I'd interpret dead weight as being... well a dead weight, say an anchor holding back progress. Or being generous at least not contributing anything even they aren't actively holding things back. Doing "the bare minimum" isn't dead weight though, they are still contributing
That is the exact propaganda I don’t buy. My 20 year long career that pays quite well would think either you’re wrong or most of corporate America’s management is not “Competent Management”.
Your comment upsets and disappoints me. In large part because it's true: at my previous workplace, I was casually told that CME is a polite fiction and all employees are expected to exceed expectations.
> 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.
> Amusingly enough, Leetcode style interviews are effective at ensuring deadweights remain so.
yep. They also ensure that anyone wanting to move on will probably be doing most of their day Leetcoding. Because you're going to stay at a tech job 1-2 years max and it takes most people probably 6+ months (kids, family, etc.) to ramp up from nothing. Once you have LC down and did the hard part, you need to retain it. Which means constantly doing problems.
> 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.
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.
W-2 “freelance” in addition to W-2 “non-freelance” at the same time? In other words, you violated your employment agreement and got fired. The sad part is you still don’t quite understand the basics of W-2 and why you got fired in the first place.
Apparently you don’t either. In the US at will employment doesn’t mean you can’t have another job. There may be a clause in an employment agreement that says you agree to not work for any other company, but I’ve only seen this clause once in 10 jobs. Do you know what this clause is commonly called?
In Clerky, you will find it under the section “Outside Activities.” Custom contracts may have a different name for that clause. 1 out of 10? Maybe if you’re in Hollywood or some other highly specialized vertical. In tech, it will be 99 out of 100.
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.
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 at HQ 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”.
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.
Another concern that is very prevailing is rewards. I could work 2 times harder in my current position, however what is that going to bring me?
Promotion or bigger bonus - it’s the same as playing stock options with your time, you are better off playing office politics for a much better RoI.
Self value? Senior engineer in FAANG is almost never going to have REAL impact, so I can only enjoy thinking that someone cares about that tiny piece of software that I work with. Again, getting drunk is a better RoI.
Same with self improvement… where side project usually allows one to grow more
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.
> > 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
> 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.
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.
I think it's pretty common that when someone says "nobody does X", that's shorthand for "there is probably a very small number of people who do X, but not enough to make much of a difference".
Sure, there are some people who abuse WFH, but I suspect it is far fewer people than Zuckerberg and Pichai suggest, and there are other, more important reasons for productivity losses. Reasons that have more to do with management and poor strategy than the actions of individual employees.
If you view people as dead weight, that is the problem. Few folks that make a decent salary want to do the bare minimum. Only managers that treat them as such will call them 'dead weight'.
Note that I'm not claiming you to be a manager, however your viewpoint of these employees reflects some of the managers I've dealt with. I once worked at a company who provided zero training, zero documentation, very poor pay, and no possibility of anything despite offering the world when I joined. I was told by my manager that I was dead weight. I was fired by HR. The situation did not end well for them, legally, or in terms of coworkers leaving.
In my experience working in software development, I've encountered only one person who was dead weight, and he ended up leaving on his own. I've been doing this for close to 20 years mind you. I've seen many accused of being dead weight, and sure, some could have tried harder, but most simply struggled with the mess that was the code we were working on. The symptoms were common: no documentation, hostile management demanding tight deadlines, and poor communication.
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.
For another, all the people who post on Hackernews justifying cheating in college. My favorite bullshit excuse was cheating was justified because the professor didn't expend much effort with countermeasures.
Was going to disagree, because you portrayed this as as "unjust personal affront". I mean like everyone who ever got fired from McDonalds thinks "my boss irrationally hates me."
But on reflection this happens frequently, not due to personal reasons, but due to corporate politics. Side A won the war, so side B just punches the clock until whenever they get around to layoffs. In any big company, there's going to be a bunh of teams where "they know, but we haven't told them yet".
> 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.
> 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. I know tons of people like me , like 50% of my friend circle. Ppl just don't give a shit.
or, they felt being a dead weight was wrong, but wanted to be one, so came up with a justification. If they actually didn't want to be dead weight they'd work in spite of their situation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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)
The US litoral ships are 3500 tons 115m length. Russian Black Sea frigates 4000 tons 125m (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiral_Grigorovich-class_frig...) Black Sea is deep everywhere, ie. there is no "litoral" area where those frigates wouldn't be able to operate due to their size. And their roles there are currently mostly those of "litoral" ships, like the land attacks.
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
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
At Google, which I'm pretty confident the parent comment was describing, promotion is supposed to be recognition that you've already been consistently performing at that level for a long time. So someone newly promoted is not actually up-leveled, they're just no longer down-leveled.
Not in this case, here, my claim is the role was very clearly grown into, and the rating reflected the fact that these decisions are mostly tenure-based, + or - 2 or 3 years, and the rating was always going to be average even if I cured cancer, as was explicitly spelled out later. That disincentives putting in effort because it doesn't matter. Creates an uncomfortable nihilist atmosphere that can be suffocatingly depressive
Yeah...in at least one part of Google, as recently as last year, getting a rating higher than "meets expectations" in the second perf cycle after promo required a VP to approve an exception. Part of why I left.
> 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.
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.
From my experience with a temporary 4 day work week: the people who want to appear busy will still find a way to schedule in the same amount of pointless meetings into the fewer hours.
If those people have control over the schedules of other workers, then those workers lose their focus time.
You need guardrails to prevent org & overhead from overwhelming everything else.
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.
For me it's less about "find a hobby/enjoy life" or more that we're likely in this field because we want to feel necessary and useful.
I WFH with amazing TC and WLB. I do my hobbies all day and then work just a few hours. But I feel like an absolute piece of shit just coasting at work. Doesn't matter how well my hobbies are going, I'll always have the quiet stress of not contributing what I'm capable of doing. The times I feel good about myself are when I actually ship something cool with my team.
People working 4 hours a week still have to pretend to be productive for the other 36 hours though. They still have to sit through meetings, and justify their time, and answer Slack messages, and have reviews. They're not free to work on their own projects - they're just 'not working'. That sounds far worse than spending time working on something you actually care about even if it's not your own idea.
The comment that kicked this off was “ 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"”
$300k is (around here) over 7x the mode of income [1]. That's a significant amount (basically the yearly income of 7 "regular joes") and raises (to me) the ethical question of whether I'd deserve it. For a full 40-hour workload, perhaps a case could be made.
But for a 4-hour workload? The only way I'm getting that sort of compensation for so little work is if I'm a parasite on society. And that's not something I would want.
Note: this, by itself, does not imply no one would deserve that sort of compensation. It simply raises the bar - perhaps to a level that is beyond human reach, perhaps not.
> But for a 4-hour workload? The only way I'm getting that sort of compensation for so little work is if I'm a parasite on society.
That isn't the case with the power of scaling. If the product you happen to be working on 4 hrs a week happens to have X billion users, your tiny contribution gets multiplied by 9 orders of magnitude.
There's still something arbitrary and random about it, but it's not accurate to say you aren't producing net value for your employer/users/society/whatever.
This is the age-old ethical question "do people deserve more reward for their time when they do higher-leverage work?"
It's not as obvious a "yes" as I first thought. I do high-leverage work, but that just means my work builds on the work of many others. I couldn't do anything near what I do now we're it not for thousands or even millions of other people doing low-leverage work that provides the fulcrum for my work. It's society that allows me to do my high-leverage work -- why should I personally collect the pay check for it?
Also I won the genetical lottery to have the interest and intellectual capacity for this work. Is that something I should be rewarded for? Or is it an unfair advantage that other people should be compensated for not having? There's nothing about my personal effort that has given me that advantage.
Not to mention the education and relaxed upbringing that allowed me to reach this potential. That's also a gift from society to me. Should my response be to not repay? To hoard the rewards alone?
I don't know! That's the system we live in. But is it the system we ought to have?
> This is the age-old ethical question "do people deserve more reward for their time when they do higher-leverage work?"
Indeed. And I would argue that society answers this question already, in the form of teacher salaries. Teachers have the mightiest of levers: the not-yet-capable enter and the capable to highly capable leave. Any high-impact individual was molded by them.
Granted, there's not a trivial 1-on-1 relating between future excellence and a particular teacher. On the other hand, every person who had an outsized impact on the world had teachers that helped him/her along that path.
So I'd say society is pretty comfortable with a big "naah" here: teacher salaries are nothing special. (In the West - I remember reading about rock star salaries for good tutors in some Asian country.)
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
I dunno, have you seen some of the other replies here? =)
Seems like lots of ppl still can’t fathom something better than an interesting, high paying, but still fulltime job as their “ideal”, or don’t have any passions they’d rather spend their time on.
IMO one reason why so many haven’t found any passions is precisely cause all their time has been spent working, which is sad, honestly.
Yeah, agreed. It would be ideal to perfectly align your life passion with what you can get paid for, and a some people do manage to do that. It's not the only way though, despite what adherents of "success culture" seem to preach.
There is definitely a lot of work out there that needs to be done that isn't going to be anyone's passion. Still needs to be done, and it can pay well, and then you can do all kinds of fun things that you'd never be able to get paid for on the side.
A lot of people aren't monogamous in their passions either, which is kind of what you need to be in order to turn it into a career. Personally, I can't imagine every being so focused on one thing that it's all I'd want to do. I like my work, and I also love a lot of things that aren't my work.
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.
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.
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”.
I would take virtually any job that paid what I make now (nowhere close to $300k) and required 4 hours a week over the very best job that paid what I make now and required 40 hours a week. Don't even have to think about it.
I can fill 36 hours a week of my time better than anyone else can. If the money's equal and the time difference is that steep, I'll take the shorter time commitment.
Not parent but absolutely. There isn't a single thing I could do 40 hours a week long term without at least getting kind of sick of... but 4 hours per week means I wouldn't get sick of it, plus I'd have all that flexibility and energy and time to devote to several things that do interest me
Depends on if the 4 hours a week was all time I had to be at the office or the time I could do something useful but still had to be there 40 hours. For the first option it might be ok. I could find other things to do, maybe start my own little company, spend more time with the family and so on.
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.
"There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company."
One of my favourite corporate laziness stories was a friend of my brother's who would regularly nap for most of the working day in some unused basement room. After a while, his preferred room got converted into something else and he had to find a new sleeping spot.
He eventually found a room where a large laundry hamper would be left full of towels until they were washed or folded. Perfect, he thought. Secretive and soft! He went to get in and go to sleep, only to find someone else already in there asleep.
> 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.
> 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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've got a colleague with similar history - 24+ years of tech experience - software, hardware, networking, etc. He's built systems that processed tens of millions of dollars, has single-handedly reworked legacy crap spaghetti in to testable, documented, well-functioning stuff. He came in to a company, then covid hit, and no one else on the team has anywhere near his level of experience. One guy graduated high school 18 months ago and loves kotlin. Every meeting is him trashing everything saying how cool kotlin in. He's rewritten existing working image processing libraries from C (which my colleague wrote and were working in production) in to Kotlin because "kotlin is faster". Guess what's broken now?
They have multiple meetings per week where people argue about what encryption library they should use for JWT token signing. Like... 5 people - none of whom have ever written encryption, nor written a JWT, arguing based on all the blog posts they've collectively read. That's just one example. This happens constantly. And the manager is of the view that "everyone's opinion matters, everyone should be heard". So the person with decades of experience who's already written (and written docs and tests) for the system they're trying to migrate to has to sit and listen to people who can not spell SQL talk about how 'bad' his system is because it's not in Kotlin.
That feels like an extreme example, but the more I talk with other folks, it doesn't seem to be that uncommon. Probably 15% or so of folks I connect with seem to have wildly imbalanced skill levels in their teams which are not acknowledged as such. It's fine for someone to have less experience. It's not fine to pretend that your 6 months of CS-101 homework is equivalent to someone else's decades of experience and working/documented/tested code.
in my experience the team needs critical mass of decent developers. And by 'decent' I don't mean all-knowing experienced beasts. I mean adequate devs with ability to listen and to be wrong. If team has it, better devs naturally get listened more and everyone gets chance to improve from it.
It doesn't mean that you just don't let juniors express their opinions (everyone should be able to talk), but the 'weight' of dev's opinion determines by his track of previous cases. And obviously every opinion comes with responsibility for the result. If you forced your approach you need to be able to deal with the results.
ah yeah, the mythical 10x dev. He, who has the permission and authority of management, to completely eviscerate any and all process to get whatever management wants done. I know a guy like that. He recently commit a massive code change without so much as a code review or a Jira ticket. 100s of new files. No one knows what the fuck they do. Wonder of wonders.
People still believe in 10x. People also believe in agile. It's amazing. If you're doing code reviews, proper unit tests, Jira micromanagement bullshit, it's an impossibility to get a 10x dev. We have WIP limits for fucks sake! WIP!! You literally cannot merge enough code to be a 10x without management favoritism.
> People still believe in 10x. People also believe in agile. It's amazing.
I'm not sure it's the same people who 'believe' in both, or... there's more nuance.
I 'believe' in the '10x' thing, because... at times, I've been the 10x person, by many metrics (bugs closed, docs written, tests written, lines of code, tickets addressed, etc). And yes, I'm aware that metrics like that can be gamed in some fashion. I never did, mostly because it's not really apparent at the time there's an output imbalance, but looking back at some numbers like those, I was the '10x' person on a team. It said as much or more about the rest of the team than it did me personally. I've been on other teams where I was decidedly not a 10x, and do have memories of being the -2x person a few times.
I 'believe' in agile, but only to the extent that it supports and enhances an already functioning team. I've seen it played out in a team from a few years ago, and it was as much of a 'well-oiled machine' as you could get while being a growing startup expanding and hiring a lot. That said, the skills and people together would have worked decently and productively together absent any formal process. Obviously just 'imo', but after decades in software, you sort of get a sense of skill levels and ability. We/they were a decent team, and would have been without 'agile' - that was some extra layers of process and ceremony which no doubt helped some people with visibility. That benefit was largely ancillary to the delivery of working software. One could argue the 'repeatability' and 'onboarding' benefits of 'agile', but I've not seen it be a huge boon in most teams I've seen adopt 'agile'.
I did such thing at least twice (unintentionally). Usually there is a quite simple way to overcome this - cultivate review process and some some of tech meetings, where your '10x dev' can talk about their approach and others have chance to criticise it. If other devs don't care enough to challenge 10x and just roll with it, well then they have it coming.
As a current FANNG employee, I have seen so many dead weights here, especially the new-hires after COVID. They took advantage of the lenient WFH policy. Some travels around the world for a year; some becomes a social media influencer; some comes up with all sorts of excuse like wife/kids/parents being sick to take unlimited sick day.
It pains me to see how a great company gets abused like this. The cycle to put people on PIP is so long that they can coast at least a year before anything can be done.
Our org doesn’t have daily standup. We have weekly meetings but they dial in with camera off. When asked to give updates, they usually mention some small change, being blocked by other teams, or waiting for test result/releases. When you look at their code review, they often take 1 day to reply to comments so each diff could take a few days to submit.
So why do you put up with that? I'd absolutely be bringing that up as an issue with the coworker first and if that went nowhere with our manager if it was regularly causing issues within the team.
So these are devs on base salaries over 160k+, presumably considered to be somewhat senior, and their teams just let them get away without contributing their share? Not even showing up to stand ups or whatever regular team meetings there are? Something seems very off for that to be the case.
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.
It’s really sad when people who want to be meaningful, are stymied by the floaters.
The floaters stick around by inserting themselves into an essential process that needs non-advocate reviewers infrequently, this is usually supply chain, quality assurance, and security. Then they collude by scheduling meetings for each other, which is really just socializing.
When meaningful people need to use a process, and engage the floaters. They find that they are impossible to engage because they are in meetings. And if there’s special considerations that need to happen in a process, which is a given when you’re innovating, it means that the floaters have more opportunities to schedule more meetings, and sap the productivity of the meaningful people.
Not only do the floaters succeed in slowing down the productivity of the meaningful people, they also impose an opportunity cost, which is that the meaningful people cannot engage in another activity while the former activity is going through process. They have to also spend time engaging the floaters in meetings for the process to continue.
"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.
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.
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.
> people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company.
Jim Keller had an interesting perspective on how you should think if you are in managing position and need to fire people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TmuJSbms9c he and Peterson discuss it somewhere in the middle
>> "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.
I think the dead weight is a given, in either circumstance. It's not about motivating them, that's a sunk cost.
It's more about making the 90% of folks that aren't dead weight not suffer under the burden of the stuff OP mentions that overtakes day to day life as organizations get bigger. That's the issue.
I disagree with this. An entire business day is a long time to do nothing. I've always loved jobs where there was enough strategic direction to know what to focus on but enough latitude where you could actually do it. I can't think of anyone (not suffering from pure burnout) that didn't devour meaningful work that had well written requirements.
I have seen the “floaters” but it’s rare. What is worse are the occasional people (and some companies have lots more of this than others) that are a net negative impact to the productivity. There are different reasons but sometimes they believe that their work adds value but in the end it’s really just creating inefficiencies (like creating processes for process sake, work about work etc). That’s how large companies with everything going for them can easily start loosing their edge - when there’s more “no” people than “yes” people!
I think spending about 20 minutes on r/antiwork will get most folks to agree with you.
I think most people want a purpose. Many are perfectly happy for that to be something other than their work or means of earning an income. Nothing wrong with this of course but try be the person where some of your purpose is tied up in your work on that forum, or even this forum at times, and you get accused of having Stockholm syndrome toward your employment captors.
People want to grow, they want to do better. They also, crucially, want recognition and to feel valued for it. That means they must (must) be treated with respect by their employers, and rewarded or at least recognized when they achieve personal or professional growth.
If you don’t reward and respect people who try to grow, why would they ever continue that?
They are not 'pretending' in most cases. They are busy, and think they are adding value.
So do their managers.
Also - sometimes the inverse! I've caught myself feeling 'useless' at BigTech until some feedback/situation made me realize 'OMG this matters' kind of things.
It's hard.
That is maybe Management's #1 job is to get people focused on things that matter.
I have worked in one of those companies. Most were lazy and did barely any work. They were there for a paycheck and it showed. Not everyone works in a mission driven startup where the employees are intrinsically motivated to contribute. Many are just free riders and hide under a middle manager hoping they don't get noticed. Such B teamers need to be weeded out quick.
Then I switched companies and everyone was motivated and hard working. The leader there hired better (less stragglers to begin with) and fired better (fired stragglers within 3 months).
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.
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.
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.
Blind is full of people from the Bay Area, where if you are the very best in the world at wringing the corporate ladder for everything it’s worth, you might just maybe be able to buy a home for your family one day.
One thing remote work might bring us is a little more chill about compensation, as people live in regions where people not optimizing for TC can be comfortable and secure.
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.
The biggest lie I ever got told at work was "all teams have equal opportunity for impact". They don't, and team+org is about 80% of your potential performance.
At the time my org had a "mission & building" group and a "maintenance & operations" group. I was placed in the maintenance group.
Every single project in the maintenance group went the same: good idea, planning & initial prototype, gets noticed by management, you get permanently blocked or management pilfers your star players and you start again or scope down. All our projects were tiny or failures. Meanwhile the people in the mission group got showered with raises and promotions.
It was soul crushing, I had never been so unhappy. I had no (opportunity for) impact on the business, so my reviews were always that I was technically strong but didn't demonstrate impact. You can get stuck in a real feedback loop there, you get burned out at constant failure.
I'm sure we all looked lazy from above, I certainly felt lazy, but the org structure simply quashed any attempts at progress and we were all powerless against it.
I ended up leaving that role, it gave me a strong focus on impact only roles which was the best career move I ever made.
That sounds like a dysfunctional organization and a good example why trying to measure "impact" in the sense you're describing is not a good idea. Let's say you're on an internal tools team that's building tools that others in the organization rely on to build whatever products your company is making money of. You might say your direct "impact" [edit: is small/zero] but your indirect impact is definitely not. In a well run company those people would be highly valued for their indirect contribution.
You're absolutely right that how a company is organized, and its culture, is directly linked to those outcomes. The ability of individuals to make impact is also very related to their being in the right position to utilize their strengths aka role fit. In a well run company managers try to optimize for all these things. Ofcourse the best intentioned managers can't always place everyone in the perfect spot and lots of projects have work that isn't super shiny but is still important.
Sounds like you made the right decision in leaving.
It sounds to me like you were in a bad fit for the role. Projects definitely have a life cycle. Prototype, build, maintain. And you typically have different types of people doing these different roles. You may not have enjoyed the role that you played - but some people really do enjoy each of those roles.
>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.
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.
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?
The acronym FAANG was made up/popularized by Jim Cramer, a TV finance guy, intended to be "these companies are going to DOMINATE tech with the BIGGEST MARKET CAPS". Today the market caps are (in billions) 479 (Meta), 2719 (Apple), 1450 (Amazon), 300 (Netflix), 1566 (Alphabet) + 2166 (MSFT). Cramer tried to make an updated version happen in 2021: (Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet) because Netflix did not explode and Microsoft did not disappear in the way he had predicted.
So yes, IMO Microsoft sits pretty in the no-longer-accurate acronym FAANG.
Better pay? Not for new hires. Most recent reports I have seen (blind, levels.fyi) and my own experiences have shown Amazon skyrocket to the top paying FAANG, with the first two years heavily skewed toward cash and backloading RSUs. I am surprised out of all the FAANGs you picked the generally lowest paying one as the counter example.
I really have trouble understanding why ppl should dream about labor / fulfilment at work.
There are so many ways to find a real meaning.
Be a great person, help others, read a book, do yoga, help kids with homework, plant a tree, build something with own hands, grow food, clean-up trash.
So many things to keep you busy. Work is just a necessity to do something that actually matters in the longer run (for majority at least).
Ppl that deeply care about the company and product are such a tiny minority.
I don't know how to not care. I've been writing software since I was a teenager and it's always been a central part of my life. I've always cared and that care is partly what made me successful (or so I believe). But it definitely is also what's stressing me out... I've always seen work as basically being able to be paid to practice my hobby though as well all know(?) your fun hobby becomes less fun when it's work.
I remember having lunch with a co-worker who was saying something along the lines that he's never really wanted to code and the only reason he's doing it (got a degree and a career) is for the money and I didn't understand how that was even possible ;)
I assume because you literally spend most of your life there, and if it doesn't mean something, that is ... awful?
I mean, there have been times / places in history where you work so that you have enough money to not die; and you enjoy your life with whatever pittance is left afterward.
I doubt anyone reading this website is in such a time or place.
Basically every corporation you can work for will have you doing something meaningless (and is dedicated to a meaningless pursuit besides). As the world population shrinks in the deep future, perhaps that will change - but right now it definitely will not.
As such, I have trouble seeing why you'd think any work you do means anything. Most likely it doesn't and that's okay. It is not within your control to have meaningful work available. It is within your control to have a healthier attitude towards your workplace and your work.
If you find your work to be meaningless, who am I to argue. But I've had a number of jobs at different companies at various places along the 'meaning' gradient. It's not all the same. Though I also agree that meaning is, to large degree, yours to make, at least as much as it is a property of the situation.
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.
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.
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.
At a product company, the lead engineer(s) and the product manager, who is a direct everyday member of the engineering team, collectively own what the product is supposed to be. There’s not someone else two departments away who is a more legitimate authority on what to build.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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'
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.
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.
A pretty well known ticketing company bought our startup a few years ago, and after the first week of parties, raising salaries and hyping us the reality struck us very hard. It was impossible to do any work at all. Anything you wanted to do would require tons of meetings, there was always a few people blocking any initiative you could have.
And then the freaking Agile By The book (with agile coaches and all!) I couldn't stand for the life of me. We'd have like 10 ritual meetings a week and the joke was that those meetings were to discuss "What we're going to do, what we're not doing, and what we didn't do".
Worst part, is that *everything* pushed you to just stay at your desk watching online courses or reading stuff on the internet and do nothing, and as long as you showed up to your scheduled meetings, all was good. You'd even get promotions by just smiling around and being nice to others.
I left that and now I'm at a company about 3 times as big. The difference is that here we're 100% remote and 100% async, written communication. Literally ZERO work meetings a week, just one "hang out" to not forget about the faces of your coworkers. No Agile, no Jira, no bullshit. A shared "to do" list to show others what you're on and weekly reports of your progress. I just can't believe how well this works.
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.
> 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.
There were coffee-mug-carriers and hall-wanderers back in the office as well. I don’t think it’s new in WFH, but at least now they bother fewer people with their “checking in”.
I swear one guy must have gotten 15K steps/day in just wandering around the building.
One job I was at had four of us working in one room. A guy from a completely different department would wander in with his cup of whatever and talk at us for at least an hour. He was both dodging actual work and interrupting us. Since he didn't report to our manager there was nothing we could do. His boss was a piece of work as well.
It's these useless people that make open plans so toxic. It's bad enough that the general noise and visual distraction decreases your ability to concentrate and get anything done, but the wandering trolls of gossip and sports talk just add an extra booger icing on the shit cake.
I spent about a year and a half being dead weight. I was so completely burned after working months of 70 to 90 hour weeks I just couldn't do anything. Things that used to take me an hour to code now took me days. Complete mental block. Luckily I had built up such a good reputation prior I was able to coast and it was a weird project. In a new job / role now and it's better. Only work 40 hours max. Still not back to normal but 75% of the way there.
> 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.
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.
I moved jobs recently and this has been a minor issue for me. I get invited to all the meetings, including those where neither my input nor attendance is required, but I don't know that until a few minutes in. At that point I either sit and listen to something barely related to my role or awkwardly drop off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Measure the product before measuring productivity.
across the board execs complaining about productivity turn out to be poor at defining product ("its just a website, how long could it take to build, Jeez").
Any productivity comparisons between software and other manufacturing processes should begin with a few minutes spent to compare software specs and the said product's spec, see how hard it is to change its spec ("add a button to accept payments" v/s. "add a knob on the car's dashboard")
provide a technical spec first, then we can talk about productivity.
That's one take, but if you hang around on Blind (which is an anonymous forum heavily populated by FAANG), you will find many who gloat about how little they work.
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.
>And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need.
I once spent two months trying to get my technical lead to do a code review for a PR I raised. Eventually the business informed us they didn't actually need the feature that the PR implemented. At that point, my technical lead immediately approved the PR so it wouldn't be (seen as) a waste.
> And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need.
Not entirely true. I don't mind that one bit. I can voice my opinion on what "we need", but ultimately that's not my decision and there are people hired to do that. I get paid to write it, I'm happy in that spot, and if I end up not having to deploy it, go through whatever baroque testing cycles are in place, or do the job of 3 with the salary of 1 by having to do sysadmin, DevOps, or whatever other fad du jour is sweeping the industry with fancy terms just trying to keep the CEO's in their millions, fine with me.
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.
> 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.
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.
Another factor here is that companies will hire more people as a growth strategy without having any clear idea of how to deploy them. Even if they have a high level idea they may not know how to translate that high level idea to something actionable. They have a high P/E. There's cheap money. They need to somehow grow. The only way they know to grow is just to hire more people. As you say, no wonder they don't have anything to work on. Maybe the idea is that if they're working for you they're not working for the competition. I donno.
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.
I think my department was Agile, doing the stuff on the left (good) side of the Agile Manifesto [1], even as we didn't think we were doing Agile. We made deadlines, had smooth deployments, and any bugs in production were not that bad. Then new management came in (company was bought) and started pushing "Agile" on us, which is doing the stuff on the right [bad] side of the Agile Manifesto. Now we've missed deadlines, rarely have a smooth deployment, and are now constantly finding bugs in production. When pressed, upper management has stated that "Agile" is to make it possible to work faster than we were.
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.
I find this attitude among developers frustrating to say the least.
Apparently developers are just helpless sheep being ruled by an amorphous entity called “management”.
Supposedly developers are important enough to command 3-400k in salaries, but not important enough that “management” would be open to all of them pointing out that maybe that 1 daily meeting is costing too much in employee time and not giving enough value and could be reduced to 2-3 times a week.
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.
> "and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees"
Come on! This is straight up impossible. Anyone who has worked for any length of time in the tech industry has come across people that simply don't do anything, and are totally fine with that. It is *very common* and its borderline dishonest to say otherwise.
Is it really? I haven't worked at that many companies but I've seen it maybe once or twice out of hundreds of workers. I have see devs that were incompetent but tried. I see a lot of pms, managers, business analysts etc who seemed to always be collaborating with each other but contribute very little to the actual product. But the truly lazy dgaf dev is very rare in my experience.
I wish this were true but most of the people I have worked with in the past 3 years are just lazy and will pretend to be doing a days worth of work for 2 weeks whenever they can get away with it
> 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.
Remote working has been around forever. The pandemic opened the doors to a larger set of candidates. None if it changed human nature. There are people who do well on their own. I think most don’t.
I know someone who has had remote jobs for probably 35 years. How does he spend his time? Re-roofing his home, upgrading his bathrooms, fixing his cars, etc. Not working. And these are six figure jobs. Watching this first hand —for decades— has not made me a huge believer in remote work for everyone. Not sure how to define who does well and who does not.
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)
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).
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.
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.
I’ve held a job ever since I was 12 years old. And I worked before that under the table to pay for my things as a child. I’ve worked at many multinationals now that I’m middle aged. Yes, I’m American. And my view on this is completely contrary to conventional wisdom. Private enterprise is not only less efficient than government, it’s destructive.
Private enterprise doesn’t care about doing a good job or delivering quality product. It only cares about making money. It’s a perverse incentive that drives everything down to the bottom almost every time. The only way to circumvent that perverse incentive system is to have someone in charge that cares about something other than profits. And there just are not enough Steve Jobs or similar characters out there that cared about quality and legacy enough to make blind participation as a buyer in your favor.
Of course someone will say, that’s how you make money is by delivering quality. But that’s not true. You deliver money by monopolizing, putting in barriers to entry, or simply by cutting costs. By definition, if something you buy was cheaper to produce than the price you paid, you’re getting a bad deal. People just don’t see this because they have no other choice.
Now all that said, I also believe that it is the worst system, except for all the others. I think with sensible regulation to counterbalance abuse, the system is as good of one as I’ve seen.
This has been my experience too. As a youth I worked as a lifeguard, first for a company and then for the county government. The private company gave us an initial 8 hours of training once every three years. The government trained us every single weekend. In an emergency I would have been useless at the private company because I was so poorly trained. At the government I would have been very prepared to deal with the situation. It comes down to incentives, the company wanted to maximize profit, cutting training helps that. Emergencies are rare situations that can easily dealt with by shifting blame to the front line workers. The government didn't have these incentives and were able to invest in training.
Not saying gov good, private bad. Just saying that it is a lot more complicated than gov bad private good.
I see that in my own job. We don't do any training. That's on my own time and dime. It has definitely hurt my productivity. Software is a great example of cost cutting to death. There's a couple sayings that apply. "What if we train people and they leave? What if we don't, and they stay?", and "slow down to go fast". For the owner, he's getting rich, so anything that works at all is good for him.
Most software joints I've worked at essentially need to be hiring top experts because otherwise there's no real support system to carry you when necessary. Everyone is overloaded with work, many are underpaid for how qualified they are if they're on visas, and most people are in really bad moods. My current place of work is largely toxic. It's just not the right way to go through life.
I've worked at exceptional workplaces that ran like a top, John Deere was one. I realize they have some right-to-repair woes. :) But the vast majority were pretty bad and definitely examples of slash-n-burn capitalism.
Another thing worth adding to this conversation is that privately owned enterprise tends to be better than public. Maybe not in how they treat employees, because the boss is closer to you usually in privately held companies. But definitely in the quality of the product. Public companies are the worst. While I'd prefer to work at a public company in general, I would almost never buy product from one, given the choice.
We really need more worker owned cooperatives. You have to work there to own a share, and one share equals one vote on matters. They may not work for venture capitalism, but for proven business models that aren't innovating, it really makes no sense to me why 7-Eleven out of Japan dominates our convenience stores. As opposed to those shops being owned by the people that work there. Proven business models have to move to that.
My goal in life, which I may never achieve, is to start a business, stabilize it, make my money and then sell it to my employees if they want it. Turn it into a democratically owned workplace. I think this is the only way to get the best of both worlds: high quality product, and fair treatment for employees. I'm a strong believer that people need "skin in the game" or they just won't care about the quality of their work. This model of 1 person taking it all really should only be done for unproven business models.
Cheers to a fellow child labor participant. I was grinding down spot welding tips before my paper routes that I got at 12. Grocery stores at least then let you bag groceries at 13. I worked on a farm. Done it all and I think it's a uniquely American experience. And probably Bangladesh.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
All enterprise is, fam. Everything slows down and bureaucracy and politics take over. Watched it happen in real time at the last acquisition and have decided to only focus on startups for the next decade. There's way more speed, passion, and fulfillment..
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.
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?
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.
Yeah, it's legit difficult to find work that is impactful and fulfilling. Making incremental changes on a product that a billion people might actually use isn't the worst thing imo. I worked hard at startups on projects that, while fun, very few people really use. After a while I gotta wonder is it really worth the effort.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
It is imperfect like all analogies, but let's take a toy example to clarify what I think. Let's say you are going to start something in 3 months, a new job or maybe you want to finally get in shape. If you think that your energy, will, and desire are like fuel in a slowly refilling tank, you might want to stop what you are doing now to save the energy that will have to be spent in 3 months.
I remember years ago, when I was a serious sportsman, we had a few days off at Easter. And I rested. I came back flat, dead, without energy.
Now the flywheel accumulates energy when the motor to which it is connected is working. The flywheel stores energy during the expansion phases (the combustion phase in an ICE) of the engine to return it during the passive phases.
Which, going back to the dilemma "when you have long-term down time, you have energy available to do other work, for networking, etc.," if the flywheel analogy is the right one, it means that you store energy to spend when there is down time by doing work, not by turning the engine off for days or weeks.
If no work is done for a certain period of time (the motor is off), the flywheel does not accumulate energy to spend, it is dead, needs time to accumulate energy again.
If you don't go to the gym one or two days after a period of serious training, which may be a week or a month, the training session is likely to go well. If the rest period, "I'm so tired, I need a break," is longer, say two weeks, you are likely to come back not invigorated, but flat, without desire, you may think about putting it off for another two weeks because you still feel tired, the tank has not been filled with fuel, you may think. But it is because energy, will and desire work like a flywheel.
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.
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.
I posit there is another category: people who don't accept or can't deal with being idle, but are not careerists and so instead of following your advice or resting-vesting, they find ways to spend their time helping solve actual problems in the company.
My theory is that these people keep many companies afloat, because they go proactively solve the problems the resters are not solving because work, and the job-optimizers won't touch because not promotion-track.
I don't think there's anything on the list I mentioned, other than the "working on personal projects" one, that conflicts with that. Augmenting their own capabilities increases their effectiveness at "solving actual problems in the company" in addition to benefiting themselves. It's their own choice as to whether they do that.
What is the value of one’s career? To make more money? Why is it smart to devote so much effort to moving up when you’ll be dead and your work completely forgotten much sooner than anyone cares to admit? If you’re seeking lasting glory then the well trod path there is politics, war, or art: technologists generally are not remembered outside their time (with maybe literally a half dozen exceptions since antiquity).
I ask this honestly, because at this point in my own career the only answer I can come up with is the personal satisfaction of getting better and more knowledgeable about something I at one time enjoyed.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've had a different experience (at least with engineering processes). Most of the time, it's been due to things in the past that have broken because we didn't check things or we got misaligned on something or people made assumptions that turned out not to be true.
I'm not saying that adding additional layers of process is always the right answer--there's obviously a cost to adding more process so there needs to be a balance and a continual reassessment of which processes are worth keeping. But in my experience, the intention has always been good: to avoid mistakes, problems, and failures that we've experienced in the past.
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.
>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.
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.
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
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.
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!'
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.
I consulted for a Fortune 500 where the CEO would spend a hour or so every month taking sales and support phone calls. He would use this information operationally -- he would send out missives to the head of marketing saying "people are not asking about product X." I wonder what he said when people asked to speak to his manager.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Relying on VPs to do every front-line job in order to identify and fix problems would indicate that something is fundamentally broken at the company. That should never be the primary method by which a company identifies and fixes such problems.
As a former engineering manager, if someone on my team walked me through why getting PRs out to prod was an insane nightmare, I'd take note, work with them to gather evidence, and present it to my director and try to escalate it to the point where we could take action to improve it. If the VP is any good at their job, they'll listen and work with us to fix it.
If they aren't good at their job or it is status quo, they will brush it off. Sometimes it takes a new perspective to say what the fuck is wrong with this?
As an example, I joined a company with ~8k employees recently. They over communicate on email. I get 50+ emails a day. I filter heavily. My inbox is still unusable due to the volume of automated junk. I raised this issue in Slack and the majority of responses were just "well, that's how it is".
I am sure the development process has very similar deficiencies that I am blind to because I participate in it everyday.
> If they aren't good at their job or it is status quo, they will brush it off.
In your example, you rely on them to be even better: you assume that they'll be a competent engineer and be able to understand the complexities of day-to-day software development by making a toy PR when many of them haven't done it for years for decades. That's a much stronger assumption than the one that I'm making: that a good VP will listen to their subordinates.
That's about the time I'd expect for a new hire to ramp up on the codebase and submit a PR behind a feature flag and probably experiment that makes it to production. It takes a day to even set up the environment and be able to start looking at and running the code locally. Four days to read through a brand new codebase, identify the changes that are necessary, write a small tech spec (optional based on how small the change is), submit the PRs, get them reviewed and approved, and then merged sounds reasonable to someone who's never worked in the codebase before.
> 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).
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.
> 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...
As a counterpoint, in most of the Latin American family empires, where the eldest son is by birth designated to be the next CEO of the company, he usually starts working at the factory in childhood, doing all of the menial jobs. Then he's given a job like outbound sales rep and essentially has to "work his way to the top" (of course on an accelerated timeline, and without really needing to be the best at any level). That way by the time he is CEO, he has the credibility and knowledge of how every facet of the business works.
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.
And then what? Are they supposed to design a better development process and build tools to improve efficiency? Again seems like both a supreme waste of time and also as an engineer something I really would not want. Or are they supposed to tell the dev experience team to do something. If so why not just have the dev experience team or leader go through the motions instead?
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.
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.
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.
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.
+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.
>Maybe it’s not the employees fault, but the management who hired them…
I think the managers are just putting up a straight face, as they need to respond to the changing circumstances.
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.
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.
(I am not working at google or facebook, but I will probably get to feel the implications as well...)
> 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.
Yeah at least several years ago I had an explanation for this (though I’m not sure if it still applies). Basically, I think one reason for this weird type of interview is that it was an indirect way to bias towards young hires.
Young people have that energy and naïveté to do a lot of the grunt work. And most work at any established company is kind’ve grunt work. Anyways, just a random theory but nowadays it may be backfiring.
Not sure about Mark wouldn’t be surprised if he still hacks php on the side but Pichai joined google as a manager I think from mckinsey of all places… so Im going with “never”
> 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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
>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.
I have passed these interviews. Had offers from multiple FAANGs, worked at G. The algorithms interview is idiotic. It is a way for them to gate the jobs to people who have CS degrees while being able to say they do not require CS degrees.
I rarely come to the to the optimal solution on my own for a leetcode problem. It is about learning the techniques so you know how to speak about the solutions, then basically learning (by reading) the right answers to different problem types.
This isn't from being hurt, I pass these interviews. I've worked there. It is a horrible selection criteria for what you actually do at the jobs - design docs, meetings, tickets, tests, and code reviews. It creates a ton of false expectations too, you do not need to know advanced algorithms to work on some internal user interface, close maintenance tickets, or to write 10 lines of test code for a 2 line change. You get in there and realize none of the work you are doing is as clever as the interview.
The tasks described above are the reality of working in a large organization. They shouldn't be, but they are. The interview should more closely match that.
That's a great perspective, thanks for sharing that. What would you like to see as the best interview questions then? I'll probably adapt my future interviews based on your ideas (not that I ask any real algorithm questions anyway).
Use them to measure how well people will perform in the tasks that you need them to do. For coding interviews, Square's is really good. [1] I am not sure if they have sample questions written anywhere in the linked blog posts, but very simple things with added complexity.
Example - Write a rate limiter that takes in a timestamp (integer) and returns true if it hasn't hit a rate limit. Ok, now what if we make the rate limiter per user. Just simple things to see how you represent data, store it, create interfaces to it, and how you refactor to deal with change.
Most likely, you want to be having someone write tests for some code and review some code. Then speak to them about their experience. Depends on your organization though, maybe you are small and people need to produce a lot more than the large tech companies.
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".
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.
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.
I went through a similar struggle to how I read your story. I had a cushy job that paid more than ever, my manager was great, and the work was easy, but I was struggling with depression. I ended up quitting and crashing on a friend's couch for a while, and despite making that change to be able to pursue more meaningful work, my depression didn't abate. I ended up crashing and burning in a pretty significant way, and it was rough.
The point I wanted to make in sharing this story is that I wish I had taken the depression more seriously by itself and hadn't assumed that it was solely or maybe even largely caused by my job situation. Both from my experience with mental illness and from the scientific literature I've read, sometimes the big external issues are masks or plausible excuses for your body & mind to go into a depression because it makes sense that you have a big change outside, and so you get a big change inside. Sometimes those external changes do definitely cause big psychological struggles, but other times the depression kind of comes out because your psychological defenses feel comfortable enough that you will avoid addressing the root of the problem, and only address the external circumstances which you are able to reasonably enough blame your depression on. It's like a release valve in some way, but whose function is to avoid real psychological change at all costs, because the status quo is the safest place to be for our psyches.
I'm not a scientist and you might describe this as some kind of "just so" explanation or too much into psychoanalysis, and that's certainly a possibility. But with this stuff I've found that often times our psyches are very cagey and difficult to really understand in a straightforward way. If my explaining this pattern I've observed in my own history is beneficial to you or anyone else reading this, or at the very least interesting, that's good enough for me.
You've hit the nail on the head, and I think many people who have struggled with substance abuse disorders would agree: You can't fix whats inside by changing the outside... sure maybe changing external circumstance can help nudge you in the right direction, but it wont fix anything. Recovering drug addicts don't magically become functioning members of society just because they stopped using drugs... They do a lot of internal work, and find happiness within themselves, not within their surroundings or substances (or they go back to abusing drugs and die an addict).
If you are interested in any of this I highly recommend reading about the psychology of drug addiction more, because it is so very relevant to anyone and everyone at the end of the day (and very related to what you're speaking about). Even non-addicts can learn a lot about themselves and how to be happy, by learning how recovering drug addicts do it. If a formerly homeless heroin addict can find his way to happiness and 6 figure income, why wouldn't your average person not want to learn more about that journey for their own benefit? This is why a lot of recovering addicts wind up being more effective at life than the average person IF they managed to overcome addiction and stay sober. Overcoming addiction is like a master class in effectively living life, being happy, and overcoming anything. Its unfortunate that so few make it, but there's a lot be learned from it.
Yes!! I haven't had struggles with substance addiction, but I see SO much overlap in what you described as how much extra work and problem solving and self-leadership addicts have to foster and constantly practice to survive, let alone thrive, in what I've had to do to try to heal my depression and other maladies. It's like, I can't even begin to describe how much work it's been to someone who hasn't had to deal with that kind of a problem.
I was given an irrevocable 100 hour a week job called "try to survive while depressed" when I was 17, and thrown in the deep end with no guide, no mentors, and no reasons why. Every day of my life is a battle to keep my head above water. For years I barely managed and somehow am still here, but it is relentlessly difficult. Some days you think you're starting to get things figured out, on a roll, and then your positive wellbeing evaporates into thin air from the time it takes you to walk from your car to your apartment door. What is this life? You start to lose all hope of even figuring out any rhyme or reason or pattern in your depression, and just try to get through the day.
When it gets to be like that, I have found MUCH solace in the mantra of the substance abuse recovery world, "One day at a time." It's like an alien tongue to someone who's never dealt with the kind of waking death spirit companion depression comes to be. How could anything be so bad that you can only focus on a single day at a time, or that doing so would help in any kind of way? Thank your everything that that phrase gives you no feeling or hope. It's the last refuge of the damned.
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!
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.
> lack of challenge has actually caused me to spiral into a deep depression
Why does this have to be at work? Google might not offer you challenges but you can go rock climbing at Yosemite every other week if you wanted to (or whatever other challenging things you like)? Especially if you only need minimal effort to hang around.
a well paying job with low expectations sounds great, but actually sucks after a while. i’ve been there a couple times. it’s just not fulfilling. it brought out a weird mixture of guilt and sadness in me. i was getting great reviews, and by every measure was doing my job well.
when i’ve moved on from those jobs i’ve been happier, grown more, and it’s led to more money.
This is why I don’t understand when some say that people would rather not work at all if given the opportunity and still live well. As people we need challenges to keep finding meaning in our lives. I’ve also experienced depression in the past as a result of getting paid but lack of work. Zuck and Pichai’s complain isn’t wrong, it’s just that they’re part of the problem for paid employees having little work, and it’s admittedly very hard for any of us to recognize when we’re the problem. Everyone suffers from bad leadership, from the employees to the boss.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It's exhausting being mentally present while knowing you're not doing anything useful. Using that time to actually work on side projects feels very unethical, so it's kind of just going with the tide for 8 hours a day then being exhausted at night. So the challenges I found were usually in games, not anything productive.
I have far more energy now that I'm actually productively working in a new job and seem to have lost a lot of interest in games as a side effect.
Yeah this seems obvious to me. So many people have trained their minds to rely on their professional career to be happy. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with finding something you can stand, and then devoting yourself 100% elsewhere to something you love or want to learn/explore.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 between innovation and stability.
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.
Reading this caused the following factoid bubbled up in my mind: the leading cause of death for firefighters is now heart disease. The 98% of their time that’s not responding to calls is evidently spent napping and eating lasagna. I’m not naysaying this arrangement, it’s how it has to be. I don’t see why it should be too different at Google, for some employees anyways.
> 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.
That's bullshit and you're gonna scare the shit out of any junior Amazonian reading this unnecessarily. Obviously nothing is TRULY anonymous - at the end of the day there is a super secured database that HR can go into if there is a need. The data is there much in the same way that every email you send is discoverable in a lawsuit. Or if you get fired and bring a USB key and copy all your data they'll get it. Nothing you do on a work computer is truly private.
But that doesn't mean anyone's manager has access to some secret dashboard to get any of this data or is able to view it on demand. Short of a serious legal case it just won't be relevant.
Noone's manager has access to individual answers and neither does anyone in their org chart.By default, week-over-week, that connections information is private.
What actually (probably) happened is your team's scores were shitty and somewhere up in your org chart noticed and started giving your manager shit to improve them. Then they went in and decided to use their best guesses about who voted for what to start harassing people to figure out how to improve things.
They absolutely epitomized Goodhart's law and they got the result they wanted - you stopped giving a shit and voted for whatever got them off your back.
That sucks but thats not how it is on most teams. Every team I've been on used this data bi-weekly or monthly to have an honest review of what we're doing well and where we need to improve. Nobody gets picked on. If there is a clear outlier where one person was unhappy we don't try to find out why but I (as a senior leader) try to be vocally self-critical and try to come up with multiple guesses and/or reasons for why they might have said that, and what could be done about different root causes. (TO not force whoever was the outlier to speak up).
Your manager sounds like an idiot/asshole, but the least I can say from looking up your name is at least your former manager isn't managing anyone anymore!
I stand corrected about the anonymity of the surveys. I wasn't a manager and I can't say I paid much attention during the meetings. But there are a lot of sub-managers who have just a couple of reports and it can't be particularly hard to figure out. Still, I shouldn't have stated it as fact. I'd edit the post if I could.
You didn't confirm or deny that manager performance was tied to those connections data. Care to clarify this? As I said, it was a guess on my part.
My manager was actually a great guy and our group was productive. He only got that way after the surveys became a thing and - I'm guessing - his superiors started getting uptight.
Heh, I like how you checked up on me, but use amzn-throw for your comment. Comms is watching you Wazowski, always watching. Anyways, I still stand by my general sentiment.
My primary HN account has a lot of other things in it that I'd rather not be associated with me being an "Amazonian", hence this one :)
Manager performance is not tied to connections data. However, manager's performance is tied to the kind of facets of team cohesion, productivity, satisfaction, and delivery that the Connections data. Does that make sense?
And it's not a terrible proxy. For example, it would be relevant if a manager was measured on their ability to hire and retain people, right? Well, if certain connections questions have a direct correlation with people leaving the team, you can imagine someone would tell the manager "Fix this connections score, or else people will leave the team."
But if they fixed the connection score, but people still left the team, they wouldn't be able to get away with that as a success. The metric is a proxy, not the target.
"But that's not how it is on my team!" is the dumbest and yet most common response you hear from Amazon employees when they hear about Amazon's horrible business practices. The whole company is in fact a team. You are part of the exact same team.
My main message was that NO - that's not how it is ANYWHERE at the company. Connections data isn't available to managers de-anonymized. Period. On any team.
This post also has nothing to do with Amazon's business practices, but rather HR practices with employees.
Lastly, yes, there are some facets of what I wrote that are about my team. But this is the case anywhere. Some teams have good manager. Some have bad ones. Good ones rise. Bad ones fall. That includes using the same tools and techniques for good or for evil.
I absolutely do see Amazon as one whole team. That's why I felt the need to comment to make people working on other teams not think that this poster is revealing some secret insider information, and new SDEs be scared thinking what is happening with their 'private survey' results.
The REASONS for why there is such a variability in process and culture between AMazon teams would need a whole other blog post, but the tl;dr is: The #1 focus of Amazon development teams is delivering results and getting things done. This is done by removing road blocks and incentivizing RADICAL autonomy on the teams - way more than is available at tech giants of comparable stature (whether Apple, Google, Facebook, or Microsoft).
The upside of this is a tremendous sense of autonomy and responsibility offered to every engineer which is empowering and addictive.
The downside of this is that toxic managers can thrive temporarily and ruin good teams through misused autonomy. They do get weeded out, but it takes time. And good people can be lost along the way.
> That's because his bonus was probably tied to your performance
Or they just don't want to take on the burden of getting you to improve. PIPs are a pain for everyone involved. If a manger hands out anything lower than "Meets Expectations", their next step is to help you get there, or gather enough data points for HR to safely see you out the door
I have never worked for Google and likely never will.
Stories like these make me wonder why we put X-Googlers on such a high pedestal.
I don't mean that personally in an offence to anyone. It's just a general observation.
If you were early at Google it means more as going through that hypergrowth was very difficult and there was less dead weight. But for the last 10 years Google means essentially two things from a hiring manager's perspective: 1) you have decent floor of basic technical ability as no one stupid or a complete faker makes it through the technical interviews (but note it's a low floor as anybody with 100 IQ and reasonably technical mind can probably brute force their way to passing if they want it bad enough) and 2) if you were successful there you can deal well with large-scale system complexity and (likely) the politics of working with many partner teams and stakeholders. It's not foolproof as any given individual, role or team could get lucky in terms of having relatively high agency and fewer dependencies, but on balance anyone L5+ is going to have to deal with a fair amount of that.
Given the 15 years of essentially unconstrained growth and moats from any real competition, I think your assessment is largely correct though. The name brand reputation of Google far outweighs the likely strength of any given candidate, especially if you expect execution without limitless resources and industry-leading technical mentors/gatekeepers at every critical juncture.
The reputation of ex Googlers was established in the early days when they were tremendously productive, the bar was genuinely very high and turnover was tiny so there were very xooglers to begin with and they were mostly founding startups.
Over time Google grew an enormous amount. Productivity dropped through the floor due to endless headcount expansion, the bar did get lower and "I was at Google for two years" became a much more common thing to hear. But first impressions stick so Google still had done of that early day mystique.
Source: was at Google 8 years, early days, still have friends who work there. Saw the changes with my own eyes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?")
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
I’ve had someone unironically tell me SREs are just people who are too dumb to be SWE so there’s probably more to the gatekeeping than just on-call lol
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.
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
> “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.
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.
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.
Even if it is due to circumstances, I've never seen a lazy person become unlazy after intervention from management. Sample size .. perhaps 20? The best solution is to terminate them quickly. Zuck's attitude here is what I look for in leaders when considering whether to join a company. There is little that's more demoralizing than pulling someone's weight for years while management is too disorganized to fire them, or worse yet when management thinks that half of your output is actually the output of the person you've been carrying.
I've seen many turnarounds. I've seen others that just don't understand what's expected and will never turn around. I've seen folks sit on a team they hate for 3+ year cause they love the people but hated the work. I found that one a new team and they're very productive again, but they would have stayed unhappy and unproductive for years without intervention.
> I found that one a new team and they're very productive again
This. I should have added context that my experience was in small companies where it wasn't really possible to change teams. But some of the people that were bad performers became good performers only after they were fired and found new jobs. I've seen this happen at more than one company. They were probably just demotivated or hated their boss or something, and no amount of intervention can really fix that, short of a change in job (or a change in team, as you mention, if it's a bigger company).
Some people don't know others see them going slow and managers don't have conversations till it's become problematic. Some people don't realize or won't inculcate feedback until they're fired. They play brinkmanship with their managers. Those people firing cab help. Kick in the pants as it were.
Sub-standard is relative to a standard. If someone finds themselves to be sub-standard, maybe they should find a place with lower standards? That's exactly what Zuck is saying.
On one hand, I've worked with a guy once who, as far as I could tell, did about an hour of work per day (if that) and played fantasy baseball in his office most of the time, waiting to be PIPed and managed out for a really long time... I inherited his code and it was a patchwork of minimum effort hacky fixes with no care for quality (cause he wasn't going to maintain it, I guess?). I really don't care what his circumstances are, I don't want to work with people like that, I wish they could fire him much faster than they did, and I bet most people would agree.
On the other hand I've heard about FB in particular is that there are teams with lots of people working 12-hour days. I am not willing to do that; it would be dumb for me to join such a team, and kind of a dick move to stick around as a low performer (I heard it from a friend who tried to keep up then decided to quit).
> Sub-standard is relative to a standard. If someone finds themselves to be sub-standard, maybe they should find a place with lower standards? That's exactly what Zuck is saying.
Sure, and maybe Zuck should just keep shifting the goal-posts, without limit? Where's the harm?
From talking with friends at Meta, this is re-raising the bar. Meta was apparently pretty understanding how Covid affected people psychologically, even if they didn't get sick. My contacts say this is a return to the pre-covid standard.
Additionally, the economy is struggling and Meta hasn't had great earnings reports vs expectations. Wouldn't you want a CEO to communicate that the company needs to buckle down before things get dire?
> It's truly disturbing when Zuckerberg says something so dystopian, and people 'in the trenches' call for more.
Or maybe people here on HN are sick of finding --in team after team-- those 1 or 2 people who take forever to finish their work and drag the whole team down.
I don’t care about people who take forever. Or who don’t know things. What I dislike is people who don’t care. Who write just shit that then breaks all the time or has to be fixed by others. If you are slow, take your time. But please care enough to write quality code.
Does it materially hurt you somehow if the team doesn’t finish all their print points? If you work at a company as big as Facebook, then certainly not.
I had a coworker whom I sat next to that reflected a lot of these qualities, that I had worked very hard to eliminate from myself just a few years earlier. It was simultaneously irritating because I was waiting on him for work, while also invoking sympathy. I knew what kinds of problems he was struggling with, and could guess at a few of the causes.
Rather than continue replying to individuals, my final thoughts:
The responses here seem short-sighted.
A company is openly increasing pressure on staff to force people to leave.
This does not protect or benefit you, despite what you may think about how great things will be once your idiotic, lazy co-workers amicably depart with zero collateral impact.
This is aggressively targeted at you. Not today's you (or so you believe) but tomorrow's you.
Just because you imagine you'll benefit from this shifting of boundaries, doesn't mean you'll continue to benefit next time it happens.
And for the variations on the theme "so you think everyone should be allowed to slack off", nope, and I didn't say that.
Oh sweet summer child, they aren't saying that they are going to get rid of the poor performers. They've said they are going to turn up the heat. That means that the people, like yourself, who actually do the work, are going to face the heat. The poor performers have a skill: and that skill is keeping their jobs without doing any work. So you're the one that is going to have to do more work, and it is people like you who are going to get a clue and go work somewhere else. If you stay, you'll have an even bigger portion of the work to do.
100% this. The only people who will leave when things get harder are those who respect themselves enough to not want to waste their time anymore (as they should)
Poor performers are demotivating, yep. The challenge of a manager, and really, the whole management system, is making reasonable efforts to get employees back on track, if that's possible. I mentioned the life events thing because it's real. Sometimes a PIP (performance improvement plan) gives people a jolt and gets them back on track, sometimes not. It's the job of management to separate true under-performers from temporary ones and to find the best roles for members of the team.
What Zuck wrote had none of the nuance or understanding that one would expect of someone with even a moderate amount of experience managing people. It's true that firing people is hard, which is probably why these companies should not have focused on eating the world so voraciously for the past N years.
Facebook has regular, systematic performance reviews and a PIP process like most large companies. Nobody is talking about firing people for temporary performance lapses.
Zuckerberg could have said some stuff like "I have confidence our existing performance evaluation processes will be able to handle productivity issues, with some adjustments", or some other bland but reassuring words, but he chose what he said.
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.
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.
The idea these firms hire people just to stop them going to competitors is popular on HN but I never saw any evidence of it when I was there.
Trophy hires? Sure, occasionally, but they were all doing stuff for the company. And the idea there was some sort of policy is wrong. It may look like that from the outside though, because there was never a strong connection between hiring and need.
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.
> 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.
In addition to a surplus of great people, they have lots of mediocre people too, just like everywhere else. There may have been a time where this wasn't true, but now anyone who passes a day of tricky tech interviews is in, and that doesn't always correlate with good performance. At least that's my take having worked at Google.
I do not want to be in a place where this kinda signaling goes top down from the CEO and is not abhorred by the ones doing the work.
As a dev, being forced to first plan and then PROVE that I am NOT lazy, NOT a poor performer and my code is NOT the reason the product sucks is just breeding a CYA culture full of conflicts, closeness, suspicion and politics. The only one's who will survive this environment are not the ones whom you want to retain anyway.
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.
'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.
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.
Setting measurable performance expectations for software roles is notoriously difficult.
Setting quantitative targets often leads to developers optimizing for whatever metric you set, while compromising on the details that aren't quantifiable.
For all of the problems and biases that qualitative performance review has, I think it makes for a more enjoyable and engaging environment.
There are people who were performing well but had temporary setbacks due to circumstances, and there are people who wanted to coast from day one. It's easy to tell them apart if you have worked with them closely.
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).
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.
> 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.
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 think the thing with Yahoo was that it tried do too much, and it never really had any focus on any particular vertical. Its legacy has always been that it was the place you would go for anything, and I think that hurt it more later on because the company itself was unfocused, and it didn't have a money-printing machine like Google's ads to fund the experimental work.
When Marissa Mayer was on board, the focus was "mobile and emerging products", which was absolutely the right call in 2012, but it was still too general to rally a company around. It had a lot of great small things, but none of them had enough investment to turn into a multi-billion dollar business on its own, as well as a lot of legacy things that still needed to be maintained.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Most of our work is about interacting with entities outside the company.
Bots usually take source code that is hosted outside the company do do things internally, such as QA, and then publish the result externally or to some internal channel that is accessible from outside the usual IT systems (IT workarounds). It's complicated to tell you without going into details.
As long as everyone in a team feels like other team members are collaborating effectively (vs holding each other up) that doesn't sound like a problem, but it's hard to imagine how that's possible without regular communication between team members which implies some sort of "logging in", even if it's just via WhatsApp...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
> 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.
It's a troll. "Optional activities" gets translated to "mandatory" and a game is "far more important" yet apparently in such a game nobody really likes each other, too.
> It's a troll. "Optional activities" gets translated to "mandatory"
It sounds to me that you are the one trolling. It should be quite clear that when someone who has power over you "invites" you to do an "optional" after work gathering with other people (who are often your direct career competitors), it is not really an optional thing.
> game is "far more important" yet apparently in such a game nobody really likes each other
And I am not sure what's your point here. It sounds like you are misunderstanding what I am saying.
I've been at many workplaces where I've enjoyed hanging out with coworkers for fun at the pub. Granted, usually complaining about the company and boss.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, you could roll up at 10 and grab breakfast, start working at 10:30, then finish at 4:30, work out, shower, then grab dinner and head home. Pretty fucking idyllic.
Breakfast stopped 9:30 or 10am, depending on cafe in mountain view. Dinner mostly started 6:30pm. There were some cafes that provided food continuously, so some folks grabbed dinner at 5pm and left.
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).
You know that 8 hrs is entirely arbitrary right? It’s not some directive from god. I really don’t see why you’re so jammed up by some people playing basketball during (gasp) work hours
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
The Hallmark if a bad manager is having zero consideration for their subordinates.
I find bad managers usually can't grasp the cost of interruptions from meetings - because their work isn't interrupted from meeting - because their work IS meetings.
I'm sure you're aware of this, but 99% of standups are not this way. Given that, it's safe to assume that wherever you are, they don't need to exist. The odds are quite simply much better.
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.
Speaking as a manager who at least _thinks_ I run stand ups well, I have them run for 5-10 minutes max for 5 people and treat them as an update so that I can run interference on any “status updates” other parts of the company demand across a day, and as the time for the team to tell me what problems I need to go fix for the team to be productive.
I usually leave a standup with a list of 1-3 people I need to go talk to, to either move the code through bureaucratic processes, or an actual decision to make on which projects we’ll take on based on information found while engineering.
That said I also don’t care if my people say they have nothing of note and skip the meeting
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
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.
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.
That’s why I just do 3-5 min syncs 3-4 times a week one on one with my direct reports with flex to lengthen if a deeper topic comes up. Uses more of my time but less zoning out and more chance to actually unblock blockers. Downside is I need to tell people to communicate if there is value in team collaboration, but we have other opportunities for fostering that.
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.)
"High intensity physical activity..." is exactly one of the things I DON'T want. Any programming position that wants me out of my chair for exercise... nope.
I'll deal with exercise and nutrition on my own time, thank you very much.
No one’s talking about forcing a basketball game, but people here are acting like taking the time out of the blessed 8 hrs to play one of you want is sacrilegious.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't think the Facebook woodshop fits the definition of a Third place. It's just another room at your employer's office. People using this facility are still AT work, just not working and anything that happens there is going to happen by your employer's rules. Perhaps this view is affected by my personal stance of never ever ever using employer-owned perks like this because it's just a trick to keep you there longer. I much prefer to pay for access to a hackerspace than use that shop facebook offers. And, wouldn't a hackerspace be a true Third place anyway?
Its that it is competing with the hackerspace and blurring the lines between the third place and the work place for the employees. If you are in the wood workshop at Facebook and are a practiced craftsman hobbiest and see your manager messing up an expensive piece of wood - do you treat him as a novice? or as a manager?
Next, these things are to try to encourage the retaining of the college mindset. Aside form the "play hard" there's the "work hard" - the all night cramming that you had with college gets translated to working all night to meet some project target date.
Additionally, by establishing these pseudo-third places, it encourages the people who use them to be part of the work "community" rather than the civic community (where the hacker space or coffee shop is). This in turn makes the people who work there more isolated from the people in the community and has an impact on the third places there as there are fewer people in the civic community who use them (when they are provided free at work). Yes, you would rather use the local hacker space than the one that FB has for a woodshop - but that isn't true of a fair number of people.
Lastly, these perks aren't things that the company values too highly and thus is apt to remove them when times get tighter. Establishing those perks as the norm (see Basecamp with its combination of company forum pseudo-third places and perks) and then changing how they're done or making them location specific (FB employee in SV gets a woodshop, while the remote worker doesn't) will create discontent later down the road.
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I believe that companies that are offering these perks and pseudo-third places (as perks) are finding that the trouble that they cause is more than the value they provide to their employees from the employer perspective but are having trouble withdrawing.
The SV style perk - I believe - is a liability to a company. While it may improve employe retention a bit while it is active (and I really question that in as junior dev tenure has been dropping combined with an increase in remote work), removing it can result in singicant discontent and hosting it increases the issues that HR has with maintaining it.
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.
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.
Assuming that in a creative art like programming that efficiency (time spent at keyboard? and cost cutting? you can get 100 staff for the price of 98+ perks!) are the route to profitability is questionable. Add in supply/demand and competition for top talent and skimping on goodies is just bizarre.
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.
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.
> Staff said they were expected to frequently work more than 12 hours a day, starting early to accommodate calls with China and ending late
According to what I see on Blind, this is still the case, so clearly the reporting has not done anything. On the other hand, FB and Google are ramping up their intensity. It's almost like if you have a lucrative monopoly, people are incentivized to work really hard to disrupt it, and you have to work really hard to defend it.
Yes, the failure to kill TikTok was a leadership failure by Zuck. But you need good leadership AND good execution to win. The latter means hard work. Ask yourself why Europe has far fewer major tech companies and startups than the US, even though the EU economy is almost the same size.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
I agree that there is definitely a sense of entitlement in this industry, especially with these larger companies. On the other hand, if you’re coming from a startup, you’re going to be way more incentivized to put in the work since that ultimately determines your future (and likely, your pay). These guys playing basketball in the middle of the day are getting paid either way, regardless of how well their projects turn out. I don’t blame them. I’ve been at those cushy jobs and doing extra work often doesn’t get rewarded anyway, so you may as well maximize your quality of life.
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.
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?
I don't see them as bragging. The first part of the paragraph is their previous "hard-working" perspective, and later comes understanding of the people they were looking down on.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
My experience at Google was that until I decided the company was kinda directionless and started selectively ignoring leadership to get stuff done. Of course avoiding the "insubordination" line. Turns out they're still happy as long as you give them what they want in the end, or if not, what their boss wants. And I'm happy to see things work.
> 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.
There are lots of people who are comfortable where they are and continue to do solid work. I'd say that's probably almost half of folks at the mid-career levels in the big tech companies. This is actually why rest-and-vesters are so damaging. If you get a couple of these people on your team, they tend to bring down the morale of the much larger group who are earning their keep.
It's easy to be happy getting paid your current rate for doing a good solid job. But, it is really hard to stay happy in that situation if the person sitting next to you is getting paid the same, but doing almost-but-not-quite nothing.
In this situation, the previously-happy-worker types tend to either 1) seek a new team where they're not working with a rest-and-vester, or 2) slowly degrade into emulating the rest-and-vester because they feel demotivated and that their work isn't appreciated (since it isn't being appreciated more than the rest-and-vester's non-work)
Good managers identify this situation and put the rest-and-vester on notice to shape up (many of them will if you work with them -- many of them used to be the previously-happy-worker but at some point got poisoned and just need to have the callouses removed. (And a few of them just need the boot)
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On the other hand, in tech really you are either growing or dying. That doesn't mean that you have to be growing in promotion/job-ladder-shaped ways. But if you're not learning something and growing in some way, you're probably regressing.
> But if you're not learning something and growing in some way, you're probably regressing.
but this has nothing to do with your work - you grow and learn as part of your personal desire or interest. If it happens that your personal interest intersects with your job, then that's a great coincidence.
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.
This seems cyclical to me. If you do the bare minimum and get fired, that is a contradiction.
If the bare minimum is getting promoted then that means there is no room to slack.
If you look like you are slacking to your coworkers, then you probably are not doing the bare minimum. The bare minimum would be exactly what it takes to keep your job.
So I believe what you are saying is that there are multiple bare minimums from various perspectives. In those cases, you take the biggest one.
Another example for a gameable aspect of promotion is cutting up your achievements to look more favorable during a promo round e.g., salami slicing. If you hit a promotion, save the extra stuff for the next round.
And if you are at a large organization, you certainly have the data to estimate exactly the bars for promotion.
The key delta is often that the bare minimum to keep your coworkers from being demotivated by you is a bit higher than the bare minimum to keep your manager from noticing your underperformance.
If the work you are doing falls in this middle range, then your slacking will harm those around you but you probably won't get fired (if it takes longer for a manager to get fed up than the mean time between reorgs, you probably can survive indefinitely)
If the game was fixed and everyone had full information, there isn’t a reason this would happen.
But I agree if the promotion/firing is relative or dynamic in some way, then you’d race down to arbitrarily low effort.
The real problem is correlating work with value in an unbiased way. If you had perfect information on the value of each worker, I can’t see how it would be complicated to do a cost/benefit analysis.
But without reading/predicting the future you can’t usually figure out value because an unfinished product has no current value and a finished/legacy product has fixed value. In either case the worker has no marginal value.
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.
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.
“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.”
"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?
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.
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.
> 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.
Blind is an app that has people with confirmed company affiliations but anonymous, if you trust them. People speak openly if very greedily about wrk place shenanigans. It seems like an informative if distorting and addictive sort of thing. I check it every few months or if there is something big going on, e.g. layoffs or whatever. There are sections only your company can see and then more shared areas where you can read the woes of a PIP at Amazon or the rest and festers at Google, etc.
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.
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".
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.
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).
When I joined Google, I realized it was the same on the inside as the outside. There's a lack of direction. It's not just chat apps, and it permeates the entire company including Sundar. Maybe it's just too easy to lose focus when nearly all your income comes from one product and none of the others matter.
> 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.
Because it doesn't actually make sense.
* Google has an audience. I suspect everything Google does is a good enough idea for a small subset of people -- or solves a problem for a lot of people but isn't profitable, like Google Reader -- and because it's Google doing it, a lot of people hear about it and use it. So the shutdown of Google's random ideas affects more people than the shutdown of some random startup.
* Google just kills the products completely instead of spinning them off or selling them to interested parties as earlier incarnations of Silicon Valley tech companies would have done. A company not bloated from search advertising revenue would have happily sold something like Google Reader for some money instead of just killing it.
Most of the problems with product @ today's Google come from "shipping the org chart." You touched on this in your third point.
This was one of the major factors that led to me walking away from there after a decade.
That, and it's just a slow boring place to work most of the time. One spends the bulk of one's time basically seeking permission to do the thing that needs to be done -- by this I mean: get in the right MDB groups, get the right sign off on design docs, be sure to be in the right team, be sure to have gotten the right people on your code reviews, made sure there's visibility to the right stakeholders -- and hope to god the thing you're working on isn't sexy enough that somebody better connected won't just steal it from you when you're halfway through it anyways. Or just take credit for it.
And the perf process and the culture around it produces terrible results on top of that.
Paid well, but was a terrible place to work. Especially once COVID hit and the free gourmet food and subsidized massages were a thing of the past.
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.
After 3 months at Google I've come to realize the high hiring bar is there because you need to be particularly smart just to get basic shit done in their environment. I spent 3 hours the other day trying to authenticate to one of Google's own internal APIs from within the Google network using their bespoke IDE. In the end the code necessary was pretty simple. But I'd tried many incorrect solutions before that. The API library itself is "deprecated" but the API is still very much in production and not changing any time soon.
1) Treat services you call like your own code. Familiarize yourself with the server code. Try running it locally and poke at it. If you run into problems in staging/production, go look at their logs and monitoring dashboards (if that's still allowed; I have a feeling that things have changed around permissions since I left). What I learned that there was never an error I needed help with as soon as I read the code and error logs of the app I was trying to call. "Oh, this deprecated field is actually still required, it's just IGNORED now", that sort of thing. In the real world, it really helps with open source libraries. There is never any useful documentation. So get used to reading the code, and you'll never notice it's missing. As you get good at it, it really becomes a productivity superpower.
2) Fill out all available forms. I wrote and maintained a monitoring system at Google. I remember going to some tech talk about how the network worked, and realized that I could be using a high network priority instead of Best Effort, just by filling out some form. In the unlikely event of a network problem, we'd probably still have monitoring! Fill out the form I did. And one day there was some network incident where a lot of consumer-facing apps were slow/down, and my service didn't miss any messages. No unnecessary outages or pages or a long night, all because I filled out a form that anyone could fill out. I honestly felt a little bad because I guess we could have lived without the monitoring if it would have saved GMail. But hey, victory goes to the team that's willing to fill out the form and maybe have a quick meeting about it. Not everything in software engineering is programming.
There is quite the ramp up time, and there is a lot of learning to do, but once you get a handle on it, you can really do great things at high speed. If you ever leave, you will miss it. As much as people complain about the tools/systems/libraries, it is all really top notch. The "real world" is a hodgepodge of half-baked systems that all cost $30,000 a year. (Whoever wrote Prometheus left too early and cloned varz instead of Monarch. Hurts my soul every single day.)
I most miss D, Spanner, Blaze, and Monarch. Spanner you can buy from Google, but I can't afford it. Bazel is open-source. The rest... you just have to settle for something not as good.
I like some of the tech so far. And I have a good amount of startup experience, so I know the world of paying for SaaS instead of having your own special internal solution. Sometimes paid SaaS is superior. It's built for users more so than developers. That limits your powers but also means it's meant to be used by someone that doesn't know how it works.
Blaze seems very nice. I'm deep in a special domain far from g3 - so I only came across it this week. But it has worked exactly how I want it to and has given me no trouble, only a good experience so far. Much better than the terrible world of whatever build system NodeJS is using this week.
And the perks are pretty nice. Not enough to make me never go back to startups. But I appreciate them. Extra days off that no one else would get. Free trips to amusement parks. Days off to go sailing. Good free food. Good free cappuccinos. Good free snacks. Free car charging. I'm shocked so many people living in Mountain View refuse to commute in after working from home for two years.
> 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.
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.
Google has Android, which is a lot better than luck. Apple made iMessage popular just by putting it on every phone. Google did that too, but they did it wrong.
Yeah so you compete against luck by leveraging your prior dominance in mobile OSes with a committed iMessage-like approach, instead of waiting for two former Yahoo! employees to eat your lunch then launching several competing apps that you kill off later.
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.
... 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.
I don’t know what you’re trying to say? Are you saying they discontinued a product that was big in India? How is this reverse imperialism? What is reverse imperialism?
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.
>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.
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.
FWIW, I don't think this is the case at Apple. I sit in with the product manager as they get grilled by VPs and SVPs. They get damned hard questions - mainly the short ones ("why", "what if" and "how", and to a lesser extent "when" and who") and part of my job there is to provide data for their cover. I've given demos to SVPs before, and it's not a pleasant experience, I'm very happy to leave it to the PM.
Sometimes my job is to gently point out to an SVP that his/her assumptions are wrong, but most of the time I stay out of the way. The PM puts together the slide-deck (usually with help from engineering management) and the PM presents it, though (s)he can call on others for expertise for specific sections.
PM's have to be very good at defending the direction they want to take the company in, and the top brass are scarily good at coming up with the hard questions, even when those questions are very domain-specific.
In any event, (S)VPs at Apple are very invested in what the company does, when it will happen, what the consequences are, and why we're doing X. Directors and Managers are the ones responsible for execution, and the concept of a DRI is very very important in Apple culture.
Fully agreed re: Apple from first-hand knowledge, and IMO this is a large part of the company's "secret sauce".
Which is both a high compliment to Apple and a damning indictment of other companies like Google: the secret sauce is having your senior leadership and executives live and breathe product! Huh. It seems like an obvious observation, but clearly not obvious enough because most large tech cos do not do this!
Your senior leadership should have encyclopedic knowledge about the product and its roadmap. They should be able to describe, in detail, the major features that will be shipping and why the company is pursuing them. They should also relentlessly question product proposals because most product proposals are absolutely not good enough at inception to be worth building, and refuse to greenlight projects until they pass muster.
This is how you ship good products in big companies.
[edit] Another salient point worth bringing up: there is a deeply-held belief at Google (and from what I hear, also at FB) that product viability cannot be tested except with the public via rigorous A/B testing. The result of this poorly substantiated belief is that trying new ideas requires building out (at minimum) a full MVP. The execution costs for trying new ideas is extraordinarily high, and more than that requires commitments to the public.
This is distinctly unlike more functional product orgs where ideas can be validated in a number of ways short of building the actual thing (user research, focus groups, simplified prototypes tested with selected members of the public under observation, etc.) and are much faster and much cheaper. You can get a lot of understanding of what products and features work without committing to a full buildout.
Yep: Ken Kocienda, in "Creative Selection", his book about Apple's design process, makes fun of how the "others" ran 100s of A/B tests to determine the shade of blue for some interface, and other such metrics obsessions.
Apple's different philosophy is admirable: hire people with "taste".
As Fred Brooks said, "great design comes from great designers" (though by "design" he meant "engineering" but still) [1]
> 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.
Founder led companies or where the staff includes some product visionary seems to solve that. It’s not common though at all and not long lasting. In my experience when the non technical or accountant types inevitably start calling the shots effort can get grossly misallocated but utilisation will be high.
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.
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.
Seriously - the misallocation of resources in areas of Google is insane. And then there are niches of the Google Cloud product that are seemingly woefully understaffed, or just negligent in their maintenance.
I was a gcloud customer for years, happily using the App Engine Flexible for a PHP apo. It wasn't perfect, but it did it's job autoscaling and managing a decent sized consumer app. For years there wasn't much like it in PHP land where you could get away with doing very little sysadmin/cloud arch and get the features they offered.
But then support just _stopped_ around 2 years ago.
The official docker images are still stuck on PHP 7.3 and there has been no updates or support for nearly 18 months in upgrading to 7.4, 8.0 or 8.1.. [1]
AppEngine wasn't some vaporware at gcloud, it was one of the OG products, yet their perfectly fine letting it just rot and officially support a version of PHP that's a year outside of security patches.
I was spending nearly $80k/yr on that product + the rest of the cloud spend that comes from tying yourself to a cloud vendor. But this issue was so bad that I invested the time migrating off appengine and google cloud to another vendor.
There are people internally assigned to this, but either complacency or lazyness or poor focus the details cost them a customer.
Your mention of “upper management” engagement in decisions seems counter to what I hear all the time, about an (upper) management philosophy of “getting out of the way” to “empower” “people close to the ground” and “delegate decision making”
And yet, I am with you: shouldn’t the top (smartest?) people be closely involved “in the weeds”? It seems like “design dictators” [from another comment] and such could actually make the org’s products a lot better. Which seems to be the philosophy at Apple: “experts leading experts” – as a reply here says, and the article in [1].
"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.
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.
Management is just reacting to a changed financial environment. But they can't admit that, so that they make it look as if it is about someones incompetence.
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 as well, 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...
I work at one of the two mentioned companies. 20% of the employees do 80% of the work, and another 60% do maybe 50%. the last 20% account for -30%. It's demoralizing how incapable management seems to be at jettisoning the chaf, however it was explained to me once thusly: good engineers are hard to find and also very valuable. An unmotivated/lazy engineer is one step away from being a valuable engineer. It's worthwhile spending a lot of effort trying to find what motivates them.
Also, if you look at revenue and divide by employees, you will see that the strategy of "employee 5 engineers and hope at least one is good" is still profitable.
This is more or less exactly why Google/Meta need to be regulated and cut down to size. The fact that super-expensive engineers do not have to create value for these companies, but they are still 'affordable' while every other tech company is struggling to hire, means that they are capturing way too much value, i.e. rent.
Can't say I agree. When I go to my local mom & pop grocery store, there are 3 employees and only one of them works, the other two seem to just be on their phones. We should either find a way to cut that business down to size also, or abandon the entire idea.
I have been working for about 4.5 years now across 3 big tech companies (Google included).
I would consider myself a hardworking and ambitious person who loves computer science. I graduated top of my class at a state school. I've gotten promoted, consistently "exceed expectations", lots of positive feedback, etc. But I have not actually accomplished a damn thing or written a single interesting or useful component in my professional work.
The thing is, it's becoming clearer and clearer that so much of what goes on is bullshit. A pattern I have seen 3 times now is managers significantly over-hiring to build their little management moat of mediocre junior devs, then leaving on to brighter pastures with their shinier resume or promotion.
Most of the work is dealing with other people's code messes, operational gruntwork, and ticket grinding that will have little to no impact and is a complete waste of smart people's time. It has little to do with building software or solving hard problems, just maintaining and tweaking the existing systems. It does absolutely nothing for your career. You could be Jeff Dean stuck on worthless legacy grunt crap with no upside and I doubt you would get noticed.
On the flip side, people who actually get interesting, promotable work are the luckiest in the world. It is the difference between a rocket ship advance of career and skill or stagnation and frustration. But this is rare IMO.
And it's so hard to tell going in which you're going to get. I've now taken a gamble on three teams that looked good on paper but turned out to be legacy management empire crap. It pisses me off that once you choose you're basically stuck there for a year or two before you can try again. I don't want to waste any more of my life on this merry go round.
Just wanted to say that you've hit on a real problem: the rich-get-richer feedback cycle in which all the good projects are taken by high ranking engineers. On my teams, including at Google, we intentional counteracted that by giving the interesting work to the person just barely qualified to do it, and biasing the crud toward the senior team members.
This is why it is much better for younger engineers to work at smaller companies working on interesting ideas but if you wanna get google pay, then you gotta make those sacrifices.
Strongly disagree. Most new grads who gets offers from Google, Microsoft or another big-league software company, should absolutely take it. There are only a few very specific smaller companies working on cutting edge ideas and it's unlikely that a new entrant in the industry will be able to identify them.
This is why you shouldn't be a heads down "efficient" worker doing any and all tasks you are given, if you are in this position always do enough of the boring work to be employed but use the rest of the time to research interesting projects that are being worked on in the company, then when you have a decent understanding of where you wanna go, go there.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
You just sound like you don’t quiet people and are trying to justify it. You don’t need to rock the boat if it’s smooth sailing. Do you want everyone complaining and trying to change things?
Sorry to be clear: most quiet types are excellent hard workers. But most of the “dead weight” devs I’ve worked with or under me also happened to fit this pattern of behavior. The loud and lazy get weeded out fast IME.
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.
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.
It's still just a job. And at the end of the day, unless the company is giving me stock, the only thing that matters to me is whether the company still exists tomorrow. If I'm learning new tech on my own time, that's for MY personal enrichment, not theirs. Sure, I could spend my personal time dreaming up new ideas for the company, but I'm not inclined to spend a second of my time prioritizing them over my own personal interests.
I've built multimillion dollar success stories online and still been laid off as the only developer because they thought they could go into a "maintenance phase." Nobody ever again will ever get more of my time than I am compensated for.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
This works great until you PIP an underperforming female, minority, or person over 40.
The discrimination lawsuits will make the company regret their progressive stances.
You wouldn’t believe how many times I have seen this happen.
The median outcome is a settlement with no admission of guilt (usually because it’s cheaper than the alternatives), and the person now has a job for life or is given severance until they get a comparable position elsewhere (and they won’t be rushing).
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.
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.
> 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.
Sorry, I don't. I did have it when we were discussing productivity during my MBA, and the lecturer gave us a bunch of references for the studies that have been done, but that was a few years ago and they're probably out of date now.
It's one of those well-known truths ("diverse teams are more productive" is another one) that's well-supported by the literature and generally agreed on, but still comes up as "needs citation" every time. I should go dig out the citation so I can avoid this when I bring it up ;)
I'm not sure I understand your question completely, but if I understand it right, this is more a question of "are you hired to do 40 hours a week at work, or are you hired to perform a set of tasks?".
The objections to WFH tend to come from managers who manage by insisting their employees do at least 40 hours in the office each week, rather than measuring actual output and productivity, because it's easier. A similar question is: If you're super efficient and get your work done quickly, can you end your day early and go home?
In your GP comment, you say "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."
I think I agree with your second paragraph entirely.
To me, two issues are being conflated here: the location of the work (wfh vs office) and the length of the work day. The benefits of wfh you are describing sound like they could more or less also come from a 6 hour work day. Ignoring commute time (it's an issue, but just for simplicity's sake). You'd be able to do useful things around your house just the same if you were in an office for 6 hours and able to go home.
Some would describe what you're saying as "slacking" for those hours outside the six, but I don't see it that way. Instead, wfh has become a socially acceptable vehicle for a shorter work day. It allows workers to achieve a shorter work day while bypassing those arguments. I think productive discussion around the issue is impossible until these issues are disentangled.
> Some would describe what you're saying as "slacking" for those hours outside the six
this is the core issue - are you hired to do 8 hours of work, or are you hired to complete a set of tasks?
if the former, then yes, you're slacking off if you stop after 6 hours
if the latter, then no, as soon as you're done with those tasks then you have completed your day's work and can go do something else.
old-skool authoritarian management tends towards the former, and tends to measure time-at-desk rather than actual productivity. Hence they don't like WFH because it forces the latter.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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. Do this if you want to kill morale and be chronically understaffed (either not enough bodies or not enough qualified bodies) for the rest of your existence.
This type of mentality breeds mediocrity for a number of reasons, the main one being that A-players will run away from teams/companies structured around these heuristics. Furthermore, they will make sure all of their A-player friends are aware of this environment.
Good managers and good management teams have no issues with productivity of in-office or remote workers. If your team or company is actually having productivity issues (rather than using productivity as a precursor to a rif), then point that finger at the management and management culture.
In every other HN thread, people slam FAANGs for being so bloated, and we praise the small startup where everyone on the team gets shit done fast. And in every other thread, people ask "What the hell does <BigTechCo> need 10,000 engineers for??"
And now Zuck says "We've gotten complacent as a company, and we have to turn up the heat and sense of urgency, and get rid of people who aren't contributing"... and HN freaks out at this 'dystopian' missive.
“Contrarian” in this sense means someone who disagrees on purpose, at best for hypothetical intellectual jousting, and at worst to simply act as a troll.
In either case it’s not very interesting to read threads of people practicing their debating skills.
Alternative view: When you go on such a massive hiring spree in the last 1-2 years from headcount X to headcount Y, how can you be shocked at you're not getting headcount Y amount of productivity?
Proper onboarding attention and tenure impacts productivity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
>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!".
>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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Based on previous experience at a SV "unicorn", more often than not, a ton of work was not done. The "specs" were vague and poorly written. "Lacks attention to detail" is how I would describe most PMs at that place. I think they had a 1:1 ratio of PMs to engineers.
I was only slightly exaggerating. Though I do remember being in my daily standup, and regularly there were 3 engineers, a dev manager, 2 PMs, the product directory, and a designer of some sort.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
My favorite is the PMs who I've never met in my life, apparently they work in my product area, I only hear from them 2x per year only when they're planning some crucial 'team summit' far away from their usual work location (and spouse/children) where they get shitfaced drunk at the company's expense. Nothing actionable ever comes from these 'summits' in case that's not obvious.
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.
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)
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"
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.
Perhaps this is mainly to try to please Wall Street. But I think the jig is up, so to speak. It should now be painfully obvious if you are a "tech" worker for an advertising-supported "tech" company that this "business" relies, indirectly, on the abundance of cheap capital, i.e., super low cost debt. To me, that does not signify "essential" services. It signifies "optional". The web will not die if these companies disappear, but these companies _will_ die without sufficient web traffic. In the absence of "venture capital", Facebook could vanish and people would still find ways to use the internet to stay in touch. That is what I think. The only way to know for sure is to let them fade away and see what happens. To argue otherwise is to underestimate human ingenuity, not to mention how much bandwidth, storage and CPU consumers today have at their disposal. The "tech" worker who argues "You need us" to the public is, IMO, now much less convincing when their employers are admitting they really do not need most of you.
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.
> 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...
The bureaucracy to launch a project can be high. I think some of it is essential. A company really does need to ensure every project launch adheres to regulatory/branding/legal guidelines. We do have to adhere to a high a11y/i18n standard. A smaller company can just choose to ignore a bunch of these things.
The problem is when these requirements mean you have to hunt down a lawyer who can flip the bit and they're busy with other things for the next few weeks. Same goes for security reviewers. Another thing is the ambiguity for what exactly is required for a11y/i18n. These things can be improved.
I work in Google Cloud. After the main technical work is done, a feature launch requires probers, integration tests, metrics, alerts, dashboards, updating the gcloud CLI tool, updating client libraries in several libraries, writing internal support playbooks, writing external docs, writing an external business-side blog post. This can all be construed as bureaucracy since it's not the main feature itself. But we do need all of these things to provide a good customer experience. I've written the main code for a feature that took about 2-3 weeks and then spend 2-3 months doing the rest of these things.
to be honest, you can never be an extremely efficient org with a huge head count like google and to be honest i don't even see what their problem is, record profits year over year, how long exactly is that trend supposed to continue? in perpetuity?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Those claims aren't accurate, but this does sound spot on as to what his internal narrative would be were it put to words. Zuckerberg is known for steamrolling over anyone to get what he wants, and orchestrating a narrative that paints him as the sympathetic talented protagonist he absolutely is not and has never been.
If I worked for a someone with this sort of attitude, and I was in a position that I could walk away from this sort of megalomania, I would run for the hills.
Dignity is important to me, idgaf how many zeroes are in someone's net worth, if they started intimidating people over a zoom call I would intentionally miss the meeting even if I was initially going to attend.
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.
So are people in IRL meetings once the meetings get large enough. PMs are only focusing when it is their time to talk or take notes for stuff about their team, otherwise they are answering emails or responding to other messages.
Just a note that neither Pichai nor Zuckerberg actually said the words: "Too many employees, but few work". This is just recycled from another news site [1] which chose to summarize their comments that way.
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.
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."
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.
Let me make an observation... eventually every manager gets to a point where the only way to get promoted is to grow their reports. So they beg for additional headcount for their team with little (but important) work, hire a bunch of people who are better suited working in other areas, and repeat for 10+ years until the CEO notices.
Having worked inside and outside Google I just want to say how happy I am that products can't be launched without privacy and security review. I've seen some outright garbage launched at other companies with obvious, gaping holes in their privacy and user-data security stories and it's completely terrifying.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a bit suspicious both tech companies started complaining about productivity around the time the market started to turn. Management is happy to collect their bonuses when things are going well but seem quick the blame the workers when they aren't. Also, it's not like these these companies aren't still outrageously profitable.
Just because an employee is content 'meeting expectations' doesn't mean that they are dead weight. The managers set the expectations and if they're meeting them then the engineer is more than pulling their weight (i.e the company benefits exceeds their compensation, which for these companies is something like $1.6 million per employee). Like any large human organization, these companies are lumbering schizophrenic bureaucratic beasts with innumerable layers of management pulling in different directions so yeah there isn't great productivity but the workers aren't to blame for that nor has the situation been any different for the last decade.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Well from experience of being an undergrad and going to career fairs, this assessment is spot on. You don't realize this whole thing is bullshit until a few years into your career.
Because my frame of reference is being early or maybe early-mid career, where you can't possibly have the necessary experience to be 'best' without working significantly more than 40 hours weekly, and from my perspective most of getting there in the future follows that path too. I'm not discounting that some top engineers could exist outside of working a lot, but for most people the path to that distinction is a lot of work, and in most places that lot of work gets done outside of the hours when people are distracting you with meetings and small talk, which means not stopping at 40 hours weekly.
Having said all that, I don't discount the possibility of work life balance in the 60-80 hour range, but that's a whole separate skillset.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
Yeah sorry I did edit the number down based on digging deeper into my link based on your comment here. I still think 0.3% (my original number was 0.1%) is not a meaningful amount of engineers for a "starve the rest of the world of talent" strategy to work.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Interesting, thanks for that info, licenses in other industries artificially reduce participants in that field. I wonder if tech not having them has resulted in our field to dominate most of the economy in the past 5-10 years(or helped that domination).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
> "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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
Every competitive has a stack ranking system whether they admit it or not.
They put lipstick on a pig but everyone's getting ranked and the lowest performers getting weeded out.
The whole "People get fired even if they're doing a good job just by being a low performer on a strong team" is an edge case that happens INCREDIBLY rarely but when it does gets all the attention.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Then why is their hiring geared toward brain teasers and Bigoh notation? If they want to keep people from building the next Facebook (costing them M&A money, because they'd have to acquire it), why not hire based on ability to get things done?
> 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.
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.
American corporations post record profits for several years and then one quarter of decreased revenue, their conclusion, their workers aren't productive enough.
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
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?
Until fairly recently, I worked as a SWE at a big, unsexy, enterprise corporation where tech is an unrespected cost center. Pay as a senior SWE there (and companies like it) was probably around what a junior or lower midlevel engineer at a FAANG-like company would make.
A lot of people there were working very hard not to go the extra mile or chase after a promotion, but rather to become Professional Leetcoders so that they could jump ship for a better company. I've had friends at other, similar, companies tell stories like this too. And I have to admit, I too was one of their ranks, as were many of my friends. The goal - leave the crufty enterprise world and get into FAANG, or at least a better, Silicon Valley style, tech company where you can go to work in shorts and flipflops instead of dressing up in "business casual" like a bean counter.
The whole tech interview nonsense has probably created legions of similar people. They might be doing a decent job at their current workplaces, but they're certainly not going above and beyond when they can be grinding leetcode instead.
However the context of this thread is Google, Meta, and other FAANG and FAANG-tier companies. I have no insight there, as the second part of this whole Professional Leetcoder thing is that once you get into such an "endgame company", you're supposed to hang up your leetcode gosu badge and work your ass off. Which is what I'm actually doing now.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
As someone who is working in a very large tech company, I see one of the strong reasons as why employees are not motivated is because the returns for working hard and delivering results is not there. Things like promotions, pay rises are always not explained and the expectations for promotion is never clearly communicated, intentionally kept vague and consequently the individual is not clear what more to do and is frustrated. Once these large companies find out you are good in one thing, they really want you to keep doing that one thing day in and day out.
Add immigration related uncertainty on top of this, wherein people on H1B, and awaiting Green Card cannot easily quit and change job, it directly correlates to lot of burnt out people just waiting for their immigration situation to change to get out and that wait can take years.
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.
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.
Convenient that they only worry about this during recessions, what purpose would management have to ignore these problems until now? It's a sleight-of-hand to shift blame come earnings time and give management something to do to 'fix the problem' (that their mismanagement created) they can point to, nothing more.
Yes. I think that has to do with the culture of budgetary cycles and planning. It makes it very unlikely that a leader would want to jettison dead weight during “the good times” since they might lose the budget if the role is not backfilled quickly.
The joke here is that many companies parroted a lot of "cool" stuff from FB/GOOG like open office, Agile, etc. without understanding that such stuff actually decreases productivity, and that hasn't been an issue for FB/GOOG only because they take in top performers from top universities and have business model to print money at $1.5M+/employee/year. The parroting companies don't have such employees and don't have such business model, and for them those parroted things cause very noticeable harm, and to mentally reconcile that situation they conclude that they "aren't doing those things right" and thus double-down on that parroting thus increasing the harm even further.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Glad to learn we're gonna see this top tier talent hit the market in the coming future. Having perfected ad slinging web tech who knows what they'll solve next. Climate change, interstellar travel, or the cure for cancer? Bright future ahead for us all.
Issue trackers create an alternate reality where code quality and organization doesn't matter. This makes leaders seek for insights in the issue tracker instead of diving into the code base.
The result? all developers try to game the system by closing tickets faster at the expense of burying the project into tech debt. The endgame of late JIRA-based development is having an army of thousands of developers checking 2 lines of code per month.
Meanwhile the competition clones the best selling aspects of your product and before you know it nobody wants to buy your bloated, slow, unstable and expensive solution is slowly replaced by cheaper alternatives.
Product managers as owners of project backlogs is the ruin of software.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I didn’t see them call the employees lazy. They said they weren’t productive. And again calling a conscious decision to hire people you won’t need in a couple years isn’t necessarily poor planning. If being the first to release a product gives you a big advantage it’s probably a good idea to hire all those people in the right situation.
If the employees were not being productive, that would show up in their KPIs and reviews and they would be fired. That process already exsists so you can't use it as a scapegoat. This is squarely about leadership's poor planning.
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.
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
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.
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:)
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.
I think “turning up the heat” is just going to add pressure on the ones already doing most of the work. And some of those people will leave. The ones not doing anything aren’t going to suddenly start caring and aren’t probably all that motivated to find something else.
This is a faliure of some management to not motivate/correct employees who are not meeting expectations.
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.
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.
> 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.
There is a huge problem with productivity at my company. Unfortunately too many people just took advantage of the flexible work arrangements offered by the response to the pandemic. What is even more frustrating is that people refuse to own up to it. Most of them pretend to be busy and overworked while conspicuously putting in the bare minimum every day.
Remote work obviously has its advantages but I’m starting to believe that it is a privilege that should not be granted by default to the entire workforce. Perhaps it makes more sense to only grant it to exceptional employees who have already demonstrated significant value to the company.
I think people will look back on this time as a second guilded age.
They will look upon the greed and the ego of Zuck, Bezos, Gates and Musk the same way we look back upon J.P. Morgan, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Carnegie.
This statement will sound as bad to people in 2100 as arguing against 8 hour works days sounds to us now.
How many generations folly have to be blamed on the working class before we can come to our senses and regulate those who would amass wealth beyond measure but cannot hold a single drop of responsibility, humility, or honesty without it burning their skin or slipping between their fingers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
This is pretty disgusting PR to try to spin what is clearly a systemic failure of business management at every level or other hidden motives of the planners of the business into blame for the worker who doesn't control the system nor what there assigned to do. It's disgusting reporters don't push back on this nonsense, but just parrot whatever press release they get.
As many others have said here: 20% of the people at these big companies are not just doing nothing, they are getting in the way and providing negative value to the 80% who come to work to honestly try and get something done. It is bad for the company and the industry to be paying these people high six figures to be useless. It is unpleasant to work with them (if you even notice they're there) because it makes your work seem pointless.
If you asked the employees who the 20% were, I bet there would be consensus. They could be found and removed easily. It would also include plenty of managers and directors, it's not just leaf nodes who can be useless.
But the big tech companies are absolutely terrified of being seen as talent-hostile by firing low performers. So instead they will "turn up the heat" and hope the problem solves itself. They will complain that their employees aren't working hard enough without giving them any reasons to work harder or removing any obstacles in their way. As leaders they should be ashamed for not owning and fixing this problem.
> Meanwhile, 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.
I have repeatedly logged into large meetings people demanded I attend and promptly gone to sleep or when I worked in the office, I would show up and then spend a half hour sitting on the toilet.
The problem is that the meeting really isn't important.
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.
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.
'“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,” he said. '
That sounds like a CEO that has failed on a few significant counts. Maybe the first change needed is a new CEO.
Looking at all the things that can be improved in various Google or Facebook products, there is not too few work for developers. The problem is that the classical management structure is not suited for developer companies.
Google and Facebook have cheated when at the beginning, the management and development were two, respectively one person. Management understood what development was doing. Nowadays, when those roles are split into many people, it takes much more management to understand what some code is doing.
Code is a very dense notation. If the same knowledge has to be communicated in normal language, it requires far more people.
So if Google and Facebook don't want to leave decisions to developers, they have to increasing their management overhead. They could introduce various committees to manage all aspects of a product. That would require a massive cultural shift because management wouldn't be a hierarchy anymore.
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.
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.
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.
Work? No, in the article he was talking about an all-hands meeting. Those meetings are content-less, can be replaced by an email and serve only to stroke the ego of the presenter. "Look at how many people I can command as an audience".
How much actual information needs to go to all employees in a synchronous fashion? If you're broadcasting information, then it doesn't need to happen synchronously.
The real information revealed here is how poorly these CEOs conceive of how work is happening in their companies. They aren't tracking the performance of their employees in a sane fashion. This is a massive red flag for Facebook and Google.
Are there people there that shouldn't be? I can think of at least one name that should leave to improve the business.
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.
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.
I always wondered what all those tens of thousands of people at these megacompanies actually do -- even after working at one myself! (and never managing to get a lot done)
So it’s amusing and interesting to hear that even the CEOs don’t really know either.
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
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.
Incentivize engineers instead of treating them code monkey peasants and they will work hard and make you a lot of money. Create useless management layers and make them play politics to advance and you get FAANG culture.
Yea right. Zuckerberg probably means not enough people are overworking themselves. I feel this whole not working then is newspeak for we arn't getting employees to work 80 hr weeks any more.
Not to be holier than thou or anything but if you're at FAANG/high paying job with enough of a nest egg and working on something that does not impact the bottom line or make any difference please quit your job and do something useful with your life, time and skill.
Open a shawarma shop or something, at least it will make people happy unlike another Google chat app.
You can discuss ad infinitum whose fault all this is (middle management, metric-first strategy, execs etc.) but it's your life being wasted at the end of the day.
Productivity is limited by the scope of your products. If you have 100 Work years of work available to do but have 500 employees then each employee can only do 0.2 work years worth of work per year. People want to be productive but if there's not enough productive work do then people start doing unproductive work because it's all that is available.
Solution:
You need to either increase the scope of products: get into new industrys like Tesla and Amazon are doing OR cut head count massively.
There's tons of stuff to do, the problem is management creates enormous hurdles for anyone to do anything within Google. The amount of red tape and disorganization is hard to believe if not witnessed first hand.
> “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,” [Pichai] said.
When you direct a huge amount of your company’s resources toward ESG initiatives, should you be surprised when your employees are not particularly focused on the real work at hand? Are these CEOs really so blind?
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.
What I always love about these statements from CEOs is that if there is a culture of poor performance or whatever, it is actually the companies and the CEOs themselves who are doing a poor job. Ultimately, the performance of the company is a reflection of what the CEO puts in.
I like how these CEOs never talk about leaving, even thought they're usually a big part of the problem.
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.
To me, this may signal an ominous culture shift. I don't work for Google or Facebook, and don't expect to. (Not sour grapes, just reality). But if a return to a more draconian culture becomes popular with investors, it could eventually trickle down to my little hamlet. Not something I look forward to.
Draconian culture is an environment that spurs tech innovation by new entrants. If anything, it might cause a mass migration of employees from those outfits into great new companies.
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.
Do we want FAANG employees? From what I'm reading here great people started these companies and we've had 20 years of sleepy civil service style meeting people. They sound like they might fit at a bank but not at any company that needs to produce?
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.
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.
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?
A lot of the comments seem to focus on ICs/devs, but for me the people who fit the category of person being discussed are managers, people who basically do nothing and don't contribute anything of value.
Every single manager I’ve had continued to be a solid IC. The only difference is that they had a larger portion of the vote when we decided what we wanted to work on but we were all in the trenches together.
I remember long stretches of time when these companies would scoop up as many tech workers as possible to deny their competition access to workers. Guess they've decided this isn't necessary anymore.
Looking through all those comments, why are so many tech workers crabs in a bucket? So many weirdos in here just dying to fire their co workers for the blasphemy of not giving 110% to their massive company.
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"
This is why I prefer working for smaller companies. Your work makes a big difference. You have a big say in the future of the company, and chances to learn something new come quickly.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Well I'm in a corp style place. The haircut was done by rolling dice. And whilst my number didn't come up, I wouldn't be so sure that's it's good for any involved.
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.
meh i doubt either pichai or zuckerberg has this right. both companies are making hand over fist money wise, not sure how complaining about worker productivity goes into that picture
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.
Sounds like a public truce to me. These companies hire defensively and pay well to take talent from each other.
When other FAANG isn’t hiring, they can all afford to dump part of their workforce, knowing that the rest of the industry won’t soak them up. There’s no where else for them to go without taking pay cuts.
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.
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.
Any idea why these companies all ballooned in size so much during the pandemic? Was it purely about more time spent online = more money = more hiring or was there some actual strategy behind it?
That seems like a red herring given the amount of expansion that FB has had - DEI or no DEI, doubling your headcount is going to result in a quality drop
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
It's like a bull market, where 70% of the value of shitty companies is driven by the bull market and the vertical they are in. Same goes for employment: during good(bullish) times, one doesn't need to deliver much and still can coast.
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...
These CEOs are by definition not deserving of their exorbitant compensation.
In an actually functioning market they would have been kicked to the curb, long long before making these kinds of embarrassing excuses for their incompetence.
If the boards of such companies weren’t stuffed full of the same kind of absurdly entitled, overpaid and under-qualified executives, our capitalist system would be a lot less dysfunctional.
Instead we get this wildy embarrassing neo-aristocracy..
Adam Smith warned us about this:
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
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?
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)
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.
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.
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...
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.
In India, the most significant difference is caused by the caste system. Within this system, the lower caste is considered genetically inferior, lazy, and never completing any hard work. It is perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy as what is the point in working hard if the hard work will not be recognized. In China, people work extremely hard and are proud of it. This can be attributed to Confucianism and communism. There is a 996 culture in China. That is 9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week. Cultures are very different indeed.
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.