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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This kind of "development process theater" causes terrible cognitive dissonance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The typical expectation on salaried employees is that you spend your 8-5 in meetings and then you 5-midnight actually doing programming work.
Senge, Peter M.. The Fifth Discipline (p. 16). Crown. Kindle Edition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
In most companies agile/scrum meetings are make-believe work.
Well said!
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.
Of course this isn't true.
Have you worked in Government?
edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26727803 for an example
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That would be a surpreme waste of company money, and probably they have engineers working for them who are far better developers than they are.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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 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.
Your standup meeting could've been an email. Their immovable basketball game (quality of life) is far more important than a meeting that can happen at any time - and probably doesn't even need to exist in the first place.
Other than that, your points stand.
{soapbox}
I believe a lot of companies are trying to establish a third place ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place and https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/02/28/20030228/ ) to help transition new grads and young adults from a college atmosphere to a professional atmosphere... but putting a lot of emphasis on having that third place. Having it _also_ means that employees tend to stay later at work.
Things like https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/custom-woodworking/cabine...
These are ways to use excess money in a way that rewards employees and makes some of the aspects hard to leave ("I could switch companies but then I'd lose the woodshop!") but it also sets up another set of problems in the nature of the third place - that its not work. The coffee shop that you show up to outside of work shouldn't have a manager / employee relationship between the patrons, but the coffee shop on the campus of a big company - that's harder.
It is those third space encroachments where the company is sponsoring it and yet the company wanting to not be political / social / getting into those HR issues, but yet the invariably show up there that lead to articles about how the company is going to be not political, or that half the staff is leaving because the company took a certain stance in a not-3rd space.
These third space encroachments where company life is used as a substitute for one's own hobbies and stepping beyond the college life atmosphere is where companies have social problems.
{/soapbox}
There are tech companies that absolutely print money and have those perks. There are also companies that grind and don’t turn out shit.
If fresh blueberries for software engineers are gonna wreck you, you aren’t in a business worth doing.
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.
It seems like management was aware their employees were bums, and needed your companies energy to infuse some productivity into their lifestyle.
Looks like it failed though.
Yes, that's how it usually works out.
By the way, 'perqs' is a peculiar word. English is my second language but I'm used to seeing the word 'perks'.
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.
https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
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'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.
Where the hell did they think productivity would go?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> “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.
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.
The ones who leave may be dissatisfied with the artificial goals.
Though you could be inferring that from working there or from all the other news about them.
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.
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.
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?
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.
HP did this back in 2013; be in the office or resign.
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".
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.
* a genuine interest in trying new things and trying to see if they'd stick, without the baggage of established UX & customers - Allo/Duo are like this. I don't think people give the company enough credit for this.
* leadership downplaying the cost to the Google brand of shutting things down all the time. When brought up internally, execs shrug saying that we must be willing to try and see if things stick. This makes sense, but why are people particularly mad at Google for doing this? It must be for a good reason, not merely a meme.
* org silos. The org behind Google Docs / Chat has a different reason for a chat app (chat as a checkbox for enterprise office suite sales) than the one behind Google Maps (you can chat with restaurants or whatnot)
* a lack of a good "design dictator", meaning our chat apps, as with other apps, falter for lack of great UX and don't gain traction. The biggest example I can think of is how Google Chat has a loading spinner for the emoji picker - this simple thing should be lightning quick, but it took a year for someone to even prioritize it.
* faulty marketing / branding. Taking the simple, beloved "GChat", which was the dominant chat app between AIM and FB Messenger, and wringing it though "Hangouts" and "Allo/Duo" and "Chat" - that's no fun for users.
I think the lesson here is that people want a simple, hyper-fast app that gets out of their way and slowly adds nice things on top. I'd say the apps that are most fun and fast to use are Messenger and iMessage. (I have plenty of problems with both - unremovable stories on Messenger, lack of archiving chats and general slowness on iMessage).
All these are my opinions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
1 - https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/php-docker/issues/530
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].
Thoughts anyone?
[1] https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio...
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!".
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.
Having worked at both Google and Facebook I can tell you it's contradictory because in some cases you have an embarrassment of riches, hundreds or even thousands of heads, virtually unlimited resources (CPU, storage, networking), etc. Some make sense like Google+. I mean it was a failure and probably came way too late to succeed no matter what Google did but I understand trying. Maps, Docs, Youtube, Photos, Drive, Chrome, Android... all of these make sense.
I also understand you can't necessarily predict "winners" so to a certain extent you have to try things and expect failures.
Interestingly though every project I listed there (apart from Drive and Photos) was an acquisition.
On the other hand, you have projects desperate for people that turn into abandonware because they don't get sufficiently funded, even when they have PMF.
There are a ton of middle managers at big tech companies who exist only to get promoted and to empire build. You could, in my opinion, take everyone from L7 (M3 at Google, M2 at Facebook) to VP and fire 75% of them and be perfectly fine.
Both of these companies are now in what I call permanent reorg churn. Every few months you'll get an email saying your mananger's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager as part of a broad reorg. You've never met any of these people. This is a meme internally.
But what you have to understand is that reorgs are a way of avoiding the appearance of failure while appearing to be doing something. Don't get me wrong. Bad organizational structure can set you up for failure and a good org structure can help you succeed but reorg churn is none of this.
Reorg churn is simply changing the structure every 6 months. Nothing is ever in place long enough to determine if it succeeded or failed. People responsible for those decisions have probably moved on.
Additionally, at Google in particular, the amount of process required to do anything is insane. But don't worry. Bureaucracy busters has another 3 surveys for you to fill out to improve things. I once spent a quarter just babysitting a launch calendar entry.
The checklist to launch anything is insanely long. Even getting a small amount of resources requires Machiavellian machinations.
But sure, there are too many employees. Got it.
> 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 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.
Photos wasn't really an acquisition. Yes they acquired Picasa but Google Photos has no real connection to Picasa.
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 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.
Overall, I don’t think the plan at yahoo was to fix anything, but just asset-strip it, which worked well for stockholders.
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...
Sure, but since when has an executive ever faced consequences for incompetence?
Did you miss the Covid-inspired pay cuts for remote workers? The expansion into lower-cost tech hubs like North Carolina?
> falling revenue
Yet still huge profits
> blaming the employees.
Bad play, since employees make the revenues.
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.
And? Don't leave us hanging. Have you figured out a way to get out of this vicious cycle?
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.
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.
Pick a lane, people.
I wouldn’t mind having the ability to filter HN replies to “+5 Insightful” and drop anything else marked “Contrarian”.
Proper onboarding attention and tenure impacts productivity.
Also, I block everything Facebook at the router level with unbound.
But isn't this a business decision? "Punishment" implies a fault, but the employees are not at fault here.
What would "taking personal responsibility" look like for management?
> “There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have. [We need to] create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer-focused,
Ohhh! Two declarations based in unfounded evidence that will instill fear in employees and prevent them to ask for raises.
What a shitty piece of journalism.
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.
> 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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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)
[1] https://in.mashable.com/tech/36076/google-has-too-many-emplo...
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
Maybe engineers should turn up the heat a little. Maybe they should leave and start their own businesses. Haven’t we made Zuck, Pichai, Page, Brin, etc. rich enough?
Answer: yes, we have made them rich enough.
How much worse could they make our world?
It's not just the ads, its the search result / timeline / suggestion bubble echo chamber that may bring about a new Dark Age. Let's hope they fail.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is to suck up all the TALENT that would compete with their tech monopolies.
This is FANG’s competitive edge. Having the excess cash and profits to do so.
Most of the software and libraries I use nowadays have existed a decade ago, and truth be told, weren't that much different.
* get a job at FAANG
* do nothing, other than show up and do some minimal work
* collect mad money
* when bored go to another FAANG
Compared this to startups:
* get a job at startup
* work work work work work
* collect OK money
* go back to work
HN advice? Get a job at FAANG!
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.
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.
This is a faliure of some management to not motivate/correct employees who are not meeting expectations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In my (middling-long) career I have noticed the following cycles:
Company grows and takes on new projects. Workers start getting stretched thin.
Work starts to suffer as people are thrashing, there's no more concrete focus.
Company responds by hiring (or making) more managers.
Each manager now thinks they have to justify their existence by inserting themselves into every possible process, gatekeeping, etc.
Decisions start to be made by committee, as nobody wants to stick their neck out.
Now decision-making suffers; productivity declines even more.
Company responds by shuttering entire divisions, firing employees, etc.
As we all know, the most productive hackers prioritize all-hands meetings. I hope this is misattribution from the author.
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.
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.
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.
That sounds like a CEO that has failed on a few significant counts. Maybe the first change needed is a new CEO.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So it’s amusing and interesting to hear that even the CEOs don’t really know either.
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.
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.
I'm stuck in the agency life - I have to log seven hours a day and I'm at roughly 80% billable hours on average a week (to clients)
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?
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.
I like how these CEOs never talk about leaving, even thought they're usually a big part of the problem.
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.
Meta has 83,553 employees (source: Wikipedia) which means that 292 employees are producing 50% of the output.
Not necessarily just those who will be laid off, but the ones who don't like their coworkers getting laid off so they can do 1.5x the work for the same money.
Fire up those LinkedIn contacts!
And Zuck is part of the problem here.
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.
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"
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.
It's war time, managers. Time to sharpen those axes...
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.”
