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0 pointsryandrake2y ago0 comments

I agree with this. Maybe I've been very fortunate in choice of employers, but every company I've ever worked at, large FAANG to small startup, has had far more work in the queue than staff to do that work. Like MULTIPLES more: 4-10X as many bugs than staff available to fix. 4-10X as many possible features to implement than staff could possible do. So everyone has to prioritize, and the list of bugs and list of potential features always grows faster than it shrinks. People fight for headcount not just to grow their empire, but because there is so much work to do, and they (as managers) are accountable for getting that work done. Of course, not everyone is actually 100% utilized--there's some slack, but as you say, 80-90% utilization seems right. The vast majority of people don't just sit there, twiddling their thumbs for the majority of the time.

EDIT: OK, jeez, I'm willing to admit I'm wrong; but this doesn't even remotely square with any reality I've ever seen at about a dozen companies. People just hired to... do nothing? It doesn't make any sense at all. How many of you have an empty bug tracker? How many have zero tasks waiting for you when you clock out at the end of the day?

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myshpa2y ago

Google and Meta over-hired thousands of employees who do 'fake work,' says PayPal Mafia's Keith Rabois

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-meta-staff-do-fake-wo...

Alphabet's Google and Facebook owner Meta had thousands of employees who don't do anything.

"There's nothing for these people to do — they're really — it's all fake work," he said. "Now that's being exposed, what do these people actually do, they go to meetings."

Google, he continued, had intentionally over-hired engineers and tech talent to stop them from moving to other companies, a strategy he described as "pretty coherent." But, he added, that meant engineers had been happy to "be entitled, sit at their desks, and do nothing."

rhaway847732y ago

You’re not wrong. But HNers have decided that their employers are terrible tyrants, companies are awful entities that are both efficiently Machiavellian but also incredibly stupid and unproductive, and managers and executives are just foolish people who work for status and have no idea how to do actual real work.

And yet, somehow, these companies have existed for decades and the only time they’ve died out is usually because of technological leaps implemented by a competitor that looks very much like them.

OnlineGladiator2y ago

> People fight for headcount not just to grow their empire, but because there is so much work to do, and they (as managers) are accountable for getting that work done.

How does this square with a company like Google that is famous for having multiple teams competing with each other on the same product categories, ie the disaster that is their chat platform? Sure, there's work to do - because they're creating frivolous work intentionally. It's nothing but empire building. And the end result is a worse product!

I get that my topic is a bit of a tangent because you're talking mostly about IC productivity and the gist of my comment is on managerial incompetence. But ultimately my point is people are doing meaningless work and the system is designed for it. I've never worked somewhere that valued productivity over politics when it came time to promote people.

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