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Working 2 hours a day while getting paid 300K+ is unsustainable. That's just not true though. If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then

Working 2 hours a day while getting paid 300K+ is unsustainable. That's just not true though. If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant at your job, and demanding you work more hours is idiotic. Put simply, there is no function that converts "salary / hours" into any useful measure of a person's output.

ninkendo 4y ago
Or the far more likely scenario is that your job is only barely needed in the first place, and you were hired because some line manager knows that increasing their head count is the best way to get promoted. And since their manager is thinking the same (and probably one layer above too), and the company is still doing gangbusters on ad revenue, no one really questions it.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  I just don’t get how this is possible. Every single company I’ve ever worked at (large and small) has had at least 10x more work in the backlog than could possibly be done with the staff they have. Everyone’s JIRA queue is stuffed full, and since there is so much work, things have to be brutally prioritized and even high-value stuff has to be cut, since there are just not enough people-hours to get it all done. Where are these companies/teams who have nothing to do, or so little to do they have time for side projects??
  - ninkendo 4y ago
    Just because you have a full JIRA queue doesn't mean any of the work is worth doing. Management tends to want to build empires, and that can mean taking on projects that don't contribute at all to the company's bottom line, or are so high-effort/low-impact that any sane company wouldn't even bother with the project. See also Google's new chat app every year, or how companies decide to rewrite their UI every six months, refactoring legacy code that works just fine, chasing the latest framework du jour, etc etc etc. Teams tend to take on work on a whim, and there's rarely anyone at the top keeping tabs on which of the projects are actually useful vs just spinning your wheels.
  - pharmakom 4y ago
    Tackle just enough of the tickets to not arouse suspicion. Managers won’t be able to estimate how hard the tickets really were.
    - eclipxe 4y ago
      Is this based on your actual experience at Google/Meta or are you guessing?
ehnto 4y ago
The more likely scenario for most is that there are other people or mechanisms making the money, or that they're living off the success of previous efforts. It's not necessarily their fault at a company that large, sometimes people are just grossly under-utilized or misallocated. People can just vanish in a manner of speaking, by getting forgotten about or by having your responsibilities taken from you but not replaced.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  If you have some producers that aren't "pulling their weight" then that just means you have others that are pulling 2x+ and still only making a fraction of the actual value they provide. I'll be the first to agree that FAANG and friends have ridiculous overhead and way more engineers than I think is necessary but these companies are making money hand over fist. If we are looking for fat to cut I'd start with management/execs in most cases.
  - ehnto 4y ago
    Respectfully I have two qualms with your thoughts here, first is that lack of effort from one person must mean extra effort from another to balance out in some way, you could easily have people not pulling their weight but still be producing based on some leverage or multiplying factor in your business. More effort doesn't always equate to more value. Some businesses are just spinning their wheels, keeping themselves busy, while the core value generator keeps ticking over. I worked at a 10 man company that was turning over millions a month from automated lead generation, we could have all walked away for 6 months and it would have kept making money. The other is just that it's not a realistic way to look at a workforce, especially in software, hours and effort don't equate to an "output" neatly. Most software companies are in the business of making value producing automations, not producing the raw value themselves. You can have one production engineer in a factory completely eliminate someone's job with a nifty insight that took him an hour to spot, now that person isn't pulling their weight (because their job doesn't exist anymore) but the business is more profitable, for one example.
  - pharmakom 4y ago
    Impossible to cut only the dead weight though.
matwood 4y ago
> If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant at your job Sure, but Google and other big tech have a completely different problem. Their one product makes so much money, that there is not a natural forcing function for other ventures to succeed or fail. This lets them take moonshots, but also makes it easy to slip into making bad investment decisions. For example, green-lighting a team to build another chat app.
- gumby 4y ago
  > Their one product makes so much money, that there is not a natural forcing function for other ventures to succeed or fail. This is what appalled me about Pichai’s productivity comment. Google may not have high productivity, but that’s not its problem. The company has just drifted since Schmidt stopped running it, reminiscent of Microsoft in the second half (and before?) of the Ballmer period. The ladder-climbing PMs are running the show and there is no overall strategy.
  - GlennS 4y ago
    Not knowing anything about how Google works internally, this is very much how it looks from the outside. They just don't seem to be able to make products that anyone wants. And the products they made before which people did want just drift in a generally worse direction as they fiddle with them randomly over time.
    - whatarethembits 4y ago
      They have no coherent vision. As a consumer I have no idea what I'm getting with a Google product, or what their ethos is. Their products and features are always randomly baked together, without any coherent story. Left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. I can't rely on any of it. This is why I moved to Apple eco system last year. Google as a company seems analogous to the Linux eco system; TON of duplicated work across different teams, none providing an actual complete solution for day to day use. Such a waste of talent.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
JasserInicide 4y ago
Yeah but we all know that doesn't and won't ever scale up.
nojito 4y ago
>That's just not true though. If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant at your job, and demanding you work more hours is idiotic. That's not the argument for layoffs. The argument is that that role shouldn't exist at all and should be swallowed up by another FTE instead.
bioemerl 4y ago
> you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant Or you're working at a useless user hostile company that's coasting on tools and ideas from a decade ago while failing hard at everything it does today.
Workaccount2 4y ago
oof, peak programmer arrogance.
azangru 4y ago
Is an average Google engineer expected to generate $50m of revenue?
tmpz22 4y ago
> If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day This is irrational. You're only able to generate $50m in revenue because a giant multi-billion dollar apparatus exists and is maintained around you and that is not free. In almost all circumstances you were not the sole driver of that revenue.
- onion2k 4y ago
  That doesn't matter. If your two hours are a key component in the work needed to make that $50m then nothing changes - you're still brilliant and asking you to work longer is still silly.
  - tmpz22 4y ago
    If you're only providing a component of the work you are not contributing the full $50m. Thats why the statement is still irrational. This argument waves "look at all this value I bring" is hyperinflated and thus dishonest to pull out every time this gets discussed. I'm not saying good engineers can't bring disproportionate value and should work/be compensated commensurately. I'm saying stop gaming the numbers like a Goldman Sachs accountant.
rightbyte 4y ago
Once I worked as a dam operator a summer. I did not claim that I generated 2MW of revenue by opening the lids.

ninkendo 4y ago

Or the far more likely scenario is that your job is only barely needed in the first place, and you were hired because some line manager knows that increasing their head count is the best way to get promoted. And since their manager is thinking the same (and probably one layer above too), and the company is still doing gangbusters on ad revenue, no one really questions it.

ryandrake 4y ago
I just don’t get how this is possible. Every single company I’ve ever worked at (large and small) has had at least 10x more work in the backlog than could possibly be done with the staff they have. Everyone’s JIRA queue is stuffed full, and since there is so much work, things have to be brutally prioritized and even high-value stuff has to be cut, since there are just not enough people-hours to get it all done. Where are these companies/teams who have nothing to do, or so little to do they have time for side projects??
- ninkendo 4y ago
  Just because you have a full JIRA queue doesn't mean any of the work is worth doing. Management tends to want to build empires, and that can mean taking on projects that don't contribute at all to the company's bottom line, or are so high-effort/low-impact that any sane company wouldn't even bother with the project. See also Google's new chat app every year, or how companies decide to rewrite their UI every six months, refactoring legacy code that works just fine, chasing the latest framework du jour, etc etc etc. Teams tend to take on work on a whim, and there's rarely anyone at the top keeping tabs on which of the projects are actually useful vs just spinning your wheels.
- pharmakom 4y ago
  Tackle just enough of the tickets to not arouse suspicion. Managers won’t be able to estimate how hard the tickets really were.
  - eclipxe 4y ago
    Is this based on your actual experience at Google/Meta or are you guessing?

ehnto 4y ago

The more likely scenario for most is that there are other people or mechanisms making the money, or that they're living off the success of previous efforts. It's not necessarily their fault at a company that large, sometimes people are just grossly under-utilized or misallocated. People can just vanish in a manner of speaking, by getting forgotten about or by having your responsibilities taken from you but not replaced.

joshstrange 4y ago
If you have some producers that aren't "pulling their weight" then that just means you have others that are pulling 2x+ and still only making a fraction of the actual value they provide. I'll be the first to agree that FAANG and friends have ridiculous overhead and way more engineers than I think is necessary but these companies are making money hand over fist. If we are looking for fat to cut I'd start with management/execs in most cases.
- ehnto 4y ago
  Respectfully I have two qualms with your thoughts here, first is that lack of effort from one person must mean extra effort from another to balance out in some way, you could easily have people not pulling their weight but still be producing based on some leverage or multiplying factor in your business. More effort doesn't always equate to more value. Some businesses are just spinning their wheels, keeping themselves busy, while the core value generator keeps ticking over. I worked at a 10 man company that was turning over millions a month from automated lead generation, we could have all walked away for 6 months and it would have kept making money. The other is just that it's not a realistic way to look at a workforce, especially in software, hours and effort don't equate to an "output" neatly. Most software companies are in the business of making value producing automations, not producing the raw value themselves. You can have one production engineer in a factory completely eliminate someone's job with a nifty insight that took him an hour to spot, now that person isn't pulling their weight (because their job doesn't exist anymore) but the business is more profitable, for one example.
- pharmakom 4y ago
  Impossible to cut only the dead weight though.

matwood 4y ago

> If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant at your job Sure, but Google and other big tech have a completely different problem. Their one product makes so much money, that there is not a natural forcing function for other ventures to succeed or fail. This lets them take moonshots, but also makes it easy to slip into making bad investment decisions. For example, green-lighting a team to build another chat app.

gumby 4y ago
> Their one product makes so much money, that there is not a natural forcing function for other ventures to succeed or fail. This is what appalled me about Pichai’s productivity comment. Google may not have high productivity, but that’s not its problem. The company has just drifted since Schmidt stopped running it, reminiscent of Microsoft in the second half (and before?) of the Ballmer period. The ladder-climbing PMs are running the show and there is no overall strategy.
- GlennS 4y ago
  Not knowing anything about how Google works internally, this is very much how it looks from the outside. They just don't seem to be able to make products that anyone wants. And the products they made before which people did want just drift in a generally worse direction as they fiddle with them randomly over time.
  - whatarethembits 4y ago
    They have no coherent vision. As a consumer I have no idea what I'm getting with a Google product, or what their ethos is. Their products and features are always randomly baked together, without any coherent story. Left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. I can't rely on any of it. This is why I moved to Apple eco system last year. Google as a company seems analogous to the Linux eco system; TON of duplicated work across different teams, none providing an actual complete solution for day to day use. Such a waste of talent.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago

JasserInicide 4y ago

Yeah but we all know that doesn't and won't ever scale up.

nojito 4y ago

>That's just not true though. If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant at your job, and demanding you work more hours is idiotic. That's not the argument for layoffs. The argument is that that role shouldn't exist at all and should be swallowed up by another FTE instead.

bioemerl 4y ago

> you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant Or you're working at a useless user hostile company that's coasting on tools and ideas from a decade ago while failing hard at everything it does today.

Workaccount2 4y ago

oof, peak programmer arrogance.

azangru 4y ago

Is an average Google engineer expected to generate $50m of revenue?

tmpz22 4y ago

> If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day This is irrational. You're only able to generate $50m in revenue because a giant multi-billion dollar apparatus exists and is maintained around you and that is not free. In almost all circumstances you were not the sole driver of that revenue.

onion2k 4y ago
That doesn't matter. If your two hours are a key component in the work needed to make that $50m then nothing changes - you're still brilliant and asking you to work longer is still silly.
- tmpz22 4y ago
  If you're only providing a component of the work you are not contributing the full $50m. Thats why the statement is still irrational. This argument waves "look at all this value I bring" is hyperinflated and thus dishonest to pull out every time this gets discussed. I'm not saying good engineers can't bring disproportionate value and should work/be compensated commensurately. I'm saying stop gaming the numbers like a Goldman Sachs accountant.

rightbyte 4y ago

Once I worked as a dam operator a summer. I did not claim that I generated 2MW of revenue by opening the lids.