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'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

• newaccount2021 4y ago
• arkitaip 4y ago
  Either these CEOs are insanely incompetent leaders who have gone on obviously unnecessary hiring sprees as late as a few months ago, or something else is up. Either way, it takes a particularly dishonest leaders to suggest that the main problem is low employee productivity.
  • leishman 4y ago
    It’s no secret that most people at Google hardly work. It’s been like this for years but you’re right it’s management’s fault for allowing this culture.
    • laichzeit0 4y ago
      As an end user of Google Ads/Analytics what frustrates me the most is every time I have some question it’s like at least 3 meetings with different people explaining the same problem and the answer is always to pass the buck down to some “specialist”. It’s like no one even understands their products anymore. You have a “measurement specialist” and like three layers of specialists in that layer. You actually can’t get your questions answered because no one person seems to know how everything fits together. Just passing the problem from one so called specialist to the next.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • galdosdi 4y ago
      Allowing? They've encouraged it by creating a system where there is very little relationship between what gets you promoted and what is good for your business unit. That's why you have 13 failed exciting messaging apps, all of which got lots of ICs promoted, instead of 1 successful boring messaging app that just kept getting maintained in a wise manner, getting very few people promoted.
  • bell-cot 4y ago
    Doubtless those honest, selfless CEO's were completely duped by evil conspiracies of rotten & incompetent middle managers, who've spent the last decade or two building ever-larger pyramids of bloat to set their golden thrones on top of...
    • kennend3 4y ago
      This! Far too often middle managers are incentivized to build the largest team possible. While the message from the top may be "lean and mean" but you compensate middle managers based on team size... Perverse incentive certainly comes to mind.
      • metadat 4y ago
        "We can only promote you to director if your team size is 15+"
    • Kaze404 4y ago
      Is this sarcasm? I honestly can't tell
      • lovelearning 4y ago
        I believe so, based on the phrase "honest selfless CEOs."
        • bell-cot 4y ago
          Fair point - "evil conspiracies of rotten & incompetent..." is often a simple & obvious truth.
        • Kaze404 4y ago
          That was my inclination as well, but the grand parent comment being said unironically wouldn't be the weirdest thing I've seen on this website :p
    • 202206241203 4y ago
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  Google would have been a lot more productive if it had hired people to work on one good messaging app instead of 13+ bad messaging apps. Google has long had an attitude of "we hire the best so we can afford to have them stand on one leg and balance on a ball while holding a cane in their mouth and balancing a bunch of dishes on the end of the cane while typing with one hand on a chorded keyboard and looking at a monitor through a mirror." I've heard stories that range from "of course I am productive, I am shooting the s--t all day with the smartest people to" to "I have no idea of how what I'm doing impacts the bottom line".
  • dont__panic 4y ago
    Blaming the employees smells like a smokescreen for poor management IMO. Who's to blame for lowered employee productivity: employees who are disconnecting from work more to avoid burnout thanks to corporate BS like paperwork and constant report filing? Or the managers who impose those requirements on employees but fail to empower the individual contributors beneath them in the org chart? I recently left a large-medium sized tech company that failed to address massive structural issues in my department for years. It's not like these were a secret -- I brought them up constantly in my 1on1s, and tried to brainstorm solutions with my management chain. When I left, the head honcho begged me to stay, and when I brought up those issues... told me he had no idea that was such a problem! But also refused to address it because he had to "gather information" about the issue. I'm much happier at a smaller company without so much bureaucracy. At some point, managers are so disconnected from their underlings that they are completely incapable of improving work conditions. And when you need high-level approval to make a big decision... more often than not, the big decision just never gets made. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
  • bergenty 4y ago
    We’ll a lot of their products come out if individual side projects, Google is an incubator of sorts so I’m not surprised that’s how their product gets made.
    • PaulHoule 4y ago
      ... There was that time that top management thought reverse imperialism was a good idea so they dumped a perfectly good Google Wallet in the U.S. for something that was big in India... No thought of cultural sensitivity. A few years later they reversed the decision, with no consequence for the people who made it. If you are doing that for your products though you are never going to get long-term traction no matter how good or bad your engineers or marketing people are.
• SavageBeast 4y ago
  I see this as more or less a ruse to justify ridding the companies of all the now remote people who moved away to live in Cheap Town during the pandemic. This is a pretext for the typical Corporate House Cleaning/Reduction In Force scenario. Some people do well working remote (Im one of them in fact) but I suspect and from what I've seen the majority of people simply cant handle the responsibility/self management of working remote. Alternatively, the economic forecasters at these companies see trouble on the horizon economically and know that layoffs to boost stock price will be necessary. In such case, best develop a pretext for these layoffs thats not "We're having financial trouble so we're laying people off". Instead it's "Nope, nothing to see here, THIS IS FINE - we're just cutting dead weight!". I don't work for either of these companies nor do I know anyone personally who does, but I have to wonder if a sort of entitled, country club culture developed there and this an effort to reign in that behavior. Maybe someone with some inside insight can comment here?
  • fred_is_fred 4y ago
    "I suspect and from what I've seen the majority of people simply cant handle the responsibility/self management of working remote." While this may be true, if this has to be solved by forcing everyone to move to SF/NY - then couldn't you just save more money by firing their managers?
    • acdha 4y ago
      Exactly. You can’t make this claim without saying that your managers are incompetent all the way up to the C level because it means nobody was measuring performance even though that’s a core job requirement.
      • lanstin 4y ago
        It is extremely rare for management, especially higher levels, to have any method of distinguishing smart and hard working people from duffers or from “managing upwards” big talkers. Git logs sort of help much interpretation is so context sensitive that the signal is blurry. So while measuring performance might seems like a core job function, de facto it is not. Also people that find this thread interesting should join Blind.
• metadat 4y ago
  What's wrong with taking a break to run necessary errands or pick your kids up from school? As long as you're meeting performance expectations, it should be fine. Is Zuck really slaving away at his desk 9-5 everyday? I don't think so. Sounds like another case of "One rule for thee and another for me"
  • VirusNewbie 4y ago
    I agree 100%. However, if someone schedules a meeting for work hours and 50% of the people can't make it because they are grocery shopping I can understand the frustration. These aren't low paid employees. Meta is paying 300k+ for mid level engineers.
• phendrenad2 4y ago
  They're right, but they aren't getting to the root of the issue. Most dev teams don't communicate anymore, and people just work on their siloed projects and "throw it over the fence" to the code reviewer when done. There's very little collaboration or ad-hoc knowledge transfer. This leads to a disjointed, unworkable codebase. If I'm seeing this at the piddly little startups I have worked for during the pandemic, then I'm sure the effect is amplified at the most exclusive development teams in the world.
• senttoschool 4y ago
  This is inherently a problem with full-remote or hybrid work. People will point to "studies" showing how remote work improves productivity. Maybe it did initially but eventually, people will check out, feeling isolated, feeling less motivated. Some people who worked remotely before covid swears that it helped their productivity. But these people are biased because they were probably one of the few who were disciplined enough to make it work and they gained the employer's trust over time. There were a lot of reports of Zuckerberg bemoaning about productivity. Tim Cook wanted everyone back in the office full-time before Delta. Google also wanted everyone back in the office. Clearly, these CEOs aren't just making decisions on a whim and they have real data on productivity rather than some 3rd party studies. This opinion is not popular here but this is how I see it.
  • dev_0 4y ago
    The amount of meetings need to be cut down for engineers...
    • senttoschool 4y ago
      Sure, just have no meetings at all. Just send you tickets with perfect specs. You'll never have to talk to anyone.
      • dev_0 4y ago
        I mean the middle men meeting where someone translate business requirements to technical solutions. Engineers should be treated as problem solver and not code monkey
        • senttoschool 4y ago
          You mean a product manager? You do realize that most engineers would hate to have to do the work of a PM? Talking to users. Analyzing data. Coming up with solutions. Convincing executives. Convincing designers. Convincing dev managers. Convincing devs. Writing specs. Handholding the project through the finish line. You told me you don't want more meetings. But you realize that you'd have to have a ton of meetings to do the above? You think a spec just magically shows up and a ton of work was not done before it ever makes it to your queue? >Engineers should be treated as problem solver and not code monkey Engineers solve technical problems. Some engineers want to solve business problems too. Those might be good candidates to become product managers.
• dev_0 4y ago
  Developers should be "lazy"? Hardworking developers tend to create tedious solution that are not optimized
  • blurbleblurble 4y ago
    Seriously, and it can sometimes make for frustrating amounts of tech debt and tangles.
• jstx1 4y ago
  I don't think that this is about anyone's slacking off. If you're going to reduce staff, you make yourself look better by dressing it up as improved productivity and efficiency, that's why Zuckerberg is making these statements.
  • galdosdi 4y ago
    Bingo. Nothing about a "recession" makes it easier or harder for upper management to manage performance. If they were good at it before they're good at it now and if they were bad at it before, they're not going to suddenly get any better at identifying poor performers. But if layoffs are going to have to happen for unrelated reason, might as well try to spin it so that those that are left behind feel grateful and prideful rather than resentful and worried.
• dev_0 4y ago
  I have seen colleagues working long hours because they take 2 hours of lunch break and 1 hour of teabreak. And management think they are hardworking.
  • abledon 4y ago
    tbf, 1 persons 2 hours of coding is equivalent to another persons 8 or 16 hours of coding. Work smart, not Hard
• mikhael28 4y ago
  Maybe it’s not the employees fault, but the management who hired them… or maybe it’s the fact that it takes forever to get anything done at FAANG nowadays. Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders.. but a great way of identifying people who can hack a process to secure maximal reward. Look, if I can ‘crack the coding interview’, then I can certainly crack ‘how to do as little work as possible and stack paper to the ceiling while my stock vests’. I wonder when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod.
  • galdosdi 4y ago
    > Look, if I can ‘crack the coding interview’, then I can certainly crack ‘how to do as little work as possible and stack paper to the ceiling while my stock vests’. What's worse, many of the jaded people going through the motions probably started out gung-ho but then got frustrated to see how little impact they were really able to have and eventually became checked out. These kinds of things are self fulfilling prophecies in organizations.
    • birdyrooster 4y ago
      They see blood in the water for startups and know they don’t have to subsidize employment to keep them from being able to hire.
    • llaolleh 4y ago
      Motivation is finite. By the time you get the through red tape to get approvals, permissions, and a million of other things, you have nothing left in the tank to code.
      • shepherdjerred 4y ago
        God. Every once in a while I think 'I should go back to a FAANG', and then comments like this remind me of how soul-sucking and toxic it is.
• tpmoney 4y ago
  This seems like something that should be expected? Every time the WFH battle has come up over the last few years, there are always people talking about how they’re able to do all their days work in 4 hours and spend the rest of the time idle “pretending to work”. Is it really surprising that as a result of this companies are reevaluating how much slack time their employees have? Especially as wages and demand for wages due to inflation have spiked, you can probably shore up some of that demand just by dropping some of those 4 hour employees and using their wages to pay others to become 6 hour or 8 hour employees. Sure it’s unrealistic for a company to expect every employee is 100% engaged 40 hours a week, especially in knowledge / creative work we’re sometimes unplugging and downtime is exactly what the job requires. But it seems equally unrealistic to crow about how the pandemic has demonstrated that WFH is perfectly fine and had no negative impacts because everyone was already only putting in 20 hours a week and not expect that to have caused companies to make a shift.
  • MAGZine 4y ago
    I think we've built companies and cultures that are incompatible with long-term employment and happiness. Anyone who joins a company can crank full 8+ hours a day for a while to establish themselves (and a reputation). The "problem" is, as people establish themselves, the problem domain becomes less exciting. There's less urgency to crank indefinitely. They settle into a pattern that involves fewer hours, though those hours are more productive because they know the ropes. There is a sweet spot where someone knows enough to be productive but isn't yet complacent. This is the spot that every employer dreams of: employees cranking, full speed, productively, for 8 hours. It's just not sustainable. You can fire people and try and keep turning over staff such that everyone stays in that sweet spot, but you'll eventually end up with a different sort of headache when your staff has no organizational memory for why decisions were made. The people who built things and have the long-term visions have left, and those who pick up the torch try will never have the same big-picture in their head. The challenging bit is how do you separate someone who works 3h a day because that's all they can sustain (and they're just being realistic), and those who work 3h a day, could work more, but chooses not to? I'm not sure you want to force either out, but can you incentivize the latter to produce more?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• torginus 4y ago
  I think all successful companies' products have already been built - and have been built for quite a while, most of the work that gets done is just polishing, window dressing, adventures and reorganizing things for the sake of it. Most of the software and libraries I use nowadays have existed a decade ago, and truth be told, weren't that much different.
• nrmitchi 4y ago
  I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working for current-or-potential competitors. Purposely over-hiring to prevent work being done elsewhere, and then claiming there is not enough work to be done, feels like it shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Hell, Google has created ~18 (I think?) different messenger/chat apps at this point. If you wanted a clue that there wasn't enough work to go around (and that your promotion incentives may not be aligned with the business), this should have been the first clue.
  • BobbyJo 4y ago
    100% this. The clearest basis on which to measure productivity is product, and Google's scattershot approach is obviously not efficient.
  • api 4y ago
    > I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working for current-or-potential competitors. Wow, I've suspected this for many years and people told me it was nutty.
    • smueller1234 4y ago
      That's because it is. It makes no sense whatsoever to think that could be a deliberate strategy. Managers are happy when they get their hands on a new role to hire into because they all have more projects than they (think that they) can deliver at good quality with the people they have.
      • treis 4y ago
        It doesn't even make a little sense. Giving a bunch of money and free time to someone makes it easier for them to start a company. Not harder.
    • roflyear 4y ago
• yuan43 4y ago
  > To be sure, the Covid-induced pandemic saw Meta embark on a massive hiring spree, growing its number of full-time staff from 48,000 at the end of 2019 to more than 77,800 — a 62 per cent jump. But now the firm must “prioritise more ruthlessly” and “operate leaner, meaner, better executing teams,” Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox wrote in a memo, which appeared on the company’s internal discussion forum Workplace before the Q&A. The article doesn't mention a different problem. Those new hires entered at extremely inflated salary levels due to literally every other company doing the same thing at the same time. Righting that ship means not just layoffs, but recalibrating salary expectations. The process is just starting.
  • nvarsj 4y ago
    It already recalibrated, didn't it? Much of that compensation is stock - of which its value dropped 50% for Meta.
• waspight 4y ago
  Why is Netflix part of FAANG? Isn’t all the other ones much larger corporations?
  • truffdog 4y ago
    Their top tier compensation packages and stock performance over the past 15 years
    • bombcar 4y ago
      That's the story, but I feel the acronym was "unfortunate" without them, so they were added.
      • inkcapmushroom 4y ago
        Leaving Netflix out would have been a GAAF.
  • ajross 4y ago
    When the acronym was coined, Netflix was in the process of disrupting the entire entertainment industry and it looked for all the world like it was going to eat them all. As it happened, the industry (well, Disney and HBO at least) figured things out faster than expected, so much of the speculation on Netflix turned out to be wrong. But they absolutely were a Top of the World tech innovator for a while there. But it's just an acronym, it's not perfect. The other big error is that, obviously, Microsoft needs to be in that list given their pay scale and hiring process.
    • 202206241203 4y ago
      > Top of the World tech innovator Yes, top reason an average enterprise developer has to deal with a distributed mess as opposed to a more manageable monolithic one: "we will do microservices despite being nothing like Netflix". On the upside, more developers are now required.
  • sn41 4y ago
• ur-whale 4y ago
  Few work, mostly because the desire to get stuff done gets nixed from day one by process, bureaucracy and business drones. Also, the prospect to make an actual fuckton of money is completely unlikely these days. Google can't get anything done for a very simple reason: a) comps are way too high. why bother doing anything when gold rains from the sky every day of the year. b) you're never going to make it to 50 Million at Google however hard you work, unless you make it to SVP, which is a 15 year endeavor. In other words, strictly no incentives to do amazing stuff when compared to a startup. c) the environment is highly political, actual entrepreneur spirit is long gone and/or smothered by product type folks. If what you're looking for in life is a civil servant type of highly paid cushy job, Google is the perfect place to be. If you want to innovate and change the world, flee this godforsaken place as soon as you can.
• syntaxing 4y ago
  Yeah you lazy fucks, how dare you work so little that we only have an annual NET INCOME of 39B (39B for Meta, 76B for Alphabet).
  • vbezhenar 4y ago
    I guess they measure some KPIs and observe big difference between peers.
    • buildbot 4y ago
      How would they get that comparable info from other companies? Do the CEOs all have a secret slack channel were Satya is bragging that one MS dev equals 3 googles programmers?
      • gretch 4y ago
        All you have to do is take the company's rev/profit and divide it by the number of employees (factoring in how much you pay an employee) So yeah if MSFT can make 3 billion dollars with 1000 engineers, and Google makes 1 billion dollars with 1000 engineers, then 1 MSFT eng is worth 3 of Googles (simplified - obv business involves sales, marketing, etc)
        • TheCoelacanth 4y ago
          That's not a measure of how much work engineers are doing. It's a measure of how effective the company is at making money from the work their engineers are doing.
          • trebbble 4y ago
            Right. Consider how different the profit of a company hiring $300,000/yr software engineers to mow lawns 8 hours per day might be, compared with another company hiring them to... write extremely valuable software 4 hours per day. The company with (let's say) identically-skilled employees putting in twice as many hours probably won't be the more profitable of the two. Replace "mow lawns" with "write pointless, doomed-from-the-start messaging apps" and the actual problem starts to become clear.
• lordleft 4y ago
  I'm a bit worried that this will trigger some kind of move to measure productivity in increasingly crude ways -- i.e. exhaustive, invasive telemetry that tracks every mouse click and keypress.
  • gjvc 4y ago
    google for "employee monitoring software" to see how hard this is being pushed
  • sn41 4y ago
    Snowcrash vibes. If you read an email too fast or too slow, you could be fired.
  • falcolas 4y ago
    Probably. For every hard problem, there’s a bad technological solution.
  • jollyllama 4y ago
    IMO In-person five days a week is preferable to dystopian tracking automation, not that they're mutually exclusive.
    • dymk 4y ago
      Why give an inch? Meta is struggling because they put all their eggs in one basket, and turns out that was probably not a good bet. And now they're struggling for it. That's leadership's problem. FAANG employees make up a group of some of the most hire-able employees I can think of. If leadership makes work hard, they will quit. (Baring H1B employees, they just get the shit stick all around, but that's not unique to this particular issue)
  • Rayhem 4y ago
    Technical people often believe using more/new tools will solve people problems. "If only we could measure more by better decomposing tasks in Jira, then we'd know how to be more efficient! If only we could add micro-specific tags to or documentation, then anyone can search for what they want and find the resource! We just need to put every single process anyone has ever heard of into confluence; then anyone can look them up and follow them!" Tools don't solve people problems because at the scale of people problems everyone has a different philosophy about the tool (and the problem). Communication is what solves people problems.
• akmarinov 4y ago
  Uber’s apps alone can probably be maintained comfortably with about 30-50 people these days
• wrinkl3 4y ago
  The quote in the title doesn't appear in the body of the article, I can't tell if either of these CEOs actually said that.
• alkonaut 4y ago
  How do they conclude that “few work”, other than through some expectation of productivity compared to head count or payroll? Do they have a problem with employees literally not working? How do they conclude that?
• cryptodan 4y ago
  Could it be that meetings can often happen in email, and if the meeting is important use Skype or another in office messenger app so that employees don't need to leave their desks?
• dmitrygr 4y ago
  If there was slacking, who’d write all those chat apps?
• neves 4y ago
  > Zuckerberg noticed that it was getting harder to get all the employees to attend a meeting as they were sometimes taking time out in a day for personal work. > “There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have. [We need to] create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer-focused, Ohhh! Two declarations based in unfounded evidence that will instill fear in employees and prevent them to ask for raises. What a shitty piece of journalism.
  • mikhael28 4y ago
    Honestly, I'd be pissed too if I was Zuck. I'm a goddamn billionaire - if I invite you to the meeting, idgaf what you are doing unless someone died - get on this goddamn Zoom call. And even then, they better have been important! Dogs, cats, idgaf, get on this goddamn Zoom call! Then, because I'm a genius who singlehandedly started Facebook by myself, I extrapolate this thought to its logical extreme and start intimidating my employees based on this intensely personal feeling. I'm Mark fucking Zuckerberg. Get on this goddamn Zoom call.
    • dymk 4y ago
      That's a great reason why Meta employees who are content with making, oh, a nice $200k a year are in a position of wonderful power. Even if Zuck personally fires you, you can go get a job elsewhere in a week, making a comparable amount of money. And you don't need demean yourself for some billionare who wants you to dance because he says so.
    • neves 4y ago
      Yes, the inflation is eating the wages of my employees, now they are asking for raises to maintain their standard of living. Let's call them slackers so I won't decrease my now extra profits. A shitty report of a enterprise magazine will take my words in face value and publish.
    • fritztastic 4y ago
      Those claims aren't accurate, but this does sound spot on as to what his internal narrative would be were it put to words. Zuckerberg is known for steamrolling over anyone to get what he wants, and orchestrating a narrative that paints him as the sympathetic talented protagonist he absolutely is not and has never been. If I worked for a someone with this sort of attitude, and I was in a position that I could walk away from this sort of megalomania, I would run for the hills. Dignity is important to me, idgaf how many zeroes are in someone's net worth, if they started intimidating people over a zoom call I would intentionally miss the meeting even if I was initially going to attend.
• mberning 4y ago
  This is not surprising to anybody that ever worked at a sufficiently large organization. Once you get a large number of employees, then layer in HR, legal, compliance, etc. considerations it creates quite a lot of opportunities for low performers to get in the door and never leave.
  • schlauerfox 4y ago
    Convenient that they only worry about this during recessions, what purpose would management have to ignore these problems until now? It's a sleight-of-hand to shift blame come earnings time and give management something to do to 'fix the problem' (that their mismanagement created) they can point to, nothing more.
    • mberning 4y ago
      Yes. I think that has to do with the culture of budgetary cycles and planning. It makes it very unlikely that a leader would want to jettison dead weight during “the good times” since they might lose the budget if the role is not backfilled quickly.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jbverschoor 4y ago
  Maybe zuck expected 10x engineers
  • sgt 4y ago
    Instead he added 10 times the amount of 1x engineers.
    • jbverschoor 4y ago
      Still not the same people
      • jbverschoor 4y ago
        output*
• entropicgravity 4y ago
  Not working is better than working and being a liability.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• wsinks 4y ago
  It's OKR season
• jjslocum3 4y ago
  Glad these guys seem to finally be noticing. I was a software engineering manager at a lean, high-margin, profitable start-up based in the NYC area starting in the late 2000s. We were acquired in 2014 by a very typical (for the time) SV-based competitor that had raised hundreds of millions in an IPO a few years earlier. Our acquirers had yet to see a single quarter of profit, of course. I and my team had so many good laughs at the attitudes of our CA counterparts. One especially strong memory is when, a week after a particularly dismal quarterly earnings report, a junior engineer based in the HQ of our new corporate overlords sent out a team-wide email complaining about the corporate decision to no longer stock the refrigerators with free fresh blueberries. They bemoaned the lack of respect for the "talent," and tossed in gratis the ubiquitous pseudo-threat "if you don't treat us right, we can always go down the road to an employer who will." On visits to HQ in Redwood City, I marveled at the paradisaical campus-like setting (several buildings around a "quad," with parks, a tennis court, swimming pool, gyms, etc. etc.) and noted the amount of time the local staff spent taking advantage of these amenities. I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money. Since that was Silicon Valley during one of the many gold rushes, I thought that I must have been "missing something." What seemed like common sense to me was clearly heresy to the golden people there. The explanation I arrived at was that such perqs were the necessary counterpart to an expectation that your employees have no life other than work. I came to realize I wasn't missing anything, they were. That company did end up burning through their cash stockpile, and had to sell a few years later for less than 1/4 of what they paid to acquire us.
  • excitom 4y ago
    I remember a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an Austin-based startup that crashed in 2000. At the company meeting where layoffs were announced, the floor was opened for questions. Someone asked "does this mean the rock climbing wall in the cafeteria won't be completed?"
  • racl101 4y ago
    > Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money. Yes, that's how it usually works out. By the way, 'perqs' is a peculiar word. English is my second language but I'm used to seeing the word 'perks'.
• potatolicious 4y ago
  It's frustrating that this thread seems to be focused so heavily on people sitting around resting and vesting. Having been inside Google (and multiple other FAANGs) this is generally untrue, and focusing on this element of the problem misses a much larger productivity problem: Most engineers at Google aren't "sitting around doing nothing", they are very busy shipping projects that do not matter. Their days are filled with doing work that will not move the needle on any metric that matters to the company, but they are far from idle. The misallocation of labor is a far bigger problem than said labor slacking off, and management must own it. Google doesn't need their engineers to fly into startup mode, work 12 hour days, or never surf Reddit on company time. Their labor is severely under-utilized because they are assigned to zero/negative-impact projects or duplicative projects (hey, somehow you gotta ship 5 chat apps at the same time, right?) Part of the problem is that Google's upper management refuses to engage with the product at all. Entire orgs are given very broad OKRs like "increase DAUs by 10%" without virtually no guidance as to what features management is interested in. Authority to ship features also rests close to the leaf nodes of direct line-managed teams. The expectation is that teams are entrepreneurial and invent features, implement them, and ship them all without direct upper management involvement. The result is a bunch of bad product that doesn't do anything positive for the company, were never soberly evaluated by upper management prior to building, and would never have passed the smell test if it did. This, above all other factors, is why Google produces so much product that it then has to scrap. This is the main cause of Google's low labor productivity - not because people are sitting around drinking coffee and eating free food - but because they are assigned to projects that do not pass muster, and there is an almost-comical aversion to validating product ideas before they are implemented. The single biggest thing Google can do to improve its labor productivity isn't cracking down on slackers, it's forcing its management to actually engage with product definition so entire orgs don't burn years on things that don't matter.
  • clusterhacks 4y ago
    >Their days are filled with doing work that will not move the needle on any metric that matters to the company This, 100%. I think this simple observation reverberates across the entire software engineering field and at many (most?) non-FAANG companies as well. I am not confident there is a real solution to the problem of making sure people only work on things that matter. Medium to small organizations seem to struggle with having management even understand what "good" product looks like or how to optimize for that outcome.
• saos 4y ago
  big tech been sounding the alarm lately lol. They are all realising that they are funding early retirements for majority of their employee who usually come hacker news to post a blog about how they quit their job to fly solo.
• GingerBoats 4y ago
  I feel this has more to do with unrealistic expectations and improper management of engineers at these firms. All of these major companies hired like crazy to meet the demand on their products as the pandemic hit. Most large companies will have a manager that understands an entry-level and mid-level contributor will take six to twelve months to ramp up and actually be productive on a team. Coupled the above with improper time management skills on remote teams, and you get a distributed work force that sometimes just doesn't produce as well as when they were forced to do the grind in the office.
• antonymy 4y ago
  Weird how Zuckerberg's red flag for low productivity was employees avoiding meetings to work on personal projects. In the first place, I was under the impression FAANG companies encouraged employees to pursue personal projects for the benefit of the company.
  • scarmig 4y ago
    Oh sweet summer child.
  • nso95 4y ago
    Sounded more like errands than personal projects
• gfosco 4y ago
  "Too many employees, but very few of them supported or utilized correctly." is how I'd put it. I worked at Facebook for over 7 years, and I would've worked myself to death for the company. I was making a small fortune, and living a nice life, and I greatly appreciated it. (in hindsight, lol, so glad I left.) The real problems, imo, were the organizational rules, the expectation that basically everyone in a role is the same... the red tape, the ridiculously gamed review cycles, the little empires that reject change... the fear & the blame. This all on top of bad managers, of which I had a fair mixture, those who were helpful and those who actively worked to hurt me. Regardless, the downsizing is coming, and it's all leaderships fault.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• weeblewobble 4y ago
  Easy to blame lazy overpaid ICs, but really this is an organizational problem. When I was at a big tech company I was on not one but two different teams that were created to build a poorly-thought-out product with no plan and no serious executive backing. Both teams accomplished ~nothing and were re-orged into non-existence within a year or so. We did work hard though, at least until it was obvious that we were going nowhere. I never quite could figure out why they did this. Are these moonshots where they "fund" a bunch of "startups" and hope someone knocks it out of the park and produces enough revenue to justify all the failures? Or is this make-work for some executive to justify their headcount? Or maybe the company was so profitable that they were willing to fund non-profitable enterprises for PR or customer goodwill reasons?
• HomeDeLaPot 4y ago
  I didn't expect to ever find a news site that labeled itself "B.S."!
• mikhael28 4y ago
  Yes. Yes they are. On some teams. On other teams, they put out revolutionary products/developer tools. It comes back to management, and talent self-selecting itself. Truly talented people won't be content to waste their career, and will leave poor performing teams to join high performing ones.
• sylens 4y ago
  Why don't the boards of these companies hold the CEOs and management teams responsible for overhiring and not having the right ways to track productivity and route resources accordingly? This is essentially Pichai and Zuckerberg admitting that they made colossal mistakes
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• rockbruno 4y ago
  This is the standard for any FAANG company. There are multiple reasons why this is the case, with over-hiring being the one that annoys the most. I can't understand why some of these companies keep hiring several hundred engineers every year to work on shitty stuff nobody asked for.
• tomatotomato37 4y ago
  Wasn't the whole point of showing off "Unlimited PTO" was the ability to run errands? Seems like that facade is dropping fast
  • bobharris 4y ago
    Laughs. How does "Unlimited PTO" even work? Mystery of the universe. For me it's "Unlimited PTO" right up to being let go.
• Ekaros 4y ago
  Work is not equally distributed. I'm sure there is plenty of Engineers everywhere that have way too much on their plates. And on other hand there is also plenty of those who do little or have little to do. And then there is question of how much of the work is actually even needed. Specially in companies with too much money. Also why should all employees attend to the meetings? Certainly to some, but it clearly is job that can afford certain level of flexibility in most teams.
  • FactualActuals 4y ago
    I am running into this problem where I currently work. I'm not a rockstar developer but I can finish my tasks pretty quickly. But when management won't allow me to help take over some tasks to alleviate my coworker's growing backlog, I can't do anything but twiddle my thumbs waiting for more tasks.
• pipeline_peak 4y ago
  I wonder if Zuckerberg realizes how undesirable of a place to work he’s creating, or there’s some big picture I’m not getting. Either way, a lot of silicon valley roles outside of SWE are absolute fluff. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s now becoming increasingly obvious as he can no longer afford it.
  • mola 4y ago
    He wants ppl to quit. He said it. He wants other ppl to pay for his mistakes
• cheriot 4y ago
  > Zuckerberg noticed that it was getting harder to get all the employees to attend a meeting as they were sometimes taking time out in a day for personal work. So the Meta boss said that, in an effort to be “cost-conscious,” he was freezing or reducing staffing for low-priority projects and slashing engineer-hiring plans for the year by 30 per cent, reports added. As we all know, the most productive hackers prioritize all-hands meetings. I hope this is misattribution from the author.
• dekhn 4y ago
  By the end of my employment at Google I was not working very hard. Probably a few hours a day, mostly doing whatever I felt like doing. My managers consistently gave me "meets expectations" regardless of how much I achieved or how hard I worked. However, any time there was an emergency related to my function, I had everything required to jump in, fix serious problems, and then get out of the way during the cleanup then contributing my bit to the postmortem. I could tell there were very few (fewer all the time) people who truly understand google prod, and in that sense, the company seems to be OK with paying top salaries to people who can prevent the company losing lots of money, or other critical prod issues.
  • ipsum2 4y ago
    Were you an SRE? What you described sounds very similar to what I experienced.
    • dekhn 4y ago
      I started as a test engineer on an SRE team (ads database, which I think no longer exists), did a mission control rotation, and then sort of found a way to be a software engineer (non-SRE, which pissed off the SRE leadership) and run my own projects in prod without any real oversight (that was exacycle- using all the idle cycles in prod). I used my knowledge of SRE and my good connections with SRE to run my service with minimal impacts on the $MONEY$ services. Later I did stuff that involved working closely with SRE and hwops but always SRE-adjacent, not part of SRE. I had a standing offer to join multiple SRE groups but chose not to because I can't do oncalls while my kids are still at home.
      • EddySchauHai 4y ago
        What are test engineer roles like at Google? I’ve basically only spent my time in startups on critical systems (defense, finance) so have no idea what it’d be like at a larger company or team.
        • dekhn 4y ago
• bdcravens 4y ago
  This may not apply to Facebook necessarily, but for many companies, look at their GitHub accounts. So many companies have so many side projects not related to their core business. Hand-waving it away as “attracting developers” can only go so far if you’re not massively profitable. I wonder how many of us built a large part of careers atop of projects paid for by others? When that spending tightens up, I wonder what the overall picture will look like then.
• bastardoperator 4y ago
  I'm reading this as "Executive leadership makes hiring and planning mistakes and punishes employees opposed to taking personal responsibility" Also, I block everything Facebook at the router level with unbound.
  • tra3 4y ago
    Not a Facebook or a google fan or an apologist. But isn't this a business decision? "Punishment" implies a fault, but the employees are not at fault here. What would "taking personal responsibility" look like for management?
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      > What would "taking personal responsibility" look like for management? The lowest bar would be not putting the blame on other, unnamed people.
    • bastardoperator 4y ago
      Not sure because no one has ever seen it...
  • colinmhayes 4y ago
    Mistake is a big word here. Maybe they figured the pandemic would provide the company opportunities it hadn’t foreseen and in order to be the first to capitalize they need to hire 30,000 people. Now those extra employees aren’t necessary, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t provide value earlier. I guess it’s a bit rude to hire someone knowing that their position will be eliminated in a few years, but that doesn’t make it a mistake, just ruthless.
• wnolens 4y ago
  This has always been the case (source: I've worked at 2 FANGetc companies over last 10y) but they've just had the economic climate to brush it off. It's the tax they pay for offering such high salaries regardless of team, and having so much grunt work because they are too big to care that they're paying some people 300k to click "deploy" (source: getting paid right now to manually roll out changes at a FANGetc and silence alarms that have been red forever because backlog)
• Flankk 4y ago
  • spoonjim 4y ago
    Oh yes, those lazy Indian and Chinese people, they never get anything done
    • Flankk 4y ago
      In India, the most significant difference is caused by the caste system. Within this system, the lower caste is considered genetically inferior, lazy, and never completing any hard work. It is perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy as what is the point in working hard if the hard work will not be recognized. In China, people work extremely hard and are proud of it. This can be attributed to Confucianism and communism. There is a 996 culture in China. That is 9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week. Cultures are very different indeed.
      • spoonjim 4y ago
        It was a joke, the Indian and Chinese engineers working at American tech companies are highly productive
• tagami 4y ago
  A haircut (10-20%?) would be good for all involved. There are great employees and there are slackers in all fields.
  • ReflectedImage 4y ago
    Well I'm in a corp style place. The haircut was done by rolling dice. And whilst my number didn't come up, I wouldn't be so sure that's it's good for any involved.
• strangattractor 4y ago
  Now they notice:0 Weren't they they ones responsible for hiring all those employees? It never ceases to amaze how productivity is mis-measured. When the company is making money hand over fist there are never enough people. When the macro economy changes somehow there are way too many employees. I guess it all sounds better than just saying we never really cared about you as people. Employees are a means to and ends. The ends are changing so must the means:)
• stakkur 4y ago
  A reasonable test of 'productivity': if you fire large swaths of employees and 'productivity' remains the same, was it a failure of management, or of the employees? I'm just kidding. Measuring employee 'productivity' is one of the biggest hand-waving magical misdirection performances in business. The mistake is employees think it means 'working hard' or 'smart', or whatever. The truth is it doesn't really mean anything, but too many people are heavily invested in it being a thing.
• diogenescynic 4y ago
  Who would be motivated to work hard for Zuckerberg? He seems like a total jerk who has only made society worse. I'd do the bare minimum for him.
• gorgoiler 4y ago
  It’s knives out time, I’m afraid, for any activist or negative employee. I am flabbergasted by the number of people I’ve worked with who are flat out ungrateful when it comes to their relationship with their employer either being outright miserable and surly, or constantly virtue signalling about hypothetical problems that just drag everyone down the purity spiral. They get paid and they push code but they seem to think that’s the be all and end all of the relationship. It would be like living with a partner who takes out the bins and cooks every other night but never gives you a birthday card and constantly complains about your behaviour. I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with wanting to have good social relationships between staff because the flip side is that every Eeyore, loner, and whiner chips away at morale bit by bit until they are the only people left. How have you rewarded camaraderie, positive attitude, leadership, and goodwill today?
  • becquerel 4y ago
    Uh... why should employees have a friendly relationship with their work? We don't work because we want to make friends. We work because otherwise we don't have money to buy food or clothe ourselves. This is not a voluntary arrangement. Expecting us to be grateful for it is absurd.
    • sn0w_crash 4y ago
      This seems a very hostile attitude towards your employer. If they treat you poorly, you are able to complain and voice discontent. Is there no inverse to that? If they treat you well, is there no reason to show gratitude? I imagine coworkers would feel uncomfortable in such a hostile environment.
    • gorgoiler 4y ago
      Your employer — and particularly your hiring manager when they become your line manager — is grateful for your time, I can assure you of that. You didn’t have to work there and a large part of accepting a role is wanting to work for / with someone. It’s uncharitable to not bring at least some level of social pleasantry to the office every day. I mean unless you work for Walmart or something. I assume we are both talking about senior, highly remunerated, creative and specialist technical work here, not breaking rocks.
• summerlight 4y ago
  It's weird to say, but there's a genuine lack of headcount all over the company while Pichai (and probably Zukerberg) also does a correct assessment on the situation. This seems a contradiction, but if you take a deeper look into mid level managements there are a good number of teams responsible for billions of users/revenue and driving their growth but screaming for more headcounts. (Yeah, I'm in one of those teams) # increases to hundreds (or thousands?) at smaller scale. IMO, they deserve more headcounts for their scope. But it's also clear that the overall productivity of those companies begins to plateau. Why does this happen? Of course I don't know. I've seen some clues on bigger structural issues but cannot say for sure. But the famous "I just want to serve 5TB" video gives us some hints... Most of the particular issues mentioned in the video have been solved but its spirit hasn't gone away. And now back with a good reason. Which makes it much harder to solve. Think about launching non-trivial but small features in their major products. At a small company, a competent junior engineer can usually do that within a quarter. In Google it's not that simple. There are so many stakeholders. Privacy and security. Legal. Downstream dependencies. Infrastructure team. PA wide modeling and quality review. They're also busy and might not like your launch. At least PM will likely be your side but they may have a different priority than yours. To navigate this organizational complexity, you probably want to have a good manager/tech lead. If you don't care? You're going to piss off them for sure and if the things go very wrong then you could get indivisible attention from the VP level... And you're now dealing with several hundreds of millions of users so a minimum level of engineering quality should be ensured. You gotta deal with resource planners who also need to allocate finite hardware resources among unlimited demands. The service should have some level of reliability, scalability and redundancy. Thanks to all the works done by core and technical infrastructure team, this is easier than other places but the inherent complexities don't go away. Oh, did I mention that most of the complex infrastructures have integration tests that run over 1~2 hours with a good level of flakiness? If the build dashboard doesn't go green, you might miss your launch by 1 week. It's just a tip of iceberg for productionization, multiply the work by 10x. This is a death by thousand cuts and I don't see a silver bullet to solve everything at once.
  • wildrhythms 4y ago
    >Why does this happen? Of course I don't know. 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.
• iroh2727 4y ago
  Yeah this is definitely a problem, but I blame the companies. On the one hand, yes, for a long time there have been a lot of people that don't do much work. They should've been firing those people long ago, but they I guess were too scared/defensive. They felt it was better for business to just keep them. But now there is a big uptick in employees not working much, and I think the cause is just that companies are so disconnected from people. For example, Sundar wants people to be more "customer-focused" but everywhere at Google, all anyone talks about is this metric and that metric. Customers are just treated as a number to be aggregated into a metric. They're really not talking about specific customer problems. And they're not empowering employees to have vision for how to solve specific customer problems overall imo. Also, speaking of their own employees as people, they're similarly disconnected. They just treat employees as part of a metric too to a large extent. And what does that lead to? Employees that also care mostly about that metrics ($) and not building cool, assistive/helpful products. I mean it all comes back to incentives of companies trying to grow their stock value. So it's really that and not out-of-touch CEOs. But although a recession is heartbreaking, we do need to regain some sense of reality imo. Perhaps return to technology that's actually trying to assist people or fix things in the world. One can hope.
• daenz 4y ago
  >Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here. And part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me. He might realize that nobody cares about Facebook, they just care about their fat compensations for relatively little work (according to him). Honestly, aside from the experience of working with technology at that scale, are there a lot of other reasons to work at Facebook? I think we all are recognizing its had its time in the spotlight and its on its way out.
• alexk307 4y ago
  This is such an embarrassment for these two... Aren't YOU the CEO of your company? Didn't YOU approve hiring plans and corporate goals? If there's not enough work, why don't you find something for them to work on, or replace your managers with folks that will. Instead, it's the employee's fault for being so unproductive.
  • yibg 4y ago
    Not to defend either of them as CEOs but isn't that what they're doing? Part of addressing a problem is surfacing it in the first place.
    • AzzieElbab 4y ago
      Well, there’s is a lot of room to wiggle with ~1M revenue per employee. I’d be curious to hear about working habits of people at Apple :)
    • qqtt 4y ago
      They are surfacing it in a weaselly way which absolves them of personal responsibility. In reality, they approved the strategic direction of the company and signed off on the outrageous hiring plans. They were responsible for fostering a culture of execution and measuring the results of their teams. They were responsible for ensuring their investments were paying off. Instead of messaging that "As CEO, we did not invest in the correct strategic direction of the company with the associated supporting culture to execute on our plans and as a result need to re-calibrate our investments" - they instead say "Too many employees aren't working, it's all the fault of the low performers!" or a variation of that message.
      • stickfigure 4y ago
        I'm not sure how you expect the process to go? As the CEO of a big company you aren't personally involved in hiring or managing line engineers. Your input is to tell underlings to tell their underlings to hire more or work more or whatnot. Feedback is just as slow moving up the chain. Basically, "memo to employees" is the process.
• nickstewart 4y ago
  It would be nice to work in a relaxed environment like that I'm stuck in the agency life - I have to log seven hours a day and I'm at roughly 80% billable hours on average a week (to clients)
• fefe23 4y ago
  As a consultant, I come around a bit. I have seen many companies with very poor productivity, and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees. In fact they usually would have loved to be more productive. Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight. But as companies grow they install more and more rules and regulations that end up making sure nothing ever gets done. It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done! Also remember that this is only half the problem. The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. I wouldn't be surprised if of the productivity that is left, more than half gets wasted on crufty software structures and writing code before you understood the problem. And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need. Wasting yet more productivity on working around bad decisions from before we knew what we are actually building.
  • hef19898 4y ago
    Not getting rid of "legacy" stuff that doesn't work is a, IMHO, a version of throwing good moneybafter bad money. Instead of acknowledging that the unusable code, or whatever, was a crucial part of understanding the problem, and throw it out once the problem was understood, people tend to build upon those not fit for purpose things...
    • toss1 4y ago
      YES!! Even coming from an attitude of being big on abstractions and generalized/scaled solutions, I cannot overstate the importance of writing a throw-away version at the outset. Hit the highlights, write it fast & dirty, use it, extend it a bit as you start to understand the system — then throw it away. Use that knowledge to design and build your real system, from scratch, but informed by your earned knowledge. >>agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. And to this in the GP post, I think he identified a fundamental problem with Agile. Its entire bias is to write code fast, when the bias should be to avoid writing code — code is slow and habitat for bugs. Obviously everything requires code, but it should be minimized, not maximized. Of course, writing code quickly and seeing it run is satisfying, but developers' dopamine hits shouldn't be the primary driver of design & mgt - end performance should be, and that takes careful thought of what can be eliminated, and basing that thought on knowledge of a throw-away-version-1 is very useful, and pays benefits to both the dev team and to users for years.
• mathgladiator 4y ago
  A key challenge at Meta is limited scope. There are many unification projects rather than expansion projects, and this is one of the reasons I left as it was just too hard to push new businesses. So, here they are bitching about people not doing enough work when it is really a reflection of an inability to overcome the innovators dilemma.
• timwaagh 4y ago
  I've kinda noticed it too. It's one of the downsides of working from home. Personally my productivity has only gone up but I'm worried about my colleagues. Sometimes it's hard to get a hold of them for hours. It's incredibly sad to say but maybe they should introduce some kind of bossware to check that people at least aren't afk for hours.
• joshAg 4y ago
  Sounds like they're finding out why most companies won't fuck around with outbidding competitors for talented employees just so that they can't work for a competitor.
• telchior 4y ago
  Which companies with similar concerns have actually managed to increase productivity in a way that satisfies the C-suite? A much older anecdote: I had a friend who worked at Yahoo around the time Marissa Mayer was coming on as CEO. At the time, they were allowing semi-WFH for certain positions. I literally never saw this guy go to work, or actually do any work. He was part of a stand-up comedy workshop and spent 100% of his time there. He'd figured out how to keep his manager happy enough, pass performance reviews, collect a huge paycheck, and do exactly squat. Somehow during all the "clean house" reviews, he passed. Everyone, including him, were shocked that somehow, nobody seemed to be able to figure out that he was essentially a ghost employee. What finally got him was a "return to office" directive -- no more WFH, which he couldn't comply with. This all took place a decade ago, and I've thought of it several times post-Covid as all these companies that "discovered" WFH suddenly decided that employees need to return. But none of the extensive attempts to fix Yahoo's culture, management etc came to anything, the company continued to backslide despite all efforts and now basically no longer exists. Mark Zuckerberg's aggressive "some people shouldn't be here" statements feel like a repeat of that whole Yahoo debacle (although I suppose Facebook probably isn't yet as dysfunctional as Yahoo was in 2012).
  • Scoundreller 4y ago
    I think yahoo found something like 35% of its wfh staff hadn’t logged in for weeks or months. (I can’t find a source for the number, so maybe I’m off, but vpn logs were used to justify ending wfh, which is… an imperfect approach for many reasons). Overall, I don’t think the plan at yahoo was to fix anything, but just asset-strip it, which worked well for stockholders.
    • wizofaus 4y ago
      It baffles me how that's possible - in 25+ years working for software companies all my co-workers have been people I interact with basically daily (certainly more than once a week) - so how could someone not log in for weeks and it not be an issue?
      • beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
• nitwit005 4y ago
  > Zuckerberg noticed that it was getting harder to get all the employees to attend a meeting as they were sometimes taking time out in a day for personal work The last time I was at a larger company, I just asked someone else on the team to attend the all hands and let me know if anything interesting was mentioned. I did bring up not caring about some of the content, and the head of the department even said he appreciated the feedback, but didn't seem to change the content at all.
• GoldenMonkey 4y ago
  The reason FANG needs to retain unproductive but very smart ppl. Is to suck up all the TALENT that would compete with their tech monopolies. This is FANG’s competitive edge. Having the excess cash and profits to do so.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  Everyone in the Bay Area knows Google is a retirement home and FB is where you go to join a team that is 20% high-performance, 40% normal, and 40% low-performance-never-fired. It's like the standard story of a group project in university (though all my group projects had hotshots I'd gladly work with). But this seems like it's inevitable at larger companies. I recall at one such company someone told a friend of mine that one project was going to take 29 months or something to execute. That company had a realistic 6 months to justify their stock price at the time. It cratered 75% - and this was not a COVID boost situation.
• supernova87a 4y ago
  All I can say is, thank god there seems to be some conserved (or marginally decreasing) quantity of output with increasing size of the company. (i.e. even as you grow bigger your efficiency and effectiveness drops in opposition to the number of people you accrete) Otherwise we'd all be living under our corporate overlords for sure.
• r00fus 4y ago
  Looks like some cuts are coming to the FAANG workforce - perhaps it's a good time to poach people for your upcoming initiative. Not necessarily just those who will be laid off, but the ones who don't like their coworkers getting laid off so they can do 1.5x the work for the same money. Fire up those LinkedIn contacts!
  • shubb 4y ago
    Do we want FAANG employees? From what I'm reading here great people started these companies and we've had 20 years of sleepy civil service style meeting people. They sound like they might fit at a bank but not at any company that needs to produce?
• seydor 4y ago
  Hint: You don't need to work (anymore) when you 're a monopoly or two
• ccn0p 4y ago
  There's a lot of pointing fingers here. At the risk of sounding crass, any company with more than 1000 employees (pick a number) has high performers and low performers. Yes, culture, management, and process all basically move the sides of the bell curve, but nothing "fixes" human nature and organizational inefficiencies as companies grow. This is why companies rate and rank employees and low performers find their way to the door and/or go through [bi]annual RIF processes to clean up the org. It's the natural growth process.
  • beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
    It's also around that point where you start to get low and high performers that, in my opinion, the burden of productivity should shift quite a bit to managers rather than individual employees. Once a company gets to a certain size, certain bureaucratic workflows and systems become far more necessary and entrenched as "the way we do business". Some "low performers" at that point, as a result of this internal dynamic and internal limitations in a business, often just have less work to do or they are limited in sign-offs to work on other projects/coordinate with other teams. At that point, the role of managing teams and individuals becomes much more important and consequential. What you often get though, is management that defers accountability as problems with individual performance with employees below them. This is, essentially, a way of ignoring how the way the company operates has changed.
• stuckinhell 4y ago
  It feels like the dotcom bubble bursting again. Good luck everyone!
• titzer 4y ago
  Quoth Zuck: > “And part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.” Wow. Just. Wow. Why not inject some more dysfunction into an already strained relationship with employees and callously but passively aggressively deal with a seriously broken hiring pipeline in the laziest way possible? If a company can't be bothered to set performance expectations that are measurable and actionable, but just expects to push people out by "turning up the heat", that's an abject failure of a workplace. There used to be things like quarterly/yearly performance reviews, ratings, even "performance improvement plans" for under-performing employees--you know, clear expectations, clear communications, criteria and steps and timelines put forward when someone is not meeting expectations. You know, sometimes life happens to people and they slow down a quarter or two, maybe because of a family crisis, divorce, child, death in the family, traumatic event. Global pandemic? 2 years of isolation WFH? Yeah, there might be reasons... But, from the top, the message "these people will find their way to the door if we make work suck enough"--I couldn't imagine anything more demoralizing.
  • frogpelt 4y ago
    I don't think you can infer from this article that Meta isn't setting new, measurable and actionable performance expectations internally. Though you could be inferring that from working there or from all the other news about them.
  • cmollis 4y ago
    'too many employees, but few work'.. this is misleading.. given the spin, you might think this indicates that they hired these people to do specific line-of-business things, and they didn't get done. However, what actually happened was they hired a bunch of people to do.. something.. but they weren't sure what.. all they were told is that they need to hire them.. then they realized they might have 'a down quarter or two'.. apple's killing their advertising business, and they're thinking.. 'hey wait a minute.. our headcount's gone up.. no one in middle-management seems to know what they're doing (which is actually our fault.. but we can't say that), so we'll call the people we hired lazy unmotivated clowns and get rid them that way.' Cue the high-fives.
• satisfice 4y ago
  You can’t really tell from a distance if engineers are productive. The key to success is having a culture where people are motivated and principled so that they manage their own productivity. That culture requires respect. Zuckerberg isn’t showing that to his people, and he is paying the price for that.
• TrevorFSmith 4y ago
  "When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich". - J.J.R.
• jeffbee 4y ago
  Hopefully they are planning to start the productivity witch hunt at the top, not at the bottom. I mean, what the hell does Urs even do, from New Zealand? Cut the fat at the top, save billions.
• jimbob45 4y ago
  They’re probably seeing the natural result of Agile - you get nice planned deadlines and schedules but your employees have no incentive to work once they’re done with their items (and it’s not like the deadline is going to be moved up). Is that a problem though? As long as the work is getting done and can be used to plan things out, what’s the complaint? Of course, this “not showing up to meetings” garbage is something I don’t condone. That kind of behavior would have resulted in getting fired everywhere I’ve worked.
• mcguire 4y ago
  Fancy way of saying Meta is cutting head-count.
• efitz 4y ago
  I die inside when I hear people talk about "productivity" in the economic sense. At least in the US, everything is already over-optimized for human beings. I have to pay extra to interact with a human being to book a flight or do banking. Every nontrivial business I interact with tries like hell to keep me from talking to a human, not trusting me to figure out when I can resolve my problem with their web site (yes I f-ing know about companyname.com, now let me talk to a representative, I called for a reason). Companies love their metrics, and do shitty things to humans to make their metrics just a little better. Ever have a CS rep hang up on you (accidentally "disconnected")? Maybe you asked one too many questions and were bumping up their average call time for that shift, putting them at risk of disciplinary action. Or, your company is a "meritocracy" and you have to spend hours and hours writing a review doc in a system desperately trying to objectively measure humans but failing down to the subjective- how hard is your manager willing to fight for you? Also, nobody except legal and HR care about the review doc anyway because the stack rank meeting happened three weeks ago. Even legal and HR only care to the extent that they can use it to cover their asses. And, you're screwed because your teammate is buddies with your manager and takes him boating or water skiing every weekend. You know who's getting the "exceeds" review, and btw there's only room for one because "bell curve". Only a few stock awards for you this time. Or, your job just went away because paying western native English speakers is way more expensive than outsourcing your job. By the way, would you please train your replacement before you go? Don't forget your non-compete and assignment of inventions, and sign this exit agreement that you won't write or say anything bad about the company or we'll sue you for your severance! But don't worry, we've driven down the cost of trinkets built overseas by slave labor, so you can watch a nice TV while you're unemployed. F--- optimization. F--- productivity. I love technology, and I love capitalism, but "optimization" and "productivity" are euphemisms/excuses that companies hide behind when they're going to do shady shit so that the share price will go up and the executives will get a bigger bonus.
• zht 4y ago
  what I've found is that the % of deadweight at the company is proportional to the number of "tech influencers" at the company these are the kinds of people who, at least what I've generally found, do very little work, spend a lot of time "asking questions", shitposting on blind, and making "tech influencers" on tiktok that are "a day in the life of" or those youtube videos with the clickbait thumbnails like "HOW I MADE 3 MILLION DOLLARS BY AGE 25 AT META"
• scarmig 4y ago
  This is nothing new. Google and Facebook are pretty much planned economies that have a lot of resources. There are no real existential competitive pressures, either externally or internally. This leads to politics (of all sorts) instead of economics or productivity driving employees. In some ways it parallels the resource curse of countries that develop their economy on a bunch of oil, which makes people rich but leads to lots of social and governance dysfunction. Things like the Amazon "stack rank and then fire the worst performer on every team regularly, even if they actually are good enough" is one way to handle it, but that has its own obvious downsides. It does appear to simultaneously increase productivity and decrease overall employee happiness. This is a problem inherent to all large organizations.
• rajeshp1986 4y ago
  It is amusing how the article says "employees" but everyone in the comments are talking about developer productivity and laziness. It is shocking how no one points out about the laziness of PMs and management. I have seen PMs and managers taking generous time off and lazying around. Don't forget lot of hiring happens because managers and PMs do planning roadmaps and hire based on that. Some managers also hire more than necessary just cos they want to manage more people. In my previous company our manager hired 3x more engineers than available projects. He jumped ship recently and moved to another FAANG company while the team is now clueless and feeling scared that team might see layoffs.
  • wildrhythms 4y ago
    My favorite is the PMs who I've never met in my life, apparently they work in my product area, I only hear from them 2x per year only when they're planning some crucial 'team summit' far away from their usual work location (and spouse/children) where they get shitfaced drunk at the company's expense. Nothing actionable ever comes from these 'summits' in case that's not obvious.
• cjrd 4y ago
  First, is productivity really the issue here? It makes for a great sound bite, but I imagine we've all spent a lot of time and effort working really, really hard...on the wrong thing. Second, for large companies that want to weather the "impending recession," how is it that working harder will allow them to do this? What specific results will this yield? More product launches/improvements? Happier customers because of these launches (heh - when was the last time this happened for these companies) that translates into more revenue? What I would love to see are execs that say something like "We really want to focus on listening more to our customers and improving our relationship with them. While others are shouting 'build! build! build!', we're saying 'listen, build, repeat.' Here's some specific ways we are going to do this: ..." Then, sure, turn up the heat internally around this mission. Great - a rally cry around an objective. But right now, the rally cry is the rally cry is the rally cry. Work hard to work harder so that we work harder, and oh yeah, we'll fire people who don't because they're lazy and not 1337 enough to be here. You know, because recession.
• elcapitan 4y ago
  In a world where more and more work gets automated anyway, those people just managed to get a private version of UBI before everybody else.
• taylodl 4y ago
  They increased their headcount by 62% during the pandemic and now are like - these people are deadweight and not productive? Really? There are a lot of logistics you have to have in place to hire that many people, especially when you're already a LARGE company, and keep them all working. It seems to me their hiring process is completely broken - hire everybody, see who works out, can the rest. This just confirms the horror stories I hear from people working at FAANGs. It's not anywhere I want to be.
  • colinmhayes 4y ago
    I mean it’s not unreasonable to think they needed those people then, but now they don’t. If you’ve got 40,000 people worth of work and 70,000 people some of them aren’t going to be productive. Just because you had 70,000 people worth of work last year doesn’t mean they’re still productive this year.
    • tomuli38 4y ago
      Then say that and don't blame employee laziness for poor planning.
      • colinmhayes 4y ago
        I didn’t see them call the employees lazy. They said they weren’t productive. And again calling a conscious decision to hire people you won’t need in a couple years isn’t necessarily poor planning. If being the first to release a product gives you a big advantage it’s probably a good idea to hire all those people in the right situation.
        • tomuli38 4y ago
          If the employees were not being productive, that would show up in their KPIs and reviews and they would be fired. That process already exsists so you can't use it as a scapegoat. This is squarely about leadership's poor planning.
• micromacrofoot 4y ago
  Same old "no one wants to work anymore" bullshit from the ruling class. They've been saying this for over 100 years.
• DubiousPusher 4y ago
  American corporations post record profits for several years and then one quarter of decreased revenue, their conclusion, their workers aren't productive enough.
• chadlavi 4y ago
  Would these two meet their own criteria? because freeing up their salaries would sure go a long way.
• luckydata 4y ago
  I honestly don't understand what Sundar is talking about as everyone I know at google is covered in work and struggling to get through enormous amounts of red tape, but change would be a lot easier if leadership decided to, you know, lead for a change.
• wilde 4y ago
  You get what you reward. Large corps reward “increase in scope”. This is hard for people on other teams to evaluate fairly, so most companies end up with “scope = number of people involved”. That’s vaguely equivalent to deploying an O(n^2) algo into prod. Looks good at small sizes but breaks down as everyone talks to everyone else to add collaborators to pad scope.
• DubiousPusher 4y ago
  Hasn't Zuckerberg in particular been a bit irrationally down on the economy for quite some time now? He's had strong YouTube economist energy for awhile now.
• fleddr 4y ago
  If employees can get away with doing little work, that's a management problem. That still doesn't make it an easy problem to solve though. To take the typical scrum/agile method as our context... First and foremost, you're supposed to deliver things that have value. In most cases though, this is very much a "soft science". You can have an incredibly full backlog of items with things nobody asked for, as the feedback loop after a release is often non-existing and the team is working on the next thing already. Likewise, issues (due to laziness or incompetence) are super easy to mask. The engineer can call out some unexpected dependencies, setbacks, unclarities in the story (shifting blame), hardware issues, the list of excuses is endless. It's not like the PM understands any of it, so "it is what it is". The story is moved to the next sprint, or is split in two. Same for task estimation. In particular with a dynamic where the PM is technically clueless, which is common as a team holds a wide variety of tech skills nobody can understand in total, it's easy to inflate estimates. There's little to no incentive to stretch your productivity, in fact it's a type of self-harm. Because next you'd be expected to deliver at that stretch level forever. Better to under-perform a little, create some breathing room. Quality: often unmanaged, as amount of story points delivered is typically a primary metric. Now combine all this and you can have a team looking busy/productive whilst it's delivering nothing of value, too late, and with poor quality. Without setting of any alarm bells. The lack of value, productivity and quality is close to invisible. Now imagine having dozens if not hundreds of such teams, lol.
• Sevii 4y ago
  Facebook hired too many people during the pandemic and then got hit by the iPhone privacy change that killed their revenues. Facebook's stock is roughly 1/2 what it was a year ago. Also if increase your headcount by 62% obviously people won't have enough work to do. "To be sure, the Covid-induced pandemic saw Meta embark on a massive hiring spree, growing its number of full-time staff from 48,000 at the end of 2019 to more than 77,800 — a 62 per cent jump."
• unicornmama 4y ago
  Pichai and Zuckerberg's PR departments are doing their job to "position" them ahead of layoffs.
• ken47 4y ago
  I see other people's points that these quotes aren't the best reflection of these leaders, but I'd give them some benefit of the doubt in that we're lacking context. We're just getting the sensational headlines and quotes. There is something to be said for managing company morale, so we'll see how FB's employees handle the very blunt message they received... That being said, even though the message itself is bitter, I would strongly prefer that leadership communicate such difficulties openly rather than surprising the company out of the blue with layoffs, pay cuts, etc. Then, employees have an opportunity to make a decision about how much harder they want to work, or whether they want to leave for different pastures.
• carom 4y ago
  I think a lot of this comes from organizational bureaucracy. I love to program. I write code on personal projects every single night. It is so difficult to get tickets at work though. Want to build something new? Well, we will have to maintain it forever, so we need to make sure it is worth it. Want to build on another team's infra? You need open a ticket to get someone assigned to review your code, that ticket will take 3 weeks to be triaged. This is for a 2 line change. Ok, you're building something. Design doc, stories, epics, meetings most days of the week, code reviews, tests. On calls, you're going to do the builds. You're going to watch the nodes deploy 1 by 1. You're going to keep an eye on query latency. I'm not saying these things are all bad, but in total, they absolutely kill productivity. The more of this bureaucracy, the less you're getting out of me in regards to what I am really good at (designing and building systems). When I can build complex web apps in my spare time and end up making a 50 line change at work every 2 weeks there is a horrible disconnect. I write code every day, just not for my employer, and not because I am lazy or don't want to. Yes, I should be fired. Yes, you should hire someone at 50% my rate to watch the code deploy. Hire me back when you have work for me to do that matches my skillset.
• nokeya 4y ago
  When I click “Select all” in Gmail my browser hangs for several seconds at least. And now they say there is too much people. Hello! There is not too much people, there is is misutilization of your workforce! Instead of doing 100500+ chat app that will not do it to production, maybe focus on real customer problems and not on metrics? There is a lot comments now and before from people saying they seeing no impact from their work in FAANG. Of course, when your code means nothing and changes nothing - you will loose all motivation to do something useful
  • wildrhythms 4y ago
    Fixing the 'select all' hang doesn't get anyone promoted, and managers can't parade it around as a win before they springboard to some other org.
• touisteur 4y ago
  What this sounds like: 1) let's hire like mad, make every graduate engineer do the dance, and suck up every talent that might appear, and raise comp so high that no one can hire. Also acquihire like crazy, take it all in! Hey, now it's strange how we haven't had serious competition for years. 2) now that times are getting hard, let's say that the people we're dumping on the market are deadweights, bad contributors, lazy. Don't hire them, they're the worst, they dragged us down! I thought they hired only the best! Weeks of interviews! I'm sad for the people getting canned soon. I hope they got some money away. And that they're ready to accept -50% because I don't think there's a market for all the people Google and Facebook are preparing to get rid of, at faang comp. We'll see but this all seems very unethical, from two unethical companies. Good luck everyone.
• tomgp 4y ago
  Looking at Meta’s product line at the moment it’s easy to see how people might not be motivated to give their all. Facebook and Instagram are so markedly driven by numbers rather than any kind of product vision, i can imagine it being pretty depressing.
• kache_ 4y ago
  There's actually a clear solution to this problem. It's called URA. I think what's actually happening is that URA goals are falling short, because managers are failing to meet them. It's war time, managers. Time to sharpen those axes...
• mola 4y ago
  Go on a hiring spree inflate salaries, kill startups while having no infrastructure to actually manage this newly aquired workforce, then claim it's their fault for not being hungry enough. Bah these guys are such psychos
• dqpb 4y ago
  Let’s look at the flip side. If an engineer saves Google/Meta $10 million annually by better resource utilization, is this reflected in their salary or bonus? Answer: fuck no, it is not. Maybe engineers should turn up the heat a little. Maybe they should leave and start their own businesses. Haven’t we made Zuck, Pichai, Page, Brin, etc. rich enough? Answer: yes, we have made them rich enough.
• tonioab 4y ago
  The job market for top engineers is supply-constrained, as demonstrated by the rapid increase in SWE wages in the past 15 years. If you agree that top engineers are the primary input to these companies' success, then it makes sense for them to adopt a "hoarding" behavior. In other words, these companies have over-hired as a way to prevent competitors from hiring these same engineers. Although this has created a situation where the company has hired past the theoretical "productive" point, it was still a rational behavior. Now that the tide is turning, the productivity goal becomes relatively more important than the competitive goal. In the long run though, I don't think the job market will fundamentally change - there is still a shortage of top engineering talent in the US.
• anigbrowl 4y ago
  When management starts blaming the employees for the lack of direction, it's over. Both FB and Google are as disruptable now as they have ever been. FB's main competition is Telegram, imho. Google has more of an incumbent advantage but less of a strategic vision.
• cartweheel 4y ago
  I worked at a place where the VP of engineering didn't understand anything about engineering nor his department. Lifers who shunned any type of responsibility were given free reign to continue their ways and made sure to spread their attitude to new hires in their teams. The VP promoted a total whack to be the overall architect which came up with one stupid idea after another disrupting all operations. A complete overflowed influx of fresh product managers and mid-level people managers with zero engineering experience created an even worse hierarchical political mess where it was now impossible to give any sort of proper feedback. Orders would come through several layers before it reached some low level grunt without a fancy title who would finally recognize that the orders made absolutely no fucking sense, yet had no way to resist them. Many of the actually talented but overworked doers left. All the problems in this organization lay squarely with the leadership and their inaptitude with regards to engineering. When a nice image of an organization is valued more than actually valuable work, this is what you get. I've heard similar stories from other places as well, because I went looking, and I really wanted to know if what I had seen was unique. It unfortunately wasn't, although I couldn't find an example as bad as mine. Similar types of stories and situations existed in most places, but not in an as concentrated fashion it seemed. So when I hear anyone complaining like Zuck or Pichai, I know where to look for the problem. The non-engineer managers who provide no value themselves, don't understand what makes engineering tick, and prevent those that do to get their ideas through, unless they can take credit for them and with low risk. Elon Musk is right on this point. Unfortunately they've already infested themselves so tightly in the fabric of the organization, patting each others backs, that it is impossible to get them out. These same people are now going to be put in charge of throwing the "garbage" out. Ha ha ha.
• jeffwask 4y ago
  Robber barons don't like worker's gaining rights, news at 11. All those tech campuses with barbershops, laundries, etc weren't built for the employees benefit. They were built to trap you and keep you working long hours. It's sucks when your employee can just log off after 8 hours and be in their yard with their kids minutes later.
• notyourday 4y ago
  I don't understand why this is a surprise. Is it that no one from FAANG upper management visited HN? HN general position is: * get a job at FAANG * do nothing, other than show up and do some minimal work * collect mad money * when bored go to another FAANG Compared this to startups: * get a job at startup * work work work work work * collect OK money * go back to work HN advice? Get a job at FAANG!
• cletus 4y ago
  Once again, companies blaming strategic problems on ICs rather than real culprit: leadership. Or, rather, the lack thereof. Having worked at both Google and Facebook I can tell you it's contradictory because in some cases you have an embarrassment of riches, hundreds or even thousands of heads, virtually unlimited resources (CPU, storage, networking), etc. Some make sense like Google+. I mean it was a failure and probably came way too late to succeed no matter what Google did but I understand trying. Maps, Docs, Youtube, Photos, Drive, Chrome, Android... all of these make sense. I also understand you can't necessarily predict "winners" so to a certain extent you have to try things and expect failures. Interestingly though every project I listed there (apart from Drive and Photos) was an acquisition. On the other hand, you have projects desperate for people that turn into abandonware because they don't get sufficiently funded, even when they have PMF. There are a ton of middle managers at big tech companies who exist only to get promoted and to empire build. You could, in my opinion, take everyone from L7 (M3 at Google, M2 at Facebook) to VP and fire 75% of them and be perfectly fine. Both of these companies are now in what I call permanent reorg churn. Every few months you'll get an email saying your mananger's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager as part of a broad reorg. You've never met any of these people. This is a meme internally. But what you have to understand is that reorgs are a way of avoiding the appearance of failure while appearing to be doing something. Don't get me wrong. Bad organizational structure can set you up for failure and a good org structure can help you succeed but reorg churn is none of this. Reorg churn is simply changing the structure every 6 months. Nothing is ever in place long enough to determine if it succeeded or failed. People responsible for those decisions have probably moved on. Additionally, at Google in particular, the amount of process required to do anything is insane. But don't worry. Bureaucracy busters has another 3 surveys for you to fill out to improve things. I once spent a quarter just babysitting a launch calendar entry. The checklist to launch anything is insanely long. Even getting a small amount of resources requires Machiavellian machinations. But sure, there are too many employees. Got it.
  • Willish42 4y ago
    > There are a ton of middle managers at big tech companies who exist only to get promoted and to empire build. You could, in my opinion, take everyone from L7 (M3 at Google, M2 at Facebook) to VP and fire 75% of them and be perfectly fine. > Both of these companies are now in what I call permanent reorg churn. Every few months you'll get an email saying your mananger's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager as part of a broad reorg. You've never met any of these people. This is a meme internally. > But what you have to understand is that reorgs are a way of avoiding the appearance of failure while appearing to be doing something. Don't get me wrong. Bad organizational structure can set you up for failure and a good org structure can help you succeed but reorg churn is none of this. So many nails being hit on heads. Bravo. I see a lot of discussion in these threads around how hard it is to measure IC productivity, but nearly nothing about how to measure middle manager productivity (spoiler: you can't because their credit is based on work done by the people below them). In the middle of this hiring freeze stuff I got yet another reorg email from my company about my great-great-grand-boss, who I've never met, switching around to add a new layer of middle management new hires. Each of these is worth at least 5 IC headcount, probably more. I don't see a lot of criticism aimed at how _that_ band of the headcount doesn't match productivity...
• yalogin 4y ago
  The speed at which the tone of these is changing is amazing. Just a few weeks ago everyone said its getting impossible to hire and so they need to expand to other tech hubs, pay exorbitant salaries and offer lot of perks to attract candidates. All of a sudden now, just in the span of a few weeks, these executives started realizing their headcount is too high, productivity too low and that employees should self select out of the company. Doesn't this show incompetence on the executive part? They just didn't see this till the recession flags were raised, it's almost as if they need to cut costs to cover up falling revenue and so blaming the employees.
  • kibwen 4y ago
    > Doesn't this show incompetence on the executive part? Sure, but since when has an executive ever faced consequences for incompetence?
  • MichaelMoser123 4y ago
    Management is just reacting to a changed financial environment. But they can't admit that, so that they make it look as if it is about someones incompetence. I think its the war of Russia against Ukraine. All of a sudden there is less money to go around, interest rates go up and it got harder to raise money. I think they are just putting up a straight face, as they respond to the changing circumstances. And they probably changed their plans as well, now it is less about 'new features' and more about 'maintenance of existing systems'. But that didn't get into the article, so it's all the fault of the people who will have to look for a new job...
  • gowld 4y ago
    > pay exorbitant salaries 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.
• amelius 4y ago
  That's because we all have the equivalent of a TV-set on our office desks. And Zuck is part of the problem here.
• electromech 4y ago
  TL;DR, Zuck & Pichai demonstrating how NOT to lead. I can see the Cheyenne Dialysis commercial now... --- <a black-and-white screen portrays a boss screaming at employees> Narrator: "Do your employees seem disengaged? Is it 'getting harder to get all the employees to attend a meeting'¹?" <a wild Zuck appears in full color> Zuck: Then COME ON DOWN to Cheyenne Dialysis for a copy of my hot new leadership book: "This Place Isn’t For You!"¹ <dramatic pause to let that sink in> Zuck: Check out what Microsoft's own dear leader, Pichai, had to say about the new book... <Zuck clears throat to prepare to impersonate Pichai> "Pichai": "When I said we needed to 'create a culture that is more mission-focused'¹, I knew my employees needed 'more hunger'¹. This book taught me to squash those pesky 'personal projects'¹, so we can focus on our core values as a company: 'leaner, meaner'¹. <phone number appears on screen> Zuck: COME ON DOWN or call today to reserve your copy of "This Place Isn’t For You!"¹ On sale for only $19.99! err... only $24.99! err... only $29.99! --- ¹ LMAO that these are actual quotes from the article. Parody can't hold a candle to the absurdity of real life.
• PostOnce 4y ago
  Adtech companies being more "productive" than they already are is a terrifying thought. How much worse could they make our world? It's not just the ads, its the search result / timeline / suggestion bubble echo chamber that may bring about a new Dark Age. Let's hope they fail.
• victor9000 4y ago
  This sounds more like WFH is being used to scapegoat a decade of bad management, business, and product decisions.
• throw7 4y ago
  C-suite needs to blame something other than themselves for not hitting quarters.
• trhway 4y ago
  The joke here is that many companies parroted a lot of "cool" stuff from FB/GOOG like open office, Agile, etc. without understanding that such stuff actually decreases productivity, and that hasn't been an issue for FB/GOOG only because they take in top performers from top universities and have business model to print money at $1.5M+/employee/year. The parroting companies don't have such employees and don't have such business model, and for them those parroted things cause very noticeable harm, and to mentally reconcile that situation they conclude that they "aren't doing those things right" and thus double-down on that parroting thus increasing the harm even further.
• iainmerrick 4y ago
  I always wondered what all those tens of thousands of people at these megacompanies actually do -- even after working at one myself! (and never managing to get a lot done) So it’s amusing and interesting to hear that even the CEOs don’t really know either.
• throw8383833jj 4y ago
  Productivity is limited by the scope of your products. If you have 100 Work years of work available to do but have 500 employees then each employee can only do 0.2 work years worth of work per year. People want to be productive but if there's not enough productive work do then people start doing unproductive work because it's all that is available. Solution: You need to either increase the scope of products: get into new industrys like Tesla and Amazon are doing OR cut head count massively.
  • luckydata 4y ago
    There's tons of stuff to do, the problem is management creates enormous hurdles for anyone to do anything within Google. The amount of red tape and disorganization is hard to believe if not witnessed first hand.
• bfung 4y ago
  Honest don’t disagree. I first heard the saying “Rest and Vest” from googlers. (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14943146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14943146
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• trinsic2 4y ago
  Yea right. Zuckerberg probably means not enough people are overworking themselves. I feel this whole not working then is newspeak for we arn't getting employees to work 80 hr weeks any more.
• zppln 4y ago
  Glad to learn we're gonna see this top tier talent hit the market in the coming future. Having perfected ad slinging web tech who knows what they'll solve next. Climate change, interstellar travel, or the cure for cancer? Bright future ahead for us all.
• camdenlock 4y ago
  > “There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have. [We need to] create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer-focused,” [Pichai] said. When you direct a huge amount of your company’s resources toward ESG initiatives, should you be surprised when your employees are not particularly focused on the real work at hand? Are these CEOs really so blind?
• 1024core 4y ago
  I blame managers. 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.
• etempleton 4y ago
  I think “turning up the heat” is just going to add pressure on the ones already doing most of the work. And some of those people will leave. The ones not doing anything aren’t going to suddenly start caring and aren’t probably all that motivated to find something else. This is a faliure of some management to not motivate/correct employees who are not meeting expectations.
• cosmiccatnap 4y ago
  I think people will look back on this time as a second guilded age. They will look upon the greed and the ego of Zuck, Bezos, Gates and Musk the same way we look back upon J.P. Morgan, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Carnegie. This statement will sound as bad to people in 2100 as arguing against 8 hour works days sounds to us now. How many generations folly have to be blamed on the working class before we can come to our senses and regulate those who would amass wealth beyond measure but cannot hold a single drop of responsibility, humility, or honesty without it burning their skin or slipping between their fingers.
• tssva 4y ago
  '“There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have. [We need to] create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer-focused,” he said. ' That sounds like a CEO that has failed on a few significant counts. Maybe the first change needed is a new CEO.
• throwawaysleep 4y ago
  > Meanwhile, Zuckerberg noticed that it was getting harder to get all the employees to attend a meeting as they were sometimes taking time out in a day for personal work. I have repeatedly logged into large meetings people demanded I attend and promptly gone to sleep or when I worked in the office, I would show up and then spend a half hour sitting on the toilet. The problem is that the meeting really isn't important.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  Perhaps this is mainly to try to please Wall Street. But I think the jig is up, so to speak. It should now be painfully obvious if you are a "tech" worker for an advertising-supported "tech" company that this "business" relies, indirectly, on the abundance of cheap capital, i.e., super low cost debt. To me, that does not signify "essential" services. It signifies "optional". The web will not die if these companies disappear, but these companies _will_ die without sufficient web traffic. In the absence of "venture capital", Facebook could vanish and people would still find ways to use the internet to stay in touch. That is what I think. The only way to know for sure is to let them fade away and see what happens. To argue otherwise is to underestimate human ingenuity, not to mention how much bandwidth, storage and CPU consumers today have at their disposal. The "tech" worker who argues "You need us" to the public is, IMO, now much less convincing when their employers are admitting they really do not need most of you.
• steve76 4y ago
  [dead]
• fathrowaway12 4y ago
  I have been working for about 4.5 years now across 3 big tech companies (Google included). I would consider myself a hardworking and ambitious person who loves computer science. I graduated top of my class at a state school. I've gotten promoted, consistently "exceed expectations", lots of positive feedback, etc. But I have not actually accomplished a damn thing or written a single interesting or useful component in my professional work. The thing is, it's becoming clearer and clearer that so much of what goes on is bullshit. A pattern I have seen 3 times now is managers significantly over-hiring to build their little management moat of mediocre junior devs, then leaving on to brighter pastures with their shinier resume or promotion. Most of the work is dealing with other people's code messes, operational gruntwork, and ticket grinding that will have little to no impact and is a complete waste of smart people's time. It has little to do with building software or solving hard problems, just maintaining and tweaking the existing systems. It does absolutely nothing for your career. You could be Jeff Dean stuck on worthless legacy grunt crap with no upside and I doubt you would get noticed. On the flip side, people who actually get interesting, promotable work are the luckiest in the world. It is the difference between a rocket ship advance of career and skill or stagnation and frustration. But this is rare IMO. And it's so hard to tell going in which you're going to get. I've now taken a gamble on three teams that looked good on paper but turned out to be legacy management empire crap. It pisses me off that once you choose you're basically stuck there for a year or two before you can try again. I don't want to waste any more of my life on this merry go round.
  • jeffbee 4y ago
    Just wanted to say that you've hit on a real problem: the rich-get-richer feedback cycle in which all the good projects are taken by high ranking engineers. On my teams, including at Google, we intentional counteracted that by giving the interesting work to the person just barely qualified to do it, and biasing the crud toward the senior team members.
    • strikelaserclaw 4y ago
      This is why it is much better for younger engineers to work at smaller companies working on interesting ideas but if you wanna get google pay, then you gotta make those sacrifices.
• SamvitJ 4y ago
  Just a note that neither Pichai nor Zuckerberg actually said the words: "Too many employees, but few work". This is just recycled from another news site [1] which chose to summarize their comments that way. [1] https://in.mashable.com/tech/36076/google-has-too-many-employees-but-too-few-work-says-sundar-pichai-after-reports-of-declining-revenue https://in.mashable.com/tech/36076/google-has-too-many-emplo...
• siliconc0w 4y ago
  It's a bit suspicious both tech companies started complaining about productivity around the time the market started to turn. Management is happy to collect their bonuses when things are going well but seem quick the blame the workers when they aren't. Also, it's not like these these companies aren't still outrageously profitable. Just because an employee is content 'meeting expectations' doesn't mean that they are dead weight. The managers set the expectations and if they're meeting them then the engineer is more than pulling their weight (i.e the company benefits exceeds their compensation, which for these companies is something like $1.6 million per employee). Like any large human organization, these companies are lumbering schizophrenic bureaucratic beasts with innumerable layers of management pulling in different directions so yeah there isn't great productivity but the workers aren't to blame for that nor has the situation been any different for the last decade.
• decafninja 4y ago
  Until fairly recently, I worked as a SWE at a big, unsexy, enterprise corporation where tech is an unrespected cost center. Pay as a senior SWE there (and companies like it) was probably around what a junior or lower midlevel engineer at a FAANG-like company would make. A lot of people there were working very hard not to go the extra mile or chase after a promotion, but rather to become Professional Leetcoders so that they could jump ship for a better company. I've had friends at other, similar, companies tell stories like this too. And I have to admit, I too was one of their ranks, as were many of my friends. The goal - leave the crufty enterprise world and get into FAANG, or at least a better, Silicon Valley style, tech company where you can go to work in shorts and flipflops instead of dressing up in "business casual" like a bean counter. The whole tech interview nonsense has probably created legions of similar people. They might be doing a decent job at their current workplaces, but they're certainly not going above and beyond when they can be grinding leetcode instead. However the context of this thread is Google, Meta, and other FAANG and FAANG-tier companies. I have no insight there, as the second part of this whole Professional Leetcoder thing is that once you get into such an "endgame company", you're supposed to hang up your leetcode gosu badge and work your ass off. Which is what I'm actually doing now.
• 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Issue trackers create an alternate reality where code quality and organization doesn't matter. This makes leaders seek for insights in the issue tracker instead of diving into the code base. The result? all developers try to game the system by closing tickets faster at the expense of burying the project into tech debt. The endgame of late JIRA-based development is having an army of thousands of developers checking 2 lines of code per month. Meanwhile the competition clones the best selling aspects of your product and before you know it nobody wants to buy your bloated, slow, unstable and expensive solution is slowly replaced by cheaper alternatives. Product managers as owners of project backlogs is the ruin of software.
• SMAAART 4y ago
  Pareto principle: Meta has 83,553 employees (source: Wikipedia) which means that 292 employees are producing 50% of the output.
• khazhoux 4y ago
  In every other HN thread, people slam FAANGs for being so bloated, and we praise the small startup where everyone on the team gets shit done fast. And in every other thread, people ask "What the hell does <BigTechCo> need 10,000 engineers for??" And now Zuck says "We've gotten complacent as a company, and we have to turn up the heat and sense of urgency, and get rid of people who aren't contributing"... and HN freaks out at this 'dystopian' missive. Pick a lane, people.
  • gorgoiler 4y ago
    Well said. Slashdot was groundbreaking for many things, especially so for categories. I wouldn’t mind having the ability to filter HN replies to “+5 Insightful” and drop anything else marked “Contrarian”.
    • 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
      what's wrong with contrarian view, or perhaps you just want to read things you agree with only.
      • gorgoiler 4y ago
        “Contrarian” in this sense means someone who disagrees on purpose, at best for hypothetical intellectual jousting, and at worst to simply act as a troll. In either case it’s not very interesting to read threads of people practicing their debating skills.
  • okdood64 4y ago
    Alternative view: When you go on such a massive hiring spree in the last 1-2 years from headcount X to headcount Y, how can you be shocked at you're not getting headcount Y amount of productivity? Proper onboarding attention and tenure impacts productivity.
• faangiq 4y ago
  Incentivize engineers instead of treating them code monkey peasants and they will work hard and make you a lot of money. Create useless management layers and make them play politics to advance and you get FAANG culture.
• analog31 4y ago
  To me, this may signal an ominous culture shift. I don't work for Google or Facebook, and don't expect to. (Not sour grapes, just reality). But if a return to a more draconian culture becomes popular with investors, it could eventually trickle down to my little hamlet. Not something I look forward to.
  • nrb 4y ago
    Draconian culture is an environment that spurs tech innovation by new entrants. If anything, it might cause a mass migration of employees from those outfits into great new companies.
• sharmin123 4y ago
• smashah 4y ago
  Not to be holier than thou or anything but if you're at FAANG/high paying job with enough of a nest egg and working on something that does not impact the bottom line or make any difference please quit your job and do something useful with your life, time and skill. Open a shawarma shop or something, at least it will make people happy unlike another Google chat app. You can discuss ad infinitum whose fault all this is (middle management, metric-first strategy, execs etc.) but it's your life being wasted at the end of the day.
• internxt 4y ago
• anothernewdude 4y ago
  Work? No, in the article he was talking about an all-hands meeting. Those meetings are content-less, can be replaced by an email and serve only to stroke the ego of the presenter. "Look at how many people I can command as an audience". How much actual information needs to go to all employees in a synchronous fashion? If you're broadcasting information, then it doesn't need to happen synchronously. The real information revealed here is how poorly these CEOs conceive of how work is happening in their companies. They aren't tracking the performance of their employees in a sane fashion. This is a massive red flag for Facebook and Google. Are there people there that shouldn't be? I can think of at least one name that should leave to improve the business.
• pta2 4y ago
  As someone who is working in a very large tech company, I see one of the strong reasons as why employees are not motivated is because the returns for working hard and delivering results is not there. Things like promotions, pay rises are always not explained and the expectations for promotion is never clearly communicated, intentionally kept vague and consequently the individual is not clear what more to do and is frustrated. Once these large companies find out you are good in one thing, they really want you to keep doing that one thing day in and day out. Add immigration related uncertainty on top of this, wherein people on H1B, and awaiting Green Card cannot easily quit and change job, it directly correlates to lot of burnt out people just waiting for their immigration situation to change to get out and that wait can take years.
• bagacrap 4y ago
  I work at one of the two mentioned companies. 20% of the employees do 80% of the work, and another 60% do maybe 50%. the last 20% account for -30%. It's demoralizing how incapable management seems to be at jettisoning the chaf, however it was explained to me once thusly: good engineers are hard to find and also very valuable. An unmotivated/lazy engineer is one step away from being a valuable engineer. It's worthwhile spending a lot of effort trying to find what motivates them. Also, if you look at revenue and divide by employees, you will see that the strategy of "employee 5 engineers and hope at least one is good" is still profitable.
  • habosa 4y ago
    I love this framing, those percentages match up 100% with what I saw on the inside of a FAANG company.
  • cm277 4y ago
    This is more or less exactly why Google/Meta need to be regulated and cut down to size. The fact that super-expensive engineers do not have to create value for these companies, but they are still 'affordable' while every other tech company is struggling to hire, means that they are capturing way too much value, i.e. rent.
    • phendrenad2 4y ago
      Can't say I agree. When I go to my local mom & pop grocery store, there are 3 employees and only one of them works, the other two seem to just be on their phones. We should either find a way to cut that business down to size also, or abandon the entire idea.
• StopHammoTime 4y ago
  What I always love about these statements from CEOs is that if there is a culture of poor performance or whatever, it is actually the companies and the CEOs themselves who are doing a poor job. Ultimately, the performance of the company is a reflection of what the CEO puts in. I like how these CEOs never talk about leaving, even thought they're usually a big part of the problem.
• itsautomatisch 4y ago
  A lot of the comments seem to focus on ICs/devs, but for me the people who fit the category of person being discussed are managers, people who basically do nothing and don't contribute anything of value.
  • daxaxelrod 4y ago
    Every single manager I’ve had continued to be a solid IC. The only difference is that they had a larger portion of the vote when we decided what we wanted to work on but we were all in the trenches together.
• metamateme 4y ago
• indymike 4y ago
  This is why I prefer working for smaller companies. Your work makes a big difference. You have a big say in the future of the company, and chances to learn something new come quickly.
• extant_lifeform 4y ago
  Its these clueless middle managers, fire half of them and see the productivity improve.
• closedloop129 4y ago
  Looking at all the things that can be improved in various Google or Facebook products, there is not too few work for developers. The problem is that the classical management structure is not suited for developer companies. Google and Facebook have cheated when at the beginning, the management and development were two, respectively one person. Management understood what development was doing. Nowadays, when those roles are split into many people, it takes much more management to understand what some code is doing. Code is a very dense notation. If the same knowledge has to be communicated in normal language, it requires far more people. So if Google and Facebook don't want to leave decisions to developers, they have to increasing their management overhead. They could introduce various committees to manage all aspects of a product. That would require a massive cultural shift because management wouldn't be a hierarchy anymore.
• Consultant32452 4y ago
  I remember long stretches of time when these companies would scoop up as many tech workers as possible to deny their competition access to workers. Guess they've decided this isn't necessary anymore.
• HacklesRaised 4y ago
  Under whose leadership did this state of affairs come to be? Pathetic!!
• habosa 4y ago
  As many others have said here: 20% of the people at these big companies are not just doing nothing, they are getting in the way and providing negative value to the 80% who come to work to honestly try and get something done. It is bad for the company and the industry to be paying these people high six figures to be useless. It is unpleasant to work with them (if you even notice they're there) because it makes your work seem pointless. If you asked the employees who the 20% were, I bet there would be consensus. They could be found and removed easily. It would also include plenty of managers and directors, it's not just leaf nodes who can be useless. But the big tech companies are absolutely terrified of being seen as talent-hostile by firing low performers. So instead they will "turn up the heat" and hope the problem solves itself. They will complain that their employees aren't working hard enough without giving them any reasons to work harder or removing any obstacles in their way. As leaders they should be ashamed for not owning and fixing this problem.
• lazyeye 4y ago
  Each of us is a 1 man company. And like any company our mission is to maximize profit as efficiently as we can (i.e minimize work).
• poxwole 4y ago
  Maybe start with reducing your salaries first
• xtat 4y ago
  The thought that meeting attendance is the measure of work is so beautifully corpo cringe tech. Honestly FAANG is looking more b-list every day.
  • xtat 4y ago
    Also how many employees does meta actually need? 1% of what they have currently? (70,000!)
• horns4lyfe 4y ago
  Looking through all those comments, why are so many tech workers crabs in a bucket? So many weirdos in here just dying to fire their co workers for the blasphemy of not giving 110% to their massive company.
• machiaweliczny 4y ago
  Aren’t these „issues”(revenue) simply caused by Apple limiting tacking for 3rd party?
• cannabis_sam 4y ago
  These CEOs are by definition not deserving of their exorbitant compensation. In an actually functioning market they would have been kicked to the curb, long long before making these kinds of embarrassing excuses for their incompetence. If the boards of such companies weren’t stuffed full of the same kind of absurdly entitled, overpaid and under-qualified executives, our capitalist system would be a lot less dysfunctional. Instead we get this wildy embarrassing neo-aristocracy.. Adam Smith warned us about this: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
• Zanneth 4y ago
  There is a huge problem with productivity at my company. Unfortunately too many people just took advantage of the flexible work arrangements offered by the response to the pandemic. What is even more frustrating is that people refuse to own up to it. Most of them pretend to be busy and overworked while conspicuously putting in the bare minimum every day. Remote work obviously has its advantages but I’m starting to believe that it is a privilege that should not be granted by default to the entire workforce. Perhaps it makes more sense to only grant it to exceptional employees who have already demonstrated significant value to the company.
• schlauerfox 4y ago
  This is pretty disgusting PR to try to spin what is clearly a systemic failure of business management at every level or other hidden motives of the planners of the business into blame for the worker who doesn't control the system nor what there assigned to do. It's disgusting reporters don't push back on this nonsense, but just parrot whatever press release they get.
• ikrenji 4y ago
  meh i doubt either pichai or zuckerberg has this right. both companies are making hand over fist money wise, not sure how complaining about worker productivity goes into that picture