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If that is (and had historically been) true, what is the article about then, or do you believe it's inaccurate? The whole thesis is that people are now being as

If that is (and had historically been) true, what is the article about then, or do you believe it's inaccurate? The whole thesis is that people are now being asked to be productive who were not previously held to productivity Edit: or do you mean that previously there was room for slackers as long as they didn't care about promotion, and the difference now is their jobs are at risk?

dekhn 4y ago
Google is an incredibly complicated situation. Yes, it's impact-driven. But many other variables affect how your impact is perceived. For amusing reasons, over the past decade, the number of people who can and want to work on the core parts of google3- the load balancer/front end/web server/search/ads- has been dropping. No CS grad wants to work on a 15 year old web server that is mostly patches to deal with odd cases and a million tests that fail if you look at a load bearing comment oddly. The dwindling pool of experts has seized the memes of production (ha) and has the ability to work less because they are absolutely needed. The best anecdote I ever heard from an SRE was "the VP was chagrined when I told them it didn't matter I was in a nerf war, because nothing was broken or needed to be fixed, but they still saw my point and let me continue" (I used to work in an SRE area that overlapped with an SVP's preferred meeting room so Susan Wojcicki was always getting pinged by a rogue nerf bullet). As for slackers? Sure, when I joined around 2008 there were definitely folks who were slacking off. in fact they got rid of sabbatical because so many people were taking it then coming back and quitting.
- dc-programmer 4y ago
  Going to have to steal “load bearing comment”
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  Nothing wrong with slacking off unless you have a real job as a firefighter or ER nurse.
  - gammarator 4y ago
    I once walked through a park on a fine spring day and saw an EMT team playing whiffleball using their stretcher as a backstop. Great way to wait for a call if you ask me.
    - Brian_K_White 4y ago
      Considering their low pay and high responsibility, I would never take away what little they have such as a little park time.
  - jkaplowitz 4y ago
    Even firefighters also sometimes slack off when they're not responding to a call, although the responsible ones do it in a way that allows them to go from slacking off to driving off in the fire truck in a ridiculously small number of minutes (like 2). As you say, nothing wrong with that.
riku_iki 4y ago
> or do you mean that previously there was room for slackers as long as they didn't care about promotion, and the difference now is their jobs are at risk? Yes, I think they collected lots of mediocre employees through the aggressive hiring. Also, some of them may be not productive by common metrics (say bugs closed, lines of code implemented), others are good at those metrics, but produce high quantity/low quality work, and make more damage than impact: systems are overengineered, buggy, etc. I think second type is likely makes companies suffer much more than first one, they are much harder to trace and fire.

dekhn 4y ago

Google is an incredibly complicated situation. Yes, it's impact-driven. But many other variables affect how your impact is perceived. For amusing reasons, over the past decade, the number of people who can and want to work on the core parts of google3- the load balancer/front end/web server/search/ads- has been dropping. No CS grad wants to work on a 15 year old web server that is mostly patches to deal with odd cases and a million tests that fail if you look at a load bearing comment oddly. The dwindling pool of experts has seized the memes of production (ha) and has the ability to work less because they are absolutely needed. The best anecdote I ever heard from an SRE was "the VP was chagrined when I told them it didn't matter I was in a nerf war, because nothing was broken or needed to be fixed, but they still saw my point and let me continue" (I used to work in an SRE area that overlapped with an SVP's preferred meeting room so Susan Wojcicki was always getting pinged by a rogue nerf bullet). As for slackers? Sure, when I joined around 2008 there were definitely folks who were slacking off. in fact they got rid of sabbatical because so many people were taking it then coming back and quitting.

dc-programmer 4y ago
Going to have to steal “load bearing comment”
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Nothing wrong with slacking off unless you have a real job as a firefighter or ER nurse.
- gammarator 4y ago
  I once walked through a park on a fine spring day and saw an EMT team playing whiffleball using their stretcher as a backstop. Great way to wait for a call if you ask me.
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    Considering their low pay and high responsibility, I would never take away what little they have such as a little park time.
- jkaplowitz 4y ago
  Even firefighters also sometimes slack off when they're not responding to a call, although the responsible ones do it in a way that allows them to go from slacking off to driving off in the fire truck in a ridiculously small number of minutes (like 2). As you say, nothing wrong with that.

riku_iki 4y ago

> or do you mean that previously there was room for slackers as long as they didn't care about promotion, and the difference now is their jobs are at risk? Yes, I think they collected lots of mediocre employees through the aggressive hiring. Also, some of them may be not productive by common metrics (say bugs closed, lines of code implemented), others are good at those metrics, but produce high quantity/low quality work, and make more damage than impact: systems are overengineered, buggy, etc. I think second type is likely makes companies suffer much more than first one, they are much harder to trace and fire.