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This post seems kind of naive? A big part of why big tech companies need so many people is because any big company, especially one sitting on piles of money, b
by rippercushions 4y ago
This post seems kind of naive? A big part of why big tech companies need so many people is because any big company, especially one sitting on piles of money, becomes a target for all sorts of predators and has to defend itself. So it has to have armies of SOX compliance officers (because it's still cheaper than getting sued by the SEC), travel expense auditors (because it's still cheaper than shareholder suits after a VP whoops it up in Vegas and sends the bill to the company), mandatory diversity training educators (because it's still cheaper than getting sued by various minorities), patent litigation departments (because it's still cheaper than losing to patent trolls) etc etc, all of which feel like "bullshit jobs" to the average 3-man startup because the average 3-man startup doesn't face any of these problems.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoFinally! A brave champion for the poor beleaguered corporations!
- richwater 4y ago[flagged]
- tdeck 4y agoWhat percentage of a big company do you think falls into these categories? The idea that "mandatory diversity training educators" or "travel expenses audiotrs" are anything but a drop in the bucket is laughable. Also, often roles like these are farmed out to vendors and aren't actually staffed by company employees at all.
- chasd00 4y agoThe diversity training and other efforts like that are definitely a thing. my referral bonus for getting a POC hired to a peer position is 5 figures ( and it doesn't start with a '1'). It's taken pretty seriously at big companies.
- junofan 4y agoGoogle literally has a C-level Chief Diversity Officer. Her LinkedIn claims an org size of 130+.
- Octoth0rpe 4y agoAnd at google's size, that's a drop in the bucket.
- threeseed 4y agoAnd her role is: Lead the Employee Engagement Organization which is a global team of 130+ googlers who are responsible for driving large-scale impact across Diversity, Equity & Inclusion programs; Employee Relations; and Compliance, Integrity & Governance. So far more than just specifically diversity all for a company of 200,000+ people. i.e. 0.065% of the total workforce.
- trieste92 4y ago130 × 250k = 32.5 million I'd be surprised if this "drop in the bucket" was anything more than a sunk cost
- red-iron-pine 4y agoThere is no way that many or even most of them are getting anywhere near $250k per annum. Even living in the bay area -- which many of them might not be. GOOG has offices in Austin, Calgary, and Nashville, for example.
- tdeck 4y agoBut that's not what this thread is about, it's about why the companies have so many employees. These 130 jobs that so many people want to complain about don't even begin to have relevance to why there are 190,000 people at Google.
- mschuster91 4y agoAnd at the scale of what Google is doing and just how much impact even seemingly trivial changes can have on millions if not billions of people, taking care of diversity is actually important. Just imagine something as small as a change in color in a website element - 8% of men and so 4% of the global population are color blind. That's 320 million people potentially affected. A copy text that requires more than 4th grade literacy skills in English to grasp? Like half of Americans, 165 million people, potentially affected. An illustration graphic using cows as an example for whatever? A potential offense to a billion of Hindu Indians. And the list goes on and on and on. With Google holding ~85% of the global market share in search or 2.5 billion MAUs for Youtube, taking care about diversity is not even close to optional - it's foundational to make sure the company doesn't get into any sort of trouble.
- threeseed 4y agoThis comment is like a Fox News parody of what tech companies are like. I've worked for a few and there definitely wasn't 1000s of people in the Legal & Compliance departments constantly getting sued and harassing managers and engineers about travel expenses or diversity training. Instead, it is the exact same problems you see at every large company i.e. excess of middle managers each trying to grow their own fiefdom and duplicating capabilities across the organisation. Or it's too many poorly conceived and managed product and R&D adventures.
- jameshart 4y agoThe thing about being a large company in an innovative industry is that the optimal number of “poorly conceived and managed product and R&D adventures” you need to run is not zero. Certainly it’s possible to run too many of them, but if you are overindexing on perfect vetting and execution of every idea you might not be running enough.
- logifail 4y ago> excess of middle managers [and/or] too many poorly conceived and managed product and R&D adventures My OH works for a big multinational, has had a variety of roles, at a variety of locations, and despite the fact that she's not in tech you've still managed to summarise pretty much every single conversation I've had with her about her work over the last 20+ years.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ethanbond 4y agoUgh, it’s so much simpler than that. Everyone’s number one objective in any company is to make their individual life easier. Full stop. The most obvious way to do that, if you have the ability/budget, is to hire people to do your work for you. Then you can brag about managing higher headcount, you do less work, and you flounder around as a very bad manager with no accountability so long as you keep your workload below the level of your manager (who, remember, hired you just to remove work from their own plate). Now remember that everyone you hired has the exact same incentive. It keeps going til the money runs out or until the company buckles under its own organizational complexity.
- killingtime74 4y agoI feel like you tried to describe it as a negative but that is called delegation and the trait of a good manager. Of course it's a spectrum and there are negatives and positives but the concept itself is not bad.
- ethanbond 4y agoIt's not intrinsically negative, but IMO it's a far more powerful and far more prevalent force than the countervailing forces in most tech orgs.
- deepsquirrelnet 4y agoIt is simpler, but not for the reasons you describe. The issue is that once you have layers of middle managers - as in managers managing managers, a snake pit ensues. Nobody gets into middle management and says “ahh at last, I’ve arrived”. The goal is to amass influence and push up as quickly as possible to try and reach the executive level. From here, it becomes a very political situation, rife with corporate climbers try to push each other down into the mud to reach upward. One way to appear influential is to manage a large team of people. Your main goal is to pull headcount for your org chart, while your peers are also trying to do the same. So you invent ridiculous “strategies” with inflated headcount requirements and promise astronomical results. It all stems from the personal ambitions of the people in the middle. And of course, they’re usually the most out of touch with the real operations of the company because they’re only peripherally connected to any actual work as a distant connection in the telephone game.
- jimbokun 4y agoAt the same time, those are all reasons large corporations could be vulnerable to a 3 person startup.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- HillRat 4y agoBoth are equally true: big tech companies have big tech problems and big company problems, both of which tend to require big expenditures to deal with. And let’s not forget all the folks you need for sales, marketing, finance/accounting/treasury, legal and audit, logistics, manufacturing, trust and safety, customer service, civic affairs, shareholder relations … the list goes on and on. Companies are vast empires, and even from 10,000 feet up it’s hard to track everything being done.
- vdchuyen 4y ago[dead]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bambax 4y agoPerhaps, but none of the things you mention are engineers' positions; the OP is talking about SWE jobs, not auditors or diversity educators.