6 ms·
Google over-hired talent to do ‘fake work’, claims Keith Rabois
- na2200 4y agoKeith Rabois? Sexual harasser Keith Rabois? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/26/keith-rabois-square-resigns_n_2559017.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/26/keith-rabois-square... Founder of effectively bankrupt OpenDoor Keith Rabois? https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/open/advanced-charting https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/open/advanced-...
- EdwardDiego 4y agoWow, that Marc Andreessen quote is incredibly obnoxious, especially given how much money his firm has thrown into an entirely useless industry.
- jmeister 4y agoUseless maybe, but still new and constructive. The laptop class he derides is mostly nihilistic and destructive. At the absolute worst he facilitated the transfer of funds from wealthy investors to crypto programmers?
- malermeister 4y agoHe is the laptop class, just richer and more useless. You think that guy builds anything with his hands? He's even more removed from anything useful being done, he's not even the one doing stuff on a screen, he uses his screen to tell other people to do stuff on their screens. Real rich having that complaint come from him of all people
- pkdpic 4y agoYeah that was embarrassingly out of touch seeming.
- gisely 4y agoYes such useful and constructive new ways organize Ponzi schemes. Andreessen is a member of the laptop class himself, just one of the most grating ones. Seems to think telling other people to build makes him a builder. YIMBY in his tweets, NIMBY in his streets.
- swyx 4y ago> an entirely useless industry synbio? green tech? crypto? adam neumann? you're gonna have to be more specific
- skrebbel 4y agoI love (and agree) that Adam Neumann is an industry.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y agoMore about Andreesen. Yes, he is investing in the WeWork idiot's latest project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GWIR3h2twI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GWIR3h2twI
- davoneus 4y agoAnyone who presides what Musk had done at Twitter is obviously either a Musk-can-do-no-wrong acolyte, or an ignoramus who's out of touch. I'd bet the former, if for no other reason than pity.
- benjaminwootton 4y agoI dislike Elon Musk, but apart from a few stability glitches the product seems fine and product delivery seems to be moving faster than it has in years. I know everyone is waiting for it to crash, and you may be right, but so far, stripping (hundreds of?) millions of cost out of the business seems to be have been a good strategy from a technical perspective at least.
- random314 4y agoOnly need about 20% of the engineers are dedicated to keeping services running in any tech company. The other 80% are focused on new product features, growing revenue, growing engagement, growing new user signups, l blocking bad actors and legal compliance.
- csande17 4y agoHaving worked in a "growing engagement" role at a big company, I'd say it's more accurate to describe it as "running no-op experiments over and over until the A/B testing tool tells you one had a 'statistically significant' result". It seemed to me like the exact kind of make-work Musk fans criticize. Axing all of those roles could make it easier to ship valuable user-visible features, since the remaining engineers wouldn't have to work around feature flags for fifty ongoing experiments.
- random314 4y agoLet's not project your role at Company X onto Twitter. Especially, given that neither of us have worked at Twitter X.0
- zpeti 4y ago
- 29athrowaway 4y agoIs Fuchsia fake work?
- olliej 4y agoAccording to folk like this: yes. It does sadly look like fuchsia seems to have been a victim of google's culling of talented engineers :-/ (disclosure: I did work on fuchsia briefly and the engineers working on it were all incredibly talented and very hard working) Anything that isn't immediately profitable is fake work, anything that fails to work out means that it was also fake work.
- jfim 4y agoIt's more that there doesn't seem to be any kind of synergy between Fuschia and Google's business of selling ads, hence the fake work label. If Google tried to launch a FM radio ad business and it flopped, it would be at least related to their core business.
- scaramanga 4y agoNow we're just dunking on people who think the purpose of the economy is (ought to be) to connect idle hands with needed work? Instead, we're lamenting that a company should "at least be trying" to pump more sewage into the river we all drink from. What a sad state of affairs :)
- olliej 4y agoThe goal of fuchsia is/was to create a better platform for future products - a lot of engineering goes into securing the linux base of android which is not free. There was also talk about being "better at modern hardware", "lighter weight", etc ideas but I generally feel that claims like that from any software/platform are questionable: they're not really measurable, and what is "good" could easily be different in a generation or two of hardware/software changes. The more robust security basis for the platform is a much stronger claim, and remains true as hardware and software change around it. E.g. we can improve the security of a platform by adding CHERI say, and that improves the security of a linux+android based system, but fuchsia would also get those wins on top of the existing more secure basis - the gap may be reduced but fuchsia stays ahead. So the goal is to create a platform that is more profitable in the long term, so not "fake work". It would appear that Google decided that there has not been sufficient evidence of success to warrant any further investment, but that does not mean it is "fake work". Such a definition of "fake work" would mean that any project that you should never do or attempt anything if you do not have guaranteed success. Note: Google's business model is ads. Android exists for the purpose of selling ads. The long term goal of fuchsia under this model would be a cost reduction in the maintenance of some android style product (whether it would still be branded android shrug). That's the business argument for fuchsia, and it would appear that google has decided that it doesn't think the end result is likely to warrant the cost of getting there. I think that's a shame, and I feel bad for my former coworkers, but I can't say "companies should be required to continue developing projects forever, even if it appears they won't succeed in their goals" because that would also be dumb :-/
- paxys 4y agoI was with him until "[Musk's] axing of half the Twitter team since his takeover in October should provide inspiration to other tech bosses". While yes it is likely true that Google and other tech companies have excess staff, there is a right way to handle that situation so it doesn't adversely affect the business, and what Elon did is not it. Twitter's problem was cash flow and avoiding getting margin called amid falling ad revenue, high expenses and interest payment obligations, all related to Elon's buyout. They needed to stop the bleeding, and fast. Large tech corps are meanwhile sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in their bank account and posting profits of tens of billions every quarter. It would be idiotic to further disrupt their operations for no reason. Should Google do more rounds of layoffs, kill employee morale, increase overwork and burnout, shut innovative businesses, send talent to competition and significantly weaken the company's long-term prospects, all for a few hundred million in payroll savings that will go towards stock buybacks? The sad part is that the activist investor class will reply with a resounding – yes.
- unxdfa 4y agoI’m fine with the tech layoffs and “Musk being right” movement. Mostly because it has generated a large shitlist of companies I will never work for, will never invest in and will never integrate with or recommend.
- latency-guy2 4y agoThat's a weird form of investment strategy, what is your yearly returns looking like?
- unxdfa 4y agoPretty good so far. I put it all into property and ETFs and beat any market investment I would have made. Not investing in a toxic and volatile shit show is a good investment strategy. My father threw a lot of money into Tesla and is breaking even. His entire life is consumed with "oh shit what did Musk say now"
- 4y ago
- politician 4y agoSpeaking of fake work, didn't Meta recently cancel the metaverse?
- rejectfinite 4y agoI love that the tech tiktok women are getting fired.
- quest88 4y agoWhat about the tech TikTok men
- rejectfinite 4y agoBecause they dont do shit like this? https://streamable.com/7czsxd https://streamable.com/7czsxd Yea we slack off but nothing like this. So happy seeing this lmaao
- scaramanga 4y agoThe downside, Rabois said, was that the new hires just had to "be entitled, sit at their desks, and do nothing." "There's nothing for these people to do —it's all fake work. Now that's being exposed, what do these people actually do, they go to meetings." I think I see the problem, workers are taking over tasks traditionally reserved for middle and upper management: entitlement, desk-sitting, inane meetings, LARPing as people who have real work to do. The difference being that for people with actual talent, the state of affairs is intolerable. So you have to wonder what kind of efforts management were exerting to prevent these capable hands from being set to necessary work (of which there is plenty). Then again, if you've ever worked in the tech industry, you needn't spend too long wondering since your own experiences will furnish you with more examples than you would want to enumerate, lol.
- anuraaga 4y agoI would be very surprised if anyone at these companies go to their desk to just do nothing. Less productive than should be, sure, but doing nothing would cause general revolts from people that do something (of course there are people that do something, innovative or not new features come and general uptime is held). It's basically impossible to both have an entitled tech elite but also members that don't work among them unless 100% are not working.
- scaramanga 4y agoYeah my experience is people who have nothing contribute tend to make frenzied efforts to LARP as people who do something. Often creating needless busy work for others, or creating constant messes for others to deal with. Usually those people are at least in middle management, if not in upper management, so when people are trying to fix or ameliorate the damage they've done, they can't even stand up and say that that's what they're doing for fear of offending these peoples fragile egos. Alternatively, if the culprits are not in management, then management has hired them, but simply may not willing to admit they made a hiring mistake so will deal with any information from subordinates as simple personality issues for the employees to solve themselves. As a result, the people that work have to take on themselves an additional unpaid responsibility the actual restorative work or, at the very least, the emotional labour of pretending the mess being cleaned up wasn't made by someone, and just fell out of the sky. This leads to a syndrome called "burnout" and "staff turnover" far more often than it leads to "open revolt". You can't have an open revolt of one (that's just called "a mad shouty fucker who can't hack it"). And you can't come together with others to revolt if you're unsure to what extent people have internalized the state of affairs as being their own fault, or at least, being something that is not okay to be discussed (either for fear of retaliation, or they've internalized the notion that it's an unsolvable personality conflict and the done thing is to be polite).
- vvrm 4y agoThe problem with over-hiring is not that there's a lot of people doing nothing. The problem is that there's a lot of people who need to do something to write in their annual reviews. Since there's only so many useful things to do, people start doing non-useful things e.g. over-engineering simple things. These non-useful things then slow down the development of useful things by 1. Creating needless technical complexity. 2. Creating needless compatibility issues. 3. Distracting the focus. So over-hiring isn't just a waste of money (which G has plenty of), it is also a waste of time (which G can't afford with competitors, like ChatGPT, breathing down it's neck). Hiring 2X more people is not going to result in 2X more value creation, but laying off half the staff is not going to 2X the productivity either.
- freefaler 4y agoIt's not only in companies, the same logic works for any bureaucracies. Examples such as overregulation in EU or large universities bodes well for this argument.
- scaramanga 4y agoWashed up failed entrepreneur who hired boyfriend into a quid-pro-quo job and then accused by him of sexual harassment before being forced to resign says: "other companies are making bad hiring choices." in bid for relevance. -- Yahoo (all the news that's shit to print)
- Adriel5654 4y ago[dead]