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VC Says Half of Google Staff Do 'No Real Work'
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoI guess the problem is it’s hard to identify which half.
- etskinner 2y agoTitle doesn't reflect the article's title (emphasis mine): "Andreessen Horowitz investor says half of Google's white-collar staff probably do 'no real work'" Without "probably", it sounds like he has insider information and can say it as a fact. With "probably", it shows that this is an educated, yet falsifiable opinion.
- plorg 2y agoI would suggest that with "investor" and "probably" in the title it's more or less just the mumblings of a crank.
- s_dev 2y agoHow do we seperate that from for example the pareto principal where it may be the case that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people or a night security guard who works maybe 5% of the time and the rest is spent watching TV yet still an invaluable part of the company in terms of insurance box checking and PCI compliance etc. Seems like a common fallacy to just jump in like Elon Musk and start trimming out the perceived false jobs and end up with a company that is weaker than it was originally. I've no doubt the VC is has a case but it's a lot hairer than a simple sentence alludes to. I feel like I end up back where I started -- in that I simply don't know or lack the info to make that call -- many jobs could simply be redundant but redundancy isn't always a bad thing -- espeically in massive tech companies with staff leaving for greener pastures on a whim.
- pseudosavant 2y agoWhereas VC and private equity staff all "work"...
- nzzn 2y agoVC’s, hedge funds, etc. all run lean—none have 10k+ employees or anything close. Employees are under a much brighter spotlight by the owners all the time. Groups might lose focus for an interval but once they their score is down it’s goodbye & the score is P&L calculated in very short intervals.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> VC’s, hedge funds, etc. all run lean—none have 10k+ employees or anything close This describes none of the multi-fund behemoths, e.g. Andreessen, Sequoia, et cetera. They have an entire caste of VC associates whose productivity is measured by the number of meetings they take; they're literally professional time wasters.
- sudosysgen 2y agoNot 10k+, but a lot of leading hedge funds, especially tech focused ones, have 2-3k employees with a similar to lower revenue/employee to big tech. Doesn't seem to me that they run much leaner.
- ta1243 2y agoIt's a joke as old as time Q: How many people work at $large_org A: About half of them!
- bongoman37 2y ago[dead]
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- cdme 2y agoI imagine this guy doesn’t do much real work himself.
- bifrost 2y agoHe built OpenDNS and exited it, he was pretty technical when I met him. I suspect he doesn't have to work and does so anyways...
- dredmorbius 2y agoAs stated in 'graph 4 of TFA (reinforcing your point against OP's shallow dismissal).
- jebarker 2y agoPeople in glass houses...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tanx16 2y ago> "Another issue with all the 'BS' jobs in large corporations is that it takes profits away from shareholders who are most often the pensioners and retirement accounts of the rest of America," he said. "...they are also taking money away from the rest of the workforce's retirement programs." Oh no, think of the poor retired shareholders!
- 1234letshaveatw 2y agobecause old people don't matter?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- FredPret 2y agoThat's ... basically every old person and everyone with some savings. Even if you don't own Google stock (or even any stock) directly, you likely have exposure to it because it's in the S&P 500, which is used as foundational financial product in many contexts.
- hot_gril 2y agoTrue, but it's weird how many times he mentions retirement in particular.
- bdcravens 2y agoStockholders are the owners.
- hot_gril 2y agoYeah but stockholders aren't necessarily retired.
- FredPret 2y agoTrue but - everybody should have the opportunity to retire - that means they have to save & invest - that means corporations have a moral duty to do their best - if an old person entrusted my company with the financial results of their life's work, I'd feel a lot of pressure to make good on the implied promise that I won't just take the money and put my feet up
- boringg 2y agoBusiness insider bringing high quality journalism.
- RankingMember 2y agoreally angling for those rage-clicks
- IvyMike 2y agoPutting together a promo packet is hard work!
- MattGaiser 2y ago> The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade Isn’t Google pretty open that it doesn’t expect most of these to succeed? This statement has “shut down the R&D as it doesn’t make money” vibes.
- pfdietz 2y agoIt's the "when you look for things, look where they are". A stunning approach to R&D. Maybe Google needs to invest in crystal balls?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hot_gril 2y agoIf you mean the moonshots, Google killed most of them and hasn't announced new ones. I do think Google was mistaken that it could detach parts of itself to act like startups. Too much red tape and not enough grit. What bothers me more is how they fumbled repeatedly on conventional projects like chat apps.
- newfocogi 2y agoCommunication costs scale super-linearly with organization size, as does the cost of mistakes. I think a twitter warrior saying some portion of a massive company's engineers 'Do No Real Work' is just a lazy way to get headlines. Throwing shade at the issue isn't novel, but solving it is really, really hard.
- dredmorbius 2y agoKey theme of Geoffrey West's Scale: <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/314049/scale-by-geoffrey-west/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/314049/scale-by-geo...>
- adonovan 2y agoThis attitude is why private equity is destroying US companies. The hubris and ignorance of investors routinely gets translated into a cull of workers whose jobs they don't understand, leaving behind "lean" organizations that retain only whatever bits are currently most profitable but are less functional, resilient, sustainable, and humane.
- FredPret 2y agoInvestors routinely make big mistakes, but they also routinely get wiped out and replaced by someone with a more long-term vision. Think how much money all the day-traders put together make (probably less than zero) versus someone like Warren Buffett (a lot more than zero!), or the many successful owner-operated or founder-owned companies out there.
- falcor84 2y agoI would agree, except for the fact that I read Graeber's Bullshit Jobs and was quite convinced by his research showing that anything between 15-50% of employees across many surveys believe that their role is useless.
- jvanderbot 2y agoYou can believe your role is useless and be wrong. It may be that the processes were grown in a time when the needs were different, and hopefully those needs were for a worse version of today - a kind of bad situation that might just come back around again. A system in which every resource is 100% utilized has no slack or adaptability.
- bdcravens 2y agoPerhaps, but how many Assistant Directors of Tech Conference Swag Acquisition is too many?
- hot_gril 2y agoThere was a real industry-wide hiring glut leading up to this. Once the market changed, a lot of companies had more people than they knew what to do with.
- hot_gril 2y ago"Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment" Hah, who exactly did they contact at Google to ask if half their staff are doing nothing useful?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- _fw 2y agoThe ideological bullshit here is hilarious. We have a VC here whining that a business with one of the most exceptional margins in modern capitalism is… not returning enough to shareholders? And those pesky workers are to blame? The buck here stops with management. If the people with power in your organisation are powerless to ship features, innovation and value… aren’t they the problem? Get leadership that works. Hire a board that knows how to innovate. 95% of VC knob-ends do no real work. They spend other people’s money on other people’s businesses and help themselves to profits other people have generated. Google probably is too big, but don’t blame Jane from Legal or Deepak from Accounts
- ranger_danger 2y ago> They spend other people’s money on other people’s businesses and help themselves to profits other people have generated I mean this is quite common even without VC involved... the only thing is you have to make sure to spend that money on the _right_ other businesses to get things done properly.
- numeromancer 2y agoWhenever you extrapolate the "corporate vision" of these VC pontificators, you see a company all of whose revenue goes to investor share-grabbers, and whose projects are all funded by employees who are paid nothing.
- RankingMember 2y agoTake a look in the mirror, guy
- gresrun 2y ago"Rich asshole makes demeaning comments about situations they don't know" More at 11. Seriously though, how out-of-touch do you have to be to think that entire organizations full of smart people are so incompetent as to have 100% bloat? Could you lay off 50% of Google today and still have a functional, competitive product tomorrow? Yes. Would you still have a functional, competitive product in 2 years? No. Engineers are building and maintaining the product, SREs are keeping the jobs, servers and infrastructure humming, sales is bringing in new clients and keep existing clients happy, marketing is... OK maybe Google does need a marketing overhaul... Deep cuts will also signal to employees and competitors that blood is in the water. Any remaining loyalty would evaporate and MSFT, AAPL, AMZN, & META would all be eager to scoop up that talent to build competing products to Google Search & Ads and bolster their cloud & AI offerings. Disclosure: Google employee
- bdcravens 2y agoHow much does the Google+ or Stadia codebase contribute to today's product?
- qaq 2y agoWell most VCs loose money ...
- TideAd 2y ago> "I don't think it's crazy to believe that half the white-collar staff at Google probably does no real work," he said. "The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade, and all that money could have been returned to shareholders who have retirement accounts." So, he doesn't really understand Google's dysfunction and is just guessing at the causes?
- sharpshadow 2y agoIt’s like the famous quote:“Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” In my opinion the money is better placed in the pockets of workers not investors.
- srj 2y agoYeah for all the possible criticism of Google he's seriously arguing it's that there's too much speculative R&D? Generally companies become irrelevant by trying to hold onto their cash cow and not trying to reinvent / find new revenue streams. I can think of ways I would have approached some specific instances differently (e.g Waymo), but the existence of speculative projects isn't evidence of waste. The specific callout of retirement accounts is strange too. I'm sure many institutional investors are backed by 401ks but is that actually representative? As a wealthy investor I'm guessing he's thinking more about himself and his dividend than other's retirement accounts.
- horns4lyfe 2y agoYa, the retirement account thing sounds to me like a lame attempt to justify his logic “for the people” or something, when his whole premise is that Google could have made a few rich people richer. I’ve honestly never hated a VC more
- roncesvalles 2y ago>The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade Also, the supreme irony of a VC saying this.
- ranger_danger 2y agoOne time I saw a high-paid google engineer stocking a fridge in the hallway with drinks and snacks. A nearby office with accountants in it also saw this, and when I mentioned it they took it upon themselves to calculate exactly how much money it was costing the company for him to do that. It was $250/hr.
- dredmorbius 2y agoThinking doesn't occur solely at one's workstation / laptop. Meditative physical operations can be conducive to thinking through problems.
- dt3ft 2y agoPure ragebait. Ignore this clown VC and move on.
- bdcravens 2y agoI know this is an against the grain (for HN at least) take, but I don't disagree. If you're not working on, or supporting, the company's product, you MAY have a BS job. Good example: Twitter, which functioned well after layoffs of 80% or so (the owner's persona has damaged the revenue and reputation extensively, but the product itself has been fine). They're maybe the boldest, but hardly the only company in the past couple of years to do mass layoffs and not collapse at the core. With Google of course, many projects are at some point considered core, to be dismissed later, so the line between "product" and "BS" is blurry and changing.
- tech_ken 2y agoAnecdotal-ish evidence but it does not seem like Twitter is functioning nearly as well as it used to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search/?q=broken&sort=relevance&restrict_sr=on&t=year https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search/?q=broken&sort=relev...
- bdcravens 2y agoPossibly but couldn't that be attributed to confirmation bias? It's not like Twitter was bug-free when they were still 7500 employees strong.
- tech_ken 2y agoYeah sure, as I said it’s basically anecdotal data nothing I would say perfectly proves any particular point. Still it’s more evidence than the original comment provided to support their statement
- ltdanimal 2y agoThe Twitter example is the exact nearsighted reason a lot of comments like the one we're all talking about come up. A lot of smart people spent years trying to make a resilient system and then everyone claims they aren't needed when it doesn't immediately crumble. There are also many examples of huge gaps in content moderation, customer reps, and other "useless" functions that has lead to it's decay other than just it's unhinged CEO. Twitter swallowed a poison pill, and we're just seeing some of the onset of sickness.
- jvanderbot 2y agoThere's a few types of "non workers" I've encountered, that for all extents and purposes are worthless .... until they very much aren't. 1. "former" engineers and non-specialists - they tend to sit in meetings, try to sound important, pontificate about "better ways" but never seem to do real work. Then when SHTF they seem to have all the knowledge to make the problem go away super fast. Maybe SHTF never happens to you. 2. Middle managers and HR abstraction layers - again, more meetings, demanding reports, passing down all this make-work, etc etc. Then when an audit, leadership change, layoff, or program collapse happens, they magically have all the context in mind to pivot the team into a new area so they aren't butchered. 3. Project management / systems engineers. My god do they cause headaches with their overly-complicated, under-knowledgeable "designs" and cross-functional requirements. And they'll sit in standups / scrums without any contributions and just nod along half the time. Or worse, they'll pass along 3rd party statements of what the system should do from "product" that make no sense, get feedback, dissapear, and repeat. Then you realize that your execs, investors, and customers are seeing a totally different view of the system, and thank god you don't have to try to talk to those troublemakers. Over the last 10 years I've realized a lot of the bullshit jobs that you can do without - you probably could, until you can't. "Cut the fat" is a great corporate euphemism, but the biological analogy fails if there's a corporate version of "famine". Let's be honest, if we're judging people by tangible improvements, process cranking, or institutional knowledge, the most valuable people are the admins, not even the engineers. Half the time an engineer is sitting around thinking or drinking all the coffee.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoThey're very much like firefighters. Firefighters spend the vast majority of their working hours either literally doing nothing or else doing somewhat pointless make work, like washing the fire truck. If your firefighters are spending more than ~10% of their time doing their actual job, then the odds of them needing to be in two places at once reaches unacceptable levels. Old fashioned secretaries are similar, if less extreme. An executive secretary's main job is not to do secretarial work, but to be available at a moment's notice. If they're busy, they're not generally available.
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- dimask 2y agoA VC calling out BS jobs in big tech, oh the irony.
- tech_ken 2y agoThings going well: all these engineers are just wasting salary dollars and not contributing anything, layoffs for everyone! Things going badly: all these engineers are incompetent and just wasting salary dollars, layoffs for everyone! Now where's my 7 figure consulting fee...
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> all these engineers I doubt they're referring to engineers.
- tech_ken 2y agoSure feel free to swap in whatever job role you like, my main point is that I’d rather hear an analysis from someone embedded in the problem space than from someone whose ‘job’ is to squeeze profit off other people’s work. I’m sure there are a few decent and prudent managers of giant capital stacks, but honestly at this guy’s level of removal from the realities of building literally anything I am extremely skeptical of any advice he has to offer outside of recommending me an expensive restaurant or a nice resort somewhere.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> I’d rather hear an analysis from someone embedded in the problem space than from someone whose ‘job’ is to squeeze profit off other people’s work Everyone believes someone else is squeezing off their work. In tech, I've heard it from founders and sales about engineers; engineers about everyone else, including every other engineer; the person who keeps the shitshow of a culture hanging by a thread; the lawyers who keeps the company from being fined into oblivion; et cetera. If there is a summary to draw from it, it's that the uselessness is probably concentrated in the person complaining and doing nothing about it (whether due to impulse or ability).
- tech_ken 2y ago> it's that the uselessness is probably concentrated in the person complaining and doing nothing about it So basically this PE guy?
- dtjb 2y agoa16z has halved their yearly rate of investor-led rounds. Are half of their 150 partners still doing "real work?" Of course it would be silly for an outsider without any real knowledge of their complex operations to hazard such a guess.
- paulpauper 2y agoIt's not so much they are paid to work, they are paid to be available. When something goes wrong, you need someone to fix it ASAP.
- hindsightbias 2y agoWhat percentage of goggle engineers are: - Maintaining old stuff - Rewriting old stuff - Writing new stuff You can't do w/o most of the first, most of the second is a waste, and maybe a quarter of the last is worthwhile. I've always had the feeling google isn't filled with a lot of the first, as it's just not cool.
- TideAd 2y agoFrom everything I've heard it's less "not cool" and more "not valued by the Google promotion and advancement system".
- fitsumbelay 2y agowelp, made me look in other words, am not surprised by a vc -- let alone an Andreesen adjacent -- uttering thusly on any given bait-thirsty "news" site, bizz-nuss or otherwise?
- bifrost 2y agoI've heard this from a lot of ex googlers, its not a huge surprise. Google hired a bunch of people to keep them out of the hands of others. Those people now sit around and write papers on useless topics...
- johnea 2y agoPretty funny coming from an industry where no one does any real work...
- longdustytrail 2y agoI think there’s a distinction to be made between people who are working on stuff that doesn’t end up providing any benefit to the company to the company and people who are straight up not burning any calories. When I worked in big tech, I spent a lot of time working on stuff that didn’t ship, or shipped but never got traction, which ended up providing no benefit to the company. This is IMO largely the responsibility of management, although there’s certainly an idea that line workers have a responsibility to find impactful projects/teams to work on.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoAdvertising-supported nerds using the media to attack each other. The person making this coment about "BS jobs" is the one who started EasyDNS and OpenDNS and tried to compete with the pre-Chrome "Google toolbar" and later Chrome and eventually the "omnibox" for the privilege of injecting ads into the "user experience", and/or collecting data to support ad services. Google, with its control over being "default search engine", through any means possible (e.g., bribe/payola, etc.), felt threatened by OpenDNS and claimed OpenDNS was "intercepting Google queries" (because users involuntarily "chose" to send them to Google?) This is what lead to "Google Public DNS". It's another case of two companies fighting over who gets to annoy computer users with ads. Two companies that wanted to hijack NXDOMAIN for profit. Verisign had earlier tried it at the registry level. Thought experiment: What if all "jobs" that aim to annoy computer users with ads, and provide "services" to do that, are BS. What if VC that fund these surveillance companies are BS, too. What does the computer user not funded by advertising and doing real work think of Google staff. https://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/ietf/verisign-abuse.html https://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/ietf/verisign-abuse.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_toolbar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_toolbar https://www.wired.com/2008/02/webmasters-accuse-the-google-toolbar-of-hijacking-error-pages/ https://www.wired.com/2008/02/webmasters-accuse-the-google-t... https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2007/05/google-stashing-adware-dell-systems-says-opendns-founder https://www.virusbulletin.com/blog/2007/05/google-stashing-a... https://www.computerworld.com/article/1566104/google-dell-browser-tool-spyware-charges-opendns-founder.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/1566104/google-dell-br... http://umbrella.cisco.com/blog/opendns-google-dns http://umbrella.cisco.com/blog/opendns-google-dns https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974876 http://blog.opendns.com:80/2009/12/03/opendns-google-dns http://blog.opendns.com:80/2009/12/03/opendns-google-dns
- StuntPope 2y agoeasyDNS and OpenDNS have completely different founders. You are probably confused with EveryDNS - was founded by the same person who started OpenDNS.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
- e_y_ 2y agoIf engineers are doing fake work, it's because managers are doing fake managing. Engineers generally like to work on meaningful projects. Sometimes we do get sidetracked on pet projects like building a better database design or whatnot, but the time spent on things like that pales in comparison to the scale of pet projects imposed from above. Or projects, or entire product divisions, that were just badly researched, badly planned, and never should have been signed off in the first place.