4 ms·

You underestimate how sclerotic large corporations can be. I've seen people do zero work, quite visibly, at fortune 500s and not be fired for over a year.

locknitpicker 9mo ago
> You underestimate how sclerotic large corporations can be. I've seen people do zero work (...) This is the very first time I saw anyone with a straight face talking about Amazon workers and mentioning "people do zero work, quite visible".
- scottLobster 9mo ago
  To be fair I've never worked at Amazon, but at this point they have 1.6 million employees worldwide. I don't care what their hiring brochures say, if you think they don't suffer the same ailments as every corporation that size I have a bridge to sell you. Certain sectors are high performing centers of excellence whose staff write blog posts that get posted to HN, publish papers, get put on the covers of hiring media and give speeches. The majority of the company is somewhere in the middle holding down their relatively uneventful but important functions, and probably a larger chunk than Corporate leadership would like to acknowledge are deadweight hiding in the cracks.
  - Apocryphon 9mo ago
    The comment was likely less about positive corporate spin, more about rumors of Amazon's allegedly grueling, PIP-centered culture.
    - scottLobster 9mo ago
      Yeah, if that culture is actually widespread I imagine their deadweight is more the variety that's figured out how to game the system or has connections, rather than the "I'm going to do literally no work and watch youtube all day" varieties that I've witnessed.
SoftTalker 9mo ago
There are people at my office who haven't really done anything since March 2020 when we all got sent home. They probably weren't doing anything before then either, but at least they were there eight hours a day.
- ryandrake 9mo ago
  I've never understood this meme. Maybe I'm naive, but why would a company hire someone to "not do anything?" How would they stay employed if their performance review showed they "weren't doing anything?" Everyone around me is busy doing 3x the amount of work they can sustain because we're so short staffed. Where are these companies that have people just sitting there picking their nose watching YouTube? I've never really seen this either in BigTech or MediumTech companies. Maybe these employees are actually doing things--just things you don't see or appreciate?
  - elzbardico 9mo ago
    This is really complicated in big companies.
    - SoftTalker 9mo ago
      Yep especially where the number of reports on an org chart matters to a Director or AVP.
  - browningstreet 9mo ago
    To defend ICs against middle management a bit: a lot of IC work is dependent on decisions that need to be made by upper level managers. A 2 week contiguous workstream can take 2+ years easy once a few managers ask a few questions and need 10-20 meetings to get 5 bullet points clarified (so many projects can't even produce that). But if that person gets replaced their institutional knowledge and work readiness evaporates. I've been on 10+ projects at big companies and have begged to do work. Mostly it was showing up to 3-5 meetings/week while managers try and figure things out, and their VPs reconfigure budgets, priorities, and resources. Sometimes I do the work and hold it until someone wants it. There's usually no standard top-down view about what happens when 3 VPs change the scope on 5 projects. But in reality, that usually means 10-30 people downstream are paralyzed. This is also where the tension between "new work" and "scalable processes" comes into play (need a consultant?). Add regulatory compliance and approval gates, and then..
whatever1 9mo ago
I don't know your particular examples but likely your assessment is biased. We always tend to think that others have it easier than us, as we do not have the full picture.
- scottLobster 9mo ago
  Of course it's biased. I'm just saying I find it quite believable that some program was funded 5 years ago under different financial conditions and has remained funded until now despite no longer being viable. People generally don't like losing their jobs, and will put a positive spin on every report that might be good enough to pass muster with middle management bureaucracy at a large firm. All it takes is for enough people in the chain of command to shrug, sign whatever docs are needed and move onto something they care about more.

locknitpicker 9mo ago

> You underestimate how sclerotic large corporations can be. I've seen people do zero work (...) This is the very first time I saw anyone with a straight face talking about Amazon workers and mentioning "people do zero work, quite visible".

scottLobster 9mo ago
To be fair I've never worked at Amazon, but at this point they have 1.6 million employees worldwide. I don't care what their hiring brochures say, if you think they don't suffer the same ailments as every corporation that size I have a bridge to sell you. Certain sectors are high performing centers of excellence whose staff write blog posts that get posted to HN, publish papers, get put on the covers of hiring media and give speeches. The majority of the company is somewhere in the middle holding down their relatively uneventful but important functions, and probably a larger chunk than Corporate leadership would like to acknowledge are deadweight hiding in the cracks.
- Apocryphon 9mo ago
  The comment was likely less about positive corporate spin, more about rumors of Amazon's allegedly grueling, PIP-centered culture.
  - scottLobster 9mo ago
    Yeah, if that culture is actually widespread I imagine their deadweight is more the variety that's figured out how to game the system or has connections, rather than the "I'm going to do literally no work and watch youtube all day" varieties that I've witnessed.

SoftTalker 9mo ago

There are people at my office who haven't really done anything since March 2020 when we all got sent home. They probably weren't doing anything before then either, but at least they were there eight hours a day.

ryandrake 9mo ago
I've never understood this meme. Maybe I'm naive, but why would a company hire someone to "not do anything?" How would they stay employed if their performance review showed they "weren't doing anything?" Everyone around me is busy doing 3x the amount of work they can sustain because we're so short staffed. Where are these companies that have people just sitting there picking their nose watching YouTube? I've never really seen this either in BigTech or MediumTech companies. Maybe these employees are actually doing things--just things you don't see or appreciate?
- elzbardico 9mo ago
  This is really complicated in big companies.
  - SoftTalker 9mo ago
    Yep especially where the number of reports on an org chart matters to a Director or AVP.
- browningstreet 9mo ago
  To defend ICs against middle management a bit: a lot of IC work is dependent on decisions that need to be made by upper level managers. A 2 week contiguous workstream can take 2+ years easy once a few managers ask a few questions and need 10-20 meetings to get 5 bullet points clarified (so many projects can't even produce that). But if that person gets replaced their institutional knowledge and work readiness evaporates. I've been on 10+ projects at big companies and have begged to do work. Mostly it was showing up to 3-5 meetings/week while managers try and figure things out, and their VPs reconfigure budgets, priorities, and resources. Sometimes I do the work and hold it until someone wants it. There's usually no standard top-down view about what happens when 3 VPs change the scope on 5 projects. But in reality, that usually means 10-30 people downstream are paralyzed. This is also where the tension between "new work" and "scalable processes" comes into play (need a consultant?). Add regulatory compliance and approval gates, and then..

whatever1 9mo ago

I don't know your particular examples but likely your assessment is biased. We always tend to think that others have it easier than us, as we do not have the full picture.

scottLobster 9mo ago
Of course it's biased. I'm just saying I find it quite believable that some program was funded 5 years ago under different financial conditions and has remained funded until now despite no longer being viable. People generally don't like losing their jobs, and will put a positive spin on every report that might be good enough to pass muster with middle management bureaucracy at a large firm. All it takes is for enough people in the chain of command to shrug, sign whatever docs are needed and move onto something they care about more.