I have seen many companies with very poor productivity, and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees. In fact they usually would have loved to be more productive. Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight.
But as companies grow they install more and more rules and regulations that end up making sure nothing ever gets done. It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done!
Also remember that this is only half the problem. The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. I wouldn't be surprised if of the productivity that is left, more than half gets wasted on crufty software structures and writing code before you understood the problem.
And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need. Wasting yet more productivity on working around bad decisions from before we knew what we are actually building.
"Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight."
I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. The larger the team/company, the more chances of those people being around. They pretend to be always busy and doing something but don't actually get anything done. Seen it all for 18+ years.
Having said that, there are plenty of people as well who would LOVE to do something meaningful but are stuck with red tape. I was one of those and quit my high paying Investment Bank Tech Job to start my own thing. I was getting paid big as a consultant and once my main project finished, they just wanted me around because traders loved me. I literally had to find things to do every day otherwise it was soooo boring unless something broke.
I'm surprised to see this is the top voted comment because it is completely off the mark in this case and anyone that has spent any amount of time reading Blind (a website dedicated to... I'm not sure what exactly) knows it.
While Facebook/Meta, Google, and others have always paid comparatively well, in the past 2-3 years the pay shot up even higher and the only price of admission is supreme obedience to "grinding LeetCode." This hysteria created an entire culture of pay chasers that congregate on that Blind website with little regard for anyhing other than compensation. These people, who I consider to be among the most toxic people in tech, have a singular focus on pay and it is not at all surprising that when put in minimal supervision environments they choose to merely exist and collect said paycheck. CEOs lamenting this are merely reaping what they sow.
I just know of at least 20 people left my previous company because we had nothing to do. Every meeting was trying to figure out what the direction was. As an engineer when the company gets to the size of 1000+ you are largely not at all empowered to solve this problem but have to rely on your manager or in some cases your managers manager.
But come time for performance review you get bad marks. If you think that many people are just lazy for no reason you have no right to be managing or running a business.
Sitting around pretending to work all day is a recipe for depression and burnout. No one wants that.
>But as companies grow they install more and more rules and regulations that end up making sure nothing ever gets done. It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done!
As long as you're not mean, you can hang out at most companies for at least 6 months just doing nothing.
I've been reprimanded before , when I took the initiative to try and start building out a framework. I literally had nothing else to do, but I was later told I should have waited until a committee could be formed.
Even if you barely do anything, at least you're not causing trouble. In my career. I've worked with several abrasive angry people, I've seen folks confront C level employees.
Developers who cry about having to use a PC to write some.net code and throw a temper tantrum. Threaten to just walk out because some legacy code needed updating and they're so used to having a precious Mac to code on.
That said, I actually really like him how limited social interactions are with remote work. I don't need to know your political beliefs, I don't need to be your friend, I don't want to get drinks with you, I want to do what is necessary for my job.
Corporate fluff plays a role. I imagine Google develops products that will never be profitable just so they can look at their shareholders and say, looky we do stuff aside from search.
What I noticed is it is not employee laziness but the FAANG companies have ton of dead weight in terms of future projects or project features which never get released. One of my co-workers was working on a feature which was shelved after working 2+ years on it. He lost motivation after that and coasted the rest of the time doing minimum work. I think FAANG companies have lot of PMs and top management who are as clueless and lazy as engineers.
I really have trouble understanding why ppl should dream about labor / fulfilment at work.
There are so many ways to find a real meaning.
Be a great person, help others, read a book, do yoga, help kids with homework, plant a tree, build something with own hands, grow food, clean-up trash.
So many things to keep you busy. Work is just a necessity to do something that actually matters in the longer run (for majority at least).
Ppl that deeply care about the company and product are such a tiny minority.
Part of the problem is also the incentives and performance axes that are defined to evaluate work/productivity.
At a higher experience level, you are expected not just to churn out code but also to demonstrate performance on axes such as influence, scope, leadership etc. In fact, if you just churn out code and not perform on other axes, you are under performing under other axes. So, I could solve a particular problem for my team quickly with no dependencies with other teams/people, but I am now forced to go to other teams and look if they have similar problems to solve and then work on getting alignment on a common solution which would work as a common framework for both team's use cases. While this in theory is good to have one generic solution for a set of similar problems, once a huge company has incentivized this, lot of people are trying to build the next standard/framework and as you'd expect adoption becomes a problem because everyone is trying to evangelize their own framework. The end result, you suddenly have to work with x number of people and let everyone align with what you are doing, that takes time, then you implement something and now have to convince others to use your framework, which again takes time. Add these dependencies and you have what you currently have, a mechanism that moves slowly with most people involved feel helpless and think if it was just up to them they would have it all done in a few days.
Not getting rid of "legacy" stuff that doesn't work is a, IMHO, a version of throwing good moneybafter bad money. Instead of acknowledging that the unusable code, or whatever, was a crucial part of understanding the problem, and throw it out once the problem was understood, people tend to build upon those not fit for purpose things...
It's not just meetings. I spend 80% of my energy fighting internal resistance, in the form of moronic decision, moronic policies, short signtedness and incompetence. It's not even bad will or people deliberately sabotaging the business. Just frictions grinding the organisation to a quasi standstill, people taking principled approaches to cover their own ass irrespective of the consequences, or being so far remote from the ground that they have no idea of the consequences of their decisions. And in the middle of that you have some courgageous busy bees trying to make things happen despite this internal resistance. Many have given up. I am somewhere in the middle.
A pretty well known ticketing company bought our startup a few years ago, and after the first week of parties, raising salaries and hyping us the reality struck us very hard. It was impossible to do any work at all. Anything you wanted to do would require tons of meetings, there was always a few people blocking any initiative you could have.
And then the freaking Agile By The book (with agile coaches and all!) I couldn't stand for the life of me. We'd have like 10 ritual meetings a week and the joke was that those meetings were to discuss "What we're going to do, what we're not doing, and what we didn't do".
Worst part, is that *everything* pushed you to just stay at your desk watching online courses or reading stuff on the internet and do nothing, and as long as you showed up to your scheduled meetings, all was good. You'd even get promotions by just smiling around and being nice to others.
I left that and now I'm at a company about 3 times as big. The difference is that here we're 100% remote and 100% async, written communication. Literally ZERO work meetings a week, just one "hang out" to not forget about the faces of your coworkers. No Agile, no Jira, no bullshit. A shared "to do" list to show others what you're on and weekly reports of your progress. I just can't believe how well this works.
I worked at a company where I'd have at least 2 or 3 days a week where we had 4 hours of meetings. It was pure hell. Half the time I wouldn't even pay attention. I'd be browsing reddit or HN.
You hit the nail on the head with agile. I remember writing some code only to have the whole thing ripped out "next sprint" because nobody bothered to think a couple weeks ahead. Or starting an integration project with a third party, only to find out they're not ready, so we have no API that actually works. So we waste time mocking it out, only to find out the docs they gave us don't match reality.
> Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight
I read loads of blogs and posts where people are loving WFH, doing very little and openly recommending tech career to others because its so great. They might not think they're a dead weight, they just think thats what modern working is like.
I spent about a year and a half being dead weight. I was so completely burned after working months of 70 to 90 hour weeks I just couldn't do anything. Things that used to take me an hour to code now took me days. Complete mental block. Luckily I had built up such a good reputation prior I was able to coast and it was a weird project. In a new job / role now and it's better. Only work 40 hours max. Still not back to normal but 75% of the way there.
> It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done!
IMHO, if you're a developer and have more than 8h of meetings a week then you are no longer a developer. In the worst case, you are a body to fill a seat in a meeting to fluff the self-importance of your management. In the best case, you're on track to being management yourself.
Material affluence for the majority has gradually shifted people’s orientation toward work—from what Daniel Yankelovich called an “instrumental” view of work, where work was a means to an end, to a more “sacred” view, where people seek the “intrinsic” benefits of work. “Our grandfathers worked six days a week to earn what most of us now earn by Tuesday afternoon,” says Bill O’Brien, former CEO of Hanover Insurance. “The ferment in management will continue until we build organizations that are more consistent with man’s higher aspirations beyond food, shelter and belonging.”
Senge, Peter M.. The Fifth Discipline (p. 16). Crown. Kindle Edition.
I thought the point of iterating early is that sometimes writing code is the best way to gain understanding of the problem (depending on the kind of problem). You're supposed to throw that stuff away... it's iteration...
Measure the product before measuring productivity.
across the board execs complaining about productivity turn out to be poor at defining product ("its just a website, how long could it take to build, Jeez").
Any productivity comparisons between software and other manufacturing processes should begin with a few minutes spent to compare software specs and the said product's spec, see how hard it is to change its spec ("add a button to accept payments" v/s. "add a knob on the car's dashboard")
provide a technical spec first, then we can talk about productivity.
That's one take, but if you hang around on Blind (which is an anonymous forum heavily populated by FAANG), you will find many who gloat about how little they work.
I've seen companies where the leaders will only trust the opinions of the consultants. Even if they are the same conclusions of existing employees.
Hired talent isn't magical but for some businesses the consultant workers have an glow about them. The result is the business effectively making their own workforce redundant because they fear relying on them. And then morale tanks, and people leave.
>And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need.
I once spent two months trying to get my technical lead to do a code review for a PR I raised. Eventually the business informed us they didn't actually need the feature that the PR implemented. At that point, my technical lead immediately approved the PR so it wouldn't be (seen as) a waste.
> And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need.
Not entirely true. I don't mind that one bit. I can voice my opinion on what "we need", but ultimately that's not my decision and there are people hired to do that. I get paid to write it, I'm happy in that spot, and if I end up not having to deploy it, go through whatever baroque testing cycles are in place, or do the job of 3 with the salary of 1 by having to do sysadmin, DevOps, or whatever other fad du jour is sweeping the industry with fancy terms just trying to keep the CEO's in their millions, fine with me.
The sad part about excessive meetings is often they are not enough on their own. In between all of the the pointless meetings, smaller, less formal, often unscheduled, real meetings where actual decisions are made still need to happen.
> The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. I wouldn't be surprised if of the productivity that is left, more than half gets wasted on crufty software structures and writing code before you understood the problem.
I've seen this increase proportional to the number of employees. People start trying to worry more about perception of progress by tracking proxy metrics, because the large the company, the harder it is to prove how each one contributes directly to the bottom line.
Large corps are propped up by intellectual property law and economies of scale. They do not hold their market positions on their own merit. If we remove IP laws, we will have another golden age of tech innovation tomorrow.
Another factor here is that companies will hire more people as a growth strategy without having any clear idea of how to deploy them. Even if they have a high level idea they may not know how to translate that high level idea to something actionable. They have a high P/E. There's cheap money. They need to somehow grow. The only way they know to grow is just to hire more people. As you say, no wonder they don't have anything to work on. Maybe the idea is that if they're working for you they're not working for the competition. I donno.
This iteration through pseudo productivity comes from management's real world problem of demonstrating progress on their projects. The promises of visibility on your development team's productivity always turns Agile into a steaming pile of burn-downs and story points.
"No one has done true Agile" is the "No one has done true Communism" for software engineering. Because, in the real world, no one uses Agile in an ideal environment free of pressures like deadlines or budgets.
I find this attitude among developers frustrating to say the least.
Apparently developers are just helpless sheep being ruled by an amorphous entity called “management”.
Supposedly developers are important enough to command 3-400k in salaries, but not important enough that “management” would be open to all of them pointing out that maybe that 1 daily meeting is costing too much in employee time and not giving enough value and could be reduced to 2-3 times a week.
Maybe it’s not the employees fault, but the management who hired them… or maybe it’s the fact that it takes forever to get anything done at FAANG nowadays.
Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders.. but a great way of identifying people who can hack a process to secure maximal reward.
Look, if I can ‘crack the coding interview’, then I can certainly crack ‘how to do as little work as possible and stack paper to the ceiling while my stock vests’.
I wonder when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod.
By the end of my employment at Google I was not working very hard. Probably a few hours a day, mostly doing whatever I felt like doing. My managers consistently gave me "meets expectations" regardless of how much I achieved or how hard I worked. However, any time there was an emergency related to my function, I had everything required to jump in, fix serious problems, and then get out of the way during the cleanup then contributing my bit to the postmortem.
I could tell there were very few (fewer all the time) people who truly understand google prod, and in that sense, the company seems to be OK with paying top salaries to people who can prevent the company losing lots of money, or other critical prod issues.
> “And part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.”
Wow. Just. Wow.
Why not inject some more dysfunction into an already strained relationship with employees and callously but passively aggressively deal with a seriously broken hiring pipeline in the laziest way possible? If a company can't be bothered to set performance expectations that are measurable and actionable, but just expects to push people out by "turning up the heat", that's an abject failure of a workplace. There used to be things like quarterly/yearly performance reviews, ratings, even "performance improvement plans" for under-performing employees--you know, clear expectations, clear communications, criteria and steps and timelines put forward when someone is not meeting expectations.
You know, sometimes life happens to people and they slow down a quarter or two, maybe because of a family crisis, divorce, child, death in the family, traumatic event. Global pandemic? 2 years of isolation WFH? Yeah, there might be reasons...
But, from the top, the message "these people will find their way to the door if we make work suck enough"--I couldn't imagine anything more demoralizing.
Which companies with similar concerns have actually managed to increase productivity in a way that satisfies the C-suite?
A much older anecdote: I had a friend who worked at Yahoo around the time Marissa Mayer was coming on as CEO. At the time, they were allowing semi-WFH for certain positions.
I literally never saw this guy go to work, or actually do any work. He was part of a stand-up comedy workshop and spent 100% of his time there. He'd figured out how to keep his manager happy enough, pass performance reviews, collect a huge paycheck, and do exactly squat. Somehow during all the "clean house" reviews, he passed. Everyone, including him, were shocked that somehow, nobody seemed to be able to figure out that he was essentially a ghost employee. What finally got him was a "return to office" directive -- no more WFH, which he couldn't comply with.
This all took place a decade ago, and I've thought of it several times post-Covid as all these companies that "discovered" WFH suddenly decided that employees need to return. But none of the extensive attempts to fix Yahoo's culture, management etc came to anything, the company continued to backslide despite all efforts and now basically no longer exists. Mark Zuckerberg's aggressive "some people shouldn't be here" statements feel like a repeat of that whole Yahoo debacle (although I suppose Facebook probably isn't yet as dysfunctional as Yahoo was in 2012).
I was a software engineering manager at a lean, high-margin, profitable start-up based in the NYC area starting in the late 2000s. We were acquired in 2014 by a very typical (for the time) SV-based competitor that had raised hundreds of millions in an IPO a few years earlier. Our acquirers had yet to see a single quarter of profit, of course.
I and my team had so many good laughs at the attitudes of our CA counterparts. One especially strong memory is when, a week after a particularly dismal quarterly earnings report, a junior engineer based in the HQ of our new corporate overlords sent out a team-wide email complaining about the corporate decision to no longer stock the refrigerators with free fresh blueberries. They bemoaned the lack of respect for the "talent," and tossed in gratis the ubiquitous pseudo-threat "if you don't treat us right, we can always go down the road to an employer who will."
On visits to HQ in Redwood City, I marveled at the paradisaical campus-like setting (several buildings around a "quad," with parks, a tennis court, swimming pool, gyms, etc. etc.) and noted the amount of time the local staff spent taking advantage of these amenities. I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money.
Since that was Silicon Valley during one of the many gold rushes, I thought that I must have been "missing something." What seemed like common sense to me was clearly heresy to the golden people there. The explanation I arrived at was that such perqs were the necessary counterpart to an expectation that your employees have no life other than work.
I came to realize I wasn't missing anything, they were. That company did end up burning through their cash stockpile, and had to sell a few years later for less than 1/4 of what they paid to acquire us.
I see this as more or less a ruse to justify ridding the companies of all the now remote people who moved away to live in Cheap Town during the pandemic. This is a pretext for the typical Corporate House Cleaning/Reduction In Force scenario. Some people do well working remote (Im one of them in fact) but I suspect and from what I've seen the majority of people simply cant handle the responsibility/self management of working remote.
Alternatively, the economic forecasters at these companies see trouble on the horizon economically and know that layoffs to boost stock price will be necessary. In such case, best develop a pretext for these layoffs thats not "We're having financial trouble so we're laying people off". Instead it's "Nope, nothing to see here, THIS IS FINE - we're just cutting dead weight!".
I don't work for either of these companies nor do I know anyone personally who does, but I have to wonder if a sort of entitled, country club culture developed there and this an effort to reign in that behavior. Maybe someone with some inside insight can comment here?
Google would have been a lot more productive if it had hired people to work on one good messaging app instead of 13+ bad messaging apps.
Google has long had an attitude of "we hire the best so we can afford to have them stand on one leg and balance on a ball while holding a cane in their mouth and balancing a bunch of dishes on the end of the cane while typing with one hand on a chorded keyboard and looking at a monitor through a mirror." I've heard stories that range from "of course I am productive, I am shooting the s--t all day with the smartest people to" to "I have no idea of how what I'm doing impacts the bottom line".
It's frustrating that this thread seems to be focused so heavily on people sitting around resting and vesting.
Having been inside Google (and multiple other FAANGs) this is generally untrue, and focusing on this element of the problem misses a much larger productivity problem:
Most engineers at Google aren't "sitting around doing nothing", they are very busy shipping projects that do not matter. Their days are filled with doing work that will not move the needle on any metric that matters to the company, but they are far from idle.
The misallocation of labor is a far bigger problem than said labor slacking off, and management must own it.
Google doesn't need their engineers to fly into startup mode, work 12 hour days, or never surf Reddit on company time. Their labor is severely under-utilized because they are assigned to zero/negative-impact projects or duplicative projects (hey, somehow you gotta ship 5 chat apps at the same time, right?)
Part of the problem is that Google's upper management refuses to engage with the product at all. Entire orgs are given very broad OKRs like "increase DAUs by 10%" without virtually no guidance as to what features management is interested in. Authority to ship features also rests close to the leaf nodes of direct line-managed teams. The expectation is that teams are entrepreneurial and invent features, implement them, and ship them all without direct upper management involvement.
The result is a bunch of bad product that doesn't do anything positive for the company, were never soberly evaluated by upper management prior to building, and would never have passed the smell test if it did. This, above all other factors, is why Google produces so much product that it then has to scrap. This is the main cause of Google's low labor productivity - not because people are sitting around drinking coffee and eating free food - but because they are assigned to projects that do not pass muster, and there is an almost-comical aversion to validating product ideas before they are implemented.
The single biggest thing Google can do to improve its labor productivity isn't cracking down on slackers, it's forcing its management to actually engage with product definition so entire orgs don't burn years on things that don't matter.
"Too many employees, but very few of them supported or utilized correctly." is how I'd put it. I worked at Facebook for over 7 years, and I would've worked myself to death for the company. I was making a small fortune, and living a nice life, and I greatly appreciated it. (in hindsight, lol, so glad I left.)
The real problems, imo, were the organizational rules, the expectation that basically everyone in a role is the same... the red tape, the ridiculously gamed review cycles, the little empires that reject change... the fear & the blame. This all on top of bad managers, of which I had a fair mixture, those who were helpful and those who actively worked to hurt me.
Regardless, the downsizing is coming, and it's all leaderships fault.
The speed at which the tone of these is changing is amazing. Just a few weeks ago everyone said its getting impossible to hire and so they need to expand to other tech hubs, pay exorbitant salaries and offer lot of perks to attract candidates. All of a sudden now, just in the span of a few weeks, these executives started realizing their headcount is too high, productivity too low and that employees should self select out of the company. Doesn't this show incompetence on the executive part? They just didn't see this till the recession flags were raised, it's almost as if they need to cut costs to cover up falling revenue and so blaming the employees.
I work at one of the two mentioned companies. 20% of the employees do 80% of the work, and another 60% do maybe 50%. the last 20% account for -30%. It's demoralizing how incapable management seems to be at jettisoning the chaf, however it was explained to me once thusly: good engineers are hard to find and also very valuable. An unmotivated/lazy engineer is one step away from being a valuable engineer. It's worthwhile spending a lot of effort trying to find what motivates them.
Also, if you look at revenue and divide by employees, you will see that the strategy of "employee 5 engineers and hope at least one is good" is still profitable.
I have been working for about 4.5 years now across 3 big tech companies (Google included).
I would consider myself a hardworking and ambitious person who loves computer science. I graduated top of my class at a state school. I've gotten promoted, consistently "exceed expectations", lots of positive feedback, etc. But I have not actually accomplished a damn thing or written a single interesting or useful component in my professional work.
The thing is, it's becoming clearer and clearer that so much of what goes on is bullshit. A pattern I have seen 3 times now is managers significantly over-hiring to build their little management moat of mediocre junior devs, then leaving on to brighter pastures with their shinier resume or promotion.
Most of the work is dealing with other people's code messes, operational gruntwork, and ticket grinding that will have little to no impact and is a complete waste of smart people's time. It has little to do with building software or solving hard problems, just maintaining and tweaking the existing systems. It does absolutely nothing for your career. You could be Jeff Dean stuck on worthless legacy grunt crap with no upside and I doubt you would get noticed.
On the flip side, people who actually get interesting, promotable work are the luckiest in the world. It is the difference between a rocket ship advance of career and skill or stagnation and frustration. But this is rare IMO.
And it's so hard to tell going in which you're going to get. I've now taken a gamble on three teams that looked good on paper but turned out to be legacy management empire crap. It pisses me off that once you choose you're basically stuck there for a year or two before you can try again. I don't want to waste any more of my life on this merry go round.
It’s knives out time, I’m afraid, for any activist or negative employee. I am flabbergasted by the number of people I’ve worked with who are flat out ungrateful when it comes to their relationship with their employer either being outright miserable and surly, or constantly virtue signalling about hypothetical problems that just drag everyone down the purity spiral.
They get paid and they push code but they seem to think that’s the be all and end all of the relationship. It would be like living with a partner who takes out the bins and cooks every other night but never gives you a birthday card and constantly complains about your behaviour.
I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with wanting to have good social relationships between staff because the flip side is that every Eeyore, loner, and whiner chips away at morale bit by bit until they are the only people left.
How have you rewarded camaraderie, positive attitude, leadership, and goodwill today?
This seems like something that should be expected? Every time the WFH battle has come up over the last few years, there are always people talking about how they’re able to do all their days work in 4 hours and spend the rest of the time idle “pretending to work”. Is it really surprising that as a result of this companies are reevaluating how much slack time their employees have? Especially as wages and demand for wages due to inflation have spiked, you can probably shore up some of that demand just by dropping some of those 4 hour employees and using their wages to pay others to become 6 hour or 8 hour employees. Sure it’s unrealistic for a company to expect every employee is 100% engaged 40 hours a week, especially in knowledge / creative work we’re sometimes unplugging and downtime is exactly what the job requires. But it seems equally unrealistic to crow about how the pandemic has demonstrated that WFH is perfectly fine and had no negative impacts because everyone was already only putting in 20 hours a week and not expect that to have caused companies to make a shift.
In every other HN thread, people slam FAANGs for being so bloated, and we praise the small startup where everyone on the team gets shit done fast. And in every other thread, people ask "What the hell does <BigTechCo> need 10,000 engineers for??"
And now Zuck says "We've gotten complacent as a company, and we have to turn up the heat and sense of urgency, and get rid of people who aren't contributing"... and HN freaks out at this 'dystopian' missive.
Yeah this is definitely a problem, but I blame the companies. On the one hand, yes, for a long time there have been a lot of people that don't do much work. They should've been firing those people long ago, but they I guess were too scared/defensive. They felt it was better for business to just keep them.
But now there is a big uptick in employees not working much, and I think the cause is just that companies are so disconnected from people. For example, Sundar wants people to be more "customer-focused" but everywhere at Google, all anyone talks about is this metric and that metric. Customers are just treated as a number to be aggregated into a metric. They're really not talking about specific customer problems. And they're not empowering employees to have vision for how to solve specific customer problems overall imo.
Also, speaking of their own employees as people, they're similarly disconnected. They just treat employees as part of a metric too to a large extent. And what does that lead to? Employees that also care mostly about that metrics ($) and not building cool, assistive/helpful products.
I mean it all comes back to incentives of companies trying to grow their stock value. So it's really that and not out-of-touch CEOs. But although a recession is heartbreaking, we do need to regain some sense of reality imo. Perhaps return to technology that's actually trying to assist people or fix things in the world. One can hope.
This is inherently a problem with full-remote or hybrid work.
People will point to "studies" showing how remote work improves productivity. Maybe it did initially but eventually, people will check out, feeling isolated, feeling less motivated.
Some people who worked remotely before covid swears that it helped their productivity. But these people are biased because they were probably one of the few who were disciplined enough to make it work and they gained the employer's trust over time.
There were a lot of reports of Zuckerberg bemoaning about productivity. Tim Cook wanted everyone back in the office full-time before Delta. Google also wanted everyone back in the office. Clearly, these CEOs aren't just making decisions on a whim and they have real data on productivity rather than some 3rd party studies.
This opinion is not popular here but this is how I see it.
I'm a bit worried that this will trigger some kind of move to measure productivity in increasingly crude ways -- i.e. exhaustive, invasive telemetry that tracks every mouse click and keypress.
It is amusing how the article says "employees" but everyone in the comments are talking about developer productivity and laziness. It is shocking how no one points out about the laziness of PMs and management. I have seen PMs and managers taking generous time off and lazying around. Don't forget lot of hiring happens because managers and PMs do planning roadmaps and hire based on that. Some managers also hire more than necessary just cos they want to manage more people. In my previous company our manager hired 3x more engineers than available projects. He jumped ship recently and moved to another FAANG company while the team is now clueless and feeling scared that team might see layoffs.
[+] [-] fefe23|3 years ago|reply
I have seen many companies with very poor productivity, and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees. In fact they usually would have loved to be more productive. Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight.
But as companies grow they install more and more rules and regulations that end up making sure nothing ever gets done. It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done!
Also remember that this is only half the problem. The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. I wouldn't be surprised if of the productivity that is left, more than half gets wasted on crufty software structures and writing code before you understood the problem.
And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need. Wasting yet more productivity on working around bad decisions from before we knew what we are actually building.
[+] [-] codegeek|3 years ago|reply
I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. The larger the team/company, the more chances of those people being around. They pretend to be always busy and doing something but don't actually get anything done. Seen it all for 18+ years.
Having said that, there are plenty of people as well who would LOVE to do something meaningful but are stuck with red tape. I was one of those and quit my high paying Investment Bank Tech Job to start my own thing. I was getting paid big as a consultant and once my main project finished, they just wanted me around because traders loved me. I literally had to find things to do every day otherwise it was soooo boring unless something broke.
[+] [-] rubiquity|3 years ago|reply
While Facebook/Meta, Google, and others have always paid comparatively well, in the past 2-3 years the pay shot up even higher and the only price of admission is supreme obedience to "grinding LeetCode." This hysteria created an entire culture of pay chasers that congregate on that Blind website with little regard for anyhing other than compensation. These people, who I consider to be among the most toxic people in tech, have a singular focus on pay and it is not at all surprising that when put in minimal supervision environments they choose to merely exist and collect said paycheck. CEOs lamenting this are merely reaping what they sow.
[+] [-] bogota|3 years ago|reply
But come time for performance review you get bad marks. If you think that many people are just lazy for no reason you have no right to be managing or running a business.
Sitting around pretending to work all day is a recipe for depression and burnout. No one wants that.
[+] [-] 999900000999|3 years ago|reply
As long as you're not mean, you can hang out at most companies for at least 6 months just doing nothing.
I've been reprimanded before , when I took the initiative to try and start building out a framework. I literally had nothing else to do, but I was later told I should have waited until a committee could be formed.
Even if you barely do anything, at least you're not causing trouble. In my career. I've worked with several abrasive angry people, I've seen folks confront C level employees.
Developers who cry about having to use a PC to write some.net code and throw a temper tantrum. Threaten to just walk out because some legacy code needed updating and they're so used to having a precious Mac to code on.
That said, I actually really like him how limited social interactions are with remote work. I don't need to know your political beliefs, I don't need to be your friend, I don't want to get drinks with you, I want to do what is necessary for my job.
Corporate fluff plays a role. I imagine Google develops products that will never be profitable just so they can look at their shareholders and say, looky we do stuff aside from search.
[+] [-] rajeshp1986|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pojzon|3 years ago|reply
There are so many ways to find a real meaning.
Be a great person, help others, read a book, do yoga, help kids with homework, plant a tree, build something with own hands, grow food, clean-up trash.
So many things to keep you busy. Work is just a necessity to do something that actually matters in the longer run (for majority at least).
Ppl that deeply care about the company and product are such a tiny minority.
[+] [-] asdjjsvnn|3 years ago|reply
At a higher experience level, you are expected not just to churn out code but also to demonstrate performance on axes such as influence, scope, leadership etc. In fact, if you just churn out code and not perform on other axes, you are under performing under other axes. So, I could solve a particular problem for my team quickly with no dependencies with other teams/people, but I am now forced to go to other teams and look if they have similar problems to solve and then work on getting alignment on a common solution which would work as a common framework for both team's use cases. While this in theory is good to have one generic solution for a set of similar problems, once a huge company has incentivized this, lot of people are trying to build the next standard/framework and as you'd expect adoption becomes a problem because everyone is trying to evangelize their own framework. The end result, you suddenly have to work with x number of people and let everyone align with what you are doing, that takes time, then you implement something and now have to convince others to use your framework, which again takes time. Add these dependencies and you have what you currently have, a mechanism that moves slowly with most people involved feel helpless and think if it was just up to them they would have it all done in a few days.
[+] [-] dboreham|3 years ago|reply
This kind of "development process theater" causes terrible cognitive dissonance.
[+] [-] hef19898|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2187|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] likortera|3 years ago|reply
A pretty well known ticketing company bought our startup a few years ago, and after the first week of parties, raising salaries and hyping us the reality struck us very hard. It was impossible to do any work at all. Anything you wanted to do would require tons of meetings, there was always a few people blocking any initiative you could have.
And then the freaking Agile By The book (with agile coaches and all!) I couldn't stand for the life of me. We'd have like 10 ritual meetings a week and the joke was that those meetings were to discuss "What we're going to do, what we're not doing, and what we didn't do".
Worst part, is that *everything* pushed you to just stay at your desk watching online courses or reading stuff on the internet and do nothing, and as long as you showed up to your scheduled meetings, all was good. You'd even get promotions by just smiling around and being nice to others.
I left that and now I'm at a company about 3 times as big. The difference is that here we're 100% remote and 100% async, written communication. Literally ZERO work meetings a week, just one "hang out" to not forget about the faces of your coworkers. No Agile, no Jira, no bullshit. A shared "to do" list to show others what you're on and weekly reports of your progress. I just can't believe how well this works.
[+] [-] icedchai|3 years ago|reply
You hit the nail on the head with agile. I remember writing some code only to have the whole thing ripped out "next sprint" because nobody bothered to think a couple weeks ahead. Or starting an integration project with a third party, only to find out they're not ready, so we have no API that actually works. So we waste time mocking it out, only to find out the docs they gave us don't match reality.
[+] [-] rr888|3 years ago|reply
I read loads of blogs and posts where people are loving WFH, doing very little and openly recommending tech career to others because its so great. They might not think they're a dead weight, they just think thats what modern working is like.
[+] [-] wonderwonder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dleslie|3 years ago|reply
IMHO, if you're a developer and have more than 8h of meetings a week then you are no longer a developer. In the worst case, you are a body to fill a seat in a meeting to fluff the self-importance of your management. In the best case, you're on track to being management yourself.
[+] [-] commandlinefan|3 years ago|reply
The typical expectation on salaried employees is that you spend your 8-5 in meetings and then you 5-midnight actually doing programming work.
[+] [-] adolph|3 years ago|reply
Senge, Peter M.. The Fifth Discipline (p. 16). Crown. Kindle Edition.
[+] [-] harpiaharpyja|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gofreddygo|3 years ago|reply
across the board execs complaining about productivity turn out to be poor at defining product ("its just a website, how long could it take to build, Jeez").
Any productivity comparisons between software and other manufacturing processes should begin with a few minutes spent to compare software specs and the said product's spec, see how hard it is to change its spec ("add a button to accept payments" v/s. "add a knob on the car's dashboard")
provide a technical spec first, then we can talk about productivity.
[+] [-] throwaway292939|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonzo41|3 years ago|reply
Hired talent isn't magical but for some businesses the consultant workers have an glow about them. The result is the business effectively making their own workforce redundant because they fear relying on them. And then morale tanks, and people leave.
[+] [-] rgblambda|3 years ago|reply
I once spent two months trying to get my technical lead to do a code review for a PR I raised. Eventually the business informed us they didn't actually need the feature that the PR implemented. At that point, my technical lead immediately approved the PR so it wouldn't be (seen as) a waste.
[+] [-] michaelcampbell|3 years ago|reply
Not entirely true. I don't mind that one bit. I can voice my opinion on what "we need", but ultimately that's not my decision and there are people hired to do that. I get paid to write it, I'm happy in that spot, and if I end up not having to deploy it, go through whatever baroque testing cycles are in place, or do the job of 3 with the salary of 1 by having to do sysadmin, DevOps, or whatever other fad du jour is sweeping the industry with fancy terms just trying to keep the CEO's in their millions, fine with me.
[+] [-] osigurdson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hcarvalhoalves|3 years ago|reply
I've seen this increase proportional to the number of employees. People start trying to worry more about perception of progress by tracking proxy metrics, because the large the company, the harder it is to prove how each one contributes directly to the bottom line.
[+] [-] devwastaken|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YZF|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantg2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coffeeisyummy|3 years ago|reply
"No one has done true Agile" is the "No one has done true Communism" for software engineering. Because, in the real world, no one uses Agile in an ideal environment free of pressures like deadlines or budgets.
[+] [-] addicted|3 years ago|reply
Apparently developers are just helpless sheep being ruled by an amorphous entity called “management”.
Supposedly developers are important enough to command 3-400k in salaries, but not important enough that “management” would be open to all of them pointing out that maybe that 1 daily meeting is costing too much in employee time and not giving enough value and could be reduced to 2-3 times a week.
[+] [-] mikhael28|3 years ago|reply
Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders.. but a great way of identifying people who can hack a process to secure maximal reward.
Look, if I can ‘crack the coding interview’, then I can certainly crack ‘how to do as little work as possible and stack paper to the ceiling while my stock vests’.
I wonder when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod.
[+] [-] dekhn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] titzer|3 years ago|reply
> “And part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.”
Wow. Just. Wow.
Why not inject some more dysfunction into an already strained relationship with employees and callously but passively aggressively deal with a seriously broken hiring pipeline in the laziest way possible? If a company can't be bothered to set performance expectations that are measurable and actionable, but just expects to push people out by "turning up the heat", that's an abject failure of a workplace. There used to be things like quarterly/yearly performance reviews, ratings, even "performance improvement plans" for under-performing employees--you know, clear expectations, clear communications, criteria and steps and timelines put forward when someone is not meeting expectations.
You know, sometimes life happens to people and they slow down a quarter or two, maybe because of a family crisis, divorce, child, death in the family, traumatic event. Global pandemic? 2 years of isolation WFH? Yeah, there might be reasons...
But, from the top, the message "these people will find their way to the door if we make work suck enough"--I couldn't imagine anything more demoralizing.
[+] [-] telchior|3 years ago|reply
A much older anecdote: I had a friend who worked at Yahoo around the time Marissa Mayer was coming on as CEO. At the time, they were allowing semi-WFH for certain positions.
I literally never saw this guy go to work, or actually do any work. He was part of a stand-up comedy workshop and spent 100% of his time there. He'd figured out how to keep his manager happy enough, pass performance reviews, collect a huge paycheck, and do exactly squat. Somehow during all the "clean house" reviews, he passed. Everyone, including him, were shocked that somehow, nobody seemed to be able to figure out that he was essentially a ghost employee. What finally got him was a "return to office" directive -- no more WFH, which he couldn't comply with.
This all took place a decade ago, and I've thought of it several times post-Covid as all these companies that "discovered" WFH suddenly decided that employees need to return. But none of the extensive attempts to fix Yahoo's culture, management etc came to anything, the company continued to backslide despite all efforts and now basically no longer exists. Mark Zuckerberg's aggressive "some people shouldn't be here" statements feel like a repeat of that whole Yahoo debacle (although I suppose Facebook probably isn't yet as dysfunctional as Yahoo was in 2012).
[+] [-] jjslocum3|3 years ago|reply
I was a software engineering manager at a lean, high-margin, profitable start-up based in the NYC area starting in the late 2000s. We were acquired in 2014 by a very typical (for the time) SV-based competitor that had raised hundreds of millions in an IPO a few years earlier. Our acquirers had yet to see a single quarter of profit, of course.
I and my team had so many good laughs at the attitudes of our CA counterparts. One especially strong memory is when, a week after a particularly dismal quarterly earnings report, a junior engineer based in the HQ of our new corporate overlords sent out a team-wide email complaining about the corporate decision to no longer stock the refrigerators with free fresh blueberries. They bemoaned the lack of respect for the "talent," and tossed in gratis the ubiquitous pseudo-threat "if you don't treat us right, we can always go down the road to an employer who will."
On visits to HQ in Redwood City, I marveled at the paradisaical campus-like setting (several buildings around a "quad," with parks, a tennis court, swimming pool, gyms, etc. etc.) and noted the amount of time the local staff spent taking advantage of these amenities. I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money.
Since that was Silicon Valley during one of the many gold rushes, I thought that I must have been "missing something." What seemed like common sense to me was clearly heresy to the golden people there. The explanation I arrived at was that such perqs were the necessary counterpart to an expectation that your employees have no life other than work.
I came to realize I wasn't missing anything, they were. That company did end up burning through their cash stockpile, and had to sell a few years later for less than 1/4 of what they paid to acquire us.
[+] [-] SavageBeast|3 years ago|reply
Alternatively, the economic forecasters at these companies see trouble on the horizon economically and know that layoffs to boost stock price will be necessary. In such case, best develop a pretext for these layoffs thats not "We're having financial trouble so we're laying people off". Instead it's "Nope, nothing to see here, THIS IS FINE - we're just cutting dead weight!".
I don't work for either of these companies nor do I know anyone personally who does, but I have to wonder if a sort of entitled, country club culture developed there and this an effort to reign in that behavior. Maybe someone with some inside insight can comment here?
[+] [-] PaulHoule|3 years ago|reply
Google has long had an attitude of "we hire the best so we can afford to have them stand on one leg and balance on a ball while holding a cane in their mouth and balancing a bunch of dishes on the end of the cane while typing with one hand on a chorded keyboard and looking at a monitor through a mirror." I've heard stories that range from "of course I am productive, I am shooting the s--t all day with the smartest people to" to "I have no idea of how what I'm doing impacts the bottom line".
[+] [-] potatolicious|3 years ago|reply
Having been inside Google (and multiple other FAANGs) this is generally untrue, and focusing on this element of the problem misses a much larger productivity problem:
Most engineers at Google aren't "sitting around doing nothing", they are very busy shipping projects that do not matter. Their days are filled with doing work that will not move the needle on any metric that matters to the company, but they are far from idle.
The misallocation of labor is a far bigger problem than said labor slacking off, and management must own it.
Google doesn't need their engineers to fly into startup mode, work 12 hour days, or never surf Reddit on company time. Their labor is severely under-utilized because they are assigned to zero/negative-impact projects or duplicative projects (hey, somehow you gotta ship 5 chat apps at the same time, right?)
Part of the problem is that Google's upper management refuses to engage with the product at all. Entire orgs are given very broad OKRs like "increase DAUs by 10%" without virtually no guidance as to what features management is interested in. Authority to ship features also rests close to the leaf nodes of direct line-managed teams. The expectation is that teams are entrepreneurial and invent features, implement them, and ship them all without direct upper management involvement.
The result is a bunch of bad product that doesn't do anything positive for the company, were never soberly evaluated by upper management prior to building, and would never have passed the smell test if it did. This, above all other factors, is why Google produces so much product that it then has to scrap. This is the main cause of Google's low labor productivity - not because people are sitting around drinking coffee and eating free food - but because they are assigned to projects that do not pass muster, and there is an almost-comical aversion to validating product ideas before they are implemented.
The single biggest thing Google can do to improve its labor productivity isn't cracking down on slackers, it's forcing its management to actually engage with product definition so entire orgs don't burn years on things that don't matter.
[+] [-] gfosco|3 years ago|reply
The real problems, imo, were the organizational rules, the expectation that basically everyone in a role is the same... the red tape, the ridiculously gamed review cycles, the little empires that reject change... the fear & the blame. This all on top of bad managers, of which I had a fair mixture, those who were helpful and those who actively worked to hurt me.
Regardless, the downsizing is coming, and it's all leaderships fault.
[+] [-] yalogin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bagacrap|3 years ago|reply
Also, if you look at revenue and divide by employees, you will see that the strategy of "employee 5 engineers and hope at least one is good" is still profitable.
[+] [-] fathrowaway12|3 years ago|reply
I would consider myself a hardworking and ambitious person who loves computer science. I graduated top of my class at a state school. I've gotten promoted, consistently "exceed expectations", lots of positive feedback, etc. But I have not actually accomplished a damn thing or written a single interesting or useful component in my professional work.
The thing is, it's becoming clearer and clearer that so much of what goes on is bullshit. A pattern I have seen 3 times now is managers significantly over-hiring to build their little management moat of mediocre junior devs, then leaving on to brighter pastures with their shinier resume or promotion.
Most of the work is dealing with other people's code messes, operational gruntwork, and ticket grinding that will have little to no impact and is a complete waste of smart people's time. It has little to do with building software or solving hard problems, just maintaining and tweaking the existing systems. It does absolutely nothing for your career. You could be Jeff Dean stuck on worthless legacy grunt crap with no upside and I doubt you would get noticed.
On the flip side, people who actually get interesting, promotable work are the luckiest in the world. It is the difference between a rocket ship advance of career and skill or stagnation and frustration. But this is rare IMO.
And it's so hard to tell going in which you're going to get. I've now taken a gamble on three teams that looked good on paper but turned out to be legacy management empire crap. It pisses me off that once you choose you're basically stuck there for a year or two before you can try again. I don't want to waste any more of my life on this merry go round.
[+] [-] gorgoiler|3 years ago|reply
They get paid and they push code but they seem to think that’s the be all and end all of the relationship. It would be like living with a partner who takes out the bins and cooks every other night but never gives you a birthday card and constantly complains about your behaviour.
I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with wanting to have good social relationships between staff because the flip side is that every Eeyore, loner, and whiner chips away at morale bit by bit until they are the only people left.
How have you rewarded camaraderie, positive attitude, leadership, and goodwill today?
[+] [-] tpmoney|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] khazhoux|3 years ago|reply
And now Zuck says "We've gotten complacent as a company, and we have to turn up the heat and sense of urgency, and get rid of people who aren't contributing"... and HN freaks out at this 'dystopian' missive.
Pick a lane, people.
[+] [-] iroh2727|3 years ago|reply
But now there is a big uptick in employees not working much, and I think the cause is just that companies are so disconnected from people. For example, Sundar wants people to be more "customer-focused" but everywhere at Google, all anyone talks about is this metric and that metric. Customers are just treated as a number to be aggregated into a metric. They're really not talking about specific customer problems. And they're not empowering employees to have vision for how to solve specific customer problems overall imo.
Also, speaking of their own employees as people, they're similarly disconnected. They just treat employees as part of a metric too to a large extent. And what does that lead to? Employees that also care mostly about that metrics ($) and not building cool, assistive/helpful products.
I mean it all comes back to incentives of companies trying to grow their stock value. So it's really that and not out-of-touch CEOs. But although a recession is heartbreaking, we do need to regain some sense of reality imo. Perhaps return to technology that's actually trying to assist people or fix things in the world. One can hope.
[+] [-] senttoschool|3 years ago|reply
People will point to "studies" showing how remote work improves productivity. Maybe it did initially but eventually, people will check out, feeling isolated, feeling less motivated.
Some people who worked remotely before covid swears that it helped their productivity. But these people are biased because they were probably one of the few who were disciplined enough to make it work and they gained the employer's trust over time.
There were a lot of reports of Zuckerberg bemoaning about productivity. Tim Cook wanted everyone back in the office full-time before Delta. Google also wanted everyone back in the office. Clearly, these CEOs aren't just making decisions on a whim and they have real data on productivity rather than some 3rd party studies.
This opinion is not popular here but this is how I see it.
[+] [-] lordleft|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajeshp1986|3 years ago|reply