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'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm (business-standard.com)
730 points by quaffapint on Aug 10, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 1104 comments



As a consultant, I come around a bit.

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 have met a few of those people, but every single one of them needed a justification.

Some told me they felt wronged by the company somehow. For example they had experienced bullying, or didn't get promoted when they felt they should have been, or they had contributed something and then it got cut from the product, something like that in most cases. Now didn't feel they owed the company anything. Yet others said the pay is not enough to really get them invested in the work.

The fact that they needed these excuses tells me they felt what they did to be morally wrong and didn't really want to be dead weight.

I personally have done a few projects that turned out to be purely compliance based, and had no merit whatsoever. I remember the feeling of wasting my life to be absolutely soul crushing and I have been avoiding that kind of project as if my life depended on it.

Your mileage may vary.


I am not a dead weight and I’ll never be, but I also do absolutely bare minimum to not get fired. And by bare minimum, I mean, I will always finish my work in the time it is expected to be finished. And if the expectations are higher, I’ll move on to another job.

I do this as a way to get back at corporate America. Too many companies get away with sucking out their employees dry and firing them once they can’t meet the unreasonable expectations that are set for them. You could be dying of cancer or have lost a child, and they will get rid of you the moment they can do so without breaking the law, and in some cases even break the law in the hopes that you’d not pursue any legal action. Nah don’t work hard, work smart, for yourself.


>You could be dying of cancer or have lost a child, and they will get rid of you the moment they can do so without breaking the law, and in some cases even break the law in the hopes that you’d not pursue any legal action. Nah don’t work hard, work smart, for yourself.

Amen, once upon a time I worked for a company and I didn't miss a single day for almost 3 years. Then at the moment I needed to work remote due to a family member's terminal cancer, I got oh so sorry to hear that, but by the way you f*** something up last week.

You sure you really need to work remote, can you work remote like one day a week. Are you sure, it's like terminal terminal.

Eventually they agreed to let me work remote but then they hired a replacement behind my back .

Luckily my childhood taught me not to trust people. When someone shows you who they really are, believe them. So I already had a better paying job lined up.

Hell, I nearly doubled my pay too!


>family member's terminal cancer

Yep, I lived this and it really woke me up. The day my dad died my boss called to ask "your going to be in tomorrow right, since you don't have to take care of him anymore"

Not to mention things like "are you sure its terminal" "Do you know what terminal means? just checking maybe you didn't understand the doctor"

To a company you are a number and nothing more,treat them the same. The people in charge got there by ruthlessly focusing on that fact. Trying to get sympathy from work is like trying to explain to a debt collector why you can't pay. They don't care at all and never will, everything you say will be used against you and they are hoping you will slip up.

Its as pointless as a mouse trying to debate a hungry cat as to why he should not eat him.


I don't care about my employees at all. Their family lives are meaningless to me, distracting and dull.

However I always pretend to care, always make sure they're well paid, have clear growth in development and pay, feel looked after, that they don't need to hesitate to ask if they need a cash advance or time off for an emergency, etc.

You can be ruthlessly focused and unempathetic whilst also being sympathetic and helping people love what they do. They're not mutually exclusive.


To be fair, I have had some compassionate employers offer me a couple of extra days of PTO after an emergency.

But this is offset by the fact that since I never took PTO, I had stopped accumulating it almost a year ago.

Something I love about remote work, is it encourages people to actually build real social circles.

I make my friends at bars, concerts, and industry meetups. I don't make work friends, I'm not trying to be buddy buddy with my manager

Because that same manager who was like. Yeah good job. You just saved the company $30,000, here's a $400 bonus

The moment something happens, like you know your dad dying, is going to tell you. If you don't get back in shape they'll have to look hiring someone else.

Work to maximize your income, try not to be mean to people at work, but you should never treat work as anything but a transaction.


My wife had a Big Crunch at her job so I needed to leave early every day to pick up my son instead of my wife doing it. My job gave zero fucks and wanted my butt-in-seat until 5pm. I still left 30 minutes early every day and got fired for it, but not before lining up another job. Some work places seem great, until real life hits you in the face. I wish there was some way to detect empathy of a workplace before joining, without coming across as sketchy.


>Some work places seem great, until real life hits you in the face.

This goes for every type of relationship though.

Friendships, marriage, and employment.

But I'm very much a mercenary at this point, I have no loyalty to any company. I save my money, and I know I can get fired without cause at any time.

Instead of socializing at work, and having that social circle ripped from you when you get a better job.

Build your social circle via bars, concerts, and for more industry-minded people tech related meetup groups.


> to detect empathy of a workplace

A family business is usually a place, but you should expect that a kin selection will prevail when it comes to promotions.


A family business is worse. You will always be considered an outsider.

The idea of greater sympathy is a fallacy. You are simply closer to the people with power, they don't want to seem cruel because that drives away talented/hard workers, they have to make concessions. They don't have the resources to make people expendable yet. They don't get the luxury of having 6 layers of mgmt to shield them from being remorselessly cruel. As soon as they have those layers you will see what they really are. Ask me how I know...

You get the added bonus of some borderline mentally challenged family member will be put in a position of power. The other family members know but don't want to hurt their feelings. Then you get to be drawn into awkward family squabbles when you have to appeal to the other family members that their actions are hurting the business and need to be corrected, basically babysitting your own boss for them. Without the benefit of ever being in charge yourself.


You get back at corporate america by being a mindless corporate drone?


I get back at it by getting paid as much as I can for as little work I can do. Like I said, I’m not doing nothing, but I’ll never sell my soul for marginal increases in wages and that occasional promotion.

I get back by having a life after 5 pm, Never going in to work on a weekend, taking time off to spend it with family and never letting stress and bs from corporate world affect my private life.


Yeah, that's how corporate America works, buddy. You give up on finding fulfillment at work or striking it rich, and just do what they tell you without thinking too much about it. In return, you get to clock out at 5 and take a nice vacation every year.


As oppose to what? Spending 20hr of unpaid overtime in hopes to get noticed? Or starting a company and betting your (and your family) whole future to be next facebook?

They are doing 9-5 and then do whatever they want with their life. Maybe they are working on a side to break from corpo world, maybe they have no other choice or wants.


Oh, I'm definitely not saying they should do otherwise. One of the great things about large corporations is that they can provide a stable work environment that doesn't interfere with the rest of your life.

But to suggest that this is how you "get back at corporate America" is laughable. In fact, it's the opposite.


Fair enough, Agreed its definitely not getting back at anything


Isn’t that just…. Taking the deal?


lol, honestly...

If you're not getting fired... you're either going to or you're doing as much as expected so everyone is happy.


That’s nonsense. It’s extremely hard to fire people in many corps. I’ve personally seen it take years even when everyone agreed (including management) someone needed to go. And often the paperwork threshold is so high that even people producing negative work aren’t fired; you just hope they eventually move on since you’re not giving them raises etc.


That’s when an org really starts to collect dead weight (actual dead weight).

Don’t get me wrong, shitty managers need checks and balances, but when an org loses so much trust in itself that it makes it impossible to remove pretty much anyone (except those trying to improve things usually, despite the rules), it’s going to get pretty bad soon.


What you’re doing is called “quiet quitting”

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/aug/06/quiet-quitting...


I dislike that framing. It seems disingenuous to call "doing what I'm required to do by my employer" any variant on "quitting". It's explicitly not quitting, after all. If the employer expects that you do more, it should require it.

Reminds me of the Office Space "flair" scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ChQK8j6so8


That is a stupid name. Why not just say somthing like slacking or coasting?


Some office workers are using the word "slacking" as being on Slack and you wouldn't use "coasting" when you live in flyover State /s


LOL.


Slacking or coasting implies you're lazy or you've lost motivation. Quiet quitting is a conscious choice


It's a conscious choice to slack off and coast, plus an excuse.


The only way your claim of "as little work I can do" is accurate is that if you spent one minute less working, it becomes the trigger point where you'll get fired.

But it sounds like you're just a normal corporate worker who does exactly what is stated in your employment contract and no more (and no less) -- but I suppose you should know that there are many people who do much less work than is formally required and get to keep their job.

There is a pain threshold for most managers to fire an employee. They have to spend time and money on recruiting and training a new replacement, so in theory if the cost of you slacking off is lower than the cost of finding a replacement, they might not actually fire you.


This is comical. "I get back at capitalism by doing exactly what I'm told, when I'm told, for the amount I've agreed to!!!!".

Go get 'em kid. :)


You call that dead weight? If you're finishing your work on time then you may (gasp) be a decent employee.


This framing is unhelpful.

You haven't been wronged by “corporate America”. That's not even a thing that could have wronged you.

You've worked for or with people behaving badly. Did you call them out on it? If nobody calls them out on bad behaviour how will things get better?

Some people are being so bad that you just have to leave to avoid harm. Fair enough.

It's hard to imagine that this silent retribution does anything but make the problem worse.


Getting back at corporate america by sacrificing your own ambition seems like a pretty unfulfilling and ineffective strategy.


“Ambition” is tricky. New grads become a “Senior Engineer” or a “manager” in 5 years these days. And most people don’t climb corporate ladder beyond a Senior Staff Engineer or a director. So you have almost 40 years worth of career left to climb two more levels.

Working your ass off continuously in pursuit of that ambition is pointless. If that’s the only thing in your life, then maybe it’s not, but ambition can be found outside of corporate America.


Corporate doesn't even notice this guy.


Forget the compan(y/ies) for a moment. In a decade or two when you look back will you feel your time was well spent?

The companies, much less corporate America in aggregate, will have assuredly not noticed your protest. But will you notice your lack of professional accomplishment?

Being wronged extracts a price, through vengeance you can pay it twice.


My argument is that professional accomplishment can be achieved while just meeting expectations. I’ve seen people who are at the same level, work harder (read longer) than I do and yet get paid less and not get the promotions they were trying for. The system isn’t a perpetual growth machine, otherwise all of us would be VPs and CEOs. I never said I don’t do any work, I still work on things I want to and take great pride in every single thing I do. I just don’t do it for free or at the expense of other parts of my life. Ambition needs to be checked with reality.


This isn't an irrational reaction, but it also isn't always as clever as it seems. Working this way can suck the soul out of your life in the same way that failing to exercise yourself mentally or physically will eventually eat away at your fitness. Is it terminal? Of course not. But it does take a toll on you. And it eats away at your sense of fulfillment and happiness.

Could it be something like diabetes, where it won't kill you today but it will kill you tomorrow? Maybe. Only you can figure out the answer for that for yourself. I know the answer for myself by now, which is yes. I'd much rather work for a company that gives me the opportunities to stretch myself, do work in a space I actually find interesting, and mostly get rewarded and advance even if they extract an absolute larger percentage of my surplus labor than other companies, than vice versa. And that is because I am getting a worse deal in today terms, and a better deal in tomorrow terms. I've been burned by this attitude before, but I've also had exceptional outcomes I'd never take back or redo any other way. YMMV.


“ do absolutely bare minimum to not get fired “

agree with this. have been trying to get to this point for a few months. I usually am a friendly person but I’ve learned to limit to personal relations and not let it flow into my work ethic. I have some other issues to be ironed out though like overzealous colleagues, and some flexibility needs


This is what has become the default that our current system works to incentivize in real terms, but with a lot of marketing to discourage following this path. I work in India, but with a corporate American client atm, and have seen this in operation,(luckily it's a fairly small/medium company so not too much). Having worked in a few startups(with ESOPs) from India before this, I really, really wonder how a global/multi-national company can work with equity based incentives at this point, and if it will help a bit to improve the incentives.


Hell of a way to go through life though. "Corporate America" doesn't care in the slightest bit. It's an unthinking unfeeling machine.


> I am not a dead weight and I’ll never be, but I also do absolutely bare minimum to not get fired.

That's the literal definition of dead weight.


This is the "pieces of flair" debate. If their manager asks for fifteen tickets a month, and they do exactly fifteen, the manager sits them down and asks why they don't do twenty, like their colleague over there.

They ask the manager, "If you want twenty tickets, just ask me for twenty tickets. Why do you set fifteen as the standard, and then try to use cheap psychological tricks to get me to do twenty tickets?"

I have managed teams going back to the nineties. If I want fifteen tickets, I ask for fifteen tickets. If someone just does the minimum, they just get paid the minimum, but I have set my expectations such that their work is a net benefit to the company, so they keep their job.

If things change and I need twenty tickets, I will ask for twenty tickets. It's not complicated. The "bare minimum" is still enough to keep a job. If it isn't, it's on me to establish a different minimum such that the "minimum" is exactly that: The minimum needed to remain employed.

"Dead weight" is someone whose work is not a net benefit to the company. If I as a manager set a minimum, and someone does the minimum, and they are not a net benefit, WTF am I doing as a a manager setting fifteen tickets as the minimum?

Employees meeting expectations but not being a net benefit? That's a management problem. And if it's across the org, that's a SYSTEMIC management problem.

So if this person is meeting the minimum, either they are NOT dead weight, or there is a management problem. Either way, they are not the problem.


As a manager myself, here is the problem I see in what you're saying: Most often, the time estimates are set by engineers themselves. I don't tell them "Do this task in 3 days" -- I ask them how many days/week it will take, and we track against that. This relies on my trust that they are working hard and not half-assing it.

The "minimum expectation" is therefore hard to concretely define. It's not "everyone should fix 3 bugs a week" or "everyone must implement 2 features a month," because the work is always going to vary depending on the specific issues and project needs.

The variability of coding work can make it hard to explain to under-performers that they're falling behind their peers.


If you're a manager and are not capable of seeing an overestimated timeline for what it is, you have one or more problems: 1) you do not know your employees, 2) you do not understand the work they're supposed to be doing, 3) you do not understand your product. Either of these or all of them or any combination in between still means you're the problem.

If you look at a problem and you estimate a timeline, you'll underestimate sometimes. so when an engineer brings you a significantly longer timeline, ask them to justify it, ask them to show you what they mean. This will eat a few extra minutes out of your day, but it will help you separate the bullshitters from the genuine people, and it will help you understand what they do better. And if you just can't add those extra minutes to your schedule without causing trouble, then the problem lies with your boss, not you. It's your job to know your people and understand what they do, and if you're not given the leeway to do that you'll never be effective.


You're describing a scenario where an incompetent manager is both clueless about the technology and doesn't spare even a few minutes to do their job. I'm sure that happens, unfortunately.

But, the point that I was making was simply that trust is an essential part of software work, and people who pride themselves on doing only the minimal amount of work, risk messing up this system of trust for everyone else. We all want a manager who trusts us when we say a problem is hard and it will take time. And managers want engineers who when they say they're working on a problem, they're actually putting time and effort into it.

In the (hopefully very rare) case where an engineer puts in a measly amount of effort during the week but pretends they're hard at work, this trust is broken, and in the worst outcome, the manager or company overcorrects and it becomes a shitty place to work.


Yeah, but this is where knowing your people comes in. If you've got a bullshitter on your team and you know it, you need to be figuring out how to get them not just off your team, but out of the company. If you don't know it, you're not doing your job.

This can be hard I know with the way contracts are, labor laws, severances, and often times it is easier to just offload the employee to another team, which compounds these problems and makes them systemic. That's the only sticking point I think that takes the blame off management. It should be easier to fire bullshitters.


If you don’t trust their estimates, Look up estimation poker. The whole team plays. It’s a good way to keep everyone honest with regards to estimation and allows everyone to learn hidden things that someone else may see.


Is this comment section to devolve into a discussion about software engineering practices? We could now write thousands of pages on that topic or we can cut down to the chase. If the manager can't tell whether his project is on track or not, remember nobody gives a damn whether it takes 50000 lines of code or 500 or that you closed X tickets, then the project has either already failed or the project manager is taking a huge risk with a greenfield project where he is just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.


Surely you don’t blindly accept estimates? Do you dig down and ask what assumptions they are making for how long it will take?

This doesn’t sound like a problem with minimum expectations. This sounds like a project management problem.


I've been lucky to only ever work at places with very technical managers, who don't blindly accept estimates, and actively work with the developers to figure out how to work faster.

But, the usual pattern for people who work slow, is that some new complication always comes up. And it's not easy to know when the complication is legitimate and will take time to figure out, or something that could easily be dispatched in an hour's time.


Currently a manager, you wrote exactly what I would say, only in a much more robust manner. "Meeting standards" should not be cause for alarm. If it is, there are many things wrong with the company.


The problem with this line of reasoning is you’re assuming everything required to keep a company going can be reduced to a job description, but there’s millions of small, impactful ways employees can contribute that fall through the cracks. Being pleasant to your coworkers is rarely part of the job description, but it can make or break that coworker’s productivity for a whole day.

If you aren’t willing to do these extra tasks, that’s fine, but you’re doing nothing to keep the company surviving and someone else will have to pick up your slack. It’s in everyone’s best interests to keep the company surviving as long as possible so it can keep paying salaries.

Of course the C level has a lot more to gain, but everyone has to work somewhere so why not do your reasonable best to make a positive impact.


True; I see your point and mostly agree with you, with the caveat that I'd file those traits as "being a decent human being with a reasonable level of emotional maturity" - things that I personally filter for in the interview stage.


Since when is a software engineer's output measured in "tickets" per month?

That said I agree with the idea that someone that adds value that is some reasonable multiple of their salary gets to keep their job. If they're not adding value because they can't perform their job or don't care they should not keep their job. If they're not adding value because of how they're managed their manager should not keep his job. If this issue is endemic in the company that probably means the CEO shouldn't keep their job... In an ideal world anyways.


This is the best response. I used "tickets" as a rhetorical device because it maps very neatly to pieces of flair from Office Space.

In reality, trying to measure software development productivity objectively always makes me whip out a little venn diagram that shows that what matters and what can be measured have but a small intersection.

But abstracting away from tickets, as a manager you set some kind of expectation for "the minimum." However it is you rate people from "not meeting expectations" to "meeting expectations" to "exceeding expectations," my contention is that it's the job of a manager to make sure that "meeting expectations" means that an employee's work is a net benefit to the company.

Whereas, "dead weight" describes someone who is a net loss to the company. So to me, someone who just meets expectations should not be "dead weight." If they are, I suggest there is a management problem.


TPM - bug squashing/or MBA manager would be my take. Would bounce if ever that was my metric. Its like GPM but for SEs.


I got reprimanded for not posting enough comments on issues and then was compared to another engineer.. who didn’t post timely comments on issues. At some point it’s not about trying to determine if you’re an underperformer but just that they want you out. Lots more tales from that crypt but I’m happy where I am at the moment


Finally saw "Office Space" recently! Now I know about "flair". 15 is the bare minimum. Look at <dedicated-employee> - he has what, 35 pieces of flair! Don't you feel like a slacker, barely achieving minimum expectations?

As to the parent thread: I make about half what I would be making if I had gone the FAANG route -- but I get to choose what I work on. That is a fair deal in my mind. Working on things that fascinate & inspire me make me a 10x rockstar. But if I'm asked to keep dead code limping along zombie-like, I need to work harder and longer because in that scenario I am a 0.5x sleeper. YMMV


Exactly, most employees aren't in a position to allocate their own tasks. The entire point of management is to algin what happens in the company with the interests of the owners of the company. If management makes a mistake in allocating work and there is no flaw in execution by the employees the real dead weight lies in management.


Dead weight would be people doing nothing. After those come the negative contributors: they do stuff but is all politicking and scheming, or just waste others time. Doing strictly what you are really paid for is bad now?


“Enough” is not in the vocabulary of corporate vampires. Doing your job to the requirements should be acceptable, and that only works if your org is run by empathetic, reasonable leadership, you don’t tolerate the abuse of being squeezed, or you have a union. If the bar is never enough, you’re being gaslit, and that’s psychological abuse.


That's exactly why most performance reviews are a scam. "Always room for improvement."


And I think that's exactly the original commenter's point: if the company he works for ever decides that "enough" isn't sufficient to satisfy his boss, he's he'll move on.


Working to rule is the first labor action unions start doing ahead of a strike.

If you want to do piecework/hourly work, you should be a contractor.


Working to rule involves malicious compliance, which may very well be harder work than actually being productive. Just being unenthusiastic is not the same thing.


No, dead weight is someone who does little or no work, should be fired, but manages to fly under the radar somehow in order to keep their job.

Someone who does the bare minimum in order to buy get fired is just a... satisfactory employee. Never gonna get big raises, never gonna get promoted, but gets their work done and doesn't go above or beyond.


Apparently you have never continually excelled at your job and been rewarded with zero raises, zero promotions, zero added trust, and zero added authority or influence.

Every place I have ever worked has taken advantage of anyone who does more than they are asked. None of those individuals were ever rewarded for going above or beyond. Not a single time.

Doing the bare minimum is what employers do. Why should employees do any more?

I believe it is our moral duty to improve ourselves. I do not believe it is our moral duty to donate effort to an unthankful entity.


> That's the literal definition of dead weight.

No.

literal definition

> the weight of an inert person or thing.

The metaphor refers to people that do nothing and are only a burden. Dead weight cannot positively contribute.


Just doing the job you are paid to do is called dead weight now? That’s the exact ideology I refuse to follow.


The problem is when you tell your manager it'll take you X number of weeks to finish a task, and your manager trusts that you're working hard and that the task simply requires X weeks of work... but in reality you're barely spending any time on it every day, and could easily have done it in a few days. Meanwhile, the rest of the project is moving slowly because they need your piece to complete.

If, on the other hand, the manager's trust has no relevance here, because you are not setting your own time-work estimates, then have at it!


This is kind of a wild take. Estimates should be reviewed like anything else on a team, and if the estimate doesn’t fit the timeline, the team should try to either split up / parallelize the work, drop scope, or look for a creative solution (usually involving taking on some strategic tech debt).

Work planning should be a team effort.


This is completely consistent with what I said. Even as a team effort, you want your manager to trust when you say something has some non-obvious complexity. And the manager wants to trust their team members.

But my comment stems from someone above who said they do the minimum amount of work possible. This sucks for the team, who is working hard and trying to make progress, meanwhile this person is barely doing any work every day in between gaming or reddit or whatever, but (presumably) still joins stand-ups and Slack to chime in with whatever "complication" he's having to work through that day, and always gives the impression that their work is super tricky.


You might be misunderstanding what "minimum amount of work" means. The OP might simply be referring the minimum amount of work achievable without overexerting oneself via extra hours, working weekends, under stress, etc. Someone's minimum amount of work can be hard work. They literally said "I will always finish my work in the time it is expected to be finished." So if that amount of time is not satisfactory, it is up to the manager to ask for the time to be shortened- and then that becomes the new minimum.


Would you use the same argument if your company could easily pay you 2x your current salary but just pays you x?


It’s also a problem when the manager can’t tell if an estimate is bogus or not. It could be exaggerated. It could also be overly optimistic. To be a decent dev manager you need a feel for whether it’s in the right ball park. Or know when to bring in someone else who does.


IMHO (having managed small teams) a manager of technical team members needs to be able to accurately estimate how long something will take and the variance on that estimate. This is a core part of the manager's job. If a manager isn't technical enough to know how to do the tasks themselves if they had to, that manager should not have a job IMHO. This is part of what sets engineer-led companies like SpaceX apart from their "dinosaur" competitors and why SpaceX seems to be 10x better in output.


You’re literally on the literal wrong path of understanding what dead weight is.

I think you missed the productivity porn thread posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32335165


No, the LITERAL definition of dead weight is " 1: the unrelieved weight of an inert mass 2: DEAD LOAD 3: a ship's load including the total weight of cargo, fuel, stores, crew, and passengers"

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deadweight

Examples of literal in a Sentence:

" The literal meaning of “know your ropes” is “to know a lot about ropes,” while figuratively it means “to know a lot about how to do something.”

I was using the word in its literal sense.

The story he told was basically true, even if it wasn't the literal truth. "


No that's not dead weight. Dead weight is people who don't contribute and don't get their work done.

Going above and beyond requirements is a personal decision.


Sometimes it’s the even worse folks - the people who do things that are net negatives and need to be drug around by everyone else like they’re an anchor around the companies throat.


Is it? I'd interpret dead weight as being... well a dead weight, say an anchor holding back progress. Or being generous at least not contributing anything even they aren't actively holding things back. Doing "the bare minimum" isn't dead weight though, they are still contributing


>I mean, I will always finish my work in the time it is expected to be finished.

But this isn't what a dead weight does.


> That's the literal definition of dead weight.

You must not have worked in companies with actual dead weight.


Got news for ya, that’s dead weight. Competent management would make getting rid of you a priority, as that behavior drags everyone else down.


That is the exact propaganda I don’t buy. My 20 year long career that pays quite well would think either you’re wrong or most of corporate America’s management is not “Competent Management”.


Your comment upsets and disappoints me. In large part because it's true: at my previous workplace, I was casually told that CME is a polite fiction and all employees are expected to exceed expectations.


> or didn't get promoted when they felt they should have been, or they had contributed something and then it got cut from the product, something like that in most cases

Can definitely speak to these cases - especially where you do great work and have a narrative that it was unappreciated - and clearly see lesser performing or less impressive colleagues getting ahead. For a lot of people, it takes only a few instances of this to switch to "I'll do the bare minimum not to get fired - why sacrifice much of my life and mental energy for this?"

I've been there a few times, and to speak to your point: I decided that instead of being a dead weight I should just look for another job where I don't feel this way. I can say that amongst my peers, that behavior is an exception. Most people who become deadweights will remain that way. It's work to find a new job, and you may have to move, etc. Amusingly enough, Leetcode style interviews are effective at ensuring deadweights remain so.


> Amusingly enough, Leetcode style interviews are effective at ensuring deadweights remain so.

yep. They also ensure that anyone wanting to move on will probably be doing most of their day Leetcoding. Because you're going to stay at a tech job 1-2 years max and it takes most people probably 6+ months (kids, family, etc.) to ramp up from nothing. Once you have LC down and did the hard part, you need to retain it. Which means constantly doing problems.

Our industry is a burnout treadmill.


I agree. I would argue that a large portion of those meeting the "dead weight" definition are just truly burnt out.


> Can definitely speak to these cases - especially where you do great work and have a narrative that it was unappreciated - and clearly see lesser performing or less impressive colleagues getting ahead.

I did great work for a company and got fired... because I took a freelance w2 contract in my spare time. The company didn't even know that I'd taken on the role, and the role had actually finished, when they somehow did find out and I got my marching papers.

FUCK working hard and FUCK doing "good" work.


Personally, I think disallowing other work should be illegal. Having said that: What was the policy at your workplace for other work? In my company it's clearly allowed if it's in a different industry - although they've not given clear guidance on whether I need to disclose it in those cases.


Who said it's disallowed? They couldn't disallow because he didn't ask and that's more likely to be the problem.


How did they find out?


W-2 “freelance” in addition to W-2 “non-freelance” at the same time? In other words, you violated your employment agreement and got fired. The sad part is you still don’t quite understand the basics of W-2 and why you got fired in the first place.


Apparently you don’t either. In the US at will employment doesn’t mean you can’t have another job. There may be a clause in an employment agreement that says you agree to not work for any other company, but I’ve only seen this clause once in 10 jobs. Do you know what this clause is commonly called?


In Clerky, you will find it under the section “Outside Activities.” Custom contracts may have a different name for that clause. 1 out of 10? Maybe if you’re in Hollywood or some other highly specialized vertical. In tech, it will be 99 out of 100.


I turned into dead weight once during a hostile takeover of the company I was working for. It was pretty shit, and I'm glad I moved on after a few months of being unproductive. Management removed our ability to move forward on any existing work, and allocated no new work, and rejected any proposals from anyone from the 'old' company.

Wound up spending most of my (remote) work day occasionally checking my work laptop for emails, working on personal projects on my personal laptop and gardening or doing some DIY fixes on our old house.

Felt bad the entire time and finding a new job was a huge weight off my shoulders.


Through a weird sequence of events, a group of us ended up working through a consulting company re-billing arrangement for a large financial services company that was closing our office. The “suits” needed us on payroll to feel secure that our code would keep working, so we got promised our annual bonus (substantial) if we worked until X date. The tech leaders at HQ hated that we existed at all and so gave us no work. We might have worked 40 hours in 4.5 months (total, not per week).

Bonuses eventually hit our account and we all resigned serially; literally a line outside the manager’s door waiting to resign.

It sucked; was so bad that one colleague didn’t want to Google something one evening “because he needed something to do tomorrow at work”.


I had a coworker who ended up in a similar situation. At one point they were almost literally being paid to do nothing. They eventually stopped even going in to the office all while collecting a pay check. As nice as that sounds, it was still not a great situation because they didn't know how long it would last and figured eventually, without warning, they'd be dropped. They ended up leaving on their own to actually do something and have a more stable job.


If you thing about what limited time we have on this earth, it seems like to better choice to find something you enjoy in the shortest amount of time.


I've been in this situation. Not knowing is the hard part. Don't waste this time, start a project and work like crazy on it because it never lasts.


Ended up in a similar situation. Gave me time to start up my own company. Was 10 years ago. Company still running. Lucky I was.


Another concern that is very prevailing is rewards. I could work 2 times harder in my current position, however what is that going to bring me?

Promotion or bigger bonus - it’s the same as playing stock options with your time, you are better off playing office politics for a much better RoI.

Self value? Senior engineer in FAANG is almost never going to have REAL impact, so I can only enjoy thinking that someone cares about that tiny piece of software that I work with. Again, getting drunk is a better RoI. Same with self improvement… where side project usually allows one to grow more

So, what is the benefit of working harder?


There is none, modern humans are so productive they struggle to think of things to work on, they should just work fewer hours.


My millage is that it's not absolute "dead weight". It's more wanting limited responsibility and tasks that require limited scope/time spent, but does actually contribute, just a much smaller scale than others.

> The fact that they needed these excuses tells me they felt what they did to be morally wrong and didn't really want to be dead weight.

My guess from your comment is that you judge them for being slackers, and the feel obligated to explain to YOU that its not morally correct. Personally, I have no qualm with those that want to drift around megacorps while collecting a nice paycheck.


Do you feel the same way about people who put effort in but are not skilled enough to contribute (or make things worse by trying)?


> people who put effort in ... make things worse

Dead weight? Sounds more like friendly antimatter

GP:

> > I have no qualm with those that want to drift around megacorps

For me, that depends on what the company is doing. Let's say it's mobile games or quant trading -- then, slacking at work in a way just gives people more time away from the computer (fewer games to play?). And changes which ones of the rich people, get richer.

Then what does it matter.

Whilst if one is working for a hospital or a stopping-online-manipulation department, then, in such cases, slacking is sad, not good for society, right


> Whilst if one is working for a hos, pital or a stopping-online-manipulation department, not good for society, right

Oh definitely. I'm under the (maybe wrong) assumption that the majority of people are not doing this. I believe most my peers in the silicon valley bubble I live in aren't really moving needles that benefit humanity.


People will always make up reasons if the tone of the conversation feels adversarial, but just spend a week in r/cscareerquestions to see the unfiltered sentiment: lots of people literally bragging about working 30 or even 20 hours per week as a full time employee, or who explicitly call out "slacking off" as a reason for preferring WFH. "Rest and vest". Etc.


Or maybe those are just the people who spend time on reddit disproportionately, it could be sampling error


Yeah, but the claim was that nobody was like this, while there are obviously a bunch of people explicitly doing this


I think it's pretty common that when someone says "nobody does X", that's shorthand for "there is probably a very small number of people who do X, but not enough to make much of a difference".

Sure, there are some people who abuse WFH, but I suspect it is far fewer people than Zuckerberg and Pichai suggest, and there are other, more important reasons for productivity losses. Reasons that have more to do with management and poor strategy than the actions of individual employees.


What percentage of the population is that person's cutoff for saying "nobody"? My assumption is that it likely was not literal

If 3/80000 people do something, is the behavior significant or relevant?


Depends what the behavior is and who the 3 people are.


The behavior is already defined in this thread

Do only famous people matter? I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.


...explicitly claiming to do this.

I don't know that subreddit; in general this sort of thing could become the thing being bragged about in a community, irrespective of reality.


/r/overemployed and Blind are even worse TBH, people in /r/cscareerquestions are often just trying to strike a somewhat tolerable WLB


If you view people as dead weight, that is the problem. Few folks that make a decent salary want to do the bare minimum. Only managers that treat them as such will call them 'dead weight'.

Note that I'm not claiming you to be a manager, however your viewpoint of these employees reflects some of the managers I've dealt with. I once worked at a company who provided zero training, zero documentation, very poor pay, and no possibility of anything despite offering the world when I joined. I was told by my manager that I was dead weight. I was fired by HR. The situation did not end well for them, legally, or in terms of coworkers leaving.

In my experience working in software development, I've encountered only one person who was dead weight, and he ended up leaving on his own. I've been doing this for close to 20 years mind you. I've seen many accused of being dead weight, and sure, some could have tried harder, but most simply struggled with the mess that was the code we were working on. The symptoms were common: no documentation, hostile management demanding tight deadlines, and poor communication.


Or did a huge amount of work on a project, didn't get properly credited or worse, had their credit stolen by some other employee.

When there's little correlation between amount of effort and advancement as is very often the case, it's justified to just cruise.

I don't see it as "morally wrong but they didn't really want to be dead weight" when it is a justified response.


People who do things they know are wrong will always conjure up an explanation that absolves them of any culpability. They'll even believe it themselves.

For example, people who steal office supplies from work always have a good reason they tell themselves.

For another, all the people who post on Hackernews justifying cheating in college. My favorite bullshit excuse was cheating was justified because the professor didn't expend much effort with countermeasures.


Was going to disagree, because you portrayed this as as "unjust personal affront". I mean like everyone who ever got fired from McDonalds thinks "my boss irrationally hates me."

But on reflection this happens frequently, not due to personal reasons, but due to corporate politics. Side A won the war, so side B just punches the clock until whenever they get around to layoffs. In any big company, there's going to be a bunh of teams where "they know, but we haven't told them yet".


> I have met a few of those people, but every single one of them needed a justification.

This isn’t true at all in my experience. I’ve contracted at many places that simply had a culture of avoiding work. Where a majority of the permanent employees hardly do any work, their main focus is coming up with reasons why problems are somebody else’s problems to solve, and avoiding accountability for anything that goes wrong. The pandemic and WFH has made this a lot worse in many companies. Out of the dozens of large orgs I’ve contracted to, far more of them had these problems than didn’t.


> I have met a few of those people, but every single one of them needed a justification.

Nah man. They just want to chillax. I know because i was one of them at some of my jobs. I don't get any satisfaction from crud/etl type jobs at all. I just want to a paycheck to fund my lifestyle and hobbies. I know tons of people like me , like 50% of my friend circle. Ppl just don't give a shit.


or, they felt being a dead weight was wrong, but wanted to be one, so came up with a justification. If they actually didn't want to be dead weight they'd work in spite of their situation.


If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. As long as that's the actual acknowledged situation and not "most of your job is pretending to work and making people think you're important".

I wonder how successful a lot of companies would be if they openly cut required hours in half.


Yeah it’s the “pretending to work” part that’s soul crushing. If you could be explicit that “this is what I need to do this week, it’ll only take 4 hours. The rest of the time I’ll be available but I won’t do make-work”, that’d be awesome.

Also a lot of people don’t realize that being available for questions or if something comes up IS work - it severely limits what you can do with that time even if working remotely.

So were you near your computer 9-5 today and could respond on short notice? Well then you worked 8 hours basically. And that availability itself is hugely valuable to employers.


Not only is the availability, but so is the image. I had a CEO who loved the image of an office full of people all day, all week. I've been working remotely since then. I think he just wanted to feel important.


Happens a lot.

It's also a problem with the Navy.

More, smaller, near-coast ("littoral") ships would be much more effective tools for wartime and for maintaining peace on the seas. There are some. Acquisitions has been fraught with problems and weighty opinions of captains and admirals who want to feel important on enormous ships. Enormous ships which aren't as useful in the day to day operations in the Navy and would be extremely vulnerable at war with modern weaponry.

A lot of what gets done around the world is heavily influenced by how a decision will influence the feelings of people in power.


>would be extremely vulnerable at war with modern weaponry.

the point of those enormous ships is to minimize the chances of war happening.

>More, smaller, near-coast ("littoral") ships would be much more effective tools for wartime

Russia lost the big ship on the Black Sea and have the situation you're describing - ie. their fleet is several missile frigates, and such their situation is very weak. The fleet can't really operate. (And with recent successful attack on a Russian airfield in Crimea the air support for those remaining ships is expected to dwindle which will be a clear show case of how [in]capable fleet without air support (which we do actually know since WWII really), and that air support usually, until you operate near your shores, can only come from aircraft carriers)


Frigates are much, much bigger than litoral ships.


The US litoral ships are 3500 tons 115m length. Russian Black Sea frigates 4000 tons 125m (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiral_Grigorovich-class_frig...) Black Sea is deep everywhere, ie. there is no "litoral" area where those frigates wouldn't be able to operate due to their size. And their roles there are currently mostly those of "litoral" ships, like the land attacks.


Required reading on this subject should be "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber.


At a FAANG and I can tell you it's not nearly so positive as this.

It was shocking coming from startup world.

It's not so much "gee I only have 4 hours of work to do this week"

It's...well, it's impossible to say how long it takes to do anything in particular, so I shouldn't feel stressed trying to get it done...

oh there's actually no real management style/pressure to get things done here?

Promo is seniority-based?

There's silly unspoken rules like after you get promoted, you're _guaranteed_ a middling performance rating because its an easy horsetrade to do?

Your manager doesn't have to argue $X was super important and strategic and this newly promoted character needs a better rating, and the other manager doesn't need to argue $Y needs to keep a high rating to show continued momentum in his growth, they just do it.

There's no way to rebel against this system, or work within it, other than transfer companies?

It's a rather horrific situation and I don't think it's helping anyone or anyone is particularly satisfied with it. The problem is, any other solution is worse and will hurt The Vibes in the short run. Interesting to see Zuck move towards Dark Zuck and say things I've never heard at FAANG


I have a bad habit of working on important things that don't actually glitter, unblocking other teams and people constantly and recommending against shiny cool solutions, so promotions this year went to my two colleagues who took a glittery project, recommended a shiny shit idea, and have now delivered shit covered in glitter that is immediately getting sales/support feedback like um but it doesn't do what we needed and it is missing what we asked for.

I complained about a bug that blocked our CI for a week, which I'd shepherded around; that the company needs people to be prepared to work on things that they "don't own" because surprise, we don't have anyone assigned to owning the interaction of those six systems! Actual response: well, you didn't have to do that work.

Now let me go back to waiting for anyone to respond to any of the EIGHT CRs I have out, just as well I'm working from home so I can use the time to clean the toilet.


I was in a team like that. One person in particular would pick ambitious tasks, do a completely inadequate implementation, reject all feedback and then leave everyone else to deal with the production outages.

Unfortunately management only saw the “picks ambitious tasks” and were blind to everything else.

You can’t really blame people for responding to absurd incentives in absurd ways.


Ya know what sitting in the manager chair other than not taking feedback I would probably give them kudos too.

Being the person who comes up with mediocre solutions to hard problems is way more impressive than the guy who has expertly designed solutions to easy problems. One of the devs on my team is like that. Everything he writes is like 30% broken from the get go but all his stuff ships and nobody else has the moxy to blindly charge into the unknown and not get stuck because their afraid to cut themselves on edge cases.


Just curious, what kind of software is this? Is it ETL stuff or what?


>Now let me go back to waiting for anyone to respond to any of the EIGHT CRs I have out, just as well I'm working from home so I can use the time to clean the toilet.

There's nothing like being annoyed at waiting for a blocker to motivate me to do the dishes. Second best motivation is being in a boring meeting I'm not really needed in.


I don’t see how giving an up-leveled employee time to adjust to a new responsibility scope is a bad thing.

Working under conditions of pressure and stress provides few long term benefits and is the refuge of those who don’t have the smarts to perform well and need to look like they do.


At Google, which I'm pretty confident the parent comment was describing, promotion is supposed to be recognition that you've already been consistently performing at that level for a long time. So someone newly promoted is not actually up-leveled, they're just no longer down-leveled.


I’m aware, point stands. If you meet somebody for the first time the L* sets an expectation. You need to grow into it.


Not in this case, here, my claim is the role was very clearly grown into, and the rating reflected the fact that these decisions are mostly tenure-based, + or - 2 or 3 years, and the rating was always going to be average even if I cured cancer, as was explicitly spelled out later. That disincentives putting in effort because it doesn't matter. Creates an uncomfortable nihilist atmosphere that can be suffocatingly depressive


Yeah...in at least one part of Google, as recently as last year, getting a rating higher than "meets expectations" in the second perf cycle after promo required a VP to approve an exception. Part of why I left.


> I don’t see how giving an up-leveled employee time to adjust to a new responsibility scope is a bad thing.

It's not a bad thing, but the parent you are replying to never said otherwise. They were talking about a fake performance rating that is given for political reasons.


Anyone who thinks that performance ratings aren’t dog and pony shows have drunk the corporate Kool-Aid. Either you have a manager that likes you and will play the game to give you the best politically feasable ratings because it’s the tool they have as middle management to keep you around or you will toil to meet whatever arbitrary expectations someone with authority but no power has and you should run.


Yeah, first after a promo is “fake” in the sense it is purposefully low pressure.


Sounds like Google, specifically. I don't think Amazon or Meta or Netflix is like this. Don't know about Apple.


IIRC Amazon does stack ranking too.


The comment I was responding to wasn't about stack ranking, not sure if you meant to reply to someone else.


From my experience with a temporary 4 day work week: the people who want to appear busy will still find a way to schedule in the same amount of pointless meetings into the fewer hours.

If those people have control over the schedules of other workers, then those workers lose their focus time.

You need guardrails to prevent org & overhead from overwhelming everything else.


"If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal."

Oh, you're bucking for CEO!

A lot of companies could have cut out four to eight hours of meetings a week and still maintained the same level of productivity.


If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal.

Would you take that over $300k to work 40 hours doing something you actually care about? I don't think I would.


I am more than capable of finding other things I value to do with my time. Not everyone is that way, especially when peoples lives are set up from a very young age to "work" for a third of the hours in their life.


Are you incapable of doing something you actually care about with the freed up 36 hours?


For me it's less about "find a hobby/enjoy life" or more that we're likely in this field because we want to feel necessary and useful.

I WFH with amazing TC and WLB. I do my hobbies all day and then work just a few hours. But I feel like an absolute piece of shit just coasting at work. Doesn't matter how well my hobbies are going, I'll always have the quiet stress of not contributing what I'm capable of doing. The times I feel good about myself are when I actually ship something cool with my team.


People working 4 hours a week still have to pretend to be productive for the other 36 hours though. They still have to sit through meetings, and justify their time, and answer Slack messages, and have reviews. They're not free to work on their own projects - they're just 'not working'. That sounds far worse than spending time working on something you actually care about even if it's not your own idea.


The comment that kicked this off was “ If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. As long as that's the actual acknowledged situation and not "most of your job is pretending to work and making people think you're important"”


Unlike sibling comments, I completely agree.

$300k is (around here) over 7x the mode of income [1]. That's a significant amount (basically the yearly income of 7 "regular joes") and raises (to me) the ethical question of whether I'd deserve it. For a full 40-hour workload, perhaps a case could be made.

But for a 4-hour workload? The only way I'm getting that sort of compensation for so little work is if I'm a parasite on society. And that's not something I would want.

Note: this, by itself, does not imply no one would deserve that sort of compensation. It simply raises the bar - perhaps to a level that is beyond human reach, perhaps not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(statistics)


> But for a 4-hour workload? The only way I'm getting that sort of compensation for so little work is if I'm a parasite on society.

That isn't the case with the power of scaling. If the product you happen to be working on 4 hrs a week happens to have X billion users, your tiny contribution gets multiplied by 9 orders of magnitude.

There's still something arbitrary and random about it, but it's not accurate to say you aren't producing net value for your employer/users/society/whatever.


This is the age-old ethical question "do people deserve more reward for their time when they do higher-leverage work?"

It's not as obvious a "yes" as I first thought. I do high-leverage work, but that just means my work builds on the work of many others. I couldn't do anything near what I do now we're it not for thousands or even millions of other people doing low-leverage work that provides the fulcrum for my work. It's society that allows me to do my high-leverage work -- why should I personally collect the pay check for it?

Also I won the genetical lottery to have the interest and intellectual capacity for this work. Is that something I should be rewarded for? Or is it an unfair advantage that other people should be compensated for not having? There's nothing about my personal effort that has given me that advantage.

Not to mention the education and relaxed upbringing that allowed me to reach this potential. That's also a gift from society to me. Should my response be to not repay? To hoard the rewards alone?

I don't know! That's the system we live in. But is it the system we ought to have?


> This is the age-old ethical question "do people deserve more reward for their time when they do higher-leverage work?"

Indeed. And I would argue that society answers this question already, in the form of teacher salaries. Teachers have the mightiest of levers: the not-yet-capable enter and the capable to highly capable leave. Any high-impact individual was molded by them.

Granted, there's not a trivial 1-on-1 relating between future excellence and a particular teacher. On the other hand, every person who had an outsized impact on the world had teachers that helped him/her along that path.

So I'd say society is pretty comfortable with a big "naah" here: teacher salaries are nothing special. (In the West - I remember reading about rock star salaries for good tutors in some Asian country.)


Few people understand how much of a golden ticket this would be…

Do you have any aspirations to build something of your own at all, whether profitable or not? Well you’ve now been given 300k/year of funding without giving up any equity, with the only condition that you put in 4hrs/week for your “job”

Or maybe you like fixing houses? Same thing, etc etc


> Few people understand how much of a golden ticket this would be…

Uh.. I think you got that backwards. Nearly anyone would recognize that as a major golden ticket!


I dunno, have you seen some of the other replies here? =)

Seems like lots of ppl still can’t fathom something better than an interesting, high paying, but still fulltime job as their “ideal”, or don’t have any passions they’d rather spend their time on.

IMO one reason why so many haven’t found any passions is precisely cause all their time has been spent working, which is sad, honestly.


Yeah, agreed. It would be ideal to perfectly align your life passion with what you can get paid for, and a some people do manage to do that. It's not the only way though, despite what adherents of "success culture" seem to preach.

There is definitely a lot of work out there that needs to be done that isn't going to be anyone's passion. Still needs to be done, and it can pay well, and then you can do all kinds of fun things that you'd never be able to get paid for on the side.

A lot of people aren't monogamous in their passions either, which is kind of what you need to be in order to turn it into a career. Personally, I can't imagine every being so focused on one thing that it's all I'd want to do. I like my work, and I also love a lot of things that aren't my work.


I've come to enjoy doing things other than coding more than I enjoy writing code, but they don't pay nearly as well when done professionally. I'd rather code for four hours and then do those things with the free time.


Maybe? But not until I’ve spent a while doing the whole 4-hours thing.

If I’m working 4-hours a week, that’s a 4-days a week I can be skiing. And reading, and hanging out with friends, and working on actually interesting code projects that aren’t beholden to the whims and timelines of a company. I’d absolutely do that for a while.


In addition to the good points made in other replies, there just aren’t many jobs like that available! “Something you actually care about”, I mean, rather than just “something that’s reasonably interesting to work on and not actively bad”.

And not many pay $300K.


I would take virtually any job that paid what I make now (nowhere close to $300k) and required 4 hours a week over the very best job that paid what I make now and required 40 hours a week. Don't even have to think about it.

I can fill 36 hours a week of my time better than anyone else can. If the money's equal and the time difference is that steep, I'll take the shorter time commitment.


Even over doing something awesome like trying to land people on Mars?


Not parent but absolutely. There isn't a single thing I could do 40 hours a week long term without at least getting kind of sick of... but 4 hours per week means I wouldn't get sick of it, plus I'd have all that flexibility and energy and time to devote to several things that do interest me


Yes, 100%. Honestly can’t think of many things that interest me less than 40 hours a week trying to land people on Mars.

I’ll take 4 hours a week at work, a livable salary, and 36 hours sitting in a coffee shop reading a book and shitposting on Reddit thanks.


To each their own.

Any fiction recommendations?


Jack Reacher series. John Grisham. Michael Crichton. The new Heat 2 novel. Pretty much any crime/medical/legal thriller does it for me.


Now add in that contractually, you cannot controbute to any open source project, and any intellectual property you develop hoes to the company.

Still worth it?


Depends on if the 4 hours a week was all time I had to be at the office or the time I could do something useful but still had to be there 40 hours. For the first option it might be ok. I could find other things to do, maybe start my own little company, spend more time with the family and so on.


I would be more than happy with that arrangement! Think of it, you could spend 36+ hours a week working on something you want to work on!


Why can't it be a job you care about 4 days per week?


Sure those people exist: but there are plenty of people who aren't that way.

I've worked a couple of different places where the systems, processes and structures in place effectively rendered me as deadweight. In both cases it was incredibly stressful and had a profoundly negative impact on my mental health. In the first case I hung around for quite a while hoping things would get better (because they had been better in the past) but, actually, they got worse, so eventually I left. In the second case I stuck it out for only a few months before leaving. Not soon enough unfortunately: I think it was a significant contributor to losing a relationship.

For a lot of people I've worked with over the course of my 20-odd year career not being able to make a meaningful contribution is intolerable over the medium to long term, and not much fun in the short term either. Of course, there have been useless layabouts, but they've been vastly in the minority, and tend to be spotted and managed out.


Agreed. I edited my comment to talk about the ones who do want to do something (I was one of those at my last corporate job)


"There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company."

One of my favourite corporate laziness stories was a friend of my brother's who would regularly nap for most of the working day in some unused basement room. After a while, his preferred room got converted into something else and he had to find a new sleeping spot.

He eventually found a room where a large laundry hamper would be left full of towels until they were washed or folded. Perfect, he thought. Secretive and soft! He went to get in and go to sleep, only to find someone else already in there asleep.


> There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company

Not really. Even they will carve out some niche and pretend (even to themselves) to be doing useful work. Middle managers love to schedule irrelevant meetings, but they will provide some business justification to themselves and to others. You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves.

It's very rare that employees are just twiddling their thumbs and doing nothing all day. Specially if we are talking about a highly skilled workforce. I've seen that more often on boring entry level jobs - because the jobs are already boring by nature, so doing nothing and doing something is not much of a difference anyway.


> Even they will carve out some niche and pretend (even to themselves) to be doing useful work. ... You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves.

In my experience, internal apps need far more love. Maintaining internal apps is far more useful than most 'real' work, just because it can be a multiplier on so much other 'real' work.


I probably know north of 30 people in sales, all in my somewhat close friend circle. They all brag about not working and making money. I think it's part of the sales culture. It's like a badge of honor to not work hard and make money. Hell, I don't blame them. Visit any golf course since covid and you'll see tee time and tee time stacked with people 'working from home'.


I usually assume that I can't take sales people at face value. If it's a badge of honour, they're incentivised to say that they don't work hard even if they are in fact actually working hard (this includes pretending to enjoy golf).

Having said that, 30 people is a lot of people, so I'm inclined to accept your assessment at face value.


>You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves

This.


The two types you describe can also be the same person at different times.

At my last company, my workload started to thin out considerably. Initially, it was pretty great having so much free time, even as I made my extra bandwidth clear to my manager (while being careful not to overstate the case!). There was a period of novelty to coasting, but after a few months, it began to wear off.

My ideal workload may not be being plugged in a full 40+ hours a week, but I learned I also need something far north of 4 hours a week. When a combination acquisition and spinoff took even more off my plate, it looked like I'd have months ahead of very nearly nothing at all. With a promise of no layoffs post-transaction, it looked like a coaster's dream.

Instead, I left.


I have seen it in many places. It's like you can watch the emergence of Orwell's Animal Farm in every human setting. A small fraction doing more and more, which in turn let the others do less and less.


> which in turn let the others do less and less.

Force the others to do less and less. I’ve seen this a million times, you have one dev going absolutely buck wild building a cathedral of abstractions that only they can understand. The rest of the devs struggle to implement basic features because, and I can’t overstate this enough because it’s true every time the code is a horribly written tightly coupled shoddily architected ball of chewing gum of twine spooky action at a distance with no isolation between components (usually because “DRY”) which is impossible to reason about unless you wrote it.

That dev becomes insanely productive in that codebase, the hero of to all managers, and everyone grinds to a halt gets demotivated because they can’t tackle anything ambitious.


I've been that person in a couple of projects, and it wasn't just because I went off and did my own thing. In at least one case the other people on the team were simply not very capable. As in... I've been building web applications for 25 years, and some of the other folks on the team came out of a bootcamp. And... they don't talk.

"Please, joe, let's connect and you can follow along with what I'm doing". Silence.

"Hey, dave, I see the PR is only a few days late. We still have some time left, can you write a test for it?"

I can get stuff done or I can 'corral and build up' the others, but I can't do both. If you want stuff done by a deadline, and you will not discipline the non-contributors (discipline doesn't mean fire, but it might mean "you have to come to these meetings and pair and follow along and document and write tests")... what's left?

FWIW, I know the difference between decent teams and non-decent teams. The non-decent ones were poorly managed, largely because management could not determine who was skilled and who wasn't. The decent teams I've been on were situations where I still generally had more overall experience (function of age) but the other less-experienced people will still good, engaged, and already contributing, and were measurably improving month to month.


It is one thing if they don't talk. It is even worse if they have no experience but thousands of suggestions that don't work. And you have to debunk every of these suggestions to management while keeping the progress going.

Often, if the work horse leaves, no one is able to keep the project going or rewrite the project from scratch. They should be able to do the latter if their suggestions are so great and they have been kept back. But they cannot.


I've got a colleague with similar history - 24+ years of tech experience - software, hardware, networking, etc. He's built systems that processed tens of millions of dollars, has single-handedly reworked legacy crap spaghetti in to testable, documented, well-functioning stuff. He came in to a company, then covid hit, and no one else on the team has anywhere near his level of experience. One guy graduated high school 18 months ago and loves kotlin. Every meeting is him trashing everything saying how cool kotlin in. He's rewritten existing working image processing libraries from C (which my colleague wrote and were working in production) in to Kotlin because "kotlin is faster". Guess what's broken now?

They have multiple meetings per week where people argue about what encryption library they should use for JWT token signing. Like... 5 people - none of whom have ever written encryption, nor written a JWT, arguing based on all the blog posts they've collectively read. That's just one example. This happens constantly. And the manager is of the view that "everyone's opinion matters, everyone should be heard". So the person with decades of experience who's already written (and written docs and tests) for the system they're trying to migrate to has to sit and listen to people who can not spell SQL talk about how 'bad' his system is because it's not in Kotlin.

That feels like an extreme example, but the more I talk with other folks, it doesn't seem to be that uncommon. Probably 15% or so of folks I connect with seem to have wildly imbalanced skill levels in their teams which are not acknowledged as such. It's fine for someone to have less experience. It's not fine to pretend that your 6 months of CS-101 homework is equivalent to someone else's decades of experience and working/documented/tested code.


in my experience the team needs critical mass of decent developers. And by 'decent' I don't mean all-knowing experienced beasts. I mean adequate devs with ability to listen and to be wrong. If team has it, better devs naturally get listened more and everyone gets chance to improve from it. It doesn't mean that you just don't let juniors express their opinions (everyone should be able to talk), but the 'weight' of dev's opinion determines by his track of previous cases. And obviously every opinion comes with responsibility for the result. If you forced your approach you need to be able to deal with the results.


ah yeah, the mythical 10x dev. He, who has the permission and authority of management, to completely eviscerate any and all process to get whatever management wants done. I know a guy like that. He recently commit a massive code change without so much as a code review or a Jira ticket. 100s of new files. No one knows what the fuck they do. Wonder of wonders.

People still believe in 10x. People also believe in agile. It's amazing. If you're doing code reviews, proper unit tests, Jira micromanagement bullshit, it's an impossibility to get a 10x dev. We have WIP limits for fucks sake! WIP!! You literally cannot merge enough code to be a 10x without management favoritism.


> People still believe in 10x. People also believe in agile. It's amazing.

I'm not sure it's the same people who 'believe' in both, or... there's more nuance.

I 'believe' in the '10x' thing, because... at times, I've been the 10x person, by many metrics (bugs closed, docs written, tests written, lines of code, tickets addressed, etc). And yes, I'm aware that metrics like that can be gamed in some fashion. I never did, mostly because it's not really apparent at the time there's an output imbalance, but looking back at some numbers like those, I was the '10x' person on a team. It said as much or more about the rest of the team than it did me personally. I've been on other teams where I was decidedly not a 10x, and do have memories of being the -2x person a few times.

I 'believe' in agile, but only to the extent that it supports and enhances an already functioning team. I've seen it played out in a team from a few years ago, and it was as much of a 'well-oiled machine' as you could get while being a growing startup expanding and hiring a lot. That said, the skills and people together would have worked decently and productively together absent any formal process. Obviously just 'imo', but after decades in software, you sort of get a sense of skill levels and ability. We/they were a decent team, and would have been without 'agile' - that was some extra layers of process and ceremony which no doubt helped some people with visibility. That benefit was largely ancillary to the delivery of working software. One could argue the 'repeatability' and 'onboarding' benefits of 'agile', but I've not seen it be a huge boon in most teams I've seen adopt 'agile'.


Separately, what you described in the first paragraph isn't a "10x" dev, that's a "loose cannon".


I did such thing at least twice (unintentionally). Usually there is a quite simple way to overcome this - cultivate review process and some some of tech meetings, where your '10x dev' can talk about their approach and others have chance to criticise it. If other devs don't care enough to challenge 10x and just roll with it, well then they have it coming.


Animal Farm was an allegory for communist dictatorships, and most large organisations are internally run like communist dictatorships.


As a current FANNG employee, I have seen so many dead weights here, especially the new-hires after COVID. They took advantage of the lenient WFH policy. Some travels around the world for a year; some becomes a social media influencer; some comes up with all sorts of excuse like wife/kids/parents being sick to take unlimited sick day.

It pains me to see how a great company gets abused like this. The cycle to put people on PIP is so long that they can coast at least a year before anything can be done.


What level are they hired at though, and are you talking developers?


Mostly level 4 SWEs, a few L5s.


Our org doesn’t have daily standup. We have weekly meetings but they dial in with camera off. When asked to give updates, they usually mention some small change, being blocked by other teams, or waiting for test result/releases. When you look at their code review, they often take 1 day to reply to comments so each diff could take a few days to submit.


So why do you put up with that? I'd absolutely be bringing that up as an issue with the coworker first and if that went nowhere with our manager if it was regularly causing issues within the team.


So these are devs on base salaries over 160k+, presumably considered to be somewhat senior, and their teams just let them get away without contributing their share? Not even showing up to stand ups or whatever regular team meetings there are? Something seems very off for that to be the case.


I think it varies widely by job. I've met few programmers, percentages wise, that want to be dead weight. At generic office jobs (where my SO works) it seems to be the norm, and it's a problem for her because she's not like that and people load her up with work because they know it will be done right and on time.


It’s really sad when people who want to be meaningful, are stymied by the floaters.

The floaters stick around by inserting themselves into an essential process that needs non-advocate reviewers infrequently, this is usually supply chain, quality assurance, and security. Then they collude by scheduling meetings for each other, which is really just socializing.

When meaningful people need to use a process, and engage the floaters. They find that they are impossible to engage because they are in meetings. And if there’s special considerations that need to happen in a process, which is a given when you’re innovating, it means that the floaters have more opportunities to schedule more meetings, and sap the productivity of the meaningful people.

Not only do the floaters succeed in slowing down the productivity of the meaningful people, they also impose an opportunity cost, which is that the meaningful people cannot engage in another activity while the former activity is going through process. They have to also spend time engaging the floaters in meetings for the process to continue.


"Plenty" is not a good measure, and often seems more based on role and type of firm than just related to a lack of drive.

I've observed whole teams that are effectively 'dead weight' and ones where there is all killer, no filler. Of the DWs I've seen, many are DW not always by choice, but because other factors shove them into odd corners and they can't figure out (or are too constrained by other factors)

You are never going to 100% all-in motivation even from top performers in perpetuity, and even anecdotally most people don't want to be moribund for decades on end, and certainly not the majority of workers.


In particular, people who never really figured out how to do more than bare minimum technical work tend to fail upwards into primarily "collaborative" roles.


Unless I actually have substantive impact — like truly meaningful like people not one bacon distance away from me really feel it you’re getting the bare minimum.

This is the downside of trying to make knowledge workers a commodity and replaceable — work gets coasting and my side projects get my real creativity.


I'm not talking about people who have technical side projects.


> people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company.

Jim Keller had an interesting perspective on how you should think if you are in managing position and need to fire people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TmuJSbms9c he and Peterson discuss it somewhere in the middle


>> "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.

No, the parent is right. Psychological research shows clearly that people don't want to be dead weights. They lose motivation and become burned out for many reasons.

And it's entirely the company responsibility to address the problem.


I think the dead weight is a given, in either circumstance. It's not about motivating them, that's a sunk cost.

It's more about making the 90% of folks that aren't dead weight not suffer under the burden of the stuff OP mentions that overtakes day to day life as organizations get bigger. That's the issue.


I disagree with this. An entire business day is a long time to do nothing. I've always loved jobs where there was enough strategic direction to know what to focus on but enough latitude where you could actually do it. I can't think of anyone (not suffering from pure burnout) that didn't devour meaningful work that had well written requirements.


I have seen the “floaters” but it’s rare. What is worse are the occasional people (and some companies have lots more of this than others) that are a net negative impact to the productivity. There are different reasons but sometimes they believe that their work adds value but in the end it’s really just creating inefficiencies (like creating processes for process sake, work about work etc). That’s how large companies with everything going for them can easily start loosing their edge - when there’s more “no” people than “yes” people!


100%

Working in a +200 yr old manufacturer, and some entire teams may fit that definition.


I think spending about 20 minutes on r/antiwork will get most folks to agree with you.

I think most people want a purpose. Many are perfectly happy for that to be something other than their work or means of earning an income. Nothing wrong with this of course but try be the person where some of your purpose is tied up in your work on that forum, or even this forum at times, and you get accused of having Stockholm syndrome toward your employment captors.


People want to grow, they want to do better. They also, crucially, want recognition and to feel valued for it. That means they must (must) be treated with respect by their employers, and rewarded or at least recognized when they achieve personal or professional growth.

If you don’t reward and respect people who try to grow, why would they ever continue that?


They are not 'pretending' in most cases. They are busy, and think they are adding value.

So do their managers.

Also - sometimes the inverse! I've caught myself feeling 'useless' at BigTech until some feedback/situation made me realize 'OMG this matters' kind of things.

It's hard.

That is maybe Management's #1 job is to get people focused on things that matter.


> There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company.

Very true. It's an unfortunate occurrence at many larger companies (not just in tech).


I have worked in one of those companies. Most were lazy and did barely any work. They were there for a paycheck and it showed. Not everyone works in a mission driven startup where the employees are intrinsically motivated to contribute. Many are just free riders and hide under a middle manager hoping they don't get noticed. Such B teamers need to be weeded out quick.

Then I switched companies and everyone was motivated and hard working. The leader there hired better (less stragglers to begin with) and fired better (fired stragglers within 3 months).


Corporate dead weight aka corporate welfare. It happens a lot more often than you think.


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.


TC or GTFO.

Honestly I've been in markets where this worked out. You pay a lot of money to get someone good who's motivated and does great work. Tech recently though has been a game where you get a high paying job and you just spend a year trying to get the next one rather than working.


Blind is interesting. I'm grateful for the insights into total compensation it granted me, and Blind combined with a managerial stint gave me a very solid feel for both industry and company-specific bands. I also got notice of an impending reorg that was coming my way, and started early in looking for another home.

On the other hand, it only exacerbated the cynicism and burnout covid and WFH brought. Trolls are rewarded with attention through "engagement" with their incendiary posts, misinformation and speculation passed as dogma are rampant, and as you mentioned the collective priority in "the community" is this egocentric worship of money. It reminds me of the subreddit /r/relationships, where the number one piece of advice is to obviously break up or divorce because you're getting screwed over. Blind's number one piece of advice is to obviously grind leetcode and start interviewing because you're getting screwed over.


Blind is full of people from the Bay Area, where if you are the very best in the world at wringing the corporate ladder for everything it’s worth, you might just maybe be able to buy a home for your family one day.

One thing remote work might bring us is a little more chill about compensation, as people live in regions where people not optimizing for TC can be comfortable and secure.


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.


The biggest lie I ever got told at work was "all teams have equal opportunity for impact". They don't, and team+org is about 80% of your potential performance.

At the time my org had a "mission & building" group and a "maintenance & operations" group. I was placed in the maintenance group.

Every single project in the maintenance group went the same: good idea, planning & initial prototype, gets noticed by management, you get permanently blocked or management pilfers your star players and you start again or scope down. All our projects were tiny or failures. Meanwhile the people in the mission group got showered with raises and promotions.

It was soul crushing, I had never been so unhappy. I had no (opportunity for) impact on the business, so my reviews were always that I was technically strong but didn't demonstrate impact. You can get stuck in a real feedback loop there, you get burned out at constant failure.

I'm sure we all looked lazy from above, I certainly felt lazy, but the org structure simply quashed any attempts at progress and we were all powerless against it.

I ended up leaving that role, it gave me a strong focus on impact only roles which was the best career move I ever made.


That sounds like a dysfunctional organization and a good example why trying to measure "impact" in the sense you're describing is not a good idea. Let's say you're on an internal tools team that's building tools that others in the organization rely on to build whatever products your company is making money of. You might say your direct "impact" [edit: is small/zero] but your indirect impact is definitely not. In a well run company those people would be highly valued for their indirect contribution.

You're absolutely right that how a company is organized, and its culture, is directly linked to those outcomes. The ability of individuals to make impact is also very related to their being in the right position to utilize their strengths aka role fit. In a well run company managers try to optimize for all these things. Ofcourse the best intentioned managers can't always place everyone in the perfect spot and lots of projects have work that isn't super shiny but is still important.

Sounds like you made the right decision in leaving.


It sounds to me like you were in a bad fit for the role. Projects definitely have a life cycle. Prototype, build, maintain. And you typically have different types of people doing these different roles. You may not have enjoyed the role that you played - but some people really do enjoy each of those roles.


>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.


I was with you until that part. Having to write .NET and on Windows is just too much.


> As long as you're not mean, you can hang out at most companies for at least 6 months just doing nothing.

Longer if you're CEO.


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.


Let me guess- the management that ultimately nuked the project paraded it around to get promoted before moving to another org and doing the same thing?


^This guy has worked at FAANG.


I think you meant, “This guy FAANGs”.


ah, yes...six years at MSFT, only one year working on code that eventually shipped


MSFT is hardly a FAANG


The acronym FAANG was made up/popularized by Jim Cramer, a TV finance guy, intended to be "these companies are going to DOMINATE tech with the BIGGEST MARKET CAPS". Today the market caps are (in billions) 479 (Meta), 2719 (Apple), 1450 (Amazon), 300 (Netflix), 1566 (Alphabet) + 2166 (MSFT). Cramer tried to make an updated version happen in 2021: (Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet) because Netflix did not explode and Microsoft did not disappear in the way he had predicted.

So yes, IMO Microsoft sits pretty in the no-longer-accurate acronym FAANG.


Why? Their stock performs just as well, and they pay better than Amazon, better benefits, all with a reputation for legendary good WLB.

Amazon is hardly a FAANG


I always understood FAANGS to be defined by their engineering culture and the innovative approach to problems, not just salary.

Hence the selection of companies.


Better pay? Not for new hires. Most recent reports I have seen (blind, levels.fyi) and my own experiences have shown Amazon skyrocket to the top paying FAANG, with the first two years heavily skewed toward cash and backloading RSUs. I am surprised out of all the FAANGs you picked the generally lowest paying one as the counter example.


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.


You sound like my wife ;)

I don't know how to not care. I've been writing software since I was a teenager and it's always been a central part of my life. I've always cared and that care is partly what made me successful (or so I believe). But it definitely is also what's stressing me out... I've always seen work as basically being able to be paid to practice my hobby though as well all know(?) your fun hobby becomes less fun when it's work.

I remember having lunch with a co-worker who was saying something along the lines that he's never really wanted to code and the only reason he's doing it (got a degree and a career) is for the money and I didn't understand how that was even possible ;)


I assume because you literally spend most of your life there, and if it doesn't mean something, that is ... awful?

I mean, there have been times / places in history where you work so that you have enough money to not die; and you enjoy your life with whatever pittance is left afterward.

I doubt anyone reading this website is in such a time or place.


Basically every corporation you can work for will have you doing something meaningless (and is dedicated to a meaningless pursuit besides). As the world population shrinks in the deep future, perhaps that will change - but right now it definitely will not.

As such, I have trouble seeing why you'd think any work you do means anything. Most likely it doesn't and that's okay. It is not within your control to have meaningful work available. It is within your control to have a healthier attitude towards your workplace and your work.


If you find your work to be meaningless, who am I to argue. But I've had a number of jobs at different companies at various places along the 'meaning' gradient. It's not all the same. Though I also agree that meaning is, to large degree, yours to make, at least as much as it is a property of the situation.


Well, I care about raises. I can coast along in my current role, but I want more money, so I need to do impactful work.

If I can earn more on some side work or investment and those earnings are stable enough, then I too will not care about work.


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.


> agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem

This kind of "development process theater" causes terrible cognitive dissonance.


I'm intrigued by this statement. Maybe we run an unorthodox version of Agile, but I'm a solutions architect with imposter syndrome (which is why I clicked this link) and I spend about 3/4 of each day in meetings with PMs and SSTs (Business Analyst) generating a backlog and acceptance criteria that's structured and detailed enough that our developers are generally happy if they get to choose the variable names.


This isn't anything like how a place like Google or Facebook works.

I would guess that the vast majority of developers (I daresay 100% of them) posting on HN would not like to work at a place like that.


I think it's a mix of both - I'd kill for anyone at my current job to spend more than a bare minimum of time on their acceptance criterion so I don't just feel like I'm writing code and hoping it does vaguely what the person wants. What the GP is describing feels a bit too far in the other direction, but I'd almost rather it trend towards having an over-prescriptive ticket I can push back on then playing telephone with another department because they gave me 3 sentences of writeup for a month/quarter long project.


At a product company, the lead engineer(s) and the product manager, who is a direct everyday member of the engineering team, collectively own what the product is supposed to be. There’s not someone else two departments away who is a more legitimate authority on what to build.


That's horrific.


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...


Some of the most valuable work I've ever done was spending a month creating something, throwing every byte away, and then spending two weeks creating the same thing, much improved.

The key to rework like this is you have to actually be able to finish it and get rid of the old, instead of spending months or years maintaining two half-baked versions of something instead of just one.


Almost every single thing I build I throw away at least one of them, sometimes two.

The finished projects tend to stick around forever and, if they need maintenance, it’s adding a feature or two or updating dependencies.

I do backend work so this kind of workflow probably doesn’t work for customer-facing projects that need to iterate on finding traction. But for something where the problem is generally well defined and not likely to change drastically in the short or medium term, it’s amazing. I have multiple projects I’ve written that run on virtually every machine (server and workstation) at my company (former unicorn, current Fortune 500) that are effectively “done” and only need to be redeployed a couple times a year for dependency updates and preventing bitrot in general.

Having worked like this, I can confidently say I will never again remain on a team where this isn’t the normal state of affairs.


YES!!

Even coming from an attitude of being big on abstractions and generalized/scaled solutions, I cannot overstate the importance of writing a throw-away version at the outset. Hit the highlights, write it fast & dirty, use it, extend it a bit as you start to understand the system — then throw it away. Use that knowledge to design and build your real system, from scratch, but informed by your earned knowledge.

>>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.

And to this in the GP post, I think he identified a fundamental problem with Agile. Its entire bias is to write code fast, when the bias should be to avoid writing code — code is slow and habitat for bugs. Obviously everything requires code, but it should be minimized, not maximized. Of course, writing code quickly and seeing it run is satisfying, but developers' dopamine hits shouldn't be the primary driver of design & mgt - end performance should be, and that takes careful thought of what can be eliminated, and basing that thought on knowledge of a throw-away-version-1 is very useful, and pays benefits to both the dev team and to users for years.


> The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers.

Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering


replacing the prototype is important, but you need enough power in your org to be able to throw it away. 'nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution'


Code is Liability, the Less the Better

https://www.infoq.com/news/2011/05/less-code-is-better/


Until your boss doesn't understand this concept and thinks your prototype is a finished system, even after explaining the fact it's just a demo that you made to help gather requirements time-and-time-again.


Also goes the other way, developers believing something is good while totally ignoring user feedback stating otherwise.

Admittesly so, you example so much more frequent.


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.


Well said. This matches my experience 100%.

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.


There were coffee-mug-carriers and hall-wanderers back in the office as well. I don’t think it’s new in WFH, but at least now they bother fewer people with their “checking in”.

I swear one guy must have gotten 15K steps/day in just wandering around the building.


Seriously.

One job I was at had four of us working in one room. A guy from a completely different department would wander in with his cup of whatever and talk at us for at least an hour. He was both dodging actual work and interrupting us. Since he didn't report to our manager there was nothing we could do. His boss was a piece of work as well.

It's these useless people that make open plans so toxic. It's bad enough that the general noise and visual distraction decreases your ability to concentrate and get anything done, but the wandering trolls of gossip and sports talk just add an extra booger icing on the shit cake.


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.


> company calendar is 80% filled with meetings

The typical expectation on salaried employees is that you spend your 8-5 in meetings and then you 5-midnight actually doing programming work.


There is a disease where people add lots of people to meetings that don't really have to be there. Then people have a compulsion to go to every meeting they are invited to.

One of the best decisions I ever made was deciding to stop going to meetings unless I knew I had to. Turns out, nobody really cared, and if they really needed me they could also message me on slack and I can pop in.


I moved jobs recently and this has been a minor issue for me. I get invited to all the meetings, including those where neither my input nor attendance is required, but I don't know that until a few minutes in. At that point I either sit and listen to something barely related to my role or awkwardly drop off.


Except that's not a reasonable ask when you have a global presence and meetings into the evening. Saying no to an over-scheduled calendar is the mechanism by which you gain control of your life.

My measure of a meeting's worth is: if you were shackled to a chair for the scheduled duration of this meeting, would you get anything useful done, from a discussion perspective? If not, simply decline the invite; your brain is not important enough to have been productive in that context.


Typical where? I've _never_ had to deal with such a schedule.


When I've shoulder-surfed my managers and PMs for roughly the last ten years, they're all like that: wall-to-wall meetings. Any technical work they do (and here at least, (T)PMs are expected to potentially contribute technical work) is done outside 9-5.

Certainly there are techniques to mitigate this, but I see it, at least.


A former coworker called these people professional meeters. Had an EM like that. Either he was in a meeting or he was walking around and talking the ear off of whichever unfortunate soul he bumped into. Tangible output was basically 0.


Incredible. I haven't seen a PM that does technical work in years, maybe well over a decade.


Certainly not in most European countries.


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.


Managers also seem to love these proxy metrics, so delivering these metrics to management (as a dev) can be a good way to get noticed.


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.


Yeah but then no one would invent anything because that's the only reason anyone does anything!

_glances nervously at FOSS, science, art, & philosophy_


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.


Some company cultures will punish people for taking the initiative too.


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 think my department was Agile, doing the stuff on the left (good) side of the Agile Manifesto [1], even as we didn't think we were doing Agile. We made deadlines, had smooth deployments, and any bugs in production were not that bad. Then new management came in (company was bought) and started pushing "Agile" on us, which is doing the stuff on the right [bad] side of the Agile Manifesto. Now we've missed deadlines, rarely have a smooth deployment, and are now constantly finding bugs in production. When pressed, upper management has stated that "Agile" is to make it possible to work faster than we were.

Yeah.

[1] https://agilemanifesto.org/


exactly. the sales department has targets for the quarter and they won't give 2 damns about how many story points your team got through this sprint. They want on this date or else.


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.


I'm not sure why you needed to come around.

Leadership signs off on hiring. Leadership signs off on installing far reaching processes that inhibit devs from making contributions.

I'm sure some people try to find ways to cheat the system. But I find it hard to believe that it's a wide spread problem. Even people doing the minimum work possible probably have a ton of other interests or ideas and would rather be engaged with their work somewhat and learning things than idling.


The exact point of a big company is that nothing gets done.


I feel this in my bones, as I'm having to fill out a 27-page document to ask permission to use a new piece of software on the intranet.


> "and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees"

Come on! This is straight up impossible. Anyone who has worked for any length of time in the tech industry has come across people that simply don't do anything, and are totally fine with that. It is *very common* and its borderline dishonest to say otherwise.


Is it really? I haven't worked at that many companies but I've seen it maybe once or twice out of hundreds of workers. I have see devs that were incompetent but tried. I see a lot of pms, managers, business analysts etc who seemed to always be collaborating with each other but contribute very little to the actual product. But the truly lazy dgaf dev is very rare in my experience.


> agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity

In most companies agile/scrum meetings are make-believe work.


And, IMO, a total waste of time for a bunch of cargo cult nonsense.

Scrum is waterfall micromanagement dressed in the verbiage of worker empowerment, and merely shortens the time between death marches.


I wish this were true but most of the people I have worked with in the past 3 years are just lazy and will pretend to be doing a days worth of work for 2 weeks whenever they can get away with it


> 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.

Well said!


As Dilbert says: "our boss can't judge the quality of our work, but he knows when it's late".


Remote working has been around forever. The pandemic opened the doors to a larger set of candidates. None if it changed human nature. There are people who do well on their own. I think most don’t.

I know someone who has had remote jobs for probably 35 years. How does he spend his time? Re-roofing his home, upgrading his bathrooms, fixing his cars, etc. Not working. And these are six figure jobs. Watching this first hand —for decades— has not made me a huge believer in remote work for everyone. Not sure how to define who does well and who does not.


>Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight.

Of course this isn't true.


> Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight.

Have you worked in Government?

edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26727803 for an example


I’ve personally never witnessed this, and I’ve worked in government and know people who work in government in other contexts, and I haven’t ever heard of an actual anecdote to that effect either.

I’m sure it exists, but the meme seems overblown. From what I’ve seen, government is more frugal than the private sector day to day, the main difference is that the government ends up supporting unprofitable programs and has additional burdensome regulations that drive up costs (eg buy American)


I definitely saw a lot of dead weight and waste in government work, more than I have ever seen in the private sector.

Part of it comes down to fact that it's harder to fire people.

Another part of it is that bureaucracies end up becoming dominated by people who serve the survival of the bureau (and it's budget) at the expense of its actual mission.

Another part is that government agencies are just not as easy to hold to account - with a private business your customer can often take their business elsewhere (and if they can't, well, the government just might be the reason for that). In theory the democratic process should hold these agencies accountable, but the democratic process is more indirect than voting with your feet. And there is generally a tendency to resist democratic influence (otherwise the agency would become political).

There are probably many other reasons as well.


> Part of it comes down to fact that it's harder to fire people

Yes, what I was getting at! Developers can coast and never be forced to improve or learn new skills. very very difficult to be fired.


I hate this take of "gobernment bad, capitalism good". As a consultant having worked for both large government agencies and large corporations, they are all the same.


I completely agree -- but it is remarkable how many Americans have bought into this idea that "government is bad".


We'll, it is true that our "ownership class" and its media and political mouthpieces have spent the better part of the last two generations drilling this notion into people's skulls will all the considerable power at their disposal.


I’ve held a job ever since I was 12 years old. And I worked before that under the table to pay for my things as a child. I’ve worked at many multinationals now that I’m middle aged. Yes, I’m American. And my view on this is completely contrary to conventional wisdom. Private enterprise is not only less efficient than government, it’s destructive.

Private enterprise doesn’t care about doing a good job or delivering quality product. It only cares about making money. It’s a perverse incentive that drives everything down to the bottom almost every time. The only way to circumvent that perverse incentive system is to have someone in charge that cares about something other than profits. And there just are not enough Steve Jobs or similar characters out there that cared about quality and legacy enough to make blind participation as a buyer in your favor.

Of course someone will say, that’s how you make money is by delivering quality. But that’s not true. You deliver money by monopolizing, putting in barriers to entry, or simply by cutting costs. By definition, if something you buy was cheaper to produce than the price you paid, you’re getting a bad deal. People just don’t see this because they have no other choice.

Now all that said, I also believe that it is the worst system, except for all the others. I think with sensible regulation to counterbalance abuse, the system is as good of one as I’ve seen.


This has been my experience too. As a youth I worked as a lifeguard, first for a company and then for the county government. The private company gave us an initial 8 hours of training once every three years. The government trained us every single weekend. In an emergency I would have been useless at the private company because I was so poorly trained. At the government I would have been very prepared to deal with the situation. It comes down to incentives, the company wanted to maximize profit, cutting training helps that. Emergencies are rare situations that can easily dealt with by shifting blame to the front line workers. The government didn't have these incentives and were able to invest in training.

Not saying gov good, private bad. Just saying that it is a lot more complicated than gov bad private good.


That's a great example.

I see that in my own job. We don't do any training. That's on my own time and dime. It has definitely hurt my productivity. Software is a great example of cost cutting to death. There's a couple sayings that apply. "What if we train people and they leave? What if we don't, and they stay?", and "slow down to go fast". For the owner, he's getting rich, so anything that works at all is good for him.

Most software joints I've worked at essentially need to be hiring top experts because otherwise there's no real support system to carry you when necessary. Everyone is overloaded with work, many are underpaid for how qualified they are if they're on visas, and most people are in really bad moods. My current place of work is largely toxic. It's just not the right way to go through life.

I've worked at exceptional workplaces that ran like a top, John Deere was one. I realize they have some right-to-repair woes. :) But the vast majority were pretty bad and definitely examples of slash-n-burn capitalism.

Another thing worth adding to this conversation is that privately owned enterprise tends to be better than public. Maybe not in how they treat employees, because the boss is closer to you usually in privately held companies. But definitely in the quality of the product. Public companies are the worst. While I'd prefer to work at a public company in general, I would almost never buy product from one, given the choice.

We really need more worker owned cooperatives. You have to work there to own a share, and one share equals one vote on matters. They may not work for venture capitalism, but for proven business models that aren't innovating, it really makes no sense to me why 7-Eleven out of Japan dominates our convenience stores. As opposed to those shops being owned by the people that work there. Proven business models have to move to that.

My goal in life, which I may never achieve, is to start a business, stabilize it, make my money and then sell it to my employees if they want it. Turn it into a democratically owned workplace. I think this is the only way to get the best of both worlds: high quality product, and fair treatment for employees. I'm a strong believer that people need "skin in the game" or they just won't care about the quality of their work. This model of 1 person taking it all really should only be done for unproven business models.

Cheers to a fellow child labor participant. I was grinding down spot welding tips before my paper routes that I got at 12. Grocery stores at least then let you bag groceries at 13. I worked on a farm. Done it all and I think it's a uniquely American experience. And probably Bangladesh.


That’s not the take, that’s just how you read it in a knee jerk reaction. It’s a comment about government employee productivity, not whether the government is bad.

You can both believe that government employees are extremely inefficient and that the government is good to run certain things.

>As a consultant having worked for both large government agencies and large corporations, they are all the same.

Absolutely not. Apart from catastrophic budget crises, a government doesn’t risk bankruptcy and a department has no need to bring in more than it costs. There is no real floor for how slow employees can be because the agency is getting its money either way.


> As a consultant having worked for both large government agencies and large corporations, they are all the same.

Large corporations are often indistinguishable from government agencies in part because all large, centralized organizations suffer similar problems, and in part because they become intertwined. The only difference is often whether your prison walls are gray or beige.

But capitalism is not just "large corporations". Capitalism is also startups, freelancers, small businesses, "mittlestand", cooperatives, family farms, etc. It is respecting property rights, and managing behavior through contracts and social norms rather than reams of regulations. Those things definitely are superior to government.


RE: your example, what exactly does that example have to do with the federal government? The guy threatened to sue, those laws apply the same in the private sector.


> I was told by our HR department that we could get rid of him, or at least demote him, if he failed two annual reviews in a row. Eventually he did, but we were then told by HR that he had to fail two annual reviews in a row in the same way; if he failed twice, but differently in the second year, that didn't count

Government HR processes make it _very_ difficult to be fired.


This is ignorant nonsense…

Edit: to be a little more clear, most govt groups (Treasury, Trade, etc.) are at the mercy of non-govt contractors in the private sector.


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.


> 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’.

What's worse, many of the jaded people going through the motions probably started out gung-ho but then got frustrated to see how little impact they were really able to have and eventually became checked out. These kinds of things are self fulfilling prophecies in organizations.


Motivation is finite. By the time you get the through red tape to get approvals, permissions, and a million of other things, you have nothing left in the tank to code.


God. Every once in a while I think 'I should go back to a FAANG', and then comments like this remind me of how soul-sucking and toxic it is.


All enterprise is, fam. Everything slows down and bureaucracy and politics take over. Watched it happen in real time at the last acquisition and have decided to only focus on startups for the next decade. There's way more speed, passion, and fulfillment..


I can't think of any work to be done for a Meta company that I'd find meaningful in any way. I imagine there are plenty of people who only figured this out for themselves after coming on board.


Meta does a lot of cool stuff. The problem is that it's probably 1% of the teams.


Creating a VR game that your friends and family can play? Adding an API to React that shapes the course of frontend development for millions of people?


And in this photo, grandson, you can see where your grandpa spent 2 years running into walls at different angles, as part of the daily regression test for players being able to clip outside the world.

Of course in the end it turned out you could clip out of the world by summoning your horse in a doorway - but not by running into a wall, no siree not on my watch.

Did you know it was the first ever game where the in-game billboards for each player were auctioned dynamically? A complete auction took place in less than the time it took to draw one frame on the screen! I wish I could show you the game itself - such a pity they decommissioned the servers 15 years before you were born.


As opposed to other office jobs that are so interesting? “Let me show you the insurance papers I shuffled for 40 years.”


Yeah, it's legit difficult to find work that is impactful and fulfilling. Making incremental changes on a product that a billion people might actually use isn't the worst thing imo. I worked hard at startups on projects that, while fun, very few people really use. After a while I gotta wonder is it really worth the effort.


Submitting my 2 weeks after reading this comment.


> React How come that FB is inventing the most sophisticated, cutting-edge web technologies, but at the same time their core products (Facebook app, Messenger & Instagram) are an absolute mess both in terms of performance and usability, not to mention a ton of bugs that haven't been fixed for years?


but those things were written in PHP.


If I'm being honest, I'd probably be happier at a place where my contribution was a small drop in a giant bucket than a place where we were much smaller but my input was being largely ignored.


They see blood in the water for startups and know they don’t have to subsidize employment to keep them from being able to hire.


If you have time to faff around at a FAANG, you have time to be cultivating your network to include some very influential people, you have time to be taking advantage of training resources or learning from the experts there that are completely free that most ordinary developers would have to pay thousands to get access to, you have time to work on side projects either for the company or, if you dare, for your own personal benefit, you have time to be hunting around for internal transfers that will boost your career, etc.

If you want to rest and vest, hey, more power to you but the smart ones are taking advantage of the gigantic cornucopia of opportunity presented to them by merely getting in the door of an obscenely wealthy FAANG to catapult their careers ahead.


This is fair in theory, and I imagine that some smart, high-agency people take advantage of the situation, but as is often the case, “down time" leads to more down time rather than more time to devote to career advancement, networking, and so on.

In fact, one might think that one day, when free of obligations and with plenty of gas in the tank that is currently used for work, one will pick up the barbell, take long bike rides, and build the body one has always dreamed of showing to their partner. But they are much more likely, instead, to spend more time watching the latest horrible Netflix TV series or eating burritos. The right analogy for mental and physical energy is not the tank, but the flywheel.


Can you expand on the flywheel analogy?


It is imperfect like all analogies, but let's take a toy example to clarify what I think. Let's say you are going to start something in 3 months, a new job or maybe you want to finally get in shape. If you think that your energy, will, and desire are like fuel in a slowly refilling tank, you might want to stop what you are doing now to save the energy that will have to be spent in 3 months. I remember years ago, when I was a serious sportsman, we had a few days off at Easter. And I rested. I came back flat, dead, without energy.

Now the flywheel accumulates energy when the motor to which it is connected is working. The flywheel stores energy during the expansion phases (the combustion phase in an ICE) of the engine to return it during the passive phases. Which, going back to the dilemma "when you have long-term down time, you have energy available to do other work, for networking, etc.," if the flywheel analogy is the right one, it means that you store energy to spend when there is down time by doing work, not by turning the engine off for days or weeks.

If no work is done for a certain period of time (the motor is off), the flywheel does not accumulate energy to spend, it is dead, needs time to accumulate energy again.

If you don't go to the gym one or two days after a period of serious training, which may be a week or a month, the training session is likely to go well. If the rest period, "I'm so tired, I need a break," is longer, say two weeks, you are likely to come back not invigorated, but flat, without desire, you may think about putting it off for another two weeks because you still feel tired, the tank has not been filled with fuel, you may think. But it is because energy, will and desire work like a flywheel.


what I took from that is that inertia is more significant than total energy.

if you've got a tank of gas you can go a long way slowly, a short way quickly.

a flywheel takes a lot of effort to spin up or spin down. once it's going at a certain speed it tends to stay there.

so if you tend to get home, eat burritos, and watch netflix, you'll keep doing that.


Not at a FAANG but at a large company that has its fair share of world experts in various technical disciplines.

At least in my company, the path you suggest will make you miserable (it did me). You are not seen to be at their level, and you will more likely become a pawn and someone to offload grunt labor to. Yes, you will learn, but you have less than a 10% chance they'll let you use that knowledge to do work at their level: They need grunt laborers, and you are more valuable to them as one because you've gained that knowledge.

Oh, and they always had more pathological behavior amongst them. Very poor at teamwork, etc.

There are exceptions, which is why I said "10% chance" instead of "0%" :-)

The good news is whenever I went through this and switched to a less sexy team, I was seen as "the really smart guy who worked with the smart people" and the new team would value more than they should.


Snap. I, for my sins, am new at a WITCH company (please don't throw rotten fruit at me), and there is an obscene amount of dead time in my calendar and will be for the foreseeable. I'm rinsing their training and development resources and should have the full suite of certs I want within 6 months completely free. Certs that would literally cost thousands to acquire privately. If they want me to do some actual work I'd be delighted but I've worked at multinationals before and I'm not holding my breath. What I won't do is sit around doing nothing.


TIL: "W- Wipro I- Infosys T- TCS C- Cognizant H- HCL A- Accenture India."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707


I posit there is another category: people who don't accept or can't deal with being idle, but are not careerists and so instead of following your advice or resting-vesting, they find ways to spend their time helping solve actual problems in the company.

My theory is that these people keep many companies afloat, because they go proactively solve the problems the resters are not solving because work, and the job-optimizers won't touch because not promotion-track.


I don't think there's anything on the list I mentioned, other than the "working on personal projects" one, that conflicts with that. Augmenting their own capabilities increases their effectiveness at "solving actual problems in the company" in addition to benefiting themselves. It's their own choice as to whether they do that.


> to catapult their careers ahead.

What is the value of one’s career? To make more money? Why is it smart to devote so much effort to moving up when you’ll be dead and your work completely forgotten much sooner than anyone cares to admit? If you’re seeking lasting glory then the well trod path there is politics, war, or art: technologists generally are not remembered outside their time (with maybe literally a half dozen exceptions since antiquity).

I ask this honestly, because at this point in my own career the only answer I can come up with is the personal satisfaction of getting better and more knowledgeable about something I at one time enjoyed.


> 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.

If anything, that might be the best way to identify someone that fits in a large corp like Google. Someone that doesn't mind going thru the drudge of studying esoteric CS problems probably will be more attuned to go thru the drudge of working for a large company like Google.

I'm thinking most of the time spent at Large Corp. Inc. is doing menial work, rather than hot projects where you learn and get to work on the cutting edge.


I'm not sure I understand the comparison. CS interview problems are interesting, well-constrained math riddles with endless variety. As far as I can tell, they're nearly the opposite of menial drudgery.

I don't think they're great for interviewing, on account of how they don't resemble what programmers actually do, but I do think they're a heck of a lot more fun than menial labor, especially when job offers aren't riding on it.


The CS interview problems that are asked are a very specific view of CS that not everybody finds interesting or works on. There is a lot more variety to CS and software engineering than string and graph algorithms, which is all I've ever been asked at Google (where is numerical optimization, statistics beyond basic counting, all of graphics, etc). I also never get asked anything with regards to actually engineering software by them, whereas I have been asked that at Apple for example.


You might find them interesting, but I guarantee you many people do not. Many find them... well, something like programming trivia.

Some people love going to trivia night! Get some friends, get quizzed on some stuff, feel smart.

Lots of people are not interested.


You'd be shocked how many people plan to crack the coding interview by memorizing every problem on leetcode letter for letter without ever trying to solve one without looking up the answer.


It was only 4-5 years ago that Google was considered the pinnacle of Engineering centric culture. It was still considered top up until last year. Something is going off the rails in the big tech firms if people now view big-tech work as menial. These were the same companies that pioneered CI/CD, Services, cloud, scalable web services, and myriad other technologies.


Many of the top engineering companies (Boeing etc.) are also objectively crappy places to work at. When you're doing things at the scale of Boeing or Google, you need a lot of process, and it's just no fun to do engineering this way.


That's probably true. Not that there aren't bits of Google doing fun and interesting work, it's a massive company after all. I've worked at a few, what I would consider to be large orgs, but my experience of Google was that it's truly on a different scale when it comes to bureaucracy and company politics.


>When you're doing things at the scale of Boeing or Google, you need a lot of process

Are you sure "need" is the right word here? Whatever Boeing's been doing recently hasn't been working very well for them or 737 Max passengers.


you really do

At large scale you can't hire enough competent people. And scale x low tolerance for error means you can't rely on humans even if they are competent. To fix that you basically have to introduce process. Things are checked and controlled at numerous points, using blanket processes that often don't make any sense for the specific scenario at hand but are needed for something superficially similar. People end up in hierarchies of approval. And that's without even considering regulatory compliance which often simply mandates things at a blanket level because micro-auditing each individual part of a big company is essentially an impossible proposition.

Engineers have the best chance because we have it in our hands to automate so much, but still, we just haven't figured out a better way to do it I think.


I was on a 737 Max the other day, it's a nice plane


Most of the time when I see a heavy process at work, it's a good question to ask who does it serve?

Most of the time, the answer is that it keeps someone important entrenched in work. It's very rare that I see altruistic processes that benefit the customer.


I've had a different experience (at least with engineering processes). Most of the time, it's been due to things in the past that have broken because we didn't check things or we got misaligned on something or people made assumptions that turned out not to be true.

I'm not saying that adding additional layers of process is always the right answer--there's obviously a cost to adding more process so there needs to be a balance and a continual reassessment of which processes are worth keeping. But in my experience, the intention has always been good: to avoid mistakes, problems, and failures that we've experienced in the past.


I got hired by Google in 2016 and I could tell you the interview was a series of interesting tasks all having to do with what I was hired for - working on compilers and related tools.

Though after that I was asked for additional interviews on basic algorithmic stuff cause Google thought original interviews to be too narrow in the scope, anyway hardly any esoteric stuff.


>Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders

The interview process at FAANGs isn't designed to hire the "best" people. It's designed to hire people who are "good enough" in a consistent manner. Any form of standardized interview can be gamed. More personalized interviews can be better in theory, but they also open the door to nepotism and discrimination.

Admittedly, I'm biased because I'm unusually good at Leetcode and a rather lousy in terms of development velocity. With that disclaimer out of the way, I think the last thing that FAANGs need are more "high performing builders". In my experience, a lot of them tend to create a lot of useless passion projects that work their way into being dependencies and end up causing more harm than good. I may be a rest'n'vester, but at least I make sure the work I get done creates positive value for the company.


> when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod

That would be a surpreme waste of company money, and probably they have engineers working for them who are far better developers than they are.


At one point Waffle House required all of its senior executives to spend time each year working on the line. (They probably still do I just haven't checked in a few years). They feel this is important for their management team to more viscerally understand the lived experiences of the people working, identify issues in their processes and technology, and generally foster team spirit among their staff.


This is about empathy more than contribution, same thing with Quantas right now getting executives to handle baggage. It looks good (see how much we care?), and can be actually positive if it makes senior leadership understand what employees go through, so I think it is valuable for Zuckerberg to do an on call rotation or try and push a documentation change for these reasons


I think there's a story in the news today about Taco Bell doing the same thing.

More relevant to tech -- Automattic, Klaviyo and probably a lot of other companies require people in certain positions to do customer service rotations. Including C-level execs.

I haven't heard of a version of that for coding, though.


Door dash gets their employees to do 3 deliveries a year


I'm pretty sure that's more to remind their corporate employees what life outside the tower is like. 'See how much better your job is than being a courier who barely makes enough to survive!'


I worked for a national us clothing retailer that didn't require but encouraged their 'corporate' employees to spend time in the stores mostly doing reshelves/reracks, tidying the sales floor, etc. Mostly around holidays/sales.

I worked in software for them but 'close to the store' for a bunch of my time there, so I was often in a store somewhere and always would help out as I had time permitting. It was useful for me, it was maybe useful for some of the buyers, I'm not sure it was useful for anyone else.


I consulted for a Fortune 500 where the CEO would spend a hour or so every month taking sales and support phone calls. He would use this information operationally -- he would send out missives to the head of marketing saying "people are not asking about product X." I wonder what he said when people asked to speak to his manager.


I seem to recall reading that every Disney employee is required to spend a week working in one of the parks for the same reason.


I hope no one will try this out in a brain surgery clinic.


I'll tell you one thing though, EHRM user interfaces would almost certainly be less dogshit if the hospital admins who procure them had to actually use them.


Would it? I understand your point, but the counterpoint is that the leaders are in a position to make big changes if something is broken. They could attempt to push some simple change and see glaring process and onboarding problems, which nobody has been interested in prioritizing, and then make them top priority, saving everyone time.


That sounds good in theory but most leaders are so removed from engineering that it would take them a week ramp up to produce even the most basic tiny change/feature to push to production. A VP should not be spending one week of his or her time doing that. They should rely on engineers to identify and fix whatever is broken at that level. That's why we have staff+ engineers.

But that's also pretty divorced from the topic of what makes good interview questions. There's no way that a VP who spent a week to push out a color change to a button in prod would have any meaningful insight into how to change the coding interviews. That should also be left up to the engineers themselves to decide.


They absolutely should be spending their time doing that. They are in the position to say "I have to do X, Y, and Z to push 2 lines of code??" and actually get it fixed. That week could save the company years of developer hours lost to overhead.


Relying on VPs to do every front-line job in order to identify and fix problems would indicate that something is fundamentally broken at the company. That should never be the primary method by which a company identifies and fixes such problems.

As a former engineering manager, if someone on my team walked me through why getting PRs out to prod was an insane nightmare, I'd take note, work with them to gather evidence, and present it to my director and try to escalate it to the point where we could take action to improve it. If the VP is any good at their job, they'll listen and work with us to fix it.


If they aren't good at their job or it is status quo, they will brush it off. Sometimes it takes a new perspective to say what the fuck is wrong with this?

As an example, I joined a company with ~8k employees recently. They over communicate on email. I get 50+ emails a day. I filter heavily. My inbox is still unusable due to the volume of automated junk. I raised this issue in Slack and the majority of responses were just "well, that's how it is".

I am sure the development process has very similar deficiencies that I am blind to because I participate in it everyday.


> If they aren't good at their job or it is status quo, they will brush it off.

In your example, you rely on them to be even better: you assume that they'll be a competent engineer and be able to understand the complexities of day-to-day software development by making a toy PR when many of them haven't done it for years for decades. That's a much stronger assumption than the one that I'm making: that a good VP will listen to their subordinates.


If it takes a week to "ramp up" to produce a tiny change, then that itself is probably a broken process that needs to be improved.


That's about the time I'd expect for a new hire to ramp up on the codebase and submit a PR behind a feature flag and probably experiment that makes it to production. It takes a day to even set up the environment and be able to start looking at and running the code locally. Four days to read through a brand new codebase, identify the changes that are necessary, write a small tech spec (optional based on how small the change is), submit the PRs, get them reviewed and approved, and then merged sounds reasonable to someone who's never worked in the codebase before.


> That should also be left up to the engineers themselves to decide.

I agree with the rest, but I don't agree with this part. Engineers should have a lot of input into the hiring process, but fundamentally management is accountable for business performance and one of the biggest drivers of success is getting the right people in the door rather than just more people like the ones you already have (which is what happens almost always if you don't deliberately shape the hiring process).


The goal of that would not be to get functional code and a decent price, of course. The goal would be to ensure leadership has an accurate view of what that process is today.

Now, that may or many not achieve what the GP thinks it will. But, if you believe the leadership of your org is out-of-touch, it is a natural thing to suggest.


> a waste of company money Well, I wonder how the CEOs, VPs, and other top level people actually spend their time at work. I get that they obviously must be doing something Very Important And Useful[1], because otherwise it would be a supreme waste of company money to pay them for eating Business Lunches...

1 - https://nypost.com/2022/07/01/rotterdam-wont-dismantle-bridg...


As a counterpoint, in most of the Latin American family empires, where the eldest son is by birth designated to be the next CEO of the company, he usually starts working at the factory in childhood, doing all of the menial jobs. Then he's given a job like outbound sales rep and essentially has to "work his way to the top" (of course on an accelerated timeline, and without really needing to be the best at any level). That way by the time he is CEO, he has the credibility and knowledge of how every facet of the business works.


Yea, as an engineer I would not be happy with my CEO swooping in to commit some code then bugger off.


The point isn't that they commit some useful code. It could be something as simple as just fixing a typo. But force them to go through the motions, so they can see the inefficiency in the processes.


And then what? Are they supposed to design a better development process and build tools to improve efficiency? Again seems like both a supreme waste of time and also as an engineer something I really would not want. Or are they supposed to tell the dev experience team to do something. If so why not just have the dev experience team or leader go through the motions instead?


Then they would become the inefficiency in the process


There is some value in technical leadership familiarizing themselves with internal processes. They could take on a small side project (do Google execs get 20% time?) using libraries and APIs with the goal of providing some feedback on what direction those tools should pursue. BillG did something like this with a measure of success.


I am actually writing a book saying exactly the opposite to this.

I think we are seeing the development of "Programmable Companies" - where all aspects of the company and its data are accessible (imagine a code API that reaches down to some sane mix of data structure).

So while it is crazy for Zuckerberg to try and optimise some Ad server, what should / could exist is a Jupyter-like notebook with something like

for minion in mycompany: if minion.timeatwork < 40: crapminions+= 1

This is mostly done with crappy spreadsheets, but it does not get to the feedback that this sort of platform (I think) enables.

Anyway. The point is CEOs should code. the reason they have stopped is because their job has not been "disrupted" ... yet

Edit: I think there is a further point here. Managers used to (Drucker?) design and build the systems, the factory floor was a battleground of Kanban and command and control. But automation won out. And now the "systems of production" are designed by coders.

All the managers have left is shuffling around people from project to project. But one lever does not a effective d means of control make.

We have learnt from communism that command and control economy falls over at scale. And what is a company but a command and control economy.


Yes, it's pretty clear that humans were overfitting to their interview objective function: comp-sci algo problems.

For companies with such strong ML backgrounds, in addition to the sheer amount of content dedicated to discussing and solving tech interview questions hosted on their own platform, one would think they would have noticed earlier.


> Yes, it's pretty clear that humans were overfitting to their interview objective function: comp-sci algo problems.

Worse, it's often over-fitted to memorized specific solutions to esoteric comp-sci algo problems.

So you end up with a bunch of, admittedly smart, developers who all have the spare time to memorize an entire suite of algo problems and solutions.

Some of those developers are going to have copious amounts of spare time while working at your organization as well.


There is a human component to consider: in the case of a change in the interview process, with the new process perceived as easier than the past and current ones, I imagine the bitter protests from the currently employed engineers who would vocally complain that the quality of new hires is much worse than it used to be, and that they have had to pass much more stringent interviews than the new ones, which even a junior SWE employed in an unnamed company would be able to pass.


+1, why blame employees? blame the management. In my previous job, our manager quickly grew team and hired 3x more people just cos he wanted to manage a larger team and get to hire managers under him so that he gets promoted to Sr. Manager.


>Maybe it’s not the employees fault, but the management who hired them…

I think the managers are just putting up a straight face, as they need to respond to the changing circumstances.

I think it has more to do with the economy and the war of Russia against Ukraine. All of a sudden there is less money to go around, interest rates are rising and it got harder to raise money.

And they probably changed their plans, now it is less about 'new features' and more about 'maintenance of existing systems'. But that didn't get into the article, so it's all the fault of the people who will have to look for a new job.

Searching for a new job isn't a pleasant experience, if you ask me.

(I am not working at google or facebook, but I will probably get to feel the implications as well...)


> maybe it’s the fact that it takes forever to get anything done at FAANG nowadays.

At any large company. Tiny changes that should take an afternoon end up taking 6 months once all the red tape is done and all involved stakeholders have signed off.


Yeah at least several years ago I had an explanation for this (though I’m not sure if it still applies). Basically, I think one reason for this weird type of interview is that it was an indirect way to bias towards young hires.

Young people have that energy and naïveté to do a lot of the grunt work. And most work at any established company is kind’ve grunt work. Anyways, just a random theory but nowadays it may be backfiring.


Not sure about Mark wouldn’t be surprised if he still hacks php on the side but Pichai joined google as a manager I think from mckinsey of all places… so Im going with “never”


Did Sundar ever write code? Wasn’t he a PM? I wouldn’t be surprised if Mark still writes some code, he’s a hacker at heart


I think parent means has Mark experienced how difficult it is get code to prod these days, not can he still code


You just have to use this to push your ideology that leetcode style of interviews don't work, don't you.


> 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.

I see this argument all the time, but I can't find any other place that it comes from other than disappointment from those that didn't or can't pass those interviews. (Disclaimer, outside of college internships I've never interviewed for a FAANG SWE position nor have I ever worked for one).

Is it an objectively good measure of being a software engineer? Hard to say honestly. I doubt you'll ever find a truly great measure that you can test for in an interview. When I was interviewing candidates for my company, did I ask those leetcode algorithm questions? Not really. Maybe at most one basic tree traversal question (probably would fall under leetcode "easy" if I had to guess, but honestly the kind of thing a student would learn in AP computer science in high school). Most questions were system design and problem solving with a coding challenge (building something simple, not solving algorithmic puzzles). So by evidence of my own actions, I don't believe that they're the optimal questions for screening engineers.

That having been said, I don't understand why people are upset by these interviews. Who cares? If you really think it's suboptimal, then other companies who have "better" interviewing practices should be better at identifying undiscovered talent and hiring them. Better for you if you're hiring in those cases. Let FAANG fail on their own hiring practices. FTR I don't think they're that bad either, they just filter for a bunch of left-brained people who are good at math. Maybe they do make good engineers also. And if results are anything, clearly it's been working for FAANG for the past decade so who's to say that they shouldn't keep doing it?

> 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’.

This is a reach (to put it mildly) and unfairly paints people who are good at algorithms as inherently unmotivated and whose primary goal is to cheat the system without any evidence. Are you saying another talented developer who isn't good at algorithms could not or would not hack the system as such? I don't see any reason to expect either to be the case. Hacking said system does not require you to be able to prove the runtimes of a Van Emde Boas queue, it just requires some common sense that any human being has.

> I wonder when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod.

This is pure ad hominem and unrelated to whether or not these questions are good screening questions. I certainly hope that Mark or Sundar are not wasting even a millisecond of their time writing code and trying to get a PR out to production. It's one of the absolute worst uses of their time. But while we're on the topic, Mark literally built the first version of Facebook (to be fair, probably in a bad hacky way) and Sundar was a product manager so I certainly don't expect him to write code.


> I can't find any other place that it comes from other than disappointment from those that didn't or can't pass those interviews.

Oh, the macro is that these companies are oligopolies. About 15–20 years ago one of them realized that poaching entire teams from the others to enter new LOBs was cheaper than competing. So headcount grew.

Outside of strategic hires it doesn’t really matter who they pick up. E.g. LinkedIn isn’t going to go out of biz if they don’t find productive places for their army of level 3.5 software engineers or whatever. LinkedIn doesn’t have any competition.


I might not be connecting the dots, but I don't see how this is related to the GP's gripe that these interview questions aren't good tools for hiring engineers.


"If you really think it's suboptimal, then other companies who have "better" interviewing practices should be better at identifying undiscovered talent and hiring them. Better for you if you're hiring in those cases. Let FAANG fail on their own hiring practices."

The GGP is using an argument that if these techniques don't work, then the companies will fail, because that's how capitalism works.

The GP is saying that because these companies are oligopolies, they can do a lot of very inefficient things that don't work and distort the market, yet not fail and not be punished for it, thus that's why we should care.


I see, thanks for clarifying that. Makes sense.

Relatedly, I still don't understand why people are upset at these companies' hiring practices.


Algorithm-puzzle computer science interviews are hard to prep for. They take a long time to learn. Then, most of the time, when people get hired for engineering roles that use them for interviewing - you find that you spend exactly 0% of your time working on those kinds of problems. Kind of a rug pull.

Lots of people are busy. They don't want to spend time prepping for puzzles they will never solve in their job. They feel like they are qualified for the job, and have great work experience in many cases (let's leave jr devs out of this), but feel like they are being asked to jump through completely unnecessary hoops.

Meanwhile, someone who does have a lot of time on their hands (young, single, no kids, more energy) preps for the tests, and gets paid more money than someone who is older, who has more responsibilities, and who frankly needs the money more.

It feels unfair, in the same way that it feels unfair when rich people get away with crimes poorer people wouldn't.

Well, the rich people used the legal system you say - they paid for attorneys. You could do the same thing, if you had the money.

Well, you don't have the money. And in the case of this analogy, you don't have the time to prep for random CS problems. You don't have the energy, because after work and family obligations - you just want to sleep. Or work out. Or do anything but write and think about code.

To be clear - if you are young, single and have lots of time on your hands - I have no sympathy for you. If you want to work in FAANG, fuck it, grind leetcode. You don't have any responsibilities.

But for those older professionals, with work experience and a track record of success - you shouldn't need to prove competence to write software at a FAANG company. It should come from track record, recommendations, open-source work and other artifacts of your career besides a thirty minute whiteboard session. Depending on the day, the time of day, what food you ate, how much water you drank, you might be absolute trash at coding. And it would be a mistake to sum up someones competency in such a small sample size.

When they interview lawyers, they don't ask them to perform a mock trial. Surgeons aren't asked to 'get their hands dirty' during an interview. Mechanical engineers don't get asked to whip up a CAD diagram in 30 minutes for a part (or maybe they do, what the hell do I know).

Small sample sizes are misleading, large sample sizes (open source work audit, multiple references, perhaps a paid take home project for one of your open source packages) give a much better understanding of a persons skillset than a 30 minute exercise in stress management.


>I see this argument all the time, but I can't find any other place that it comes from other than disappointment from those that didn't or can't pass those interviews.

I have passed these interviews. Had offers from multiple FAANGs, worked at G. The algorithms interview is idiotic. It is a way for them to gate the jobs to people who have CS degrees while being able to say they do not require CS degrees.

I rarely come to the to the optimal solution on my own for a leetcode problem. It is about learning the techniques so you know how to speak about the solutions, then basically learning (by reading) the right answers to different problem types.

This isn't from being hurt, I pass these interviews. I've worked there. It is a horrible selection criteria for what you actually do at the jobs - design docs, meetings, tickets, tests, and code reviews. It creates a ton of false expectations too, you do not need to know advanced algorithms to work on some internal user interface, close maintenance tickets, or to write 10 lines of test code for a 2 line change. You get in there and realize none of the work you are doing is as clever as the interview.

The tasks described above are the reality of working in a large organization. They shouldn't be, but they are. The interview should more closely match that.


That's a great perspective, thanks for sharing that. What would you like to see as the best interview questions then? I'll probably adapt my future interviews based on your ideas (not that I ask any real algorithm questions anyway).


Use them to measure how well people will perform in the tasks that you need them to do. For coding interviews, Square's is really good. [1] I am not sure if they have sample questions written anywhere in the linked blog posts, but very simple things with added complexity.

Example - Write a rate limiter that takes in a timestamp (integer) and returns true if it hasn't hit a rate limit. Ok, now what if we make the rate limiter per user. Just simple things to see how you represent data, store it, create interfaces to it, and how you refactor to deal with change.

Most likely, you want to be having someone write tests for some code and review some code. Then speak to them about their experience. Depends on your organization though, maybe you are small and people need to produce a lot more than the large tech companies.

1. https://developer.squareup.com/blog/ace-the-square-pairing-i...


managers are employees too


We have a very nice phrase in Polish describing what kind of employees they are, literally it goes like: "there are those who are equal and those who are equaler".


You're getting downvoted but you're right. Managers generally start out as ICs and bring along with them all their biases.


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.


I have a feeling this extends to several areas in Google. I come from the GDC side of things and have the exact same experience. To keep my job requires very minimal effort on my part. In fact, nowadays I'm punishing myself by trying to do anything "above and beyond." This is mostly due to the rapid growth of committees and the struggle for power that has come out of it (i.e., I'm more likely to be denied by a change control board over political reasons).

Regardless, I'm on my way out despite people's shock that I would leave such a "cushy" job. The fact of the matter is that the lack of challenge has actually caused me to spiral into a deep depression and the best decision for me personally is to move on.


I went through a similar struggle to how I read your story. I had a cushy job that paid more than ever, my manager was great, and the work was easy, but I was struggling with depression. I ended up quitting and crashing on a friend's couch for a while, and despite making that change to be able to pursue more meaningful work, my depression didn't abate. I ended up crashing and burning in a pretty significant way, and it was rough.

The point I wanted to make in sharing this story is that I wish I had taken the depression more seriously by itself and hadn't assumed that it was solely or maybe even largely caused by my job situation. Both from my experience with mental illness and from the scientific literature I've read, sometimes the big external issues are masks or plausible excuses for your body & mind to go into a depression because it makes sense that you have a big change outside, and so you get a big change inside. Sometimes those external changes do definitely cause big psychological struggles, but other times the depression kind of comes out because your psychological defenses feel comfortable enough that you will avoid addressing the root of the problem, and only address the external circumstances which you are able to reasonably enough blame your depression on. It's like a release valve in some way, but whose function is to avoid real psychological change at all costs, because the status quo is the safest place to be for our psyches.

I'm not a scientist and you might describe this as some kind of "just so" explanation or too much into psychoanalysis, and that's certainly a possibility. But with this stuff I've found that often times our psyches are very cagey and difficult to really understand in a straightforward way. If my explaining this pattern I've observed in my own history is beneficial to you or anyone else reading this, or at the very least interesting, that's good enough for me.


You've hit the nail on the head, and I think many people who have struggled with substance abuse disorders would agree: You can't fix whats inside by changing the outside... sure maybe changing external circumstance can help nudge you in the right direction, but it wont fix anything. Recovering drug addicts don't magically become functioning members of society just because they stopped using drugs... They do a lot of internal work, and find happiness within themselves, not within their surroundings or substances (or they go back to abusing drugs and die an addict).

If you are interested in any of this I highly recommend reading about the psychology of drug addiction more, because it is so very relevant to anyone and everyone at the end of the day (and very related to what you're speaking about). Even non-addicts can learn a lot about themselves and how to be happy, by learning how recovering drug addicts do it. If a formerly homeless heroin addict can find his way to happiness and 6 figure income, why wouldn't your average person not want to learn more about that journey for their own benefit? This is why a lot of recovering addicts wind up being more effective at life than the average person IF they managed to overcome addiction and stay sober. Overcoming addiction is like a master class in effectively living life, being happy, and overcoming anything. Its unfortunate that so few make it, but there's a lot be learned from it.


Yes!! I haven't had struggles with substance addiction, but I see SO much overlap in what you described as how much extra work and problem solving and self-leadership addicts have to foster and constantly practice to survive, let alone thrive, in what I've had to do to try to heal my depression and other maladies. It's like, I can't even begin to describe how much work it's been to someone who hasn't had to deal with that kind of a problem.

I was given an irrevocable 100 hour a week job called "try to survive while depressed" when I was 17, and thrown in the deep end with no guide, no mentors, and no reasons why. Every day of my life is a battle to keep my head above water. For years I barely managed and somehow am still here, but it is relentlessly difficult. Some days you think you're starting to get things figured out, on a roll, and then your positive wellbeing evaporates into thin air from the time it takes you to walk from your car to your apartment door. What is this life? You start to lose all hope of even figuring out any rhyme or reason or pattern in your depression, and just try to get through the day.

When it gets to be like that, I have found MUCH solace in the mantra of the substance abuse recovery world, "One day at a time." It's like an alien tongue to someone who's never dealt with the kind of waking death spirit companion depression comes to be. How could anything be so bad that you can only focus on a single day at a time, or that doing so would help in any kind of way? Thank your everything that that phrase gives you no feeling or hope. It's the last refuge of the damned.


I think the theory you're describing is pretty interesting, I had never thought about depression this way.


You post strikes a chord with me. I have found over time that I personally require some mental challenge and some physical challenge to remain mentally healthy. Some days, work provides the mental challenge, the feeling you get by solving difficult problems. If we get too far into the weeds and end up in a constant state of talking about work instead of doing it, things begin to turn depressing until I need to supplement on the side by learning something new or whatever. Same goes physically for me, I keep pretty regular on working out but if I take a week or two off I start feeling sort of sad. Best of luck to you wherever you land!


I don't know if you're familiar with the book but "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber examined this phenomenon. He found that many people with bullshit jobs are struggling with deep unhappiness. Quit as soon as possible.


> lack of challenge has actually caused me to spiral into a deep depression

Why does this have to be at work? Google might not offer you challenges but you can go rock climbing at Yosemite every other week if you wanted to (or whatever other challenging things you like)? Especially if you only need minimal effort to hang around.


Because you often only get to join these companies if you’re passionate about your field of work.

You can’t force a programmer to find meaning in rock climbing (for example).

You might propose working on your passion for programming outside of work, but it’s complicated and people end up in two minds about that.


a well paying job with low expectations sounds great, but actually sucks after a while. i’ve been there a couple times. it’s just not fulfilling. it brought out a weird mixture of guilt and sadness in me. i was getting great reviews, and by every measure was doing my job well.

when i’ve moved on from those jobs i’ve been happier, grown more, and it’s led to more money.


This is why I don’t understand when some say that people would rather not work at all if given the opportunity and still live well. As people we need challenges to keep finding meaning in our lives. I’ve also experienced depression in the past as a result of getting paid but lack of work. Zuck and Pichai’s complain isn’t wrong, it’s just that they’re part of the problem for paid employees having little work, and it’s admittedly very hard for any of us to recognize when we’re the problem. Everyone suffers from bad leadership, from the employees to the boss.


Why do you look to your job for challenges. Why not simply look at it as a way to put food on the table and use the rest of your time and resources to seek out other challenges?


I can answer this- at the time I joined GOogle, my goal was to use their resources to enhance my future career as a researcher. Google gave me access to world class hardware, software, and employees, which I could use in ways that never would have been available at any other location. It helped me build and achieve a system that academia would not have allowed, that I could not have done on my own time and money.

But my goal was always to take that newly learned skill and credibility and use it to go back to academia with a stronger hiring position. I mean, that's the mental model nearly all scientists have: couple your job with your interests to maximize your impact using other people's money and time.


Is that what you ended up doing? Are you happy with how it turned out?


No, I would never return to academia now. i handle IT stuff for a large biotech, and looking at what scientist (both PIs and staff) have to put up with in academia, I don't think I'd be happy. Also, I just didn't boost my scientific creds enough to make a strong return.


The short answer is I tried - for about three years. Meanwhile, I had the onset of depression, panic attacks, and numerous other physical ailments. It's taken about two years of therapy, but I've finally realized that I am just not the person that can do that.

Funny enough, I have a co-worker who is able to perform in this way and he appears to have no issues with the current status quo. As much as I might wish I could be more tolerant, I've accepted that I'm just built different and I need my job to provide a challenging environment.


Why not both? Work is ~40hrs a week, so it's nicer if you have the option to enjoy it. There are other software jobs with similar pay to Google, but with more rewarding work. Win-win to switch, if that's what you're looking for.

Personally, the type of problems I solve at work are more interesting than I could realistically come up with and work on on my own. Ymmv.


This is how govt employees treat their jobs in various countries. In the private sector, there is no job security. What happens when one gets laid off with rusty skills? That's why folks want to use the existing job to improve skills. That explains why people want to use new frameworks, tools, languages at work.


i imagine because you’re required to be present in some sense for ~8 hours a day 5 days a week. that doesn’t leave much time for anything else, especially if you have caring responsibilities or any other life commitments. once you’re in a depressive state getting out of that hole can be a real struggle


Exactly, and it can turn into a horrible snowball effect if left unchecked. That is what happened to me and it wasn't until I started getting help in therapy that I was more able to understand the situation.


It's exhausting being mentally present while knowing you're not doing anything useful. Using that time to actually work on side projects feels very unethical, so it's kind of just going with the tide for 8 hours a day then being exhausted at night. So the challenges I found were usually in games, not anything productive.

I have far more energy now that I'm actually productively working in a new job and seem to have lost a lot of interest in games as a side effect.


It takes third of the lifetime. It's massive waste of time and energy if you get only money out of this.


Usually, jobs with challenges pay more. I switch jobs if both of these conditions are met: a) good enough challenges, b) pays more than current job


I hope you’re okay pal. But good on you for recognizing a problem and working hard for a solution!


What if you keep the he cushy job, and use the money and freedom to find more meaning outside of work?

Learn music, art, woodworking, a new language…

It’s a lot harder to find meaning with less money and more work hours.


Yeah this seems obvious to me. So many people have trained their minds to rely on their professional career to be happy. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with finding something you can stand, and then devoting yourself 100% elsewhere to something you love or want to learn/explore.


That's how I think of it. You pay firemen for their ability to solve a problem quickly and efficiently, and for being able to execute when called upon.

Giant companies making money hand over fist pay a lot of "don't fuck this up" salaries. The primary goal for everyone is to keep the money printer running smoothly; everything else is secondary.


It's worth noting that the beginning, the end and the middle of Scrum and what most companies laughably call "Agile" is to prevent exactly this: the entire structure is there to force every developer to interview for their job every morning and prove they're making "contributions" (it doesn't matter if they're good contributions, they just have to be completed by the deadlines).


Such a beautiful metaphor for the daily standup!


The key difference is people understand you’re paying the firemen for the emergencies- but a lot of SREs are actually firemen but paid like developers.

When everyone is quietly pretending you’re not a fireman but you are it leads do a disconnect where everyone is playing charades.


> SREs are actually firemen but paid like developer

Firefighters who also do development work to reduce fires and make their firefighting easier.

That said developers also do firefighting. They can be an escalation point for deeper system issues that may elude SREs.


The people handling the emergencies should get paid considerably more than developers - when they system is down, the real, actual, company-sustaining money stops coming in.


But on the other hand they don't add new features or push product forward in any way.

Maybe this is okay for a late stage company that is in the value extraction mode. In that case the private equity playbook is to lay off the app developers, and they can throw more money at ops to increase efficiency of the shrinking pie.

On the other hand if you're in a highly competitive growth industry then you need to innovate, and if you optimize for SRE talent, you won't have sufficiently senior engineering talent to find the right balance between innovation and stability.


Firefighting used to be very lucrative as people was willing to pay a lot to "solve the problem" when their house was on fire. Also one house on fire could possibly mean the whole city could burn down.


Reading this caused the following factoid bubbled up in my mind: the leading cause of death for firefighters is now heart disease. The 98% of their time that’s not responding to calls is evidently spent napping and eating lasagna. I’m not naysaying this arrangement, it’s how it has to be. I don’t see why it should be too different at Google, for some employees anyways.


Isn't the #1 cause of death for everyone heart disease?


Yeah, but for a long time previously it was things actually related to fire (burns, asphyxia, internal trauma, etc.)


> My managers consistently gave me "meets expectations"

That's because his bonus was probably tied to your performance. By making sure all his subordinates receive meets or exceeds expectations, then he looks good. His manager does the same, all the way up the chain.

They played the same game when I worked at Amazon. What's more, it became automated. They introduced non-optional surveys that popped up on your computer daily. At first I assume it was a well intentioned system to gauge general employee sentiment. It was annoying and stupid HR bullshit, so of course I immediately went in and disabled it. After a year or so, my manager finally notices and orders me to enable it again. I soon guessed why. Within a few months, we start having quarterly group meetings going over graphs of the answers. And of course, the surveys aren't anonymous, so he would call out the people who gave bad answers and start grilling them about their issue in front of everyone, if they didn't immediately recant, then they would "schedule a meeting". I assume his performance bonus had become tied to the results and everyone needed to tow the line. It was amusing to me how many of the younger employees didn't understand the game they were playing and would continue to answer honestly. I just glanced at the options, picked whatever made my manager look good and went on with my day.

You'd think those idiots in charge at the upper management levels would have heard of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." But apparently not.


That's bullshit and you're gonna scare the shit out of any junior Amazonian reading this unnecessarily. Obviously nothing is TRULY anonymous - at the end of the day there is a super secured database that HR can go into if there is a need. The data is there much in the same way that every email you send is discoverable in a lawsuit. Or if you get fired and bring a USB key and copy all your data they'll get it. Nothing you do on a work computer is truly private.

But that doesn't mean anyone's manager has access to some secret dashboard to get any of this data or is able to view it on demand. Short of a serious legal case it just won't be relevant.

Noone's manager has access to individual answers and neither does anyone in their org chart.By default, week-over-week, that connections information is private.

What actually (probably) happened is your team's scores were shitty and somewhere up in your org chart noticed and started giving your manager shit to improve them. Then they went in and decided to use their best guesses about who voted for what to start harassing people to figure out how to improve things.

They absolutely epitomized Goodhart's law and they got the result they wanted - you stopped giving a shit and voted for whatever got them off your back.

That sucks but thats not how it is on most teams. Every team I've been on used this data bi-weekly or monthly to have an honest review of what we're doing well and where we need to improve. Nobody gets picked on. If there is a clear outlier where one person was unhappy we don't try to find out why but I (as a senior leader) try to be vocally self-critical and try to come up with multiple guesses and/or reasons for why they might have said that, and what could be done about different root causes. (TO not force whoever was the outlier to speak up).

Your manager sounds like an idiot/asshole, but the least I can say from looking up your name is at least your former manager isn't managing anyone anymore!


I stand corrected about the anonymity of the surveys. I wasn't a manager and I can't say I paid much attention during the meetings. But there are a lot of sub-managers who have just a couple of reports and it can't be particularly hard to figure out. Still, I shouldn't have stated it as fact. I'd edit the post if I could.

You didn't confirm or deny that manager performance was tied to those connections data. Care to clarify this? As I said, it was a guess on my part.

My manager was actually a great guy and our group was productive. He only got that way after the surveys became a thing and - I'm guessing - his superiors started getting uptight.

Heh, I like how you checked up on me, but use amzn-throw for your comment. Comms is watching you Wazowski, always watching. Anyways, I still stand by my general sentiment.


My primary HN account has a lot of other things in it that I'd rather not be associated with me being an "Amazonian", hence this one :)

Manager performance is not tied to connections data. However, manager's performance is tied to the kind of facets of team cohesion, productivity, satisfaction, and delivery that the Connections data. Does that make sense?

And it's not a terrible proxy. For example, it would be relevant if a manager was measured on their ability to hire and retain people, right? Well, if certain connections questions have a direct correlation with people leaving the team, you can imagine someone would tell the manager "Fix this connections score, or else people will leave the team."

But if they fixed the connection score, but people still left the team, they wouldn't be able to get away with that as a success. The metric is a proxy, not the target.


"But that's not how it is on my team!" is the dumbest and yet most common response you hear from Amazon employees when they hear about Amazon's horrible business practices. The whole company is in fact a team. You are part of the exact same team.


My main message was that NO - that's not how it is ANYWHERE at the company. Connections data isn't available to managers de-anonymized. Period. On any team.

This post also has nothing to do with Amazon's business practices, but rather HR practices with employees.

Lastly, yes, there are some facets of what I wrote that are about my team. But this is the case anywhere. Some teams have good manager. Some have bad ones. Good ones rise. Bad ones fall. That includes using the same tools and techniques for good or for evil.

I absolutely do see Amazon as one whole team. That's why I felt the need to comment to make people working on other teams not think that this poster is revealing some secret insider information, and new SDEs be scared thinking what is happening with their 'private survey' results.

The REASONS for why there is such a variability in process and culture between AMazon teams would need a whole other blog post, but the tl;dr is: The #1 focus of Amazon development teams is delivering results and getting things done. This is done by removing road blocks and incentivizing RADICAL autonomy on the teams - way more than is available at tech giants of comparable stature (whether Apple, Google, Facebook, or Microsoft).

The upside of this is a tremendous sense of autonomy and responsibility offered to every engineer which is empowering and addictive.

The downside of this is that toxic managers can thrive temporarily and ruin good teams through misused autonomy. They do get weeded out, but it takes time. And good people can be lost along the way.

This is not an excuse, this is an explanation.


> That's because his bonus was probably tied to your performance

Or they just don't want to take on the burden of getting you to improve. PIPs are a pain for everyone involved. If a manger hands out anything lower than "Meets Expectations", their next step is to help you get there, or gather enough data points for HR to safely see you out the door


Seems like the feedback would need to be reviewable in a "skip level" fashion for that to work.


I have never worked for Google and likely never will. Stories like these make me wonder why we put X-Googlers on such a high pedestal. I don't mean that personally in an offence to anyone. It's just a general observation.


If you were early at Google it means more as going through that hypergrowth was very difficult and there was less dead weight. But for the last 10 years Google means essentially two things from a hiring manager's perspective: 1) you have decent floor of basic technical ability as no one stupid or a complete faker makes it through the technical interviews (but note it's a low floor as anybody with 100 IQ and reasonably technical mind can probably brute force their way to passing if they want it bad enough) and 2) if you were successful there you can deal well with large-scale system complexity and (likely) the politics of working with many partner teams and stakeholders. It's not foolproof as any given individual, role or team could get lucky in terms of having relatively high agency and fewer dependencies, but on balance anyone L5+ is going to have to deal with a fair amount of that.

Given the 15 years of essentially unconstrained growth and moats from any real competition, I think your assessment is largely correct though. The name brand reputation of Google far outweighs the likely strength of any given candidate, especially if you expect execution without limitless resources and industry-leading technical mentors/gatekeepers at every critical juncture.


The reputation of ex Googlers was established in the early days when they were tremendously productive, the bar was genuinely very high and turnover was tiny so there were very xooglers to begin with and they were mostly founding startups.

Over time Google grew an enormous amount. Productivity dropped through the floor due to endless headcount expansion, the bar did get lower and "I was at Google for two years" became a much more common thing to hear. But first impressions stick so Google still had done of that early day mystique.

Source: was at Google 8 years, early days, still have friends who work there. Saw the changes with my own eyes.


I did not come away with anything from the story that would make me have a negative opinion on author's technical capability.


I didn't see it as negative as well. Rather, it's not special. Not exceptional. It's just a job. It sounds like all the other jobs out there.


I think it’s actually a good thing to just have a pool of people who know how stuff actually works.

Otherwise there could be very key infra that only one or two people fully understand since the code is “mature”, doesn’t need modifications, and nobody wants to work on it.

In theory of course, I’m sure in reality the digital world isn’t at the mercy of <200 SWEs who gave up on promo and live in the basement.


This is an interesting question to me — do software engineers follow a Pareto distribution on their impact?

That would imply that around 1,000 SDEs are delivering 38% of the impact in the field.

A change in culture which drove out that 0.1% would potentially noticeably drop the UX of “tech”, across the US.


Impact is hard to define, I’m just talking about sprawling code bases, decades of reorgs, title changes, corporate priorities, and the very important little bits that just kinda make it all run.


Maybe the distribution is relative to the company's Eng org?


Were you an SRE? What you described sounds very similar to what I experienced.


I started as a test engineer on an SRE team (ads database, which I think no longer exists), did a mission control rotation, and then sort of found a way to be a software engineer (non-SRE, which pissed off the SRE leadership) and run my own projects in prod without any real oversight (that was exacycle- using all the idle cycles in prod). I used my knowledge of SRE and my good connections with SRE to run my service with minimal impacts on the $MONEY$ services.

Later I did stuff that involved working closely with SRE and hwops but always SRE-adjacent, not part of SRE. I had a standing offer to join multiple SRE groups but chose not to because I can't do oncalls while my kids are still at home.


What are test engineer roles like at Google? I’ve basically only spent my time in startups on critical systems (defense, finance) so have no idea what it’d be like at a larger company or team.


It's varied. Some posts below describe the standard software test engineering. Test engineers on Google Fiber would buy every microwave and 2.4GHz cordless phone and baby monitor, and see if our changes to interference mitigation algorithms improved or regressed between releases. So you're basically in a lab trying to break Wifi algorithms, probably not writing much code. (Also things like "does our change to move iPhone 6 to 5GHz when it's closer to the 5GHz access point also work with and iPhone 5?")


This was a long time ago and it was a "bespoke" position created by the SRE team. I set up a continuous build and then fixed bugs until it went green.

Test engineers at Google at the time (~2008) were expected to build test infrastructure, rather than writing unit tests (SWEs were expected to write unit tests and integration tests), or to build complex system tests.


Yeah that sounds pretty familiar to my experience! Right now I'm in an infra team and work on the CI pipelines, testing frameworks for devs, testing infra, etc... So more time dealing with docker/k8s than a unit testing framework that's for sure!


> which pissed off the SRE leadership

Really? I thought Googlers could move internally with little friction and yada yada. Is that just propaganda?


Often times the interesting teams knew who they wanted to fill headcount with. They would say "stop by for an informal chat", then in that chat they would interview you on (e.g.) very niche terminology. After that they would tell you it is not a good fit. Tried to go to 3 different teams on my way out of Google and none of them were interested. I think it is a bit of a status game, like they are looking for a PhD or to justify a visa.

Specific examples, an Android static analysis team and Fuchsia security both passed after informal chats (unprepared interviews). I've spent a ton of time in reverse engineering frameworks, malware, and building automated code analysis solutions (with tons of bugs found to my name). When you have that experience, and they bring you on to do front end dev on some internal tool, like there is just such a disconnect.


At the time (2009 or so) it was hard to leave SRE and be a SWE because SRE had a hard time keeping employees given the oncall and nature of the role. My mistake was to tell people it was easy to leave SRE, which the head of SRE didn't like. He called my new manager and chewed him out. To his credit, my new manager told me I wasn't in trouble, but to be more circumspect when dealing with predatory leadership.


I wonder if it's still that way. At Meta it is not, you need to go through an interview loop to move from Production Engineering to SWE (even though the culture at Meta makes PE far more similar to SWE than SRE is to SWE). I bet the reasoning is the same: they don't want to make it easy for folks to move from PE to SWE.


I’ve had someone unironically tell me SREs are just people who are too dumb to be SWE so there’s probably more to the gatekeeping than just on-call lol


No, you can move easily, which is why he could piss off his current leadership without consequence.

Being able to move doesn't mean your current manager will be happy about you moving. The "easy" part of the process means that they just can't do much to sabotage you or your future.


chrome is still buggy, the search bar moves my plugins a little after loading and I end up favoriting an empty page by clicking the star on the search bar. I think Google engineers are highly overrated for such a simple problem to still exist


Quoth Zuck:

> “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.


I've been at places where I would love to hear the CEO say that. Being forced to work with poor performers, lazy people, and people who deliver poor quality results is frustrating and demoralizing.

Those kinds of people can stick around for years, especially in good times when the company is making so much money that leadership doesn't need to care. Netflix is one of the few large companies that has a culture of culling the herd even in good times, and I wish more large companies would take that approach.


It depresses me no end that someone can see poor performance, laziness etc only as a trait others possess, and not as a reaction to circumstance that they themselves might experience one day.

I guarantee that anyone -- anyone -- can find themselves viewed as substandard.

It's truly disturbing when Zuckerberg says something so dystopian, and people 'in the trenches' call for more.


Even if it is due to circumstances, I've never seen a lazy person become unlazy after intervention from management. Sample size .. perhaps 20? The best solution is to terminate them quickly. Zuck's attitude here is what I look for in leaders when considering whether to join a company. There is little that's more demoralizing than pulling someone's weight for years while management is too disorganized to fire them, or worse yet when management thinks that half of your output is actually the output of the person you've been carrying.


I've seen many turnarounds. I've seen others that just don't understand what's expected and will never turn around. I've seen folks sit on a team they hate for 3+ year cause they love the people but hated the work. I found that one a new team and they're very productive again, but they would have stayed unhappy and unproductive for years without intervention.


> I found that one a new team and they're very productive again

This. I should have added context that my experience was in small companies where it wasn't really possible to change teams. But some of the people that were bad performers became good performers only after they were fired and found new jobs. I've seen this happen at more than one company. They were probably just demotivated or hated their boss or something, and no amount of intervention can really fix that, short of a change in job (or a change in team, as you mention, if it's a bigger company).


Some people don't know others see them going slow and managers don't have conversations till it's become problematic. Some people don't realize or won't inculcate feedback until they're fired. They play brinkmanship with their managers. Those people firing cab help. Kick in the pants as it were.


Sub-standard is relative to a standard. If someone finds themselves to be sub-standard, maybe they should find a place with lower standards? That's exactly what Zuck is saying.

On one hand, I've worked with a guy once who, as far as I could tell, did about an hour of work per day (if that) and played fantasy baseball in his office most of the time, waiting to be PIPed and managed out for a really long time... I inherited his code and it was a patchwork of minimum effort hacky fixes with no care for quality (cause he wasn't going to maintain it, I guess?). I really don't care what his circumstances are, I don't want to work with people like that, I wish they could fire him much faster than they did, and I bet most people would agree.

On the other hand I've heard about FB in particular is that there are teams with lots of people working 12-hour days. I am not willing to do that; it would be dumb for me to join such a team, and kind of a dick move to stick around as a low performer (I heard it from a friend who tried to keep up then decided to quit).


> Sub-standard is relative to a standard. If someone finds themselves to be sub-standard, maybe they should find a place with lower standards? That's exactly what Zuck is saying.

Sure, and maybe Zuck should just keep shifting the goal-posts, without limit? Where's the harm?


From talking with friends at Meta, this is re-raising the bar. Meta was apparently pretty understanding how Covid affected people psychologically, even if they didn't get sick. My contacts say this is a return to the pre-covid standard.

Additionally, the economy is struggling and Meta hasn't had great earnings reports vs expectations. Wouldn't you want a CEO to communicate that the company needs to buckle down before things get dire?


> It's truly disturbing when Zuckerberg says something so dystopian, and people 'in the trenches' call for more.

Or maybe people here on HN are sick of finding --in team after team-- those 1 or 2 people who take forever to finish their work and drag the whole team down.


I don’t care about people who take forever. Or who don’t know things. What I dislike is people who don’t care. Who write just shit that then breaks all the time or has to be fixed by others. If you are slow, take your time. But please care enough to write quality code.


Does it materially hurt you somehow if the team doesn’t finish all their print points? If you work at a company as big as Facebook, then certainly not.


I had a coworker whom I sat next to that reflected a lot of these qualities, that I had worked very hard to eliminate from myself just a few years earlier. It was simultaneously irritating because I was waiting on him for work, while also invoking sympathy. I knew what kinds of problems he was struggling with, and could guess at a few of the causes.


Okay, so you think it’s all circumstantial? What’s the mix? Are there no people that just like to skate by?


Nope. Don't know. Nope.


Rather than continue replying to individuals, my final thoughts:

The responses here seem short-sighted.

A company is openly increasing pressure on staff to force people to leave.

This does not protect or benefit you, despite what you may think about how great things will be once your idiotic, lazy co-workers amicably depart with zero collateral impact.

This is aggressively targeted at you. Not today's you (or so you believe) but tomorrow's you.

Just because you imagine you'll benefit from this shifting of boundaries, doesn't mean you'll continue to benefit next time it happens.

And for the variations on the theme "so you think everyone should be allowed to slack off", nope, and I didn't say that.


Oh sweet summer child, they aren't saying that they are going to get rid of the poor performers. They've said they are going to turn up the heat. That means that the people, like yourself, who actually do the work, are going to face the heat. The poor performers have a skill: and that skill is keeping their jobs without doing any work. So you're the one that is going to have to do more work, and it is people like you who are going to get a clue and go work somewhere else. If you stay, you'll have an even bigger portion of the work to do.


100% this. The only people who will leave when things get harder are those who respect themselves enough to not want to waste their time anymore (as they should)


Poor performers are demotivating, yep. The challenge of a manager, and really, the whole management system, is making reasonable efforts to get employees back on track, if that's possible. I mentioned the life events thing because it's real. Sometimes a PIP (performance improvement plan) gives people a jolt and gets them back on track, sometimes not. It's the job of management to separate true under-performers from temporary ones and to find the best roles for members of the team.

What Zuck wrote had none of the nuance or understanding that one would expect of someone with even a moderate amount of experience managing people. It's true that firing people is hard, which is probably why these companies should not have focused on eating the world so voraciously for the past N years.


Facebook has regular, systematic performance reviews and a PIP process like most large companies. Nobody is talking about firing people for temporary performance lapses.


Zuckerberg could have said some stuff like "I have confidence our existing performance evaluation processes will be able to handle productivity issues, with some adjustments", or some other bland but reassuring words, but he chose what he said.


Yeah and he didn't say anything about firing people. He said people should choose to leave if they don't fit.


From what I understand, Netflix doesn't cull the herd — they get rid of good (but not excellent) performers too. The article is talking about actually cullung the herd and getting rid of the mediocre performers who previously could skate by.


Yeah true, but this coming from the likes of Facebook and Google, two companies well known for warehousing talent... it mostly just comes across as tone deaf and naive.

For years they've literally hired very smart and capable people, and then shoehorned them into working on some ad-tech engine that an intern could do, just so they didn't work for a competitor. And now they're angry that their employees "don't work hard?"

Holy fuck, for being Google, they sure have some idiots in leadership.


The idea these firms hire people just to stop them going to competitors is popular on HN but I never saw any evidence of it when I was there.

Trophy hires? Sure, occasionally, but they were all doing stuff for the company. And the idea there was some sort of policy is wrong. It may look like that from the outside though, because there was never a strong connection between hiring and need.


This sounds plausible, but I'd love to hear if others agree with this claim.

Isn't this a failure of the free market? This leads to the obvious question, which is: what could be done to improve optimal talent distribution?

It seems bad to society if rich companies can monopolize talent to control development and output in order to ensure greater political power and control.


> but I'd love to hear if others agree with this claim.

I'm one of those that agree with that claim, I've said something similar a couple of times during the last few years on this forum (I remember that once I even used the term "golden handcuffs" in order to describe the whole situation).

As to why and how this came to happen in relation to the free market? The short answer is that both Google and FB are de-facto monopolies. In a way that can also be extended to Apple and MS. Of course that these companies will make tons and tons of a money during a period when software is eating the world (I know it sounds marketing-ish, but it's the reality). As such, they can use that money to "park" the best developers available among their ranks, so that no real competitor can emerge.


> they can use that money to "park" the best developers available among their ranks, so that no real competitor can emerge.

i highly doubt they are really parking developers, because innovation that endangers those companies don't come from individual developers.


In addition to a surplus of great people, they have lots of mediocre people too, just like everywhere else. There may have been a time where this wasn't true, but now anyone who passes a day of tricky tech interviews is in, and that doesn't always correlate with good performance. At least that's my take having worked at Google.


It's nice to hear someone admit that Google hires a lot of mediocre people. I'm also not shocked, their interview process invites people to gamify.


Biggest issue here are workaholics, over-achievers, and extremely talented people setting unhealthy standards for everyone else.


I do not want to be in a place where this kinda signaling goes top down from the CEO and is not abhorred by the ones doing the work.

As a dev, being forced to first plan and then PROVE that I am NOT lazy, NOT a poor performer and my code is NOT the reason the product sucks is just breeding a CYA culture full of conflicts, closeness, suspicion and politics. The only one's who will survive this environment are not the ones whom you want to retain anyway.

The path to hell is paved with good intentions.


Yes, a very powerful move of Zuckerberg. Many people get offended by an aggressive CEO, but these CEO's end up with many more applications of ambitious candidates than they can employ.


'too many employees, but few work'.. this is misleading.. given the spin, you might think this indicates that they hired these people to do specific line-of-business things, and they didn't get done. However, what actually happened was they hired a bunch of people to do.. something.. but they weren't sure what.. all they were told is that they need to hire them.. then they realized they might have 'a down quarter or two'.. apple's killing their advertising business, and they're thinking.. 'hey wait a minute.. our headcount's gone up.. no one in middle-management seems to know what they're doing (which is actually our fault.. but we can't say that), so we'll call the people we hired lazy unmotivated clowns and get rid them that way.' Cue the high-fives.


I don't understand this either. He has to trust entire layers of useless middle management to get accurate performance numbers. All he'll get are invented numbers on a piece of paper (metaphorically speaking).

The ones who leave may be dissatisfied with the artificial goals.


I don't think you can infer from this article that Meta isn't setting new, measurable and actionable performance expectations internally.

Though you could be inferring that from working there or from all the other news about them.


Setting measurable performance expectations for software roles is notoriously difficult.

Setting quantitative targets often leads to developers optimizing for whatever metric you set, while compromising on the details that aren't quantifiable.

For all of the problems and biases that qualitative performance review has, I think it makes for a more enjoyable and engaging environment.


There are people who were performing well but had temporary setbacks due to circumstances, and there are people who wanted to coast from day one. It's easy to tell them apart if you have worked with them closely.


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 think Yahoo was a special case though. At that point in the company's life, they attracted the kinds of people that wanted a job they could phone in. I knew a bunch of Ex-Yahoos, and they all cited this fact as one of the main reasons they left.

I also knew some Yahoos at that time, who were not like that, but were frustrated so many of their coworkers were, especially since they had to carry the load. But they liked their job so they stayed anyway.

Marissa came into a terrible situation, and tried to make some big changes to fix it. She wasn't successful, but she did try.


> I knew a bunch of Ex-Yahoos, and they all cited this fact as one of the main reasons they left.

Which was a shame, because they had built something really interesting and nice when it came to the web. Between 2006 and 2008 (give or take) I'd say Yahoo was neck and neck with Google when it came to bringing "cool stuff" to the web. Yahoo! Pipes is still something I think of from time to time after all these years.


Indeed. The ex-Yahoos I worked with were some of the best most talented engineers I've worked with, and the managers were all fantastic too. In its prime Yahoo was a real powerhouse.

I'm not exactly sure where it went wrong.


I was at Yahoo during the Marissa Mayer era.

I think the thing with Yahoo was that it tried do too much, and it never really had any focus on any particular vertical. Its legacy has always been that it was the place you would go for anything, and I think that hurt it more later on because the company itself was unfocused, and it didn't have a money-printing machine like Google's ads to fund the experimental work.

When Marissa Mayer was on board, the focus was "mobile and emerging products", which was absolutely the right call in 2012, but it was still too general to rally a company around. It had a lot of great small things, but none of them had enough investment to turn into a multi-billion dollar business on its own, as well as a lot of legacy things that still needed to be maintained.


I think yahoo found something like 35% of its wfh staff hadn’t logged in for weeks or months. (I can’t find a source for the number, so maybe I’m off, but vpn logs were used to justify ending wfh, which is… an imperfect approach for many reasons).

Overall, I don’t think the plan at yahoo was to fix anything, but just asset-strip it, which worked well for stockholders.


It baffles me how that's possible - in 25+ years working for software companies all my co-workers have been people I interact with basically daily (certainly more than once a week) - so how could someone not log in for weeks and it not be an issue?


I work for a company where the VPN sucks so much that we find ways to work outside it. Shadow IT is a thing here. I'd say some of our most productive and value-creating employees may go months without logging in internal systems, because things that are inside the company are able to pull their work that they do outside, so they don't have to deal with the shitty Windows-centric IT.


But are you talking software development? And if so, is that because key systems like source control/ticketing/chat/meetings etc. are all cloud-hosted and don't require logging into the domain/VPN etc.? If so, I'd still count that as "logging in", in the sense, they're online and interacting with other co-workers.


Most of our work is about interacting with entities outside the company.

Bots usually take source code that is hosted outside the company do do things internally, such as QA, and then publish the result externally or to some internal channel that is accessible from outside the usual IT systems (IT workarounds). It's complicated to tell you without going into details.


As long as everyone in a team feels like other team members are collaborating effectively (vs holding each other up) that doesn't sound like a problem, but it's hard to imagine how that's possible without regular communication between team members which implies some sort of "logging in", even if it's just via WhatsApp...


Regular communication between the engineers is also done under Shadow IT.


I've heard from some people in tech companies/remote first companies that once the company gets to a certain size (by employee #) it becomes extremely easy to float through. I know of people that have essentially outsourced their entire job by just hiring cheap freelancers to do their work for them. Those roles include designers, SWEs, marketers, etc... And throughout it all managers and finance and payroll and any sort of checks on employees all approved them all the way through and never.

Find yourself with the right manager/employer and you can get away with a remarkable amount of coasting.


You reach a certain kafkaesque threshold where making any move at all requires coordination outside your team with at least four other teams, you end up in gridlock. That said when i've been in such a position I have sometimes just fallen into gold-plating the hell out of whatever I was working on. Far beyond what was useful, just too keep myself sane.


That very much to me sounds like the wrong manager/employer! I just can't imagine working in an environment coworkers aren't genuinely keen on actively contributing towards building/ maintaining products and features. It's surely the reason you get into software development in the first place.


Given her attitude toward WFH, I'd say Marissa Mayer knew. Maybe not about this specific person, but then he was likely not a special case.


Glad these guys seem to finally be noticing.

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 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.

Your standup meeting could've been an email. Their immovable basketball game (quality of life) is far more important than a meeting that can happen at any time - and probably doesn't even need to exist in the first place.

Other than that, your points stand.


This seems crazy to me, but I don't work in FAANG. A basketball game (I'm assuming recurring) during work hours? Quality of life from inside work? Are you all at campus for most of your day (ie, longer than 8h?)

To me, quality of life is working hard and smart during the 8h, and keeping the rest of the day for you and your family. Quality of life comes from outside work, and the company respects and encourages that boundary. Of course we still do team building activities, but these are occastional off sites. Or optional after work things (drinks, workouts, indoor football etc)


> To me, quality of life is working hard and smart during the 8h, and keeping the rest of the day for you and your family

Mate, I browsed your profile and you live in Australia. Why would you want to spend the better, sunnier part of the day inside of an office? How is that "quality of life" better than spending an hour or so to play some basketball with some friends?

> Of course we still do team building activities, but these are occastional off sites. Or optional after work things (drinks, workouts, indoor football etc)

So it's not okay to intrude on "work" by playing an occasional basketball game, but it is okay to push mandatory work activities that eat up one's personal time? Also, if you think those activities are not work, you are deluding yourself -- no one likes to hang out with their boss or coworkers for "fun" after work hours.


You’ve honestly never made friends with any of your teammates at work? (A friend being someone you’d choose to spend some of your time off with).


It's a troll. "Optional activities" gets translated to "mandatory" and a game is "far more important" yet apparently in such a game nobody really likes each other, too.


> It's a troll. "Optional activities" gets translated to "mandatory"

It sounds to me that you are the one trolling. It should be quite clear that when someone who has power over you "invites" you to do an "optional" after work gathering with other people (who are often your direct career competitors), it is not really an optional thing.

> game is "far more important" yet apparently in such a game nobody really likes each other

And I am not sure what's your point here. It sounds like you are misunderstanding what I am saying.


k


Speak for yourself, cobber.

I've been at many workplaces where I've enjoyed hanging out with coworkers for fun at the pub. Granted, usually complaining about the company and boss.


> no one likes to hang out with their boss or coworkers for "fun" after work hours.

Oh, there absolutely are people who like to do this, but their intent is not at all altruistic.


True and that's a big part of the problem. I just don't want to spend my free time with people behaving like that.


That makes two of us, but I believe we are the minority in a lot of companies.


What studies show that 5 days x 8 hours is the optimal point for productivity?

We picked those numbers based on tradition (and complaints from unions about the 7x12 schedule) well before software engineering was a career. Companies that do 5x6 or 4x8 seem to be doing fine.


Studies looking at WW1 and WW2 show that 40 hours a week is optimal. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262809555_The_Produ...

You can use scihub to get the paper or here's a secondary pop-sci source: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190912-what-wartime-m...


You can work any hours of the day.

Intramural stuff is usually scheduled DURING work hours - so people are at work for this stuff to happen.

If you schedule an intramural basketball game for 5:00 a.m. in the morning or 8:00 p.m. at night - nobody is going to make it - just like if you schedule a standup during those hours - no one is going to make it.

It's expected that you either can do your job in less than 8 hours on some days - or you work extra hours to make up for enjoying your life doing things like playing basketball.

Most adults can be adults.


The freedom to schedule things during the day is very powerful and a huge factor in my wellbeing. Being able to for example spontaneously drop work for a few hours to enjoy the first beautiful weather of the year is worth more a lot to me psychologically.

Being able to schedule out of work things during "work" hours is amazing too! I've been able to have a level of involvement in volunteer and community projects that is not really possible on a nights & weekends basis. Maintain relationships with my friends and family who don't work 9-5s, watch their kids regularly. Go to those odd-hours sparsely attended religious services and grow different connections in that community too.

To me this is all much more sustainable than having a relationship to work where I grind away at it waiting for it to be over so I can live my life. There are risks here too, specifically boundaries as you mentioned. But when managed well it feels like work is just one of my obligations among several, rather than the time I suffer through so I can do worthwhile things instead.


Pre-pandemic, Google stopped serving breakfast at 8 and started dinner at 7. A lot of the younger folks were there for 11 hours every day so they could get all three meals. If you're there that long, you need to take breaks once in a while, which they of course provided plenty of options. They even had laundry machines on site so that you could do laundry between meetings.


Breakfast stopped at 10, not 8. Dinner started at 6, but most people didn't stay for it.


Yeah, you could roll up at 10 and grab breakfast, start working at 10:30, then finish at 4:30, work out, shower, then grab dinner and head home. Pretty fucking idyllic.


Breakfast stopped 9:30 or 10am, depending on cafe in mountain view. Dinner mostly started 6:30pm. There were some cafes that provided food continuously, so some folks grabbed dinner at 5pm and left.


Team building. A lot of great stuff and camaraderie have been built over a coffee and walk, or some beer after hours with colleagues.

To the grandfather commenter: I still agree that you weren't missing anything about your parent company. Work needs to happen and it needs to be aligned with a market and be profitable or have a strategic advantage (to make the company desirable).


You know that 8 hrs is entirely arbitrary right? It’s not some directive from god. I really don’t see why you’re so jammed up by some people playing basketball during (gasp) work hours


Of all the types of meetings that could be emails, stand-ups are at the very bottom of the list. A well run, efficient stand-up can head off a day's worth of productivity sucking emails and Slack messages with a 10 min conversation.


I've been in MANY different standups. The vast majority of them are not well run.

Standups are also (rarely) recorded, and therefore unsearchable.

Have you ever thought - maybe an email process can also be done well?

Maybe the majority of your email threads are terrible. That doesn't mean they have to be. Maybe you think all of your meetings are well run - it doesn't mean everyone else thinks they are...


I've been in many different companies and the majority of all processes are not well run. That just means things are being badly run, not that you shouldn't do the right things and run them well.

And no, email processes cannot be well done. You may think your's are, but that doesn't mean everyone else does.

If I had my druthers I would ban email for all in-house communication and do everything verbally, via chat apps, or workflow management tools. Anything that needs more thorough elaboration should be written down as a thoughtfully articulated memo. If you feel the need to record the contents of a 20 minute group conversation to search it later that probably means you need to focus and take better notes.

I will say it is truly a wild claim to assert that an intramural basketball game is more conducive to team productivity than a stand-up meeting though.


You haven't convinced me there's a good substitute for email when it comes to threaded, easy, async, thoughtful communication. Your suggestions all fail one of these.


There is no reason threaded, async, or easy need to be requirements for all types of communication.


A 10 minute conversation can be had outside of a stand-up meeting, and without wasting the time of the people who don't need to be part of it.


> without wasting the time of the people who don't need to be part of it

In my experience, the very people who think these cross-team sync meetings are a waste that they don't need to be a part of are the first to make noise that they weren't consulted or included in a discussion that actually doesn't impact them.


10 minutes x everyone on the team x scheduled time for all x disruption and context switch loss

I like in person updates myself, but it's not as obvious of a cost calc as you present. There is definitely a place for async, written updates


The Hallmark if a bad manager is having zero consideration for their subordinates.

I find bad managers usually can't grasp the cost of interruptions from meetings - because their work isn't interrupted from meeting - because their work IS meetings.


I'm sure you're aware of this, but 99% of standups are not this way. Given that, it's safe to assume that wherever you are, they don't need to exist. The odds are quite simply much better.


I would go to the office to play basketball with my team. I'd think that it'd build team chemistry and cross team collaboration.


Those are such buzzwords. I for one would hate to be forced to play basketball just for that.


This is exactly the mindset of failure. The team standup has 10x more priority than some dumb basketball league


Show me the studies on the effectiveness of a daily 10 min standup and I’d be happy to listen. Otherwise I’d be happy to make up some other rituals that sound good on paper and then rationalize them with buzzwords.


Speaking as a manager who at least _thinks_ I run stand ups well, I have them run for 5-10 minutes max for 5 people and treat them as an update so that I can run interference on any “status updates” other parts of the company demand across a day, and as the time for the team to tell me what problems I need to go fix for the team to be productive.

I usually leave a standup with a list of 1-3 people I need to go talk to, to either move the code through bureaucratic processes, or an actual decision to make on which projects we’ll take on based on information found while engineering.

That said I also don’t care if my people say they have nothing of note and skip the meeting


[flagged]


The only particularly useful standup I've been in is when our VP was joining to see if we needed any quick escalations each day for about a week

Everything else is fun for memorizing what everyone's doing so I can respond immediately to random questions, but the value is questionable. Everyone else on my team would be better off if I didn't know everything off hand, and instead relied on the proper sources of truth


As it happens the last The Office episode I saw a couple of months ago involved Michael Scott organizing a basketball match during work hours, even though corporate had just been complaining about low numbers from him and his team (if I remember right).

Related to a comment further up the thread about fruits, a close friend of mine told me some time ago how one of his colleagues was complaining in the company chat about the kiwi fruits that were being given by the company as free perks having too much of that “hairy” stuff on them (I’m on my phone, too lazy to search for the exact English term), and how he preferred to be served “lean” and “shiny” kiwi fruits instead. Said friend works at the local subsidiary of a big US tech company of which everyone on this forum has heard about.


Agree to disagree.

A team standup has close to no value.

Having a high quality of life has a lot of value (including increased work productivity).

As the California Milk Campaign went - happy cows make quality cheese, and happy workers make quality work...

Again - one can be moved, the other cannot.


Getting a bunch of introverts to talk to each other every day can have tremendous value for the company.

But in most companies standups are just agile cargo cult. Nobody knows why they are doing standups, so naturally they turn into "I publicly report to my manager and pretend I work really hard, because everybody else is doing that".

People forgot (or never realized?) that standups are not for the manager, they are for the team.


It has value to a single person - the person running the meeting. Everyone else zones out until it's their time to speak.


That’s why I just do 3-5 min syncs 3-4 times a week one on one with my direct reports with flex to lengthen if a deeper topic comes up. Uses more of my time but less zoning out and more chance to actually unblock blockers. Downside is I need to tell people to communicate if there is value in team collaboration, but we have other opportunities for fostering that.


If team happiness comes from basketball, that's (probably) not the team driving revenue. I've mostly only seen that tied to results in professional basketball teams.

(Not to hate on balls: it was great playing volleyball in grad school. After 5pm. A couple of $B companies came out of that group.)


High intensity physical activity keeps you in shape both physically and mentally.

Standup everyday with people burnt out and depressed due to a lack of excercise and poor nutrition is a recipe for failure too.


"High intensity physical activity..." is exactly one of the things I DON'T want. Any programming position that wants me out of my chair for exercise... nope.

I'll deal with exercise and nutrition on my own time, thank you very much.


No one’s talking about forcing a basketball game, but people here are acting like taking the time out of the blessed 8 hrs to play one of you want is sacrilegious.


I guess you and I are in the minority now because I absolutely agree. To me, the hypothetical was akin to skipping school to go hang out with your friends.


A team building activity has 10x the priority than some standup. If you need a standup to get stuff done or to motivate people then you’ve already lost.


Not for the participants apparently.


> 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.

{soapbox}

I believe a lot of companies are trying to establish a third place ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place and https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/02/28/20030228/ ) to help transition new grads and young adults from a college atmosphere to a professional atmosphere... but putting a lot of emphasis on having that third place. Having it _also_ means that employees tend to stay later at work.

Things like https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/custom-woodworking/cabine...

These are ways to use excess money in a way that rewards employees and makes some of the aspects hard to leave ("I could switch companies but then I'd lose the woodshop!") but it also sets up another set of problems in the nature of the third place - that its not work. The coffee shop that you show up to outside of work shouldn't have a manager / employee relationship between the patrons, but the coffee shop on the campus of a big company - that's harder.

It is those third space encroachments where the company is sponsoring it and yet the company wanting to not be political / social / getting into those HR issues, but yet the invariably show up there that lead to articles about how the company is going to be not political, or that half the staff is leaving because the company took a certain stance in a not-3rd space.

These third space encroachments where company life is used as a substitute for one's own hobbies and stepping beyond the college life atmosphere is where companies have social problems.

{/soapbox}


I don't think the Facebook woodshop fits the definition of a Third place. It's just another room at your employer's office. People using this facility are still AT work, just not working and anything that happens there is going to happen by your employer's rules. Perhaps this view is affected by my personal stance of never ever ever using employer-owned perks like this because it's just a trick to keep you there longer. I much prefer to pay for access to a hackerspace than use that shop facebook offers. And, wouldn't a hackerspace be a true Third place anyway?


Its that it is competing with the hackerspace and blurring the lines between the third place and the work place for the employees. If you are in the wood workshop at Facebook and are a practiced craftsman hobbiest and see your manager messing up an expensive piece of wood - do you treat him as a novice? or as a manager?

Next, these things are to try to encourage the retaining of the college mindset. Aside form the "play hard" there's the "work hard" - the all night cramming that you had with college gets translated to working all night to meet some project target date.

Additionally, by establishing these pseudo-third places, it encourages the people who use them to be part of the work "community" rather than the civic community (where the hacker space or coffee shop is). This in turn makes the people who work there more isolated from the people in the community and has an impact on the third places there as there are fewer people in the civic community who use them (when they are provided free at work). Yes, you would rather use the local hacker space than the one that FB has for a woodshop - but that isn't true of a fair number of people.

Lastly, these perks aren't things that the company values too highly and thus is apt to remove them when times get tighter. Establishing those perks as the norm (see Basecamp with its combination of company forum pseudo-third places and perks) and then changing how they're done or making them location specific (FB employee in SV gets a woodshop, while the remote worker doesn't) will create discontent later down the road.

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I believe that companies that are offering these perks and pseudo-third places (as perks) are finding that the trouble that they cause is more than the value they provide to their employees from the employer perspective but are having trouble withdrawing.

The SV style perk - I believe - is a liability to a company. While it may improve employe retention a bit while it is active (and I really question that in as junior dev tenure has been dropping combined with an increase in remote work), removing it can result in singicant discontent and hosting it increases the issues that HR has with maintaining it.


Sure but the big faang stocks literally print more money than every other company (idk maybe aramco or berkshire can compete, but nothing else). So something's working there.


Casinos print money too and farms don't. The amount of cash a business throws off is only somewhat related to how much work it requires and how useful it is.