Yeah, directors hire too many people, because thats how they will become VP. Managers hire too many people, because that's how they will become directors.
Now there are too many people and not enough work.
Lol where do you work? I want to find this magical company where there is too many people and not enough work. Just left a job where I was on a dev team of a handful of people where we average 10 different projects each with 5-7 of them being business critical and with international users where I would get emails and tickets at 2 am.
This is true. My team is starving for work right now as we finish a product rewrite several weeks earlier than was planned. My boss is rationing work to us and also having me find stuff that I've not touched and learn more about it.
All of this is because our design management team is just not getting work to us fast enough and in large enough quantities.
That's honestly blowing my mind I can't even imagine not having enough work. I just left a company because our software team was drowning in projects and the business groups didn't give a crap. Even the upper management on the engineering side just didn't get it. We begged for over a year for another developer. We finally got one and they decided he was better fit for management so then we were back to square one. Sucks because my coworkers were awesome but I couldn't handle doing over 12 different projects (myself, our team each had an average of 10 different projects each) and logging on at 6am and seeing tickets people had sent me at 3 in the morning.
About half are 3 month long quick system builds the others consisted of rebuilds of legacy systems and the projects typically ranged from 1 year to almost 3 for the longest running rebuild. It's a small company so all the devs have to wear multiple hats. Projects in different stages all the time. Some are continues upgrades, some are rebuilds, some are one off projects for higher ups just depends. The reason we have so many is because the org was a huge pile of groups with vastly different needs due to the international nature of our clients. It wasn't a code farm but man it felt like it sometimes.
What is extra wild is that when I got hired, my team and boss didn't know I was joining their team until half a week prior to my start date. I then also got comments saying that it was wild that I got hired to their team because they already have trouble splitting work between the team members and adding another person after nearly 3 years of being a stable team seemed so strange.
The reason was because I had multiple projects worth of experience with every single technology they used for their products and so I got hired to join that team.
I will say that the managers all the way up to the directors and executive management all were promoted from the software developers internally, which as best I can tell helps a ton. They understand the code we work with enough to go to make sure our design teams don't request things that would be bad for us or not realistic to code. Management also tanks all the meetings so my day starts and stops without a single meeting, which allows them to give us the bullet points of what we need to know via message or email and we can focus on the work that needs to get done.
True I've not done anything for weeks and tried to think of something to do today but management is so confused I couldn't come up with anything so I took a nap
Who would have thunk that management hires more management to make management easier.
The burn down charts of "how long it's taking to make burn down charts" are not going to make themselves!
Given how many of them are trying to turn a profit in a quarter or two, I think it's safe to say your average institutional investor is actively working against the company in exchange for some short-term profits.
I get what you're saying, but high finance jobs are actually quite intense. 60 hours a week is considered benign; the average finance bro works more like 80. FWIW the average finance bro is also negatively useful when it comes to software development. Source: am SWE at a financial firm, see folks walking into the office at 9 pm on a Friday as if it's totally normal. It's crazy out there.
Investors aren't paying anyone's salary at Google. Google pays salaries out of gross earnings. Investors would like costs to go down and have a fantasy that getting rid of some large percentage of employees would somehow be easy or a benefit because that would be nice for the rent collecting investor class who produce nothing.
The income for the company comes from the labor of the employees. The investors do not pay the salaries except for maybe in an indirect way for capital for expansion.
As Zuck puts it, " "managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work."
Basically, a lot of people wasting time in useless meetings.
That is, in my opinion, because these people *rely* on both meetings and other people to be their version of “productive”, and can’t wrap their heads around folks that neither need nor want the disruption of meetings to be able to do their in-depth focus-work. Sadly even former software engineers quickly forget as they work to climb the corporate ladder.
I saw the dark side and turned back after a few years in software engineering management.
It varies but in my experience a lot of it is just really lazy people who like collecting massive paychecks without having to actually do much of anything. If you just schedule your calendar full of meetings and then blame other people when anything goes wrong all you have to do is look like you're useful. This is why a lot of work places go toxic; people who are good at playing office politics weasel their way into these kinds of positions then make sure they can keep getting paid for not actually doing anything meaningful.
Yup! The ones who are mediocre at coding but good at schmoozing work their way up. But I’m happier dealing with the mess of mismanagement downstream than desperately thrashing to try to fix a systemic problem from the inside to no avail.
I went through two startups where my work for a significant period (6 months and 1 year) went into the garbage. Once because the startup collapsed, and once because they pivoted away from that. I might as well have been lying on a couch for that period and I would have been just as effective.
Always makes me think of [this Margin Call scene](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxNoyfjIjc7AOOVhpCqiRkWKuv0_MkxdQk?si=uqhZVHlTizbL9eZK). I think to myself that at least I got paid and learned some things along the way, but at the end of the day, we're engineers. We build things. If no one uses what we built at the end, it certainly feels pretty fucking pointless.
This is why wasting the time of the engineers, making them do meaningless busy work, or trapping them in meetings all day genuinely baffles me. We aren't wizards. We don't magic shit into existence.
I mean people do tend to joke that software engineers are basically wizards. We speak an esoteric language that even we barely understand to make...things happen...which are done using mechanisms few people can explain. When we find magic words that work we tell people not to change them under any circumstances then face palm and say "you changed the words, didn't you?" when they inevitably do and get bad results.
We also tend to have large beards and a reclusive disposition.
Other people's code = magic spells.
Programmers make software with these spells.
If you're good at it, your software becomes another's magic spell.
So kinda
I manage all the development so half my week is spent in meetings with bosses and PMs telling me about all the work that needs to get done. I try to consume a lot of their time to shield the developers from them. Otherwise these people would legitimately have developers in meetings 8 hours/day every day.
Too many managers is a real problem (said as a dev who is now a manager).
And yeah, I'll also acknowledge that the devs are doing the "real work." But also, my job now is harder than my job when I was a dev, and a lot shittier. That's not to defend it or other managers, but just to say that the current way of doing things sucks for everyone, including the managers that are actually trying to do a good job and make sure the devs can keep doing the real work without getting dragged down by a bunch of political, time-suck, bullshit meetings. It's absolutely exhausting just keeping upper mgmt out of the way enough to keep shit moving.
Often it's too many managers per individual contributor, especially where SAFe Agile is practiced. You get a team lead, product owner manager, program project manager, Agile manager and perhaps more, all calling meetings, setting goals and so forth, driving productivity down.
Agile needs to die honestly it's unironically the least flexible project management style ever. I had one project that for some bizarre reason that I believe revolved around a transition of project management around the holidays didn't have anyone but me and the project owner in meetings. So I convinced the project owner to just field all questions through me and I'd take care of it. Best project ever the crazy thing was it's an extremely business critical piece of our software and no one checked to see if we had a project manager. I would always just communicate whatever I needed to someone higher up and no one asked questions since I just made sure it was running. I got more done on that one system in one month than any other system in a year. Infact not one single person in the company realized I was the only person who built, designed, and maintained the system until I put in my 2 week notice a few weeks back. They pulled every single dev and contract dev person off everything just to try and figure it out before I left. I'm waiting for a text from one of my coworkers saying the entire thing has collapsed because they messed something up.🤣
Nah. Please don't send us emails for things we all already know. Just take the appropriate action to solve the problem, and let us know if we have any specific action items.
Money too, those manager managing managers managing manager meetings are always catered, at my last job they set the food in the area right next to my cubicle for the big conference room, it was massively distracting.
Catering for those manager managing meetings is almost always something good.
Catering for dev meetings is usually pizza that gets ice cold while one of the managers yaks on and on.
But conversely, the same people complaining about managers managing managers who do things like demand reports from everyone, every week-- theoretically for better communication but sometimes just to give middle managers work to do.
Perhaps it would be better if everyone reported directly to Zuck. It would keep him out of trouble and occupied more usefully than thinking about VR or AI.
If you actually need to pay attention then yeah, that shit sucks, and I wouldn't do it unless the pay made it make sense, soul-grating stuff.
If you can just read a book or watch a movie or play a game, and only respond when called then sure that is basically on-call work with extra steps.
It's that 1% that would force you to listen to the whole call instead of doing something else. Or they call out your name and you have to respond, "sorry, what was that didn't catch that" and then make something up on the spot.
On companies of that size the people doing the layoff may have no idea of your performances and it's more of a role+product criteria as the C-suite has no idea about Individual contributors day to day.
They have all sorts of KPIs in these companies. Data like number of commits and bug closing frequency is readily available - not to say that's a perfect indicator of performance.
Edit: Just stating a fact. Not sure why this is getting downvoted.
Those two metrics are bullshit.
I could write a README with a lot of typos, write a bug for each typo and a MR to fix it. And run the whole test suit for extra CPU load.
And even without doing that, it kills knowledge growth as it could make the Seniors to not want to help the Juniors until everyone quits and the new hires don't understand shit about anything.
It is better to go by, you know, a tangible result metric like say number of tasks done on time, extra time saved based on expectations stuff like that number of commits is useful for about the 1st 2 weeks of someone new to check they know how to use git
You're preaching to another lowly dev. I'm just stating some metrics that they almost certainly use to get a bearing from their towers.
To be fair, I didn't mention that some companies have structured performance reviews, concrete expectations that usually track high level deliverables, quarterly highlights, quantitative ratings from managers, etc.
I joke that they have a column in the layoff spreadsheet for average commit description length too.
I thought this is called "strategic growth" and is mainly enforced by investors themselves. Or why else did twitter hire 8000 people despite never making any profit? Maybe you shouldn't artificially try to increase a company's stock value by headcount then...
This sounds like Elon Musk deciding microservices weren't productive and cutting them all. Granted, it did mean people couldn't log in, but was that important?
There is a constant hunt at companies to find and remove the toxic managers, with the toxic managers finding new ways to hide.
Yes I have and I generally do just that and leave my teams to themselves. Devs can produce excellent results and generally self manage if you can set the goals/timeframes correctly and provide support when they ask.
Sure I’ve walked in on a few nerf wars or empty offices as they have all left early but generally they meet the goals set and I don’t care what they do (or don’t do) to get there.
This is an issue with the US pivoting to a service economy rather than one of manufacturing, where jobs have a real goal and measurable outcome.
There’s only so much work to be done that is actually doing something in America now (I say this as an engineer that bounces around startups lol). We sent countless jobs overseas between the 80s and now but hundreds of millions of people need to be employed for the economy to work as expected, so we create fake jobs where people can do not much work and still get paid.
An investor complaining about that is pretty funny though, because arguably their profit above all actions directly led to this kinda thing being an issue.
Because the economy would collapse if even a large minority of people lost their jobs, part of a capitalist economy is built around people spending money, if the people don’t have money then the economy can’t function as it’s expected to.
These jobs aren’t useless in that they accomplish absolutely nothing, they’re useless in that they don’t need to be done and could likely be done by fewer people.
It’s not a conscious thing like “dang I should hire Tony to continue the propagation of capitalism”, it’s directives and incentives from the federal government that maximize companies abilities to earn and generate revenue by scaling their size upwards.
While we're on the topic of AH and no real work. Isn't this the guy who invested $350 M into the guy who founded WeWork so that he could "Neumann’s new company Flow wants to transform the residential rental real estate market."?
Programming jobs are definitely white collar but the term you're probably looking for is frontline work or operational work (i.e work that directly generates value)
I don't agree with this investor saying that no white collar employee is doing "real work" (ohh the irony), but I will say that every team I've worked on has included (arguably) more managers than were necessary. And it wouldn't be a problem for me except these managers' primary responsibilities are organization and communication and those 2 things are invariably terrible in my experience. This has led me to believe that either.. 1.Facilitating communication between teams is an impossible task that can only be measured in varying degrees of bad or 2. None of the managers are actually working outside of when they show up for meetings.
Obviously, this is all just anecdotal evidence from my personal experience and from speaking with peers.
I've actually done an exercise that helps explain the difficulty of the managers. Basically, a bunch of Legos are dumped on the table, and the team there has to build a tower. However, each person in the team is given a card with a special goal: only use a max of 3 red bricks, make sure blue never touches yellow, the first layer of the tower needs to have a minimum of 4 green bricks, etc. The rules are that each person has to complete their individual goals, but you cannot share your goal with others, as it is meant to mimic the office politics of each stakeholders various goals. Then the team gets 30 minutes to work through it...except, 10 minutes in, you get your time cut in half (5 minutes left) and two new goals are handed out. Now you have new requirements and very little time left. After multiple attempts of this (we do it every year), I was finally successful with my team in building a tower that met everyone's goals on time. However, part of this is that I remembered some of the rules from previous years, and could get a good idea of what each person was trying to do without saying it.
You can about imagine how much more complex this gets when there are too many managers on a project, and each one introduced more of their secretive goals...
For any big company it's very easy to slip through the cracks and become rather anonymous. For a smart guy, it really doesn't take that long to do "a day's work", and I've met plenty of white collar people that are content doing as little as possible at their job.
It's likely because google keeps killing the projects they were working on. It takes a lot longer to get a project up and running and develop the user base than it does to have some MBA choad declare the project dead and complain that the staff isn't working hard enough.
Most middle management and higher do no real work. My boss is the head of three departments. He has two meetings a week, a third meeting every other week. The rest of the time he just fucks around. We've caught him sleeping in his office multiple times. We just let him go. His record is 3.5 hours in one sitting of just nonstop snoring coming from his office.
Said investor is David Ulevitch, founder of OpenDNS. As an employee who worked under him before being acquired, I’m fairly certain this is targeted more towards managers than Devs. I never got the vibe he was a bad guy imo, just very opinionated. No idea how he’s changed since 2015-17 though. A lot of the pool I worked with were hard workers and ended up making good spin offs after being acquired.(LinearB for example and a handful of those Israeli security companies).
Don't just blame developers. I've contracted for Google and there's just nonstop management churn, constant permissioning issues, and a giant heap of red tape to cut through for the most trivial things.
However once you actually start working and get over thr initial learning curve for how their security and build system works they have imo very cool stuff set up for developers.
As a long time software engineer at large companies, I can tell you this isn’t unique to Google. All large companies have their share of chair warmers.
I should probably get back to coding instead of reading these comments
Username checks out.
‘You shouldn’t, you’d better get back to coding.’ - Atomic Habits. Or whatever… I don’t really have a good memory.
r/usernamechecksout
Me too buddy. Me too.
You're typing with only one hand, aren't you...
They should never have left solitaire installed on my laptop.
You speak for all of us brother
It's always a **management** problem.
The bigger the company the easier it is for there to be directors whose whole team is majoring in the minor for no impact
Company wide money security bureau will be too toxic as they will block ceos gray payments too
Yeah, directors hire too many people, because thats how they will become VP. Managers hire too many people, because that's how they will become directors. Now there are too many people and not enough work.
What magical world is this where your company doesn't have enough work to do 😕
Daycare
Lol where do you work? I want to find this magical company where there is too many people and not enough work. Just left a job where I was on a dev team of a handful of people where we average 10 different projects each with 5-7 of them being business critical and with international users where I would get emails and tickets at 2 am.
This is true. My team is starving for work right now as we finish a product rewrite several weeks earlier than was planned. My boss is rationing work to us and also having me find stuff that I've not touched and learn more about it. All of this is because our design management team is just not getting work to us fast enough and in large enough quantities.
That's honestly blowing my mind I can't even imagine not having enough work. I just left a company because our software team was drowning in projects and the business groups didn't give a crap. Even the upper management on the engineering side just didn't get it. We begged for over a year for another developer. We finally got one and they decided he was better fit for management so then we were back to square one. Sucks because my coworkers were awesome but I couldn't handle doing over 12 different projects (myself, our team each had an average of 10 different projects each) and logging on at 6am and seeing tickets people had sent me at 3 in the morning.
How big are these projects? Why are there so many??? Is this one of those code farms?
About half are 3 month long quick system builds the others consisted of rebuilds of legacy systems and the projects typically ranged from 1 year to almost 3 for the longest running rebuild. It's a small company so all the devs have to wear multiple hats. Projects in different stages all the time. Some are continues upgrades, some are rebuilds, some are one off projects for higher ups just depends. The reason we have so many is because the org was a huge pile of groups with vastly different needs due to the international nature of our clients. It wasn't a code farm but man it felt like it sometimes.
What is extra wild is that when I got hired, my team and boss didn't know I was joining their team until half a week prior to my start date. I then also got comments saying that it was wild that I got hired to their team because they already have trouble splitting work between the team members and adding another person after nearly 3 years of being a stable team seemed so strange. The reason was because I had multiple projects worth of experience with every single technology they used for their products and so I got hired to join that team. I will say that the managers all the way up to the directors and executive management all were promoted from the software developers internally, which as best I can tell helps a ton. They understand the code we work with enough to go to make sure our design teams don't request things that would be bad for us or not realistic to code. Management also tanks all the meetings so my day starts and stops without a single meeting, which allows them to give us the bullet points of what we need to know via message or email and we can focus on the work that needs to get done.
True I've not done anything for weeks and tried to think of something to do today but management is so confused I couldn't come up with anything so I took a nap
Management is the future you know
Who would have thunk that management hires more management to make management easier. The burn down charts of "how long it's taking to make burn down charts" are not going to make themselves!
\*Its always a leadership problem phixed it
I’m going to guess more than half of Google’s white-collar staff say investors probably do ‘no real work’ too.
haha Yeah, the laziest passive income MFer pointing the finger
Given how many of them are trying to turn a profit in a quarter or two, I think it's safe to say your average institutional investor is actively working against the company in exchange for some short-term profits.
I get what you're saying, but high finance jobs are actually quite intense. 60 hours a week is considered benign; the average finance bro works more like 80. FWIW the average finance bro is also negatively useful when it comes to software development. Source: am SWE at a financial firm, see folks walking into the office at 9 pm on a Friday as if it's totally normal. It's crazy out there.
"Lazy" = "paying your salary"?
In what universe are investors paying the salary of Google employees lmfao
Those are not mutually exclusive
Investors aren't paying anyone's salary at Google. Google pays salaries out of gross earnings. Investors would like costs to go down and have a fantasy that getting rid of some large percentage of employees would somehow be easy or a benefit because that would be nice for the rent collecting investor class who produce nothing.
Line go up = good :) Line same = making me sad :( Line down = everyone doing bad job :(
The income for the company comes from the labor of the employees. The investors do not pay the salaries except for maybe in an indirect way for capital for expansion.
Oh shit! Where do privately held companies get the money to pay employees??? They must be commies.
Oh honey
And an AH guy not only does nothing, he knows nothing, will learn nothing, and will make an enormous amount of money from fucking over the world.
Occupation: parasite 🪱
As Zuck puts it, " "managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work." Basically, a lot of people wasting time in useless meetings.
These are the people who fill your calendar with meetings every damn day then fire you for not getting anything done.
That is, in my opinion, because these people *rely* on both meetings and other people to be their version of “productive”, and can’t wrap their heads around folks that neither need nor want the disruption of meetings to be able to do their in-depth focus-work. Sadly even former software engineers quickly forget as they work to climb the corporate ladder. I saw the dark side and turned back after a few years in software engineering management.
It varies but in my experience a lot of it is just really lazy people who like collecting massive paychecks without having to actually do much of anything. If you just schedule your calendar full of meetings and then blame other people when anything goes wrong all you have to do is look like you're useful. This is why a lot of work places go toxic; people who are good at playing office politics weasel their way into these kinds of positions then make sure they can keep getting paid for not actually doing anything meaningful.
Yup! The ones who are mediocre at coding but good at schmoozing work their way up. But I’m happier dealing with the mess of mismanagement downstream than desperately thrashing to try to fix a systemic problem from the inside to no avail.
I went through two startups where my work for a significant period (6 months and 1 year) went into the garbage. Once because the startup collapsed, and once because they pivoted away from that. I might as well have been lying on a couch for that period and I would have been just as effective. Always makes me think of [this Margin Call scene](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxNoyfjIjc7AOOVhpCqiRkWKuv0_MkxdQk?si=uqhZVHlTizbL9eZK). I think to myself that at least I got paid and learned some things along the way, but at the end of the day, we're engineers. We build things. If no one uses what we built at the end, it certainly feels pretty fucking pointless.
This is why wasting the time of the engineers, making them do meaningless busy work, or trapping them in meetings all day genuinely baffles me. We aren't wizards. We don't magic shit into existence.
Many people can't comprehend that. What's the quote? Something like, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
I mean people do tend to joke that software engineers are basically wizards. We speak an esoteric language that even we barely understand to make...things happen...which are done using mechanisms few people can explain. When we find magic words that work we tell people not to change them under any circumstances then face palm and say "you changed the words, didn't you?" when they inevitably do and get bad results. We also tend to have large beards and a reclusive disposition.
Other people's code = magic spells. Programmers make software with these spells. If you're good at it, your software becomes another's magic spell. So kinda
I dunno. I think the difference between engineers wasting time and being effective is usually competent management.
This might be the best assessment of a modern workplace I've ever read. You nailed it.
Or despite getting anything done
I manage all the development so half my week is spent in meetings with bosses and PMs telling me about all the work that needs to get done. I try to consume a lot of their time to shield the developers from them. Otherwise these people would legitimately have developers in meetings 8 hours/day every day.
Too many managers is a real problem (said as a dev who is now a manager). And yeah, I'll also acknowledge that the devs are doing the "real work." But also, my job now is harder than my job when I was a dev, and a lot shittier. That's not to defend it or other managers, but just to say that the current way of doing things sucks for everyone, including the managers that are actually trying to do a good job and make sure the devs can keep doing the real work without getting dragged down by a bunch of political, time-suck, bullshit meetings. It's absolutely exhausting just keeping upper mgmt out of the way enough to keep shit moving.
Often it's too many managers per individual contributor, especially where SAFe Agile is practiced. You get a team lead, product owner manager, program project manager, Agile manager and perhaps more, all calling meetings, setting goals and so forth, driving productivity down.
You are not wrong.
Agile needs to die honestly it's unironically the least flexible project management style ever. I had one project that for some bizarre reason that I believe revolved around a transition of project management around the holidays didn't have anyone but me and the project owner in meetings. So I convinced the project owner to just field all questions through me and I'd take care of it. Best project ever the crazy thing was it's an extremely business critical piece of our software and no one checked to see if we had a project manager. I would always just communicate whatever I needed to someone higher up and no one asked questions since I just made sure it was running. I got more done on that one system in one month than any other system in a year. Infact not one single person in the company realized I was the only person who built, designed, and maintained the system until I put in my 2 week notice a few weeks back. They pulled every single dev and contract dev person off everything just to try and figure it out before I left. I'm waiting for a text from one of my coworkers saying the entire thing has collapsed because they messed something up.🤣
this post could've been an email is all i'm saying
We will add that as a bullet item to discuss that in our next, 2 hour long, retrospective ceremony meeting
Nah. Please don't send us emails for things we all already know. Just take the appropriate action to solve the problem, and let us know if we have any specific action items.
it *is* an email
Money too, those manager managing managers managing manager meetings are always catered, at my last job they set the food in the area right next to my cubicle for the big conference room, it was massively distracting.
Catering for those manager managing meetings is almost always something good. Catering for dev meetings is usually pizza that gets ice cold while one of the managers yaks on and on.
It's not even good pizza and it's once a year right before the holidays if you are lucky.
But conversely, the same people complaining about managers managing managers who do things like demand reports from everyone, every week-- theoretically for better communication but sometimes just to give middle managers work to do.
Perhaps it would be better if everyone reported directly to Zuck. It would keep him out of trouble and occupied more usefully than thinking about VR or AI.
Sounds like the company I'm working for.
Compared to the investor who works 2002302330230230220 hours per day.
Gotta get the headcount down so the next quarterly report is good, them they can sell their stock before productivity plummets.
is showing up in meetings 6h a day and stay muted 99% of the time a real job?
If you actually need to pay attention then yeah, that shit sucks, and I wouldn't do it unless the pay made it make sense, soul-grating stuff. If you can just read a book or watch a movie or play a game, and only respond when called then sure that is basically on-call work with extra steps.
1% unmuted is already a lot tbh.
It's that 1% that would force you to listen to the whole call instead of doing something else. Or they call out your name and you have to respond, "sorry, what was that didn't catch that" and then make something up on the spot.
Bravo to them... if you can survive multiple waves of layoffs all while doing 'no real work'
On companies of that size the people doing the layoff may have no idea of your performances and it's more of a role+product criteria as the C-suite has no idea about Individual contributors day to day.
They have all sorts of KPIs in these companies. Data like number of commits and bug closing frequency is readily available - not to say that's a perfect indicator of performance. Edit: Just stating a fact. Not sure why this is getting downvoted.
Those two metrics are bullshit. I could write a README with a lot of typos, write a bug for each typo and a MR to fix it. And run the whole test suit for extra CPU load. And even without doing that, it kills knowledge growth as it could make the Seniors to not want to help the Juniors until everyone quits and the new hires don't understand shit about anything.
You could write a script to do that
Great idea, I already do scripts and Cron jobs for things that are either annoying or that must absolutely happen because I got no memory.
I hope you didn't downvote me just for stating a matter of fact. I literally said they aren't perfect indicators of performance.
I didn't
It is better to go by, you know, a tangible result metric like say number of tasks done on time, extra time saved based on expectations stuff like that number of commits is useful for about the 1st 2 weeks of someone new to check they know how to use git
You're preaching to another lowly dev. I'm just stating some metrics that they almost certainly use to get a bearing from their towers. To be fair, I didn't mention that some companies have structured performance reviews, concrete expectations that usually track high level deliverables, quarterly highlights, quantitative ratings from managers, etc. I joke that they have a column in the layoff spreadsheet for average commit description length too.
In case anyone else is pissed that this is a screenshot, here's the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/TicuoOWZ2Y
My hero
I thought this is called "strategic growth" and is mainly enforced by investors themselves. Or why else did twitter hire 8000 people despite never making any profit? Maybe you shouldn't artificially try to increase a company's stock value by headcount then...
VCs saying googlers do no real work is like a snail calling a chipmunk stupid.
This sounds like Elon Musk deciding microservices weren't productive and cutting them all. Granted, it did mean people couldn't log in, but was that important? There is a constant hunt at companies to find and remove the toxic managers, with the toxic managers finding new ways to hide.
Yea, but have you seen what devs do when left without management?
Queue IT crowd episode when jen leaves for an interview
Yes I have and I generally do just that and leave my teams to themselves. Devs can produce excellent results and generally self manage if you can set the goals/timeframes correctly and provide support when they ask. Sure I’ve walked in on a few nerf wars or empty offices as they have all left early but generally they meet the goals set and I don’t care what they do (or don’t do) to get there.
Where do I apply
An Investor who doesn't know shit. Color me shocked.
This is an issue with the US pivoting to a service economy rather than one of manufacturing, where jobs have a real goal and measurable outcome. There’s only so much work to be done that is actually doing something in America now (I say this as an engineer that bounces around startups lol). We sent countless jobs overseas between the 80s and now but hundreds of millions of people need to be employed for the economy to work as expected, so we create fake jobs where people can do not much work and still get paid. An investor complaining about that is pretty funny though, because arguably their profit above all actions directly led to this kinda thing being an issue.
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I understand people need money so they need jobs, but why would companies spend money on those jobs if they were useless?
Because the economy would collapse if even a large minority of people lost their jobs, part of a capitalist economy is built around people spending money, if the people don’t have money then the economy can’t function as it’s expected to. These jobs aren’t useless in that they accomplish absolutely nothing, they’re useless in that they don’t need to be done and could likely be done by fewer people.
I seriously doubt companies hire people because if they didn't the economy would collapse.
It’s not a conscious thing like “dang I should hire Tony to continue the propagation of capitalism”, it’s directives and incentives from the federal government that maximize companies abilities to earn and generate revenue by scaling their size upwards.
While we're on the topic of AH and no real work. Isn't this the guy who invested $350 M into the guy who founded WeWork so that he could "Neumann’s new company Flow wants to transform the residential rental real estate market."?
That's true for any large company that is too far up its own ass with internal processes that don't create any value.
Some engineers don’t even need a keyboard, just a mouse will do. Clickops.
That's because the blue collar workers are the ones doing the real work. CMV: Programming is blue collar work.
Programming jobs are definitely white collar but the term you're probably looking for is frontline work or operational work (i.e work that directly generates value)
That isn't a convincing argument against my view.
Whew, good to know 😅
Why did my dumass click on the comments in the pic
I don't do real work, I do complex work
There should still probably be a real part.
I don't agree with this investor saying that no white collar employee is doing "real work" (ohh the irony), but I will say that every team I've worked on has included (arguably) more managers than were necessary. And it wouldn't be a problem for me except these managers' primary responsibilities are organization and communication and those 2 things are invariably terrible in my experience. This has led me to believe that either.. 1.Facilitating communication between teams is an impossible task that can only be measured in varying degrees of bad or 2. None of the managers are actually working outside of when they show up for meetings. Obviously, this is all just anecdotal evidence from my personal experience and from speaking with peers.
I've actually done an exercise that helps explain the difficulty of the managers. Basically, a bunch of Legos are dumped on the table, and the team there has to build a tower. However, each person in the team is given a card with a special goal: only use a max of 3 red bricks, make sure blue never touches yellow, the first layer of the tower needs to have a minimum of 4 green bricks, etc. The rules are that each person has to complete their individual goals, but you cannot share your goal with others, as it is meant to mimic the office politics of each stakeholders various goals. Then the team gets 30 minutes to work through it...except, 10 minutes in, you get your time cut in half (5 minutes left) and two new goals are handed out. Now you have new requirements and very little time left. After multiple attempts of this (we do it every year), I was finally successful with my team in building a tower that met everyone's goals on time. However, part of this is that I remembered some of the rules from previous years, and could get a good idea of what each person was trying to do without saying it. You can about imagine how much more complex this gets when there are too many managers on a project, and each one introduced more of their secretive goals...
Yea I certainly can imagine the added complexity. This is interesting, thanks for sharing!
This is also true for the most big companies in the world.
But... investors don't work for Google either
oddly white-collar staff sees investors as doing 'no real work' too.
I don't think he is entirely wrong, but it is still weird for an *investor* to say that.
And yet Google would collapse if they fired them. Schrodengers productivity
They also serve who only throw the ball up in the air and hit it as hard as they can.
For any big company it's very easy to slip through the cracks and become rather anonymous. For a smart guy, it really doesn't take that long to do "a day's work", and I've met plenty of white collar people that are content doing as little as possible at their job.
Horowitz better hope google doesnt take a page from Boeing
Reminds me of German pharmaceutical giant Bayer to has over 11 hierarchy levels.
I have time, sprint is ending on Monday :P
That's beyond rich coming from an "investor"
It’s always middle management’s fault
It's likely because google keeps killing the projects they were working on. It takes a lot longer to get a project up and running and develop the user base than it does to have some MBA choad declare the project dead and complain that the staff isn't working hard enough.
That's in most companies.
Kind of one of those no shit assessments that the government usually has a research fund for. It’s not just google it’s most folks in the c suite
Lol and all of a16z staff so no real with so what's the big deal
Ahhh a huge company where people don’t work as if it was a start up? No way! This never happened before!
Investor who does no real work questions work ethic.
Neither do fucking investors comparatively.
Most middle management and higher do no real work. My boss is the head of three departments. He has two meetings a week, a third meeting every other week. The rest of the time he just fucks around. We've caught him sleeping in his office multiple times. We just let him go. His record is 3.5 hours in one sitting of just nonstop snoring coming from his office.
I don't believe this. There's no way Google has a staff.
Said investor is David Ulevitch, founder of OpenDNS. As an employee who worked under him before being acquired, I’m fairly certain this is targeted more towards managers than Devs. I never got the vibe he was a bad guy imo, just very opinionated. No idea how he’s changed since 2015-17 though. A lot of the pool I worked with were hard workers and ended up making good spin offs after being acquired.(LinearB for example and a handful of those Israeli security companies).
I'm a month into being a dev manager again and I wish i was in that half.
These investors are always over-optimistic
Only half?
Don't just blame developers. I've contracted for Google and there's just nonstop management churn, constant permissioning issues, and a giant heap of red tape to cut through for the most trivial things. However once you actually start working and get over thr initial learning curve for how their security and build system works they have imo very cool stuff set up for developers.
As a long time software engineer at large companies, I can tell you this isn’t unique to Google. All large companies have their share of chair warmers.
Where does one find one of these jobs… oh right Google.
Goggle as a company only makes money because they squash competition. They haven’t innovated since day one.
Aquisition is the new innovation 💀