Yeah this is definitely one of those things that sounds good on paper but has unintended "consequences" shall we say.

I worked for one company about a decade ago where the task was to redesign the corporate homepage. The "about us" pages on the homepage, not the actual product the company was selling. These pages got a few hundred hits a month. The decision was made to create two sub-teams, one would create a custom CMS, the other would "render" the data entered into the CMS to the website visitors. So that was about 10-20 people in total. The project took over a year. All completely unnecessary.

I didn't understand why this was happening. Who gained from this? I couldn't figure it out. I supposed it was just a lack of controls on how long things took, and this was the result, but that didn't really feel right to me. It felt like someone had to really gain from this, but I couldn't work it out.

Anyway, during my leaving drinks, after a few pints, my boss told me "yeah I think I'm going to get promoted, the other managers who are applying for this job manage far fewer people so I think I'm well positioned to get it".

The penny dropped. The purpose of this project was to occupy people, so that more people could get hired, so his headcount increased, so he could get a promotion, and a payrise.

But this creates an environment where the natural empire building among managers isn't tempered by the need for their units to produce revenue covering their costs. So the organization tends to grow to where it consumes all the billions raining from the sky.

Disclaimer: Just a loose thought from a cynical ex Googler.

I don't know if we prefer a world in which Google itself made these kinds of contributions and not the people who own Google.

Conceivable, but we probably won't get there anytime soon.

Capitalism is a best that needs insatiable ever growing revenue and profits.

Google has tried building housing in Mountain View, but they can't permits easier than anyone else.

I think you might be off by 3 orders of magnitude and google could “afford” to pay every homeless person a thousand times more than you’re suggesting.

I further think that undermines your argument about the problem being fundamentally intractable due to the scale.

So the question still remains is it tractable? The answer given my above argument is still up in the air, because the honest truth is there are many underlying assumptions in my argument so again it doesn’t really say much about it being tractable. It was only trying to say it was intractable which again it fell short of doing. For example in the per month. After Google dumps all or even some of their profit into that for even one month it is somehow going to still reach the same profit margins the next month the proof for that is up to someone trying to prove it’s tractable. There are too many other variables like this that exist and it really needs a much bigger burden to show that something like that is tractable.

[1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2870+billion+%2F+12%29... [2]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2830+billion+%2F+12%29...

The good way to change that is to add more housing (let's ignore the option of removing people).

Giving homeless people money doesn't end the physical reality at all. It can make some homeless people able to afford housing, but an equal number of housed people will replace them as homeless.

It's mostly homes that are between occupants. A tenant or owner moves out, and it takes a few weeks or months for someone new to move in.

It's also homes in depopulated town where there are not enough jobs anymore.

Neither is a practical source of housing for the homeless in SF.

Citation strongly needed.

>It's also homes in depopulated town where there are not enough jobs anymore.

I'm not sure I need to explain what happens when people move to a depopulated area?

I don't know about that...

Google search specifically transformed society in a way comparable with railroads. Impossible became easy. Days of planning turned into minutes or seconds of googling. It really changed the world.

I do, and this is a wild exaggeration. Altavista was excellent, and there were always databases online to look up books. Google was far better than Altavista for a short time because of Pagerank, and after Pagerank was gamed was only better than the alternatives because the alternatives had shut down their crawlers.

I miss Altavista. It would be nice to be able to grep the web for things that I want to find, rather than to beg search engines to suggest something for me that they claim their research shows that I might like, but is probably just profitable for them.

Well yes. That was one of the Great Inventions in Human History.

(Obviously not just page rank but also everything else that made it a working product, but that was the key innovation.)

I do believe that the Internet/WWW is one of our greatest inventions, though, so this is just nit-picking. :)

Every great invention is just a simple addition to all the accumulated knowledge in human history up to that point.

That hasn’t changed one bit. Google made it possible to find what you’re looking for. That was literally and figuratively revolutionary. This hasn’t changed either.

These days their search is starting to turn. Too many sponsored results, no way to avoid the AI takeover or copycat sites. In short the search doesn't actually find you the best results. But still it's hard to avoid it. There's no better way to find what you are looking for wherever it is on the web.

What's really changed for me is that now we don't have conversations that peter out because nobody has access to basic facts, i.e. whose population is greater, France or Germany. Now we just look it up, end the argument and move on.

Of course this was possible with other search engines. Google's utility comes conflated with the rise of the smart phone and mobile internet, all of which happened around the same time. Everybody having access to the answer to every question in their pocket is the real game changer.

They built the useful thing already. It prints money. Let them house and feed a bunch of people as employees. Idk maybe I'm missing something

Creating value feels more like the purpose of the business. Google is creating value, and I dont see the problem with them creating a bunch of easy jobs for people as a means of distributing that value

It's like the government redistributing your money to bullshit initiatives

My core stance probably comes down to: I don't see how putting money into payroll can be considered a waste to society. It's distributing money directly into the bank accounts of the working class.

They are in a position to provide value to society. They have as large a team of vetted professionals as they can. A bit cliche, but the horse has been lead to water

You'll get the proxy that you measure but often not the actual productivity that you were hoping for.

Lines of code is a terrible public metric, but that does not mean you can't quietly monitor it, see outliers and then look at it qualitatively without ever mentioning the triggering metric is lines of code?

An example is the folks that generate enormous lift by enabling others to produce better faster delivery in the code base. They work relentlessly but never change code. They’re the most valuable engineer you have, and are frankly in my experience what a 10x engineer must be. Are they unproductive? How do you measure their contribution?

The only answer is by watching them work and understanding the team dynamic and just letting them do what magic they do.

But this is actually hard work for managers and requires introspection and empathy most managers lack. Most managers are there to monitor widget production, promote people along the level guidance by the metrics, report status to their managers, and give delivery timelines based on all this. These managers strangle engineering by their attempts to measure.

I call this the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of software engineering.

the problem is this ridiculous notion that a software manager shouldn't know anything at all about software. how long do you think a construction foreman would last if they new nothing about construction.

Individual managers can do that, but it doesn't scale to an organization. Someone is going to spill the beans on what metrics you're looking at.

Managers generally are incentivized for their team to look good on whatever metrics the organization is watching, so they are going to push their team to work to the metric, possibly even to the point of telling what the secret metric is.

And not for individual engineers, but whole teams.

What are the bosses above your boss are doing if resources are allocated on useless projects ?

You're very clever, young man, very clever. But it's bosses all the way up!

(Of course, in practice regular people by and large don't vote their shares.)

For the former, if at all possible, you should sell those, and invest in the general market: your job already gives you plenty of excess exposure to the fortunes of your employer, and your career gives you excess exposure to the general industry you are in. No need to concentrate your effective investments even more. Diversify.

For the latter: don't bother picking stocks as an individual investor. Just go with a low cost index fund (and they can vote the shares for you).

I'm not sure why I would care about what the board/management of some /other/ public company (that I don't work for) thinks about my vote. Almost certainly they won't think about it at all.

(There's an impeachment process. But that's not available for regular voters.)

Then there are those from other backgrounds that somehow landed a position in management as well.

It is like politics, as long as the boat is going forward and not letting them do a bad figure in whatever evaluation meetings are taking place, all is fine.

Then comes the disruption, the catharsis, the big revenge, the complete destruction of old systems and arrival of techno-utopia where everything is done and done right and done correct, we're all told, or...the "young man" comment is quite apt here.

I think how true this is varies from person to person.

"Sucking the company dry" is a really shortsighted way to optimize for your own best life. You're going to have a better life if you use your resources to actually accomplish something that contributes.

But I think that beyond a certain level management probably doesn't have a clear idea of how long things should take. If they've worked in a company for 20 years, and have always been told that creating a corporate website requires a team of 20 people for 2 years, they'll just assume that's the way it is? I mean you may argue it is their job to know such things, and that might be right, but maybe they're just not competent and their managers aren't competent either?

Or maybe they don't really care as it's not their money?

Or maybe it really doesn't matter and there is higher-impact stuff for that level of manager to focus on? I mean if the company is making $100m a year and they can do something that will drive a 10% increase in that, would foregoing that activity to reduce spending on a website down from $1m be the right call?

I think the older and more experienced I get the more I realise that the suits giving overly large estimates are generally just correct. They're a lot better than the suits that want unrealistically short deadlines, at least!

In academia it's very easy to wander into a field adjacent, see a bunch of maths you feel like you ought to understand but don't, spend a bit of time trying to understand and failing, and then making the leap to thinking that everyone in the field is overcomplicating things and wasting their time. Often in actuality there are a bunch of subtleties to the problem you just don't see without spending time working through it.

It's clearly in principle possible to waste time doing unproductive reinventing, but when people set up complicated projects, you really gotta be sure you understand the self-professed reasons people felt like they had to do it that way before being at all convincing in arguing for another course of action. This will require patience and humility.

People under you ~= cost of whatever it is you are providing. Equating that to some sort of "value" you create is an insane proposition; the only thing that communicates, at first glance, is that you/your division/what you work on is EXPENSIVE.

By and large the team doing the work are the technical experts

Nobody higher up really knows more

If you use more resources, then your project looks more impressive

This is a problem in many fields including academia. They need some way to judge work, but the only people qualified are your peers

In tech, however, any company is ~1 good (implemented) idea away from >100X ROI. From the top that looks like bringing in as many good people as possible in order to maximize your chances of one of them having that idea while on your clock.

Once a company is big enough it’s the multiple management layers that make that simple equation almost impossibly complicated.

Answer: the one that's most familiar to the person making the decision.

20 people got to keep their paychecks and the company retained them, which means the company held on to their capacity to do work, in case a new project came up.

It turns out they didn’t need that capacity, but we all pay a lot for insurance that we hopefully and typically don’t use.

Of course, thinking critically about the error margins is one of the things that engineers are explicitly trained in, so it is somewhat surprising that we get upset about this sort of thing.

The fundamental issue for Google/tech in general is that their culture was designed to work for nerds with good intentions but now it has been taken over by the types of money chasing psychopaths who would have been working for Wall Street or McKinsey 30 years ago.

When you have a money printer like Search it attracts these types of people to try and skim some of the money in various ways by climbing the power structure. Politicians take over while the builders who create value are forced out. Culturally Google is pretty similar to corrupt 3rd world countries with oil money, lots of cash spent on leadership's vanity projects and in deep trouble if the cash cow gets disrupted

At the core, organizations want to align individual growth with organizational & business growth.

Because most of these companies run many businesses with wide varying nature of revenue impact, they've decided to use size of organization as a proxy for business impact. From my experience at Amazon, there's a process to acquire additional headcount where business leaders will assess your proposal and approve additional headcount.

However, most mid level managers now purely optimize for headcount with complete disregard for customer value or business impact. I think we're missing 2 things:

- Leaders who can discern whether some work requires X people or 2X people. The margins are not off by 10-20%, they are off by 200-500%.

- Feedback loops. I havent seen this talked about much in the tech circles yet. Once headcount is assigned, there's no further checks on whether original goals have been met. Leaders, managers & teams move on to find even more land to grab. If we had feedback loops around what that additional headcount has achieved, a lot of the empire building behavior could be curtailed.

Teams that would allow engineers to idle should be the exception and not the norm. I am not sure extrapolating the experience from such a team would produce an accurate image of a large company.

Definitely Goodhart's Law in action.

Instead, in my experience, it’s more based on ego and politics whether you or anyone else keeps their job.

that's how bankers used to measure companies (some still do), a sad metric in a wrong place

Edit: I regret using the word cancer, but they are still bad

Google has separate management and SWE tracks, but tries to promote SWEs to management. It's pretty disastrous: people who fundamentally just want to be writing code burn their day on performance reviews and people issues (resolving a database latency issue is not nearly as fun as figuring out who's going to resolve it because the database guy's mom just died, and he'll be out... Shit, we don't know, his mom just died, it's on a spectrum of "he'll be back in a week" to "he'll be changing careers," it's not up to the manager).

The end result is that people who want to do good work are managed by people who are ill-trained and ill-temperamented to enable them to do good work, and it can make for a pretty miserable experience. There are exceptions, but the exceptions usually come from the process finding the rare superhuman who's extremely competent in (and fulfilled by) both arenas. The best managers at Google cared deeply about systems and deeply about their teams, and they were rare to find (and usually ended up at the top of an org chart where they could do the most good, so rarely were the direct boss for a SWE II or SWE III).

This is real life for most managers. It is also true some can’t handle the stress and find toxic ways of dealing with it (inappropriate comments, focusing more on the promotion than improving the lives of their team members).

> The end result is that people who want to do good work are managed by people who are ill-trained and ill-temperamented to enable them to do good work, and it can make for a pretty miserable experience.

Sort of true. The reality is somewhere in between. Most managers want to go good. Few are truly evil who get off on making others suffer - or take pleasure in uprooting lives. Incentives and personal motivations play a very big part in how they manage.

That is the same absurd logic as for not to replace low qualified human physical work by machines (self checkout in supermarket).

Having less jobs due to technology or less stupid work should be seen as good for humanity.

Perhaps, instead, of imagining some stupid jobs and occupation, so peoples can be paid and survive. We coul reduce the total workhours of working people, so that senseful work would employ more peoples. And with no changes to the salary ofc.

I am not so good with english, so let me rephrase it. What would happen to humanity if 90 % went jobless because -let's imagine- robots and IA would efficientely replace us. Would 90 % be condemned to die in the cold when there is abondance ? Because they have no job and a 0.00001 % "owns" the robots ?

Our current system cannot work with abondance.

It actually blows me away sometimes the willingness people w/i companies have to just spend money that isn't theirs.

It's not even the calculation of build vs buy, they'll spend exorbitant amounts of money for nothing in particular. It makes me understand the stereotypical budget constraints, because without them people would just waste money left and right.

- Prevent theft

- Keep track of what's specifically been sold, to help determine re-ordering schedules

- Sometimes, put things in bags. Some stores just ask the customer to do this even if they have a cashier.

The thing about physically moving products over a barcode scanner is only for those first two purposes. Mostly the first -- if theft weren't an issue, it would be cheaper to just do manual inventory more frequently.

The customer is not preventing theft. They (mostly) aren't stealing, but they also aren't deterring anyone from stealing. The lone employee for the eight self-checkout kiosks is doing that -- with the help of scales, cameras, and (these days) a little bit of AI.

Not that I'm endorsing that of course. But if you're going to saddle me with work you don't want to pay people to do, without training and without compensation and I happen to make a mistake... well. Guess that was a bad move on your part.

Less obvious benefits to the customer: you can have one employee oversee multiple registers, instead of only 1. So less employees needed, so prices can go down. Customers can more easily take distancing measures themselves, as long as there isn't a queue for self-checkout.

But sure, some asshat may forget or "forget" to scan something. That happens with regular registers as well, but is more likely to be caught. And if it isn't: lucky for the asshat, less so gor the other customers - they will end up paying for the store's losses.

I have never in my entire life used an arrangement like that. I've only used the ones where they have a computerized terminal with a scale and conveyor belt, basically a checkout with the computer turned backwards, along with a computer-illiterate person manning between 4 and 6 of those resolving all the dumb problems they have.

> increases throughput and reduces latency.

Until the stupid scale stops working and you need to wait for one employee manning six of the things to come over and tell the stupid computer that your stupid eggs are in fact on the stupid scale.

Like, I can't overemphasize how bad these can get. If you're using the scale as a theft-deterrent, it doesn't work. Never in my life has the register person actually looked at what I'm bagging to see if it's correct. They would probably catch it if I ring up a 52" OLED TV as 16 pounds of avocados, but like, if I ring up organic avocados as regular ones? They're never gonna see that, and even if they did I doubt most would even care enough to do something about it given the wage they're making.

If your argument is instead efficiency, the things brutalize that too because so many purchases in an average grocery store are going to cause problems, things like cigarettes need to be kept in cases, things like alcohol require ID verification (which I've also never ever been carded at a self checkout!), some medications do too, and their constant problems and glitches require an attendant to resolve, while adding to customer frustration in general. And I just don't even try to use coupons at them, that's a complete fucking nightmare.

If your argument is instead cost cutting, everything at my grocery store is more expensive than it was 3 years ago, and it's basically all self checkouts now minus the pharmacy counter. So that clearly didn't pan the fuck out. Either that or all the theft it's now trivial to do is eating into their margins, who's to say.

Like I genuinely am fine with these, when they're well maintained and work. The ones at Home Depot come to mind; they don't use the stupid scale at all, they have nice, big displays the attendants seem better trained than most, and they use wireless scanners which makes the whole process a whole lot less of a pain in the ass. But when they're put in by some cut-rate business barely making margins? God damn do they suck.

It's become the norm around here: pick up a dedicated scanner at the entrance, scan while you go, at cash register, return scanner in a reader that extracts all necessary info. Newest gimmick is you don't need the store's dedicated scanner, but can use an app from your phone.

Bonus I didn't foresee: no more need to ask an employee "how much is this?" - just scan. This also shows you if your personal discount applies (if the store does personal discounts).

> Until the stupid scale stops working I think that's part of why they went with on-the-fly scanning. It's one thing to detect a postcard on an empty scale, quite another on a scale with a few 2L bottles of soda. Your example with eggs is also perfect: not that heavy, all but guaranteed to be last on the scale. Here, I think most stores switched from scales to doing random checks (where they scan 3-5 items).

Or we could reform our system so it can cope with abundance. It's perfectly well known how to do it, and it helps creating that abundance too. But the 0.01% seems completely decided to fight against this to their death, so I'm not holding my breath.

To be fair, we don't know if the manager was using that headcount to do something impactful outside of the mandated work. Based on the story, however, it seems doubtful that the manager was thinking of anything other than their career trajectory.

The entrepreneur did that. Entrepreneurs create jobs. Managers just manage, and shuffle around value, they don't create it like entrepreneurs do.

I have also worked with those "just manage" managers too. But one shoe does not fit all

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”

All that is to say, it ain't only in tech! And I take this kind of waste – of vainglorious pursuits via manipulation of image-maintenance and resource-mongering for purposes of self-aggrandizing optics (rather than actual collective advancement and good) – is not unique to just advertising and tech, but is prevalent everywhere, throughout history, etc. And only rarely do we see managers & bosses & leaders & corporations & workers come together for actual good.

The issue is that if the manager had grown the team in a way that grew revenues and value they manager could have created more than 20 roles in the entire organization. Sometimes the manager with 5 engineers and a strong vision can create enough value to hire hundreds or thousands of people throughout the company.

The manager who empire builds often creates negative value. So they create jobs for 20 people. But these jobs contribute nothing. Someone’s work in the org went to pay for those 20 jobs, and they got sucked into a black hole. Worse they require support, interact throughout the company, distract from real valuable work. In the end they contribute negative value, and the manager employed 20 people at the cost of 3 people’s jobs that could have been created but never were, their employment cost -23 people’s worth of value and contributed zero.

Now in many organizations this leads to a promotion because they seem important for having so many employees. They create a role model for other less effective leaders. As they hire managers to work for them, they hire those that add people as fast as possible regardless of value production. Now they’ve created 200 jobs, at a cost of 30. But their emergent doppelgängers have formed 10 of them with 20 people, contributing -30 jobs as well. Now there are 400 created jobs, but -60 net jobs.

Eventually the company is overrun with empire builders. It’s a big company. There are a few highly profitable cash cow teams that are extremely competitive to get into and are largely left alone. The profits though of the entire enterprise are flat and inline with peers of similar size. Headcount makes the comping look like a giant of industry. But it’s half the size it could be if there had been focus on creating new and better value.

In my experience this is why Amazon employs nearly 2 million people and is hyperbolic in its growth over such a long time. While empire building certainly exists there is a lot of process to control for it. Hiring (generally) is well metered, and leaders (sometimes) are rewarded for their dynamism in business growth (not always, YMMV). It adds new businesses constantly and a lot (not all!) businesses do pretty well and if they don’t get shut down and people reassigned.

Google, well, listen. It’s got great benefits and the managers have some impressive empires with high salaries and a stable of smart people to tally up for their biography. But there are only a few successful businesses and god bless you if you can name one that’s launched in the last 10 years. But it is killing them.

Many companies don’t have the luxury of a wildly profitable cash cow like Google. They get overrun and whither away, sometimes really fast.

That’s how it’s like cancer. Not literal cancer, and cancer is a horrible disease not to make light of, but empire building represses job growth over the long term in exchange for rapid short term growth that ultimately kills the host entirely.

> In my experience this is why Amazon employs nearly 2 million people and is hyperbolic in its growth over such a long time.

Amazon employs millions of people to staff their warehouses, not to write software.

From their 2021 report, of their 1.1 million employees, 760 thousand were "laborers & helpers". That doesn't even count the managers for those hundreds of thousands of employees (probably a good chunk of the 62 thousand "first/mid officials & mgrs"), customer service, etc. (Or temps / contractors, if that's fueling the "2 million" figure you cited -- their latest earnings report indicated they had 1.5 million employees.)

https://assets.aboutamazon.com/ff/dc/30bf8e3d41c7b250651f337...

(And yes my 2mm is net of non full time employees while the I9 population is 1.5mm)

If as a book seller they had built empires they would be struggling against Barnes and noble still.

I would not have guessed that -- Whole Foods's website indicates 105k+ employees. Am I missing a whole other order of magnitude?

https://media.wholefoodsmarket.com/about/

I would absolutely take that “offer”, on the condition that they allow me to work on some open source project in the meantime. Don't really care if it would have to be © Google instead of in my name. Getting paid to do something you like that would help everybody? Hey, why not.

Of course plenty of people don't achieve very much, but it makes a big difference whether you're trying to achieve something, or just coasting. (Edit to cynically add: or does it??)

Pretend to monitor the system, but don't actually do anything.

Write the reports with Google Bard.

1: https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/

It freaks me out to realize that's what most people probably think "Cc:" means nowadays.

Like, doing the fun parts of the job, sure.

But to deliberately do only the boring, soul-destroying parts seems like it’s own special circle of hell.

Also, how do people get job offers for these high paid do nothing jobs?

I did get a recruiter email from Google the one time, I believe it was for the Google Docs / Workspace team, but it involved relocating to Germany and Docs didn't seem interesting to me, so I didn't take them up on the offer at the time.

For the next 1-2 months, you can probably keep making excuses. If your manager is paying close attention to new hires, they might object. But many managers are overstretched. Between office politics, planning, and all the ongoing "problem cases," they might simply not have enough cycles to watch your output real close.

Even after your manager is fed up, it takes time to fire you. In part to avoid legal risks, HR typically wants to see a written plan first, giving you about three months to prove yourself. If you do nothing, that's usually the end of the road. But if you lift a finger and earn a passing grade, the timer essentially restarts. In fact, you're now your manager's success story, and they might be reluctant to admit they were wrong.

And that's on average teams. If you end up on a dysfunctional team or on a project in turmoil, you might not even have to pretend. There's just no one who is close enough to your role and still cares about the result.

Of course, this doesn't mean you're fully off the hook during that time, while it is less informal and laid back, doesn't mean you don't have to deliver

Especially in countries that have some kind of labour protections and limits on letting people go, this is important

Just a small addition, starting from the beginning of 2023, all new hires get their first rating as OI (aka outstanding impact aka one rating higher than the target "meeting expectations"/"significant impact").

Unfortunately, it takes more than lifting a finger to earn a passing grade. These companies are competitive and do fire low performers pretty easily, whether they are new employees or been there for a decade. The word goes that Google is more lenient on that regard though, I'd be curious to see some numbers.

Re: do-nothing tolerance, the dirty secret at Google is that there's too little meaty work to satisfy all the people hungry to take it on, and everything takes ages to do anyways because of all the red tape, so it's kinda hard to tell who's phoning it in deliberately and who's getting stuck in the constant muck of cross-team approval and bikeshedding bullshit when they take 4x as long as expected to deliver half of what was promised (which mostly doesn't have any impact anyways). And managers are (were?) rated at least in part based on how many people they manage, not what their teams produce, so dead weight doesn't matter to most managers, if they're trying to get bumped up to director level the last thing they want is the distraction of having to PIP and then fire someone when they could just keep them around as padding and say they hit their staffing target...

I think this is also a good reason behind 20% time. It's not to crowd source ideas, it's to keep smart people with the company.

[1] https://github.com/google

Haven't worked at Google so this is entirely my speculation, but:

From the amount [1] of GitHub repos, with some things tangential to any current Google project [2], I think it's not too hard to get approval to do a project on company time. Maybe even contribute to a third-party one, totally unrelated to whatever you're supposed to do at Google.

[1]: https://github.com/orgs/google/repositories – 2.6k!

[2]: e. g. https://github.com/google/sonic-midi, and I've seen a couple outright silly ones, though I can't remember the names right now

I also haven't worked on open source, not really, I could imagine there being communities that would make it significantly nicer to work on.

Most of the important, high impact opensource projects are built by teams.

And if you don’t like your job - well, it’s an open secret that contributing to llvm or chrome is a great way to get hired.

https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

Essentially they usually mean it’s not Open Source if at some point the source code of downstream projects could be closed source.

Still wondering about what the actual community aspect of it looks like, beyond individual issues. Probably the best way to find out is to contribute ;)

It'd be incredible to be paid to do whatever I want for a year. I have a billion projects I want to do but don't have time for.

Now I can barely do anything at all (re: Lunni, not in general), so I've decided to focus on finding a job instead (as I have maybe 3-4 more months of personal “runway”).

It can even be a trap to lure you into a position where you end up with an instant dismissal.

Lines can change as well.

If you feel wrong at what you are doing switch places. For your own good.

"Do nothing for 12 months, you do you" literally means "Don't cause any more trouble, get out of here on your account ASAP, make it easier for me to fire you"

The manager could at most offer you a handshake deal.

I work at a fairly large tech company, and I've very happy that my experience has been nothing like the one the author described. Things move relatively quickly, people care and are earnest, managers are empathetic and actually good, etc.

Not all sunshine and rainbows of course, but it's pretty damn good compared to what I hear about other companies.

I have friends in all the big tech companies and I don't think any of them is fundamentally better. They all have their idiosyncrasies, they all have good teams and terrible ones, they all have a ton of red tape.

I think the main problem is that they built their reputation by claiming they invented a new way of doing business and a new way of treating their employees. They were supposed to be the antidote to the corporate culture at Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and whatnot. But ultimately, they converged on pretty much the same.

First, it matters most what team you're on at these big companies. There are definitely teams that are more chill, and you better believe there are great managers that care about you. But many don't, and often teams that are "high impact" (i.e. move the needle on growth by owning the signup funnel) are more intense.

As for FAANG, Netflix was known to be the most laborious, although the best paying; They'd slash the bottom x% every cycle. Apple was known for being secretive and siloed, and because of their shipping cycles many teams can have intense overtime, but overall it seemed ok. Amazon in general sounded like a half a tier lower in terms of pay and work culture. Google and Facebook were often similar on most fronts and generally pleasant to work at, although I did hear Google's promotions were more bureaucratic.

In terms of "a new way of treating employees", well yes they achieved that. Outside of silicon valley have you heard of those flexible hours, rest and vest, unlimited free food, arcades, swag, best equipment, or even well-documented formulaic promotions? I remember telling my friends and family for the first time and without fail their jaws would drop. That's why most people in the world would love to work at FAANG still. You better bet those thousands of employees are very much happy there. These practices have spread by way of tech startups, but are still not "common" by any measure.

Anyway that's my 2c, I worked on a very pleasant team at FB.

And an HN selection bias in tone too: a story about how great it was to work at a FAANG is probably also not going to get many upvotes.

> I have friends in all the big tech companies and I don't think any of them is fundamentally better.

Amazon had a reputation for working their software people pretty hard. Not sure if that's still the case.

Every single step you need to implement requires you to look up several internal wiki pages, some of which are outdated and/or poorly written or linking out to another wiki page, and so on. My ex-manager always talk about 'scalability' (because they want to sell it to other teams for visibility) although that tool we are designing is going to be used by like 2-3 people and is processing at most like 500GB-1TB a day (which is not big data in my experience). In the name of scalability and rapid deployment, the manager wants us to use CDK, and we spend probably half of our team's effort maintaining/patching/upgrading that CDK dependencies (like Node.js and others). This is not to mention that when you want to tear down the resources created by CDK, it doesn't do things cleanly, so you are left with lots of CDK-created S3 buckets over time. Oh man, I can recount a few more problems surrounding the tools used within Amazon and how obtuse they are for usability and ease-of-development.

Outside of oncall, I’m constantly pushing back people who try to give me more work. Team is great, manager is great. We’re a team and I can definitely rely on them for support and my welfare. Work life balance can be really bad at times, but we get a good amount of PTO, promotions seem achievable, and my pay at least is really good cause of my manager and perf rating.

Edit: to be more clear - you have always been able to ask strangers for rides or to sleep at their place. It's just obviously impractical without a marketplace linking you cheaply and easily to willing hosts.

However Uber did improve upon traditional taxi pricing by adopting the airport shuttle model of paying for the destination – rather than the perverse incentives and unpredictability of pay-per-mile or pay-per-minute. They also had better app-based dispatch and ride tracking.

On the flip side, if you can explain it away as "they just don't get it and I do," it's a lot easier to act. And the thing is, sometimes, you get good results. Sometimes, the old way of doing business is just a matter of inertia, and the justifications used by others turn out to be bad.

But about just as often, you end up reinventing the wheel or re-learning the lessons that others learned before.

I had previously worked at numerous large tech companies - Microsoft, IBM, etc.

Small ones too - redhat when it was quite small, etc

It is, by far, the best large tech company i worked at.

At the same time I would offer within a company the size of Google, particularly one whose divisions are large and do such different things, you will find remarkably different cultures and experiences.

I think people often mistake this. When you join a small early stage startup, you really are joining "the company". When you sign on as ID 25432 at bigcorp, you are (excepting exec roles) joining "a team". Your experience can be wildly different than someone who joins a different team, even at the same time. Depending on the org, this may be basically irreversible, or easily changed.

To complete the picture I had a kind of "mediocre" story at Google, negative but not the worst possible. I was hired as the pandemic started, before anyone had figured out how to onboard me or ship me a work laptop, then the actual onboarding experience itself was a lot of talks about how "privacy is very important to us, accessibility VERY important to us, oh you can't forget that security is VERRRY important to us." (At orientation we were broken into teams and told to build an app together, but the team met like twice and was undecided about what app to build and at the end someone presented one of the three ideas of apps that we might build, as an app that we had built, and not a line of code was shed.)

Working on my team was a little better, although nobody really took me "under their wing" and when I would ping with having trouble with my dev environment my team was not very responsive. For about a year the only person on my team who really cared enough to review my CLs was halfway across the world in Singapore, so day-to-day dev work fixing bugs incurred this really long latency. For feature development, there was a different really long latency: because everyone insisted on design docs that they didn't get around to approving! So after my second perf cycle kicked in and I was told that the volume of the output was not looking great (because, on perf, maintenance work and bugs fixed doesn't really count for anything), it was just like "okay, I cannot wait for my team to actually approve these before starting the work, that'll be just like the Nooglers bickering about which app to start." So I got like 90% of the way through shipping a feature and the key stakeholders still hadn't gotten around to reviewing and approving the design doc.

The ridiculous latencies actually led to me going a little "cabin-fever"-crazy and writing stochastic simulations of work at Google so that I could give better estimates to my manager about my deadlines. I was optimized by my whatever-it-was-like-7-years at smaller companies to eliminate multitasking and pursue things with a considerable focus; but the simulations showed that my major problem was that in this high-latency environment you have to multitask as aggressively as possible: you basically need to have "this person is reviewing this for me and that person is doing that for me and I have this design doc when my CLs are waiting to be reviewed and and and...". I was working in the best way possible to get a lot of meaningful work done in a small focused team, but simulations showed it was the worst way possible to work at Google, even though the actual team size was about the same.

The cabin fever was a sort of real mental-health decline. I deferred taking my baby-bonding leave to be with my daughter for like a whole year of my wife saying "hey I really need your help here" because every week it was like "oh we'll just finally ship this thing and then I'll be leaving on a high" and it's like nope, things never really shipped. Was so focused on "respecting the opportunity" that I didn't really "respect your own biology and go to the doctor and stuff" -- it never really seemed like my work was successful enough that I was psychologically safe to take time for those basic things. The simulations helped me know that it wasn't "just me" and "here's what you need to do."

So I eventually successfully got my work output up, even to the point of doing some honest-to-goodness team leadership: I noticed that we had overcommitted on our OKRs for the upcoming Q1 2023, I had some really productive work with others at the end of Q4 2022, so I developed a design doc on "Hot Potato Agile" for how the team was going to work together like a small-company team to deliver on our ambitious OKRs and we could get everyone's OKRs done if we all worked together, I had a super-excited manager and buy-in for everyone to do this experiment with me... and then like the very next day after everyone was super excited for this thing, I and thousands of colleagues chosen apparently at random suddenly discovered that we were locked out of everything, both social and professional, for two months as we waited to be axed. Nobody knew how to contact me to say goodbye to me, eventually some folks pinged me on LinkedIn.

And like it was nice to have Tony's Chocolonely in the microkitchen on the third floor and bidets on the toilets and a barista making me free mochas on the fifth, when I was in the office. Felt very swanky. Although my favorite part, truth be told, was just the GBikes. I love the wind in my hair. And it was especially nice in the US to go to a pharmacy for my maintenance inhaler and to have my card out and the person who handed me the medicine was just like "oh don't worry about that, you owe $0, have a nice day," like "what is this, the UK or something?". But the day-to-day work felt like Sisyphus and a boulder at times, just never-ending grind to end up in the same place you started. That, I didn't like. A real mix of "Great" and "WTF".

Also started pandemic beginning of Pandemic as an SRE (not ads), didn't have onboarding in place and no one to really take me under their wing. Ran into long-latency issues, created & co created many agile pieces for the team, etc. I ended up "I'm leaving or joining a different team" and managed to get to a different non-Cloud team and it's been much better since, but 2 1/2 years of "awful".

I think that the way they offboarded us was awful; the fact that I know that as of 1PM the day prior my immediate manager had no idea (because like I said, he was at this workflow meeting super-excited and asking questions, whereas if he'd known I'm sure even if he had to be quiet he's a very honest man and he'd have been like "uh, Chris, I appreciate your enthusiasm but let's come back to this topic next week...") ... and the fact that the business was doing well revenue and cashflow wise, it's hard to not be salty about that. But again that's kind of a separate issue.

The Perf culture is one big thing, and is the reason that Google's reputation is as "we will cancel everything:" that is what their old perf culture incentivized. And I cannot emphasize how bad it was to have to devote like four weeks twice a year to doing performance reviews, right, those quarters were just like "you will only have two thirds of your scheduled time this sprint, and also this work you spend making it easy for your manager to present your achievements and your team's achievements to the faceless committee, is not going to be rewarded by the faceless committee." But that procedure was canned because the managers complained about how long they spent perfing. (Also the four-weeks thing is dependent on how much your manager keeps apprised of the team's work and progress, I happened to have, at least at first, a very hands-off manager who needed the whole 6 months of work collected and summarized.)

I think the big thing I was missing was just mentorship. This was not for a lack of trying to find it, but I mean in terms of jobs where I've had really good mentorship, I think I've only had one (and maybe one or two jobs where I've succeeded in providing really good mentorship) so maybe I'm not criticizing that strongly enough, but I think "that's a problem everyone has", it was just much more visible in this case because I was aching loudly for it and still not getting it.

So every project should be viewed as having work units and for each work unit you can define "I am 50% confident that it will be done in time T_50 and 80% confident it will be done in time T_80" and those are enough to define a log-normal distribution, whose cumulative density function is

   P(t) = 1/2 [1 + erf[ ln(t / T) / (s sqrt(2)) ]]

You can then generate a random number Z with Box-Muller[2] and then a random variable T exp(s Z) is log-normally distributed with the requested parameters. This is nice because the log-normal distribution is long-tailed so when it's off it's unusually off.

You can then look at some ongoing projects and the commits associated with that project and the research steps and reviews and all that which went into it, and say

- what things happened up til now and what is happening right now on this project

- what was estimated for those tasks, if nothing was estimated then they were "invisible", otherwise assume that was an 80% estimate, try to guess how the 50% "optimistic estimate" might have been different

- how did the tasks that I identified, depend on other tasks happening?

- and finally, I want to know, was this a task I did or a task somebody else did?

So on the basis of that you can start to either

1. take an upcoming project or two, or

2. generate a random tree-like project,

and throw in a bunch of these various things, and define some agents with deterministic strategies like "work on the oldest task" or "these nodes are hidden, now work on the visibly-longest chain of tasks" or the like. Then for a given assignment of times to all the random variables, you can see which algorithm was able to do the project fastest and you can dig into an event log to see what were they doing at the time.

Rather than "start on the hardest problem, the longest chain of dependencies" being the best like I would have expected, it was usually wrong, dominated by approaches like "do the smallest task first," because those could multiplex the review times, "please review this, please review that, I'll be working on this third thing." They did have problems with "okay now there is a long hard slog at the end" but the latency savings usually made up for it at the beginning.

I think that probably you could find a balance between the two that would work even better, "start with a couple fast tasks then work on a slow one, try to do fast-fast-slow all throughout," but that was hard to program and I already had my fundamental lesson that I needed to change my workflow.

1: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=solve+%281+%2B+erf%281%... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box%E2%80%93Muller_transform

This covers a large number of tech jobs in the US if you choose to.

In contrast, I have the impression that some FAANG employees make it within 5 years or less, considering some of the salaries there...

To your point though, if you do want to amass 1mm liquid quickly without a fancy certification (e.g. neurosurgeon), absolutely FAANG and wall st. are among the most risk free ways to do that.

Or you can go the route of pissing a lot of it away because you make "good money" now; your choice.

Caring for sick parents/loved ones

Your own medical/etc issues

Kids

Divorce

Market changes etc

I mean, without getting into my personal life, for example, , google gave options and not equity for years, and there were times those options were underwater, etc.

So it's not all just raking in money hand over fist.

I just always wonder how many millionaires have been made simply via FAANG employment.

Thinking about it, the same dynamics hold at even the smallest scale. If a company has two divisions of 25 employees in each division, over time they will start to feel like working at two different companies if you work in both divisions. Even the same department can feel like a different company after a management shakeup.

You can't manage a 100-person firm and a 100,000-person firm in the same way. Not unlike large distributed computer systems, personnel and management systems that work fine in the small do not scale in the large. So Google is (slowly but surely) coming around to being a traditional company with checks and balances and process and protocol, but because self-motivation, encouragement of independence, and the remaining veneer of "the company that will save the world" is still there, these systems clash hard and can make for the occasional miserable outcome.

I can't tell how many anecdotes I picked up of people who gave it there all like they felt ownership of the company only to realize it's just a company, and promotion is driven more by salary budget constraints, headcount, very arbitrary quotas, and market and social forces uncontrollable by one employee than by effort. It's made worse by the aspects of the old system that are still there, such as your work being evaluated by a team that is intentionally chosen to know very little about your project (to minimize favoritism), which has the side effect of encouraging self-promotion and communication skills that aren't particularly valuable in the day-to-day of software engineering (in other words, good engineering can be overlooked in favor of good self-promotion).

It's not clear to me where the average experience is closer to mine or the one on this blog post, but I hope it's closer to mine.

The people who build a successful business attract others by that success. The 'others' weren't attracted to the company for the same reason as the builders, they are joining because prestige and money are there already. These people change the culture of the company from prioritizing the things that made it sucessful to prioritizing prestige and pay of the 'others'. This distortion then makes things weird. The reputation of the company tarnishes. The builders no longer opt to join due to the weirdness. Now, all that is left are the 'others'.

This is really orthogonal to the problem you are pointing out, which has a kernel of truth: if the money and/or impact gets big enough you start to attract people who are primarily motivated by that. This is true at all levels.

Search revenue gives them a nearly infinite rope to keep accumulating the 'others' without having to attract 'builders' to open up new revenues. Just use blind for an hour and you'll see how bad it has gotten over the years.

If you have any concerns about (or god forbid, no knowledge of) your manager in a new opportunity, that's an excellent reason for a hard-pass.

If I were a large pension fund or asset manager, I would be asking questions to the board like, "Given nothing gets done on many teams, what would happen if Google reduced its headcount by 50%?" and "Why is increasing headcount currently an incentive for managers within organizations, especially without any apparent penalty function?"

Probably because most people understand that horror stories reported on the web are likely to be outliers and not representative of the typical experience, or of a massive company as a whole.

It takes motivation to write a horror story. If you worked at a company that you expected to be a good place to work, and it turned out that it was a good place to work, what's your motivation to write about it? And if you do write about it, what's the motivation for someone to submit your non-horror story to a site like Hacker News, or of a reader to upvote it?

So the distribution of stories you'll see on the web and HN is going to be biased toward horror stories and other extremes.

Because the way things are run at Google now are all FOR SHAREHOLDERS and for maximum value extraction with maximum stock buybacks.

Hacker culture and non-standard corporate leadership is always undesireable and PUNISHED by the shareholding class. Oracle/IBM type business leadership is familiar and rewarded.

This state of matters is the default for corporate America and Google was special because it managed to not be that for so long - until shareholders finally managed to bring it under control into the operating mode they understand.

There's a reason why modern corporate america is eating its own economic future and is becomming brittle to attacks from China.

They could not accurately judge productivity, talent or motivation, so some groups would lose their key players. This would demotivate everyone left. They would launch 500-1000 startups with knowledge of how some market of merely a hundred million people is being underserved. A dozen or a hundred of those would become true competitors in those markets.

It would be good for everyone except those who lost health insurance and income at the wrong time, and the Goog itself.

So, cut headcount, juice the stock, then have a bunch of possible acquisition targets that have developed viable products in new markets by not being saddled with the intractable corporate inefficiencies you suffer? Sounds like breaking some eggs for a tasty omelette.

I'm only mostly kidding.

I agree that Google benefits from monopolizing headcount, even if the employees waste their lives doing nothing, because it reduces competition. I would even Google poisons people's work ethic/priorities permanently when they try to leave and go to other startups (this is my personal experience working with former non-technical google employees who only play politics).

It is the same question as "how do we measure programmer productivity?" which is similarly a huge problem and, so far, unsolvable.

It really doesn't matter much what the company produces PR how well it manages its org, they just need to keep producing numbers in a quarterly earning report that few even read so a few clips can make a headline and bolster the stock.

Either way, the primary purpose of the company is to produce paper for financial services

They can pretty much do whatever they want and still make money. Most shareholders don't really care about what happens in there. Money in, money out.

I think a lot of people also falsely hold on to the belief that money validates process. FB had some terrible processes going on and yet people kept cheering them on. Then when stock prices plummeted, they blamed it on the most recent event, rather than asking why FB rebranded to Meta.

It's similar here. Revenue is a lagging indicator. Many shareholders are happy to blindly trust the leadership and paying them huge containers of money as long as stonks go up.

Are the other fortune 100 companies better or worse managed than Google?

"Major investor calls on Google owner to ‘aggressively’ cut staff and pay"

A couple of months after this article appeared, google laid off 12,000 employees and didn't renew quite a few contracts. There were a few others too.

And this after a fairly hard hiring freeze that left a bunch of people in limbo.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/15/major-inv...

It used to be that everyone would dream of making a startup that big tech would acquihire. Now everyone seems to believe the ultimate goal of a tech job is to land at a FAANG, and just stay there for life?

It’s so tame, so complicit. Hackerdom is now mostly about obscene levels of money and status?

This really goes to show how pathetic the tech industry has been for the past ~2 decades. People don't aspire to build the next Google, just to get a job with Google. That's like saying the Matrix inspired you to land a job where you get your own cubicle.

When I was a kid dreaming of the future, I never thought that "success" meant being acquihired by a tech giant. That seems stupid, why wouldn't I just apply like a normal person? Building something like eBay or YouTube and turning it into a massive success to rival the giants was the dream. All you needed was a keyboard and luck.

I don't know if I'm alone in that, or if this is a generational thing? I'm currently under 30, so if it is, then it's probably a relatively recent phenomenon. I guess programmers born in the mid 00s probably grew up in a world already dominated by the same few tech giants, and missed the part where they were growing and fighting for dominance.

Of course, I would say that's probably the most reasonable dream to have considering the circumstances. If you do manage to build an innovative and sustainable business, it's unlikely you'll survive once the tech giants attack you with anticompetitive tactics that they know they can get away with.

...that doesn't make it any less lame though.

I think the core of it is that I internalized a (supposedly) fundamental hacker aesthetic of autonomy, and it seems the culture traded that away for a needy, zero sum, external-validation-needing void.

Now we're told that we really should be working on our brands, amassing our GitHub stars, and other bullshit that is wholly orthogonal to actually building cool stuff. Cause who wants to do that when the rewards are uncertain? Follower counts are what really matters, this is the attention economy, and you can't be left behind!

Things felt nicer when we were all still just building.