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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

I guess an implicit questions is: Can you teach old dogs new tricks?

Can you turn around people who are used to coming in at 10, getting coffee/snacks for the next 30 minutes who then talk shop for 30 minutes, figure out who's on-call this week, set up some meetings, train new onboard, then discuss lunch plans and when they'll head down to the gym, then return at 2 for a meeting, at 3 do some work, then talk about whether it's uber or something else back home while getting their favorite drink prepared.

Can that be turned around, or are those apples spoiled?

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Many companies are moving to four day work weeks. Productivity peaks at under 50 hours per week. Silicon Valley humans are not immune to this just because they work in big tech.

Anyone who focuses purely on hours worked or misery while working is merely perpetuating this country's unhealthy Protestant style relationship with work. If an employee can be fully productive to the demands of their work and still have time to chat or go to the gym, what is the issue? You act like you've just described the worst thing you've ever seen ("spoiled apples") but I just see a happy workforce.

Of course, if they are truly not productive, that's something different. But unless they are your reports, you have no idea what their true level of productivity is.

It's beyond time we start recognizing that happy employees are more productive, and stop shaming people for daring to seem happy at work. Because right now, a lot of us seem like the proverbial crab not letting others crawl out of the bucket.

The owner wants to cut the fat. He's finding it. Yeah, he'll take out some muscle here and there, but were they overstaffed, could they do with less? Yes and yes. In a down market you don't survive by running things bloated especially when you have not been consistently profitable. He's not running a ClubMed charity.

Not a single part of what you criticised is inherently unreasonable. It entirely depends on the quality of the work done, and the overwhelming majority of people do not use anything close to an 8 hour workday to get stuff done. 4-5 at most.

I agree that 3-4 hours of productivity is all you're gonna get. Many people could be done without though. Some are a burden than help. He can run the co on 50% current staff easily, 25% is a bit bare bones, but doable.

Reminder that this situation is made up based on videos you saw on TikTok

I wish that were true. I've seen it in person (of course, this is not representative of every team every day --but it also occurs).

This isn't a knock on you. This is a knock on people who are parasitic to a company. Look, people cargo culted the SGI&Sun ethos and said, aha, they know! Let's follow. But these places are no longer the cult of engineers, it's the cult of MBAs and biz-dev types who if they were not in tech would be doing similar useless things at investment banking firms.

These are the kinds of people who balloon spending: we had this and that at [FANG] Let's get this that and the other here without knowing why we had it there and whether or not it make sense here, but, hey, you hired me, so let me have what I know -no, I don't want this viable alternative, that's not what the cool kids at FANG used, eeewww!

are you joking? is that most day-in-a-lifes for high paid senior workers there? damn I'm working at the wrong place

All? No. Obviously he'll be keeping a bunch and obviously some key people are productive. But, look, what are new revenue streams and features added in the last 5 years? One hand's digits can enumerate them.

Here is a biz-dev at TWTTR: in her own words: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/skmAZHNuEP0

Same, with MST 3000-style commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk6T1pmHCAE

i am screaming, why am i grinding leetcode again? LOL

Reminds me of a similar video but from a LinkedIn employee https://youtu.be/X5TZVhKDwpk

I don't see how you can infer anything at all from that video. It's not like she's going to show her screen while she's typing away at an email (I hope it's obvious why...). There's also no timestamps, so the video says nothing about how much time is spent slacking off vs working. The video snippets probably only accounted for 2 hours of her day (at most). That doesn't seem super wasteful to me. If your impression is that "smoothie and wine on tap = slacking off", I think that's your misconception to correct.

That commentary video is also worse than useless; they're obviously not aware of how tech companies operate. They're commenting on things like the office being empty and the employee visiting the office for the first time. Are they not aware of WFH? The "gourmet" meals are also standard at many tech companies, and are an extremely small part of the cost. It's not like vegetables are more expensive when you prepare them in a way that looks good. On the net, offering the free food (and smoothie, foosball etc.) leads to much more value created than they cost to provide. This mentality is penny-wise, pound-foolish.

I've had that sort of schedule, except for me it was more like leave early to catch a movie (happily that coincided with the summer that Moviepass was big).

Would be interesting to see how Elon's own schedule looks like. And no not his PR enabled one. Would love to understand how he finds time to meme post almost every hour and handles all the insane context switching from managing 4/5 companies at a time.

normalize this

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