Google is an 'amazing example' of employing people in 'BS jobs' | Hacker News Reader

Google is an 'amazing example' of employing people in 'BS jobs'

fortune.com

61 pointse2e429 comments

Google is the only company I’ve seen over my 25 years in the industry in which I had a director reporting to a director _and_ a VP reporting to a VP in my chain of command at the same time. So IDK about half of everyone, but half of management could be let go and things would only improve. Thing is, though, they’re the ones laying people off.

The management class has grown fat in the US. Layoffs at my company haven’t impacted management AT ALL.

Because as someone wrote me here, the management is the business and the employees are only enforcing the goals of the management.

Sorry, I'm from Germany and when I read that I have to shake my head how short sighted that is.

There is something to be said there about power in society, ruling classes, interests and that German dude with the beard

Yes, Hitler was socialist but he taught that hierarchies were inevitable since they are found everywhere in nature. It was called natural law.

You are thinking of the dude with the mustache.

Oops, thanks. I guess Marx was being referenced? I had thought Marx was English but apparently he was German-Jewish[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx

What is this revision of history? Fascism and socialism are incompatible and one of the first persecuted were the communists. Pretty sure the only relation with socialism was the party name. Calling yourself a good person doesn’t make you one

> one of the first persecuted were the communists

Yeah, because communists never get into factionalism and infighting /s

Have you worked for another company of similar size? I had this situation at a company with under 25k employees.

Several. In fact I currently work in such a company. When I left “hierarchical” Microsoft for “flat” Google many years ago, there were 6 layers of management between me and Ballmer, and 7 between me and Schmidt. Back then it didn’t really matter because the company was bottom up and management did not interfere much with what was going on (“controlled chaos”), but now during my more recent stint there there seemed to be a lot more gatekeepers on everything “aligning” with one another without fully understanding wtf is going on. As someone very technical and very senior at the same time that was kind of frightening to watch, like a slo-mo trainwreck when you’re within the blast radius

I'm in management (still technical, so low level of management) and the whole alignment thing is massively stupid. Language is inherently imprecise. When some group is saying they are doing X and another group is doing Y, which has the same words to describe it, doesn't mean X=Y.

Used to be that higher level management at Google was technical too, BTW. You could discuss deeply technical matters with them like you would with a very capable engineer, and they’d also chime in with design feedback a lot of which was extremely insightful. That’s long gone now.

Hey that sounds a lot like where I work.

So not a director reporting to a senior director and a VP reporting to a SVP?

When I was there (admittedly, years ago) one could have fired at least 50% of the managers PLUS engineers, and Google would have been much better off. Based on what colleagues who are still there tell me, the situation has drastically deteriorated to the point where some are calling for splitting apart the entire company in combination with a massive round of additional layoffs. What's absolutely clear is that Sundar needs to go. He's been largely responsible for the rot and ossification that has absolutely devastated whatever pioneering spirit was still there when engineers called the shots.

Discussion [0] (55 points, 1 day ago, 93 comments)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40278915

If this is true, the 10 rounds of intense interviewing is some beautiful irony

In my company, when engineers were somewhat in charge, it wasn't like this. As management got to "manage" the process, that's where we are. Plus a shitty economy lets us be more selective I guess.

I'm sure that management was highly self-congratulatory, and rewarded themselves accordingly.

People focussed on really doing a great job for the company will always lose out to people who are focussed on focussed on promoting themselves, either through grabbing creedit or parasititing on the processes.

It really is evolutionary unavoidable.

Otoh, it is also the reason why new entrants can displace incumbents.

It’s a law of managerial capitalism that serious success at any firm will first create a culture of executives and managers who compete for company teats and later a company of vultures, pecking at the carcass of the mother the executives and managers drained of life. So if you want interesting work in a healthy environment, you might look for struggling firms that want to improve their fortunes.

That may well be true, but "VC partner" is an even more extreme example of a bullshit job that entails no real work. Classic projecting.

There was some mention of retirement in the other thread, which was flagged by unpopular demand, so putting this here.

One way of looking at it, when an organization has more money than it truly needs to be set for the foreseeable future, it gets to retire.

Or it gets to retire any time it wants to after that.

If everybody starts out working their butt off until there is steady financial progress, that's when they have earned the right to slack off "back to normal". Whatever that is, but the slacking off can be an essential recovery process, especially for emergency workers ("firefighters"). Without clear recognition of the role differences, this could set a bad example for production workers or executives, they could drift toward fewer accomplishments. People could end up basically doing less than full-time work while collecting full-time pay. Or even above-market pay.

The kind of bureaucratic thing that has been seen as organizations grow from the bottom up.

It can take a lifetime to get a hold of enough funds for that, other times not so much.

For instance, sometimes financial strength comes more from the work of previous generations. Some organizations have been financially well set before anyone living was even born, in computers IBM was already like that decades ago. Some of today's "pure" financial houses (or their money) go back much further by far. Everybody there does not have to work their butt off to begin with. Many times "no hard work" is supposed to be the hallmark of prosperity, and there can be great pride in this among certain classes. Not that the prosperity starts out being a direct result of production in every venture.

Interestingly, Google, along with Microsoft, would not have had the same initial opportunity if it weren't for IBM having already been "retired" for so many years, decades beforehand. Packed with people who got on board a company having the wherewithal to coast, but their productivity had certainly not dropped to zero, they were very "active retirees" in their "later years".

So in the late 1970's IBM built their most impressive retirement "home" up until that point, and it was up in Boca.

Wrote it off since they were actually working, they had secretly committed to a desktop computer, which they were designing in between trips to the beach.

They were still making something out of nothing and it was hardware, takes a while no matter how you do it, and once it began to take shape it was already too late, they were going to need somebody like Microsoft or the software was going to take forever.

Citrix and Magic Leap, OTOH started out retired in Florida.

Where you're supposed to have money before you go there.

I see articles like this claiming that there are tons of employees at Big Tech who get paid for doing basically nothing.

And yet, my (and all of my friends') combined observed experience of Big Tech is the opposite. Almost every team is understaffed, especially after layoffs.

It's not that there aren't inefficiencies; but they are of a more procedural/bureaucratic kind. Eg: layers of approvals or privacy reviews to do any analysis on user data, or poorly documented internal tech stacks with a high ramp up cost.

Has anyone here who works in Big Tech actually met these hordes of employees who are given no work for months?

Exceptions can happen in any large company (eg: someone joins a team right when a reorg is happening, and it takes a month to figure out where they fit in the new org), but I am extremely skeptical that this happens on a systematic basis.

It's not a paradox. It's just a different set of definitions. Someone can work long hours but produce nothing that helps the bottom line of the corporation. Now, usually these tasks are said to increase the long-term profitability or perhaps improve the firm's influence or reputation. Perhaps. But this allows people to make the claim that many could be fired without any real, immediate consequences.

BTW, it's easy for me from outside Google to spot these teams. Many are working on cool technical problems and some of those are being cut. Dart, for instance, was a neat language but it's not really going to be used much in the near future and the company will do quite well without it.

The reality is, after managing very large teams, is that a lot of the work teams decide to do don't really move the needle. Managers let it slide because they are afraid to look like their teams aren't doing valuable work, and don't want to lose headcount but also don't want to be accused of micro-managing.

It's not a great situation.

I've known tons of people paid to basically do nothing, and periodically that's applied to me as well, at basically every place I've ever worked. This is despite some teams being constantly understaffed. I'm not sure why Big Tech would be immune from that.

[dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40278915

Reply on news.ycombinator.com