Comment by tsycho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsycho | Hacker News Reader

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.

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