Or better yet, work for companies like Google and do the absolute bare minimum to get paid and promoted. Cold hard self interest works both ways.
If Google’s trajectory is any indication, that’s what their workers are doing anyway.
If Google’s trajectory is any indication, that’s what their workers are doing anyway.
<Rant Over>
Of course, it is the norm.
Any real idea, any real effort does what is absolutely number 1 on the forbidden, sacrilege, NEVER DO THIS list: it would upset the social balance in management. More than that, it would upset the balance in unpredictable ways.
A culture where employees feel that their dedication to the company mission is reciprocated must surely provide value?
Also don't confuse my statement reading the market with what i believe.
Doing the bare minimum for a "Meets Expectations" rating after performance review and calibrations still means working a lot and delivering on the projects you've committed to, drafting design documents, doing interviews, actively improving existing codebases, and mentoring junior ICs. If you do all that, then the company's happy.
(Just to dispel the impression that you can join Google/FAANG by acing the interview, and then coast along. Fake work with zero impact is very obvious.)
A good engineer can do all that's needed of them in 20-30 hours a week. It's not quite coasting, but it's not difficult either.
Too bad all of those totally don't matter. What you're saying here comes down to doing what management wants. And management, above all else, DOES NOT WANT THE STATUS-QUO UPSET. The chairs in management are to be divided according to endless politicking and 5000 meetings for every line in the org chart, the only thing that matters. If any effort is actually successful beyond what was agreed beforehand ... that would undo the "work" of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of management meetings.
In other work drafting design documents, doing interviews, improving existing codebases, mentoring junior ICs (to do the same) ... it's not a design document to create a new successful product on the internet. It's a design document discussing whether component #1823871 of Google maps should be monitored by a Python, C++, Java or Go program, and whether it this monitoring server gets configured using json, yml, chubby, files with strings, protobuf, python (configuration in code, python to configure flags, python to configure startup files, python to change build files, or python read by the program upon startup), Go, Java or Go. Don't forget: 8 page minimum, and you can't have less than 40 reviewers.
This document is then followed by a manager from outside your org deciding that the whole monitoring is being shipped to India, and 3 months later you check on borg ... and surprise! There ISN'T anything monitoring it, as far as you can tell. Your manager assures you your work was not for nothing, but your design document curiously has never been accessed, and everybody you ask (btw: you're quickly told you're not supposed to do that) says management forbade them from looking at your design document.
Later you learn that there isn't a single team in India that actually has access to your document (if you're working long enough at Google and actually know how to check that, which used to be 99%, but now ... perhaps 20%).
A year later, the product takes down all of Google maps, your team's lack of monitoring gets blamed for the outage ... but 10 minutes after you go to your manager with this the postmortem, suddenly, gives you "access denied". Then, you get scheduled for a support checkin where the person doing the support checkin has no idea what it's about.
Of course, what it's really about is that your forced one of the managers in your org to explain to higher ups how your concern is being addressed while still meeting budget constraints ... Which could have upset the status quo (recognizable by "Moderate impact" on your GRAD review) or actually upset the status quo ("Not Enough Impact" on your review). Congratulations!
These bureaucratic processes have been around for a while, but within the past ~2 years it all became shamelessly overt, and is now explicitly about "business as usual".
Me, I’d sooner take a job where I’m contributing positively to society, even if I could make a bit more in adtech.
Why would you do that to your family, all to help some shareholders who don’t give a rat’s ass about you?
If that harms your chance to be hired, that’s evidence that the status quo agreement isn’t that.
My experience is people who have the attitude of doing the bare minimum do not have “works competently and efficiently for eight hours a day” as a target in mind when they say that.
For a lot of engineering work, competent and diligent for 30 hours per week could easily out-perform 40.
Both parties lie in an interview. It’s a dance.
This seems normal at most FANGs/big companies. People also have a lot of choice around when to come in, leave, and have a hybrid in office policy. Where are the lies?
If people don’t like the job they’re doing; they should quit and find something else to do.
Not my problem
We designed a system that's actively hostile to life and well being to profit the top 0.1%
No contract states you have to give your best, and there is no way for anyone to enforce that anyways
And your proposed solution is to personally be actively hostile to the well being of those around you for your own benefit?
Imagine acting in the most anti-communal way while thinking you have a moral high ground and fuck the little guys around you because you think you're sticking it to the man.
The minimum is actually a lot, because at companies like that individual performance is monitored closely and other people are going to be working very hard.