It’s All Bullshit: Performing productivity at Google

one designer complained of spending 40 percent of their time on “the inefficien[cy] overhead of simply working at Google.”

First job in mid to large tech?

You’ve got to fight against the meetings, or they’ll eat up 3-4 of your working days. Not enough people just say no.

In an anonymous online poll on how many “focused hours of work” software engineers put in each day, 71 percent of the over four thousand respondents claimed to work six hours a day or less, while 12 percent said they did between one and two hours a day

That doesn’t seem so bad. There are 8 hours in a work day, if you’re getting 6 hours of work done that’s good. And the 12% probably constitutes managers and “staff”/senior plus employees who work on tech designs and organizing work.

The compulsion to launch new projects in order to scale the corporate ladder has become so ubiquitous that employees call it the LPA cycle: launch, promo, abandon.

This is really common outside of tech too. You get this on governments, you get it in enterprises, one a company reaches 1000 employees this kind of thing is really really common. In tech itamifesrs as shipping cool sounding shit that nobody asked for with horrible quality.

Today, about 15 percent of Google’s workforce is made up of middle managers, roughly one manager for every five to six employees, far surpassing the average manager to employee ratio in the service sector of one to fifteen. Where it was possible for a hundred engineers to report to a single manager in the aughts, most engineers are now placed on teams of no more than a dozen, frequently less.

In my experience not having a manager is fun, but worse. Of you want a promotion that’s entirely a function of selling yourself, whereas a manager can fight for you. And managers not knowing what you’re working on always results in average performance reviews regardless of your quality. 6-12 employees per manager is fine. After having been a manager, if you have too many employees you’re just doing HR’s job anyways. And why is the service sector a good comparable? A fry cook doesn’t do different tasks, they’re either incompetent, or fine.

To demonstrate their own managerial prowess, they must sell the illusion that whatever it is their team is doing is good for business and users, even if it clearly isn’t.

Every manager should have to demonstrate that what their team is doing is good for the business, always. That’s their job. That some people at the top can’t distinguish expanding headcount from delivering value is the problem. Often times that’s due to shitty execs who are only hired for corporate nepotism or just never having the consequences of their own incompetence.

I worked for a few years as a contractor going around to demonstrate when a project is doomed to fail or not, and it happens a lot where I’d tell management they won’t see a return on their investment of their own org but they do nothing because that’s bad for them. They never accept it even when the numbers are clear because they’re paid not to. One org had a team of 20+ premium paid engineers working on a product generating $30 a day with nothing to indicate it would pick up. Their core users didn’t like it, it didn’t attract new users, but you always get that “numbers can’t explain all value” response (then why did they hire me? Because good numbers demonstrate business value, the bad ones aren’t relevant, but I digress…). You need good management to say no to shit work.

Tech workers have had an unusual amount of agency over the past decade. In recent years, a historical shortage of labor in a sector awash with capital has emboldened them to demand more from their employers. Pinterest employee Ifeoma Ozoma, for example, exposed her employer for their discriminatory practices. Frances Haugen, a product manager at Facebook, disclosed internal documents to the Wall Street Journal and the Securities and Exchange Commission revealing the detrimental societal impacts of her employer’s platform.

While whistleblowing takes privileges, it’s not that tech workers are so spoiled they do it all the time.

There's some good points in this article about how launching products irresponsibly has weakened Google's overall portfolio and eroded customer trust.

But there's a whole of of weird anti-worker vibes in here too. Overall I really don't think the problem with trillion dollar mega corporations is that people don't work enough dedicated hours.

I've never thought of platform profits as rents but it actually makes a lot of sense.

I can definitely see the idea in my own work. If I stop working, it's not like revenue will go down. At least not right away. In that sense, my work is "unproductive".

I do think stronger regulation is the most viable way forward. I don't think these monopolies will break themselves.

This seems like it was written by a very bitter and jealous ex-google employee.

It's all true, but the experimental and failure cycle isn't a bad thing. It's just how you innovate.