'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

Re:'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg so... by whateveracct on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @12:29PM (#32414649)

And more than that - it's abstract problem solving. Sometimes the problem is never gonna have an answer until I am washing my dishes after breakfast tomorrow. My subconscious & creativity can't be sped up.

It's this idiocy that you can convert time into software at a fixed rate that got us into this mess.

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Re:'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg so... by jonny_eh on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @02:28PM (#32416449)

aka "The Mythical Man Month" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

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Re:'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg so... by whateveracct on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @03:48PM (#32417453)

I recently read through that book and it's nuts both how prescient it is and how different some of the suggestions are than what anyone now would consider.

For instance, there was talk of a team structure with one programmer and everyone else in specialized, supporting roles. That wouldn't fly today because everyone is obsessed with employee fungibility and bus factor.

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Re:'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg so... by twblalock on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @05:01PM (#32418412)

> That wouldn't fly today because everyone is obsessed with employee fungibility and bus factor.

Rightly so. Job hopping is much easier in the software industry now than it was when that book was written. Average tenure in software jobs is significantly lower than the average for all professions, and even that general average is only around 4 years.

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