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

Re:'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg so... by ceeplusplus on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @05:11PM (#32418524)

That's how you lose to hungrier competitors. TikTok engineers don't work 4 hours a day. Back in the day when Google Plus was coming out, FB engineers didn't work 4 hours a day either [1]. That's how they killed it in the cradle.

If you want a chill work life balance, 20 hour weeks, etc. then you can have that. But maybe you won't have the $400k salary that big tech pays anymore.

[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/how-mark-zuckerberg-...

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Re:'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg so... by qazwse_ on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @05:58PM (#32418956)

Yeah, they're probably working some gruelling 996 schedule, I guess we'll all need to go back to accepting 12 hours a day, 6 days a week to compete.

https://www.ft.com/content/174ed2e2-f88e-4759-9a7f-133629aab...

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Re:'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg so... by ceeplusplus on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @10:39PM (#32420922)

The article claims

> Staff said they were expected to frequently work more than 12 hours a day, starting early to accommodate calls with China and ending late

According to what I see on Blind, this is still the case, so clearly the reporting has not done anything. On the other hand, FB and Google are ramping up their intensity. It's almost like if you have a lucrative monopoly, people are incentivized to work really hard to disrupt it, and you have to work really hard to defend it.

Yes, the failure to kill TikTok was a leadership failure by Zuck. But you need good leadership AND good execution to win. The latter means hard work. Ask yourself why Europe has far fewer major tech companies and startups than the US, even though the EU economy is almost the same size.

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