Lead the Employee Engagement Organization which is a global team of 130+ googlers who are responsible for driving large-scale impact across Diversity, Equity & Inclusion programs; Employee Relations; and Compliance, Integrity & Governance.
So far more than just specifically diversity all for a company of 200,000+ people.
i.e. 0.065% of the total workforce.
I'd be surprised if this "drop in the bucket" was anything more than a sunk cost
Just imagine something as small as a change in color in a website element - 8% of men and so 4% of the global population are color blind. That's 320 million people potentially affected. A copy text that requires more than 4th grade literacy skills in English to grasp? Like half of Americans, 165 million people, potentially affected. An illustration graphic using cows as an example for whatever? A potential offense to a billion of Hindu Indians.
And the list goes on and on and on. With Google holding ~85% of the global market share in search or 2.5 billion MAUs for Youtube, taking care about diversity is not even close to optional - it's foundational to make sure the company doesn't get into any sort of trouble.
I've worked for a few and there definitely wasn't 1000s of people in the Legal & Compliance departments constantly getting sued and harassing managers and engineers about travel expenses or diversity training.
Instead, it is the exact same problems you see at every large company i.e. excess of middle managers each trying to grow their own fiefdom and duplicating capabilities across the organisation.
Or it's too many poorly conceived and managed product and R&D adventures.
My OH works for a big multinational, has had a variety of roles, at a variety of locations, and despite the fact that she's not in tech you've still managed to summarise pretty much every single conversation I've had with her about her work over the last 20+ years.
Certainly it’s possible to run too many of them, but if you are overindexing on perfect vetting and execution of every idea you might not be running enough.
Everyone’s number one objective in any company is to make their individual life easier. Full stop. The most obvious way to do that, if you have the ability/budget, is to hire people to do your work for you.
Then you can brag about managing higher headcount, you do less work, and you flounder around as a very bad manager with no accountability so long as you keep your workload below the level of your manager (who, remember, hired you just to remove work from their own plate).
Now remember that everyone you hired has the exact same incentive.
It keeps going til the money runs out or until the company buckles under its own organizational complexity.
Most importantly, there are very few managers and business leaders who think "You know what would make my life easier? Having a lot more people to manage!" The usual reason people are hired is because the needs (or anticipated needs, which can often be wildly off as we've seen recently) of the business require it, and without more people there will either be lost business opportunity or risk that existing employees are working at an unsustainable rate.
I'm definitely not saying that businesses can't be inefficient, but when I read your sentence "Everyone’s number one objective in any company is to make their individual life easier" (with a "full stop" no less as if that somehow guarantees its unassailability), I honestly didn't know what you were talking about.
If you're talking about good managers, then yes, having more people creates more work.
The lazy middle managers aren't interested in hands-on middle management, though. They cultivate teams of people who can self-manage or be managed through fear. They take the people who need a lot of attention and they transfer them to other roles. They penalize anyone who asks too many questions or requires too much management input.
These aren't good, hands-on managers. They may be great at talking big in meetings and schmoozing around the office, but they're not putting in the work to be hands-on with their employees.
Sure, but the exceptions do all the hiring!
I agree, which is why people who do know that tend to be extremely hesitant to hire (they’re trying to preserve their own local quality of life). But as the sibling comment says, this realization only occurs to good managers and even then it takes some time.
I think hiring is all about making peoples lives easier (to the extent they’re allowed). However, there’s a cynical way to look at it and there’s a positive way to look at it as well.
We look at people and they generally work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Is it going to be surprising we need a whole lot of people running global operations 24/7?
No company can maintain that dynamic at scale, though. As you grow, you accumulate people who are good at presenting an image of doing the good work, but they're actually operating adversarially in a way that collects the most rewards with the least effort.
It's not just managers. A lot of ICs treat the workplace like a min-max game, where they are trying to maximize their compensation and minimize the work they do. Every time I mention this, there are comments about how that's actually a good thing because companies have the same strategy, but the people who do this usually screw their teammates more than the company. Big companies don't suffer if random people are slacking off and refusing to do their work, but their teammates who want to get a promotion or build their skillsets are going to suffer the consequences of deadbeat coworkers.
Small companies aren't immune from these problems, but it's so much easier to identify and remove the dead weight in a small company. When you have 20 people in a company, it's clearly obvious when someone isn't pulling their weight. But when you have 100,000 people in a company, a large number of people are going to find ways to settle into obscure roles where their output is hard to measure and they'll coast as much as they can.
That's less fun than doing the right things, and more work than min/maxing your quality of life
That is one big reason why i stopped caring about the employees taking the clandestine adversarial approach to their relationship with employers. It's one thing to put in low effort at a scrappy startup, but another when the company discourages excellence.
People are supposed to choose their career strategy and on the job behaviour so that their teammates(not friends, teammates) can optimize their own career strategy ?
A similar thing, but with much higher stakes, happens on the front-lines during a war. Confronted with a much superior enemy your individual optimal decision would be to desert, or, at least, to retreat, no matter what the high-command located at the back of the front has to say about it. They're not the ones who are going to die.
But, in doing that, you're weakening the flanks of the other brigades/platoon from your side with which you're sharing the front-line, and in so doing you're drastically decreasing the chances for them to see their kids and their wives back home.
That is why I dislike it when people are working free overtime. They are wage dumping me.
Ya know, they have a word for that...
This is the thing about the HN crowd and the remote only dogma that is constantly thrown around that is perplexing. The HN demo loudly proclaims that the workplace is not the place for you to build friendships and personal relationships and to go do it on your own time.
The natural effect of this is ambitious employees are going to min-max their career trajectory for their benefit and maybe the company's. Why would anyone truly care about faceless Zoom rectangle team members that they're never going to see after x months/years? In this case, they're not fighting a war, so the stakes are drastically low and payoff substantially better. And yet HN looks down on this as bad behavior. This is just the emergent property of the current tech culture that we've established.
Are you actually unironically asking this? If so, we have live in very different social spectrum and there's absolutely nothing I can tell you that will convince you otherwise. You should, however, try interacting with everyone in your life (loved ones, family, friends, etc.) via zoom, since it's all the same anyway. Probably saves a lot on commute and travel expenses!
> Magically they become actual people once you see them with your own eyes, resulting in increased effectiveness and no resentment from wasted time commuting and forced interpersonal relationships with people they find annoying.
Commuting, daycare, housing, etc. are side effects of a larger systemic problem that isn't the scope of what is discussed here.
Calling it a “forced interpersonal relationships with people they find annoying” is such an immature take. This is just literally interacting with people in a society. Most people learn how to deal with others in school. The ones who don’t end up socially clueless and wonder why everyone else keeps getting promoted instead of them, the “10x” engineer who totally isn’t the annoying one.
The issue has nothing to do with seeing people as actual people or not. Without a common ground for camaraderie and fellowship, there’s no need to pretend it exists besides being generally a cordial person. Using the OP’s analogy of War, employees are no longer soldier’s fighting for a cause, just mercenaries making sure they’re getting their dues.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy! The people who game the system eventually move to further enforce the system (for their own benefit), at the expense of the purpose the for which the system was first put in place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_la...
It seems like this is related to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
And this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
It's almost as if you mix those two things together, you get Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
From my experience whenever this happens the people who get "pushed out of the way" were useless to begin with
Or useless with office politics, and didn’t manage to market themselves well with the new lead. It’s never been clean-cut in my experience.
They screw themselves more than anyone else by spurning opportunities for bettering themselves
??? You've got it exactly reversed. Slacking coworkers are the company's problem, not yours.
I've never seen any company decide not to give a promotion to somebody because their coworker was useless. Hell, sometimes the useless coworker helps because it makes them look better by comparison.
Ah, but have you ever seen a company give raises promotions to the people on projects that were successfully delivered?
> Posting this just never gets old... > > It must have been a couple of months because... > >> I keep this link sitting around and enjoy dusting it off every couple of > >> months or so > >> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
If anything the more we have grown the more over engineering and obnoxious processes we have.
All because late stage people just don’t really get it imo. When you start needing to have meetings so people can “feel like they belong” which translates to weeks of wasted cycles trying to find “what works for us” it’s ludicrous.
You’re hired to do a job, maybe you’re a Java or Go engineer hired to work on services or infra. Or you’re hired to build UIs. You aren’t hired to waste time on setting up slack bots that become annoying af 2 sprints later and removed, or trying experiments instead of shipping.
I can understand having technical processes to make our codebase better, but this side organizational engineering bullshit is just annoying.
Idk it’s just stupid. Imo companies need to be leaner and have less people who actually just do their job. You know, the thing they’re paid 300k plus TC for. I’ve personally been picking up the slack on a bunch of people on my team along with a couple of OGs and new hires who are actually really good. It’s getting annoying now when people just literally are not doing their job and writing 20 page documents on process improvements. did we hire a consulting firm jokers or software engineers?
That is because all the managers who have outsourced all their work to their direct reports now has to still produce evidence that the manager is still needed. So they ask you for reports and data, that they can hand to their managers. And those managers also try to come up with that sort of evidence, so middle managers asks for lots of reports and data from line managers that they can hand directly as is to their superiors etc.
Too much work compiling all those reports etc? Hire a manager to do it for you, then hire more, try to ensure that their tasks produce the artifacts you need to hand to your manager. This isn't efficient for the company, but very efficient for your career. And that is the hardest part about being a manager, that the other managers acts like this and try to push all the real work onto you while taking all the credit.
The issue is that once you have layers of middle managers - as in managers managing managers, a snake pit ensues. Nobody gets into middle management and says “ahh at last, I’ve arrived”. The goal is to amass influence and push up as quickly as possible to try and reach the executive level.
From here, it becomes a very political situation, rife with corporate climbers try to push each other down into the mud to reach upward. One way to appear influential is to manage a large team of people. Your main goal is to pull headcount for your org chart, while your peers are also trying to do the same. So you invent ridiculous “strategies” with inflated headcount requirements and promise astronomical results.
It all stems from the personal ambitions of the people in the middle. And of course, they’re usually the most out of touch with the real operations of the company because they’re only peripherally connected to any actual work as a distant connection in the telephone game.
Some of them really do love work and are workaholics… more commonly they’ll always find a reason why they’re “needed”, because there will always be so much more to do. It’s often tough to tell the difference.
However, I rarely see cases where less workload is a motivation for hiring. Often times it’s practically impossible for it to be… and hiring is really the only way they can get work added.
I mean, I've never worked in a team that large. A big part of that is because I can't imagine asking someone else's permission to write code. If a company can get so big that they can't trust their developers to release code, maybe that company is just too big?
Companies like Google are a joke. All the Cap'n Crunch you can eat, but do your job and write some code and get it into production? Can't have that!
Might want to look into Github to see all of the many open source projects that are doing code reviews for every PR.
Edit: oh God, I looked at his linked personal site and this isn't a parody account. I really hope this guy is drinking or something, he claims to have worked in VR/AR. Claiming that none of his coworkers in 20 years have been able to understand linear algebra, while working in that field?
If you're not constantly working with linear algebra, you're going to get rusty fast. Mind you, he seems like he writes a matrix multiplication with goto based loops every time, so he can make sure that he keeps knowing linear algebra, and to prevent the business he's working at from getting anything done because he doesn't like their ethics
Sub par developers parrot industry recommendations such as code reviews or microservices, and Above Average anti-social dude asks why and gets a dumb answer, and out-engineers all the idiots trying to mimic industry best practices.
Now Above Average engineer’s ego expands even more. Not only is he smarter than everyone else, all these best practices are dumb too.
Look at all these people needing code reviews or unit tests, they still can’t ship. Those people doing it at Meta and Amazon must be dumb too.” They think.
The thing is, their arrogance and/or disdain for (whatever) endures they only get hired at companies where this cycle repeats.
It is not a “brag” to say none of the developers you’ve ever worked with don’t understand linear algebra, it means you only work with morons. Being the king of morons isn’t a thing to be proud of…
I mean, how have we ended up in such a situation as today, where were have--in our pockets--a computer that would have been considered a supercomputer when I was born, and yet all it does well is make sure advertisers can reach me?
You want to defend the practices of major engineering organizations? Get ready to defend their business practices, too.
Yes, I know I'm coming off as a blowhard. But I think if you really start to look at the technology industry, try to figure out its ills, you start to realize that you can't unpack the good from the bad. That ethics are way out the window, because engineering erroneously sees itself as separate from business. "It doesn't matter that Meta makes it's money off of manipulating users into purchasing decisions, I'm just working on a web app framework". Our engineering jobs would exist without the business unit. Whatever we do, no matter how far removed from the business it is, our jobs wouldn't exist if they didn't count to the bottom line.
However, this is an orthogonal issue to not reviewing code. To contrast, if we push code to production _before_ review, then production is much more likely to be full of bugs, and we force people to go looking for them afterwards. I've worked in this kind of environment, and the amount of wasted resources (both compute and engineering time) is staggering. Somebody's pet project ends up taking way more compute than anybody would have deemed acceptable and we have exactly the overhead and waste you are referring to.
Better, lower overhead abstractions require buy-in, and this means it needs to work for other people than the person who wrote them. At some point it needs review and discussion, otherwise it will just be a continual edit war between competing parties.
As others have pointed out: code reviews exist for many complex projects even outside of these big companies. Code reviews existed before these companies.
If I were to be in an environment where there are multiple developers who can understand even the basic mathematics of geometry and linear algebra too do what I do (that's a tall order. It hasn't happened once in 20 years that I've worked in a company that has had even one other developer that knew anything beyond basic algebra), why would they spend their time telling me how to do my job, rather than just doing their job? If I got something wrong in my code, A) how did the process guarantee that it will be caught? B) why wouldn't whoever found the problem just fix it?
It's kind how my children argue over basic things like bedtime. They insist it's only "fair" if one of them turns off the light and the other closes the door. And if the light is already off when they enter the room, then the door closer is going to get pissy and turn the light on to make his brother get up out of bed and turn it off.
It's a meaningless exercise developed to give the illusion of control.
Writing code that other people understand is an independent skill from solving the particular problem at hand. If your colleagues don't understand your code, either you need different colleagues, or you can't write understandable code.
It's also the main skill of a developer. Code is for people.
> It's also the main skill of a developer. Code is for people.
If there are any people reading this starting out in their career, i can't stress how important this is. Being able to write beautiful code and being able to explain it to your peers and see them take off with it and do amazing things is the single most important skill as a software engineer IMO. I would put it above any algorithm riddle, esoteric language feature, tool expertise, or anything else.
Why code reviewer wouldn't fix errors himself? Well, that's an interesting question for sure. One reason, I guess, is that it current way encourages people to avoid doing mistakes over and over again. If code reviewer would have to fix error himself, that would not encourage person writing the code to avoid issues in the future and that would discourage person doing code review to find any issues. But, I guess, in a very trusted environment that definitely could work.
well.. fair point. Code review guarantees nothing, if there is an issue found there's going to be delay to fix it as it rolls back through the process. I hate "process" as much as anyone else but I learned during COVID its importance. I implemented a vaccine system for a state government with a team starting at 3 and growing to over 100 in about 8 weeks. It was the hardest thing i ever did and "process" saved my ass and kept CNN off my front lawn a few times. It also was a real thorn in my side when i needed to get things done. Process vs getting-shit-done is a balance and it's rarely perfect.
Oh boy.