I think there's a subtle point here about the cost of layoffs being hard to quantify but hugely underestimated by large companies.

A culture where employees feel that their dedication to the company mission is reciprocated must surely provide value?

I think what you are talking about was what large companies that were startups built over the last 5-10 years and felt betrayed by the anti company sentiment even though they had all a ton of fantastical things for employees and mostly unchecked employee growth. Now its swinging the other way.

Also don't confuse my statement reading the market with what i believe.

> absolute bare minimum

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.)

> (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.)

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!

Ah I felt like I just stepped back in time. Dang that was vivid!

Articulate, accurate, and simultaneously funny and sad.

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".

> (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.

+1 I don't understand why people work hard for such corporations. Doing the bare minimum, and quiet quitting should be the norm. I think if the execs can pay themselves $200M for taking the responsibility and being so horribly wrong about the direction they took the company in, then why shouldn't the rank and file employees do the bare fucking minimum that they are paid to do. Treat intellectual work the same as bagging groceries, do it from 9 to 5, only when sitting at the desk, and only for bugs that have been assigned. If the bug don't say "add an extra debug log" then don't add an extra debug log.

<Rant Over>

> Doing the bare minimum, and quiet quitting should be the norm

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.

I think it's a bigger slight against yourself to "not try" in your life and your work. You won't learn as much and feel less accomplished. Just find somewhere where you'll feel good about it.

You should definitely try hard in your life and your work. Google is not your life, however, and you don't own your work for them. They only deserve the dedication they demonstrate towards others, which is none.

Still, kinda sad to be spend such a big portion of your time on earth doing something nobody gives a shit about, not even you.

Me, I’d sooner take a job where I’m contributing positively to society, even if I could make a bit more in adtech.

Don't think about the time you waste. Think about the time you actually can use.

Every surplus ounce of effort you put towards work is an ounce of effort you deprive your spouse, your children, and yourself.

Why would you do that to your family, all to help some shareholders who don’t give a rat’s ass about you?

Without work, you might find yourself deprived of a spouse and children, so you probably better try and run the rat race at least a bit faster than the slowest rat. Take it from a slow rat indeed.

Time, maybe, but not effort.

You're no good to your family as a zombie drained of all energy by work.

If anything, soul-crushing boredom is likely to achieve that more thoroughly than being engaged with your work.

YMMV but no, that's not how energy works for me. If I'm bored, I can take a nap. Literally just sit there in front of the computer with my eyes closed and fall asleep.

It might be surprising to many but there is a life outside of the office...

Yes but most people work at least eight hours a day each weekday (Monday through Friday) and it’s incredibly painful for those that don’t want to waste 40 hours a week of their life to have to deal with people that do the absolute bare minimum to get by at work.

If people don’t like the job they’re doing; they should quit and find something else to do.

> to have to deal with people that do the absolute bare minimum to get by at work.

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

>We designed a system that's actively hostile to life and well being to profit the top 0.1%

And your proposed solution is to personally be actively hostile to the well being of those around you for your own benefit?

this is exactly what companies going through mass layoffs while distributing record dividends are doing.

And as they say, two wrongs always makes right.

If you want to be abused feel free to go ahead no one will stop you. I hope you're confident with your choices because death bed regrets don't sound like fun, especially when it comes to grinding for big brother

Behaving like a sheep won't change their behavior tho. What's the point of leaving only them the option to abuse?

One party is a multinational megacorp with billions of dollars and the other party is a worker. Whether the worker does a "wrong" or a "right" or is even exceptional at doing "right"s, their behavior will never invite more favor from the megacorp, as evidenced by the many layoffs at many megacorps over the last 4 years.

What is funny is that in my insides I'm 100% sure the type of people that spout that crap about "not my problem" and fuck their co-workers are the ones that would act the most dictator-like and dystopian-capitalists if given the chance. They just reveal their true way of thinking- the fact they chose "the worker" cause they have no power doesn't mean they wouldn't flip if they had power.

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.

I never said it was your problem. That was the whole point of my post. It’s a problem for people that don’t want to waste eight hours a day, that want those hours to be meaningful and work with other motivated people.

And that is 8 hours a day. 12 hours long shifts are extremely common around here, with only 1 weekend free in a month. Sure, office jobs are mostly 8 hours long, but the rest are 12 hours, and there is a LOT of those kind of jobs. Overtime hours are typically not paid either.

Why would you not want to do meaningful things instead of work for a huge corporation, even if you think you're "sticking it" to them? Why not give it your full effort and work with good people you respect?

Doing the bare minimum at work isn’t “not trying” in your life. It’s not even “not trying” at work. It’s just trying the agreed upon amount.

Thought experiment: tell the interviewer you “plan to do the bare minimum at work”.

If that harms your chance to be hired, that’s evidence that the status quo agreement isn’t that.

I tell the interviewer that "I will go above and beyond to fulfill my duties". For me "Above and beyond" means that I will try to show up for work and will at least pretend to be interested.

“Oh yes, we value work-life balance. We’re like a family here!”

Both parties lie in an interview. It’s a dance.

I often hear and also tell people “take vacation when you want, we will work around it. Don’t work on vacation.” That’s the bare minimum, no gold star for that. But also “working the weekends should be the exception, not the norm.”

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?

As if companies were straight with you lol, they're experiencing their own poison

A job interview isn’t an exchange of true statements. It’s a game with each player having different goals. Whichever side you’re on, your goal is to win.

And as an interviewer, winning means not hiring the sort of person who's going to do the absolute bare minimum, because then you'd have to suffer through working with them.

Hiring someone who works competently and efficiently for eight hours a day could be better for the company than hiring someone who works twice as long but is not as competent or focused.

Of course!

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.

Yes and your goal also isn’t to hire a person who’s so ambitious and such a go-getter that they’ll hate your dysfunctional organization and leave super fast.

> do the absolute bare minimum to get paid and promoted

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.

From what I understand though, it’s often possible to just “look” busy without actually being productive. Seems like cranking out design docs and scheduling meetings to make yourself and your work appear important can push one up the ladder a lot faster than making improvements to the codebase will. Optics matter most in organizations the size of Google.

My experience at a FAANG was that it's like any other job. You are on a team and you have a supervisor. You are expected to be productive. The stories of people finding themselves floating freely at a huge company without being expected to deliver business value are mostly apocryphal.

I don't think we are talking about people floating freely without management. Everyone is on a team and has a supervisor, but different people have wildly different skill at politics and "appearing productive." We all know at least one person who was hired at a lower or similar level, yet who basically does nothing productive. They make up for it with bullshit: lots of managing upward, credit taking, writing good sounding but ultimately contentless docs, they're well dressed and groomed, charming, high charisma, ivy league mannerisms. They always end up with a sharp upward career trajectory, parachuting into Director, VP, SVP and so on roles.