It’s All Bullshit: Performing productivity at Google

Comments

• EmergMemeHologram@startrek.website ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

    Yeah I read this part and immediately felt like this employee is brainwashed.

    For the people who don’t get it: “8 hours of work DOES NOT MEAN 8 hours of labor.” Bathroom breaks. Mental breaks. Getting coffee. Eating lunch. Chit chatting.

    A lot of people gotta stop thinking the “If you got time to lean, you got time to clean” mentality.

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    • EmergMemeHologram@startrek.website ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah that drives me nuts.

      People went from 9-5 to talking about 9-6, because that’s 8 hours of work and then breaks, but breaks were always a part of it. Factory shift workers doing 8 hours had time for a sandwich.

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• Odelay42@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • cashews_best_nut@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Launching or Killing?

    I don’t think launching is an issue. It’s the sheer number of products they kill off.

    It’s becoming comical how many times they’ve killed and relaunched Google Chat.

    They’ve become incredibly unreliable.

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    • Odelay42@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Both.

      They shouldn’t have launched 4 chat apps and killed 3.

      They shouldn’t launch products with no plan to support them.

      They shouldn’t kill products that customers use.

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  • thalience@lemmy.world [bot] ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It reads like different people wrote different sections of it

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  • Ilflish@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s not that people don’t work enough but when companies close in on monopolies there is less pressure to grab market and when companies with high stock prices offer stocks, there is bound to be some relaxation when you find out your stocks have inflated like a large Christmas bonus. There’s not much you can do about it is the thing. Every company does it’s best when competitive and the problems occur during stagnation at the top.

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• chakan2@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    ex-google employee

    Ex-Microsoft as it says at the bottom.

    It’s just how you innovate.

    Did you read the whole article? I feel like they explain why this innovation doesn’t work.

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    • chakan2@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      they explain why this innovation doesn’t work.

      They explained why they hated innovating that way.

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• SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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