It’s All Bullshit: Performing productivity at Google::The tech industry is supposed to be the cradle of innovation—but it’s become a redoubt of waste and unproductivity.
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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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Interesting. Breaks are very commonly unpaid in my country. So an 8 hour work day means being in the office for 8.5 hours.
It’s not uncommon in the US for labor jobs, and it’s bullshit.
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.
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.
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.
You wanna know who’s to blame?
You’ll never guess…
Steve Jobs. One of founders, Larry or Sergey, was given a piece of advice that they found so ‘incredible’ that they mentioned it during an interview and a book.
‘Don’t be afraid to trim the fat and kill products’. About 6 months after I read about that Google’s products started dying like flies. They’ve kept the same pathological drive to murder products for over a decade since and it’s fucking infuriating.
Tbf the motivation makes sense but don’t publicly announce products just to abruptly drop them. I’ve literally never heard of an apple product that was discontinued. When you make it customer facing you’d best be prepared to put your weight behind it.
I’ve literally never heard of an apple product that was discontinued.
iPods and the Newton come to mind.
Not many examples though eh?
iPods were sunset after a long successful run and basically being supplanted by the iPhone. And they did kill them, they just stopped making me one.
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.
It reads like different people wrote different sections of it
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.
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.
they explain why this innovation doesn’t work.
They explained why they hated innovating that way.
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.
