There's a few types of "non workers" I've encountered, that for all extents and purposes are worthless .... until they very much aren't.
1. "former" engineers and non-specialists - they tend to sit in meetings, try to sound important, pontificate about "better ways" but never seem to do real work. Then when SHTF they seem to have all the knowledge to make the problem go away super fast. Maybe SHTF never happens to you.
2. Middle managers and HR abstraction layers - again, more meetings, demanding reports, passing down all this make-work, etc etc. Then when an audit, leadership change, layoff, or program collapse happens, they magically have all the context in mind to pivot the team into a new area so they aren't butchered.
3. Project management / systems engineers. My god do they cause headaches with their overly-complicated, under-knowledgeable "designs" and cross-functional requirements. And they'll sit in standups / scrums without any contributions and just nod along half the time. Or worse, they'll pass along 3rd party statements of what the system should do from "product" that make no sense, get feedback, dissapear, and repeat. Then you realize that your execs, investors, and customers are seeing a totally different view of the system, and thank god you don't have to try to talk to those troublemakers.
Over the last 10 years I've realized a lot of the bullshit jobs that you can do without - you probably could, until you can't. "Cut the fat" is a great corporate euphemism, but the biological analogy fails if there's a corporate version of "famine".
Let's be honest, if we're judging people by tangible improvements, process cranking, or institutional knowledge, the most valuable people are the admins, not even the engineers. Half the time an engineer is sitting around thinking or drinking all the coffee.
They're very much like firefighters. Firefighters spend the vast majority of their working hours either literally doing nothing or else doing somewhat pointless make work, like washing the fire truck.
If your firefighters are spending more than ~10% of their time doing their actual job, then the odds of them needing to be in two places at once reaches unacceptable levels.
Old fashioned secretaries are similar, if less extreme. An executive secretary's main job is not to do secretarial work, but to be available at a moment's notice. If they're busy, they're not generally available.
This has largely been my experience. Obviously, there are people in these roles that can be "dead weight" just like any other job, but overall the net contribution is beneficial.
I feel like the tech industry has spend the last year or so over-correcting and is now burning the furniture to heat the cabin. Slashing headcount is fine if you're also willing to scale back the things that headcount was expected to build/maintain. Now you have teams that are stretched thin just keeping the lights on. It's not an environment that's going to be conducive to innovation.
The only positive I see in all this is that many of these big companies are now much more vulnerable to competition. Unfortunately I feel like the appetite to take on the big guys just isn't there right now - it's definitely a muscle that's atrophied in the startup space over the last decade.
There are any number of organisations and organisational functions which are essentially risk management. Some of those risks are upside (new products / markets), some are downside (loss, fraud, moat-building, etc.).
You'd expect that a VC of all people would appreciate the fact that in high-tech spaces, many new ventures are required to find one unicorn, with absolute failure rates of about 90%,[1] and Angellist giving 1:40 odds (2.5%) likelihood of seed-stage startups reaching US$1b valuation ("unicorn").[2]
Google has hit paydirt once with advertising, and spent most of its subsequent life either reinforcing that status (with varying levels of legality) or seeking out alternative hits, with ... stunningly little success. But then, nobody else has had any real success there either, save Facebook.
There are also the roles within organisations which are principally risk mitigation. I had the insight a few years back that ops is essentially a risk-management role.[3] In one of my earlier mentions of this on HN someone responded that that is in fact how Google treats its SRE role, and is a point emphasised in its fairly well-known book on the topic.
Another point that's become glaringly clear over the past few years is that efficiency and resilience are contrasting points on the optimisation space. I'm not sure if that's one-dimensional or multi (think "fast, cheap, good"), but it does have multiple optima depending on the specified criteria.
And ... in some spaces, notably pharmaceuticals (very large search space, very high search costs, long-term exploration), a business model which has emerged is to spin out new-molecule / treatment development indepenently of the majors (Pfizer, J&J, Roche, Novartis, Merck, AstrZeneca, GSK, etc.), either as controlled subsidiaries or independent ventures, and then aquire the successes. Contrast other R&D-heavy models such as 3M, Edison Mfg. Co., DuPont, etc. There's also the hit-factory / tentpole model of film, music,[4] and print (a small number of hits supports a much larger mid-list). I'd argue that much of the start-up and established-firm tech space has come to resemble these models, for much the same underlying dynamic logic.
I agree that these archetypes exist generally speaking. And any team will inevitably have a certain degree of waste. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not very important for director level and above management to continually be looking for ways to restructure the system so that skilled and motivated employees can do their magic without BS. When I look back on my career, there were definitely some teams that were much better at this than others and it seemed to be correlated with how much original critical thinking managers were doing, as opposed to just executing industry playbooks by rote. It’s easier to do this on small teams. Harder to do this at scale. But that’s the game to be played even if it’s difficult.
This attitude is why private equity is destroying US companies. The hubris and ignorance of investors routinely gets translated into a cull of workers whose jobs they don't understand, leaving behind "lean" organizations that retain only whatever bits are currently most profitable but are less functional, resilient, sustainable, and humane.
There was a real industry-wide hiring glut leading up to this. Once the market changed, a lot of companies had more people than they knew what to do with.
Yeah, but the glut was used for something. And that something was management mandated projects. All successful Google projects were bottom-up ideas or acquisitions, with management usually fighting it as much as they can, because that's what management does.
Management isn't involved in actual functioning of the company, just in how it's organized. And of course, their main skill always turns out to be "organizing" it to their own advantage. Actual good ideas WILL lead to reorganizing work, and rearranging the management deck chairs. So management always turns out to be radically against those.
The engineers at the bottom are not just a necessity, they're THE source of revenue.
But guess what happens when you "trim the fat". Management is really good at keeping themselves in a job, and don't care about sacrificing the bottom. Meaning the worst possible outcome, according to these investors, and I'm 100% sure this happened at Google: the proportion of managers goes up when the layoffs happen. MORE organizing, less work.
> Management is really good at keeping themselves in a job, and don't care about sacrificing the bottom.
Engineers are also good at explaining why their system or feature needs to be three times more complex than it really needs to be. Or why last year's tool or framework needs to be replaced with a new one. As an engineer I've seen this bullshit my whole career.
With no incoming work, we SWEs will make ourselves "100% utilized" just rearranging things. We might be sincerely trying to clean up the software, but still, it'll never end until you give us a real task.
And the alternative is to have managers who do nothing but rearrange the chairs in the company. Which doesn't even achieve good uptime or code cleanup, plus, in the case that your company does find something to do, those engineers CAN do it. The managers can't.
Investors routinely make big mistakes, but they also routinely get wiped out and replaced by someone with a more long-term vision.
Think how much money all the day-traders put together make (probably less than zero) versus someone like Warren Buffett (a lot more than zero!), or the many successful owner-operated or founder-owned companies out there.
I would agree, except for the fact that I read Graeber's Bullshit Jobs and was quite convinced by his research showing that anything between 15-50% of employees across many surveys believe that their role is useless.
You can believe your role is useless and be wrong. It may be that the processes were grown in a time when the needs were different, and hopefully those needs were for a worse version of today - a kind of bad situation that might just come back around again.
A system in which every resource is 100% utilized has no slack or adaptability.
> "I don't think it's crazy to believe that half the white-collar staff at Google probably does no real work," he said. "The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade, and all that money could have been returned to shareholders who have retirement accounts."
So, he doesn't really understand Google's dysfunction and is just guessing at the causes?
Yeah for all the possible criticism of Google he's seriously arguing it's that there's too much speculative R&D? Generally companies become irrelevant by trying to hold onto their cash cow and not trying to reinvent / find new revenue streams.
I can think of ways I would have approached some specific instances differently (e.g Waymo), but the existence of speculative projects isn't evidence of waste. The specific callout of retirement accounts is strange too. I'm sure many institutional investors are backed by 401ks but is that actually representative? As a wealthy investor I'm guessing he's thinking more about himself and his dividend than other's retirement accounts.
Ya, the retirement account thing sounds to me like a lame attempt to justify his logic “for the people” or something, when his whole premise is that Google could have made a few rich people richer. I’ve honestly never hated a VC more
I know this is an against the grain (for HN at least) take, but I don't disagree.
If you're not working on, or supporting, the company's product, you MAY have a BS job.
Good example: Twitter, which functioned well after layoffs of 80% or so (the owner's persona has damaged the revenue and reputation extensively, but the product itself has been fine). They're maybe the boldest, but hardly the only company in the past couple of years to do mass layoffs and not collapse at the core.
With Google of course, many projects are at some point considered core, to be dismissed later, so the line between "product" and "BS" is blurry and changing.
Twitter is not great example because revenue collapsed while rest of the industry revenue is up 20% and Meta revenue is up 35%. Besides his personal antics, he fired a lot of sales, safety/trust and support people. He also did it in very public way which worried brands a lot. It’s unclear what contributed the most but final result is not great.
Very few people work on weekend which tells you you need way less people to keep lights on - so keeping lights on with 20% of eng is not surprising.
The Twitter example is the exact nearsighted reason a lot of comments like the one we're all talking about come up.
A lot of smart people spent years trying to make a resilient system and then everyone claims they aren't needed when it doesn't immediately crumble.
There are also many examples of huge gaps in content moderation, customer reps, and other "useless" functions that has lead to it's decay other than just it's unhinged CEO.
Twitter swallowed a poison pill, and we're just seeing some of the onset of sickness.
Yeah sure, as I said it’s basically anecdotal data nothing I would say perfectly proves any particular point. Still it’s more evidence than the original comment provided to support their statement
Things going well: all these engineers are just wasting salary dollars and not contributing anything, layoffs for everyone! Things going badly: all these engineers are incompetent and just wasting salary dollars, layoffs for everyone! Now where's my 7 figure consulting fee...
Sure feel free to swap in whatever job role you like, my main point is that I’d rather hear an analysis from someone embedded in the problem space than from someone whose ‘job’ is to squeeze profit off other people’s work. I’m sure there are a few decent and prudent managers of giant capital stacks, but honestly at this guy’s level of removal from the realities of building literally anything I am extremely skeptical of any advice he has to offer outside of recommending me an expensive restaurant or a nice resort somewhere.
> I’d rather hear an analysis from someone embedded in the problem space than from someone whose ‘job’ is to squeeze profit off other people’s work
Everyone believes someone else is squeezing off their work. In tech, I've heard it from founders and sales about engineers; engineers about everyone else, including every other engineer; the person who keeps the shitshow of a culture hanging by a thread; the lawyers who keeps the company from being fined into oblivion; et cetera.
If there is a summary to draw from it, it's that the uselessness is probably concentrated in the person complaining and doing nothing about it (whether due to impulse or ability).
VC’s, hedge funds, etc. all run lean—none have 10k+ employees or anything close. Employees are under a much brighter spotlight by the owners all the time. Groups might lose focus for an interval but once they their score is down it’s goodbye & the score is P&L calculated in very short intervals.
> VC’s, hedge funds, etc. all run lean—none have 10k+ employees or anything close
This describes none of the multi-fund behemoths, e.g. Andreessen, Sequoia, et cetera. They have an entire caste of VC associates whose productivity is measured by the number of meetings they take; they're literally professional time wasters.
Not 10k+, but a lot of leading hedge funds, especially tech focused ones, have 2-3k employees with a similar to lower revenue/employee to big tech. Doesn't seem to me that they run much leaner.
Communication costs scale super-linearly with organization size, as does the cost of mistakes. I think a twitter warrior saying some portion of a massive company's engineers 'Do No Real Work' is just a lazy way to get headlines. Throwing shade at the issue isn't novel, but solving it is really, really hard.
Title doesn't reflect the article's title (emphasis mine): "Andreessen Horowitz investor says half of Google's white-collar staff probably do 'no real work'"
Without "probably", it sounds like he has insider information and can say it as a fact. With "probably", it shows that this is an educated, yet falsifiable opinion.
How do we seperate that from for example the pareto principal where it may be the case that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people or a night security guard who works maybe 5% of the time and the rest is spent watching TV yet still an invaluable part of the company in terms of insurance box checking and PCI compliance etc.
Seems like a common fallacy to just jump in like Elon Musk and start trimming out the perceived false jobs and end up with a company that is weaker than it was originally. I've no doubt the VC is has a case but it's a lot hairer than a simple sentence alludes to. I feel like I end up back where I started -- in that I simply don't know or lack the info to make that call -- many jobs could simply be redundant but redundancy isn't always a bad thing -- espeically in massive tech companies with staff leaving for greener pastures on a whim.
"Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment" Hah, who exactly did they contact at Google to ask if half their staff are doing nothing useful?
If you mean the moonshots, Google killed most of them and hasn't announced new ones. I do think Google was mistaken that it could detach parts of itself to act like startups. Too much red tape and not enough grit.
What bothers me more is how they fumbled repeatedly on conventional projects like chat apps.
I think there’s a distinction to be made between people who are working on stuff that doesn’t end up providing any benefit to the company to the company and people who are straight up not burning any calories.
When I worked in big tech, I spent a lot of time working on stuff that didn’t ship, or shipped but never got traction, which ended up providing no benefit to the company. This is IMO largely the responsibility of management, although there’s certainly an idea that line workers have a responsibility to find impactful projects/teams to work on.
If engineers are doing fake work, it's because managers are doing fake managing.
Engineers generally like to work on meaningful projects. Sometimes we do get sidetracked on pet projects like building a better database design or whatnot, but the time spent on things like that pales in comparison to the scale of pet projects imposed from above.
Or projects, or entire product divisions, that were just badly researched, badly planned, and never should have been signed off in the first place.
"Rich asshole makes demeaning comments about situations they don't know" More at 11.
Seriously though, how out-of-touch do you have to be to think that entire organizations full of smart people are so incompetent as to have 100% bloat?
Could you lay off 50% of Google today and still have a functional, competitive product tomorrow? Yes.
Would you still have a functional, competitive product in 2 years? No.
Engineers are building and maintaining the product, SREs are keeping the jobs, servers and infrastructure humming, sales is bringing in new clients and keep existing clients happy, marketing is... OK maybe Google does need a marketing overhaul...
Deep cuts will also signal to employees and competitors that blood is in the water. Any remaining loyalty would evaporate and MSFT, AAPL, AMZN, & META would all be eager to scoop up that talent to build competing products to Google Search & Ads and bolster their cloud & AI offerings.
One time I saw a high-paid google engineer stocking a fridge in the hallway with drinks and snacks. A nearby office with accountants in it also saw this, and when I mentioned it they took it upon themselves to calculate exactly how much money it was costing the company for him to do that. It was $250/hr.
> "Another issue with all the 'BS' jobs in large corporations is that it takes profits away from shareholders who are most often the pensioners and retirement accounts of the rest of America," he said. "...they are also taking money away from the rest of the workforce's retirement programs."
That's ... basically every old person and everyone with some savings.
Even if you don't own Google stock (or even any stock) directly, you likely have exposure to it because it's in the S&P 500, which is used as foundational financial product in many contexts.
Yes, I'm mostly making fun of the fact that this extremely wealthy investor is pointing at the elderly (who likely have a higher percentage of their retirement saved in bonds and less-volatile investments) and distracting everyone from the fact that he benefits massively more if Google decides to make shareholders more money.
- that means corporations have a moral duty to do their best
- if an old person entrusted my company with the financial results of their life's work, I'd feel a lot of pressure to make good on the implied promise that I won't just take the money and put my feet up
Agreed but in the case of retired people, that duty hits different. They don't have the ability to go back and earn more money; many are also in cognitive decline.
You can't do w/o most of the first, most of the second is a waste, and maybe a quarter of the last is worthwhile. I've always had the feeling google isn't filled with a lot of the first, as it's just not cool.
in other words, am not surprised by a vc -- let alone an Andreesen adjacent -- uttering thusly on any given bait-thirsty "news" site, bizz-nuss or otherwise?
We have a VC here whining that a business with one of the most exceptional margins in modern capitalism is… not returning enough to shareholders?
And those pesky workers are to blame?
The buck here stops with management. If the people with power in your organisation are powerless to ship features, innovation and value… aren’t they the problem?
Get leadership that works. Hire a board that knows how to innovate.
95% of VC knob-ends do no real work. They spend other people’s money on other people’s businesses and help themselves to profits other people have generated.
Google probably is too big, but don’t blame Jane from Legal or Deepak from Accounts
Whenever you extrapolate the "corporate vision" of these VC pontificators, you see a company all of whose revenue goes to investor share-grabbers, and whose projects are all funded by employees who are paid nothing.
> They spend other people’s money on other people’s businesses and help themselves to profits other people have generated
I mean this is quite common even without VC involved... the only thing is you have to make sure to spend that money on the _right_ other businesses to get things done properly.
Advertising-supported nerds using the media to attack each other. The person making this coment about "BS jobs" is the one who started EasyDNS and OpenDNS and tried to compete with the pre-Chrome "Google toolbar" and later Chrome and eventually the "omnibox" for the privilege of injecting ads into the "user experience", and/or collecting data to support ad services. Google, with its control over being "default search engine", through any means possible (e.g., bribe/payola, etc.), felt threatened by OpenDNS and claimed OpenDNS was "intercepting Google queries" (because users involuntarily "chose" to send them to Google?) This is what lead to "Google Public DNS". It's another case of two companies fighting over who gets to annoy computer users with ads. Two companies that wanted to hijack NXDOMAIN for profit. Verisign had earlier tried it at the registry level.
Thought experiment: What if all "jobs" that aim to annoy computer users with ads, and provide "services" to do that, are BS. What if VC that fund these surveillance companies are BS, too. What does the computer user not funded by advertising and doing real work think of Google staff.
1. "former" engineers and non-specialists - they tend to sit in meetings, try to sound important, pontificate about "better ways" but never seem to do real work. Then when SHTF they seem to have all the knowledge to make the problem go away super fast. Maybe SHTF never happens to you.
2. Middle managers and HR abstraction layers - again, more meetings, demanding reports, passing down all this make-work, etc etc. Then when an audit, leadership change, layoff, or program collapse happens, they magically have all the context in mind to pivot the team into a new area so they aren't butchered.
3. Project management / systems engineers. My god do they cause headaches with their overly-complicated, under-knowledgeable "designs" and cross-functional requirements. And they'll sit in standups / scrums without any contributions and just nod along half the time. Or worse, they'll pass along 3rd party statements of what the system should do from "product" that make no sense, get feedback, dissapear, and repeat. Then you realize that your execs, investors, and customers are seeing a totally different view of the system, and thank god you don't have to try to talk to those troublemakers.
Over the last 10 years I've realized a lot of the bullshit jobs that you can do without - you probably could, until you can't. "Cut the fat" is a great corporate euphemism, but the biological analogy fails if there's a corporate version of "famine".
Let's be honest, if we're judging people by tangible improvements, process cranking, or institutional knowledge, the most valuable people are the admins, not even the engineers. Half the time an engineer is sitting around thinking or drinking all the coffee.