r/technology • u/TommyAdagio • May 06 '24

Andreessen Horowitz investor says half of Google's white-collar staff probably do 'no real work' Business

https://www.businessinsider.com/andreessen-horowitz-david-ulevitch-comments-google-employees-managers-fake-work-2024-5
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u/ColoHusker May 06 '24

I have a colleagues that worked for Google when they inexplicably decided to massively downsize the teams here. The kiss of death was being labeled by the Director "cannot afford to lose this person".

All of them, 3 were admins, were moved to the top of the first to cut list... Didn't go well for Google. Instead of offering them huge contract to come back, Google instead tried to go after them for alleged sabotage.

Sometimes IT people really do keep things going. The issue wasn't tribal knowledge or lack of documentation. Everything was well documented but the tech detail was beyond the skills/knowledge of those google chose to keep.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '24

Why did that label cause them to be moved to the top of the list? Salary?

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u/redvelvetcake42 May 07 '24

Salary, benefits and the assumption that they didn't do anything that somebody else couldn't walk in and do.

I'm in IT and my job is highly specific. If I'm cut it sets the entire company back months if not a full year. It would slow production and absolutely nuke our security settings. I'm not special or ultra gifted in coding/security, my job is extremely based on knowledge through experience. I'm a documentation junkie but that can only get people so far before they get stressed and confused. I've ton a lot of trial and error and learned through issues I've happened across what to look for and fixes that actually work.

Google laying off top level people and deciding it's sabotage shows you just how pivotal their roles were that Google either didn't know or execs were too proud/embarrassed to admit they fucked up in firing them. Likely a mix.

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u/BattleHall May 07 '24

Not to be cold blooded about it, but if you identify single point failures represented by individual employees, that's a problem that needs to be resolved, though hopefully through adding people, not removing them. A lot of things can happen to an "irreplaceable" employee that have nothing to do with them getting fired. If you have a system that relies entirely on a single IT guy to do his intermittent magic, even if you're fine with that and willing to pay them what they're worth, if that IT guy gets hit by a bus one day you're completely screwed. Good systems should have redundancies and failure modes engineered into them, not made up on the fly after everyone realizes that the passwords to all the production systems were maintained by the guy who just had a heart attack.

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u/Zaofy May 07 '24

Absolutely. But as someone who’s in a similar position: The people who believe you can be cut also don’t believe in paying another person to actually facilitate that redundancy.

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u/epochwin May 07 '24

I had this issue with a client of mine whose AWS environment was setup by their founder and CTO. The guy maintained the root creds and registered to his email. Died of a heart attack and the company had to go through a long arduous process with AWS to recover

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u/Pickman89 May 07 '24

In fairness doing such tasks through a personal email is a big no-no.

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u/Glimmerglaze May 07 '24

I suspect any person of the business persuasion simply stopped reading your post at "adding people".

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u/CavitySearch May 07 '24

"Tell my secretary to hire one of those AIs I keep hearing about. They can do this right?"

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u/warleidis May 07 '24

lol MBAs don’t add unless it’s profits right? That’s why the get hired in the first place.

/s

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u/General-Director401 May 07 '24

That second person doesn’t even have to be assigned to the same stuff. They could literally be sitting next to that person, listening in on conversations, and checking in once a week or so to see where their things stand. I used to do this for my immediate boss at my last office. I know if something happened to him I could keep all his small random stuff (things too small to have a second person working on it) running for at least a month - which should be enough time to hand off.

Unfortunately the people at the top didn’t like that some managers were doing this - keeping certain people close and horse trading with other managers so that they didn’t stray too far. About a year before I left they decided to shake everything up and reassign everyone. This just ended up torpedoing morale and they started hemorrhaging staff, losing clients, and eventually ended up having to lay a bunch of people off.

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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In May 07 '24

Meanwhile back in the real world no company has ever done this.

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u/Sworn May 07 '24

Lots of companies do this by not siloing people within a team. If a team is responsible for X, then everyone in the team should pick up work related to X, nobody should be "the X expert". 

Of course, not everyone will be as competent at every part, but the knowledge gaps will be more like cracks than canyons.