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.
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.
> "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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
"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.
> "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
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadQ: How many people work at $large_org
A: About half of them!
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.
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.
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.
I suspect he doesn't have to work and does so anyways...
Oh no, think of the poor retired shareholders!
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.
- everybody should have the opportunity to retire
- that means they have to save & invest
- 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
Isn’t Google pretty open that it doesn’t expect most of these to succeed?
This statement has “shut down the R&D as it doesn’t make money” vibes.
Maybe Google needs to invest in crystal balls?
What bothers me more is how they fumbled repeatedly on conventional projects like chat apps.
<https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/314049/scale-by-geo...>
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.
A system in which every resource is 100% utilized has no slack or adaptability.
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.
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.
<https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-like-a-...>
/s
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?
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.
Disclosure: Google employee
So, he doesn't really understand Google's dysfunction and is just guessing at the causes?
In my opinion the money is better placed in the pockets of workers not investors.
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.
Also, the supreme irony of a VC saying this.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.