I see this as more or less a ruse to justify ridding the companies of all the now remote people who moved away to live in Cheap Town during the pandemic. This is a pretext for the typical Corporate House Cleaning/Reduction In Force scenario. Some people do well working remote (Im one of them in fact) but I suspect and from what I've seen the majority of people simply cant handle the responsibility/self management of working remote.
Alternatively, the economic forecasters at these companies see trouble on the horizon economically and know that layoffs to boost stock price will be necessary. In such case, best develop a pretext for these layoffs thats not "We're having financial trouble so we're laying people off". Instead it's "Nope, nothing to see here, THIS IS FINE - we're just cutting dead weight!".
I don't work for either of these companies nor do I know anyone personally who does, but I have to wonder if a sort of entitled, country club culture developed there and this an effort to reign in that behavior. Maybe someone with some inside insight can comment here?
"Rest and vest" is a phrase that gets bandied about often -- including by people who are trying to do it.
I couldn't tell you what fraction of employees, but there are folks hiding in all of the big tech companies that are happy with their comp, aren't trying to advance, and have adopted the "do the minimum to not get fired" approach to their work.
If too many of these get together in one org or on one team, the whole thing gets poisoned and everyone starts barely getting anything done.
My experience at Google (which matched other large companies I've been at) was more that the "smartest" (I.E. earliest) members of a team laid down so many road blocks for later members, in the form of tech-debt and undocumented knowledge, that the output difference between coasting and working yourself to death was pretty small. It's an easy environment to get discouraged in.
My fear is that is what I'm doing right now. I've been writing code alone for a while, it's very possible it will be hard for new hires to understand or update. I know there is tech debt but I don't have time to fix it (because I'm alone, natch).
Oh well. Maybe they can spend their time replacing my work.
My experience at Google was that until I decided the company was kinda directionless and started selectively ignoring leadership to get stuff done. Of course avoiding the "insubordination" line. Turns out they're still happy as long as you give them what they want in the end, or if not, what their boss wants. And I'm happy to see things work.
> that are happy with their comp, aren't trying to advance
Why does this
> and have adopted the "do the minimum to not get fired" approach to their work
necessarily have to go with this?
What's wrong with deciding "I don't need to advance further; I like the work I do, I make enough money; I don't need to be hustling anymore"?
It seems to me the concept of "enough" is hard to grasp for a lot of people, especially those who are deep in any high-paying field (not just SV tech types, but certain kinds of doctors, lawyers, etc).
If there's no place in Silicon Valley for people who know what "comfortable" feels like, then it's definitely a place I'd prefer to stay away from.
There are lots of people who are comfortable where they are and continue to do solid work. I'd say that's probably almost half of folks at the mid-career levels in the big tech companies. This is actually why rest-and-vesters are so damaging. If you get a couple of these people on your team, they tend to bring down the morale of the much larger group who are earning their keep.
It's easy to be happy getting paid your current rate for doing a good solid job. But, it is really hard to stay happy in that situation if the person sitting next to you is getting paid the same, but doing almost-but-not-quite nothing.
In this situation, the previously-happy-worker types tend to either 1) seek a new team where they're not working with a rest-and-vester, or 2) slowly degrade into emulating the rest-and-vester because they feel demotivated and that their work isn't appreciated (since it isn't being appreciated more than the rest-and-vester's non-work)
Good managers identify this situation and put the rest-and-vester on notice to shape up (many of them will if you work with them -- many of them used to be the previously-happy-worker but at some point got poisoned and just need to have the callouses removed. (And a few of them just need the boot)
--
On the other hand, in tech really you are either growing or dying. That doesn't mean that you have to be growing in promotion/job-ladder-shaped ways. But if you're not learning something and growing in some way, you're probably regressing.
> But if you're not learning something and growing in some way, you're probably regressing.
but this has nothing to do with your work - you grow and learn as part of your personal desire or interest. If it happens that your personal interest intersects with your job, then that's a great coincidence.
A rational actor will notice they get either a promotion or less work in the high/low work instances. If you work in between those boundaries, you get nothing extra.
This seems cyclical to me. If you do the bare minimum and get fired, that is a contradiction.
If the bare minimum is getting promoted then that means there is no room to slack.
If you look like you are slacking to your coworkers, then you probably are not doing the bare minimum. The bare minimum would be exactly what it takes to keep your job.
So I believe what you are saying is that there are multiple bare minimums from various perspectives. In those cases, you take the biggest one.
Another example for a gameable aspect of promotion is cutting up your achievements to look more favorable during a promo round e.g., salami slicing. If you hit a promotion, save the extra stuff for the next round.
And if you are at a large organization, you certainly have the data to estimate exactly the bars for promotion.
The key delta is often that the bare minimum to keep your coworkers from being demotivated by you is a bit higher than the bare minimum to keep your manager from noticing your underperformance.
If the work you are doing falls in this middle range, then your slacking will harm those around you but you probably won't get fired (if it takes longer for a manager to get fed up than the mean time between reorgs, you probably can survive indefinitely)
If the game was fixed and everyone had full information, there isn’t a reason this would happen.
But I agree if the promotion/firing is relative or dynamic in some way, then you’d race down to arbitrarily low effort.
The real problem is correlating work with value in an unbiased way. If you had perfect information on the value of each worker, I can’t see how it would be complicated to do a cost/benefit analysis.
But without reading/predicting the future you can’t usually figure out value because an unfinished product has no current value and a finished/legacy product has fixed value. In either case the worker has no marginal value.
Doing work is a low status activity. If too many people in your team or org are trying to get ahead, you will be drowning in project management and recurring cross-team syncs and grand plans but with hardly anyone writing code.
For companies that adjust salary for remote workers, those employees who moved to Cheap Town are now cheaper for the company to pay than those who work in Silicon Valley.
“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said on the call, according to a Reuters report. “And part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.”
"I suspect and from what I've seen the majority of people simply cant handle the responsibility/self management of working remote." While this may be true, if this has to be solved by forcing everyone to move to SF/NY - then couldn't you just save more money by firing their managers?
Exactly. You can’t make this claim without saying that your managers are incompetent all the way up to the C level because it means nobody was measuring performance even though that’s a core job requirement.
It is extremely rare for management, especially higher levels, to have any method of distinguishing smart and hard working people from duffers or from “managing upwards” big talkers. Git logs sort of help much interpretation is so context sensitive that the signal is blurry.
So while measuring performance might seems like a core job function, de facto it is not.
Also people that find this thread interesting should join Blind.
> Also people that find this thread interesting should join Blind.
What is "Blind" ? Is it some sort of think-tank ?
If the manager has done a good job he/she has hired people that are more knowledge and experienced in their specialization fields then the manager.
This is only true for "intellectual" work though, if the employees do physical work, like laying bricks, you can measure performance on how many bricks where laid.
For example, one employee might have spent 3 weeks carefully reading code to find a bug. Not a single code push for a whole month. And might not even have found the bug. But likely found lots of unused code that everyone been too scared to touch. So if you're measuring performance by LOC written, that person could end up on the nagive.
Blind is an app that has people with confirmed company affiliations but anonymous, if you trust them. People speak openly if very greedily about wrk place shenanigans. It seems like an informative if distorting and addictive sort of thing. I check it every few months or if there is something big going on, e.g. layoffs or whatever. There are sections only your company can see and then more shared areas where you can read the woes of a PIP at Amazon or the rest and festers at Google, etc.
Would you say that software engineering and architecture aren’t core job functions because they require skills and experience to do? It’s not effortless but these people are being paid top salaries so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect them to have at least a rough idea of what the people who report to them are doing.
This goes double for the other concerns you mentioned: if you’ve created an incentive system where people commonly BS their way into promotions, that’s a major management failure.
Alternatively, the economic forecasters at these companies see trouble on the horizon economically and know that layoffs to boost stock price will be necessary. In such case, best develop a pretext for these layoffs thats not "We're having financial trouble so we're laying people off". Instead it's "Nope, nothing to see here, THIS IS FINE - we're just cutting dead weight!".
I don't work for either of these companies nor do I know anyone personally who does, but I have to wonder if a sort of entitled, country club culture developed there and this an effort to reign in that behavior. Maybe someone with some inside insight can comment here?