'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm
Glad these guys seem to finally be noticing.<p>I was a software engineering manager at a lean, high-margin, profitable start-up based in the NYC area starting in the late 2000s. We were acquired in 2014 by a very typical (for the time) SV-based competitor that had raised hundreds of millions in an IPO a few years earlier. Our acquirers had yet to see a single quarter of profit, of course.<p>I and my team had so many good laughs at the attitudes of our CA counterparts. One especially strong memory is when, a week after a particularly dismal quarterly earnings report, a junior engineer based in the HQ of our new corporate overlords sent out a team-wide email complaining about the corporate decision to no longer stock the refrigerators with free fresh blueberries. They bemoaned the lack of respect for the &quot;talent,&quot; and tossed in gratis the ubiquitous pseudo-threat &quot;if you don&#x27;t treat us right, we can always go down the road to an employer who will.&quot;<p>On visits to HQ in Redwood City, I marveled at the paradisaical campus-like setting (several buildings around a &quot;quad,&quot; with parks, a tennis court, swimming pool, gyms, etc. etc.) and noted the amount of time the local staff spent taking advantage of these amenities. I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn&#x27;t work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money.<p>Since that was Silicon Valley during one of the many gold rushes, I thought that I must have been &quot;missing something.&quot; What seemed like common sense to me was clearly heresy to the golden people there. The explanation I arrived at was that such perqs were the necessary counterpart to an expectation that your employees have no life other than work.<p>I came to realize I wasn&#x27;t missing anything, they were. That company did end up burning through their cash stockpile, and had to sell a few years later for less than 1&#x2F;4 of what they paid to acquire us.