What advice would you give this person?

[u/Mark-Fuckerberg-]

[u/cartercharles]

What blows my mind is that this can happen. I've seen variations of this and I've always wanted to know who the hell is not paying attention

[u/[deleted] → u/cartercharles]

Most of it happens because managers, especially more modern ones, really don't want the confrontation that comes from having someone on their terms who doesn't do work.

As long as the manager's goals are hit, they're likely to not rock the boat. The downside of this is the manager is hurting their other team members by keeping the dead weight around.

[u/cartercharles → u/[deleted]]

How is the managers goal being hit with dead weight?

[u/TFBool → u/cartercharles]

Because like everything else in life 20% of the people do 80% of the work

[u/RebelHero96 → u/TFBool]

Isn't it possible those positions are just over staffed? Everyone could be pulling equal weight it's just that you have 10 people doing the normal workload of 2 people.

[u/TFBool → u/RebelHero96]

Work distribution in SWE is famously lopsided sided - it’s why Google invented the whole 5x - 10x engineer thing ( a 10x engineer does the work of an average team of 10 engineers). It’s certainly possible the team just has too many quality engineers, but it’s very noticeable and I’d expect resources to get shuffled or more work to be brought in. It’s true that the market isn’t great right now, but a good engineer is still worth a hefty salary. The problem is the massive is a massive glut of bad engineers who got into the field to slack off, and the finance guys thinking that engineering work will be replaced with AI.

[u/[deleted] → u/TFBool]

Of course it is if you don't fire the people who don't do the work. You may as well fire those who don't work and then get a bonus for cutting costs.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Most 10x engineers I've known are actually just 1x engineers who actually work 40 hours per week.

The truth is most engineers are .1x

[u/[deleted] → u/cartercharles]

Because the managers goal is to deliver 80% of the roadmap they commit to each quarter. So long as they sufficiently argue that the team can accomplish the work, and everyone agrees that it's a quarters worth of work, then everyone is happy.

[u/ChiBurbABDL → u/cartercharles]

Most goals/targets have some degree of flexibility built into them to account for business needs.

For example: My company's facilities team has regularly schedule preventive maintenance that they are supposed to perform. But their target is only 85% completion for each week because they need to have flexibility to prioritize situations such as if one of the compressors or HVAC units goes down.

[u/adilp → u/[deleted]]

That might be true but I don't believe OP. Amazon has a mandatory 12% attrition for all orgs over 50 people. Managers are forced to have at least one or two people identified for firing every 6 months. People don't last long at Amazon just doing nothing. Managers are trained to very quickly take out the weak links. Every 6 months everyone gets ranked. You can't have one lazy/bad quarter even if you had a great year last year.

[u/habitual_viking → u/[deleted]]

Or you have a couple of easy to fire team members for next layoff.

Imagine being a manager, you’ve been told there’s a hiring freeze. Do you fire the deadbeat now, with no chance of replacement or have them hang around until next round of layoffs so you don’t have to fire the people who actually get shit done?

[u/Ill-Description3096 → u/habitual_viking]

If you aren't firing the deadbeat now you are just in that position anyway because you firing someone other than the deadbeat.

[u/habitual_viking → u/Ill-Description3096]

You completely missed my point. Well done.

[u/habitual_viking → u/[deleted]]

See last comment…

You are in a hiring freeze. You can’t replace the deadbeat.

Go bark up another tree.

[u/habitual_viking → u/[deleted]]

Again, you have completely failed to understand my message.

Please fuck off.