That's just not true though. If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant at your job, and demanding you work more hours is idiotic.
Put simply, there is no function that converts "salary / hours" into any useful measure of a person's output.
Where are these companies/teams who have nothing to do, or so little to do they have time for side projects??
Sure, but Google and other big tech have a completely different problem. Their one product makes so much money, that there is not a natural forcing function for other ventures to succeed or fail. This lets them take moonshots, but also makes it easy to slip into making bad investment decisions. For example, green-lighting a team to build another chat app.
This is what appalled me about Pichai’s productivity comment. Google may not have high productivity, but that’s not its problem. The company has just drifted since Schmidt stopped running it, reminiscent of Microsoft in the second half (and before?) of the Ballmer period. The ladder-climbing PMs are running the show and there is no overall strategy.
They just don't seem to be able to make products that anyone wants. And the products they made before which people did want just drift in a generally worse direction as they fiddle with them randomly over time.
One of the things he said that stuck out to me was basically "I am baffled how these really large teams you have can work I can't imagine software development working well beyond a handful of engineers before the telephone game problem kicks in" [paraphrased].
Me too, Eric, me too.
I met Eric later and we chatted about my project and how Google should be more aggressive at getting into Cloud. He and I thought on pretty much the same wavelength and I realized- he was a far better leader of Google than either Page or Pichai.
When he came to Waterloo to visit it was because he happened to be in Toronto pitching the Sidewalk Labs "spy^H^H^Hsmart" city thing. Remember that? Look it up. Fiasco IMHO. To me, being deeply involved in that debacle is indicative of a kind of business and intellectual arrogance that seems out of touch with reality.
He used to bring Henry Kissinger in for "fireside chats" at Google. He seemed/seems very fascinating by this kind of ... technocratic realpolitik. Google playing around in that area is a really not good look and did not in general get good reaction from the staff and looks really dubious in the current era.
There's enough ungrounded conspiracy theories about Google, they don't need, y'know, actual conspiracies.
But as a manager he definitely seemed to have a better sense of how the day to day operation of a large engineering firm can work.
I'll be the first to agree that FAANG and friends have ridiculous overhead and way more engineers than I think is necessary but these companies are making money hand over fist. If we are looking for fat to cut I'd start with management/execs in most cases.
The other is just that it's not a realistic way to look at a workforce, especially in software, hours and effort don't equate to an "output" neatly. Most software companies are in the business of making value producing automations, not producing the raw value themselves. You can have one production engineer in a factory completely eliminate someone's job with a nifty insight that took him an hour to spot, now that person isn't pulling their weight (because their job doesn't exist anymore) but the business is more profitable, for one example.
This is irrational. You're only able to generate $50m in revenue because a giant multi-billion dollar apparatus exists and is maintained around you and that is not free. In almost all circumstances you were not the sole driver of that revenue.
I'm not saying good engineers can't bring disproportionate value and should work/be compensated commensurately. I'm saying stop gaming the numbers like a Goldman Sachs accountant.
That's not the argument for layoffs. The argument is that that role shouldn't exist at all and should be swallowed up by another FTE instead.
Or you're working at a useless user hostile company that's coasting on tools and ideas from a decade ago while failing hard at everything it does today.