[HN Gopher] Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
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Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
Author : samizdis
Score : 228 points
Date : 2022-07-01 03:00 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > some of you might decide that this place isn't for you, and
| that self-selection is OK with me
|
| Of course he's ok with it, no need to pay severance to employees
| that "voluntarily" quit.
| bregma wrote:
| There's a reason why constructive dismissal is illegal in any
| sane jurisdiction.
|
| The catch is you usually have to prove it to a court or
| tribunal. The CEO saying he's doing in in public communications
| is probably pretty solid evidence.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Yes, that is so cheeky... We are going to put pressure so that
| we do not have to pay any severance because they will leave
| "willingly".
|
| Good luck with keeping just the good people with that
| technique.
| aetherson wrote:
| Facebook had more than $7B net income last quarter and has $60B
| cash-on-hand.
|
| While I'm sure that, ceteris paribus, they're more happy if low
| performers quit than have to be laid off, I'm equally sure that
| if they felt like they could go through and cut out low
| performers right now, and the only cost to do so was paying
| severance, they'd be happy to do it. The idea that Facebook or
| Zuckerberg of all people has an unwillingness to pay short-term
| costs for long term benefits is crazy.
|
| There's a difference between being cynical about a corporation
| and being willing to attribute every bad trait in the world
| unconditionally to every corporation without any reflection.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And for management performance, just rank those leaving in
| other categories than "unwanted attrition" and everything is
| good.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Not just severance. Possibly unemployment.
|
| I'm not sure what the law is in California, but one state where
| I was fired, the company doing the firing was required to pay
| half of my unemployment benefits.
|
| Not surprisingly, it fought it. Which is how I found out about
| the law.
|
| Someone from the state unemployment department called me to get
| my side of the story. Then called my former employer to get its
| side of the story. Then told my former employer to write a
| check or lose its business license.
| [deleted]
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Meta clearly have too many employees in comparison to the number
| of users. Even if we calculate that on the fake official user
| count. In my sphere people simply do not use Instagram and
| Facebook anymore besides for chatting. Instagram kinda killed
| itself for me with all the porn spam.
| kjeetgill wrote:
| This is a great example of why anecdotal evidence is close to
| meaningless. I don't know a single person not on one of, if
| not, two or all three of: Facebook, Insta, Whatsapp.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Surely Meta does not have 3 billion unique users. Not even
| half of the people I know in one of the most technical
| advanced countries in the world use any service from Meta. It
| is just sucha ridiculous number. Meta is a fraud and the
| stock will tell truth sooner or later. Sooner it seems...
| Lapsa wrote:
| Left Facebook for quite awhile now. Got punished with post
| restrictions for quoting Futurama's Bender's "kill all humans"
| under friend's status update of how he's gonna watch the show
| after a hard workday. I mean, it utterly failed to deliver the
| very core basic feature it's supposed to - random socializing
| with your friends. My pal still doesn't have a clue I'm a fan of
| Bender.
| posharma wrote:
| Does Meta really think they'll be able to attract talent this
| way?
| danielovichdk wrote:
| The real question here is: Is the economy going down ?
|
| I have heard others saying we are entering a deep recession
| within the next year
| coolspot wrote:
| US debt/GDP is 370%, inflation is 9%, natural resources locked
| in Russia, and Fed can't do QE anymore.
| blevin wrote:
| Nobody knows for sure, and a single summary statistic of a huge
| economy cannot capture the dispersion of lived experiences, but
| yes, there are objective indications suggesting recession is
| possible.
|
| For one example, the Atlanta Federal Reserve runs a real-time
| GDP forecast called GDP Now. The update today is -2.1%
|
| https://twitter.com/atlantafed/status/1542922843511574528
| einpoklum wrote:
| Now if only people could turn up the heat so that Meta/Facebook
| would quit...
| chocolatemildew wrote:
| As a soon to be ex-meta employee, I have two thoughts:
|
| 1. What Mark says is real, no BS, finally telling people how it
| really is. He's focused on the metaverse - if I was a long term
| investor - I'd buy more all the way down - and I think it will go
| down.
|
| 2. I'm jumping ship, no more metamates, just me. Many offers on
| the table set to go, was stressful but enough is enough. I love
| the job, but I like surfing and hanging out with family more. A
| players can and will leave, they will have many offers - market
| for A players is strong. Mark will continue to attract talent -
| and in time - meta will prevail
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I am not sure why I should quit myself and just not ideologically
| start to do nothing to add value to the company while getting
| paid and just wait to be laid off with severance when the time
| comes, like I have no interest of self-sacrificing for facebook
| and at this point I also have no interest in adding value to this
| shithole
| saos wrote:
| > "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the
| company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said.
|
| > "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 decide that this place
| isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me," he said.
|
| He is planning to make cuts with those comments. Clearly.
|
| I assumed Facebook was making profit given its advertising
| powers. Wonder how that's taken a hit over the months
| Ecstatify wrote:
| Bad quarter incoming
| t_mann wrote:
| Well, Coinbase just did 18% layoffs (that's one gone from every
| 5-person team). In theory it's nicer if your CEO just tells you
| basically 'please start looking for jobs now, we don't want to
| have to do layoffs'.
|
| What's so off-putting here is that he's already trying to frame
| those departures as separating from 'the weakest' (which is
| disingenuous, because it's old management wisdom that the first
| to leave in such situations are generally among the best, because
| those have the best outside options).
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Not really. The best leave first when the ship is sinking. Here
| it sounds like they are going to let people go more easily
| based on performance. If you have high rating already then you
| don't need to worry so much and no reason for you to start
| looking outside.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| Here's a prediction, operations middle management will be
| unchanged while the rest of the plebs have their lives made more
| difficult.
|
| Just go on LinkedIn and search for "Director, Operations" at
| meta. I know of directors who have gotten there simply by hiring
| two "layers" of management under them.
|
| This is a company that has paid well above market for Ops
| "talent" and the MBAs that dot the insides of the firm do very
| little. Nonexistent support, hacked accounts everywhere, no one
| cares. This isn't an engineering problem, it's a bad bad
| political problem within operations.
| msbarnett wrote:
| Yeah, "we hired people we shouldn't have so now we're going to
| make it increasingly unpleasant to work here" doesn't work.
|
| First-hand, what I've seen happen is that your most talented
| people, who are the most in demand, leave the organization quite
| quickly because they correctly realize they don't have to put up
| with this bullshit. It's the coasters who fear they'll never land
| an equally cushy job who attempt to ride out the heat as long as
| they can.
| blantonl wrote:
| And I've seen first-hand where the most talented people aren't
| having the heat turned up on them, they know they are good,
| they still get it good, and they will continue to do so.
|
| Even the most talented people can be locked into positions with
| compensation packages that will severely handcuff them to
| staying put. And if we really are in one of the most severe
| downturns we've ever seen, those talented people will very
| quickly realize they have it _really good_
|
| There are zillions of HR strategies for retaining the baller
| employees, while trimming the ones that aren't baller when
| things get lean. To many who have managed teams of people,
| products, etc, they look like standard HR stuff, to others,
| they look inhuman terrible practices. Sorry.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Similarly, I was at a startup and revenue growth had stopped.
| They decided to blame the dev team for not making features fast
| enough. I don't know what happened between that time and two
| years later when they shutdown, but I'm sure it was terrible.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| This also happened when more paternalistic companies in the 80s
| would offer buyouts of one kind or another.
|
| The better employees, feeling more certain they could find
| another job, were often the ones who left.
| joshstrange wrote:
| It's absolute insanity that they don't see that the best talent
| can and will walk out the door if this happens. Even if the top
| performers are insulated from the "heat" there are a non-zero
| number of them that this won't sit right with and/or they are
| affected and they leave.
|
| Any company who uses this kind of shadow-layoff or whatever you
| want to call it is scum, plain and simple. I mean that's no
| surprise for Meta or maybe even Tesla but as I see other
| companies employee this "tactic" I just add them to my list of
| "places I'd never consider working". Such short-sighted
| thinking.
| aeturnum wrote:
| It's also...if they have the ability to recognize and protect
| their high performers - why "turn up the heat" in general?
| You've already identified who isn't performing.
|
| Conversely, if you can't avoid harassing your highest
| performers - those seem like the people who will leave first,
| while the people who are under-performing will dig in to
| avoid risking the job market.
| datalopers wrote:
| > It's absolute insanity that they don't see that the best
| talent can and will walk out the door if this happens
|
| Or maybe the best talent is sick of these overpaid rest-and-
| vest lackeys and more than happy to see them get the axe.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Why would you think that the people who managed to navigate
| office politics enough to avoid being fired so far are the
| ones who will get fired now?
| datalopers wrote:
| For sure they may not, but this announcement implies
| they're aggressively looking for people to terminate
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > Even if the top performers are insulated from the "heat"
| there are a non-zero number of them that this won't sit right
| with and/or they are affected and they leave.
|
| Or some of the low (but not negative) productivity teammates
| get pushed out and the top performer follows them because
| keeping them around was good for morale for reasons unrelated
| to their actual job descriptions (or their individual metrics
| were rubbish but they also were valued assistants who
| unlocked the top guy to work at full speed).
| sbf501 wrote:
| > It's absolute insanity that they don't see that the best
| talent can and will walk out the door if this happens. E
|
| When your 51% CEO has so little life experience, what did you
| expect? There's a reason why - IN GENERAL - the best CEOs are
| older than 55.
|
| Zuck got lucky with FB and made billions selling personal
| data and retained 51% control. Did we really think he was
| actually GOOD at anything?
| joshstrange wrote:
| > Did we really think he was actually GOOD at anything?
|
| Lol, absolutely not. He got lucky, stole someone else's
| idea, and had a massive safety net to fall back on. I'm not
| saying he has zero skills but managing to hold onto 51% of
| the company does not make you a good CEO (as you stated).
| foepys wrote:
| > Even if the top performers are insulated from the "heat"
| there are a non-zero number of them that this won't sit right
| with and/or they are affected and they leave.
|
| I have seen instances where the "underperformers" were the
| people that made the workplace/team pleasant to be in. Once
| they were let go, some overperfomers quit not much later.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| AWS is another. The gripe i have with them is they do it
| during the good times as well. I've seen some pretty horrible
| effects on perfectly good devs who were subject to what i'm
| only going to characterize as mental torture during their
| time there.
| colonelpopcorn wrote:
| This in regards to their warehouse workforce, but relevant
| to devs as well:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/22/amazon-
| wo...
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > It's absolute insanity that they don't see that the best
| talent can and will walk out the door if this happens.
|
| On the contrary, the best talent is probably already
| performing to these higher expectations and won't be
| impacted. Their peers who weren't keeping up are the ones who
| will be impacted.
|
| Holding employees accountable for high performance standards
| is generally welcomed by high performers.
| bayindirh wrote:
| There's evidence that best talent works best when there's
| slack and when they crash, they crash hard.
|
| For example, I have an optimal load which I can work almost
| indefinitely and performing very well (in my own scale),
| when the load shots up, I lock up.
|
| This is why I'm automating as much as I can, so I can keep
| in that optimal zone which I perform really well.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Lol, anyone who's really a high performer knows that being
| metriced is terrible. Having to constantly be cranking out
| LoC because some middle manager doesn't actually understand
| the process of actually making software is infuriating. And
| even if they are doing well now, no one wants to feel that
| dark gnawing instability that comes from knowing the people
| on your team you grow to know and trust are constantly on
| the chopping block.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| At a previous job the management team got all excited
| about KPIs and made each dept come up ~5 of them and then
| report on them weekly (or maybe it was monthly). I fought
| it tooth and nail arguing that it was both silly that we
| were coming up with them and how easily it would be
| gamed. My concerns fell of deaf ears and instead we
| wasted upwards of 4-6 person-weeks of time building tools
| to extract data from Jira to serve as our KPIs. We wrote
| the damn code to calculate it, of course we know how to
| juice the numbers. It was a huge waste of time, nothing
| interesting came out of it (for us or any department),
| and "management" patted themselves on the back for
| "taking action".
|
| I'm not say all metrics suck and are a waste of time but
| you better have a very good reason for them before you go
| all-in.
|
| A friend of mine's company started requiring all their
| developers to track their time, down to the 15min
| interval. I'd be looking for a new job within a week.
| Don't even get me started on how asking your employees to
| track their time is essentially asking them to lie which
| means the stats you get are worthless, worse than
| worthless because time tracking takes time on it's own to
| do.
| sbf501 wrote:
| Really high performance MANAGERS understand you can't
| succeed at scale without indicators. You seem to come
| from the naive viewpoint that solo devs rule the world
| and run open-loop like some imaginary hotshot. That
| couldn't be more wrong.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Anyone who isn't directly contributing to a product can't
| be high performing. Maybe they can be supportive of high
| performing individuals, but usually that just entails
| keeping upper management out of the way.
|
| As a field we have yet to find good metrics for coding
| performance, anyone who tells you otherwise just wants to
| have an excuse to fire you when they suddenly decide that
| you no longer serve their purposes, even if those
| purposes is just to have a cool social club that
| validates their fragile ego.
| sbf501 wrote:
| > Anyone who isn't directly contributing to a product
| can't be high performing.
|
| Are you implying managers don't directly contribute to a
| product? Because wow, you're really either horribly naive
| or wildly narcissistic. As a someone who managed
| programmers for almost 20 years, only a fraction were
| hands-off. Why do you think all the 10x engineers become
| managers? A high performing manager hits targets, ships
| products, and makes customers happy. If you think a hot
| shot programmer on a team can do this all by themselves,
| I don't know what to tell you. You'll have to learn the
| hard way.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I couldn't agree more, especially about the lack of good
| metrics for coding performance. I feel like more often
| than not metrics or even new "policies" are put into
| place just to provide cover for firing people. So they
| can "backsolve" or use "parallel construction" to justify
| the firing.
| jfim wrote:
| This really depends on the definition of success. If
| success is just execution without needing to be too
| novel, metrics work.
|
| Coming up with a new idea, researching its feasibility,
| and executing on it isn't really doable with rigidly
| monitored metrics, because a lot of the productive work
| on novel things looks like thinking about things and
| trying things that don't work out.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I guess it really comes down to what specifically "turning
| up the heat" means. It sounds like a hell of KPIs and other
| stupid metrics that waste everyone's time so that a manager
| can boil a person down to a number instead of doing their
| job and making hard calls.
|
| I've been a high (if not the highest) performer at
| companies I've worked at (albeit much smaller companies
| Meta), if they suddenly want me to log my hours, do a bunch
| of metric-related BS, or grade me on KPIs that have no
| basis in reality then I'm leaving.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > Holding employees accountable for high performance
| standards is generally welcomed by high performers.
|
| While this is true (working in a company that doesn't value
| high performers over slackers is infuriating for the
| former), it's really unlikely that you'll be able to change
| your company's culture in the right direction at will (if
| rewarding high performers and kicking the butt of low
| performers was that easy why weren't you doing so all along
| ?!), so what's usually happening is:
|
| - the management starts monitoring some KPI some consulting
| firm told them to monitor
|
| - they start annoy everyone in the company based on these
| BS arbitry "holly metrics", which are indeed poor
| performance indicators and are easily gameable
|
| - top performers will be pissed off and leave
|
| - low performers will do all they can to maximize their
| metrics instead of doing actual work, reducing their
| productivity even more
|
| - congrats you've destroyed your company's talent pool and
| have now turned Meta into IBM. Too bad you don't even have
| a sales department on par with IBM's, so you'll probably
| end up like AOL or Yahoo!
| AlexandrB wrote:
| If my CEO said:
|
| > "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at
| the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said during
| the meeting, according to Reuters.
|
| I'd probably start looking for another job. It's one thing
| to fire poor performers, it's another to make vague
| allusions to "people who shouldn't be here". If they
| shouldn't be there, _fire them_. Otherwise, this just
| sounds like management has no clue.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > If they shouldn't be there, fire them.
|
| No, you set clear performance expectations, give them
| feedback, and then hold them accountable if they don't
| meet those performance expectations. Which seems to be
| what Meta is doing here.
|
| I honestly can't believe so many people in this thread
| would prefer that Meta just slash and burn employees
| instead of giving them expectations and a chance to meet
| them.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Are you suggesting that Facebook has no performance
| evaluation process for the employees _at all_ right now?
| If they do, it seems like you could look at those
| evaluations and make some decisions immediately. If they
| don 't, then fair enough, implement that. What's the
| purpose of "turning up the heat" to try to get people to
| quit? And, as others have mentioned, those who quit first
| if you make their lives harder will be the ones that have
| other options (usually the high performers).
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| I'm surprised you actually believe that a company that
| has incompetently hired thousands of excess people will
| suddenly have an amazing process for setting performance
| expectations and holding people accountable.
|
| Some people might just think those are weasel words to
| cover an impending large-scale RIF.
| juve1996 wrote:
| > I honestly can't believe so many people in this thread
| would prefer that Meta just slash and burn employees
| instead of giving them expectations and a chance to meet
| them.
|
| I honestly can't believe you'd trust this kind of
| management to give fair expectations.
|
| Let's be honest. They know who they're going to get rid
| of. Now they just have to create the pre-text.
| [deleted]
| vkou wrote:
| Everyone knows that there are poor performers in any
| organization, but nobody knows for sure who many of them
| are.
| DragonStrength wrote:
| Yep, I don't want to work in a fear-based management
| structure. Sorry for those who don't have better options,
| but I'm walking when I hear stuff like this.
| colonelpopcorn wrote:
| Unless the baseline is where the high performers are
| performing at right now.
|
| It's a win-win for companies to hold employees to high
| standards. Either they sacrifice health, family,
| relationships, hobbies, etc. to meet unsustainable demands
| or they "self-select" and the company no longer has to pay
| their salary, healthcare, benefits, etc. In the economic
| climate we're living in, it just makes economic sense to
| squeeze as much productivity as possible out of your
| workers. This includes pushing already high performing
| workers to do more than they already are.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| This assumes that you have solved the decades-old problem
| of measuring knowledge worker productivity in some sort of
| concise and accurate way.
|
| What's your solution here for engineers? Counting the lines
| of code they write?
| thsijustin wrote:
| bilsbie wrote:
| zac23or wrote:
| > First-hand, what I've seen happen is that your most talented
| people, who are the most in demand, leave the organization
| quite quickly
|
| True. The first time I came across this effect was reading the
| book about the IBM disaster: Big Blues
| https://www.amazon.com/Big-Blues-Unmaking-Paul-Carroll/dp/05...
|
| After twenty years working in the field, my conclusion on this
| is: the good worker for the people in power is irrelevant. They
| want to get rid of anyone and that's it.
| throwaway5371 wrote:
| and go where? most people are there for the money, pretty much
| only roblox, gambling, crypto and few others pay similar to fb
| or above, and its unlikely its much nicer there
| msbarnett wrote:
| Share price has tanked anyway, compensation at FB is less
| competitive than it used to be.
|
| IME your top performers are generally less compensation
| motivated than "interesting problem and interesting
| environment" motivated. Many companies will bend over
| backwards to give a top performer from a FAANG as much
| autonomy and interesting work as they want, for compensation
| differences that aren't that major anymore.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Sounds like you're describing this
| https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
| smegsicle wrote:
| or the 'dead sea effect'- as in talent evaporates, leaving
| only the salty underperforming solute
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Yeah, "we hired people we shouldn't have so now we're going
| to make it increasingly unpleasant to work here" doesn't work.
|
| But that's not what Meta is saying. The goal isn't just to make
| it miserable. The goal is to raise the expectations and hold
| people accountable throughout the company.
|
| The exact quote "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of
| people at the company who shouldn't be here" is hard to argue
| with. Every company that went on a hiring spree during the last
| bull run has collected some percentage of people who aren't
| performing or aren't qualified. Raising expectations and
| holding people accountable is a reasonable approach, IMO. Much
| better than just firing people.
|
| Give people a chance to meet _very clear_ expectations and fair
| warning when they 're not. Remove people who can't or won't
| catch up.
| II2II wrote:
| The problem isn't what they are saying, it is how it is
| implemented and how it is read. Then there is the issue of
| how it affects company culture. The tech industry seems to
| view culture as the type of people they want to work with.
| That is not the whole picture. If having a job with the
| company (or receiving promotions) becomes some sort of
| survivalist game, there will be people who employ survivalist
| tactics to protect themselves and those close to them. The
| goal may not involve making people miserable, yet the outcome
| will be.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| the people that shouldn't be there are the ones that approved
| the hiring spree
| msbarnett wrote:
| Like I said, I've been through this first hand.
|
| I was exceeding expectations, and given a big promotion in
| the middle of it. But people I worked with and interacted
| with every day were feeling extremely stressed and worried
| about their ability to meet the new bar. Now, in many cases,
| they didn't _need_ to be worried, but it 's natural to
| question these things in an environment where you're seeing
| people get PIP'd and unceremoniously shitcanned regularly.
|
| Morale was through the floor, it was an absolutely miserable
| environment to work in - even though I was personally doing
| quite well. So I said "fuck this" and was the first person
| out the door on my team. The second highest performer quit a
| week later.
|
| The least technically capable person on the team was there
| for another year.
| Veuxdo wrote:
| > very clear expectations
|
| Unfortunately, this is beyond most companies when it comes to
| software developers.
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| This is just a factory owner telling the workers the expected
| output increased by 20%. Nothing more. This thinking belongs
| in 1872.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| The problem is that the "very clear expectations" end up
| being lines of code written, tickets closed, bugs fixed, or
| whatever, then your employees optimize for _that_ , rather
| than doing what is right.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > Give people a chance to meet very clear expectations
|
| "Impact" is not a clear expectation. its not really that
| actionable either.
|
| The biggest problem with Meta is that there is no real
| pedigree for making new products. Everything successful has
| been bought in.
|
| I'm still not sure why Meta decided to double the number of
| employees, there was no clear goal, and it appears that teams
| were making up bullshit metrics to prove that they needed
| more staff.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yeah, I thought 35k (when I left) was too much. 70k
| definitely feels insane.
|
| One of the great things about FB before that was that it
| was small and had ambitious goals, so you'd tend to work on
| important stuff, as would everyone else.
|
| But they kept making more money and hiring more people, and
| the culture got murdered (again) due to external senior
| management hiring.
|
| And the last four to five years have hollowed out the
| original core of competent execs. Their replacements are
| less good, which cascades downhill and causes more
| problems.
| the_biot wrote:
| Frankly I think that's a naive take. I suspect in reality
| it'll come down to managers being told to cut some percentage
| of staff, and in many cases that'll come down to everybody
| feeling the pressure of swords hanging over their necks.
|
| That is not a formula for the "worst performers" leaving or
| getting fired, it's more like a formula for chaos, nasty
| office politics, and people leaving just because they don't
| need that shit in their life.
| blakesley wrote:
| 100%! My company ineptly stumbled into a scenario like this, so
| to speak, and the result was as you described. After witnessing
| how that played out, I would expect a similar outcome in other
| scenarios.
| mberning wrote:
| Absolutely. I worked at GE for 5 years and their reluctance to
| performance manage individual contributors was just insane.
| They will do anything to cut people in ways that are not
| performance related. VJRP. SERO. Contractor reductions. Site
| eliminations. And then finally the blanket RIF. I never saw
| anybody get fired for poor performance, and many of them should
| have been. And they also make it hell on people leaders to put
| people on PIPs. If you take over a team and 50% of them are
| slackers you can not put all of them on PIPs. HR will start
| looking at you as a people leader. "Why can't you motivate and
| inspire these people?" It was insane really. I actually loved
| working there, but the bureaucratic BS was crazy.
| siva7 wrote:
| Well, why can't you motivate and inspire these people?
| Nothing insane about this question
| api wrote:
| You'll lose the best people that way, not the dead wood.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| There _is_ one other reason people will stay, and that 's
| vesting schedules. But if the share price is tanking then that
| reason goes away.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31950015 - it stands on
| its own and I'm trying to make the thread less top heavy.
| Havoc wrote:
| Why on earth would you say something like that? Its not
| necessarily a bad business move doing it...but loudly announcing
| it?
|
| Reminds me of the musk "sleep on factory floor" macho bullshit.
| paxys wrote:
| Because investors eat this shit up
| vmoore wrote:
| So I was wondering, does this mean Meta will have to hire people
| who are 10x more productive and Get Things Done at a faster, more
| reliable pace? If there are people like that who yield better
| results consistently, how do they manage burnout? Are they
| treated as the mythical 'rock-star engineer' who other companies
| like to poach and clamor for?
|
| 10x output is so rare in this industry, and having 10 employees
| that match the output of one person is seen as silly, but there's
| nothing wrong with hiring 10 people to do something a single
| person can do. Yeah sure, you have to pay out 10x more salary,
| but since mythical rock-star developers are in such short supply
| and regularly poached, I don't see a reason for clamoring for
| them IMHO.
| kleinsch wrote:
| Meta used to be able to hire those people, but with their
| reputation issues and other companies joining them in tier 1
| pay, they have trouble getting them now. What they're dealing
| with is, Meta used to be a very results-based environment where
| people worked really hard to try to hit perf goals. 10x engs
| would get huge bonuses.
|
| In the last 6-8 years, it's gotten so big and bureaucratic that
| for many people, driving your individual metric to move is a
| coinflip that's out of your control. They've hired tons and
| tons of people in that time, so there's a good chunk of people
| who work a straight 40, collect their meets-all review, and
| live their life. I would guess Zuck wants to try to get back to
| where people were more motivated, but with the stock price not
| going through the roof and the company closing in on 100K
| employees, I don't see how employees are going to feel that
| sense of ownership or control.
| deckard1 wrote:
| a 10x dev is just a 1x dev that was anointed by their manager
| buddy. That person then goes off and dicks around for a month
| or two with no oversight, no code reviews, no QA, no sign-offs,
| no stakeholders, no Jira tickets, and pops out of their cave
| with a shiny new library or API free of sin, purified in the
| waters of Lake Minnetonka.
|
| Agile/scrum makes 10x devs impossible. Dirty secret of our
| industry. Management picks the winners by removing them from
| process.
| downrightmike wrote:
| They are probably already trying to get two 10xers to breed a
| 100x.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Apparently a few of you have never met consultants...
| jsemrau wrote:
| That's how you keep your company alive. Social is about to change
| quite heavily. FB as a product is now 15+ years old. This will be
| a really interesting space to watch.
| GoOnThenDoTell wrote:
| I cant imagine they'll have an easy hiring funnel after this.
| This begins the slow decline
| jsemrau wrote:
| This is still a FAANG company with loads of people from the
| big schools. If the previous scandals (Cambridge Analytics,
| etc) haven't slowed down their hiring, this won't affect them
| as well.
| rvz wrote:
| Yeah. The same goes for Twitter, Tesla, Unity, Dropbox, Uber,
| etc
| theaeolist wrote:
| Maybe not so slow.
| cityzen wrote:
| Music to my ears, hope the headwinds blow them off the road and
| into a ditch.
| darthrupert wrote:
| What on earth can make a person as successful as Zuckerberg be so
| fucking clueless? Obviously the first people to leave when heat
| turns up are the best ones, as they are the ones who have the
| most opportunities and courage. I have seen this a dozen times
| and this happens almost mechanically.
|
| I knew success was mostly about luck, but things like this make
| it seem like it's 100% about luck.
| clumsysmurf wrote:
| I asked myself the same question when I watched this interview
| "CNBC's Jim Cramer interviewed Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyoVLipRVPw
|
| It sounds like he really believes his own bull.
| tgv wrote:
| Much of it is. Luck, and sales skills.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Money and luck. Zuck may be portrayed as a "drop out college
| kid" but he went to Harvard and they guy knew going in that he
| had the safety net of his dad (and his offer to have/run a
| McDonalds franchise) to fall back on. I think some people
| greatly underestimate the power of a strong safety net and what
| that can do to your confidence, even more so if you've grown up
| knowing it was rock solid and you could take big risks without
| really putting yourself in much danger.
| labrador wrote:
| > _"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 decide that this place
| isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,"_
|
| Translation: We feel bad letting people go because we're all fam
| so we're going to make it your fault you were let go. If you
| can't meet the arbitrary and unequally applied goals we set for
| you then that's on you.
| anewpersonality wrote:
| Instagram is basically Facebook at this point.
| elforce002 wrote:
| It's worse than that. Ig is their Frankenstein Monster.
| Facebook is for old people (literally) since gen Z is all over
| TikTok and Snapchat (to a certain extent).
|
| The fb era is starting to sunset.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| I've wondered for a few years how Meta seems to employ some of
| the world best "advice-givers". I don't use LinkedIn a lot, but
| the times I'm there, I get post suggestions from 2nd degree
| connections working at Meta who seemed to wax on and on during
| the pandemic about how they're "donating their time to review
| resumes and help with interview prep" (I assume for non
| engineering roles)
|
| We're talking some Walmart/Severence level cringe everyday. "Five
| things successful leaders do that you should too" etc
|
| I kept going down the rabbit hole of these posts and realized
| what a huge bubble it is, underwritten solely by the immense pre-
| AppTrackingTransparency advertising model. I'll admit, for a
| short while, I wanted to have a job like that without any real
| work but later realized how hollow and short sighted it was to
| think that way.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Firing a bunch of people shows that the CEO is "tough minded" and
| that boosts the stock price.
|
| For the first couple of years it hardly matters who leaves,
| especially at a company as big as Facebook. It's just the
| symbolism for Wall Street to appreciate.
| achow wrote:
| Interesting quote from CEO in an all hands directly to employees.
| I don't want to be at Meta right now..
|
| _.. "turning up the heat" on performance management to weed out
| staffers unable to meet more aggressive goals._
|
| _" Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the
| company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said. "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 decide that this place isn't for you, and that
| self-selection is OK with me," he said._
| papito wrote:
| I wonder how many people at Meta are there _specifically_ for
| the money. Just learn to game their interview process, get in,
| and coast. I doubt that there are a lot of engineers working
| for Zuck for the love of the mission, let alone for moral
| reasons.
|
| In other news, the value of a developer who knows how to solve
| the _problem at hand_ vs torching your money on maintaining the
| overkill of dozens of microservices has just gone up.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Every single Meta employee I know is only there for the
| money, and for the ability to put Facebook/Meta on their
| resume for the next job. Nobody is really interested in the
| product, though all but one of them like the working
| conditions and how they treat [engineers] there. Anecdotal,
| obviously.
| dom96 wrote:
| Wow. Guess I left Meta just in time. It still feels difficult
| to believe Zuckerberg would say this though.
| Balgair wrote:
| The second Iron Law of Bureaucracy states:
|
| "In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the
| bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to
| the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have
| less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated
| entirely."
|
| It seems that FB, err Meta, is going to advance the turn of the
| breaking wheel one rotation. They may be attempting, in good
| faith, to eliminate the flotsam and jetsam in the bureaucracy,
| but are more than likely to just eliminate those least
| connected to internal politics.
|
| I would not be surprised if remote-only workers are the most
| affected, followed by the most 'heads-down' programmers.
|
| It's interesting that these steps are occurring with the recent
| leaving of Sandberg and I wonder if there is any connection.
| myunclestory wrote:
| > Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the
| company who shouldn't be here,"
|
| He makes it sound like these people sneaked in into the company
| without being hired.
|
| This reminds me of my greedy uncle - went to a wedding, gobbled
| every other food and drink in sight and then when the fierce
| loose motions hit, blamed the food.
| sorokod wrote:
| There is something charming about the use of "realistically", a
| discovery the CEO just had that "bunch of people at the company
| who shouldn't be here" as if this had nothing to do with him.
| 31835843 wrote:
| I mean, isn't that always the case though? That lots of
| people don't belong there? It's just the law of large numbers
| + the ever shifting lives of people.
| sorokod wrote:
| Don't see why this should always be the case. Also I don't
| recognize your use of addition and the sense in which you
| invoke the law of large numbers.
| 31835843 wrote:
| There is no hiring process that is perfect. Plus, people
| burn out, organizations shift focus, etc. People who
| shouldn't have been hired in the first place make it in,
| and people whose skills no longer match the job hang on.
| d--b wrote:
| Does this read "Let's ditch those ethical people who get in the
| way of profit."?
|
| Yes FB is not for me. Not as a worker, not as a customer.
| eru wrote:
| > Does this read "Let's ditch those ethical people who get in
| the way of profit."?
|
| Not to me. Just reads like they want to ditch low performers.
|
| (They might or might not still want to ditch 'ethical
| people', no clue. It just doesn't read that way here.)
| bmitc wrote:
| It's a framing issue, just like what Tesla recently did.
| Now they have the agency to clean house as they see fit
| with the excuse of "turning up the heat on performance" to
| hide behind.
| eru wrote:
| Well, if you say so.
|
| I would have assumed that Facebook always had the ability
| to manage-out people they wanted out.
| dagw wrote:
| _Does this read "Let's ditch those ethical people who get in
| the way of profit."?_
|
| I read it more as let's ditch those 'lazy' people that don't
| 'embrace the grind', only want to work 8 hours a day and then
| just go home.
| [deleted]
| rvz wrote:
| > Does this read "Let's ditch those ethical people who get in
| the way of profit."?
|
| No. You said that. Not sure what you are reading.
|
| It is basically getting rid of very low performers, slackers
| and those unable to deliver those expected goals.
|
| No where did it say what you have just said.
| boredtofears wrote:
| Imagine how bleak it must be to be an average SWE at
| facebook. Sure, you get paid a ton of money, but now they are
| going to "turn up the heat" on you to pump glorified CRUD
| message board features faster.
|
| (yes, I know there are probably lots of intellectually
| interesting jobs at Meta, but the overall purpose and mission
| just isn't exactly inspiring)
| elpescado wrote:
| > glorified CRUD message board
|
| That's like describing SpaceX as "glorified fireworks"
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Did you just compare CRUD to literal rocket science?
| akhmatova wrote:
| Yup, they did (despite the perorations in the sibling
| comment). Precious.
| elpescado wrote:
| But launching rockets isn't rocket science. You build
| giant steel tube, fill it with some explosives and liquid
| oxygen, ignite it and, kaboom! you go to space. That's
| the theory behind it. Now, to put that into actual
| practice is whole different thing.
|
| The same with CRUD. CRUD is simple, but to do CRUD on
| ~Facebook~ Meta scale, that's a different thing.
| akhmatova wrote:
| Meta-scale CRUD is fancy, to be sure. But the craft
| behind it is still not on the same level as building
| things that can, you know, blow up on the lauchpad. Or
| break apart up at 46,000 with you a schoolteacher and
| other crew members inside. While the nation watches.
| Stuff like that.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| Meta has done a lot of interesting work in the hardware
| space. In hardware, you just kind of accept, regardless of
| your company or its vision, that your work is ultimately
| used to facilitate the watching of cat videos.
| eru wrote:
| Alternatively, your work is being used to process
| financial information and trades a few nanoseconds
| faster, or your work is being used by the military, ...
| Cerium wrote:
| For a long time I thought that cat videos, HFT, and
| military tech were the options. I worked HFT for a while.
| Then I discovered medical technology. You can work on
| interesting hardware and software for devices that
| absolutely make the world better. It's great.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Do any companies in the medtech space pay as well as the
| other options?
| Cerium wrote:
| In my experience, yes. I get paid a bit better than I
| would expect at Microsoft and a bit worse than if I went
| to Apple.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Is this in Silicon Valley? In my area (a southeast tech
| hub) I've seen these type of companies offering jobs in
| the $100k-$120k range, which is far below Microsoft or
| any FAANG.
| marshray wrote:
| Data security!
|
| You can work on defending the masses from the militaries
| and bad actors of the world.
| xxs wrote:
| Naturally, the nature of the 1st to ring the bell (i.e.
| HFT) poses an interesting concept. It's a very technical
| goal in itself.
| eru wrote:
| Definitely.
|
| And I don't actually disagree with HFT or finance in
| general, or sending cat pictures around.
|
| (I'm reserving my judgement on the military.)
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Also lots of hardware in industrial applications. Though
| fundamentally you can consider that everything is in
| indirectly service of cat videos. Even a jet turbine
| blade casting machine is going to be used to get someone
| home faster to load up the cats.
| gabaix wrote:
| Add to this the devastating effects that they had on human
| minds, in particular on teenagers.
|
| When money is good, most people turn a blind eye. Stop the
| music and people will think twice.
| mike00632 wrote:
| Let's also not forget that Facebook knowingly facilitated
| a genocide of the Rohingya people of Myanmar.
| malermeister wrote:
| I quit Facebook because I was getting pings by Zuckerberg
| himself on button padding on one of his pet projects.
| bagels wrote:
| Is this literally true?
| abdabab wrote:
| Shouldn't that take only a few minutes?
| malermeister wrote:
| Haha, not in the codebase I was working in at the time.
| Paddings being manipulated programmatically all over the
| place.
|
| Also, what a clear signal the CEO is not focusing on what
| matters. This was during the time the Cambridge Analytica
| thing broke... There's really nothing more important that
| needed his attention?
| bayindirh wrote:
| Maybe he needed something to direct his stress into and
| distract himself. I'm not saying what he did was right,
| BTW.
| malermeister wrote:
| That was kind of my read too. Focus on the small things
| you can control to make up for the loss of control over
| the big things.
|
| I just didn't like to be on the receiving end of his
| coping strategy.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > I just didn't like to be on the receiving end of his
| coping strategy.
|
| That's a very fair need. Hope your life turns out better
| than you ever hope it to be.
| frankincense wrote:
| At a company the size of Facebook, the CEO should not be
| involved at that level.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Why not? It's his company. He can do what he wants.
| onion2k wrote:
| His company pays design and UX experts a huge amount of
| money to come up with designs that work _for users_ , not
| for him personally. Meta isn't Zuckerberg's toy. Ignoring
| that expertise, and designing for himself instead of
| users, is failing the shareholders by wasting money and
| not maximizing revenue.
|
| The parallel to Steve Jobs is a fair one, except that
| Steve was brilliant at design and UX and got things
| right. He wasn't bothered about tiny details like the
| padding on a single button but rather the design of the
| entire system, and he picked up on things that didn't sit
| in the overall architecture brilliantly.
|
| He also drove people to leave Apple, _and that was a bad
| thing._ Things aren 't right or justifiable just because
| they're like things Steve did. Sometimes he got things
| wrong, particularly when it came to managing people.
| charcircuit wrote:
| CEOs dog fooding their products and leaving feedback on
| them is not failing shareholders. Would you prefer a CEO
| to completely ignore everything their company makes and
| just trust others to tell him how things are going?
| jjav wrote:
| A wise CEO doesn't bypass the product and engineering
| process he's delegated to be put in place. Bypasing the
| process not only interferes with someones sprint and
| product roadmap, but more importantly, tells the people
| who own the process that they don't really own it after
| all. Which leads to people quitting.
| andsoitis wrote:
| If the CEO of my company prodded me about a feature I
| work on, I think that's actually a great opportunity to
| build rapport.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I'm surprised that nobody is questioning this. Zuckerberg
| owns ~17% of Meta shares, so it quite clearly not "his"
| company where he can do whatever he pleases. Primarily he
| is an employee and has a responsibility to the owners
| (which does include him) to do his job, arguably looking
| at button padding is not part of his job description.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Zuckerberg has a voting majority. As long as he believes
| he is acting in the companies best interests he can do
| whatever he likes.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| This isn't strictly true, Zuckerberg has to act in the
| interests of the minority shareholders as well. He can't
| take a deal that helps himself while hurting all other
| shareholders.
|
| Getting involved in button padding issues isn't one of
| those cases though. He can spend all the time in the
| world on that if he likes.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That's irrelevant when discussing ownership. He owns 17%
| of Meta. That he retains control of 90% of Meta doesn't
| mean that he has the moral right to ignore his
| responsibilities to his co-owners.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| No one has the moral right to do anything since the
| entire idea of moral rights is absurd. Yes, Zuckerberg
| has a duty to act in the best interest of shareholders.
| Courts have repeatedly ruled that good faith belief is
| all that requires. Unless you think his interest in
| button ui is somehow in self interest over company
| interest he didn't do anything wrong.
| fleetwoodsnack wrote:
| Not really. The role of the fiduciary is to act in the
| best interests of the organization, including seeking
| counsel and advice from experts. "I was doing what I
| thought was best," is not an affirmative defense, and has
| been successfully argued to be a dereliction of duty in
| corporate and contract law.
| t_mann wrote:
| 17% of stocks != 17% of voting rights. I don't know the
| current numbers, but Zuck was known for aggressive use of
| priority shares to retain voting control of the company
| as he was selling shares.
| koolba wrote:
| Share of stock class != Share of stock class
|
| Zuck controls 90% of the voting rights of FB:
| https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1061237/how-
| facebook-si...
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| >17% of stocks != 17% of voting rights
|
| Stock classes are the biggest robbery of modern times.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/robbery
|
| > larceny from the person or presence of another by
| violence or threat
|
| How does Facebook's share offering meet the definition of
| robbery?
|
| That Zuckerberg was selling a product with such high
| demand and so little supply that he was able to sell at a
| very high price does not qualify as Zuckerberg robbing
| others. It is not even bread for a starving person, it is
| equity to chase returns.
| texaslonghorn5 wrote:
| It seemed obvious to me that robbery was being used in
| the colloquial sense (rip off)
| malermeister wrote:
| _Should not_ , not _must not_. He _can_ do what he wants,
| but he _shouldn 't_.
| [deleted]
| beambot wrote:
| Respectfully: Zuckerberg has earned the right to care
| about whatever he darn-well pleases at company the size
| of his.
| eru wrote:
| Sure. But random employees also have the right to quit,
| if they don't like that meddling.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| As soon as you start talking about "rights" you're just
| having your own argument. We are obviously talking about
| what's best practice.
| achow wrote:
| Steve Jobs was famously known to be involved in even more
| micro product details than that.
| Kye wrote:
| Just like working hard won't make you rich on its own,
| it's not enough to be a micromanager. The directions you
| give have to actually produce results.
|
| Facebook is no iPod.
| martingoodson wrote:
| "So Vic, we have an urgent issue, one that I need
| addressed right away. I've already assigned someone from
| my team to help you, and I hope you can fix this
| tomorrow" said Steve.
|
| "I've been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and
| I'm not happy with the icon. The second O in Google
| doesn't have the right yellow gradient. It's just wrong
| and I'm going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay
| with you?" Of course this was okay with me.
| trhway wrote:
| It takes a few minutes once, it takes a few minutes
| another time, ... and now you have an exec who is like
| Pavlov's dog got used to prompt completion of his/her
| caprices. That isn't a way to a happy life for you (well,
| until you a one of those who thrive in execs' attention).
| Instead you wait until second or third reminder (if it is
| important the exec would remind, if not - then there
| wasn't a reason to bother to start with, and given the
| ferret like attention span of a typical exec...), you
| similarly wait for reminders another time, ... and now
| you have an exec frustrated by such an impedance mismatch
| and who as a result would move their attention to
| somebody else to promptly care for his/her caprices :)
| forgingahead wrote:
| But why was your padding work so shoddy?
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| He's a _low performer_ ; it's just one of his immutable
| and context-independent properties.
|
| /s
| malermeister wrote:
| Cause i was modifying the shoddily built codebase of the
| feature we were modifying.
|
| Turns out "move fast and break things" doesn't make for
| maintainable code.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| You self selected because he turned up the heat on those
| buttons, and you know what? He's okay with that
|
| (Being facetious)
| threeseed wrote:
| > glorified CRUD message board features faster
|
| I think this comment says more about you than anything.
|
| If you look into Meta's tech stack they have challenges no
| company on the planet has and clearly a lot of talent.
| Having just played with CacheLib it's an impressive project
| and yet to see an equivalent anywhere else. And I imagine
| much of what they do is like this when you're operating at
| their extremes.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| CacheLib appears to be a library that's useful to large
| centralized organizations that control large numbers of
| servers. So it is probably not value-neutral, but a force
| for increasing social centralization. "Scale" is
| fundamentally authoritarian, and it necessitates
| hierarchies of domination within abusive corporate
| structures.
|
| Imagine what the engineer capable of writing CacheLib
| would have done instead, had they not worked for
| Facebook.
| water-your-self wrote:
| Hardly. A lot of what they do is likely filibuster.
| papito wrote:
| There is no denying that there is some interesting
| "engineering exhaust" coming from Facebook, side and
| passion projects developed on company time that are
| genuinely interesting and in ways industry-changing
| (React), but that is driven by devs and not the company.
| That is almost expected from a FAANG, where they have
| enough money to let that happen. Now, I bet, things will
| be different. You won't just be able to "do your own
| thing".
|
| Say ello to KPIs.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| Exactly this. The historical value of tech companies was
| that they provided safe, stable employment that gave
| employees enough slack to do things of value to society
| while tending to the profit engine. As these companies
| have evolved instead towards tightly-managed, low-slack
| organizations focused on KPIs, they now actively (and
| coercively) divert talent and attention from the
| "exhaust" that had been the positive externality. In this
| new state they become an active drain on society.
| boredtofears wrote:
| Like I said in my original comment: I'm sure there are a
| ton of interesting jobs at meta, no doubt - but they are
| the "meta" jobs of meta. In terms of driving their
| primary objective it's nothing that innovative from a
| technical perspective. Their innovation is solely rooted
| in behavioral psychology. Not self-driving cars, not
| better medical devices, not VR technology (well, OK, they
| bought their way into that). The prime directive at
| facebook is to keep people on facebook.
|
| They've definitely been responsible for pushing web
| technologies forward -- but all in the name of increased
| engagement. Let's not pretend there is an altruistic
| angle to this.
| savolai wrote:
| No, it doesn't seem like they're doing much to alleviate
| the damage to society they've done. Still your comment
| seems rather cynical.
|
| Yet, relative to the age of humanity or even modern
| society, they are still _a new modality_ to humanity 's
| interaction. One that facilitates also a lot of good
| that's happening in the world.
|
| There is still a ton they could do right if they chose
| to, to make that environment for communication a
| healthier one. Could they find willingness to reroot
| their design choices in a wider tradition of social
| psychology, for instance?
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _Still your comment seems rather cynical._
|
| Your first paragraph points out the damage FB has done to
| society.
|
| Your second paragraph appears to give them a pass because
| social media is "new" and has also done some good.
|
| Your third paragraph tacitly gives FB credit for the
| things they could do right if they chose to.
|
| Perhaps you're not cynical enough?
| EndorphinRush wrote:
| _Their innovation is solely rooted in behavioral
| psychology._
|
| I'm not a fan of Facebook. I don't even have an account.
| But it would be unfair to say they haven't come up with
| some truly innovative approaches to large scale
| infrastructure.
|
| Also, to their credit they are huge supporters of open
| source. For example the Open Compute Project is still
| alive and well in large data halls. They are also still
| supporting the Telecom Infra Project which is responsible
| for OpenRAN as well as their Open DWDM hardware.
|
| Does all of this work in their favor to support their own
| business? Absolutely. But that can also be said for every
| tech company in some form or fashion. But, they still
| open source it which is way more than a lot of other
| shops can say.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Issa joke
| [deleted]
| yieldcrv wrote:
| No, I don't read it that way, anyone at Facebook doing their
| 2 year big tech stint has already wrestled with that irony.
| npteljes wrote:
| >"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 decide that this place
| isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me," he said.
|
| This, to me, sounds like he's pressuring people to leave, so
| that they don't have to fire them, which would involve
| severance.
| cs137 wrote:
| Generally, people who get PIP'd don't get severance, even if
| fired.
|
| The real purpose of the PIP process is to grind people down
| so they make mistakes, costing them what could otherwise be
| beautiful lawsuits [1], or just stop showing up (which I
| guess would fall under quitting, since they end up firing
| themselves, at least bureaucratically speaking).
|
| ----
|
| [1] This is surprisingly easy to do in the US. If you post
| about your termination on social media, this can be construed
| as "cause after the fact" and make a termination that was in
| fact unjust or unlawful now legal. The employer's argument
| becomes that they knew you held malice toward the company
| ("cause") but couldn't prove it--the social media activity
| becomes said "proof".
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| I have never, at any company, found this to be true.
| williamsmj wrote:
| > Generally, people who get PIP'd don't get severance, even
| if fired.
|
| Not quite true at Amazon, the most infamous PIP user. You
| get put on "Focus". If you fail that, you are offered
| severance or to go on a PIP. True, once you're on the PIP,
| you're not going to get a severance offer. (This is all
| according to
| https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/amazon, which is
| excerpted by the author here https://twitter.com/GergelyOro
| sz/status/1537810787473006593.)
| [deleted]
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| That may be for more cold blooded companies but most PIPs
| I've witnessed have gotten severance and actually good
| packages to boot.
| aeyes wrote:
| Agree, I mostly saw: Take this generous amount of money
| and hand in your resignation or you won't have to come
| back tomorrow and you get nothing.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| Take this generous amount of money (1 month pay) and SIGN
| THIS WAIVER RELEASING US OF ALL FUTURE LIABILITIES is the
| important part.
| krallja wrote:
| also usually anti-badmouthing clauses in both directions.
| "you may never blog about this experience"
| bko wrote:
| Same here. Severance is very cheap in the grand scheme of
| things. If someone is a poor performer, they're
| essentially a negative value add. Your default is
| continuing to pay them a salary, so you may as well agree
| to continue to do that for a number of weeks and just
| have them not work. I've seen 2 weeks for every year at
| the firm as standard
| rexpop wrote:
| It's not necessarily about severance; could be keeping
| unemployment insurance premiums low, too.
| ac29 wrote:
| Yes, most people dont realize companies can be
| financially impacted through the unemployment system when
| they lay someone off even if there are no direct
| severance payments.
|
| An employee who quits isnt eligible for unemployment.
|
| (these rules obviously vary by country/state/etc)
| cs137 wrote:
| This is the, "I fucked up and I'm going to have cut people, but
| I'm going to blame the people getting cut because I'm a shit
| human being" speech. It's never a good sign.
| kypro wrote:
| Not really. Business cycles exist and advertisement is
| extremely cyclical. Labour demand isn't fixed. Sometimes you
| have to cut not because you over hired, but because economic
| conditions change and this seems to be what's happening in
| regards to Facebook.
|
| I don't think he's blaming anyone either. The fact he's
| acknowledging there are probably people working at FB who
| shouldn't be suggests you're wrong and that for years FB has
| kept people despite it not being the company's best
| interests.
|
| Tbh I wish all companies were honest about why they're
| cutting back. I know I've been given BS reasons for being cut
| before and I've also been given no notice or warning. This
| seems relatively honest and direct in comparison. Those
| providing value will be fine, those who are not will be let
| go - isn't this how employment should function?
| fleetwoodsnack wrote:
| Returning to contract law; the employment agreement is a
| contract engaged by two or more parties to exchange labor
| for money (or a basket of financial incentives including
| money, in part).
|
| In virtually every instance, Meta proffered the employment
| contract and its provisions, vetted the counter party, and
| gave assent to enter into contract.
|
| Arguably, "there are probably a bunch of people at the
| company who shouldn't be here," and their intent to "turn
| up the heat," represents a failure of Meta to conduct
| proper due diligence when entering into contract, and a
| modification of the provisions of employment after-the-
| fact.
|
| In most instances these would be considered organizational
| failures. Your reference to the business cycle and other
| delicate economic terms are not the explanatory variables,
| not even to Meta themselves.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| Yeah, i really don't understand the point he thinks he
| was making. These companies spend BILLIONS on employee
| benefits to take away the noise of "real life".
|
| You CAN NOT attract top tier talent easily to a dumpster
| fire and they know this. You can't be giving away free
| food, ice cream, no performance reviews for two years
| during the pandemic and shipping 10s of thousands of
| office equipment to each individual employees homes for
| two years during the pandemic, continue to approve
| aggressive hiring plans and laying out $10 Billion dollar
| outlays for the fucking Metaverse and then turn around
| and say to the employees you hired that "You guys suck"
|
| I would just call it childish, but this asshole deserves
| no benefit of doubt. It's downright disgusting.
| notacoward wrote:
| Meta engineering could definitely afford to get a bit leaner,
| but the question is whether their approach will cut fat or
| muscle. Having been there, I suspect muscle. There's a strong
| correlation there between the "impact" that is the be-all and
| end-all of their performance measurement, churn, and technical
| debt. If they cut headcount but keep all of the people
| generating churn and technical debt, there will be more of
| those per person who's left and fewer of those risking bad
| reviews to actually keep things running. Some parts of
| engineering are already cracking under that load, so the
| results could be pretty bad. Expect more outages.
|
| This reminds me a bit of a discussion that used to be common
| during hard times early in my career: layoffs or pay cuts? It
| didn't take long for companies to figure out that with a layoff
| you get to choose who goes, but with pay cuts it will
| disproportionately be your best people because they have the
| greatest ability to jump upward. Nobody has that conversation
| any more, because the answer is known. I suspect in a few years
| Meta's approach to forced attrition (already practiced at
| Amazon for years) will also be recognized as bad for the long
| term.
| Dan_Sylveste wrote:
| What's with this seemingly-new use of 'staffers' instead of
| 'personnel' or 'staff?'
|
| 'Staffers' to me always meant personnel in a political context,
| i.e. White House Staffers or, in a commercial context,
| recruiters, i.e. people responsible for providing staff.
|
| Does anyone else concur? I did check with the dictionary which
| is telling me that 'staffers' is a synonym for 'staff' but...
| I've not seen it used that way commonly until very recently.
| npteljes wrote:
| Aren't staffers the ones who work in hiring, talent
| acquisition, etc?
| Dan_Sylveste wrote:
| Yes, to me 'staffer' means 'recruiter' as in, a person
| responsible for providing staff.
|
| In the context of a political organisation it is used to
| mean 'team members' (because they're not always formally
| employed staff) but I've not encountered it being used that
| way to refer to staff/consultants employed by a private
| company, hence my questioning.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| You will never beee president
|
| You will never beee president
|
| So that's one less thing to worry about, one less thing to
| worry about
|
| I imagine that song from Hamilton plays on Zuck's bidet
| Dan_Sylveste wrote:
| You think they're using the term specifically because of
| its political-staff connotations? Interesting...
| yieldcrv wrote:
| he had some delusional political aspirations before so I
| could see him trying to internalize it
| andsoitis wrote:
| In the North American context, a "staffer" is a member of
| staff of an organization, especially of a newspaper. I think
| reporters are using staffer because that's what they call
| employees at their organizations, even though the
| organizations they talk about doesn't use that nomenclature.
| mgh2 wrote:
| He is blaming the economy and employees, when in fact the
| product itself is dying.
|
| Lots of CEOs with bad businesses will play this card to avoid
| responsibility...
| LaundroMat wrote:
| And vice-versa: when things go well, they're geniuses and
| circumstances outside of their control have nothing to do
| with it.
| WJW wrote:
| > there are probably a bunch of people at the company who
| shouldn't be here
|
| Would be interesting to see whether he still considers
| himself essential for the future of Meta.
| oblio wrote:
| How many founders of successful companies willingly stepped
| out? 1%? 0.01%? :-)
| abeppu wrote:
| How would you know? When a founder is out unwillingly,
| most of the time don't both sides pretend it was willing
| and amicable because they know it looks bad?
| Kye wrote:
| There was a thread on HN some time ago discussing how
| different growth stages needed different people in the
| hot seat, and the fate of a company was often decided by
| the founder's willingness to cede control to someone with
| the right skills and experience. I think it came up in
| the context of VCs wanting to bring in CEOs for this
| purpose and the pushback they encountered.
| kornhole wrote:
| I keep asking people if they know anybody excited about the
| metaverse. I have not found any even among people who are
| total Facebook products.
| dangus wrote:
| It's because the Metaverse is just Facebook's last ditch
| effort at controlling an App Store.
|
| Never mind the fact that VR is niche and will always be
| niche, or that VR conference calls add zero value beyond a
| simple Zoom call, Meta is going for it anyway because they
| have no other viable options.
|
| I have to admit that the technology itself looks really
| cool, but it's a solution looking for a problem.
| gedy wrote:
| I'm not a Meta-hater, but the tone of this is always
| destructive when it comes up. It's basically soft layoffs that
| try and paint those leaving/pushed out as "unmotivated" or
| "can't keep up with the rest of us". I wish companies would be
| more honest that they aren't doing well, over hired, etc
| instead.
|
| I kinda get mgmt types thinking this will keep remaining
| feeling motivated, safe, etc. but it's very phoney to a lot of
| us who've been through this before.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > I kinda get mgmt types thinking this will keep remaining
| feeling motivated, safe, etc.
|
| That seems completely counterintuitive to me. Seeing your co-
| worker tip off the end of the plank doesn't make me feel safe
| as we are all inching closer to the end of it.
|
| Though it would motivate me to look for a job elsewhere.
| hinkley wrote:
| I've heard it asserted that your median level of talent
| doesn't change much with these strategies. But that means
| you're losing people that you could probably ill afford to
| lose.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| I've worked at a couple places that took this layoff
| philosophy. Twelve months later headcount was back to the
| same level. More of the best employees left on their own
| volition after layoffs. Company spent a bunch in severance
| and damaged reputation for no real gain. Shareholders I
| guess felt they got their pound of flesh.
| redisman wrote:
| When things get nasty and it's clear the good days are over
| it's usually those most able to leave (the actual best
| employees) who get the message
| deckard1 wrote:
| but where do they go? You can't escape the recession. All
| the FAANGs are in it. A startup seems even more risky in
| this atmosphere.
| go_elmo wrote:
| Maybe you didnt mean it that technical, but the median is
| very robust to outliers. So your first statement is true
| but the conclusion is not necessarily.
| hinkley wrote:
| No, this is an old saw and we see it happen over and over
| and the managers never learn. When they announce things
| like this, or voluntary layoffs, they mean for the lower
| quartile to leave in droves and for the overall quality
| of the remaining employees to improve. For the amount of
| stuff per dollar to increase.
|
| But what actually happens is that a few of the lower
| quartiles leave, and at least as many from the upper
| quartiles leave. None of the Dunning Kruger people leave
| because they're all that and a bag of chips. So you tend
| toward mediocrity. Doubly so because when the changes
| that management expected don't happen, now everyone knows
| there is likely to be a round of involuntary layoffs. So
| the people you have left either start playing it safe or
| become demotivated, further lowering the stuff per
| dollar. And now the company is doing worse, and some
| idiot upstairs thinks it's just their predictions coming
| true, instead of self fulfilling prophecy.
|
| Not that I mean any of this as a lecture or warning for
| Zuck. More like a movie trailer. I hope it all burns and
| we get to watch it happen. But more likely they'll turn
| into Microsoft. Fewer teeth, but still essentially the
| same bastards they always were, because changing a
| negative founder culture is really, really hard for any
| social or business group.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Just do the old Netflix culture doc style
|
| Welcome! You're going to get fired! If you want a "family" join
| a startup!
| tsimionescu wrote:
| What a horrible idea.
|
| Truly great engineering requires long-term commitment. Great
| engineering organizations often have people leave by
| retiring, not being fired.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Tenure at Netflix tends to be longer than at other tech
| companies.
|
| https://developerpitstop.com/how-long-do-software-
| engineers-...
| mercutio2 wrote:
| The numbers on that graph for the companies I'm familiar
| with are wildly, _wildly_ incorrect.
|
| I have no idea where those numbers come from, but I don't
| for a second buy the idea that average tenure at Netflix
| is larger than others on the peninsula.
| ggambetta wrote:
| Should have finished that email with _" may the odds be ever in
| your favor"._
| dimmke wrote:
| There was a time where I wanted to work at Meta/Facebook
| someday - it was actually "next" on my list. I didn't care
| about the negative press that Facebook got, I felt like they
| were unfairly targeted because of the 2016 election.
|
| And a lot of the engineering work that has come out of Facebook
| has been excellent, like React/React Native have changed the
| world.
|
| But it's just really hard to see Zuckerberg as a good business
| leader. When you compare the business to something like Amazon
| - which has a strong culture around decision making and
| cultivates a style of leadership in it's executives.
|
| So far, it seems like he hit a really good product/market fit
| and had good timing with Facebook. The strategy since then has
| basically been to stay ahead by acquiring social platforms that
| become successful. Until one came along that he couldn't just
| throw money at and acquire. Oops.
|
| And now with the turn on the dime to "Meta" - other companies
| have been trying to figure out VR for a long time. Apple has
| reportedly had a VR headset concept going for _years_ and is
| probably still several years from releasing it. For Amazon to
| come out with a product like that, it would have to start with
| a PRFAQ and a lot of vetting just to release the product. To
| rename the company and start putting all their energy towards
| it, which letting actual profit centers languish just wouldn 't
| happen.
|
| So not only has he not validated this new direction, he's now
| asking people working comfy FAANG jobs to knuckle down and
| suffer for it. It works when Elon Musk does it because he can
| make appeals like "we're going to make humanity multi-
| planetary"
|
| Meta's pitch is "What if we convinced everybody to live in a
| virtual world controlled entirely by us, where we take 50% of a
| cut of every digital good that is purchased" - who wants to
| work 70 hours a week towards making that dystopia a reality?
|
| I feel like Epic Games, with Fortnite being basically a social
| hub for kids and monetizing skins/associating social status
| with skins is closer to realizing some early version of "the
| metaverse" then what we've seen from Meta. I think that
| metaverse behavior is already happening in a lot of ways, it
| just isn't happening with dorky headsets and probably won't
| until the tech matures enough to get there.
| deckard1 wrote:
| Generally, people seem to enjoy working at Facebook. I knew a
| director that worked there and he constantly raved about it.
| Almost cult-like at times. I don't think I've read a single
| good story about working at Amazon, though. They may have the
| better business, but they are _horrible_ for employees at all
| levels.
|
| If we're talking ethics and it has to be FAANG... I guess
| that just leaves Netflix really. And maybe I just don't know
| their business in detail. But all the rest are ethically
| compromised.
|
| Facebook, to their credit, were the ones that forced higher
| engineering salaries. We wouldn't even be talking about the
| stupid concept of FAANG (why anyone took Jim Cramer seriously
| is beyond me) if it weren't for Facebook. Because Google,
| Apple, etc. were doing backroom deals to form a hiring
| cartel[1], to prevent poaching talent and keep salaries
| artificially low. Facebook refused to play. Even today I hear
| that if you have a Google offer then you better have a
| Facebook offer in hand just to get Google to budge on their
| low-ball.
|
| [1] https://pandodaily.com/2014/03/30/court-docs-google-
| hiked-wa...
| cableshaft wrote:
| > it just isn't happening with dorky headsets and probably
| won't until the tech matures enough to get there
|
| Zuckerberg is well aware of the technical challenges of VR
| headsets and they're putting a lot of effort into getting the
| headsets where they need to be. Seems like they're helping
| push the technology much further than any other company right
| now.
|
| Here's a 30 minute video where he and Michael Abrash go into
| the technical challenges, and what they've been doing to
| address those issues, as well as showing off prototype
| devices they've been working on[1].
|
| And there's an hour long episode of Adam Savage's Tested
| series where they get to try the prototypes and go into even
| more detail[2].
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sThLeiw8h2Y
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6AOwDttBsc
| dimmke wrote:
| >they're putting a lot of effort into getting the headsets
| where they need to be.
|
| 1. Nobody knows "where they need to be" to become suitable
| for mass adoption. Definitely better than they are now, but
| personally I highly doubt I'd feel comfortable using a full
| VR headset regularly unless it was a "full dive" experience
| where I don't have to use a controller.
|
| 2. Hardware is a lot more difficult than software.
| Facebook's hardware track record is non existent beyond
| what they acquired with Oculus, which was a startup.
|
| Apple has more experience designing and producing hardware
| than Google, Facebook and Amazon combined and if they don't
| think the tech is ready, it's probably not ready.
|
| 3. Why is Mark Zuckerberg the face of this? People find him
| talking so uncomfortable that they make memes about him
| being a lizard person. That more than anything is what
| makes it feel like a billionaire's vanity project. How is
| he being allowed to bet the entire company on this? Does
| the board have any real power? If I had any kind of
| significant equity in Meta I'd be really concerned right
| now that the CEO seems to be in la-la land and is issuing
| missives telling his employees to quit.
| leaflets2 wrote:
| > bet the entire company on this?
|
| It's that an exaggeration?
|
| Still, about how much does Meta bet on VR? Maybe compared
| to profits?
| boloust wrote:
| > I highly doubt I'd feel comfortable using a full VR
| headset regularly unless it was a "full dive" experience
| where I don't have to use a controller.
|
| The Quest headsets already have accurate controllerless
| hand tracking, but not many experiences optimized for the
| input mode.
|
| > Apple has more experience designing and producing
| hardware than Google, Facebook and Amazon combined and if
| they don't think the tech is ready, it's probably not
| ready.
|
| Apple is releasing a VR headset next year, which means
| they think the technology is ready.
|
| Apple entering this space will probably do wonders for
| broader acceptance of the technology, like the
| dedorkification of smartwatches with the introduction of
| the apple watch.
| asd88 wrote:
| Lol, Meta (with their known intense PSC culture) of all places
| is doing this?
| coolandsmartrr wrote:
| PSC culture?
| achow wrote:
| _Performance Summary Cycle._
|
| _This is a two-week period that kick-starts the review
| process for both managers and employees._
|
| https://candor.co/articles/tech-careers/performance-
| reviews-...
| TomVDB wrote:
| Performance Summary Cycle.
|
| It's a thing where you get performance reviews every 6
| months, and where every minute contribution gets scored. Or
| so I've been told by a former mid-level Facebook manager
| who quit after a bit more than a year because he couldn't
| stand that toxic place anymore.
|
| I found it particularly funny that the interviewers who
| gave the thumbs up to hire him would get bad marks because
| of his early departure.
| achow wrote:
| I read that it is once in a year now.
| pavlov wrote:
| Yes, they changed it effective this year. No more summer
| PSC, just the January one.
|
| If anything, that makes this internal announcement worse
| because of the whiplash.
|
| "We're going to make PSC less onerous and stressful by
| only doing it once a year!"
|
| "Just kidding, we're actually going full Hunger Games
| with the new once-a-year cycle!"
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > "We're going to make PSC less onerous and stressful by
| only doing it once a year!"
|
| There's something interesting going on here. I agree that
| people will probably perceive annual PSC as less
| stressful than semiannual PSC. But even there, some
| people might not.
|
| And there is a point where more frequent is very clearly
| less stressful. If you did PSC once a week, it wouldn't
| be cause for stress, it would just be something you did
| every week.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| What about, you know... _zero_ "PSC"? Sounds like the
| type of shit a company does when it builds a culture of
| mistrusting its own employees.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| No performance reviews, ever?
| TomVDB wrote:
| That's de facto my situation.
|
| After copy-and-pasting the same answers year after year
| in the self evaluation form, my manager got the message.
| That was, what, 10 years ago?
|
| Now, once per year, we have a 20min meeting, he tells me
| "good job", gives my new salary and RSUs, and we're good.
|
| It's great.
| padolsey wrote:
| Performance Summary Cycle. From experience, the psc culture
| within fb/meta is intense, internally competitive (even
| within teams) and heavily focuses on quantifiable gains
| (e.g. often tech-debt or ethical-minded features are
| forgone for engagement metric increases ... via any means).
| It's not nice unless you're a very specific type of person.
| wiz21c wrote:
| If Zuckerberg finds it OK to talk like that to its
| employees, then it means the general culture there must
| be able to hear him. So you're right, very specific type
| of person. But I wonder : how would you describe that
| type ? the type "if I'm in Meta it's because I'm the best
| of the best and I want to continue to prove I'm the best
| of the best, at any cost" ?
| distrill wrote:
| i don't know about "at any cost", but i haven't heard
| anyone push back against the performance and feedback
| culture. my team just wants to get better.
|
| i have been really pleasantly surprised at how pervasive
| this mindset is among pretty much every one of my
| colleagues. it's something that i wanted at my previous
| jobs. i suppose it's not for everyone but it's been
| working for the small sample of people i know.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Amazonian?
|
| I don't know if you can graft that onto a company,
| though. Amazon's like that because Bezos is. It seems
| like Facebook/Meta is more like playing fast and loose
| and damn the consequences, which isn't exactly the same
| thing. Being the best is not the same as winning, though
| neither of 'em are necessarily nice at the highest levels
| of performance.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > But I wonder : how would you describe that type ?
|
| At first blush, someone that thinks they can _game_ that
| kind of system.
|
| So: unlock a bunch of achievements (I don't care about
| tech debt do u?), try to diminish the contributions of
| coworkers, cash out when you win and then head off to the
| next company.
| pilgr wrote:
| So well said! Absolutely, totally reflects my own
| experience.
| matwood wrote:
| > Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the
| company who shouldn't be here
|
| He's probably not wrong though. People are routinely amazed
| just how many people these large companies employ. Big company
| culture often slips into not what is delivered, but how many
| people does a manager have under them.
|
| In the past, successful companies have used economic downturns
| as a way to reset this culture.
| tarsinge wrote:
| > turning up the heat
|
| Well that was long due:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2013/mar/11...
| rsynnott wrote:
| 15 degrees!
|
| Presumably only where legally permitted. For instance,
| Ireland:
|
| > for sedentary office work, a minimum temperature of 17.5deg
| C, so far as is reasonably practicable, is achieved and
| maintained at every workstation after the first hour's work.
| [deleted]
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| > "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of Zuckerbergs at
| the company who shouldn't be here," people said.
|
| There, fixed it.
| LegitShady wrote:
| hasn't meta been hiring like crazy?
| graedus wrote:
| From the article: "Zuckerberg indicated that Meta plans to slow
| its hiring plans for engineers by at least 30% this year -
| adding roughly 6,000 or 7,000 workers rather than the 10,000 it
| initially expected to hire."
|
| So yes, still hiring quite a lot of people, just fewer than
| originally planned.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| I think this is a pretty good way to do layoffs because it gives
| people more agency over whether they get laid off and more runway
| to make contingency plans
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| projektfu wrote:
| The elves leave Middle Earth.
|
| https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
| lljk_kennedy wrote:
| I think this could be construed as grounds for constructive
| dismissal for their Irish operations at least.
|
| https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemploymen...
| googlryas wrote:
| I read the article, but I will choose to take the headline
| literally.
|
| Since men on average prefer a colder work environment than women,
| I wonder if this will lead to a disproportionate number of males
| leaving the workplace, improving their male:female ratio?
| OnionBlender wrote:
| I know you're joking but I've always hated how cold the office
| is. I would often get a mug of hot water just to warm my hands.
| I've seen female co-workers wearing those fingerless gloves or
| wearing their winter coat because of how cold they were.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| What I find interesting so far about these hiring freezes &
| layoffs is that at the moment it's been quite diffuse. All the
| announcements have been about how the companies will shrink head
| count and costs etc. But so far there haven't really been the
| focused sweeping announcements you would expect.
|
| When a company really hits hard times you expect them to be much
| more deliberate about how they cut, they start making decisions
| about which businesses do they really want to be in and how much
| do they want to spend. Facebook is a great example of this. You
| take a look at the business and say "What's the core business"
| it's ad-supported social media, you look at the focus and spend
| and it's this weird hardware platform that's a big bet and
| probably a long way off and not really connected to the core
| business. Facebook has _completely_ lost focus on its core
| business. So this focus on efficiency seems just silly. A lot of
| these cuts seem entirely driven by some meme about the economy
| rather than actual real market pressure. When real headwinds
| start to hit, the cutting is going to be far more about focus and
| direction than on this vague idea of being lean. It doesn 't
| matter how lean you are while designing a headset, because you're
| running a social media site.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| I disagree. They didn't lose focus. Their new focus is VR. They
| anticipate it's going to be much bigger growth engine for them
| in the next decades, while the current core business is slowing
| down. Maybe their mistake is that they are too aggressive with
| the VR spending. There are many examples of companies that had
| a great core business that was gradually slowing down and new
| companies came and ate their lunch. Meta is trying to prevent
| that by being the leader in a completely new space. It's a bet
| that is going to be either a huge win or fail.
| thrown321 wrote:
| Mark indicated that WhatsApp was next for growth/monetization
| and then VR, when he last appeared on CNBC's Mad Money.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| VR isn't like digital cameras destroying film, it's a
| completely different business. It'd be like Netflix deciding
| their video streaming business has peaked so they're going to
| hire 10,000 new engineers to work on a new wind turbine
| business.
|
| I agree with you they are focused on VR, but where I disagree
| is that they _are_ a social media company. They 're not
| focused on what their company actually does. It's kind of an
| obvious point that maybe the reason their core business is
| slowing down is because the head of the company decided to
| stop working on it. At some point it's going to become
| obvious that if you spun off the Facebook part of Meta it
| would have a significantly larger market cap than Meta has.
| htrp wrote:
| netflix did make that transition from mail to online
| streaming (albeit badly at first)
| tinyhouse wrote:
| I don't think it's a problem that VR is a completely new
| business. (It has a social aspect to it but it's not
| relevant to the discussion). I do agree that a better model
| would be the Amazon one. Amazon grew a completely new
| business (AWS) that had nothing to do with its core
| business (retail) but didn't lose focus on its core
| business and managed to grow both at the same time.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| But when AWS started with s3 the stakes were small and
| they already had the technology. It was a natural, low
| stakes attempt to diversify. They didn't bet the farm on
| AWS it just kinda happened organically. At least that is
| my assumption, I could be wrong.
|
| FB is betting the farm on a completely new technology
| with almost no user validation or product market fit.
| It's incredibly higher risk than Amazon expanding into
| AWS.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| I agree Amazon's approach was better. But I wouldn't say
| that FB is getting on something completely new without
| product market fit. They acquired Oculus in 2014, so they
| have almost a decade of experience with the technology.
| Also their VR headsets are very popular and have high
| demand. The problem is that they didn't figure out a way
| to monetize yet and it's far from mainstream. The main
| use case is still video games, far from the social vision
| Zuck has. I have a Quest and I like it, but even for
| video games if I had to pick one console, the Quest
| wouldn't be in my top 3 choices. I hope they succeed and
| I think it's not fair to judge them so early.
| _rutinerad wrote:
| That's a poor comparison. Amazon spun off a cost center
| into a separate business, so that they could make a
| profit on infrastructure they already had to have for
| their core business. So even with zero customers "AWS"
| would still have to exist in some form for Amazon's core
| business to function. That is completely different
| relationship than Meta's core business and their VR
| initiatives.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| You're partly correct. Their VR tech is not "new". Oculus was a
| masterstroke of an acquisition and arguably has technology
| that's years ahead of anyone else out there.
|
| Eye, finger tracking, touch haptics, variable focus, incredible
| performance optimized rendering, you name it. The tech talk
| given by John Carmack , that he went on stage and just winged
| without slides is one of the highest density talks i've heard:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti_3SqavXjk
|
| It would have been their iPhone moment, but Zucccc bungled it
| with his hateful pursuit of Apples perceived slow walking of
| their App review. That enmity concluded with the App Tracking
| Transparency move, without which, we would have been still
| seeing record breaking ad numbers today.
| zuhayeer wrote:
| It's interesting because slashing hiring plans at a big company
| is almost akin to a full fledged layoff at a later stage private
| company. Simply because of attrition levels at these large
| companies, just stop hiring and stay put for a while and you've
| trimmed size. Way different for a startup where people are
| sticking around for a payday.
| gundmc wrote:
| When the economy turns south the attrition rates go WAY down.
| If things are truly bad, no one wants to leave a stable and
| secure gig.
| aetherson wrote:
| Yeah, I think this is part of the great relearning that we're
| going into after a decade plus of bull markets: if the job
| market isn't hot, you can just... Not leave your job after
| two years.
| danuker wrote:
| This merely selects for sociopaths. A person affected by other
| people's demands (i.e. manager yelling at them harder) will quit
| first.
|
| But that is completely orthogonal to skill or value provided.
| DogLover_ wrote:
| It is hard for me to understand that big successful companies can
| hire so aggressively and then in time of a little economic
| downturn they need to cut people. From the outside, it looks like
| FOMO on a bigger scale and that just seems unprofessional.
| [deleted]
| bilsbie wrote:
| akhmatova wrote:
| Empty spaces, what are we living for? Abandoned places, I
| guess we know the score, on and on Does anybody know what
| we are looking for? Another hero, another mindless crime
| Behind the curtain, in the pantomime Hold the line
| Does anybody want to take it anymore? The show must
| go on The show must go on, yeah Inside my heart
| is breaking My makeup may be flaking But my
| smile, still, stays on
| tinyhouse wrote:
| I don't understand why Meta gets so much hate here. I do
| understand the Facebook/Instagram hate. The only good thing left
| on Facebook is the groups. But as a tech crowd we should be more
| appreciative seeing a huge tech company risking everything in
| order to innovate in an exciting space such as VR. Don't get me
| wrong, I think the whole Metaverse story the way Zuck's tells it
| is pretty stupid, but there are many VR use cases I'm very
| excited about. A different CEO would just try to keep milking the
| Facebook/Instagram cow. But Zuck is much more bold.
|
| Now back to the post. The problem is that Meta is one of the
| highest paying companies. But being such a big company with far
| than optimal hiring process, you get a lot of bad apples in (or
| even good apples that just don't fit in), which leads to being
| inefficient and wasteful. You end up with many people making a
| killing but who are "resting and vesting" or even worse, having
| negative impact. They don't have an incentive to leave cause no
| one is going to pay them as much or more.
| olivermarks wrote:
| Reminds me of Yahoo! at their great obsolescence tipping point
| when they were sunsetted to be replaced by Facebook. Zuckerberg
| has huge spread in Hawaii just like Yahoo! founder Yang did...the
| chuckling Marissa Meyer, cutbacks... 'lean in' Sandberg facing a
| host of legal issues.. it's like the same script again. Wonder
| what the new Yabook! will look like post recession...
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Blood in the water. Might be a good time to start a new social
| network. A simple blue interface that doesn't have all of the
| clutter and noise of Mybook. We can launch at universities
| first, invite-only.
| olivermarks wrote:
| Look for a big FB data breach when the shiny new next gen
| platform is ready so everyone will migrate
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches
|
| and idiotic c suite parties during mass layoffs and cutbacks
| https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-
| blow...
| closedloop129 wrote:
| How come students don't do this every other year? What's
| Facebook's lock-in that each generation of students cannot
| monetize their own social graph?
| Dan_Sylveste wrote:
| >What's Facebook's lock-in that each generation of students
| cannot monetize their own social graph?
|
| Universities and schools using Facebook as their de-facto
| platform for group announcements, it seems.
| maneesh wrote:
| We could call it themybook.com
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| Years ago someone introduced me to FaceBook and found it so
| ridiculous that I called it FarceBook.
|
| I don't know why many people don't see that you can draw a
| straight line from FarceBook --> Trump --> Roe Overturned
|
| Baffles me why some (seemingly) smart (ML) people still
| work there, including a certain Turing award winner. Ah
| yes...must be the money.
| xtracto wrote:
| Whatever comes to replace Facebook I really hope it is a
| distributed system that doesn't have a single unique owner.
| And that monetization is not done through advertising.
|
| The problem with Friendster, MySpace and then Facebook was
| their centralized nature. It sucks to produce/place your
| content in a place you have to pay for.
| the_biot wrote:
| That's been done, it's exactly what Mastodon is. It hasn't
| made a dent in anything.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Whatsapp?
| tuckerman wrote:
| I think we do a disservice to ourselves and the open culture at
| many SV companies to give leakers so much attention.
|
| Without context (which when speaking to a company can also
| include context you can only get by working there and
| experiencing the culture/norms) it's possible to pull out clips
| from most speeches/announcements to excite anger from just about
| anyone and many media outlets seem very happy to help leakers do
| just that.
| TomVDB wrote:
| Why a disservice? It's the contrary.
|
| Thanks to those kinds of leaks, I had already decided I'd never
| want to work for that place.
|
| When a good friend started working there, he confirmed pretty
| much everything.
| tuckerman wrote:
| It's fun and juicy to read leaks from other companies but it
| really sucks when your leadership stops being open or stops
| taking questions in all hands meetings because everything
| they say immediately gets posted on Twitter.
|
| Just because you'd like to know the information about the on-
| goings of a company doesn't make you entitled to it and I
| wish large companies would collectively do more to go after
| leakers in court to stop this trend.
| juve1996 wrote:
| > I wish large companies would collectively do more to go
| after leakers in court to stop this trend.
|
| "Don't talk or we'll ruin your life financially."
|
| Whistleblowers have a hard enough time in this day and age.
| I hope more do this - corporations dominate enough of our
| lives.
| tuckerman wrote:
| There is a very specific meaning of whistleblowing and
| giving every leaker that title does a disservice to those
| that are actual whistleblowers.
| juve1996 wrote:
| I don't see how this doesn't fit the meaning - providing
| info of something that can severely damage many people's
| livelihoods.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Absolutely comical.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| On the bright side, the Facebook recruiters have stopped bugging
| me.
| jstx1 wrote:
| Which makes me think - what are FB recruiters doing right now
| if the company isn't hiring and has no plans to start? Are many
| of them laid off too? If not, are they just... chilling?
| [deleted]
| ra7 wrote:
| Friend is a FB recruiter (who's quitting soon). They are not
| laid off (yet), they're just chilling with zero work for the
| past couple of months.
| kibibyte wrote:
| Having seen a similar situation over 5 years ago play out,
| some of them (including many of their best recruiters) will
| go elsewhere because they have no work to do. Some others, of
| course, will become redundant. Although Meta has the
| advantage of name recognition, this kind of attrition can
| mess up hiring pipelines for a while and make it difficult to
| ramp up hiring in the future, which can make it difficult to
| attract the talent they really want.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Having seen a similar situation over 5 years ago play
| out, some of them (including many of their best recruiters)
| will go elsewhere because they have no work to do.
|
| For an internal recruiter, what share of compensation is
| baseline salary and what share is bonuses from successful
| hires?
| coldcode wrote:
| For years I got those emails all the time. If I had printed
| them out they would have made great fire starters. I could not
| ever imagine working for FB even though they paid a lot at the
| time.
| [deleted]
| jossclimb wrote:
| > "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the
| company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said.
|
| > "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 decide that this place
| isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me," he said."
|
| Incredibly stupid on the face of it. Considering a good many
| talented engineers suffer with imposter syndrome and perhaps
| self-esteem issues (the past two years has not been easy on many
| of us), this will not only have your poor performers flying out
| the door, but a lot of your engineering talent as well (who a lot
| of companies will make a 'hiring exception' for).
|
| Any sort of doom casting / or "rally or else" action from a CEO
| is never going to play out well. You will just spook folks at all
| levels of performance and degrade morale.
|
| I can't honestly say I will grieve a world without meta though,
| they played a good part in degrading democracy in my country. I
| would not swap my life with a Zuckerberg / Musk for any amount of
| money.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| Precisely. Also, he realized this . . NOW ? What an asshole. He
| directly would have been involved in setting and approving
| those hiring plans.
|
| It's on him if his strategy was so wrong.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Yes, certainly not good for morale. Meta isn't a company where
| you can cruise ("move fast" and high turner over contribute to
| this). Also, many "talents" (esp. those recruited in the last
| year) are considering quitting because of the drop in Meta
| stock.
| leobueno wrote:
| There's no chance this will work for them when their stock is
| crashing and there's no growth. High performing employees already
| have incentive to leave and get new stock grants elsewhere, they
| will leave at a higher rate now.
| intodameta wrote:
| This is going to get super ugly over there. Sheryl Sandberg
| leaving was a part of this, the entire "oh, we have this pending
| investigation into you...no big deal" is the corporate equivalent
| of the claws coming out just a little bit to tell you that if you
| don't quit, the claws will come out all the way. She was
| expensive and probably not fully engaged and bought in with this
| random direction change into Metaverse, a business which won't
| exist for another five years, realistically.
|
| This is classic managed decline. They have real problems.
|
| I went through something similar at a past employer. Best people
| left almost instantly. Followed by a steady drain. Then
| eventually the garbage got thrown out the back forcefully (people
| who couldn't get out, we're lucky to escape the purge or didn't
| get the memo that they needed to leave months ago).
|
| The reality is that Meta probably doesn't need the best people to
| run what they have, it's mostly figured out. The entire metaverse
| business is a giant open ended R&D spend to fool gullible pension
| funds and investors into not selling their stock. Building a
| TikTok clone by copying features won't be that hard and doesn't
| need 10,000 engineers.
|
| They really are going to be forced to acquire companies to gain
| any real traction in metaverse. Very unlikely they come up with
| what they need in house.
|
| Unload the ship, sabe capital, try to buy up tons of companies at
| the bottom at good prices to recap the talent, have some high
| skill team build the TikTok thing, keep a skeleton crew running
| the FB app.
|
| Will just be horrible. The tone of what he just said is going to
| green light everyone eating eachother alive.
|
| I wouldn't want to be a ceo because you have to do things like
| this. No. Thanks.
| cokeandpepsi wrote:
| The 'metaverse' play just feels weird to me, kudos to them if
| it works out though
| papito wrote:
| Have you been to the metaverse? It's atrocious. 3G graphics
| from 1996, no real interactivity, nothing to do just "walk
| around". It's a thing that was stitched together by a bunch
| of people who clearly do not believe in any of it. Just the
| bare minimum to collect the fat FB paycheck and options.
| xtracto wrote:
| Can I ask a genuine question (I'm 40 years old so please
| bear with me): What the heck is the "Meteaverse"? Is it an
| app/game that Facebook implemented similar to "Second
| Life"? is it something like Fortnite? Those have been for
| quite some time... shit, I was playing Unreal Tournament
| online decades ago. Eve online players have been having
| full financial/belic/development online interactions also
| for decades.
|
| What's the "innovative" thing about this "Metaverse"? is it
| the 3D headset thing? Does that work for people who have
| strong astigmatism in one or two eyes (3D films sucked for
| me because given the difference in my eyesight on each eye,
| I never saw the 3D effect).
| papito wrote:
| Well, that's it. I have never met anyone who bragged
| about owning a unique car in GTA. Literally no one cares.
| Why I would want to pay hundreds of dollars for virtual
| Nike sneakers is beyond me.
| buzzert wrote:
| I don't think the future of the metaverse will have
| anything to do with 3D actually. The 3D/VR stuff is more
| of a fad than a long term plan.
|
| The real vision behind the metaverse is thinking that
| many of the things we currently do in person (i.e.,
| concerts, going to bars, school, work, etc.) will
| eventually move online. Meta wants to position themselves
| as the "platform" for this.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Facebook the brand isn't just poison, it's an pandemic killer
| virus on any other markets.
|
| Instagram will be a bad joke soon, worse than facebook. Will
| anyone want their most superficial and narcissitic period of
| their lives remembered? Nope, it'll get chucked out when their
| audience grows up. Which is right about..... now.
|
| Metaverse? Who would want Zuckerberg and his sociopathy
| associated with a virtual world? Other companies will do it
| better and with more trust.
|
| Facebook is old news. It's the FoxNews of FAANG.
| elforce002 wrote:
| Facebook as a platform is for old people. Gen Z is on TikTok
| and Snap. Late millennials (28-36) are on Instagram and
| moving to TikTok.
|
| Facebook still has relevance outside the US but TikTok is
| gaining momentum. The reality is that the fb era is starting
| to sunset.
|
| IG is becoming the Frankenstein Monster, copying features
| from other platforms trying to stay relevant.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| The best part is, if you quit now it's an implicit admission you
| were one of the ones who "shouldn't be here". It's a really
| wonderful set of incentives. Great job, Mark.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Hardly.
|
| Top talent is first to leave as a firm's fortunes turn.
|
| (FB's fortunes turned a while ago.)
| Peritract wrote:
| > Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the
| company who shouldn't be here
|
| If a company has both
|
| 1) A lot of dead wood
|
| 2) No better strategy to deal with it than 'turning up the heat'
|
| Then this suggests a _profound_ failure of management and
| leadership. I 'd start cutting the dead wood there.
| justinbaker84 wrote:
| 100% Agree.
| refurb wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd blame management for not having a crystal ball
| and seeing the market downturn in advance.
|
| I can see them getting fired for not hitting their hiring and
| spending targets when the company has aggressive expansion
| goals.
|
| And the idea you can hire thousands of people and exclude all
| potential deadwood is just fantasy.
| mlyle wrote:
| But you could, you know, actually measure performance and
| manage according to it.
|
| I'm not saying self-selection shouldn't be a part of it. Some
| employees should absolutely be thinking, "eh, I might be
| managed-out eventually for underperformance because I am not
| a great fit here... and I don't know that I can fix it or
| that it's worth fixing it" and depart on their own.
|
| But it should absolutely be because management quality is
| good and everyone understands the process and what's going
| on. Not because the workplace has been made artificially
| unpleasant to see who quits: that makes the wrong people
| leave.
| robonerd wrote:
| 3) They see fit to announce point 2 plainly, instead of simply
| doing it without saying that's what they're doing.
|
| I guess announcing it is part of the "turn up the heat"
| process?
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| [deleted]
| IAmWorried wrote:
| Eh, sounds like most of big tech TBH. When you're dealing with
| a money faucet situation it can be tough to tell what's a good
| decision and what's a bad decision since either choice will
| result in increased profits. That is, until the fed crashes the
| party.
| [deleted]
| blantonl wrote:
| I would suggest that you interpreted Mark's statement that
| "there are probably a bunch of people at the company who
| shouldn't be here" without considering it in the context of the
| other statement: _he warned that a recent slump in the markets
| "might be one of the worst downturns that we've seen in recent
| history_
|
| He and his team is doing exactly what public company management
| is supposed to do during challenging times, provide better
| shareholder value.
|
| The only real other strategy in cases like we're seeing is to
| just pull an IBM and fire 45,000 people in one week.
|
| Which strategy would you prefer?
| ironlake wrote:
| >Which strategy would you prefer?
|
| They actually teach this in business school. Laying off
| bunches of people triggers regulatory compliance which can
| limit hiring and other stuff. Announcing layoffs without
| actually doing them causes the best to leave, the expert
| strap-hangers to entrench, and the people in the middle to
| become less focused.
|
| The accepted strategy is to cut as deeply as you need to cut
| to get through the downturn, then get back to business. Do it
| fast, do it deep, do it once.
|
| Zuck chose to turn the workplace into a low-stakes Hunger
| Games.
|
| No one needs another reason to dislike Facebook, but Zuck
| gave us another one.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| If a company is collecting a lot of "dead wood"
| underperformers, the correct response is to start raising
| performance expectations and hold people accountable to those
| standards.
|
| That's essentially what Meta is saying they're going to do. The
| "...so employees will quit" was an editorialized addition to
| the headline. The real story is that they're tightening their
| employee expectations and holding people accountable, which IMO
| is a totally reasonable thing to do. HN comments are always
| full of people claiming that FAANG employees are nothing
| special, so I'm a bit surprised to see the negative reaction to
| a FAANG company going on record to say that they're raising
| expectations for their employees.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| dnissley wrote:
| It's not just about new employees though. The pandemic
| shifted people's priorities, but many are still clinging to
| a job that doesn't fit those new priorities.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| What a brilliant argument. Can you cite anything . .just
| anything at all to back up your premise or are you just
| going to present that as fact?
|
| App Tracking Transparency was the primary reason for the
| ad behemoth to slow down leading to the domino effects
| we're seeing here, but clearly , in your mind, there's an
| alternate set of facts running.
| [deleted]
| rad88 wrote:
| > 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 decide that
| this place isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with
| me.
|
| That it's so employees will quit is the truth of the matter.
| We shouldn't assume that this is to target "dead wood
| underperformers". Facebook has a ridiculous performance
| review scheme that, whatever else it does, is effective at
| firing people.
|
| They already push people out to sea as a matter of course --
| what's happening now is that the economic outlook is
| unfavorable, and they need people, including decent
| employees, to quit. They declared a hiring freeze and have
| announced a policy of attrition. These are normal things that
| happen during a downturn. It shouldn't be framed as somehow
| making their workforce more excellent, or as if the people
| who'll lose their job were "dead wood" anyway. The economy is
| going to put a lot of people out of work this year, of all
| sorts.
| nabilhat wrote:
| It's more of a summary:
|
| > _" 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 decide that
| this place isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with
| me," he said._
|
| Some in leadership view cost of risk of employees who quit as
| being cheaper than employees who are fired, or if they're
| narcissistic enough that "the most loyal" employees will
| stick it out. It's normally common sense that this kind of
| strategy is kept very far away from anything that might come
| up in discovery if there's legal pushback. Zuckerberg saying
| this to _Reuters_ in an interview requires a depth of
| innocent cluelessness that suggests he 's insulated himself
| from critical feedback. This statement is going to be
| referenced by employees who feel the need to pursue recourse
| for perceived constructive dismissal.
| downrightmike wrote:
| They also hire people so they don't go work for the
| competition. There are bound to be a ton of people with
| bullshit jobs just checking in for the paycheck.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > Then this suggests a profound failure of management and
| leadership.
|
| Dead wood management?
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Deadwood management sounds like a great description.
| dnissley wrote:
| As a meta employee, here's my read: Zuck just wants folks to
| get back in gear after being somewhat (justifiably) distracted
| over the past 2 years.
|
| To be honest I see where he's coming from. I heard about and
| read a lot about the company culture before I joined, both good
| and bad. I thought at minimum I was signing up for a certain
| level of intensity that definitely seems to be lacking.
| Veuxdo wrote:
| But, by any sane measure of the US, things are worse and are
| getting worse.
| s17n wrote:
| Every sufficiently large company has a lot of dead wood, and
| nobody has yet devised a better strategy than 'turning up the
| heat'.
| corrral wrote:
| Does this not have the side effect of also driving away
| employees with the best alternatives (so, probably your best
| ones)?
| nkrisc wrote:
| The worst performers know they can't get an equivalent job
| somewhere else, so they're going to cling on no matter how
| miserable you make it. They have no choice. Your best
| performers know they have their pick of any job they like
| so it anything gets worse for them they'll just go
| somewhere else.
| thenightcrawler wrote:
| The key for this to work is that you need to give everybody
| big raises so the best want to stay when the heat gets
| tough (like sterotypical ibanking)
| kennywinker wrote:
| That's implying the best people choose the best pay, not
| the best work, 100% of the time. I quit my Big Tech job
| because the work sucked. There was no reasonable raise
| that would have kept me there, but turning DOWN the heat
| might have kept me there...
| adg001 wrote:
| Absolutely, employees leave bad managers, they seldom want
| to leave the employer itself - Or at least this was my
| personal experience, always on the run from dead woods.
| mcv wrote:
| Is it an effective strategy at all? I can imagine that
| turning up the heat without any benefits is just as likely to
| chase the most talented people away.
| huffmsa wrote:
| If it's just reviewing people at a higher standard, I don't
| see how that'll turn high performers away.
| IncRnd wrote:
| The stock value has dropped by over half and meta is
| preparing for a recession. Ad sales and user growth have
| already slowed.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I disagree, though it greatly depends on how "turning up
| the heat" is done.
|
| There is not a lot that is more demoralizing to top
| performers than to see dead wood continue to plot along and
| earn a sizable paycheck and produce little of value. And
| it's not even all solely an envy issue - it's also an issue
| of poor performers getting in the way and making other
| people's job more painful and inefficient.
|
| So a message of "we're going to start getting real about
| ensuring our high bar is met, and having hard conversations
| with people who consistently don't meet that bar" is
| something that some folks would look forward to.
|
| Of course, like I said, the devil is in the details, and if
| "turning up the heat" means we're going to have more time
| cops than yes, I think it would be demoralizing.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Citation needed. alternative strategies would include:
|
| Rewarding good employees and firing bad ones.
|
| Deciding on actual useful performance metrics ahead of time
| and measuring people against them.
| bricemo wrote:
| This is exactly what they are doing with one improvement:
| instead of firing, they are allowing attrition to happen
| naturally. That's better than layoffs
| kennywinker wrote:
| Why is that better?
|
| Making everybody suffer until some people leave because
| it's intolerable to them... that doesn't sound better to
| me.
| bricemo wrote:
| It's not "making people suffer". It is having high
| expectations for performance that A-players and teams can
| easily hit. If companies are going to survive during a
| crisis time when the whole world is facing headwinds,
| there is no margin for error, at FB or anywhere.
|
| Layoffs are always awful, they take jobs away from people
| without them having a say. They should always be a last
| resort.
| kennywinker wrote:
| End result is the same people without jobs. Raising
| expectations and making people quit has the side effect
| of those "low performers" leaving, some people easily
| hitting the expectations, and most people busting their
| ass to keep up. Sounds bad to me.
|
| I don't really see this as an extinction level downturn
| for fb. Time will tell, but I'd be shocked if this
| seriously threatened the company in any way except its
| share price.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| It seems unlikely to me that they'll turn up the pressure
| on the high performers. More likely they'll just raise
| the bar for what is considered adequate. The real pain
| will be having less people to do the work, but that
| happens with layoffs as well.
| tuckerman wrote:
| A very reasonable interpretation of turning up the heat is
| exactly to start doing a better job of holding people
| accountable to your already established ladder.
| kennywinker wrote:
| That would be a reasonable interpretation if the next
| words out of his mouth weren't
|
| "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more
| aggressive goals..."
| tuckerman wrote:
| First, I think goals and expectations are different. That
| said, it's possible to have intended to always be setting
| ambitious goals but look back and see that maybe you were
| unintentionally coasting. Fixing that problem isn't
| nefarious.
|
| I think reading into this any deeper is just succumbing
| to a leakers goal of finding sound bites which sound bad
| to get people all excited and angry.
| kennywinker wrote:
| You can word dance around it all you want - his intent is
| clear: working at meta is going to be harder tomorrow
| than it was yesterday, with the intent that some people
| will quit over it.
|
| How you feel about that depends on if you see yourself as
| more similar to an owner of meta, or as a worker at meta.
| tuckerman wrote:
| I've seen the pain low performers cause others around
| them as an IC and having the company try and fix that
| problem seems very reasonable. But who knows, for all we
| know this could just be rhetoric to inspire some
| initiative.
|
| Assuming people that don't support your strong gut
| reaction to this leak view themselves as "an owner of
| meta" is strange--my views here are very much colored by
| my experience as an IC at a similar company where I
| thought I'd be happier, as a worker, if we could do a
| better job at both managing low performers and firing
| leakers.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Why do you care, as a worker, about leakers and low
| performers? I understand being frustrated if people you
| work with are obstructionist, poor communicators, or have
| bad attitudes - but in my experience most of those people
| would be classified by the company as HIGH performers.
| The "low performers" are, in my experience, the most fun
| to work with.
| danielrpa wrote:
| What you say makes sense, but have in mind that it's not
| that easy to selectively fire employees (as opposed to mass
| layoffs) in big companies, at least in California. It's
| arguable whether it _should_ be easy to do that, but firing
| any employee - even with a very good reason - can open your
| company to a nasty lawsuit in many states. You can simply
| call it the cost of doing business, but big companies are
| scared to death of big labor lawsuits, especially class
| actions, as clever lawyers can often find _some_
| interesting pattern in the fired employees.
| hluska wrote:
| If I had one wish, it would be that we would all give up
| that rude "citation needed" trope. I agree with you, yet
| that's such a childish way to argue that it hurts the
| point. Just have the confidence to say you don't agree!
| kennywinker wrote:
| What I mean by that is more than "i don't agree" - it's
| "hey, it looks like you asserted an opinion as fact".
|
| I'm pretty sure all ways of saying that come off rude.
| Sometimes rudeness is irreducible, and I think this is
| one of those times. I like "citation needed" because to
| me it seems like a playful version of rude rather than a
| serious version of rude. Shrugging emoji
| synu wrote:
| How does this work well? Aren't the good people the first to
| leave if you decide to make everyone miserable?
| daok wrote:
| Yes, good people that know they can find something else
| will leave first. Those who stay are mostly very
| comfortable and well positioned that they know they far in
| the queue of layoff or those that know they cannot find
| something similarly well paid.
| aetherson wrote:
| It turns out that "increase expectations of delivery" is
| not synonymous with "make everyone miserable."
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Even if you can do this accurately the second order
| effects in terms of stress on the team, friends and
| colleagues getting kicked out and self doubt do make the
| job more miserable. The people that are nominally "safe"
| aren't some island of calm unaffected by their coworkers
| and culture shift that isn't. And I'd expect that the
| actual approach will end up being a far blunter
| instrument and make the situation adversarial.
| synu wrote:
| That's true, but at a company that size when the order
| comes all the way from the top to "turn up the heat?"
| Sounds like a recipe for misery generation.
| aetherson wrote:
| Where should the order come from?
|
| I'm agnostic about whether or not Facebook will implement
| this well. Certainly it's possible to implement these
| kinds of initiatives badly. But the whole HN attitude of
| "how dare you?!?" doesn't strike me as people who are
| taking an appropriately realistic view of the real
| problems in trying to make a large organization be high
| performing, it strikes me as entitlement.
|
| I also feel like Zuckerberg has had a fairly large amount
| of success building a highly performant organization in
| the past, and while that doesn't mean he hasn't lost
| touch or that FB hasn't gotten too big to do the same
| things with or whatever, this certainty that you see in
| these comment threads that he's just like tripping on his
| shoelaces and doing self-evidently idiotic things seems
| extremely overconfident.
| synu wrote:
| I think that building a high performance organisation
| starts way before you get to the point where you need an
| emergency leadership directive at the beginning of a
| downturn that from now on you're going to turn up the
| heat and hold people accountable for performance. If you
| are pulling that lever to some extent I think you have to
| admit you took a wrong turn somewhere.
| aetherson wrote:
| I dunno, maybe there was a wrong turn -- or maybe just
| you're responding to rapidly changing conditions.
|
| But if there was a wrong turn, and now you're error
| correcting, that still seems quite a bit different from,
| "Lol what does this doofus know, he's just an idiot."
| synu wrote:
| I don't recall having said anything like that.
| blantonl wrote:
| the good people are the ones that perform well in the
| kitchen when it gets hot.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Lol. Bullshit.
|
| The good ones know to get out when a company treats it's
| employees like shit. Just because they aren't the target
| today doesn't mean they won't be the target tomorrow. The
| idea that people should wear bad working conditions as a
| badge of honor is just silly and something I'd expect
| people (the good ones) to grow out of after a few years
| max in the industry.
| blantonl wrote:
| you know, there are economic times where it's tough to
| find a job in certain industries, no matter how awesome
| you are.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Just so I'm clear, your response to "good workers don't
| put up with that shit" is essentially "they will if they
| can't find a different/better job"? Cause that just
| sounds exploitative and scummy. I'm sure companies make
| those calculations but it doesn't make it right/moral.
|
| In a vacuum I can understand and empathise with your
| comment but as part of this chain (where you say "the
| good people are the ones that perform well in the kitchen
| when it gets hot.") I can't take it seriously. Which is
| it? Do the good people perform well (and enjoy) when it
| gets hot or are they held hostage by the economic times?
| blantonl wrote:
| It's probably a combination of both. After all, the
| answer to an equation typically has two or more values
| associated with it.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Never underestimate the power of a bored bureaucrat under
| pressure to keep his job.
| [deleted]
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| The good people are the ones who don't have to stay in a
| hot kitchen if they don't want to
|
| I wonder... will the people who hired deadwood get
| shafted, or will they consider how to improve their
| hiring process? (ha. ha. ha.)
| elteto wrote:
| Lol no. They go find nicer, cooler kitchens.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| They might.. for a little while, but eventually most
| people will just say 'meh' and head for greener pastures.
| A lot depends on the relationships and once the first
| link breaks, odds are, more people will follow the first
| 'defector'.
|
| It is really not that complicated. Few will put up with
| 'heat' if it gets to an annoying level; especially if
| they have other options.
| hluska wrote:
| There are many better strategies.
| mcculley wrote:
| Organizations that need good people will try to improve the
| ones they have. While some organizations have dead wood that
| cannot be improved and must be replaced, great organizations
| play the long game and try to develop people.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Because expecting managers to do their damn jobs would just
| be too hard?
|
| It wasn't the #1 reason but "dead wood" probably ranked 2 or
| 3 for why I left my last job and it was 100% the manager's
| fault. Had that company decided to "turn up the heat" I would
| have left even faster and I can promise you the "dead wood"
| would have stayed till the bitter end.
|
| I doubt the claim that no one has come up with a better
| strategy and I question the leadership abilities of anyone
| who thinks it's a good strategy.
| flashgordon wrote:
| I am not sure demonizing managers here is the fair thing
| (popular perhaps). Managers (I've had incompatible managers
| and have been one myself) don't operate in a vacuum.
| Managers jobs are very much guided/dictated by hr policies
| (atleast at big cos) down to the point of precise wording
| to avoid/use, strict "formulas" for comp and refreshers,
| tight flowcharts to set on tracking execution, planning
| processes etc. Not to mention just general organisational
| chaos with project cancellations and fielding requests from
| N different (indirect) bosses. There is a lot more risk
| than to justify the reward of going against the tide. Heck
| even tooling and templates for conducting 1/1s are getting
| more and more standardized and doing slightly different
| gets you in trouble.
|
| There are definitely incompetent managers just like there
| are incompetent engineers or lawyers or directors or
| leaders etc. A broad/general stroke - I am not sure is
| justified.
| robonerd wrote:
| Managers have personal priorities and interests that may
| not align with the interests of the company. e.g. company
| doesn't want dead weight, but the manager does for any
| number of reasons. Maybe the manager really likes those
| people on a personal level, or maybe the dead weight have
| dirt on the manager, or maybe the dead weight are kept
| around as sacrificial material should the manager ever be
| forced to make cuts, or maybe the incentive structure in
| the company rewards managers for having more reports, etc.
|
| So yes, expecting managers to put company interests before
| their own may actually be too hard.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Or, in my specific situation, my manager (and the manger
| above them) were terrible at handling intrapersonal
| conflicts. They would just ignore it until it went away
| and hating confronting anyone about anything. At least
| one of them also "liked" the "dead wood" in question or
| had at least worked with them for a long time. I
| understand all of that. But at the end of the day, it was
| bad managers. Even if you somehow manage to clear the
| "dead wood" (good luck, they hold on longer that
| performing members in my experience) you are still stuck
| with bad managers and you'll be right back in the same
| place in little time.
| tootie wrote:
| It's definitely indicative of immature leadership. Meta
| invested absolutely willy nilly in unprofitable moonshots and
| they're not the only ones. They could have held some cash, or
| paid down debt (fiscal, technical, organizational) and left
| themselves with cushion but they didn't. It seems like the
| other web 1.0 companies (Google, Apple, Amazon) are all
| weathering this downturn pretty comfortably.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| My roommate works at Meta and from how he describes the culture
| to me it seems quite intense and competitive already. I can't
| imagine what "turning up the heat" even more would imply.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| They'll force more people into the lower buckets of the stack
| rank. It's very dystopian in its simplicity.
| distrill wrote:
| there isn't really a stack rank, and they're pretty careful
| about not fitting performance into predetermined quota
| buckets. honestly i think attrition will get the numbers down
| fairly quickly, although unfortunately probably pretty evenly
| distributed among good and bad engineers.
| digbert wrote:
| > there isn't really a stack rank, and they're pretty
| careful about not fitting performance into predetermined
| quota buckets
|
| That's what I thought too, but then in my first PSC as a
| manager when I was there I was added to a spreadsheet
| called "<org name> stack rank", where we had to rank
| everyone rated as Meets All, because we were 3 people short
| of our quota for <= Meets Most
| psyc wrote:
| When I was there (Oculus) I would not have survived 2 weeks if
| I had not worked > 8 hours and gone in most weekends. I was on
| a small team whose pace was simply much faster than any job
| I've ever had. And everyone seemed to have had a more
| impressive career than I. Perhaps I'm who Mark is talking
| about! Microsoft was much more my speed.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Maybe I'm being totally naive, but what I want from FB is not
| better discoverability and metaverse, I want my friends to put
| their lives on it like they used to a few years ago. I don't even
| put anything on it myself anymore because of the smell around the
| company, and very few people I know do either, so my feed now
| looks like a bunch of memes and random news, with adverts in
| between.
|
| Engagement with a real human purpose seems like a better goal
| than just beating tiktok, but yes I'm just being an old man
| nostalgic for the old innocent days.
| earlyriser wrote:
| Engagement with a real human purpose is the focus of my app,
| ferris.app
|
| I'm not in FB anymore, but the old days were the best.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| It's not the smell of the company that has significantly
| reduced my usage. For me it's just the fact I cannot state any
| opinion at all because of the controversy it might cause. It's
| just not fun anymore. The stakes got to high.
|
| All FB is good for now is an occasional cat or kid post. And
| even the kid pictures I don't really feel comfortable with
| either because of the paper trail I would be leaving for my
| kid.
| boredtofears wrote:
| > I want my friends to put their lives on it like they used to
| a few years ago
|
| Really, you _want_ to go back to that? They don't have to
| regain your trust in any way?
|
| I don't think the "innocent" days were all that innocent, many
| were just naive.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| > They don't have to regain your trust in any way?
|
| I think you misread the comment you replied to.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| It's like you're describing FB having gone from Public
| Broadcasting Station to Home Shopping Network.
|
| That sounds about right. (And the internet in general is
| becoming more and more a string of commercials -- but don't let
| that comment keep you from getting off my lawn!)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Impersonal blasts are done, and ephemeral stories are still
| common but becoming less broadly viewable as well and maybe on
| the way out. Its all groupchats, that you're not in.
|
| 0 post instagram accounts are common in my circles, its still a
| fair assumption to assume they archived all their old photos as
| opposed to deleting them or never having any, but 0 post and
| story exclusive accounts (only create "stories" that are
| visible for 24 hours) are a fine way to interact. Just to be
| able to view your stories and send DMs. And many don't really
| engage with the stories, but maybe do more "close friends"
| stories that only a whitelisted group can see, even if the
| profile was already private.
|
| Its really more like hybrid of Snapchat and Tiktok now, and you
| need to make closer friends yourself. The network part about
| finding "people you met once" or "15 years ago" is done, people
| want more genuine connections right now, its going to leave
| lonely people in the dust if it hasn't already, but there are
| ways to take initiative yourself by adding a few people to your
| close friends list.
|
| This is how people are getting their engagement with real human
| beings, far better than status updates on a wall ever did. The
| latter would actually be a weird thing to me right now.
| akudha wrote:
| What I would like is to not hear about Meta (Zuck, Sheryl ...),
| at all. Even if they suddenly become the world's nicest/honest
| company overnight, it would not be enough. They've already
| caused irreversible damage, both in the U.S and abroad.
|
| Some things in life are too broken and can't be fixed. FB is
| one of these.
|
| Every time I hear their name, it is just a bad feeling
| garlicrouted wrote:
| Interesting.
| plantwallshoe wrote:
| I worked at Meta for 2 years and the pressure to land features
| while keeping up on your code review/LoC metrics was a fucking
| nightmare during the boom times.
|
| I can only imagine how shitty it will get with the specter of
| layoffs floating around
| ivraatiems wrote:
| Assuming LoC = lines of code... seriously? That's by far the
| dumbest metric for measuring software engineer productivity
| that exists.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Typical middle management bs. The best engineers even delete
| far more code than they write.
| plantwallshoe wrote:
| There is a graph of your submitted commits/LoC/code review
| comments over time, overlayed with the rest of your teams
| metrics.
|
| Managers will tell you that those metrics are not important
| to your performance review , but it is absolutely not true.
| They didn't make the graph so it can be ignored.
| pbalau wrote:
| Before I've left fb, early 2018, loc/code review did not
| matter. Around 2016, there was a push to switch to
| management from within the engs. This did not go that well.
| After, since the company kept growing and there was a real
| need to get more managers, they started hiring from
| outside. One of these outside hires become my manager and
| he was the reason I left. Code review used to be on the
| same axis as onboarding, office hours, that sort of thing.
| dboreham wrote:
| > LoC metrics
|
| See: Goodhart's Law
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Yeah, I know some people that worked for meta and they called
| it the most psychologically damaging environment they've ever
| worked in. And they were all originally game devs.
|
| One went back to game dev, one decided to retire early, and the
| other went to Google.
| plantwallshoe wrote:
| Meta is very skilled at hiring smart, motivated, hard working
| people - then creating a perverse system of carrots and
| sticks to get those people to push themselves as hard as they
| can.
|
| I think the only thing that really bothers me about this is
| that it's all for the purpose of increasing engagement with
| Reels or selling digital tshirts in the metaverse.
|
| If a company like Meta had 40,000 smart, highly motived
| people working themselves to death for the sake of solving
| climate change or homelessness, what a fucking world we might
| live in.
| rglover wrote:
| So in other words they don't have the slightest clue what
| they're doing.
| bagels wrote:
| Add on top of that huge pay cuts, Meta stock is down 50%.
| Doesn't sound pleasant.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Talking about "turning up the heat" at FB and using this kind of
| language is fairly odd to me while at the same time Google is
| actively reforming their perf and promo process in a way that
| seems (at least to me, newly on the outside) to be kind of the
| opposite of this and a response to internal frustration, and lots
| of attrition.
|
| I don't know, maybe we'll see a similar thing happen at Google
| over the next few months. But not right now, at least not what
| I'm hearing.
| stathibus wrote:
| What's going on at Google is mostly orthogonal in my view. They
| are slimming down the process, not lowering performance
| expectations.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| From what I'm hearing it sounds overall positive and giving
| managers and teams more discretion for promo at the lower
| levels?
|
| I personally stayed at L4 for my entire 10 years because the
| whole idea of going through that process was repulsive to me
| and everything I worked on kept getting cancelled or shifted
| around and I didn't have the personality to go peeing on
| metaphorical firehydrants to make them "mine" enough to claim
| what they said I needed for L5. But I had plenty of managers
| who would have gone to bat for me in this new process, I
| suspect. But I quit just a few months before they rolled this
| out.
| 31835843 wrote:
| People who work at FAANG calibre companies are professionals,
| perfectly capable of finding new positions that suit their skills
| and level of commitment. I think it's infantilizing to take the
| CEO's comments and imply that those employees are being
| mistreated.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Now we are entering what I like to call the "pauper CEO" phase of
| the economic cycle. When leadership turns out their pockets and
| "socializes the losses" as it were.
|
| Generally even if you work for a company that is unaffected by
| the current economic climate, it will be used as a justification
| for low raises and higher expectations at work. With high
| inflation happening at the same time, we are entering a bad time
| to grow your career or get promoted.
|
| For me, I found a role that reduced my overtime and is relatively
| easy. I wouldn't want to get promoted now if it meant a increase
| in responsibility as the rewards are unlikely to even surpass
| inflation by a meaningful amount. This will suck for people
| without established careers of course, I was in that position in
| 2008 and the slow economic recovery had me working for very low
| salaries up until a few years ago.
|
| They only get away with this beacuse most workers don't or can't
| respond to the incentives they have laid out here. Firms are
| shouting at us "I don't have the ability to reward you for your
| effort!", I suggest you listen before working all that hard.
| dan_quixote wrote:
| Yeah, we finally entered a phase where employees had some
| leverage and it quickly turned into an economic liability (high
| inflation). I'm more convinced that organized labor is the only
| answer as the years go by.
| anm89 wrote:
| Damn it's enjoyable to watch them crash and burn.
| rvz wrote:
| I know, the diversity and inclusion executives and talking
| heads at Netflix, Twitter, Tesla, Fast, etc are always the
| first to leave and it is hilarious to see them get the axe.
|
| When you see tons of companies (mostly unprofitable companies)
| cut useless positions that add zero value to the company it is
| a great thing for them to next time watch their balance sheet
| and make money. Lots of schadenfreude there.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| just like your 401k?
| anm89 wrote:
| My only positions have been short the market(psq) cash and
| gold since November of last year.
|
| Which is part of the reason that this is extremely enjoyable
| for me.
| mellavora wrote:
| So "buy on the dips", but buying psq. Nice !
| [deleted]
| jossclimb wrote:
| A 401k has a very high chance of returning to growth, as and
| when the market recovers (which it will at some point,
| although no one knows when of course, but it will
| eventually). The same being true for meta is much less
| certain.
| rrrhys wrote:
| Worth it.
| jsemrau wrote:
| If you would have invested in 2017, you would be exactly in the
| same spot now after 4+ years.
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