[HN Gopher] Former Meta staffer reveals she had to 'fight for work'
___________________________________________________________________
Former Meta staffer reveals she had to 'fight for work'
Author : sgerenser
Score : 92 points
Date : 2023-03-16 20:01 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fortune.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fortune.com)
| gardenhedge wrote:
| [flagged]
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The concept of FAANG hoarding workers to deprive competitors of
| talent is an idea that has been bandied about on HN for quite
| some time. Finally, some solid substantiation of this practice.
| 4674yryfhf wrote:
| It doesn't really sound like she was hired to hoard talent
| though. From the article it sounds like she was hired as a
| diversity token. She probably wasn't put on anything
| significant because if you put a token on something valuable
| and they're lackluster you can't fire them without losing your
| token which means you're stuck with them dragging the project
| down. Nothing-work was a safe middle ground that solved the
| dillema.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| I don't think so. She describes her experience of not getting
| any work, but she merely speculates that she was hired so other
| companies couldn't have here. This isn't any more solid that
| any speculation on this subject on HN.
| spaced-out wrote:
| You really think Meta hired this recruiter as part of some plan
| to keep smaller companies from being able to hire recruiters?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| She mentions other employees experiencing the same. Perhaps
| this is the first whistleblower who will pave the way for
| more corroborating with their own respective stories.
| bradlys wrote:
| She also sounds a bit like a clout goblin from just what
| I've seen. Clout goblins are infamously known for - you'll
| be surprised to hear this - making shit up.
| subsubzero wrote:
| +1, I am really glad to see actual proof of this anti-
| competitive practice. The sole purpose of which is to "starve"
| out smaller competitors and startups of talent so there is less
| competition for meta and other larger incumbents. My guess is
| here is wall street forced Zuck's hand to offload this excess
| headcount by driving the stock down, but given FB's share
| structure(Zuckerberg has almost complete control over the
| company due to his share structure ownership) he could have
| kept along his pre-2022 path without much consequence except a
| battered share price.
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| Yes. Meta is on a mission to starve startups and smaller
| competitors from people who do DEI work. What would
| competitor do without diverse talent in recruiting?
|
| >Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta's Sourcer
| Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers
| from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology
| recruiting industry.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| I am skeptical this proved that Meta hires to starve other
| companies of talent. This all that the person said:
|
| > it kind of seemed that Meta was hiring people so that other
| companies couldn't have us and they were just hoarding us
| like Pokemon cards
|
| Sounds like it was just speculation
| dilyevsky wrote:
| I don't think it's necessarily a master plan it's just an
| emergent property of these highly successful monopolistic
| megacorps
| umeshunni wrote:
| This person was a DEI hire:
|
| > Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta's Sourcer
| Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from
| underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology
| recruiting industry.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| deanCommie wrote:
| > "Everyone else that I worked with got to work on stuff but I
| didn't. So I am one of those employees that was hired into a
| really strange position where they immediately put me into a
| group of individuals that was not working.
|
| > "I mean, like, we were just sitting there. We had to basically
| fight to find work. It was a very strange environment and it kind
| of seemed that Meta was hiring people so that other companies
| couldn't have us and they were just hoarding us like Pokemon
| cards."
|
| People claim they want autonomy, they accept a position at a
| company that famously has a bottoms-up hacker ethos.
|
| Then they complain that they weren't immediately "assigned" work
| on Day 1.
|
| WTF.
| bumby wrote:
| I think this depends on the seniority of the hire. A junior
| employee needs more mentoring and "assigning" under they get
| enough contextual understanding to know what's important and
| what isn't. Someone brand-new to an organization isn't likely
| to understand what problems their time is best spent on
| solving.
| politician wrote:
| Is there any justifiable explanation for this hiring strategy?
| "Keep us from working for others" seems like flawed reasoning. If
| they went to work for others, then wage pressure should drop, but
| by hoarding developers on fake projects wage pressure increases.
| A strategy that raises median wages doesn't seem like it would
| come from a FAANG.
| Clubber wrote:
| _Before the NCAA started limiting scholarships in 1973, teams
| could stock up on workhorses -- Bear Bryant 's Alabama teams
| would bring in blue-chippers by the shipload, not so his Tide
| could use them, so other schools couldn't._
|
| It's been done before. If Google hired the guys who made
| ChatGPT and put them on production support or anything, they
| wouldn't be scared for their existence right now. In tech, it
| only takes a handful of people to put you out of business in a
| few years, and you'd never see it coming. The corpses of once
| great tech companies are many: MySpace, Yahoo, Sun, etc.
|
| I would argue the tech giants aren't so much afraid of each
| other, but upstarts out of nowhere that makes their business
| obsolete.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| She was a recruiter that started right when meta instituted a
| hiring freeze. Then they were too slow to lay recruiting people
| off.
| tourgen wrote:
| [dead]
| bunnyswipe_com wrote:
| They can borrow hundreds of billions, they don't care.
| _dain_ wrote:
| >Is there any justifiable explanation for this hiring strategy?
|
| yes. but you can only obliquely hint at it.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| It doesn't make much sense. A more likely explanation is just
| that Facebook wants self directed people, and doesn't have much
| of a system in place for people who need to be hand held.
| marmee wrote:
| I always thought that when revenues are too high these companies
| need to raise expenses so they could have places to trim for
| rough quarters up ahead. Therefore the hiring strategy in 2020
| was sound.
|
| I've also seen the reverse, Netflix not curbing on shared
| accounts and Microsoft having really limited anti piracy tooling
| early on, allowing them to keep revenue reserves for the future
| lockhouse wrote:
| Microsoft still doesn't really care that much about piracy for
| some products. You can run Windows 11 Pro with 99% of the
| features in tact without activating it.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| I just installed Windows 10 on a laptop using the official
| USB creation tool. You just gotta leave it disconnected from
| the internet and you can make a local account with no
| restrictions.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Yea microsoft mostly cares about the enterprise market now.
| They prefer people pirating windows over using other
| operating systems because it ensures their enterprise
| productivity software monopoly.
| marmee wrote:
| Haven't used windows 11, but there were times when 999999999
| was a valid cdkey and there were times when you had to
| activate the OS with Microsoft servers
| bombcar wrote:
| Microsoft is WAY more concerned with companies selling PCs
| with illegitimate copies of windows than it is with people
| having illegitimate copies.
|
| So as long as Windows 11 shows "HACKED BY GONZO, TOTALLY
| NOT LEGIT" they're fine with it.
| themitigating wrote:
| I thought the lack of anti piracy for Windows and Abode
| products was a way of getting people into the ecosystem which
| helps later. Not sure if this was ever confirmed
| hangonhn wrote:
| Yeah at one of my old jobs in IT, Microsoft would perform
| software license audits just after a new release of Office.
| They would find that we were in deficit and then force us to
| buy licenses but the only licenses we could buy were the new
| versions of Office. Of course then we would have to upgrade
| all the other ones that had the licenses. This happens every
| few years. Obviously it was our fault for not doing better
| license allocation but I feel like Microsoft knew this is
| common and took advantage of it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Back in the Zortech days, we didn't install any copy
| protection mechanism for just this reason. (Also, copy
| protection annoys people, and annoying our customers was not
| something we wished to do.)
|
| That also meant we had no idea how many copies were pirated.
| granshaw wrote:
| I've had a similar overall thought - as a CEO/CFO seems that
| you'd want a relatively in-line growth/margin/whatever target
| each quarter, and so if you get a windfall you'd be
| incentivized to somehow spread that out or create slack for
| yourself in future quarters instead of milking it for all it's
| worth.
|
| Very weird, but that's what the current public capital markets
| incentivize...
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/maka7
| lnsru wrote:
| There always 2 sides of a story. This just does not sound
| trustworthy.
|
| I had also a job where I was reading Wikipedia all day.
| Management forgot to buy me a software license and I had nothing
| to do. I silently quit.
| bumby wrote:
| I'm curious how this works. Did you continually remind
| management that you didn't have the tools to do your job and
| they ignored you or were you quietly satisfied that this gave
| you a plausible excuse to do nothing?
| saurik wrote:
| I have been in what feels like a ridiculous number of arguments
| over the years with people who will defend to the hilt the idea
| that these companies all need as many workers as they do,
| insisting that the very idea that they might have a ton of people
| hired doing effectively nothing is some combination of insulating
| and naive. Of course, the fact that some of us actually know such
| people--my favorite example: I had an indirect friend who loved
| to tell the story of how, after his third project at Google got
| killed before launch, he just stopped working and realized there
| were little, if any, actual consequences for doing nothing ;P--
| never seemed to hold any weight.
|
| I'm really hoping that, if nothing else comes out of 202[23], it
| is a realization that the size and scope of these teams was, in
| fact, _madness_ , and no one will ever be able to credibly claim
| that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a
| single app _ever again_ (but, sadly, I know that this isn 't the
| case, as about three months from now no one will remember any of
| this happened and none of this has ever come to light and if you
| try to casually mention it as if it were common knowledge you'll
| get flooded with "citation needed" as we live in the land of
| Eternal September where somehow no one ever thinks it is useful
| to study even recent history).
| jjulius wrote:
| > ... no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need
| thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever
| again...
|
| Nor do we need to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a
| gigantic new building[1], on the roof of which we will put a
| 12.6-acre park and live animals, including foxes, so all of
| those thousands and thousands of people can maintain that
| _single app_ (well, in reality, apps), ever again.
|
| I will forever be blown away by the excess I witnessed every
| time I visited that campus, and I'm sure it's similar
| elsewhere.
|
| [1]https://www.builtinsf.com/2020/02/25/facebook-
| headquarters-m...
| dymk wrote:
| The smoked BBQ lunch spot made it all worth it, though
| swatcoder wrote:
| The FAANG team sizes and TC packages were never about fueling
| the production engine. They were about:
|
| 1. stockpiling fuel for when you may need it
|
| 2. starving your competitors of fuel
|
| With money cheap and valuations absurd, idle or overpriced
| talent was a much lesser problem than somebody else hoovering
| up all the good stuff.
|
| So you recruit aggressively using mechanical filters like
| leetcode/whiteboard tests, then let internal processes figure
| out who's actually worth using on meaningful projects. The rest
| you can sit on, just in case.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I hear this a lot but I think it's bullshit. Neither of those
| are goals that anyone would realistically pursue. It was
| almost certainly middle managers wanting to demonstrate
| impact by leading a larger team.
| twelve40 wrote:
| how could middle managers double the headcount by
| themselves? nobody above them noticed that?
| christophilus wrote:
| Probably exactly this. Each tier of management hired a
| fair bit more than they should have. Managers are
| generally incentivized to do so. The behavior was
| normalized and no one really noticed while money was
| cheap and all seemed well with the world.
| greenthrow wrote:
| "A friend if a friend said he didn't do anything at Google"
| plus one lady on Tiktok are not evidence of the widespread
| malfeasance you are claiming.
|
| I know people directly who have been affected by the layoffs.
| They did work. It's just work that has been deprioritized.
|
| Stop trying to demonize the workers who are victims of
| mismanagement.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I couldn't disagree more with your take.
|
| Meta is one of the most revenue efficient companies in the
| history of the world. Each employee generates $1.929 million in
| revenue, and they have an 79.63% profit margin. _After_
| employee compensation. That 's _each employee_ including the
| recruiters, EMs, etc.
|
| Part of the reason these employees had to "fight" for work is
| intentional - if they had more people than they needed and no
| forcing function (i.e. perf cycle) then these people _wouldn
| 't_ fight for their work, they'd just sit there getting paid
| and not complaining about it. The company would then be
| dramatically less efficient.
|
| I disagree with their model in a lot of ways, but this is a
| completely unfair characterization of how their incredibly
| efficient org actually works.
|
| They hired as though the COVID trajectory would continue, and
| saw less attrition than expected as people stuck to their jobs
| due to uncertainty. So they're trimming a little and re-
| focusing. That's all.
|
| > "I mean, like, we were just sitting there. We had to
| basically fight to find work."
|
| To put a very fine point on it, the reason they had to fight
| (like everyone else there) is because if they didn't come up
| with something to do that was quantifiable and impactful in
| line with org goals, they'd be terminated within the year. It
| was their job to find a way to be useful. The system culls
| those who do not. It can be harsh and impersonal, yes, ruthless
| even - but it is very effective.
|
| > I had an indirect friend who loved to tell the story of how,
| after his third project at Google got killed before launch, he
| just stopped working and realized there were little, if any,
| actual consequences for doing nothing ;P--never seemed to hold
| any weight.
|
| That was at Google. This is Meta. They are very different
| companies. Each FAANG is completely different internally and it
| would be a mistake to assume that experience translates.
| dkasper wrote:
| Just because Meta is pretty revenue efficient already doesn't
| mean it couldn't be _more_ revenue efficient. Why is $2M per
| employee good? It 's actually quite bad if Meta should be
| generating $10M per employee.
| corbulo wrote:
| Saying Meta is just a single app is like saying Google is just
| a search engine or Amazon is just a e-commerce site.
|
| Meta while unsurprisingly not very efficient, does need a lot
| of employees to maintain what they've built.
| twelve40 wrote:
| they don't need 87000 people to maintain what they have
| built, if you don't believe me, take it from Zuck, who
| already fired like what, 20k of them?
| corbulo wrote:
| You should read their 10-Q reports to figure out how
| they're violating their fiduciary duty with your claims
| here. You'd win millions of dollars in that suit.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| > no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need
| thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever
| again
|
| I don't think they'd ever claim this because these companies do
| way more than "maintain a single app".
|
| If companies don't attempt to innovate, even big ones, they
| lose in the marketplace. Meta for example has multiple apps to
| support, each serving hundreds of millions of users. On top of
| mere maintenance, they experiment and add new features. On top
| of that, what about the occasional greenfield/skunkworks type
| projects?
|
| It's a shame your friend worked on three consecutive projects
| that got axed, but that's a separate problem from him being
| able to coast without getting fired for it.
| zer0zzz wrote:
| I work at Meta on compiler support for all kinds of apps. We
| regularly write and use some pretty aggressive compiler
| optimizations and we often experiment and evolve lots of
| compiler and programming language features that are really
| experimental for use in our apps and services.
|
| I don't think you can directly compare an app like the ones a
| small team can build to the apps that larger more established
| companies have to maintain and evolve. I mean sure you could
| just do a full app rewrite and start from scratch but that's
| hugely risky and certainly fails more often than it succeeds.
| dathinab wrote:
| > or to stop them working for rival
|
| or because they bought up companies to prevent competition, but
| couldn't just shut them down because doing so isn't quite legal
|
| or because they have enough work for all that people, but fail to
| manage the work load distribution because it's really hard and
| for many core projects having more people isn't always good
| beyond a certain point
| yalogin wrote:
| This sounds really bizarre to me. A company hiring to hoard
| talent is just mind-blowing. If they have surplus money, they
| should just acquire smaller companies and find talent. I really
| hope this is not a company wide culture promoted by the upper
| management and that some middle level manager who wants to feel
| important started hiring to expand their team. If there is one
| thing I want clarity on it's this. I really hope Mark and Sundar
| talk about this at some point and explain what is going on
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Do engineers and designers suffer the same fate?
|
| I interviewed with them a long time ago and basically couldn't
| pass the interview. Had lots of ideas on what I wanted to work
| on, and things I think would have made the platform better.
| Didn't matter.
|
| Why do they put up hugely difficult entrance exams, employ the
| "best" and then... not put them to work? What's the point of
| burning so much time and capital?
| Mizoguchi wrote:
| Perhaps because one A-player working for Meta is one A-player
| less working for Google or TikTok.
| malermeister wrote:
| When I worked for Facebook, this was more or less accepted as
| common knowledge amongst the employees. It's a pretty sweet
| deal if you get your fulfillment from other (worse-paid)
| pursuits.
|
| I wfh'd a lot and dramatically improved my cooking skills!
| rodgerd wrote:
| If they hired you, you'd be competing with existing staff who
| are already doing the practical day-to-day work that they need
| done.
|
| These kind of hires that the interviewee represents are about
| keeping people away from competitors. These companies -
| Facebook aren't the only one - are so rich that they can afford
| to hire people simply to reduce the chance that competitors
| will emerge; rather than waiting until you have to pay big
| money for Instagram or Whatsapp, you identify the kind of
| people who have the skills to build competitors, hire them, and
| lock them in a basement somewhere.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > What's the point of burning so much time and capital?
|
| Difficult to prove, but arguably, denying resources and skills
| to the competition (or any other company in general).
| tourgen wrote:
| [dead]
| pengaru wrote:
| Disclaimer: I didn't watch her video.
|
| Nearly every tech job I've had there was the potential to do very
| little to nothing and stay employed.
|
| What I've gathered from her quotes in the Fortune article is that
| this person failed to take advantage of her opportunity to be
| paid highly with total autonomy while surrounded by Smart People.
|
| It's long been an established practice to hire talented engineers
| and let them make interesting things. Give them as much autonomy
| as you can afford to. If they're smart and driven they'll produce
| value.
|
| Otherwise you're herding cats to do things you may not even
| understand nearly as well as the supposed geniuses you've hired.
| It's not a good use of your time and you'll probably fail at it.
|
| Just look at the history of UNIX and Plan9 FFS. These guys were
| messing around with what interested them! Management didn't know
| what to tell them to work on... and we're all better for it with
| these wonderful innovations.
|
| This former Meta staffer just put a big fat DO NOT HIRE sign on
| her forehead as far as I'm concerned.
| luckydata wrote:
| you're wrong. The issue at Meta is that you might not be able
| to find the right combination of work that will get you a
| positive evaluation come performance review time.
|
| Let's say you get hired in an org where the opportunity for
| impact are limited (mature area, blocked by dependencies in
| other teams etc...) then doing nothing or doing stuff that
| doesn't matter means you will get a poor performance review
| unless you're politically savvy enough to get a LOT of people
| to essentially overlook that the work you've done is
| meaningless.
|
| After the negative perf, you will get piped and then fired.
| It's incredibly stressful to be in that situation and breeds
| all kinds of bad behaviors that make Meta a bad place to work
| at times (very often).
| derwiki wrote:
| Why would a new hire be placed in an org where opportunity
| for impact is limited? What are they expected to do?
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Empire building
| robryan wrote:
| Not everyone wants this though. Many people, especially when
| first starting out, would prefer some tasks to be assigned to
| them.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| That's a take.
| lapcat wrote:
| > It's long been an established practice to hire talented
| engineers and let them make interesting things.
|
| She wasn't an engineer. "Levy previously told Insider she was
| hired on Meta's Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program
| that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the
| corporate technology recruiting industry."
|
| The Insider article has a better representation of her
| complaints:
|
| "There were other people in our program that were nurses,
| teachers, and firefighters. They left their jobs, their entire
| career and Meta didn't even let them get one year of
| experience."
|
| "We were trying to pivot into a career. If you have anything
| less than a year, you have to basically start from scratch
| again. You have to start at the bottom."
|
| Basically, these were people trying to break into tech, so they
| were in need of both guidance and experience, not at all like
| hiring experienced engineers and letting them run wild.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-facebook-worker-tech-la...
| thrownawaydad wrote:
| I think this is too harsh a take, at least without knowing
| more. There are some managers and shops where "find something
| useful to do" is encouraged, or at least accepted. I was
| shocked to discover later in my career that there are plenty of
| shops that are _not_ like that. High-paying shops, even, or
| perhaps especially.
|
| Why? For starters, some companies are rich, and they can afford
| to waste a lot of money. Think of all of those interviews
| you've been on that waste your time and that of the interview
| loop, even though it's clear that they have never intended to
| hire. Or maybe just 1 in 500. (One company I was hired at
| boasted to me about the "500". Ugh.)
|
| Or, at least in the trading world, things can be very
| secretive. You might have the skills to contribute, but no one
| will even talk to you, for fear that you'll steal the secret
| sauce.
|
| Mostly it's just simple managerial incompetence.
|
| The employer/employee match is sort of like a key and lock. In
| order for it to work, _all_ of the pins have to align. It's not
| enough to be a skilled, team-player, etc., employee. Your
| employer also has to bring several things to the table.
| Sometimes they just don't.
| cududa wrote:
| BS. 90% of people aren't "self-starters". That's fine. Further,
| the vast majority of "self guided" software engineers work on
| nonsense that scratches an intellectual itch, not something
| that moves the business forward.
| ugh123 wrote:
| TLDR; Her job was "DEI Program Sourcing Specialist"
|
| Basically, a recruiter.
| floatinglotus wrote:
| Another day, another indication that Meta is an awful company
| from top to bottom, ruled by a socially awkward buffoon from his
| private island.
|
| I wonder what is in store for tomorrow?
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post unsubstantive or name-calling comments to HN.
|
| You may not owe companies better, but you owe this community
| better if you're participating in it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| saos wrote:
| > It was a very strange environment and it kind of seemed that
| Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn't have us
| and they were just hoarding us like Pokemon cards."
|
| Really????
| [deleted]
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| In technical circles, I doubt it.
|
| ICs can do whatever they want. Performance is based on impact, so
| you have to pick the right things to work on yourself.
|
| There are very few non-performers because the calibration process
| is brutal and efficient.
|
| Maybe there are non-technical realms of empire building like any
| megacorp, but that would be nothing new.
| shagie wrote:
| Article about Brit Levy from Washington Post a bit over a month
| ago with some more context and info:
|
| After layoffs, Meta, tech companies face uphill battle to boost
| diversity - https://wapo.st/3lmVr6w
| cletus wrote:
| A lot of people don't understand what's going on here. Maybe you
| haven't worked for a large company but it operates quite
| differently to a small company.
|
| Two things can be true at once: a company can both need to hire
| and people at that company can have difficulty finding a role.
| These are not contradictory statements.
|
| Orgs and teams within large companies have budgets and/or head
| counts. They need to "spend" these to hire. They hire with
| external hires and internal transfers. Like any recruitment it
| can take time. A given position might have a bunch of external
| and internal candidates. Team may also want to keep head count
| open to use opportunistically.
|
| If you are employed at a large company, you may be competing with
| a bunch of internal and external candidates for a job. You can
| fail to find a position and these positions are being filled by
| other people.
|
| Think about it this way: we have an unemployment rate that is in
| large part transitional because of these time factors. We won't
| hit 0% unemployment. That's just not possible.
|
| Saying failure to find an internal job is evidence of over-hiring
| is like saying "there is no labor shortage because I could not
| get a job" (side note: for completeness, "labor shortage" isn't
| realy anyway; there are only "wage deficits" not "labor
| shortages").
| spaceguillotine wrote:
| honestly the first month I worked at Google they knew they needed
| bodies but didn't have offices for us, we doubled up on desks and
| split into two shifts had zero policy for the work they wanted
| done and some days had no available work load for our teams and
| then would have us do busy work that no one was trained on for
| other depts who would them throw out all our work. (this was 2010
| to 2012) my NDA is expired yo. Second shift got Pizza every night
| for meals as the kitchen wouldn't stay open late enough for us.
| gumby wrote:
| > Rabois ... told a banking event earlier this month that Big
| Tech companies like Meta and Google had hired thousands of people
| ... and to stop them working for rivals.
|
| I got an _informal_ offer like this over dinner once, when I was
| trying to get a startup off the ground: "Come work for us; you
| can do your startup or find something else interesting. Just send
| me an email and I'll hire you". They told me explicitly that they
| were hiring certain people to keep those folks from working for
| the competition.
|
| I stress _informal_ because, though I continue talking /emailing
| with this person (whom I already knew), and still do, I didn't
| ask to follow up. So sure, they could have been bullshitting, but
| why volunteer something like that unless it was real?
| seydor wrote:
| An excess of money
| borroka wrote:
| I find myself in a situation similar to the one described by
| "Meta staffer" in the article. I was hired a few years ago in a
| biotech company and, after some months of mostly uneventful work
| -- but I was doing something -- for the past two years I have
| done almost nothing.
|
| I tried to propose new ideas and projects, offered my expertise
| to other groups, but my attempts were met with benign
| indifference. After realizing that looking for work meant to
| others that I had nothing better to do at work (or nothing to do,
| basically, at work), I have decided to put the proverbial feet on
| the desk and milk the money until I can find a job -- elsewhere
| -- that I like better. The challenge I see is that I am getting
| paid very well -- exceptionally well considering I do very little
| -- and very much enjoying the mental and physical freedom that my
| current nonexistent workload is giving me.
| swader999 wrote:
| Work from home and get another remote job.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Umm.. don't you have a manager? Surely they could find work for
| you, no?
| andmikey wrote:
| My first job out of college was like this. My manager knew I
| had no work and had no particular interest in letting me take
| on anything I proposed or found. I ended up quitting a few
| months in because (on top of a few other issues) I found it
| way too soul-destroying to have _nothing_ to do.
| borroka wrote:
| I do. But it is one of the situations that converge in a kind
| of mutually beneficial indifference. It is no different in
| spirit from that of a husband and wife who live under the
| same roof but seek intimacy elsewhere, or who have repressed
| their desires for so long that they no longer even remember
| how to make a baby.
| devindotcom wrote:
| The way I see it as a worker you are making your abilities
| available and are entitled absolutely to the wages they give
| you. Kind of feels like robbing them sure, but they're robbing
| themselves. More of an indictment of capitalism and corporate
| structure than anything else. Pay it forward if you can and
| their loss is everyone else's gain.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| It's also funny that if you just straight up tell them you're
| not doing anything and need work, they're indifferent.
|
| And if you ask them if you're SUPPOSED to do NOTHING, they get
| defensive. I'd rather work with people who at least have the
| ability to admit you're just hired to pad out the roster.
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| She was recruiter hired right at about time when Meta announced
| hiring freeze. The only lesson here is not that FAANG hires
| people to do nothing but that Meta was way too slow to layoff 90%
| of recruiting org probably because it hoped economy/revenues
| improve and company will resume hiring.
| Calvin02 wrote:
| Yeah, and that she joined just as the internal demand was
| probably going down. She was hired in anticipation of a need
| that didn't materialize. Kudos to her for "fighting" for work.
| Most people would be tempted to slack off.
| helen___keller wrote:
| Was she a recruiter? It didn't specify in the article
| NonEUCitizen wrote:
| In recent years, "sourcers" are the ones who email / call
| engineers on behalf of the recruiters. They are part of the
| recruiting department.
|
| Article says:
|
| "Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta's Sourcer
| Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers
| from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology
| recruiting industry."
| perryh2 wrote:
| I'm surprised there was a 12-month program to become a
| sourcer.
| chris11 wrote:
| It could make sense. I'm assuming they will be doing
| actual work during that time. A paid 12 month long
| apprenticeship would be good for both parties. It's
| enough time for Meta to decide if they want to hire an
| employee full time, and a year would give sourcers a
| decent amount of experience if they wanted to leave.
| Matthias247 wrote:
| it's in the headline: "staffer"
| wizee wrote:
| Staffer means member of staff. For example, engineers are
| staffers.
| komadori wrote:
| That just means a member of staff.
| Matthias247 wrote:
| Ok sorry. Then it was a misunderstanding of my side as
| non native speaker. I always assumed it means recruiter
| since I've so far never seen the word used in another
| context
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Doesn't that just mean she was on the staff? I wouldn't
| understand staffer to mean recruiter. Is it different in
| the US?
| giords wrote:
| Big Head, from "Silicon Valley" the show, comes to mind
| wgx wrote:
| Rest and Vest
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