Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
reuters.com
reuters.com
.."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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes FB is not for me. Not as a worker, not as a customer.
(yes, I know there are probably lots of intellectually interesting jobs at Meta, but the overall purpose and mission just isn't exactly inspiring)
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?
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.
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.
If they want a change made that's basically a completely trivial detail that was already within my ability to have done when I was doing the work (e.g. just putting some padding that just felt about right), then sure, I guess. Not sure it's actually important, but whatever.
If it will go against other work (e.g. the padding comes from some central styling rules), entails substantial off-route work, or adds future maintenance debt or project risk, it should go via the product manager if there is one. A good CEO knows not to preempt the people who decide how the product works, what it needs to do and how the team(s) are going to get there. He should also know that product will consider a valid suggestion (and he should know if they're so slammed that they can't even think about it, in which case he can help in other ways than moaning about padding).
In this case it sounds like Zuckerberg is bikeshedding over something trivial (doesn't get much more trivial than padding on a specific button) just to swing his dick about. If he has something insightful to say about the business logic, that would actually show engagement and understanding.
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.
Zuck controls 90% of the voting rights of FB: https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1061237/how-facebook-si...
Stock classes are the biggest robbery of modern times.
> 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.
Unfortunately, corporations have been successfully lobbying on removing constraints on what they are doing and against adding new ones.
“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.
Facebook is no iPod.
/s
Turns out "move fast and break things" doesn't make for maintainable code.
(Being facetious)
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.)
You can work on defending the masses from the militaries and bad actors of the world.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
i think the poster meant 'business model' rather than innovation.
Having an immoral business model doesn't imply they are not innovative - facebook does plenty of technical innovation indeed.
Say ello to KPIs.
Imagine what the engineer capable of writing CacheLib would have done instead, had they not worked for Facebook.
That's like describing SpaceX as "glorified fireworks"
The same with CRUD. CRUD is simple, but to do CRUD on ~Facebook~ Meta scale, that's a different thing.
When money is good, most people turn a blind eye. Stop the music and people will think twice.
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.)
I would have assumed that Facebook always had the ability to manage-out people they wanted out.
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.
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.
No - it is specifically aimed at getting rid of people who were doing fine before -- may have been top performers, even -- but who refuse to go into overdrive (start sacrificing sleep, or time with their families) to meet artificial goals.
That is to say: goals designed to reduce headcount -- by turning high performers into low performers.
'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.
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
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.
Welcome! You're going to get fired! If you want a “family” join a startup!
Truly great engineering requires long-term commitment. Great engineering organizations often have people leave by retiring, not being fired.
https://developerpitstop.com/how-long-do-software-engineers-...
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.
This, to me, sounds like he's pressuring people to leave, so that they don't have to fire them, which would involve severance.
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".
An employee who quits isnt eligible for unemployment.
(these rules obviously vary by country/state/etc)
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/GergelyOrosz/status/1537810787473006593.)
What they are really trying to avoid is laying off the wrong people. Management is really bad at guessing who wants to stay and who wants out. Often, a bunch of “low performers” are riffed. Some are bad, some are just on the wrong team, some are having life complications- birth, death, divorce, etc.
It’s really bad PR to fire someone who is a low performer because of a bad pregnancy, grandma died, etc. especially when they call a reporter and show their stellar ratings from previous years.
On top of all that, with the rif comes a higher work load. At this time many high performers will quit, which sucks because you just laid off a bunch of people, many of whom were close to these guys in performance.
Then the company is at risk of making bad decisions. They they push even harder on those that remain? Do they become pragmatic and cut initiatives they can no longer staff?
All moves have risk.
Well that was long due: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2013/mar/11...
Presumably only where legally permitted. For instance, Ireland:
> for sedentary office work, a minimum temperature of 17.5° C, so far as is reasonably practicable, is achieved and maintained at every workstation after the first hour’s work.
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?
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.
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.
People change, employ motivation levels wane, especially when a chunk of your employees are millionaires. Lots of folks who want to rest and vest- this announcement is aimed at getting those people to fire back up to higher productivity, or to take a different job they are passionate about.
Lots of CEOs with bad businesses will play this card to avoid responsibility...
Would be interesting to see whether he still considers himself essential for the future of Meta.
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.
It’s not really about VR, it’s just that FB had no chance whatsoever of competing with existing players in the PC, console, or mobile market so they are pushing VR as a “staple” gaming product. They’re trying to make a new market where they can be a major player.
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.
There are people that are willing to zap their eyes with laser only to not wear their glasses that actually allow them to see.
People literally hate putting things on their face/head that restricts what they can see. Maybe because I would fell too vurnable without ability to check what's happening around me.
Now sell them glasses/vr headset that are even less useful. And way heavier.
Or how successful 3d glasses were with 3d tvs or before that colored 3d glasses or even IMAX with their 3D(watched on movie there, not worth the price). Or fact that Nintendo made their 3d work without glasses and then started selling 2d version of that handheld and then forget about 3d in their later products.
Even cyberpunk ability to jack in would be useful to me only when I were still able to use my eyes(or implants) while controlling a device.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
What secret sauce has Apple found that will make it more compelling than all other solutions which have utterly failed to gain any traction? Cheaply enough that anyone outside early adopters will want it?
People don’t want to wear glasses for long periods of time in the first place — it’s why LASIK exists.
Pancake optics and Apple silicon will probably play a key role in Apple's VR product. But Apple often succeeds where others fail through incredible execution, holistic product design, and the trust they've built with consumers.
Some people don't, but plenty of people do, or at least would rather where glasses than be blind or take a slightly risky procedure. I'm one of those people.
I've chosen to keep wearing glasses despite LASIK being a thing for 24 years now. Even my own father has gotten LASIK and I haven't.
If anything, getting into VR (I use it for about an hour a day on average, it's become part of my workout routine) has made me want to get the eye surgery more, to make putting on/off the headset more convenient.
For now I've just gotten prescription lenses for my headset, which are definitely a lot better than putting the headset over my glasses, but still not ideal.
Also, I choose to wear glasses instead of contact lenses. I did wear contact lenses for a couple years, but it my eyes dried out a lot, I left them in when I passed out on accident periodically, easy to lose, they were expensive, and my left eye really fought me putting them in. I'm far from the only person, as:
"According to the Vision Council of America, approximately 75% of adults use some sort of vision correction. About 64% of them wear eyeglasses, and about 11% wear contact lenses, either exclusively, or with glasses."[1]
[1]: http://www.glassescrafter.com/information/percentage-populat...
It's that an exaggeration?
Still, about how much does Meta bet on VR? Maybe compared to profits?
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...
>If we're talking ethics and it has to be FAANG...
I wasn't really talking about ethics, that was more of an aside. I was trying to make the point that not only is the metaverse (and using metaverse here I mean a virtual reality controlled by a private company) completely unproven ground as a market, and is easily 5-10 years away from being even somewhat practical and not a complete gimmick with technology, it also would make most of the big unsolved problems our society is still grappling with around technology way worse
Like platform control. Facebook And Epic both say Apple has too much power. Apple hurt FB's ad business by limiting tracking. Epic sued to try to force a change in IAP rules etc... Then you've got Republicans saying the exact same thing about Facebook and other social platforms - that they have too much power and got mad when they banned Donald Trump. Republicans right now are pressuring Google to stop marking their shady campaign emails as spam in Gmail.
And I agree with them, but I also agree with Apple that it would be hard for iOS to be as secure as it is if they didn't have that level of control. Smart phones are computers. And for a lot of people, it's their only computer. It's a really tricky issue that has not been solved yet.
In a hypothetical scenario where people spend most of their lives working and after work in a "metaverse" controlled by a private company, that's even worse. What if you get banned from the metaverse, and it effectively cuts off your ability to live a normal life or participate in society? Hey, it's their platform so first amendment doesn't apply but every job in your field uses the metaverse as a remote workplace. You don't get to see your friends or family nearly as much. Your agency and autonomy as a human being is controlled down to what physical movements you can make, who you can speak to, it can all be recorded and controlled. Of course, even if control was handed to the government that would be handing them more direct power over people than any government has ever had.
I don't know why Mark Zuckerberg thinks that he would be trusted with this amount of control even if he got the tech down when the level of trust people have in FB as an entity has deteriorated an extreme amount over the last 7 years and they've faced vicious criticism from both parties in the United States.
There's a huge "ethics" gulf between writing code that is unambiguously good for the world (or whatever) and building... that. Like I said in my original post, I think a lot of the criticism Facebook got as a result of the 2016 election was unfounded. I don't think Facebook is an "evil" company (whatever evil even means here) but I don't think it's an ethical or moral one either.
It's especially odd because when Mark talks, he seems to really make a point to talk about Facebook's "vision" and "goal" to "connect people" - which is super vague. But it's like he expects that to be enough to inspire people. It's not. People choose to work there because they pay more and like you said, have a good rep as being a good place to work for and great on a resume.
Which brings me back to my original point: I don't think Mark Zuckerberg is a competent leader for a company of Meta's size and scope. When Bezos wanted to do spaceships, he didn't rename Amazon and start pushing in that direction, he spun off a separate company. It's clear Mark is passionate about this. He's hanging out doing videos with his R&D team. He should find someone else to head Facebook and focus on what he's passionate about. He wouldn't necessarily need to leave Meta, just transition his leadership so he's not CEO anymore.
This isn't responsible behavior from someone who leads a very large publicly traded company and I think it's part of why their stock is so volatile.
Facebook and it's portfolio of companies is threatened by TikTok and whatever comes next, but not existentially. TikTok will never offer what Facebook does in terms of things like groups, marketplace, a decade + of curated personas that people have on there. I had to create a Facebook account when I moved out of the United States because there were ex-pat groups on there and it was a reliable and non sketchy way to find things like long term housing.
One path for Facebook was/still is to become the "Oracle" of social media. Profitable, reliable and dependable but not new and exciting. Instagram, WhatsApp and FB are all profitable and stable businesses. Instead, it's like he's stuck in this mindset where he still thinks social media is all about "what's next" and FB will become MySpace if he can't keep 13-20 year olds on his platforms. Social media as a space has matured. Meta should mature with it.
Facebook was severely harmed when Apple made their platform changes. Imagine if Google's only revenue still came from search ads and they didn't have Android, YouTube, Google Cloud, Google Suite or the many other things they've done. Or if Amazon's revenue came from selling products to consumers online instead of AWS and Advertising.
Why has Facebook not able to diversify it's revenue and seemingly the only strategy has been acquiring competitors? Bad executive leadership. I don't understand why it's not discussed more.
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.
"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.
> "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.
It's on him if his strategy was so wrong.
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.
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 naïve.
I think you misread the comment you replied to.
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.
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
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!)
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.
Years ago I would have rolled my eyes at this comment. As someone who is liberal and runs in liberal circles, it seems ludicrous to me that any sane person would get called out for anything not overtly racist or mean spirited.
Then one time I asked in a group chat — with people I thought were my friends — about where I could read about trans kids getting hormone blockers, because I wasn’t really sure about giving kids (who generally don’t know what they want) the kinds of drugs that alter their bodies.
The rebuke I got was swift and severe. For reference… I’m a mid-30s gay man who lives in the Bay Area, and I wasn’t even expressing an opinion.
Yeah; I’m out.
I'm not in FB anymore, but the old days were the best.
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.
losses for thee
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...
Universities and schools using Facebook as their de-facto platform for group announcements, it seems.
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.
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.
Our whole engineering team, myself included, is ex-Facebook.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To me it means: "Nice job you have here, would be a shame if something happens to it!"
I had senior level managers communicating along those lines and squandered my respect in about 3 seconds.
Not that it really matters, but still.
> “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.
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.
Some people might just think those are weasel words to cover an impending large-scale RIF.
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.
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.
What's your solution here for engineers? Counting the lines of code they write?
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.
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!
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.
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?
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).
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.
Or maybe the best talent is sick of these overpaid rest-and-vest lackeys and more than happy to see them get the axe.
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).
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.
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.
Unfortunately, this is beyond most companies when it comes to software developers.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
The better employees, feeling more certain they could find another job, were often the ones who left.
Now they get to lose even more time being productive finding gigs.
Brenden Gregg leaves Netflix, weeks later its stock and reputation tank. They don’t think we know, but we do. There’s no reason to put our faith is people who are clearly more of the same rich grifters being propped up by collective belief. Believe something else.
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.
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.
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.
https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
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).
For an internal recruiter, what share of compensation is baseline salary and what share is bonuses from successful hires?
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
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.
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.
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.
Agile/scrum makes 10x devs impossible. Dirty secret of our industry. Management picks the winners by removing them from process.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> "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
>"If I had to bet, I'd say that this might be one of the worst downturns that we've seen in recent history," Zuckerberg told workers in a weekly employee Q&A session, audio of which was heard by Reuters."
This is fascinating. I have seen interviews with everyone from Larry Summers to Janet Yellen, Jamie Dimon and countless other prodigious economic minds recently and the only thing that any of them state with any certainty is that a recession "might" happen. None of them have made any pronouncements as to the severity of the downturn should it happen. Yet here Zuck is, not only sharing the degree of certainty but also the degree of severity.
Zuckerberg really comes off as desperate sounding. I can't imagine this speech instilling any inspiration, confidence or good will in employees. Certainly not anyone who may have been on the fence about the whole "let's be the company on the Metaverse" garbage. I hope people do "self-select" and leave in droves.
I can only imagine how shitty it will get with the specter of layoffs floating around
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.
See: Goodhart's Law
One went back to game dev, one decided to retire early, and the other went to Google.
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.
If farmville were a job… my god, I think they’ve gone and done it.
> people that worked for meta and they called it the most psychologically damaging environment they've ever worked in
Just wait until they try using the platform they built. At least they have something in common with their users.
Years ago, there was a Darwin Award for a man who removed the safety padding from a ski lift pole, carried it up the hill and then used it to sled back down on. He crashed into the pole he removed it from and died.
So meta.
There, fixed it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
I also disagree that anything in what was leaked of Mark’s statement is severely damaging to livelihoods any more so than any other time someone has gotten let go for performance reasons.
Which is it? Your position is logically inconsistent.
But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s this information is useful for outsiders, not a disservice.
As for wanting leakers to be dragged into court…
Are you saying, for example, that Amazon warehouse workers should not be allowed to expose terrible working conditions? Or pretty much any other unethical action of a company?
Because that’s exactly what you’re advocating for.
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 onNow 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.
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemploymen...
I have heard others saying we are entering a deep recession within the next year
For one example, the Atlanta Federal Reserve runs a real-time GDP forecast called GDP Now. The update today is -2.1%
The fb era is starting to sunset.
Well, If that’s the case, whose fault is it? you hired them and you have been keeping them. This kind of passive-aggressive layoff style feels like weak leadership and trying to weasel out from paying severance. Zuckerberg is really looking like a douche and poor leader here (yes, shocking I know).
I knew success was mostly about luck, but things like this make it seem like it’s 100% about luck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyoVLipRVPw
It sounds like he really believes his own bull.
I'm looking at you Hacker News.
Of course he's ok with it, no need to pay severance to employees that "voluntarily" quit.
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.
Good luck with keeping just the good people with that technique.
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.
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.
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.
Top talent is first to leave as a firm's fortunes turn.
(FB's fortunes turned a while ago.)
But again, clue flees first.
Reminds me of the musk "sleep on factory floor" macho bullshit.
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?
So yes, still hiring quite a lot of people, just fewer than originally planned.
But that is completely orthogonal to skill or value provided.
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.
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.
Rewarding good employees and firing bad ones.
Deciding on actual useful performance metrics ahead of time and measuring people against them.
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
Making everybody suffer until some people leave because it’s intolerable to them… that doesn’t sound better to me.
Layoffs are always awful, they take jobs away from people without them having a say. They should always be a last resort.
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.
“Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals…”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I wonder... will the people who hired deadwood get shafted, or will they consider how to improve their hiring process? (ha. ha. ha.)
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.
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.
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."
I think paraphrasing that as "Zuckerberg's an idiot" is, if anything, charitable.
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.
So yes, expecting managers to put company interests before their own may actually be too hard.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
Dead wood management?
I guess announcing it is part of the "turn up the heat" process?
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.
Which is part of the reason that this is extremely enjoyable for me.
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.