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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dead wood management?
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.
I guess announcing it is part of the "turn up the heat" process?