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Comment by s17n | Hacker News Reader

Every sufficiently large company has a lot of dead wood, and nobody has yet devised a better strategy than 'turning up the heat'.

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Is it an effective strategy at all? I can imagine that turning up the heat without any benefits is just as likely to chase the most talented people away.

The stock value has dropped by over half and meta is preparing for a recession. Ad sales and user growth have already slowed.

I disagree, though it greatly depends on how "turning up the heat" is done.

There is not a lot that is more demoralizing to top performers than to see dead wood continue to plot along and earn a sizable paycheck and produce little of value. And it's not even all solely an envy issue - it's also an issue of poor performers getting in the way and making other people's job more painful and inefficient.

So a message of "we're going to start getting real about ensuring our high bar is met, and having hard conversations with people who consistently don't meet that bar" is something that some folks would look forward to.

Of course, like I said, the devil is in the details, and if "turning up the heat" means we're going to have more time cops than yes, I think it would be demoralizing.

If it's just reviewing people at a higher standard, I don't see how that'll turn high performers away.

How does this work well? Aren’t the good people the first to leave if you decide to make everyone miserable?

the good people are the ones that perform well in the kitchen when it gets hot.

Lol. Bullshit.

The good ones know to get out when a company treats it's employees like shit. Just because they aren't the target today doesn't mean they won't be the target tomorrow. The idea that people should wear bad working conditions as a badge of honor is just silly and something I'd expect people (the good ones) to grow out of after a few years max in the industry.

you know, there are economic times where it's tough to find a job in certain industries, no matter how awesome you are.

Just so I'm clear, your response to "good workers don't put up with that shit" is essentially "they will if they can't find a different/better job"? Cause that just sounds exploitative and scummy. I'm sure companies make those calculations but it doesn't make it right/moral.

In a vacuum I can understand and empathise with your comment but as part of this chain (where you say "the good people are the ones that perform well in the kitchen when it gets hot.") I can't take it seriously. Which is it? Do the good people perform well (and enjoy) when it gets hot or are they held hostage by the economic times?

It's probably a combination of both. After all, the answer to an equation typically has two or more values associated with it.

Never underestimate the power of a bored bureaucrat under pressure to keep his job.

The good people are the ones who don't have to stay in a hot kitchen if they don't want to

I wonder... will the people who hired deadwood get shafted, or will they consider how to improve their hiring process? (ha. ha. ha.)

They might.. for a little while, but eventually most people will just say 'meh' and head for greener pastures. A lot depends on the relationships and once the first link breaks, odds are, more people will follow the first 'defector'.

It is really not that complicated. Few will put up with 'heat' if it gets to an annoying level; especially if they have other options.

Lol no. They go find nicer, cooler kitchens.

Yes, good people that know they can find something else will leave first. Those who stay are mostly very comfortable and well positioned that they know they far in the queue of layoff or those that know they cannot find something similarly well paid.

It turns out that "increase expectations of delivery" is not synonymous with "make everyone miserable."

That’s true, but at a company that size when the order comes all the way from the top to “turn up the heat?” Sounds like a recipe for misery generation.

Where should the order come from?

I'm agnostic about whether or not Facebook will implement this well. Certainly it's possible to implement these kinds of initiatives badly. But the whole HN attitude of "how dare you?!?" doesn't strike me as people who are taking an appropriately realistic view of the real problems in trying to make a large organization be high performing, it strikes me as entitlement.

I also feel like Zuckerberg has had a fairly large amount of success building a highly performant organization in the past, and while that doesn't mean he hasn't lost touch or that FB hasn't gotten too big to do the same things with or whatever, this certainty that you see in these comment threads that he's just like tripping on his shoelaces and doing self-evidently idiotic things seems extremely overconfident.

I think that building a high performance organisation starts way before you get to the point where you need an emergency leadership directive at the beginning of a downturn that from now on you’re going to turn up the heat and hold people accountable for performance. If you are pulling that lever to some extent I think you have to admit you took a wrong turn somewhere.

I dunno, maybe there was a wrong turn -- or maybe just you're responding to rapidly changing conditions.

But if there was a wrong turn, and now you're error correcting, that still seems quite a bit different from, "Lol what does this doofus know, he's just an idiot."

I don’t recall having said anything like that.

I recall you saying that Zuckerberg's plan was to "make everyone miserable," and that the result of that would be that the highest performers would quit.

I think paraphrasing that as "Zuckerberg's an idiot" is, if anything, charitable.

Even if you can do this accurately the second order effects in terms of stress on the team, friends and colleagues getting kicked out and self doubt do make the job more miserable. The people that are nominally “safe” aren’t some island of calm unaffected by their coworkers and culture shift that isn’t. And I’d expect that the actual approach will end up being a far blunter instrument and make the situation adversarial.

Because expecting managers to do their damn jobs would just be too hard?

It wasn't the #1 reason but "dead wood" probably ranked 2 or 3 for why I left my last job and it was 100% the manager's fault. Had that company decided to "turn up the heat" I would have left even faster and I can promise you the "dead wood" would have stayed till the bitter end.

I doubt the claim that no one has come up with a better strategy and I question the leadership abilities of anyone who thinks it's a good strategy.

Managers have personal priorities and interests that may not align with the interests of the company. e.g. company doesn't want dead weight, but the manager does for any number of reasons. Maybe the manager really likes those people on a personal level, or maybe the dead weight have dirt on the manager, or maybe the dead weight are kept around as sacrificial material should the manager ever be forced to make cuts, or maybe the incentive structure in the company rewards managers for having more reports, etc.

So yes, expecting managers to put company interests before their own may actually be too hard.

Or, in my specific situation, my manager (and the manger above them) were terrible at handling intrapersonal conflicts. They would just ignore it until it went away and hating confronting anyone about anything. At least one of them also "liked" the "dead wood" in question or had at least worked with them for a long time. I understand all of that. But at the end of the day, it was bad managers. Even if you somehow manage to clear the "dead wood" (good luck, they hold on longer that performing members in my experience) you are still stuck with bad managers and you'll be right back in the same place in little time.

From the CEO's point of view, line managers and employees are basically an undifferentiated mass of potential dead wood. Getting managers to "do their jobs" is exactly the intention of a policy like this.

I am not sure demonizing managers here is the fair thing (popular perhaps). Managers (I've had incompatible managers and have been one myself) don't operate in a vacuum. Managers jobs are very much guided/dictated by hr policies (atleast at big cos) down to the point of precise wording to avoid/use, strict "formulas" for comp and refreshers, tight flowcharts to set on tracking execution, planning processes etc. Not to mention just general organisational chaos with project cancellations and fielding requests from N different (indirect) bosses. There is a lot more risk than to justify the reward of going against the tide. Heck even tooling and templates for conducting 1/1s are getting more and more standardized and doing slightly different gets you in trouble.

There are definitely incompetent managers just like there are incompetent engineers or lawyers or directors or leaders etc. A broad/general stroke - I am not sure is justified.

Citation needed. alternative strategies would include:

Rewarding good employees and firing bad ones.

Deciding on actual useful performance metrics ahead of time and measuring people against them.

If I had one wish, it would be that we would all give up that rude “citation needed” trope. I agree with you, yet that’s such a childish way to argue that it hurts the point. Just have the confidence to say you don’t agree!

What I mean by that is more than “i don’t agree” - it’s “hey, it looks like you asserted an opinion as fact”.

I’m pretty sure all ways of saying that come off rude. Sometimes rudeness is irreducible, and I think this is one of those times. I like “citation needed” because to me it seems like a playful version of rude rather than a serious version of rude. Shrugging emoji

This is exactly what they are doing with one improvement: instead of firing, they are allowing attrition to happen naturally. That’s better than layoffs

Why is that better?

Making everybody suffer until some people leave because it’s intolerable to them… that doesn’t sound better to me.

It’s not “making people suffer”. It is having high expectations for performance that A-players and teams can easily hit. If companies are going to survive during a crisis time when the whole world is facing headwinds, there is no margin for error, at FB or anywhere.

Layoffs are always awful, they take jobs away from people without them having a say. They should always be a last resort.

End result is the same people without jobs. Raising expectations and making people quit has the side effect of those “low performers” leaving, some people easily hitting the expectations, and most people busting their ass to keep up. Sounds bad to me.

I don’t really see this as an extinction level downturn for fb. Time will tell, but I’d be shocked if this seriously threatened the company in any way except its share price.

It seems unlikely to me that they'll turn up the pressure on the high performers. More likely they'll just raise the bar for what is considered adequate. The real pain will be having less people to do the work, but that happens with layoffs as well.

Ok so high performers are fine, low performers are out. What about everyone else?

A very reasonable interpretation of turning up the heat is exactly to start doing a better job of holding people accountable to your already established ladder.

That would be a reasonable interpretation if the next words out of his mouth weren’t

“Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals…”

First, I think goals and expectations are different. That said, it’s possible to have intended to always be setting ambitious goals but look back and see that maybe you were unintentionally coasting. Fixing that problem isn’t nefarious.

I think reading into this any deeper is just succumbing to a leakers goal of finding sound bites which sound bad to get people all excited and angry.

You can word dance around it all you want - his intent is clear: working at meta is going to be harder tomorrow than it was yesterday, with the intent that some people will quit over it.

How you feel about that depends on if you see yourself as more similar to an owner of meta, or as a worker at meta.

I’ve seen the pain low performers cause others around them as an IC and having the company try and fix that problem seems very reasonable. But who knows, for all we know this could just be rhetoric to inspire some initiative.

Assuming people that don’t support your strong gut reaction to this leak view themselves as “an owner of meta” is strange—my views here are very much colored by my experience as an IC at a similar company where I thought I’d be happier, as a worker, if we could do a better job at both managing low performers and firing leakers.

Why do you care, as a worker, about leakers and low performers? I understand being frustrated if people you work with are obstructionist, poor communicators, or have bad attitudes - but in my experience most of those people would be classified by the company as HIGH performers. The “low performers” are, in my experience, the most fun to work with.

What you say makes sense, but have in mind that it's not that easy to selectively fire employees (as opposed to mass layoffs) in big companies, at least in California. It's arguable whether it should be easy to do that, but firing any employee - even with a very good reason - can open your company to a nasty lawsuit in many states. You can simply call it the cost of doing business, but big companies are scared to death of big labor lawsuits, especially class actions, as clever lawyers can often find some interesting pattern in the fired employees.

Does this not have the side effect of also driving away employees with the best alternatives (so, probably your best ones)?

The key for this to work is that you need to give everybody big raises so the best want to stay when the heat gets tough (like sterotypical ibanking)

That’s implying the best people choose the best pay, not the best work, 100% of the time. I quit my Big Tech job because the work sucked. There was no reasonable raise that would have kept me there, but turning DOWN the heat might have kept me there…

Absolutely, employees leave bad managers, they seldom want to leave the employer itself – Or at least this was my personal experience, always on the run from dead woods.

The worst performers know they can't get an equivalent job somewhere else, so they're going to cling on no matter how miserable you make it. They have no choice. Your best performers know they have their pick of any job they like so it anything gets worse for them they'll just go somewhere else.

Organizations that need good people will try to improve the ones they have. While some organizations have dead wood that cannot be improved and must be replaced, great organizations play the long game and try to develop people.

There are many better strategies.

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