Meta cracks down on low performers staffer says feels like a 'witch hunt' | Hacker News Reader

Meta cracks down on low performers staffer says feels like a 'witch hunt'

businessinsider.com

45 pointsachow31 comments

If you are in a higher paid, tech skill role in a FAANG, the regular cutting of bottom 10% performers should be expected. These are (generally) high-prestige, high-pay, competitively-sought roles. This type of job at this type of company is not the 'no-cut' team, although in some very successful companies during a booming economic period, it can kind of become that way for a time. However, those heady times always end eventually.

If you highly value long-term employment stability, it would be better to look for a role in a state, government, educational (or similar) organization. It won't be nearly as highly-paid, upwardly-mobile or prestigious but you'll generally have a better chance of staying employed even if you remain in the 'middle of the pack' performance-wise.

I'd probably be fine with knowing I had to excel if it was fully accepted they were genuinely the bottom ten percent of performers. Everything I read as an outsider from people working in such places seems to suggest otherwise though. People who work hard but have a PM cancel a project becoming low performers. Stories about people who ignore tech debt, ignore bugs, and launch a new chat app become top performers. I don't know if it's as prevalent as the comments often suggest.

> if it was fully accepted they were genuinely the bottom ten percent of performers.

The problem is that your "If" rarely happens in the real-world. In situations of competitive evaluative performance, the person who loses out usually doesn't agree with the outcome of the process and the 'winners' rarely have reason to complain or post about it.

Certainly there must have been situations where external variables (product cancellation or whatever) result in layoffs of non-bottom-10%-ers. But in high-growth tech companies, this instability is simply an ambient fact of life. My point was that highly-paid, high-skill tech roles in FAANG-type growth companies come with higher variability, some of which is going to be out of the employee's control. These jobs typically come with total comp packages which can be worth millions of dollars over time due to equity grants. That's there to compensate for the variability.

Stack ranking (especially rank and yank) has consistently been shown as a poor management practice. It leads to employees spending more time chasing good performance reviews than providing value to the company, and in many cases has been shown to cause employees to actively sabotage other people's work, and in other cases to not work with high performers.

Amazon hires to fire due to it. Microsoft moved away from it, but had known issues with sabatogue across teams/projects.

I fully agree. I'm not defending stack ranking as good, just saying that these types of roles are usually very competitive. With options, there's millions of dollars at stake. There is going to generally be some sort of evaluative process to insure all that money is buying sufficient value. Not saying it's fair...

This possibly the worst way to "trim", because it's not the low performers they will be trimming off, it's the ones who are bad at politics or networking will be let go.

What's the alternative? Randomly letting people go?

Yeah I don’t know, this isn’t to vouch for Amazon’s “planned attrition” quota at all but it seems regular “trimming of under performers” is better than “all at once witch hunt”. If I think about the “under performers” at my workplace I wish they were gone long ago (from a work standpoint, this isn’t a personal stab). But all of the above creates a pretty hostile work environment, probably. And to be a contrarian I have also worked at a place (non eng) that did maintain public (but anonymous) employee rankings (based on “customer” feedback [kind of complicated to explain in brief])- it was still a decent place to work. When it comes to this topic I relate to academic GPA - it’s a flawed and imperfect system but from a business/Org perspective what other options are there? I wouldn’t want to work in that environment myself but what do workers at Meta or Amzn expect?

Yeah it's funny. When I worked fast food the workers always kept their own s**list of coworkers they wished would get fired. In a crunchtime environment, underperforming makes everyone else shoulder more load. Ironically it was always the owner/managers who insisted on keeping around the ne'er-do-wells in hopes that their performance would improve.

Most corporate places I have worked at have generally done a good job giving me reliable performance reports (I've never been on a PIP but I hear it's incredibly common). Like, no one should ever be blindsided that they are underperforming.

Possibly. Maybe managers could shield X% of their reports, and the remaining Y% would be selected from randomly.

It's still unfair, but doesn't disproportionately affect a specific group as much.

I'm pretty sure this is how most processes work. I think the exception is if an entire division is underperforming they will let go of everyone regardless of individual performance.

Kind of. Proper word is decimation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(punishment)

Romans knew what they are doing!

I don't know about that. Companies generally do regular performance reviews, so there should be a lot of information about who the underperforming or merely adequate workers in each group are.

Why don't they already do something about the low performers without needing such an initiative? What I've read about layoffs also implies that its not necessarily only the low performers who are let go, that it can be quite random which I don't understand -- why would a company randomly let people go if it has information about who are its lower rung performers?

Facebook has only hinted that they have to trim headcount. Literally everything else in this article is pure speculation - no one knows what the actual process will be.

More than likely Facebook (sorry, Meta) will probably do it by team and trim underperforming departments. A low performer in an important department is probably more likely to stick around than a high performer in a money pit.

Performance...lines of code? The complexity of a solved solution or how many buddys you have (aka network)?

This is really difficult to do. Ratings tend to be done mentally by managers by comparing peers. Meaning every group has top and bottom performers. It ignores the fact that the absolute level of performance of each team is likely very different. The bottom performer of a top performing team could be way better than average. Will that be caught, who knows? The inverse is also true. That someone shitty is on a great team and it's hard to observe that.

There are likely a lot of downsides to their PSC system, but Meta is way more rigorous than this. They take performance reviews written by the employee themselves, reports, peers, managers, and calibrate them in meetings involving peer managers and several levels of managers above.

It's probably one of the more rigorous systems in the tech industry that at least avoids this kind of bias, though there are certainly ways it can be gamed.

Performance reviews degenerating into assessment of "politics and networking" skills, as GP put it, is more common than people care to admit.

Objectively evaluating performance of somebody who is smarter than you is incredibly hard, and sliding into using "s/he is a nice person" metric instead, is an easy way to avoid that hard work.

This isn't strictly true. I do think they are going to lose some number of the highest performers because they have options and they will realize they can go somewhere else.

However, there are still people who are bad at their job and are not good enough at politics/networking to survive a layoff/firing. And there are a set of people who are not liked by an incompetent manager and will also probably be managed out who do not deserve it and are good workers.

So you lose some at the top, some at the bottom, and some in the middle. The issue for Meta, will these actions be able to get rid of enough of the unproductive people to be worth it?

The other issue: morale always goes down after these kinds of things. So I think there is a good chance that overall productivity will go down as people do enough not to be marked for firing, but are not motivated to go above and beyond.

I personally think that Mark Zucherberg doesn't have the charisma to deliver this message in a way that doesn't actually cause harm to the company. But time will tell.

IMO, everyone on the team knows exactly who gets shit done and who doesn't. If you're in the "gets shit done" camp, you're very likely valued. If you're not, well, they probably weren't going to put up with it forever.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220726092834/https://www.busin...

What an embarrassing place to work.

I feel zero sympathy for any employee of Facebook. The company is literally the primary source of misinformation and disinformation on the internet and the people working there all benefit from it. Early on, they may not have realized what a propaganda machine they were creating, but for the past half decade they all have been turning a blind eye to the problem, or implementing dark patterns under the pretense of "increasing user engagement" and making it worse.

Why can't I filter my feed to strip out news items and only see personal updates and photos? Why isn't news in it's own section, like groups, marketplace, etc.? Why is disinformation labeled, rather than hidden by default? Why is violent content ignored, yet a nipple will get your account banned? Why can't I simply pay money and turn off ads? Why can't I set my feeds to chronological order permanently? Why can't I turn off suggested content? Why isn't the profile information and interests I explicitly entered respected rather than being solely based on AI analysis of my activity?

They literally have no excuses. If they're eating their own and demoralizing the rest? Great.

The real question is why it takes 85,000 employees to make Facebook do so little.

> they may not have realized what a propaganda machine they were creating

Do you also despise news organisations, magazines, and so on? Or are they deliberately propaganda, so it’s excusable?

Someone remind me, is this sort of comment a straw man, false equivalence, ad hominem, ad absurdum, Just Asking Questions or some another term? I can't remember. Maybe all the above?

I guess this is just how some people rationalize unethical behavior.

Meta employs a class of the most privileged people in human history.

Nobody should have sympathy for the clowns that choose to work at Meta at this point. They can find work elsewhere.

I suspect many employees at Meta have trust funds or other family wealth they can rely on. They don’t even need to work, but will spend a lot of time studying up for what is perceived as a high status place to work.

While talented I doubt they would work at a “lesser” company and instead just wait around for the next cool thing.

What evasive double-speak.

"I suspect" = "I really don't know anything." "many employees" = "I really have no idea." 2? 2k? So if you worked at a company of say, 400 people, and 3 of them had trust funds, this would apply, and by extension, apply to you.

This is literally no better than the comments about Mexico sending over their rapists and murders. Did Central American rapists and murderers cross the border? No doubt. Were they the majority? High improbable. Did they top 10%? If so, given the number of illegal crossings, Central America should be the safest place in the world by now, what with all the criminals now in the US.

I work at a startup with ex-Facebook, ex-Google, etc people. I have yet to see any evidence of trust funds.

A recession or the scare of a recession is usually the time strong companies decide to dismiss the weaker performers and distribute the work among the rest of the company. The companies try to get rid of as much slack as possible. That's what's happening. This will happen with others too, such as Google, Microsoft and on an on.

Facebook and the others will usually come out stronger and leaner at the other end.

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