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Comment by alexk307 | Hacker News Reader

This is such an embarrassment for these two... Aren't YOU the CEO of your company? Didn't YOU approve hiring plans and corporate goals? If there's not enough work, why don't you find something for them to work on, or replace your managers with folks that will. Instead, it's the employee's fault for being so unproductive.

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It just seems like setting a frame for upcoming layoffs nothing more or less than that.

Sounds like a public truce to me. These companies hire defensively and pay well to take talent from each other.

When other FAANG isn’t hiring, they can all afford to dump part of their workforce, knowing that the rest of the industry won’t soak them up. There’s no where else for them to go without taking pay cuts.

Not to defend either of them as CEOs but isn't that what they're doing? Part of addressing a problem is surfacing it in the first place.

Well, there’s is a lot of room to wiggle with ~1M revenue per employee. I’d be curious to hear about working habits of people at Apple :)

They are surfacing it in a weaselly way which absolves them of personal responsibility.

In reality, they approved the strategic direction of the company and signed off on the outrageous hiring plans. They were responsible for fostering a culture of execution and measuring the results of their teams. They were responsible for ensuring their investments were paying off.

Instead of messaging that "As CEO, we did not invest in the correct strategic direction of the company with the associated supporting culture to execute on our plans and as a result need to re-calibrate our investments" - they instead say "Too many employees aren't working, it's all the fault of the low performers!" or a variation of that message.

I'm not sure how you expect the process to go? As the CEO of a big company you aren't personally involved in hiring or managing line engineers. Your input is to tell underlings to tell their underlings to hire more or work more or whatnot. Feedback is just as slow moving up the chain.

Basically, "memo to employees" is the process.

The CEO may not be involved in hiring line engineers sure, but the buck still stops with the CEO. The least they can do is be sensitive in messaging. "Some of you don't belong here" just comes across as crass and insensitive. Given how FB is doing may be Zuck himself doesn't belong there anymore? Did he think about that before making the comment?

I think the spirit of the comment is that the CEOs aren't taking responsibility for something they created. They should write a postmortem.

I heard from former, recently departed Facebookers that their standards for hiring dropped quite a bit during the pandemic.

If I had to guess why Zuck isn't happy, it's that the new hires plus the increased organisational bloat of such a massive amount of new hires didn't materalize into spreadsheet numbers that looked good.

Any idea why these companies all ballooned in size so much during the pandemic? Was it purely about more time spent online = more money = more hiring or was there some actual strategy behind it?

I'm convinced that much of this hand wringing is about self justification. I think the role of the CEO is essentially to pretend to be in charge so everyone actually doing the work doesn't lose faith.

Well, we're viewing these messages without context. Absent of context, I would say that Zuckerberg's messaging is too aggressive, and many otherwise decent employees would find it toxic. Now, if there was a proper build-up of messaging to this level of aggression, perhaps that context justifies it to a certain extent. But it looks quite bad in isolation.

Pichai's messaging is more reasonable, even without context. He's just saying the company needs people to work harder. I'm fine with that.

> If there's not enough work, why don't you find something for them to work on

Or why don't they bring back the 20% rule and let the smart folks they have hired to come up with new projects? Some of them may end up bringing revenue.

This doesn't work in a company of large size. There is a reason it's called 120% rule at Google.

They lack creativity and vision. The biggest cash cows at these companies are already built.

Ads and app stores

It's like a bull market, where 70% of the value of shitty companies is driven by the bull market and the vertical they are in. Same goes for employment: during good(bullish) times, one doesn't need to deliver much and still can coast.

Well so what ? Hes acknowledging the problem and plan to fix it. Isnt that the kind of responsability taking you are precisely asking for ?

This is the REAL conversation that needs to be happening.

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