Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

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Quoth Zuck:

> “And 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 just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.”

Wow. Just. Wow.

Why not inject some more dysfunction into an already strained relationship with employees and callously but passively aggressively deal with a seriously broken hiring pipeline in the laziest way possible? If a company can't be bothered to set performance expectations that are measurable and actionable, but just expects to push people out by "turning up the heat", that's an abject failure of a workplace. There used to be things like quarterly/yearly performance reviews, ratings, even "performance improvement plans" for under-performing employees--you know, clear expectations, clear communications, criteria and steps and timelines put forward when someone is not meeting expectations.

You know, sometimes life happens to people and they slow down a quarter or two, maybe because of a family crisis, divorce, child, death in the family, traumatic event. Global pandemic? 2 years of isolation WFH? Yeah, there might be reasons...

But, from the top, the message "these people will find their way to the door if we make work suck enough"--I couldn't imagine anything more demoralizing.

I've been at places where I would love to hear the CEO say that. Being forced to work with poor performers, lazy people, and people who deliver poor quality results is frustrating and demoralizing.

Those kinds of people can stick around for years, especially in good times when the company is making so much money that leadership doesn't need to care. Netflix is one of the few large companies that has a culture of culling the herd even in good times, and I wish more large companies would take that approach.

It depresses me no end that someone can see poor performance, laziness etc only as a trait others possess, and not as a reaction to circumstance that they themselves might experience one day.

I guarantee that anyone -- anyone -- can find themselves viewed as substandard.

It's truly disturbing when Zuckerberg says something so dystopian, and people 'in the trenches' call for more.

Even if it is due to circumstances, I've never seen a lazy person become unlazy after intervention from management. Sample size .. perhaps 20? The best solution is to terminate them quickly. Zuck's attitude here is what I look for in leaders when considering whether to join a company. There is little that's more demoralizing than pulling someone's weight for years while management is too disorganized to fire them, or worse yet when management thinks that half of your output is actually the output of the person you've been carrying.

I've seen many turnarounds. I've seen others that just don't understand what's expected and will never turn around. I've seen folks sit on a team they hate for 3+ year cause they love the people but hated the work. I found that one a new team and they're very productive again, but they would have stayed unhappy and unproductive for years without intervention.

> I found that one a new team and they're very productive again

This. I should have added context that my experience was in small companies where it wasn't really possible to change teams. But some of the people that were bad performers became good performers only after they were fired and found new jobs. I've seen this happen at more than one company. They were probably just demotivated or hated their boss or something, and no amount of intervention can really fix that, short of a change in job (or a change in team, as you mention, if it's a bigger company).

Some people don't know others see them going slow and managers don't have conversations till it's become problematic. Some people don't realize or won't inculcate feedback until they're fired. They play brinkmanship with their managers. Those people firing cab help. Kick in the pants as it were.

Sub-standard is relative to a standard. If someone finds themselves to be sub-standard, maybe they should find a place with lower standards? That's exactly what Zuck is saying.

On one hand, I've worked with a guy once who, as far as I could tell, did about an hour of work per day (if that) and played fantasy baseball in his office most of the time, waiting to be PIPed and managed out for a really long time... I inherited his code and it was a patchwork of minimum effort hacky fixes with no care for quality (cause he wasn't going to maintain it, I guess?). I really don't care what his circumstances are, I don't want to work with people like that, I wish they could fire him much faster than they did, and I bet most people would agree.

On the other hand I've heard about FB in particular is that there are teams with lots of people working 12-hour days. I am not willing to do that; it would be dumb for me to join such a team, and kind of a dick move to stick around as a low performer (I heard it from a friend who tried to keep up then decided to quit).

> Sub-standard is relative to a standard. If someone finds themselves to be sub-standard, maybe they should find a place with lower standards? That's exactly what Zuck is saying.

Sure, and maybe Zuck should just keep shifting the goal-posts, without limit? Where's the harm?

From talking with friends at Meta, this is re-raising the bar. Meta was apparently pretty understanding how Covid affected people psychologically, even if they didn't get sick. My contacts say this is a return to the pre-covid standard.

Additionally, the economy is struggling and Meta hasn't had great earnings reports vs expectations. Wouldn't you want a CEO to communicate that the company needs to buckle down before things get dire?

> It's truly disturbing when Zuckerberg says something so dystopian, and people 'in the trenches' call for more.

Or maybe people here on HN are sick of finding --in team after team-- those 1 or 2 people who take forever to finish their work and drag the whole team down.

I don’t care about people who take forever. Or who don’t know things. What I dislike is people who don’t care. Who write just shit that then breaks all the time or has to be fixed by others. If you are slow, take your time. But please care enough to write quality code.

Does it materially hurt you somehow if the team doesn’t finish all their print points? If you work at a company as big as Facebook, then certainly not.

I had a coworker whom I sat next to that reflected a lot of these qualities, that I had worked very hard to eliminate from myself just a few years earlier. It was simultaneously irritating because I was waiting on him for work, while also invoking sympathy. I knew what kinds of problems he was struggling with, and could guess at a few of the causes.

Okay, so you think it’s all circumstantial? What’s the mix? Are there no people that just like to skate by?

Nope. Don't know. Nope.

Rather than continue replying to individuals, my final thoughts:

The responses here seem short-sighted.

A company is openly increasing pressure on staff to force people to leave.

This does not protect or benefit you, despite what you may think about how great things will be once your idiotic, lazy co-workers amicably depart with zero collateral impact.

This is aggressively targeted at you. Not today's you (or so you believe) but tomorrow's you.

Just because you imagine you'll benefit from this shifting of boundaries, doesn't mean you'll continue to benefit next time it happens.

And for the variations on the theme "so you think everyone should be allowed to slack off", nope, and I didn't say that.

Oh sweet summer child, they aren't saying that they are going to get rid of the poor performers. They've said they are going to turn up the heat. That means that the people, like yourself, who actually do the work, are going to face the heat. The poor performers have a skill: and that skill is keeping their jobs without doing any work. So you're the one that is going to have to do more work, and it is people like you who are going to get a clue and go work somewhere else. If you stay, you'll have an even bigger portion of the work to do.

100% this. The only people who will leave when things get harder are those who respect themselves enough to not want to waste their time anymore (as they should)

Poor performers are demotivating, yep. The challenge of a manager, and really, the whole management system, is making reasonable efforts to get employees back on track, if that's possible. I mentioned the life events thing because it's real. Sometimes a PIP (performance improvement plan) gives people a jolt and gets them back on track, sometimes not. It's the job of management to separate true under-performers from temporary ones and to find the best roles for members of the team.

What Zuck wrote had none of the nuance or understanding that one would expect of someone with even a moderate amount of experience managing people. It's true that firing people is hard, which is probably why these companies should not have focused on eating the world so voraciously for the past N years.

Facebook has regular, systematic performance reviews and a PIP process like most large companies. Nobody is talking about firing people for temporary performance lapses.

Zuckerberg could have said some stuff like "I have confidence our existing performance evaluation processes will be able to handle productivity issues, with some adjustments", or some other bland but reassuring words, but he chose what he said.

Yeah and he didn't say anything about firing people. He said people should choose to leave if they don't fit.

From what I understand, Netflix doesn't cull the herd — they get rid of good (but not excellent) performers too. The article is talking about actually cullung the herd and getting rid of the mediocre performers who previously could skate by.

Yeah true, but this coming from the likes of Facebook and Google, two companies well known for warehousing talent... it mostly just comes across as tone deaf and naive.

For years they've literally hired very smart and capable people, and then shoehorned them into working on some ad-tech engine that an intern could do, just so they didn't work for a competitor. And now they're angry that their employees "don't work hard?"

Holy fuck, for being Google, they sure have some idiots in leadership.

The idea these firms hire people just to stop them going to competitors is popular on HN but I never saw any evidence of it when I was there.

Trophy hires? Sure, occasionally, but they were all doing stuff for the company. And the idea there was some sort of policy is wrong. It may look like that from the outside though, because there was never a strong connection between hiring and need.

This sounds plausible, but I'd love to hear if others agree with this claim.

Isn't this a failure of the free market? This leads to the obvious question, which is: what could be done to improve optimal talent distribution?

It seems bad to society if rich companies can monopolize talent to control development and output in order to ensure greater political power and control.

> but I'd love to hear if others agree with this claim.

I'm one of those that agree with that claim, I've said something similar a couple of times during the last few years on this forum (I remember that once I even used the term "golden handcuffs" in order to describe the whole situation).

As to why and how this came to happen in relation to the free market? The short answer is that both Google and FB are de-facto monopolies. In a way that can also be extended to Apple and MS. Of course that these companies will make tons and tons of a money during a period when software is eating the world (I know it sounds marketing-ish, but it's the reality). As such, they can use that money to "park" the best developers available among their ranks, so that no real competitor can emerge.

> they can use that money to "park" the best developers available among their ranks, so that no real competitor can emerge.

i highly doubt they are really parking developers, because innovation that endangers those companies don't come from individual developers.

In addition to a surplus of great people, they have lots of mediocre people too, just like everywhere else. There may have been a time where this wasn't true, but now anyone who passes a day of tricky tech interviews is in, and that doesn't always correlate with good performance. At least that's my take having worked at Google.

It's nice to hear someone admit that Google hires a lot of mediocre people. I'm also not shocked, their interview process invites people to gamify.

Biggest issue here are workaholics, over-achievers, and extremely talented people setting unhealthy standards for everyone else.

I do not want to be in a place where this kinda signaling goes top down from the CEO and is not abhorred by the ones doing the work.

As a dev, being forced to first plan and then PROVE that I am NOT lazy, NOT a poor performer and my code is NOT the reason the product sucks is just breeding a CYA culture full of conflicts, closeness, suspicion and politics. The only one's who will survive this environment are not the ones whom you want to retain anyway.

The path to hell is paved with good intentions.

Yes, a very powerful move of Zuckerberg. Many people get offended by an aggressive CEO, but these CEO's end up with many more applications of ambitious candidates than they can employ.

'too many employees, but few work'.. this is misleading.. given the spin, you might think this indicates that they hired these people to do specific line-of-business things, and they didn't get done. However, what actually happened was they hired a bunch of people to do.. something.. but they weren't sure what.. all they were told is that they need to hire them.. then they realized they might have 'a down quarter or two'.. apple's killing their advertising business, and they're thinking.. 'hey wait a minute.. our headcount's gone up.. no one in middle-management seems to know what they're doing (which is actually our fault.. but we can't say that), so we'll call the people we hired lazy unmotivated clowns and get rid them that way.' Cue the high-fives.

I don't understand this either. He has to trust entire layers of useless middle management to get accurate performance numbers. All he'll get are invented numbers on a piece of paper (metaphorically speaking).

The ones who leave may be dissatisfied with the artificial goals.

I don't think you can infer from this article that Meta isn't setting new, measurable and actionable performance expectations internally.

Though you could be inferring that from working there or from all the other news about them.

Setting measurable performance expectations for software roles is notoriously difficult.

Setting quantitative targets often leads to developers optimizing for whatever metric you set, while compromising on the details that aren't quantifiable.

For all of the problems and biases that qualitative performance review has, I think it makes for a more enjoyable and engaging environment.

There are people who were performing well but had temporary setbacks due to circumstances, and there are people who wanted to coast from day one. It's easy to tell them apart if you have worked with them closely.

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