Facebook to purge thousands of workers as part of ‘quiet layoffs’ | Hacker News Reader

Facebook to purge thousands of workers as part of ‘quiet layoffs’

nypost.com

74 pointsbusymom035 comments

Makes me very curious as to how they are measuring performance.

I've seen the firing of "low performing employees" destroy teams, because the performing they were doing was important but undervalued. Likewise I've seen employees who were not missed that we considered high value because they made a lot of noise. One particular instance of which became very clear that they were causing a lot of the work that they were also taking credit for.

> Zuckerberg said Meta would be slashing budgets across all of its departments and subsidiaries, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

It sounds like they don't really know where to make the cuts they want.

>It sounds like they don't really know where to make the cuts they want.

Metaverse. Nuke the entire thing from orbit. It's clearly the wrong thing for them to be focused on.

Nah their AR/VR division is the only thing they’ve got to dangle in front of long term investors. I think it’s giving them about 24 months of runway before the sky starts falling for them.

I would argue it's probably almost the only thing they're working on that has any real value too. Most of their other products don't, or even have negative value, in terms of their usefulness to society and humanity.

Metaverse has negative value too, but at least it has novelty...

There's useful applications for AR and VR. I don't know that Meta would actually pursue those instead of harmful applications, but at least it's easy to imagine the positive potential for these technologies.

I'm not sure this is true. Their metaverse stuff could easily actually be a drag on their share price right now. There's 2 ways to view Meta: The bull case is that Facebook/Insta absolutely churn out money and that's great, but for future growth their going into the metaverse and they're going to win there and unlock more explosive growth. But there's the bear case: Facebook/Insta absolutely churn out money but they're not growing because the CEO has lost focus on the core business, and share holders aren't going to get to enjoy that money because the CEO who has absolute total control of the company is going to plough all that money into a nebulous new business that's incredibly unlikely to pay off.

It could very well be that right now Meta's stock is trading at a discount, because investors are discounting the revenue streams because they don't think it's going to go to share holders. So instead of strangling the golden goose by cutting across the core facebook business, you could massive bring down spend on VR, refocus on your core business and the stock price would shoot through the roof.

I think the sentiment will be popular on HN but this is Meta's moonshot to stay relevant to young people. I mean it's an absolute dumpster fire and somehow more cringy than NFTs but this is the horse they bet on to try and get a piece of "gaming as a social network" that they were legitimately completely caught off guard by. They aren't going to be able to buy their way into pc, console, or mobile so this is their attempt to create a new market where they can be a player.

Without this their outlook is slowing growth on their existing properties and a sword of damocles hanging over Facebook. They're not going to be able to swing 20-30% annual growth for much longer without getting into other markets.

They would have to accept being a drastically smaller company going forward which I doubt they are prepared to do. It seems like they want to recapture the glory days and it is all or nothing.

How could they possibly have so many underperformers? I thought they did leetcode interviews which find all the A players. Weird.

Facebook has been notoriously easy to get into for the past few years. Some of the people I’ve seen hired were B players at best. I think it’s been hard to hire top people since their reputation scraped the bottom of the barrel. Anyone who’s competent enough to get a cushy job with high prestige and pay has many options.

I haven't figured out a good way of quantifying them, but the "Day in the life of an X at Facebook/Meta" are a fantastic proxy for utilization.

Executives should have an alert set up and the minute one pops up, they can immediately know they've over-hired.

This applies to nearly every technology company.

Stop trying to make "quiet-whatever" take off. We're not doing this one.

Covert terminations.

Quiet quitting = coasting

Quiet firing = managing out

No kidding. We are finally done with “the unreasonable effectiveness of…” and “what we talk about when we talk about…”, and now we have the spread of “quiet…”

"Things programmers believe about" titles considered harmful.

quiet-* only caught on because of how loudly people complained about it. Everyone having a visceral reaction to the term made sure it was going to stick.

Thank you.

Quiet layoffs are absolutely real.

Traditionally, companies announce layoffs, first internally and then publicly. The public announcement is sometimes hoping for a bump in their stock price or just getting ahead of inevitable news stories.

Quietly laying people off is more like "managing out" or what Facebook is doing here. They haven't given us a hard number for the layoffs, and they're trying to use performance to justify the layoffs rather than just telling people they're redundant.

Legally, a layoff is when the employee isn’t replaced. A termination is when they are replaced.

A layoff based on performance is still a layoff.

Well, no, if it's based on performance, it isn't a layoff. At least in theory.

Whenever you cut staff for a layoff, you always base it on performance.

No. It’s often based simply on utility.

When you hiring an external firm to do the same function.

Many companies used to employ janitors. Now companies hire “janitors services” companies to clean.

The difference between a layoff and a termination is whether it's based on performance. Hence unemployment eligibility

Facebook has spent so much time trying to reinvent their products to be like other products they have failed to innovate at every turn. Worse, they have products that have lost much of their original appeal.

In fact, Facebook has never even copied well. I can’t think of a time that they pulled a Microsoft and successfully copied a product sufficiently enough to hold off the competition. Their best business moves have all been acquisitions.

Stories? Pretty much killed Snapchat.

“Quiet layoff” is totally a thing. Back in the 2000’s when I worked for a Fortune 500 software shop, I feel like it had a different name. If Meta is trying the same thing, then they’re pretty incompetent.

The idea was to “resource action” workers in small percentages over an extended period. That keeps you out of the news.

It totally defeats the purpose to layoff 15% percent or whatever over a short period! That gets you in the news. The goal of a “quiet layoff” is to keep it quiet!

Thanks NY Post for the “quality journalism”. You could have addressed all this and you didn’t (the content-mill is based on quotas, don’t ya know?)

Layoffs suck, but I’m pretty convinced that it’s far better to cut deep, cut once, and then start to repair/rebuild/move ahead than to drag out a slow, chaotic reduction over 6-12 months. Those prolonged morale sinks encourage a lot of your employees with the most options to leave on their own. That’s usually not what you want.

Layoffs over a certain size bring legal obligations like WARN Act filings. In some sectors, employers just eat the cost and walk people out on the day of but leave them on payroll for the required legal period. However, if you’re really concerned about costs, you can still squeeze something out of an employee on notice.

That's what Exxon and Shell did a while back.

>thousands of employees getting pink slips

Before they raised the dividend.

What do these slow 6/12 month reductions look like? I have a feeling this is happening where I work due to morale destroying team reshuffles every 5 or 6 months.

There's a spectrum of approaches, but I often see them starting as "hiring slowdowns, then 'all backfills need specific approval', then hiring freezes, often coupled with teams merging or being shuffled around.

It's not that any individual of those things are bad decisions or terrible omens, but in combination or series of increasing pressures, they combine to become bad omens and, if left unaddressed, tend to accelerate the attrition of some employees with more options for employment, which leads to more team combinations/shuffling.

The other, even worse IMO, path to slow reductions is "managing out a few underperformers over here", then "managing out a few underperformers over there", then "eliminating some roles in a product that isn't our core focus over here", then "closing down this group over here because reasons". Those series of small, involuntary terminations are a much stronger signal to be updating LinkedIn and your resume, IMO.

IBM wrote the book on it.

Is the term "quiet layoff" somehow intended to be the equivalent to "quiet quitting"? I don't think the usage of "quiet" makes any sense in this case.

Employees are openly grouped into performance categories, with "needs support" (as per the article) as the entry on the bottom of the list. That in combination with Zuckerberg talking about approaching the currently persisting downtrend conservatively should immediately alert any employee. An impeding layoff doesn't really get much more obvious than this.

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