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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

Can someone elaborate on the quiet part of quiet layoff?

Business Insider’s journos are low quality. They will have heard about the quiet quitting movement and now the word quiet is in vogue and they’re applying it to all articles because they think it sounds good.

The reality is all layoffs are made quietly. It’s not something companies like to shout about

Quietgate is coming can you feel it

Heh. I wonder what else we’ll all be subjected to quietly in the coming years.

Hopefully not IRL ‘a quiet place.’

Online newspapers quietly dying due to nobody paying to get past paywalls would be my bet.

Loudcels are not ready to take the quietpill.

That's not true, mass layoffs are usually announced and get a lot of press

The difference here is the "layoffs" are that they are changing performance targets so more people get fired over the year instead of laying off a bunch of people at once

No, the reality is that layoffs have legally mandated public announcements, but pressuring a lot of employees into resigning all at the same time doesn't, which makes this a layoff that is quiet.

I don't know how California works, but in some other states when you fire someone without cause, the company is on the hook for additional unemployment payments.

Forcing 12,000 people to quit instead of firing them would save Facebook millions.

Would be awesome of those 12,000 didn't quit and just did the absolute minimum/nothing until they were actually fired. Wonder if facebook (or any company) would blink. But game theory dictates every employee thinks about self-preservation and would try to be the first one out.

The maximum unemployment benefit in CA is $450/week[1], $100k/52 weeks is $1,923/week. Even if Meta paid the full amount of $5.4M per week the net is they are still saving tens/hundreds of millions with the reduction.

[1] https://edd.ca.gov/en/Unemployment/UI-Calculator

Correct. IBM laid people off for years making sure to stay under the amount which would legally oblige them to report it publicly.

It's not a publicly announced layoff. These people will be "managed out" - they'll be put on PIPs, given shitty work to do, have constant reviews, never given any chance for a promotion or a raise, until eventually they choose to quit.

> until eventually they choose to quit

This is the part I don’t understand. What’s to stop people from not working and getting fired/packaged out instead?

I was being nice. Building up enough evidence to legitimately fire them is also a part of the "managing out" process.

Got it. Feels like this will be a lengthy process and require a lot of work, i.e. collecting evidence and documenting over multiple quarters, having people manage the process, all for 12k people. And my understanding is when you get PIP’d, you get offered a package of some kind to leave. I would be surprised if this approach is cheaper than just laying people off.

It will be pushed to line level managers, who will be overworked and stressed about it. But if you just make your managers do more, it doesn't cost the company anything.

It's embarrassing and awkward, and you can just go get another job instead of going through all that

"Quiet quitting" became a thing, now every writer feels a need to use it in a sentence.

I think they believe it show how they are current and on top of things?

Once "quiet quitting" took off the news was awash with stories like :

"You heard of quiet quitting, but quiet [firing, terminating, layoffs] is the next big thing".

Classic news feeds, find something trending, modify it slightly and hope your version trends too?

Reasons can be many just some ideas:

- Probably because they try to avoid needing to given an press statement/explanation to some more official entity.

- The whole meta verse could be going not so grate.

- Advertisement might not be going that well for meta either.

- Facebook is mostly used by older people and at least where I live most of the people have zombie Facebook accounts (i.e. they have one check in once a week due to family/old people connections and don't use it any further then that, so they might count as active users but are de-facto not)

- There had been a lot of whispers going around about people being unhappy about how some of the big tech companies kill competition by buying small startups and then silently dropping them after some time. This can count as not fully legal anti-competitive behavior in some situations so they can't just fire the people they brought, which might have contributed to them overgrowing.

- Silicon Valley has IMHO overpaid developers in average (and _only_ in average, and specific to SV) now that they have for years effectively killed most competition in one way or another (bought up, talent starvation, etc.) they might feel that it's time to lower wages for which they first have to get right of many existing contracts. What is better suited for this then a unstable economy where 1) they have an excuse to fire people 2) they can press lower wages because people are frightened and care more about having a ok paying job then potentially getting a greatly paying job.

- I feel some of the big tech companies work rather inefficient, sure they do have problems only people at their scale have, but then some small dev teams can sometimes compete with their products if you ignore that (and ignore network effect).

- Maybe they want to hide some fishy lay of schemes about not how many but which people they lay of. Potentially outright conflicting with employee protection laws in some states.

uh, I guess this are all wild rumors I have, in the end we will have to wait and see.

Probably because they try to avoid needing to given an press statement/explanation to some more official entity.

There are both federal and state laws that require companies to let the government know if they fire a certain number of people.

Trying to dodge a law that apples to every other company sounds like par for the course for Facebook and the other SV companies that aspire to emulate it.

That's the thing with quite layoffs. You for example could convince people to quit instead of being fired obfuscating the actual size and patterns of the layoffs.

And I mean especially Facebook is well known for not caring about low as long as they are not forced to.

> - The whole meta verse could be going not so grate.

It was pretty grating so far…

It is Facebook, who broke the wage-suppression cartel collusion between Apple, Google, Intuit, Adobe, etc. Love to see how FB layoffs can play out in terms of ToC at other places.

On the software side, I think this is related to Meta shutting down entire projects at a time.

Their employees have some fixed amount of time (3 months?) to find another team in the company before they are forced to exit.

It would be easy for the company to arrange it so that high performers find a team easily and low performers are phased out quietly without a team picking them up.

I am not sure how many of the people that the article is describing are software engineers. Contrary to other comments, I believe a large proportion of the workforce that will be removed will be technical.

> It would be easy for the company to arrange it so that high performers find a team easily and low performers are phased out quietly without a team picking them up.

Yes - in fact this should happen naturally by simply restricting each team's headcount growth, together with shutting down other teams.

In my head, I imagine Zuck would prefer to just force all the employees into one large room and dump as many knives as there are jobs he wants to keep in and let nature take its course, but I could be a bit of a cynic.

Squid Game style?

I think there's a legitimate issue with how salary expectations have increased during the pandemic. These expectations will now have to be corrected. What's happening at Facebook is just part of that correction.

Google is doing the same thing, as are other tech companies.

2023 is going to be bloody and brutal.

I haven't seen it. I was thinking more like gladiatorial games - doesn't Zuck see himself as a Neo-Augustus type leader?

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-haircut-expl...

So, I don't have a source to back this up, and without a source this will be worst of the rumour mill, but I'll say it anyways in case someone has a source to back it up or refute it.

A few weeks ago it was explained that Facebook is telling affected people they are no longer on the team they were on before, and they have X weeks (4?) to apply internally and find a role on a new team. So you're not fired, you just don't have a team and failed to find a new one, so.. see ya?

It was hard and took a lot of digging but I was able to find a source for what you said:

https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/12000-facebook-empl...

It's always in the last place you would think of looking

A mass layoff of 50 people or more within 30 days from a single work location requires public announcements in California. Presumably Facebook is managing all these departures so they are 'resigning' or something, so they don't have to make an announcement. https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN

> a single work location

What do WFH employees qualify as?

Interesting question. A company might try to skirt the law that way but I'm guessing a judge would squash it. So it would probably the main office you report out of, the HQ or the entire "remote" WFH cohort.

Structured to avoid the "WARN Act": https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn

That is, a bunch of people coincidentally ending up on performance plans, to Meta, might not be a "layoff".

The government takes a dim view on WARN act avoidance so if that is what is in fact being done it will come back to haunt Meta... It may even spur unionization among engineers. IBM PIP'd a bunch of older folks and that ended up in them settling a major lawsuit to avoid the airing of their dirty laundry.

I’m assuming they labeled it as quiet because it falls outside legislation such as the WARN Act.

Mass layoffs are supposed to be formally announced, well structured, and within a set of government-mandated guidelines.

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