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lljk_kennedy

Honest question - what does 'take accountability' and 'take responsibility' actually look like for Zuckerberg here?

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This question comes up in every layoff thread.

It doesn't mean "this will have negative consequences on me personally".

It means "I don't blame anyone else for this".

If you look at his net worth, which is likely to be mostly on paper, it has suffered a lot. I know its a "cry me a river", "worlds smallest violin" type of thing but for someone at his level that is the material impact. I would imagine someone with empathy will feel horrible about having to do this to 11,000 people's livelihoods. I'm not implying Zuck has or doesn't have empathy, I don't know him. I'm just saying this likely has an impact. It might also have a business impact on future hiring, forecasting, etc. for the company as well. Maybe the pace of funding in the VR BigBet gets pulled back some? We'll know in a couple quarters.

Those people knowingly didn't escape the sinking boat and decided to work at Meta. We can say this for every social media platform company and their employees. I'd work at microsoft but not at snapchat or facebook. These apps are just trends and they go away in 10-15 years. They past maturity phase and in decline for the last 5 years already.

My english is non-native but I would expect when someone says "I take accountability and responsibility" to means exactly that and I have a hard time figuring out what else it could mean.

The OP sounds like they would expect the person to perform some sort of public penance or resign. Which IMO is the wrong thing to do when making a mistake. The correct thing is to own up to your mistakes and hopefully learn from them.

Accountability to me, means that your actions have consequences. Saying "I'm accountable" but it not having any material affect based on the outcome of your actions feels unfair to most people. Especially when it's really 11,000 people who are the ones to actually feel the consequences.

Zuck's net worth dropping from one unfathomable level of wealth, to another unfathomable level of wealth, isn't really a consequence here.

So each time someone makes a mistake there should be a material consequence to the person?

Would this not create an atmosphere of fear and drive society towards a fixed mindset where everyone would in case of mistake try to hide their mistake?

AFAIK the biggest upgrade to global aviation safety happened when mistakes were de-penalized, and all stakeholders could honestly discuss what went wrong and how to improve things in the future.

IMO, the biggest issues is not punishment, but understanding that a mistake was made, and an honest attempt to avoid similar mistakes in the future.

If a perpetrator fails to honestly see the harm in their actions, and perpetuate the same mistake repeatedly, then yes, they should probably face secondary consequences to make it understandable to every stakeholder that such behaviour is not acceptable. The reasoning here, however, is not some sense of global justice, but to simply de-normalize the pathological behaviour (if you repeat something without consequences it becomes 'accepted way of working').

Even "perpetrator" is harsh - overhiring is a business mistake, not some ethical or legal violation. It's part of the deal - you get hired, and you can get laid off later. It sucks for the employees to go through but they aren't victims.

I think you're dishonestly trying to equate a CEO having to fire 11,000 people due to his decisions, to something like an engineer wiping out a DB and having to restore from backups.

If suddenly, 11,000 people died today in airplane crashes in a single company's air fleet, you're be sure that their CEO would be under question. I'm not saying this is a fair analogy - but just as similar, your one wasn't either.

I suppose it boils down to how serious is the mistake of the CEO from the point of view of society, Facebook owners and other stakeholders.

I could imagine Facebook doing things that would indeed merit the sacking of CEO. For instance, doing something that leads to the death of 11k people would warrant severe consequences. I have no idea how Facebook could do that, but on the same par. They have all the data to do tons of nasty things.

I would view accidentally hiring 11k people from the point of view of the above interested parties indeed on the level of an engineer wiping db via accident (not negligence).

I imagine the mistake would be something like, you look at the market, you see it skyrocketing, you feed the numbers to your trusty excel sheet that has served you years and say, hey, we need more people. Only when market conditions normalize you realize the mistake.

Honestly, I really can't see the harm done here. People lose their jobs all the time. Corporation hire and fire. Why would this be any worse than standard practice in corporate america? (Of course it sucks to be laid off)

as i said in another comment, for 90% of the world's population, the level of wealth fo the average facebook employee is unfathomable too. so it's hard to play the "oh he's wealthy so there are no real consequences" card just for zuckerberg

He's not my favorite person, but he did use language that said he, personally, predicted the business conditions wrong, overhired, etc. You don't have to look far to find layoff messages that blame covid or other outside forces and don't take any blame.

It means nothing especially with 50% voting shares. The funny thing about these layoffs is how they just go by the C-Suites without even denting their value.

Honest question - what do you expect it to look like beside making the statement and giving employees a more than gracious severance package to back up the words?

He goes and asks an executive recruitment firm to find a successor and spends more time on the board.

Yeah it sounds tough but if he'd hired a guy who oversaw what's just happened, he would have fired him.

When you actually take responsibklity and accountsbility in the real world and not the bs world of C-suite executives, it means there are consequences for you. Might mean he steps down from his position, it might mean he gets a his compensation package cut, it might mean something else. But it means more than empty words.

I mean, if you get into a minor car accident, taking responsibility basically means paying for damage to the car. To me it seems like taking responsibility for hiring too many people by ensuring a nice severance package and paying for access to external hiring consultants for people who want it, is pretty analogous to how ordinary people take responsibility when they accidentally do something that wrongs someone else i.e. They try and fix the effects of the wrong.

Taking responsibility means trying to make it right. It doesn't mean taking a hit personally, unless that hit helps make the situation right.

He's not personally paying for those severance packages. Is this really that hard to understand?

Does it matter as long as he is the cause of them getting compensated?

Vengence isn't the same as justice. If you care more about zuck personally hurting than laid off employees being compensated, you are after the former not the latter.

To use the car accideny analogy - do you also think its a cop out for people to have insurance?

he's taken a major hit to his personal wealth as a consequence of this bad decision, so I'd say the consequences are pretty real for him

I guess in an ideal world, the board removes him as CEO?

He has the majority of the voting shares so it's rightfully his decision.

Why? He is making a correct decision from the business point of view, it is unclear who will be the replacement CEO, and there are similar layoffs across other tech companies. The board has zero incentive of changing the CEO now.

It's evidently clear now, his "correct decision from a business point of view" to increase investments during Covid was wrong as they resulted in these 11,000 people being let go. I think the same could be said for the increased investment in metaverse, which I imagine is predicated on the prior large growth of people moving online during Covid, which is now returning to the mean.

I think their share price has taken strong corrections due to these decisions. I think that's an incentive for a board to take action?

(I'm purposefully ignoring the ouroborus that is Zuck's control of voting shares that protects him here.)

This decision is correct, given all the incorrect strategic decisions he made leading up to it. The markets have clearly lost a lot of confidence in his leadership, and I would have to imagine the remaining employees have too. Stepping down would be a drastic step, but merely stating “I take responsibility” is unlikely on its own to restore confidence in his ability to right the ship either.

This decision might be correct but the previous one was wrong. In his own words:

"I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected."

So, keep him to downsize the company and replace him when it's time to start growing again?

I would expect that he doesn't say he would take responsibility if that doesn't mean anything at all.

Its just business speak for "I'm sorry, its my fault".

I don't think that's a bad thing. Its always worthwhile to apologize even if there is nothing else to be done.

Only he can punish himself, effectively. He has control of the company.

Losing three quarters of his net worth?

Meh, it's inconsequential given he's never going to want for money.

if we're going down that road, being fired is pretty inconsequential for a silicon valley software engineer. whoever your next employer is, relative to 90% of the world's population you'll still have a richer and more comfortable life than they could ever dream of

Guy has lost dozens of billions of dollars. As far as accountability goes he's pretty up there.

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