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Comment by hooby | Hacker News Reader

Imho the real question here is, why is it that Meta keeps hiring right right until they do large layoff rounds?

The kind of issue that requires large layoff rounds is not something that just materializes overnight, out of the blue.

So why does their management - which should be able to read the writing on the wall, since that's part of their job - not issue a strict hiring freeze (in addition to other measures taken to try and avoid/reduce the impeding layoffs).

Why do they go from hiring to firing in the blink of an eye?

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> So why does their management - which should be able to read the writing on the wall, since that's part of their job - not issue a strict hiring freeze [...] Why do they go from hiring to firing in the blink of an eye?

They did have a hiring freeze, and didn't really go from hiring to firing in the blink of an eye:

* In May they froze hiring for engineers and low-level data scientists.

* In July they announced that there would be restructures, and asked managers to start identifying weak performers.

* In September they extended the freeze to all areas and announced that they would be reducing labour budgets for teams, and restructuring.

In all probability, this engineer was probably considered 'on-shoring' rather than a hire so slipped through the hiring freeze (headcount figure stays the same, we are just moving someone on-shore) but then didn't escape the corporate redundancy. Although this individual story is awful, at the scale of 12,000 layoffs unfortunately there will inevitably be instances where the circumstances are poor.

Doesn't have to inevitable, though. They literally have all the data.

That's the problem with just reading data reports at scale.

Hiring 30k people so recently then firing almost half of them the next year, even filtering a tiny quarter of a percent is going to create outliers who get affected with serious life changing events.

It's really more about whether the decision makers at that level care about this kind of stuff or not.

Literally, if we lived in a literally perfect world none would have to be literally fired either. Yet, here we literally are.

> Doesn't have to inevitable, though. They literally have all the data.

Even if you have all the data, lets say there is a 4 person team being reduced to 3 during this redundancy - What do you do? Fire Anne instead of Peter purely because Peter joined the team more recently? Sure that sounds more fair for Peter, but it's less fair for Anne.

Sort of? Dealing and living with that dilemma is part of the job though.

Someone else suggested putting Peter at risk - inform him that in 3 months he will be part of a layoff, so that he has those 3 months to find a new job.

It probably would have been cheaper and less effort to make sure the hiring freeze actually properly works as intended - rather than interviewing, hiring, relocating and firing someone (including relocation and severance packages) for just two days of work.

Eh, large redundancies are usually planned semi-confidentially and executed immediately for obvious reasons, which makes these sort of things pretty inevitable.

The obvious reasons aren't just from a corporate perspective, it's also for an employee welfare perspective - Sometimes it's better that 13% of people immediately know rather than 100% of employees worrying about their job before 13% are eventually sacked.

> Although this individual story is awful, at the scale of 12,000 layoffs unfortunately there will inevitably be instances where the circumstances are poor.

Basically 1 layoff is a tragedy, 12K is a statistic.

> So why does their management - which should be able to read the writing on the wall, since that's part of their job - not issue a strict hiring freeze (in addition to other measures taken to try and avoid/reduce the impeding layoffs).

Hiring freezes are an internally visible sign (which may lead to critical people jumping ship at the wrong time or uncontrolled ship-on-fire quittings that end up larger than the original plans), but most importantly they are externally visible - and at that point they're market relevant, because early knowledge can be used to time the market as a serious headcount reduction will at least cause a significant volatility for the stock. Since there are specific disclosure requirements on potentially market relevant news, it makes sense to treat hiring freezes and layoffs by default as market relevant to keep the SEC and other market regulators away. And often enough, it's only highest level leadership that knows about plans, with not even HR being involved until the very last second, much less some middle manager with hiring authority.

It absolutely sucks for everyone involved, particularly new hires, but I don't see a way around that for a publicly traded company. However, companies should be mandated to cover all costs of relocation and half a year severance for breach of contract in bad faith for such cases.

So, basically a Perverse Incentive [0] - a systemic problem.

But the firings are externally visible as well - and it's also externally visible whether the firings occurred with or without a hiring freeze in place beforehand. And whether the number of people fired is larger - or smaller is visible as well (and after a hiring freeze and counter-measures it's always gonna be somewhat smaller).

And one of those two options signals greater unpredictability and volatility then the other - which to investors means higher risk, right?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

> But the firings are externally visible as well - and it's also externally visible whether the firings occurred with or without a hiring freeze in place beforehand.

Yeah, the key thing that a company this size has to take care about is to announce the news to everyone - employees, media and investors - at the exact same time, so no one can claim that "insider trading" has taken place.

> And one of those two options signals greater unpredictability and volatility then the other - which to investors means higher risk, right?

Yes but no at the same time. The playing field is theoretically the same for every investor, which means that there is always a non-zero chance of a company announcing massive layoffs.

It can take 3+ months from offering a contract to a foreigner before they start, depending how quickly visas can be processed, where the person and their family live, and notice periods.

It’s like that scene from the Margin Call. All is well, until you notice the calculations you did before make no sense.

checking formulas on spreadsheet - hmm it looks like I typed over the "total cost" number - which explains why it didnt change when I added more staff

> Why do they go from hiring to firing in the blink of an eye?

Hiring is used as a metric for middle management.

And time spent is probably not accounted for, so in the books you don't feel the costs in time and money of hiring.

> So why does their management - which should be able to read the writing on the wall, since that's part of their job

You know how many engineers can’t code right? I don’t think a check of whether someone can read the future is part of a management interview.

its too big. Meta wont want to leak that people are going to get laid off so they let the business carry on globally as per usual right up until the layoff button gets pressed.

its safer for the company to manage it that way.

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