Meta CTO told employees higher headcount resulted in 'untenable' slow movement | Hacker News Reader

Meta CTO told employees higher headcount resulted in 'untenable' slow movement

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29 pointssigna1126 comments

I don't know if anyone else has real experience of this, but I highly suspect that you can take a lean company, hire aggressively and turn it into a fat slow moving company. I strongly suspect if you take a fat slow moving company and cut it down it doesn't suddenly become lean again, it stays slow and fat, but just does less. Also, as a side note:

>A meeting with 50+ people that took a month to schedule.

Very funny. There's not a single meeting on earth outside of a parliament that needs 50+ people.

>A meeting with 50+ people that took a month to schedule.

It's amazing how they're oblivious to the real problem here.

Real solution is “this is when the meeting is, we’ll be making a decision then with or without you”

Just gotta stop being silly at some point.

I would be very careful taking that line.

Organizationally, cutting a group out of decision making is probably the fastest way to alienate them and make them hostile towards other groups. I have had this happen to me; my team is already overloaded from being pulled into various things, some team has a project we don't have time for, they go ahead without us, and it creates a mess. We're mad at them because their system won't work with ours, we blame them for moving ahead without us, they blame us for not being ready to move ahead. The end result was a bunch of re-work and resentment in both sides.

It also screws up higher level planning and prioritization. It lets teams directly apply pressure to each other without filtering through upper management who can look at the big picture of prioritization before passing the pressure down. It doesn't matter if project X is more important, project Y is threatening to move ahead without us and we need to get in front of that before it becomes tech debt for us.

Ultimatums don't work in relationships, and team dynamics are still a human relationship even if it occurs in a business setting.

My real solution is that the lowest manager with oversight over both teams needs to clearly set priorities and expectations, and to enforce those. If that 50 person meeting is for a project with a low priority, people need to accept that it will likely move slowly. If it's for a high priority meeting, management needs to communicate that this meeting trumps other conflicts.

It's either important or its not, if its important enough to them they'll be there the same way I'm sure they somehow manage to always be there for their dentist appointment or a parcel arriving at their house or its not important and they just wont be there.

I agree with the other commenter that this is needlessly antagonistic. Thing is, no meeting needs 50 people. You can invite 50 people to a meeting but most of them will be optional and them showing up or not has little impact.

If a meeting is focused on low level concerns, then only the team members involved in the implementation need to participate (if this is more than 10 people, you're probably doing something wrong)

If a meeting is focused on high-level concerns, then only representatives are required. This too should be less than 10 people.

If a meeting requires the active participation of 50 different people, you've royally messed up your company structure.

I am having a hard time believing that people at Meta are really that oblivious that they require random HNers to show them where the issues are with their org.

It's probably more likely that there are good reasons why they are doing what they are doing and the root causes for their slowness are a lot more subtle than "meetings too big".

People are actually very oblivious to how they contribute to the issues in orgs. They are paid to do what they're doing, and rocking the boat will damage their position. Therefore the safest bet is to stay within the fence, and to defend that fence.

Anyone that comes in and says "you're wrong" is removed. That upsets the hierarchy.

Isn’t that kind of the point? That there are too many people who all think they should be in a meeting.

Small teams and small companies are able to move more quickly.

You don’t have to fire people to literally be small, but it’s also hard to design true autonomy within large orgs.

John Carmack’s recent resignation letter [0] hints at this and I think most complaints are common to large organizations and any company with lots of smart people metaperforming (ie, working to advance on compensation and power rather than value and meaning) will suffer these problems.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34028079

The fat slow company is like that because thousands of C-teamers are weighing down the 100 A-teamers. Whether it becomes lean and fast after terminations depends on how accurately you're able to isolate the C-teamers and remove them.

Oh yes this is the real issue... Do you really think they hired a bunch of C-teamers? Give it a break...

Yes. Most people cannot code or manage. They puffed up their resume, copy and pasted someone else's work, and presented well. Therefore they got the job. That's how the game works. It's not about what you know.

You think code or manage is the only way a social media company works? What about content policy? What about sales (you know, the thing that lays the bills)?

Despite it being cliche, that is my experience. Most people don't add much value either because they lack the competence or they're lazy.

> if you take a fat slow moving company and cut it down it doesn't suddenly become lean again, it stays slow and fat, but just does less

Yes. And the reason for this is that the thing that slows companies down is not the number of employees directly but the evolution of the organization, and the forces which shape the evolution of orgs are human forces. As people seek status they seek to create layers of bureaucracy so they can manage/lead/be senior to others and this will cause your organization to become sclerotic and slow down. Removing people won't fix the problem any more than chopping off one of your own limbs will solve the problem if you become overweight.

Paraphrasing the title: Management Blames Employees

It must be bonus season.

If scheduling a meeting with a mere 50 people takes a month, then why does he think going from 70k employees to some fraction of that (but still well over 50) is going to change the meeting culture? It has nothing to do with the number of employees, but rather the culture that they have cultivated.

There is an old saying that when you are renewing a brothel, you shouldn't change the beds, but the sex workers. (It is a bit more spicy ofc when said informally)

If you want to change the culture - you should first get rid of the people that embody the old culture (some of them may be able to be nudged into the new direction, but most not)

> you should first get rid of the people that embody the old culture

Which, by definition, seems like it must include the person that has been in charge since day 1.

The problem is that some (maybe most) of those "old culture" people are also the ones keeping the current organisation going (in whatever state that might be). I've seen this in several organisations - staff representing the old order who had been with the organisation for years (or even decades) are got rid of. And because there's a feeling it's better to rip-off the plaster quickly - you get rid of multiple people at the same time. And then things start to go wrong.

> change the beds, but the sex workers

CTO (& middle management) are the sex workers, the beds are the run of the mill employees.

I cannot fathom any scenario where building software would require 50 people to be in a meeting.

If the benefit of adding a new employee is lower than the burden within the organisation that adding them causes, it sounds a lot like a concurrency issue more than an headcount issue as such.

What they're describing seems to be too many people working on the overlapping/interacting projects and relying heavily on synchronous communication (which they can't even schedule, talk about contention!) to move.

If the teams were better isolated, given more autonomy and asynchronous communication between them encouraged then things would probably go a lot more smoothly.

So I think it's less of a headcount issue and more of a structure issue. But I suppose it also depends on what work is available and what the integration requirements are as well, depending on what they've got this might not be possible.

This is an org structure problem not a headcount problem. No team is empowered to make changes without 5 other teams' approval.

>Meta CTO told employees higher headcount resulted in 'untenable' slow movement

If only somebody had read the Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks (RIP) then maybe they would have realised they had to slim it down a bit.

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