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Comment by fatnoah | Hacker News Reader

> This seems like a bad move for Meta, just leaving the axe up in the air ready to strike like this.

That may be intentional. I could see a scenario where voluntary attrition helps them get reduce size more organically and with lower cost than a layoff. Meta is still huge and pays good money. They can handle a huge level of attrition and still have enough "A players" left over to work on the thing that truly require that level of operation.

> With numbers in the thousands, it gives me the sense that it might not always matter what you do or how good you are.

Fully agree on this. At that scope, it's broad cuts with a lot of meat going with the fat.

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I could see a scenario where voluntary attrition helps them get reduce size more organically and with lower cost than a layoff

This is a terrible idea, though. It's always the desirable employees that have options that leave an environment like this, and it's always the less competent employees that hold on for dear life and stay.

I've seen this so many times in my career. The A players will stay because they're attached to the things they've created, but the B players will leave and you're left with lots of C players.

In the long run its cheaper to lay off people.

People who want to leave and have options, will consider those options either way. There is no way for meta to force them to stay. Even if meta announced layoffs with all the list of names, following months many who want will leave. Pretty much every layoff is followed by people leaving voluntary. Some over bad feelings of what happened, some because their friends are away so why not and some dont like new position. But they will be leaving.

> it's always the less competent employees that hold on for dear life and stay.

Meh. People stay for many reasons. It is not always "not having options". It is fairly often "I actually want to stay despite layoff". And again, there is no way to force people to stay. Confident people will be leaving either way.

The worry is less confident people proactively seek more certain employment choices when faced with uncertainty

As they should! Why would a company like Meta base their policy on what some hypothetically unconfident employees might be thinking.

Does the management, or the quantitative performance of the company, agree with you here? I'm somewhat dubious given how frequently this occurs, but ideally I think you'd want some really long-term study that looks at both the layoff(s), attrition, and later progress (or growth if it occurs).

I'd bet that this is the difference between having good middle managers and not. If you have confidence in your directors and middle managers, you can target the C players. If not, then you can't and you'll wind up shedding B players anyways.

You want to know if companies stop growing for a decade or so after a mass-layoff?

If so, yes, they do. But it's incredibly hard to decide on causality there, because companies are only expected to do mass-layoffs when the management believes it can't grow anymore.

> It's always the desirable employees that have options that leave an environment like this, and it's always the less competent employees that hold on for dear life and stay

Meta's hiring bar is pretty high, though. Plenty of desirable people will stay because there's nowhere else to go that pays as well, and the "less competent" ones are likely still more competent than the industry average.

These elite companies have now laid off hundreds of thousands of people. The idea that there's enough "low performers" to throw in the garbage should be obsolete now, and reveals a sort of wishful thinking "all those other people who lost their jobs deserve it, but not me, it will never happen to me"

> Meta's hiring bar is pretty high, though.

I'm not making any comments or judgements whatsoever on employees there, but doesn't Meta use the same terrible hiring practices that values so-called "leet" code style interviews? Such interviewing practices are bound to produce poor results, especially at the scale that Meta, Amazon, etc. do them at. (This is also not a comment in support of the layoffs. I think layoffs are a failure of management and executives.)

> but doesn't Meta use the same terrible hiring practices that values so-called "leet" code style interviews? Such interviewing practices are bound to produce poor results, especially at the scale that Meta, Amazon, etc. do them at.

These two statements do not follow, why would "such interviewing practices [be] bound to produce poor results, especially at the scale that Meta, Amazon, etc. do them at?"

By poor results I really meant a wide variance in hiring fits. If you are hiring based upon these "leet" style trivia interviews and for somewhat arbitrary team placement, then you are greatly constraining your hiring process to only filter on effectively a single vector of background and experience. So the high bar commented above only applies to that particular vector in that many may be great at a particular niche of coding but effectively randomized in other vectors of software development or other employee skills.

Thus, it is only natural that you may have many people in the organization and on teams who are poor fits, either technically, culturally, etc., because almost all of the "leet" code stuff is irrelevant to most real-world work. If it is relevant, then it is usually only a small portion of the job. This isn't a judgement on anything other than the hiring practice.

But like I said, I don't really know much about Meta's hiring process. It's possible that I'm misapplying this style of interview to them and misunderstood about if they actually use it. Amazon does, and I can confirm it was a miserable interview experience.

>>I've seen this so many times in my career. The A players will stay because they're attached to the things they've created, but the B players will leave and you're left with lots of C players.

The problem is A, B, and C are not at birth positions. People in these buckets rotate across the buckets at various phases in their careers. And the participants in the A buckets are basically people with good leadership- who can train, motivate and get them good products/projects to work on. That given anybody can leave the company and if you have good managers it wouldn't matter.

The real problem happens when you go meta to this. How do you get A level managers. That's a very hard problem to solve and often it also depends of the boss at the very top. The CEO. Many times the revolving door, golden parachute CEOs don't even care. The founder CEO's are tired in most cases. Performing at unicorn level can be brutal on your body and mind on the longer run. And they'd rather semi retire after a few years than continue with that lifestyle. This is where the real problems begin.

In cases where the top most boss gives a damn about the company, the company tends to be A player generation factory. Look at Ford under Henry Ford, Apple under Jobs. Microsoft under Bill G. The boss at the top just needs to get this right else its over.

> the thing that truly require that level of operation.

After giving legs to avatars, is there really much work left?

> I could see a scenario where voluntary attrition helps them get reduce size more organically and with lower cost than a layoff

This is exceptionally hard on immigrants on a visa, who have limited options to leave voluntarily.

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