Former Meta staffer reveals she had to ‘fight for work’
fortune.com
fortune.com
I'm really hoping that, if nothing else comes out of 202[23], it is a realization that the size and scope of these teams was, in fact, madness, and no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever again (but, sadly, I know that this isn't the case, as about three months from now no one will remember any of this happened and none of this has ever come to light and if you try to casually mention it as if it were common knowledge you'll get flooded with "citation needed" as we live in the land of Eternal September where somehow no one ever thinks it is useful to study even recent history).
1. stockpiling fuel for when you may need it
2. starving your competitors of fuel
With money cheap and valuations absurd, idle or overpriced talent was a much lesser problem than somebody else hoovering up all the good stuff.
So you recruit aggressively using mechanical filters like leetcode/whiteboard tests, then let internal processes figure out who’s actually worth using on meaningful projects. The rest you can sit on, just in case.
The strategy comes straight from the top, and it makes perfect sense. Even if they are not fully utilized, even a FAANG salary is small potatoes compared to what top-tier talent can bring to a company. Think of it as the HR version of what VC do, invest in many people knowing 90% will fail to live up to their potential, because the 10% that do more than make up for it.
As for (2), that's as true as fairy tales.
I've worked as a TL on several teams before where we didn't assign any implementation work to me specifically, but I was there to jump in and help paddle the boat when folks got stuck.
This worked great, because usually the sticky places were integration points between subsystems, which can be especially tough for junior engineers to navigate. As someone with the big picture I could jump in and save them tons of time.
In the meantime, if I had spare cycles I'd work on tooling, test automation (and especially stubbing out and deflaking integration tests).
Projects where I did this tended to have fewer bugs and hit their deadlines.
What I referring to is a team of 50 people, say, with 10 of them that are "on rotation" sitting on the bench and wait for new assignments. What happens is that 2 of them get used to the "vacation" and are not much motivated to get on a new project when the time comes, 2 disappear, 1 takes advantage of the R&R to work on tools and do some self-study, and 6 start interviewing for other companies. Horses want to run.
I don't think they'd ever claim this because these companies do way more than "maintain a single app".
If companies don't attempt to innovate, even big ones, they lose in the marketplace. Meta for example has multiple apps to support, each serving hundreds of millions of users. On top of mere maintenance, they experiment and add new features. On top of that, what about the occasional greenfield/skunkworks type projects?
It's a shame your friend worked on three consecutive projects that got axed, but that's a separate problem from him being able to coast without getting fired for it.
I don’t think you can directly compare an app like the ones a small team can build to the apps that larger more established companies have to maintain and evolve. I mean sure you could just do a full app rewrite and start from scratch but that’s hugely risky and certainly fails more often than it succeeds.
Nor do we need to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a gigantic new building[1], on the roof of which we will put a 12.6-acre park and live animals, including foxes, so all of those thousands and thousands of people can maintain that single app (well, in reality, apps), ever again.
I will forever be blown away by the excess I witnessed every time I visited that campus, and I'm sure it's similar elsewhere.
[1]https://www.builtinsf.com/2020/02/25/facebook-headquarters-m...
Meta while unsurprisingly not very efficient, does need a lot of employees to maintain what they've built.
I know people directly who have been affected by the layoffs. They did work. It's just work that has been deprioritized.
Stop trying to demonize the workers who are victims of mismanagement.
Meta is one of the most revenue efficient companies in the history of the world. Each employee generates $1.929 million in revenue, and they have an 79.63% gross profit margin vs a sector median of 49%. That's each employee including the recruiters, EMs, etc.
Part of the reason these employees had to "fight" for work is intentional - if they had more people than they needed and no forcing function (i.e. perf cycle) then these people wouldn't fight for their work, they'd just sit there getting paid and not complaining about it. The company would then be dramatically less efficient.
I disagree with their model in a lot of ways, but this is a completely unfair characterization of how their org actually works.
They hired as though the COVID trajectory would continue, and saw less attrition than expected as people stuck to their jobs due to uncertainty. So they're trimming a little and re-focusing. That's all.
> "I mean, like, we were just sitting there. We had to basically fight to find work."
To put a very fine point on it, the reason they had to fight (like everyone else there) is because if they didn't come up with something to do that was quantifiable and impactful in line with org goals, they'd be terminated within the year. It was their job to find a way to be useful. The system culls those who do not. It can be harsh and impersonal, yes, ruthless even - but it is very effective.
> I had an indirect friend who loved to tell the story of how, after his third project at Google got killed before launch, he just stopped working and realized there were little, if any, actual consequences for doing nothing ;P--never seemed to hold any weight.
That was at Google. This is Meta. They are very different companies. Each FAANG is completely different internally and it would be a mistake to assume that experience translates.
Again, their system is designed to be ruthlessly efficient. They probably over-hired like 10-15%. I'd strongly suggest listening to the Odd Lots episode with Patrick McKenzie titled roughly 'what happens to tech workers in the age of layoffs.'
I get it's fun to speculate from the outside but there's no reason to look at it and go 'yep should be 5X higher' simply because they have a lot of staff. They have a lot of staff because they have billions of monthly active users and optimizing every aspect of their business is something they can do, and something that yields more profit than cost.
A lot of this armchair quarterbacking comes from folks who never worked there. Find someone who works at Meta and ask them about PSC.
I don’t totally disagree with you. People at Meta work hard and they optimize everything and psc for better or worse definitely encourages performance. But I don’t know where numbers like “overhired by 10-15%” come from. I don’t think things were falling through the cracks and not being optimized before the company doubled in size.
Towards the end this started to change for me, but it happened a bunch earlier in engineering/product. Fundamentally, the standard way to grow headcount was revenue per head, and while that works for sales and ops it's a terrible, terrible idea for engineering because you end up fighting for work.
In fact, I'm part of an ex Facebook group, and all of the old timers are incredibly shocked that this was allowed to happen, and a bunch of newer people are confirming it did.
Some would argue that management's sole goal is to effectively measure which direction the wind is blowing and predict course accordingly. The fact that so many did so poorly may make some question why management gets reimbursed as well as they do.
Do you have a source for this? Does this include contractors, as well?
You're saying the approach "one of the most efficient companies in the history of the world" takes to producing value is: let's just hire people and let them figure out the value they can provide, otherwise we'll fire them.
Am I getting that right?
Before I've even hired someone I've already scoped and quantified the impact I need them to have. I then go find someone that is qualified to do that, and then I motivate them to do more. It is _extremely_ inefficient from an _everything_ perspective to do so in reverse. Not harsh. Not impersonal. Not even ruthless. It's objectively n. e. fish. ent.
For example this is how every tech "body shop" hires. The value is just out there in the ether of modern enterprise.
Bring in 20% more people year over year. Keep attrition rate for them and existing hires around 10%. Go knock hat in hand at every Fortune 1000 company and wrangle whatever buzzwords Gartner has thrown at them into a project or managed service you can slip as many billable hours as possible into.
It's the same with Meta, they can try literally about anything so when GPT or crypto or Web3 or AR or whatever comes along they just want to be able to throw a bunch of people at it to figure out how to socialize, advertise, and monetize it at massive scale.
I'm not even convinced that antitrust would fix it at this point. Someone might need to invent "therapy but for corporations" so big orgs can rid themselves of dysfunction (as if).
That is what leveraged buyouts and activist investors are supposed to do. Emphasis on supposed
The situation in the article sounds more like a bureaucratic snafu, where the company is hiring but the teams either aren't given open headcount to use, or they don't want to use it on the new hires for some reason.
Isn't that weird? Wouldn't you like to know how that happened?
I doubt it generalizes, but it's interesting.
I think you have misinterpreted my comment.
The phrase "symbols of blue state bloat and waste" is in no way an assertion that they are bloated and wasteful.
It's an assertion that nearly everyone (regardless of politics) stereotypes them as such, and believes in the negative characterization of government employees, which is what I was challenging, in context.
Not only may they be more efficient than some other states, but more so than some major tech companies too.
At one point, they've got some major deadline coming up and they ask for help / borrowed some folks from our team, but after a week or so our teammates started showing back up to our stand-up. I asked how it was going "over there" and the response was, "They don't have anything for us to do."
Article says:
"Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry."
From a different article ( https://wapo.st/3lmVr6w ):
> Levy, who is Mexican American, agreed to start the 12-month gig in April after she checked with Meta that her position would be secure for the duration of the program despite the company’s financial challenges. She was told that the program, which aimed to improve the pipeline of recruiters who focus on diversity, was fully funded for the year.
I tried to propose new ideas and projects, offered my expertise to other groups, but my attempts were met with benign indifference. After realizing that looking for work meant to others that I had nothing better to do at work (or nothing to do, basically, at work), I have decided to put the proverbial feet on the desk and milk the money until I can find a job -- elsewhere -- that I like better. The challenge I see is that I am getting paid very well -- exceptionally well considering I do very little -- and very much enjoying the mental and physical freedom that my current nonexistent workload is giving me.
From that angle its easy to understand why a manager would like to do little, as long as their manager has a similar relationship with them.
And if you ask them if you're SUPPOSED to do NOTHING, they get defensive. I'd rather work with people who at least have the ability to admit you're just hired to pad out the roster.
In an earlier comment, I made an adventurous analogy with love stories: you fall in love with Robert, you know it might end, and friends tell you "be careful, my friend, it will be a rude awakening when he dumps you. Robert is handsome, but unreliable -- Jim, instead, sure is boring, but looks more reliable".
And you think it might end, sure, it is not your first flight, but maybe it will continue for a while, and he will be handsome, and lovely, and passionate, and it might even happen that you fall in love with someone else before he does. Or maybe you die, or he dies, who knows.
Two things can be true at once: a company can both need to hire and people at that company can have difficulty finding a role. These are not contradictory statements.
Orgs and teams within large companies have budgets and/or head counts. They need to "spend" these to hire. They hire with external hires and internal transfers. Like any recruitment it can take time. A given position might have a bunch of external and internal candidates. Team may also want to keep head count open to use opportunistically.
If you are employed at a large company, you may be competing with a bunch of internal and external candidates for a job. You can fail to find a position and these positions are being filled by other people.
Think about it this way: we have an unemployment rate that is in large part transitional because of these time factors. We won't hit 0% unemployment. That's just not possible.
Saying failure to find an internal job is evidence of over-hiring is like saying "there is no labor shortage because I could not get a job" (side note: for completeness, "labor shortage" isn't realy anyway; there are only "wage deficits" not "labor shortages").
The solution to this? Hire more people so that the bottlenecks can be cleaned... and Brooks's law starts taking its toll on every single late project.
Sure, there are some teams that are rather focused and can push things through, but there are a lot that stuck somewhere and the hiring to try to. do things in those teams just makes it worse. There's work to do - just none of it can be done in this part of the org because there are too many people.
I've also seen the reverse, Netflix not curbing on shared accounts and Microsoft having really limited anti piracy tooling early on, allowing them to keep revenue reserves for the future
That also meant we had no idea how many copies were pirated.
So as long as Windows 11 shows "HACKED BY GONZO, TOTALLY NOT LEGIT" they're fine with it.
Very weird, but that's what the current public capital markets incentivize...
ICs can do whatever they want. Performance is based on impact, so you have to pick the right things to work on yourself.
There are very few non-performers because the calibration process is brutal and efficient.
Maybe there are non-technical realms of empire building like any megacorp, but that would be nothing new.
I got an informal offer like this over dinner once, when I was trying to get a startup off the ground: "Come work for us; you can do your startup or find something else interesting. Just send me an email and I'll hire you". They told me explicitly that they were hiring certain people to keep those folks from working for the competition.
I stress informal because, though I continue talking/emailing with this person (whom I already knew), and still do, I didn't ask to follow up. So sure, they could have been bullshitting, but why volunteer something like that unless it was real?
Nearly every tech job I've had there was the potential to do very little to nothing and stay employed.
What I've gathered from her quotes in the Fortune article is that this person failed to take advantage of her opportunity to be paid highly with total autonomy while surrounded by Smart People.
It's long been an established practice to hire talented engineers and let them make interesting things. Give them as much autonomy as you can afford to. If they're smart and driven they'll produce value.
Otherwise you're herding cats to do things you may not even understand nearly as well as the supposed geniuses you've hired. It's not a good use of your time and you'll probably fail at it.
Just look at the history of UNIX and Plan9 FFS. These guys were messing around with what interested them! Management didn't know what to tell them to work on... and we're all better for it with these wonderful innovations.
This former Meta staffer just put a big fat DO NOT HIRE sign on her forehead as far as I'm concerned.
She wasn't an engineer. "Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry."
The Insider article has a better representation of her complaints:
"There were other people in our program that were nurses, teachers, and firefighters. They left their jobs, their entire career and Meta didn't even let them get one year of experience."
"We were trying to pivot into a career. If you have anything less than a year, you have to basically start from scratch again. You have to start at the bottom."
Basically, these were people trying to break into tech, so they were in need of both guidance and experience, not at all like hiring experienced engineers and letting them run wild.
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-facebook-worker-tech-la...
Let's say you get hired in an org where the opportunity for impact are limited (mature area, blocked by dependencies in other teams etc...) then doing nothing or doing stuff that doesn't matter means you will get a poor performance review unless you're politically savvy enough to get a LOT of people to essentially overlook that the work you've done is meaningless.
After the negative perf, you will get piped and then fired. It's incredibly stressful to be in that situation and breeds all kinds of bad behaviors that make Meta a bad place to work at times (very often).
Why? For starters, some companies are rich, and they can afford to waste a lot of money. Think of all of those interviews you've been on that waste your time and that of the interview loop, even though it's clear that they have never intended to hire. Or maybe just 1 in 500. (One company I was hired at boasted to me about the "500". Ugh.)
Or, at least in the trading world, things can be very secretive. You might have the skills to contribute, but no one will even talk to you, for fear that you'll steal the secret sauce.
Mostly it's just simple managerial incompetence.
The employer/employee match is sort of like a key and lock. In order for it to work, _all_ of the pins have to align. It's not enough to be a skilled, team-player, etc., employee. Your employer also has to bring several things to the table. Sometimes they just don't.
or because they bought up companies to prevent competition, but couldn't just shut them down because doing so isn't quite legal
or because they have enough work for all that people, but fail to manage the work load distribution because it's really hard and for many core projects having more people isn't always good beyond a certain point
>Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry.
> it kind of seemed that Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us and they were just hoarding us like Pokémon cards
Sounds like it was just speculation
> Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry.
After layoffs, Meta, tech companies face uphill battle to boost diversity - https://wapo.st/3lmVr6w
I would be careful with that. There are software engineers, and talent in other fields in this world who are targeted by competitors. The competitors may not intend to put them on a project right away. Or ever.
If anything, getting squirreled away like that may be a signal, when combined with other signals, that you're talented. This backlash may have unintended consequences.
There are a lot of other variables. I'm sorry this happened to a lot of engineers, but a lot of them can talk publicly about it without getting made fun of.
We're not laughing at them.
I interviewed with them a long time ago and basically couldn't pass the interview. Had lots of ideas on what I wanted to work on, and things I think would have made the platform better. Didn't matter.
Why do they put up hugely difficult entrance exams, employ the "best" and then... not put them to work? What's the point of burning so much time and capital?
Difficult to prove, but arguably, denying resources and skills to the competition (or any other company in general).
I wfh'd a lot and dramatically improved my cooking skills!
These kind of hires that the interviewee represents are about keeping people away from competitors. These companies - Facebook aren't the only one - are so rich that they can afford to hire people simply to reduce the chance that competitors will emerge; rather than waiting until you have to pay big money for Instagram or Whatsapp, you identify the kind of people who have the skills to build competitors, hire them, and lock them in a basement somewhere.
yes. but you can only obliquely hint at it.
She was hired in April ( https://wapo.st/3lmVr6w ) with promises that it would be fully funded for the entire duration of the 12 months (appears to be the standard for a recruiter).
It's been done before. If Google hired the guys who made ChatGPT and put them on production support or anything, they wouldn't be scared for their existence right now. In tech, it only takes a handful of people to put you out of business in a few years, and you'd never see it coming. The corpses of once great tech companies are many: MySpace, Yahoo, Sun, etc.
I would argue the tech giants aren't so much afraid of each other, but upstarts out of nowhere that makes their business obsolete.
> Brit Levy, 35, was eager to join Meta’s paid training program for aspiring human resources managers last year because she wanted to gain a foothold in the recruiting field and help other military families find jobs in the lucrative tech sector.
> Levy, who is Mexican American, agreed to start the 12-month gig in April after she checked with Meta that her position would be secure for the duration of the program despite the company’s financial challenges. She was told that the program, which aimed to improve the pipeline of recruiters who focus on diversity, was fully funded for the year.
> About six months later, Meta laid off Levy and most of the other participants in her program, along with 13 percent of its full-time workers, amid falling revenue growth from a sluggish economy and more competition in the social media market.
---
This is a training program - Meta should expect that it will require some mentoring.
She was hired in April. This isn't a "just hired before the hiring freeze".
Recruiters are frequently on a 12 month contract. This appears to be industry standard (I've seen it when looking at jobs at other companies too - a quick search shows https://careers.ey.com/ey/job/Toronto-Recruiter-12-Month-Con... https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/NielsenIQ/743999750237276-r... https://careers.edrington.com/job/New-York-Contract-Recruite... )
The contract would have been finished in 4 months. Ending it early when it was said to be fully funded means the original statement was bald faced lie.
This isn't a "she was the only one laid off" - but rather "most of the other participants in her program."
Basically, a recruiter.
Really????
> “I mean, like, we were just sitting there. We had to basically fight to find work. It was a very strange environment and it kind of seemed that Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us and they were just hoarding us like Pokémon cards.”
People claim they want autonomy, they accept a position at a company that famously has a bottoms-up hacker ethos.
Then they complain that they weren't immediately "assigned" work on Day 1.
WTF.
I wonder what is in store for tomorrow?
You may not owe companies better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
I had also a job where I was reading Wikipedia all day. Management forgot to buy me a software license and I had nothing to do. I silently quit.
This is one of these memories to understand, that I am only a row in excel in payroll department.
- In one company, I complained to managers immediately, but at the same time used a strictly worse (but free) alternative, became good with it, while still raising the issue up to two levels above me (unfortunately my managers were as powerless as me - just big corporation things).
- In another company, I just took ownership of the issue, talked to sales myself, worked out an acceptable solution and got the deal sealed (this was a much smaller company though).
Unless you're a junior or early mid-level you're expected to show some initiative.