Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I didn't watch her video.

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.

> It's long been an established practice to hire talented engineers and let them make interesting things.

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...

BS. 90% of people aren’t “self-starters”. That’s fine. Further, the vast majority of “self guided” software engineers work on nonsense that scratches an intellectual itch, not something that moves the business forward.

I think this is too harsh a take, at least without knowing more. There are some managers and shops where "find something useful to do" is encouraged, or at least accepted. I was shocked to discover later in my career that there are plenty of shops that are _not_ like that. High-paying shops, even, or perhaps especially.

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.

Not everyone wants this though. Many people, especially when first starting out, would prefer some tasks to be assigned to them.

you're wrong. The issue at Meta is that you might not be able to find the right combination of work that will get you a positive evaluation come performance review time.

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 would a new hire be placed in an org where opportunity for impact is limited? What are they expected to do?

Empire building

That's a take.

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