Meta Layoffs

I don't doubt that people earlier in their career work better with more senior people at arms length to help them. Hell, I experienced a bit of that my first few months at a new job where I struggled to understand processes.

But after a period of time, I got it. Sure it took longer, but I got there.

Now, I get less work done in the office because people spend time socializing, and more importantly, the workstation is not customized to my liking because of this whole satellite desk situation.

I'll say this: If these companies tanked during the height of Covid, they'd blame it on WFH. Of course, the financial performance for these companies was quite good, so now that there's a bit of correction, they search for reasons to bring employees back to the office.

This is meaningless without knowing how productivity is being measured. It's very possible that said metric inherently favors in-person collaboration over remote collaboration - which would then skew the results of any further analysis of that metric.

This is also meaningless without knowing exactly what's being compared. I wouldn't be surprised if 3 in-person days a week was indeed more productive than 0, but what about 2? 1? 1/2? 1/30? 1/365.24? There's a lot of numbers between 0 and 3, and coming to any conclusions without understanding the actual shape of that graph is folly.

This is also meaningless without information on the wide range of in-person cultures or the wide range of remote cultures. These preliminary results could readily come about from having a remote culture that's more dysfunctional than other remote cultures and/or an in-person culture that's less dysfunctional than other in-person cultures. I've personally experienced both ranges more-or-less in full over the course of my career - as well as varying combinations of the two in hybrid environments.

I feel the opposite though I'm an n=1 and don't have any data beyond myself. My company went full WFH during the pandemic and committed to it. Ever since we've become much more meeting heavy (I also have pretty senior IC title sadly.) Why?

Along with going WFH we began hiring from other timezones in earnest. Low cost of living areas are cheaper to hire from. Previously we were really careful about hiring teams in a given timezone together, everyone on the team used to be within +- 1 hour of each other. Now lunch times, day start, and day end times weren't in sync anymore. Before standup was at 1100, now meetings started appearing at 1000, 0900, eventually 0800. After all 0800 in UTC-8 was actually 1100 in UTC-5. My 1200 lunch is overwritten all the time by folks in UTC-6 for whom it's actually 1400.

Before you'd see people run to the bathroom or express annoyance finding meeting rooms, but now going from meeting to meeting is just a click of a button. What used to be a hallway conversation or an extra 10 minutes of hanging outside a conference room to hash out a few details becomes another 30 min time slot they book on my calendar along with everyone else.

> To me, although I’d certainly concede that WFH pares down meeting culture and certainly has benefits in logistics, it’s always been fairly obvious that in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture, and I suspect is important especially to larger orgs because it helps to even out performance. High caliber, experienced employees probably get just as much done at home at the office, or maybe more, but junior employees with less direction struggle more, and WFH provides the ultimate cover for less motivated people (which in a larger company will always be a percentage of the total) that might otherwise be held more accountable in-person.

It's not just about the heavy hitters, it's about the team as a whole. In person work, though a logistical headache and social annoyance, drives team cohesion.

Moreover, with multiple rounds of layoffs nobody's gonna join Meta. Why joining? Getting 500k "salary" with a risk of being laid off in the next 6 months and spending the next 6 months looking for a job? It's not 500k, folks. It's a fake 500k carrot for naive bunnies.

I had offer from Meta, and I am so happy that I didn't go there. The company is just unstable, going downwards spiral. They have to pay me a really good sign up bonus with a good vesting schedule so I consider them, maybe, one day.

I remember when I left feeling funny that there were as many people working on metaverse stuff as were in company when I joined (like 16k), and it’s mind boggling to me now that the layoffs are affecting around same amount.

I love remote work, because I grew up in a small city with no companies operating in my industry and when covid hit I was able to go full remote, move back home, and be around my friends and family while contributing to my company and to my local economy.

The biggest thing that has helped my dev team thrive and be able to onboard new members is mob programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_programming). We have our own take on exactly how we do it, but the gist is that all our software engineers are in a video conference with each other as much as possible and focus on a single task.

We're starting to add new members in timezones that are 5+ hours offset from the rest of the team and that integration is proving to be hard. If anyone has advice on building TZ-distributed teams I would love to hear advice!

I stumbled into a job like this recently. The startup hired an upper management team from some well-known tech companies. They had several people who claimed that “organization design” was their passion, wrote “thought leader” blogs or substacks, and presented themselves as experts in all things agile.

I thought I was joining a lean startup team focused on efficient execution (as they pitched themselves) but they operated in the most bloated, inefficient, and bureaucratic manner I’ve ever seen. Roles and processes were so artificially segmented that I wasn’t allowed to use Jira without waiting for the next scheduled meeting so everyone could tell the project manager what buttons to click in Jira during long shared meetings. If you started to make any comments that sounded like they might be a product-related idea, they’d scold you for daring to think about anything other than code and demand that only product managers be allowed to talk about product things. Several managers seemed to do nothing other than police process among teams, dropping into your team’s meetings unannounced to observe and take notes about who was, and was not, following the extensive process documents they prepared for everyone.

Their solution to every problem was always to hire more people. If a new requirement came up, they’d stop teams from working on it and try to find a way to spin the new requirement into more headcount. This created absurd situations where, for example, the design lead had convinced the company to hire a new designer for every new initiative while the designers for past projects sat mostly idle all day. It didn’t matter, though, because the only goal was to increase headcount. People were praised for the amount of hiring they did and the number of people they managed.

This company was an extreme version of the dysfunction described in the article. I felt so relieved when I left and rejoined a company that didn’t create elaborate self-serving management structures as their primary goal. So many people at the dysfunctional company just thrived on shuffling from meeting to meeting every day, creating the appearance of doing a lot of work while actively interfering with everyone just trying to execute efficiently.

> High caliber, experienced employees probably get just as much done at home at the office, or maybe more…

“Probably” is the key word, here. It signals to me that the author is tired of writing at this point and throws in something with little conviction or defense.

I care about this point, and am inclined in the opposite direction: I think less work is done in office by these people.

Withholding any self reflection to qualify myself as “high caliber”, I can say I’m an experienced employee - and feel that my productivity dwindles in person due to distractions and thus an inability to “zone in”.

That means that I’m putting in extra hours outside work to achieve the same level of pre-RTO productivity. I’ve heard the same from others. Together, we’ve expressed concerns about the sustainability of these efforts.

For me, toss that sentence from this article and let’s dedicate time to that discussion, independently.

1) makes it actually clearer what is delivered and by whom

2) requires more from the manager to make sure the right stake holders are communicating efficiently and employees are satisfied - doable but more work load for managers and requires more experience from them

I think #2 is that companies are actually struggling with. It is not about the workers productivity (which generally increases by WFH), it is about the managers comfort, skills and experience.

Zuckerberg is not an "ideas" guy. He had that one great idea back in the early 2000s (whether you believe it was his idea or not, he did execute on it) and everything since then has been acquisitions. Sure maybe they can wring out more "productivity" by return to office or firing their middle managers or whatever but so what? It doesn't matter how fast you can run if you are running in the wrong direction.

My theory is that the companies grew bigger, their management became risk-averse for good or for bad. The logical thing for the management to do, is to insert a layer under them to insulate themselves from unknown risks. As a result, managers were busy planning and aligning and challenging any bottom-up plans but in reality they were just actively avoiding personal risks.

Bullshit. Everyone who worked in-office knows folks who spend half their day in pointless meetings, and the other half chatting by the coffee machine. Obscuring lack of productivity in an office setting is not particularly hard - it's a lot easier to "look busy" in person

Author seems to be confusing established companies that hold near monopolies as highly functioning. It is difficult to to learn from large US tech companies. At Google not breaking the webpage might be a good day of work, but in my field not shipping a prototype etc will end our company.

I would be skeptical of productivity statistics from a company in decline.

Sooner rather than later a large chunk of line managers and middle managers industry-wide are going to face a "what would you say you do here?" moment, and it already seems to have started at Meta.

On the middle management purge, I am glad to see it. I went into management at the time that was the only way to increase your leverage as an engineer. Over time it’s become a simpering pile of drivel and I am actively looking to switch back to IC roles. I’m sick to death of the professional manager culture in tech these days - it’s literally filled with people that just don’t like computers that much - likely got into it because their parents thought it was a good career and they realized after a few years they weren’t into it and switched to management. It’s been steered towards managers holding the nominal power but none of the ability to understand their decisions, so they a) don’t make them, b) when cornered make bad decisions. It’s sickening and I literally can’t stand my career as it stands. I’m not even allowed to commit code any more, and even if I were, I’m too busy going to bs offsites to talk about decisioning shift left strategies and how to make inhuman hotel seating open floor plan offices fun enough that people want ti come into their chicken coops to be milked.

But they have failed to do this. When they actually provide such data (a rarity), it’s cherry-picked to justify getting asses back in seats for egocentric reasons. They just want to feel the busyness of the business when they walk in the door. It makes the executives feel like they’re in charge of something.

No, the future is simple: eventually, you will be glad to hire competent people no matter where they want to work. COVID and the generally suppressed immune systems that it’s leaving behind will continue to thin the employee pool. The fascists will shut down H1-B and close the borders. You’ll hire us WFH, or hybrid, or full time in-office, by employee choice, and you’ll like it. Because otherwise you won’t have anyone to hire at all.

If their performance data is reliable, why does Meta need several rounds of layoffs? The foundation of their analysis is weak.

I believe the second part but not the first. The most productive collaborations I've had by far have been virtual. People rapid fire exchanging ideas, testing things out on slack, quickly sharing screens to solve a problem and then jumping out again to focus on the next bit, etc. When it works well it's exhilirating. Everyone will have encountered situations when it worked badly. But nothing is as unproductive 12 people spending hours in a room where it inevitably gets dominated by 1 or 2 extroverts and the rest sit back passively. Doing it well either way is hard.

Although and manager worth their salt would know to pass this info along.

And anyway, in a "creative" area, like writing code, inventing new stuff, since when is "efficiency" a good thing, all that does is make the same shot, just more of it.

"Year of efficiency" is year of cost cutting. The blog post has an interesting take on it tho.

When I read this, I translate it to:

"We don't know how to collaborate remotely efficiently, so we don't try anything different and say 'office work is better' "

Yes there's a value to meeting in-person. But don't say the process doesn't work when you don't know how to use the available tools to collaborate

My team lost manager almost 8 month ago. And I took additional management role alongside with a TL role by necessity. Burned out completely by now. It's so much more work and information you must operate I don't understand who can ever say managers aren't needed. It's ridiculous.

A line manager ought to be in the trenches, handling oncall, writing some code now and then, automating the bits of drudgery away, project managing, product managing, code reviewing and generally being an engineer. None of these things have to be done all the time and to the highest level of performance, but the idea that managers delegate all of these responsibilities leads to yes-men being promoted. If, as a manager, you do none of these activities, how on earth do you evaluate your people? You become the Vladimir Putin of your team, fed horseshit by people who have agendas or loudmouths while completely missing out on the concerns of people who do the actual work, with absolutely no idea of the actual performance and problems of the team.

It doesn’t check out to me that this is an overwhelming opinion. People definitely like remote and hybrid work but the tradeoffs vs being in person at least some of the time are well known to the point of being obvious. Partially-remote teams inherently have higher communication bandwidth between the in-office cadre versus the remote teammates, and all-remote teams specifically plan for team retreats and hangouts to build camaraderie, emotional connection, and understanding.

The Meta studies are one of those “you have to find numbers for the thing that is obviously true” situations.

It’d be really surprising to me to hear any kind of experienced developer contest this, even if their personal preference is to knowingly make that trade in favor of the flexibility being remote gives.

I’m curious if others agree or disagree here, given the author presented the exact opposite of my stance so frankly.

Even the organizations that I have worked for that have been better at this than others have still struggled. Perhaps there is room to just point out that high-level architects need to be involved in people and organization decisions.

In the end, flatter organizations are better, but structure of both organizations and software are hard problems and things that we struggle with throughout our careers on either track. I have usually fought to have ICs report at every level so that part makes sense.

But the question becomes what you replace middle management with? The answer shouldn't be "chaos."

Can someone who agrees explain how these points are obvious, to me, a person who's worked part- or full-time remotely for more than 10 years and has no concept of either of these things?

And this would be ok for a small company. But when you have tens of thousands of people who now need new clear marching orders, this is a very dangerous thing. And doubly so if you keep on changing those people's goals because you think you need to launch something big and new that requires thousands of people to build it (but you don't know exactly how it's going to be built).

Why is it dangerous (and I mean org-productivity-wise)? Because everyone has a natural need to feel useful and that they're productive and deserving of their pay.

So when clear instructions are lacking about what we're supposed to do, we make up things to work on. We hire people who say they can help us figure out what to work on. We create managers to manage people who seem to not know what they're working on, so that some direction can seem like it's clear. Because you can't have 10 people not knowing what they're working on, without a manager to manage their not knowing what they're working on. We schedule meetings to find out what other people are working on, and how we should get involved to be useful, distracting the few who are actually being productive.

So you find, after a few years, that you've accumulated a massive apparatus of people who have created a behomth of their own, simply from the desire to believe they're working on something useful. Sometimes they're very convincing, looking like they're working on something useful.

And unpleasant as it is (and surprising, as Elon Musk showed), many of them could stand to be fired without much detriment to the original purpose of the company.

Figure out what you want to build before you hire tens of thousands of people to do it. (and whether it will work). Or, at least as a caution, when your goal changes but you already have tens of thousands of people, be prepared to act unless you want to find yourself unwittingly in this position.

Heavy coding and no management have a place in the world. But no coding and heavy management also has a place in the world. Coding "heats up" the environment and management "cools it down". Sometimes you need heat, sometimes you need to temper the heat.

Companies start out with all coding and no management because they need to just produce. Then when they have something valuable, they must reign in the cowboy culture with management. Unfortunately, this often ends up overdone and there are very few leaders who have the guts to prune the overmanaged companies. Let's see how it turns out for the Zuck.

Quiet part out loud. tbf, it can definitely be true.

The downside to removing all management layers is:

* You'll have to interact with the directors of a company directly. I have experience with this and from this I can tell you that you'll find they don't share the viewpoints of most devs. They will expect things done yesterday and all possible corners to be cut. They don't care about Tech debt. Your estimates will always be too high and they will demand they be cut down to the unreasonable. They leave 0 time for testing as far as they know the dev work is done once the dev says so. They don't care about the complexity of implementation, they only see complexity in what they are asking you. SO if They ask "build me the next facebook" that is quite a simple statement but the implementation is very complex they see that because the statement is simple so should be the implementation

* Good luck ever getting a pay raise or a promotion. A decent manager will track you through those things as you work for a company and push for them on your behalf. A director only sees development as a cost to be reduced

* Much easier to directly blame developers when things go wrong. You bet your ass that if prod goes down there will be hell to pay. Fire the dev that brought it down. A good manager shields the team from this as they spread the blame of many departments making it hard to fire anyone

* You won't get any time for personal development. Kiss all those pluralsight courses goodbye that costs money. A yearly conference ? who's paying for that. Remember that the directors of a company will see money being spent as their own money because every dollar spent reduces EBITDA which will reduce their mega bonus

* Any problems you have with other devs are now yours to fix. Remember HR aren't their to help you they are there to help the company

* Projects will be dumped on you that are way outside your field of expertise. Directors often lump all devs into the same bucket. So for example if there is a new project that involves AI and no-one on the teams got any real experience then tough luck get her done

* You'll have to deal with strange requests. For example given chatgpt has been in the news a lot you'll suddenly be told to add chatgpt to the product regardless if it makes any sense. Normally a good manager would bat these types of things off to protect the dev team

* Time management is your problem. You'll be given an end date and told everything has to be done for that date

Note I get that having too many managers is bad but you ideally want small IC to manager ratio so that you are getting the benefit.