Meta Is Planning to Cut 5% of Lowest Performers, Memo Shows | Hacker News Reader

Meta Is Planning to Cut 5% of Lowest Performers, Memo Shows

bloomberg.com

22 pointstoomuchtodo15 comments

When you layoff the worse 5%, you drag the best 5% down too due to their lack of trust in the company. Nobody wants to go above and beyond when companies don’t seem to value employees.

Not really. Meta as the best retention policy for top performers. The amount of money the top 5% can make is simply too high to leave

If you zoom in on the memo, you can see a tiny little line of text that says "wasting $45 billion dollars on a VR boondoggle doesn't count as low performing"

Are .. those the fact checkers?

https://archive.today/vso3L

> the company would backfill those roles

So, if they are just going to hire more to make up for this, then it's not actually a layoff. That implies these folks would not be eligible for unemployment benefits. In other words, they are being fired.

> “I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster,” Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in the memo. “We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”

I can't imagine working for someone that sends out a memo like that. But, I say that as someone that’s never worked at Mega cap. Maybe my view changes if I was working for Meta. Dunno.

or maybe thats the point of the memo? Soft lay-off?

I can. Meta is a huge company. I'd want them to cut the slackers. I hate lazy co-workers. Only reason to worry or be upset is if you-yourself, are a "poor performing employee".

That perspective doesn’t mesh well with them wanting to use AI to replace people. They won’t care how well you perform if an AI can do it.

Luckily an AI can’t effectively replace almost any job.

That’s denial. Plenty of mid level startups use AI to write a lot of code that is then human reviewed.

That’s great for them, and despite all available evidence, I hope they can make it work.

AI can definitely help people work sometimes, maybe to the tune of obviating some need for additional staff, but I doubt it.

I'd expect any normal company to do this on a regular basis, but without the barely intelligible corporate-speak.

As Microsoft, IBM and numerous other organizations have shown, stack ranking is one of the worst ways to assess who to cut. It solves the C-suite issue of cutting the headcount quickly to satiate shareholders, but doesn't solve the manager's problem of making cuts in a way that allows performance to remain high.

>“We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”

I would assume the managing out people is dealing with the slackers. The idea that "x% of our workforce is underperforming and should be let go" on a regular basis (5-10% every few years seems to be the current trend) on top of that is a fun thing re-emerging in tech where these companies think a hard internal focus on performance will result in the best employees sticking around and them hiring 'performance focused' engineers.

The inevitable result is the next wave of companies to get back on the 'we treat our employees like humans and care about your wellbeing' will hoover up all the best of the new and recently disenchanted and highly capable experienced engineers and developers while those with the highest threshold for abuse are the ones actually retained in these companies.

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