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Comment by abvdasker | Hacker News Reader

Meta does this. Guess what one of the criteria for their recent layoffs was.

Meta tracks token consumption, but has explicitly stated that it is not a primary performance metric. Instead, employees are evaluated on "impact."

Indeed, they also said that previous time off for ill health wasn't a reason either.

but looking at the number of people who had taken leave, it suggests otherwise.

You can believe whatever conspiracy theories you want, of course, but the most straightforward explanation is that when you lay off X,000 or XX,000 people, some number of them will be on leave.

My understanding is that they must layoff some workers on leave, otherwise they would be discriminating

In Europe people on sick leave are protected (under certain conditions).

Megacorps being dishonest and human-hostile under capitalism is hardly a theory.

In London, large number of people on sick leave, or were recently on sick leave were fired. I was there, I saw the people, did the numbers.

If you did the numbers, would you share them with the rest of us instead of just alleging secret facts?

Sure, and I have a bridge to sell you. Or alternately refer you to the inevitability of Goodhart's law.

And my CTO insists that PR count isn't a performance metric. But guess what number gets used the minute people are forced to stack rank (of course they don't call it that, but... that's basically what it is)?

You get what you measure.

Famously honest and on-the-level company Meta, who we can parrot the word of uncritically and unquestioningly.

Do you have any source for this at all? I’ve seen so many different exonerations for Meta’s layoff criteria including claims that engineers using the most AI were laid off because Meta had them build AI tools to replace themselves.

Everyone is oddly confident despite all of the conflicting explanations.

Without any evidence, I would be shocked if performance rating wasn't a factor in the layoffs. But performance rating is not the same thing as AI tool use.

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