24 ms·

Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• achow 4y ago
  Interesting quote from CEO in an all hands directly to employees. I don't want to be at Meta right now.. .."turning up the heat" on performance management to weed out staffers unable to meet more aggressive goals. "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said. "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me," he said.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • gedy 4y ago
    I'm not a Meta-hater, but the tone of this is always destructive when it comes up. It's basically soft layoffs that try and paint those leaving/pushed out as "unmotivated" or "can't keep up with the rest of us". I wish companies would be more honest that they aren't doing well, over hired, etc instead. I kinda get mgmt types thinking this will keep remaining feeling motivated, safe, etc. but it's very phoney to a lot of us who've been through this before.
    • hinkley 4y ago
      I've heard it asserted that your median level of talent doesn't change much with these strategies. But that means you're losing people that you could probably ill afford to lose.
      • redisman 4y ago
        When things get nasty and it’s clear the good days are over it’s usually those most able to leave (the actual best employees) who get the message
        • deckard1 4y ago
          but where do they go? You can't escape the recession. All the FAANGs are in it. A startup seems even more risky in this atmosphere.
      • doktorhladnjak 4y ago
        I’ve worked at a couple places that took this layoff philosophy. Twelve months later headcount was back to the same level. More of the best employees left on their own volition after layoffs. Company spent a bunch in severance and damaged reputation for no real gain. Shareholders I guess felt they got their pound of flesh.
      • go_elmo 4y ago
        Maybe you didnt mean it that technical, but the median is very robust to outliers. So your first statement is true but the conclusion is not necessarily.
        • hinkley 4y ago
          No, this is an old saw and we see it happen over and over and the managers never learn. When they announce things like this, or voluntary layoffs, they mean for the lower quartile to leave in droves and for the overall quality of the remaining employees to improve. For the amount of stuff per dollar to increase. But what actually happens is that a few of the lower quartiles leave, and at least as many from the upper quartiles leave. None of the Dunning Kruger people leave because they’re all that and a bag of chips. So you tend toward mediocrity. Doubly so because when the changes that management expected don’t happen, now everyone knows there is likely to be a round of involuntary layoffs. So the people you have left either start playing it safe or become demotivated, further lowering the stuff per dollar. And now the company is doing worse, and some idiot upstairs thinks it’s just their predictions coming true, instead of self fulfilling prophecy. Not that I mean any of this as a lecture or warning for Zuck. More like a movie trailer. I hope it all burns and we get to watch it happen. But more likely they’ll turn into Microsoft. Fewer teeth, but still essentially the same bastards they always were, because changing a negative founder culture is really, really hard for any social or business group.
    • JKCalhoun 4y ago
      > I kinda get mgmt types thinking this will keep remaining feeling motivated, safe, etc. That seems completely counterintuitive to me. Seeing your co-worker tip off the end of the plank doesn't make me feel safe as we are all inching closer to the end of it. Though it would motivate me to look for a job elsewhere.
  • asd88 4y ago
    Lol, Meta (with their known intense PSC culture) of all places is doing this?
    • coolandsmartrr 4y ago
      PSC culture?
      • achow 4y ago
        Performance Summary Cycle. This is a two-week period that kick-starts the review process for both managers and employees. https://candor.co/articles/tech-careers/performance-reviews-bonuses-at-facebook https://candor.co/articles/tech-careers/performance-reviews-...
      • TomVDB 4y ago
        Performance Summary Cycle. It's a thing where you get performance reviews every 6 months, and where every minute contribution gets scored. Or so I've been told by a former mid-level Facebook manager who quit after a bit more than a year because he couldn't stand that toxic place anymore. I found it particularly funny that the interviewers who gave the thumbs up to hire him would get bad marks because of his early departure.
        • achow 4y ago
          I read that it is once in a year now.
          • pavlov 4y ago
            Yes, they changed it effective this year. No more summer PSC, just the January one. If anything, that makes this internal announcement worse because of the whiplash. "We're going to make PSC less onerous and stressful by only doing it once a year!" "Just kidding, we're actually going full Hunger Games with the new once-a-year cycle!"
            • 4y ago
  • d--b 4y ago
    Does this read “Let’s ditch those ethical people who get in the way of profit.”? Yes FB is not for me. Not as a worker, not as a customer.
    • boredtofears 4y ago
      Imagine how bleak it must be to be an average SWE at facebook. Sure, you get paid a ton of money, but now they are going to "turn up the heat" on you to pump glorified CRUD message board features faster. (yes, I know there are probably lots of intellectually interesting jobs at Meta, but the overall purpose and mission just isn't exactly inspiring)
      • malermeister 4y ago
        I quit Facebook because I was getting pings by Zuckerberg himself on button padding on one of his pet projects.
        • abdabab 4y ago
          Shouldn’t that take only a few minutes?
          • malermeister 4y ago
            Haha, not in the codebase I was working in at the time. Paddings being manipulated programmatically all over the place. Also, what a clear signal the CEO is not focusing on what matters. This was during the time the Cambridge Analytica thing broke... There's really nothing more important that needed his attention?
            • bayindirh 4y ago
              Maybe he needed something to direct his stress into and distract himself. I'm not saying what he did was right, BTW.
  • ggambetta 4y ago
    Should have finished that email with "may the odds be ever in your favor".
  • Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
    What's with this seemingly-new use of 'staffers' instead of 'personnel' or 'staff?' 'Staffers' to me always meant personnel in a political context, i.e. White House Staffers or, in a commercial context, recruiters, i.e. people responsible for providing staff. Does anyone else concur? I did check with the dictionary which is telling me that 'staffers' is a synonym for 'staff' but... I've not seen it used that way commonly until very recently.
    • yieldcrv 4y ago
      You will never beee president You will never beee president So that's one less thing to worry about, one less thing to worry about I imagine that song from Hamilton plays on Zuck’s bidet
      • Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
        You think they're using the term specifically because of its political-staff connotations? Interesting...
        • yieldcrv 4y ago
          he had some delusional political aspirations before so I could see him trying to internalize it
    • npteljes 4y ago
      Aren't staffers the ones who work in hiring, talent acquisition, etc?
      • Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
        Yes, to me 'staffer' means 'recruiter' as in, a person responsible for providing staff. In the context of a political organisation it is used to mean 'team members' (because they're not always formally employed staff) but I've not encountered it being used that way to refer to staff/consultants employed by a private company, hence my questioning.
  • yieldcrv 4y ago
    Just do the old Netflix culture doc style Welcome! You're going to get fired! If you want a “family” join a startup!
    • tsimionescu 4y ago
      What a horrible idea. Truly great engineering requires long-term commitment. Great engineering organizations often have people leave by retiring, not being fired.
      • andsoitis 4y ago
        Tenure at Netflix tends to be longer than at other tech companies. https://developerpitstop.com/how-long-do-software-engineers-stay-at-a-job/# https://developerpitstop.com/how-long-do-software-engineers-...
        • mercutio2 4y ago
          The numbers on that graph for the companies I'm familiar with are wildly, wildly incorrect. I have no idea where those numbers come from, but I don't for a second buy the idea that average tenure at Netflix is larger than others on the peninsula.
          • KerrAvon 4y ago
            I am also skeptical of that data. Some of the companies mentioned couldn’t function with that rate of churn.
  • npteljes 4y ago
    >"Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me," he said. This, to me, sounds like he's pressuring people to leave, so that they don't have to fire them, which would involve severance.
    • cs137 4y ago
      Generally, people who get PIP'd don't get severance, even if fired. The real purpose of the PIP process is to grind people down so they make mistakes, costing them what could otherwise be beautiful lawsuits [1], or just stop showing up (which I guess would fall under quitting, since they end up firing themselves, at least bureaucratically speaking). ---- [1] This is surprisingly easy to do in the US. If you post about your termination on social media, this can be construed as "cause after the fact" and make a termination that was in fact unjust or unlawful now legal. The employer's argument becomes that they knew you held malice toward the company ("cause") but couldn't prove it--the social media activity becomes said "proof".
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
        That may be for more cold blooded companies but most PIPs I've witnessed have gotten severance and actually good packages to boot.
        • aeyes 4y ago
          Agree, I mostly saw: Take this generous amount of money and hand in your resignation or you won't have to come back tomorrow and you get nothing.
          • DisjointedHunt 4y ago
            Take this generous amount of money (1 month pay) and SIGN THIS WAIVER RELEASING US OF ALL FUTURE LIABILITIES is the important part.
  • tarsinge 4y ago
    > turning up the heat Well that was long due: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2013/mar/11/facebook-staff-chill-cold-offices https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2013/mar/11...
    • rsynnott 4y ago
      15 degrees! Presumably only where legally permitted. For instance, Ireland: > for sedentary office work, a minimum temperature of 17.5° C, so far as is reasonably practicable, is achieved and maintained at every workstation after the first hour’s work.
  • dom96 4y ago
    Wow. Guess I left Meta just in time. It still feels difficult to believe Zuckerberg would say this though.
    • grepfru_it 4y ago
      Anyone who was someone at Davos are saying the same things.
  • cs137 4y ago
    This is the, "I fucked up and I'm going to have cut people, but I'm going to blame the people getting cut because I'm a shit human being" speech. It's never a good sign.
    • kypro 4y ago
      Not really. Business cycles exist and advertisement is extremely cyclical. Labour demand isn't fixed. Sometimes you have to cut not because you over hired, but because economic conditions change and this seems to be what's happening in regards to Facebook. I don't think he's blaming anyone either. The fact he's acknowledging there are probably people working at FB who shouldn't be suggests you're wrong and that for years FB has kept people despite it not being the company's best interests. Tbh I wish all companies were honest about why they're cutting back. I know I've been given BS reasons for being cut before and I've also been given no notice or warning. This seems relatively honest and direct in comparison. Those providing value will be fine, those who are not will be let go - isn't this how employment should function?
      • fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
        Returning to contract law; the employment agreement is a contract engaged by two or more parties to exchange labor for money (or a basket of financial incentives including money, in part). In virtually every instance, Meta proffered the employment contract and its provisions, vetted the counter party, and gave assent to enter into contract. Arguably, “there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here,” and their intent to “turn up the heat,” represents a failure of Meta to conduct proper due diligence when entering into contract, and a modification of the provisions of employment after-the-fact. In most instances these would be considered organizational failures. Your reference to the business cycle and other delicate economic terms are not the explanatory variables, not even to Meta themselves.
        • DisjointedHunt 4y ago
          Yeah, i really don't understand the point he thinks he was making. These companies spend BILLIONS on employee benefits to take away the noise of "real life". You CAN NOT attract top tier talent easily to a dumpster fire and they know this. You can't be giving away free food, ice cream, no performance reviews for two years during the pandemic and shipping 10s of thousands of office equipment to each individual employees homes for two years during the pandemic, continue to approve aggressive hiring plans and laying out $10 Billion dollar outlays for the fucking Metaverse and then turn around and say to the employees you hired that "You guys suck" I would just call it childish, but this asshole deserves no benefit of doubt. It's downright disgusting.
  • mgh2 4y ago
    He is blaming the economy and employees, when in fact the product itself is dying. Lots of CEOs with bad businesses will play this card to avoid responsibility...
    • WJW 4y ago
      > there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here Would be interesting to see whether he still considers himself essential for the future of Meta.
      • oblio 4y ago
        How many founders of successful companies willingly stepped out? 1%? 0.01%? :-)
        • Kye 4y ago
          There was a thread on HN some time ago discussing how different growth stages needed different people in the hot seat, and the fate of a company was often decided by the founder's willingness to cede control to someone with the right skills and experience. I think it came up in the context of VCs wanting to bring in CEOs for this purpose and the pushback they encountered.
          • dilyevsky 4y ago
            Ofc VCs would prefer ceo they fully control ;-) what else is new?
        • abeppu 4y ago
          How would you know? When a founder is out unwillingly, most of the time don't both sides pretend it was willing and amicable because they know it looks bad?
    • kornhole 4y ago
      I keep asking people if they know anybody excited about the metaverse. I have not found any even among people who are total Facebook products.
  • papito 4y ago
    I wonder how many people at Meta are there specifically for the money. Just learn to game their interview process, get in, and coast. I doubt that there are a lot of engineers working for Zuck for the love of the mission, let alone for moral reasons. In other news, the value of a developer who knows how to solve the problem at hand vs torching your money on maintaining the overkill of dozens of microservices has just gone up.
    • karaterobot 4y ago
      Every single Meta employee I know is only there for the money, and for the ability to put Facebook/Meta on their resume for the next job. Nobody is really interested in the product, though all but one of them like the working conditions and how they treat [engineers] there. Anecdotal, obviously.
  • matwood 4y ago
    > Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here He's probably not wrong though. People are routinely amazed just how many people these large companies employ. Big company culture often slips into not what is delivered, but how many people does a manager have under them. In the past, successful companies have used economic downturns as a way to reset this culture.
    • KerrAvon 4y ago
      Can you name a few of those companies? I’d genuinely like to read about them. My current hypothesis is that a company needs to have a near-death experience to acquire actual management discipline and true focus. Chrysler in 1979. Apple in 1996.
  • myunclestory 4y ago
    > Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," He makes it sound like these people sneaked in into the company without being hired. This reminds me of my greedy uncle - went to a wedding, gobbled every other food and drink in sight and then when the fierce loose motions hit, blamed the food.
  • dimmke 4y ago
    There was a time where I wanted to work at Meta/Facebook someday - it was actually "next" on my list. I didn't care about the negative press that Facebook got, I felt like they were unfairly targeted because of the 2016 election. And a lot of the engineering work that has come out of Facebook has been excellent, like React/React Native have changed the world. But it's just really hard to see Zuckerberg as a good business leader. When you compare the business to something like Amazon - which has a strong culture around decision making and cultivates a style of leadership in it's executives. So far, it seems like he hit a really good product/market fit and had good timing with Facebook. The strategy since then has basically been to stay ahead by acquiring social platforms that become successful. Until one came along that he couldn't just throw money at and acquire. Oops. And now with the turn on the dime to "Meta" - other companies have been trying to figure out VR for a long time. Apple has reportedly had a VR headset concept going for years and is probably still several years from releasing it. For Amazon to come out with a product like that, it would have to start with a PRFAQ and a lot of vetting just to release the product. To rename the company and start putting all their energy towards it, which letting actual profit centers languish just wouldn't happen. So not only has he not validated this new direction, he's now asking people working comfy FAANG jobs to knuckle down and suffer for it. It works when Elon Musk does it because he can make appeals like "we're going to make humanity multi-planetary" Meta's pitch is "What if we convinced everybody to live in a virtual world controlled entirely by us, where we take 50% of a cut of every digital good that is purchased" - who wants to work 70 hours a week towards making that dystopia a reality? I feel like Epic Games, with Fortnite being basically a social hub for kids and monetizing skins/associating social status with skins is closer to realizing some early version of "the metaverse" then what we've seen from Meta. I think that metaverse behavior is already happening in a lot of ways, it just isn't happening with dorky headsets and probably won't until the tech matures enough to get there.
    • cableshaft 4y ago
      > it just isn't happening with dorky headsets and probably won't until the tech matures enough to get there Zuckerberg is well aware of the technical challenges of VR headsets and they're putting a lot of effort into getting the headsets where they need to be. Seems like they're helping push the technology much further than any other company right now. Here's a 30 minute video where he and Michael Abrash go into the technical challenges, and what they've been doing to address those issues, as well as showing off prototype devices they've been working on[1]. And there's an hour long episode of Adam Savage's Tested series where they get to try the prototypes and go into even more detail[2]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sThLeiw8h2Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sThLeiw8h2Y [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6AOwDttBsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6AOwDttBsc
  • notacoward 4y ago
    Meta engineering could definitely afford to get a bit leaner, but the question is whether their approach will cut fat or muscle. Having been there, I suspect muscle. There's a strong correlation there between the "impact" that is the be-all and end-all of their performance measurement, churn, and technical debt. If they cut headcount but keep all of the people generating churn and technical debt, there will be more of those per person who's left and fewer of those risking bad reviews to actually keep things running. Some parts of engineering are already cracking under that load, so the results could be pretty bad. Expect more outages. This reminds me a bit of a discussion that used to be common during hard times early in my career: layoffs or pay cuts? It didn't take long for companies to figure out that with a layoff you get to choose who goes, but with pay cuts it will disproportionately be your best people because they have the greatest ability to jump upward. Nobody has that conversation any more, because the answer is known. I suspect in a few years Meta's approach to forced attrition (already practiced at Amazon for years) will also be recognized as bad for the long term.
  • Balgair 4y ago
    The second Iron Law of Bureaucracy states: "In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely." It seems that FB, err Meta, is going to advance the turn of the breaking wheel one rotation. They may be attempting, in good faith, to eliminate the flotsam and jetsam in the bureaucracy, but are more than likely to just eliminate those least connected to internal politics. I would not be surprised if remote-only workers are the most affected, followed by the most 'heads-down' programmers. It's interesting that these steps are occurring with the recent leaving of Sandberg and I wonder if there is any connection.
  • sorokod 4y ago
    There is something charming about the use of "realistically", a discovery the CEO just had that "bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here" as if this had nothing to do with him.
    • 31835843 4y ago
      I mean, isn’t that always the case though? That lots of people don’t belong there? It’s just the law of large numbers + the ever shifting lives of people.
      • sorokod 4y ago
        Don't see why this should always be the case. Also I don't recognize your use of addition and the sense in which you invoke the law of large numbers.
        • 31835843 4y ago
          There is no hiring process that is perfect. Plus, people burn out, organizations shift focus, etc. People who shouldn’t have been hired in the first place make it in, and people whose skills no longer match the job hang on.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• akhmatova 4y ago
  Empty spaces, what are we living for? Abandoned places, I guess we know the score, on and on Does anybody know what we are looking for? Another hero, another mindless crime Behind the curtain, in the pantomime Hold the line Does anybody want to take it anymore? The show must go on The show must go on, yeah Inside my heart is breaking My makeup may be flaking But my smile, still, stays on
• olivermarks 4y ago
  Reminds me of Yahoo! at their great obsolescence tipping point when they were sunsetted to be replaced by Facebook. Zuckerberg has huge spread in Hawaii just like Yahoo! founder Yang did...the chuckling Marissa Meyer, cutbacks... 'lean in' Sandberg facing a host of legal issues.. it's like the same script again. Wonder what the new Yabook! will look like post recession...
  • phendrenad2 4y ago
    Blood in the water. Might be a good time to start a new social network. A simple blue interface that doesn't have all of the clutter and noise of Mybook. We can launch at universities first, invite-only.
    • quickthrower2 4y ago
      Whatsapp?
    • olivermarks 4y ago
      Look for a big FB data breach when the shiny new next gen platform is ready so everyone will migrate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches and idiotic c suite parties during mass layoffs and cutbacks https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-blows-millions-on-parties-and-sponsorships-says-eric-jackson-2015-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-blow...
    • closedloop129 4y ago
      How come students don't do this every other year? What's Facebook's lock-in that each generation of students cannot monetize their own social graph?
      • Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
        >What's Facebook's lock-in that each generation of students cannot monetize their own social graph? Universities and schools using Facebook as their de-facto platform for group announcements, it seems.
• dgs_sgd 4y ago
  My roommate works at Meta and from how he describes the culture to me it seems quite intense and competitive already. I can't imagine what "turning up the heat" even more would imply.
  • doktorhladnjak 4y ago
    They'll force more people into the lower buckets of the stack rank. It’s very dystopian in its simplicity.
    • distrill 4y ago
      there isn't really a stack rank, and they're pretty careful about not fitting performance into predetermined quota buckets. honestly i think attrition will get the numbers down fairly quickly, although unfortunately probably pretty evenly distributed among good and bad engineers.
      • digbert 4y ago
        > there isn't really a stack rank, and they're pretty careful about not fitting performance into predetermined quota buckets That's what I thought too, but then in my first PSC as a manager when I was there I was added to a spreadsheet called "<org name> stack rank", where we had to rank everyone rated as Meets All, because we were 3 people short of our quota for <= Meets Most
      • doktorhladnjak 4y ago
        If you have differentiated rewards, you have a stack rank. They might not call it that or leave some flexibility in evaluating it but rest assured it is there.
  • psyc 4y ago
    When I was there (Oculus) I would not have survived 2 weeks if I had not worked > 8 hours and gone in most weekends. I was on a small team whose pace was simply much faster than any job I've ever had. And everyone seemed to have had a more impressive career than I. Perhaps I'm who Mark is talking about! Microsoft was much more my speed.
• anm89 4y ago
  Damn it's enjoyable to watch them crash and burn.
  • waynesonfire 4y ago
    just like your 401k?
    • rrrhys 4y ago
      Worth it.
    • anm89 4y ago
      My only positions have been short the market(psq) cash and gold since November of last year. Which is part of the reason that this is extremely enjoyable for me.
      • mellavora 4y ago
        So "buy on the dips", but buying psq. Nice !
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
    • jossclimb 4y ago
      A 401k has a very high chance of returning to growth, as and when the market recovers (which it will at some point, although no one knows when of course, but it will eventually). The same being true for meta is much less certain.
  • jsemrau 4y ago
    If you would have invested in 2017, you would be exactly in the same spot now after 4+ years.
  • rvz 4y ago
    I know, the diversity and inclusion executives and talking heads at Netflix, Twitter, Tesla, Fast, etc are always the first to leave and it is hilarious to see them get the axe. When you see tons of companies (mostly unprofitable companies) cut useless positions that add zero value to the company it is a great thing for them to next time watch their balance sheet and make money. Lots of schadenfreude there.
• jsemrau 4y ago
  That's how you keep your company alive. Social is about to change quite heavily. FB as a product is now 15+ years old. This will be a really interesting space to watch.
  • GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
    I cant imagine they’ll have an easy hiring funnel after this. This begins the slow decline
    • theaeolist 4y ago
      Maybe not so slow.
    • jsemrau 4y ago
      This is still a FAANG company with loads of people from the big schools. If the previous scandals (Cambridge Analytics, etc) haven't slowed down their hiring, this won't affect them as well.
    • rvz 4y ago
      Yeah. The same goes for Twitter, Tesla, Unity, Dropbox, Uber, etc
• lordnacho 4y ago
  Maybe I'm being totally naive, but what I want from FB is not better discoverability and metaverse, I want my friends to put their lives on it like they used to a few years ago. I don't even put anything on it myself anymore because of the smell around the company, and very few people I know do either, so my feed now looks like a bunch of memes and random news, with adverts in between. Engagement with a real human purpose seems like a better goal than just beating tiktok, but yes I'm just being an old man nostalgic for the old innocent days.
  • boredtofears 4y ago
    > I want my friends to put their lives on it like they used to a few years ago Really, you _want_ to go back to that? They don't have to regain your trust in any way? I don't think the "innocent" days were all that innocent, many were just naïve.
    • inferiorhuman 4y ago
      > They don't have to regain your trust in any way? I think you misread the comment you replied to.
  • yieldcrv 4y ago
    Impersonal blasts are done, and ephemeral stories are still common but becoming less broadly viewable as well and maybe on the way out. Its all groupchats, that you’re not in. 0 post instagram accounts are common in my circles, its still a fair assumption to assume they archived all their old photos as opposed to deleting them or never having any, but 0 post and story exclusive accounts (only create “stories” that are visible for 24 hours) are a fine way to interact. Just to be able to view your stories and send DMs. And many don't really engage with the stories, but maybe do more “close friends” stories that only a whitelisted group can see, even if the profile was already private. Its really more like hybrid of Snapchat and Tiktok now, and you need to make closer friends yourself. The network part about finding “people you met once” or “15 years ago” is done, people want more genuine connections right now, its going to leave lonely people in the dust if it hasn't already, but there are ways to take initiative yourself by adding a few people to your close friends list. This is how people are getting their engagement with real human beings, far better than status updates on a wall ever did. The latter would actually be a weird thing to me right now.
• cityzen 4y ago
  Music to my ears, hope the headwinds blow them off the road and into a ditch.
• intodameta 4y ago
  This is going to get super ugly over there. Sheryl Sandberg leaving was a part of this, the entire “oh, we have this pending investigation into you…no big deal” is the corporate equivalent of the claws coming out just a little bit to tell you that if you don’t quit, the claws will come out all the way. She was expensive and probably not fully engaged and bought in with this random direction change into Metaverse, a business which won’t exist for another five years, realistically. This is classic managed decline. They have real problems. I went through something similar at a past employer. Best people left almost instantly. Followed by a steady drain. Then eventually the garbage got thrown out the back forcefully (people who couldn’t get out, we’re lucky to escape the purge or didn’t get the memo that they needed to leave months ago). The reality is that Meta probably doesn’t need the best people to run what they have, it’s mostly figured out. The entire metaverse business is a giant open ended R&D spend to fool gullible pension funds and investors into not selling their stock. Building a TikTok clone by copying features won’t be that hard and doesn’t need 10,000 engineers. They really are going to be forced to acquire companies to gain any real traction in metaverse. Very unlikely they come up with what they need in house. Unload the ship, sabe capital, try to buy up tons of companies at the bottom at good prices to recap the talent, have some high skill team build the TikTok thing, keep a skeleton crew running the FB app. Will just be horrible. The tone of what he just said is going to green light everyone eating eachother alive. I wouldn’t want to be a ceo because you have to do things like this. No. Thanks.
  • cokeandpepsi 4y ago
    The 'metaverse' play just feels weird to me, kudos to them if it works out though
    • papito 4y ago
      Have you been to the metaverse? It's atrocious. 3G graphics from 1996, no real interactivity, nothing to do just "walk around". It's a thing that was stitched together by a bunch of people who clearly do not believe in any of it. Just the bare minimum to collect the fat FB paycheck and options.
• saos 4y ago
  > "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said. > "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me," he said. He is planning to make cuts with those comments. Clearly. I assumed Facebook was making profit given its advertising powers. Wonder how that’s taken a hit over the months
  • Ecstatify 4y ago
    Bad quarter incoming
• DisjointedHunt 4y ago
  Here’s a prediction, operations middle management will be unchanged while the rest of the plebs have their lives made more difficult. Just go on LinkedIn and search for “Director, Operations” at meta. I know of directors who have gotten there simply by hiring two “layers” of management under them. This is a company that has paid well above market for Ops “talent” and the MBAs that dot the insides of the firm do very little. Nonexistent support, hacked accounts everywhere, no one cares. This isn’t an engineering problem, it’s a bad bad political problem within operations.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• zuhayeer 4y ago
  It’s interesting because slashing hiring plans at a big company is almost akin to a full fledged layoff at a later stage private company. Simply because of attrition levels at these large companies, just stop hiring and stay put for a while and you’ve trimmed size. Way different for a startup where people are sticking around for a payday.
  • gundmc 4y ago
    When the economy turns south the attrition rates go WAY down. If things are truly bad, no one wants to leave a stable and secure gig.
    • aetherson 4y ago
      Yeah, I think this is part of the great relearning that we're going into after a decade plus of bull markets: if the job market isn't hot, you can just... Not leave your job after two years.
• Johnny555 4y ago
  On the bright side, the Facebook recruiters have stopped bugging me.
  • jstx1 4y ago
    Which makes me think - what are FB recruiters doing right now if the company isn't hiring and has no plans to start? Are many of them laid off too? If not, are they just... chilling?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • kibibyte 4y ago
      Having seen a similar situation over 5 years ago play out, some of them (including many of their best recruiters) will go elsewhere because they have no work to do. Some others, of course, will become redundant. Although Meta has the advantage of name recognition, this kind of attrition can mess up hiring pipelines for a while and make it difficult to ramp up hiring in the future, which can make it difficult to attract the talent they really want.
      • thaumasiotes 4y ago
        > Having seen a similar situation over 5 years ago play out, some of them (including many of their best recruiters) will go elsewhere because they have no work to do. For an internal recruiter, what share of compensation is baseline salary and what share is bonuses from successful hires?
    • ra7 4y ago
      Friend is a FB recruiter (who’s quitting soon). They are not laid off (yet), they’re just chilling with zero work for the past couple of months.
  • coldcode 4y ago
    For years I got those emails all the time. If I had printed them out they would have made great fire starters. I could not ever imagine working for FB even though they paid a lot at the time.
• jossclimb 4y ago
  > "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said. > "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me," he said." Incredibly stupid on the face of it. Considering a good many talented engineers suffer with imposter syndrome and perhaps self-esteem issues (the past two years has not been easy on many of us), this will not only have your poor performers flying out the door, but a lot of your engineering talent as well (who a lot of companies will make a 'hiring exception' for). Any sort of doom casting / or "rally or else" action from a CEO is never going to play out well. You will just spook folks at all levels of performance and degrade morale. I can't honestly say I will grieve a world without meta though, they played a good part in degrading democracy in my country. I would not swap my life with a Zuckerberg / Musk for any amount of money.
  • DisjointedHunt 4y ago
    Precisely. Also, he realized this . . NOW ? What an asshole. He directly would have been involved in setting and approving those hiring plans. It's on him if his strategy was so wrong.
  • yodsanklai 4y ago
    Yes, certainly not good for morale. Meta isn't a company where you can cruise ("move fast" and high turner over contribute to this). Also, many "talents" (esp. those recruited in the last year) are considering quitting because of the drop in Meta stock.
• Lapsa 4y ago
  Left Facebook for quite awhile now. Got punished with post restrictions for quoting Futurama's Bender's "kill all humans" under friend's status update of how he's gonna watch the show after a hard workday. I mean, it utterly failed to deliver the very core basic feature it's supposed to - random socializing with your friends. My pal still doesn't have a clue I'm a fan of Bender.
• wly_cdgr 4y ago
  I think this is a pretty good way to do layoffs because it gives people more agency over whether they get laid off and more runway to make contingency plans
• DogLover_ 4y ago
  It is hard for me to understand that big successful companies can hire so aggressively and then in time of a little economic downturn they need to cut people. From the outside, it looks like FOMO on a bigger scale and that just seems unprofessional.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• t_mann 4y ago
  Well, Coinbase just did 18% layoffs (that's one gone from every 5-person team). In theory it's nicer if your CEO just tells you basically 'please start looking for jobs now, we don't want to have to do layoffs'. What's so off-putting here is that he's already trying to frame those departures as separating from 'the weakest' (which is disingenuous, because it's old management wisdom that the first to leave in such situations are generally among the best, because those have the best outside options).
  • tinyhouse 4y ago
    Not really. The best leave first when the ship is sinking. Here it sounds like they are going to let people go more easily based on performance. If you have high rating already then you don't need to worry so much and no reason for you to start looking outside.
• FullyFunctional 4y ago
  > "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of Zuckerbergs at the company who shouldn't be here," people said. There, fixed it.
• posharma 4y ago
  Does Meta really think they’ll be able to attract talent this way?
• anewpersonality 4y ago
  Instagram is basically Facebook at this point.
  • elforce002 4y ago
    It's worse than that. Ig is their Frankenstein Monster. Facebook is for old people (literally) since gen Z is all over TikTok and Snapchat (to a certain extent). The fb era is starting to sunset.
• projektfu 4y ago
  The elves leave Middle Earth. https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%e2%80%93-soda%e2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
• danielovichdk 4y ago
  The real question here is: Is the economy going down ? I have heard others saying we are entering a deep recession within the next year
  • blevin 4y ago
    Nobody knows for sure, and a single summary statistic of a huge economy cannot capture the dispersion of lived experiences, but yes, there are objective indications suggesting recession is possible. For one example, the Atlanta Federal Reserve runs a real-time GDP forecast called GDP Now. The update today is -2.1% https://twitter.com/atlantafed/status/1542922843511574528 https://twitter.com/atlantafed/status/1542922843511574528
  • coolspot 4y ago
    US debt/GDP is 370%, inflation is 9%, natural resources locked in Russia, and Fed can’t do QE anymore.
• DisjointedHunt 4y ago
  I’ve wondered for a few years how Meta seems to employ some of the world best “advice-givers”. I don’t use LinkedIn a lot, but the times I’m there, I get post suggestions from 2nd degree connections working at Meta who seemed to wax on and on during the pandemic about how they’re “donating their time to review resumes and help with interview prep” (I assume for non engineering roles) We’re talking some Walmart/Severence level cringe everyday. “Five things successful leaders do that you should too” etc I kept going down the rabbit hole of these posts and realized what a huge bubble it is, underwritten solely by the immense pre-AppTrackingTransparency advertising model. I’ll admit, for a short while, I wanted to have a job like that without any real work but later realized how hollow and short sighted it was to think that way.
• SilverBirch 4y ago
  What I find interesting so far about these hiring freezes & layoffs is that at the moment it's been quite diffuse. All the announcements have been about how the companies will shrink head count and costs etc. But so far there haven't really been the focused sweeping announcements you would expect. When a company really hits hard times you expect them to be much more deliberate about how they cut, they start making decisions about which businesses do they really want to be in and how much do they want to spend. Facebook is a great example of this. You take a look at the business and say "What's the core business" it's ad-supported social media, you look at the focus and spend and it's this weird hardware platform that's a big bet and probably a long way off and not really connected to the core business. Facebook has completely lost focus on its core business. So this focus on efficiency seems just silly. A lot of these cuts seem entirely driven by some meme about the economy rather than actual real market pressure. When real headwinds start to hit, the cutting is going to be far more about focus and direction than on this vague idea of being lean. It doesn't matter how lean you are while designing a headset, because you're running a social media site.
  • tinyhouse 4y ago
    I disagree. They didn't lose focus. Their new focus is VR. They anticipate it's going to be much bigger growth engine for them in the next decades, while the current core business is slowing down. Maybe their mistake is that they are too aggressive with the VR spending. There are many examples of companies that had a great core business that was gradually slowing down and new companies came and ate their lunch. Meta is trying to prevent that by being the leader in a completely new space. It's a bet that is going to be either a huge win or fail.
    • SilverBirch 4y ago
      VR isn't like digital cameras destroying film, it's a completely different business. It'd be like Netflix deciding their video streaming business has peaked so they're going to hire 10,000 new engineers to work on a new wind turbine business. I agree with you they are focused on VR, but where I disagree is that they are a social media company. They're not focused on what their company actually does. It's kind of an obvious point that maybe the reason their core business is slowing down is because the head of the company decided to stop working on it. At some point it's going to become obvious that if you spun off the Facebook part of Meta it would have a significantly larger market cap than Meta has.
• tinyhouse 4y ago
  I don't understand why Meta gets so much hate here. I do understand the Facebook/Instagram hate. The only good thing left on Facebook is the groups. But as a tech crowd we should be more appreciative seeing a huge tech company risking everything in order to innovate in an exciting space such as VR. Don't get me wrong, I think the whole Metaverse story the way Zuck's tells it is pretty stupid, but there are many VR use cases I'm very excited about. A different CEO would just try to keep milking the Facebook/Instagram cow. But Zuck is much more bold. Now back to the post. The problem is that Meta is one of the highest paying companies. But being such a big company with far than optimal hiring process, you get a lot of bad apples in (or even good apples that just don't fit in), which leads to being inefficient and wasteful. You end up with many people making a killing but who are "resting and vesting" or even worse, having negative impact. They don't have an incentive to leave cause no one is going to pay them as much or more.
• willcipriano 4y ago
  Now we are entering what I like to call the "pauper CEO" phase of the economic cycle. When leadership turns out their pockets and "socializes the losses" as it were. Generally even if you work for a company that is unaffected by the current economic climate, it will be used as a justification for low raises and higher expectations at work. With high inflation happening at the same time, we are entering a bad time to grow your career or get promoted. For me, I found a role that reduced my overtime and is relatively easy. I wouldn't want to get promoted now if it meant a increase in responsibility as the rewards are unlikely to even surpass inflation by a meaningful amount. This will suck for people without established careers of course, I was in that position in 2008 and the slow economic recovery had me working for very low salaries up until a few years ago. They only get away with this beacuse most workers don't or can't respond to the incentives they have laid out here. Firms are shouting at us "I don't have the ability to reward you for your effort!", I suggest you listen before working all that hard.
  • dan_quixote 4y ago
    Yeah, we finally entered a phase where employees had some leverage and it quickly turned into an economic liability (high inflation). I'm more convinced that organized labor is the only answer as the years go by.
  • nunez 4y ago
    gains for me losses for thee
  • goldenchrome 4y ago
    Why not continue getting promoted and when the market picks back up you’ll be ahead?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Planktonne 4y ago
  > Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here If a company has both 1) A lot of dead wood 2) No better strategy to deal with it than 'turning up the heat' Then this suggests a profound failure of management and leadership. I'd start cutting the dead wood there.
  • s17n 4y ago
    Every sufficiently large company has a lot of dead wood, and nobody has yet devised a better strategy than 'turning up the heat'.
    • corrral 4y ago
      Does this not have the side effect of also driving away employees with the best alternatives (so, probably your best ones)?
      • thenightcrawler 4y ago
        The key for this to work is that you need to give everybody big raises so the best want to stay when the heat gets tough (like sterotypical ibanking)
        • kennywinker 4y ago
          That’s implying the best people choose the best pay, not the best work, 100% of the time. I quit my Big Tech job because the work sucked. There was no reasonable raise that would have kept me there, but turning DOWN the heat might have kept me there…
      • adg001 4y ago
        Absolutely, employees leave bad managers, they seldom want to leave the employer itself – Or at least this was my personal experience, always on the run from dead woods.
      • nkrisc 4y ago
• 31835843 4y ago
  People who work at FAANG calibre companies are professionals, perfectly capable of finding new positions that suit their skills and level of commitment. I think it’s infantilizing to take the CEO’s comments and imply that those employees are being mistreated.
• jonny_eh 4y ago
  > some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me Of course he's ok with it, no need to pay severance to employees that "voluntarily" quit.
  • reaperducer 4y ago
    Not just severance. Possibly unemployment. I'm not sure what the law is in California, but one state where I was fired, the company doing the firing was required to pay half of my unemployment benefits. Not surprisingly, it fought it. Which is how I found out about the law. Someone from the state unemployment department called me to get my side of the story. Then called my former employer to get its side of the story. Then told my former employer to write a check or lose its business license.
  • hef19898 4y ago
    And for management performance, just rank those leaving in other categories than "unwanted attrition" and everything is good.
  • pfortuny 4y ago
    Yes, that is so cheeky… We are going to put pressure so that we do not have to pay any severance because they will leave “willingly”. Good luck with keeping just the good people with that technique.
  • aetherson 4y ago
    Facebook had more than $7B net income last quarter and has $60B cash-on-hand. While I'm sure that, ceteris paribus, they're more happy if low performers quit than have to be laid off, I'm equally sure that if they felt like they could go through and cut out low performers right now, and the only cost to do so was paying severance, they'd be happy to do it. The idea that Facebook or Zuckerberg of all people has an unwillingness to pay short-term costs for long term benefits is crazy. There's a difference between being cynical about a corporation and being willing to attribute every bad trait in the world unconditionally to every corporation without any reflection.
  • bregma 4y ago
• einpoklum 4y ago
  Now if only people could turn up the heat so that Meta/Facebook would quit...
• darthrupert 4y ago
  What on earth can make a person as successful as Zuckerberg be so fucking clueless? Obviously the first people to leave when heat turns up are the best ones, as they are the ones who have the most opportunities and courage. I have seen this a dozen times and this happens almost mechanically. I knew success was mostly about luck, but things like this make it seem like it’s 100% about luck.
  • tgv 4y ago
    Much of it is. Luck, and sales skills.
  • joshstrange 4y ago
    Money and luck. Zuck may be portrayed as a "drop out college kid" but he went to Harvard and they guy knew going in that he had the safety net of his dad (and his offer to have/run a McDonalds franchise) to fall back on. I think some people greatly underestimate the power of a strong safety net and what that can do to your confidence, even more so if you've grown up knowing it was rock solid and you could take big risks without really putting yourself in much danger.
  • clumsysmurf 4y ago
    I asked myself the same question when I watched this interview "CNBC's Jim Cramer interviewed Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyoVLipRVPw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyoVLipRVPw It sounds like he really believes his own bull.
• msbarnett 4y ago
  Yeah, "we hired people we shouldn't have so now we're going to make it increasingly unpleasant to work here" doesn't work. First-hand, what I've seen happen is that your most talented people, who are the most in demand, leave the organization quite quickly because they correctly realize they don't have to put up with this bullshit. It's the coasters who fear they'll never land an equally cushy job who attempt to ride out the heat as long as they can.
  • joshstrange 4y ago
    It's absolute insanity that they don't see that the best talent can and will walk out the door if this happens. Even if the top performers are insulated from the "heat" there are a non-zero number of them that this won't sit right with and/or they are affected and they leave. Any company who uses this kind of shadow-layoff or whatever you want to call it is scum, plain and simple. I mean that's no surprise for Meta or maybe even Tesla but as I see other companies employee this "tactic" I just add them to my list of "places I'd never consider working". Such short-sighted thinking.
    • DisjointedHunt 4y ago
      AWS is another. The gripe i have with them is they do it during the good times as well. I've seen some pretty horrible effects on perfectly good devs who were subject to what i'm only going to characterize as mental torture during their time there.
      • colonelpopcorn 4y ago
        This in regards to their warehouse workforce, but relevant to devs as well: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/22/amazon-workers-shortage-leaked-memo-warehouse https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/22/amazon-wo...
    • PragmaticPulp 4y ago
      > It's absolute insanity that they don't see that the best talent can and will walk out the door if this happens. On the contrary, the best talent is probably already performing to these higher expectations and won't be impacted. Their peers who weren't keeping up are the ones who will be impacted. Holding employees accountable for high performance standards is generally welcomed by high performers.
• vmoore 4y ago
  So I was wondering, does this mean Meta will have to hire people who are 10x more productive and Get Things Done at a faster, more reliable pace? If there are people like that who yield better results consistently, how do they manage burnout? Are they treated as the mythical 'rock-star engineer' who other companies like to poach and clamor for? 10x output is so rare in this industry, and having 10 employees that match the output of one person is seen as silly, but there's nothing wrong with hiring 10 people to do something a single person can do. Yeah sure, you have to pay out 10x more salary, but since mythical rock-star developers are in such short supply and regularly poached, I don't see a reason for clamoring for them IMHO.
  • downrightmike 4y ago
    They are probably already trying to get two 10xers to breed a 100x.
    • downrightmike 4y ago
      Apparently a few of you have never met consultants...
  • kleinsch 4y ago
    Meta used to be able to hire those people, but with their reputation issues and other companies joining them in tier 1 pay, they have trouble getting them now. What they're dealing with is, Meta used to be a very results-based environment where people worked really hard to try to hit perf goals. 10x engs would get huge bonuses. In the last 6-8 years, it's gotten so big and bureaucratic that for many people, driving your individual metric to move is a coinflip that's out of your control. They've hired tons and tons of people in that time, so there's a good chunk of people who work a straight 40, collect their meets-all review, and live their life. I would guess Zuck wants to try to get back to where people were more motivated, but with the stock price not going through the roof and the company closing in on 100K employees, I don't see how employees are going to feel that sense of ownership or control.
  • deckard1 4y ago
    a 10x dev is just a 1x dev that was anointed by their manager buddy. That person then goes off and dicks around for a month or two with no oversight, no code reviews, no QA, no sign-offs, no stakeholders, no Jira tickets, and pops out of their cave with a shiny new library or API free of sin, purified in the waters of Lake Minnetonka. Agile/scrum makes 10x devs impossible. Dirty secret of our industry. Management picks the winners by removing them from process.
• LegitShady 4y ago
  hasn't meta been hiring like crazy?
  • graedus 4y ago
    From the article: "Zuckerberg indicated that Meta plans to slow its hiring plans for engineers by at least 30% this year – adding roughly 6,000 or 7,000 workers rather than the 10,000 it initially expected to hire." So yes, still hiring quite a lot of people, just fewer than originally planned.
• danuker 4y ago
  This merely selects for sociopaths. A person affected by other people's demands (i.e. manager yelling at them harder) will quit first. But that is completely orthogonal to skill or value provided.
• bilsbie 4y ago
• smrtinsert 4y ago
  Absolutely comical.
• leobueno 4y ago
  There's no chance this will work for them when their stock is crashing and there's no growth. High performing employees already have incentive to leave and get new stock grants elsewhere, they will leave at a higher rate now.
• andrewflnr 4y ago
  The best part is, if you quit now it's an implicit admission you were one of the ones who "shouldn't be here". It's a really wonderful set of incentives. Great job, Mark.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    Hardly. Top talent is first to leave as a firm's fortunes turn. (FB's fortunes turned a while ago.)
    • andrewflnr 4y ago
      (Obviously it doesn't actually imply that, but it'll feel like that if you're there and hear that, especially if you already had non-zero imposter syndrome. Point is, it's an exceptionally shitty way to treat employees.)
      • dredmorbius 4y ago
        The head-trip game is brutal, yes. But again, clue flees first.
• garlicrouted 4y ago
  Interesting.
• plantwallshoe 4y ago
  I worked at Meta for 2 years and the pressure to land features while keeping up on your code review/LoC metrics was a fucking nightmare during the boom times. I can only imagine how shitty it will get with the specter of layoffs floating around
  • ivraatiems 4y ago
    Assuming LoC = lines of code... seriously? That's by far the dumbest metric for measuring software engineer productivity that exists.
    • plantwallshoe 4y ago
      There is a graph of your submitted commits/LoC/code review comments over time, overlayed with the rest of your teams metrics. Managers will tell you that those metrics are not important to your performance review , but it is absolutely not true. They didn’t make the graph so it can be ignored.
      • pbalau 4y ago
        Before I've left fb, early 2018, loc/code review did not matter. Around 2016, there was a push to switch to management from within the engs. This did not go that well. After, since the company kept growing and there was a real need to get more managers, they started hiring from outside. One of these outside hires become my manager and he was the reason I left. Code review used to be on the same axis as onboarding, office hours, that sort of thing.
    • AtNightWeCode 4y ago
      Typical middle management bs. The best engineers even delete far more code than they write.
  • dboreham 4y ago
    > LoC metrics See: Goodhart's Law
  • bcrosby95 4y ago
• lnxg33k1 4y ago
  I am not sure why I should quit myself and just not ideologically start to do nothing to add value to the company while getting paid and just wait to be laid off with severance when the time comes, like I have no interest of self-sacrificing for facebook and at this point I also have no interest in adding value to this shithole
• Havoc 4y ago
  Why on earth would you say something like that? Its not necessarily a bad business move doing it...but loudly announcing it? Reminds me of the musk "sleep on factory floor" macho bullshit.
  • paxys 4y ago
    Because investors eat this shit up
• labrador 4y ago
  > “Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,” Translation: We feel bad letting people go because we're all fam so we're going to make it your fault you were let go. If you can't meet the arbitrary and unequally applied goals we set for you then that's on you.
• googlryas 4y ago
  I read the article, but I will choose to take the headline literally. Since men on average prefer a colder work environment than women, I wonder if this will lead to a disproportionate number of males leaving the workplace, improving their male:female ratio?
  • OnionBlender 4y ago
    I know you're joking but I've always hated how cold the office is. I would often get a mug of hot water just to warm my hands. I've seen female co-workers wearing those fingerless gloves or wearing their winter coat because of how cold they were.
• tuckerman 4y ago
  I think we do a disservice to ourselves and the open culture at many SV companies to give leakers so much attention. Without context (which when speaking to a company can also include context you can only get by working there and experiencing the culture/norms) it’s possible to pull out clips from most speeches/announcements to excite anger from just about anyone and many media outlets seem very happy to help leakers do just that.
  • TomVDB 4y ago
    Why a disservice? It’s the contrary. Thanks to those kinds of leaks, I had already decided I’d never want to work for that place. When a good friend started working there, he confirmed pretty much everything.
    • tuckerman 4y ago
      It’s fun and juicy to read leaks from other companies but it really sucks when your leadership stops being open or stops taking questions in all hands meetings because everything they say immediately gets posted on Twitter. Just because you’d like to know the information about the on-goings of a company doesn’t make you entitled to it and I wish large companies would collectively do more to go after leakers in court to stop this trend.
      • juve1996 4y ago
        > I wish large companies would collectively do more to go after leakers in court to stop this trend. "Don't talk or we'll ruin your life financially." Whistleblowers have a hard enough time in this day and age. I hope more do this - corporations dominate enough of our lives.
        • tuckerman 4y ago
          There is a very specific meaning of whistleblowing and giving every leaker that title does a disservice to those that are actual whistleblowers.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Talking about "turning up the heat" at FB and using this kind of language is fairly odd to me while at the same time Google is actively reforming their perf and promo process in a way that seems (at least to me, newly on the outside) to be kind of the opposite of this and a response to internal frustration, and lots of attrition. I don't know, maybe we'll see a similar thing happen at Google over the next few months. But not right now, at least not what I'm hearing.
  • stathibus 4y ago
    What's going on at Google is mostly orthogonal in my view. They are slimming down the process, not lowering performance expectations.
    • cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      From what I'm hearing it sounds overall positive and giving managers and teams more discretion for promo at the lower levels? I personally stayed at L4 for my entire 10 years because the whole idea of going through that process was repulsive to me and everything I worked on kept getting cancelled or shifted around and I didn't have the personality to go peeing on metaphorical firehydrants to make them "mine" enough to claim what they said I needed for L5. But I had plenty of managers who would have gone to bat for me in this new process, I suspect. But I quit just a few months before they rolled this out.
• chocolatemildew 4y ago
  As a soon to be ex-meta employee, I have two thoughts: 1. What Mark says is real, no BS, finally telling people how it really is. He’s focused on the metaverse - if I was a long term investor - I’d buy more all the way down - and I think it will go down. 2. I’m jumping ship, no more metamates, just me. Many offers on the table set to go, was stressful but enough is enough. I love the job, but I like surfing and hanging out with family more. A players can and will leave, they will have many offers - market for A players is strong. Mark will continue to attract talent - and in time - meta will prevail
• JJMcJ 4y ago
  Firing a bunch of people shows that the CEO is "tough minded" and that boosts the stock price. For the first couple of years it hardly matters who leaves, especially at a company as big as Facebook. It's just the symbolism for Wall Street to appreciate.
• lljk_kennedy 4y ago
  I think this could be construed as grounds for constructive dismissal for their Irish operations at least. https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemployment_and_redundancy/dismissal/constructive_dismissal.html https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemploymen...
• AtNightWeCode 4y ago
  Meta clearly have too many employees in comparison to the number of users. Even if we calculate that on the fake official user count. In my sphere people simply do not use Instagram and Facebook anymore besides for chatting. Instagram kinda killed itself for me with all the porn spam.
  • kjeetgill 4y ago
    This is a great example of why anecdotal evidence is close to meaningless. I don't know a single person not on one of, if not, two or all three of: Facebook, Insta, Whatsapp.
    • AtNightWeCode 4y ago
      Surely Meta does not have 3 billion unique users. Not even half of the people I know in one of the most technical advanced countries in the world use any service from Meta. It is just sucha ridiculous number. Meta is a fraud and the stock will tell truth sooner or later. Sooner it seems…
• kwatsonafter 4y ago
  I'm calling it: Facebook is now what MySpace was when Facebook became Facebook. I think if we can take away anything it's that the future of, "computers communicating" isn't, "inviting normies to the conversation as to turn everything into a bathroom wall." I'm looking at you Hacker News.
• bogomipz 4y ago
  From the article: >"If I had to bet, I'd say that this might be one of the worst downturns that we've seen in recent history," Zuckerberg told workers in a weekly employee Q&A session, audio of which was heard by Reuters." This is fascinating. I have seen interviews with everyone from Larry Summers to Janet Yellen, Jamie Dimon and countless other prodigious economic minds recently and the only thing that any of them state with any certainty is that a recession "might" happen. None of them have made any pronouncements as to the severity of the downturn should it happen. Yet here Zuck is, not only sharing the degree of certainty but also the degree of severity. Zuckerberg really comes off as desperate sounding. I can't imagine this speech instilling any inspiration, confidence or good will in employees. Certainly not anyone who may have been on the fence about the whole "let's be the company on the Metaverse" garbage. I hope people do "self-select" and leave in droves.
• seahawks78 4y ago
  What happened to the Libra project? Anyone has any idea?
• mhss 4y ago
  > "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here" Well, If that’s the case, whose fault is it? you hired them and you have been keeping them. This kind of passive-aggressive layoff style feels like weak leadership and trying to weasel out from paying severance. Zuckerberg is really looking like a douche and poor leader here (yes, shocking I know).
• sidcool 4y ago
  I think Meta engineers would be in demand enough to not worry about their careers.