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> 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

> 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
    The worst performers know they can't get an equivalent job somewhere else, so they're going to cling on no matter how miserable you make it. They have no choice. Your best performers know they have their pick of any job they like so it anything gets worse for them they'll just go somewhere else.
- mcv 4y ago
  Is it an effective strategy at all? I can imagine that turning up the heat without any benefits is just as likely to chase the most talented people away.
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    I disagree, though it greatly depends on how "turning up the heat" is done. There is not a lot that is more demoralizing to top performers than to see dead wood continue to plot along and earn a sizable paycheck and produce little of value. And it's not even all solely an envy issue - it's also an issue of poor performers getting in the way and making other people's job more painful and inefficient. So a message of "we're going to start getting real about ensuring our high bar is met, and having hard conversations with people who consistently don't meet that bar" is something that some folks would look forward to. Of course, like I said, the devil is in the details, and if "turning up the heat" means we're going to have more time cops than yes, I think it would be demoralizing.
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    The stock value has dropped by over half and meta is preparing for a recession. Ad sales and user growth have already slowed.
  - huffmsa 4y ago
    If it's just reviewing people at a higher standard, I don't see how that'll turn high performers away.
- kennywinker 4y ago
  Citation needed. alternative strategies would include: Rewarding good employees and firing bad ones. Deciding on actual useful performance metrics ahead of time and measuring people against them.
  - hluska 4y ago
    If I had one wish, it would be that we would all give up that rude “citation needed” trope. I agree with you, yet that’s such a childish way to argue that it hurts the point. Just have the confidence to say you don’t agree!
    - kennywinker 4y ago
      What I mean by that is more than “i don’t agree” - it’s “hey, it looks like you asserted an opinion as fact”. I’m pretty sure all ways of saying that come off rude. Sometimes rudeness is irreducible, and I think this is one of those times. I like “citation needed” because to me it seems like a playful version of rude rather than a serious version of rude. Shrugging emoji
  - bricemo 4y ago
    This is exactly what they are doing with one improvement: instead of firing, they are allowing attrition to happen naturally. That’s better than layoffs
    - kennywinker 4y ago
      Why is that better? Making everybody suffer until some people leave because it’s intolerable to them… that doesn’t sound better to me.
      - bricemo 4y ago
        It’s not “making people suffer”. It is having high expectations for performance that A-players and teams can easily hit. If companies are going to survive during a crisis time when the whole world is facing headwinds, there is no margin for error, at FB or anywhere. Layoffs are always awful, they take jobs away from people without them having a say. They should always be a last resort.
- synu 4y ago
  How does this work well? Aren’t the good people the first to leave if you decide to make everyone miserable?
  - blantonl 4y ago
    the good people are the ones that perform well in the kitchen when it gets hot.
    - joshstrange 4y ago
      Lol. Bullshit. The good ones know to get out when a company treats it's employees like shit. Just because they aren't the target today doesn't mean they won't be the target tomorrow. The idea that people should wear bad working conditions as a badge of honor is just silly and something I'd expect people (the good ones) to grow out of after a few years max in the industry.
      - blantonl 4y ago
        you know, there are economic times where it's tough to find a job in certain industries, no matter how awesome you are.
        joshstrange 4y ago
        Just so I'm clear, your response to "good workers don't put up with that shit" is essentially "they will if they can't find a different/better job"? Cause that just sounds exploitative and scummy. I'm sure companies make those calculations but it doesn't make it right/moral. In a vacuum I can understand and empathise with your comment but as part of this chain (where you say "the good people are the ones that perform well in the kitchen when it gets hot.") I can't take it seriously. Which is it? Do the good people perform well (and enjoy) when it gets hot or are they held hostage by the economic times?
        blantonl 4y ago
- hluska 4y ago
  There are many better strategies.
- mcculley 4y ago
  Organizations that need good people will try to improve the ones they have. While some organizations have dead wood that cannot be improved and must be replaced, great organizations play the long game and try to develop people.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  Because expecting managers to do their damn jobs would just be too hard? It wasn't the #1 reason but "dead wood" probably ranked 2 or 3 for why I left my last job and it was 100% the manager's fault. Had that company decided to "turn up the heat" I would have left even faster and I can promise you the "dead wood" would have stayed till the bitter end. I doubt the claim that no one has come up with a better strategy and I question the leadership abilities of anyone who thinks it's a good strategy.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    Managers have personal priorities and interests that may not align with the interests of the company. e.g. company doesn't want dead weight, but the manager does for any number of reasons. Maybe the manager really likes those people on a personal level, or maybe the dead weight have dirt on the manager, or maybe the dead weight are kept around as sacrificial material should the manager ever be forced to make cuts, or maybe the incentive structure in the company rewards managers for having more reports, etc. So yes, expecting managers to put company interests before their own may actually be too hard.
    - joshstrange 4y ago
      Or, in my specific situation, my manager (and the manger above them) were terrible at handling intrapersonal conflicts. They would just ignore it until it went away and hating confronting anyone about anything. At least one of them also "liked" the "dead wood" in question or had at least worked with them for a long time. I understand all of that. But at the end of the day, it was bad managers. Even if you somehow manage to clear the "dead wood" (good luck, they hold on longer that performing members in my experience) you are still stuck with bad managers and you'll be right back in the same place in little time.
      - s17n 4y ago
        From the CEO's point of view, line managers and employees are basically an undifferentiated mass of potential dead wood. Getting managers to "do their jobs" is exactly the intention of a policy like this.
justinbaker84 4y ago
100% Agree.
refurb 4y ago
I’m not sure I’d blame management for not having a crystal ball and seeing the market downturn in advance. I can see them getting fired for not hitting their hiring and spending targets when the company has aggressive expansion goals. And the idea you can hire thousands of people and exclude all potential deadwood is just fantasy.
- mlyle 4y ago
  But you could, you know, actually measure performance and manage according to it. I'm not saying self-selection shouldn't be a part of it. Some employees should absolutely be thinking, "eh, I might be managed-out eventually for underperformance because I am not a great fit here... and I don't know that I can fix it or that it's worth fixing it" and depart on their own. But it should absolutely be because management quality is good and everyone understands the process and what's going on. Not because the workplace has been made artificially unpleasant to see who quits: that makes the wrong people leave.
  - refurb 4y ago
    Agree with you there. Crappy performance management is a massive red light and all your good people will bail ASAP.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
If a company is collecting a lot of "dead wood" underperformers, the correct response is to start raising performance expectations and hold people accountable to those standards. That's essentially what Meta is saying they're going to do. The "...so employees will quit" was an editorialized addition to the headline. The real story is that they're tightening their employee expectations and holding people accountable, which IMO is a totally reasonable thing to do. HN comments are always full of people claiming that FAANG employees are nothing special, so I'm a bit surprised to see the negative reaction to a FAANG company going on record to say that they're raising expectations for their employees.
- DisjointedHunt 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dnissley 4y ago
    It's not just about new employees though. The pandemic shifted people's priorities, but many are still clinging to a job that doesn't fit those new priorities.
    - DisjointedHunt 4y ago
      What a brilliant argument. Can you cite anything . .just anything at all to back up your premise or are you just going to present that as fact? App Tracking Transparency was the primary reason for the ad behemoth to slow down leading to the domino effects we're seeing here, but clearly , in your mind, there's an alternate set of facts running.
- nabilhat 4y ago
  It's more of a summary: > "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. Some in leadership view cost of risk of employees who quit as being cheaper than employees who are fired, or if they're narcissistic enough that "the most loyal" employees will stick it out. It's normally common sense that this kind of strategy is kept very far away from anything that might come up in discovery if there's legal pushback. Zuckerberg saying this to Reuters in an interview requires a depth of innocent cluelessness that suggests he's insulated himself from critical feedback. This statement is going to be referenced by employees who feel the need to pursue recourse for perceived constructive dismissal.
blantonl 4y ago
I would suggest that you interpreted Mark's statement that "there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here" without considering it in the context of the other statement: he warned that a recent slump in the markets “might be one of the worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history He and his team is doing exactly what public company management is supposed to do during challenging times, provide better shareholder value. The only real other strategy in cases like we're seeing is to just pull an IBM and fire 45,000 people in one week. Which strategy would you prefer?
- ironlake 4y ago
  >Which strategy would you prefer? They actually teach this in business school. Laying off bunches of people triggers regulatory compliance which can limit hiring and other stuff. Announcing layoffs without actually doing them causes the best to leave, the expert strap-hangers to entrench, and the people in the middle to become less focused. The accepted strategy is to cut as deeply as you need to cut to get through the downturn, then get back to business. Do it fast, do it deep, do it once. Zuck chose to turn the workplace into a low-stakes Hunger Games. No one needs another reason to dislike Facebook, but Zuck gave us another one.
downrightmike 4y ago
They also hire people so they don't go work for the competition. There are bound to be a ton of people with bullshit jobs just checking in for the paycheck.
avgcorrection 4y ago
> Then this suggests a profound failure of management and leadership. Dead wood management?
- chrisco255 4y ago
  Deadwood management sounds like a great description.
tootie 4y ago
It's definitely indicative of immature leadership. Meta invested absolutely willy nilly in unprofitable moonshots and they're not the only ones. They could have held some cash, or paid down debt (fiscal, technical, organizational) and left themselves with cushion but they didn't. It seems like the other web 1.0 companies (Google, Apple, Amazon) are all weathering this downturn pretty comfortably.
robonerd 4y ago
3) They see fit to announce point 2 plainly, instead of simply doing it without saying that's what they're doing. I guess announcing it is part of the "turn up the heat" process?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dnissley 4y ago
As a meta employee, here's my read: Zuck just wants folks to get back in gear after being somewhat (justifiably) distracted over the past 2 years. To be honest I see where he's coming from. I heard about and read a lot about the company culture before I joined, both good and bad. I thought at minimum I was signing up for a certain level of intensity that definitely seems to be lacking.
- Veuxdo 4y ago
  But, by any sane measure of the US, things are worse and are getting worse.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
[flagged]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
IAmWorried 4y ago
Eh, sounds like most of big tech TBH. When you're dealing with a money faucet situation it can be tough to tell what's a good decision and what's a bad decision since either choice will result in increased profits. That is, until the fed crashes the party.

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
  The worst performers know they can't get an equivalent job somewhere else, so they're going to cling on no matter how miserable you make it. They have no choice. Your best performers know they have their pick of any job they like so it anything gets worse for them they'll just go somewhere else.
mcv 4y ago
Is it an effective strategy at all? I can imagine that turning up the heat without any benefits is just as likely to chase the most talented people away.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  I disagree, though it greatly depends on how "turning up the heat" is done. There is not a lot that is more demoralizing to top performers than to see dead wood continue to plot along and earn a sizable paycheck and produce little of value. And it's not even all solely an envy issue - it's also an issue of poor performers getting in the way and making other people's job more painful and inefficient. So a message of "we're going to start getting real about ensuring our high bar is met, and having hard conversations with people who consistently don't meet that bar" is something that some folks would look forward to. Of course, like I said, the devil is in the details, and if "turning up the heat" means we're going to have more time cops than yes, I think it would be demoralizing.
- IncRnd 4y ago
  The stock value has dropped by over half and meta is preparing for a recession. Ad sales and user growth have already slowed.
- huffmsa 4y ago
  If it's just reviewing people at a higher standard, I don't see how that'll turn high performers away.
kennywinker 4y ago
Citation needed. alternative strategies would include: Rewarding good employees and firing bad ones. Deciding on actual useful performance metrics ahead of time and measuring people against them.
- hluska 4y ago
  If I had one wish, it would be that we would all give up that rude “citation needed” trope. I agree with you, yet that’s such a childish way to argue that it hurts the point. Just have the confidence to say you don’t agree!
  - kennywinker 4y ago
    What I mean by that is more than “i don’t agree” - it’s “hey, it looks like you asserted an opinion as fact”. I’m pretty sure all ways of saying that come off rude. Sometimes rudeness is irreducible, and I think this is one of those times. I like “citation needed” because to me it seems like a playful version of rude rather than a serious version of rude. Shrugging emoji
- bricemo 4y ago
  This is exactly what they are doing with one improvement: instead of firing, they are allowing attrition to happen naturally. That’s better than layoffs
  - kennywinker 4y ago
    Why is that better? Making everybody suffer until some people leave because it’s intolerable to them… that doesn’t sound better to me.
    - bricemo 4y ago
      It’s not “making people suffer”. It is having high expectations for performance that A-players and teams can easily hit. If companies are going to survive during a crisis time when the whole world is facing headwinds, there is no margin for error, at FB or anywhere. Layoffs are always awful, they take jobs away from people without them having a say. They should always be a last resort.
synu 4y ago
How does this work well? Aren’t the good people the first to leave if you decide to make everyone miserable?
- blantonl 4y ago
  the good people are the ones that perform well in the kitchen when it gets hot.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    Lol. Bullshit. The good ones know to get out when a company treats it's employees like shit. Just because they aren't the target today doesn't mean they won't be the target tomorrow. The idea that people should wear bad working conditions as a badge of honor is just silly and something I'd expect people (the good ones) to grow out of after a few years max in the industry.
    - blantonl 4y ago
      you know, there are economic times where it's tough to find a job in certain industries, no matter how awesome you are.
      - joshstrange 4y ago
        Just so I'm clear, your response to "good workers don't put up with that shit" is essentially "they will if they can't find a different/better job"? Cause that just sounds exploitative and scummy. I'm sure companies make those calculations but it doesn't make it right/moral. In a vacuum I can understand and empathise with your comment but as part of this chain (where you say "the good people are the ones that perform well in the kitchen when it gets hot.") I can't take it seriously. Which is it? Do the good people perform well (and enjoy) when it gets hot or are they held hostage by the economic times?
        blantonl 4y ago
hluska 4y ago
There are many better strategies.
mcculley 4y ago
Organizations that need good people will try to improve the ones they have. While some organizations have dead wood that cannot be improved and must be replaced, great organizations play the long game and try to develop people.
joshstrange 4y ago
Because expecting managers to do their damn jobs would just be too hard? It wasn't the #1 reason but "dead wood" probably ranked 2 or 3 for why I left my last job and it was 100% the manager's fault. Had that company decided to "turn up the heat" I would have left even faster and I can promise you the "dead wood" would have stayed till the bitter end. I doubt the claim that no one has come up with a better strategy and I question the leadership abilities of anyone who thinks it's a good strategy.
- robonerd 4y ago
  Managers have personal priorities and interests that may not align with the interests of the company. e.g. company doesn't want dead weight, but the manager does for any number of reasons. Maybe the manager really likes those people on a personal level, or maybe the dead weight have dirt on the manager, or maybe the dead weight are kept around as sacrificial material should the manager ever be forced to make cuts, or maybe the incentive structure in the company rewards managers for having more reports, etc. So yes, expecting managers to put company interests before their own may actually be too hard.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    Or, in my specific situation, my manager (and the manger above them) were terrible at handling intrapersonal conflicts. They would just ignore it until it went away and hating confronting anyone about anything. At least one of them also "liked" the "dead wood" in question or had at least worked with them for a long time. I understand all of that. But at the end of the day, it was bad managers. Even if you somehow manage to clear the "dead wood" (good luck, they hold on longer that performing members in my experience) you are still stuck with bad managers and you'll be right back in the same place in little time.
    - s17n 4y ago
      From the CEO's point of view, line managers and employees are basically an undifferentiated mass of potential dead wood. Getting managers to "do their jobs" is exactly the intention of a policy like this.

justinbaker84 4y ago

100% Agree.

refurb 4y ago

I’m not sure I’d blame management for not having a crystal ball and seeing the market downturn in advance. I can see them getting fired for not hitting their hiring and spending targets when the company has aggressive expansion goals. And the idea you can hire thousands of people and exclude all potential deadwood is just fantasy.

mlyle 4y ago
But you could, you know, actually measure performance and manage according to it. I'm not saying self-selection shouldn't be a part of it. Some employees should absolutely be thinking, "eh, I might be managed-out eventually for underperformance because I am not a great fit here... and I don't know that I can fix it or that it's worth fixing it" and depart on their own. But it should absolutely be because management quality is good and everyone understands the process and what's going on. Not because the workplace has been made artificially unpleasant to see who quits: that makes the wrong people leave.
- refurb 4y ago
  Agree with you there. Crappy performance management is a massive red light and all your good people will bail ASAP.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

If a company is collecting a lot of "dead wood" underperformers, the correct response is to start raising performance expectations and hold people accountable to those standards. That's essentially what Meta is saying they're going to do. The "...so employees will quit" was an editorialized addition to the headline. The real story is that they're tightening their employee expectations and holding people accountable, which IMO is a totally reasonable thing to do. HN comments are always full of people claiming that FAANG employees are nothing special, so I'm a bit surprised to see the negative reaction to a FAANG company going on record to say that they're raising expectations for their employees.

DisjointedHunt 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dnissley 4y ago
  It's not just about new employees though. The pandemic shifted people's priorities, but many are still clinging to a job that doesn't fit those new priorities.
  - DisjointedHunt 4y ago
    What a brilliant argument. Can you cite anything . .just anything at all to back up your premise or are you just going to present that as fact? App Tracking Transparency was the primary reason for the ad behemoth to slow down leading to the domino effects we're seeing here, but clearly , in your mind, there's an alternate set of facts running.
nabilhat 4y ago
It's more of a summary: > "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. Some in leadership view cost of risk of employees who quit as being cheaper than employees who are fired, or if they're narcissistic enough that "the most loyal" employees will stick it out. It's normally common sense that this kind of strategy is kept very far away from anything that might come up in discovery if there's legal pushback. Zuckerberg saying this to Reuters in an interview requires a depth of innocent cluelessness that suggests he's insulated himself from critical feedback. This statement is going to be referenced by employees who feel the need to pursue recourse for perceived constructive dismissal.

blantonl 4y ago

I would suggest that you interpreted Mark's statement that "there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here" without considering it in the context of the other statement: he warned that a recent slump in the markets “might be one of the worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history He and his team is doing exactly what public company management is supposed to do during challenging times, provide better shareholder value. The only real other strategy in cases like we're seeing is to just pull an IBM and fire 45,000 people in one week. Which strategy would you prefer?

ironlake 4y ago
>Which strategy would you prefer? They actually teach this in business school. Laying off bunches of people triggers regulatory compliance which can limit hiring and other stuff. Announcing layoffs without actually doing them causes the best to leave, the expert strap-hangers to entrench, and the people in the middle to become less focused. The accepted strategy is to cut as deeply as you need to cut to get through the downturn, then get back to business. Do it fast, do it deep, do it once. Zuck chose to turn the workplace into a low-stakes Hunger Games. No one needs another reason to dislike Facebook, but Zuck gave us another one.

downrightmike 4y ago

They also hire people so they don't go work for the competition. There are bound to be a ton of people with bullshit jobs just checking in for the paycheck.

avgcorrection 4y ago

> Then this suggests a profound failure of management and leadership. Dead wood management?

chrisco255 4y ago
Deadwood management sounds like a great description.

tootie 4y ago

It's definitely indicative of immature leadership. Meta invested absolutely willy nilly in unprofitable moonshots and they're not the only ones. They could have held some cash, or paid down debt (fiscal, technical, organizational) and left themselves with cushion but they didn't. It seems like the other web 1.0 companies (Google, Apple, Amazon) are all weathering this downturn pretty comfortably.

robonerd 4y ago

3) They see fit to announce point 2 plainly, instead of simply doing it without saying that's what they're doing. I guess announcing it is part of the "turn up the heat" process?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dnissley 4y ago

As a meta employee, here's my read: Zuck just wants folks to get back in gear after being somewhat (justifiably) distracted over the past 2 years. To be honest I see where he's coming from. I heard about and read a lot about the company culture before I joined, both good and bad. I thought at minimum I was signing up for a certain level of intensity that definitely seems to be lacking.

Veuxdo 4y ago
But, by any sane measure of the US, things are worse and are getting worse.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

[flagged]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

IAmWorried 4y ago

Eh, sounds like most of big tech TBH. When you're dealing with a money faucet situation it can be tough to tell what's a good decision and what's a bad decision since either choice will result in increased profits. That is, until the fed crashes the party.