13 ms·

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

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.
  - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    Lol, anyone who's really a high performer knows that being metriced is terrible. Having to constantly be cranking out LoC because some middle manager doesn't actually understand the process of actually making software is infuriating. And even if they are doing well now, no one wants to feel that dark gnawing instability that comes from knowing the people on your team you grow to know and trust are constantly on the chopping block.
    - joshstrange 4y ago
      Exactly. At a previous job the management team got all excited about KPIs and made each dept come up ~5 of them and then report on them weekly (or maybe it was monthly). I fought it tooth and nail arguing that it was both silly that we were coming up with them and how easily it would be gamed. My concerns fell of deaf ears and instead we wasted upwards of 4-6 person-weeks of time building tools to extract data from Jira to serve as our KPIs. We wrote the damn code to calculate it, of course we know how to juice the numbers. It was a huge waste of time, nothing interesting came out of it (for us or any department), and "management" patted themselves on the back for "taking action". I'm not say all metrics suck and are a waste of time but you better have a very good reason for them before you go all-in. A friend of mine's company started requiring all their developers to track their time, down to the 15min interval. I'd be looking for a new job within a week. Don't even get me started on how asking your employees to track their time is essentially asking them to lie which means the stats you get are worthless, worse than worthless because time tracking takes time on it's own to do.
    - sbf501 4y ago
      Really high performance MANAGERS understand you can't succeed at scale without indicators. You seem to come from the naive viewpoint that solo devs rule the world and run open-loop like some imaginary hotshot. That couldn't be more wrong.
- aeturnum 4y ago
  It's also...if they have the ability to recognize and protect their high performers - why "turn up the heat" in general? You've already identified who isn't performing. Conversely, if you can't avoid harassing your highest performers - those seem like the people who will leave first, while the people who are under-performing will dig in to avoid risking the job market.
- foepys 4y ago
  > 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. I have seen instances where the "underperformers" were the people that made the workplace/team pleasant to be in. Once they were let go, some overperfomers quit not much later.
- sbf501 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. E When your 51% CEO has so little life experience, what did you expect? There's a reason why - IN GENERAL - the best CEOs are older than 55. Zuck got lucky with FB and made billions selling personal data and retained 51% control. Did we really think he was actually GOOD at anything?
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    > Did we really think he was actually GOOD at anything? Lol, absolutely not. He got lucky, stole someone else's idea, and had a massive safety net to fall back on. I'm not saying he has zero skills but managing to hold onto 51% of the company does not make you a good CEO (as you stated).
  - edmundsauto 4y ago
    So are you saying that the idea is what mattered, and not execution? How come other people with the exact same idea didn’t make it, given they had the head start?
- datalopers 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 Or maybe the best talent is sick of these overpaid rest-and-vest lackeys and more than happy to see them get the axe.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Why would you think that the people who managed to navigate office politics enough to avoid being fired so far are the ones who will get fired now?
    - datalopers 4y ago
      For sure they may not, but this announcement implies they're aggressively looking for people to terminate
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  > 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. Or some of the low (but not negative) productivity teammates get pushed out and the top performer follows them because keeping them around was good for morale for reasons unrelated to their actual job descriptions (or their individual metrics were rubbish but they also were valued assistants who unlocked the top guy to work at full speed).
bilsbie 4y ago
bilsbie 4y ago
Sounds like you’re describing this https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-–-soda’s-are-no-longer-free/amp/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
- smegsicle 4y ago
  or the 'dead sea effect'- as in talent evaporates, leaving only the salty underperforming solute
PragmaticPulp 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. But that's not what Meta is saying. The goal isn't just to make it miserable. The goal is to raise the expectations and hold people accountable throughout the company. The exact quote "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here" is hard to argue with. Every company that went on a hiring spree during the last bull run has collected some percentage of people who aren't performing or aren't qualified. Raising expectations and holding people accountable is a reasonable approach, IMO. Much better than just firing people. Give people a chance to meet very clear expectations and fair warning when they're not. Remove people who can't or won't catch up.
- Jasper_ 4y ago
  the people that shouldn't be there are the ones that approved the hiring spree
- msbarnett 4y ago
  Like I said, I've been through this first hand. I was exceeding expectations, and given a big promotion in the middle of it. But people I worked with and interacted with every day were feeling extremely stressed and worried about their ability to meet the new bar. Now, in many cases, they didn't need to be worried, but it's natural to question these things in an environment where you're seeing people get PIP'd and unceremoniously shitcanned regularly. Morale was through the floor, it was an absolutely miserable environment to work in – even though I was personally doing quite well. So I said "fuck this" and was the first person out the door on my team. The second highest performer quit a week later. The least technically capable person on the team was there for another year.
- Veuxdo 4y ago
  > very clear expectations Unfortunately, this is beyond most companies when it comes to software developers.
- thesuitonym 4y ago
  The problem is that the "very clear expectations" end up being lines of code written, tickets closed, bugs fixed, or whatever, then your employees optimize for that, rather than doing what is right.
mberning 4y ago
Absolutely. I worked at GE for 5 years and their reluctance to performance manage individual contributors was just insane. They will do anything to cut people in ways that are not performance related. VJRP. SERO. Contractor reductions. Site eliminations. And then finally the blanket RIF. I never saw anybody get fired for poor performance, and many of them should have been. And they also make it hell on people leaders to put people on PIPs. If you take over a team and 50% of them are slackers you can not put all of them on PIPs. HR will start looking at you as a people leader. “Why can’t you motivate and inspire these people?” It was insane really. I actually loved working there, but the bureaucratic BS was crazy.
- siva7 4y ago
  Well, why can’t you motivate and inspire these people? Nothing insane about this question
  - mberning 4y ago
    It’s not a bad or unreasonable question, but it is completely ignorant and pollyannish. These are the same HR professionals that let managers submit high or acceptable marks for all employees every year and then wonder why a large number of teams underperform. Inside large orgs you will regularly encounter people that have insanely high titles and their only appreciable skill is being able to survive inside the bureaucracy like a cockroach after successive nuclear blasts. You will encounter senior and staff enterprise software engineers that have never written a line of code and have zero commits ever.
blantonl 4y ago
And I've seen first-hand where the most talented people aren't having the heat turned up on them, they know they are good, they still get it good, and they will continue to do so. Even the most talented people can be locked into positions with compensation packages that will severely handcuff them to staying put. And if we really are in one of the most severe downturns we've ever seen, those talented people will very quickly realize they have it really good There are zillions of HR strategies for retaining the baller employees, while trimming the ones that aren't baller when things get lean. To many who have managed teams of people, products, etc, they look like standard HR stuff, to others, they look inhuman terrible practices. Sorry.
api 4y ago
You'll lose the best people that way, not the dead wood.
FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
There is one other reason people will stay, and that's vesting schedules. But if the share price is tanking then that reason goes away.
JJMcJ 4y ago
This also happened when more paternalistic companies in the 80s would offer buyouts of one kind or another. The better employees, feeling more certain they could find another job, were often the ones who left.
thsijustin 4y ago
These events impact the broader economy by having too many people idle aimlessly rather than end up productive elsewhere. Now they get to lose even more time being productive finding gigs. Brenden Gregg leaves Netflix, weeks later its stock and reputation tank. They don’t think we know, but we do. There’s no reason to put our faith is people who are clearly more of the same rich grifters being propped up by collective belief. Believe something else.
throwaway5371 4y ago
and go where? most people are there for the money, pretty much only roblox, gambling, crypto and few others pay similar to fb or above, and its unlikely its much nicer there
- msbarnett 4y ago
  Share price has tanked anyway, compensation at FB is less competitive than it used to be. IME your top performers are generally less compensation motivated than "interesting problem and interesting environment" motivated. Many companies will bend over backwards to give a top performer from a FAANG as much autonomy and interesting work as they want, for compensation differences that aren't that major anymore.
blakesley 4y ago
100%! My company ineptly stumbled into a scenario like this, so to speak, and the result was as you described. After witnessing how that played out, I would expect a similar outcome in other scenarios.
dang 4y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31950015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31950015 - it stands on its own and I'm trying to make the thread less top heavy.
gitfan86 4y ago
Similarly, I was at a startup and revenue growth had stopped. They decided to blame the dev team for not making features fast enough. I don't know what happened between that time and two years later when they shutdown, but I'm sure it was terrible.
zac23or 4y ago
> First-hand, what I've seen happen is that your most talented people, who are the most in demand, leave the organization quite quickly True. The first time I came across this effect was reading the book about the IBM disaster: Big Blues https://www.amazon.com/Big-Blues-Unmaking-Paul-Carroll/dp/0517882213 https://www.amazon.com/Big-Blues-Unmaking-Paul-Carroll/dp/05... After twenty years working in the field, my conclusion on this is: the good worker for the people in power is irrelevant. They want to get rid of anyone and that's it.
frays 4y ago
Thanks for this insight. I wouldn't have thought of it this way.

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.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  Lol, anyone who's really a high performer knows that being metriced is terrible. Having to constantly be cranking out LoC because some middle manager doesn't actually understand the process of actually making software is infuriating. And even if they are doing well now, no one wants to feel that dark gnawing instability that comes from knowing the people on your team you grow to know and trust are constantly on the chopping block.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    Exactly. At a previous job the management team got all excited about KPIs and made each dept come up ~5 of them and then report on them weekly (or maybe it was monthly). I fought it tooth and nail arguing that it was both silly that we were coming up with them and how easily it would be gamed. My concerns fell of deaf ears and instead we wasted upwards of 4-6 person-weeks of time building tools to extract data from Jira to serve as our KPIs. We wrote the damn code to calculate it, of course we know how to juice the numbers. It was a huge waste of time, nothing interesting came out of it (for us or any department), and "management" patted themselves on the back for "taking action". I'm not say all metrics suck and are a waste of time but you better have a very good reason for them before you go all-in. A friend of mine's company started requiring all their developers to track their time, down to the 15min interval. I'd be looking for a new job within a week. Don't even get me started on how asking your employees to track their time is essentially asking them to lie which means the stats you get are worthless, worse than worthless because time tracking takes time on it's own to do.
  - sbf501 4y ago
    Really high performance MANAGERS understand you can't succeed at scale without indicators. You seem to come from the naive viewpoint that solo devs rule the world and run open-loop like some imaginary hotshot. That couldn't be more wrong.
aeturnum 4y ago
It's also...if they have the ability to recognize and protect their high performers - why "turn up the heat" in general? You've already identified who isn't performing. Conversely, if you can't avoid harassing your highest performers - those seem like the people who will leave first, while the people who are under-performing will dig in to avoid risking the job market.
foepys 4y ago
> 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. I have seen instances where the "underperformers" were the people that made the workplace/team pleasant to be in. Once they were let go, some overperfomers quit not much later.
sbf501 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. E When your 51% CEO has so little life experience, what did you expect? There's a reason why - IN GENERAL - the best CEOs are older than 55. Zuck got lucky with FB and made billions selling personal data and retained 51% control. Did we really think he was actually GOOD at anything?
- joshstrange 4y ago
  > Did we really think he was actually GOOD at anything? Lol, absolutely not. He got lucky, stole someone else's idea, and had a massive safety net to fall back on. I'm not saying he has zero skills but managing to hold onto 51% of the company does not make you a good CEO (as you stated).
- edmundsauto 4y ago
  So are you saying that the idea is what mattered, and not execution? How come other people with the exact same idea didn’t make it, given they had the head start?
datalopers 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 Or maybe the best talent is sick of these overpaid rest-and-vest lackeys and more than happy to see them get the axe.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Why would you think that the people who managed to navigate office politics enough to avoid being fired so far are the ones who will get fired now?
  - datalopers 4y ago
    For sure they may not, but this announcement implies they're aggressively looking for people to terminate
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
> 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. Or some of the low (but not negative) productivity teammates get pushed out and the top performer follows them because keeping them around was good for morale for reasons unrelated to their actual job descriptions (or their individual metrics were rubbish but they also were valued assistants who unlocked the top guy to work at full speed).

bilsbie 4y ago

Sounds like you’re describing this https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-–-soda’s-are-no-longer-free/amp/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

smegsicle 4y ago
or the 'dead sea effect'- as in talent evaporates, leaving only the salty underperforming solute

PragmaticPulp 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. But that's not what Meta is saying. The goal isn't just to make it miserable. The goal is to raise the expectations and hold people accountable throughout the company. The exact quote "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here" is hard to argue with. Every company that went on a hiring spree during the last bull run has collected some percentage of people who aren't performing or aren't qualified. Raising expectations and holding people accountable is a reasonable approach, IMO. Much better than just firing people. Give people a chance to meet very clear expectations and fair warning when they're not. Remove people who can't or won't catch up.

Jasper_ 4y ago
the people that shouldn't be there are the ones that approved the hiring spree
msbarnett 4y ago
Like I said, I've been through this first hand. I was exceeding expectations, and given a big promotion in the middle of it. But people I worked with and interacted with every day were feeling extremely stressed and worried about their ability to meet the new bar. Now, in many cases, they didn't need to be worried, but it's natural to question these things in an environment where you're seeing people get PIP'd and unceremoniously shitcanned regularly. Morale was through the floor, it was an absolutely miserable environment to work in – even though I was personally doing quite well. So I said "fuck this" and was the first person out the door on my team. The second highest performer quit a week later. The least technically capable person on the team was there for another year.
Veuxdo 4y ago
> very clear expectations Unfortunately, this is beyond most companies when it comes to software developers.
thesuitonym 4y ago
The problem is that the "very clear expectations" end up being lines of code written, tickets closed, bugs fixed, or whatever, then your employees optimize for that, rather than doing what is right.

mberning 4y ago

Absolutely. I worked at GE for 5 years and their reluctance to performance manage individual contributors was just insane. They will do anything to cut people in ways that are not performance related. VJRP. SERO. Contractor reductions. Site eliminations. And then finally the blanket RIF. I never saw anybody get fired for poor performance, and many of them should have been. And they also make it hell on people leaders to put people on PIPs. If you take over a team and 50% of them are slackers you can not put all of them on PIPs. HR will start looking at you as a people leader. “Why can’t you motivate and inspire these people?” It was insane really. I actually loved working there, but the bureaucratic BS was crazy.

siva7 4y ago
Well, why can’t you motivate and inspire these people? Nothing insane about this question
- mberning 4y ago
  It’s not a bad or unreasonable question, but it is completely ignorant and pollyannish. These are the same HR professionals that let managers submit high or acceptable marks for all employees every year and then wonder why a large number of teams underperform. Inside large orgs you will regularly encounter people that have insanely high titles and their only appreciable skill is being able to survive inside the bureaucracy like a cockroach after successive nuclear blasts. You will encounter senior and staff enterprise software engineers that have never written a line of code and have zero commits ever.

blantonl 4y ago

And I've seen first-hand where the most talented people aren't having the heat turned up on them, they know they are good, they still get it good, and they will continue to do so. Even the most talented people can be locked into positions with compensation packages that will severely handcuff them to staying put. And if we really are in one of the most severe downturns we've ever seen, those talented people will very quickly realize they have it really good There are zillions of HR strategies for retaining the baller employees, while trimming the ones that aren't baller when things get lean. To many who have managed teams of people, products, etc, they look like standard HR stuff, to others, they look inhuman terrible practices. Sorry.

api 4y ago

You'll lose the best people that way, not the dead wood.

FooBarBizBazz 4y ago

There is one other reason people will stay, and that's vesting schedules. But if the share price is tanking then that reason goes away.

JJMcJ 4y ago

This also happened when more paternalistic companies in the 80s would offer buyouts of one kind or another. The better employees, feeling more certain they could find another job, were often the ones who left.

thsijustin 4y ago

These events impact the broader economy by having too many people idle aimlessly rather than end up productive elsewhere. Now they get to lose even more time being productive finding gigs. Brenden Gregg leaves Netflix, weeks later its stock and reputation tank. They don’t think we know, but we do. There’s no reason to put our faith is people who are clearly more of the same rich grifters being propped up by collective belief. Believe something else.

throwaway5371 4y ago

and go where? most people are there for the money, pretty much only roblox, gambling, crypto and few others pay similar to fb or above, and its unlikely its much nicer there

msbarnett 4y ago
Share price has tanked anyway, compensation at FB is less competitive than it used to be. IME your top performers are generally less compensation motivated than "interesting problem and interesting environment" motivated. Many companies will bend over backwards to give a top performer from a FAANG as much autonomy and interesting work as they want, for compensation differences that aren't that major anymore.

blakesley 4y ago

100%! My company ineptly stumbled into a scenario like this, so to speak, and the result was as you described. After witnessing how that played out, I would expect a similar outcome in other scenarios.

dang 4y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31950015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31950015 - it stands on its own and I'm trying to make the thread less top heavy.

gitfan86 4y ago

Similarly, I was at a startup and revenue growth had stopped. They decided to blame the dev team for not making features fast enough. I don't know what happened between that time and two years later when they shutdown, but I'm sure it was terrible.

zac23or 4y ago

> First-hand, what I've seen happen is that your most talented people, who are the most in demand, leave the organization quite quickly True. The first time I came across this effect was reading the book about the IBM disaster: Big Blues https://www.amazon.com/Big-Blues-Unmaking-Paul-Carroll/dp/0517882213 https://www.amazon.com/Big-Blues-Unmaking-Paul-Carroll/dp/05... After twenty years working in the field, my conclusion on this is: the good worker for the people in power is irrelevant. They want to get rid of anyone and that's it.

frays 4y ago

Thanks for this insight. I wouldn't have thought of it this way.