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> 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

> 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.
  - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    Anyone who isn't directly contributing to a product can't be high performing. Maybe they can be supportive of high performing individuals, but usually that just entails keeping upper management out of the way. As a field we have yet to find good metrics for coding performance, anyone who tells you otherwise just wants to have an excuse to fire you when they suddenly decide that you no longer serve their purposes, even if those purposes is just to have a cool social club that validates their fragile ego.
    - joshstrange 4y ago
      I couldn't agree more, especially about the lack of good metrics for coding performance. I feel like more often than not metrics or even new "policies" are put into place just to provide cover for firing people. So they can "backsolve" or use "parallel construction" to justify the firing.
    - sbf501 4y ago
      > Anyone who isn't directly contributing to a product can't be high performing. Are you implying managers don't directly contribute to a product? Because wow, you're really either horribly naive or wildly narcissistic. As a someone who managed programmers for almost 20 years, only a fraction were hands-off. Why do you think all the 10x engineers become managers? A high performing manager hits targets, ships products, and makes customers happy. If you think a hot shot programmer on a team can do this all by themselves, I don't know what to tell you. You'll have to learn the hard way.
  - jfim 4y ago
    This really depends on the definition of success. If success is just execution without needing to be too novel, metrics work. Coming up with a new idea, researching its feasibility, and executing on it isn't really doable with rigidly monitored metrics, because a lot of the productive work on novel things looks like thinking about things and trying things that don't work out.
joshstrange 4y ago
I guess it really comes down to what specifically "turning up the heat" means. It sounds like a hell of KPIs and other stupid metrics that waste everyone's time so that a manager can boil a person down to a number instead of doing their job and making hard calls. I've been a high (if not the highest) performer at companies I've worked at (albeit much smaller companies Meta), if they suddenly want me to log my hours, do a bunch of metric-related BS, or grade me on KPIs that have no basis in reality then I'm leaving.
- CaptainZapp 4y ago
  > I guess it really comes down to what specifically "turning up the heat" means. To me it means: "Nice job you have here, would be a shame if something happens to it!" I had senior level managers communicating along those lines and squandered my respect in about 3 seconds. Not that it really matters, but still.
AlexandrB 4y ago
If my CEO said: > “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said during the meeting, according to Reuters. I'd probably start looking for another job. It's one thing to fire poor performers, it's another to make vague allusions to "people who shouldn't be here". If they shouldn't be there, fire them. Otherwise, this just sounds like management has no clue.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > If they shouldn't be there, fire them. No, you set clear performance expectations, give them feedback, and then hold them accountable if they don't meet those performance expectations. Which seems to be what Meta is doing here. I honestly can't believe so many people in this thread would prefer that Meta just slash and burn employees instead of giving them expectations and a chance to meet them.
  - monkey_monkey 4y ago
    I'm surprised you actually believe that a company that has incompetently hired thousands of excess people will suddenly have an amazing process for setting performance expectations and holding people accountable. Some people might just think those are weasel words to cover an impending large-scale RIF.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    Are you suggesting that Facebook has no performance evaluation process for the employees at all right now? If they do, it seems like you could look at those evaluations and make some decisions immediately. If they don't, then fair enough, implement that. What's the purpose of "turning up the heat" to try to get people to quit? And, as others have mentioned, those who quit first if you make their lives harder will be the ones that have other options (usually the high performers).
  - juve1996 4y ago
colonelpopcorn 4y ago
Unless the baseline is where the high performers are performing at right now. It's a win-win for companies to hold employees to high standards. Either they sacrifice health, family, relationships, hobbies, etc. to meet unsustainable demands or they "self-select" and the company no longer has to pay their salary, healthcare, benefits, etc. In the economic climate we're living in, it just makes economic sense to squeeze as much productivity as possible out of your workers. This includes pushing already high performing workers to do more than they already are.
JohnBooty 4y ago
This assumes that you have solved the decades-old problem of measuring knowledge worker productivity in some sort of concise and accurate way. What's your solution here for engineers? Counting the lines of code they write?
bayindirh 4y ago
There's evidence that best talent works best when there's slack and when they crash, they crash hard. For example, I have an optimal load which I can work almost indefinitely and performing very well (in my own scale), when the load shots up, I lock up. This is why I'm automating as much as I can, so I can keep in that optimal zone which I perform really well.
littlestymaar 4y ago
> Holding employees accountable for high performance standards is generally welcomed by high performers. While this is true (working in a company that doesn't value high performers over slackers is infuriating for the former), it's really unlikely that you'll be able to change your company's culture in the right direction at will (if rewarding high performers and kicking the butt of low performers was that easy why weren't you doing so all along ?!), so what's usually happening is: - the management starts monitoring some KPI some consulting firm told them to monitor - they start annoy everyone in the company based on these BS arbitry “holly metrics”, which are indeed poor performance indicators and are easily gameable - top performers will be pissed off and leave - low performers will do all they can to maximize their metrics instead of doing actual work, reducing their productivity even more - congrats you've destroyed your company's talent pool and have now turned Meta into IBM. Too bad you don't even have a sales department on par with IBM's, so you'll probably end up like AOL or Yahoo!

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.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  Anyone who isn't directly contributing to a product can't be high performing. Maybe they can be supportive of high performing individuals, but usually that just entails keeping upper management out of the way. As a field we have yet to find good metrics for coding performance, anyone who tells you otherwise just wants to have an excuse to fire you when they suddenly decide that you no longer serve their purposes, even if those purposes is just to have a cool social club that validates their fragile ego.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    I couldn't agree more, especially about the lack of good metrics for coding performance. I feel like more often than not metrics or even new "policies" are put into place just to provide cover for firing people. So they can "backsolve" or use "parallel construction" to justify the firing.
  - sbf501 4y ago
    > Anyone who isn't directly contributing to a product can't be high performing. Are you implying managers don't directly contribute to a product? Because wow, you're really either horribly naive or wildly narcissistic. As a someone who managed programmers for almost 20 years, only a fraction were hands-off. Why do you think all the 10x engineers become managers? A high performing manager hits targets, ships products, and makes customers happy. If you think a hot shot programmer on a team can do this all by themselves, I don't know what to tell you. You'll have to learn the hard way.
- jfim 4y ago
  This really depends on the definition of success. If success is just execution without needing to be too novel, metrics work. Coming up with a new idea, researching its feasibility, and executing on it isn't really doable with rigidly monitored metrics, because a lot of the productive work on novel things looks like thinking about things and trying things that don't work out.

joshstrange 4y ago

I guess it really comes down to what specifically "turning up the heat" means. It sounds like a hell of KPIs and other stupid metrics that waste everyone's time so that a manager can boil a person down to a number instead of doing their job and making hard calls. I've been a high (if not the highest) performer at companies I've worked at (albeit much smaller companies Meta), if they suddenly want me to log my hours, do a bunch of metric-related BS, or grade me on KPIs that have no basis in reality then I'm leaving.

CaptainZapp 4y ago
> I guess it really comes down to what specifically "turning up the heat" means. To me it means: "Nice job you have here, would be a shame if something happens to it!" I had senior level managers communicating along those lines and squandered my respect in about 3 seconds. Not that it really matters, but still.

AlexandrB 4y ago

If my CEO said: > “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said during the meeting, according to Reuters. I'd probably start looking for another job. It's one thing to fire poor performers, it's another to make vague allusions to "people who shouldn't be here". If they shouldn't be there, fire them. Otherwise, this just sounds like management has no clue.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> If they shouldn't be there, fire them. No, you set clear performance expectations, give them feedback, and then hold them accountable if they don't meet those performance expectations. Which seems to be what Meta is doing here. I honestly can't believe so many people in this thread would prefer that Meta just slash and burn employees instead of giving them expectations and a chance to meet them.
- monkey_monkey 4y ago
  I'm surprised you actually believe that a company that has incompetently hired thousands of excess people will suddenly have an amazing process for setting performance expectations and holding people accountable. Some people might just think those are weasel words to cover an impending large-scale RIF.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Are you suggesting that Facebook has no performance evaluation process for the employees at all right now? If they do, it seems like you could look at those evaluations and make some decisions immediately. If they don't, then fair enough, implement that. What's the purpose of "turning up the heat" to try to get people to quit? And, as others have mentioned, those who quit first if you make their lives harder will be the ones that have other options (usually the high performers).
- juve1996 4y ago

colonelpopcorn 4y ago

Unless the baseline is where the high performers are performing at right now. It's a win-win for companies to hold employees to high standards. Either they sacrifice health, family, relationships, hobbies, etc. to meet unsustainable demands or they "self-select" and the company no longer has to pay their salary, healthcare, benefits, etc. In the economic climate we're living in, it just makes economic sense to squeeze as much productivity as possible out of your workers. This includes pushing already high performing workers to do more than they already are.

JohnBooty 4y ago

This assumes that you have solved the decades-old problem of measuring knowledge worker productivity in some sort of concise and accurate way. What's your solution here for engineers? Counting the lines of code they write?

bayindirh 4y ago

There's evidence that best talent works best when there's slack and when they crash, they crash hard. For example, I have an optimal load which I can work almost indefinitely and performing very well (in my own scale), when the load shots up, I lock up. This is why I'm automating as much as I can, so I can keep in that optimal zone which I perform really well.

littlestymaar 4y ago

> Holding employees accountable for high performance standards is generally welcomed by high performers. While this is true (working in a company that doesn't value high performers over slackers is infuriating for the former), it's really unlikely that you'll be able to change your company's culture in the right direction at will (if rewarding high performers and kicking the butt of low performers was that easy why weren't you doing so all along ?!), so what's usually happening is: - the management starts monitoring some KPI some consulting firm told them to monitor - they start annoy everyone in the company based on these BS arbitry “holly metrics”, which are indeed poor performance indicators and are easily gameable - top performers will be pissed off and leave - low performers will do all they can to maximize their metrics instead of doing actual work, reducing their productivity even more - congrats you've destroyed your company's talent pool and have now turned Meta into IBM. Too bad you don't even have a sales department on par with IBM's, so you'll probably end up like AOL or Yahoo!