5 ms·

Some of these comments mentioned in the article coming from Meta's leadership about there being people who shouldn't probably be there or to get rid of coasters

Some of these comments mentioned in the article coming from Meta's leadership about there being people who shouldn't probably be there or to get rid of coasters seems so inhumane and demoralizing. What kind of leadership is that? I mean it's understandable that businesses have to cut costs, but have some empathy, and understand how words affect people. Just wow. It's so cynical and depressing.

nafix 4y ago
I like it. I really dislike working with under-performers and people who just refuse to do due diligence on their end. I dislike working with people who always want you to come over to their frame of mind rather than trying to get into yours or meet in the middle. I saw a ton of people coasting during Covid. People need to get negative feedback when they deserve it.
- rosywoozlechan 4y ago
  The arrival of Covid was a period of great stress and change in people's lives. Maybe they were dealing with some things and not really coasting? Just maybe needed some more support? This way of thinking about people, coworkers, without understanding the situation in their lives and what they've been talking to with their managers about, is just alien to me and I don't understand it. I don't think it's a good way to manage people. If you have a problem with someone being a burden on your team that you and others have to deal with, that's understandable and you should bring it up with your team, but managers talking in these sorts of ways in public conversation about the people working at their company, it's just awful.
  - ejb999 4y ago
    IMO, it is not awful to state the obvious. Every company - especially every company over a certain size, knows there are a certain percentage of people that just 'phone it in' and aren't pulling their weight relative to others - pretending that isn't true, really doesn't help anyone. More importantly, it is demoralizing to the people you want to keep - to make it seem to them that putting in the extra effort doesn't do anything for you, so they start looking for the exits to find a position where there effort and talents are better appreciated; retaining the best people, at the end of the day is more important than a low-performer's hurt feelings.
    - convolvatron 4y ago
      if its 10% phoners, this isn't a problem. because there is a natural turnover with everyone else, and the phoners tend to stick they generally represent an increasing faction over time. as they start to dominate the organization, they actually cast shade on people that are trying to get something done. nothing is getting done so the giant company starts sucking in as many people as possible to try to replace the outflow and to try to start getting something done. does anyone know of a company that survived this process?
    - retinaros 4y ago
      the problem is that it is really hard to identify. to some manager even a good employee might be a low performer. some managers only see like 1% of you through your days. now imagine you are having a bad day or a bad meeting and on the day your manager is looking at your performance it appears to be subpar because that day you had other worries? sometimes it only takes one conversation or someone else saying something about you to your manager. if you think companies work fairly at identifying people « coasting » you are deadwrong. everything is politics.
  - laweijfmvo 4y ago
    i was at google when the pandemic started. it was certainly a difficult change for a lot of people, but IMO those aren't the people that should be targeted. it's the ones who were worthless/coasting well before the pandemic and/or have no real excuses for their lack of performance since. at least for the first 6 months of the pandemic (when I left google), Google was VERY considerate of employees and their difficult situations.
- strix_varius 4y ago
  Agreed. It's demoralizing to have an under-performing colleague stick around for months or years. It's even worse to work with someone who's mastered the art of "talking the talk" to get a job, who makes big promises but always has some excuse for why they can't deliver, and who never actually ships anything. Most first-level tech managers don't have the courage to fire fast enough. The best feedback I've ever gotten from a member of my team is that I should have fired under-performers faster to preserve the motivation of my top-performers. It's absurd that someone who has negligible, or oftentimes negative impact, should stick around claiming their $250k participation check every year.
  - fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
    Seems like you have a responsibility to yourself and your team to bring this up with the appropriate party and go farther if need-be. Proactive feedback is more useful than passive resentment.
    - strix_varius 4y ago
      Of course, and that tends to happen, but the alignment of the manager to their team's mission isn't perfect. So you'll see: "Soft coaching" instead of a PIP. PIPs that end in "retain," leaving the PIP recipient to revert to their previous level of output afterwards. These are often celebrated as management success stories. Working out an "exchange" deal with another team that has headcount or backfill so the under-performers float around. The most common strategy from a manager who knows of a disparity in competency, but is unwilling to address it directly, is to over time expect (and ask) less and less of the under-performer, implicitly putting more workload on the rest of the team. Basically, take the under-performer out of all critical paths. This is especially likely if the direct manager was also the hiring manager, in which case they're reticent for their peers & boss to recognize that they made a hiring mistake. Even moreso if the hire helped the org's D&I numbers.
      - fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
        Seems like I’ve ruffled a few feathers and ended up -2 on my previous comment here, not clear what rule I violated but that’s beside the point. I have a suggestion: take these findings and send them to your direct report and their direct report too (or whoever the appropriate party is in your organization). You’ve spotted some major issues and I think your organization would benefit from your insights. Include the names of the specific underperformers to establish credibility, and so that the appropriate parties can observe and take action to benefit the team. These operational insights are too valuable to languish on an anonymous forum.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ProfessorLayton 4y ago
  This is under the presumption that most/all of the people being let go are actually low performers, and that leadership is able to correctly identify them. The same leadership that thought those people met the caliber for working there in the first place. I won't deny that there's low performers at any organization, but this is giving the people making the cuts too much credit imo. Double-digit cuts say more about leadership than the people being let go.
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    Microsoft ruthlessly fired tons of "low performers" for over a decade, which gave them the organizational efficiency they needed to ship such resoundingly successful products as Bing Search, Windows Mobile, and Windows 8
  - sfvegandude 4y ago
    Performance isn’t static. Hiring is hard. Organizational priorities shift, people lose interest, etc. It’s often better for both parities if one just moves on.
- noncoml 4y ago
  > I dislike working with people who always want you to come over to their frame of mind rather than trying to get into yours or meet in the middle. I agree with due diligence, but the “frame of mind” argument is way to subjective. What if, hear me out, in their opinion it’s me who refuses get in their frame of mind or meet them in the middle?
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Should you be worried that others might consider you the under-performer? Perhaps others felt you were coasting. When you said you hate others who won't come over to your point of view. How many feel similiar that you won't come over to theirs?
- sfvegandude 4y ago
  I also like it, and believe that Meta’s way of going about this is more humane than keeping people on who aren’t performing. We are not talking about underpaid wage slaves here. These are professionals who deserve honest feedback about their work.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  That's fine. The place to address it is directly, in private, with those employees. You do not humiliate people in public, not a single person, not a group of people. That's what flailing, incompetent managers do. For every person like you who doesn't think the execs are talking about them, there is a person who is actually performing very well, who management would like to keep around, who does think it applies to them, and it is killing their morale. And you don't know definitively that they aren't talking about you either, Mr High Performance. Your management chain could easily have a different view of you than you have of yourself, whether it's justified or not.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
karmasimida 4y ago
Empathy is anti-capitalist. I think the executive getting rid of their usual fake friendly corporate talk, reflecting the degree how bad their bottom line is hurt.
- 11101010001100 4y ago
  Loyalty is anti-capitalist.
  - karmasimida 4y ago
    As software engineers, I don't think this industry value loyalty in the past decade. Job hopping is the norm and is encouraged essentially by the market. Nothing is wrong doing it, we are following the money as we should. Just neither empathy or loyalty is relevant to me, not reliable both ways.
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    Pretty much, yeah. The entire idea of capitalism was completely different from previous systems like feudalism. There you were loyal to a lordship and did what was needed and they provided for you. You consumed in the outputs and this is largely how you were compensated. The idea of capitalism is that you trade your labor/expertise/skills for a wage. You don’t own the means of production and you don’t own the outputs of them. Your labor is sold on the market and you are free to bargain and negotiate and step away. So yea, there’s no reason at all to be loyal. It’s a beautiful system that way. It’s liberty and freedom to do as you choose. To decide if you value personal time or working for money.
- rosywoozlechan 4y ago
  Right, I wasn't suggesting fake friendliness, just like something better than making generalizations that bring up the spector of hidden bad people working at the company and nobody knows whose head is going to roll. It creates uncertainty, fear and just general demoralization in the ranks if you ask me.
  - spacemadness 4y ago
nonethewiser 4y ago
It also suggests that they have known about slackers and have been OK with it. 1. Very unlikely. Which means they're lying. 2. They are incompetent for keeping people that are slacking If people are truly just slacking off then they should be let go as part of the normal business process. This focused effort to get leaner suggests that there are many known slackers that they were OK with up to this point. There is really no reason to call people slackers even if it's true. They should have went the patreon route of saying they fucked up and hired too many people into roles that didn't provide as much value as they need.
- dzikimarian 4y ago
  Everybody is incompetent about detecting slackers for last two years. I've seen multiple people having two or even three full time contracts and successfully juggling tasks at minimal required level, due to remote work and flexible hours. I guess they'll finally spoil it for everyone.
  - llbeansandrice 4y ago
    If they're doing what's required, what's the problem?
    - dzikimarian 4y ago
      They don't. Some of them try to raise arguments, that they completed given tasks, but forget to mention that they compromised quality along the way. Couple years ago, we had a lot of talks saying that engineers should have slack time to polish things. That's kinda counter-productive if slack time goes into working for other companies.
      - thebradbain 4y ago
        If they’re contracts, they’re not employees and they’re fully in their rights to work for others too. They owe that company no loyalty, and if they’re doing what’s laid out in the contract, there is no expectation for them to do more, either. Nevertheless, I don’t see how this is slacking either way.

nafix 4y ago

I like it. I really dislike working with under-performers and people who just refuse to do due diligence on their end. I dislike working with people who always want you to come over to their frame of mind rather than trying to get into yours or meet in the middle. I saw a ton of people coasting during Covid. People need to get negative feedback when they deserve it.

rosywoozlechan 4y ago
The arrival of Covid was a period of great stress and change in people's lives. Maybe they were dealing with some things and not really coasting? Just maybe needed some more support? This way of thinking about people, coworkers, without understanding the situation in their lives and what they've been talking to with their managers about, is just alien to me and I don't understand it. I don't think it's a good way to manage people. If you have a problem with someone being a burden on your team that you and others have to deal with, that's understandable and you should bring it up with your team, but managers talking in these sorts of ways in public conversation about the people working at their company, it's just awful.
- ejb999 4y ago
  IMO, it is not awful to state the obvious. Every company - especially every company over a certain size, knows there are a certain percentage of people that just 'phone it in' and aren't pulling their weight relative to others - pretending that isn't true, really doesn't help anyone. More importantly, it is demoralizing to the people you want to keep - to make it seem to them that putting in the extra effort doesn't do anything for you, so they start looking for the exits to find a position where there effort and talents are better appreciated; retaining the best people, at the end of the day is more important than a low-performer's hurt feelings.
  - convolvatron 4y ago
    if its 10% phoners, this isn't a problem. because there is a natural turnover with everyone else, and the phoners tend to stick they generally represent an increasing faction over time. as they start to dominate the organization, they actually cast shade on people that are trying to get something done. nothing is getting done so the giant company starts sucking in as many people as possible to try to replace the outflow and to try to start getting something done. does anyone know of a company that survived this process?
  - retinaros 4y ago
    the problem is that it is really hard to identify. to some manager even a good employee might be a low performer. some managers only see like 1% of you through your days. now imagine you are having a bad day or a bad meeting and on the day your manager is looking at your performance it appears to be subpar because that day you had other worries? sometimes it only takes one conversation or someone else saying something about you to your manager. if you think companies work fairly at identifying people « coasting » you are deadwrong. everything is politics.
- laweijfmvo 4y ago
  i was at google when the pandemic started. it was certainly a difficult change for a lot of people, but IMO those aren't the people that should be targeted. it's the ones who were worthless/coasting well before the pandemic and/or have no real excuses for their lack of performance since. at least for the first 6 months of the pandemic (when I left google), Google was VERY considerate of employees and their difficult situations.
strix_varius 4y ago
Agreed. It's demoralizing to have an under-performing colleague stick around for months or years. It's even worse to work with someone who's mastered the art of "talking the talk" to get a job, who makes big promises but always has some excuse for why they can't deliver, and who never actually ships anything. Most first-level tech managers don't have the courage to fire fast enough. The best feedback I've ever gotten from a member of my team is that I should have fired under-performers faster to preserve the motivation of my top-performers. It's absurd that someone who has negligible, or oftentimes negative impact, should stick around claiming their $250k participation check every year.
- fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
  Seems like you have a responsibility to yourself and your team to bring this up with the appropriate party and go farther if need-be. Proactive feedback is more useful than passive resentment.
  - strix_varius 4y ago
    Of course, and that tends to happen, but the alignment of the manager to their team's mission isn't perfect. So you'll see: "Soft coaching" instead of a PIP. PIPs that end in "retain," leaving the PIP recipient to revert to their previous level of output afterwards. These are often celebrated as management success stories. Working out an "exchange" deal with another team that has headcount or backfill so the under-performers float around. The most common strategy from a manager who knows of a disparity in competency, but is unwilling to address it directly, is to over time expect (and ask) less and less of the under-performer, implicitly putting more workload on the rest of the team. Basically, take the under-performer out of all critical paths. This is especially likely if the direct manager was also the hiring manager, in which case they're reticent for their peers & boss to recognize that they made a hiring mistake. Even moreso if the hire helped the org's D&I numbers.
    - fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
      Seems like I’ve ruffled a few feathers and ended up -2 on my previous comment here, not clear what rule I violated but that’s beside the point. I have a suggestion: take these findings and send them to your direct report and their direct report too (or whoever the appropriate party is in your organization). You’ve spotted some major issues and I think your organization would benefit from your insights. Include the names of the specific underperformers to establish credibility, and so that the appropriate parties can observe and take action to benefit the team. These operational insights are too valuable to languish on an anonymous forum.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ProfessorLayton 4y ago
This is under the presumption that most/all of the people being let go are actually low performers, and that leadership is able to correctly identify them. The same leadership that thought those people met the caliber for working there in the first place. I won't deny that there's low performers at any organization, but this is giving the people making the cuts too much credit imo. Double-digit cuts say more about leadership than the people being let go.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  Microsoft ruthlessly fired tons of "low performers" for over a decade, which gave them the organizational efficiency they needed to ship such resoundingly successful products as Bing Search, Windows Mobile, and Windows 8
- sfvegandude 4y ago
  Performance isn’t static. Hiring is hard. Organizational priorities shift, people lose interest, etc. It’s often better for both parities if one just moves on.
noncoml 4y ago
> I dislike working with people who always want you to come over to their frame of mind rather than trying to get into yours or meet in the middle. I agree with due diligence, but the “frame of mind” argument is way to subjective. What if, hear me out, in their opinion it’s me who refuses get in their frame of mind or meet them in the middle?
ipaddr 4y ago
Should you be worried that others might consider you the under-performer? Perhaps others felt you were coasting. When you said you hate others who won't come over to your point of view. How many feel similiar that you won't come over to theirs?
sfvegandude 4y ago
I also like it, and believe that Meta’s way of going about this is more humane than keeping people on who aren’t performing. We are not talking about underpaid wage slaves here. These are professionals who deserve honest feedback about their work.
KerrAvon 4y ago
That's fine. The place to address it is directly, in private, with those employees. You do not humiliate people in public, not a single person, not a group of people. That's what flailing, incompetent managers do. For every person like you who doesn't think the execs are talking about them, there is a person who is actually performing very well, who management would like to keep around, who does think it applies to them, and it is killing their morale. And you don't know definitively that they aren't talking about you either, Mr High Performance. Your management chain could easily have a different view of you than you have of yourself, whether it's justified or not.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

karmasimida 4y ago

Empathy is anti-capitalist. I think the executive getting rid of their usual fake friendly corporate talk, reflecting the degree how bad their bottom line is hurt.

11101010001100 4y ago
Loyalty is anti-capitalist.
- karmasimida 4y ago
  As software engineers, I don't think this industry value loyalty in the past decade. Job hopping is the norm and is encouraged essentially by the market. Nothing is wrong doing it, we are following the money as we should. Just neither empathy or loyalty is relevant to me, not reliable both ways.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  Pretty much, yeah. The entire idea of capitalism was completely different from previous systems like feudalism. There you were loyal to a lordship and did what was needed and they provided for you. You consumed in the outputs and this is largely how you were compensated. The idea of capitalism is that you trade your labor/expertise/skills for a wage. You don’t own the means of production and you don’t own the outputs of them. Your labor is sold on the market and you are free to bargain and negotiate and step away. So yea, there’s no reason at all to be loyal. It’s a beautiful system that way. It’s liberty and freedom to do as you choose. To decide if you value personal time or working for money.
rosywoozlechan 4y ago
Right, I wasn't suggesting fake friendliness, just like something better than making generalizations that bring up the spector of hidden bad people working at the company and nobody knows whose head is going to roll. It creates uncertainty, fear and just general demoralization in the ranks if you ask me.
- spacemadness 4y ago

nonethewiser 4y ago

It also suggests that they have known about slackers and have been OK with it. 1. Very unlikely. Which means they're lying. 2. They are incompetent for keeping people that are slacking If people are truly just slacking off then they should be let go as part of the normal business process. This focused effort to get leaner suggests that there are many known slackers that they were OK with up to this point. There is really no reason to call people slackers even if it's true. They should have went the patreon route of saying they fucked up and hired too many people into roles that didn't provide as much value as they need.

dzikimarian 4y ago
Everybody is incompetent about detecting slackers for last two years. I've seen multiple people having two or even three full time contracts and successfully juggling tasks at minimal required level, due to remote work and flexible hours. I guess they'll finally spoil it for everyone.
- llbeansandrice 4y ago
  If they're doing what's required, what's the problem?
  - dzikimarian 4y ago
    They don't. Some of them try to raise arguments, that they completed given tasks, but forget to mention that they compromised quality along the way. Couple years ago, we had a lot of talks saying that engineers should have slack time to polish things. That's kinda counter-productive if slack time goes into working for other companies.
    - thebradbain 4y ago
      If they’re contracts, they’re not employees and they’re fully in their rights to work for others too. They owe that company no loyalty, and if they’re doing what’s laid out in the contract, there is no expectation for them to do more, either. Nevertheless, I don’t see how this is slacking either way.