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Facebook to purge thousands of workers as part of ‘quiet layoffs’
- selfmodruntime 4y agoIs the term "quiet layoff" somehow intended to be the equivalent to "quiet quitting"? I don't think the usage of "quiet" makes any sense in this case. Employees are openly grouped into performance categories, with "needs support" (as per the article) as the entry on the bottom of the list. That in combination with Zuckerberg talking about approaching the currently persisting downtrend conservatively should immediately alert any employee. An impeding layoff doesn't really get much more obvious than this.
- aliqot 4y agoStop trying to make "quiet-whatever" take off. We're not doing this one.
- Apocryphon 4y agoCovert terminations.
- doktorhladnjak 4y agoQuiet quitting = coasting Quiet firing = managing out
- kwertyoowiyop 4y agoNo kidding. We are finally done with “the unreasonable effectiveness of…” and “what we talk about when we talk about…”, and now we have the spread of “quiet…”
- plaguepilled 4y agoThank you.
- smt88 4y agoQuiet layoffs are absolutely real. Traditionally, companies announce layoffs, first internally and then publicly. The public announcement is sometimes hoping for a bump in their stock price or just getting ahead of inevitable news stories. Quietly laying people off is more like "managing out" or what Facebook is doing here. They haven't given us a hard number for the layoffs, and they're trying to use performance to justify the layoffs rather than just telling people they're redundant.
- pyuser583 4y agoLegally, a layoff is when the employee isn’t replaced. A termination is when they are replaced. A layoff based on performance is still a layoff.
- tacostakohashi 4y agoWell, no, if it's based on performance, it isn't a layoff. At least in theory.
- mickdeek86 4y agoThe difference between a layoff and a termination is whether it's based on performance. Hence unemployment eligibility
- aarnvns 4y ago“Quiet layoff” is totally a thing. Back in the 2000’s when I worked for a Fortune 500 software shop, I feel like it had a different name. If Meta is trying the same thing, then they’re pretty incompetent. The idea was to “resource action” workers in small percentages over an extended period. That keeps you out of the news. It totally defeats the purpose to layoff 15% percent or whatever over a short period! That gets you in the news. The goal of a “quiet layoff” is to keep it quiet! Thanks NY Post for the “quality journalism”. You could have addressed all this and you didn’t (the content-mill is based on quotas, don’t ya know?)
- sokoloff 4y agoLayoffs suck, but I’m pretty convinced that it’s far better to cut deep, cut once, and then start to repair/rebuild/move ahead than to drag out a slow, chaotic reduction over 6-12 months. Those prolonged morale sinks encourage a lot of your employees with the most options to leave on their own. That’s usually not what you want.
- coredog64 4y agoLayoffs over a certain size bring legal obligations like WARN Act filings. In some sectors, employers just eat the cost and walk people out on the day of but leave them on payroll for the required legal period. However, if you’re really concerned about costs, you can still squeeze something out of an employee on notice.
- fuzzfactor 4y agoThat's what Exxon and Shell did a while back. >thousands of employees getting pink slips Before they raised the dividend.
- lloydatkinson 4y agoWhat do these slow 6/12 month reductions look like? I have a feeling this is happening where I work due to morale destroying team reshuffles every 5 or 6 months.
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- smeagull 4y agoMakes me very curious as to how they are measuring performance. I've seen the firing of "low performing employees" destroy teams, because the performing they were doing was important but undervalued. Likewise I've seen employees who were not missed that we considered high value because they made a lot of noise. One particular instance of which became very clear that they were causing a lot of the work that they were also taking credit for. > Zuckerberg said Meta would be slashing budgets across all of its departments and subsidiaries, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It sounds like they don't really know where to make the cuts they want.
- jjulius 4y ago>It sounds like they don't really know where to make the cuts they want. Metaverse. Nuke the entire thing from orbit. It's clearly the wrong thing for them to be focused on.
- goldenchrome 4y agoNah their AR/VR division is the only thing they’ve got to dangle in front of long term investors. I think it’s giving them about 24 months of runway before the sky starts falling for them.
- midoridensha 4y agoI would argue it's probably almost the only thing they're working on that has any real value too. Most of their other products don't, or even have negative value, in terms of their usefulness to society and humanity.
- homonculus1 4y agoMetaverse has negative value too, but at least it has novelty...
- midoridensha 4y ago
- 0x20cowboy 4y agoHow could they possibly have so many underperformers? I thought they did leetcode interviews which find all the A players. Weird.
- goldenchrome 4y agoFacebook has been notoriously easy to get into for the past few years. Some of the people I’ve seen hired were B players at best. I think it’s been hard to hire top people since their reputation scraped the bottom of the barrel. Anyone who’s competent enough to get a cushy job with high prestige and pay has many options.
- tenpies 4y agoI haven't figured out a good way of quantifying them, but the "Day in the life of an X at Facebook/Meta" are a fantastic proxy for utilization. Executives should have an alert set up and the minute one pops up, they can immediately know they've over-hired. This applies to nearly every technology company.
- black_13 4y ago
- etempleton 4y agoFacebook has spent so much time trying to reinvent their products to be like other products they have failed to innovate at every turn. Worse, they have products that have lost much of their original appeal. In fact, Facebook has never even copied well. I can’t think of a time that they pulled a Microsoft and successfully copied a product sufficiently enough to hold off the competition. Their best business moves have all been acquisitions.
- disgruntledphd2 4y agoStories? Pretty much killed Snapchat.