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Not only the structure, the wording is also identical: "Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history." "Today we’re annou
by lafreb 4y ago
Not only the structure, the wording is also identical:
"Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history."
"Today we’re announcing the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date."
"At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth."
"At the outset of the pandemic in 2020, the world rotated overnight towards e-commerce."
"There is no good way to do a layoff, but we hope to [...] do whatever we can to support you through this."
"There’s no good way to do a layoff, but we’re going to [...] do whatever we can to help."
etc.
- KingOfCoders 4y agoCorporate robots are the same everywhere.
- threeseed 4y agoAlso known as best practice. The whole point of HR/PR in these situations is to make the situation as forgettable as possible.
- swader999 4y agoTelling the truth is always better. "I bet the company on metaverse and I was wrong." Or, "now looks like a really good time to lay everyone off because all the other companies are doing it too"
- stingraycharles 4y agoI don’t think it’s that simple — yes maybe in private you could say that, but this would set them up for an investor revolt or make them come across as huge assholes if they say things like that. They may be true, but telling it to everyone is definitely not always better.
- deltasevennine 4y agoOf course. It's not about the best move or what looks better. Nobody cares for that. It's about the truth. That's what people care about in the end. And if none of it was said here, parent is pointing out that Mark is truly an ass. Something like "laying off people because other companies are doing it" is pretty fucked up.
- cmmeur01 4y agoMaking shit up to obscure the truth is a way bigger asshole move than just telling the truth.
- themitigating 4y agoWhat did they lie about?
- travisporter 4y agozuck did say “I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here.”
- bart_spoon 4y agoIs he laying off himself too? Because simply saying "I take accountability" without any actual consequences isn't taking accountability.
- namdnay 4y agohe lost 75% of his personal wealth, so there have been pretty real consequences for him already
- solardev 4y agoWhat does that even mean? He won't have to work for a few centuries instead of a millennium? Lol. Compared to his employees' livelihoods, a billionaire losing some bit of their immeasurable wealth is irrelevant. He made a stupid bet and doesn't suffer any real consequences for it because Meta has no real accountability.
- dsfyu404ed 4y agoIf we want to treat the numbers as meaningful and make low effort quips about wealth inequality being bad for society when they go up then we must also concede that it is meaningfully bad for him when the numbers go down if we are to be logically consistent. Personally I think beyond a couple billion it serves no purpose for quality of life for anyone and we only care in order to crudely "keep score" of who's in charge of more "stuff" since it can't really be liquidated or repurposed other endeavors efficiently and these people are de-factor world leaders in some capacity (a private industry analogue to GDP if you will).
- solardev 4y agoIt's not a logical inconsistency to point out that dollars matter a lot less once you have enough. The difference between having a dollar and ten dollars a day is huge. The difference between a hundred and a thousand a day is still big, sure, but you're probably not going to die of starvation either way. And once you're in dev salary land and higher, you're counting bedrooms, acres, cars, vacations, yachts... The wealth inequality thing matters not because Bezos has spaceships and Zuckerberg only has 3d glasses. It's that we still have millions of people with food and shelter insecurity, regardless of how much the richest have. It's not a linear thing. Zuckerberg losing a few million is utterly meaningless vs a regular family losing a few thousand.
- joshspankit 4y agoWould telling the truth be better if the real truth was “We’ve been waiting for a good excuse to drop a bunch of people and boost the bottom line short-term so we can get some loans”? p.s. I’m making up a scenario based on other businesses, I have no idea what meta is doing these days
- rinze 4y ago> I have no idea what meta is doing these days What you said, but in a Second Life clone.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoThe tech industry labor market has been cooling rapidly this year, it's not only ad-tech companies, and certainly not only in companies who might have over-hired due to betting everything on metaverse.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoOr the fed increased interest rates and the economy is forced into recession too stop inflation.
- snapcaster 4y agoAre you trolling? that would be worse for literally everyone involved. Have you held yourself to this standard in your professional life? it seems so absurd
- swader999 4y agoYeah, in 2008 I saw the writing on the wall. Told my team we'd all be laid off soon. I finished the project I was on first and was the first laid off due to no more work.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago> the truth is always better A favourite Mr. Robot scenes has everybody at the AllSafe office wearing a giant badge with their most fundamental truth written on it. It mocks a "post-privacy" some fools advocate, via the cynical eyes of Esmail's hacker character Elliot. Point being; human relations don't work on "truths" but on carefully managed mutually secured fictions and personas to protect us and preserve power relations. Traditionally we call those "manners" (tactical lying so others can save face etc). But for the comedy of unexpectedly volunteered truths, who wouldn't enjoy a Mufti Day, where everyone at work gets to speak the unvarnished truth with absolute impunity for a day?
- themihai 4y agoMany people can't handle the truth. That's why see weird situations that don't make sense(i.e religion, populist leaders, snakeoil etc)
- KingOfCoders 4y agoYes, perhaps for legal reasons, but what does using a template that feesl like GPT-3 tell the people about management that are still with the company?
- alvis 4y agoHonestly I think GTP-3 can generate a much better human-touched message than the template
- osigurdson 4y agoTypo: GPT-3
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y agoYour say best practice, I see apologies for doublespeak and the attempt to normalize unaccountable dehumanizing statements from corporate lackeys.
- maerF0x0 4y ago> best practice. Which is actually average practice... and in most distributions that's definitionally not the best.
- shswkna 4y ago
- KingOfCoders 4y agoExactly! My #TF2 nick is "Sheep with a gun"!
- shswkna 4y agoI replied by editing my original comment. I got flagged, so I thought it appropriate to edit my comment to motivate what I posted. My comment ‘Sheep commentors everywhere’ was a reply to your post ‘Corporate robots everywhere’, intending to mirror the original comment. I tried to elaborate this in my edited update of my comment above. I can see why it got flagged, but my intention was different to how it was understood, IMO.
- la64710 4y agoThe overlords saw they were losing control with people opting to WFH and great resignation … so they said “What audacity … inflict pain and suffering on the mortals”.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y agoWell, we'll see who wins. My prediction: after a rough period, the situation stabilizes and a pattern emerges: most white-collar workers will try to land a job with companies offering remote and hybrid work whereas the rest will have to have a stationary job and work their way up to upgrade to remote/hybrid.
- marcus0x62 4y agoThe two companies probably hired the same consulting firm to plan their respective layoffs.
- SilasX 4y agoOr, the dynamics behind the two events are very similar and there’s only so many different ways to describe it, so you shouldn’t expect significant variation in how they’re described. Not everything has to be 100% brand-new and unique.
- mromanuk 4y agoThat would make it very simple for real AI bots to take its place.
- whymauri 4y agoit took the collective brain power of an army of Big Three management consultant alumni to draft this soulless document.
- chank 4y agoLayoffs have become so normalized these days, I'm sure they have templates.
- hiyer 4y agoStartup idea - layoff mail generator using GPT-3.
- klyrs 4y agoWhy stop at HR, the whole c-suite is a massive cost center and ripe for disruption.
- dopidopHN 4y agoExactly. GPT3 for conversations, some humain actor giving enough materials so the C suite can appears in all hands and the likes thought realistic model ( not the meta crap ) The rest is implementation details.
- deltasevennine 4y agoWhy stop at the c-suite? We may not be close to being ready to disrupt software engineering but the trend is heading in that direction. We already passed a milestone for code generation. Realistically, C-suite probably will probably target engineers first before letting themselves get replaced by AI. It may be fractionally partially responsible for the current layoff.
- klyrs 4y agoHey now, that's my job ;)
- arminiusreturns 4y agoRecently there was an ask hn that was "What SaaS do you wish existed". My response was "c-suite replacment". I've been priveledged enough to see the insides of hundreds of companies. The problem is ALWAYS the leadership! (or lack thereof)
- klyrs 4y agoI haven't seen inside very many, but when I was at university I participated in bargaining with the execs there; I've also interacted with execs of the small- and medium-sized companies I've worked at. Regardless of the purpose and scale of the organization, they all seemed to be emitting the same blandishments, always loosely correlated to context...
- alvis 4y agoCorporate robots are the same, that's why corporate mistakes are also the same :/
- ChrisRR 4y agoProbably from a "How to make people redundant" template
- bhouston 4y agoSomeone did crib the Stripe layoff notice at Meta. Strange, but yeah, obviously someone at Meta did base it on this Stripe one.
- bombcar 4y agoI dare say that once some are out the others look to them and copy what they can if it worked. I bet they may even adjust severance etc to be slightly better than previous ones to make the company look better. Facebook can afford to spend money on PR.
- texasbigdata 4y agoDon’t they share either Kleiner or Anderson horowitz as common investors and board members?
- dontwatchthis 4y agowell they saw the postive feedback that the Stripe comments got and plagiarised it
- paulcole 4y agoThe wording is quite similar but I don’t think identical is the word you’re looking for.
- papito 4y agoSeriously. The sweetest words to me would be: "Here is your six months severance and full medical, now get your shit and get out!"
- treffer 4y agoAt least the last sentence reminds me of "The hard thing about hard things".
- bjourne 4y agoThat just can't be a coincidence. American tech giants are again colluding to control the job market for software developers.
- z3c0 4y agoWe must have massively different world views, or at least different definitions to colluding. This doesn't survive Hanlon's Razor. At worst, this is corporate corner-cutting, not collusion.
- stulentsev 4y ago- hey, can I copy your homework? - sure, but change it so it doesn't look like a copy
- rufus_foreman 4y agoDon't companies usually use consultants to plan layoffs?
- system2 4y agoThis is scary.
- loeg 4y agoSame layoff consultants?