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> I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that. As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice. Businesse
by andyjohnson0 4y ago
> I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.
As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice.
Businesses usually try to find ways to correct for major failures in decision making. In the case of Zuck, given his ownership, does anything actually happen or change? I'm sure his net worth has been reduced by changes to Meta's share price, but he was a multi-billionaire before and he still is now. Is that it?
- varsketiz 4y agoHe is paying a pretty decent severance package for the US as far as I understand.
- noname2021 4y agoTaking responsibility might mean ponying up to give all the affected people additional months of pay / benefits etc. After all he is responsible for a big time disruption to their families That would be a meaningful way of saying he is sorry as well as setting a precedent for all other billionaires who just "take responsibility" and continue on
- iepathos 4y agoIn practice, the change is they're laying people off and paying them generous severance packages and some other support options to help them transition as well as looking to cut infrastructure expenses. I'm not sure what other change you would be expecting. As a major share holder he is significantly impacted, losing over $100 billion since 2021. He's far from the only tech CEO to invest in fast expansion during the initial covid boom. It can very much be argued he made general good decisions to fast expand then and retract now given the information they had at the time, though I think his investments specifically in VR have been terrible for the company as a whole. Only time will tell if that will ever pay off for them or continue to be a money sink hole.
- faangiq 4y agoLike the soul of America, it’s nothing but empty corporate speak.
- throwawaysleep 4y agoIt means as much as was said. Nothing at all.
- texasbigdata 4y agoThat’s super pessimistic. What do you want him to say: “sucks all y’all lost your jobs but wasn’t my fault. Haha you’re unemployed now”. Like sure it’s not much, but without owning your mistakes how do you get better and improve to prevent them from repeating?
- fullshark 4y agoI'd like him to say words that have actual meaning, and not words that resemble meaning after being filtered by a PR consultant.
- andyjohnson0 4y agoI think your confusng pessimism with scepticism. Either his claim to take responsibility means something, in terms of it actually leading to consequnces and/or actions, or it doesn't. If it's the former, then what are they? If it's the latter, then why? For example: do shareholders hold him to his responsibility? And if so, how? If they don't, who improves Meta's corporate governance to ensure that this self-admitted mistake doesnt reoccur and sexure their investment? I've never worked at a BigCorp. How does this stuff work?
- triceratops 4y agoHe can resign. As CEO he's ultimately responsible for the share price. By that measure, he just might be the worst-performing employee at the company.
- javajosh 4y agoIf it was poker, then Mark just lost a big hand because he made a bad call. But he's still got a big stack, so he's not going to walk away from the table.
- eru 4y agoIn poker you might even make the right move, but still lose. It's all probabilities. Business shares something with that.
- discordance 4y ago"Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye to the entire Nucleus division. All Nucleus personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure."
- cdolan 4y agoSV from HBO I’d really something else
- TchoBeer 4y agoFor how long it is, it's incredible how high the hit rate for jokes were.
- jghn 4y agoAt sone point “I take responsibility” came to mean nothing more than “My bad”. It’s as if the act of saying it was your fault is all that’s necessary. Ive noticed it used this way more and more, presumably as people realize it’s utility as a get of jail free card
- StevePerkins 4y agoJust months ago, "The Crying CEO" guy became a viral meme for expressing too much empathy in a layoff. It's fucking job terminations. You're GOING to be criticized no matter how you do them. The best approach is to just be robotic about it, and maybe throw in a platitude that amounts to, "It's not you, it's me".
- Aeolun 4y agoNo, he was criticized for using it as publicity on LinkedIn.
- jghn 4y agoSure. But it's only "taking responsibility" if you demonstrate you're actually intending to either a) actually be accountable in some fashion and/or b) actually lay out how you'll change to make the bad thing not happen in the future. "We need to layoff half of the company. I'm sorry and take responsibility. I have failed our employees and shareholders. Because of this, I am stepping down". That's taking responsibility. "We had a major F-up. It was my responsibility. And here are the concrete steps I am taking to ensure it never happens again, along with the mechanisms you all have to hold me accountable. If these fail, the following bad thing will happen to me." That's taking responsibility
- wickedsickeune 4y agoI know that this is a low quality comment, but thank you, you have restored my faith in humanity.
- vasco 4y agoA company is bound to fire people in a well functioning economy or the alternative is every single employee will lose their job when the company goes bankrupt. Some people would rather bring every company down to the ground before firing a single person. In a well functioning economy what you then want is a short worker reallocation time. Also if one of your options for "taking responsibility" is quitting, I guess your view of the world is that you would also fire any of your employees when they mess up, when whole industries have recognized the need for blameless cultures where making mistakes is part of the learning process.
- gustavorg 4y ago> I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice. "Some of you May Die, But it's a Sacrifice I am Willing to Make" - Lord Farquaad
- dolmen 4y agoBest quote.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Aeolun 4y ago> Businesses usually try to find ways to correct for major failures in decision making. Which eventually leads to complete stagnation and nobody being willing and/or able to make a decision.
- paulcole 4y agoWhat would him taking responsibility in practice look like to you?
- triceratops 4y agoResigning.
- micromacrofoot 4y agosacrificing some personal wealth for the good of the people that were affected
- patentatt 4y agoYeah, he could easily bankroll a 36 month severance package or something similar. Like "sorry I fucked you right at the onset of a recession, here's a pile of cash to help you weather the storm." That would be actually taking responsibility
- mbesto 4y agoHe lost $90B. I'm not sympathizing with Zuck, but what you're suggesting literally happened.
- bombcar 4y agoBut he wasn't punished - people demand blood and blood can only be given non-voluntarily.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoHe was punished by the market. People want more blood than that and some people will literally never be satisfied
- sumeno 4y agoFacing repercussions on the level of those he's laying off. If he's responsible he should be the first one out the door.
- adamzerner 4y agoI think a Bayesian perspective is helpful here. 1) How likely is it that Zuck makes that statement if he feels like he is responsible? 2) How likely is it if he doesn't feel responsible? I think the answers to those questions are quite similar, in which case hearing the statement doesn't actually tell us much.
- Enginerrrd 4y agoJust to elaborate on this since I had to think about it and I might save someone else the effort: Let M = Makes the statement Let R = Feels Responsible Notation: ~R = Not R Answering OP's questions 1 & 2: I think it's safe to assume P(M|R) = P(M|~R) = 1 So P(M) = 1 So Bayes' theorem simplifies as follows: P(R|M) = P(M|R)P(R)/PM) = P(R) Thus, OP's point is that the statement tells us essentially nothing about the probability he actually feels responsible or empathetic, and I agree.
- abstractmath 4y agoBut both of your assumptions imply the conclusion, so the math doesn’t actually seem helpful at all.
- adamzerner 4y agoI disagree. The question at hand is how we should update our beliefs in response to the evidence of Zuck making the statement. Given the priors of P(M|R) and P(M|~R), it tells us that we shouldn't really update. Different priors would lead to a different update. Sometimes this sort of thing happens where our priors don't allow for a belief update in response to evidence. For example, does me writing this comment change your best guess as to whether my favorite color is blue? That depends on what you think of P(favorite color blue | comment) and P(favorite color blue | ~comment). Both of those are probably the same right? If so, my comment doesn't allow you to update. This excerpt from http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/20 http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/20 is relevant: Professor Quirrell looked at Harry. "Mr. Potter," he said solemnly, with only a slight grin, "a word of advice. There is such a thing as a performance which is too perfect. Real people who have just been beaten and humiliated for fifteen minutes do not stand up and graciously forgive their enemies. It is the sort of thing you do when you're trying to convince everyone you're not Dark, not -" "I can't believe this! You can't have every possible observation confirm your theory! " "And that was a trifle too much indignation." "What on Earth do I have to do to convince you? " "To convince me that you harbor no ambitions of becoming a Dark Lord?" said Professor Quirrell, now looking outright amused. "I suppose you could just raise your right hand." "What?" Harry said blankly. "But I can raise my right hand whether or not I -" Harry stopped, feeling rather stupid. "Indeed," said Professor Quirrell. "You can just as easily do it either way. There is nothing you can do to convince me because I would know that was exactly what you were trying to do. And if we are to be even more precise, then while I suppose it is barely possible that perfectly good people exist even though I have never met one, it is nonetheless improbable that someone would be beaten for fifteen minutes and then stand up and feel a great surge of kindly forgiveness for his attackers. On the other hand it is less improbable that a young child would imagine this as the role to play in order to convince his teacher and classmates that he is not the next Dark Lord. The import of an act lies not in what that act resembles on the surface, Mr. Potter, but in the states of mind which make that act more or less probable." Harry blinked. He'd just had the dichotomy between the representativeness heuristic and the Bayesian definition of evidence explained to him by a wizard.
- mattmaroon 4y agoYeah that’s about it. He’s lost about $90b in net worth. I suppose you can debate whether that’s punishment enough or not when you’ve got another $38b left or whatever. But I’ll tell you this from experience: lasting people off because you chose to grow too fast is really, really hard. I’ve done it, though in my case it was a lot fewer people and I actually knew and loved them all. If I had to lay off 11,000 people I’d lose a lot of sleep over it. I can’t imagine life is fun for him at the moment. But, just like every affected employee, he will get through it.
- avgcorrection 4y agoEveryone: The hero of their own story.
- recuter 4y agoI can't imagine these sort of layoffs, which are baked into the lifecycle and business plans of the company, were not something he wasn't anticipating years and years ago when hiring was being ramped up. In fact some notable fraction of these 11,000 were hired in the first place only to be fired, by design. Sweet dreams.
- BarryMilo 4y agoAnd unlike any of his employees, he is a billionaire. I'm sure he'll find a way to sleep.
- disgruntledphd2 4y agoI'm pretty sure that there's some multi millionaires left at FB. Chris Cox is still there, he's likely a billionaire. There's potentially one or two others left...
- jacobsenscott 4y agoThis isn't hard for Zuck - he just directs his subordinates to layoff a bunch of people, and then goes back to swimming in his vault of cash. Losing x billion of essentially infinity money is the same as losing no money. Once you reach Zuck's level of wealth you can't really even conceive of non-billionairs as the being same species as you, much less empathize with them.
- reaperducer 4y ago> I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that. As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice. Perhaps he will give up his sixth boat, or his fourth house, or his 13th car? Maybe he's going to wait on buying that private island until next quarter. Everyone has to make sacrifices.
- robbintt 4y agoIt might slow the pace at which he tries to take over the private resources of the island of Kauai, Hawaii from the billionaires before him but I doubt it. I think it's interesting how pedestrian Oprah, Zuck, and Larry Ellison are, obsessing over a place Elvis visited for pork barbecue parties while demonstrating 0 understanding of local people and their needs. It's incredibly embarrassing for humanity.
- crazygringo 4y agoIt means he's not trying to scapegoat a VP or the board or say "It's not my fault nobody foresaw this economy." It doesn't mean anything in terms of action or "self-punishment" but nor should it. The dude has already lost many more billions of dollars than you or I will ever see. I'm no fan of the guy, but some people won't even take responsibility verbally. So at least he's not descending that low. And the severance seems decent so it all seems to be handled fine. Not sure what more you're looking for.
- 2rsf 4y ago> The dude has already lost many more billions of dollars than you or I will ever see Those are mostly virtual dollars and he has a lot more real ones in his account, while I agree that whatever he does to "punish himself" will be practically meaningless it might have some symbolic meaning. Lowering his and senior management salaries and incentives won't save jobs but will give a better image of the crisis
- crazygringo 4y agoHis salary is already only $1/yr, and has been since 2013. So there's nothing to do there. And lowering the salaries of senior management doesn't make any sense. They're paid market rates. If you punitively cut their compensation in half or something, they'll just leave for another company that does pay market rate. You can't force them to stick around and be "punished", that's not how salaried employment in a market economy works. Also, punishing management goes against the idea that he's taking all the responsibility here. Wouldn't that just be scapegoating?
- paledot 4y ago> His salary is already only $1/yr, and has been since 2013. So there's nothing to do there. That's a joke, a tax dodge, a PR gag, a farce. There's nothing fiscally responsible about it. Taking financial responsibility, if such a thing exists, would involve giving up his equity comp or even some of his holdings. Give it to the employees whose careers you've disrupted through your bad business decisions. That's responsibility. "Market rates" is likewise a joke. A: "Market rates for corporate executives are obscene." B: "They're paid market rates, what's the problem?"
- lapcat 4y agoTaking responsibility would mean resigning as CEO, for example. Or altering the voting situation where he has absolute power, can't be voted out by the board of directors, and thus has no accountability for his actions and mistakes. But just saying that you're taking responsibility is not actually taking responsibility. It's empty words.
- Enginerrrd 4y agoI don't agree with that take at all. No leader would be able to learn from mistakes or grow if they had to metaphorically commit Seppuku every time they made a mistake by resigning or abdicating their authority. Taking responsibility would mean owning the situation as being caused by you, and critically evaluating your actions to see if there were different paths you could have taken given the same information, or if there was other information that you should have added to your decision-making. There are some mistakes so grave and unjustifiable that resignation would be the appropriate way to take responsibility for them, but I don't think a round of layoffs pending an expected economic downturn after excessive growth qualifies.
- lapcat 4y ago> if they had to metaphorically commit Seppuku every time they made a mistake This is very far from Zuck's first mistake. In any case, though, I offered an alternative: making himself accountable to the board of directors. He is not accountable. He can't be fired, he can only resign. The fundamental problem is that Zuck gets to define the terms of his own accountability, which is almost an oxymoron.
- ilaksh 4y agoAll of them bloated up. It's just like, polite to take the blame.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- adrianmsmith 4y agoI thought this https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1590304422735015936 https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1590304422735015936 was a good explanation: > What this means is they don’t blame outside factors. Compare this w layoffs where the CEO says this is due to “the economy” “the macro climate”, suggesting they did everything right. When someone says they take accountability, it means it was their poor decisions - that could have/should have been better - that led to this. You know who to blame.
- kraf 4y agoActually to me his explanation kind of sounds like he's blaming the economy
- sausagefeet 4y agoThis is a pretty poor take, IMO. I have not seen any difference in results of a CEO who "takes responsibility" vs "blames outside factors". Taking responsibility seems to be a cheap way to come off as a better person without actually doing anything differently.
- apineda 4y agoI understand this take but it seems to assume that people and systems aren't flawed.
- sausagefeet 4y agoMy take assumes that? I don't think it does. My point is simply that I don't see any evidence to say that someone who makes that claim is somehow better than someone that blames the environment. It's very easy to wrote those words down.
- pb7 4y agoDoes it get tiring being this cynical all the time? Admit it, nothing he could have said would have satisfied folks like you. This was a tactful announcement and a generous severance after providing a job with pay and benefits in the top 0.1% for potentially many years.
- alecbz 4y agoI think just leaving it at "I got this wrong" would land way better. Adding "and I take responsibility" without actually substantiating that makes it sound way more hollow.
- BurningFrog 4y agoIt just means he accepts the blame, and holds no one else responsible. Do people want him to fire himself to show he means it, or what?
- khyryk 4y agoPeople have a problem with it because it's a string of words without meaning. Better to leave it out than to sully modern language further with meaningless gibberish that looks like language.
- nh23423fefe 4y agoPretending not to understand doesn't mean the speaker was unclear.
- jimbokun 4y agoIs there a better way to say this? I think the meaning is pretty clearly "Many of you are being let go not because of poor performance on your part, but bad decisions on my part." It's acknowledging fault.
- orangepurple 4y ago> I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice Increasing value of company stock
- stillametamate 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lazide 4y agoHe lost untold billions of dollars (admittedly off his giant pile of even more untold billions of dollars). He’s the primary controlling shareholder and defacto owner. What other kind of accountability would make any sense at all? Even if he fired himself, he’d either have to shut the company down, or find someone to replace him and manage them, which makes him their boss. Edit: to correct dumb statement around share ownership. But you know what I meant.
- spacemadness 4y agoApparently taking responsibility means lessening the impact by releasing this news alongside election results so it is somewhat buried.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jbaczuk 4y agoWow, people can find a way to complain about anything. The severance benefits are insanely generous. Nobody takes a job thinking that it will be permanent, or is that a thing now? Would it have been better if he blamed the layoffs on the market? Maybe it's just a glass half empty kind of thing.
- arbitrage 4y ago> Nobody takes a job thinking that it will be permanent, or is that a thing now? Does everybody take a job expecting to leave it? I don't think that is the case.
- drc500free 4y agoEveryone in tech whose job is a bet on the future success of a product should expect to leave it. Expecting 100% of products to have 100% success in 100% of economic environments is a bit naïve.
- epolanski 4y agoJust to point out Facebook is a success and is still making insane profits every single day. They aren't losing money or posting losses.
- jbaczuk 4y agoThe employees don't have control of the company, and they agreed to not have control when they signed on. If they want to control, they are free to start their own company, invest capital to get more voting rights or provide enough value that the company wants their input enough to give them voting rights. Also, just getting another job is an option... But I admire what seems to be a very generous severance package, which is not legally required on the part of Meta.
- miiiiiike 4y ago> As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice. Remember a few years ago when people were asking "Why can't people just say they made a mistake and own up to it instead of shifting blame?" Now that people are taking responsibility for mistakes publicly the response is "Yes, but what does that mean?" Taking responsibility means just that. It means saying you fucked up and not blaming others for your failures. It doesn't mean that self immolation follows soon after. I move on from bad breaks pretty quickly but there are few things that I've held on to. Things that still burn years later and all of them involve refusals to accept responsibility. Hearing someone say: "Yep, it was me. I fucked you and I'm sorry. Here's what I can offer." isn't nothing. Layoffs suck but the rate of hiring in big companies wasn't sustainable. A correction is here. It's temporary, but, it's real. If you've tried to hire outside of FAANG over the past decade you'd know one thing: FAANG is hoarding talent. Every developer I've really wanted to hold on to has gone to a big tech company.. I can't blame them. But, here's the thing, so have many of the contractors that I didn't end up hiring for very good reasons. These layoff messages, down to the structure and content, all sound the same because PR people follow best practices just like everyone else. You wouldn't ask why all Redux or Angular apps use similar patterns.. They're using patterns, that's what patterns are for.
- littlestymaar 4y ago> Remember a few years ago when people were asking "Why can't people just say they made a mistake and own up to it instead of shifting blame?" Now that people are taking responsibility for mistakes publicly But they aren't, this isn't “taking responsibility”, this is just following the latest spin doctor trend in public communication. Taking responsibility for a failure means stepping down.
- karaterobot 4y agoI think people are forgetting that a severance package is not a legal requirement, and that this one is actually pretty generous. "I fucked up, here's what I can offer" is more or less what this letter is saying, but it's just not drawing the connection between the two parts in a way that makes sense to people. People can disagree about whether the package is satisfactory, but that's completely beside the point. The severance package is the make good Zuckerberg is offering: it is an expense his company is paying when they do not have to. It is the implied answer to the question "Oh yeah? How is he taking responsibility?" Argue about whether it's good enough, but it is an answer.
- baxtr 4y agoTaking responsibility means first of all admitting that you were wrong. Most people never even get to this first step.
- Yhippa 4y agoThink about it this way. If I, for example, did a series of activities that led to 13% of my division's business being impacted adversely, I'm almost assuredly getting fired. When you go higher up the food chain, the same thing happens. When the people at the very top do something like that, does the same happen? Sometimes. Depends on who's on the BoD I guess.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- smsm42 4y agoI'd say yeah, that's pretty much it. In any case, what'd you expect? He's not giving up the control of the company. He made a mistake, yes - but there's no obligation for anybody who makes a mistake to give up everything and never have any responsibility again. So what else is there?
- conductr 4y agoI live in a oil rich area and there's a large economy of well paid folks attached to it. They all understand it's boom and bust. They get paid really well when it's booming. Then they take the L when it's busting. All to say, I think people need to come to terms with the fact they weren't being paid well due to their sheer brilliance but due to the risk they assumed by joining a boom and bust industry. Nobody was lured into a job at FB under unfair circumstances and I'm sure they're not exiting on unfair circumstances. Does it suck to be in a cyclical bust period, does it hurt worse that it's in large part self inflicted by Zuck. Of course, of course.
- pishpash 4y agoOn some level it's not even Zuck's fault. It's Jerome Powell's. It's however up to each individual to plan for what comes after knowing 2020-2021 was an epic bubble.