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> We foolishly thought that we would naturally be protected from any layoffs, being a team that reduced costs of any team we partnered with. In retrospect, that
by yafbum 4y ago
> We foolishly thought that we would naturally be protected from any layoffs, being a team that reduced costs of any team we partnered with. In retrospect, that was a little naive. A team that reduces costs of other teams is not on anyone’s critical path.
> The whole Probability division was laid off as a cost-cutting measure. I have no explanation for how this was justified and I note that if the company were actually serious about cost-cutting, they would have grown our team, not destroyed it.
It does sound naive, but it's also possible that this is plain wrong. Just because your team results in some cost cutting does not mean that your team is generating enough cost savings to justify 50 headcount. I'm sure there are teams at meta with very large / existential cost cutting needs, and it doesn't sound like any one of them was relying critically on your team for enough of their cost cutting objectives for them to make a case to keep this investment going.
- ericlippert 4y agoYou have accurately re-stated the situation, yes. I know for a fact that there are teams like that! And what are they going to do now that the scientists who could have helped them make those decisions in a principled way are scattered to different teams or companies? This is the very definition of penny-wise and pound-foolish.
- yafbum 4y agoWhat are they going to do... make poorer decisions? How much poorer? Will it matter? When a company undertakes cost cutting as a strategic priority, it is usually that they have made overeager long-term bets that turn out to be unsustainable and need correcting. It tends to be short termist. Real estate analogy. Say I bought a house on a mortgage and I'm fixing it up to resell it. I'm hiring a roofer to fix leaks. That's important long term because it'll save on future repair costs. He gets to work. Then I suddenly have a need for funds for something urgent and unrelated, so I need to make a choice: do I stop paying the mortgage, or the roofer? Probably the roofer. It's still dumb not to fix the leaks. But it's more dumb to get the house repossessed. When you hit the bottom of your capital reserve (for some definition of "bottom" - Meta is obviously not bankrupt but it cares about its stock price), you end up having to make choices that are really sucky. "Should I cut off your arm, or your leg, sir?" type of choices. Yet they must be made or you circle the drain for a long time before ending up like Yahoo.
- yafbum 4y agoIOW I wouldn't see it as a judgement of value of your work. If you're the roofer that's been cut off, it's not because it's bad to fix leaks, or because you don't do a good job at it. It's only because your employer felt like they needed the cash for something else.