5 ms·
This is long overdue. Years ago playing Civ 4 I distinctly remember hearing Leonard Nimoy's voice say "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the ex
by cletus 4y ago
This is long overdue.
Years ago playing Civ 4 I distinctly remember hearing Leonard Nimoy's voice say "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". That's what management in these companies is like. It became a meme that every 6 months you'd get an email saying "your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager". You'd never seen, heard of or let alone met any of these people.
A large company like this should ahve a structure that's really no deper than:
1. CEO
2. SVP
3. VP
4. Director and really high level ICs
5. Manager and high-level ICs
6. ICs
Any deeper than that is organizational bloat. The above will allow ~5000 ICs per SVP without any layer having two many branches (eg a manager should really have no more than 10-15 reports).
This is better than layoffs because mid-level management is more responsible for bad company strategy than any IC is. Even though this is a step in the right direction, Zuck still faces two way bigger problems:
1. There is no vision for the company's key assets (ie FB, IG, WA). All of these seem to be relatively stagnant (if not in outright decline) and facing pressure from new platforms, most notably Tiktok as well as the behemoth that Youtube remains; and
2. There is absolutely no product market fit for the metaverse, certainly none that justifies sinking tens of billions of dollars into it.
Disclaimer: ex-Facebooker.
Disclaimer:
- baggy_trough 4y agoFB is attempting to burn the ships by renaming to Meta and focusing heavily on that. Unfortunately, metaverse is a loser.
- qualudeheart 4y agoReally agree of the emtsverse. Out of my dunbars number friend group I only know one VR enthusiast.
- redtriumph 4y agoShoutout to fellow Civ player! Just curious: Is Civ something very popular at FB or something? I know Zuck himself plays Civ [0]. [0] https://www.facebook.com/civ/posts/thanks-mark-zuckerberg-for-helping-bring-in-the-next-generation-of-civilization-/10159379478050359/ https://www.facebook.com/civ/posts/thanks-mark-zuckerberg-fo...
- amethyst 4y agoI would say it's about as popular among the gamers at Meta as it is among gamers outside the company. I play it myself periodically, but I wasn't even aware that Mark was a fan of the game, and I've been here a long time.
- disgruntledphd2 4y agoI remember him commenting at a Friday AMA about it when Civ 6 came out, which was a long time ago. Oddly, Civ seems to be very very popular amongst data scientists. I have no idea why.
- bagels 4y agoMost of the reporting chains for ICs were ~8 steps away from Zuck, from what I recall.
- xtracto 4y agoBy that structure, the maximum number of people that such a company should have is 7×7×7×7×7 = 16807 Given the best practices of number of direct reports [1]. How would you deal with the rest 30,000+ Full time employees that Facebook has? [1] https://www.inc.com/jim-schleckser/how-many-direct-reports-should-you-have.html https://www.inc.com/jim-schleckser/how-many-direct-reports-s...
- ikrenji 4y agoadd one more layer and now you can accommodate 100k +
- thefaux 4y ago> By that structure, the maximum number of people that such a company should have is 7×7×7×7×7 = 16807 That actually sounds like pretty reasonable limit. There are very, very few organizations that should exceed this size in my view. In fact, even 16807 sounds far larger than ideal in most cases.
- tpolm 4y agosimple: more layoffs
- shawabawa3 4y agoIncrease number of reports at the top levels 10101077 = 49000
- SturgeonsLaw 4y agoLet them run wild in an experiment in free range anarchy