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Meta reportedly plans more job cuts
- eschneider 4y agoSome much for doing the big cut and getting it over with. Worst of all possible worlds.
- majikaja 4y agoThe employees must have seen the writing on the wall when the company was hiring en masse. Hiring standards must have fallen if they added people so rapidly.
- andsoitis 4y agoEngineers vocally advocated for hiring more people because they have “too much work”. Engineers are on the interview panels and so are also responsible for hiring standards to drop (if, in fact, that is true).
- bushbaba 4y agoThere’s always more work to be done. Doesn’t mean it’s worth doing.
- klodolph 4y agoFacebook went through some really massive, traumatic growth and the amount of work increased far faster than hiring or engineering could keep up. This left scars on the organization—better to have too many engineers than too few, the wisdom went. During this period of growth, the “more work” that needed to be done really was critical. It just isn’t critical any more.
- majikaja 4y agoMost of the engineers I worked with (non-tech industry) never seemed to have a clue about the business situation of the company. They could just see there were lots of requirements and assumed the future was bright. Edit: Yes, I see this contradicts my original post. I was hoping the employees in big tech would be a bit smarter.
- shakkhar 4y ago> Hiring standards must have fallen if they added people so rapidly I have been hearing this about Meta / FB for the last 10 years. This line of thinking is overly simplistic. If a company like FB wants to ramp up hiring, they have many tools at their disposal. Hiring bar isn't the only tool, or even a very important one. Things they can do: 1. They can really jack up the compensation package and signing bonuses 2. Open offices in places where they didn't have any presence 3. Open up to remote work 4. Allow flexible hours 5. Increase retention through outstanding perks and benefits 6. Scale hiring efforts - expand the recruiting org, train more employees to conduct interview, reward employees for referrals and conduct interviews 7. Expand outreach into communities from where we historically didn't get much applicants Meta tried everything above, and possibly more. Hiring bar doesn't matter when you have boatload of money.
- majikaja 4y agoOk maybe you're right (I have no experience of trying to integrate huge numbers of people coming from outside big tech in a way that doesn't devalue their skills), but I would feel a bit concerned for my future compensation regarding #2, #3 and #4 in your list if I wasn't extremely bullish about the future of the business (especially #3).
- ojbyrne 4y ago“Meta did not immediately to Engadget’s comment request.” I don’t really see much value to the numerous hurried regurgitations of the original story (from the Financial Times), though I guess this link is a form of that. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
- chrisbolt 4y agoblank did not immediately respond to blank's request for comments is so common as to mean nothing.
- bugbuddy 4y agoHow do we know if the article was not written by an AI?
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- ojbyrne 4y agoMy experience is that AI is generally better than humans at _syntax_. Leaving a word out seems to be exclusive to (rushed) humans.
- viraptor 4y agoWhat do you mean? It's added because that's what happened. You'll also find lots of articles if you google "company spokesperson said". It's far from meaningless when there's no response.
- pixard 4y agoHow much time passed between reaching out and publishing the article? Who decides how much time is "enough"? You could technically send out an email, and then immediately publish the article. After all a few seconds passed with no reply... Because of this the line is meaningless (to me at least).
- bugbuddy 4y agoUsing the same logic as the market’s expectations of the Fed rate hike cycle, does this mean that they will start hiring again sooner?
- Hamuko 4y agoIs this just pandemic era overhiring or is the Metaverse push floundering?
- jujube3 4y agoYes.
- siva7 4y agoI believe this should send a message to the remaining employees to improve morale or get out.
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- labrador 4y agothe firings will continue until morale improves
- bugbuddy 4y agoWhat about the raises, bonuses, and stock awards this year? Will they also be cut?
- labrador 4y agoIt's an old phrase meant to be humorous https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/371325/origin-of-the-beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/371325/origin-of...
- science4sail 4y agoFrom what I hear on the grapevine, bonuses have been cut, but I'm not sure about the others.
- logifail 4y ago> send a message [..] to improve morale or get out The saying "the beatings will continue until morale improves" is supposed to be a joke, not a guide for management.
- techie128 4y ago> the floggings will continue until morale improves FTFY
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- akmarinov 4y agoZuck: “I take full responsibility this time too!”
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- xt00 4y agoLast time they did a big layoff the stock went up.. so I guess keep firing people as long as the stock keeps going up is the plan for say people who own lots of the stock.. I wonder who might benefit?
- paxys 4y agoLogic checks out. They can keep doing layoffs until Zuck is the only employee left and the stock is worth infinite dollars.
- twblalock 4y ago> I wonder who might benefit? The shareholders, for whose purpose the business exists, are the ones who will benefit, and they deserve to. Don't forget that most of the employees are also shareholders and most of them make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the stock. It sucks that people get laid off, but a large portion of the employees were lucky to be hired in the first place, because of the crazy growth that was enabled and rewarded by the market in the last few years. They made a lot of money and now they have to look for work again. It's not like laying off factory workers.
- smeagull 4y agoPerhaps. I'd take this as a signal that the company has no big innovation happening, and is a negative signal for the medium to long term.
- marco_yolo 4y agoshareholders benefit when a company streamlines its operations. seeing as most meta employees are shareholders, they would benefit. a company cannot grow infinitely. any temporary bump in share price will only matter and sustain if the cuts actually help the company. getting laid off is hard, no doubt, but as long as the severance packages are fair I don't see any ethical issue here.
- givemeethekeys 4y agoStock goes up when costs are reduced. If there's a major outage due to structural weakness (as a result of layoffs), then the stock crashes down.
- gazpachotron 4y ago[dead]
- LAC-Tech 4y agoHow has the Database Engineering team faring? Looks like RocksDB is still being updated regularly which is a good sign.
- klodolph 4y agoIt’s a good question but my sense is that database engineering is pretty damn critical for Meta.
- andirk 4y agoAs a common Software Engineer, I see my type of position as transient, whereas those database guys, the ones who make sure all the guts run, all that crazy shit, they're needed night and day. They can fire me and hire a version of me the next day, but the people next to the bare metal seem to have a lot more stored in their brain than can be easily replicated with the next recruit.
- jstx1 4y agoYou're putting them on a pedestal a bit too much. Their work isn't as different as you think.
- klodolph 4y agoI worked closely enough with the people maintaining custom database software at $COMPANY. They were damn smart and had lots of good experience. BigTable at Google was created by an all-star team and they raised a generation of amazing programmers and SREs under them. There’s a lot of cross-pollination, staff moving between Google and Facebook, and Facebook has its own teams of amazing programmers working on database problems. Maybe the work “isn’t so different” but it is more difficult, on a technical level, than most projects. Some real interesting, ground-breaking work was done in the past 20 years or so and a lot of the people who did that work are still around.
- ttyyzz 4y agoIn our large company, we often had a consulting firm that advised us in difficult times. Bottom line, they said that they think the company needs to deeply breath out and then breathe in again. After the severance payments, we were always urgently looking for people. For me, that was always proof that the managers had failed. But a disproportionately small number of managers had to leave the company.
- civicsquid 4y agoI have no idea what will happen, but it sort of sounded like (from the limited reporting that's been done) they'll focus a bit more on managers / non-ICs this time -- if it happens at all. It is kind of nasty to think about the timing though. If true, they kept those managers around to do the very undesirable and time-consuming performance cycle (yearly review) work and will be letting them go now that the process has concluded.
- a4a4a4a4 4y agoI think Meta does reviews every 6 months, which makes it basically perpetual.
- nicolashahn 4y agoOfficial perf reviews recently switched to yearly, but there's a "touchpoint" every three months, which is just a very light perf review with no ratings/direct outcomes until the annual one
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoThe people leave, but the culture of failure stays. Its a long way down, until in some run down office park, the last flickering neon light goes dark. Whats more interesting though is how the let go workers venture within there cultural spheres. Meta workers are more likely to go to places, that have adapted similar cultures, with AB Tests.
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- altacc 4y agoThis is familiar to those of us who went through the dot com bubble burst. We're not at the same scale of industry specific recession but there are similarities with an economic slow down, more cautious spending, reduction in VC money and shareholders seeking returns. Wave after wave of redundancies to try and reach a stable cashflow, each one "right sizing" until they realise that their calculations where wrong and there is even less free flowing money/debt than they thought. It becomes incredibly demoralising, which constant suspicions of what meetings are about, wondering when the next round will be and if you'll in the next batch.
- b212 4y agoWhere is this VC money going though? There’s more money on the markets than ever, billionaires are richer than ever etc.
- bagels 4y agoJust before the last round of layoffs, Zuck said some of you "shouldn't be here" and a memo circulating in management-only groups was laying blame on "coaster" ICs (it leaked and they got called out, and tried to walk it back). I don't wish any ill will towards anyone there, but it's flavors of schadenfreude that management (probably mostly M1/M2) is now instead the target of the layoff machine.
- SilverBirch 4y agoWith all these layoffs though, it's perverse because the people being laid off are practically never the people responsible for the problems. Laying aside Mark Zuckerberg's personal responsibility for lighting billions of dollars on fire for nothing, the reason there's a massive swathe of middle management in Meta is because that's what Meta's management team decided to reward. If you were a good IC, you got made a manager. Now they've got tonnes of managers doing nothing and instead of saying "Ok, let's take a look at senior leadership and figure out where the weak leadership is that led to this situation", the answer is to fire a load of top performers (that's why they got made managers!) and let the people who made the mistakes continue to coast. The exact same problems are going to happen again, because whilst they'll do a detailed post-mortem for 5 minutes of downtime, no one is interested in a post-morterm for 5,000 fired engineers.
- Shish2k 4y ago> If you were a good IC, you got made a manager I’ve been here for 8 years, and never known that to be true. At most, higher IC levels are expected to do more “direction setting” work (ie, writing a technical design doc for your team to follow, rather than writing all the code by yourself), but that’s still distinct from “management”
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- dustedcodes 4y agoMeta is one of the few companies where the job cuts really make sense. I mean, they have not a single product which is basically not on a steep dying path. Facebook will be gone as soon as the boomer generation will fall like dominoes. Instagram is slowly dying amongst millennials and the Metaverse has already been largely rejected by users before it even took off. If Meta didn't own WhatsApp then I think most people would even forget that this company still exists.
- kingkongjaffa 4y ago> Instagram is slowly dying Is it? I thought it was still the premiere place for virtually all segments of product and lifestyle influencing. Rough thesis: The kids on TikTok don’t have money to buy $fancy thing. But the adults on Instagram do.
- duud 4y ago2.96 billion people remember that the company exists on a daily basis. Meta did more than three times TikTok's reported total 2022 revenue in Q4 alone. https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2022/q4/Meta-12.31.2022-Exhibit-99.1-FINAL.pdf https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2022/q4...
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- oblio 4y ago> Facebook will be gone as soon as the boomer generation will fall like dominoes. Mr. Soapbox, freaking Yahoo isn't dead and you think Facebook will be gone :-) Heck, Borland IDEs are still around. Facebook (the social media network) will be around in some form or another long after my kids are gone. You don't go from having several billion users to 0 in anything less than a lifetime, because you know what, that network is probably profitable even with 10-50 million people and if Meta doesn't want it, someone will ask them to spin it off and sell it to them. Successful software rarely dies, successful networked dies even harder and slower.
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- Avshalom 4y agohttps://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/01/facebook-parent-meta-announces-40-billion-stock-buyback.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/01/facebook-parent-meta-announc...