3 ms·

Just 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"

by bagels 4y ago

Just 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 ago
With 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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3 ms·

Just 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"

by bagels 4y ago

SilverBirch 4y ago
With 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”
  - deleted 4y ago
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