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That’s the thing; the A players are still in demand (even Z players like me are still getting contacted for roles), and I wonder if sending this message out lik

That’s the thing; the A players are still in demand (even Z players like me are still getting contacted for roles), and I wonder if sending this message out like this is a huge gamble on Meta’s part. If I were there I’d be seriously considering a less volatile environment. If I were an A player, I’d be able to do so even easier and potentially find more meaningful work. This seems like a bad move for Meta, just leaving the axe up in the air ready to strike like this. With numbers in the thousands, it gives me the sense that it might not always matter what you do or how good you are.

fatnoah 4y ago
> This seems like a bad move for Meta, just leaving the axe up in the air ready to strike like this. That may be intentional. I could see a scenario where voluntary attrition helps them get reduce size more organically and with lower cost than a layoff. Meta is still huge and pays good money. They can handle a huge level of attrition and still have enough "A players" left over to work on the thing that truly require that level of operation. > With numbers in the thousands, it gives me the sense that it might not always matter what you do or how good you are. Fully agree on this. At that scope, it's broad cuts with a lot of meat going with the fat.
- CountSessine 4y ago
  I could see a scenario where voluntary attrition helps them get reduce size more organically and with lower cost than a layoff This is a terrible idea, though. It's always the desirable employees that have options that leave an environment like this, and it's always the less competent employees that hold on for dear life and stay. I've seen this so many times in my career. The A players will stay because they're attached to the things they've created, but the B players will leave and you're left with lots of C players. In the long run its cheaper to lay off people.
  - watwut 4y ago
    People who want to leave and have options, will consider those options either way. There is no way for meta to force them to stay. Even if meta announced layoffs with all the list of names, following months many who want will leave. Pretty much every layoff is followed by people leaving voluntary. Some over bad feelings of what happened, some because their friends are away so why not and some dont like new position. But they will be leaving. > it's always the less competent employees that hold on for dear life and stay. Meh. People stay for many reasons. It is not always "not having options". It is fairly often "I actually want to stay despite layoff". And again, there is no way to force people to stay. Confident people will be leaving either way.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      The worry is less confident people proactively seek more certain employment choices when faced with uncertainty
      - geodel 4y ago
        As they should! Why would a company like Meta base their policy on what some hypothetically unconfident employees might be thinking.
  - zerkten 4y ago
    Does the management, or the quantitative performance of the company, agree with you here? I'm somewhat dubious given how frequently this occurs, but ideally I think you'd want some really long-term study that looks at both the layoff(s), attrition, and later progress (or growth if it occurs).
    - CountSessine 4y ago
      I'd bet that this is the difference between having good middle managers and not. If you have confidence in your directors and middle managers, you can target the C players. If not, then you can't and you'll wind up shedding B players anyways.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      You want to know if companies stop growing for a decade or so after a mass-layoff? If so, yes, they do. But it's incredibly hard to decide on causality there, because companies are only expected to do mass-layoffs when the management believes it can't grow anymore.
  - raydev 4y ago
    > It's always the desirable employees that have options that leave an environment like this, and it's always the less competent employees that hold on for dear life and stay Meta's hiring bar is pretty high, though. Plenty of desirable people will stay because there's nowhere else to go that pays as well, and the "less competent" ones are likely still more competent than the industry average. These elite companies have now laid off hundreds of thousands of people. The idea that there's enough "low performers" to throw in the garbage should be obsolete now, and reveals a sort of wishful thinking "all those other people who lost their jobs deserve it, but not me, it will never happen to me"
    - bmitc 4y ago
      > Meta's hiring bar is pretty high, though. I'm not making any comments or judgements whatsoever on employees there, but doesn't Meta use the same terrible hiring practices that values so-called "leet" code style interviews? Such interviewing practices are bound to produce poor results, especially at the scale that Meta, Amazon, etc. do them at. (This is also not a comment in support of the layoffs. I think layoffs are a failure of management and executives.)
      - satvikpendem 4y ago
        > but doesn't Meta use the same terrible hiring practices that values so-called "leet" code style interviews? Such interviewing practices are bound to produce poor results, especially at the scale that Meta, Amazon, etc. do them at. These two statements do not follow, why would "such interviewing practices [be] bound to produce poor results, especially at the scale that Meta, Amazon, etc. do them at?"
        bmitc 4y ago
        By poor results I really meant a wide variance in hiring fits. If you are hiring based upon these "leet" style trivia interviews and for somewhat arbitrary team placement, then you are greatly constraining your hiring process to only filter on effectively a single vector of background and experience. So the high bar commented above only applies to that particular vector in that many may be great at a particular niche of coding but effectively randomized in other vectors of software development or other employee skills. Thus, it is only natural that you may have many people in the organization and on teams who are poor fits, either technically, culturally, etc., because almost all of the "leet" code stuff is irrelevant to most real-world work. If it is relevant, then it is usually only a small portion of the job. This isn't a judgement on anything other than the hiring practice. But like I said, I don't really know much about Meta's hiring process. It's possible that I'm misapplying this style of interview to them and misunderstood about if they actually use it. Amazon does, and I can confirm it was a miserable interview experience.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kamaal 4y ago
    >>I've seen this so many times in my career. The A players will stay because they're attached to the things they've created, but the B players will leave and you're left with lots of C players. The problem is A, B, and C are not at birth positions. People in these buckets rotate across the buckets at various phases in their careers. And the participants in the A buckets are basically people with good leadership- who can train, motivate and get them good products/projects to work on. That given anybody can leave the company and if you have good managers it wouldn't matter. The real problem happens when you go meta to this. How do you get A level managers. That's a very hard problem to solve and often it also depends of the boss at the very top. The CEO. Many times the revolving door, golden parachute CEOs don't even care. The founder CEO's are tired in most cases. Performing at unicorn level can be brutal on your body and mind on the longer run. And they'd rather semi retire after a few years than continue with that lifestyle. This is where the real problems begin. In cases where the top most boss gives a damn about the company, the company tends to be A player generation factory. Look at Ford under Henry Ford, Apple under Jobs. Microsoft under Bill G. The boss at the top just needs to get this right else its over.
- noduerme 4y ago
  > the thing that truly require that level of operation. After giving legs to avatars, is there really much work left?
- anxrn 4y ago
  > I could see a scenario where voluntary attrition helps them get reduce size more organically and with lower cost than a layoff This is exceptionally hard on immigrants on a visa, who have limited options to leave voluntarily.
fnbr 4y ago
Yes, 1000%. Especially when it comes to AI. Meta has an excellent team of ML engineers, many of whom are in exceptionally high demand right now. If I were a ML engineer at Facebook, _especially_ if I was working remotely, I'd be sending out a ton of applications right now. I bet they end up getting an easier, more meaningful, higher paying job. I'm an AI research engineer who was recently laid off and this was my experience.
- gat1 4y ago
  What's the difference between an ML engineer and an AI research engineer ?
  - fnbr 4y ago
    ML engineers work on products, AI research engineers work for AI research labs. Skillset is almost identical, biggest difference is having research experience.
  - jonathankoren 4y ago
    The first ships products. The second is the code monkey to the statistician.
- tick_tock_tick 4y ago
  > I bet they end up getting an easier, more meaningful, higher paying job. They won't. > I'm an AI research engineer who was recently laid off and this was my experience. But not from Facebook? They are very well compensated right now; they aren't just going to drop into a better paying role.
  - fnbr 4y ago
    FAANGs aren’t anywhere near the high end of the ML job market currently.
    - Nimitz14 4y ago
      Is this comment speaking from personal experience? Meta pays much more than any other FAANG. E.g. Know someone who's openai offer (2x Google) was matched by meta.
ben7799 4y ago
It's hard to see how anyone has thought FB/Meta would be a great place to work for a long time. They have been involved in so many shady things and have had such a "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach it sounds maddening. I think a lot of people working there just made the calculated decision that Meta being at the very high end of the compensation scale made it worth it. Even if you are in the ML/AI stuff. You have to balance out that they were funding at a very high rate versus that they were funding the work for less than stellar reasons.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  It’s been the money.
  - distcs 4y ago
    Literally said in the comment you are replying to if you bother to read until the 3rd para!
    - foobiekr 4y ago
      I think you’re missing the point of my deliberately terse reply. All of the replies you are getting are trying to tell you that there’s no deep thinking involved. There’s no “hey I considered it and the comp overcame my concerns” etc. Most of the leetcode-into-fang people are not doing a moral calculus or even spending thirty seconds thinking about the ethical aspects. There are no concerns. There are no ethics for most of the people in our industry. It is an employer who pays well so they work there. Your comment implies that, yes, it came down to comp, but also implies that for Facebook employees, on average, there is any thought process beyond economic maximization. There isn’t. I know a ton of facebook and ex-facebook engineers. They also worked for famously ethical companies like Zynga and Uber. Now and then they’ll do the pretend performative handwringing or whatever but their decisions are consistent. There is just money.
- scarface74 4y ago
  > It's hard to see how anyone has thought FB/Meta would be a great place to work for a long time. Maybe because, I don’t know, Meta pays well? I don’t go to work for self fulfillment. I work to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. No I don’t work for Meta nor have I ever.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
alvis 4y ago
A players always in demand, no matter whatever the economic situation. They have the freedom to choose wherever they want to work. I'm not sure how many A players have left meta, but I'm sure A players never want to work in a low morale company. The damage is much higher than layoff number.
scarface74 4y ago
So exactly where are you going to find this “less volatile environment”? Other BigTech companies that are also doing layoffs? Unprofitable startups or other money losing recently public companies? Are they going to sully themselves and work as “enterprise developers” (note sarcasm)?
Balgair 4y ago
>... I wonder if sending this message out like this is a huge gamble on Meta’s part. I don't know how to break this to HN, but the Zuck isn't the sharpest tool in the shed. He may be gambling, but Hanlon's Razor says otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
- jonathankoren 4y ago
  The guy lucked into a money making machine that was nigh impossible to screw up. Hasn’t done much since except do the obvious when you have a mountain of cash — buy competitors.
  - okeuro49 4y ago
    It's odd when people think that Zuckerberg is some sort of genius for creating a cleaner looking clone of MySpace.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    How did that work out for MySpace, Google+, Friendster, etc?
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Lol.. such a foolish comment. He didn't luck into anything. He stole it and made it into what it is today. Remember the login to your email and we'll send invites to everyone? Facebook invented that. Keep it restricted to .edu and rolling out school by school was a strategy. Identify companies who are a threat and buy them.. facebook was very successful at that. Luck had very little to do with facebook's success.
    - jonathankoren 4y ago
      Luck had everything to do with it. FB was no different than Six Degrees, or Friendster, or Orkut, let alone MySpace. Identifying threats? Please. EVERYONE knows who the threats to FB were and are. It’s just that not all of us has the money to buy them. Mark Zuckerberg is average. His one big “innovation” is taking legs out of Second Life.
devjab 4y ago
> I wonder if sending this message out like this is a huge gamble on Meta’s part. I'm Danish, but we have laws and regulations about mass-layoffs which means companies have to give employees an advance notice of 30-60-90 days, depending on company and layoff size. I imagine California might have something similar.
- ardit33 4y ago
  CA is 60 days, NYC is 90, federal is 60 by default (WARN act). Most companies choose to lay you off, then give you 'severance' package/pay that is equal or more to those days.
codemac 4y ago
This was posted the week after all management should have communicated AE to A players. I know for senior directors last day of performance review comms was Friday. What is AE? Meta has a program for their top ~1% or so (who knows really) where they dump a pile of RSUs on your head, "additional equity", to retain you and bet on your future at the company. For most it's 2-4x your annual stock refresher, though I don't know exactly how it varies. If you're E7+, this is another 1M+ stock grant on a 4 year vest on top of your 600k+ refresher grant. Stock is up from their internal refresher pricing. Their "A players" all just got ~5% bump on their 1.5M+ RSU grant. G and other FAANG struggle to compete with Meta on comp for the actual A players. We'll see if they budgeted enough for AE to keep the people that matter.
- blsapologist42 4y ago
  While some people do get 1M/yr, it's hardly every E7+. I don't know the exact % obviously, but anecdotally it's <30% (though more get the smaller grants--around 250k or 500k).
fwungy 4y ago
There has to be plenty of demand at the lower tiers. There is a ton of work to do everywhere. It's just that they don't pay the same as top tier. FANGs are holding a lot of talent to keep them from competitors, as has been pointed out.

fatnoah 4y ago

> This seems like a bad move for Meta, just leaving the axe up in the air ready to strike like this. That may be intentional. I could see a scenario where voluntary attrition helps them get reduce size more organically and with lower cost than a layoff. Meta is still huge and pays good money. They can handle a huge level of attrition and still have enough "A players" left over to work on the thing that truly require that level of operation. > With numbers in the thousands, it gives me the sense that it might not always matter what you do or how good you are. Fully agree on this. At that scope, it's broad cuts with a lot of meat going with the fat.

CountSessine 4y ago
I could see a scenario where voluntary attrition helps them get reduce size more organically and with lower cost than a layoff This is a terrible idea, though. It's always the desirable employees that have options that leave an environment like this, and it's always the less competent employees that hold on for dear life and stay. I've seen this so many times in my career. The A players will stay because they're attached to the things they've created, but the B players will leave and you're left with lots of C players. In the long run its cheaper to lay off people.
- watwut 4y ago
  People who want to leave and have options, will consider those options either way. There is no way for meta to force them to stay. Even if meta announced layoffs with all the list of names, following months many who want will leave. Pretty much every layoff is followed by people leaving voluntary. Some over bad feelings of what happened, some because their friends are away so why not and some dont like new position. But they will be leaving. > it's always the less competent employees that hold on for dear life and stay. Meh. People stay for many reasons. It is not always "not having options". It is fairly often "I actually want to stay despite layoff". And again, there is no way to force people to stay. Confident people will be leaving either way.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    The worry is less confident people proactively seek more certain employment choices when faced with uncertainty
    - geodel 4y ago
      As they should! Why would a company like Meta base their policy on what some hypothetically unconfident employees might be thinking.
- zerkten 4y ago
  Does the management, or the quantitative performance of the company, agree with you here? I'm somewhat dubious given how frequently this occurs, but ideally I think you'd want some really long-term study that looks at both the layoff(s), attrition, and later progress (or growth if it occurs).
  - CountSessine 4y ago
    I'd bet that this is the difference between having good middle managers and not. If you have confidence in your directors and middle managers, you can target the C players. If not, then you can't and you'll wind up shedding B players anyways.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    You want to know if companies stop growing for a decade or so after a mass-layoff? If so, yes, they do. But it's incredibly hard to decide on causality there, because companies are only expected to do mass-layoffs when the management believes it can't grow anymore.
- raydev 4y ago
  > It's always the desirable employees that have options that leave an environment like this, and it's always the less competent employees that hold on for dear life and stay Meta's hiring bar is pretty high, though. Plenty of desirable people will stay because there's nowhere else to go that pays as well, and the "less competent" ones are likely still more competent than the industry average. These elite companies have now laid off hundreds of thousands of people. The idea that there's enough "low performers" to throw in the garbage should be obsolete now, and reveals a sort of wishful thinking "all those other people who lost their jobs deserve it, but not me, it will never happen to me"
  - bmitc 4y ago
    > Meta's hiring bar is pretty high, though. I'm not making any comments or judgements whatsoever on employees there, but doesn't Meta use the same terrible hiring practices that values so-called "leet" code style interviews? Such interviewing practices are bound to produce poor results, especially at the scale that Meta, Amazon, etc. do them at. (This is also not a comment in support of the layoffs. I think layoffs are a failure of management and executives.)
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      > but doesn't Meta use the same terrible hiring practices that values so-called "leet" code style interviews? Such interviewing practices are bound to produce poor results, especially at the scale that Meta, Amazon, etc. do them at. These two statements do not follow, why would "such interviewing practices [be] bound to produce poor results, especially at the scale that Meta, Amazon, etc. do them at?"
      - bmitc 4y ago
        By poor results I really meant a wide variance in hiring fits. If you are hiring based upon these "leet" style trivia interviews and for somewhat arbitrary team placement, then you are greatly constraining your hiring process to only filter on effectively a single vector of background and experience. So the high bar commented above only applies to that particular vector in that many may be great at a particular niche of coding but effectively randomized in other vectors of software development or other employee skills. Thus, it is only natural that you may have many people in the organization and on teams who are poor fits, either technically, culturally, etc., because almost all of the "leet" code stuff is irrelevant to most real-world work. If it is relevant, then it is usually only a small portion of the job. This isn't a judgement on anything other than the hiring practice. But like I said, I don't really know much about Meta's hiring process. It's possible that I'm misapplying this style of interview to them and misunderstood about if they actually use it. Amazon does, and I can confirm it was a miserable interview experience.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kamaal 4y ago
  >>I've seen this so many times in my career. The A players will stay because they're attached to the things they've created, but the B players will leave and you're left with lots of C players. The problem is A, B, and C are not at birth positions. People in these buckets rotate across the buckets at various phases in their careers. And the participants in the A buckets are basically people with good leadership- who can train, motivate and get them good products/projects to work on. That given anybody can leave the company and if you have good managers it wouldn't matter. The real problem happens when you go meta to this. How do you get A level managers. That's a very hard problem to solve and often it also depends of the boss at the very top. The CEO. Many times the revolving door, golden parachute CEOs don't even care. The founder CEO's are tired in most cases. Performing at unicorn level can be brutal on your body and mind on the longer run. And they'd rather semi retire after a few years than continue with that lifestyle. This is where the real problems begin. In cases where the top most boss gives a damn about the company, the company tends to be A player generation factory. Look at Ford under Henry Ford, Apple under Jobs. Microsoft under Bill G. The boss at the top just needs to get this right else its over.
noduerme 4y ago
> the thing that truly require that level of operation. After giving legs to avatars, is there really much work left?
anxrn 4y ago
> I could see a scenario where voluntary attrition helps them get reduce size more organically and with lower cost than a layoff This is exceptionally hard on immigrants on a visa, who have limited options to leave voluntarily.

fnbr 4y ago

Yes, 1000%. Especially when it comes to AI. Meta has an excellent team of ML engineers, many of whom are in exceptionally high demand right now. If I were a ML engineer at Facebook, _especially_ if I was working remotely, I'd be sending out a ton of applications right now. I bet they end up getting an easier, more meaningful, higher paying job. I'm an AI research engineer who was recently laid off and this was my experience.

gat1 4y ago
What's the difference between an ML engineer and an AI research engineer ?
- fnbr 4y ago
  ML engineers work on products, AI research engineers work for AI research labs. Skillset is almost identical, biggest difference is having research experience.
- jonathankoren 4y ago
  The first ships products. The second is the code monkey to the statistician.
tick_tock_tick 4y ago
> I bet they end up getting an easier, more meaningful, higher paying job. They won't. > I'm an AI research engineer who was recently laid off and this was my experience. But not from Facebook? They are very well compensated right now; they aren't just going to drop into a better paying role.
- fnbr 4y ago
  FAANGs aren’t anywhere near the high end of the ML job market currently.
  - Nimitz14 4y ago
    Is this comment speaking from personal experience? Meta pays much more than any other FAANG. E.g. Know someone who's openai offer (2x Google) was matched by meta.

ben7799 4y ago

It's hard to see how anyone has thought FB/Meta would be a great place to work for a long time. They have been involved in so many shady things and have had such a "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach it sounds maddening. I think a lot of people working there just made the calculated decision that Meta being at the very high end of the compensation scale made it worth it. Even if you are in the ML/AI stuff. You have to balance out that they were funding at a very high rate versus that they were funding the work for less than stellar reasons.

foobiekr 4y ago
It’s been the money.
- distcs 4y ago
  Literally said in the comment you are replying to if you bother to read until the 3rd para!
  - foobiekr 4y ago
    I think you’re missing the point of my deliberately terse reply. All of the replies you are getting are trying to tell you that there’s no deep thinking involved. There’s no “hey I considered it and the comp overcame my concerns” etc. Most of the leetcode-into-fang people are not doing a moral calculus or even spending thirty seconds thinking about the ethical aspects. There are no concerns. There are no ethics for most of the people in our industry. It is an employer who pays well so they work there. Your comment implies that, yes, it came down to comp, but also implies that for Facebook employees, on average, there is any thought process beyond economic maximization. There isn’t. I know a ton of facebook and ex-facebook engineers. They also worked for famously ethical companies like Zynga and Uber. Now and then they’ll do the pretend performative handwringing or whatever but their decisions are consistent. There is just money.
scarface74 4y ago
> It's hard to see how anyone has thought FB/Meta would be a great place to work for a long time. Maybe because, I don’t know, Meta pays well? I don’t go to work for self fulfillment. I work to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. No I don’t work for Meta nor have I ever.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

alvis 4y ago

A players always in demand, no matter whatever the economic situation. They have the freedom to choose wherever they want to work. I'm not sure how many A players have left meta, but I'm sure A players never want to work in a low morale company. The damage is much higher than layoff number.

scarface74 4y ago

So exactly where are you going to find this “less volatile environment”? Other BigTech companies that are also doing layoffs? Unprofitable startups or other money losing recently public companies? Are they going to sully themselves and work as “enterprise developers” (note sarcasm)?

Balgair 4y ago

>... I wonder if sending this message out like this is a huge gamble on Meta’s part. I don't know how to break this to HN, but the Zuck isn't the sharpest tool in the shed. He may be gambling, but Hanlon's Razor says otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

jonathankoren 4y ago
The guy lucked into a money making machine that was nigh impossible to screw up. Hasn’t done much since except do the obvious when you have a mountain of cash — buy competitors.
- okeuro49 4y ago
  It's odd when people think that Zuckerberg is some sort of genius for creating a cleaner looking clone of MySpace.
- scarface74 4y ago
  How did that work out for MySpace, Google+, Friendster, etc?
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Lol.. such a foolish comment. He didn't luck into anything. He stole it and made it into what it is today. Remember the login to your email and we'll send invites to everyone? Facebook invented that. Keep it restricted to .edu and rolling out school by school was a strategy. Identify companies who are a threat and buy them.. facebook was very successful at that. Luck had very little to do with facebook's success.
  - jonathankoren 4y ago
    Luck had everything to do with it. FB was no different than Six Degrees, or Friendster, or Orkut, let alone MySpace. Identifying threats? Please. EVERYONE knows who the threats to FB were and are. It’s just that not all of us has the money to buy them. Mark Zuckerberg is average. His one big “innovation” is taking legs out of Second Life.

devjab 4y ago

> I wonder if sending this message out like this is a huge gamble on Meta’s part. I'm Danish, but we have laws and regulations about mass-layoffs which means companies have to give employees an advance notice of 30-60-90 days, depending on company and layoff size. I imagine California might have something similar.

ardit33 4y ago
CA is 60 days, NYC is 90, federal is 60 by default (WARN act). Most companies choose to lay you off, then give you 'severance' package/pay that is equal or more to those days.

codemac 4y ago

This was posted the week after all management should have communicated AE to A players. I know for senior directors last day of performance review comms was Friday. What is AE? Meta has a program for their top ~1% or so (who knows really) where they dump a pile of RSUs on your head, "additional equity", to retain you and bet on your future at the company. For most it's 2-4x your annual stock refresher, though I don't know exactly how it varies. If you're E7+, this is another 1M+ stock grant on a 4 year vest on top of your 600k+ refresher grant. Stock is up from their internal refresher pricing. Their "A players" all just got ~5% bump on their 1.5M+ RSU grant. G and other FAANG struggle to compete with Meta on comp for the actual A players. We'll see if they budgeted enough for AE to keep the people that matter.

blsapologist42 4y ago
While some people do get 1M/yr, it's hardly every E7+. I don't know the exact % obviously, but anecdotally it's <30% (though more get the smaller grants--around 250k or 500k).

fwungy 4y ago

There has to be plenty of demand at the lower tiers. There is a ton of work to do everywhere. It's just that they don't pay the same as top tier. FANGs are holding a lot of talent to keep them from competitors, as has been pointed out.