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Former Meta staffer reveals she had to ‘fight for work’
- seydor 4y agoAn excess of money
- gardenhedge 4y ago[flagged]
- Apocryphon 4y agoThe concept of FAANG hoarding workers to deprive competitors of talent is an idea that has been bandied about on HN for quite some time. Finally, some solid substantiation of this practice.
- amadeuspagel 4y agoI don't think so. She describes her experience of not getting any work, but she merely speculates that she was hired so other companies couldn't have here. This isn't any more solid that any speculation on this subject on HN.
- subsubzero 4y ago+1, I am really glad to see actual proof of this anti-competitive practice. The sole purpose of which is to "starve" out smaller competitors and startups of talent so there is less competition for meta and other larger incumbents. My guess is here is wall street forced Zuck's hand to offload this excess headcount by driving the stock down, but given FB's share structure(Zuckerberg has almost complete control over the company due to his share structure ownership) he could have kept along his pre-2022 path without much consequence except a battered share price.
- dfadsadsf 4y agoYes. Meta is on a mission to starve startups and smaller competitors from people who do DEI work. What would competitor do without diverse talent in recruiting? >Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry.
- andrewmutz 4y agoI am skeptical this proved that Meta hires to starve other companies of talent. This all that the person said: > it kind of seemed that Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us and they were just hoarding us like Pokémon cards Sounds like it was just speculation
- umeshunni 4y agoThis person was a DEI hire: > Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
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- 4674yryfhf 4y agoIt doesn't really sound like she was hired to hoard talent though. From the article it sounds like she was hired as a diversity token. She probably wasn't put on anything significant because if you put a token on something valuable and they're lackluster you can't fire them without losing your token which means you're stuck with them dragging the project down. Nothing-work was a safe middle ground that solved the dillema.
- spaced-out 4y agoYou really think Meta hired this recruiter as part of some plan to keep smaller companies from being able to hire recruiters?
- Apocryphon 4y agoShe mentions other employees experiencing the same. Perhaps this is the first whistleblower who will pave the way for more corroborating with their own respective stories.
- bradlys 4y agoShe also sounds a bit like a clout goblin from just what I've seen. Clout goblins are infamously known for - you'll be surprised to hear this - making shit up.
- dilyevsky 4y agoI don’t think it’s necessarily a master plan it’s just an emergent property of these highly successful monopolistic megacorps
- deanCommie 4y ago> “Everyone else that I worked with got to work on stuff but I didn’t. So I am one of those employees that was hired into a really strange position where they immediately put me into a group of individuals that was not working. > “I mean, like, we were just sitting there. We had to basically fight to find work. It was a very strange environment and it kind of seemed that Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us and they were just hoarding us like Pokémon cards.” People claim they want autonomy, they accept a position at a company that famously has a bottoms-up hacker ethos. Then they complain that they weren't immediately "assigned" work on Day 1. WTF.
- bumby 4y agoI think this depends on the seniority of the hire. A junior employee needs more mentoring and "assigning" under they get enough contextual understanding to know what's important and what isn't. Someone brand-new to an organization isn't likely to understand what problems their time is best spent on solving.
- politician 4y agoIs there any justifiable explanation for this hiring strategy? "Keep us from working for others" seems like flawed reasoning. If they went to work for others, then wage pressure should drop, but by hoarding developers on fake projects wage pressure increases. A strategy that raises median wages doesn't seem like it would come from a FAANG.
- bunnyswipe_com 4y agoThey can borrow hundreds of billions, they don't care.
- _dain_ 4y ago>Is there any justifiable explanation for this hiring strategy? yes. but you can only obliquely hint at it.
- HDThoreaun 4y agoShe was a recruiter that started right when meta instituted a hiring freeze. Then they were too slow to lay recruiting people off.
- shagie 4y agoThe hiring freeze was in September (Meta Will Freeze Most Hiring, Zuckerberg Tells Employees - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/29/technology/meta-hiring-freeze.html?unlocked_article_code=Mnqhz6Ce4ykhLyvhe4aeRSv5OO20UvVNTJa6V7ioXH8ph4xAX2EvtvQ_0evh_U4OtRRsxR_X62nXwiQYRCqMDl2cfdtZ3N-pdGAXkHcQsAvBj8ls8KGAcXLbHIZWg2D_qE6eC0XPEo_1FbHvVU4nqb_p46hZhJOXLanjcrpTD2oNtbxw-Z2WIjZ_5dGYaqwfdEzfocY5AIkMU8ygCOzpDSD5lUMTHg3tqcel4GBxpz5yAT5EJPe6NLIHmTw8414j3yf3pMXhDu9MuM5qncB7Uph67A4xhQHk2-BdEIek8geKSaHFfoZLIgftdH5zLRxqxn0M1SZUMlCbWZwjRrRs&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/29/technology/meta-hiring-fr... ) She was hired in April ( https://wapo.st/3lmVr6w https://wapo.st/3lmVr6w ) with promises that it would be fully funded for the entire duration of the 12 months (appears to be the standard for a recruiter).
- Clubber 4y agoBefore the NCAA started limiting scholarships in 1973, teams could stock up on workhorses -- Bear Bryant's Alabama teams would bring in blue-chippers by the shipload, not so his Tide could use them, so other schools couldn't. It's been done before. If Google hired the guys who made ChatGPT and put them on production support or anything, they wouldn't be scared for their existence right now. In tech, it only takes a handful of people to put you out of business in a few years, and you'd never see it coming. The corpses of once great tech companies are many: MySpace, Yahoo, Sun, etc. I would argue the tech giants aren't so much afraid of each other, but upstarts out of nowhere that makes their business obsolete.
- lnsru 4y agoThere always 2 sides of a story. This just does not sound trustworthy. I had also a job where I was reading Wikipedia all day. Management forgot to buy me a software license and I had nothing to do. I silently quit.
- bumby 4y agoI'm curious how this works. Did you continually remind management that you didn't have the tools to do your job and they ignored you or were you quietly satisfied that this gave you a plausible excuse to do nothing?
- lnsru 4y agoI told them, 30 days trial is over and asked to buy. Then I asked if it was ordered. Nope it wasn’t. After 4 months it was bought, but I left. During these 4 months I did 2 bug fixes in other departments. This is one of these memories to understand, that I am only a row in excel in payroll department.
- bumby 4y agoPlease take this in the spirit it is intended, but maybe it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you act like just "a row in excel payroll" (i.e., you aren't meaningfully and consistently engaged in solving problems, even those unexpected ones), you will likely be treated as such.
- lnsru 4y agoHello, thanks for warm advice. My luck in corporate setting is really bad. I am still analyzing why it’s happening. Being hired for a design of Ethernet camera in a company where Ethernet traffic analysis tools are forbidden does not happen to everybody.
- msm_ 4y agoDo you honestly don't see the problem in your own behaviour? Your manager is as busy as you, and also a human - communicating your needs is your responsibility. I had a similar expreience with one piece of software that is expensive, notoriously hard to buy, but used by everyone in my industry. - In one company, I complained to managers immediately, but at the same time used a strictly worse (but free) alternative, became good with it, while still raising the issue up to two levels above me (unfortunately my managers were as powerless as me - just big corporation things). - In another company, I just took ownership of the issue, talked to sales myself, worked out an acceptable solution and got the deal sealed (this was a much smaller company though). Unless you're a junior or early mid-level you're expected to show some initiative.
- saos 4y ago> It was a very strange environment and it kind of seemed that Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us and they were just hoarding us like Pokémon cards.” Really????
- spaceguillotine 4y agohonestly the first month I worked at Google they knew they needed bodies but didn't have offices for us, we doubled up on desks and split into two shifts had zero policy for the work they wanted done and some days had no available work load for our teams and then would have us do busy work that no one was trained on for other depts who would them throw out all our work. (this was 2010 to 2012) my NDA is expired yo. Second shift got Pizza every night for meals as the kitchen wouldn't stay open late enough for us.
- gumby 4y ago> Rabois ... told a banking event earlier this month that Big Tech companies like Meta and Google had hired thousands of people ... and to stop them working for rivals. I got an informal offer like this over dinner once, when I was trying to get a startup off the ground: "Come work for us; you can do your startup or find something else interesting. Just send me an email and I'll hire you". They told me explicitly that they were hiring certain people to keep those folks from working for the competition. I stress informal because, though I continue talking/emailing with this person (whom I already knew), and still do, I didn't ask to follow up. So sure, they could have been bullshitting, but why volunteer something like that unless it was real?
- dfadsadsf 4y agoShe was recruiter hired right at about time when Meta announced hiring freeze. The only lesson here is not that FAANG hires people to do nothing but that Meta was way too slow to layoff 90% of recruiting org probably because it hoped economy/revenues improve and company will resume hiring.
- helen___keller 4y agoWas she a recruiter? It didn’t specify in the article
- Matthias247 4y agoit's in the headline: "staffer"
- wizee 4y agoStaffer means member of staff. For example, engineers are staffers.
- komadori 4y agoThat just means a member of staff.
- Matthias247 4y agoOk sorry. Then it was a misunderstanding of my side as non native speaker. I always assumed it means recruiter since I’ve so far never seen the word used in another context
- komadori 4y agoNo worries :-). To be fair, it does sound, "staff-er", like someone who produces "staff". I've never it used as a reference to recruitment, but perhaps in some contexts it is used that way.
- 4y ago
- marmee 4y agoI always thought that when revenues are too high these companies need to raise expenses so they could have places to trim for rough quarters up ahead. Therefore the hiring strategy in 2020 was sound. I've also seen the reverse, Netflix not curbing on shared accounts and Microsoft having really limited anti piracy tooling early on, allowing them to keep revenue reserves for the future
- themitigating 4y agoI thought the lack of anti piracy for Windows and Abode products was a way of getting people into the ecosystem which helps later. Not sure if this was ever confirmed
- hangonhn 4y agoYeah at one of my old jobs in IT, Microsoft would perform software license audits just after a new release of Office. They would find that we were in deficit and then force us to buy licenses but the only licenses we could buy were the new versions of Office. Of course then we would have to upgrade all the other ones that had the licenses. This happens every few years. Obviously it was our fault for not doing better license allocation but I feel like Microsoft knew this is common and took advantage of it.
- WalterBright 4y agoBack in the Zortech days, we didn't install any copy protection mechanism for just this reason. (Also, copy protection annoys people, and annoying our customers was not something we wished to do.) That also meant we had no idea how many copies were pirated.
- lockhouse 4y agoMicrosoft still doesn’t really care that much about piracy for some products. You can run Windows 11 Pro with 99% of the features in tact without activating it.
- marmee 4y ago
- yalogin 4y agoThis sounds really bizarre to me. A company hiring to hoard talent is just mind-blowing. If they have surplus money, they should just acquire smaller companies and find talent. I really hope this is not a company wide culture promoted by the upper management and that some middle level manager who wants to feel important started hiring to expand their team. If there is one thing I want clarity on it's this. I really hope Mark and Sundar talk about this at some point and explain what is going on
- pengaru 4y agoDisclaimer: I didn't watch her video. Nearly every tech job I've had there was the potential to do very little to nothing and stay employed. What I've gathered from her quotes in the Fortune article is that this person failed to take advantage of her opportunity to be paid highly with total autonomy while surrounded by Smart People. It's long been an established practice to hire talented engineers and let them make interesting things. Give them as much autonomy as you can afford to. If they're smart and driven they'll produce value. Otherwise you're herding cats to do things you may not even understand nearly as well as the supposed geniuses you've hired. It's not a good use of your time and you'll probably fail at it. Just look at the history of UNIX and Plan9 FFS. These guys were messing around with what interested them! Management didn't know what to tell them to work on... and we're all better for it with these wonderful innovations. This former Meta staffer just put a big fat DO NOT HIRE sign on her forehead as far as I'm concerned.
- robryan 4y agoNot everyone wants this though. Many people, especially when first starting out, would prefer some tasks to be assigned to them.
- lapcat 4y ago> It's long been an established practice to hire talented engineers and let them make interesting things. She wasn't an engineer. "Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry." The Insider article has a better representation of her complaints: "There were other people in our program that were nurses, teachers, and firefighters. They left their jobs, their entire career and Meta didn't even let them get one year of experience." "We were trying to pivot into a career. If you have anything less than a year, you have to basically start from scratch again. You have to start at the bottom." Basically, these were people trying to break into tech, so they were in need of both guidance and experience, not at all like hiring experienced engineers and letting them run wild. https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-facebook-worker-tech-layoffs-severance-pay-mark-zuckerberg-dei-2023-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-facebook-worker-tech-la...
- 4y ago
- ugh123 4y agoTLDR; Her job was "DEI Program Sourcing Specialist" Basically, a recruiter.
- msm_ 4y agoHow is this a TLDR.
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- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- borroka 4y agoI find myself in a situation similar to the one described by "Meta staffer" in the article. I was hired a few years ago in a biotech company and, after some months of mostly uneventful work -- but I was doing something -- for the past two years I have done almost nothing. I tried to propose new ideas and projects, offered my expertise to other groups, but my attempts were met with benign indifference. After realizing that looking for work meant to others that I had nothing better to do at work (or nothing to do, basically, at work), I have decided to put the proverbial feet on the desk and milk the money until I can find a job -- elsewhere -- that I like better. The challenge I see is that I am getting paid very well -- exceptionally well considering I do very little -- and very much enjoying the mental and physical freedom that my current nonexistent workload is giving me.
- theGnuMe 4y agoUmm.. don't you have a manager? Surely they could find work for you, no?
- borroka 4y agoI do. But it is one of the situations that converge in a kind of mutually beneficial indifference. It is no different in spirit from that of a husband and wife who live under the same roof but seek intimacy elsewhere, or who have repressed their desires for so long that they no longer even remember how to make a baby.
- andmikey 4y agoMy first job out of college was like this. My manager knew I had no work and had no particular interest in letting me take on anything I proposed or found. I ended up quitting a few months in because (on top of a few other issues) I found it way too soul-destroying to have nothing to do.
- tmpz22 4y agoThis is because it takes work to make work. There's planning, and scoping, and cross-functional coordination, and, and, and. From that angle its easy to understand why a manager would like to do little, as long as their manager has a similar relationship with them.
- dathinab 4y ago> or to stop them working for rival or because they bought up companies to prevent competition, but couldn't just shut them down because doing so isn't quite legal or because they have enough work for all that people, but fail to manage the work load distribution because it's really hard and for many core projects having more people isn't always good beyond a certain point
- floatinglotus 4y agoAnother day, another indication that Meta is an awful company from top to bottom, ruled by a socially awkward buffoon from his private island. I wonder what is in store for tomorrow?
- dang 4y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive or name-calling comments to HN. You may not owe companies better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- shagie 4y agoArticle about Brit Levy from Washington Post a bit over a month ago with some more context and info: After layoffs, Meta, tech companies face uphill battle to boost diversity - https://wapo.st/3lmVr6w https://wapo.st/3lmVr6w
- giords 4y agoBig Head, from "Silicon Valley" the show, comes to mind
- wgx 4y agoRest and Vest
- saurik 4y agoI have been in what feels like a ridiculous number of arguments over the years with people who will defend to the hilt the idea that these companies all need as many workers as they do, insisting that the very idea that they might have a ton of people hired doing effectively nothing is some combination of insulating and naive. Of course, the fact that some of us actually know such people--my favorite example: I had an indirect friend who loved to tell the story of how, after his third project at Google got killed before launch, he just stopped working and realized there were little, if any, actual consequences for doing nothing ;P--never seemed to hold any weight. I'm really hoping that, if nothing else comes out of 202[23], it is a realization that the size and scope of these teams was, in fact, madness, and no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever again (but, sadly, I know that this isn't the case, as about three months from now no one will remember any of this happened and none of this has ever come to light and if you try to casually mention it as if it were common knowledge you'll get flooded with "citation needed" as we live in the land of Eternal September where somehow no one ever thinks it is useful to study even recent history).
- swatcoder 4y agoThe FAANG team sizes and TC packages were never about fueling the production engine. They were about: 1. stockpiling fuel for when you may need it 2. starving your competitors of fuel With money cheap and valuations absurd, idle or overpriced talent was a much lesser problem than somebody else hoovering up all the good stuff. So you recruit aggressively using mechanical filters like leetcode/whiteboard tests, then let internal processes figure out who’s actually worth using on meaningful projects. The rest you can sit on, just in case.
- spywaregorilla 4y agoI hear this a lot but I think it's bullshit. Neither of those are goals that anyone would realistically pursue. It was almost certainly middle managers wanting to demonstrate impact by leading a larger team.
- 4y ago
- neonate 4y agohttps://archive.ph/maka7 https://archive.ph/maka7
- yawnxyz 4y agoDo engineers and designers suffer the same fate? I interviewed with them a long time ago and basically couldn't pass the interview. Had lots of ideas on what I wanted to work on, and things I think would have made the platform better. Didn't matter. Why do they put up hugely difficult entrance exams, employ the "best" and then... not put them to work? What's the point of burning so much time and capital?
- FridgeSeal 4y ago> What's the point of burning so much time and capital? Difficult to prove, but arguably, denying resources and skills to the competition (or any other company in general).
- Mizoguchi 4y agoPerhaps because one A-player working for Meta is one A-player less working for Google or TikTok.
- malermeister 4y agoWhen I worked for Facebook, this was more or less accepted as common knowledge amongst the employees. It's a pretty sweet deal if you get your fulfillment from other (worse-paid) pursuits. I wfh'd a lot and dramatically improved my cooking skills!
- rodgerd 4y agoIf they hired you, you'd be competing with existing staff who are already doing the practical day-to-day work that they need done. These kind of hires that the interviewee represents are about keeping people away from competitors. These companies - Facebook aren't the only one - are so rich that they can afford to hire people simply to reduce the chance that competitors will emerge; rather than waiting until you have to pay big money for Instagram or Whatsapp, you identify the kind of people who have the skills to build competitors, hire them, and lock them in a basement somewhere.
- tourgen 4y ago[flagged]
- tinglymintyfrsh 4y agoIn technical circles, I doubt it. ICs can do whatever they want. Performance is based on impact, so you have to pick the right things to work on yourself. There are very few non-performers because the calibration process is brutal and efficient. Maybe there are non-technical realms of empire building like any megacorp, but that would be nothing new.
- cletus 4y agoA lot of people don't understand what's going on here. Maybe you haven't worked for a large company but it operates quite differently to a small company. Two things can be true at once: a company can both need to hire and people at that company can have difficulty finding a role. These are not contradictory statements. Orgs and teams within large companies have budgets and/or head counts. They need to "spend" these to hire. They hire with external hires and internal transfers. Like any recruitment it can take time. A given position might have a bunch of external and internal candidates. Team may also want to keep head count open to use opportunistically. If you are employed at a large company, you may be competing with a bunch of internal and external candidates for a job. You can fail to find a position and these positions are being filled by other people. Think about it this way: we have an unemployment rate that is in large part transitional because of these time factors. We won't hit 0% unemployment. That's just not possible. Saying failure to find an internal job is evidence of over-hiring is like saying "there is no labor shortage because I could not get a job" (side note: for completeness, "labor shortage" isn't realy anyway; there are only "wage deficits" not "labor shortages").
- throwbadubadu 4y agoI call nonsense, have worked for large comoany. Processes are long, bureaucracy is huge, yes, but in no case there was never enough work to fill peoples desks, from software engineers to HR, wtf? The unemployment comparison from company to whole society stinks, too, and there are examples that even 0% unemployment can be true, but again not sure how this relates to a company.
- shagie 4y agoEvery piece of your work is stuck somewhere in the system. There's a PR waiting for review, there's a product owner who hasn't made up their mind about something and is waiting to have a meeting with 5 other people who invariably always have one of them unavailable. The dependency for another piece of work is still buggy and needs to be fixed and updated before can do something there. The solution to this? Hire more people so that the bottlenecks can be cleaned... and Brooks's law starts taking its toll on every single late project. Sure, there are some teams that are rather focused and can push things through, but there are a lot that stuck somewhere and the hiring to try to. do things in those teams just makes it worse. There's work to do - just none of it can be done in this part of the org because there are too many people.
- DrNosferatu 4y agoHey Meta! I’m doing a PhD in some pretty cool machine learning, do you want to hire me right now, even before I finish? Much better use of your resources. Let me know ;)
- jgerrish 4y ago> "It’s a tradeoff and it sounds great, but it’s going to really screw up people’s careers.” I would be careful with that. There are software engineers, and talent in other fields in this world who are targeted by competitors. The competitors may not intend to put them on a project right away. Or ever. If anything, getting squirreled away like that may be a signal, when combined with other signals, that you're talented. This backlash may have unintended consequences. There are a lot of other variables. I'm sorry this happened to a lot of engineers, but a lot of them can talk publicly about it without getting made fun of. We're not laughing at them.
- sgerenser 4y agoNo to say this didn’t also happen to engineers, but this article is about people in a recruiter training program.