5 ms·

I 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

by saurik 4y ago

I 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 ago
The 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 ago
  I 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.
  - twelve40 4y ago
    how could middle managers double the headcount by themselves? nobody above them noticed that?
    - christophilus 4y ago
      Probably exactly this. Each tier of management hired a fair bit more than they should have. Managers are generally incentivized to do so. The behavior was normalized and no one really noticed while money was cheap and all seemed well with the world.
  - fmajid 4y ago
    No. There was a data science conference in the Western US a decade ago. Mark Zuckerberg showed up unannounced, with a job offer for every single attendee. The strategy comes straight from the top, and it makes perfect sense. Even if they are not fully utilized, even a FAANG salary is small potatoes compared to what top-tier talent can bring to a company. Think of it as the HR version of what VC do, invest in many people knowing 90% will fail to live up to their potential, because the 10% that do more than make up for it.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Honestly I can't think of any evidence to support this theory.
- borroka 4y ago
  For a new team that was set up in my company, there was this idea that we should have had some slack in the system, that is, a certain number of people should be rotating on a sort of "bench", ready to get into action when new work came up: an absurd view of intellectual work, which I very much doubt is viable in a top company like Facebook. As for (2), that's as true as fairy tales.
  - QuercusMax 4y ago
    I'm not sure it's so absurd. There's always unexpected tasks that show up which can throw off a schedule. Or sick leave, vacation, etc. Things happen. I've worked as a TL on several teams before where we didn't assign any implementation work to me specifically, but I was there to jump in and help paddle the boat when folks got stuck. This worked great, because usually the sticky places were integration points between subsystems, which can be especially tough for junior engineers to navigate. As someone with the big picture I could jump in and save them tons of time. In the meantime, if I had spare cycles I'd work on tooling, test automation (and especially stubbing out and deflaking integration tests). Projects where I did this tended to have fewer bugs and hit their deadlines.
    - borroka 4y ago
      But the role you are describing is different. What I referring to is a team of 50 people, say, with 10 of them that are "on rotation" sitting on the bench and wait for new assignments. What happens is that 2 of them get used to the "vacation" and are not much motivated to get on a new project when the time comes, 2 disappear, 1 takes advantage of the R&R to work on tools and do some self-study, and 6 start interviewing for other companies. Horses want to run.
dgs_sgd 4y ago
> no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever again I don't think they'd ever claim this because these companies do way more than "maintain a single app". If companies don't attempt to innovate, even big ones, they lose in the marketplace. Meta for example has multiple apps to support, each serving hundreds of millions of users. On top of mere maintenance, they experiment and add new features. On top of that, what about the occasional greenfield/skunkworks type projects? It's a shame your friend worked on three consecutive projects that got axed, but that's a separate problem from him being able to coast without getting fired for it.
- zer0zzz 4y ago
  I work at Meta on compiler support for all kinds of apps. We regularly write and use some pretty aggressive compiler optimizations and we often experiment and evolve lots of compiler and programming language features that are really experimental for use in our apps and services. I don’t think you can directly compare an app like the ones a small team can build to the apps that larger more established companies have to maintain and evolve. I mean sure you could just do a full app rewrite and start from scratch but that’s hugely risky and certainly fails more often than it succeeds.
  - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    Facebooks compiler team basically exists because rewrites are crazy hard.
jjulius 4y ago
> ... no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever again... Nor do we need to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a gigantic new building[1], on the roof of which we will put a 12.6-acre park and live animals, including foxes, so all of those thousands and thousands of people can maintain that single app (well, in reality, apps), ever again. I will forever be blown away by the excess I witnessed every time I visited that campus, and I'm sure it's similar elsewhere. [1]https://www.builtinsf.com/2020/02/25/facebook-headquarters-menlo-park-office https://www.builtinsf.com/2020/02/25/facebook-headquarters-m...
- dymk 4y ago
  The smoked BBQ lunch spot made it all worth it, though
  - fatnoah 4y ago
    The Meat Shack is legit!
corbulo 4y ago
Saying Meta is just a single app is like saying Google is just a search engine or Amazon is just a e-commerce site. Meta while unsurprisingly not very efficient, does need a lot of employees to maintain what they've built.
- twelve40 4y ago
  they don't need 87000 people to maintain what they have built, if you don't believe me, take it from Zuck, who already fired like what, 20k of them?
  - corbulo 4y ago
    You should read their 10-Q reports to figure out how they're violating their fiduciary duty with your claims here. You'd win millions of dollars in that suit.
greenthrow 4y ago
"A friend if a friend said he didn't do anything at Google" plus one lady on Tiktok are not evidence of the widespread malfeasance you are claiming. I know people directly who have been affected by the layoffs. They did work. It's just work that has been deprioritized. Stop trying to demonize the workers who are victims of mismanagement.
- chriscappuccio 4y ago
  Did you read the article? It certainly doesn't blame the workers.
arcticbull 4y ago
I couldn't disagree more with your take. Meta is one of the most revenue efficient companies in the history of the world. Each employee generates $1.929 million in revenue, and they have an 79.63% gross profit margin vs a sector median of 49%. That's each employee including the recruiters, EMs, etc. Part of the reason these employees had to "fight" for work is intentional - if they had more people than they needed and no forcing function (i.e. perf cycle) then these people wouldn't fight for their work, they'd just sit there getting paid and not complaining about it. The company would then be dramatically less efficient. I disagree with their model in a lot of ways, but this is a completely unfair characterization of how their org actually works. They hired as though the COVID trajectory would continue, and saw less attrition than expected as people stuck to their jobs due to uncertainty. So they're trimming a little and re-focusing. That's all. > "I mean, like, we were just sitting there. We had to basically fight to find work." To put a very fine point on it, the reason they had to fight (like everyone else there) is because if they didn't come up with something to do that was quantifiable and impactful in line with org goals, they'd be terminated within the year. It was their job to find a way to be useful. The system culls those who do not. It can be harsh and impersonal, yes, ruthless even - but it is very effective. > 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. That was at Google. This is Meta. They are very different companies. Each FAANG is completely different internally and it would be a mistake to assume that experience translates.
- dkasper 4y ago
  Just because Meta is pretty revenue efficient already doesn't mean it couldn't be more revenue efficient. Why is $2M per employee good? It's actually quite bad if Meta should be generating $10M per employee.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    I would say an 80% margin is objectively good, and that moving it really doesn't make much difference even if you can make the number feel bigger. Again, their system is designed to be ruthlessly efficient. They probably over-hired like 10-15%. I'd strongly suggest listening to the Odd Lots episode with Patrick McKenzie titled roughly 'what happens to tech workers in the age of layoffs.' I get it's fun to speculate from the outside but there's no reason to look at it and go 'yep should be 5X higher' simply because they have a lot of staff. They have a lot of staff because they have billions of monthly active users and optimizing every aspect of their business is something they can do, and something that yields more profit than cost. A lot of this armchair quarterbacking comes from folks who never worked there. Find someone who works at Meta and ask them about PSC.
concinds 4y ago
The traditional way for companies to learn this lesson are all gone (antitrust breakups, or Innovator's Dilemma-style disruption) since M&A is at an all-time high, antitrust isn't enforced, and companies can just acquire innovative startups. I'm not even convinced that antitrust would fix it at this point. Someone might need to invent "therapy but for corporations" so big orgs can rid themselves of dysfunction (as if).
- FormerBandmate 4y ago
  > Someone might need to invent "therapy but for corporations" so big orgs can rid themselves of dysfunction (as if). That is what leveraged buyouts and activist investors are supposed to do. Emphasis on supposed
  - revelio 4y ago
    Index funds are killing off activist investors.
skybrian 4y ago
It seems like both you and the people you're arguing with are generalizing wildly and lack curiosity. The situation in the article sounds more like a bureaucratic snafu, where the company is hiring but the teams either aren't given open headcount to use, or they don't want to use it on the new hires for some reason. Isn't that weird? Wouldn't you like to know how that happened? I doubt it generalizes, but it's interesting.
maxerickson 4y ago
Why are you so aligned with the man on this?
vba616 4y ago
State governments that are absolutely the symbols of blue state bloat and waste run applications to serve millions of people with a couple of hundred employees.
- rufflez 4y ago
  That is far a better use of resources than to actively promote hate against transgender, gay, women, and other marginalized groups, and now doctors and nurses too - a sad trend in some of the other parts of the country
  - vba616 4y ago
    >That is far a better use of resources I think you have misinterpreted my comment. The phrase "symbols of blue state bloat and waste" is in no way an assertion that they are bloated and wasteful. It's an assertion that nearly everyone (regardless of politics) stereotypes them as such, and believes in the negative characterization of government employees, which is what I was challenging, in context. Not only may they be more efficient than some other states, but more so than some major tech companies too.
    - rufflez 4y ago
      Thanks for the clarification. I have indeed misinterpreted your previous comment
scruple 4y ago
I once worked adjacent to a team with ~700 people. I honestly couldn't comprehend what they were all doing. At one point, they've got some major deadline coming up and they ask for help / borrowed some folks from our team, but after a week or so our teammates started showing back up to our stand-up. I asked how it was going "over there" and the response was, "They don't have anything for us to do."

by saurik 4y ago

swatcoder 4y ago

The 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 ago
I 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.
- twelve40 4y ago
  how could middle managers double the headcount by themselves? nobody above them noticed that?
  - christophilus 4y ago
    Probably exactly this. Each tier of management hired a fair bit more than they should have. Managers are generally incentivized to do so. The behavior was normalized and no one really noticed while money was cheap and all seemed well with the world.
- fmajid 4y ago
  No. There was a data science conference in the Western US a decade ago. Mark Zuckerberg showed up unannounced, with a job offer for every single attendee. The strategy comes straight from the top, and it makes perfect sense. Even if they are not fully utilized, even a FAANG salary is small potatoes compared to what top-tier talent can bring to a company. Think of it as the HR version of what VC do, invest in many people knowing 90% will fail to live up to their potential, because the 10% that do more than make up for it.
arcticbull 4y ago
Honestly I can't think of any evidence to support this theory.
borroka 4y ago
For a new team that was set up in my company, there was this idea that we should have had some slack in the system, that is, a certain number of people should be rotating on a sort of "bench", ready to get into action when new work came up: an absurd view of intellectual work, which I very much doubt is viable in a top company like Facebook. As for (2), that's as true as fairy tales.
- QuercusMax 4y ago
  I'm not sure it's so absurd. There's always unexpected tasks that show up which can throw off a schedule. Or sick leave, vacation, etc. Things happen. I've worked as a TL on several teams before where we didn't assign any implementation work to me specifically, but I was there to jump in and help paddle the boat when folks got stuck. This worked great, because usually the sticky places were integration points between subsystems, which can be especially tough for junior engineers to navigate. As someone with the big picture I could jump in and save them tons of time. In the meantime, if I had spare cycles I'd work on tooling, test automation (and especially stubbing out and deflaking integration tests). Projects where I did this tended to have fewer bugs and hit their deadlines.
  - borroka 4y ago
    But the role you are describing is different. What I referring to is a team of 50 people, say, with 10 of them that are "on rotation" sitting on the bench and wait for new assignments. What happens is that 2 of them get used to the "vacation" and are not much motivated to get on a new project when the time comes, 2 disappear, 1 takes advantage of the R&R to work on tools and do some self-study, and 6 start interviewing for other companies. Horses want to run.

dgs_sgd 4y ago

> no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever again I don't think they'd ever claim this because these companies do way more than "maintain a single app". If companies don't attempt to innovate, even big ones, they lose in the marketplace. Meta for example has multiple apps to support, each serving hundreds of millions of users. On top of mere maintenance, they experiment and add new features. On top of that, what about the occasional greenfield/skunkworks type projects? It's a shame your friend worked on three consecutive projects that got axed, but that's a separate problem from him being able to coast without getting fired for it.

zer0zzz 4y ago
I work at Meta on compiler support for all kinds of apps. We regularly write and use some pretty aggressive compiler optimizations and we often experiment and evolve lots of compiler and programming language features that are really experimental for use in our apps and services. I don’t think you can directly compare an app like the ones a small team can build to the apps that larger more established companies have to maintain and evolve. I mean sure you could just do a full app rewrite and start from scratch but that’s hugely risky and certainly fails more often than it succeeds.
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  Facebooks compiler team basically exists because rewrites are crazy hard.

jjulius 4y ago

> ... no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever again... Nor do we need to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a gigantic new building[1], on the roof of which we will put a 12.6-acre park and live animals, including foxes, so all of those thousands and thousands of people can maintain that single app (well, in reality, apps), ever again. I will forever be blown away by the excess I witnessed every time I visited that campus, and I'm sure it's similar elsewhere. [1]https://www.builtinsf.com/2020/02/25/facebook-headquarters-menlo-park-office https://www.builtinsf.com/2020/02/25/facebook-headquarters-m...

dymk 4y ago
The smoked BBQ lunch spot made it all worth it, though
- fatnoah 4y ago
  The Meat Shack is legit!

corbulo 4y ago

Saying Meta is just a single app is like saying Google is just a search engine or Amazon is just a e-commerce site. Meta while unsurprisingly not very efficient, does need a lot of employees to maintain what they've built.

twelve40 4y ago
they don't need 87000 people to maintain what they have built, if you don't believe me, take it from Zuck, who already fired like what, 20k of them?
- corbulo 4y ago
  You should read their 10-Q reports to figure out how they're violating their fiduciary duty with your claims here. You'd win millions of dollars in that suit.

greenthrow 4y ago

"A friend if a friend said he didn't do anything at Google" plus one lady on Tiktok are not evidence of the widespread malfeasance you are claiming. I know people directly who have been affected by the layoffs. They did work. It's just work that has been deprioritized. Stop trying to demonize the workers who are victims of mismanagement.

chriscappuccio 4y ago
Did you read the article? It certainly doesn't blame the workers.

arcticbull 4y ago

I couldn't disagree more with your take. Meta is one of the most revenue efficient companies in the history of the world. Each employee generates $1.929 million in revenue, and they have an 79.63% gross profit margin vs a sector median of 49%. That's each employee including the recruiters, EMs, etc. Part of the reason these employees had to "fight" for work is intentional - if they had more people than they needed and no forcing function (i.e. perf cycle) then these people wouldn't fight for their work, they'd just sit there getting paid and not complaining about it. The company would then be dramatically less efficient. I disagree with their model in a lot of ways, but this is a completely unfair characterization of how their org actually works. They hired as though the COVID trajectory would continue, and saw less attrition than expected as people stuck to their jobs due to uncertainty. So they're trimming a little and re-focusing. That's all. > "I mean, like, we were just sitting there. We had to basically fight to find work." To put a very fine point on it, the reason they had to fight (like everyone else there) is because if they didn't come up with something to do that was quantifiable and impactful in line with org goals, they'd be terminated within the year. It was their job to find a way to be useful. The system culls those who do not. It can be harsh and impersonal, yes, ruthless even - but it is very effective. > 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. That was at Google. This is Meta. They are very different companies. Each FAANG is completely different internally and it would be a mistake to assume that experience translates.

dkasper 4y ago
Just because Meta is pretty revenue efficient already doesn't mean it couldn't be more revenue efficient. Why is $2M per employee good? It's actually quite bad if Meta should be generating $10M per employee.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  I would say an 80% margin is objectively good, and that moving it really doesn't make much difference even if you can make the number feel bigger. Again, their system is designed to be ruthlessly efficient. They probably over-hired like 10-15%. I'd strongly suggest listening to the Odd Lots episode with Patrick McKenzie titled roughly 'what happens to tech workers in the age of layoffs.' I get it's fun to speculate from the outside but there's no reason to look at it and go 'yep should be 5X higher' simply because they have a lot of staff. They have a lot of staff because they have billions of monthly active users and optimizing every aspect of their business is something they can do, and something that yields more profit than cost. A lot of this armchair quarterbacking comes from folks who never worked there. Find someone who works at Meta and ask them about PSC.

concinds 4y ago

The traditional way for companies to learn this lesson are all gone (antitrust breakups, or Innovator's Dilemma-style disruption) since M&A is at an all-time high, antitrust isn't enforced, and companies can just acquire innovative startups. I'm not even convinced that antitrust would fix it at this point. Someone might need to invent "therapy but for corporations" so big orgs can rid themselves of dysfunction (as if).

FormerBandmate 4y ago
> Someone might need to invent "therapy but for corporations" so big orgs can rid themselves of dysfunction (as if). That is what leveraged buyouts and activist investors are supposed to do. Emphasis on supposed
- revelio 4y ago
  Index funds are killing off activist investors.

skybrian 4y ago

It seems like both you and the people you're arguing with are generalizing wildly and lack curiosity. The situation in the article sounds more like a bureaucratic snafu, where the company is hiring but the teams either aren't given open headcount to use, or they don't want to use it on the new hires for some reason. Isn't that weird? Wouldn't you like to know how that happened? I doubt it generalizes, but it's interesting.

maxerickson 4y ago

Why are you so aligned with the man on this?

vba616 4y ago

State governments that are absolutely the symbols of blue state bloat and waste run applications to serve millions of people with a couple of hundred employees.

rufflez 4y ago
That is far a better use of resources than to actively promote hate against transgender, gay, women, and other marginalized groups, and now doctors and nurses too - a sad trend in some of the other parts of the country
- vba616 4y ago
  >That is far a better use of resources I think you have misinterpreted my comment. The phrase "symbols of blue state bloat and waste" is in no way an assertion that they are bloated and wasteful. It's an assertion that nearly everyone (regardless of politics) stereotypes them as such, and believes in the negative characterization of government employees, which is what I was challenging, in context. Not only may they be more efficient than some other states, but more so than some major tech companies too.
  - rufflez 4y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. I have indeed misinterpreted your previous comment

scruple 4y ago

I once worked adjacent to a team with ~700 people. I honestly couldn't comprehend what they were all doing. At one point, they've got some major deadline coming up and they ask for help / borrowed some folks from our team, but after a week or so our teammates started showing back up to our stand-up. I asked how it was going "over there" and the response was, "They don't have anything for us to do."