13 ms·

Meta employees grill Mark Zuckerberg at all-hands meeting following layoffs

79 points by bryan0 4y ago

Overtonwindow 4y ago
The utopia is crashing and people are mad.
sposeray 4y ago
[dead]
anotherhue 4y ago
Yeah, that'll do it.
Fede_V 4y ago
It's a vicious cycle, but, every time one of these internal town halls gets leaked to the internet, the execs lose the ability to speak candidly, and the workers feel like execs are completely aloof and detached from the reality on the ground. Unfortunately, it's incredibly difficult to maintain a certain level of trust once an org gets over a certain size.
- poisonborz 4y ago
  Things just don't scale well over a certain size. Like social networks.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  It's just as well. Seeing into the twisted workings of Zuck's mind isn't going to reassure any normal people "Oh, you saw an opportunity to save money by firing people randomly and threatening the rest, so you can get almost as much work out of us without paying bonuses or promoting people this year? Friedman[1] would be very proud of you sir!" 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    Leakers also provide a vital window into company culture for people who may need to decide whether to work there. You never get the truth about what the company and leadership is really like during the Potemkin village tour of recruiting and interviewing.
    - Fede_V 4y ago
      I completely agree re: Potemkin village tour of recruiting, but, those townhalls are not a window into company culture at all exactly because they get leaked. The only way to get a candid view into company culture is to have insider friends that can tell you what it's really like to work there.
extr 4y ago
I'm of a few minds about this. I don't think these questions are unfair, because it's destabilizing mentally to deal with constant rumors, unclear direction, and actual layoffs. I worked at Meta during the Nov layoffs (though not personally impacted), and I remember the day to day anxiety in the lead up and aftermath. Nobody wants that. It's part of the reason I quit. I don't think Mark's answers are necessarily unfair either, he's running a business after all. He does have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, even if that means making difficult staffing decisions (still true even if they were his fault to begin with by over-hiring). Ultimately you agree to participate in this framework by accepting a job at a public company. But there is a point after which it becomes distasteful. It gives me the same sort of feeling as those stories about companies pulling offers right before the start date, after an employee has quit their previous job. Legal? Yes. Justifiable? No doubt. Morally? It's grey. And it leaves a sour taste. On an individual level, it's the kind of thing that is punished in the long run, through reputational damage. In an ideal world I would like to see companies face something similar.
- khazhoux 4y ago
  > He does have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, even if that means making difficult staffing decisions I feel like people over-index on the idea of "fiduciary responsibility to shareholders." I don't think most decisions a CEO makes are really done with shareholders specifically in mind. They do what is best for the company --for its health, growth, and sometimes survival-- and shareholders are just there for the ride. Certainly, there are some executive decisions where shareholders are the primary factors, but by and large I think they're an afterthought at best. He over-hired, he lost faith in the direction of a big chunk of Meta's initiatives, and he now wants to pare back.
  - extr 4y ago
    Honestly I agree, I think "fiduciary responsibility to shareholders" is kind of a funny phrase to be honest. I don't really believe most CEOs at an individual level think of shareholders much except that stock price up means good, and stock price down means bad, and sometimes they complain and we have to justify our actions and respond politely for reasons. To me the phrase almost is a moral shorthand for capitalism. A corporation has no inherent right to life or survival instinct the way a person does, and the phrasing and pretense of "duty to shareholders" is used to give it one by proxy. Does that make sense? So rephrasing my original post, it would be something like "We all agree it's moral to seek profit, since that's the economic system that seems to work, and his actions can be seen as in line with that, so therefore if you agree capitalism makes sense, his actions are justifiable and moral".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
solatic 4y ago
Employees and board members don't have the same interests in a BigCo. Sure, board members will judge Zuckerberg on whether he's getting Meta to make progress on the goals he's set in agreement with the board, which should fulfill the board's goals of increasing shareholder value. But that's not the employee's interest. The employee is interested in whether their employment status is stable, whether their work is engaging / interesting, and whether their employer offers opportunities for advancement, in roughly that order of priority. Employers that focus on that order of priorities typically have no such problems with employee trust. Zuckerberg might as well have said that he doesn't really care if he has employee trust anymore, because he doesn't foresee , in the short term, Meta employees willingly leaving their jobs in droves in a bad economy, trust or no trust. But smart Meta employees will keep their ears to the ground and their options open. People remember for far longer than economic boom/bust cycles.
- dumbotron 4y ago
  > board members will judge Zuckerberg Not that it matters when he controls most of the voting shares.
- rektide 4y ago
  This whole "we elites know better than our hired knowledge workers" schtik would be more interesting if the knowledge workers ever really had any say in these companies, if we had anything other than the traditional machiavellian top-down org to study & observe. It's all a-technical product orgs pushing demands down to the technicals, everywhere, far as the eye can see. But instead the dismal of the knowledge workers is just embraced, by anti labor disbelief like this, just chalking up the people who know systems & what we could do & their hopes as irrelevant. Strong disagree.
  - postmeta 4y ago
    Zappos' "holacracy" kinda tried, and Valve has tried: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy
pttrn 4y ago
https://archive.is/2023.03.18-053710/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/16/zuckerberg-meta-townhall/ https://archive.is/2023.03.18-053710/https://www.washingtonp...
dumbotron 4y ago
Trust after saying this wasn't going to happen again is one thing. The other is that didn't have a few months of foresight. This isn't 2008. Conditions aren't significantly worse than in November, and certainly not in a way that was unforeseeable. This time is also showing how rushed the first round was. No one thought about what work is needed. They just cut people who has a sub-par review 10 months before. Trusting that he's being honest is half of it. Trusting that he sees a direction for the company and how that fits in the macro environment is the other.
- Xcelerate 4y ago
  > They just cut people who has a sub-par review 10 months before Did they? I left on my own a month before the layoffs and what I heard from former coworkers was that it seemed mostly random.
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
  > Trusting that he's being honest is half of it. Isn't this a guy who's been shady with a lot of things in Facebook's past? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook
dumbotron 4y ago
Employee questions have been about 6 months ahead of what Zuckerberg says. It's going to be "return to office or else" in October.
zer0zzz 4y ago
lol wapo title almost suggests this is a bad thing. Zuck gets grilled all the time at these things and it’s one of the best things about meta.
- eastbound 4y ago
  Does WaPo still belong to Amazon?
  - pavlov 4y ago
    Never did. It’s owned by Bezos personally.
ar9av 4y ago
I remember that day in November when Mark scolded all of us for even asking if this was going to happen again. He said that decision was made with surgical precision and had been planned for months, and they weren’t even thinking about it at that time. He insisted there wouldn’t be anything more that normal attrition and we needn’t speculate. Then this happens 4 months later. LMFAO
- gregjor 4y ago
  That’s called “visionary.”
- echelon 4y ago
  Leave and start a company.
  - black_13 4y ago
    Bull thats the same argument “if you dont like American just leave”
    - echelon 4y ago
      No, I mean it in all earnestness. Leave and capture the upside. It's not easy, but it is liberating. Recent AI developments present a really great window of opportunity.
exodust 4y ago
I wonder how much of this is about VR not doing so well? Huge investment but not a lot of excitement (yet). Maybe they'll pull something out of the hat, combining slick new VR with AI, with live real-time movie making, or something. Either way, I don't mind when big tech lay staff off instead of finding sneaky hostile ways to keep the billions of dollars in ad revenue rolling in. If things aren't going as well as hoped, then say it bluntly, deal with it, then get on with it.
polote 4y ago
Tech workers just discovered that they will be kept only if they are performant, and they are stressed about it. Welcome in the real world. Most meta employees don't produce any value but are getting well paid because in the past meta has managed to be the most used social network. Produce value for the company and not what you believe is value and yoi will never get fired
- danjac 4y ago
  Sweet summer child. Who do you think determines whether you are "productive"? Your manager. If you don't play the political game and get on their side, you get fired, no matter how "productive" you think you are. Or your entire team gets fired by their manager, because you are collectively considered unproductive. Sucks to be you if you worked on a project that was considered to be Hot New Thing that Saves the Company up until 5 minutes ago.
- oblio 4y ago
  In many of these companies the system, process, algorithm, whatever that lays off individuals just informs people from senior manager down, they don't even know who's going away. How do you imagine that correlates with individual performance? The correlation is basically 0, maybe negative sometimes :-)
- nailuj 4y ago
  The average individual contributor in a big company is not able to meaningfully influence whether they produce value or not. They might be stuck in a team or even department with an agenda that produces little value, with no opportunities to make proactive change. It's quite intransparent in the FAANG hiring process if you will end up in such a team after your offer. If ensuring your part of the company is working on the big picture right things becomes your responsibility, what's even the point of joining an established enterprise over a startup?
infinitedata 4y ago
Microsoft Teams or Zoom should work on a system that injects a subtle distinction in each and every stream so you know who is the leaker. Or at least, similar to certain internal communications that vary a bit depending on the group receiving them.
- threatripper 4y ago
  Don't they already do that?
insomagent 4y ago
Just a fun observation, these layoffs are happening around the same time GPT-4 was released.
gregjor 4y ago
Maybe the people laid off won’t lap up the corporate feel-good bullshit at their next job: We’re all a family. Employees come first. You matter to us. Management is here for you. “Don’t be evil.” “Move fast and break things.” Fake work-life balance double-speak.
- sparrish 4y ago
  It's almost like it's a business arrangement. If you expect your employer to love you and take care of you like your parents, you will be disappointed. It's business.
akmarinov 4y ago
Did he take full responsibility this time as well?
- dumbotron 4y ago
  I'd love to see how PSC went for him. I'm sure he got "exceeds" or better, but between missing TikTok, nor being ready for Apple's privacy change, wasting time on a crypto currency and the metaverse, and a botched layoffs, he's flirting with "meets some."
sacnoradhq 4y ago
Wouldn't exactly call it "grill". He gave adulting answers and is business adulting more these days. Don't see anything wrong the questions or with his answers.
unsupp0rted 4y ago
I don't see the point of questioning Mark Zuckerberg. It's the same as questioning Chat GPT. The answers are all auto-generated to sound realistic, with plenty of hedges at the end to avoid taking responsibility for anybody's misperceptions.
TheHappyOddish 4y ago
It's crazy to see all the current and ex Meta staff in here having their say on tastefulness etc, when they've made a decision that clearly requires some serious low moral character - working at Meta. The compartmentalisation must be amazing.

79 points by bryan0 4y ago

Overtonwindow 4y ago

The utopia is crashing and people are mad.

sposeray 4y ago

[dead]

anotherhue 4y ago

Yeah, that'll do it.

Fede_V 4y ago

It's a vicious cycle, but, every time one of these internal town halls gets leaked to the internet, the execs lose the ability to speak candidly, and the workers feel like execs are completely aloof and detached from the reality on the ground. Unfortunately, it's incredibly difficult to maintain a certain level of trust once an org gets over a certain size.

poisonborz 4y ago
Things just don't scale well over a certain size. Like social networks.
Firmwarrior 4y ago
It's just as well. Seeing into the twisted workings of Zuck's mind isn't going to reassure any normal people "Oh, you saw an opportunity to save money by firing people randomly and threatening the rest, so you can get almost as much work out of us without paying bonuses or promoting people this year? Friedman[1] would be very proud of you sir!" 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
- ryandrake 4y ago
  Leakers also provide a vital window into company culture for people who may need to decide whether to work there. You never get the truth about what the company and leadership is really like during the Potemkin village tour of recruiting and interviewing.
  - Fede_V 4y ago
    I completely agree re: Potemkin village tour of recruiting, but, those townhalls are not a window into company culture at all exactly because they get leaked. The only way to get a candid view into company culture is to have insider friends that can tell you what it's really like to work there.

extr 4y ago

I'm of a few minds about this. I don't think these questions are unfair, because it's destabilizing mentally to deal with constant rumors, unclear direction, and actual layoffs. I worked at Meta during the Nov layoffs (though not personally impacted), and I remember the day to day anxiety in the lead up and aftermath. Nobody wants that. It's part of the reason I quit. I don't think Mark's answers are necessarily unfair either, he's running a business after all. He does have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, even if that means making difficult staffing decisions (still true even if they were his fault to begin with by over-hiring). Ultimately you agree to participate in this framework by accepting a job at a public company. But there is a point after which it becomes distasteful. It gives me the same sort of feeling as those stories about companies pulling offers right before the start date, after an employee has quit their previous job. Legal? Yes. Justifiable? No doubt. Morally? It's grey. And it leaves a sour taste. On an individual level, it's the kind of thing that is punished in the long run, through reputational damage. In an ideal world I would like to see companies face something similar.

khazhoux 4y ago
> He does have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, even if that means making difficult staffing decisions I feel like people over-index on the idea of "fiduciary responsibility to shareholders." I don't think most decisions a CEO makes are really done with shareholders specifically in mind. They do what is best for the company --for its health, growth, and sometimes survival-- and shareholders are just there for the ride. Certainly, there are some executive decisions where shareholders are the primary factors, but by and large I think they're an afterthought at best. He over-hired, he lost faith in the direction of a big chunk of Meta's initiatives, and he now wants to pare back.
- extr 4y ago
  Honestly I agree, I think "fiduciary responsibility to shareholders" is kind of a funny phrase to be honest. I don't really believe most CEOs at an individual level think of shareholders much except that stock price up means good, and stock price down means bad, and sometimes they complain and we have to justify our actions and respond politely for reasons. To me the phrase almost is a moral shorthand for capitalism. A corporation has no inherent right to life or survival instinct the way a person does, and the phrasing and pretense of "duty to shareholders" is used to give it one by proxy. Does that make sense? So rephrasing my original post, it would be something like "We all agree it's moral to seek profit, since that's the economic system that seems to work, and his actions can be seen as in line with that, so therefore if you agree capitalism makes sense, his actions are justifiable and moral".

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

solatic 4y ago

Employees and board members don't have the same interests in a BigCo. Sure, board members will judge Zuckerberg on whether he's getting Meta to make progress on the goals he's set in agreement with the board, which should fulfill the board's goals of increasing shareholder value. But that's not the employee's interest. The employee is interested in whether their employment status is stable, whether their work is engaging / interesting, and whether their employer offers opportunities for advancement, in roughly that order of priority. Employers that focus on that order of priorities typically have no such problems with employee trust. Zuckerberg might as well have said that he doesn't really care if he has employee trust anymore, because he doesn't foresee , in the short term, Meta employees willingly leaving their jobs in droves in a bad economy, trust or no trust. But smart Meta employees will keep their ears to the ground and their options open. People remember for far longer than economic boom/bust cycles.

dumbotron 4y ago
> board members will judge Zuckerberg Not that it matters when he controls most of the voting shares.
rektide 4y ago
This whole "we elites know better than our hired knowledge workers" schtik would be more interesting if the knowledge workers ever really had any say in these companies, if we had anything other than the traditional machiavellian top-down org to study & observe. It's all a-technical product orgs pushing demands down to the technicals, everywhere, far as the eye can see. But instead the dismal of the knowledge workers is just embraced, by anti labor disbelief like this, just chalking up the people who know systems & what we could do & their hopes as irrelevant. Strong disagree.
- postmeta 4y ago
  Zappos' "holacracy" kinda tried, and Valve has tried: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy

pttrn 4y ago

https://archive.is/2023.03.18-053710/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/16/zuckerberg-meta-townhall/ https://archive.is/2023.03.18-053710/https://www.washingtonp...

dumbotron 4y ago

Trust after saying this wasn't going to happen again is one thing. The other is that didn't have a few months of foresight. This isn't 2008. Conditions aren't significantly worse than in November, and certainly not in a way that was unforeseeable. This time is also showing how rushed the first round was. No one thought about what work is needed. They just cut people who has a sub-par review 10 months before. Trusting that he's being honest is half of it. Trusting that he sees a direction for the company and how that fits in the macro environment is the other.

Xcelerate 4y ago
> They just cut people who has a sub-par review 10 months before Did they? I left on my own a month before the layoffs and what I heard from former coworkers was that it seemed mostly random.
Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
> Trusting that he's being honest is half of it. Isn't this a guy who's been shady with a lot of things in Facebook's past? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook

dumbotron 4y ago

Employee questions have been about 6 months ahead of what Zuckerberg says. It's going to be "return to office or else" in October.

zer0zzz 4y ago

lol wapo title almost suggests this is a bad thing. Zuck gets grilled all the time at these things and it’s one of the best things about meta.

eastbound 4y ago
Does WaPo still belong to Amazon?
- pavlov 4y ago
  Never did. It’s owned by Bezos personally.

ar9av 4y ago

I remember that day in November when Mark scolded all of us for even asking if this was going to happen again. He said that decision was made with surgical precision and had been planned for months, and they weren’t even thinking about it at that time. He insisted there wouldn’t be anything more that normal attrition and we needn’t speculate. Then this happens 4 months later. LMFAO

gregjor 4y ago
That’s called “visionary.”
echelon 4y ago
Leave and start a company.
- black_13 4y ago
  Bull thats the same argument “if you dont like American just leave”
  - echelon 4y ago
    No, I mean it in all earnestness. Leave and capture the upside. It's not easy, but it is liberating. Recent AI developments present a really great window of opportunity.

exodust 4y ago

I wonder how much of this is about VR not doing so well? Huge investment but not a lot of excitement (yet). Maybe they'll pull something out of the hat, combining slick new VR with AI, with live real-time movie making, or something. Either way, I don't mind when big tech lay staff off instead of finding sneaky hostile ways to keep the billions of dollars in ad revenue rolling in. If things aren't going as well as hoped, then say it bluntly, deal with it, then get on with it.

polote 4y ago

Tech workers just discovered that they will be kept only if they are performant, and they are stressed about it. Welcome in the real world. Most meta employees don't produce any value but are getting well paid because in the past meta has managed to be the most used social network. Produce value for the company and not what you believe is value and yoi will never get fired

danjac 4y ago
Sweet summer child. Who do you think determines whether you are "productive"? Your manager. If you don't play the political game and get on their side, you get fired, no matter how "productive" you think you are. Or your entire team gets fired by their manager, because you are collectively considered unproductive. Sucks to be you if you worked on a project that was considered to be Hot New Thing that Saves the Company up until 5 minutes ago.
oblio 4y ago
In many of these companies the system, process, algorithm, whatever that lays off individuals just informs people from senior manager down, they don't even know who's going away. How do you imagine that correlates with individual performance? The correlation is basically 0, maybe negative sometimes :-)
nailuj 4y ago
The average individual contributor in a big company is not able to meaningfully influence whether they produce value or not. They might be stuck in a team or even department with an agenda that produces little value, with no opportunities to make proactive change. It's quite intransparent in the FAANG hiring process if you will end up in such a team after your offer. If ensuring your part of the company is working on the big picture right things becomes your responsibility, what's even the point of joining an established enterprise over a startup?

infinitedata 4y ago

Microsoft Teams or Zoom should work on a system that injects a subtle distinction in each and every stream so you know who is the leaker. Or at least, similar to certain internal communications that vary a bit depending on the group receiving them.

threatripper 4y ago
Don't they already do that?

insomagent 4y ago

Just a fun observation, these layoffs are happening around the same time GPT-4 was released.

gregjor 4y ago

Maybe the people laid off won’t lap up the corporate feel-good bullshit at their next job: We’re all a family. Employees come first. You matter to us. Management is here for you. “Don’t be evil.” “Move fast and break things.” Fake work-life balance double-speak.

sparrish 4y ago
It's almost like it's a business arrangement. If you expect your employer to love you and take care of you like your parents, you will be disappointed. It's business.

akmarinov 4y ago

Did he take full responsibility this time as well?

dumbotron 4y ago
I'd love to see how PSC went for him. I'm sure he got "exceeds" or better, but between missing TikTok, nor being ready for Apple's privacy change, wasting time on a crypto currency and the metaverse, and a botched layoffs, he's flirting with "meets some."

sacnoradhq 4y ago

Wouldn't exactly call it "grill". He gave adulting answers and is business adulting more these days. Don't see anything wrong the questions or with his answers.

unsupp0rted 4y ago

I don't see the point of questioning Mark Zuckerberg. It's the same as questioning Chat GPT. The answers are all auto-generated to sound realistic, with plenty of hedges at the end to avoid taking responsibility for anybody's misperceptions.

TheHappyOddish 4y ago

It's crazy to see all the current and ex Meta staff in here having their say on tastefulness etc, when they've made a decision that clearly requires some serious low moral character - working at Meta. The compartmentalisation must be amazing.