9 ms·
When I was an engineering manager there, engineering leadership described performance reviews as, in a large well run engineering organization, you'll probably
by lacker 2y ago
When I was an engineering manager there, engineering leadership described performance reviews as, in a large well run engineering organization, you'll probably be firing 5-10% of your employees every year for low performance. (Well, "non regrettable attrition", which includes people who quit when they get pipped.)
Lower than 5% at scale would be a red flag, not necessarily wrong, you don't want to "stack rank" with a quota and force managers to fire people who shouldn't want to be fired, but if you have 100 engineers in a department and only one of them gets fired in a year, probably the director is making a mistake.
So, I'm sure this won't be the only firing for the year at Meta. But this doesn't really seem like it's very far away from normal practices.
- tqi 2y agoYeah 5% is a very weird number. Why not just stop over hiring?
- bdcravens 2y agoFear. Effects on stock price during when talent is a hot commodity. Besides, all those Associate Directors of Nonengineering Engineers of Developer Conference Swag Acquisition need to eat too.
- nateglims 2y agoThe goal is to always be bringing in new talent and cutting lowest performers to increase productivity. They want the new talent and don’t care about the low performers at a personal level.
- blsapologist42 2y agoThe goal is to replace that 5% with new hires, resulting in higher average performance. It has nothing to do with total hiring amount.
- drillsteps5 2y agoI'm confused. The article specifically states that Meta cut 25% of its workforce since 2022 (that's not counting the 5% that are being reported). What overhiring?
- NBJack 2y agoHave you looked at their numbers on and before 2022? They very much over-hired a crazy amount. Zuckerberg admitted as such through his statements on "over investing". https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-layoff-message-to-employees/ https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-layoff-mes... And if that wasn't enough: https://www.itpro.com/business/business-strategy/mark-zuckerberg-tech-layoffs-in-2024-have-been-a-natural-response-to-pandemic-era-over-hiring https://www.itpro.com/business/business-strategy/mark-zucker...
- Redoubts 2y agoA lot of companies doubled in size due to the Covid surge, for questionable strategic reasons
- mingus88 2y agoMetas philosophy (based on what an ex Meta person told me) is “up or out” So if you aren’t getting a promotion, you are eventually getting fired. This meat grinder probably has some perverse incentives for employees and makes sure you are always churning through folk who you don’t need to pay QoL raises to
- psunavy03 2y agoWhy? Why set an arbitrary number of people who need to be fired as opposed to grading people to a standard? Is your hiring process so flawed that you just accept that you screwed up hiring 5 percent of your people? This smells like the Welchian nonsense that drove GE into the ground.
- foobarian 2y agoHonestly I would be ecstatic if it was possible for a hiring process to have a 95% success rate.
- hnthrowaway6543 2y ago> Is your hiring process so flawed that you just accept that you screwed up hiring 5 percent of your people? if you only messed up 5% of your hires you'd be a goddamn genius and every company in the world would want to put you in charge of their hiring process the "standard" is more like 20% of hires end up being bad hires
- tauwauwau 2y agoOther than agreeing with "spacemadness", I wanted to point out a small correction. Original argument was about 5% of total employees, not only new hires.
- spacemadness 2y agoAre these numbers coming out of thin air? Gut feel perhaps? So after you fire 10% and don’t hire, that holds until there is nobody left? Maybe we should stop with the gut feel managerial apologies and think about what we’re doing and how it affects company morale, no?
- hnthrowaway6543 2y agomorale is also adversely affected by people having obvious underperformers on their team that they have to work around, so pick your poison
- 2y ago
- whynotmaybe 2y agoIsn't this quite paradoxical that those kind of companies have hard interviews where you have to almost prove that P=NP in front of 5 people that judges everything you do, yet they fire engineer because "ratio"? Could this lead to a manager that tries to have the best team for himself will always include average employees that they can easily fire?
- supriyo-biswas 2y agoThese interview practices are probably in part because of the huge number of applicants trying to get into Meta, which allows them to rachet up the difficulty to the highest level. My assumption based on some interview experience articles[1][2] is that there's an internal arms race between the recruiting and engineering at Meta where candidates are not forwarded for the interview process until they feel sufficiently prepared, often giving them months (in any other company, I feel this would be a big red flag), and interviewers expecting the equivalent of Djikstra or Knuth to join their team, regardless of what the team actually does. (I assume not everyone writes distributed system or database implementations from scratch at Meta.) [1] https://medium.com/@rohitverma_87831/my-interview-experience-at-meta-ad7eb22dd220 https://medium.com/@rohitverma_87831/my-interview-experience... [2] https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/5132569/Meta-E5-Infra-Engineer-or-New-York-or-YOE%3A-8-or-Reject/ https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/5132569/Me...
- blsapologist42 2y agoAs a former interviewer at Meta who did hundreds of technical interviews, I can tell you that the people that I hardly expected "Djikstra or Knuth". Honestly I gave pretty reasonable questions that were similar to the types of things I would do in my work (with some modifications to work as an interview question). And still the majority of people didn't do great. It's even worse at the "screen" stage, where I've had people that, e.g. didn't know what "function" means or couldn't write a loop to find the max number in an array.
- matsemann 2y agoYup, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy where you hire extra, possibly not top candidates, just so you have something to shed when the time comes without affecting your existing team.
- soulbadguy 2y agoLevel and start/end year of tenure if you don't mind sharing. As meta grew in employee number things definitly worsen on that front
- elevatedastalt 2y agoIt's understandable that in an organization that hasn't tightened its screws on employees, you will be able to find 5% low performers. But do you expect to find 5% low performers even after 5 iterations of these firings? Like eventually you are left only with medium to high performers, and you are just making their lives miserable by turning work into a meaningless Hunger Games season.
- senordevnyc 2y agoIsn't the average tenure low enough that after five years, most of your workforce has turned over?
- elevatedastalt 2y agoVaries. What I have seen happening often is that many teams end up with a mix of very tenured people (who are strong contributors and who are sticking around for whatever reasons), and new hires who are too early in the role to be properly evaluated or to be thrown the lowest rating at.
- jerojero 2y agoI would imagine a lot of the firings are new hires, or people being replaced by new people who are a better fit; so it really depends on the rate your company is growing. If the company is growing 10% a year and firing 5% a year you're still growing significantly. So I think it's pretty important to look at the rate of hiring, not just the rate of firing.
- dambi0 2y agoIsn’t performance relative?
- dugmartin 2y agoIt sounds like you missed the fun that was stack ranking in the ‘90s. Combine that with “360 reviews” like we had at GE where team members rank each other and the only sensible thing was to “defect” and rank everyone low in the hopes someone wouldn’t understand the game and rank you higher.
- ralfd 2y agoI am lukewarm about unions, but if that shit would be the new work norm I would go hard left. Wouldn’t be every coworker a competitor? How do you plan your life or start a family if you are every year 10% likely of being fired or backstabbed?
- soulbadguy 2y agoI am very much opposed to unions,I think in general , with time unions workers are just trading one oppressing power structure where they have not much control for another. However, i think with the way things go, it's inevitable that IT/Knowledge worker with start unionizing. The same things happens for starbucks the coffee : As the company grew, the margin improvement came at the expense of the employee working conditions until unions start forming
- blsapologist42 2y agoIt's not like the firing is random. "Low performers" get a lot of warnings throughout the year. Most people are average or above so they will be completely unaffected, it's not likely you would drop from 50th percentile to 5th. On the other hand, do you really want to be stuck working with someone who's not very competent? I think we've all had that experience and it's miserable.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Reubachi 2y agoIt's not the perception of "randomness" that is a problem, it's the arbitrary figure attributed to getting fired with no comment on methodology or the attributes that will get you fired. We assume there would probably be PIP for those individuals in this hypothetical scenario. However even then, saying "10 percent of our workforce will guaranteed be subject to PIP and or firing as a matter of our staffing methodology" instantly turns much of your working time into fluffing your work and backstabbing colleagues. OR running away at great speed. OR telling investorts "We do not grow, we abritrarilly trim regardless of market forces." AKA, GE.
- riffic 2y agothat's such a mad, fear-based way to run shop.
- paxys 2y agoWhat's noteworthy is that there isn't going to be a PIP process this year. The day the review cycle is over the bottom 5% of employees will be shown the door.
- stg22 2y agoViewed in isolation, the number of redundancies might not be unusual, but how it's being presented to the employees is. Before, Zuckerberg rhetorically accepted responsibility for lay-offs, but now he's making clear that the people he's firing are entirely to blame. He's deliberately talking up the firings, bringing them closer, making them feel more personal and making it a bit harder for the people fired to get replacement jobs, all for the purpose of cratering his own employees' morale. He's making Facebook a pro-MAGA company and has decided that the way to make the workers get with the program is to intimidate them.
- kazinator 2y agoCanadian tycoon Jim Pattison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Pattison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Pattison) was known for firing the lowest performing car salesman each month.
- siva7 2y agoLet's not glorify this people and state what it is: toxic behavior and abuse.
- riffic 2y agoit was cute, perhaps, in Glengarry Glen Ross (coffee is for closers!), it's abhorrent when seeing it used here.
- deciduously 2y agoIt wasn't cute there, either, it was explicitly a device to stage the desperation that catalyzed the rest of the plot.
- yodsanklai 2y ago> But this doesn't really seem like it's very far away from normal practices. I think the difference is that they'll get rid of the PIP and fire people straight away.
- surgical_fire 2y agoI call bullshit on this. What I have seen in the past was engineers that were performing completely fine being put on PIP-equivalents because there must be a few being PIPped on every department, based off on some bullshit percentage. In reality, low perforers should be culled, no need to enforce percentages department-wide. That would require managers doing their job properly of course.
- downrightmike 2y agoThis is pretty stupid, you hire the best and the brightest, arbitrarily firing any of them 'just because' seems like a good way to burn moral for no real gain.
- kingbiz 2y agoSo as a manager you get to fire 5% without you being affected then in turn the other 95% work harder to make you look better. Sounds like a win win. I can see why you are in favor of this insane policy.
- weatherlite 2y agoWell, I'm betting some managers will be let go as well if it makes you feel better...