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Let's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really smal
by hintymad 6mo ago
Let's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview questions. Many of those engineers were perfectly smart and capable. Meta have built so many amazing systems. So, the only explanation I can produce is that there's just too little work for too many people. I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio of meeting hours over coding hours per person went through the roof in the past few years in Meta.
- pipes 6mo agoAre you saying you interviewed meta engineers and found this? Or is this speculation?
- pembrook 6mo agoAs someone who has worked at big tech (and interviewed fellow big tech workers), I can confirm this is pretty typical. People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing specifically. And if they were high enough on the org chart to be responsible for something real, they weren't ever hands on and just played politics all day in meetings. Everyone will claim otherwise of course, but its all layers and layers of diffusion of responsibility. The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature (eg. "add a 5th confusing toolbar to Gmail to market Google's 7th video call tool"), take months to build it and run it up the organizational gauntlet for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4. For many people at these orgs this is what an entire year of "work" can look like, for which they will be paid roughly $400k.
- joenot443 6mo agoWhile at G I was one of three engineers working on a mid-sized iOS app. We shared ownership of the entirety of the codebase. It wasn't dissimilar to some of the other teams I've worked on at orgs of differing sizes. > The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature, take months to build it and run it up the organizational ladder for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4. This sounds wonderful, it certainly wasn't the case for us.
- operatingthetan 6mo agoI've contracted at several big tech companies and that other commenter is making stuff up. My experience was similar to yours, the engineers were very productive on impactful projects. I'm sure there is some dead weight in every company, but it's the exception not the norm.
- pembrook 6mo agoIt sounds like you have financial incentives motivating your desire to shape opinions on this issue. I already exited big tech so I'm able to be candid. But don't worry, giant companies aren't going to stop your gravy train, they already know you're not highly "productive" and "impactful." That's the point. If you were actually important to the organization it would be a terrible mismanagement of the company. A well-run big org is designed such that workers are replaceable cogs in generalized salary bands, that's what makes the machine durable. It's very easy to think you're "productive" and "busy" when your days are filled with meetings and trying to placate various groups of stakeholders. But if you look at your actual work output after a year in big tech, it's fundamentally low impact, and it's that way by design.
- joenot443 6mo ago> it's fundamentally low impact, and it's that way by design. I'd like to keep tugging on this thread, I find it interesting. In my experience, everyone up my chain of command was motivated to derive as much impact from their reports as they possibly could. If anything, it felt as if the system was designed to reward impact above all else - promotions were given to engineers who could demonstrate their work on _____ increased _____ by x% driving revenue by y%. Nowhere in the system seemed designed to reward low impact, it really felt the opposite. When you were at a big tech co, your experience was different?
- ironman1478 6mo agoI worked at Meta and they're spot on.
- ironSkillet 6mo agoI interviewed someone recently who worked at Meta a couple years ago. He was a software engineer, was paid a bunch of money to mostly up dashboards all day, and eventually quit because it was neither interesting nor challenging.
- renewiltord 6mo agoI interviewed a Meta Senior SWE in 2023. Guy couldn't write the most basic Python loop. Attempts were made. I didn't expect a list comprehension. This was just a warmup exercise fizz-buzz level so everyone can feel confident and talk. Everyone just smashes it. I could have done it as a teenager. Had to call it off after 15 min of trying. It was too much. But he took it on the chin. "Yep, thanks, sorry I didn't get too far. Bad day, maybe" or something like that. Most confident guy I've ever talked to. I was impressed by that - to totally bomb and be cool about it. Good for him.
- blharr 6mo agoThe 3-year old anecdote is a bit pointless. It literally could have been a bad day. I've burnt myself out on a problem the night before and absolutely bombed simple interview questions, too. Or it just happened to be the least competent engineer at Meta. It doesn't give much information on their average employee, though
- renewiltord 6mo agoOh totally. In general I don’t think you can conclude anything about anyone, really. Yesterday they were someone. Today someone else.
- mrweasel 6mo agoWe had the same experience with Meta engineers. One candidate had been with Meta/Facebook for seven years and had nothing to show for it. They had an incredibly hard time articulating what work they actually did. It was something related to storage, but pretty much every answer was "well, actually someone else does that part". Also same experience with basic coding, no actual skills, yet somehow manages to have a CS degree. Someone has to be doing the actual work at Meta, but that might not be the people who are seeking out new jobs. So we get this false impression that their engineers are a bit... not good, because those are the ones actually leaving.
- jeffbee 6mo agoStrongly held but apparently not popular opinion: candidates should not be expected, and should refuse, to discuss confidential internals of their former employers.
- dnnddidiej 6mo agoAgreed, but what has it got to do with what you replied to?
- jeffbee 6mo ago"couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks"
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- mediaman 6mo agoI think he's saying that during interviews the candidates were being asked to dive deep into their preceding employers' tech stacks. Which does seem to be asking them to tread in dicey legal waters in a coercive situation.
- dnnddidiej 6mo agoI see. Always stuggled with this. I think design interview on hypotheticals is better. Or have you used X with follow up questions about X? Probably OK to say we used kubetnetes. But not OK to describe inner workings of a custom controller that speeds up their workloads even if candidate wrote the code.
- hintymad 6mo agoThere's no need to ask about anything confidential. Meta published a lot about their internal tech stacks, and they use plenty of open-source stuff. ZippyDB, Interview candidate can also talk about generic stuff, and I can drill on the theory or common practice.
- rsanek 6mo agoMeta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.
- jiggawatts 6mo agoMicrosoft and Google have a vastly broader array of products and systems compared to Meta.
- Macha 6mo agoGoogle and Microsoft have significantly more products. That's even just counting their consumer products, their cloud providers are a whole other kettle of fish.
- pembrook 6mo agoThink about the scope of Apple's business (Hardware, Processors, Operating Systems, Software competitors for every app category, Physical Retail, Global Ecommerce, Global distribution networks, App stores, Payments, Credit cards, Banking, Music streaming, Film/TV studio, etc). Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operating systems, no processor design, and a few hardware boondoggles only 1/10000th the scale of Apple's, etc. Now realize that, if you subtract out Apple's retail employees, they have roughly similar headcount to Meta. Now tell me again that Apple is in a "worse" position than Meta on efficiency.
- kaladin-jasnah 6mo ago> No operating systems, no processor design, Meta bought Rivos, and as far as I can see do a ton of work related to Linux kernel stuff (I heard about this in the context of eBPF). But datacenter side, not consumer.
- hintymad 6mo agoNot familiar with Microsoft. But it's definitely amazing that Google managed to grow itself to one of the most bureaucratic companies in the past 15 years. And yeah, it's bloated as hell.
- laweijfmvo 6mo agoit stems from an abundance of ineffective and abysmal leadership, where someone finds themselves in a position of importance and the only thing they know how to do is hire subordinates to blame or rely on. Those subordinates need headcount, and so it goes all the way down to bloated teams of ICs. some people call it empire building, but it’s really just incompetence.
- lenerdenator 6mo agoWell, if that's the case, it's time to hold leadership accountable, because they recklessly spent company money on hiring people who did not create value for the shareholders. Mark Zuckerberg ultimately approved that hiring initiative, right? He's the CEO; either he approved it or he approved of the hiring of the person that handled it and likely delegated the task to that person. Mark needs to be shown the door. Oh wait. Mark's on the board. And he has majority voting power. ... I'm starting to think there might be difficulty in holding him accountable.
- NotMichaelBay 6mo agoOh no, poor shareholders, they must have blindsided. When did Mark gain majority voting power?
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- lenerdenator 6mo agoThe problem isn't when he might have gotten it, it's that he could have it to begin with. The real issue is that our systems allow for one person to effectively control hundreds of billions of dollars of capital with absolutely no one to provide any consequences if they make bad decisions with that capital. If we really are setting this up as a for-profit, publicly-traded company, how does that system of corporate governance enforce any sort of way to make sure that Zuckerberg's ego doesn't get in the way of doing things right? Basically right now it's a sole proprietorship with window dressing.
- zmjone2992 6mo agomany of the people that will be laid off are doing very real work. i certainly was!
- superfrank 6mo agoI believe you, but that doesn't mean the comment you're responding to is wrong. Large layoffs are like trying to doing surgery with a butcher knife while wearing an eye patch and a pair of mittens. Since companies usually don't want to telegraph the layoffs too far in advance, they try and keep the people in the know as small as possible. That means the people making the decisions on who stays and who goes are often multiple levels removed from a lot of the people affected. I'm really sorry to hear that you got let go and I hope you are able to find a new role soon.
- away271828 6mo agoPretty much. In a prior role I didn't have a real job any longer but the people making the decisions for a fairly small layoff probably didn't know that. Would have been happy to have taken a decent severance package. Hung out for a while more or less.
- mcmoor 6mo agoI thought it's also mostly to preserve feeling, to obscure the connection between performance and layoff to ease employee transition to another job. That's why sometimes it's a branch all at once from the middle to bottom.
- casualscience 6mo agoAre these meta engineers that were let go? The one thing you learn more than anything else as a Meta engineer is how to sell your work and how amazing it is
- kjkjadksj 6mo agoPresumably meta will always need engineers. Why fire staff who have meta experience and inevitably have to hire more engineers probably in some weeks or days? Engineers who will need onboarding and might not turn out too.
- culi 6mo agoPeople bring up "overhiring" every single time. We've had like 3 years of these massive layoffs already. How many "corrections" do they need? I'm beginning to feel like the "overhiring" line is a concerted campaign
- bobmcnamara 6mo agoUnemployment is an economic feature for wage modulation, not a bug.
- wakawaka28 6mo agoIt is no doubt a campaign or at least a meme. It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere. There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly. So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered. The only ways out of the pool are basically retirement, career change, and death. I know there are complications with this argument. For example, unemployment could double by basically doubling the average time to find a job. That kind of thing could support an overhiring thesis if the unemployment rate in tech got very low. To really test the "everybody overhired" thesis, I think you need to do a full accounting of early careers people, unemployed, retired, etc. I'm not gonna attempt that...
- sureMan6 6mo agoOverhired has nothing to do with the talent pool and just means they hired more than they actually needed or wanted, if the talent pool is large enough then everyone can overhire
- wakawaka28 6mo agoOf course the judgement about whether people overhired is subjective on a per-company basis. My point is, you can't hire people who don't exist, and the ways to get people into the industry are limited. All other things equal, we would expect massive overhiring to be matched with very low unemployment in the industry, and the correction should not go below some baseline.
- bandrami 6mo agoThis is exactly right and I've got to wonder what the AI conversation would be like in the alternate timeline where tech didn't massively overhire in the wake of Covid.
- DanielHB 6mo agoI wonder if the facebook redesign also sucked a lot of manual labor and it is now mostly done so they don't need so many people anymore to maintain that product.
- Brystephor 6mo agoMeta had grown headcount by 50% in the last 7 years. In the same time frame, they tripled their revenue up to mid $200B range. Even if every employee fired saved $500k a year, that'd be roughly $4B in a year. Not a small amount but relative to their income, not huge either
- wazzup01 6mo agoYou no who I am ( meta )it me .0. I'm coming to see u meta u killed and hurt to many people. Wear are the children. Kids..... You know who I'm talking about this is holly war people humans you know as well. This is not your world 2010 to 2025 it's human world
- wazzup01 6mo agoYour computer is the problem meta to many dead people that why computers are fucking up..your programs are tanted and bad programing formula bads. Your killing people
- wazzup01 6mo agoThis is the truth god's word
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