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Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

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Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#161

Post by tinyhouse »

SilverBirch wrote: post #151

What I find interesting so far about these hiring freezes & layoffs is that at the moment it's been quite diffuse. All the announcements have been about how the companies will shrink head count and costs etc. But so far there haven't really been the focused sweeping announcements you would expect. When a company really hits hard times you expect them to be much more deliberate about how they cut, they start making de…

I disagree. They didn't lose focus. Their new focus is VR. They anticipate it's going to be much bigger growth engine for them in the next decades, while the current core business is slowing down. Maybe their mistake is that they are too aggressive with the VR spending. There are many examples of companies that had a great core business that was gradually slowing down and new companies came and ate their lunch. Meta is trying to prevent that by being the leader in a completely new space. It's a bet that is going to be either a huge win or fail.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#162

Post by JKCalhoun »

lordnacho wrote: post #22

Maybe I'm being totally naive, but what I want from FB is not better discoverability and metaverse, I want my friends to put their lives on it like they used to a few years ago. I don't even put anything on it myself anymore because of the smell around the company, and very few people I know do either, so my feed now looks like a bunch of memes and random news, with adverts in between. Engagement with a real human pu…

It's like you're describing FB having gone from Public Broadcasting Station to Home Shopping Network.

That sounds about right. (And the internet in general is becoming more and more a string of commercials — but don't let that comment keep you from getting off my lawn!)

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#163

Post by matwood »

achow wrote: post #2

Interesting quote from CEO in an all hands directly to employees. I don't want to be at Meta right now.. .."turning up the heat" on performance management to weed out staffers unable to meet more aggressive goals. "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said. "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turni…

> Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here

He's probably not wrong though. People are routinely amazed just how many people these large companies employ. Big company culture often slips into not what is delivered, but how many people does a manager have under them.

In the past, successful companies have used economic downturns as a way to reset this culture.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#164

Post by SilverBirch »

tinyhouse wrote: post #161
SilverBirch wrote: post #151

What I find interesting so far about these hiring freezes & layoffs is that at the moment it's been quite diffuse. All the announcements have been about how the companies will shrink head count and costs etc. But so far there haven't really been the focused sweeping announcements you would expect. When a company really hits hard times you expect them to be much more deliberate about how they cut, they start making de…

I disagree. They didn't lose focus. Their new focus is VR. They anticipate it's going to be much bigger growth engine for them in the next decades, while the current core business is slowing down. Maybe their mistake is that they are too aggressive with the VR spending. There are many examples of companies that had a great core business that was gradually slowing down and new companies came and ate their lunch. Meta…

VR isn't like digital cameras destroying film, it's a completely different business. It'd be like Netflix deciding their video streaming business has peaked so they're going to hire 10,000 new engineers to work on a new wind turbine business.

I agree with you they are focused on VR, but where I disagree is that they are a social media company. They're not focused on what their company actually does. It's kind of an obvious point that maybe the reason their core business is slowing down is because the head of the company decided to stop working on it. At some point it's going to become obvious that if you spun off the Facebook part of Meta it would have a significantly larger market cap than Meta has.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#165

Post by willcipriano »

Now we are entering what I like to call the "pauper CEO" phase of the economic cycle. When leadership turns out their pockets and "socializes the losses" as it were.

Generally even if you work for a company that is unaffected by the current economic climate, it will be used as a justification for low raises and higher expectations at work. With high inflation happening at the same time, we are entering a bad time to grow your career or get promoted.

For me, I found a role that reduced my overtime and is relatively easy. I wouldn't want to get promoted now if it meant a increase in responsibility as the rewards are unlikely to even surpass inflation by a meaningful amount. This will suck for people without established careers of course, I was in that position in 2008 and the slow economic recovery had me working for very low salaries up until a few years ago.

They only get away with this beacuse most workers don't or can't respond to the incentives they have laid out here. Firms are shouting at us "I don't have the ability to reward you for your effort!", I suggest you listen before working all that hard.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#166

Post by tinyhouse »

SilverBirch wrote: post #164
tinyhouse wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. They didn't lose focus. Their new focus is VR. They anticipate it's going to be much bigger growth engine for them in the next decades, while the current core business is slowing down. Maybe their mistake is that they are too aggressive with the VR spending. There are many examples of companies that had a great core business that was gradually slowing down and new companies came and ate their lunch. Meta…

VR isn't like digital cameras destroying film, it's a completely different business. It'd be like Netflix deciding their video streaming business has peaked so they're going to hire 10,000 new engineers to work on a new wind turbine business. I agree with you they are focused on VR, but where I disagree is that they are a social media company. They're not focused on what their company actually does. It's kind of an o…

I don't think it's a problem that VR is a completely new business. (It has a social aspect to it but it's not relevant to the discussion). I do agree that a better model would be the Amazon one. Amazon grew a completely new business (AWS) that had nothing to do with its core business (retail) but didn't lose focus on its core business and managed to grow both at the same time.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#167

Post by digbert »

distrill wrote: post #89
doktorhladnjak wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll force more people into the lower buckets of the stack rank. It’s very dystopian in its simplicity.

there isn't really a stack rank, and they're pretty careful about not fitting performance into predetermined quota buckets. honestly i think attrition will get the numbers down fairly quickly, although unfortunately probably pretty evenly distributed among good and bad engineers.

> there isn't really a stack rank, and they're pretty careful about not fitting performance into predetermined quota buckets

That's what I thought too, but then in my first PSC as a manager when I was there I was added to a spreadsheet called " stack rank", where we had to rank everyone rated as Meets All, because we were 3 people short of our quota for <= Meets Most

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#169

Post by eru »

xxs wrote: post #102
eru wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, your work is being used to process financial information and trades a few nanoseconds faster, or your work is being used by the military, ...

Naturally, the nature of the 1st to ring the bell (i.e. HFT) poses an interesting concept. It's a very technical goal in itself.

Definitely.

And I don't actually disagree with HFT or finance in general, or sending cat pictures around.

(I'm reserving my judgement on the military.)

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#170

Post by eru »

bmitc wrote: post #80
eru wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does this read “Let’s ditch those ethical people who get in the way of profit.”? Not to me. Just reads like they want to ditch low performers. (They might or might not still want to ditch 'ethical people', no clue. It just doesn't read that way here.)

It's a framing issue, just like what Tesla recently did. Now they have the agency to clean house as they see fit with the excuse of "turning up the heat on performance" to hide behind.

Well, if you say so.

I would have assumed that Facebook always had the ability to manage-out people they wanted out.

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