Now if only people could turn up the heat so that Meta/Facebook would quit...
Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
211–220 of 509 posts
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#212> Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here If a company has both 1) A lot of dead wood 2) No better strategy to deal with it than 'turning up the heat' Then this suggests a profound failure of management and leadership. I'd start cutting the dead wood there.
Every sufficiently large company has a lot of dead wood, and nobody has yet devised a better strategy than 'turning up the heat'.
Is it an effective strategy at all? I can imagine that turning up the heat without any benefits is just as likely to chase the most talented people away.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every sufficiently large company has a lot of dead wood, and nobody has yet devised a better strategy than 'turning up the heat'.
Does this not have the side effect of also driving away employees with the best alternatives (so, probably your best ones)?
The key for this to work is that you need to give everybody big raises so the best want to stay when the heat gets tough (like sterotypical ibanking)
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#214Yeah, "we hired people we shouldn't have so now we're going to make it increasingly unpleasant to work here" doesn't work.
First-hand, what I've seen happen is that your most talented people, who are the most in demand, leave the organization quite quickly because they correctly realize they don't have to put up with this bullshit. It's the coasters who fear they'll never land an equally cushy job who attempt to ride out the heat as long as they can.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#215So I was wondering, does this mean Meta will have to hire people who are 10x more productive and Get Things Done at a faster, more reliable pace? If there are people like that who yield better results consistently, how do they manage burnout? Are they treated as the mythical 'rock-star engineer' who other companies like to poach and clamor for?
10x output is so rare in this industry, and having 10 employees that match the output of one person is seen as silly, but there's nothing wrong with hiring 10 people to do something a single person can do. Yeah sure, you have to pay out 10x more salary, but since mythical rock-star developers are in such short supply and regularly poached, I don't see a reason for clamoring for them IMHO.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#216What on earth can make a person as successful as Zuckerberg be so fucking clueless? Obviously the first people to leave when heat turns up are the best ones, as they are the ones who have the most opportunities and courage. I have seen this a dozen times and this happens almost mechanically.
I knew success was mostly about luck, but things like this make it seem like it’s 100% about luck.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#217> Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here If a company has both 1) A lot of dead wood 2) No better strategy to deal with it than 'turning up the heat' Then this suggests a profound failure of management and leadership. I'd start cutting the dead wood there.
Every sufficiently large company has a lot of dead wood, and nobody has yet devised a better strategy than 'turning up the heat'.
Citation needed. alternative strategies would include:
Rewarding good employees and firing bad ones.
Deciding on actual useful performance metrics ahead of time and measuring people against them.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised that nobody is questioning this. Zuckerberg owns ~17% of Meta shares, so it quite clearly not "his" company where he can do whatever he pleases. Primarily he is an employee and has a responsibility to the owners (which does include him) to do his job, arguably looking at button padding is not part of his job description.
Zuckerberg has a voting majority. As long as he believes he is acting in the companies best interests he can do whatever he likes.
This isn't strictly true, Zuckerberg has to act in the interests of the minority shareholders as well. He can't take a deal that helps himself while hurting all other shareholders.
Getting involved in button padding issues isn't one of those cases though. He can spend all the time in the world on that if he likes.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#219hasn't meta been hiring like crazy?
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every sufficiently large company has a lot of dead wood, and nobody has yet devised a better strategy than 'turning up the heat'.
Does this not have the side effect of also driving away employees with the best alternatives (so, probably your best ones)?
Absolutely, employees leave bad managers, they seldom want to leave the employer itself – Or at least this was my personal experience, always on the run from dead woods.