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Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

reuters.com

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

#241

Post by reaperducer »

jonny_eh wrote: post #208

> some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me Of course he's ok with it, no need to pay severance to employees that "voluntarily" quit.

Not just severance. Possibly unemployment.

I'm not sure what the law is in California, but one state where I was fired, the company doing the firing was required to pay half of my unemployment benefits.

Not surprisingly, it fought it. Which is how I found out about the law.

Someone from the state unemployment department called me to get my side of the story. Then called my former employer to get its side of the story. Then told my former employer to write a check or lose its business license.

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

#243

Post by graedus »

LegitShady wrote: post #219

hasn't meta been hiring like crazy?

From the article: "Zuckerberg indicated that Meta plans to slow its hiring plans for engineers by at least 30% this year – adding roughly 6,000 or 7,000 workers rather than the 10,000 it initially expected to hire."

So yes, still hiring quite a lot of people, just fewer than originally planned.

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

#244

Post by joshstrange »

s17n wrote: post #204
Planktonne wrote: post #202

> 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'.

Because expecting managers to do their damn jobs would just be too hard?

It wasn't the #1 reason but "dead wood" probably ranked 2 or 3 for why I left my last job and it was 100% the manager's fault. Had that company decided to "turn up the heat" I would have left even faster and I can promise you the "dead wood" would have stayed till the bitter end.

I doubt the claim that no one has come up with a better strategy and I question the leadership abilities of anyone who thinks it's a good strategy.

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

#245

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

mcv wrote: post #212
s17n wrote: post #204

Earlier 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'.

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.

I disagree, though it greatly depends on how "turning up the heat" is done.

There is not a lot that is more demoralizing to top performers than to see dead wood continue to plot along and earn a sizable paycheck and produce little of value. And it's not even all solely an envy issue - it's also an issue of poor performers getting in the way and making other people's job more painful and inefficient.

So a message of "we're going to start getting real about ensuring our high bar is met, and having hard conversations with people who consistently don't meet that bar" is something that some folks would look forward to.

Of course, like I said, the devil is in the details, and if "turning up the heat" means we're going to have more time cops than yes, I think it would be demoralizing.

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

#246

Post by bilsbie »

msbarnett wrote: post #214

Yeah, "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…

Sounds like you’re describing this https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

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

#247

Post by downrightmike »

Planktonne wrote: post #202

> 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.

They also hire people so they don't go work for the competition. There are bound to be a ton of people with bullshit jobs just checking in for the paycheck.

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

#248

Post by blantonl »

synu wrote: post #224
s17n wrote: post #204

Earlier 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'.

How does this work well? Aren’t the good people the first to leave if you decide to make everyone miserable?

the good people are the ones that perform well in the kitchen when it gets hot.
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