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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

#281

Post by bcrosby95 »

plantwallshoe wrote: post #250

I worked at Meta for 2 years and the pressure to land features while keeping up on your code review/LoC metrics was a fucking nightmare during the boom times. I can only imagine how shitty it will get with the specter of layoffs floating around

Yeah, I know some people that worked for meta and they called it the most psychologically damaging environment they've ever worked in. And they were all originally game devs.

One went back to game dev, one decided to retire early, and the other went to Google.

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

#282

Post by msbarnett »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #251
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…

> Yeah, "we hired people we shouldn't have so now we're going to make it increasingly unpleasant to work here" doesn't work. But that's not what Meta is saying. The goal isn't just to make it miserable. The goal is to raise the expectations and hold people accountable throughout the company. The exact quote "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here" is hard to argue wit…

Like I said, I've been through this first hand.

I was exceeding expectations, and given a big promotion in the middle of it. But people I worked with and interacted with every day were feeling extremely stressed and worried about their ability to meet the new bar. Now, in many cases, they didn't need to be worried, but it's natural to question these things in an environment where you're seeing people get PIP'd and unceremoniously shitcanned regularly.

Morale was through the floor, it was an absolutely miserable environment to work in – even though I was personally doing quite well. So I said "fuck this" and was the first person out the door on my team. The second highest performer quit a week later.

The least technically capable person on the team was there for another year.

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

#284

Post by colinmhayes »

tsimionescu wrote: post #221
colinmhayes wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuckerberg has a voting majority. As long as he believes he is acting in the companies best interests he can do whatever he likes.

That's irrelevant when discussing ownership. He owns 17% of Meta. That he retains control of 90% of Meta doesn't mean that he has the moral right to ignore his responsibilities to his co-owners.

No one has the moral right to do anything since the entire idea of moral rights is absurd. Yes, Zuckerberg has a duty to act in the best interest of shareholders. Courts have repeatedly ruled that good faith belief is all that requires. Unless you think his interest in button ui is somehow in self interest over company interest he didn’t do anything wrong.

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

#285

Post by Veuxdo »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #251
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…

> Yeah, "we hired people we shouldn't have so now we're going to make it increasingly unpleasant to work here" doesn't work. But that's not what Meta is saying. The goal isn't just to make it miserable. The goal is to raise the expectations and hold people accountable throughout the company. The exact quote "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here" is hard to argue wit…

> very clear expectations

Unfortunately, this is beyond most companies when it comes to software developers.

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

#286

Post by labrador »

> “Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,”

Translation: We feel bad letting people go because we're all fam so we're going to make it your fault you were let go. If you can't meet the arbitrary and unequally applied goals we set for you then that's on you.

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

#287

Post by AlexandrB »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #256
joshstrange wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolute insanity that they don't see that the best talent can and will walk out the door if this happens. Even if the top performers are insulated from the "heat" there are a non-zero number of them that this won't sit right with and/or they are affected and they leave. Any company who uses this kind of shadow-layoff or whatever you want to call it is scum, plain and simple. I mean that's no surprise for Meta o…

> It's absolute insanity that they don't see that the best talent can and will walk out the door if this happens. On the contrary, the best talent is probably already performing to these higher expectations and won't be impacted. Their peers who weren't keeping up are the ones who will be impacted. Holding employees accountable for high performance standards is generally welcomed by high performers.

If my CEO said:

> “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said during the meeting, according to Reuters.

I'd probably start looking for another job. It's one thing to fire poor performers, it's another to make vague allusions to "people who shouldn't be here". If they shouldn't be there, fire them. Otherwise, this just sounds like management has no clue.

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

#288

Post by tuckerman »

kennywinker wrote: post #217
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'.

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.

A very reasonable interpretation of turning up the heat is exactly to start doing a better job of holding people accountable to your already established ladder.

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

#289

Post by pfortuny »

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.

Yes, that is so cheeky… We are going to put pressure so that we do not have to pay any severance because they will leave “willingly”.

Good luck with keeping just the good people with that technique.

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

#290

Post by blevin »

danielovichdk wrote: post #145

The real question here is: Is the economy going down ? I have heard others saying we are entering a deep recession within the next year

Nobody knows for sure, and a single summary statistic of a huge economy cannot capture the dispersion of lived experiences, but yes, there are objective indications suggesting recession is possible.

For one example, the Atlanta Federal Reserve runs a real-time GDP forecast called GDP Now. The update today is -2.1%

https://twitter.com/atlantafed/status/1542922843511574528

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