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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

#291
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The good people are the ones who don't have to stay in a hot kitchen if they don't want to

I wonder... will the people who hired deadwood get shafted, or will they consider how to improve their hiring process? (ha. ha. ha.)

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

#292
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.

What you say makes sense, but have in mind that it's not that easy to selectively fire employees (as opposed to mass layoffs) in big companies, at least in California. It's arguable whether it should be easy to do that, but firing any employee - even with a very good reason - can open your company to a nasty lawsuit in many states. You can simply call it the cost of doing business, but big companies are scared to death of big labor lawsuits, especially class actions, as clever lawyers can often find some interesting pattern in the fired employees.

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

#293

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

Add on top of that huge pay cuts, Meta stock is down 50%. Doesn't sound pleasant.

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

#294

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

Assuming LoC = lines of code... seriously? That's by far the dumbest metric for measuring software engineer productivity that exists.

There is a graph of your submitted commits/LoC/code review comments over time, overlayed with the rest of your teams metrics.

Managers will tell you that those metrics are not important to your performance review , but it is absolutely not true. They didn’t make the graph so it can be ignored.

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

#295

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…

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. E

When your 51% CEO has so little life experience, what did you expect? There's a reason why - IN GENERAL - the best CEOs are older than 55.

Zuck got lucky with FB and made billions selling personal data and retained 51% control. Did we really think he was actually GOOD at anything?

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

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is exactly what they are doing with one improvement: instead of firing, they are allowing attrition to happen naturally. That’s better than layoffs

Why is that better?

Making everybody suffer until some people leave because it’s intolerable to them… that doesn’t sound better to me.

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

#297
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'.

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 a…

Managers have personal priorities and interests that may not align with the interests of the company. e.g. company doesn't want dead weight, but the manager does for any number of reasons. Maybe the manager really likes those people on a personal level, or maybe the dead weight have dirt on the manager, or maybe the dead weight are kept around as sacrificial material should the manager ever be forced to make cuts, or maybe the incentive structure in the company rewards managers for having more reports, etc.

So yes, expecting managers to put company interests before their own may actually be too hard.

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

#298
I read the article, but I will choose to take the headline literally.

Since men on average prefer a colder work environment than women, I wonder if this will lead to a disproportionate number of males leaving the workplace, improving their male:female ratio?

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

#299

> 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.

Facebook had more than $7B net income last quarter and has $60B cash-on-hand.

While I'm sure that, ceteris paribus, they're more happy if low performers quit than have to be laid off, I'm equally sure that if they felt like they could go through and cut out low performers right now, and the only cost to do so was paying severance, they'd be happy to do it. The idea that Facebook or Zuckerberg of all people has an unwillingness to pay short-term costs for long term benefits is crazy.

There's a difference between being cynical about a corporation and being willing to attribute every bad trait in the world unconditionally to every corporation without any reflection.

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

#300

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…

The problem is that the "very clear expectations" end up being lines of code written, tickets closed, bugs fixed, or whatever, then your employees optimize for that, rather than doing what is right.
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