> 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.
> Then this suggests a profound failure of management and leadership. Dead wood management?
Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
301–310 of 509 posts
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#302Earlier 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. 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.
Lol, anyone who's really a high performer knows that being metriced is terrible. Having to constantly be cranking out LoC because some middle manager doesn't actually understand the process of actually making software is infuriating. And even if they are doing well now, no one wants to feel that dark gnawing instability that comes from knowing the people on your team you grow to know and trust are constantly on the c…
At a previous job the management team got all excited about KPIs and made each dept come up ~5 of them and then report on them weekly (or maybe it was monthly). I fought it tooth and nail arguing that it was both silly that we were coming up with them and how easily it would be gamed. My concerns fell of deaf ears and instead we wasted upwards of 4-6 person-weeks of time building tools to extract data from Jira to serve as our KPIs. We wrote the damn code to calculate it, of course we know how to juice the numbers. It was a huge waste of time, nothing interesting came out of it (for us or any department), and "management" patted themselves on the back for "taking action".
I'm not say all metrics suck and are a waste of time but you better have a very good reason for them before you go all-in.
A friend of mine's company started requiring all their developers to track their time, down to the 15min interval. I'd be looking for a new job within a week. Don't even get me started on how asking your employees to track their time is essentially asking them to lie which means the stats you get are worthless, worse than worthless because time tracking takes time on it's own to do.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#303Earlier 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. 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.
Lol, anyone who's really a high performer knows that being metriced is terrible. Having to constantly be cranking out LoC because some middle manager doesn't actually understand the process of actually making software is infuriating. And even if they are doing well now, no one wants to feel that dark gnawing instability that comes from knowing the people on your team you grow to know and trust are constantly on the c…
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#304Yeah, "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…
I have seen instances where the "underperformers" were the people that made the workplace/team pleasant to be in. Once they were let go, some overperfomers quit not much later.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a company is collecting a lot of "dead wood" underperformers, the correct response is to start raising performance expectations and hold people accountable to those standards. That's essentially what Meta is saying they're going to do. The "...so employees will quit" was an editorialized addition to the headline. The real story is that they're tightening their employee expectations and holding people accountable,…
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Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#306> 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.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#307Without context (which when speaking to a company can also include context you can only get by working there and experiencing the culture/norms) it’s possible to pull out clips from most speeches/announcements to excite anger from just about anyone and many media outlets seem very happy to help leakers do just that.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#308Earlier 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. 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.
No, you set clear performance expectations, give them feedback, and then hold them accountable if they don't meet those performance expectations. Which seems to be what Meta is doing here.
I honestly can't believe so many people in this thread would prefer that Meta just slash and burn employees instead of giving them expectations and a chance to meet them.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#309Earlier 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.
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.
“Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals…”