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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

#311

Post by vkou »

AlexandrB wrote: post #287
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #256

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. 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.

Everyone knows that there are poor performers in any organization, but nobody knows for sure who many of them are.

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

#312

Post by DragonStrength »

AlexandrB wrote: post #287
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #256

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. 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.

Yep, I don't want to work in a fear-based management structure. Sorry for those who don't have better options, but I'm walking when I hear stuff like this.

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

#313

Post by synu »

aetherson wrote: post #276
synu wrote: 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?

It turns out that "increase expectations of delivery" is not synonymous with "make everyone miserable."

That’s true, but at a company that size when the order comes all the way from the top to “turn up the heat?” Sounds like a recipe for misery generation.

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

#314

Post by colonelpopcorn »

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.

Unless the baseline is where the high performers are performing at right now.

It's a win-win for companies to hold employees to high standards. Either they sacrifice health, family, relationships, hobbies, etc. to meet unsustainable demands or they "self-select" and the company no longer has to pay their salary, healthcare, benefits, etc. In the economic climate we're living in, it just makes economic sense to squeeze as much productivity as possible out of your workers. This includes pushing already high performing workers to do more than they already are.

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

#315

Post by joshstrange »

robonerd wrote: post #297
joshstrange wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or, in my specific situation, my manager (and the manger above them) were terrible at handling intrapersonal conflicts. They would just ignore it until it went away and hating confronting anyone about anything. At least one of them also "liked" the "dead wood" in question or had at least worked with them for a long time. I understand all of that. But at the end of the day, it was bad managers. Even if you somehow manage to clear the "dead wood" (good luck, they hold on longer that performing members in my experience) you are still stuck with bad managers and you'll be right back in the same place in little time.

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

#316

Post by JohnBooty »

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.

This assumes that you have solved the decades-old problem of measuring knowledge worker productivity in some sort of concise and accurate way.

What's your solution here for engineers? Counting the lines of code they write?

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

#317

Post by colonelpopcorn »

DisjointedHunt wrote: post #255
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…

AWS is another. The gripe i have with them is they do it during the good times as well. I've seen some pretty horrible effects on perfectly good devs who were subject to what i'm only going to characterize as mental torture during their time there.

This in regards to their warehouse workforce, but relevant to devs as well: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/22/amazon-wo...

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

#318

Post by monkey_monkey »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #308
AlexandrB wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If they shouldn't be there, fire them. 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.

I'm surprised you actually believe that a company that has incompetently hired thousands of excess people will suddenly have an amazing process for setting performance expectations and holding people accountable.

Some people might just think those are weasel words to cover an impending large-scale RIF.

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

#319

Post by joshstrange »

sbf501 wrote: post #295
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. 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?

> Did we really think he was actually GOOD at anything?

Lol, absolutely not. He got lucky, stole someone else's idea, and had a massive safety net to fall back on. I'm not saying he has zero skills but managing to hold onto 51% of the company does not make you a good CEO (as you stated).

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

#320

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Talking about "turning up the heat" at FB and using this kind of language is fairly odd to me while at the same time Google is actively reforming their perf and promo process in a way that seems (at least to me, newly on the outside) to be kind of the opposite of this and a response to internal frustration, and lots of attrition.

I don't know, maybe we'll see a similar thing happen at Google over the next few months. But not right now, at least not what I'm hearing.

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