Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 6:21 PM UTC

blantonl wrote: post #248

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?

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

They might.. for a little while, but eventually most people will just say 'meh' and head for greener pastures. A lot depends on the relationships and once the first link breaks, odds are, more people will follow the first 'defector'.

It is really not that complicated. Few will put up with 'heat' if it gets to an annoying level; especially if they have other options.

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

#322

Post by TomVDB » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 6:21 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #131

ShamelessC wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about, you know... _zero_ "PSC"? Sounds like the type of shit a company does when it builds a culture of mistrusting its own employees.

No performance reviews, ever?

That’s de facto my situation.

After copy-and-pasting the same answers year after year in the self evaluation form, my manager got the message. That was, what, 10 years ago?

Now, once per year, we have a 20min meeting, he tells me “good job”, gives my new salary and RSUs, and we’re good.

It’s great.

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

#323

Post by dnissley » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 6:21 PM UTC

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.

As a meta employee, here's my read: Zuck just wants folks to get back in gear after being somewhat (justifiably) distracted over the past 2 years.

To be honest I see where he's coming from. I heard about and read a lot about the company culture before I joined, both good and bad. I thought at minimum I was signing up for a certain level of intensity that definitely seems to be lacking.

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

#324

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 6:21 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#325

Post by api » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 6:22 PM UTC

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…

You'll lose the best people that way, not the dead wood.

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

#326

Post by FooBarBizBazz » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 6:22 PM UTC

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…

There is one other reason people will stay, and that's vesting schedules. But if the share price is tanking then that reason goes away.

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

#327

Post by aetherson » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 6:22 PM UTC

synu wrote: post #313

aetherson wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where should the order come from?

I'm agnostic about whether or not Facebook will implement this well. Certainly it's possible to implement these kinds of initiatives badly. But the whole HN attitude of "how dare you?!?" doesn't strike me as people who are taking an appropriately realistic view of the real problems in trying to make a large organization be high performing, it strikes me as entitlement.

I also feel like Zuckerberg has had a fairly large amount of success building a highly performant organization in the past, and while that doesn't mean he hasn't lost touch or that FB hasn't gotten too big to do the same things with or whatever, this certainty that you see in these comment threads that he's just like tripping on his shoelaces and doing self-evidently idiotic things seems extremely overconfident.

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

#328

Post by tuckerman » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 6:23 PM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #309

tuckerman wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would be a reasonable interpretation if the next words out of his mouth weren’t “Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals…”

First, I think goals and expectations are different. That said, it’s possible to have intended to always be setting ambitious goals but look back and see that maybe you were unintentionally coasting. Fixing that problem isn’t nefarious.

I think reading into this any deeper is just succumbing to a leakers goal of finding sound bites which sound bad to get people all excited and angry.

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

#329

Post by SQueeeeeL » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 6:23 PM UTC

sbf501 wrote: post #303

SQueeeeeL wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Really high performance MANAGERS understand you can't succeed at scale without indicators. You seem to come from the naive viewpoint that solo devs rule the world and run open-loop like some imaginary hotshot. That couldn't be more wrong.

Anyone who isn't directly contributing to a product can't be high performing. Maybe they can be supportive of high performing individuals, but usually that just entails keeping upper management out of the way.

As a field we have yet to find good metrics for coding performance, anyone who tells you otherwise just wants to have an excuse to fire you when they suddenly decide that you no longer serve their purposes, even if those purposes is just to have a cool social club that validates their fragile ego.

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

#330

Post by bayindirh » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 6:23 PM UTC

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.

There's evidence that best talent works best when there's slack and when they crash, they crash hard.

For example, I have an optimal load which I can work almost indefinitely and performing very well (in my own scale), when the load shots up, I lock up.

This is why I'm automating as much as I can, so I can keep in that optimal zone which I perform really well.