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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

#341

Post by datalopers »

joshstrange wrote: post #225
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…

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

Or maybe the best talent is sick of these overpaid rest-and-vest lackeys and more than happy to see them get the axe.

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

#342

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

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.

[flagged]

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

#343

Post by bricemo »

kennywinker wrote: post #296
bricemo wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not “making people suffer”. It is having high expectations for performance that A-players and teams can easily hit. If companies are going to survive during a crisis time when the whole world is facing headwinds, there is no margin for error, at FB or anywhere.

Layoffs are always awful, they take jobs away from people without them having a say. They should always be a last resort.

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

#345

Post by AtNightWeCode »

ivraatiems wrote: post #262
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

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

Typical middle management bs. The best engineers even delete far more code than they write.

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

#346

Post by littlestymaar »

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.

> Holding employees accountable for high performance standards is generally welcomed by high performers.

While this is true (working in a company that doesn't value high performers over slackers is infuriating for the former), it's really unlikely that you'll be able to change your company's culture in the right direction at will (if rewarding high performers and kicking the butt of low performers was that easy why weren't you doing so all along ?!), so what's usually happening is:

- the management starts monitoring some KPI some consulting firm told them to monitor

- they start annoy everyone in the company based on these BS arbitry “holly metrics”, which are indeed poor performance indicators and are easily gameable

- top performers will be pissed off and leave

- low performers will do all they can to maximize their metrics instead of doing actual work, reducing their productivity even more

- congrats you've destroyed your company's talent pool and have now turned Meta into IBM. Too bad you don't even have a sales department on par with IBM's, so you'll probably end up like AOL or Yahoo!

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

#347

Post by joshstrange »

SQueeeeeL wrote: post #329
sbf501 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, eve…

I couldn't agree more, especially about the lack of good metrics for coding performance. I feel like more often than not metrics or even new "policies" are put into place just to provide cover for firing people. So they can "backsolve" or use "parallel construction" to justify the firing.

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

#348

Post by kennywinker »

tuckerman wrote: post #328
kennywinker wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can word dance around it all you want - his intent is clear: working at meta is going to be harder tomorrow than it was yesterday, with the intent that some people will quit over it.

How you feel about that depends on if you see yourself as more similar to an owner of meta, or as a worker at meta.

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

#349

Post by rglover »

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

So in other words they don't have the slightest clue what they're doing.
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