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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

#351

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#352

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.

Are you suggesting that Facebook has no performance evaluation process for the employees at all right now? If they do, it seems like you could look at those evaluations and make some decisions immediately. If they don't, then fair enough, implement that. What's the purpose of "turning up the heat" to try to get people to quit? And, as others have mentioned, those who quit first if you make their lives harder will be the ones that have other options (usually the high performers).

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

#353
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…

I am not sure demonizing managers here is the fair thing (popular perhaps). Managers (I've had incompatible managers and have been one myself) don't operate in a vacuum. Managers jobs are very much guided/dictated by hr policies (atleast at big cos) down to the point of precise wording to avoid/use, strict "formulas" for comp and refreshers, tight flowcharts to set on tracking execution, planning processes etc. Not to mention just general organisational chaos with project cancellations and fielding requests from N different (indirect) bosses. There is a lot more risk than to justify the reward of going against the tide. Heck even tooling and templates for conducting 1/1s are getting more and more standardized and doing slightly different gets you in trouble.

There are definitely incompetent managers just like there are incompetent engineers or lawyers or directors or leaders etc. A broad/general stroke - I am not sure is justified.

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

#354
post #303

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.

This really depends on the definition of success. If success is just execution without needing to be too novel, metrics work.

Coming up with a new idea, researching its feasibility, and executing on it isn't really doable with rigidly monitored metrics, because a lot of the productive work on novel things looks like thinking about things and trying things that don't work out.

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

#355

The best part is, if you quit now it's an implicit admission you were one of the ones who "shouldn't be here". It's a really wonderful set of incentives. Great job, Mark.

Hardly.

Top talent is first to leave as a firm's fortunes turn.

(FB's fortunes turned a while ago.)

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

#356

> 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.

Eh, sounds like most of big tech TBH. When you're dealing with a money faucet situation it can be tough to tell what's a good decision and what's a bad decision since either choice will result in increased profits. That is, until the fed crashes the party.

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

#358

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

Yeah, I know some people that worked for meta and they called it the most psychologically damaging environment they've ever worked in. And they were all originally game devs. One went back to game dev, one decided to retire early, and the other went to Google.

Meta is very skilled at hiring smart, motivated, hard working people - then creating a perverse system of carrots and sticks to get those people to push themselves as hard as they can.

I think the only thing that really bothers me about this is that it’s all for the purpose of increasing engagement with Reels or selling digital tshirts in the metaverse.

If a company like Meta had 40,000 smart, highly motived people working themselves to death for the sake of solving climate change or homelessness, what a fucking world we might live in.

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

#360

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…

These events impact the broader economy by having too many people idle aimlessly rather than end up productive elsewhere.

Now they get to lose even more time being productive finding gigs.

Brenden Gregg leaves Netflix, weeks later its stock and reputation tank. They don’t think we know, but we do. There’s no reason to put our faith is people who are clearly more of the same rich grifters being propped up by collective belief. Believe something else.

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