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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

#391

Post by DisjointedHunt »

dnissley wrote: post #331
DisjointedHunt wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

It's not just about new employees though. The pandemic shifted people's priorities, but many are still clinging to a job that doesn't fit those new priorities.

What a brilliant argument. Can you cite anything . .just anything at all to back up your premise or are you just going to present that as fact?

App Tracking Transparency was the primary reason for the ad behemoth to slow down leading to the domino effects we're seeing here, but clearly , in your mind, there's an alternate set of facts running.

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

#392

Post by DisjointedHunt »

aeyes wrote: post #223
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be for more cold blooded companies but most PIPs I've witnessed have gotten severance and actually good packages to boot.

Agree, I mostly saw: Take this generous amount of money and hand in your resignation or you won't have to come back tomorrow and you get nothing.

Take this generous amount of money (1 month pay) and SIGN THIS WAIVER RELEASING US OF ALL FUTURE LIABILITIES is the important part.

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

#393

Post by aetherson »

synu wrote: post #377
aetherson wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

I think that building a high performance organisation starts way before you get to the point where you need an emergency leadership directive at the beginning of a downturn that from now on you’re going to turn up the heat and hold people accountable for performance. If you are pulling that lever to some extent I think you have to admit you took a wrong turn somewhere.

I dunno, maybe there was a wrong turn -- or maybe just you're responding to rapidly changing conditions.

But if there was a wrong turn, and now you're error correcting, that still seems quite a bit different from, "Lol what does this doofus know, he's just an idiot."

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

#394

Post by AtNightWeCode »

Meta clearly have too many employees in comparison to the number of users. Even if we calculate that on the fake official user count. In my sphere people simply do not use Instagram and Facebook anymore besides for chatting. Instagram kinda killed itself for me with all the porn spam.

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

#395

Post by coolspot »

danielovichdk wrote: post #145

The real question here is: Is the economy going down ? I have heard others saying we are entering a deep recession within the next year

US debt/GDP is 370%, inflation is 9%, natural resources locked in Russia, and Fed can’t do QE anymore.

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

#396

Post by kjeetgill »

AtNightWeCode wrote: post #394

Meta clearly have too many employees in comparison to the number of users. Even if we calculate that on the fake official user count. In my sphere people simply do not use Instagram and Facebook anymore besides for chatting. Instagram kinda killed itself for me with all the porn spam.

This is a great example of why anecdotal evidence is close to meaningless. I don't know a single person not on one of, if not, two or all three of: Facebook, Insta, Whatsapp.

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

#397

Post by andsoitis »

jjav wrote: post #183
charcircuit wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CEOs dog fooding their products and leaving feedback on them is not failing shareholders. Would you prefer a CEO to completely ignore everything their company makes and just trust others to tell him how things are going?

A wise CEO doesn't bypass the product and engineering process he's delegated to be put in place. Bypasing the process not only interferes with someones sprint and product roadmap, but more importantly, tells the people who own the process that they don't really own it after all. Which leads to people quitting.

If the CEO of my company prodded me about a feature I work on, I think that's actually a great opportunity to build rapport.

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

#398

Post by nabilhat »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #239
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.

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,…

It's more of a summary:

> "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me," he said.

Some in leadership view cost of risk of employees who quit as being cheaper than employees who are fired, or if they're narcissistic enough that "the most loyal" employees will stick it out. It's normally common sense that this kind of strategy is kept very far away from anything that might come up in discovery if there's legal pushback. Zuckerberg saying this to Reuters in an interview requires a depth of innocent cluelessness that suggests he's insulated himself from critical feedback. This statement is going to be referenced by employees who feel the need to pursue recourse for perceived constructive dismissal.

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

#399

Post by kennywinker »

bricemo wrote: post #343
kennywinker wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

End result is the same people without jobs. Raising expectations and making people quit has the side effect of those “low performers” leaving, some people easily hitting the expectations, and most people busting their ass to keep up. Sounds bad to me.

I don’t really see this as an extinction level downturn for fb. Time will tell, but I’d be shocked if this seriously threatened the company in any way except its share price.

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

#400

Post by marshray »

eru wrote: post #68
georgeburdell wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta has done a lot of interesting work in the hardware space. In hardware, you just kind of accept, regardless of your company or its vision, that your work is ultimately used to facilitate the watching of cat videos.

Alternatively, your work is being used to process financial information and trades a few nanoseconds faster, or your work is being used by the military, ...

Data security!

You can work on defending the masses from the militaries and bad actors of the world.

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