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

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

#471

Post by david38 » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 5:25 AM UTC

npteljes wrote: post #107

achow wrote: post #2

Interesting quote from CEO in an all hands directly to employees. I don't want to be at Meta right now.. .."turning up the heat" on performance management to weed out staffers unable to meet more aggressive goals. "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said. "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turni…

>"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. This, to me, sounds like he's pressuring people to leave, so that they don't have to fire them, which would involve severance.

I doubt it. You can just slow down and be fired. Severance is a pittance to them.

What they are really trying to avoid is laying off the wrong people. Management is really bad at guessing who wants to stay and who wants out. Often, a bunch of “low performers” are riffed. Some are bad, some are just on the wrong team, some are having life complications- birth, death, divorce, etc.

It’s really bad PR to fire someone who is a low performer because of a bad pregnancy, grandma died, etc. especially when they call a reporter and show their stellar ratings from previous years.

On top of all that, with the rif comes a higher work load. At this time many high performers will quit, which sucks because you just laid off a bunch of people, many of whom were close to these guys in performance.

Then the company is at risk of making bad decisions. They they push even harder on those that remain? Do they become pragmatic and cut initiatives they can no longer staff?

All moves have risk.

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

#472

Post by kennywinker » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 5:33 AM UTC

seti0Cha wrote: post #367

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 seems unlikely to me that they'll turn up the pressure on the high performers. More likely they'll just raise the bar for what is considered adequate. The real pain will be having less people to do the work, but that happens with layoffs as well.

Ok so high performers are fine, low performers are out. What about everyone else?

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

#473

Post by chii » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 5:35 AM UTC

EndorphinRush wrote: post #141

boredtofears wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said in my original comment: I'm sure there are a ton of interesting jobs at meta, no doubt - but they are the "meta" jobs of meta. In terms of driving their primary objective it's nothing that innovative from a technical perspective. Their innovation is solely rooted in behavioral psychology. Not self-driving cars, not better medical devices, not VR technology (well, OK, they bought their way into that). The…

Their innovation is solely rooted in behavioral psychology. I’m not a fan of Facebook. I don’t even have an account. But it would be unfair to say they haven’t come up with some truly innovative approaches to large scale infrastructure. Also, to their credit they are huge supporters of open source. For example the Open Compute Project is still alive and well in large data halls. They are also still supporting the Tel…

> Their innovation is solely rooted in behavioral psychology.

i think the poster meant 'business model' rather than innovation.

Having an immoral business model doesn't imply they are not innovative - facebook does plenty of technical innovation indeed.

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

#474

Post by akhmatova » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 5:37 AM UTC

rvz wrote: post #112

d--b wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this read “Let’s ditch those ethical people who get in the way of profit.”? Yes FB is not for me. Not as a worker, not as a customer.

> Does this read “Let’s ditch those ethical people who get in the way of profit.”? No. You said that. Not sure what you are reading. It is basically getting rid of very low performers, slackers and those unable to deliver those expected goals. No where did it say what you have just said.

It is basically getting rid of very low performers,

No - it is specifically aimed at getting rid of people who were doing fine before -- may have been top performers, even -- but who refuse to go into overdrive (start sacrificing sleep, or time with their families) to meet artificial goals.

That is to say: goals designed to reduce headcount -- by turning high performers into low performers.

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

#475

Post by not-a-good-bet » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 5:41 AM UTC

frays wrote: post #453

kornhole wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep asking people if they know anybody excited about the metaverse. I have not found any even among people who are total Facebook products.

I don’t think the future of the metaverse will have anything to do with 3D actually. The 3D/VR stuff is more of a fad than a long term plan. The real vision behind the metaverse is thinking that many of the things we currently do in person (i.e., concerts, going to bars, school, work, etc.) will eventually move online. Meta wants to position themselves as the “platform” for this.

By this moment, i think the Steam Deck has a better position to build the 3D metaverse.

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

#476

Post by lumost » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 5:42 AM UTC

KerrAvon wrote: post #464

cam0 wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this expectation is incredibly far fetched. It is betting on the reversal of many, many years of human habit which has become habit for a reason.

I have no faith that Facebook knows what it’s doing, but I need to point out that COVID is going to absolute cripple the population if we don’t all learn to get virtual for anything truly optional real quick. And if it does cripple the population, a lot of stuff will have to be virtual to be attended at all.

Most of Europe and the America's are winding down lockdown measures. mRNA vaccines are highly effective. if you try to book a plane or concert ticket you'll see that people are racing to get out of their homes after 2+ years.

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

#477

Post by zaven » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 5:51 AM UTC

xtracto wrote: post #184

phendrenad2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blood in the water. Might be a good time to start a new social network. A simple blue interface that doesn't have all of the clutter and noise of Mybook. We can launch at universities first, invite-only.

Whatever comes to replace Facebook I really hope it is a distributed system that doesn't have a single unique owner. And that monetization is not done through advertising. The problem with Friendster, MySpace and then Facebook was their centralized nature. It sucks to produce/place your content in a place you have to pay for.

This is exactly what we’re trying to build at Niche. Give us a follow if you’re interested in updates (we’re keeping things pretty low key for now). https://twitter.com/nicheprotocol

Our whole engineering team, myself included, is ex-Facebook.

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

#478

Post by whiplash451 » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 6:12 AM UTC

andsoitis wrote: post #397

jjav wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right…

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

#479

Post by deepsquirrelnet » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 6:21 AM UTC

plantwallshoe wrote: post #358

bcrosby95 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> creating a perverse system of carrots and sticks to get those people to push themselves as hard as they can

If farmville were a job… my god, I think they’ve gone and done it.

> people that worked for meta and they called it the most psychologically damaging environment they've ever worked in

Just wait until they try using the platform they built. At least they have something in common with their users.

Years ago, there was a Darwin Award for a man who removed the safety padding from a ski lift pole, carried it up the hill and then used it to sled back down on. He crashed into the pole he removed it from and died.

So meta.

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

#480

Post by TomVDB » Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 6:56 AM UTC

tuckerman wrote: post #374

TomVDB wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why a disservice? It’s the contrary. Thanks to those kinds of leaks, I had already decided I’d never want to work for that place. When a good friend started working there, he confirmed pretty much everything.

It’s fun and juicy to read leaks from other companies but it really sucks when your leadership stops being open or stops taking questions in all hands meetings because everything they say immediately gets posted on Twitter. Just because you’d like to know the information about the on-goings of a company doesn’t make you entitled to it and I wish large companies would collectively do more to go after leakers in court…

How did you get to the conclusion that anyone thinks they’re entitled to that information? Of course nobody is.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s this information is useful for outsiders, not a disservice.

As for wanting leakers to be dragged into court…

Are you saying, for example, that Amazon warehouse workers should not be allowed to expose terrible working conditions? Or pretty much any other unethical action of a company?

Because that’s exactly what you’re advocating for.