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Meta and Google are cutting staff

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Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#211
I've noticed news articles saying that Meta have been cutting back on support staff, like cleaners and custodial roles. To me, these are the wrong people to be cutting. The people who clean Meta are not the reason why Meta is hemorrhaging money. I'm sure they actually do their jobs very well.

They should fire the people who are actually causing the problems. Everyone stopped using facebook because they are uncomfortable using a giant, ad serving, spy machine. They are also discouraged that facebook started deciding which friends are important to the user instead of letting the user pick. The people who implemented these ?features? should be the first to be fired.

Similarly, the reason everyone is walking away from Google is because the search is getting worse. Why? Because Google increasingly doesn't allow you to search for what actually exists, but instead what it thinks you should see. Fire the people who did this. Fire them because they are destroying your company.

I don't care if you don't, it's your wealth to lose, but I also know that's not who will be shouldering the burden of yet another recession. I could easily do this for every company: Netflix: it's the crappy political shows, Microsoft: it's the telemetry and continually slower product, Apple: it's intentionally slowing working products, Goldman Sachs: it's the bro/frat culture, Most Banks: it's the insulting fees, Amazon: it's the way you treat your warehouse staff: Most Fast Food: it's the price gouging Most Food companies: it's the annoying shrinkflation. Fire these people. They made you short term profits and now your brand is ruined and everyone hates you.

But instead they will fire the people who are actually doing their job, and keep all the executives and "thought leaders", or whatever, in their protected positions. I think everyone basically knows why everyone hates facebook and left. Just stop doing that, is what I'm getting at.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#212

The article highlights that the easiest way for these companies to let go of staff right now is to dissolve entire teams. I've heard from friends that work at these companies that recent hiring freezes have actually made managers more hesitant to fire low performers because anyone they fire can't be replaced and they'd rather have a low performer than no one at all. The team dissolving process seems to sidestep this…

>...they'd rather have a low performer than no one at all. Seems contradictory to many modern interview process opinions that low performers introduce a net negative effect.

Even if a low performer reduces team productivity, having more team members rather than fewer might be in the manager's personal interest.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key component of stack ranking / sorting by performance is that there's no absolute measure of your contribution, only a relative measure by which you have to outcompete everyone else in your team/department. If you fire your lowest 15% of engineers—no matter how good they are on an absolute level—that's a stack ranking system. It's a horrifying Red Queen's Race that punishes high-quality teams. I'm not necessari…

The other key component of stack ranking was that it's on a per team basis. A team of 20 people may have no low performers. An org of 400 probably has a couple, at some point the law of large numbers does really start to apply, and you're no longer in competition with the people you're working with on the daily. If one member of your two-pizza team is going to get fired each year, it makes sense to throw someone unde…

Having endured several such calibration sessions at FB/Meta I can also assure you that we are not even talking about 'large' numbers before there is a strong expectation that the ranking totals within an org will meet the predicted curve when it comes to the percentage at exceeds, meets, and meets most. I distinctly remember wasting more than 15 minutes of my life arguing with a skip level manager that someone who had course corrected and delivered solid work while digging themselves out of a PIP was at least a meets before eventually realizing this manager had a quota of meets most to fill and the person we were discussing was destined for that bucket just to make the numbers look as expected.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#214
post #152
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because a job gets posted doesn't mean it is actually available to be filled. The barrier to posting jobs to LinkedIn is extremely low. Don't let yourself be fooled into a false sense of confidence, you'd really need to test the process out to see if it yields an offer!

Data point of one and all but I chatted with a Meta recruiter a month ago and asked specifically about the hiring freeze that was on-going at the time. They mentioned they were still hiring for more senior engineers so YMMV.

Recruiters' whole primary job is to recruit, and they don't get a lot of top secret information about what's coming next, either. It's in their best interest to always say they are hiring, otherwise why are they even employed by Señor Zuckerberg? They don't get a two month vacation during a hiring freeze.

And yeah, if you are top, top egghead talent it's possible there is always at job for you at Meta. It might just save that recruiters job if they source you and you pan out.

Think about it like this: earlier this year the bar to get an offer was that you need to be hot, like a 6/10 before. In this new climate, you need to be more like a 9.5/10 to make it through their little hiring game.

With that said..

Don't let some random on the Internet stop or discourage you; go get that job if you are up to the task and actually want to work at Meta! Have fun.. yeah.

My original comment was more about the non-Bigco job postings, a lot of times they may just be testing the waters to see what they can dredge up. If it looks appealing, they might bite. It's mostly a huge waste of time for the poor candidates, though.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#215

I can't read WSJ while at work, but after checking on the financials for both Meta and Alphabet, I do not understand why either would be cutting staff. Both look pretty strong, so I am not sure how cuts are justified or why Zuckerberg has a negative outlook, especially since 2021 was such a great year for both. Do American executives, investors, and start up owners not have the guts for even a moderate stock price dr…

They don’t have useful things for those employees to do.

And why would they need justification? They don’t owe anyone permanent sinecures.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#216

I've noticed news articles saying that Meta have been cutting back on support staff, like cleaners and custodial roles. To me, these are the wrong people to be cutting. The people who clean Meta are not the reason why Meta is hemorrhaging money. I'm sure they actually do their jobs very well. They should fire the people who are actually causing the problems. Everyone stopped using facebook because they are uncomforta…

>I've noticed news articles saying that Meta have been cutting back on support staff, like cleaners and custodial roles. To me, these are the wrong people to be cutting.

In my experience, some non-trivial amount of these cost-control measures is about signaling. I worked in Japan for a large company that allowed employees to ride in first class (Green Car) on the Narita Express when traveling internationally for business; that went away during a period of belt-tightening. Saved a whole $15 each way.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#217
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They will refute at all cost that this is stack ranking Graded in the context of peers’ performance does not imply that they sort employees by performance.

Interesting. I can't find a way to read "graded in the context of peers" that doesn't parse into exactly the same concept as "sort employees by performance". AFAIK, it's not something you can interpret as, those are literally synonyms. But well, stack ranking is not only about sorting (the name is a lie), it's about placing people in fixed sized cohorts. The real question is if there is a limitation on the number of…

That’s because once you have a score for each employee you already have a sort button in excel. Who wouldn’t?

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pay is near top and the engineers are talented. There are a lot of systems in place to get you to work near max capacity all the time with little slowdown time. There are lots of processes and political upheavals that make it hard to ship code. Some people love it.

Can you give an example of a system that’s in place to ensure workers are near max capacity most of the time?

Diff count/LoC count is recorded and made publicly available for all engineers in a graph that lets you easily compare metrics between developers and teams. This means if you are constantly comparing your output to the rest of the team.

The multi-axis performance review criteria that requires you to show deliverables on things like your impact on team-building or culture. This means that when you might normally get a couple week low-output time between projects, you are usually looking for something to fill in the non-coding axis, like organizing a team virtual offsite event or searching for a way to improve the codebase.

Organizing team activities and code quality initiatives are a good thing, but the explcitivity in which you need to show deliverable impact on all axis is something I found unique to Meta and very exhausting.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#219

The article highlights that the easiest way for these companies to let go of staff right now is to dissolve entire teams. I've heard from friends that work at these companies that recent hiring freezes have actually made managers more hesitant to fire low performers because anyone they fire can't be replaced and they'd rather have a low performer than no one at all. The team dissolving process seems to sidestep this…

> the easiest way for these companies to let go of staff right now is to dissolve entire teams. The options seem to be: * Cut risky or underperforming products or teams and focus company resources on the products and teams that are doing well. * Or cut staff across the board, leaving all teams struggling to succeed with fewer resources. The first option seems wiser. "More wood behind fewer arrows", as the saying goes…

If you layoff a bunch of people working on greenfield projects, people will catch on and try to avoid working on more research-like roles out of fear of it happening again.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#220

Amazon seems to be on the short list of big tech companies still not completely frozen the hiring. They seem to have slowed down, according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32929483 but not full pause.

Amazon always comes as the less desirable among the big techs.

I mean it is cheap comparing to Google/Meta, but again, in a much changed environment that is still better than not being hired at all I guess.

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