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Meta and Google are cutting staff

wsj.com

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Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#221

Post by Johnny555 »

battery_glasses wrote: post #218
wallscratch wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doesn't that just encourage writing code for max LoC rather than efficiency or maintainability? Instead of generalizing a procedure you use in multiple places to make it a single function, if you write it out (slightly differently) each time you do it, then you get a higher LoC count?

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#222

Post by cdavid »

Frost1x wrote: post #134
o10449366 wrote: post #29

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.

It is more complicated than that

* losing the low performer in this context means you lose a head count. If you keep the low performer during hard times, you can hope to get them backfilled when the economic environment gets better * there are often more work to do than you have resources for: if as an EM, you have to deal with PM who refuse to adapt to capacity, you can simply assign the low perfomers to the projects you don't care about. * etc.

once you reach a certain size, those issues happen in pretty much any organization in my experience.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#223

Post by bin_bash »

piva00 wrote: post #189
bin_bash wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah apologies, I'm not sure why I didn't read that correctly the first time. It's wrong to call it "extremely negative" though, my words were "pretty bad". There are 2 levels lower than MM but they're rarely used. MM is a warning—it means you need to improve or you'll likely be put on a PIP.

No worries! I apologise for misrepresenting it as "extremely negative", still with the meaning of "pretty bad" I believe it's a specially disgusting type of language, why use positive-sounding jargon for "underperforming"? What's wrong with using "underperfoming" if that's what "meets most" means? I despise this, the dissonance between a positivity-sounding "meets most" with the actual meaning being "pretty bad" is w…

There actually is a reason (though you might not like it). The internal docs are pretty open about this, I think I can do a decent job capturing the idea:

The idea is they consider themselves to have a very high bar (which I think is largely accurate). They say you “meet most expectations” which means you hit the marks on all but 1 or 2 criteria. It’s not that you’re not good at your job, it’s that that’s not good enough for them.

Of course anyone receiving a MM is having a very shitty day despite that. They could use more direct language but I’m not sure it would have any practical difference.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#224

Post by lmm »

xpe wrote: post #104
paulbjensen wrote: post #81

Public companies trying to keep investors happy and share prices good during a downturn. Let them treat employees like cannon fodder. Some of those employees might end up creating something new and innovative, rather than building another product that gets eventually dead-pooled by Google, or copy-pasted by Meta.

If you had to identify the top three things (in terms of impact) that could be changed (albeit with difficulty) to reduce the chances of employees being stuffed into cannons, what would they be? My three would be: 1. Relatively weak labor protections in the USA. 2. The fiduciary requirement to maximize shareholder value. Why not allow a company to define its own metric, such as a blend of profit along with employee t…

Keeping unproductive employees on in a punch-clock make-work position benefits no-one. If we're going to broadly restructure society to make this kind of thing better, we'd be better off strengthening the social safety net and getting rid of all the stuff that says you have to have a single full-time job or your life will suck. Nationalise healthcare, remove all the weird tax/benefit cliffs that happen when a job goes over/under x hours/week, legalise building more homes in places people want to live...

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#225

Post by curiousllama »

battery_glasses wrote: post #58
o10449366 wrote: post #29

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…

At Meta managers can't really get away with hiding low performers. Your performance review isn't finalized by your manager, but rather the manager submits your review to a calibrating board that tries to ensure fairness and maintain quality standards. They will refute at all cost that this is stack ranking but you are absolutely graded on the curve of the other engineers in your department and level.

Anecdotally, I know this process got rid of at least 1 engineer in the past few months. No egregious mistakes, just general underperformance.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#226

Post by groby_b »

sequoia wrote: post #165

Facebook and google have "required some employees to apply for new jobs if they wish to remain at the company." I have to say this is a sort of hilarious newspeak framing of layoffs. "We're not laying you off, you just need to apply and get accepted for a job or else you're terminated." OK, so I was a job-haver, now I'm a job-seeker... but at least I haven't been laid off!

1) Vesting continues 2) Salary continues 3) Benefits continue 4) For the duration of the search, you don't have other things to do.

==> It's at the very least a paid job search. (If you only look internally during that time, you're doing it wrong). Please do talk to people who've experienced actual layoffs how that's a comparatively very cushy alternative.

And let's not forget that an internal transfer is usually significantly easier than actually finding a new job.

But sure, it's "newspeak".

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#227

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

battery_glasses wrote: post #218
wallscratch wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That penalizes those implementing one line bug fixes buried in the codebase. Each one may be worth 10K lines of new code but numeric driven management will never know.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#228

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

waynesonfire wrote: post #208
battery_glasses wrote: post #98

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.

do they have bidets yet? Try google instead.

How many Michelin stars on the food?

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#229

Post by thebradbain »

dzikimarian wrote: post #190
llbeansandrice wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're doing what's required, what's the problem?

They don't. Some of them try to raise arguments, that they completed given tasks, but forget to mention that they compromised quality along the way. Couple years ago, we had a lot of talks saying that engineers should have slack time to polish things. That's kinda counter-productive if slack time goes into working for other companies.

If they’re contracts, they’re not employees and they’re fully in their rights to work for others too. They owe that company no loyalty, and if they’re doing what’s laid out in the contract, there is no expectation for them to do more, either. Nevertheless, I don’t see how this is slacking either way.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#230

Post by acchow »

vineyardmike wrote: post #125
game_the0ry wrote: post #15

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…

I can't speak formally for any of the companies, of course, but I suspect like another commenter said, its an opportunity to cut fat. Beyond that, the last two years saw many tech companies grow stupid-fast. For example, Snap hired more than 50% of their pre-layoff workforce since start of the pandemic. Google, Meta have both doubled headcount in a similar (slightly longer) time scale. I suspect that despite being ri…

> If the median googler makes 300k

The median googler does not make 300k. The median Google engineer/manager in the US might make 300k but Google hires plenty of people in other roles and in other countries.

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