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Meta and Google are cutting staff

wsj.com

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Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#231

Post by kube-system »

alchemooly wrote: post #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 uncomforta…

Remember that their users are not their customers. User experience at either of those businesses is only relevant as much as it is useful in attracting advertisers to the platform.

Your butcher isn't too concerned about whether the chickens like the decor in their cage.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#232

Post by rockinghigh »

wallscratch wrote: post #114
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.

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

It comes down to the extreme focus on performance review. It creates an environment where every engineer is pressured to move some metrics like time spent on app, number of videos watched, or ad revenue. Because you're compared with your peers, you have to work a little more than them to maintain a good rating and stay in the race.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#233

Post by iLoveOncall »

alchemooly wrote: post #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 uncomforta…

One day you'll enter the corporate world and understand that getting rid of an executive that took a few bad decisions is a lot more damaging than getting rid of the best unqualified worker in the world.

On top of that, I'd argue that steering Facebook and Google in those directions is exactly what their executives and their customers want.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#234

Post by musicale »

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.

Interesting that they seem to think that software developer performance can be measured meaningfully and accurately in a standard way across teams.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#235

Post by pas »

znpy wrote: post #90
battery_glasses wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was contacted by meta just less than a month ago, and I declined the offer of an interview… I guess i dodged a bullet?

it depends. likely yes, but.

there are good (usually small) teams doing interesting and professionally fulfilling work that's not really common elsewhere. (things that come due to "hyperscale". a-a-and, unfortunately, in this regard all big corps are alike. so if you want to do something like that, then your best bet is a corp like FB. though of course there are smaller niche companies for everything, so just because of some niche don't rush to big co-s.)

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#236

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

musicale wrote: post #234
battery_glasses wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting that they seem to think that software developer performance can be measured meaningfully and accurately in a standard way across teams.

So should they hand out promotions and fire people based on randomness?

Take the manager's word for it and go all in on nepotism?

What's the better solution?

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#237

Post by epolanski »

nightpool wrote: post #123
Infinitesimus wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does sorting by performance look like to you? The curve determines rating and compensation, influences promotion decisions, projects people get to work on and what opportunities come their way. The seems like a sort to me given that budget and project opportunities are fixed in many places.

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…

In other words, it's like if you get rid of the worst player in each NBA team.

They are still super atheletes, but they are judged against other NBA teammates, not average professional basketballer in the world.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#238

Post by top_post »

astrange wrote: post #188
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!

This can be very valuable because it means you don't lose your unvested RSUs. Plus internal teams are more likely to already know you, or at least it's easier to show them your work, so the interview isn't necessarily that hard.

This is still lapping up the bullshit of what it actually is. It's a redundancy plain and simple, your job is being terminated, it should be reported as such.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#239

Post by llbeansandrice »

strix_varius wrote: post #205
llbeansandrice wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do understand that this is entirely different than company leadership laying off entire teams right? It could be like SNAP that fired the entire company that they acquired because they had to cut costs but the product was meaningful and I'm sure the team worked very hard on it.

> You do understand that this is entirely different than company leadership laying off entire teams right? No, this thread: > Some of these comments mentioned in the article coming from Meta's leadership about there being people who shouldn't probably be there or to get rid of coasters seems so inhumane and demoralizing. ...is specifically about this quote from the article: > Separately, the company’s head of enginee…

Ah my mistake. I see the context now. If that's truly what Meta is doing, all the more a garbage company.

It does still feel like a marketing spin on "we're cutting headcount, make it work" to me though. I find it impossible to believe that Meta wasn't already doing this.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#240

Post by godelski »

musicale wrote: post #234
battery_glasses wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting that they seem to think that software developer performance can be measured meaningfully and accurately in a standard way across teams.

This may not be surprising at all actually. Look at how they form their feeds. It is hyper-dependent on a singular metric: engagement. Engagement doesn't mean you're making your users more connected or happier, it just means they are using your product more (e.g. fighting and yelling at one another). Goodhart's Law in action. But I agree that something like human performance is incredibly difficult to quantify and requires a lot of nuance. But people, and especially bureaucrats, don't like nuance.
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