271–280 of 408 posts
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Are they? I did an interview with one of them a few months ago, passed hiring committee, and have been told everything is frozen. The other one just cancelled my interview.
They're still reaching out at least. I got contacted yesterday.
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…
Do you really believe this? How does TikTok fit into this vision of the world that you have constructed? I agree with your premise but it seems like you have made a connection between two unrelated things:
1. People are less interested in Facebook
2. Facebook is a giant, ad serving, spy machine
These two can co-exist without a propositional relationship. Unfortunately the average consumer does not care about privacy in the same way that people in this forum do. For what it's worth people have explicitly told me that they enjoy targetted ads.
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!
I had the same deal at a big telecom 7 years ago. The offer lasted one month. I moved to a better position with better pay/responsibilities.
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.
Users may not be Facebook's customers, but they are the product. It's hard to attract customers when your product is shrinking, and declining in quality (i.e. skewing older and therefor less appealing to advertisers)
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 unintended side effect is that it punishes risk takers and destroys innovation culture.
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> Apple: it's intentionally slowing working products This is really disingenuous. They slowed the CPU on products with a worn out battery in order to prevent the CPU from overdrawing from the battery, causing a reboot. Not exactly what I would call “intentionally slowing working products” but rather “reducing CPU power consumption to mitigate abrupt reboots to keep a reliable user experience”. Granted, Apple was a bi…
> They slowed the CPU on products with a worn out battery in order to prevent the CPU from overdrawing from the battery, causing a reboot Only after they have made it impossibly expensive to replace some lithium. This is an incredibly disingenuous defense of their actions. Apple is fully trying to tie hardware refreshes to the cadence of should be battery refreshes and the frog has been so boiled that android devices…
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> 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.
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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…
With large enough populations you see fairly consistent statistical information across time. Little fluctuations even out. So at org sizes of, say, 500 people you'll see pretty consistent ratings distributions between cycles. This is where you get the "we have a roughly expected ratings distribution." If you've deviated far from this then it means either that your org is training people on the evaluation process incorrectly or there is some other cause of a weird distribution. When something doesn't match, people simply investigate for an alternative solution.
What people seem to be frightened of is when somebody says to a manager of 10 people "hey you've got too many high ratings, drop some." Google and Meta are massive companies so I suspect that this happens somewhere but I've never even got the scent of this happening from my position at Google. I've had cycles where 100% of my team was in the top 20% of ratings without anybody raising an eyebrow.
This will be the trend among most tech companies. Very clear the market has now negatively reacted to high operating expenses that largely stem from excessive headcount. Most companies will likely not reduce pay if they can help it to maintain competitiveness, but if you’re a bottom or middle performer or on a non-revenue generating team suddenly your job security even at “safe” companies like Google is at risk.
> Very clear the market has now negatively reacted to high operating expenses that largely stem from excessive headcount. Are you saying that because stock prices are dropping that the market has reacted to excessive headcount? Cause I think a better explanation for that, is that in the past 2 years we've had inflation, and that was reflected in the profits of the companies for 2020-21, and now that the fed is loweri…
What if the market goes up and stays up? Fed does or doesnt hike rates? Do you really want to play hiring catch up when everyone else has a 2 year head start?
Also, your board of directors doesn't give a shit about the reason, they only care what is being done in response.