281–290 of 408 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
PIPs are lawsuit fodder. A general layoff where a bunch of people are let go at the same time makes it a lot harder for the person who was let go say it was targeted at them.
Why do you think PIPs are lawsuit fodder?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 goe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really newspeak. The difference is that you're still getting paid in between and still have a job, pretty different from getting laid off where you often don't get paid and don't have a job.
But it's still "prove you're still worth it". Instead of, we have the following teams with openings, please pick one you want to go to. No, it's, we have openings in the following teams, prove that one of them want you enough.
I think the idea of bell curving people and firing the bottom is extremely dumb, a form of decimation with similar results. It's a culture destroyer and invents many perverse incentives in the company that are counter productive to "make great products".
But ultimately I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to be authentically reviewed poorly and made to prove they should stay.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Note: 'in a standard way across teams'. You have jumped directly to 'can't be measured at all in any circumstances'
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
I guess they are hiring at some BUs and firing at others?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I mean people there aren't stupid and there is a fairly high engineering bar, your code won't get through review if you're doing stuff like that. Where it really digs is when you are 1.5 weeks into writing an in depth project plan, meeting with other engineers, coordinating cross teams, researching, reviewing code etc. you better have a good explanation why your delivery over time graph has a big flat spot.
That's 95% of what I do in my company. I guess by Meta's standards I'm not working?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 goe…
Cool but do all the legislation first rather than defending layoffs with hypothetical vapor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ha…