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Meta and Google are cutting staff

wsj.com

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Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#291

Post by nemo44x »

11101010001100 wrote: post #83
karmasimida wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Empathy is anti-capitalist. I think the executive getting rid of their usual fake friendly corporate talk, reflecting the degree how bad their bottom line is hurt.

Loyalty is anti-capitalist.

Pretty much, yeah. The entire idea of capitalism was completely different from previous systems like feudalism. There you were loyal to a lordship and did what was needed and they provided for you. You consumed in the outputs and this is largely how you were compensated.

The idea of capitalism is that you trade your labor/expertise/skills for a wage. You don’t own the means of production and you don’t own the outputs of them. Your labor is sold on the market and you are free to bargain and negotiate and step away.

So yea, there’s no reason at all to be loyal. It’s a beautiful system that way. It’s liberty and freedom to do as you choose. To decide if you value personal time or working for money.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#292

Post by systemvoltage »

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.

I used to work at a Fortune 50 company and found stack ranking...kinda fair. I used to be a high performer, made real ROI impacts, helped others and had a strong sense of initiative. I'd come out with a better raise, stock options and had opportunities to take on more responsibility.

It was more honest and straightforward than what silicon valley and Big Tech pretends to do. It is all ranking in some ways. Everything is. If you remove the facade, fundamentally you have a limited resource and you want to reward people that make the company successful. I don't see anything wrong with that. Doing anything else is wrong and unfair IMO.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#293

Post by KerrAvon »

nafix wrote: post #39
rosywoozlechan wrote: post #26

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. What kind of leadership is that? I mean it's understandable that businesses have to cut costs, but have some empathy, and understand how words affect people. Just wow. It's so cynical and depressing.

I like it. I really dislike working with under-performers and people who just refuse to do due diligence on their end. I dislike working with people who always want you to come over to their frame of mind rather than trying to get into yours or meet in the middle. I saw a ton of people coasting during Covid. People need to get negative feedback when they deserve it.

That's fine. The place to address it is directly, in private, with those employees. You do not humiliate people in public, not a single person, not a group of people. That's what flailing, incompetent managers do.

For every person like you who doesn't think the execs are talking about them, there is a person who is actually performing very well, who management would like to keep around, who does think it applies to them, and it is killing their morale.

And you don't know definitively that they aren't talking about you either, Mr High Performance. Your management chain could easily have a different view of you than you have of yourself, whether it's justified or not.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#294

Post by FearlessNebula »

water-your-self wrote: post #266
FearlessNebula wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

They were offering $30 battery changes IIRC?

I’m not sure how my comment was disingenuous

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#295

Post by KerrAvon »

karmasimida wrote: post #45
jejeyyy77 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, being laid off sounds pretty good right about now. Paid vacation before going back into a hot job market for a full remote job.

> hot job market You'd be surprised :). Even Amazon isn't eating up engineers like it was a year ago. No, there is no hot job market, unless you want to take 30-40% pay cut.

Amazon will have to keep hiring ravenously or they will run out of people to feed to the stack ranking fire.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#296

Post by KerrAvon »

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.

The dumb thing is, there isn't a downturn (yet). This is all anticipatory. These kinds of moves will bring a downturn, though.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#297

Post by function_seven »

cletus wrote: post #270
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.

It's worse than that. Not only is it graded on a curve but to prevent ratings inflation there are quotas for each ratings bucket. Many deny this, even when presented with concrete proof that such quotas exist (but were called "performance targets"). This itself would be fine except that negative ratings have a target percentage of ~10%. This includes regrettable losses and ratings below Meets All Expectations. Such t…

I'm constantly amazed at how stupid supposed smart people can be when it comes to applying metrics to an organization made up of humans.

Stack ranking and related schemes are so obviously going to be gamed, will definitely measure something other than the nominal thing, and will gum up the works. It's one thing to have a Hunger-Games-style hiring process. Bad as that is, there's an expectation that once you've passed those trials—once you're hired—that you can then devote your time to building things or leading a team that builds things.

But when it extends into quarterly or annual reviews, where there must be a loser, then of course it will serve as a distraction from accomplishing actual goals and doing useful work. Now you have to spend time managing your image, making sure you don't piss off the wrong peer, and choosing assignments that are trendy.

Companies try to avoid all of that by adding even more complexity to the review process. More layers to prevent favoritism, more concrete metrics to sidestep subjectivity, a longer list of metrics to mitigate any one of them being over-weighted.

This just means more time and attention is stolen from productive work, and directed instead toward image management and politics.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#298

Post by 29athrowaway »

baq wrote: post #93
29athrowaway wrote: post #8

They are probably trying to avoid the WARN act and staying under the radar. A goal of 10% sounds like vitality curve/rank and yank/stacked ranking. If 10% of employees get promoted at the same you will know.

It’s just accounting at this scale. 10% equals however many billion dollars per year ‘saved’.

New hires often have a higher compensation than existing employees.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#299

Post by willio58 »

mgraczyk wrote: post #265
mc32 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah sure but it's definitely different from being laid off. You can just look at the numbers. The vast majority of people end up on a new team and do not leave the company.

To put employees through this when meta and Google have billions in cash is disgusting.

Re: Meta and Google are cutting staff

#300

Post by DannyBee »

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…

This is a common viewpoint for sure, but it is also very odd. It is completely and totally obvious when this happens, and the end result is that the manager just looks bad to their manager because they are obviously doing the wrong thing for the company. so it is mostly self harming.

Even at the worst companies I’ve been at I have never seen anyone rewarded for behaving this way.

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