Meta just gave thousands of employees poor performance reviews • Hacker News Board

Re: Meta just gave thousands of employees poor performance reviews

#31

Post by rpearl » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 1:24 AM UTC

smugma wrote: post #16

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #4

> deploying AI tools to help our engineers be more productive Interested in how that turns out. I seriously doubt that it will make the work environment any more pleasant. That said, the salaries at Meta are pretty crazy. I guess folks are willing to put up with a lot to make that kind of dosh. Of course, if, as has been speculated, this is a full-court press by all the top tech companies to push down salaries, then…

There’s no evidence that “all the top tech companies” are trying to push down salaries. I’ve neither seen nor heard any evidence of this at Netflix or Apple. Google? Salary ranges for open positions in California are public.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... in which "top tech companies" (including Apple and Google) were successfully sued for trying to push down salaries.

Re: Meta just gave thousands of employees poor performance reviews

#32

Post by hourago » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 1:24 AM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #28

hourago wrote: post #27

This is one of the reasons so many people do not take management seriously. If your performance qualification depends on how many people the company wants to fire then your performance is not what is being evaluated. In good companies, jobs have a set of well expectations. Your performance is measure against that expectations. The company may be about to close and yet your performance can be good. After pulling somet…

You can replace almost all performance reviews (and grading in school) with “these people would be fired/fail before you” and anything else is just playing pretend.

That seems a little extreme. I have seen performance reviews used correctly to help engineers to improve on areas that they were lacking. And it works. Some people needs to improve communication skills, or have some blind technical spot. Doing that makes them way better, and I have seen people getting better jobs after improving (inside and outside the company).

But I agree that any tool used wrongly can be replaced by something simpler that cuts to the chase and delivers on what management is really interested in. And in this case has nothing to do with improving employees performance.

Re: Meta just gave thousands of employees poor performance reviews

#33

Post by ahahahahah » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 1:25 AM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #26

smugma wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no evidence that “all the top tech companies” are trying to push down salaries. I’ve neither seen nor heard any evidence of this at Netflix or Apple. Google? Salary ranges for open positions in California are public.

You must have missed that time they all colluded together with anti-poaching agreements to minimize liquidity in the job market then turned around and used that as an excuse to demand higher H1B quotas for more guest serfs.

> they all colluded together with anti-poaching agreements to minimize

Meta explicitly refused to join that agreement. See https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2014/03/24/shery...

Re: Meta just gave thousands of employees poor performance reviews

#34

Post by amethyst » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 1:26 AM UTC

neilv wrote: post #8

> Managers gave about 10% of the company’s workers poor reviews The article didn't manage to get a quote on what the guidance/orders for the reviews was. For example, were managers given a target on how many of their reports were to receive poor reviews? Or did the evaluation criteria change besides the target distribution?

Also keep in mind that this is the first year-long perform cycle, so % of ratings is not directly comparable to previous cycles.

Re: Meta just gave thousands of employees poor performance reviews

#35

Post by ksaj » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 1:26 AM UTC

UncleEntity wrote: post #13

neilv wrote: post #8

> Managers gave about 10% of the company’s workers poor reviews The article didn't manage to get a quote on what the guidance/orders for the reviews was. For example, were managers given a target on how many of their reports were to receive poor reviews? Or did the evaluation criteria change besides the target distribution?

Maybe they are grading on a bell curve like they did in my youth? 10% get excellent reviews, 10% get poor reviews and everyone else falls somewhere in the middle.

It was yet another way to stretch that 80-20 rule's mileage. I remember when the idea of a bell curve was new, and you saw it applied to absolutely everything, even if it was only a superficial (or sometimes completely bogus) fit.

I've even seen it applied to the Kinsey Scale. Presumably 10% of the population is totally straight, 10% totally gay, and 80% are varying degrees of total party animals after dark. Or something like that. That might have actually been where I first heard of the Bell Curve, but I've seen it applied in a lot of places since.

The worst place I've seen it applied is for DST daylight hours.

Bell curves exist, but it's strange that people only see it as a variation of the 80-20 rule.

Re: Meta just gave thousands of employees poor performance reviews

#36

Post by the_snooze » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 1:30 AM UTC

margorczynski wrote: post #30

holoduke wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if only money counts. There is also somrthing like the fun part of work. Maybe i am spoiled by living in a country where money is not really an issue.

You won't feed your family or pay of that house with the "fun part of work". It's great if you get both but there are unfortunately priorities in adult life that might bog down the romanticism.

A high-salary worker (like a Facebook employee) has more than their immediate survival needs covered. It's pretty easy to drop a high-paying job and coast on the inevitable savings (in cash and/or securities) for a good long while. At that point, priorities shift from survival to satisfaction.

Re: Meta just gave thousands of employees poor performance reviews

#37

Post by grensley » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 1:30 AM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #4

> deploying AI tools to help our engineers be more productive Interested in how that turns out. I seriously doubt that it will make the work environment any more pleasant. That said, the salaries at Meta are pretty crazy. I guess folks are willing to put up with a lot to make that kind of dosh. Of course, if, as has been speculated, this is a full-court press by all the top tech companies to push down salaries, then…

My work environment has been improved by AI tools so far. I do hope it never gets to the point where the expectation is that devs are just full time code reviewers. Feel like it would get boring at that point.

Re: Meta just gave thousands of employees poor performance reviews

#38

Post by germinalphrase » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 1:31 AM UTC

hourago wrote: post #27

This is one of the reasons so many people do not take management seriously. If your performance qualification depends on how many people the company wants to fire then your performance is not what is being evaluated. In good companies, jobs have a set of well expectations. Your performance is measure against that expectations. The company may be about to close and yet your performance can be good. After pulling somet…

“ Your performance is measure against that expectations.”

Sure - but it appears that those expectations just changed.

Re: Meta just gave thousands of employees poor performance reviews

#39

Post by metadat » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 1:33 AM UTC

cratermoon wrote: post #29

metadat wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the archive link. It is strange when a single-paragraph article is behind a paywall like this. Shallow reporting is a wholly uninspiring incentive to provide any support whatsoever to a publication.

Just months after Meta laid off 11,000 employees, there are signs the company could be preparing for another wave of cuts. The parent company of Facebook and Instagram has reportedly ranked thousands of employees as “subpar” in a recent wave of performance reviews. And that’s raising fears among workers that more belt-tightening is on the way. Those concerns come after CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 a…

I've been trying to upvote you all day. It finally went through this time.

Thanks for mirroring TentireFA here, no block of text has more than 2 sentences. What is the boundary between copy/pasta soup and journalism? >:-)

Re: Meta just gave thousands of employees poor performance reviews

#40

Post by clnq » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 1:33 AM UTC

hourago wrote: post #32

bombcar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can replace almost all performance reviews (and grading in school) with “these people would be fired/fail before you” and anything else is just playing pretend.

That seems a little extreme. I have seen performance reviews used correctly to help engineers to improve on areas that they were lacking. And it works. Some people needs to improve communication skills, or have some blind technical spot. Doing that makes them way better, and I have seen people getting better jobs after improving (inside and outside the company). But I agree that any tool used wrongly can be replaced…

Do performance reviews work better than just constructive feedback in 1:1s though?

Reviews seem to be a pathway for the company to get rid of people rather than to help them grow. As a growth pathway, it is very ineffective. Other efforts work better imo - mentoring, 1:1s, 360 degree feedback, learning budgets, workshops, introducing a culture more appreciative of learning, and so on. They can cost less in total work hours spent than performance review weeks too.