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Meta Layoffs
11–20 of 282 posts
Re: Meta Layoffs
#12Re: Meta Layoffs
#13I was a PM at Meta from 2016-2022. I work at a startup now and have to write detailed specs and deal with lots of small details —- something I was discouraged from doing as I rose in rank at Meta and scarcely did after the first year. Looking back, I don’t even remember what it was that I did if not that —- lots of strategy docs, aligning other teams, but no specs. I am having to unlearn a lot of bad attitudes and ha…
Are you excited to be writing lots of detailed specs? Especially in a startup, that seems terrible to me. When I've done startups, one of the best things for me about them was close collaboration with the product/design side of the house. Detailed specs would have slowed that down significantly for us.
Re: Meta Layoffs
#14> By the end of my tenure at Stripe in 2021 this had done a total 180. I had managers who by design had no function in the R&D org at all – they didn’t do product work, they didn’t do operations or hold a pager, they didn’t help with incoming cross-team asks, they didn’t manage the JIRA board, and a lot of the time they didn’t even run our meetings (deferring that to ICs); and the prevailing wisdom became that this was a good thing.
I stumbled into a job like this recently. The startup hired an upper management team from some well-known tech companies. They had several people who claimed that “organization design” was their passion, wrote “thought leader” blogs or substacks, and presented themselves as experts in all things agile.
I thought I was joining a lean startup team focused on efficient execution (as they pitched themselves) but they operated in the most bloated, inefficient, and bureaucratic manner I’ve ever seen. Roles and processes were so artificially segmented that I wasn’t allowed to use Jira without waiting for the next scheduled meeting so everyone could tell the project manager what buttons to click in Jira during long shared meetings. If you started to make any comments that sounded like they might be a product-related idea, they’d scold you for daring to think about anything other than code and demand that only product managers be allowed to talk about product things. Several managers seemed to do nothing other than police process among teams, dropping into your team’s meetings unannounced to observe and take notes about who was, and was not, following the extensive process documents they prepared for everyone.
Their solution to every problem was always to hire more people. If a new requirement came up, they’d stop teams from working on it and try to find a way to spin the new requirement into more headcount. This created absurd situations where, for example, the design lead had convinced the company to hire a new designer for every new initiative while the designers for past projects sat mostly idle all day. It didn’t matter, though, because the only goal was to increase headcount. People were praised for the amount of hiring they did and the number of people they managed.
This company was an extreme version of the dysfunction described in the article. I felt so relieved when I left and rejoined a company that didn’t create elaborate self-serving management structures as their primary goal. So many people at the dysfunctional company just thrived on shuffling from meeting to meeting every day, creating the appearance of doing a lot of work while actively interfering with everyone just trying to execute efficiently.
Re: Meta Layoffs
#15I just have to point out the irony that a company which believes so much in virtual work that they renamed themselves after the "metaverse" is now thinking to require employees to return to the office.
They built an entire metaverse office with little conference rooms full of avatars. It was comical.
Who doesn't like bringing everything terrible about the real world into the virtual one? Next thing you see they'll be having virtual commutes with virtual cars waiting 40 minutes just to go to your virtual office. But hey it's all metaverse, which means it's awesome and shiny, right?
Re: Meta Layoffs
#16[deleted]
Re: Meta Layoffs
#17> > Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis…
> This is meaningless without knowing how productivity is being measured. It's very possible that said metric inherently favors in-person collaboration over remote collaboration - which would then skew the results of any further analysis of that metric.
Why is it supposed to be problematic for the metric to favor or skew towards one over the other? The goal of the metric should be to measure something the company wants to optimize not to try to show all proposals for optimizing the something are equally adept at doing so. It's possible they are measuring productivity incorrectly but whether or not the measure favors a method isn't a signal for that.
I agree the other information is needed for the rest of us to consume the findings meaningfully though.
Re: Meta Layoffs
#18A lesson from Valve, which supposedly has no org chart: a company with no hierarchy has politics instead. I'm certain other companies that have tried that model have the same problem.
Re: Meta Layoffs
#19Everything is rolling along smoothly, and then, bam:
> High caliber, experienced employees probably get just as much done at home at the office, or maybe more…
“Probably” is the key word, here. It signals to me that the author is tired of writing at this point and throws in something with little conviction or defense.
I care about this point, and am inclined in the opposite direction: I think less work is done in office by these people.
Withholding any self reflection to qualify myself as “high caliber”, I can say I’m an experienced employee - and feel that my productivity dwindles in person due to distractions and thus an inability to “zone in”.
That means that I’m putting in extra hours outside work to achieve the same level of pre-RTO productivity. I’ve heard the same from others. Together, we’ve expressed concerns about the sustainability of these efforts.
For me, toss that sentence from this article and let’s dedicate time to that discussion, independently.
Re: Meta Layoffs
#20>> very high-functioning Author seems to be confusing established companies that hold near monopolies as highly functioning. It is difficult to to learn from large US tech companies. At Google not breaking the webpage might be a good day of work, but in my field not shipping a prototype etc will end our company. I would be skeptical of productivity statistics from a company in decline.
Excellent point. I would have a hard time naming anything Google has produced lately that has seemed like a big step forward to me. And with Facebook, a lot of their "productivity" seems to be wasteful (like the metaverse stuff) or actively harmful.