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Meta Layoffs

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Re: Meta Layoffs

#31

Post by geokon »

darth_avocado wrote: post #21

Middle management bloat is real. At one point there were 16 layers of management between me and the ceo when I was at a staff engineer. However the other extreme (like in places like Twitter, since the author mentioned it), you have 20 people reporting to a single manager. That is not a great place to work in. The managers are just stretched thin and the ICs are left to deal with the chaos. This becomes really hard f…

out of curiosity, what issues did you see?

20 to one seems kinda low in my experience. At my last deskjob it about 30-50 to 1 and it felt like a good balance. My team and I (~5 people) met with the manager once a week for a couple of hours. Id estimate they had 2-3 meetings a day with other teams. Project direction and blockers were dicussed and adjusted. It felt optimal, enough to get guidance, but they were too busy to micromanage and get in the way. Non-high-level nitty gritty day to day issues were just resolved within the team throughout the week

Re: Meta Layoffs

#32

Post by starkparker »

> it’s always been fairly obvious that in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture

Can someone who agrees explain how these points are obvious, to me, a person who's worked part- or full-time remotely for more than 10 years and has no concept of either of these things?

Re: Meta Layoffs

#34

Post by [deleted] »

zamadatix wrote: post #17
yellowapple wrote: post #5

> > 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 wan…

[deleted]

Re: Meta Layoffs

#35

Post by doctor_eval »

alwayslikethis wrote: post #15
paxys wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This makes me think of Futurama. There are still traffic jams, but now they’re in the sky!

Re: Meta Layoffs

#36

Post by AlotOfReading »

dangrover wrote: post #4

I 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…

In a prior life I was an archaeologist and would visit these amazing structures, built by literal dozens of people working together making steady progress over time. It was gratifying to see that incremental progress reflected in the excavations as well. Even if you were doing something as slow as cleaning a cobblestone walls/paths with a brush, over a couple weeks a few people could clean a surprisingly large fortress.

I don't feel the same about some of my years in tech. There are periods where I can't remember doing much of anything that could be called progress, even though I know that I was "meeting with stakeholders" and other ostensibly important things. There's this diffusion of responsibility that occurs in large orgs where everyone is micromanaging some infinitesimal slice of the mission while communication overhead and "following the process" consumes unimaginable amounts of time.

It's hard to not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and desire some kind of self-governed organizational anarchy, but I'm not sure where I think that line is best drawn.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#37

Post by fnordpiglet »

In office culture will die once the emotions abate and the CFO presents to the board a .02 EPS boost by closing all offices. Given the boards fiduciary duty it won’t even be a debate. The “culture” hand wave is ludicrous - a for profit public company isn’t about building culture, it’s about increasing earnings per share. The whole “we need to be in office for the kids” strikes me as absurd as well - we’ve got a 16 year queue of kids that went to school online for two years and grow up with FaceTime, zoom, slack, discord, and all the tools to get it done as common in their life as the pay phone was in ours.

On the middle management purge, I am glad to see it. I went into management at the time that was the only way to increase your leverage as an engineer. Over time it’s become a simpering pile of drivel and I am actively looking to switch back to IC roles. I’m sick to death of the professional manager culture in tech these days - it’s literally filled with people that just don’t like computers that much - likely got into it because their parents thought it was a good career and they realized after a few years they weren’t into it and switched to management. It’s been steered towards managers holding the nominal power but none of the ability to understand their decisions, so they a) don’t make them, b) when cornered make bad decisions. It’s sickening and I literally can’t stand my career as it stands. I’m not even allowed to commit code any more, and even if I were, I’m too busy going to bs offsites to talk about decisioning shift left strategies and how to make inhuman hotel seating open floor plan offices fun enough that people want ti come into their chicken coops to be milked.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#38

Post by Karrot_Kream »

> To me, although I’d certainly concede that WFH pares down meeting culture

I feel the opposite though I'm an n=1 and don't have any data beyond myself. My company went full WFH during the pandemic and committed to it. Ever since we've become much more meeting heavy (I also have pretty senior IC title sadly.) Why?

Along with going WFH we began hiring from other timezones in earnest. Low cost of living areas are cheaper to hire from. Previously we were really careful about hiring teams in a given timezone together, everyone on the team used to be within +- 1 hour of each other. Now lunch times, day start, and day end times weren't in sync anymore. Before standup was at 1100, now meetings started appearing at 1000, 0900, eventually 0800. After all 0800 in UTC-8 was actually 1100 in UTC-5. My 1200 lunch is overwritten all the time by folks in UTC-6 for whom it's actually 1400.

Before you'd see people run to the bathroom or express annoyance finding meeting rooms, but now going from meeting to meeting is just a click of a button. What used to be a hallway conversation or an extra 10 minutes of hanging outside a conference room to hash out a few details becomes another 30 min time slot they book on my calendar along with everyone else.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#39

Post by flashgordon »

geokon wrote: post #31
darth_avocado wrote: post #21

Middle management bloat is real. At one point there were 16 layers of management between me and the ceo when I was at a staff engineer. However the other extreme (like in places like Twitter, since the author mentioned it), you have 20 people reporting to a single manager. That is not a great place to work in. The managers are just stretched thin and the ICs are left to deal with the chaos. This becomes really hard f…

out of curiosity, what issues did you see? 20 to one seems kinda low in my experience. At my last deskjob it about 30-50 to 1 and it felt like a good balance. My team and I (~5 people) met with the manager once a week for a couple of hours. Id estimate they had 2-3 meetings a day with other teams. Project direction and blockers were dicussed and adjusted. It felt optimal, enough to get guidance, but they were too bus…

How is a team that is meeting their manager consisting only of 5 people if the manager has 30-50 people reporting into them? I wasn't sure if it was a typo or where you actually advocating for a manager to have 30-50 direct reports?

Re: Meta Layoffs

#40

Post by _8j50 »

aestetix wrote: post #7

I 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.

My contention is that if their metrics had actual bottom-line in mind they would have been more transparent about it.

For example, do you measure if a project is completed on time and the amount of bugs/regressions from it or do you measure how efficient contributors were by looking at loc, how much they are available,etc... because if things are getting done on time and with good quality but A lot if "unproductivity" then you have a metric problem not a productivity problem.

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