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Meta Layoffs

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Re: Meta Layoffs

#51

Post by spoonjim »

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…

LOL. One person in your team was a manager on an IC salary, and your manager was a director on a manager salary.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#52

Post by mjr00 »

KerrAvon wrote: post #27

TFA sez: But as we see, companies like Meta have been making an effort to quantify the effect of remote work on productivity, and concluded not only that there is some, but that it’s significant enough to warrant encouraging an unpopular return. [End TFA.] But they have failed to do this. When they actually provide such data (a rarity), it’s cherry-picked to justify getting asses back in seats for egocentric reasons.…

This is good fanfiction, but doesn't really reflect reality. Employees have mostly gone along with RTO/hybrid strategies and there hasn't been a mass exodus where it's happened, especially in this job market. Most people are probably assuming RTO is a matter of when, not if, for most companies anyhow. And remember that 40,000+ tech workers have been laid off in the past 6 months, and the specter of ChatGPT is lurking over the future of knowledge work for many.

There are certainly "single issue workers" who will quit over non-remote, and more power to them, but it seems silly to think that Google, Meta, or Amazon would have trouble hiring workers with a 3-day-a-week office policy, especially at their top-of-market salaries.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#53

Post by unmole »

Dalewyn wrote: post #48
nostromo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other deep irony is that many tech companies ruined the office by forcing open office designs. It was no secret that employees found them difficult places to be productive. And now they wonder why nobody wants to go there.

Just give it another 10 to 20 years and the next generation of the workforce will introduce cubicles as a monumental innovation in office design technology.

Been there, done that: https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-metas-push-to-solve-the-...

Re: Meta Layoffs

#54

Post by bigDinosaur »

doctor_eval wrote: post #35
alwayslikethis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Futurama had every single problem of the 20th century, just translated forward a millennium.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#55

Post by lmeyerov »

Plasmoid wrote: post #25
dfee wrote: post #19

Everything 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 off…

I am also vastly more productive at home than I am at an office. Especially the San Francisco lunchroom chic that plagues the city.

Here's an attempt at quantifying

Junior staff need constant help, but senior staff need space that's hard to achieve at an office. Studies show people take 30m-1.5hr to dial in for deep work.

So, imagine a "light" office day:

- 8a drive, coffee, etc

- 9a sit down

- 10a standup mtg

- 11:50a team lunch roundup

- 2p random meeting

- 5p drive home

At best, that leaves 3 hours of deep work: 11a-12, 3p-5p. Heaven forbid someone swings by your desk during that period!

WFH gets the 2 commute hours back, gives scheduling control to bookend breakfast & lunch with whatever distracting meetings, an async standup removes the sync one's disruptions, and a lot of the desk traffic is gone.

So, WFH done right, ~doubles the amount of deep work by the more effective staff

Re: Meta Layoffs

#56

Post by ge96 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #48
nostromo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other deep irony is that many tech companies ruined the office by forcing open office designs. It was no secret that employees found them difficult places to be productive. And now they wonder why nobody wants to go there.

Just give it another 10 to 20 years and the next generation of the workforce will introduce cubicles as a monumental innovation in office design technology.

WeCube

Re: Meta Layoffs

#57

Post by msoad »

ITB wrote: post #3

There are managers who aren’t competent, either at their functional craft, or managing. And there are organizations which have too many layers. But effective leadership is indispensable to make a company successful. And the best way to distribute leadership through an organization is through a hierarchy, and that usually means managers. Anyone who exclusively sees the negative aspects of having managers has only play…

I believe you might be a manager. One term frequently associated with managers is "leadership." True leadership involves being able to guide someone by saying, "Let me demonstrate the proper way to do this, so you can learn from it." In my current role, although my "leadership professional" may not know how to perform my job for an entire day, they always have "valuable advice" to offer though

Re: Meta Layoffs

#58

Post by colmvp »

> > 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 is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively.

I don't doubt that people earlier in their career work better with more senior people at arms length to help them. Hell, I experienced a bit of that my first few months at a new job where I struggled to understand processes.

But after a period of time, I got it. Sure it took longer, but I got there.

Now, I get less work done in the office because people spend time socializing, and more importantly, the workstation is not customized to my liking because of this whole satellite desk situation.

I'll say this: If these companies tanked during the height of Covid, they'd blame it on WFH. Of course, the financial performance for these companies was quite good, so now that there's a bit of correction, they search for reasons to bring employees back to the office.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#59

Post by geokon »

flashgordon wrote: post #39
geokon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. The manager managed 6+ teams. They had decades of industry experience and were very good at.. Management? dealing with project scope, knowing what clients would find useful, when to change direction etc.

Managing a team is realistically not a full time job.

He did not write any code or independently make technical decisions nor act as a mentor or senior dev or anything like that. He used to write code, so could follow technical discussions but he wasnt some topdog 10xer. He just managed and he was good at it. Since he was involved in many concurrent projects he also knew the organization and talent very well

Re: Meta Layoffs

#60

Post by AHOHA »

I just never understood how come “tech” companies never used the same concept used within their products, async communications!! Sync communication is a blocking one, you need to block all involved parties to discuss X that most of the times is useless, just use async ones, I email/text/or even video record when I have the time, and you respond when you do, not really that hard!
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