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Meta Layoffs

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Re: Meta Layoffs

#81

Post by dclowd9901 »

colmvp wrote: post #58

> > 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…

A pessimistic person might say that companies don’t trust their employees to work unless they have absolute control over their employees and how they work.

It’s a power play. Companies need to know they’re in charge.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#82

Post by geokon »

grogenaut wrote: post #73
geokon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Manager in my parlance is heavily working on growing me and the others in my team as well as managing or product portfolio. As others said that sounds like a director. Who runs the day to day off the team. Or do you only sync once a week?

i guess its situational.

I'm not clear what "the day to day off the team" actually means in concrete terms. I dont mean it in a dismissive way, genuinely curious

You need to work with someone or get feedback, then you go talk to the relevant person..? If you really need you could go run something by the manager. Again i dont really see that being a full time daily job (for just one team). Just a few hours here and there. I guess the major sync is once a week, but youre generally in the loop with whats going on throughout the week

"heavily working on growing me"

You work together with your team and learn from each other. Often there is one person with more years of experience with any particular issue

Technical mentorship is great but almost completely separate from managment

Re: Meta Layoffs

#83

Post by rtpg »

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.

The classic bit was that Slack was "no remote" pre-2020 (I'm sure nobody was counting the number of days that the C-suite and other executives deciding that were AWOL though)

Re: Meta Layoffs

#84

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Meta Layoffs

#85

Post by UberFly »

Regarding the comments in the author's post about companies requiring more and more that employees work at least 3 days in-office - I think it really boils down to the fact that most people work harder when there's someone looking over their shoulder and expectations are literally staring you in the face. It was like that in 1000 BCE and it's like that in 2023.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#86

Post by ipaddr »

elguyosupremo wrote: post #28

This piece goes from talking about meta layoffs to an indictment of remote work surprisingly quick. I love remote work, because I grew up in a small city with no companies operating in my industry and when covid hit I was able to go full remote, move back home, and be around my friends and family while contributing to my company and to my local economy. The biggest thing that has helped my dev team thrive and be able…

Like 5 or 10 developers try to add a css button? Fight breaks out over a ternary operator.. most annoying person wins? You can have too many cooks in the kitchen.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#87

Post by doktorhladnjak »

RestlessMind wrote: post #63
bink wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that that doesn't have to be the case. The companies that are failing their junior employees and new hires are doing so not because they are remote/WFH, but because those companies did not invest the energy and resources necessary to be good at remote/WFH. There are plenty of companies that focus on remote work and have no issues with onboarding or failing performance.

> There are plenty of companies that focus on remote work and have no issues with onboarding or failing performance. Can you please name a few of those? Mine has gone all in and sincerely trying to make it work. And it still sucks. So curious to know some successful examples.

A couple of well-known ones are Automattic (WordPress.com) and Gitlab. Gitlab even has its employee handbook publicly available https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/

Re: Meta Layoffs

#88

Post by Mike_12345 »

pjmlp wrote: post #76
radicaldreamer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple

The company rescued from insolvency with Microsoft money and reversed buy from NeXT, and only managed to get out of red thanks to the iPod and what came later, regardless of the office structure.

It didn't make them worse. Highest market cap on the planet.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#89

Post by KyeRussell »

pjmlp wrote: post #76
radicaldreamer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple

The company rescued from insolvency with Microsoft money and reversed buy from NeXT, and only managed to get out of red thanks to the iPod and what came later, regardless of the office structure.

How is anyone meant to respond to that? Can’t you apply this thinking to any company?

Re: Meta Layoffs

#90

Post by dclowd9901 »

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…

That is… I mean, I don’t have a lot of love for managerial positions to begin with but even I can admit that a people manager should have at most 6 or 7 direct reports. 30-50 is completely (laughably?) untenable. I mean, even grade school teachers only have 25-30 students a piece at most and that’s, like, bare bones budgeting.
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