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Meta Layoffs

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Re: Meta Layoffs

#141

Post by danabrams »

AHOHA wrote: post #60

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!

The kind of communication we’re talking about is heavily two-way and dependent on the previous signal. Each individual signal is low in content, so the biggest determinant of throughout is latency.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#142

Post by forgotusername6 »

lmeyerov wrote: post #55
Plasmoid wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

WFH gives me all those hours back. Because no matter which meeting I'm in, I'm working on something else.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#143

Post by muskmusk »

I don't think the problem is one type of management vs another type of management. But about a completely disproportional application of one type of management.

Heavy coding and no management have a place in the world. But no coding and heavy management also has a place in the world. Coding "heats up" the environment and management "cools it down". Sometimes you need heat, sometimes you need to temper the heat.

Companies start out with all coding and no management because they need to just produce. Then when they have something valuable, they must reign in the cowboy culture with management. Unfortunately, this often ends up overdone and there are very few leaders who have the guts to prune the overmanaged companies. Let's see how it turns out for the Zuck.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#144

Post by yibg »

geokon wrote: post #82
grogenaut wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Day to day from my experience:

- When there are blockers, especially with other teams. e.g. priorities mismatch

- Task assignments, priorities

- The project management side of things

I've worked in teams where the "manager" had several teams. But in those situations each team had 1 or 2 that were leads, either officially or not. But they worked with the rest of the team and were basically managers except for the people management responsibilities (performance reviews, hiring, firing etc).

Re: Meta Layoffs

#145

Post by danabrams »

gumby wrote: post #18

A 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.

All companies have politics. What you’re describing is the difference between the messy politics of having to convince others vs the easy politics of telling everyone what to do.

But dictatorships don’t have nearly as good a performance record as democracies, despite their “efficient” politics.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#146

Post by yibg »

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…

At those ratios, your "manager" doesn't really know what everyone does or how they are performing. Nor what their career goals are, what they're good at or not good at.

Really that's just a director level position with a manager title. I assume the teams have some person that's acting as the lead.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#147

Post by sokoloff »

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…

Most business decisions, including this one, are made on incomplete data. Expecting a level of scientific rigor such that conclusions are unassailable is not realistic, as science moves slowly on high-certainty and business moves quickly on low-moderate certainty.

If you don’t like the conclusion your company has reached, it’s going to be a lot faster and more fruitful to change companies than to change their mind.

I love remote overall; I think it needs some amount of in-person to be most effective. I don’t blame companies for making decisions on imperfect [not “meaningless”] information as they try to figure out how to compete.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#148

Post by usrusr »

simula67 wrote: post #134
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.

Remote work is very valuable. It makes the economy more efficient by reducing transportation costs, reducing carbon emissions etc. It allows companies to hire from locations that they previously thought were unviable. It helps employees spend less time in traffic and more time with their loved ones. There may be some negative side-effects, such as making it harder to provide guidance to new hires, holding unmotivated…

What do we do with all that productivity gain though? Back in the days of "swap money for product" capitalism the answer was "more product, yay", but now a considerable part of the economy is completely disconnected from that mechanism and is only competing in the zero sum game of visibility as a service. If Facebook employees magically got 48h per work day all we would get were steeper walls in the dopamine traps we already have. And given the resource constrained nature of life in a gravity well, even the old "more product, yay" isn't quite as yay as we used to think.

Edit: sorry, I completely lost myself on a sidetrack

Actually I believe that your assessment is spot on, only that I would weigh the drawbacks a little different, in particular everything that involves new hires, even more in particular those new hires who are new to the field. This is a long term cost that is very difficult to predict: how will "second generation" remotes work? Is there hidden knowledge implicitly present in those who started in person that can diffuse from formerly present to pure remotes, but not from one pure remote to another?

Re: Meta Layoffs

#149

Post by Karrot_Kream »

wincy wrote: post #91
peyton wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a director.

My job also calls this a manager. I’m the technical team lead and my boss (our manager) manages 3 separate teams consisting of a QA, 3-4 devs, and a then we have a PO (who is part of a separate management structure and reports to a different person). Boss is ultimately responsible for hiring/firing/pay (aside from some minor HR stuff) although he mostly relies on my assessment of people’s technical acumen. He attends…

Interesting. In the Big Tech companies I've worked at, the manager is the people-oriented equivalent of the technical team lead and controls promotions within an org structure. Why do you need one? Generally to free the technical lead's time up to deal with people concerns less. In smaller companies this doesn't matter as there just aren't that many people to deal with but at a larger company, a big technical project can interact with enough different stakeholders that you need a dedicated people manager to deal with them.

Managers are also expected to help their direct reports grow by offering them feedback. Manager feedback and regular performance evaluations eventually lead to raises and promotions which then builds up a manager's experience level. This often becomes a target in itself where managers try to optimize to promote their direct reports at the expense of more holistic growth so they can get a promotion.

Each team gets a manager because the manager controls promotions at the company and maintains employee standards.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#150

Post by sofixa »

midoridensha wrote: post #132
pjmlp wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't rescued them from insolvency, so who cares.

I wonder how the world would be different if Microsoft had just let them die. Would it be better or worse? Would we all have slate-style smartphones now, or would they have taken much longer to arise?

The iPhone wasn't the first touchscreen smartphone, it was just the flashiest (previous ones were oriented at business users), so IMO we certainly would be in the same place, just slightly later and possibly with more choice (maybe Nokia would have survived with Symbian/MeeGo, maybe Microsoft would have managed to pull off Windows Phone, etc.).
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