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.
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Meta Layoffs
161–170 of 282 posts
Re: Meta Layoffs
#162Meta's problems are due to a lack of direction and very poor decision making from the very top. The Metaverse was a huge expensive failure, their core demographics are old people and their Instagram demographic is being eaten up by TikTok.
Zuckerberg is not an "ideas" guy. He had that one great idea back in the early 2000s (whether you believe it was his idea or not, he did execute on it) and everything since then has been acquisitions. Sure maybe they can wring out more "productivity" by return to office or firing their middle managers or whatever but so what? It doesn't matter how fast you can run if you are running in the wrong direction.
Re: Meta Layoffs
#163His poignant take on weekly remote work is being wrestled to the ground stick me the most: > To me, although I’d certainly concede that WFH pares down meeting culture and certainly has benefits in logistics, it’s always been fairly obvious that in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture, and I suspect is important especially to larger orgs because it helps to even out performance. Hig…
> It's not just about the heavy hitters, it's about the team as a whole. In person work, though a logistical headache and social annoyance, drives team cohesion.
I've seen it as bit more circular: in person work required team cohesion and strong social acceptation. In return the best teams were often better than remote teams.
I remember the pre-WFH hiring criteria including a lot more of "will you be happy sitting next to this person for the next 5 years of your life" wording for the 'cultural fit' part. The whole team being bounded had a lot of weight in the balance, and we'd go for a few lunches and dinners with potential candidates to get a better feel of the "human" part.
The highs were definitely high, in exchange, the lows were way way lower, and interpersonal disputes, people leaving for social (often pretty ugly) reasons were a common thing. We also passed on candidates that had pretty low oral communication skills, and looking around I see the same kind of profile happily employed and fitting right in WFH settings. They still have issues in fast paced discussions, but most of the communication happens in written form so it's way less of an issue.
Overall I think WFH has better flexibility and could help the industry with a lot of the social issues it was struggling with if the managements do it right.
Re: Meta Layoffs
#164> WFH provides the ultimate cover for less motivated people (which in a larger company will always be a percentage of the total) that might otherwise be held more accountable in-person. Bullshit. Everyone who worked in-office knows folks who spend half their day in pointless meetings, and the other half chatting by the coffee machine. Obscuring lack of productivity in an office setting is not particularly hard - it's…
Agreed. I have been mostly remote since 2015 and if anything I feel more pressure to achieve things as I can't justify my existence merely by being there.
Re: Meta Layoffs
#165The point about remote workers been less efficient.... I really do hope they accounted that they were probably not shown the ways to game the "efficiency" system.. most people won't tell a new worker who they never met how to do something like game the efficiency metric. Although and manager worth their salt would know to pass this info along. And anyway, in a "creative" area, like writing code, inventing new stuff,…
Efficiency is meaningful in manufacturing where you exactly know what goes into a shoe, how many steps, processes and how much energy and material goes into each. You're making the same thing over and over. Then there, it's justified to say that 100 shoes per minute is better than 96 shoes per minute and additional 4 shoes can be considered as additional revenue or bringing average cost down etc.
In software, the same thing with the same software stack with the same code base is not happening. If it's happening, either the activity is meaningless or can be a step in the build pipeline as requires no thought.
Efficiency can be measured either on number of bux fixes, features added or lines of code.
Great. Lines of code are meaningless they even vary by software stack, language, framewok, domain, Feature scope or bug's severity.
Bug fixes have exactly the same problem. Could be two weeks to find out that the issue isn't even in the code but in an external that had an incorrect value.
Features? Don't know. How much against the existing features the new features goes? The more that slope is, more necessary refactoring would be required.
Re: Meta Layoffs
#166Earlier 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.
Or even: "The Door"
Re: Meta Layoffs
#167I 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.
Zuckerberg seems to lack perspective on all of the stuff he’s appropriated. For instance, basically every cyberpunk novel with a metaverse depicts it as a dystopian nightmare.
I don't think I'd agree with that: usually it's an alternate space which is the only place still free of corporations.
At the very least, there control there is less then absolute compared to meatspace.
Neuromancer's plot motivation is the guy who desperately wants his cyberdeck to work again, such that he takes on the big mission to do so.
Re: Meta Layoffs
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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/
Airbnb is another one - https://news.airbnb.com/airbnbs-design-to-live-and-work-anyw...
Re: Meta Layoffs
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Ah that's what confused me. So typically a manager managing other teams (or managers) is not a front line manager (eg senior mgr or dir). I think the op was referring to directly managing 20 reports which is imo quote brutal (imagine just doing 30 min 1/1 with 20 people each week)?
Re: Meta Layoffs
#170> > 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.
How is this not more applicable to remote work where your company can track nearly every interaction you have with a colleague?
In-office I’ve had several discussions with colleagues about the state of the company, as well as competing companies looking for new hires etc. The number of those conversations have dropped to 0 since we went all remote, for obvious reasons.