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Meta Layoffs

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Re: Meta Layoffs

#181

Post by elguyosupremo »

rmk wrote: post #140
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…

> We have our own take on exactly how we do it, but the gist is that all our software engineers are in a video conference with each other as much as possible and focus on a single task. This is a pretty fucked up way of working. People can't get anything useful done if there is a mob of people on a zoom call. It's just a talkfest or more likely an opportunity for 1-2 people to dominate the conversation while the othe…

I've found it to be quite the opposite. It's also important to note that mob programming recommends rotating who is "driving" the session, so we change who is sharing every 15 minutes.

I don't think this approach scales to more than a team of 4-6 people but we've been able to forge strong bonds on our team, solve complex problems (in domain definition, actual code, ci/cd issues, and more) in ways that the entire team feels are appropriate and while also keeping the whole team abreast of all the changes. We get far more done than we used to and we've successfully onboarded several new team members.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#182

Post by zamadatix »

yellowapple wrote: post #65
zamadatix wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Why is it supposed to be problematic for the metric to favor or skew towards one over the other? It's akin to asking whether a weightlifter or a marathon runner is more athletic. If I'm measuring athleticism by one's max jogging distance, that'll disproportionately favor the runner. If I'm measuring athleticism by one's single-rep max deadlift, that'll disproportionately favor the weightlifter. This ain't problemat…

I guess the relation I'm failing to see in this argument is why skew or no skew is supposed to be a determining factor in whether or not the metric is to be applicable outside of Meta in the first place. Say the metric weren't skewed, you still don't know it is applicable outside Meta because you don't know what it was measuring only that what was measured didn't favor either remote or on site work. Say you knew what was measured were skewed, you still don't know if it's an applicable measurement outside of Meta. The point being while you do need to understand what was measured to be able to apply it to other companies this doesn't suggest whether the metric is skewed is what plays a part in deciding if the metric is relevant or not. The metric's point of measurement is solely what's relevant while the skew is just a property of the measurement which can sometimes be skewed and sometimes not regardless if the measurement is applicable or not.

Taking this to your mention of athleticism with two examples, the first of which being athleticism by lowest BMI which skews towards runners versus weight lifters. Being skewed towards runners doesn't mean lowest BMI is a sensible metric for a coach to pick runners with it just means it's an even worse way to pick weight lifters. Similarly measuring athleticism by how many basketball shots one can make in 10 minutes may not be skewed towards one or the other but still doesn't mean it's a good way to measure a runner. The only thing relevant to know is whether the metric is one you want to optimize for. Whether or not that metric is skewed towards a certain disposition may or may not be true but regardless which it's not how you decide if the metric is one you want to optimize for.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#183

Post by elguyosupremo »

JenrHywy wrote: post #50
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…

> mob programming That sounds... horrendous. I really enjoy "pairing" when chasing down bugs, but doing that when trying to write new features would be nigh-on impossible.

I was really skeptical at first, but we've been doing it for over a year now and I've come to thoroughly enjoy it. I find that I get stuck on issues much less frequently because I have other people to talk through them, knowledge transfer is inherent, and when you have multiple people writing and reviewing the code as it's written PR reviews become basically instant and you can deploy much faster.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#184

Post by elguyosupremo »

ipaddr wrote: post #86
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.

I don't think it scales much beyond 4-6 developers, if you have bigger teams than that you could try a couple of sub-mobs.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#186

Post by elguyosupremo »

shp0ngle wrote: post #152
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…

WFH is very good and convenient for the _worker_! It's great being at your small town, or beach at Bali, or your favourite coffee. I just don't think it's very good for the company and for the overall productivity.

This is one of the reasons I have become an advocate for mob programming, I think it allows people to have a best-of-both-worlds kind of experience; allowing the flexibility of remote work while facilitating the direct collaboration of in-person work.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#187

Post by simplotek »

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.

> (...) 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.

This is not ironic. It sounds like a disingenuous ploy to force employees out of the company without having to pay them what they owe or deal with the fallback.

Amazon seems to be pulling the same stunt.

The coincidence between mass layoffs and forced return to office starts to look like a massive wave of workplace bullying, and I'd be surprised if it wasn't breaking laws.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#188

Post by lennixm »

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…

Why would they search of a reason if they see their employees being more productive WFH and they can save a significant share of their capex by getting rid of their real estate footprints? HackerNews needs to stop with the motivated reasoning when it comes to arguing against RTO. Every single major tech company clearly has bucket loads of data showing some portion of their employees being more productive working from the office to an extent where it justifies taking the massive capex hit by bringing them back to the office. Your anecdotal experience doesn't outweigh that.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#189

Post by simplotek »

eloisant wrote: post #172
Dalewyn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cubicle are so much better than open offices, it's funny to think that in the 90's they were considered a symbol of employees being treated like cattle.

> it's funny to think that in the 90's they were considered a symbol of employees being treated like cattle.

Cubicles are still a way to treat employees like cattle. Except that this free-range approach to cubicles mixes the worst of cubicles with not having ways to deal with interruption, distraction, noise.

That doesn't mean open space offices are better. Free range cattle is still cattle, isn't it?

Working from home is like working in your private office, which in the 90s was reported as a perk and a status symbol.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#190

Post by blitzar »

wunderland wrote: post #158
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.

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.

Zuckerberg seems to lack ... something.
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