Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta Layoffs

brandur.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 282 posts

Re: Meta Layoffs

#211

Post by bart_spoon »

lennixm wrote: post #188
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…

So there is no such thing as a cargo cult? Every time some trend picks up, be it agile, standup, open offices, WFH, return to office, over-hiring, massive layoffs, and what have you, it’s because it backed by rigorous data analysis?

Re: Meta Layoffs

#212

Post by 93po »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #47

The most important point is missing. The reason for Meta layoffs is that metaverse is not getting enough traction. They wasted billions and they blame engineers for WFH? It's nonsense. Moreover, with multiple rounds of layoffs nobody's gonna join Meta. Why joining? Getting 500k "salary" with a risk of being laid off in the next 6 months and spending the next 6 months looking for a job? It's not 500k, folks. It's a fa…

> The company is just unstable

Minimum net income of $10 billion a year for the past 7 years is now apparently unstable

Re: Meta Layoffs

#214

Post by [deleted] »

midoridensha wrote: post #180
sofixa wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.).

Unless there were some phones I never saw, the iPhone was the first slate-style phone that you used with your fingers. Before that, everything had buttons (like the Blackberry, which kept keyboards until they finally died), or had crappy resistive touchscreens that you needed a stylus to use. The iPhone was the first one I remember that had a glass screen with capacitive touchscreen, needed no stylus, and didn't try…

[deleted]

Re: Meta Layoffs

#215

Post by naijaboiler »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #14

> By the end of my tenure at Stripe in 2021 this had done a total 180. I had managers who by design had no function in the R&D org at all – they didn’t do product work, they didn’t do operations or hold a pager, they didn’t help with incoming cross-team asks, they didn’t manage the JIRA board, and a lot of the time they didn’t even run our meetings (deferring that to ICs); and the prevailing wisdom became that this w…

this is not dysfunction. As you yourself rightly observed, this company is incentivized to increase headcount. That's why all their structures and processes and culture is built around that. The better question to ask is why is the company's primary objective? Do they have have suga-daddy money where progress is measured in terms of headcount? Or does headcount matter to how their customers perceive them?

Re: Meta Layoffs

#216

Post by Tarq0n »

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…

In my org we'd call what you do a coordinator. Handles prioritization but is not above the team in hierarchy.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#217

Post by surgical_fire »

swiftcoder wrote: post #155

> 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…

TBF, it was always easier to look busy in an office, with everyone around you. Plenty of ways to procrastinate work with "work".

When you work remote the only thing you have to show is your output.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#218

Post by Tarq0n »

spoonjim wrote: post #51
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…

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

Or maybe your org has too many layers. Teams of smart people should be able to mostly self-direct.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#219

Post by surgical_fire »

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're starting to add new members in timezones that are 5+ hours

I am all for remote work, but large time zone differences is a massive hurdle to proper remote collaboration.

The only way to smooth it out in my experience is with a decent documentation culture (not only one that gives incentives for documentation to exist, but also for it to be kept up-to-date).

On places with only tacit knowledge that spreads around through communication (and those can very well happen through slack, screen shares and so on), it becomes hard for the people that are seldom working at the same time as the "main team".

Re: Meta Layoffs

#220

Post by NeutralCrane »

zmmmmm wrote: post #120
RancidDiarrhea wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. The anti-WFH screeds are always nearly indentical: extremely vague and non-quantifiable in a wa…

> extremely vague and non-quantifiable in a way that makes them technically impossible to argue against this is why it's a shame people are ridiculing Zuckerberg's post ... they actually did quantify it and actually did come up with some nuanced insight into what works well and what doesn't and he says they are going to keep studying it to learn more. To me, it seems like there are two tenets to this. (a) remote / di…

They didn’t quantify it. The made an assertion that people who started in person at Meta were more productive than those who started remotely, but there was no data provided to back the assertion up. What’s more, we have no way of knowing if that assertion is valid. The majority of people who started at Meta in the last few years would have been overwhelmingly skewed to remote, while in-person starts would be skewed to those from more than a few years ago. How are they comparing these two groups? Are the actually comparing the productivity of in-person vs remote, or are they unintentionally (or intentionally) comparing the productivity of people who have been at Meta for >3 years vs those with <3 years. They didn’t provide any kind of data or quantitative measures at all, and they fall into the exact category the person you responded to is describing.
Post reply on HN