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…
Meta Layoffs
221–230 of 282 posts
Re: Meta Layoffs
#222Earlier 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…
Wow. With 30 to 50 people to 1 manager, the manager is spending 15-25 hrs simply in 30 min employee 1 on 1s every week. That’s an absolutely insane number. That means if they spread it out evenly over the week, they will be spending 3-5 hrs every day on 1 on 1s. In our company we also don’t have purely people managers. Even when I was managing people who were working on projects that had nothing to do with me, I had…
But a weekly 1-1 would be excessive regardless
Re: Meta Layoffs
#223> 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.
Quiet part out loud. tbf, it can definitely be true.
Re: Meta Layoffs
#224Middle 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…
imagine trying to have 30 minute one on ones with 50 people. that's 1500 minutes, or 25 hours! Besides the mental insanity that kind of Zoom fatigue would induce, that only leaves 15 hours of room for "real work," which, because you are a manager, is probably 90% occupied by meetings!
Re: Meta Layoffs
#225I 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 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.
I wouldn’t mind going into an office if I had a private office to work in. It would get me out of the house and put me in work mode but it would also let me actually do work.
Open plan is just awful. Everyone can watch you and nobody does any work and its so loud and impossible to talk on the phone.
Re: Meta Layoffs
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. With 30 to 50 people to 1 manager, the manager is spending 15-25 hrs simply in 30 min employee 1 on 1s every week. That’s an absolutely insane number. That means if they spread it out evenly over the week, they will be spending 3-5 hrs every day on 1 on 1s. In our company we also don’t have purely people managers. Even when I was managing people who were working on projects that had nothing to do with me, I had…
You wouldn't do 1-1s like this with 50 direct reports.
yes because you would be managing seven managers who are managing seven people each. the one on ones would be with your seven directs, not your 50 skip levels.
Re: Meta Layoffs
#227Earlier 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.
One counter argument to this take is: If cube farms or offices with doors are so much better, where are the companies without open-offices and outsized performance financials. I suspect most employees just aren't that productive for it to matter much. There is probably some small percentage who are more productive, and even fewer who are much more productive, but their needs are overwhelming by larger business decisi…
>If cube farms or offices with doors are so much better, where are the companies without open-offices and outsized performance financials
Literally any of the top companies in the DOW Jones - very few offices are open plan - tech is an outlier here
Re: Meta Layoffs
#228> > 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…
> 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.
I think you are grossly overestimating the validity of that "data". Data can be twisted to say whatever you want it to say. I've watched management throw out results because it didn't align with what they thought, I've seen them cherry-pick and distort employee survey data to backup whatever they already wanted to do, I've experiences KPI hell and how it has zero bearing on the work being done.
These companies are not data-driven, they are people-driven and people are not coldly logical/analytical.
Re: Meta Layoffs
#229> > 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 does there need to be a metric? People with management experience can decide these things based on intuition. It's practically impossible to quantify anything in this industry, but 'data-driven decisionmaking' is fetishized to the extreme. Ultimately it just becomes another buzzword and method for people with little or no experience to override people with experience. Phrasing the whole discussion in terms of 'me…
> Phrasing the whole discussion in terms of 'metrics' to justify the common-sense conclusion that junior people need more direct supervision is clearly sugarcoating it for junior recipients for whom the message is intended.
This line of reasoning will never not make my blood boil. "Well of course it's not data driven but we have to pretend it is for the juniors while the seniors know the truth", what absolute hogwash. Say what you mean or I'll assume what you believe what you say. Yout don't get to have it both ways. They said it's based on data so you don't get to pretend it was intuition (on top of which the people exercising the "intuition" have a vested interest in WFO).
Re: Meta Layoffs
#230Meta'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 ha…
If the "one great idea" you refer to is a social network, Friendster and Myspace beat Zuckerberg to it by years.