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Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

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Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Why set an arbitrary number of people who need to be fired as opposed to grading people to a standard? Is your hiring process so flawed that you just accept that you screwed up hiring 5 percent of your people? This smells like the Welchian nonsense that drove GE into the ground.

> Is your hiring process so flawed that you just accept that you screwed up hiring 5 percent of your people? if you only messed up 5% of your hires you'd be a goddamn genius and every company in the world would want to put you in charge of their hiring process the "standard" is more like 20% of hires end up being bad hires

Are these numbers coming out of thin air? Gut feel perhaps? So after you fire 10% and don’t hire, that holds until there is nobody left?

Maybe we should stop with the gut feel managerial apologies and think about what we’re doing and how it affects company morale, no?

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how much more confirmation do we need that we are in a recession? Actual GDP data would be a good first start, no?

lol yea or a few bad jobs reports? I think many got use to the most incredible labor market of a generation or two and we are just now back to something more historically normal.

>> lol yea or a few bad jobs reports?

Which ones? The ones they released or the ones they re-released after overstating the numbers several times?

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#153

This is clearly to cull the "wrong thinking" employees.

Which is odd considering the "wrong thinking" people could never get hired there in the last two decades, so what's really going on here?

You seem to be under the impression that "wrong think" is in some way consistent or unchanging.

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#154

It seems Zuck is turning into Elon. What's next? closing the European offices? forcing people to return to the office? relocating HQ to Texas?

Zuck is cosplaying as Logan Paul and adopting more conservative rhetoric because he saw which way the political winds were blowing, just like everyone else who needs the help of our former and next president.

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#155
post #73

When I was an engineering manager there, engineering leadership described performance reviews as, in a large well run engineering organization, you'll probably be firing 5-10% of your employees every year for low performance. (Well, "non regrettable attrition", which includes people who quit when they get pipped.) Lower than 5% at scale would be a red flag, not necessarily wrong, you don't want to "stack rank" with a…

Isn't this quite paradoxical that those kind of companies have hard interviews where you have to almost prove that P=NP in front of 5 people that judges everything you do, yet they fire engineer because "ratio"? Could this lead to a manager that tries to have the best team for himself will always include average employees that they can easily fire?

These interview practices are probably in part because of the huge number of applicants trying to get into Meta, which allows them to rachet up the difficulty to the highest level.

My assumption based on some interview experience articles[1][2] is that there's an internal arms race between the recruiting and engineering at Meta where candidates are not forwarded for the interview process until they feel sufficiently prepared, often giving them months (in any other company, I feel this would be a big red flag), and interviewers expecting the equivalent of Djikstra or Knuth to join their team, regardless of what the team actually does. (I assume not everyone writes distributed system or database implementations from scratch at Meta.)

[1] https://medium.com/@rohitverma_87831/my-interview-experience...

[2] https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/5132569/Me...

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#156
post #73

When I was an engineering manager there, engineering leadership described performance reviews as, in a large well run engineering organization, you'll probably be firing 5-10% of your employees every year for low performance. (Well, "non regrettable attrition", which includes people who quit when they get pipped.) Lower than 5% at scale would be a red flag, not necessarily wrong, you don't want to "stack rank" with a…

I am lukewarm about unions, but if that shit would be the new work norm I would go hard left.

Wouldn’t be every coworker a competitor? How do you plan your life or start a family if you are every year 10% likely of being fired or backstabbed?

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#157
post #73

When I was an engineering manager there, engineering leadership described performance reviews as, in a large well run engineering organization, you'll probably be firing 5-10% of your employees every year for low performance. (Well, "non regrettable attrition", which includes people who quit when they get pipped.) Lower than 5% at scale would be a red flag, not necessarily wrong, you don't want to "stack rank" with a…

that's such a mad, fear-based way to run shop.

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#158
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone who is smart see's which way the winds are blowing and it isn't in the direction of "more liberal". The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.

I know people love to describe future events in terms of past events but am afraid America is heading in a direction entirely orthogonal to its history.

i read a lot of history especially US, i don't think so at all. the reawakening? prohibition? you should definitely see the Reagan admin as a parallel

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#159
post #14

how much more confirmation do we need that we are in a recession?

>how much more confirmation do we need that we are in a recession?

Were we in a recession in the 90s, as the rust belt was hollowed out and earning its name, and Wall street reaped the once in a generation windfall of outsourcing an entire country's manufacturing base overseas? Many would say those were the good times. White collar professionals had their time in the sun for those couple of decades, and GDP exploded. But the working class folks were wiped out.

Now it's our turn at the high end of technology. Once top paid SWEs are being reduced to the understanding that their careers are probably over. The economy today is chugging along just fine, but our little niche of high earning specialty labor is over, just as it was for the auto workers 30 years ago. The capitalists have almost fully completed their capture of the last remaining means of production out of their control; intellectual labor.

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#160

It seems Zuck is turning into Elon. What's next? closing the European offices? forcing people to return to the office? relocating HQ to Texas?

Everyone who is smart see's which way the winds are blowing and it isn't in the direction of "more liberal". The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.

In terms of a cultural moment it feels like the 80s. Millions of his voters weren’t ideological conservatives but didn’t fully disagree and like the strength Reagan projected after the turmoil of the mid 60s through the 70s.

They abandoned the movement during bush senior and the Clinton years.

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