Layoffs will continue until morale improves.
Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective
151–160 of 246 posts
Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using that tool has gotta be a fireable offense, right?
If you're being told explicitly to consume tokens then leaving it running while you try to get real work done sounds value-added to me. "Don't worry boss, no one's beating our team on the token leaderboard this week..."
Time and time again, we get shown that the folks running companies still don't understand Goodhart's law
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective
#153AI has caused a lot of leaders to overreact. Great leaders find a balance between overreacting and waffling. It's often wise to dampen your response a little bit, without dragging your feet.
From what I've read from people with relevant experience, the only way to get a large organization change direction is to issue imperative decrees lacking nuance, because large organization by nature tend to be process heavy and are too incompetent to follow a nuanced direction.
If you have tens of thousands of employees the more complicated the communication is, the larger the variation of interpretation of its meaning, I suppose
Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective
#154I wonder when (if ever) the companies realize that demoralizing your workforce (and destroying that sector of the job market) doesn't have only advantages. I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stop…
The problem with such a culture of fear is that the Good Ones(tm) take it as a hint and jump ship; as they're good, they have no trouble finding a job and leaving. But the Mediocre Ones(tm) know that they won't be able to find a comparable job, so they bring the knives out and it becomes a Lord of The Flies situation.
Thus the company gets hurt 2 ways: good ones leave, and bad ones stay, making the lives of everyone else miserable.
Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective
#155I wonder when (if ever) the companies realize that demoralizing your workforce (and destroying that sector of the job market) doesn't have only advantages. I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stop…
Plenty of people still work at Meta and are applying. Trying to get the good money, Meta on the CV, move on to another overpaying tech co, grind a few years and never have to work again.
Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective
#156I wonder when (if ever) the companies realize that demoralizing your workforce (and destroying that sector of the job market) doesn't have only advantages. I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stop…
Read “The Gervais Principle” https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t... I think it explains everything, most companies are optimizing for “confused” - a class within the framework of people who work hard for no reason. Not saying it’s the best but it’s certainly a way to do it, and probably becomes inevitable once the company is big enough. I also think it closely parallels the practice of compan…
This is commonly posted here, and is a hilarious read.
it's also about as valid a Freud or Horoscopes. Maybe some grains of truth, sure, but it's a view of the world filtered through old management textbooks then filtered through a comic and then filtered through the Office.
It's Dilbert meets Simulation vs. Simulacra.
Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s innovative about ads?
Instagram ads are the most consistently interesting ads I see online, and by an enormous margin. Ads suck, and I resent that their inherent purpose is to manipulate me, but they accomplish their goal better than any other ads I've ever seen.
> Instagram ads are the most consistently interesting ads I see online
The credit for that belongs to the advertisers not Instagram.
Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective
#158All of these tech companies have fallen into the Wall Street trap and it will be their ultimate undoing. Meta probably more than most.
I feel like a broken record but Google cracked this particular nut in the 2000s by creating an environment where people could flourish who would otherwise suffer in Corporate America. Google studied this and found in the 2010s that psychological safety was the number one factor in team success [1].
Corporate America typically has what's called an "up or out" mentality. Jack Welch dogmatic thinking rules here. Fire the bottom 5% every year and if you don't get promoted within a certain period, get rid of you because you've reached your potential. This is what created things like stack ranking (which is nothing more than a popularity contest) and smoothing of performance ratings. The last one is toxic because a certain percentage of ratings have to be subpar (ie below "Meets Expectations"). All of this destroys collaboration and creates an environment where those who are more political and more likable rise to the top.
And guess what? Your autistic engineers who otherwise flourished in early Google can't function effectively in such an environment. And these are the people who otherwise become subject-matter experts in storage systems, networking and other niche topics.
At some point innovation ends and the only way to satisfy the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is to raise prices and/or cut costs. So all these companies have engaged in the suppression of wages despite being wildly profitable on a per-employee basis.
As for Zuckerberg in particular, he clearly has no idea where to go with Meta and the AI division is a disaster. The posterchild for bad decision-making and leadership was the Metaverse because $70B+ was spent on an idea with no product-market fit. There were other less expensive boondoggles (eg Libra).
So Zuck hired like crazy in the pandemic because that's what everyone else did and has now engaged in massive layoffs because, well, that's what everyone else is doing and he has no idea what to do with those people. Notice how it's leadership errors that are massively disruptive to people's lives but they suffer none of the consequences when they're responsible? Yeah, me too.
Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective
#159"I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil." I'll go with both... I think the guy made some real moves early on, but it's been a while since whatsapp and instagram. And since then, if the tales in Careless People are to be believed, so much smoke has been blown up his digestive endpoint that he's mostly smoke now.
His most innovative move was acquisition
Buying a competitor to which you are losing in an emerging market is not innovative it's the opposite statement: We lack innovation internally and need to look outside the company.
Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zuckerberg was barely adult when he started Facebook. And he probably bumped into a few older guys who thought they knew better than him, and history proved them wrong. He likely developed some irrational belief that clever and young beats anything else, and saw an echo of his own bravado in Alexandr Wang. Turns out his heuristics were not calibrated properly.
Didn’t he famously trash folks over 30 years back? He has really done nothing innovative outside of ads.
and even that is mostly attributable to Sandberg