101–110 of 282 posts
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…
I just never understood how come “tech” companies never used the same concept used within their products, async communications!! Sync communication is a blocking one, you need to block all involved parties to discuss X that most of the times is useless, just use async ones, I email/text/or even video record when I have the time, and you respond when you do, not really that hard!
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.
The paragraph ended with:
> we’re focusing on understanding this further and finding ways to make sure people build the necessary connections to work effectively. In the meantime, I encourage all of you to find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person
So this is not in the least requiring employees to return to the office. In fact a reasonable reading of it is that it's actually supporting remote work by specifically articulating what is necessary for it to work well and then planning to facilitate that. It's a far more intelligent approach than the blunt option of "let's just force everyone back to the office 3 days a week".
And this would be ok for a small company. But when you have tens of thousands of people who now need new clear marching orders, this is a very dangerous thing. And doubly so if you keep on changing those people's goals because you think you need to launch something big and new that requires thousands of people to build it (but you don't know exactly how it's going to be built).
Why is it dangerous (and I mean org-productivity-wise)? Because everyone has a natural need to feel useful and that they're productive and deserving of their pay.
So when clear instructions are lacking about what we're supposed to do, we make up things to work on. We hire people who say they can help us figure out what to work on. We create managers to manage people who seem to not know what they're working on, so that some direction can seem like it's clear. Because you can't have 10 people not knowing what they're working on, without a manager to manage their not knowing what they're working on. We schedule meetings to find out what other people are working on, and how we should get involved to be useful, distracting the few who are actually being productive.
So you find, after a few years, that you've accumulated a massive apparatus of people who have created a behomth of their own, simply from the desire to believe they're working on something useful. Sometimes they're very convincing, looking like they're working on something useful.
And unpleasant as it is (and surprising, as Elon Musk showed), many of them could stand to be fired without much detriment to the original purpose of the company.
Figure out what you want to build before you hire tens of thousands of people to do it. (and whether it will work). Or, at least as a caution, when your goal changes but you already have tens of thousands of people, be prepared to act unless you want to find yourself unwittingly in this position.
Middle 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…
That's a pretty broad range, from conservative estimate 12 hours of staff meetings weekly for 30 people and 2, to 30 hours on the high side. This leaves no room for reporting up, or for relationship building via 1:1s, promotions, hiring and budget planning, among other responsibilities.
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…
It doesn’t check out to me that this is an overwhelming opinion. People definitely like remote and hybrid work but the tradeoffs vs being in person at least some of the time are well known to the point of being obvious. Partially-remote teams inherently have higher communication bandwidth between the in-office cadre versus the remote teammates, and all-remote teams specifically plan for team retreats and hangouts to build camaraderie, emotional connection, and understanding.
The Meta studies are one of those “you have to find numbers for the thing that is obviously true” situations.
It’d be really surprising to me to hear any kind of experienced developer contest this, even if their personal preference is to knowingly make that trade in favor of the flexibility being remote gives.
I’m curious if others agree or disagree here, given the author presented the exact opposite of my stance so frankly.
If their performance data is reliable, why does Meta need several rounds of layoffs? The foundation of their analysis is weak.
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.