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

Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 509 posts

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#121

Post by KptMarchewa »

t_mann wrote: post #82
cycomanic wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that nobody is questioning this. Zuckerberg owns ~17% of Meta shares, so it quite clearly not "his" company where he can do whatever he pleases. Primarily he is an employee and has a responsibility to the owners (which does include him) to do his job, arguably looking at button padding is not part of his job description.

17% of stocks != 17% of voting rights. I don't know the current numbers, but Zuck was known for aggressive use of priority shares to retain voting control of the company as he was selling shares.

>17% of stocks != 17% of voting rights

Stock classes are the biggest robbery of modern times.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#122

Post by pilgr »

padolsey wrote: post #17
coolandsmartrr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSC culture?

Performance Summary Cycle. From experience, the psc culture within fb/meta is intense, internally competitive (even within teams) and heavily focuses on quantifiable gains (e.g. often tech-debt or ethical-minded features are forgone for engagement metric increases ... via any means). It's not nice unless you're a very specific type of person.

So well said! Absolutely, totally reflects my own experience.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#123

Post by yieldcrv »

lordnacho wrote: post #22

Maybe I'm being totally naive, but what I want from FB is not better discoverability and metaverse, I want my friends to put their lives on it like they used to a few years ago. I don't even put anything on it myself anymore because of the smell around the company, and very few people I know do either, so my feed now looks like a bunch of memes and random news, with adverts in between. Engagement with a real human pu…

Impersonal blasts are done, and ephemeral stories are still common but becoming less broadly viewable as well and maybe on the way out. Its all groupchats, that you’re not in.

0 post instagram accounts are common in my circles, its still a fair assumption to assume they archived all their old photos as opposed to deleting them or never having any, but 0 post and story exclusive accounts (only create “stories” that are visible for 24 hours) are a fine way to interact. Just to be able to view your stories and send DMs. And many don't really engage with the stories, but maybe do more “close friends” stories that only a whitelisted group can see, even if the profile was already private.

Its really more like hybrid of Snapchat and Tiktok now, and you need to make closer friends yourself. The network part about finding “people you met once” or “15 years ago” is done, people want more genuine connections right now, its going to leave lonely people in the dust if it hasn't already, but there are ways to take initiative yourself by adding a few people to your close friends list.

This is how people are getting their engagement with real human beings, far better than status updates on a wall ever did. The latter would actually be a weird thing to me right now.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#124

Post by akudha »

lordnacho wrote: post #22

Maybe I'm being totally naive, but what I want from FB is not better discoverability and metaverse, I want my friends to put their lives on it like they used to a few years ago. I don't even put anything on it myself anymore because of the smell around the company, and very few people I know do either, so my feed now looks like a bunch of memes and random news, with adverts in between. Engagement with a real human pu…

What I would like is to not hear about Meta (Zuck, Sheryl …), at all. Even if they suddenly become the world’s nicest/honest company overnight, it would not be enough. They’ve already caused irreversible damage, both in the U.S and abroad.

Some things in life are too broken and can’t be fixed. FB is one of these.

Every time I hear their name, it is just a bad feeling

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#125

Post by cs137 »

npteljes wrote: post #107
achow wrote: post #2

Interesting quote from CEO in an all hands directly to employees. I don't want to be at Meta right now.. .."turning up the heat" on performance management to weed out staffers unable to meet more aggressive goals. "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said. "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turni…

>"Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me," he said. This, to me, sounds like he's pressuring people to leave, so that they don't have to fire them, which would involve severance.

Generally, people who get PIP'd don't get severance, even if fired.

The real purpose of the PIP process is to grind people down so they make mistakes, costing them what could otherwise be beautiful lawsuits [1], or just stop showing up (which I guess would fall under quitting, since they end up firing themselves, at least bureaucratically speaking).

----

[1] This is surprisingly easy to do in the US. If you post about your termination on social media, this can be construed as "cause after the fact" and make a termination that was in fact unjust or unlawful now legal. The employer's argument becomes that they knew you held malice toward the company ("cause") but couldn't prove it--the social media activity becomes said "proof".

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#126

Post by tarsinge »

achow wrote: post #2

Interesting quote from CEO in an all hands directly to employees. I don't want to be at Meta right now.. .."turning up the heat" on performance management to weed out staffers unable to meet more aggressive goals. "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said. "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turni…

> turning up the heat

Well that was long due: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2013/mar/11...

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#127

Post by dom96 »

achow wrote: post #2

Interesting quote from CEO in an all hands directly to employees. I don't want to be at Meta right now.. .."turning up the heat" on performance management to weed out staffers unable to meet more aggressive goals. "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said. "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turni…

Wow. Guess I left Meta just in time. It still feels difficult to believe Zuckerberg would say this though.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#128

Post by savolai »

boredtofears wrote: post #71
threeseed wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> glorified CRUD message board features faster I think this comment says more about you than anything. If you look into Meta's tech stack they have challenges no company on the planet has and clearly a lot of talent. Having just played with CacheLib it's an impressive project and yet to see an equivalent anywhere else. And I imagine much of what they do is like this when you're operating at their extremes.

Like I said in my original comment: I'm sure there are a ton of interesting jobs at meta, no doubt - but they are the "meta" jobs of meta. In terms of driving their primary objective it's nothing that innovative from a technical perspective. Their innovation is solely rooted in behavioral psychology. Not self-driving cars, not better medical devices, not VR technology (well, OK, they bought their way into that). The…

No, it doesn't seem like they're doing much to alleviate the damage to society they've done. Still your comment seems rather cynical.

Yet, relative to the age of humanity or even modern society, they are still a new modality to humanity's interaction. One that facilitates also a lot of good that's happening in the world.

There is still a ton they could do right if they chose to, to make that environment for communication a healthier one. Could they find willingness to reroot their design choices in a wider tradition of social psychology, for instance?

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#129

Post by ShamelessC »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #114
pavlov wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they changed it effective this year. No more summer PSC, just the January one. If anything, that makes this internal announcement worse because of the whiplash. "We're going to make PSC less onerous and stressful by only doing it once a year!" "Just kidding, we're actually going full Hunger Games with the new once-a-year cycle!"

> "We're going to make PSC less onerous and stressful by only doing it once a year!" There's something interesting going on here. I agree that people will probably perceive annual PSC as less stressful than semiannual PSC. But even there, some people might not. And there is a point where more frequent is very clearly less stressful. If you did PSC once a week, it wouldn't be cause for stress, it would just be somethi…

What about, you know... _zero_ "PSC"? Sounds like the type of shit a company does when it builds a culture of mistrusting its own employees.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#130

Post by cs137 »

achow wrote: post #2

Interesting quote from CEO in an all hands directly to employees. I don't want to be at Meta right now.. .."turning up the heat" on performance management to weed out staffers unable to meet more aggressive goals. "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said. "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turni…

This is the, "I fucked up and I'm going to have cut people, but I'm going to blame the people getting cut because I'm a shit human being" speech. It's never a good sign.
Post reply on HN