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Meta Layoffs

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Re: Meta Layoffs

#171

Post by rhaway84773 »

geokon wrote: post #31
darth_avocado wrote: post #21

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…

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 to gain a Technical understanding of their projects so we could have educated discussions and I could actually guide and help them with issues they might be facing, even if it was simply knowing who to direct them towards. We also tend to have small teams, with no project exceed about 5 devs.

If I was managing 30-50 people, that would have meant having an understanding of 6-10 wildly different projects at least.

Again, that seems well beyond the mental capacity of someone who is already spending about 50% of their work hours simply on 1 on 1s every week.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#172

Post by eloisant »

Dalewyn wrote: post #48
nostromo wrote: post #30

Earlier 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.

Just give it another 10 to 20 years and the next generation of the workforce will introduce cubicles as a monumental innovation in office design technology.

Cubicle are so much better than open offices, it's funny to think that in the 90's they were considered a symbol of employees being treated like cattle.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#173

Post by zelos »

nostromo wrote: post #30
aestetix wrote: post #7

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 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.

Exactly. No amount of free food or office social events will make a cramped, open plan office pleasant to work in.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#174

Post by glass3 »

usrusr wrote: post #148
simula67 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote work is very valuable. It makes the economy more efficient by reducing transportation costs, reducing carbon emissions etc. It allows companies to hire from locations that they previously thought were unviable. It helps employees spend less time in traffic and more time with their loved ones. There may be some negative side-effects, such as making it harder to provide guidance to new hires, holding unmotivated…

What do we do with all that productivity gain though? Back in the days of "swap money for product" capitalism the answer was "more product, yay", but now a considerable part of the economy is completely disconnected from that mechanism and is only competing in the zero sum game of visibility as a service. If Facebook employees magically got 48h per work day all we would get were steeper walls in the dopamine traps we…

Regarding you sidetrack:

When you swap money for products, you don't need time. If the economy shifts to visibility and attention, instant transactions are not possible anymore. Whatever people produce, somebody needs time to consume it. So all the productivity gains will be used to create more audience.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#175

Post by akmarinov »

eloisant wrote: post #172
Dalewyn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just give it another 10 to 20 years and the next generation of the workforce will introduce cubicles as a monumental innovation in office design technology.

Cubicle are so much better than open offices, it's funny to think that in the 90's they were considered a symbol of employees being treated like cattle.

Cubicles are employees being treated like cattle and open offices are just the next iteration.

Going back to actual offices with doors would be way better for employees’ health.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#176

Post by baxcl »

djha-skin wrote: post #29

His poignant take on weekly remote work is being wrestled to the ground stick me the most: > To me, although I’d certainly concede that WFH pares down meeting culture and certainly has benefits in logistics, it’s always been fairly obvious that in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture, and I suspect is important especially to larger orgs because it helps to even out performance. Hig…

Huge OSS projects work without in-person collaboration.

In the quoted paragraph he acknowledges that high caliber people can work better at home. He is wrong about everything else.

- In person work provides the ultimate cover for less motivated people, not WFH.

- In person collaboration is not more effective for software engineering.

- Teams take advantage of the productive persons while playing political and social games at the office.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#177

Post by midoridensha »

rightbyte wrote: post #124
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 [...] Then again peacooks have like huge swag backs for no good reason other than looks. I feel the concept of open offices are abit like agile. It is a virtue signaling "cult". It doesn't matter it is counterproductive. You just need it to get the female peacooks.

Nitpick: there's no such thing as a "female peacock". Those are called "peahens".

Re: Meta Layoffs

#178

Post by vasco »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #171
geokon wrote: post #31

Earlier 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…

You wouldn't do 1-1s like this with 50 direct reports.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#179

Post by lozenge »

geokon wrote: post #59
flashgordon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is a team that is meeting their manager consisting only of 5 people if the manager has 30-50 people reporting into them? I wasn't sure if it was a typo or where you actually advocating for a manager to have 30-50 direct reports?

Yes. The manager managed 6+ teams. They had decades of industry experience and were very good at.. Management? dealing with project scope, knowing what clients would find useful, when to change direction etc. Managing a team is realistically not a full time job. He did not write any code or independently make technical decisions nor act as a mentor or senior dev or anything like that. He used to write code, so could…

One of each team must have spent more time with the clients, planning, communicating with the official manager etc. That's a level in the managerial structure.

Re: Meta Layoffs

#180

Post by midoridensha »

sofixa wrote: post #150
midoridensha wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how the world would be different if Microsoft had just let them die. Would it be better or worse? Would we all have slate-style smartphones now, or would they have taken much longer to arise?

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 to copy the Windows UI on a tiny screen.
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