The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Being stuck carrying coworkers that don't perform sucks. Firing under-performers is what healthy businesses do.
Firing an arbitrary percentage as opposed to grading to a standard is not.
Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'
171–180 of 432 posts
Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'
#172When 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…
It's understandable that in an organization that hasn't tightened its screws on employees, you will be able to find 5% low performers. But do you expect to find 5% low performers even after 5 iterations of these firings? Like eventually you are left only with medium to high performers, and you are just making their lives miserable by turning work into a meaningless Hunger Games season.
I would imagine a lot of the firings are new hires, or people being replaced by new people who are a better fit; so it really depends on the rate your company is growing.
If the company is growing 10% a year and firing 5% a year you're still growing significantly.
So I think it's pretty important to look at the rate of hiring, not just the rate of firing.
Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'
#173Earlier 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
I understand that you made up your 20%, but at that point it feels like you are blaming bad team fit or environment as bad hires, and this fitting can change over time as bad politics or shifts to different goals happen.
Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
The word 'recession' means something though, and it's neutral on whether or not any particular humans have more income or cheaper goods. If you get a raise at work, it doesn't mean we're not in an economic recession as a country, and if you get fired or the price of gas goes up, it doesn't mean we are.
Yeah I understand recession is a technical term. I'm just trying to explain why we keep hearing people say we are in a recession. Most people don't care what the term technically means. They just know their buying power is decreasing while wealthy people are doubling their net worth. People just want to be able to afford to live and affluent people keep pointing to the chart and saying it's not a problem, but it is a…
Someone I was talking to made up the term "targeted recession" to describe it as some communities are definitely experiencing negative growth while overall metrics seem positive.
Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'
#175how much more confirmation do we need that we are in a recession?
Two or more quarters of negative GDP growth
...has never been the rule (at least for the US), just a layman rule-of-thumb that kind of sort of works a lot of the time. It's actually determined by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). They started relying on NBER back in the 80s, IIRC.
Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'
#176Earlier 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
Other than agreeing with "spacemadness", I wanted to point out a small correction. Original argument was about 5% of total employees, not only new hires.
Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'
#177Earlier 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.
This feels a little off. I think those who stand to financially benefit the most are taking advantage of the opportunity to do so while they can. Getting more specific, I don't buy the argument that we're getting more conservative. Instead, I'm inclined to think that a narrow election victory will lead to extreme measures that will create a significant backlash in the coming years. If you're in a position to exploit…
> Getting more specific, I don't buy the argument that we're getting more conservative.
We are getting more culturally conservative though - you can see that in the polls that ask people to self-identify politically.
Support for which specific policies that translates to obviously varies, but I think that's a separate question from the overall zeitgeist.
Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being stuck carrying coworkers that don't perform sucks. Firing under-performers is what healthy businesses do.
That wouldn't require a quota (5%) nor an announcement.
I’m amazed at how some engineers cheer for layoffs thinking they’re safe. The naivety really is something to behold. Or maybe they’re bots. Unclear.
Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
October and November were revised up actually. October’s is still pretty bad though w.r.t. expectations
Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'
#180> “I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster,” Zuckerberg said in the memo Doesn't this beg the question of why the bar wasn't higher the whole time?
I'm not trying to apologize for Meta here, but sometimes companies make bad hiring decisions, or good workers get lazy/apathetic.
Or have children causing distractions, or get injured etc.