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Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

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Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#221

Post by afiori »

mjburgess wrote: post #177
pyb wrote: post #161

The FAANG paradox : these companies all have this performance-intensive culture with the gruelling interview, "perf cycles", promotion processes, OKRs, etc... to ensure all engineers function at the top of their capacity. At the same time, their new public facing products have been mostly underwhelming over the last decade. It seems most of the innovation occurred back when FAANGs were 10-100x smaller. (The AI work i…

This I think is a bit like the "IQ selection" phenomenon, where if we suppose IQ actually measures (say,) test-taking ability rather than some complex notion of intelligence... then we find places that try to filter on IQ (law schools, med schools, FAANG) end up selecting for uncreative kinds of intelligence. As a bold, perhaps wrong hypothesis, this might be in play here. We have the very best leet-coders, but the v…

Probably if you filter by raw IQ (either yours or others definition) you would get a lot of imaginative people as most intellectual faculties are positively correlated with each others.

On the other hand if it turns out that you are actually filtering by "willingness to take years of testing" then you might get different results

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#222

Post by peteradio »

pembrook wrote: post #172

It’s crazy to me how Facebook has so many employees when their entire business is basically managing 3 software products (Facebook, instagram and the advertising platform). Meanwhile I think Apple has about the same number of employees if you subtract the retail Apple store workers. Yet, Apple’s business is comprised of managing, and this is only a rough guess: - 30+ hardware products and their supply chain, marketin…

Apple came from the 80s when people actually built real difficult shit instead of cashing in on corruption.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#223

Post by spicyusername »

agluszak wrote: post #159
thrwawayacc wrote: post #12

amazon manager here: it's the same with us. our director gave told us to manage out more people this year to hit our revised headcount targets for next year. there are no layoffs, just larger-than-normal targets for managing out people. I talked with friends across various orgs and the targets seem to range between 10% to 25% for different teams (as opposed to 5% for normal years).

what does "managing out" mean?

Fire someone in such a way that you don't have to pay them severance or unemployment benefits.

Very dystopian.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#224

Post by yebyen »

oblio wrote: post #216
aikinai wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popularity doesn’t have any affect on how many people you need to build it.

Oh, so that's why we have millions of blog articles about how to scale software and software organizations? Because software used by 10k people needs as many features and infrastructure care and investment as one used by 3 billion people?

No need for egregious hyperbole, there are well more than 10k iPhones in the USA

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#225

Post by HughJazz22 »

bombcar wrote: post #195
wikfwikf wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be this evil (although I have no reason to believe it won't at Amazon). A good manager can do some 'managing out' simply by communicating to her team that there are reduced opportunities for promotion or new projects coming up, and that they may be layoffs. At any time in any workplace a certain fraction of people are actively looking for a new job, and another, usually much larger fraction are ope…

If everyone is roughly performant this works. But if they are not, you may lose the good performers and keep the bad.

If you put corporate interests over the individual ones, your point sounds reasonable.

I'd personally prefer equality in such conversations. I believe corporate can survive with mediocre performers. Just like many of us live with not so great companies we work in everyday.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#226

Post by tarsinge »

oblio wrote: post #216
aikinai wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popularity doesn’t have any affect on how many people you need to build it.

Oh, so that's why we have millions of blog articles about how to scale software and software organizations? Because software used by 10k people needs as many features and infrastructure care and investment as one used by 3 billion people?

That's not how it works, WhatsApp had 50 engineers when it had 900M users[0]. Beside iMessage is not only used by 10k, some estimates put it at more than 1 billion users[1].

[0]https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2022/09/10/why-apple...

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#227

Post by mjburgess »

afiori wrote: post #221
mjburgess wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This I think is a bit like the "IQ selection" phenomenon, where if we suppose IQ actually measures (say,) test-taking ability rather than some complex notion of intelligence... then we find places that try to filter on IQ (law schools, med schools, FAANG) end up selecting for uncreative kinds of intelligence. As a bold, perhaps wrong hypothesis, this might be in play here. We have the very best leet-coders, but the v…

Probably if you filter by raw IQ (either yours or others definition) you would get a lot of imaginative people as most intellectual faculties are positively correlated with each others. On the other hand if it turns out that you are actually filtering by "willingness to take years of testing" then you might get different results

I think these correlations are often spurious. Low IQ correlates with poor performance, making it clinically useful.

I dont think there's much to be said about >115, other than by filtering on it, you at best reduce the variance in other abilities.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#228

Post by input_sh »

radicalbyte wrote: post #78
technion wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that issue I've never seen a LinkedIn message from a Tiktok recruiter, or heard messages about mass hiring. Anyone know if they operating on a much lower staff count?

Isn't it made in China? (edit: I know very little about social networks outside of twitter and finding security holes everywhere in FB back in the day because their engineering was pretty poor).

> There are about 1,000 engineers currently working for TikTok outside of China, nearly half of them based in Mountain View, California.

> “To support our rapid global growth, we plan to continue expanding TikTok’s global engineering team, including adding approximately 3,000 engineers in Canada, Europe, Singapore, as well as the U.S., over the next three years,” a TikTok spokesman said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tiktok-engineers-idUSKBN2...

Bear in mind this is from two years ago, but it gives you a sense of scale.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#229

Post by badpun »

crispyambulance wrote: post #166
ohgodplsno wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"managing out" This is about the worst kind of doublespeak I have ever heard. It is actively malicious, the very thought of it brings images of purposeful abuse of employees. Seriously, just fire people.

I've long felt it was a pity that (in most places) employees and employers could not just have honest discussions about career path, suitability, and deliberate planned exits which are a smooth transition for everyone involved. Instead it's just thick layers of bullshit during performance review time or people getting blindsided by a layoff or a fake PIP. From the employee side, one can't simply express what they nee…

Employment is a partially adversarial relationship. Both parties want to get the most of out their counterparties, while giving the least (or, at least, there's enough people and companies with such mindset, that it defines the game). Hence, honesty on either side doesn't pay off. It's smarter to play your cards close to the vest.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#230

Post by blitzar »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #121
blitzar wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am worth 1/billion of his net worth and every morning when I wake up I feel like I am getting punched in the stomach.

I wish this giant boot grinding me down into nothingness would allow me to stand up enough to get punched in the stomach for a bit.

I had that for a while, thought it was bad till one day the giant boot got taken off and discovered it was hiding a rotten diseased foot. Now I dream about the good times when there was a boot on that foot.
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