281–290 of 403 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet, Amazon has over 13,000 open tech positions: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/tech-roles
I get contacted by Amazon recruiters very often. I either ignore them or say it's not the right time for me.
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…
Even including the retail employees, Apple's footprint is barely double the size of Facebook. I agree that it's really bizarre how wasteful FB's operations seem to be compared to Apple's. What an unimaginative company...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do I understand correctly, you are saying that 5-20% of your employees will quit after having a conversation simply noting that he or she will not be receiving a bonus or raise this year, or similar? That’s really quite tenuous, especially in this economy.
It’s not just that. It’s usually a combination of low bonuses/stock rewards, minimal raises, no promotions, uninteresting/less meaningful work, and less effort put into coaching them. Basically all of the stuff managers should be doing normally. If someone’s on the receiving end of all of those things they’ll usually leave sooner or later. Who wouldn’t want to?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
12 000 people out of 58 000 is “not a big deal”? It’s especially a big deal in the context of Facebook’s decline and bleak outlook. They’ve been outcompeted by TikTok, and their bet on VR looks misguided. Facebook look doomed, and this is a big step in that direction.
How is their bet on VR misguided in your opinion?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to be suggesting that we're not entitled to opine about Facebook since we don't know the detailed internals or can't grasp the complexity, but I think that OP captures a broadly carried sentiment that Facebook's impact on society, on balance, is negative. And one internal I'll comment on, regardless of not being an insider: the downsizing through performance reviews feels very dishonest.
It’s just less interesting. If I want to see random people navel gaze about Facebook’s general impact on society there are lots and lots of places for that. HN is one of the few where I’m likely to hear from people that spent a decade there. Also interesting would be someone that studied the impact deeply from the outside. But a thread started with a slightly wordier version of “F Facebook” is just not likely to be v…
In an effort to create some high-signal content on this thread that addresses your parent's concerns about the failure modes of the performance process I'd like to shed a little first hand light: TLDR it is broken. I'm a bit limited in respecting that certain things are proprietary, but so much of this is common to all "FAANG" companies that it's basically public domain. Joma Tech on YouTube knows all of this and does (great) comedy skits on it.
Longer version: companies like FB or Google can afford arbitrary amounts of qualified experts to study mechanism design, there are people at those companies who deeply understand complex incentive structures. It doesn't hurt that the ads business is like 50% game/auction theory to begin with.
But you only have to look at any political structure in sight to know that the wonk answer, the "right" answer via math, is rarely implemented, and basically never implemented by virtue of being "right". Adam Smith's utilitarian billiard balls are a very limited approximation to human beings. Mostly people want to do the "right" thing, but in large numbers respond to incentives, and the incentive for any bureaucracy is to continue to exist.
The Google "leetcode" interview and the Google "promo-packet" performance evaluation process are not optimal, they fall down in all kinds of ways. But they are better by far than a dart board, and pretty much all the big shops cargo-culted them. They're remarkably similar in being 1) well-intentioned 2) ostensibly quantitative and 3) in practice in 2022 basically a way to money-launder bias through a spreadsheet. A lot of people oversee this process, review it annually, tweak small parts of it and play down the error bars. These people have jobs, and career tracks, and where they can do some good in general, but it's a system.
FB has it's own tweaks on the "leetcode" interview and the "promo-packet" bi-annual performance evaluation, but it's still obviously a patch set on Google's shit. I've never worked at Google, so I can't be certain, but by my trained eye FB's is actually slightly more enlightened in a few ways (Google had an SAT score minimum for US applications for longer than they want anyone to remember), but it's still governed by humans, and apparently the only thing humans want more than food or sex is tribal affiliation: asking someone for something deep in CLRS in a 40 minute coding interview isn't a technical test, it's a "went to the kind of school I did" test.
So while we're all busy laundering classism, sexism, racism, and lots of other -isms through Floyd's Tortoise and Hare interviews? I'm fairly unmoved by laundering some downsizing through the same mechanism. It's the not the root of the issue.
Seeing giants fall like this, where they achieve the highest peaks imaginable, but then struggle to find the next thing that is suitably big enough to satisfy expectations makes me never want to reach mega success status if I ever start a startup.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do I understand correctly, you are saying that 5-20% of your employees will quit after having a conversation simply noting that he or she will not be receiving a bonus or raise this year, or similar? That’s really quite tenuous, especially in this economy.
As a minor anecdote, I'm a FAANG SWE and if I was told I wouldn't be receiving a raise OR bonus this year, I'd absolutely start looking for other work. Most FAANG employees get recruiters reaching out daily, the thought of greener pastures is always on their mind.
If anything, being a FAANG SWE puts you at a disadvantage for ever having stability. Financially risky startups would love to have you, but a lot of industry verticals simply won't take a look at you because they figure you wouldn't be interested or you're perceived as a flight risk. Thing is, if you plan to retire from this profession those are the kinds of jobs you're going to need.
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Salaries here in India shot up 100-200%. 35 year old engineers were making more money than leading heart surgeons with 35 years of work experience. All the while their companies remained unprofitable. Utter insanity. Especially in hindsight when we know that there is no “new normal” - just the old normal with a few online-only remnants.
>>35 year old engineers were making more money than leading heart surgeons with 35 years of work experience. Indian here and can confirm. This sort of situation is why so many people in comparable professions(like medicine) resent software people in India. Having said this I do believe software people deserve to make more than doctors. Medicine especially after a while can be about trivia scholars. Software on the ot…