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Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

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Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#301

Post by jaredklewis »

psunavy03 wrote: post #293
jaredklewis wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think grading people to a standard is very difficult. At the last place I worked I was managing people and we were given a set of "standards" to rate employees on, used to determine raises, promotions, and so on. I tried my best fairly evaluate my reports, but obviously the standards are inherently imprecise and so the evaluations are mostly qualitative. I found that other managers, wanting to do well by their repo…

Promotions are always going to be subjective because they're a judgement call about how well the person will perform in a more senior role. Firing someone is different; the bar for that is that they are squarely underperforming relative to what is reasonably expectable. The idea that some fixed percentage of people always underperform is possibly Jack Welch's most toxic contribution to management, and with all the BS…

Well I guess I don't see how a manager can determine if someone is "underperforming relative to what is reasonably expectable" without the issues I mentioned in my first post, namely that there is no objective way to make that determination. Managers will mostly be incentivized to determine that no one is ever underperforming relative to a firing standard. And maybe it wasn’t clear, but at my previous company, those evaluations were not just used for promotions, but also who to PIP.

There is also the more philosophical question of where that standard would come from in the first place. And what if the business finds that the average applicant meets a much higher standard than the current firing standard of the company? It would seem to then make sense to raise the company's own firing standard.

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#302

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

dspillett wrote: post #138
sefrost wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain what that means in layman's terms?

Basically pulling jobs out of other territories and concentrating on being all-American where possible is going to sell to President Shart & chums more than the multinational aspect. As an aside from that though, recent & planned changes in UK regulation are trying to put more onus on social media companies to police their dungeons, and they don't like that. I'm sure this aggravation has a causal relationship with Mu…

> being all-American where possible

How much of Meta's staff is H1B?

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#304

Post by dinobones »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #297
VirusNewbie wrote: post #71

I feel like people are missing part of the memo where he said they will backfill all the roles. You can say it's not fair or cruel but this isn't a layoff. They want to churn (maybe for cheaper talent? Maybe for H1-Bs?)

Backfill (with cheaper eng) the roles. Meta is already filled with H1Bs. They are probably the model utilizer of H1B visas. They pay them all really well and the employee base is truly global, not just all from one country.

uhhhhhh.. Ok, they’re from two countries, but mostly one.

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#305

Post by aprilthird2021 »

dinobones wrote: post #304
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backfill (with cheaper eng) the roles. Meta is already filled with H1Bs. They are probably the model utilizer of H1B visas. They pay them all really well and the employee base is truly global, not just all from one country.

uhhhhhh.. Ok, they’re from two countries, but mostly one.

No they're not. You clearly don't work at Meta or haven't. My team is all H1Bs, not a single one from the two countries you're referring to.

Also those two countries make up half the world population so if you're truly hiring global talent they should make up half that group

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#306

Post by lacker »

spacemadness wrote: post #151
hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Are these numbers coming out of thin air? Gut feel perhaps? So after you fire 10% and don’t hire, that holds until there is nobody left? Maybe we should stop with the gut feel managerial apologies and think about what we’re doing and how it affects company morale, no?

The numbers are discussed by upper engineering management. They might change over time depending on the situation the company is in.

Think of a hypothetical organization with 10,000 software engineers. You're the head of engineering. You have ten divisions, each with a VP managing 1000 engineers. Each VP has ten directors, each managing 100 engineers, and each line manager has 10 engineers on the team.

The engineering team reviews the past year. You notice, overall we fired 500 people last year. Okay, so on average that was 5% of staff. Seems reasonable just as a sanity check. (You ask your buddies at other large tech companies, and the other heads of engineering are reporting similar numbers.)

Now you look through the individual teams. A lot of 10-person teams don't fire anyone. That makes sense. But would you expect a director to fire nobody from their org? From 100 people... well, maybe. I'd be a little suspicious. I'd ask some other directors, does this person have a reputation of a very high quality team, or is it more likely that this director is lax, and their org doesn't manage out its underperformers?

Now imagine a VP fired nobody. 1000 people and they all were high performers. Yeah, that doesn't seem right. That VP is probably letting their team get away with low standards. If you were the head of engineering meeting with your VPs, I think the group would be able to come to a consensus of, there's a problem here. It's based on the 5% target but it's not a hard and fast rule.

In the long run, having a high-performing team is better for morale than firing nobody. It's the difference between working at Meta and working at the DMV.

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#307

Post by lacker »

xracy wrote: post #266
hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

5% of your new hires, doesn't necessarily mean 5% of your company. https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo... ^But let's say you messed up hiring 20% of your company, and then you corrected that (layoffs for the past 2 years). You haven't hired enough people to justify perma-cutting 5%. And the number of functioning employees who stop working in a role isn't going to be as high as 5%. The reality…

This specific target being discussed was 5% of all headcount, not just new hires.

You shouldn't think of all firing as a "mistaken hire". Sometimes you hire someone, and they work effectively for years, and then they kind of "check out" and don't do much work any more. It can be a good decision to hire someone, and then later a good decision to fire them.

It's also not a cost-cutting measure per se. Typically when you fire someone you get to replace the headcount with another hire or internal transfer. The point of firing people is to get rid of low performers and replace them with high performers.

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#308

Post by surgical_fire »

ein0p wrote: post #286
surgical_fire wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for one of the FAANGS. My experience (or I might say impression) is that any project could still be on "Keeping the Lights On" mode with a fraction of the engineers there, to an acceptable level. Over time some cracks might show. Bugs that take longer to fix, issues that take longer to figure out, delayed releases, etc. New features being implemented would be severely impacted, especially if those need integ…

There's a flaw in your reasoning: you did not consider that a lot of the projects at FANGS are completely unnecessary and exist only because these companies massively over-hire. Ideal working environment is when there are a lot of worthwhile projects and not enough people. That's when you get a choice of what to work on, that's when the company really values the employees, etc. That's how Google was 15+ years ago. Th…

> There's a flaw in your reasoning: you did not consider that a lot of the projects at FANGS are completely unnecessary and exist only because these companies massively over-hire.

Maybe? Companies of all shapes and size do poor decisions. On the other hand, the nature of some projects require some time of R&D to find out whether something is worthwhile or not.

> Ideal working environment is when there are a lot of worthwhile projects and not enough people. That's when you get a choice of what to work on, that's when the company really values the employees, etc.

I am not sure I agree with this. Ideally you have resources to pursue all projects considered worthwhile.

> That is absolutely not how it is now, at any of these companies. There are way too many people and not enough work. The less ambitious employees deal with this by hiding and doing next to nothing. The more ambitious ones fight each other for scraps of meaningful work that are not yet being done by someone they can't fight. It's not a dignified place to be either way.

That was really not my experience there, although I did not work for Google specifically (perhaps reality there was different). There was actually a lot of work to be done, although a plenty of that work was, in my opinion, overhead due to how things were structured and how decisions were made, many times from the top down.

I left because of it. I felt like it was the place I worked the hardest and I was at the same time the least productive.

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#309

Post by xigency »

lacker wrote: post #307
xracy wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5% of your new hires, doesn't necessarily mean 5% of your company. https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo... ^But let's say you messed up hiring 20% of your company, and then you corrected that (layoffs for the past 2 years). You haven't hired enough people to justify perma-cutting 5%. And the number of functioning employees who stop working in a role isn't going to be as high as 5%. The reality…

This specific target being discussed was 5% of all headcount, not just new hires. You shouldn't think of all firing as a "mistaken hire". Sometimes you hire someone, and they work effectively for years, and then they kind of "check out" and don't do much work any more. It can be a good decision to hire someone, and then later a good decision to fire them. It's also not a cost-cutting measure per se. Typically when yo…

This is somehow better than exploring ways to improve your existing employees' performance?

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#310

Post by xigency »

jaredklewis wrote: post #301
psunavy03 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promotions are always going to be subjective because they're a judgement call about how well the person will perform in a more senior role. Firing someone is different; the bar for that is that they are squarely underperforming relative to what is reasonably expectable. The idea that some fixed percentage of people always underperform is possibly Jack Welch's most toxic contribution to management, and with all the BS…

Well I guess I don't see how a manager can determine if someone is "underperforming relative to what is reasonably expectable" without the issues I mentioned in my first post, namely that there is no objective way to make that determination. Managers will mostly be incentivized to determine that no one is ever underperforming relative to a firing standard. And maybe it wasn’t clear, but at my previous company, those…

Of course you can always make things so entirely vague as to be completely meaningless while still asserting that you are constantly improving by adopting a slogan like "raising the bar."
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