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Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

reuters.com

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Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#361

Post by KaiserPro »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #251
msbarnett wrote: post #214

Yeah, "we hired people we shouldn't have so now we're going to make it increasingly unpleasant to work here" doesn't work. First-hand, what I've seen happen is that your most talented people, who are the most in demand, leave the organization quite quickly because they correctly realize they don't have to put up with this bullshit. It's the coasters who fear they'll never land an equally cushy job who attempt to ride…

> Yeah, "we hired people we shouldn't have so now we're going to make it increasingly unpleasant to work here" doesn't work. But that's not what Meta is saying. The goal isn't just to make it miserable. The goal is to raise the expectations and hold people accountable throughout the company. The exact quote "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here" is hard to argue wit…

> Give people a chance to meet very clear expectations

"Impact" is not a clear expectation. its not really that actionable either.

The biggest problem with Meta is that there is no real pedigree for making new products. Everything successful has been bought in.

I'm still not sure why Meta decided to double the number of employees, there was no clear goal, and it appears that teams were making up bullshit metrics to prove that they needed more staff.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#362

Post by blantonl »

joshstrange wrote: post #260
blantonl wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the good people are the ones that perform well in the kitchen when it gets hot.

Lol. Bullshit. The good ones know to get out when a company treats it's employees like shit. Just because they aren't the target today doesn't mean they won't be the target tomorrow. The idea that people should wear bad working conditions as a badge of honor is just silly and something I'd expect people (the good ones) to grow out of after a few years max in the industry.

you know, there are economic times where it's tough to find a job in certain industries, no matter how awesome you are.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#363

Post by throwaway5371 »

msbarnett wrote: post #214

Yeah, "we hired people we shouldn't have so now we're going to make it increasingly unpleasant to work here" doesn't work. First-hand, what I've seen happen is that your most talented people, who are the most in demand, leave the organization quite quickly because they correctly realize they don't have to put up with this bullshit. It's the coasters who fear they'll never land an equally cushy job who attempt to ride…

and go where? most people are there for the money, pretty much only roblox, gambling, crypto and few others pay similar to fb or above, and its unlikely its much nicer there

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#364

Post by elteto »

blantonl wrote: post #248
synu wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this work well? Aren’t the good people the first to leave if you decide to make everyone miserable?

the good people are the ones that perform well in the kitchen when it gets hot.

Lol no. They go find nicer, cooler kitchens.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#365

Post by Cerium »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #197
Cerium wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a long time I thought that cat videos, HFT, and military tech were the options. I worked HFT for a while. Then I discovered medical technology. You can work on interesting hardware and software for devices that absolutely make the world better. It's great.

Do any companies in the medtech space pay as well as the other options?

In my experience, yes. I get paid a bit better than I would expect at Microsoft and a bit worse than if I went to Apple.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#366

Post by the_biot »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #251
msbarnett wrote: post #214

Yeah, "we hired people we shouldn't have so now we're going to make it increasingly unpleasant to work here" doesn't work. First-hand, what I've seen happen is that your most talented people, who are the most in demand, leave the organization quite quickly because they correctly realize they don't have to put up with this bullshit. It's the coasters who fear they'll never land an equally cushy job who attempt to ride…

> Yeah, "we hired people we shouldn't have so now we're going to make it increasingly unpleasant to work here" doesn't work. But that's not what Meta is saying. The goal isn't just to make it miserable. The goal is to raise the expectations and hold people accountable throughout the company. The exact quote "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here" is hard to argue wit…

Frankly I think that's a naive take. I suspect in reality it'll come down to managers being told to cut some percentage of staff, and in many cases that'll come down to everybody feeling the pressure of swords hanging over their necks.

That is not a formula for the "worst performers" leaving or getting fired, it's more like a formula for chaos, nasty office politics, and people leaving just because they don't need that shit in their life.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#367

Post by seti0Cha »

kennywinker wrote: post #296
bricemo wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what they are doing with one improvement: instead of firing, they are allowing attrition to happen naturally. That’s better than layoffs

Why is that better? Making everybody suffer until some people leave because it’s intolerable to them… that doesn’t sound better to me.

It seems unlikely to me that they'll turn up the pressure on the high performers. More likely they'll just raise the bar for what is considered adequate. The real pain will be having less people to do the work, but that happens with layoffs as well.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#368

Post by tuckerman »

kennywinker wrote: post #348
tuckerman wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, I think goals and expectations are different. That said, it’s possible to have intended to always be setting ambitious goals but look back and see that maybe you were unintentionally coasting. Fixing that problem isn’t nefarious. I think reading into this any deeper is just succumbing to a leakers goal of finding sound bites which sound bad to get people all excited and angry.

You can word dance around it all you want - his intent is clear: working at meta is going to be harder tomorrow than it was yesterday, with the intent that some people will quit over it. How you feel about that depends on if you see yourself as more similar to an owner of meta, or as a worker at meta.

I’ve seen the pain low performers cause others around them as an IC and having the company try and fix that problem seems very reasonable. But who knows, for all we know this could just be rhetoric to inspire some initiative.

Assuming people that don’t support your strong gut reaction to this leak view themselves as “an owner of meta” is strange—my views here are very much colored by my experience as an IC at a similar company where I thought I’d be happier, as a worker, if we could do a better job at both managing low performers and firing leakers.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#369

Post by stathibus »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #320

Talking about "turning up the heat" at FB and using this kind of language is fairly odd to me while at the same time Google is actively reforming their perf and promo process in a way that seems (at least to me, newly on the outside) to be kind of the opposite of this and a response to internal frustration, and lots of attrition. I don't know, maybe we'll see a similar thing happen at Google over the next few months.…

What's going on at Google is mostly orthogonal in my view. They are slimming down the process, not lowering performance expectations.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#370

Post by OnionBlender »

googlryas wrote: post #298

I read the article, but I will choose to take the headline literally. Since men on average prefer a colder work environment than women, I wonder if this will lead to a disproportionate number of males leaving the workplace, improving their male:female ratio?

I know you're joking but I've always hated how cold the office is. I would often get a mug of hot water just to warm my hands. I've seen female co-workers wearing those fingerless gloves or wearing their winter coat because of how cold they were.
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