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Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

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

#381

Post by msbarnett »

throwaway5371 wrote: post #363
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

Share price has tanked anyway, compensation at FB is less competitive than it used to be.

IME your top performers are generally less compensation motivated than "interesting problem and interesting environment" motivated. Many companies will bend over backwards to give a top performer from a FAANG as much autonomy and interesting work as they want, for compensation differences that aren't that major anymore.

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

#382

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

forgingahead wrote: post #180
malermeister wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quit Facebook because I was getting pings by Zuckerberg himself on button padding on one of his pet projects.

But why was your padding work so shoddy?

He's a low performer; it's just one of his immutable and context-independent properties.

/s

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

#383

Post by boloust »

dimmke wrote: post #200
cableshaft wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it just isn't happening with dorky headsets and probably won't until the tech matures enough to get there Zuckerberg is well aware of the technical challenges of VR headsets and they're putting a lot of effort into getting the headsets where they need to be. Seems like they're helping push the technology much further than any other company right now. Here's a 30 minute video where he and Michael Abrash go into the…

>they're putting a lot of effort into getting the headsets where they need to be. 1. Nobody knows "where they need to be" to become suitable for mass adoption. Definitely better than they are now, but personally I highly doubt I'd feel comfortable using a full VR headset regularly unless it was a "full dive" experience where I don't have to use a controller. 2. Hardware is a lot more difficult than software. Facebook…

> I highly doubt I'd feel comfortable using a full VR headset regularly unless it was a "full dive" experience where I don't have to use a controller.

The Quest headsets already have accurate controllerless hand tracking, but not many experiences optimized for the input mode.

> Apple has more experience designing and producing hardware than Google, Facebook and Amazon combined and if they don't think the tech is ready, it's probably not ready.

Apple is releasing a VR headset next year, which means they think the technology is ready.

Apple entering this space will probably do wonders for broader acceptance of the technology, like the dedorkification of smartwatches with the introduction of the apple watch.

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

#384

Post by pbalau »

plantwallshoe wrote: post #294
ivraatiems wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming LoC = lines of code... seriously? That's by far the dumbest metric for measuring software engineer productivity that exists.

There is a graph of your submitted commits/LoC/code review comments over time, overlayed with the rest of your teams metrics. Managers will tell you that those metrics are not important to your performance review , but it is absolutely not true. They didn’t make the graph so it can be ignored.

Before I've left fb, early 2018, loc/code review did not matter. Around 2016, there was a push to switch to management from within the engs. This did not go that well. After, since the company kept growing and there was a real need to get more managers, they started hiring from outside. One of these outside hires become my manager and he was the reason I left. Code review used to be on the same axis as onboarding, office hours, that sort of thing.

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

#385

Post by earlyriser »

lordnacho wrote: post #22

Maybe I'm being totally naive, but what I want from FB is not better discoverability and metaverse, I want my friends to put their lives on it like they used to a few years ago. I don't even put anything on it myself anymore because of the smell around the company, and very few people I know do either, so my feed now looks like a bunch of memes and random news, with adverts in between. Engagement with a real human pu…

Engagement with a real human purpose is the focus of my app, ferris.app

I'm not in FB anymore, but the old days were the best.

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

#386

Post by deckard1 »

dimmke wrote: post #185
achow wrote: post #2

Interesting quote from CEO in an all hands directly to employees. I don't want to be at Meta right now.. .."turning up the heat" on performance management to weed out staffers unable to meet more aggressive goals. "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said. "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turni…

There was a time where I wanted to work at Meta/Facebook someday - it was actually "next" on my list. I didn't care about the negative press that Facebook got, I felt like they were unfairly targeted because of the 2016 election. And a lot of the engineering work that has come out of Facebook has been excellent, like React/React Native have changed the world. But it's just really hard to see Zuckerberg as a good busi…

Generally, people seem to enjoy working at Facebook. I knew a director that worked there and he constantly raved about it. Almost cult-like at times. I don't think I've read a single good story about working at Amazon, though. They may have the better business, but they are horrible for employees at all levels.

If we're talking ethics and it has to be FAANG... I guess that just leaves Netflix really. And maybe I just don't know their business in detail. But all the rest are ethically compromised.

Facebook, to their credit, were the ones that forced higher engineering salaries. We wouldn't even be talking about the stupid concept of FAANG (why anyone took Jim Cramer seriously is beyond me) if it weren't for Facebook. Because Google, Apple, etc. were doing backroom deals to form a hiring cartel[1], to prevent poaching talent and keep salaries artificially low. Facebook refused to play. Even today I hear that if you have a Google offer then you better have a Facebook offer in hand just to get Google to budge on their low-ball.

[1] https://pandodaily.com/2014/03/30/court-docs-google-hiked-wa...

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

#387

Post by tsimionescu »

yieldcrv wrote: post #101
achow wrote: post #2

Interesting quote from CEO in an all hands directly to employees. I don't want to be at Meta right now.. .."turning up the heat" on performance management to weed out staffers unable to meet more aggressive goals. "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said. "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turni…

Just do the old Netflix culture doc style Welcome! You're going to get fired! If you want a “family” join a startup!

What a horrible idea.

Truly great engineering requires long-term commitment. Great engineering organizations often have people leave by retiring, not being fired.

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

#388

Post by tsimionescu »

datalopers wrote: post #341
joshstrange wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolute insanity that they don't see that the best talent can and will walk out the door if this happens. Even if the top performers are insulated from the "heat" there are a non-zero number of them that this won't sit right with and/or they are affected and they leave. Any company who uses this kind of shadow-layoff or whatever you want to call it is scum, plain and simple. I mean that's no surprise for Meta o…

> It's absolute insanity that they don't see that the best talent can and will walk out the door if this happens Or maybe the best talent is sick of these overpaid rest-and-vest lackeys and more than happy to see them get the axe.

Why would you think that the people who managed to navigate office politics enough to avoid being fired so far are the ones who will get fired now?

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

#389

Post by cmrdporcupine »

stathibus wrote: post #369
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.

From what I'm hearing it sounds overall positive and giving managers and teams more discretion for promo at the lower levels?

I personally stayed at L4 for my entire 10 years because the whole idea of going through that process was repulsive to me and everything I worked on kept getting cancelled or shifted around and I didn't have the personality to go peeing on metaphorical firehydrants to make them "mine" enough to claim what they said I needed for L5. But I had plenty of managers who would have gone to bat for me in this new process, I suspect. But I quit just a few months before they rolled this out.

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

#390

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #361
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

Yeah, I thought 35k (when I left) was too much. 70k definitely feels insane.

One of the great things about FB before that was that it was small and had ambitious goals, so you'd tend to work on important stuff, as would everyone else.

But they kept making more money and hiring more people, and the culture got murdered (again) due to external senior management hiring.

And the last four to five years have hollowed out the original core of competent execs. Their replacements are less good, which cascades downhill and causes more problems.

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