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 turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me," he said.
>"Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me," he said.
This, to me, sounds like he's pressuring people to leave, so that they don't have to fire them, which would involve severance.
I doubt it. You can just slow down and be fired. Severance is a pittance to them.
What they are really trying to avoid is laying off the wrong people. Management is really bad at guessing who wants to stay and who wants out. Often, a bunch of “low performers” are riffed. Some are bad, some are just on the wrong team, some are having life complications- birth, death, divorce, etc.
It’s really bad PR to fire someone who is a low performer because of a bad pregnancy, grandma died, etc. especially when they call a reporter and show their stellar ratings from previous years.
On top of all that, with the rif comes a higher work load. At this time many high performers will quit, which sucks because you just laid off a bunch of people, many of whom were close to these guys in performance.
Then the company is at risk of making bad decisions. They they push even harder on those that remain? Do they become pragmatic and cut initiatives they can no longer staff?
Generally, people who get PIP'd don't get severance, even if fired.
The real purpose of the PIP process is to grind people down so they make mistakes, costing them what could otherwise be beautiful lawsuits [1], or just stop showing up (which I guess would fall under quitting, since they end up firing themselves, at least bureaucratically speaking).
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[1] This is surprisingly easy to do in the US. If you post about your termination on social media, this can be construed as "cause after the fact" and make a termination that was in fact unjust or unlawful now legal. The employer's argument becomes that they knew you held malice toward the company ("cause") but couldn't prove it--the social media activity becomes said "proof".
Once you get paid, you and the company are even. Of course one would want as much reasonable employee protection as usual but practical realities dictate that you shouldn't get something for nothing.
"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
It seems that FB, err Meta, is going to advance the turn of the breaking wheel one rotation. They may be attempting, in good faith, to eliminate the flotsam and jetsam in the bureaucracy, but are more than likely to just eliminate those least connected to internal politics.
I would not be surprised if remote-only workers are the most affected, followed by the most 'heads-down' programmers.
It's interesting that these steps are occurring with the recent leaving of Sandberg and I wonder if there is any connection.
I'm not a Meta-hater, but the tone of this is always destructive when it comes up. It's basically soft layoffs that try and paint those leaving/pushed out as "unmotivated" or "can't keep up with the rest of us". I wish companies would be more honest that they aren't doing well, over hired, etc instead.
I kinda get mgmt types thinking this will keep remaining feeling motivated, safe, etc. but it's very phoney to a lot of us who've been through this before.
I've heard it asserted that your median level of talent doesn't change much with these strategies. But that means you're losing people that you could probably ill afford to lose.
> I kinda get mgmt types thinking this will keep remaining feeling motivated, safe, etc.
That seems completely counterintuitive to me. Seeing your co-worker tip off the end of the plank doesn't make me feel safe as we are all inching closer to the end of it.
Though it would motivate me to look for a job elsewhere.
> Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here
He's probably not wrong though. People are routinely amazed just how many people these large companies employ. Big company culture often slips into not what is delivered, but how many people does a manager have under them.
In the past, successful companies have used economic downturns as a way to reset this culture.
Can you name a few of those companies? I’d genuinely like to read about them. My current hypothesis is that a company needs to have a near-death experience to acquire actual management discipline and true focus. Chrysler in 1979. Apple in 1996.
Meta engineering could definitely afford to get a bit leaner, but the question is whether their approach will cut fat or muscle. Having been there, I suspect muscle. There's a strong correlation there between the "impact" that is the be-all and end-all of their performance measurement, churn, and technical debt. If they cut headcount but keep all of the people generating churn and technical debt, there will be more of those per person who's left and fewer of those risking bad reviews to actually keep things running. Some parts of engineering are already cracking under that load, so the results could be pretty bad. Expect more outages.
This reminds me a bit of a discussion that used to be common during hard times early in my career: layoffs or pay cuts? It didn't take long for companies to figure out that with a layoff you get to choose who goes, but with pay cuts it will disproportionately be your best people because they have the greatest ability to jump upward. Nobody has that conversation any more, because the answer is known. I suspect in a few years Meta's approach to forced attrition (already practiced at Amazon for years) will also be recognized as bad for the long term.
Imagine how bleak it must be to be an average SWE at facebook. Sure, you get paid a ton of money, but now they are going to "turn up the heat" on you to pump glorified CRUD message board features faster.
(yes, I know there are probably lots of intellectually interesting jobs at Meta, but the overall purpose and mission just isn't exactly inspiring)
I wonder how many people at Meta are there specifically for the money. Just learn to game their interview process, get in, and coast. I doubt that there are a lot of engineers working for Zuck for the love of the mission, let alone for moral reasons.
In other news, the value of a developer who knows how to solve the problem at hand vs torching your money on maintaining the overkill of dozens of microservices has just gone up.
Every single Meta employee I know is only there for the money, and for the ability to put Facebook/Meta on their resume for the next job. Nobody is really interested in the product, though all but one of them like the working conditions and how they treat [engineers] there. Anecdotal, obviously.
Presumably only where legally permitted. For instance, Ireland:
> for sedentary office work, a minimum temperature of 17.5° C, so far as is reasonably practicable, is achieved and maintained at every workstation after the first hour’s work.
There is something charming about the use of "realistically", a discovery the CEO just had that "bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here" as if this had nothing to do with him.
I mean, isn’t that always the case though? That lots of people don’t belong there? It’s just the law of large numbers + the ever shifting lives of people.
> Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here,"
He makes it sound like these people sneaked in into the company without being hired.
This reminds me of my greedy uncle - went to a wedding, gobbled every other food and drink in sight and then when the fierce loose motions hit, blamed the food.
What's with this seemingly-new use of 'staffers' instead of 'personnel' or 'staff?'
'Staffers' to me always meant personnel in a political context, i.e. White House Staffers or, in a commercial context, recruiters, i.e. people responsible for providing staff.
Does anyone else concur? I did check with the dictionary which is telling me that 'staffers' is a synonym for 'staff' but... I've not seen it used that way commonly until very recently.
In the North American context, a "staffer" is a member of staff of an organization, especially of a newspaper. I think reporters are using staffer because that's what they call employees at their organizations, even though the organizations they talk about doesn't use that nomenclature.
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 business leader. When you compare the business to something like Amazon - which has a strong culture around decision making and cultivates a style of leadership in it's executives.
So far, it seems like he hit a really good product/market fit and had good timing with Facebook. The strategy since then has basically been to stay ahead by acquiring social platforms that become successful. Until one came along that he couldn't just throw money at and acquire. Oops.
And now with the turn on the dime to "Meta" - other companies have been trying to figure out VR for a long time. Apple has reportedly had a VR headset concept going for years and is probably still several years from releasing it. For Amazon to come out with a product like that, it would have to start with a PRFAQ and a lot of vetting just to release the product. To rename the company and start putting all their energy towards it, which letting actual profit centers languish just wouldn't happen.
So not only has he not validated this new direction, he's now asking people working comfy FAANG jobs to knuckle down and suffer for it. It works when Elon Musk does it because he can make appeals like "we're going to make humanity multi-planetary"
Meta's pitch is "What if we convinced everybody to live in a virtual world controlled entirely by us, where we take 50% of a cut of every digital good that is purchased" - who wants to work 70 hours a week towards making that dystopia a reality?
I feel like Epic Games, with Fortnite being basically a social hub for kids and monetizing skins/associating social status with skins is closer to realizing some early version of "the metaverse" then what we've seen from Meta. I think that metaverse behavior is already happening in a lot of ways, it just isn't happening with dorky headsets and probably won't until the tech matures enough to get there.
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.
> 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 technical challenges, and what they've been doing to address those issues, as well as showing off prototype devices they've been working on[1].
And there's an hour long episode of Adam Savage's Tested series where they get to try the prototypes and go into even more detail[2].
This is the, "I fucked up and I'm going to have cut people, but I'm going to blame the people getting cut because I'm a shit human being" speech. It's never a good sign.
Not really. Business cycles exist and advertisement is extremely cyclical. Labour demand isn't fixed. Sometimes you have to cut not because you over hired, but because economic conditions change and this seems to be what's happening in regards to Facebook.
I don't think he's blaming anyone either. The fact he's acknowledging there are probably people working at FB who shouldn't be suggests you're wrong and that for years FB has kept people despite it not being the company's best interests.
Tbh I wish all companies were honest about why they're cutting back. I know I've been given BS reasons for being cut before and I've also been given no notice or warning. This seems relatively honest and direct in comparison. Those providing value will be fine, those who are not will be let go - isn't this how employment should function?
> "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 turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me," he said."
Incredibly stupid on the face of it. Considering a good many talented engineers suffer with imposter syndrome and perhaps self-esteem issues (the past two years has not been easy on many of us), this will not only have your poor performers flying out the door, but a lot of your engineering talent as well (who a lot of companies will make a 'hiring exception' for).
Any sort of doom casting / or "rally or else" action from a CEO is never going to play out well. You will just spook folks at all levels of performance and degrade morale.
I can't honestly say I will grieve a world without meta though, they played a good part in degrading democracy in my country. I would not swap my life with a Zuckerberg / Musk for any amount of money.
Yes, certainly not good for morale. Meta isn't a company where you can cruise ("move fast" and high turner over contribute to this). Also, many "talents" (esp. those recruited in the last year) are considering quitting because of the drop in Meta stock.
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 purpose seems like a better goal than just beating tiktok, but yes I'm just being an old man nostalgic for the old innocent days.
Impersonal blasts are done, and ephemeral stories are still common but becoming less broadly viewable as well and maybe on the way out. Its all groupchats, that you’re not in.
0 post instagram accounts are common in my circles, its still a fair assumption to assume they archived all their old photos as opposed to deleting them or never having any, but 0 post and story exclusive accounts (only create “stories” that are visible for 24 hours) are a fine way to interact. Just to be able to view your stories and send DMs. And many don't really engage with the stories, but maybe do more “close friends” stories that only a whitelisted group can see, even if the profile was already private.
Its really more like hybrid of Snapchat and Tiktok now, and you need to make closer friends yourself. The network part about finding “people you met once” or “15 years ago” is done, people want more genuine connections right now, its going to leave lonely people in the dust if it hasn't already, but there are ways to take initiative yourself by adding a few people to your close friends list.
This is how people are getting their engagement with real human beings, far better than status updates on a wall ever did. The latter would actually be a weird thing to me right now.
It’s not the smell of the company that has significantly reduced my usage. For me it’s just the fact I cannot state any opinion at all because of the controversy it might cause. It’s just not fun anymore. The stakes got to high.
All FB is good for now is an occasional cat or kid post. And even the kid pictures I don’t really feel comfortable with either because of the paper trail I would be leaving for my kid.
> For me it’s just the fact I cannot state any opinion at all because of the controversy it might cause.
Years ago I would have rolled my eyes at this comment. As someone who is liberal and runs in liberal circles, it seems ludicrous to me that any sane person would get called out for anything not overtly racist or mean spirited.
Then one time I asked in a group chat — with people I thought were my friends — about where I could read about trans kids getting hormone blockers, because I wasn’t really sure about giving kids (who generally don’t know what they want) the kinds of drugs that alter their bodies.
The rebuke I got was swift and severe. For reference… I’m a mid-30s gay man who lives in the Bay Area, and I wasn’t even expressing an opinion.
It's like you're describing FB having gone from Public Broadcasting Station to Home Shopping Network.
That sounds about right. (And the internet in general is becoming more and more a string of commercials — but don't let that comment keep you from getting off my lawn!)
What I would like is to not hear about Meta (Zuck, Sheryl …), at all. Even if they suddenly become the world’s nicest/honest company overnight, it would not be enough. They’ve already caused irreversible damage, both in the U.S and abroad.
Some things in life are too broken and can’t be fixed. FB is one of these.
Every time I hear their name, it is just a bad feeling
Now we are entering what I like to call the "pauper CEO" phase of the economic cycle. When leadership turns out their pockets and "socializes the losses" as it were.
Generally even if you work for a company that is unaffected by the current economic climate, it will be used as a justification for low raises and higher expectations at work. With high inflation happening at the same time, we are entering a bad time to grow your career or get promoted.
For me, I found a role that reduced my overtime and is relatively easy. I wouldn't want to get promoted now if it meant a increase in responsibility as the rewards are unlikely to even surpass inflation by a meaningful amount. This will suck for people without established careers of course, I was in that position in 2008 and the slow economic recovery had me working for very low salaries up until a few years ago.
They only get away with this beacuse most workers don't or can't respond to the incentives they have laid out here. Firms are shouting at us "I don't have the ability to reward you for your effort!", I suggest you listen before working all that hard.
Yeah, we finally entered a phase where employees had some leverage and it quickly turned into an economic liability (high inflation). I'm more convinced that organized labor is the only answer as the years go by.
Reminds me of Yahoo! at their great obsolescence tipping point when they were sunsetted to be replaced by Facebook. Zuckerberg has huge spread in Hawaii just like Yahoo! founder Yang did...the chuckling Marissa Meyer, cutbacks... 'lean in' Sandberg facing a host of legal issues.. it's like the same script again. Wonder what the new Yabook! will look like post recession...
Blood in the water. Might be a good time to start a new social network. A simple blue interface that doesn't have all of the clutter and noise of Mybook. We can launch at universities first, invite-only.
Whatever comes to replace Facebook I really hope it is a distributed system that doesn't have a single unique owner. And that monetization is not done through advertising.
The problem with Friendster, MySpace and then Facebook was their centralized nature. It sucks to produce/place your content in a place you have to pay for.
My roommate works at Meta and from how he describes the culture to me it seems quite intense and competitive already. I can't imagine what "turning up the heat" even more would imply.
When I was there (Oculus) I would not have survived 2 weeks if I had not worked > 8 hours and gone in most weekends. I was on a small team whose pace was simply much faster than any job I've ever had. And everyone seemed to have had a more impressive career than I. Perhaps I'm who Mark is talking about! Microsoft was much more my speed.
there isn't really a stack rank, and they're pretty careful about not fitting performance into predetermined quota buckets. honestly i think attrition will get the numbers down fairly quickly, although unfortunately probably pretty evenly distributed among good and bad engineers.
What I find interesting so far about these hiring freezes & layoffs is that at the moment it's been quite diffuse. All the announcements have been about how the companies will shrink head count and costs etc. But so far there haven't really been the focused sweeping announcements you would expect.
When a company really hits hard times you expect them to be much more deliberate about how they cut, they start making decisions about which businesses do they really want to be in and how much do they want to spend. Facebook is a great example of this. You take a look at the business and say "What's the core business" it's ad-supported social media, you look at the focus and spend and it's this weird hardware platform that's a big bet and probably a long way off and not really connected to the core business. Facebook has completely lost focus on its core business. So this focus on efficiency seems just silly. A lot of these cuts seem entirely driven by some meme about the economy rather than actual real market pressure. When real headwinds start to hit, the cutting is going to be far more about focus and direction than on this vague idea of being lean. It doesn't matter how lean you are while designing a headset, because you're running a social media site.
You're partly correct. Their VR tech is not "new". Oculus was a masterstroke of an acquisition and arguably has technology that's years ahead of anyone else out there.
Eye, finger tracking, touch haptics, variable focus, incredible performance optimized rendering, you name it. The tech talk given by John Carmack , that he went on stage and just winged without slides is one of the highest density talks i've heard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti_3SqavXjk
It would have been their iPhone moment, but Zucccc bungled it with his hateful pursuit of Apples perceived slow walking of their App review. That enmity concluded with the App Tracking Transparency move, without which, we would have been still seeing record breaking ad numbers today.
I disagree. They didn't lose focus. Their new focus is VR. They anticipate it's going to be much bigger growth engine for them in the next decades, while the current core business is slowing down. Maybe their mistake is that they are too aggressive with the VR spending. There are many examples of companies that had a great core business that was gradually slowing down and new companies came and ate their lunch. Meta is trying to prevent that by being the leader in a completely new space. It's a bet that is going to be either a huge win or fail.
VR isn't like digital cameras destroying film, it's a completely different business. It'd be like Netflix deciding their video streaming business has peaked so they're going to hire 10,000 new engineers to work on a new wind turbine business.
I agree with you they are focused on VR, but where I disagree is that they are a social media company. They're not focused on what their company actually does. It's kind of an obvious point that maybe the reason their core business is slowing down is because the head of the company decided to stop working on it. At some point it's going to become obvious that if you spun off the Facebook part of Meta it would have a significantly larger market cap than Meta has.
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 out the heat as long as they can.
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 or maybe even Tesla but as I see other companies employee this "tactic" I just add them to my list of "places I'd never consider working". Such short-sighted thinking.
It's also...if they have the ability to recognize and protect their high performers - why "turn up the heat" in general? You've already identified who isn't performing.
Conversely, if you can't avoid harassing your highest performers - those seem like the people who will leave first, while the people who are under-performing will dig in to avoid risking the job market.
> 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.
I have seen instances where the "underperformers" were the people that made the workplace/team pleasant to be in. Once they were let go, some overperfomers quit not much later.
AWS is another. The gripe i have with them is they do it during the good times as well. I've seen some pretty horrible effects on perfectly good devs who were subject to what i'm only going to characterize as mental torture during their time there.
> 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.
Or some of the low (but not negative) productivity teammates get pushed out and the top performer follows them because keeping them around was good for morale for reasons unrelated to their actual job descriptions (or their individual metrics were rubbish but they also were valued assistants who unlocked the top guy to work at full speed).
> It's absolute insanity that they don't see that the best talent can and will walk out the door if this happens.
On the contrary, the best talent is probably already performing to these higher expectations and won't be impacted. Their peers who weren't keeping up are the ones who will be impacted.
Holding employees accountable for high performance standards is generally welcomed by high performers.
> 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 with. Every company that went on a hiring spree during the last bull run has collected some percentage of people who aren't performing or aren't qualified. Raising expectations and holding people accountable is a reasonable approach, IMO. Much better than just firing people.
Give people a chance to meet very clear expectations and fair warning when they're not. Remove people who can't or won't catch up.
I was exceeding expectations, and given a big promotion in the middle of it. But people I worked with and interacted with every day were feeling extremely stressed and worried about their ability to meet the new bar. Now, in many cases, they didn't need to be worried, but it's natural to question these things in an environment where you're seeing people get PIP'd and unceremoniously shitcanned regularly.
Morale was through the floor, it was an absolutely miserable environment to work in – even though I was personally doing quite well. So I said "fuck this" and was the first person out the door on my team. The second highest performer quit a week later.
The least technically capable person on the team was there for another year.
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.
The problem isn't what they are saying, it is how it is implemented and how it is read. Then there is the issue of how it affects company culture. The tech industry seems to view culture as the type of people they want to work with. That is not the whole picture. If having a job with the company (or receiving promotions) becomes some sort of survivalist game, there will be people who employ survivalist tactics to protect themselves and those close to them. The goal may not involve making people miserable, yet the outcome will be.
> 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.
The problem is that the "very clear expectations" end up being lines of code written, tickets closed, bugs fixed, or whatever, then your employees optimize for that, rather than doing what is right.
And I've seen first-hand where the most talented people aren't having the heat turned up on them, they know they are good, they still get it good, and they will continue to do so.
Even the most talented people can be locked into positions with compensation packages that will severely handcuff them to staying put. And if we really are in one of the most severe downturns we've ever seen, those talented people will very quickly realize they have it really good
There are zillions of HR strategies for retaining the baller employees, while trimming the ones that aren't baller when things get lean. To many who have managed teams of people, products, etc, they look like standard HR stuff, to others, they look inhuman terrible practices. Sorry.
Absolutely. I worked at GE for 5 years and their reluctance to performance manage individual contributors was just insane. They will do anything to cut people in ways that are not performance related. VJRP. SERO. Contractor reductions. Site eliminations. And then finally the blanket RIF. I never saw anybody get fired for poor performance, and many of them should have been. And they also make it hell on people leaders to put people on PIPs. If you take over a team and 50% of them are slackers you can not put all of them on PIPs. HR will start looking at you as a people leader. “Why can’t you motivate and inspire these people?” It was insane really. I actually loved working there, but the bureaucratic BS was crazy.
Similarly, I was at a startup and revenue growth had stopped. They decided to blame the dev team for not making features fast enough. I don't know what happened between that time and two years later when they shutdown, but I'm sure it was terrible.
After twenty years working in the field, my conclusion on this is: the good worker for the people in power is irrelevant. They want to get rid of anyone and that's it.
These events impact the broader economy by having too many people idle aimlessly rather than end up productive elsewhere.
Now they get to lose even more time being productive finding gigs.
Brenden Gregg leaves Netflix, weeks later its stock and reputation tank. They don’t think we know, but we do. There’s no reason to put our faith is people who are clearly more of the same rich grifters being propped up by collective belief. Believe something else.
100%! My company ineptly stumbled into a scenario like this, so to speak, and the result was as you described. After witnessing how that played out, I would expect a similar outcome in other scenarios.
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.
Readit News
.."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 turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me," he said.
This, to me, sounds like he's pressuring people to leave, so that they don't have to fire them, which would involve severance.
What they are really trying to avoid is laying off the wrong people. Management is really bad at guessing who wants to stay and who wants out. Often, a bunch of “low performers” are riffed. Some are bad, some are just on the wrong team, some are having life complications- birth, death, divorce, etc.
It’s really bad PR to fire someone who is a low performer because of a bad pregnancy, grandma died, etc. especially when they call a reporter and show their stellar ratings from previous years.
On top of all that, with the rif comes a higher work load. At this time many high performers will quit, which sucks because you just laid off a bunch of people, many of whom were close to these guys in performance.
Then the company is at risk of making bad decisions. They they push even harder on those that remain? Do they become pragmatic and cut initiatives they can no longer staff?
All moves have risk.
The real purpose of the PIP process is to grind people down so they make mistakes, costing them what could otherwise be beautiful lawsuits [1], or just stop showing up (which I guess would fall under quitting, since they end up firing themselves, at least bureaucratically speaking).
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[1] This is surprisingly easy to do in the US. If you post about your termination on social media, this can be construed as "cause after the fact" and make a termination that was in fact unjust or unlawful now legal. The employer's argument becomes that they knew you held malice toward the company ("cause") but couldn't prove it--the social media activity becomes said "proof".
"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
It seems that FB, err Meta, is going to advance the turn of the breaking wheel one rotation. They may be attempting, in good faith, to eliminate the flotsam and jetsam in the bureaucracy, but are more than likely to just eliminate those least connected to internal politics.
I would not be surprised if remote-only workers are the most affected, followed by the most 'heads-down' programmers.
It's interesting that these steps are occurring with the recent leaving of Sandberg and I wonder if there is any connection.
I kinda get mgmt types thinking this will keep remaining feeling motivated, safe, etc. but it's very phoney to a lot of us who've been through this before.
That seems completely counterintuitive to me. Seeing your co-worker tip off the end of the plank doesn't make me feel safe as we are all inching closer to the end of it.
Though it would motivate me to look for a job elsewhere.
Lots of CEOs with bad businesses will play this card to avoid responsibility...
Would be interesting to see whether he still considers himself essential for the future of Meta.
He's probably not wrong though. People are routinely amazed just how many people these large companies employ. Big company culture often slips into not what is delivered, but how many people does a manager have under them.
In the past, successful companies have used economic downturns as a way to reset this culture.
This reminds me a bit of a discussion that used to be common during hard times early in my career: layoffs or pay cuts? It didn't take long for companies to figure out that with a layoff you get to choose who goes, but with pay cuts it will disproportionately be your best people because they have the greatest ability to jump upward. Nobody has that conversation any more, because the answer is known. I suspect in a few years Meta's approach to forced attrition (already practiced at Amazon for years) will also be recognized as bad for the long term.
Yes FB is not for me. Not as a worker, not as a customer.
(yes, I know there are probably lots of intellectually interesting jobs at Meta, but the overall purpose and mission just isn't exactly inspiring)
Not to me. Just reads like they want to ditch low performers.
(They might or might not still want to ditch 'ethical people', no clue. It just doesn't read that way here.)
I read it more as let's ditch those 'lazy' people that don't 'embrace the grind', only want to work 8 hours a day and then just go home.
No. You said that. Not sure what you are reading.
It is basically getting rid of very low performers, slackers and those unable to deliver those expected goals.
No where did it say what you have just said.
In other news, the value of a developer who knows how to solve the problem at hand vs torching your money on maintaining the overkill of dozens of microservices has just gone up.
Well that was long due: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2013/mar/11...
Presumably only where legally permitted. For instance, Ireland:
> for sedentary office work, a minimum temperature of 17.5° C, so far as is reasonably practicable, is achieved and maintained at every workstation after the first hour’s work.
He makes it sound like these people sneaked in into the company without being hired.
This reminds me of my greedy uncle - went to a wedding, gobbled every other food and drink in sight and then when the fierce loose motions hit, blamed the food.
'Staffers' to me always meant personnel in a political context, i.e. White House Staffers or, in a commercial context, recruiters, i.e. people responsible for providing staff.
Does anyone else concur? I did check with the dictionary which is telling me that 'staffers' is a synonym for 'staff' but... I've not seen it used that way commonly until very recently.
You will never beee president
So that's one less thing to worry about, one less thing to worry about
I imagine that song from Hamilton plays on Zuck’s bidet
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 business leader. When you compare the business to something like Amazon - which has a strong culture around decision making and cultivates a style of leadership in it's executives.
So far, it seems like he hit a really good product/market fit and had good timing with Facebook. The strategy since then has basically been to stay ahead by acquiring social platforms that become successful. Until one came along that he couldn't just throw money at and acquire. Oops.
And now with the turn on the dime to "Meta" - other companies have been trying to figure out VR for a long time. Apple has reportedly had a VR headset concept going for years and is probably still several years from releasing it. For Amazon to come out with a product like that, it would have to start with a PRFAQ and a lot of vetting just to release the product. To rename the company and start putting all their energy towards it, which letting actual profit centers languish just wouldn't happen.
So not only has he not validated this new direction, he's now asking people working comfy FAANG jobs to knuckle down and suffer for it. It works when Elon Musk does it because he can make appeals like "we're going to make humanity multi-planetary"
Meta's pitch is "What if we convinced everybody to live in a virtual world controlled entirely by us, where we take 50% of a cut of every digital good that is purchased" - who wants to work 70 hours a week towards making that dystopia a reality?
I feel like Epic Games, with Fortnite being basically a social hub for kids and monetizing skins/associating social status with skins is closer to realizing some early version of "the metaverse" then what we've seen from Meta. I think that metaverse behavior is already happening in a lot of ways, it just isn't happening with dorky headsets and probably won't until the tech matures enough to get there.
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...
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 technical challenges, and what they've been doing to address those issues, as well as showing off prototype devices they've been working on[1].
And there's an hour long episode of Adam Savage's Tested series where they get to try the prototypes and go into even more detail[2].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sThLeiw8h2Y
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6AOwDttBsc
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Welcome! You're going to get fired! If you want a “family” join a startup!
Truly great engineering requires long-term commitment. Great engineering organizations often have people leave by retiring, not being fired.
I don't think he's blaming anyone either. The fact he's acknowledging there are probably people working at FB who shouldn't be suggests you're wrong and that for years FB has kept people despite it not being the company's best interests.
Tbh I wish all companies were honest about why they're cutting back. I know I've been given BS reasons for being cut before and I've also been given no notice or warning. This seems relatively honest and direct in comparison. Those providing value will be fine, those who are not will be let go - isn't this how employment should function?
> "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me," he said."
Incredibly stupid on the face of it. Considering a good many talented engineers suffer with imposter syndrome and perhaps self-esteem issues (the past two years has not been easy on many of us), this will not only have your poor performers flying out the door, but a lot of your engineering talent as well (who a lot of companies will make a 'hiring exception' for).
Any sort of doom casting / or "rally or else" action from a CEO is never going to play out well. You will just spook folks at all levels of performance and degrade morale.
I can't honestly say I will grieve a world without meta though, they played a good part in degrading democracy in my country. I would not swap my life with a Zuckerberg / Musk for any amount of money.
It's on him if his strategy was so wrong.
Engagement with a real human purpose seems like a better goal than just beating tiktok, but yes I'm just being an old man nostalgic for the old innocent days.
0 post instagram accounts are common in my circles, its still a fair assumption to assume they archived all their old photos as opposed to deleting them or never having any, but 0 post and story exclusive accounts (only create “stories” that are visible for 24 hours) are a fine way to interact. Just to be able to view your stories and send DMs. And many don't really engage with the stories, but maybe do more “close friends” stories that only a whitelisted group can see, even if the profile was already private.
Its really more like hybrid of Snapchat and Tiktok now, and you need to make closer friends yourself. The network part about finding “people you met once” or “15 years ago” is done, people want more genuine connections right now, its going to leave lonely people in the dust if it hasn't already, but there are ways to take initiative yourself by adding a few people to your close friends list.
This is how people are getting their engagement with real human beings, far better than status updates on a wall ever did. The latter would actually be a weird thing to me right now.
Really, you _want_ to go back to that? They don't have to regain your trust in any way?
I don't think the "innocent" days were all that innocent, many were just naïve.
I think you misread the comment you replied to.
All FB is good for now is an occasional cat or kid post. And even the kid pictures I don’t really feel comfortable with either because of the paper trail I would be leaving for my kid.
Years ago I would have rolled my eyes at this comment. As someone who is liberal and runs in liberal circles, it seems ludicrous to me that any sane person would get called out for anything not overtly racist or mean spirited.
Then one time I asked in a group chat — with people I thought were my friends — about where I could read about trans kids getting hormone blockers, because I wasn’t really sure about giving kids (who generally don’t know what they want) the kinds of drugs that alter their bodies.
The rebuke I got was swift and severe. For reference… I’m a mid-30s gay man who lives in the Bay Area, and I wasn’t even expressing an opinion.
Yeah; I’m out.
That sounds about right. (And the internet in general is becoming more and more a string of commercials — but don't let that comment keep you from getting off my lawn!)
I'm not in FB anymore, but the old days were the best.
Some things in life are too broken and can’t be fixed. FB is one of these.
Every time I hear their name, it is just a bad feeling
Generally even if you work for a company that is unaffected by the current economic climate, it will be used as a justification for low raises and higher expectations at work. With high inflation happening at the same time, we are entering a bad time to grow your career or get promoted.
For me, I found a role that reduced my overtime and is relatively easy. I wouldn't want to get promoted now if it meant a increase in responsibility as the rewards are unlikely to even surpass inflation by a meaningful amount. This will suck for people without established careers of course, I was in that position in 2008 and the slow economic recovery had me working for very low salaries up until a few years ago.
They only get away with this beacuse most workers don't or can't respond to the incentives they have laid out here. Firms are shouting at us "I don't have the ability to reward you for your effort!", I suggest you listen before working all that hard.
losses for thee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches
and idiotic c suite parties during mass layoffs and cutbacks https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-blow...
The problem with Friendster, MySpace and then Facebook was their centralized nature. It sucks to produce/place your content in a place you have to pay for.
When a company really hits hard times you expect them to be much more deliberate about how they cut, they start making decisions about which businesses do they really want to be in and how much do they want to spend. Facebook is a great example of this. You take a look at the business and say "What's the core business" it's ad-supported social media, you look at the focus and spend and it's this weird hardware platform that's a big bet and probably a long way off and not really connected to the core business. Facebook has completely lost focus on its core business. So this focus on efficiency seems just silly. A lot of these cuts seem entirely driven by some meme about the economy rather than actual real market pressure. When real headwinds start to hit, the cutting is going to be far more about focus and direction than on this vague idea of being lean. It doesn't matter how lean you are while designing a headset, because you're running a social media site.
Eye, finger tracking, touch haptics, variable focus, incredible performance optimized rendering, you name it. The tech talk given by John Carmack , that he went on stage and just winged without slides is one of the highest density talks i've heard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti_3SqavXjk
It would have been their iPhone moment, but Zucccc bungled it with his hateful pursuit of Apples perceived slow walking of their App review. That enmity concluded with the App Tracking Transparency move, without which, we would have been still seeing record breaking ad numbers today.
I agree with you they are focused on VR, but where I disagree is that they are a social media company. They're not focused on what their company actually does. It's kind of an obvious point that maybe the reason their core business is slowing down is because the head of the company decided to stop working on it. At some point it's going to become obvious that if you spun off the Facebook part of Meta it would have a significantly larger market cap than Meta has.
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 out the heat as long as they can.
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 or maybe even Tesla but as I see other companies employee this "tactic" I just add them to my list of "places I'd never consider working". Such short-sighted thinking.
When your 51% CEO has so little life experience, what did you expect? There's a reason why - IN GENERAL - the best CEOs are older than 55.
Zuck got lucky with FB and made billions selling personal data and retained 51% control. Did we really think he was actually GOOD at anything?
Conversely, if you can't avoid harassing your highest performers - those seem like the people who will leave first, while the people who are under-performing will dig in to avoid risking the job market.
I have seen instances where the "underperformers" were the people that made the workplace/team pleasant to be in. Once they were let go, some overperfomers quit not much later.
Or some of the low (but not negative) productivity teammates get pushed out and the top performer follows them because keeping them around was good for morale for reasons unrelated to their actual job descriptions (or their individual metrics were rubbish but they also were valued assistants who unlocked the top guy to work at full speed).
On the contrary, the best talent is probably already performing to these higher expectations and won't be impacted. Their peers who weren't keeping up are the ones who will be impacted.
Holding employees accountable for high performance standards is generally welcomed by high performers.
Or maybe the best talent is sick of these overpaid rest-and-vest lackeys and more than happy to see them get the axe.
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 with. Every company that went on a hiring spree during the last bull run has collected some percentage of people who aren't performing or aren't qualified. Raising expectations and holding people accountable is a reasonable approach, IMO. Much better than just firing people.
Give people a chance to meet very clear expectations and fair warning when they're not. Remove people who can't or won't catch up.
I was exceeding expectations, and given a big promotion in the middle of it. But people I worked with and interacted with every day were feeling extremely stressed and worried about their ability to meet the new bar. Now, in many cases, they didn't need to be worried, but it's natural to question these things in an environment where you're seeing people get PIP'd and unceremoniously shitcanned regularly.
Morale was through the floor, it was an absolutely miserable environment to work in – even though I was personally doing quite well. So I said "fuck this" and was the first person out the door on my team. The second highest performer quit a week later.
The least technically capable person on the team was there for another year.
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.
"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.
Unfortunately, this is beyond most companies when it comes to software developers.
The better employees, feeling more certain they could find another job, were often the ones who left.
Even the most talented people can be locked into positions with compensation packages that will severely handcuff them to staying put. And if we really are in one of the most severe downturns we've ever seen, those talented people will very quickly realize they have it really good
There are zillions of HR strategies for retaining the baller employees, while trimming the ones that aren't baller when things get lean. To many who have managed teams of people, products, etc, they look like standard HR stuff, to others, they look inhuman terrible practices. Sorry.
True. The first time I came across this effect was reading the book about the IBM disaster: Big Blues https://www.amazon.com/Big-Blues-Unmaking-Paul-Carroll/dp/05...
After twenty years working in the field, my conclusion on this is: the good worker for the people in power is irrelevant. They want to get rid of anyone and that's it.
Now they get to lose even more time being productive finding gigs.
Brenden Gregg leaves Netflix, weeks later its stock and reputation tank. They don’t think we know, but we do. There’s no reason to put our faith is people who are clearly more of the same rich grifters being propped up by collective belief. Believe something else.
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.
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