I have been in what feels like a ridiculous number of arguments over the years with people who will defend to the hilt the idea that these companies all need as many workers as they do, insisting that the very idea that they might have a ton of people hired doing effectively nothing is some combination of insulating and naive. Of course, the fact that some of us actually know such people--my favorite example: I had an indirect friend who loved to tell the story of how, after his third project at Google got killed before launch, he just stopped working and realized there were little, if any, actual consequences for doing nothing ;P--never seemed to hold any weight.
I'm really hoping that, if nothing else comes out of 202[23], it is a realization that the size and scope of these teams was, in fact, madness, and no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever again (but, sadly, I know that this isn't the case, as about three months from now no one will remember any of this happened and none of this has ever come to light and if you try to casually mention it as if it were common knowledge you'll get flooded with "citation needed" as we live in the land of Eternal September where somehow no one ever thinks it is useful to study even recent history).
Meta is one of the most revenue efficient companies in the history of the world. Each employee generates $1.929 million in revenue, and they have an 79.63% gross profit margin vs a sector median of 49%. That's each employee including the recruiters, EMs, etc.
Part of the reason these employees had to "fight" for work is intentional - if they had more people than they needed and no forcing function (i.e. perf cycle) then these people wouldn't fight for their work, they'd just sit there getting paid and not complaining about it. The company would then be dramatically less efficient.
I disagree with their model in a lot of ways, but this is a completely unfair characterization of how their org actually works.
They hired as though the COVID trajectory would continue, and saw less attrition than expected as people stuck to their jobs due to uncertainty. So they're trimming a little and re-focusing. That's all.
> "I mean, like, we were just sitting there. We had to basically fight to find work."
To put a very fine point on it, the reason they had to fight (like everyone else there) is because if they didn't come up with something to do that was quantifiable and impactful in line with org goals, they'd be terminated within the year. It was their job to find a way to be useful. The system culls those who do not. It can be harsh and impersonal, yes, ruthless even - but it is very effective.
> I had an indirect friend who loved to tell the story of how, after his third project at Google got killed before launch, he just stopped working and realized there were little, if any, actual consequences for doing nothing ;P--never seemed to hold any weight.
That was at Google. This is Meta. They are very different companies. Each FAANG is completely different internally and it would be a mistake to assume that experience translates.
> To put a very fine point on it, the reason they had to fight (like everyone else there) is because if they didn't come up with something to do that was quantifiable and impactful in line with org goals, they'd be terminated within the year. It was their job to find a way to be useful. The system culls those who do not.
You're saying the approach "one of the most efficient companies in the history of the world" takes to producing value is: let's just hire people and let them figure out the value they can provide, otherwise we'll fire them.
Am I getting that right?
Before I've even hired someone I've already scoped and quantified the impact I need them to have. I then go find someone that is qualified to do that, and then I motivate them to do more. It is _extremely_ inefficient from an _everything_ perspective to do so in reverse. Not harsh. Not impersonal. Not even ruthless. It's objectively n. e. fish. ent.
>They hired as though the COVID trajectory would continue
Some would argue that management's sole goal is to effectively measure which direction the wind is blowing and predict course accordingly. The fact that so many did so poorly may make some question why management gets reimbursed as well as they do.
Just because Meta is pretty revenue efficient already doesn't mean it couldn't be more revenue efficient. Why is $2M per employee good? It's actually quite bad if Meta should be generating $10M per employee.
>Meta is one of the most revenue efficient companies in the history of the world. Each employee generates $1.929 million in revenue, and they have an 79.63% gross profit margin vs a sector median of 49%. That's each employee including the recruiters, EMs, etc.
Do you have a source for this? Does this include contractors, as well?
> no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever again
I don't think they'd ever claim this because these companies do way more than "maintain a single app".
If companies don't attempt to innovate, even big ones, they lose in the marketplace. Meta for example has multiple apps to support, each serving hundreds of millions of users. On top of mere maintenance, they experiment and add new features. On top of that, what about the occasional greenfield/skunkworks type projects?
It's a shame your friend worked on three consecutive projects that got axed, but that's a separate problem from him being able to coast without getting fired for it.
I work at Meta on compiler support for all kinds of apps. We regularly write and use some pretty aggressive compiler optimizations and we often experiment and evolve lots of compiler and programming language features that are really experimental for use in our apps and services.
I don’t think you can directly compare an app like the ones a small team can build to the apps that larger more established companies have to maintain and evolve. I mean sure you could just do a full app rewrite and start from scratch but that’s hugely risky and certainly fails more often than it succeeds.
The FAANG team sizes and TC packages were never about fueling the production engine. They were about:
1. stockpiling fuel for when you may need it
2. starving your competitors of fuel
With money cheap and valuations absurd, idle or overpriced talent was a much lesser problem than somebody else hoovering up all the good stuff.
So you recruit aggressively using mechanical filters like leetcode/whiteboard tests, then let internal processes figure out who’s actually worth using on meaningful projects. The rest you can sit on, just in case.
I hear this a lot but I think it's bullshit. Neither of those are goals that anyone would realistically pursue. It was almost certainly middle managers wanting to demonstrate impact by leading a larger team.
For a new team that was set up in my company, there was this idea that we should have had some slack in the system, that is, a certain number of people should be rotating on a sort of "bench", ready to get into action when new work came up: an absurd view of intellectual work, which I very much doubt is viable in a top company like Facebook.
> ... no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever again...
Nor do we need to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a gigantic new building[1], on the roof of which we will put a 12.6-acre park and live animals, including foxes, so all of those thousands and thousands of people can maintain that single app (well, in reality, apps), ever again.
I will forever be blown away by the excess I witnessed every time I visited that campus, and I'm sure it's similar elsewhere.
I once worked adjacent to a team with ~700 people. I honestly couldn't comprehend what they were all doing.
At one point, they've got some major deadline coming up and they ask for help / borrowed some folks from our team, but after a week or so our teammates started showing back up to our stand-up. I asked how it was going "over there" and the response was, "They don't have anything for us to do."
It seems like both you and the people you're arguing with are generalizing wildly and lack curiosity.
The situation in the article sounds more like a bureaucratic snafu, where the company is hiring but the teams either aren't given open headcount to use, or they don't want to use it on the new hires for some reason.
Isn't that weird? Wouldn't you like to know how that happened?
The traditional way for companies to learn this lesson are all gone (antitrust breakups, or Innovator's Dilemma-style disruption) since M&A is at an all-time high, antitrust isn't enforced, and companies can just acquire innovative startups.
I'm not even convinced that antitrust would fix it at this point. Someone might need to invent "therapy but for corporations" so big orgs can rid themselves of dysfunction (as if).
State governments that are absolutely the symbols of blue state bloat and waste run applications to serve millions of people with a couple of hundred employees.
That is far a better use of resources than to actively promote hate against transgender, gay, women, and other marginalized groups, and now doctors and nurses too - a sad trend in some of the other parts of the country
She was recruiter hired right at about time when Meta announced hiring freeze. The only lesson here is not that FAANG hires people to do nothing but that Meta was way too slow to layoff 90% of recruiting org probably because it hoped economy/revenues improve and company will resume hiring.
> Levy, who is Mexican American, agreed to start the 12-month gig in April after she checked with Meta that her position would be secure for the duration of the program despite the company’s financial challenges. She was told that the program, which aimed to improve the pipeline of recruiters who focus on diversity, was fully funded for the year.
Yeah, and that she joined just as the internal demand was probably going down. She was hired in anticipation of a need that didn’t materialize. Kudos to her for “fighting” for work. Most people would be tempted to slack off.
In recent years, "sourcers" are the ones who email / call engineers on behalf of the recruiters. They are part of the recruiting department.
Article says:
"Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry."
I find myself in a situation similar to the one described by "Meta staffer" in the article. I was hired a few years ago in a biotech company and, after some months of mostly uneventful work -- but I was doing something -- for the past two years I have done almost nothing.
I tried to propose new ideas and projects, offered my expertise to other groups, but my attempts were met with benign indifference. After realizing that looking for work meant to others that I had nothing better to do at work (or nothing to do, basically, at work), I have decided to put the proverbial feet on the desk and milk the money until I can find a job -- elsewhere -- that I like better. The challenge I see is that I am getting paid very well -- exceptionally well considering I do very little -- and very much enjoying the mental and physical freedom that my current nonexistent workload is giving me.
It's also funny that if you just straight up tell them you're not doing anything and need work, they're indifferent.
And if you ask them if you're SUPPOSED to do NOTHING, they get defensive. I'd rather work with people who at least have the ability to admit you're just hired to pad out the roster.
The way I see it as a worker you are making your abilities available and are entitled absolutely to the wages they give you. Kind of feels like robbing them sure, but they're robbing themselves. More of an indictment of capitalism and corporate structure than anything else. Pay it forward if you can and their loss is everyone else's gain.
It is a situation that psychologically does not suit everyone. Many people fear being "found out" or think they are stealing from their employer. I must say that for a short time I harbored such thoughts, but now I think I have nothing to be ashamed of. I offer my expertise and competence, and they pay me for that.
I do. But it is one of the situations that converge in a kind of mutually beneficial indifference. It is no different in spirit from that of a husband and wife who live under the same roof but seek intimacy elsewhere, or who have repressed their desires for so long that they no longer even remember how to make a baby.
If you speak up too much, you wind up with bullshit work. Example: "refactoring" code for a project/dependency that isn't even used, writing tests just to hit that 99% coverage level, updating wiki articles that nobody reads. This is arguably worse than doing nothing.
My first job out of college was like this. My manager knew I had no work and had no particular interest in letting me take on anything I proposed or found. I ended up quitting a few months in because (on top of a few other issues) I found it way too soul-destroying to have nothing to do.
I wfh almost all the time. I could find another remote job, but I don't feel like it. My life is full of interests: I love reading, writing, exercising, making long phone calls, foreign languages (I am currently learning Japanese). And I make very good money.
One drawback of this whole situation is that it will be difficult to return to a normal job once this honeymoon ends. But giving the current situation up would be like giving up love because I might one day get hurt.
A lot of people don't understand what's going on here. Maybe you haven't worked for a large company but it operates quite differently to a small company.
Two things can be true at once: a company can both need to hire and people at that company can have difficulty finding a role. These are not contradictory statements.
Orgs and teams within large companies have budgets and/or head counts. They need to "spend" these to hire. They hire with external hires and internal transfers. Like any recruitment it can take time. A given position might have a bunch of external and internal candidates. Team may also want to keep head count open to use opportunistically.
If you are employed at a large company, you may be competing with a bunch of internal and external candidates for a job. You can fail to find a position and these positions are being filled by other people.
Think about it this way: we have an unemployment rate that is in large part transitional because of these time factors. We won't hit 0% unemployment. That's just not possible.
Saying failure to find an internal job is evidence of over-hiring is like saying "there is no labor shortage because I could not get a job" (side note: for completeness, "labor shortage" isn't realy anyway; there are only "wage deficits" not "labor shortages").
I call nonsense, have worked for large comoany. Processes are long, bureaucracy is huge, yes, but in no case there was never enough work to fill peoples desks, from software engineers to HR, wtf? The unemployment comparison from company to whole society stinks, too, and there are examples that even 0% unemployment can be true, but again not sure how this relates to a company.
Every piece of your work is stuck somewhere in the system. There's a PR waiting for review, there's a product owner who hasn't made up their mind about something and is waiting to have a meeting with 5 other people who invariably always have one of them unavailable. The dependency for another piece of work is still buggy and needs to be fixed and updated before can do something there.
The solution to this? Hire more people so that the bottlenecks can be cleaned... and Brooks's law starts taking its toll on every single late project.
Sure, there are some teams that are rather focused and can push things through, but there are a lot that stuck somewhere and the hiring to try to. do things in those teams just makes it worse. There's work to do - just none of it can be done in this part of the org because there are too many people.
I always thought that when revenues are too high these companies need to raise expenses so they could have places to trim for rough quarters up ahead. Therefore the hiring strategy in 2020 was sound.
I've also seen the reverse, Netflix not curbing on shared accounts and Microsoft having really limited anti piracy tooling early on, allowing them to keep revenue reserves for the future
I thought the lack of anti piracy for Windows and Abode products was a way of getting people into the ecosystem which helps later. Not sure if this was ever confirmed
Yeah at one of my old jobs in IT, Microsoft would perform software license audits just after a new release of Office. They would find that we were in deficit and then force us to buy licenses but the only licenses we could buy were the new versions of Office. Of course then we would have to upgrade all the other ones that had the licenses. This happens every few years. Obviously it was our fault for not doing better license allocation but I feel like Microsoft knew this is common and took advantage of it.
Back in the Zortech days, we didn't install any copy protection mechanism for just this reason. (Also, copy protection annoys people, and annoying our customers was not something we wished to do.)
That also meant we had no idea how many copies were pirated.
I've had a similar overall thought – as a CEO/CFO seems that you'd want a relatively in-line growth/margin/whatever target each quarter, and so if you get a windfall you'd be incentivized to somehow spread that out or create slack for yourself in future quarters instead of milking it for all it's worth.
Very weird, but that's what the current public capital markets incentivize...
Microsoft still doesn’t really care that much about piracy for some products. You can run Windows 11 Pro with 99% of the features in tact without activating it.
Yea microsoft mostly cares about the enterprise market now. They prefer people pirating windows over using other operating systems because it ensures their enterprise productivity software monopoly.
I just installed Windows 10 on a laptop using the official USB creation tool. You just gotta leave it disconnected from the internet and you can make a local account with no restrictions.
Haven't used windows 11, but there were times when 999999999 was a valid cdkey and there were times when you had to activate the OS with Microsoft servers
This sounds really bizarre to me. A company hiring to hoard talent is just mind-blowing. If they have surplus money, they should just acquire smaller companies and find talent. I really hope this is not a company wide culture promoted by the upper management and that some middle level manager who wants to feel important started hiring to expand their team. If there is one thing I want clarity on it's this. I really hope Mark and Sundar talk about this at some point and explain what is going on
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I'm really hoping that, if nothing else comes out of 202[23], it is a realization that the size and scope of these teams was, in fact, madness, and no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever again (but, sadly, I know that this isn't the case, as about three months from now no one will remember any of this happened and none of this has ever come to light and if you try to casually mention it as if it were common knowledge you'll get flooded with "citation needed" as we live in the land of Eternal September where somehow no one ever thinks it is useful to study even recent history).
Meta is one of the most revenue efficient companies in the history of the world. Each employee generates $1.929 million in revenue, and they have an 79.63% gross profit margin vs a sector median of 49%. That's each employee including the recruiters, EMs, etc.
Part of the reason these employees had to "fight" for work is intentional - if they had more people than they needed and no forcing function (i.e. perf cycle) then these people wouldn't fight for their work, they'd just sit there getting paid and not complaining about it. The company would then be dramatically less efficient.
I disagree with their model in a lot of ways, but this is a completely unfair characterization of how their org actually works.
They hired as though the COVID trajectory would continue, and saw less attrition than expected as people stuck to their jobs due to uncertainty. So they're trimming a little and re-focusing. That's all.
> "I mean, like, we were just sitting there. We had to basically fight to find work."
To put a very fine point on it, the reason they had to fight (like everyone else there) is because if they didn't come up with something to do that was quantifiable and impactful in line with org goals, they'd be terminated within the year. It was their job to find a way to be useful. The system culls those who do not. It can be harsh and impersonal, yes, ruthless even - but it is very effective.
> I had an indirect friend who loved to tell the story of how, after his third project at Google got killed before launch, he just stopped working and realized there were little, if any, actual consequences for doing nothing ;P--never seemed to hold any weight.
That was at Google. This is Meta. They are very different companies. Each FAANG is completely different internally and it would be a mistake to assume that experience translates.
You're saying the approach "one of the most efficient companies in the history of the world" takes to producing value is: let's just hire people and let them figure out the value they can provide, otherwise we'll fire them.
Am I getting that right?
Before I've even hired someone I've already scoped and quantified the impact I need them to have. I then go find someone that is qualified to do that, and then I motivate them to do more. It is _extremely_ inefficient from an _everything_ perspective to do so in reverse. Not harsh. Not impersonal. Not even ruthless. It's objectively n. e. fish. ent.
Some would argue that management's sole goal is to effectively measure which direction the wind is blowing and predict course accordingly. The fact that so many did so poorly may make some question why management gets reimbursed as well as they do.
Deleted Comment
Do you have a source for this? Does this include contractors, as well?
I don't think they'd ever claim this because these companies do way more than "maintain a single app".
If companies don't attempt to innovate, even big ones, they lose in the marketplace. Meta for example has multiple apps to support, each serving hundreds of millions of users. On top of mere maintenance, they experiment and add new features. On top of that, what about the occasional greenfield/skunkworks type projects?
It's a shame your friend worked on three consecutive projects that got axed, but that's a separate problem from him being able to coast without getting fired for it.
I don’t think you can directly compare an app like the ones a small team can build to the apps that larger more established companies have to maintain and evolve. I mean sure you could just do a full app rewrite and start from scratch but that’s hugely risky and certainly fails more often than it succeeds.
1. stockpiling fuel for when you may need it
2. starving your competitors of fuel
With money cheap and valuations absurd, idle or overpriced talent was a much lesser problem than somebody else hoovering up all the good stuff.
So you recruit aggressively using mechanical filters like leetcode/whiteboard tests, then let internal processes figure out who’s actually worth using on meaningful projects. The rest you can sit on, just in case.
As for (2), that's as true as fairy tales.
Nor do we need to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a gigantic new building[1], on the roof of which we will put a 12.6-acre park and live animals, including foxes, so all of those thousands and thousands of people can maintain that single app (well, in reality, apps), ever again.
I will forever be blown away by the excess I witnessed every time I visited that campus, and I'm sure it's similar elsewhere.
[1]https://www.builtinsf.com/2020/02/25/facebook-headquarters-m...
Meta while unsurprisingly not very efficient, does need a lot of employees to maintain what they've built.
At one point, they've got some major deadline coming up and they ask for help / borrowed some folks from our team, but after a week or so our teammates started showing back up to our stand-up. I asked how it was going "over there" and the response was, "They don't have anything for us to do."
The situation in the article sounds more like a bureaucratic snafu, where the company is hiring but the teams either aren't given open headcount to use, or they don't want to use it on the new hires for some reason.
Isn't that weird? Wouldn't you like to know how that happened?
I doubt it generalizes, but it's interesting.
I'm not even convinced that antitrust would fix it at this point. Someone might need to invent "therapy but for corporations" so big orgs can rid themselves of dysfunction (as if).
That is what leveraged buyouts and activist investors are supposed to do. Emphasis on supposed
I know people directly who have been affected by the layoffs. They did work. It's just work that has been deprioritized.
Stop trying to demonize the workers who are victims of mismanagement.
From a different article ( https://wapo.st/3lmVr6w ):
> Levy, who is Mexican American, agreed to start the 12-month gig in April after she checked with Meta that her position would be secure for the duration of the program despite the company’s financial challenges. She was told that the program, which aimed to improve the pipeline of recruiters who focus on diversity, was fully funded for the year.
Article says:
"Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry."
I tried to propose new ideas and projects, offered my expertise to other groups, but my attempts were met with benign indifference. After realizing that looking for work meant to others that I had nothing better to do at work (or nothing to do, basically, at work), I have decided to put the proverbial feet on the desk and milk the money until I can find a job -- elsewhere -- that I like better. The challenge I see is that I am getting paid very well -- exceptionally well considering I do very little -- and very much enjoying the mental and physical freedom that my current nonexistent workload is giving me.
And if you ask them if you're SUPPOSED to do NOTHING, they get defensive. I'd rather work with people who at least have the ability to admit you're just hired to pad out the roster.
Two things can be true at once: a company can both need to hire and people at that company can have difficulty finding a role. These are not contradictory statements.
Orgs and teams within large companies have budgets and/or head counts. They need to "spend" these to hire. They hire with external hires and internal transfers. Like any recruitment it can take time. A given position might have a bunch of external and internal candidates. Team may also want to keep head count open to use opportunistically.
If you are employed at a large company, you may be competing with a bunch of internal and external candidates for a job. You can fail to find a position and these positions are being filled by other people.
Think about it this way: we have an unemployment rate that is in large part transitional because of these time factors. We won't hit 0% unemployment. That's just not possible.
Saying failure to find an internal job is evidence of over-hiring is like saying "there is no labor shortage because I could not get a job" (side note: for completeness, "labor shortage" isn't realy anyway; there are only "wage deficits" not "labor shortages").
The solution to this? Hire more people so that the bottlenecks can be cleaned... and Brooks's law starts taking its toll on every single late project.
Sure, there are some teams that are rather focused and can push things through, but there are a lot that stuck somewhere and the hiring to try to. do things in those teams just makes it worse. There's work to do - just none of it can be done in this part of the org because there are too many people.
I've also seen the reverse, Netflix not curbing on shared accounts and Microsoft having really limited anti piracy tooling early on, allowing them to keep revenue reserves for the future
That also meant we had no idea how many copies were pirated.
Very weird, but that's what the current public capital markets incentivize...