It's hilarious. Meta introduced stuff Democrats liked when Democrats were in charge, and it switched to stuff Republicans like precisely on the switchover to Republicans being in charge.
It's so transparent, perhaps part of the point is how nakedly self-serving and obvious it is.
What Meta actually wants to do is hoover up the world's data and sell it, get the world hooked on constant engagement, and erode their privacy until they have none left. To be the middleman getting paid in the entire world's engagement.
The left/right culture war stuff is just so the alien in the human suit can keep getting away with what he actually wants to do.
He is a snake. I also live on Kauai and most of the locals don't want him here, he is trying to turn his image around but most people aren't really buying it or haven't really thought about it too deeply.
He, in my view, is desperate to hang onto 'his throne' but all it takes is the right person, with the right vision, at the right time...with enough support.
> Defending all this in a 3 hour Joe Rogan interview. Ranting about the lack of "masculine energy" at the company.
Was it as excruciatingly cringeworthy as it sounds? I don’t want to give them the view or spend three hours of my time on that, but I’d take a highlight of the weirdest moments.
> Is this history's most bizarre midlife crisis? What is going on with this man?
It feels like he suddenly became a Musk fanboy and wants to mimic him. Maybe because Zuckerberg completely failed at going into politics when he dipped his toes in it in the past and Musk just got his candidate elected.
No not really - it's quite a good interview. Here's the masculine energy bit if you want to judge for yourself. You only have to watch a couple of minutes to get an idea https://youtu.be/7k1ehaE0bdU?t=5329 To me "ranting" is not true. He calmly says he was brought up with girls and it's quite nice go get out and do martial arts for a change. To me that's normal and getting upset about 'men' not getting free tampons is kinda weird.
Supposedly he actually talked about both "masculine energy" and "feminine energy" being valuable as opposed to the modern corporate environment being "neutral" or "neutered," so take that for whatever.
> Ranting about the lack of "masculine energy" at the company.
This one in particular feels very midlife crisis coded; weird insecure masculinity stuff. But, y'know, most men who have issues with that get by with an ill-advised car or something.
That's just how he's always been. He's an insecure little incel at heart.
Facebook's precursor was a HotOrNot clone that used female classmates' photographs without permission. It takes a certain type of person to build something like that.
The all in podcast has four high net worth people with a similar vibe.
Something disturbing is going on in the ranks of the "elite". I get these people are narcissistic, but the overt displays of contempt combined with authoritarian cowtowing is a bit frightening.
A trade war with China combined with other increasing consequences conflicts seems to be bringing the age of global free trade to an end, or at least a very different one.
The Ukrainian success with naval drones may mean the end of secure seas as well. Drones are cheap, anonymous, and effective.
That implies an disruption to the multinational corporate order, and an emphasis on domestic or near domestic production, and less of the government independence / arbitrage that the super rich have gotten used to.
But the ultras all seem to be going into these maniacal bond villain molds. Is Musk a symptom or a torchleader?
Are you implying there are no differences between masculine and feminine? If there are differences and you value diversity, you should want masculine to be represented.
Unless you mean masculine == bad, which would be a very bigoted take.
I know Zuck wasn't super popular on HN, but until these recent events, I saw him as someone generally reasonable and pragmatic.
I can understand that he had to compromise with Trump in order to protect his wealth and company. But it's clearly more than that. I wonder, does he even have values on his owns? will he reinstate the tampons if democrats win in 4 years?
My guess is that he's slowing been adhering to the Trump/Musk ideology (like a lot of people) and now is one of them.
I think once he started working out and getting strong, he looked less like an android and more like a human male. His politics may have shifted as a result of building muscle:
I don't like Zuckerberg at all but the counter point to this is that the Woke movement went too damn far to the point of creating a thought police and you can count this as part of the recent backlash we're seeing everywhere.
He just does what the government tells him to do. Now, before and in the future. I personally dislike any divide and conquer agendas, especially the woke one, and am happy that it bursts now.
> Is this history's most bizarre midlife crisis? What is going on with this man?
He's the definition of a perpetual beta trying to be alpha.
I would love to spar with him in BJJ sometime. After you train for awhile you can lock up with someone and immediately feel who they are. An alpha stays calm and relaxed, never panicking even as they are being put to sleep [1]. He went into BJJ hoping to become alpha and it just highlighted even further he's not.
[1] BTW, this isn't a bullshit masculine/man/woman thing. I roll with plenty of women and many of them are more alpha than many men I know.
When I was an engineering manager there, engineering leadership described performance reviews as, in a large well run engineering organization, you'll probably be firing 5-10% of your employees every year for low performance. (Well, "non regrettable attrition", which includes people who quit when they get pipped.)
Lower than 5% at scale would be a red flag, not necessarily wrong, you don't want to "stack rank" with a quota and force managers to fire people who shouldn't want to be fired, but if you have 100 engineers in a department and only one of them gets fired in a year, probably the director is making a mistake.
So, I'm sure this won't be the only firing for the year at Meta. But this doesn't really seem like it's very far away from normal practices.
Why? Why set an arbitrary number of people who need to be fired as opposed to grading people to a standard? Is your hiring process so flawed that you just accept that you screwed up hiring 5 percent of your people?
This smells like the Welchian nonsense that drove GE into the ground.
> Is your hiring process so flawed that you just accept that you screwed up hiring 5 percent of your people?
if you only messed up 5% of your hires you'd be a goddamn genius and every company in the world would want to put you in charge of their hiring process
the "standard" is more like 20% of hires end up being bad hires
>Why? Why set an arbitrary number of people who need to be fired as opposed to grading people to a standard?
A person, individually, indeed must always be judged by themselves objectively. But people, in aggregate, can generally be understood stochastically. And in any group of people there will always be the obvious slackers who everyone knows aren't pulling their weight. Good management clears these people out rather than allowing them to fester and lower morale. It doesn't matter if it's high paid SWEs or minimum wage workers, the dynamic is the same.
The arbitrariness is a risk. But the general idea is that there is a strong inertial bias against firing “enough”, and this grows exponentially with company size. Doing a PIP is extremely annoying when you are already sure you want to fire someone. So it’s not uncommon for underperformers to get moved around.
Essentially the individual incentives for managers are naturally to avoid making the tough decision, the idea is to put some more pressure to make the right call.
Your value of X% will vary but you hope it’s tuned by some research within the org.
We've had many years in our industry where funded and public company were in a mad rush to put seats in chairs. It's like storming a field to pick fruit because you fear others will get it all first: you're incentivized to hoard, and not inspect.
I think grading people to a standard is very difficult.
At the last place I worked I was managing people and we were given a set of "standards" to rate employees on, used to determine raises, promotions, and so on. I tried my best fairly evaluate my reports, but obviously the standards are inherently imprecise and so the evaluations are mostly qualitative. I found that other managers, wanting to do well by their reports, more leniently interpreted the standards and their reports were promoted more and treated better than my own.
So, wanting to do well by my reports, I re-calibrated my own evaluations to be more lenient. The other managers responded in kind. This arms race continued until upper management found it to have essentially broken the whole system. So then we were asked to rank the performance of reports on our team. I liked everyone on my team and wanted the best for all of them, but also had no difficulty putting them in order from most productive to least productive, with maybe the occasional tie here or there.
Anyway, the whole experience kind of highlighted to me some of the issues with "objective" standards and some of the benefits of relative standards.
If you are in growth mode, say 20% growth or more -- and you are hiring quickly, your probably gonna have new dynamics form that change the shape of the team (Every hire changes the culture). Some folks may no longer be the right folks. (Could even be a new hire -- I had someone who I had high hopes for leave in 9 months because they weren't able to mesh.)
Businesses are people but business is cogs. (In both senses of the word)
To be a manager in a large org, you need to constantly be refocusing the team on the goal. Drift happens. When you have 100 brains, you get 100 ideas.
This "rule of thumb" reason is to make sure leaders are not languishing. It's very easy to see the people, and lose sight of the business goal.
Are all 100 people aligned and driving towards the goal? (If so, amazing and you should fight to keep all of them.)
Statistically speaking there will be a few percent of bad hires and people whose skills don't match the requirements. Arguably, they could detect that during probation period, possibly extending probation period needed. That's how it's done in more progressist european countries. It gets harder to fire people after that.
Note that they also routinely fire perfectly capable people, who exceeded expectations for many years in a row and just had one bad year (sometimes after a team change or a promotion).
it makes sense that if average tenure at a company is 3-5 years then some percentage yearly firing will cull people who have 'quiet quit' and havent fully quit yet
Isn't this quite paradoxical that those kind of companies have hard interviews where you have to almost prove that P=NP in front of 5 people that judges everything you do, yet they fire engineer because "ratio"?
Could this lead to a manager that tries to have the best team for himself will always include average employees that they can easily fire?
The firing is not motivated by the ratio. It's not a handcuff saying you must find x% of the workforce to fire.
It's setting a bar that when evaluated on a curve a certain percentage of your employees wind up being below that bar. You derive the ratio from how aggressive you expect your bar to be.
But no one is saying you need to fire people. They're saying they expect a certain amount of lower performers and if they don't see it, they want to know reason. But it also only manifests at much higher populations than an individual team. Totally possible a small enough team has everyone >= meeting expectations.
> Isn't this quite paradoxical that those kind of companies have hard interviews where you have to almost prove that P=NP in front of 5 people that judges everything you do
Interview process at Meta isn't that hard. Mostly medium leetcode questions (in front of single interviewer), not particularly tricky. With enough preparation, it's doable by any reasonably good undergrad. Google was slightly harder though. Similarly, system design can be prepared.
The hardest part is to get the interview in the first place. But if you do, it's just a matter of preparation. You want to be able to nail these questions.
These interview practices are probably in part because of the huge number of applicants trying to get into Meta, which allows them to rachet up the difficulty to the highest level.
My assumption based on some interview experience articles[1][2] is that there's an internal arms race between the recruiting and engineering at Meta where candidates are not forwarded for the interview process until they feel sufficiently prepared, often giving them months (in any other company, I feel this would be a big red flag), and interviewers expecting the equivalent of Djikstra or Knuth to join their team, regardless of what the team actually does. (I assume not everyone writes distributed system or database implementations from scratch at Meta.)
Yup, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy where you hire extra, possibly not top candidates, just so you have something to shed when the time comes without affecting your existing team.
It's understandable that in an organization that hasn't tightened its screws on employees, you will be able to find 5% low performers. But do you expect to find 5% low performers even after 5 iterations of these firings? Like eventually you are left only with medium to high performers, and you are just making their lives miserable by turning work into a meaningless Hunger Games season.
I would imagine a lot of the firings are new hires, or people being replaced by new people who are a better fit; so it really depends on the rate your company is growing.
If the company is growing 10% a year and firing 5% a year you're still growing significantly.
So I think it's pretty important to look at the rate of hiring, not just the rate of firing.
It sounds like you missed the fun that was stack ranking in the ‘90s. Combine that with “360 reviews” like we had at GE where team members rank each other and the only sensible thing was to “defect” and rank everyone low in the hopes someone wouldn’t understand the game and rank you higher.
It's not like the firing is random. "Low performers" get a lot of warnings throughout the year. Most people are average or above so they will be completely unaffected, it's not likely you would drop from 50th percentile to 5th.
On the other hand, do you really want to be stuck working with someone who's not very competent? I think we've all had that experience and it's miserable.
Indeed. If you're on a team where the bottom 5% are always getting culled, eventually you're going to find yourself in the bottom 5%. That's just math.
Sounds like a good way to turn a functioning team into Survivor Island.
Every coworker (and each person outside your company with similar skills) is a competitor in a global marketplace for various skills. It's just not very useful or helpful to think about it only in that way. Day to day it's much more helpful to think of my coworkers as fellow travelers, wrenching on the same big distributed machine in the cloud, generally just trying to get shit done and be useful.
Speaking as someone who works at Meta, I certainly don't plan my life as if I'll always be employed by Meta, always earning this high of a wage. The ride could end at any minute, and I plan accordingly.
10% is an overestimate, of being fired or backstabbed in any given year, fwiw. The people getting laid off in any given cycle tend to be heavily skewed towards newcomers in my experience.
Not that I think firing 5% makes any sense but unions are a far worse evil, had to walk past almost 20 people in a tiny train station pretending to be ticket inspectors when the gate for ticket checks is automated and within view of them all so it's a completely fake job but they can't fire them so they have them do this "job" till they retire on a excellent pension which to make matters worse along with their salary are negotiated via the threat of striking crippling the capitals transport network.
If 5% is every coworker is a competitor, unions are your coworker doesn't even have to deliver any value at all yet is treated the same as you.
I am very much opposed to unions,I think in general , with time unions workers are just trading one oppressing power structure where they have not much control for another.
However, i think with the way things go, it's inevitable that IT/Knowledge worker with start unionizing.
The same things happens for starbucks the coffee : As the company grew, the margin improvement came at the expense of the employee working conditions until unions start forming
What's noteworthy is that there isn't going to be a PIP process this year. The day the review cycle is over the bottom 5% of employees will be shown the door.
So as a manager you get to fire 5% without you being affected then in turn the other 95% work harder to make you look better. Sounds like a win win. I can see why you are in favor of this insane policy.
Viewed in isolation, the number of redundancies might not be unusual, but how it's being presented to the employees is.
Before, Zuckerberg rhetorically accepted responsibility for lay-offs, but now he's making clear that the people he's firing are entirely to blame. He's deliberately talking up the firings, bringing them closer, making them feel more personal and making it a bit harder for the people fired to get replacement jobs, all for the purpose of cratering his own employees' morale.
He's making Facebook a pro-MAGA company and has decided that the way to make the workers get with the program is to intimidate them.
This is pretty stupid, you hire the best and the brightest, arbitrarily firing any of them 'just because' seems like a good way to burn moral for no real gain.
What I have seen in the past was engineers that were performing completely fine being put on PIP-equivalents because there must be a few being PIPped on every department, based off on some bullshit percentage.
In reality, low perforers should be culled, no need to enforce percentages department-wide. That would require managers doing their job properly of course.
The goal is to always be bringing in new talent and cutting lowest performers to increase productivity. They want the new talent and don’t care about the low performers at a personal level.
Metas philosophy (based on what an ex Meta person told me) is “up or out”
So if you aren’t getting a promotion, you are eventually getting fired. This meat grinder probably has some perverse incentives for employees and makes sure you are always churning through folk who you don’t need to pay QoL raises to
I'm confused. The article specifically states that Meta cut 25% of its workforce since 2022 (that's not counting the 5% that are being reported). What overhiring?
Freedom of speech is a liberal concept, the application of “liberal” as a derogatory term for one side of the political spectrum was a propaganda move. Don’t give in to it.
The current pivot, I think, is mostly that culture warriors have managed to describe their interest in liberal terms (freedom of speech), and social media companies are buying it (gets them out of moderation duty and lets them reduce headcount).
These are ad delivery networks that want to do the bare minimum required to avoid scaring people away, they’ve discovered that the bare minimum can go lower. They don’t have any principles, so why would they do anything else? They are exploring downwards in terms of effort, eventually they’ll bounce off the floor.
This feels a little off. I think those who stand to financially benefit the most are taking advantage of the opportunity to do so while they can.
Getting more specific, I don't buy the argument that we're getting more conservative. Instead, I'm inclined to think that a narrow election victory will lead to extreme measures that will create a significant backlash in the coming years. If you're in a position to exploit a system with little repercussions for four years and all it costs is a little bit of dignity and some public image, most corporate leaders would take that opportunity for the money, prestige, power, etc.
I'm willing to bet sizeable amounts of money that most voters do not support rolling back employee protections, or removing the debt ceiling, or buying/bullying [insert random country], or any of the other wildly regressionist statements thrown around by un/elected folks. Conflating the complexities involved in how a person votes with a general mandate for one specific reason people vote is not a good idea. Extrapolate that to over 100 million voters as some unified stance and it starts to feel like propaganda.
I wouldn't call it a cultural reset. It's more of a revolution.
We've never known a country where the wealthy had this much capability. Owning just one of Facebook, Amazon, Palantir, X, etc makes a person incredibly powerful, but the fact that they've all seemingly combined forces makes me think we are in for an era that makes Cyberpunk novels look like a Disney flick.
I think this is actually a misread of long term trends. Not sure when it will be, but there will be backlash to the reset.
It reminds me like when crime rose in 2020 and 2021. It had been falling for something like 25 years. Then it was rising briefly, because of COVID. Many people treated this as a new normal, and a reason to make lasting and dramatic political changes. Then crime fell again in 2023 and 2024, without those substantive changes. The truth is that the short term trend didn't really have to do with criminal justice policy.
I know people love to describe future events in terms of past events but am afraid America is heading in a direction entirely orthogonal to its history.
In terms of a cultural moment it feels like the 80s. Millions of his voters weren’t ideological conservatives but didn’t fully disagree and like the strength Reagan projected after the turmoil of the mid 60s through the 70s.
They abandoned the movement during bush senior and the Clinton years.
> Everyone who is smart see's which way the winds are blowing and it isn't in the direction of "more liberal".
Liberals are most fired up when conservatives like Trump are in office. Where I am, I expect to see more local elections fall to far lefties, I expect more BLM-like protests (which really could only have occurred under Trump), more activism and not less. It is a bit sad because I thought we were making some progress like electing moderates (who I really prefer and think are better for the community) rather than far lefties (who really can only get elected when someone like Trump is in charge).
> The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.
No, things are way too conservative now for that. We haven't had a politician as liberal as Ronald Reagan since Bill Clinton, America definitely lurched right since after the 1990s.
Zuck is cosplaying as Logan Paul and adopting more conservative rhetoric because he saw which way the political winds were blowing, just like everyone else who needs the help of our former and next president.
Yup. That sort of grandstanding is exactly what will be needed to thrive in comming years. Rules-based decisionmaking is out. We now enter the domain of meme-based corporate decisions.
Elon had a great year.Him weaponizing Twitter to go all-in on Trump has earned him so much political capital that those perky 50billion he paid for it look like a still now. I bet Zuck is feeling the heat, now with the government gunning for TikTok and looking at monopolies
Trump's publicly proposed policies will have huge detrimental short-term economic impacts, so it's wise to prepare for a difficult time, IMO. If that's what's motivating the cuts, I think that's pretty rational.
It sounds like they're laying off 5% of the company, but are also firing the lowest 5% of employees without eliminating the role.
> Meta is set to cut about 5% of its workforce, focusing on the company’s lowest-performing workers, CNBC confirmed Tuesday.
> Another 5% of the 2024 employee base “who have been with the company long enough to receive a performance rating” will also be cut, Bloomberg reported, citing an internal memo.
And a direct quote from Zucky:
> I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low performers faster. We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle, with the intention of back filling these roles in 2025.
last quote is the key point and tracks with the other Vibe Shift press releases Mark has been on about. i read this as, there was a fear that laying off underperformers without very long PIP processes would be dangerous to the company, now he thinks it's less likely given the political landscape, so let's fire them ASAP rather than drawing it out.
I'm not really clear on how the "Vibe Shift" thing is going to make this easier, but doesn't it seem like now is a great time to be doing "backfills" if you pay FAANG money?
Setting the expectation that you can be canned quickly if you aren't a good backfill will probably be a useful filter. It's not like they can get rid of all the dead weight, but every 5% helps.
Should make all those people complaining about the DEI change shut up, the timing of the announcement is so close it is hard not to think they're related.
> Below is Zuckeberg’s[sic] internal memo, which CNBC obtained.
Meta is working on building some of the most important technologies of the world. AI, glasses as the next computing platform and the future of social media.
It's very funny that he included the Ray-Bans here. Maybe it will be the next iPhone, but along with Meta Worlds (or whatever it's called), Zuckerberg simply goes all-in on dumb sci-fi toys. Considering this is pure childish impulse - VR itself didn't make the top 3 in the memo - I wonder if he'll rename the company to Specs Technologies.
I agree. The glasses would be useful if they weren't tied so much to Facebook properties. Which also happen to be very buggy. I bought mine last month and will probably return them this week.
People joke about this, but when I was in a POW camp this actually DID work.
About six months into my own daily beating regimen, I found I was sleeping longer and deeper, I had more energy and focus, and my libido had returned to a state not unlike my early 20s. My morale was fantastic. Only after having been repatriated and thus no longer subject to daily beatings did my morale return to lower levels.
It is all relative though. If the team average performance is 50%, one can easily identify the very low and very high performers. The very low performers will barely deliver anything at all, while the very high performers will deliver multiples of the average.
Now - if the mean is higher, variance is low, and the distribution isn't symmetric, that's when things start to become harder.
Worst case, you start firing people that are "low-performers" on paper, but in reality might be very close to the "meets expectation" workers. Which creates a very toxic environment, as your average workers will be walking on eggshells.
And we know from history that this isn't some outlandish scenario in tech. There have been companies that have had(still have) a strict stacked ranking system - and come hell or high water, someone has to go.
This is true in theory. In practice, most managers either do not understand what "performing well" for an engineer means, or willfully go against what they know to be true due to internal incentive structures. For example, favoring those whose contributions are more visible in the short-term, even if net negative over time. Through such a lens, someone who is competent at executing a longer term vision, or refuses to do only those tasks that are visible, is a low performer.
I don't say this to bash your statement, I agree with you in principle. Just useful to keep in mind that the context matters. Sometimes, the people complaining about having to compensate for the low performer, are the actual low performers.
Is the person who though it was a great idea to spend billions of dollars on the metaverse gonna be put on a performance plan or are performance reviews only meant for the peasants?
Readit News
- Replacing their global policy chief with the company's highest ranking Republican.
- Appointing Dana White to the company's board.
- Changing content policies to be aligned with the incoming administration.
- Elimination of DEI programs in hiring.
- Removing tampons from men's restrooms.
- Defending all this in a 3 hour Joe Rogan interview. Ranting about the lack of "masculine energy" at the company.
- 5% layoff of low performers. Company needs to get "intense".
Is this history's most bizarre midlife crisis? What is going on with this man?
It's so transparent, perhaps part of the point is how nakedly self-serving and obvious it is.
What Meta actually wants to do is hoover up the world's data and sell it, get the world hooked on constant engagement, and erode their privacy until they have none left. To be the middleman getting paid in the entire world's engagement.
The left/right culture war stuff is just so the alien in the human suit can keep getting away with what he actually wants to do.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/07/texas-meta-content-m...
He is a snake. I also live on Kauai and most of the locals don't want him here, he is trying to turn his image around but most people aren't really buying it or haven't really thought about it too deeply.
He, in my view, is desperate to hang onto 'his throne' but all it takes is the right person, with the right vision, at the right time...with enough support.
To imagine that, "the mask is off" is absurd.
None of those bullets points are crises.
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Was it as excruciatingly cringeworthy as it sounds? I don’t want to give them the view or spend three hours of my time on that, but I’d take a highlight of the weirdest moments.
> Is this history's most bizarre midlife crisis? What is going on with this man?
It feels like he suddenly became a Musk fanboy and wants to mimic him. Maybe because Zuckerberg completely failed at going into politics when he dipped his toes in it in the past and Musk just got his candidate elected.
His whole era of big name tech founders seems to be going through it.
This one in particular feels very midlife crisis coded; weird insecure masculinity stuff. But, y'know, most men who have issues with that get by with an ill-advised car or something.
Facebook's precursor was a HotOrNot clone that used female classmates' photographs without permission. It takes a certain type of person to build something like that.
The all in podcast has four high net worth people with a similar vibe.
Something disturbing is going on in the ranks of the "elite". I get these people are narcissistic, but the overt displays of contempt combined with authoritarian cowtowing is a bit frightening.
A trade war with China combined with other increasing consequences conflicts seems to be bringing the age of global free trade to an end, or at least a very different one.
The Ukrainian success with naval drones may mean the end of secure seas as well. Drones are cheap, anonymous, and effective.
That implies an disruption to the multinational corporate order, and an emphasis on domestic or near domestic production, and less of the government independence / arbitrage that the super rich have gotten used to.
But the ultras all seem to be going into these maniacal bond villain molds. Is Musk a symptom or a torchleader?
Unless you mean masculine == bad, which would be a very bigoted take.
I can understand that he had to compromise with Trump in order to protect his wealth and company. But it's clearly more than that. I wonder, does he even have values on his owns? will he reinstate the tampons if democrats win in 4 years?
My guess is that he's slowing been adhering to the Trump/Musk ideology (like a lot of people) and now is one of them.
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...
* https://hbr.org/2013/07/mens-arm-strength-affects-thei
* https://www.psypost.org/strong-men-come-across-as-more-conse...
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He's the definition of a perpetual beta trying to be alpha.
I would love to spar with him in BJJ sometime. After you train for awhile you can lock up with someone and immediately feel who they are. An alpha stays calm and relaxed, never panicking even as they are being put to sleep [1]. He went into BJJ hoping to become alpha and it just highlighted even further he's not.
[1] BTW, this isn't a bullshit masculine/man/woman thing. I roll with plenty of women and many of them are more alpha than many men I know.
That’s not a thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ti86veZBjU
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Lower than 5% at scale would be a red flag, not necessarily wrong, you don't want to "stack rank" with a quota and force managers to fire people who shouldn't want to be fired, but if you have 100 engineers in a department and only one of them gets fired in a year, probably the director is making a mistake.
So, I'm sure this won't be the only firing for the year at Meta. But this doesn't really seem like it's very far away from normal practices.
This smells like the Welchian nonsense that drove GE into the ground.
if you only messed up 5% of your hires you'd be a goddamn genius and every company in the world would want to put you in charge of their hiring process
the "standard" is more like 20% of hires end up being bad hires
A person, individually, indeed must always be judged by themselves objectively. But people, in aggregate, can generally be understood stochastically. And in any group of people there will always be the obvious slackers who everyone knows aren't pulling their weight. Good management clears these people out rather than allowing them to fester and lower morale. It doesn't matter if it's high paid SWEs or minimum wage workers, the dynamic is the same.
Essentially the individual incentives for managers are naturally to avoid making the tough decision, the idea is to put some more pressure to make the right call.
Your value of X% will vary but you hope it’s tuned by some research within the org.
At the last place I worked I was managing people and we were given a set of "standards" to rate employees on, used to determine raises, promotions, and so on. I tried my best fairly evaluate my reports, but obviously the standards are inherently imprecise and so the evaluations are mostly qualitative. I found that other managers, wanting to do well by their reports, more leniently interpreted the standards and their reports were promoted more and treated better than my own.
So, wanting to do well by my reports, I re-calibrated my own evaluations to be more lenient. The other managers responded in kind. This arms race continued until upper management found it to have essentially broken the whole system. So then we were asked to rank the performance of reports on our team. I liked everyone on my team and wanted the best for all of them, but also had no difficulty putting them in order from most productive to least productive, with maybe the occasional tie here or there.
Anyway, the whole experience kind of highlighted to me some of the issues with "objective" standards and some of the benefits of relative standards.
Businesses are people but business is cogs. (In both senses of the word)
To be a manager in a large org, you need to constantly be refocusing the team on the goal. Drift happens. When you have 100 brains, you get 100 ideas.
This "rule of thumb" reason is to make sure leaders are not languishing. It's very easy to see the people, and lose sight of the business goal.
Are all 100 people aligned and driving towards the goal? (If so, amazing and you should fight to keep all of them.)
Note that they also routinely fire perfectly capable people, who exceeded expectations for many years in a row and just had one bad year (sometimes after a team change or a promotion).
Could this lead to a manager that tries to have the best team for himself will always include average employees that they can easily fire?
It's setting a bar that when evaluated on a curve a certain percentage of your employees wind up being below that bar. You derive the ratio from how aggressive you expect your bar to be.
But no one is saying you need to fire people. They're saying they expect a certain amount of lower performers and if they don't see it, they want to know reason. But it also only manifests at much higher populations than an individual team. Totally possible a small enough team has everyone >= meeting expectations.
Interview process at Meta isn't that hard. Mostly medium leetcode questions (in front of single interviewer), not particularly tricky. With enough preparation, it's doable by any reasonably good undergrad. Google was slightly harder though. Similarly, system design can be prepared.
The hardest part is to get the interview in the first place. But if you do, it's just a matter of preparation. You want to be able to nail these questions.
My assumption based on some interview experience articles[1][2] is that there's an internal arms race between the recruiting and engineering at Meta where candidates are not forwarded for the interview process until they feel sufficiently prepared, often giving them months (in any other company, I feel this would be a big red flag), and interviewers expecting the equivalent of Djikstra or Knuth to join their team, regardless of what the team actually does. (I assume not everyone writes distributed system or database implementations from scratch at Meta.)
[1] https://medium.com/@rohitverma_87831/my-interview-experience...
[2] https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/5132569/Me...
If the company is growing 10% a year and firing 5% a year you're still growing significantly.
So I think it's pretty important to look at the rate of hiring, not just the rate of firing.
Wouldn’t be every coworker a competitor? How do you plan your life or start a family if you are every year 10% likely of being fired or backstabbed?
On the other hand, do you really want to be stuck working with someone who's not very competent? I think we've all had that experience and it's miserable.
Sounds like a good way to turn a functioning team into Survivor Island.
Speaking as someone who works at Meta, I certainly don't plan my life as if I'll always be employed by Meta, always earning this high of a wage. The ride could end at any minute, and I plan accordingly.
10% is an overestimate, of being fired or backstabbed in any given year, fwiw. The people getting laid off in any given cycle tend to be heavily skewed towards newcomers in my experience.
If 5% is every coworker is a competitor, unions are your coworker doesn't even have to deliver any value at all yet is treated the same as you.
Before, Zuckerberg rhetorically accepted responsibility for lay-offs, but now he's making clear that the people he's firing are entirely to blame. He's deliberately talking up the firings, bringing them closer, making them feel more personal and making it a bit harder for the people fired to get replacement jobs, all for the purpose of cratering his own employees' morale.
He's making Facebook a pro-MAGA company and has decided that the way to make the workers get with the program is to intimidate them.
I think the difference is that they'll get rid of the PIP and fire people straight away.
What I have seen in the past was engineers that were performing completely fine being put on PIP-equivalents because there must be a few being PIPped on every department, based off on some bullshit percentage.
In reality, low perforers should be culled, no need to enforce percentages department-wide. That would require managers doing their job properly of course.
So if you aren’t getting a promotion, you are eventually getting fired. This meat grinder probably has some perverse incentives for employees and makes sure you are always churning through folk who you don’t need to pay QoL raises to
Besides, all those Associate Directors of Nonengineering Engineers of Developer Conference Swag Acquisition need to eat too.
The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.
The current pivot, I think, is mostly that culture warriors have managed to describe their interest in liberal terms (freedom of speech), and social media companies are buying it (gets them out of moderation duty and lets them reduce headcount).
These are ad delivery networks that want to do the bare minimum required to avoid scaring people away, they’ve discovered that the bare minimum can go lower. They don’t have any principles, so why would they do anything else? They are exploring downwards in terms of effort, eventually they’ll bounce off the floor.
Getting more specific, I don't buy the argument that we're getting more conservative. Instead, I'm inclined to think that a narrow election victory will lead to extreme measures that will create a significant backlash in the coming years. If you're in a position to exploit a system with little repercussions for four years and all it costs is a little bit of dignity and some public image, most corporate leaders would take that opportunity for the money, prestige, power, etc.
I'm willing to bet sizeable amounts of money that most voters do not support rolling back employee protections, or removing the debt ceiling, or buying/bullying [insert random country], or any of the other wildly regressionist statements thrown around by un/elected folks. Conflating the complexities involved in how a person votes with a general mandate for one specific reason people vote is not a good idea. Extrapolate that to over 100 million voters as some unified stance and it starts to feel like propaganda.
We've never known a country where the wealthy had this much capability. Owning just one of Facebook, Amazon, Palantir, X, etc makes a person incredibly powerful, but the fact that they've all seemingly combined forces makes me think we are in for an era that makes Cyberpunk novels look like a Disney flick.
It reminds me like when crime rose in 2020 and 2021. It had been falling for something like 25 years. Then it was rising briefly, because of COVID. Many people treated this as a new normal, and a reason to make lasting and dramatic political changes. Then crime fell again in 2023 and 2024, without those substantive changes. The truth is that the short term trend didn't really have to do with criminal justice policy.
Yabushige: “How does it feel to shape the wind to your will?”
Toranaga: “I don’t control the wind. I only study it.”
They abandoned the movement during bush senior and the Clinton years.
1930-1980 were marked by much higher levels of taxation and wealth redistribution than we have today.
1980-Present are the neo-liberal experiment resulting in massive income inequality.
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Liberals are most fired up when conservatives like Trump are in office. Where I am, I expect to see more local elections fall to far lefties, I expect more BLM-like protests (which really could only have occurred under Trump), more activism and not less. It is a bit sad because I thought we were making some progress like electing moderates (who I really prefer and think are better for the community) rather than far lefties (who really can only get elected when someone like Trump is in charge).
> The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.
No, things are way too conservative now for that. We haven't had a politician as liberal as Ronald Reagan since Bill Clinton, America definitely lurched right since after the 1990s.
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This is already in progress, they're closing UK offices extremely quickly.
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> Meta is set to cut about 5% of its workforce, focusing on the company’s lowest-performing workers, CNBC confirmed Tuesday. > Another 5% of the 2024 employee base “who have been with the company long enough to receive a performance rating” will also be cut, Bloomberg reported, citing an internal memo.
And a direct quote from Zucky:
> I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low performers faster. We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle, with the intention of back filling these roles in 2025.
Taken together, one could read it as getting rid of people those programs had been protecting?
Setting the expectation that you can be canned quickly if you aren't a good backfill will probably be a useful filter. It's not like they can get rid of all the dead weight, but every 5% helps.
About six months into my own daily beating regimen, I found I was sleeping longer and deeper, I had more energy and focus, and my libido had returned to a state not unlike my early 20s. My morale was fantastic. Only after having been repatriated and thus no longer subject to daily beatings did my morale return to lower levels.
Why doesn’t Huberman talk about this?
Now - if the mean is higher, variance is low, and the distribution isn't symmetric, that's when things start to become harder.
Worst case, you start firing people that are "low-performers" on paper, but in reality might be very close to the "meets expectation" workers. Which creates a very toxic environment, as your average workers will be walking on eggshells.
And we know from history that this isn't some outlandish scenario in tech. There have been companies that have had(still have) a strict stacked ranking system - and come hell or high water, someone has to go.
I don't say this to bash your statement, I agree with you in principle. Just useful to keep in mind that the context matters. Sometimes, the people complaining about having to compensate for the low performer, are the actual low performers.