The article highlights that the easiest way for these companies to let go of staff right now is to dissolve entire teams. I've heard from friends that work at these companies that recent hiring freezes have actually made managers more hesitant to fire low performers because anyone they fire can't be replaced and they'd rather have a low performer than no one at all. The team dissolving process seems to sidestep this management hesitation to fire.
At Meta managers can't really get away with hiding low performers. Your performance review isn't finalized by your manager, but rather the manager submits your review to a calibrating board that tries to ensure fairness and maintain quality standards. They will refute at all cost that this is stack ranking but you are absolutely graded on the curve of the other engineers in your department and level.
Not only is it graded on a curve but to prevent ratings inflation there are quotas for each ratings bucket. Many deny this, even when presented with concrete proof that such quotas exist (but were called "performance targets"). This itself would be fine except that negative ratings have a target percentage of ~10%. This includes regrettable losses and ratings below Meets All Expectations.
Such targets are enforced at a reasonably high level, typically at director or higher over an org of 100-150+ employees.
Why is that bad? Because it creates a hugely toxic environment. Why? Because such directors and VPs will demand their managers find sufficient "low" performers to meet their targets.
The other aspect to this is that all of these ratings are essentially bullshit anyway. Why? Because it's a popularity contest. If your manager and director likes you, you'll pretty much always get a good rating. If they don't, you won't. The exact same set of facts can be used to argue ratings pretty much +/- 1 bucket, possibly more.
I'm constantly amazed at how stupid supposed smart people can be when it comes to applying metrics to an organization made up of humans.
Stack ranking and related schemes are so obviously going to be gamed, will definitely measure something other than the nominal thing, and will gum up the works. It's one thing to have a Hunger-Games-style hiring process. Bad as that is, there's an expectation that once you've passed those trials—once you're hired—that you can then devote your time to building things or leading a team that builds things.
But when it extends into quarterly or annual reviews, where there must be a loser, then of course it will serve as a distraction from accomplishing actual goals and doing useful work. Now you have to spend time managing your image, making sure you don't piss off the wrong peer, and choosing assignments that are trendy.
Companies try to avoid all of that by adding even more complexity to the review process. More layers to prevent favoritism, more concrete metrics to sidestep subjectivity, a longer list of metrics to mitigate any one of them being over-weighted.
This just means more time and attention is stolen from productive work, and directed instead toward image management and politics.
When supposedly smart people consistently act stupid, it's usually a good indication that you don't understand the actual game that is being played.
The goal of corporate employees usually is not maximizing profit. If it were, things like private equity, LBOs, and shareholder lawsuits would not be necessary. Rather, the goal of organization-man is maintenance of the hierarchy. Why? Because people who aren't interested in this goal either quit and take jobs outside of the corporate world (like consultant, therapist, small business owner, etc.) or they circulate freely throughout many different companies and rely on up-leveling at the interview stage to get raises and promotions.
With this goal, all the stack ranking, annual reviews, politics and image maintenance makes sense. For there to be a hierarchy, there must be people at the bottom of the hierarchy. There must also be a pathway to the top of the hierarchy, lest people tire of the game and quit. Therefore, people seeking to preserve the hierarchy will create processes to ensure some people are defined as needing improvement, and others are defined as being worthy of promotion and upward mobility.
The folks who are purely interested in maximizing profit usually enter finance and become hedge fund managers, where they have a small staff (largely dispensable, other than themselves) but outsize influence on markets, and can keep 20% of their profits (100% if trading their own capital) for themselves.
> how stupid supposed smart people can be when it comes to applying metrics to an organization
At the end of the day even upper management doesn't matter. This is about Owners and Workers and everything in between is just fluff. The $300k - $400k these engineers are making is a rounding error. Turning middle management into cannibals so that one day they might reach slightly higher management is exactly what is supposed to happen, because it means they are willing to kill for the owners.
> I'm constantly amazed at how stupid supposed smart people can be when it comes to applying metrics to an organization made up of humans.
Intelligence isn't a spectrum, it's an infinite-dimensional space. Someone can be smart on one axis and a dunce on infinity-minus-one other axes. Every genius ever born was almost certainly mediocre at nearly everything outside their expertise.
And even today such people exist. Encountering them is often quite an experience. Seeing them being better than you at almost everything is on one hand really nice, on the other hand it makes you wonder what you did wrong. Such folks are usually quite rare though, 1 in a thousand types of people. But I'd imagine Google should be full of them. Or maybe it isn't, idk, given GP.
I find your statements hard to accept at face value. Does a "polymath" have infinite time to develop excellence in every conceivable discipline? How good was Benjamin Franklin at, say, composing sonatas?
As a career musician I’ve never heard a piece of Benjamin Franklin’s music in my life. I didn’t even know that he composed until this comment. The link you provided has no examples of his music to listen to or to read.
Without any examples of his work it’s hard to believe that they are of any consequence. I don’t think anyone can just write a piece of music, but you don’t present a strong case that anything he wrote is even remotely worthwhile.
Hell, Bruce Willis has a band that’s released records. I just don’t see any reason to think they’re worth listening to over anyone else.
I'm not being ironic. Your article says he composed two pieces and his instrument skills were "modest". I suspect most people are modest at the hobbies they dabble in. That doesn't make a "universal genius".
We assume that the people implementing stack ranking have good incentives.
At one of my jobs, my manager blurted out what we have all suspected about Scrum. It is valuable to generate a neat numerical progress report for the guy above. It has no other value.
My manager doesn't give a shit about achieving anything either. He is doing the same gaming we are.
Stack ranking kinda-sorta makes sense in a sales team, because fundamentally it isn't a team at all. Sales tends to be made up of a bunch of individuals chasing a finite set of opportunities. Firing low-performing sales people won't remove some essential technical knowledge, and won't affect other sales. In fact, poor performing sales people may "fumble" lucrative opportunities that would have been landed if they had been fired and replaced by someone better. Replacing sales staff is also not a big problem. In fact, some new hires will bring customers with them.
None of this is true for creative workers in actual teams with deep technical or site knowledge. Someone with a decade of experience that is a bit burnt out and underperforming may still have amazing contributions albeit less frequently or predictably. Someone that doesn't commit code often but "holds the team together" by lending a helping hand and giving sage advice to juniors can be invaluable. Fire them and the juniors will flounder. New developers not only don't bring customers with them, but likely won't be productive for months. And so on, and so forth.
Stack ranking originates in organisations where sales are in charge at the upper levels. They think that what applies to them applies to everybody else at the organisation.
This is a mistake, of course, but it's fantastically difficult to overcome "cultural" biases like this. Even otherwise very smart people have a blind spot to this kind of thing. After all, the fish is the last to know it swims in water.
The current one, in which some jobs still require (foolishly imo) certain qualifications which some smart people are willing to jump through the hoops of to get, in the hope of getting the job they want, even if they might have been able to do the job they wanted without studying for an MBA.
Not to mention that decisions on whether or not to stay in education are often taken when fairly young, and even very clever people can arrive in their 20s with incorrect views about the world based on what their parents/teachers/etc believed - if you've spent your childhood being told that a degree is the only way to have a secure future, you have to not only be smarter than needing a degree you also have to be bold enough to think you already know better than everyone around you (which sure, some people are that confident as 12 year olds, some never get that confident even as adults).
TLDR, I get why business degrees get a bad rep, and agree that many idiots do do them; but also, a couple of the cleverest people I've ever known have done them, mid-career, because the job they were aiming for (and in both cases I'm thinking of, then went on to achieve) had hard requirements attached and they considered it worth wasting time on an MBA to progress.
First, it’s important to understand that managers are held to outcomes. If a manager retains low performers because “they’re friends”, over time they’ll find themselves with a low performing team and it will be visible in their results. At that stage they are now at the bottom of their manager’s stack-ranking process. Retain and promote your low-performing friends at your peril.
Of course, if you believe your entire management chain to be incompetent, perhaps those managers will never be held to account. But if you hold that view there’s no reason to believe anything is functional, let alone promotions, and I’d explore other employment opportunities if you can.
> First, it’s important to understand that managers are held to outcomes.
Respectfully, I disagree.
First, let me point out that when I say "popularity" I don't mean friends necessarily in the nepotism sense (in response to your later point). "Popularity" is a reductive term but still a relatively accurate one. What's really going on here is the intangible factors lead other around you to interpret the same set of facts charitably or not almost arbitrarily.
A big factor here is similarity in terms of demographic factors and background. This so often gets wrapped up "culture fit", which itself can be a euphemism for more problematic biases.
The example I like to give is this: a person may work on a project for a half that never ships. It may not even produce an MVP. Given this set of facts you will people who will say "we learned a lot and will take those learnings into future projects" all the way to "this team failed to deliver a prototype and as such we canned the project".
What's driving this are social factors.
Managers are subject to the same social forces that drive this interpretation. A given manager may get credit for dealing with reports that aren't necessarily bad enough to be exited but would otherwise be a headache for someone else in the org. Or that manager may be blamed for their team being perceived as low-performing even though they're given projects doomed to fail (eg under-resourced).
It's also worth noting that with any form of stack ranking or performance quotas, another factor that comes into play is horse-trading. That is, different managers are competing for a limited pool of ratings. You will find that a manager has decided someone should be promoted and that report will find themselves high on stack ranking as a result. There's an implicit quid pro quo here because other managers can get your support (as a manager) when one of their reports gets put up for promotion.
> Of course, if you believe your entire management chain to be incompetent
It's not competence. It's biases masquerading as objective determinations and an implicit over-reliance on social cues and factors all while managers have incentives that may come at the expense of those of their reports.
Have never seen a low manager get fired for having low performers inside of 2 years. I’ve seen stack ranking invented to push out non-senior managers, but never the feedback cycle you claim exists.
“there’s no reason to believe anything is functional” should be “you don’t believe in your manager.” Good managers divorce moral edict from feelings. Good managers know they don’t get to define what functional means.
It's one thing to be crazy enough to think implementing a system like this will help a team of humans cooperate more efficiently, it is a completely different thing to expect the exact OPPOSITE type of tornado cash style bot obfuscation to be OK for the actual customers buying ads.
Sure you can buy ad$... but are you prepared to buy the 30% fake impressions to fake people we require?
The fact that both systems / strategies were developed by the same group of people is for sure the "why" behind these cuts.
My experience with calibration at multiple companies is it's where you realize not only does your review depend on how happy you make your manager, but how politically savvy your manager is coupled with how much you were able to impress the people on the calibration committee.
It also gives your manager a nice out if you work hard, but they don't quite like you. All they have to do is not fight for you in calibration and you'll never be able to get much beyond a "meets expectations" rating.
I used to work at a Fortune 50 company and found stack ranking...kinda fair. I used to be a high performer, made real ROI impacts, helped others and had a strong sense of initiative. I'd come out with a better raise, stock options and had opportunities to take on more responsibility.
It was more honest and straightforward than what silicon valley and Big Tech pretends to do. It is all ranking in some ways. Everything is. If you remove the facade, fundamentally you have a limited resource and you want to reward people that make the company successful. I don't see anything wrong with that. Doing anything else is wrong and unfair IMO.
I dunno, I don't think it's helpful to identify your worst performers (or label them as "bottom 15%") unless they aren't meeting the needs of the position and need to be let go. Someone has to be the worst, and it's really not okay to arbitrarily make 15% of people's lives hell. Again, if they need to go, they need to go, but I really fucking doubt at any given time 15% of an organization is actually bad enough to warrant firing or a PEP or any action at all.
> I don't think it's helpful to identify your worst performers (or label them as "bottom 15%")
I didn't say that and I didn't imply that. Anyways, rewarding (positive reinforcement) is mutually exclusive to punishment (negative reinforcement). Rewarding should be encouraged, otherwise, I have zero motivation to do better. There are many other companies that would value me more and I would not stay there.
Extreme meritocracy is idealistic, and I understand that cannot be achieved easily and there is always politics/networking that plays a role. But it does exist and I've been a beneficiary of it.
I think when people bemoan stack ranking, they are talking about what it means for the bottom performers. I certainly don't have any issues with rewarding top performers. Did the company you worked for just rank the top?
Difficulty of project/task seemingly is a big factor. The engineer working in a legacy code base is likely to be less productive due to technical constraints.
How to grade that into any kind of ranking, in a standard way, is seemingly not likely given how subjective the difficulty of a code base is. This also completely elides the clever and best engineers that find ways to simplify and/or avoid solving problems entirely. Further, a team that built a crap pile of bad code, but know it pretty well could seem really productive just because they have built for themselves some job security. Then compound all this with measuring the utility of what was produced.
Honestly if they are targeting percentages of the company, ditching entire products, divisions or slicing diagonally across the org chart is the way to go. Consolidation of like functions and just stop projects. If there are uniquely skilled people in the layoff, give them a chance to interview with other teams. Make it quick and as painless as possible, the longer it drags out with rankings and middle managers politicking the worse morale will be.
Also, any investors out there might hear “one time restructuring charge” in the quarterly results when they talk P&L which will affect the bottom line.
> Take the manager's word for it and go all in on nepotism?
Geez, I mean there are decent managers who do rate on performance and not just buddy-buddy stuff. Frankly I'd expect to be trusted with my reviews of people under me.
This may not be surprising at all actually. Look at how they form their feeds. It is hyper-dependent on a singular metric: engagement. Engagement doesn't mean you're making your users more connected or happier, it just means they are using your product more (e.g. fighting and yelling at one another). Goodhart's Law in action. But I agree that something like human performance is incredibly difficult to quantify and requires a lot of nuance. But people, and especially bureaucrats, don't like nuance.
I saved my team a couple of times over but pissed off a manager in the process. My performance review had multiple contradictions praising me and admonishing me for the same things (being a good mentor but not spending any time onboarding new team members, etc). I left rather than deal with the gaslighting that was all but certain to ramp up.
Interesting. I can't find a way to read "graded in the context of peers" that doesn't parse into exactly the same concept as "sort employees by performance". AFAIK, it's not something you can interpret as, those are literally synonyms.
But well, stack ranking is not only about sorting (the name is a lie), it's about placing people in fixed sized cohorts. The real question is if there is a limitation on the number of raises or a minimum on the number of people treated as "low performant".
The cohorts at Meta are not fixed size (at least not at the team level).
You do get to see the average size of cohorts, and you will need to explain why your team doesn’t meet them - for example if the entire team project is going exceedingly well, or the team is really made out if a lot of extraordinarily talented people - then you can argue why you have more than the average rate of excellent rankings.
The same you’d rank a person’s work, you would rank a team or org’s work.
If that team is doing really well, it’s likely they will have a distribution of higher rankings than the average. If they’re doing really bad, it can be the opposite.
The point is that if you finished ranking some team and your rankings are higher than average, you need to have a reason why.
What does sorting by performance look like to you?
The curve determines rating and compensation, influences promotion decisions, projects people get to work on and what opportunities come their way. The seems like a sort to me given that budget and project opportunities are fixed in many places.
The key component of stack ranking / sorting by performance is that there's no absolute measure of your contribution, only a relative measure by which you have to outcompete everyone else in your team/department. If you fire your lowest 15% of engineers—no matter how good they are on an absolute level—that's a stack ranking system. It's a horrifying Red Queen's Race that punishes high-quality teams. I'm not necessarily saying that Meta's system is good, but at least it's not that.
EDIT: It sounds like at least some people are claiming that Meta has an internal policy that X% of your engineers under you are supposed to be given "Meets Most Expectations" ratings, which would also be pretty close to stack ranking (if at least allowing for some management leniency) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32930370
Sort of. I'm at Google, not Meta, but the same "we have an expected distribution of ratings" thing exists here and it causes the same confusion.
With large enough populations you see fairly consistent statistical information across time. Little fluctuations even out. So at org sizes of, say, 500 people you'll see pretty consistent ratings distributions between cycles. This is where you get the "we have a roughly expected ratings distribution." If you've deviated far from this then it means either that your org is training people on the evaluation process incorrectly or there is some other cause of a weird distribution. When something doesn't match, people simply investigate for an alternative solution.
What people seem to be frightened of is when somebody says to a manager of 10 people "hey you've got too many high ratings, drop some." Google and Meta are massive companies so I suspect that this happens somewhere but I've never even got the scent of this happening from my position at Google. I've had cycles where 100% of my team was in the top 20% of ratings without anybody raising an eyebrow.
It used to happen at Microsoft back in the day. I was in SQL Server and we openly talked about this happening. They literally told us being in a great, high functioning org like sql server had a certain penalty. Then top management said don't worry, we got extra money for our people. It was kind of obviously silly.
On stack ranking & the penalty for being in a great team - yes, also happened, being in a great team but you still had to rank someone lower, better to be in a worse team to get higher ratings. It had obviously negative impact, but there was some combination or organizational pride that had been cultivated, plus we thought we'd all be millionaires anyway so what did it hurt. But I bet some people had to leave who were the unfortunate victim of these affects.
The other key component of stack ranking was that it's on a per team basis.
A team of 20 people may have no low performers. An org of 400 probably has a couple, at some point the law of large numbers does really start to apply, and you're no longer in competition with the people you're working with on the daily.
If one member of your two-pizza team is going to get fired each year, it makes sense to throw someone under the bus on the reg. If one member of your 100 person org is going to get fired each year, that strategy doesn't make sense.
Having endured several such calibration sessions at FB/Meta I can also assure you that we are not even talking about 'large' numbers before there is a strong expectation that the ranking totals within an org will meet the predicted curve when it comes to the percentage at exceeds, meets, and meets most. I distinctly remember wasting more than 15 minutes of my life arguing with a skip level manager that someone who had course corrected and delivered solid work while digging themselves out of a PIP was at least a meets before eventually realizing this manager had a quota of meets most to fill and the person we were discussing was destined for that bucket just to make the numbers look as expected.
If you are grading in the context of peers, it's absolutely a form of sorting. Think of it like a partition-exchange sort, where everything past a particular level is in one bucket and everything above that level is in another bucket.
That's nowhere near the same as "stack ranking" in the way that the term generally used in the tech industry...
I wouldn't want to work somewhere at FB scale that doesn't grade you on the curve of other engineers in your department and level, once your departments are large enough that's exactly how it should work.
What's problematic is forcefully defining X percent as being low performing, the comparison to peers is a misused kernel of benefit.
They have a policy that XX% of engineers in a given department should* be given "Meets Most". If that's not stack ranking I'm not sure what would be.
BTW "meets most" likely doesn't sound too bad to non-Metamates. Internally it's a pretty bad mark on your record. It doesn't directly relate to being fired but a ton of people quit when they receive it. I view it as sort of a "pre-PIP" state.
(* Managers/directors will say it's only a suggestion but nobody really believes that. I'm sure management themselves are frowned upon for not having enough MM under them.)
> "meets most" likely doesn't sound too bad to non-Metamates. Internally it's a pretty bad mark on your record.
The kind of newspeak I've heard from multiple friends and former coworkers that ended up at FB/Meta at some point. Well, the ones that didn't fall into the cult of Mark.
It might be because I'm getting older but this is the kind of stuff that makes me want to puke. The co-optation of language to exude an aura of friendliness is absolutely disgusting.
Are you talking about "Metamates"—if so I said that ironically. I don't think I've ever heard anyone outside of the execs use that term when they weren't being sarcastic.
ah apologies, I'm not sure why I didn't read that correctly the first time. It's wrong to call it "extremely negative" though, my words were "pretty bad". There are 2 levels lower than MM but they're rarely used.
MM is a warning—it means you need to improve or you'll likely be put on a PIP.
No worries! I apologise for misrepresenting it as "extremely negative", still with the meaning of "pretty bad" I believe it's a specially disgusting type of language, why use positive-sounding jargon for "underperforming"? What's wrong with using "underperfoming" if that's what "meets most" means?
I despise this, the dissonance between a positivity-sounding "meets most" with the actual meaning being "pretty bad" is what I expect from the North Korean regime, or Russia. It's a disgusting type of newspeak/corporatespeak which, admittedly irrationally, boils my blood.
There actually is a reason (though you might not like it). The internal docs are pretty open about this, I think I can do a decent job capturing the idea:
The idea is they consider themselves to have a very high bar (which I think is largely accurate). They say you “meet most expectations” which means you hit the marks on all but 1 or 2 criteria. It’s not that you’re not good at your job, it’s that that’s not good enough for them.
Of course anyone receiving a MM is having a very shitty day despite that. They could use more direct language but I’m not sure it would have any practical difference.
See the comments in this thread and elsewhere about HR related issues and you can gauge how much plain speak is hated. So no wonder companies, HR departments resort to newspeak.
It's basically a 3 star review, the labels don't actually matter. Is a 3 star good? or is it bad? Who knows. It either depending on context. And that's why people don't like it.
it used to be documented publicly (internally). Last I checked (around a year ago) you could still find the doc somewhere in history. Ask on Blind, they'll send you a link.
EDIT: sorry I see you said "worked at". So I guess you won't be able to verify.
My entire point is that grading on a curve is not the same "defining the curve such that X% of our people are at the low end".
The curve is defined by the organization. They can carefully examine it, refine it, backtrack how it's performed... or you can have someone clueless hear that so and so company fires Y percent, so let's tweak the curve until Y percent are at the "extremities"
The pay is near top and the engineers are talented. There are a lot of systems in place to get you to work near max capacity all the time with little slowdown time. There are lots of processes and political upheavals that make it hard to ship code. Some people love it.
Diff count/LoC count is recorded and made publicly available for all engineers in a graph that lets you easily compare metrics between developers and teams. This means if you are constantly comparing your output to the rest of the team.
The multi-axis performance review criteria that requires you to show deliverables on things like your impact on team-building or culture. This means that when you might normally get a couple week low-output time between projects, you are usually looking for something to fill in the non-coding axis, like organizing a team virtual offsite event or searching for a way to improve the codebase.
Organizing team activities and code quality initiatives are a good thing, but the explcitivity in which you need to show deliverable impact on all axis is something I found unique to Meta and very exhausting.
Doesn't that just encourage writing code for max LoC rather than efficiency or maintainability? Instead of generalizing a procedure you use in multiple places to make it a single function, if you write it out (slightly differently) each time you do it, then you get a higher LoC count?
I mean people there aren't stupid and there is a fairly high engineering bar, your code won't get through review if you're doing stuff like that.
Where it really digs is when you are 1.5 weeks into writing an in depth project plan, meeting with other engineers, coordinating cross teams, researching, reviewing code etc. you better have a good explanation why your delivery over time graph has a big flat spot.
> Where it really digs is when you are 1.5 weeks into writing an in depth project plan, meeting with other engineers, coordinating cross teams, researching, reviewing code etc. you better have a good explanation why your delivery over time graph has a big flat spot.
That's 95% of what I do in my company. I guess by Meta's standards I'm not working?
That penalizes those implementing one line bug fixes buried in the codebase. Each one may be worth 10K lines of new code but numeric driven management will never know.
I've never experienced this at Meta. In fact I've worked considerably less intensely there than at my previous place, and I was considered a high performer in my team.
It comes down to the extreme focus on performance review. It creates an environment where every engineer is pressured to move some metrics like time spent on app, number of videos watched, or ad revenue. Because you're compared with your peers, you have to work a little more than them to maintain a good rating and stay in the race.
It's actually rooted in America's puritanical roots. Americans were largely introduced to bidets during WWII in French bordellos. It didn't leave a good reputation coming back.
No, it's cultural; Americans just can't imagine not using dry paper to smear feces around after they use the toilet, instead of using water to properly clean themselves. I tried talking to people I knew about them during the pandemic when everyone was freaking out about toilet paper shortages, but it went nowhere.
I also suspect NIH is a big part of the problem. Bidets and washlets weren't invented in America or adopted there first, so Americans can't adopt them now since that would be admitting they weren't first for something. Americans are, as a whole, completely unable to look at what other countries are doing and learn from their example.
there are good (usually small) teams doing interesting and professionally fulfilling work that's not really common elsewhere. (things that come due to "hyperscale". a-a-and, unfortunately, in this regard all big corps are alike. so if you want to do something like that, then your best bet is a corp like FB. though of course there are smaller niche companies for everything, so just because of some niche don't rush to big co-s.)
They’re still actively recruiting and interviewing?!? They should have halted most of that and probably stop any contractual recruiting and possibly had HR layoffs.
Low performer here. This is absolutely true. I cannot figure out how I was not let go even a year ago so asked the Director about it in 1:1 and she flat out said they can’t hire so it doesn’t matter.
If you layoff a bunch of people working on greenfield projects, people will catch on and try to avoid working on more research-like roles out of fear of it happening again.
On the other hand, if there is general bloat, an across the board cut could restore team health without sacrificing any of the company's seed corn (risky bets). Bloated teams can be awful to work in.
* losing the low performer in this context means you lose a head count. If you keep the low performer during hard times, you can hope to get them backfilled when the economic environment gets better
* there are often more work to do than you have resources for: if as an EM, you have to deal with PM who refuse to adapt to capacity, you can simply assign the low perfomers to the projects you don't care about.
* etc.
once you reach a certain size, those issues happen in pretty much any organization in my experience.
Agreed. It's easy to plan around and measure the potential business impact of no one. It's challenging to do the same with a low performing or otherwise inconsistent employee.
This is a common viewpoint for sure, but it is also very odd. It is completely and totally obvious when this happens, and the end result is that the manager just looks bad to their manager because they are obviously doing the wrong thing for the company. so it is mostly self harming.
Even at the worst companies I’ve been at I have never seen anyone rewarded for behaving this way.
I can't read WSJ while at work, but after checking on the financials for both Meta and Alphabet, I do not understand why either would be cutting staff. Both look pretty strong, so I am not sure how cuts are justified or why Zuckerberg has a negative outlook, especially since 2021 was such a great year for both.
Do American executives, investors, and start up owners not have the guts for even a moderate stock price drop? I guess the reaction is to cut staff, or threaten to, when there is a whiff of negativity. Fuckin weak.
My current theory on this, particularly for Google, is they're just taking advantage of the macroeconomic moment to cut some fat. Slowing growth or outright letting people go is a no-go in times of macroeconomic growth. Big companies, even if not strictly needed, can be opportunistic here and make some cuts they wouldn't be able to in other circumstances.
Yep. The hiring market has shifted from ultra-competitive during the COVID economic boom to being much tighter and more competitive during this economic downturn. You can't hire at Meta and Google scale without collecting some mis-hires and poor performers.
When the hiring market is tight you might keep them on longer and try to mentor them up to par, but when the hiring market shifts and there are a lot of great candidates on the market it's better to let the underperformers go and re-fill those jobs with great performers who are back on the market for whatever reason.
They're still hiring. This is more like cycling out hires that didn't work AND some collateral employees who unfortunately got lumped into those teams and cancelled projects. Often, the great employees who get "laid off" are quickly scooped up by other teams within the company who need their talent. It's not good business to let great engineers go.
> This is more like cycling out hires that didn't work AND some collateral employees who unfortunately got lumped into those teams and cancelled projects
I see - if they are cycling out the lower performers and hire recently laid off people on the market for a bargain, then that kind of makes sense, assuming they are not in a hiring freeze.
If they are laying off their poor performers so they can hire the laid-off from other companies, wouldn't they just be trading lemons?
The strategy probably works regardless of macro economic conditions assuming you let go of "lemons" at a greater rate than you hire them, but it seems easier when the market isn't being flooded. You could maybe argue that layoffs at other companies are reducing the proportion of lemons, but it's not clear to me.
I think reducing headcount gives an immediate outlook of lower expenses without affecting revenue in the medium term. Tons of employees at these companies aren't working on projects that will have monetary significance within several years if ever.
> so they can hire the laid-off from other companies
They don't only hire recently laid off people. Most people who apply do that for other reasons I think. Also, maybe eg Google s recruiting accuracy is better than other companies lay-off accuracy
Is there data suggesting comp bands are reducing as a result of the hiring climate? Cost of living is still through the roof, so while companies should pay based on value, there will presumably still be pressure based on that.
Given the context of their message, I think the parent switched perspectives mid-stream: ultra-competitive from the perspective of the employers (very hard to hire) to competitive from the perspective of the employees (somewhat hard to be hired).
I can't speak formally for any of the companies, of course, but I suspect like another commenter said, its an opportunity to cut fat. Beyond that, the last two years saw many tech companies grow stupid-fast. For example, Snap hired more than 50% of their pre-layoff workforce since start of the pandemic. Google, Meta have both doubled headcount in a similar (slightly longer) time scale.
I suspect that despite being rich, headcount is expensive. If the median googler makes 300k, it probably costs Google 500k to employ. A team of 100 is $50M! A news article claimed google hired 10k people in Q2, so that'd be $5B in commitment (probably actually less, but on that scale). Doesn't take many quarters of that sort of growth to outpace income.
The median googler does not make 300k. The median Google engineer/manager in the US might make 300k but Google hires plenty of people in other roles and in other countries.
Google's profits dropped last quarter, and that is a rare occurrence for them. Metas revenue actually fell last quarter, with profits dropping 35%. IIRC, that's the first revenue drop they have had since going public.
This isn't about stock prices, this is about the strength of the underlying business.
Judging by the financials, the underlying business for both is strong, especially relative to many other kinds of businesses. The drop, still, does not look fatal when considering how much growth there was in 2020 and 2021.
I agree, I mean the businesses overall are very strong. That said, as a shareholder, watching Google and FB's headcount soar over the last 5-10 years to stratospheric numbers, they have to have a point where they sit down and take a hard look at what everyone is doing and be realistic about whether the projects make sense. I am all about R&D and experimentation and moonshots and the like, but the sheer number of bodies, especially in relation to "hits" that have been made, it all feels very low. The latest Pixel phones come to mind as a real home grown hit at Google, but so many of their products seem rudderless and the result of a sprawling bureaucracy[1]. It certainly feels to me that at least 20% of the workforce could be cut with probably a net gain to the organization overall. Is it fatal? Of course not- but it could be if you just let the rot sit around.
FB/Meta is the same- They have made some low key progress with Groups, have essentially wiped out craigslist as a marketplace, made some great strategic investments like WhatsApp, and essentially cut their potential replacements off at the knees by quickly copying snapchat and to some extent tik-tok, but Meta also seems poised to throw billions and billions of dollars into this Metaverse furnace, and I just don't see that working out.
I say this as a shareholder of both firms, that I have held since their IPOs or shortly thereafter.
[1] Take their home products for instance. There are nNest protects (smoke detectors/motion detectors), thermostats, cameras and doorbells... its an absolute layup to turn this into a security system far better than the crap ADT pushes. Yet... they just haven't for over 10 years now. And then they try to force a shitty subscription on you to use their cloud features that are really worthless, and have cut off APIs to third parties so I can no longer have my doorbell play through my Sonos. Its kind of maddening to watch.
> That said, as a shareholder, watching Google and FB's headcount soar over the last 5-10 years to stratospheric numbers, they have to have a point where they sit down and take a hard look at what everyone is doing and be realistic about whether the projects make sense.
As an employee, shareholders have to remember that sometimes stock prices go down, instead of hoping for cost cutting via layoffs.
Shareholders have had it good for a long time, especially during covid, with stock prices higher now then before the pandemic. Time to pay back karma.
Agreed - stock price is irrelevant for the most part - it's the actual business and cash flows that are suffering and I think it's long past time there was some correction in the number of projects and people working on them.
Check my post history and you will see I wholly agree that stock price is an irrelevant metric.
Even if the economy overall chops along with small (but positive) real GDP growth, persistently high (relative to the last decade) interest rates are devastating to growth stock valuations
Also, financial indicators are a lagging metric. If companies are anticipating a recession and cutting advertising and marketing budgets, that will impact G/FB's future revenues. If they hired anticipating 20% YoY growth, this is the time to cut.
Maybe Meta and Alphabet has gotten to the point where they don't need more people? The return from adding another guy optimizing ads isn't that high when you already have 10 000 people doing it.
Google has 3x more people today than when I worked there, and those people are working on the same products as back then. There must be some point which it no longer makes sense to hire more people.
I can’t speak for Meta. But Google has the focus of a crack addled flea. They probably have four or five teams working on separate messaging apps. They could probably drop a third of their teams and it wouldn’t affect their successful products
Maybe if a third of their teams are 3 person teams working on moonshots and the other 2/3rds are 20 person teams working on Ads, Search, Cloud, & Android...
I worked doing layoffs and you always say to the press you are removing low performers because what else are you going to say?
In reality that’s not what happens. Instead you get rid of teams, roles or high cost individuals. Why? Because it is much easier to deal with the work the let go individuals are doing and it impacts morale less.
I never saw a stack ranked layoff. The closest was demanding teams all lose someone. But that leaves teams with really good people getting rid of good people and teams full of dogs retaining them.
PIPs require a tremendous amount of effort and work. It also doesn't guarantee that the person would be fired. There are many times where the employee might do just enough to get off the PIP, but still be a really low performer.
It also sucks for the employee, a PIP is really stressful not knowing what will happen next, will you get fired, should you start looking for a new job.
In addition, the PIP can take months to get to the finish. Maybe even six months in some cases.
A layoff takes way less time, but it does suck for the employee. I don't know which is worse. But if you have a good employer, you still might be able to transfer to another part of the company. Being on a PIP usually means your only choice is looking outside the company for a new job.
Layoffs always hit good and low performers, there is no way it can't. But if a company wants to get rid of a number of low performers at the same time, PIPs are not the way to go.
PIPs are lawsuit fodder. A general layoff where a bunch of people are let go at the same time makes it a lot harder for the person who was let go say it was targeted at them.
Because no matter what you write in a PIP someone could turn around and sue you for it and have a good enough case to at least force a settlement. Everyone has some sort of "protected class" they are part of.
But with a layoff it's really hard to prove the layoff was targeted unless everyone in the layoff happens to be part of the same protected class.
Google and Meta doubled head count during covid. They probably just realize they don't have the ability to productively manage that many people/the unique opportunities covid presented are gone, so they're trying to get back to a more manageable size.
Some of these comments mentioned in the article coming from Meta's leadership about there being people who shouldn't probably be there or to get rid of coasters seems so inhumane and demoralizing. What kind of leadership is that? I mean it's understandable that businesses have to cut costs, but have some empathy, and understand how words affect people. Just wow. It's so cynical and depressing.
I like it. I really dislike working with under-performers and people who just refuse to do due diligence on their end. I dislike working with people who always want you to come over to their frame of mind rather than trying to get into yours or meet in the middle. I saw a ton of people coasting during Covid. People need to get negative feedback when they deserve it.
The arrival of Covid was a period of great stress and change in people's lives. Maybe they were dealing with some things and not really coasting? Just maybe needed some more support? This way of thinking about people, coworkers, without understanding the situation in their lives and what they've been talking to with their managers about, is just alien to me and I don't understand it. I don't think it's a good way to manage people.
If you have a problem with someone being a burden on your team that you and others have to deal with, that's understandable and you should bring it up with your team, but managers talking in these sorts of ways in public conversation about the people working at their company, it's just awful.
Every company - especially every company over a certain size, knows there are a certain percentage of people that just 'phone it in' and aren't pulling their weight relative to others - pretending that isn't true, really doesn't help anyone.
More importantly, it is demoralizing to the people you want to keep - to make it seem to them that putting in the extra effort doesn't do anything for you, so they start looking for the exits to find a position where there effort and talents are better appreciated; retaining the best people, at the end of the day is more important than a low-performer's hurt feelings.
the problem is that it is really hard to identify. to some manager even a good employee might be a low performer. some managers only see like 1% of you through your days. now imagine you are having a bad day or a bad meeting and on the day your manager is looking at your performance it appears to be subpar because that day you had other worries?
sometimes it only takes one conversation or someone else saying something about you to your manager.
if you think companies work fairly at identifying people « coasting » you are deadwrong. everything is politics.
if its 10% phoners, this isn't a problem. because there is a natural turnover with everyone else, and the phoners tend to stick they generally represent an increasing faction over time.
as they start to dominate the organization, they actually cast shade on people that are trying to get something done. nothing is getting done so the giant company starts sucking in as many people as possible to try to replace the outflow and to try to start getting something done.
does anyone know of a company that survived this process?
i was at google when the pandemic started. it was certainly a difficult change for a lot of people, but IMO those aren't the people that should be targeted. it's the ones who were worthless/coasting well before the pandemic and/or have no real excuses for their lack of performance since. at least for the first 6 months of the pandemic (when I left google), Google was VERY considerate of employees and their difficult situations.
This is under the presumption that most/all of the people being let go are actually low performers, and that leadership is able to correctly identify them.
The same leadership that thought those people met the caliber for working there in the first place.
I won't deny that there's low performers at any organization, but this is giving the people making the cuts too much credit imo. Double-digit cuts say more about leadership than the people being let go.
Microsoft ruthlessly fired tons of "low performers" for over a decade, which gave them the organizational efficiency they needed to ship such resoundingly successful products as Bing Search, Windows Mobile, and Windows 8
Performance isn’t static. Hiring is hard. Organizational priorities shift, people lose interest, etc. It’s often better for both parities if one just moves on.
Agreed. It's demoralizing to have an under-performing colleague stick around for months or years. It's even worse to work with someone who's mastered the art of "talking the talk" to get a job, who makes big promises but always has some excuse for why they can't deliver, and who never actually ships anything.
Most first-level tech managers don't have the courage to fire fast enough. The best feedback I've ever gotten from a member of my team is that I should have fired under-performers faster to preserve the motivation of my top-performers.
It's absurd that someone who has negligible, or oftentimes negative impact, should stick around claiming their $250k participation check every year.
Seems like you have a responsibility to yourself and your team to bring this up with the appropriate party and go farther if need-be. Proactive feedback is more useful than passive resentment.
Of course, and that tends to happen, but the alignment of the manager to their team's mission isn't perfect. So you'll see:
"Soft coaching" instead of a PIP.
PIPs that end in "retain," leaving the PIP recipient to revert to their previous level of output afterwards. These are often celebrated as management success stories.
Working out an "exchange" deal with another team that has headcount or backfill so the under-performers float around.
The most common strategy from a manager who knows of a disparity in competency, but is unwilling to address it directly, is to over time expect (and ask) less and less of the under-performer, implicitly putting more workload on the rest of the team. Basically, take the under-performer out of all critical paths. This is especially likely if the direct manager was also the hiring manager, in which case they're reticent for their peers & boss to recognize that they made a hiring mistake. Even moreso if the hire helped the org's D&I numbers.
Seems like I’ve ruffled a few feathers and ended up -2 on my previous comment here, not clear what rule I violated but that’s beside the point.
I have a suggestion: take these findings and send them to your direct report and their direct report too (or whoever the appropriate party is in your organization). You’ve spotted some major issues and I think your organization would benefit from your insights. Include the names of the specific underperformers to establish credibility, and so that the appropriate parties can observe and take action to benefit the team.
These operational insights are too valuable to languish on an anonymous forum.
While that's a nice ideal, it's often not practical. As an IC, you'll rarely be rewarded for pointing out inefficiencies like this publicly - especially if it makes your boss look bad. As a manager, it's often better to expend your social/political capital to advocate for your best employees, rather than to address your worst.
Relevant to the top-level topic here, that's why many managers welcome environments in which the barrier drops for cutting their worst employees. It's nice to be able to do that, when the whole company is going through it, without bringing scrutiny down on your team (and you, specifically, as someone who potentially made a bad hire).
Seems like the deficiencies exist throughout the entire organization’s vertical. Under-performing workers and underperforming managers acting in their own self interest and shirking responsibilities that would otherwise benefit the organization.
You do understand that this is entirely different than company leadership laying off entire teams right?
It could be like SNAP that fired the entire company that they acquired because they had to cut costs but the product was meaningful and I'm sure the team worked very hard on it.
> You do understand that this is entirely different than company leadership laying off entire teams right?
No, this thread:
> Some of these comments mentioned in the article coming from Meta's leadership about there being people who shouldn't probably be there or to get rid of coasters seems so inhumane and demoralizing.
...is specifically about this quote from the article:
> Separately, the company’s head of engineering issued a call for managers to identify employees who were coasting and place them on remediation plans as a prelude to their termination.
Ah my mistake. I see the context now. If that's truly what Meta is doing, all the more a garbage company.
It does still feel like a marketing spin on "we're cutting headcount, make it work" to me though. I find it impossible to believe that Meta wasn't already doing this.
That's fine. The place to address it is directly, in private, with those employees. You do not humiliate people in public, not a single person, not a group of people. That's what flailing, incompetent managers do.
For every person like you who doesn't think the execs are talking about them, there is a person who is actually performing very well, who management would like to keep around, who does think it applies to them, and it is killing their morale.
And you don't know definitively that they aren't talking about you either, Mr High Performance. Your management chain could easily have a different view of you than you have of yourself, whether it's justified or not.
I also like it, and believe that Meta’s way of going about this is more humane than keeping people on who aren’t performing. We are not talking about underpaid wage slaves here. These are professionals who deserve honest feedback about their work.
It also suggests that they have known about slackers and have been OK with it.
1. Very unlikely. Which means they're lying.
2. They are incompetent for keeping people that are slacking
If people are truly just slacking off then they should be let go as part of the normal business process. This focused effort to get leaner suggests that there are many known slackers that they were OK with up to this point.
There is really no reason to call people slackers even if it's true. They should have went the patreon route of saying they fucked up and hired too many people into roles that didn't provide as much value as they need.
Everybody is incompetent about detecting slackers for last two years. I've seen multiple people having two or even three full time contracts and successfully juggling tasks at minimal required level, due to remote work and flexible hours. I guess they'll finally spoil it for everyone.
They don't. Some of them try to raise arguments, that they completed given tasks, but forget to mention that they compromised quality along the way.
Couple years ago, we had a lot of talks saying that engineers should have slack time to polish things. That's kinda counter-productive if slack time goes into working for other companies.
If they’re contracts, they’re not employees and they’re fully in their rights to work for others too. They owe that company no loyalty, and if they’re doing what’s laid out in the contract, there is no expectation for them to do more, either. Nevertheless, I don’t see how this is slacking either way.
If they have agreed to task-based work and that's clear for both parties, then sure. Zero issues there.
If they entered agreement (no matter legal form), that led company to believe that they will dedicate full time equivalent to given company and then did the same with another company, and charge both for full time, then it's obvious scam. It's simply beyond mental capacity of regular human being to carry out such contract.
People tend to rationalize latter one, but they will end on bad side of the layoffs, because it's simply unsustainable to pay full compensation for half-time work.
Right, I wasn't suggesting fake friendliness, just like something better than making generalizations that bring up the spector of hidden bad people working at the company and nobody knows whose head is going to roll. It creates uncertainty, fear and just general demoralization in the ranks if you ask me.
Its sort of lazy thinking, so of course a lot of people will come to the same conclusion.
I mean, sure there might be people not giving their best. But most people want to do work, want their work to be meaningful, and will generally do the right thing if guided correctly. The number of "slackers" who try to get by with no/0 effort is small, no way it could be large enough to meaningfully affect the bottomline.
Your take is entirely reasonable. The lack of empathy often comes from the well off who have never had to struggle and can’t conceptualize what that even means.
As software engineers, I don't think this industry value loyalty in the past decade. Job hopping is the norm and is encouraged essentially by the market.
Nothing is wrong doing it, we are following the money as we should.
Just neither empathy or loyalty is relevant to me, not reliable both ways.
Pretty much, yeah. The entire idea of capitalism was completely different from previous systems like feudalism. There you were loyal to a lordship and did what was needed and they provided for you. You consumed in the outputs and this is largely how you were compensated.
The idea of capitalism is that you trade your labor/expertise/skills for a wage. You don’t own the means of production and you don’t own the outputs of them. Your labor is sold on the market and you are free to bargain and negotiate and step away.
So yea, there’s no reason at all to be loyal. It’s a beautiful system that way. It’s liberty and freedom to do as you choose. To decide if you value personal time or working for money.
Facebook and google have "required some employees to apply for new jobs if they wish to remain at the company."
I have to say this is a sort of hilarious newspeak framing of layoffs. "We're not laying you off, you just need to apply and get accepted for a job or else you're terminated." OK, so I was a job-haver, now I'm a job-seeker... but at least I haven't been laid off!
This can be very valuable because it means you don't lose your unvested RSUs. Plus internal teams are more likely to already know you, or at least it's easier to show them your work, so the interview isn't necessarily that hard.
false hope, chances are when such mechanisms are in place all teams already have the clamp on budget/resourcing to achieve the overall x% reduction in headcount. so it ends up a big game of musical chairs, some just gotta go.
This is still lapping up the bullshit of what it actually is. It's a redundancy plain and simple, your job is being terminated, it should be reported as such.
You literally still have a job. Being reported as a layoff would be lying. If you don’t have a job and have to find work elsewhere then that would be the layoff. As long as the company is still paying you the at worst you’re on the bench.
1) Vesting continues
2) Salary continues
3) Benefits continue
4) For the duration of the search, you don't have other things to do.
==> It's at the very least a paid job search. (If you only look internally during that time, you're doing it wrong). Please do talk to people who've experienced actual layoffs how that's a comparatively very cushy alternative.
And let's not forget that an internal transfer is usually significantly easier than actually finding a new job.
It all depends on what percentage actually get new job offers internally. If it's "most or all" then it's very different from layoffs. If it's "few to none" than it's very similar to being laid off.
"Pay and benefits for 30 days while you look for a job" this is called "garden leave," a severance package could also cover this. If my position is terminated & I'm paid out two months salary and they continue covering my insurance for 60 days, that's great, but I'm still terminated.
I'm not against this policy, I'm not even against layoffs in all cases. Sometimes you hire a lot, sometimes you cut, that's business. This policy does seem better than direct layoffs, but eliminating people's positions and making them apply for new jobs (with 30 days garden leave) is pretty damn near layoffs. What if no other teams have headcount, what would you call it then?
I was just commenting on the turn of phrase, not laying people off but 'terminating their positions and making them look for a new job.'
Not really newspeak. The difference is that you're still getting paid in between and still have a job, pretty different from getting laid off where you often don't get paid and don't have a job.
But it's still "prove you're still worth it". Instead of, we have the following teams with openings, please pick one you want to go to. No, it's, we have openings in the following teams, prove that one of them want you enough.
Yeah sure but it's definitely different from being laid off. You can just look at the numbers. The vast majority of people end up on a new team and do not leave the company.
I work at Google and am strongly in favor of this vs pretty much any alternative. I'd be in favor even if I were one of the people on a dissolved team. Hard for me to see how this is bad for employees.
But... they are paying them. What are you proposing? That they dissolve the team and just give the employees a permanent pension while not requiring them to find a new team?
I’m proposing that cuts like this are unnecessary for companies this flush with cash. It’s an excuse to cut staff with some reason to point to for doing so.
It's totally reasonable for a company to ask you to prove you're worth it or just fire you, just like it's totally reasonable for you to demand your company prove they're worthy to employ you (increase your pay or benefits) or jump to another opportunity
I think the idea of bell curving people and firing the bottom is extremely dumb, a form of decimation with similar results. It's a culture destroyer and invents many perverse incentives in the company that are counter productive to "make great products".
But ultimately I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to be authentically reviewed poorly and made to prove they should stay.
You get garden leave while you apply for jobs internally. After 30 days (assuming you can't find a new position internally), it seems identical to having been laid off
The Area120 folks were given 4.5 months to find a new team. Even if you decide there is a 0% chance of success and start looking externally, that's a great deal.
Assumption being, if you can't pass interviews with another team, you're not good enough to stay. That only works for large campuses and of course, getting another role is more indicative of your networking abilities than skillset and experience.
Less of an interview and more of an informal team-matching coffee chat. They all have access to your co-workers and body of work, so no need to haze you with leetcode again.
That’s going away due to d&i requirements. They want everyone to have to apply for all open positions so internal transfers aren’t given preference over external.
I see it as a last chance to move to a position that's not being terminated, and also an opportunity for someone who needs headcount and has the budget for it to pick proven candidates without the hassle of an external hire. Large companies are worlds of their own. But still, I imagine if you receive that message, I'd be worried.
Haha, even a cynic like myself couldn't see this coming. It's a fantastic way to shift focus away from leadership decision making towards competition between the very employees who are supposed to work together. I suspect there will be a lot more politicking than the usual hiring process (which is quite objective, despite its other flaws).
Google has a massive number of teams, many of which are actively hiring. This is not some musical chairs exercise and it’s only getting attention because it fits the storyline journalists want to tell right now. This has been going on throughout the last decade and before.
I should have added this at first but I'm not saying this policy is bad, I'm not even against layoffs in all cases. Sometimes you hire a lot, sometimes you cut, that's business. This policy does seem better than direct layoffs.
I was just commenting on the turn of phrase, not laying people off but 'terminating their positions and making them look for a new job' (which sounds pretty dang near being laid off with garden leave).
The term "layoffs" is obviously toxic, so companies go to lengths to avoid using that particular phrase, even when that's what seems to be happening. I've been at a company while this happened: lots of reductions in headcount over a short period but "we're not doing layoffs."
I've noticed news articles saying that Meta have been cutting back on support staff, like cleaners and custodial roles. To me, these are the wrong people to be cutting. The people who clean Meta are not the reason why Meta is hemorrhaging money. I'm sure they actually do their jobs very well.
They should fire the people who are actually causing the problems. Everyone stopped using facebook because they are uncomfortable using a giant, ad serving, spy machine. They are also discouraged that facebook started deciding which friends are important to the user instead of letting the user pick. The people who implemented these ?features? should be the first to be fired.
Similarly, the reason everyone is walking away from Google is because the search is getting worse. Why? Because Google increasingly doesn't allow you to search for what actually exists, but instead what it thinks you should see. Fire the people who did this. Fire them because they are destroying your company.
I don't care if you don't, it's your wealth to lose, but I also know that's not who will be shouldering the burden of yet another recession. I could easily do this for every company: Netflix: it's the crappy political shows, Microsoft: it's the telemetry and continually slower product, Apple: it's intentionally slowing working products, Goldman Sachs: it's the bro/frat culture, Most Banks: it's the insulting fees, Amazon: it's the way you treat your warehouse staff: Most Fast Food: it's the price gouging Most Food companies: it's the annoying shrinkflation. Fire these people. They made you short term profits and now your brand is ruined and everyone hates you.
But instead they will fire the people who are actually doing their job, and keep all the executives and "thought leaders", or whatever, in their protected positions. I think everyone basically knows why everyone hates facebook and left. Just stop doing that, is what I'm getting at.
> Apple: it's intentionally slowing working products
This is really disingenuous. They slowed the CPU on products with a worn out battery in order to prevent the CPU from overdrawing from the battery, causing a reboot. Not exactly what I would call “intentionally slowing working products” but rather “reducing CPU power consumption to mitigate abrupt reboots to keep a reliable user experience”.
Granted, Apple was a bit shady by not documenting this and giving the user the option to toggle it, until they were “caught”.
> They slowed the CPU on products with a worn out battery in order to prevent the CPU from overdrawing from the battery, causing a reboot
Only after they have made it impossibly expensive to replace some lithium.
This is an incredibly disingenuous defense of their actions. Apple is fully trying to tie hardware refreshes to the cadence of should be battery refreshes and the frog has been so boiled that android devices realized it was more profitable to follow suit.
Apple is incredibly shady and there simply isnt a defense here.
Written from the perspective of someone whose battery never suddenly died from 30% in cold temperatures on a bike ride, leaving no way to phone your family. Apple’s power management for degraded batteries is a good thing and I wish they’d done it sooner.
>Everyone stopped using facebook because they are uncomfortable using a giant, ad serving, spy machine.
Do you really believe this? How does TikTok fit into this vision of the world that you have constructed? I agree with your premise but it seems like you have made a connection between two unrelated things:
1. People are less interested in Facebook
2. Facebook is a giant, ad serving, spy machine
These two can co-exist without a propositional relationship. Unfortunately the average consumer does not care about privacy in the same way that people in this forum do. For what it's worth people have explicitly told me that they enjoy targetted ads.
TikTok is happy, Facebook optimized for outrage and conflict.
When you only get shown stuff that pisses you off, you’ll get some short-term high engagement at the cost of enjoyment. Ultimately, that gave the strong impression that Facebook is Thanksgiving with your racist uncle, so young people dropped out.
I can't imagine how you could possibly think Facebook is the only platform that optimizes for outrage and conflict. That's the entire social media MO. People certainly do not leave platforms that make them angry. Making people angry generates the most engagement out of anything. Twitter makes people miserable and it seems to be doing just fine.
Young people were already leaving Facebook since the early 2010s because their parents were all making accounts, making it less of a "safe" place to express themselves, and all the moms and grandmas just got left there. So Facebook's core, active user demographic became an older generation that skews more conservative, so the outrage porn that circulates there leans in that direction.
Whereas every other mainstream platform on the internet has the young people who are more liberal and hate the older generation, so the outrage porn shared around there is about how everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi and how a straight white guy said something fatphobic. And if you're a person into that kind of stuff, that's what your Tiktok feed will be. It's certainly not "happy" unless you train the algorithm to only show you that.
It's 2 flavors of equally stupid anger bait to get people refreshing their feed all day. But it's certainly not that people have collectively decided they want happier news feeds. Quite the opposite.
>I've noticed news articles saying that Meta have been cutting back on support staff, like cleaners and custodial roles. To me, these are the wrong people to be cutting.
In my experience, some non-trivial amount of these cost-control measures is about signaling. I worked in Japan for a large company that allowed employees to ride in first class (Green Car) on the Narita Express when traveling internationally for business; that went away during a period of belt-tightening. Saved a whole $15 each way.
Remember that their users are not their customers. User experience at either of those businesses is only relevant as much as it is useful in attracting advertisers to the platform.
Your butcher isn't too concerned about whether the chickens like the decor in their cage.
The thing Facebook is learning right now is that their cage isn't very good, and the chickens are leaving.
Users may not be Facebook's customers, but they are the product. It's hard to attract customers when your product is shrinking, and declining in quality (i.e. skewing older and therefor less appealing to advertisers)
>Meta have been cutting back on support staff, like cleaners and custodial roles.
This feels like the megacorp version of when a company is caring how much money stocking cola in the company fridge is costing. Which is a good barometer that it’s time to bail in a small company.
One day you'll enter the corporate world and understand that getting rid of an executive that took a few bad decisions is a lot more damaging than getting rid of the best unqualified worker in the world.
On top of that, I'd argue that steering Facebook and Google in those directions is exactly what their executives and their customers want.
Very clear the market has now negatively reacted to high operating expenses that largely stem from excessive headcount.
Most companies will likely not reduce pay if they can help it to maintain competitiveness, but if you’re a bottom or middle performer or on a non-revenue generating team suddenly your job security even at “safe” companies like Google is at risk.
I’m speaking more to the stock price than Meta’s actions. Shares trading lower than they were 5 years ago. And many of the unprofitable growth companies down 80-90% in less than a year.
Point is tech companies are highly sensitive to interest rates and now have to course correct in a world where the market is punishing excessive spending.
Not really. Meta raised 10B (really their first debt ever) in April 2022, and GOOG has like 14B in debt. Google could pay that with less than a quarter's worth of earnings, and I think Meta's not far behind.
IMO, the market is overreacting. Both companies look pretty cheap to me.
Markets are forward looking. FB's growth numbers don't look great, and if you don't buy into their bet on the Metaverse you might be less inclined to see a bright future for that company.
Markets are forward looking, but people making the decisions are plagued by recency bias and fighting the last battle. No comment on the relative contribution of different incentives, but being "forward looking" doesn't mean "correct" and it can also include an overreaction based on recent data points.
Nasdaq is down 30%. Clearly macro factors like rates and inflation and recessionary pressures are putting pressure on rate sensitive companies generally speaking. You can’t just say it’s ad tracking when dozens of mid and large cap tech stocks are down 30-80% ytd
> This logic has broader implications than most investors realise. Now imagine you will receive $100 a year, for ever. By the reasoning above, this has a finite present value, since compound interest means payments in the distant future are almost worthless. With interest rates at 1%, the payment stream is worth $10,000; at 5%, it is worth $2,000. But as well as reducing the value, the higher rate also changes the distribution of that value. With rates at 1%, less than a tenth of the stream’s value comes from payments made in the first ten years. At 5%, around two-fifths does.
and
> In other words, higher interest rates dramatically alter firms’ incentives when choosing which timeline to invest over. Sacrificing short-term profits for longer-term gains is one thing when you are trying to persuade investors that your superapp, machine-learning algorithm or gene-sequencing widget has the potential to up-end an industry. It is another when even the best-case scenario has its value so heavily skewed towards what can be done in the next decade. Startup founders are used to shaking off derision over implausible, Utopian dreams. It is more of a kick in the teeth to realise that even Utopia is not worth much unless it can be achieved in short order.
Sorry for the long quotes, it was the best I could do, I highly recommend that article in its entirety.
Thanks for this, its confusing for many as to why growth companies(low/no-profit) are getting hit so hard due to rising interest rates and these quotes and the article linked explain the reasoning very well.
However, I think the economist column/article misses some important points:
1: There is a stereotype that corporations only look at the next quarter’s earnings. The article argues the opposite, that corporations are long term focused. The article needs to address that point.
2: Stocks and dividends should be inflation proof (with some assumptions, such as revenues increase with inflation).
3. The article doesn’t seem to mention bonds, even though it talks about constant $ returns. What?
The most interesting part of the article for me was “The original marshmallow test, it turned out, had a flaw. Exclude some children from better-off families (which seems to make them both more willing to delay gratification and more likely to succeed in later life) and much of its predictive power suddenly disappears.” [Slight edits]
The metaverse is their next play to build a world where they are a bit more shielded from Apple/Google/Microsoft's hardware influence. Pivoting a large business is really hard.
I think this, along with a slew of other factors as well.
Meta pivoting to burn money on a VR universe that nobody actually seems to want.
Meta burning FB users by constantly altering their FB news feed, making it less and less a place for friends, and more a place to see endless reposted memes and ads for drop-ship products and stolen IP tshirts.
Meta burning Instagram users by trying to force everyone's favorite photo-sharing app to be a shittier version of TikTok, as well as the above constant feed refactors...
The job market seems to have cooled substantially from where I'm looking. I have friends at a lot of different major tech companies and hiring has slowed or stopped in all cases. Earlier this year it was full steam ahead hiring, now it's harder to get reqs, reqs are being pulled, etc.
Now, if you have really in-demand skills / experience that may not matter much. But companies are slamming on the breaks. If I was laid off tomorrow I'd expect it to take twice as long to find a job as it would've at the end of 2021 or early this year. Not "there aren't any jobs" but I wouldn't consider this a "hot" market for the majority of roles.
I think the parent was posting ironically or forgot to add the \s? Otherwise, yeah, folks need to hang on to those '21/'22 salaries if they can. We may not see those again for some time.
Job market is on ice now, I used to get dozens of emails from recruiters every week, its trickled down to 1-2 now, which is nice as I am not looking to leave my company but its a stark contrast from 3+ months ago. And its a clear sign that companies are not hiring like they used to.
Depends what your salary expectations are, I guess. Finding a role with the same compensation as a Meta/Google is more difficult than finding one of many dozens of companies that will pay you low six figures and some questionable equity package.
one might argue it's a good time to gamble on a startup.
I'm recently spared from a massive layoff, but it wouldn't have been bad if I was part of that. The severance was 4 month pay plus accelerated vesting (for that 4 months)
I paid off my house thanks to the hot stock market in past 2 years (no one's saying it out loud, but pendamic has been a boom for IT workers), and have some cash cushion to maintain the lifestyle anywhere between 2 yrs to 5 yrs (depending on how frugal I choose to be)
So a 200 base and questionable (but high reward) equity in a startup working on things I'm interested in after a 4 month paid vacation? Doesnt sound too bad.
Adjusting to drinking your own coffee rather than ordering Starbucks via uber 3 times a day is an easier adjustment from going to affording food to not affording it all. Didn't think it needed to be spelled out but there you go.
No one said otherwise, this is just a strawman. You don't have to be a dick just because something bad happens to someone doing better than you. Didn't think it needed to be spelled out but there you go.
I honestly don't think there are that many remote jobs available that pay at the FAANG level, outside of FAANG companies, that is. Unless one goes into consulting, which comes with its own risks even during a non-turbulent and recession-proof market, which most definitely we don't have right now.
This. There are more than a few companies where their burn rate + valuation make it impossible to do anything except go full steam ahead. If you lose a billion dollars a year on 500 MM in revenue with 2 billion in the bank and cost of goods sold of 600 MM /yr what else can you do? Hopefully you'll continue growing and get to the point where cutting costs leaves a viable business.
What job market are you looking at? The small shops with help wanted? I don't know any tech companies on major hiring and not many small companies have had any big rounds to raise and grow on AFAIK...
In fairness, at a mega-corp there is very little data on whether an employee would be successful in a different group. Some groups have bad charters/bad team dynamics/bad skills match. An internal transfer has a huge amount of visibility into these aspects when they transfer, much more than an external hire would.
Its a pretty good deal to suggest to employees that they find a new team rather than performing a layoff, I wouldn't be surprised if the profitable/successful teams can still add head count for people they like.
>Among some Meta employees, the process of reapplying for jobs within a limited window internally is known as a sort of human-resources purgatory they call the “30 Day List.”
I mean from the article it’s pretty clear giving employees a month to find a new job internally is more like Hunger Games than some guarantee you will be successful. It sounds like a way for companies to not have to admit they are doing layoffs.
Other teams may be able to add headcount, but my experience with big companies is that the organization wants to manage the number of tenured people, and people who are now sitting in non-terminal levels. Given how many people externally are competing for spots there is less of an incentive to prioritize internal people. I don't necessarily agree with this, but you have to be aware of all the stakeholders perspectives.
Based on my experience at FB, they way prefer to get internal transfers as they require less ramping up time. It's often not worth changing orgs though, as your equity doesn't get reset so you may end up with much less than a new hire
> Very clear the market has now negatively reacted to high operating expenses that largely stem from excessive headcount.
Are you saying that because stock prices are dropping that the market has reacted to excessive headcount?
Cause I think a better explanation for that, is that in the past 2 years we've had inflation, and that was reflected in the profits of the companies for 2020-21, and now that the fed is lowering interest rates, we're expecting that inflation to stop, and so that's affecting the stock market.
This seems to have very little to do with these companies business models, and everything to do with them failing to recognize that their profit changes are readily explained by inflation/deflation. Which seems to be a better explanation of what the markets are reacting to.
Yeah but overfitting is still a better strategy, for a number of reasons. Match your competition. Equity grants on the uphill, reduce them on the downhill.
What if the market goes up and stays up? Fed does or doesnt hike rates? Do you really want to play hiring catch up when everyone else has a 2 year head start?
Also, your board of directors doesn't give a shit about the reason, they only care what is being done in response.
I disagree that overfitting is a better strategy. Because if you recognize why things are happening are unrelated to profit/work at the moment you can accept that you're going to have losses regardless, and try and plan past that in the long term. Which should lead to better profits when you're not entirely dependent on the federal reserve.
In particular, hiring benefits don't take effect immediately, it's going to be a while before productivity is realized from the new hires. So it is very short-sighted to freeze that before an economic downturn, when you want new forms of revenue and innovation to allow you to outlast the competition and grow a business into something that will become the "next big thing".
Also, as a commentary, it makes it more clear that your stock is actually stable, because the only thing that's really changed is inflation and catch up to reality from the fed turning off the money hose.
Public companies trying to keep investors happy and share prices good during a downturn.
Let them treat employees like cannon fodder. Some of those employees might end up creating something new and innovative, rather than building another product that gets eventually dead-pooled by Google, or copy-pasted by Meta.
If you had to identify the top three things (in terms of impact) that could be changed (albeit with difficulty) to reduce the chances of employees being stuffed into cannons, what would they be?
My three would be:
1. Relatively weak labor protections in the USA.
2. The fiduciary requirement to maximize shareholder value. Why not allow a company to define its own metric, such as a blend of profit along with employee treatment (or others, within some notion of reasonableness*), make this metric public, provide some sort of accounting and accountability for it, and let shareholders adjust accordingly.
3. The quarterly reporting of public companies. This makes long-term planning and investment much harder.
* I haven't studied this very broadly. I'm familiar with the Triple Bottom Line and B-Corporations.
As far as I know, you can satisfy your fiduciary requirements by treating employees well simply by claiming that it attracts better employees and avoids costs associated with searching for new ones.
Keeping unproductive employees on in a punch-clock make-work position benefits no-one. If we're going to broadly restructure society to make this kind of thing better, we'd be better off strengthening the social safety net and getting rid of all the stuff that says you have to have a single full-time job or your life will suck. Nationalise healthcare, remove all the weird tax/benefit cliffs that happen when a job goes over/under x hours/week, legalise building more homes in places people want to live...
> Among some Meta employees, the process of reapplying for jobs within a limited window internally is known as a sort of human-resources purgatory they call the “30 Day List.”
> Meta, as of last year the name of Facebook’s parent company, has long had a practice that employees whose roles are eliminated are subject to termination if they can’t find a new job internally within a month. Many other companies also make efforts to reassign employees whose groups are closed or restructured. At Meta historically, it was usually only employees deemed undesirable who failed to land new positions. Now, affected employees and managers say, workers with good reputations and strong performance reviews are being pushed out on a regular basis.
This sounds like a recipe for achieving rock-bottom morale of the remaining employees at warp speed. If anything, it seems worse than just firing people. By shunting high performers into the traditional dead-end path, the company simultaneously calls the employee's reputation into question while placing their professional short-term future in limbo.
My company is being eaten again by another company that makes them a market leader and rather than compete for a new job in a much bigger tech department, I’m taking my stack of cash and finishing my engineering degree of which I have about 75 applicable credits toward. Fuck “development” as a career, that’s just a toolset now.
I’m still sticking around the old gig to support the legacy systems for 10 hours a week and keeping the channel open for the future, but I’m gonna sit back and watch the industry smolder for a bit.
The prospect of interviewing for a development job makes me shudder.
The other one I’ve seen seems to be semi-regularly getting rid of like 50 people at a time - like essentially just keeping any big layoffs below the reporting level. I’d assume/hope that whatever regulations are involved count layoffs over a period rather than just how many in a given event - but it would not surprise me if it didn’t.
Looks like Google's limit would be 499 laid off per office. I wonder if "Remote" counts as one office location or not, and what timeframe is used to aggregate layoff events for purposes of compliance with this law. Could Google lay off 499 workers in separate layoffs happening weekly or daily?
Are they? I did an interview with one of them a few months ago, passed hiring committee, and have been told everything is frozen. The other one just cancelled my interview.
That is pretty lame unless it is for a very specialized role. But for whatever reason it seems like many companies go through the whole song and dance even if they have no intention of hiring.
It looks good to investors to see a lot of openings, so some companies that are not growing (that is they are in a great market that is small and won't grow) will go through that act of looking for people without hiring anyone. That is they get the job description of existing people, and post ads for that job, collect resumes, (they might do an initial phone screen interview for practice) but never hire anyone.
Careful. Exact same situation, company reached out to me, I went through interviewing and they told me after the third that they have no open spots currently.
It is fairly well known that Google and Facebook have been making defensive hires the last few years. Ie. They would hire someone not because they necessarily wanted them but because they were worried they might go to the other competitor.
Now that hiring has cooled they are willing to drop those folks.
Google has more than 100k employee, at any given week I bet there are more than 100 people leaving. Letting go 50 people is barely layoff. Misleading title
Meta kind of screwed everybody here. I am at one of the hyperscalers with some insight into SDE offers. Second half of 2021 things got extremely crazy with Meta offering ridiculous salaries even for junior positions. This caused a chain reaction. Other FAANG had to increase their offers outside the normal bands to fill positions, which caused experienced folks to leave where out of frustration that new hires one level down were making more money than them. Now it appears Meta overshot and are trying to clean up their own mess.
I don't understand how the article states this and concludes Google is cutting staff:
>A Google spokesman said almost 95% of employees who expressed interest in staying with the company found new roles within the notice period. Alphabet had 174,014 employees at the end of the second quarter, up 20.8% from the previous year.
I am pointing out the disconnect of the sensationalized title "Google are cutting staff" from the actual article content. The article states ~100 Google employees are being given couple months to find a new role within Google, and they cite that historically, 95% of employees find new roles within the company when this kind of thing happens.
This is the norm in Australia. You cannot fire people except for misconduct. Here they abolish your role or department due to business restructuring which is legal. Since your role is gone the company has to provide a redeployment opportunity to the impacted employees to other possible roles in the company. In a honest restructuring this works and some people do get other roles, some managers like to retain staff they like or are buddy with and are "appointed" to other role. After a specified period like 30 days if there is no suitable role for you the company will make you redundant and your will leave the company.
I believe they mean jobs within Google for the folks whose entire team is being dissolved, but aren't being laid off directly. I recall something similar during my time there, when the Google Play team was merged with the YouTube Music team.
This was standard practice at my former old school tech company employer. People were "redeployed" and given 30-90 days to apply for new roles, with many unable to get jobs secured in time they were let go with minimal severance.
Amazon seems to be on the short list of big tech companies still not completely frozen the hiring. They seem to have slowed down, according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32929483 but not full pause.
Data point of one and all but I chatted with a Meta recruiter a month ago and asked specifically about the hiring freeze that was on-going at the time. They mentioned they were still hiring for more senior engineers so YMMV.
Recruiters' whole primary job is to recruit, and they don't get a lot of top secret information about what's coming next, either. It's in their best interest to always say they are hiring, otherwise why are they even employed by Señor Zuckerberg? They don't get a two month vacation during a hiring freeze.
And yeah, if you are top, top egghead talent it's possible there is always at job for you at Meta. It might just save that recruiters job if they source you and you pan out.
Think about it like this: earlier this year the bar to get an offer was that you need to be hot, like a 6/10 before. In this new climate, you need to be more like a 9.5/10 to make it through their little hiring game.
With that said..
Don't let some random on the Internet stop or discourage you; go get that job if you are up to the task and actually want to work at Meta! Have fun.. yeah.
My original comment was more about the non-Bigco job postings, a lot of times they may just be testing the waters to see what they can dredge up. If it looks appealing, they might bite. It's mostly a huge waste of time for the poor candidates, though.
> after the biggest companies hired at breakneck speed through the pandemi
Isn't this the main reason why this "frugality excercise" is being held, and unnecessary stress generated? Sounds like a major VP+ screwup. I hope that layer will answer.
I'm not into conspiracy theories, but this mess seems orchestrated. Or simply CEOs trying to keep the feature parity at the HR level...
Is this correct? A root problem here is that public companies have a strong motivation to show consistent (or steadily increasing) performance every quarter, yet the ups and downs of the economy, not to mention things like R+D, happen on slower timescales.
This seems at odds with the great resignation. Was that actually a thing? If so, do folks think it was encouraged by companies who saw that the great freeze and now great rif were coming?
My understanding of the great resignation was it was mostly an older population who had put off retirement that decided they'd rather be retired [1]. Sure a lot of people not 55+ also quit but they came back while 55+ did not.
It definitely was a thing, but it was more about people leaving for better wages. This is signaling the great resignation era is ending and the pendulum is swinging back to normalcy and perhaps could potentially go into great layoff territory.
