Any company who uses this kind of shadow-layoff or whatever you want to call it is scum, plain and simple. I mean that's no surprise for Meta or maybe even Tesla but as I see other companies employee this "tactic" I just add them to my list of "places I'd never consider working". Such short-sighted thinking.
When your 51% CEO has so little life experience, what did you expect? There's a reason why - IN GENERAL - the best CEOs are older than 55.
Zuck got lucky with FB and made billions selling personal data and retained 51% control. Did we really think he was actually GOOD at anything?
Lol, absolutely not. He got lucky, stole someone else's idea, and had a massive safety net to fall back on. I'm not saying he has zero skills but managing to hold onto 51% of the company does not make you a good CEO (as you stated).
Conversely, if you can't avoid harassing your highest performers - those seem like the people who will leave first, while the people who are under-performing will dig in to avoid risking the job market.
I have seen instances where the "underperformers" were the people that made the workplace/team pleasant to be in. Once they were let go, some overperfomers quit not much later.
Or some of the low (but not negative) productivity teammates get pushed out and the top performer follows them because keeping them around was good for morale for reasons unrelated to their actual job descriptions (or their individual metrics were rubbish but they also were valued assistants who unlocked the top guy to work at full speed).
On the contrary, the best talent is probably already performing to these higher expectations and won't be impacted. Their peers who weren't keeping up are the ones who will be impacted.
Holding employees accountable for high performance standards is generally welcomed by high performers.
> “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said during the meeting, according to Reuters.
I'd probably start looking for another job. It's one thing to fire poor performers, it's another to make vague allusions to "people who shouldn't be here". If they shouldn't be there, fire them. Otherwise, this just sounds like management has no clue.
No, you set clear performance expectations, give them feedback, and then hold them accountable if they don't meet those performance expectations. Which seems to be what Meta is doing here.
I honestly can't believe so many people in this thread would prefer that Meta just slash and burn employees instead of giving them expectations and a chance to meet them.
I honestly can't believe you'd trust this kind of management to give fair expectations.
Let's be honest. They know who they're going to get rid of. Now they just have to create the pre-text.
Some people might just think those are weasel words to cover an impending large-scale RIF.
At a previous job the management team got all excited about KPIs and made each dept come up ~5 of them and then report on them weekly (or maybe it was monthly). I fought it tooth and nail arguing that it was both silly that we were coming up with them and how easily it would be gamed. My concerns fell of deaf ears and instead we wasted upwards of 4-6 person-weeks of time building tools to extract data from Jira to serve as our KPIs. We wrote the damn code to calculate it, of course we know how to juice the numbers. It was a huge waste of time, nothing interesting came out of it (for us or any department), and "management" patted themselves on the back for "taking action".
I'm not say all metrics suck and are a waste of time but you better have a very good reason for them before you go all-in.
A friend of mine's company started requiring all their developers to track their time, down to the 15min interval. I'd be looking for a new job within a week. Don't even get me started on how asking your employees to track their time is essentially asking them to lie which means the stats you get are worthless, worse than worthless because time tracking takes time on it's own to do.
Coming up with a new idea, researching its feasibility, and executing on it isn't really doable with rigidly monitored metrics, because a lot of the productive work on novel things looks like thinking about things and trying things that don't work out.
As a field we have yet to find good metrics for coding performance, anyone who tells you otherwise just wants to have an excuse to fire you when they suddenly decide that you no longer serve their purposes, even if those purposes is just to have a cool social club that validates their fragile ego.
Are you implying managers don't directly contribute to a product? Because wow, you're really either horribly naive or wildly narcissistic. As a someone who managed programmers for almost 20 years, only a fraction were hands-off. Why do you think all the 10x engineers become managers? A high performing manager hits targets, ships products, and makes customers happy. If you think a hot shot programmer on a team can do this all by themselves, I don't know what to tell you. You'll have to learn the hard way.
I've been a high (if not the highest) performer at companies I've worked at (albeit much smaller companies Meta), if they suddenly want me to log my hours, do a bunch of metric-related BS, or grade me on KPIs that have no basis in reality then I'm leaving.
To me it means: "Nice job you have here, would be a shame if something happens to it!"
I had senior level managers communicating along those lines and squandered my respect in about 3 seconds.
Not that it really matters, but still.
While this is true (working in a company that doesn't value high performers over slackers is infuriating for the former), it's really unlikely that you'll be able to change your company's culture in the right direction at will (if rewarding high performers and kicking the butt of low performers was that easy why weren't you doing so all along ?!), so what's usually happening is:
- the management starts monitoring some KPI some consulting firm told them to monitor
- they start annoy everyone in the company based on these BS arbitry “holly metrics”, which are indeed poor performance indicators and are easily gameable
- top performers will be pissed off and leave
- low performers will do all they can to maximize their metrics instead of doing actual work, reducing their productivity even more
- congrats you've destroyed your company's talent pool and have now turned Meta into IBM. Too bad you don't even have a sales department on par with IBM's, so you'll probably end up like AOL or Yahoo!
For example, I have an optimal load which I can work almost indefinitely and performing very well (in my own scale), when the load shots up, I lock up.
This is why I'm automating as much as I can, so I can keep in that optimal zone which I perform really well.
It's a win-win for companies to hold employees to high standards. Either they sacrifice health, family, relationships, hobbies, etc. to meet unsustainable demands or they "self-select" and the company no longer has to pay their salary, healthcare, benefits, etc. In the economic climate we're living in, it just makes economic sense to squeeze as much productivity as possible out of your workers. This includes pushing already high performing workers to do more than they already are.
What's your solution here for engineers? Counting the lines of code they write?
Or maybe the best talent is sick of these overpaid rest-and-vest lackeys and more than happy to see them get the axe.
But that's not what Meta is saying. The goal isn't just to make it miserable. The goal is to raise the expectations and hold people accountable throughout the company.
The exact quote "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here" is hard to argue with. Every company that went on a hiring spree during the last bull run has collected some percentage of people who aren't performing or aren't qualified. Raising expectations and holding people accountable is a reasonable approach, IMO. Much better than just firing people.
Give people a chance to meet very clear expectations and fair warning when they're not. Remove people who can't or won't catch up.
I was exceeding expectations, and given a big promotion in the middle of it. But people I worked with and interacted with every day were feeling extremely stressed and worried about their ability to meet the new bar. Now, in many cases, they didn't need to be worried, but it's natural to question these things in an environment where you're seeing people get PIP'd and unceremoniously shitcanned regularly.
Morale was through the floor, it was an absolutely miserable environment to work in – even though I was personally doing quite well. So I said "fuck this" and was the first person out the door on my team. The second highest performer quit a week later.
The least technically capable person on the team was there for another year.
That is not a formula for the "worst performers" leaving or getting fired, it's more like a formula for chaos, nasty office politics, and people leaving just because they don't need that shit in their life.
"Impact" is not a clear expectation. its not really that actionable either.
The biggest problem with Meta is that there is no real pedigree for making new products. Everything successful has been bought in.
I'm still not sure why Meta decided to double the number of employees, there was no clear goal, and it appears that teams were making up bullshit metrics to prove that they needed more staff.
One of the great things about FB before that was that it was small and had ambitious goals, so you'd tend to work on important stuff, as would everyone else.
But they kept making more money and hiring more people, and the culture got murdered (again) due to external senior management hiring.
And the last four to five years have hollowed out the original core of competent execs. Their replacements are less good, which cascades downhill and causes more problems.
Unfortunately, this is beyond most companies when it comes to software developers.
The better employees, feeling more certain they could find another job, were often the ones who left.
Even the most talented people can be locked into positions with compensation packages that will severely handcuff them to staying put. And if we really are in one of the most severe downturns we've ever seen, those talented people will very quickly realize they have it really good
There are zillions of HR strategies for retaining the baller employees, while trimming the ones that aren't baller when things get lean. To many who have managed teams of people, products, etc, they look like standard HR stuff, to others, they look inhuman terrible practices. Sorry.
True. The first time I came across this effect was reading the book about the IBM disaster: Big Blues https://www.amazon.com/Big-Blues-Unmaking-Paul-Carroll/dp/05...
After twenty years working in the field, my conclusion on this is: the good worker for the people in power is irrelevant. They want to get rid of anyone and that's it.
Now they get to lose even more time being productive finding gigs.
Brenden Gregg leaves Netflix, weeks later its stock and reputation tank. They don’t think we know, but we do. There’s no reason to put our faith is people who are clearly more of the same rich grifters being propped up by collective belief. Believe something else.
IME your top performers are generally less compensation motivated than "interesting problem and interesting environment" motivated. Many companies will bend over backwards to give a top performer from a FAANG as much autonomy and interesting work as they want, for compensation differences that aren't that major anymore.
First-hand, what I've seen happen is that your most talented people, who are the most in demand, leave the organization quite quickly because they correctly realize they don't have to put up with this bullshit. It's the coasters who fear they'll never land an equally cushy job who attempt to ride out the heat as long as they can.