One of those cases where they had to tone down reality so people would believe it, but still came across as unrealistic!

Quite the opposite.

The Three Comma Guy, Gavin Belson, the Conjoined Triangles of Success... Been through all that.

In Office Space there is the «pieces of flair» argument with the waitress (Aniston), it’s much more bitter, and I suspect much harder to keep it funny, because in truth those worker endured much more violent management, there is little space to spin it in a funny way.

--

When I was an early IT manager my team would make fun of me and compare me to the manager from office space... because I would always say "thanks" when I would ask them for something...

But I learned to say "thanks" because at Intel - in the 90's it was company culture to always close an email with "thanks"

When I worked at FB though it was a hostile environment. so no Thanks.

what? no one got beat over flair, and having worked in a lot of serving jobs, the level of violence serving drinks was roughly on par with the number of fights I've seen in the data center.

Living in Richardson explains Beavis and KotH.

It does mention he worked for a military contractor, which probably provided an accelerated environment for learning corporate bs.

Hilarious, yet the way corporate PR is heading it could be real and none would be the wiser.

to quote an old guy: "first as tragedy, then as farce"

Zuckerberg is clearly the responsible for the failures of Facebook.

You can’t have both.

Why not? Nothing you wrote suggests that we cannot have both. In fact, Musk bought Tesla, is not an engineer, has no engineering training or education or engineering accomplishments (the code he was writing for the company that became PayPal was notoriously terrible and had to be scrapped). Say what you want about Zuck, but if you plopped him down at a terminal and made him do the job of one of his own senior Devs I bet he would be able to do it. Musk couldn't do the same for any one of his companies in any of the technical positions.

I find it interesting that someone states something like 'you can't it both ways' without thinking it through and while presenting no reasoning for it, and then just leave it there like it is now a rule we must accept.

You should probably fact check this statement. There are plenty of people on quora or even here who worked with Musk. You are completely wrong on this.

"Some of you May Die, But it's a Sacrifice I am Willing to Make" - Lord Farquaad

Ive noticed it used this way more and more, presumably as people realize it’s utility as a get of jail free card

It's fucking job terminations. You're GOING to be criticized no matter how you do them. The best approach is to just be robotic about it, and maybe throw in a platitude that amounts to, "It's not you, it's me".

"We need to layoff half of the company. I'm sorry and take responsibility. I have failed our employees and shareholders. Because of this, I am stepping down". That's taking responsibility.

"We had a major F-up. It was my responsibility. And here are the concrete steps I am taking to ensure it never happens again, along with the mechanisms you all have to hold me accountable. If these fail, the following bad thing will happen to me." That's taking responsibility

Also if one of your options for "taking responsibility" is quitting, I guess your view of the world is that you would also fire any of your employees when they mess up, when whole industries have recognized the need for blameless cultures where making mistakes is part of the learning process.

The phrase "I take responsibility" is never accompanied with any sign that the person does in fact take responsibility. It means more than just "Ooops, I did a bad"

Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33450753

Either his claim to take responsibility means something, in terms of it actually leading to consequnces and/or actions, or it doesn't. If it's the former, then what are they? If it's the latter, then why?

For example: do shareholders hold him to his responsibility? And if so, how? If they don't, who improves Meta's corporate governance to ensure that this self-admitted mistake doesnt reoccur and sexure their investment?

I've never worked at a BigCorp. How does this stuff work?

Business shares something with that.

IIRC, the owner/CEO has fired himself some times, Ford had something like it, and I think LEGO too, years ago.

It's slightly absurd to say that "sell" is the only lever shareholders should have over public companies. It may be true in practical terms, but it's still a sad state of affairs.

How many people upset about Meta layoffs were equally fierce in condemning Zuck for Meta's stock performance over the last decade? Seems like yet another case of people wanting their cake and eating it too -- the only novelty is the people affected are some of the most privileged people in human history.

Since when does HN care about the stock price of a random company? The share price reflected the ownership structure so the people that bought in were aware and not coerced to buy the security. We shit on corporate short sightedness and suddenly everyone and their dog has a highly opinionated high conviction bet on what a random company should do with its cash flow?

Personally, I don’t care. If dude wants to try to build the jetsons space car, heck yeah. I’d rather someone in society try hard stuff (positive determinism) than more stock buy backs (like apple) or cash just sitting on the balance sheet idly (like historical google). Even if it 100% fails, society is better if we do research that doesn’t look outright obvious at first…that’s how we get better.

Which eventually leads to complete stagnation and nobody being willing and/or able to make a decision.

If a middle manager was responsible for a bad decision, their head would be on a spike. But it's the chief executive officer, so he gets a pass, if only because he's in the position of power.

Financial penalties that incentivize him to not fuck up again.

EDIT: Sure enough, Meta's stock is up ~17% since a week ago.

That tells you that companies have far too few mass layoffs.

Management has a fiduciary duty to shareholders. Stock price isn't everything, but it's still prima facie evidence of what shareholders want.

These 11k employees are not a threat to facebooks existence. Not even close. If that was the case FB stock would be tanking.

FB is pulling in record profits. They just are getting a little nervous and they are laying people off. It is ridiculous.

Put him on a PIP with a mentor? :D

Why would they need to use cloud?

If, just for the sake of argument, I said he should resign or compensate the affected people out of his own pocket, I'm fairly sure that people here would think I was being naive. People here are already saying that corporate leaders wouldnt take decisions if they had to be held responsible for the outcomes.

So we end-up with a bunch of people who everyone knows (a) are not responsible for mistakes, and (b) are tacitly understood to be able to make statements that habe no meaning. In other words, lies.

And thus the domain of trust becomes smaller and more fractured.

Saying you take responsibility is about clearing the workers of fault, it's not about thing you will reform or somehow suffer more than they will.

He could go out there and say it's not my responsibility, it is the workers fault. They underperformed. Most CEOs don't want to do that

But either way, it's still inevitable that a change in strategy would entail elimination of some of that headcount.

Let M = Makes the statement Let R = Feels Responsible Notation: ~R = Not R

Answering OP's questions 1 & 2: I think it's safe to assume P(M|R) = P(M|~R) = 1 So P(M) = 1

So Bayes' theorem simplifies as follows: P(R|M) = P(M|R)P(R)/PM) = P(R)

Thus, OP's point is that the statement tells us essentially nothing about the probability he actually feels responsible or empathetic, and I agree.

Sometimes this sort of thing happens where our priors don't allow for a belief update in response to evidence. For example, does me writing this comment change your best guess as to whether my favorite color is blue? That depends on what you think of P(favorite color blue | comment) and P(favorite color blue | ~comment). Both of those are probably the same right? If so, my comment doesn't allow you to update.

This excerpt from http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/20 is relevant:

  Professor Quirrell looked at Harry. "Mr. Potter," he said solemnly, with only a slight grin, "a word of advice. There is such a thing as a performance which is too perfect. Real people who have just been beaten and humiliated for fifteen minutes do not stand up and graciously forgive their enemies. It is the sort of thing you do when you're trying to convince everyone you're not Dark, not -"

  "I can't believe this! You can't have every possible observation confirm your theory! "

  "And that was a trifle too much indignation."

  "What on Earth do I have to do to convince you? "

  "To convince me that you harbor no ambitions of becoming a Dark Lord?" said Professor Quirrell, now looking outright amused. "I suppose you could just raise your right hand."

  "What?" Harry said blankly. "But I can raise my right hand whether or not I -" Harry stopped, feeling rather stupid.

  "Indeed," said Professor Quirrell. "You can just as easily do it either way. There is nothing you can do to convince me because I would know that was exactly what you were trying to do. And if we are to be even more precise, then while I suppose it is barely possible that perfectly good people exist even though I have never met one, it is nonetheless improbable that someone would be beaten for fifteen minutes and then stand up and feel a great surge of kindly forgiveness for his attackers. On the other hand it is less improbable that a young child would imagine this as the role to play in order to convince his teacher and classmates that he is not the next Dark Lord. The import of an act lies not in what that act resembles on the surface, Mr. Potter, but in the states of mind which make that act more or less probable."

  Harry blinked. He'd just had the dichotomy between the representativeness heuristic and the Bayesian definition of evidence explained to him by a wizard.

Since all of the priors here are speculative, there’s no use in pulling out Bayes.

The outcome given Bayes is the same as the outcome without Bayes, just a bit noisier ;)

https://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule/ has some great follow up info.

Certainly with a prior that the events are independent, then you won't be able to update your probability of R by knowing that M did happen, any more than knowing last nights lotto numbers would probability of R.

In reality, things are even worse, as assuming independence is not fully reasonable, so you will end up with uncertainly about how or if the variables relate. One could assume some form of meta probability distribution of various ways the variables could relate, but then direct application of Bayes formula not feasible. You would still in that scenario not be learning much if anything useful about P(R).

But I’ll tell you this from experience: lasting people off because you chose to grow too fast is really, really hard. I’ve done it, though in my case it was a lot fewer people and I actually knew and loved them all. If I had to lay off 11,000 people I’d lose a lot of sleep over it.

I can’t imagine life is fun for him at the moment. But, just like every affected employee, he will get through it.

Sweet dreams.

Did you find it easier or harder than when you didn’t manage people?

Have you ever laid someone off or fired them? Was it so easy?

I've heard this sentiment from people who have laid those off and it always falls flat to me.

Laying off 1 or 100 people compared to being laid off - especially when the person doing the firing, usually a Director or above, is making 3-4x at least what the line employees are - is like comparing pricking your finger with a needle to cutting it off with a dull knife.

It should be difficult if you're not a sociopath, but they're so incomparable it's not even a statement worth making or considering.

I’m arguing against the idea that if you’re a manager or have money, that moments like this are easy or that there’s no empathy. i’m not saying that anyone should feel bad for directors, CEOs, or whoever, but they shouldn’t paint a ridiculous straw man either.

You could even argue that in Zuck’s position, money is a non-factor. He has more than enough money. What he doesn’t have is a beloved and future-proof company, and these layoffs only push him further from that.

Laying off 13,000 is a statistic.

(Based on a badly misquoted Stalin.)

If this sort of thing bothered Zuck, he would not lay people off.

If it was a small startup (been there done that) then yeah, when you see people day-to-day, and get to know them and their lives outside of work? Really hard to fire people, knowing how it will affect the other people in their lives.

A multi-national, multi-billion dollar company with 80,000+ employees? I'm not so sure.

He didn't pay a fine, it isn't any sort of punishment. He tanked the value of the asset that is the primary component of his wealth. That money is gone whether he "takes responsibility" or not.

Fairly sure that none of the FB employees are paid so low where they have to stop asking their spouses to go on a $20 lunch with friends.

Not saying they shouldn't have saved for a rainy day. This is a scary time to be laid off.

Hey now, if he only has $38B that means he can't afford to buy Twitter until Elon finishes destroying it.

But that's not taking responsibility.

As an analogy, if you crash into another car with your car, you can't just say "It's my fault, I take the blame" and then walk away without paying for the repairs. Accepting blame is a nice first step, but taking responsibility means restoring the victim to how they were before the action happened.

As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice.

Perhaps he will give up his sixth boat, or his fourth house, or his 13th car? Maybe he's going to wait on buying that private island until next quarter.

Everyone has to make sacrifices.

I think it's interesting how pedestrian Oprah, Zuck, and Larry Ellison are, obsessing over a place Elvis visited for pork barbecue parties while demonstrating 0 understanding of local people and their needs.

It's incredibly embarrassing for humanity.

It doesn't mean anything in terms of action or "self-punishment" but nor should it. The dude has already lost many more billions of dollars than you or I will ever see.

I'm no fan of the guy, but some people won't even take responsibility verbally. So at least he's not descending that low.

And the severance seems decent so it all seems to be handled fine. Not sure what more you're looking for.

Those are mostly virtual dollars and he has a lot more real ones in his account, while I agree that whatever he does to "punish himself" will be practically meaningless it might have some symbolic meaning. Lowering his and senior management salaries and incentives won't save jobs but will give a better image of the crisis

And lowering the salaries of senior management doesn't make any sense. They're paid market rates. If you punitively cut their compensation in half or something, they'll just leave for another company that does pay market rate. You can't force them to stick around and be "punished", that's not how salaried employment in a market economy works.

Also, punishing management goes against the idea that he's taking all the responsibility here. Wouldn't that just be scapegoating?

That's a joke, a tax dodge, a PR gag, a farce. There's nothing fiscally responsible about it. Taking financial responsibility, if such a thing exists, would involve giving up his equity comp or even some of his holdings. Give it to the employees whose careers you've disrupted through your bad business decisions. That's responsibility.

"Market rates" is likewise a joke.

A: "Market rates for corporate executives are obscene."

B: "They're paid market rates, what's the problem?"

And their careers have been more disrupted than some random software engineer's career.

Also remember that since it's executives who set executive compensation, there is some incentive to inflate it.

(They can, of course, walk away if they disagree. But so can every other employee.)

Were they really? Did they just lose their jobs and are they now underwater on mortgages that their families can no longer afford without that income? How many executives lives were "disrupted" worse than that? Because I'm talking about a significant fraction of 11k people that you're dismissing as "some random software engineer."

Based on the latest proxy, he does not take any equity compensation. He only gets his $1 salary, a corporate private jet for business travel and $10M / year "to cover additional costs related to his and his family's personal security. This allowance is paid to Mr. Zuckerberg net of required tax withholdings, and Mr. Zuckerberg must apply the net amount towards additional personnel, equipment, services, residential improvements, or other security-related costs."

https://www.bamsec.com/filing/132680122000043/1?cik=1326801&...

The excerpt I quoted was written for a different purpose (namely to explain the $10M / year and whether the compensation committee deems it appropriate), so perhaps you feel that the language is somewhat vague as far as answering your question goes. I actually think it's pretty clear as it ends with

> "has requested to receive only $1 in annual salary and does not receive any bonus payments, equity awards, or other incentive compensation."

But earlier on in the document (https://www.bamsec.com/filing/132680122000043/1?cik=1326801&...), they do make the explicit assertion that you are looking for:

> "2021 Equity Awards. Mr. Zuckerberg did not receive any additional equity awards in 2021 because our compensation, nominating & governance committee believed that his existing equity ownership position sufficiently continued to align his interests with those of our shareholders."

Additionally, travel/security don't seem to have any hard spending limit and alleviates Zuck's personal tax liability. (by $27M anyway)

Per the filing you linked:

" Mr. Zuckerberg uses private aircraft for personal travel in connection with his overall security program (including, beginning in 2022, a private aircraft that is indirectly and wholly owned by Mr. Zuckerberg and operated by an independent charter company). On certain occasions, Mr. Zuckerberg may be accompanied by guests when using private aircraft. "

"the costs of Mr. Zuckerberg's security program vary from year to year depending on requisite security measures, his travel schedule, and other factors."

(Emphasis mine)

It was not socialist. It just called itself that.

There’s a Baptists and bootleggers coalition to pervert the meaning of socialism. Right wingers want to call everything to the left of Ronald Reagan socialism so they can paint it all as evil and a subset of people that are fairly bog standard welfare capitalists want to call themselves socialists because they think it sounds edgy and cool.

They are both wrong. Socialism involves collectivizing the means of production. Not a wealth tax. Not a greenhouse emissions rule. Not forcing companies to put women on their board. Not repealing at will employment. Collectivizing the means of production.

If you want to call for nationalizing Facebook then you are a socialist (and a fool.)

Or is this just a glib low effort put down?

When there are an estimated 7 to 9 million excess deaths recorded for the duration of the USSR, there's certainly going to be some survivorship bias with any polling.

The fall of the soviet system to capitalism was a mess, but it doesn't actually tell us anything about how people felt about communism vs capitalism. The statistic presented was in defense of socialism/communism. But, the transition from the soviet union to capitalist Russia was messy in its own right. Russia was looted by oligarchs taking advantage of the disarray.

All that being said, it looks like the poster was referencing this article, which is based on a survey conducted in 2009, long after the collapse of the soviet union...but one year into a worldwide recession. So I'm still not sure what conclusions one can really draw from that survey.

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2009/1223/Why-nearly-...

I no longer buy into either ideology as inherently good/bad anyways. At the end of the day, the powerful will exploit any system to their own benefit. I do believe that Communism is inherently dangerous, but only because it relies on an involuntary contract from everyone in the system to participate in a specific way. That contract violates the human impulse to act in their own short term rational interest. So you need to enforce rules, and that means establishing a more authoritarian governing body. Communism demands personal sacrifice of the accumulation of private wealth- and humans are naturally selfish. It just doesn't scale well.

Salvador Allende became President of Chile in 1970, he presided for 3 years before being taken down by a coup supported by the US government. In the time he was in power, he pushed a socialist program for Chile. Let's see some highlights of his "prisons, labor camps and starving", eh?

- nationalization of large-scale industries (notably copper mining and banking)

- a programme of free milk for children in the schools and in the shanty towns

- payment of pensions and grants was resumed

- increased construction of residential buildings, averaging 55,000/year

- all part-time workers granted rights to social security, and increased payments

- proposed electricity price-increase withdrawn

- bread prices fixed

- 55,000 volunteers sent to the south to teach literacy, and provide medical care

- obligatory minimum wage for workers of all ages was established

- free milk introduced for expectant and nursing mothers and [young] children

- free school-meals established

- rent reductions

- construction of Santiago subway rescheduled to serve working-class neighbourhoods first.

- state-sponsored distribution of free food to neediest citizens.

- minimum taxable income-level was raised

- middle-class Chileans benefited from elimination of taxes on modest incomes and property.

- Exemptions from capital taxes were extended, benefitted 330,000 small proprietors.

- According to one estimate, purchasing power went up by 28% between October 1970 and July 1971.[53]

- The rate of inflation fell from 36.1% in 1970 to 22.1% in 1971

- Average real wages rose by 22.3% during 1971.

- Minimum real wages for blue-collar workers were increased by 56% during the first quarter of 1971 - real minimum wages for white-collar workers were increased by 23% - Although the acceleration of inflation in 1972 and 1973 eroded part of the initial increase in wages, they still rose (on average) in real terms during the 1971–73 period.

and, much more;

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende#Presidency

By contrast, the UK today has 27% of children living in poverty[1], and the UK government has voted against free school meals for children, and just tried to push through a tax cut for the rich, and electricity prices have gone up while energy companies are posting record profits, housing construction is down and prices are up so normal citizens are being priced out of the housing market.

[1] https://cpag.org.uk/child-poverty/child-poverty-facts-and-fi...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

He's lost literally 73% of his wealth over the past year and change (assuming it's all META ownership). That is a spectacular drop.

And the people getting laid off are getting very generous severance packages.

So I don't know what you're talking about. The market has punished him, and quite severely, for his missteps.

Is it worse to lose a billion dollars when you have two b, or a thousand dollars when all you have is 2k?

The marginal utility of money for power and influence in our societies seems to start a few orders of magnitude above the upper middle class, and so far doesn't seem to bend down very much as money increases.

But just saying that you're taking responsibility is not actually taking responsibility. It's empty words.

Taking responsibility would mean owning the situation as being caused by you, and critically evaluating your actions to see if there were different paths you could have taken given the same information, or if there was other information that you should have added to your decision-making.

There are some mistakes so grave and unjustifiable that resignation would be the appropriate way to take responsibility for them, but I don't think a round of layoffs pending an expected economic downturn after excessive growth qualifies.

This is very far from Zuck's first mistake. In any case, though, I offered an alternative: making himself accountable to the board of directors. He is not accountable. He can't be fired, he can only resign. The fundamental problem is that Zuck gets to define the terms of his own accountability, which is almost an oxymoron.

That was me.

> he is literally not accountable because he answers to no one

Zuck said he wanted to take accountability for overhiring and then having to do layoffs. So the question is, what does the theoretical possibility of employees resigning or users leaving have to do with accountability for overhiring and layoffs?

He, like Vladimir Putin, is only accountable to himself.

Ideally, society should not allow this type of business structure if a company is public or a reasonably large size (say 5k employees).

https://youtu.be/Ug75diEyiA0

You know why the food sucks so bad when you know who they are catering to :p

Absolutely this. Others in this thread are saying that the fact of having lost a lot of money is enough for him to be "accountable". But IMU the specific arrangement with Meta class B vs class A shares is that the group of other institutional investors lost _more_ but didn't have any ability to influence decisions, replace the CEO, etc. Zuckerberg's large on-paper loss isn't accountability for decisions he made, but is just the risk of being a wealthy person with a lopsided portfolio.

Both because of his role in deciding to hire so much, and because he's dead set on pursuing a metaverse vision which is controversial, I think "accountability" would require him to at least make it possible for other shareholders to vote on proposals on an equal footing.

> What this means is they don’t blame outside factors. Compare this w layoffs where the CEO says this is due to “the economy” “the macro climate”, suggesting they did everything right. When someone says they take accountability, it means it was their poor decisions - that could have/should have been better - that led to this. You know who to blame.

This was a tactful announcement and a generous severance after providing a job with pay and benefits in the top 0.1% for possibly years and years.

My personal belief is that I would like to see discussion of the system that gets us to the point of mass layoffs. As rich as Zuck or Musk or whoever is, they are still close to gears in the system than orchestrators, so we should probably have a discussion about if this situation is something we could modify the system to prevent, and if we want to modify the system in that way.

Yes. Accepting responsibility is more preferable to not accepting it and blaming it on other people/things, period.

Let's say you have two leaders in this situation. #1 says "The macro economic climate is bad, so we're laying people off." #2 says "I made a mistake; this was my fault." All other things equal, I know which one I'd prefer to work with... How a leader comports themselves is just as important as their results -- especially in bad times.

Adding "and I take responsibility" without actually substantiating that makes it sound way more hollow.

Do people want him to fire himself to show he means it, or what?

I think the meaning is pretty clearly "Many of you are being let go not because of poor performance on your part, but bad decisions on my part."

It's acknowledging fault.

Increasing value of company stock

He’s the primary controlling shareholder and defacto owner. What other kind of accountability would make any sense at all? Even if he fired himself, he’d either have to shut the company down, or find someone to replace him and manage them, which makes him their boss.

Edit: to correct dumb statement around share ownership. But you know what I meant.

Does everybody take a job expecting to leave it? I don't think that is the case.

They aren't losing money or posting losses.

Remember a few years ago when people were asking "Why can't people just say they made a mistake and own up to it instead of shifting blame?" Now that people are taking responsibility for mistakes publicly the response is "Yes, but what does that mean?"

Taking responsibility means just that. It means saying you fucked up and not blaming others for your failures. It doesn't mean that self immolation follows soon after.

If you've tried to hire outside of FAANG over the past decade you'd know one thing: FAANG is hoarding talent. Every developer I've really wanted to hold on to has gone to a big tech company.. I can't blame them. But, here's the thing, so have many of the contractors that I didn't end up hiring for very good reasons.

Layoffs suck but the rate of hiring in big companies wasn't sustainable. A correction is here. It's temporary, but, it's real.

These layoff messages, down to the structure and content, all sound the same because PR people follow best practices just like everyone else. You wouldn't ask why all Redux or Angular apps use similar patterns.. They're using patterns, that's what patterns are for.

Real numbers here: $250k for a mid-level UX designer and $575k (base comp) for an Angular dev. That's expensive. And, depending on the candidate, not worth it. There's a lot of reality outside of FAANG and finance.

It is not the same for a billionaire to loose money as it is for you or me. To take a concrete example. Elon Musk could just close down Twitter right now, and waste away his 44 bn USD he spent on it. After that squander, he would still be the richest man on the planet.

But honestly a business leader that screws up so bad, should probably loose all their wealth, like 100%.

That would incentivize extremely risk-averse decisions by business leaders and lead to society-wide stagnation. The result would be far more suffering overall.

We actually have a reason to believe that the standard risk attracted business is a net-negative for society. These businesses tend to rely on government bailouts when their risky behavior doesn’t work out, or they lay off a large number of people, or they cause massive environmental damage, etc. I much prefer a business that plays it safe and doesn’t risk our environment and our economy while maximizing the profits they give to their shareholders.

Secondly, there is no reason to believe that a CEO is any sort of supreme decision maker of a company. Perhaps a democratized workplace—where the workers have a say in whether the business should engage in a risky behavior—is better at evaluating the risk. If that is the case then a CEO dictator might not want to lead the business into a risky endeavor at since they might get sued if it goes wrong, but workers who have only their jobs to loose might vote to do exactly that.

I find the society-wide stagnation prediction lacking in imagination.

This doesn't seem logical. Companies aren't some static things. Especially social media companies, which usually have very short lives. A corrective, appropriate, action, in response to a changing market, could very easily be a reduction in headcount.

All evidence suggests Facebook has no future [1].

> But honestly a business leader that screws up so bad

What's your metric for screwing up? Is it short, medium, or long term? Should short term goals/profits be the only goal of a company?

1. https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/11/teens-abandoned-facebook-p...

As a worker my metric is first and foremost about the worker. A company screws up if it fails to bring profits to the workers. Laying off 11,000 workers certainly falls under a big screw up by that metric. I know companies—such as charity/non-profits exists who have humanitarian goals, or even amusement, as their goals, however I don’t see Facebook there.

But we live in a capitalist society and most companies’ goals are profits for their shareholders. Facebook seems to have screwed that goal up as well. And instead of letting the person who lead the company into this failure pay the price of failing, they take it down on the workers... This seems quite unfair, and is even illegal in many (most?) countries.

I can't extract any meaning from this. Could you be more specific?

Maybe a scenario will help. What if the company becomes not profitable enough (there can be reason's that don't require leadership fault), and it will fail unless workers are let go? Do you let it fail, causing all to lose their jobs, or do you trim the fat, allowing some to continue?

I would assume you would want to look at the whole, more than the individual.

Please note the above happened to a company I worked for, during the last recession, and it was, very objectively, not the fault of the leadership.

I apologize if I interpreted your response incorrectly, but it was, again, very indirect.

The purpose of my question was to help me understand your perspective, and to help you present some meaning to your statement "As a worker my metric is first and foremost about the worker."

Facebook is extremely rich, facebook can afford to break apart their business and give part of it to those 11,000 workers. Heck facebook can even afford to keep those 11,000 workers earning 6 digits while being tasked with doing nothing. In either case, it would be in the interest of the worker. What is not in the interest of a worker is having a leadership that makes bad decisions, wastes the time of the workers, and then lays them off. This kind of behavior should not be rewarded.

> The workers don’t vanish with the business. If the government provides enough relief these workers can organize around a new business

Starting from scratch is rarely an efficient, or possible, solution, especially anything with IP involved.

> after being compensated from the failing business

Were they not compensated for their time during employment? Wouldn't being compensated for the failing business require knowing the future? I'm not asking this negatively, I'm just trying to understand perspective. Have you ever worked for a startup, or been involved in a small/medium business that's not-yet profitable?

I think you would find extreme risk aversion in a system implemented like you describe, if the only option were continuous success or quick failure. Are there any areas of the world that prefer bankruptcy over headcount reduction, where we could look at the statistics?

> similar how a shareholder can sue for lost profits.

Only if there's negligence or fraud, which you have about zero chance to prove in this case.

> But honestly a business leader that screws up so bad, should probably loose all their wealth, like 100%.

Would you agree to lose 100% of you money each time you make a mistake? If not, why should he?

A real consequence would be them loosing everything except 5000 USD

This is still by far the most common case, and in fact it is probably becoming more common because large index funds have recently increased requirements related to ownership share structuring (https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/08/05/sp-and-ftse-russe...).

In this specific case though, the investors knew that Zuck had complete control and they decided to invest regardless, so I do not have any sympathy for their complaints.

Edit: In this instance, the "bug" led to 11,000 people losing their jobs.

This makes the assumption that the current path was the only, and best, path, and that the CEO doesn't see a better path in the distance, or some danger immediately ahead.

Most of the big tech companies were made by people who ignored the crowds yelling at them to keep going straight. And, many of the failed behemoths of today did just that.

In a case like this, I don't think the point should be whether Zuckerberg "would actually feel" a consequence: it should be whether the people getting laid off—as in, the ones who were wronged—can feel it.

If you mean unlimited, this seems like an unreasonable expectation. FB employees receive a 4 month severance package, 4 months should be plenty of time to find a job for a developer/office worker.

That's more than fair.

Very generous I'd say.

If your decisions lead to 11,000 people losing their jobs, and you "take responsibility for that", then you should be 11,001.

Plenty of CEOs have blamed the economy, the pipeline, the customers, the competition, the weather, etc. He's accepting he made some decisions that over-extended the company and as a result they have to make difficult layoffs. (Which has happened at every company I've been a part of and is happening at many other companies just in the past week.)

What if you want to hang on, and hope to hire more in the future?

When someone is accused of a crime, they can plead innocent or guilty. That is step one.

There are more steps after that…

They don't WANT to forgive them, or provide them with any redemption. Regardless of the apology, you will use it to push back further. Look for any hole in the apology to point to. If that fails, criticize the apology for being too late, or only to save face... in any case, make sure to proclaim that you're even more angry after the apology.

I'm not saying people should never apologize, but I get sick of this whole routine and all the acting. People will always just do what they want and it will just be based on a knee jerk sense of how much they like you.

But they aren't, this isn't “taking responsibility”, this is just following the latest spin doctor trend in public communication.

Taking responsibility for a failure means stepping down.

People can disagree about whether the package is satisfactory, but that's completely beside the point. The severance package is the make good Zuckerberg is offering: it is an expense his company is paying when they do not have to.

It is the implied answer to the question "Oh yeah? How is he taking responsibility?" Argue about whether it's good enough, but it is an answer.

What they're complaining about is that Zuckerberg can't take responsibility here, it's too late (being responsible would have been gambling less), but he is claiming he will which is more obvious marketing speak (sounds good, doesn't make any sense).

When you go higher up the food chain, the same thing happens. When the people at the very top do something like that, does the same happen? Sometimes. Depends on who's on the BoD I guess.

And that's how it should be. If you own the business, nobody gets to fire you.

(assuming bad != illegal)

That would be a meaningful way of saying he is sorry as well as setting a precedent for all other billionaires who just "take responsibility" and continue on