If I were there I’d be seriously considering a less volatile environment. If I were an A player, I’d be able to do so even easier and potentially find more meaningful work. This seems like a bad move for Meta, just leaving the axe up in the air ready to strike like this.
With numbers in the thousands, it gives me the sense that it might not always matter what you do or how good you are.
That may be intentional. I could see a scenario where voluntary attrition helps them get reduce size more organically and with lower cost than a layoff. Meta is still huge and pays good money. They can handle a huge level of attrition and still have enough "A players" left over to work on the thing that truly require that level of operation.
> With numbers in the thousands, it gives me the sense that it might not always matter what you do or how good you are.
Fully agree on this. At that scope, it's broad cuts with a lot of meat going with the fat.
This is a terrible idea, though. It's always the desirable employees that have options that leave an environment like this, and it's always the less competent employees that hold on for dear life and stay.
I've seen this so many times in my career. The A players will stay because they're attached to the things they've created, but the B players will leave and you're left with lots of C players.
In the long run its cheaper to lay off people.
If so, yes, they do. But it's incredibly hard to decide on causality there, because companies are only expected to do mass-layoffs when the management believes it can't grow anymore.
> it's always the less competent employees that hold on for dear life and stay.
Meh. People stay for many reasons. It is not always "not having options". It is fairly often "I actually want to stay despite layoff". And again, there is no way to force people to stay. Confident people will be leaving either way.
Meta's hiring bar is pretty high, though. Plenty of desirable people will stay because there's nowhere else to go that pays as well, and the "less competent" ones are likely still more competent than the industry average.
These elite companies have now laid off hundreds of thousands of people. The idea that there's enough "low performers" to throw in the garbage should be obsolete now, and reveals a sort of wishful thinking "all those other people who lost their jobs deserve it, but not me, it will never happen to me"
I'm not making any comments or judgements whatsoever on employees there, but doesn't Meta use the same terrible hiring practices that values so-called "leet" code style interviews? Such interviewing practices are bound to produce poor results, especially at the scale that Meta, Amazon, etc. do them at.
These two statements do not follow, why would "such interviewing practices [be] bound to produce poor results, especially at the scale that Meta, Amazon, etc. do them at?"
Thus, it is only natural that you may have many people in the organization and on teams who are poor fits, either technically, culturally, etc., because almost all of the "leet" code stuff is irrelevant to most real-world work. If it is relevant, then it is usually only a small portion of the job. This isn't a judgement on anything other than the hiring practice.
But like I said, I don't really know much about Meta's hiring process. It's possible that I'm misapplying this style of interview to them and misunderstood about if they actually use it. Amazon does, and I can confirm it was a miserable interview experience.
The problem is A, B, and C are not at birth positions. People in these buckets rotate across the buckets at various phases in their careers. And the participants in the A buckets are basically people with good leadership- who can train, motivate and get them good products/projects to work on. That given anybody can leave the company and if you have good managers it wouldn't matter.
The real problem happens when you go meta to this. How do you get A level managers. That's a very hard problem to solve and often it also depends of the boss at the very top. The CEO. Many times the revolving door, golden parachute CEOs don't even care. The founder CEO's are tired in most cases. Performing at unicorn level can be brutal on your body and mind on the longer run. And they'd rather semi retire after a few years than continue with that lifestyle. This is where the real problems begin.
In cases where the top most boss gives a damn about the company, the company tends to be A player generation factory. Look at Ford under Henry Ford, Apple under Jobs. Microsoft under Bill G. The boss at the top just needs to get this right else its over.
After giving legs to avatars, is there really much work left?
This is exceptionally hard on immigrants on a visa, who have limited options to leave voluntarily.
I'm an AI research engineer who was recently laid off and this was my experience.
Skillset is almost identical, biggest difference is having research experience.
They won't.
> I'm an AI research engineer who was recently laid off and this was my experience.
But not from Facebook? They are very well compensated right now; they aren't just going to drop into a better paying role.
They have been involved in so many shady things and have had such a "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach it sounds maddening.
I think a lot of people working there just made the calculated decision that Meta being at the very high end of the compensation scale made it worth it.
Even if you are in the ML/AI stuff. You have to balance out that they were funding at a very high rate versus that they were funding the work for less than stellar reasons.
Maybe because, I don’t know, Meta pays well? I don’t go to work for self fulfillment. I work to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter.
No I don’t work for Meta nor have I ever.
> I think a lot of people working there just made the calculated decision that Meta being at the very high end of the compensation scale made it worth it.
Is this our level of laziness now? To read the first sentence and base our snarky replies entirely off it, ignoring the fact that it’s a rhetorical question that was answered immediately after?
That didn’t help. It’s like saying “I don’t know why the guy died. Maybe it’s because he got shot in the head at point blank range”?
Of course people work at Meta because of the money. No one works for Meta to make the world a better place
Because your comment indicates that you clearly don’t understand that people sometimes ask questions not because they want an answer but for emphasis or dramatic effect.
This was, clearly, such a case.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question
Digging down on your snark when you’re called out is a bold play that doesn’t generally work. Most people have this thing called humbleness but I guess you left it with the rhetorical questions.
The original post was no more insightful than “I wonder why he got wet when he jumped into the wster”
Hence, you know, me calling you out on it.
Get off your high horse.
All of the replies you are getting are trying to tell you that there’s no deep thinking involved. There’s no “hey I considered it and the comp overcame my concerns” etc. Most of the leetcode-into-fang people are not doing a moral calculus or even spending thirty seconds thinking about the ethical aspects.
There are no concerns. There are no ethics for most of the people in our industry. It is an employer who pays well so they work there.
Your comment implies that, yes, it came down to comp, but also implies that for Facebook employees, on average, there is any thought process beyond economic maximization. There isn’t.
I know a ton of facebook and ex-facebook engineers. They also worked for famously ethical companies like Zynga and Uber. Now and then they’ll do the pretend performative handwringing or whatever but their decisions are consistent.
There is just money.
The former approach means you can’t do anything with clear conscience: do you take that vacation or donate the money? Do you punish yourself if your work on databases eventually was used for a scam?
I find it paralyzing to operate in the former way: so I take the traditional stem person approach. I just ensure what I do is good (obviously for the highest bidder). I won’t work for an explicitly criminal organization - but as long as the government approves, am in. I am going to let them do the policy making and governing because frankly I am tired and probably incompetent at that since I don’t sink much time thinking about it.
There is nothing tricky about it. No one works at Meta thinking they are feeding starving children.
It’s also “difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”
I’m not making any moral stand either way.
Engineers in Meta have advanced technology in so many ways (buck / react / so many contributions to distributed software / leveldb …). I think it is very reductionist to discount all that work.
There’s nothing about salary depending on it here: there’s a ton about your work contributing to the global good irrespective of who’s funding it (and whatever ways they end up utilizing it).
I’m not judging anyone for making an outsized salary for working at Facebook. Just be honest that you’re there for the money and not some high minded ideals.
Ok.
That being said, Palantir's business with the US government dwarfs any they might have with the Ukrainian army. And last I checked the US is in the business of murdering brown people.
Largely because much of the company is a great place to work. Actually working there, I don't find this hard to see at all.
I'm not sure how many A players have left meta, but I'm sure A players never want to work in a low morale company. The damage is much higher than layoff number.
Are they going to sully themselves and work as “enterprise developers” (note sarcasm)?
I don't know how to break this to HN, but the Zuck isn't the sharpest tool in the shed. He may be gambling, but Hanlon's Razor says otherwise.
Luck had very little to do with facebook's success.
Identifying threats? Please. EVERYONE knows who the threats to FB were and are. It’s just that not all of us has the money to buy them.
Mark Zuckerberg is average.
His one big “innovation” is taking legs out of Second Life.
I'm Danish, but we have laws and regulations about mass-layoffs which means companies have to give employees an advance notice of 30-60-90 days, depending on company and layoff size.
I imagine California might have something similar.
Most companies choose to lay you off, then give you 'severance' package/pay that is equal or more to those days.
What is AE? Meta has a program for their top ~1% or so (who knows really) where they dump a pile of RSUs on your head, "additional equity", to retain you and bet on your future at the company. For most it's 2-4x your annual stock refresher, though I don't know exactly how it varies.
If you're E7+, this is another 1M+ stock grant on a 4 year vest on top of your 600k+ refresher grant. Stock is up from their internal refresher pricing. Their "A players" all just got ~5% bump on their 1.5M+ RSU grant.
G and other FAANG struggle to compete with Meta on comp for the actual A players. We'll see if they budgeted enough for AE to keep the people that matter.
WhatsApp famously had ~50 employees for ~$16 billion in acquisition price.
The show Silicon Valley has a great parody of this fact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFTaEenaHM
Honest question, but are they? And, just as important, is anyone other than a FAANG company willing to pay them the same high comps right at this moment?
I can see a high-need-for-people/high-comp scenario still possible in some parts of finance, but with these recent events I'm not so sure anymore. I'm also sure that right now there's a high demand for people in anything related to MIC/the war industry, but I don't think they can provide the same high comps as FAANGs do, unless one choose to go the contractor route (which also comes with its pluses and minuses).
These layoffs don't happen in a really hot market.
As much as people like to think that developers are just cogs on wheels, companies still want experienced devs (senior and above), and they are still difficult to hire.
Arguably python is so easy that junior devs aren't that far off from senior devs.
Start asking questions about Linux, or networking, or security, you won’t find many that can answer.
The difference between a junior and senior developer has nothing to do with the language. Regardless of the language the engineering fundamentals are the same.
Also, there's a billion mile difference between a junior's code and a senior's in any language and this is true of Python as much as anything else.
A languages syntactic or design simplicity is irrelevant. Even if it were not, Python's semantics make it particularly easy to write poor code and trigger footguns.
I've written C, JavaScript, Rust, Go, Python, Java and a bit of Erlang ... Python is easily one of the easiest languages to make a mess in if you've not got a solid engineering mindset.
I could go on, your comment was trash in so many ways, which experience would tell you.
As someone who's done 20 years of professional C++ development along with 15 years of professional python development, as well as 10 years of professional javascript/react development on a systems that go across the stack from the lowest level of sensors and embedded systems to the browser front end I know what I'm talking about.
I've also done rust, go, erlang, java, and I've also done a ton of haskell as well as lisp. I've been all over the place likely more than you.
>The difference between a junior and senior developer has nothing to do with the language. Regardless of the language the engineering fundamentals are the same.
This is beyond wrong. You've done C, you've done rust, then you must know that the fundamentals of systems programming is much more wider ranging then python. What's a pointer? What's a unique pointer or shared pointer? What's move semantics? What's the difference between stack allocation and heap allocation? What's an R value vs. L value? What's a borrowed value? What's virtual memory? What's an interface (arguably with the advent of annotations types are not more relevant in python but there is huge class of senior python programmers who don't use types)
The above are programming fundamentals that a python programmer never needs to know. A python programmer can go from junior to principal and not need to KNOW any of the above simply because python abstracts these concepts away from the user. The fact that a python programmer doesn't need to know any of these things makes it significantly easier. For web apps a company is most efficient if they hire a mid level python developer over some principle python developer with 10 years of experience.
I think your getting off on a different topic. Those guys aren't engineers anymore right? They're more technical managers; or architects.
>So yea, deep language knowledge, while an excellent skill, is not something that defines a senior eng (at least in Meta and I presume in similar FAANG companies).
I agree with this, but this is not what the others are talking about. The topic right now is about python developers. The more wider range role you're talking about here isn't a person with the title "Senior python software developer." Meta likely doesn't have that title.
Additionally, if a company works purely within the python ecosystem of web development, the "architecture" actually doesn't get too complex. Most of this stuff is trivial too, I give it an additional year to learn it.
If you're doing stuff with shared memory and utlra low latency applications then it's a completely different scenario, but you wouldn't be working in python if you had that requirement.
It might have heap allocation, Python has numpy.
Rust might ...
Even so, while there _may_ be more technical scope in some languages, or more immediate surface area, this should be true:
A senior developer primarily in language Y should be technically capable enough to be senior in language Z with some degree of work.
The language isn't relevant. Data structures, engineering mindset, pragmatism, intuition, maths reasoning, abstract thinking, ...
These are things that make a senior developer.
If I find a Python dev without this skillset at a high level they're not being put in a senior position because they'll add technical debt, cost and risk without even knowing it. They're a liability.
Your "senior" Python developers don't sound senior to me.
If you think you can promote anyone to senior or principal without the above, you're a liability too. Good job.
You must be from a hacker school. C has pointers.
>It might have heap allocation, Python has numpy.
Python has heap allocation. Every freaking programming language has heap allocation.
It's just in python you don't have to know when it happens and when it doesn't happen. It's hidden from you. You can guess when it happens but you have to be senior enough to know what it means.
When you need to worry about heap allocation, python is the language to NOT use. If you're a python developer, you'll never hit this problem.
>The language isn't relevant.
It is relevant. It's clear to me you don't even know what a heap allocation is and when it occurs. This concept is complex enough that you need a bit of intuition to know it. Glancing at the wikipedia won't provide you with the needed insight. If you did C++ you'd know it and you would also know how to perform this optimization in python.
In fact in fintech and gaming, they don't hire python programmers to do C++ work for a specific reason. It's 10x harder to program C++. Language MATTERS.
>Data structures, engineering mindset, pragmatism, intuition, maths reasoning, abstract thinking, ...
pfft. you think this type of thinking exists only for a select few? Let me put it to you this way. Most people in the world of normal intelligence can learn calculus. If you can learn calculus then you have the capacity to learn all of the above. Which is basically most people on earth.
>If I find a Python dev without this skillset at a high level they're not being put in a senior position because they'll add technical debt, cost and risk without even knowing it. They're a liability.
Yeah give them 1-2 years. They will get those abilities if they want it.
>If you think you can promote anyone to senior or principal without the above, you're a liability too. Good job.
You can't promote anyone. At that level it's largely political. How well can you lead, how well can you direct, how much other people respect you. It's also how a company defines the word principal. The people in these roles are not always the best in terms of technical ability.
The promotion is at the purview of the manager and he doesn't choose such a promotion based off of technical ability. If he did then a standardized test would be the most efficient way to measure technical ability.
For C++ it takes probably 4 or 5 years.
This is not nonsense. This is real.
People who can actually engineer in python is becoming more and more common place.
There's still a deficit of talent, even in Python. I don't see anyone denying this reality.
But to your point, there is a flood of bad candidates.
How would you know did you hire these candidates to find out? Or did you dismiss them as bad because they didn't pass some brain teaser algorithm interview?
Those candidates go on to get hired at companies with a lower bar for lower salaries and those lower salaries do influence the market.
Yes.
We'll still interview them, but they're usually pretty bad. I'm struggling to remember one who wasn't. The one's we've hired have been disasters.
You have to give them some take home exercise. That's the best way to determine if they're not a false negative. Unfortunately many good devs just don't have the time to do a takehome.
Did you hire a candidate who say... didn't know what MRO was, but created a stellar result for a take home project?
What I'm saying is that the market is flooded with these false negatives.
Agreed, but that's not how we interview.
>Did you hire a candidate who say... didn't know what MRO was, but created a stellar result for a take home project?
Do you have me confused with the other guy?
>What I'm saying is that the market is flooded with these false negatives.
Understood. The market is also flooded with incompetent devs, capable of talking at length about Python syntax (and sometimes even the computational model, e.g. MRO, etc.), but who aren't actually able to put that knowledge to use in engineering systems. These are systematically catastrophic hires, by which I mean, the engineering team is significantly better off hiring no-one, than hiring them.
May I ask, why does this seem to matter so much to you? If you are a bootcamp graduate yourself, that doesn't preclude you from being a good engineer. I am more than happy to believe you are the one-in-a-thousand counter-example.
I'm not a bootcamp graduate engineer. I'm actually quite good at what I do, interviewing (from both sides) and engineering. This topic matters to me because I like to argue online and I have strong opinions.
It's common for people to manipulate their perception of reality to justify their own situation, I assure you I am not doing that here, however I think you are doing this.
>>What I'm saying is that the market is flooded with these false negatives.
>Understood.
A false negative is someone who is GOOD, but appears bad. He is a negative but that assignment is false. I am saying the market is flooded with capable engineers that are good but appear bad due to interview processes and biases. Hence the term false negative.
>Do you have me confused with the other guy?
Nope you guys touched on similar points. You never mentioned syntax, but you're likely testing on algorithms so it's the same result. You get a ton of false negatives. You pay a premium for the guy who does better at the interview when you can get someone who's just as capable at a much lower cost.
The point is someone will hire those false negatives at a cheaper price and that effects the whole market. Companies hire the best they can get.
>Agreed, but that's not how we interview.
That's why a certain segment of the market looks like there's a dearth of people. It's because the interview clouds your perception. You interview the wrong way, you agree. The contradiction here is that although most people like you agree, you still reject people based off the SAME results as the WRONG interview AND you think the rejection is accurate.
That's how the psychology works. Everyone I talk to agrees interviewing is wrong overall but when they use it to judge on individual candidates they think it's accurate.
The contradiction exists even in your own reply. You agree the interview process you use is screwed yet you're really confident about your judgement of the market even though your measurement methodology is SELF admitted to be wrong. It renders your entire argument into question.
If you yourself are a bad engineer or terrible at hiring, you might mistake the chaff for the wheat, but then you're doomed anyway.
I think you're not talking from experience.
The same thing happened with JS when that was peaky, and it'll happen in other languages too.
What is old is new again.
I've been hiring roughly the same amount for 10 years. I'm actually really extremely good at modern python. My skills with python syntax are so good that I can do in 1 line exclusively with generators what a junior programmer probably needs 10 lines and twice as much mutating state to pull off. My code is also likely more modular and neater then a junior but you have to realize none of this matters that much. My skill level with python is beyond the curve of what is necessary and so is any other developer that goes beyond 2 years with python.
In the end every programmer I ever hired exclusively for python will hit this tier within 1 or 2 years, very few exceptions. Roughly half of the junior programmers I hire are actually already within this tier upon getting hired. Literally before hitting there first job. After two years the only thing left to pick up are some more unique patterns and tricks but that's it.
I am 100% talking from experience.
It isn't unique to Python.
"Of what is necessary" is subjective. Regardless of the language or framework I'm hiring within they must have the same level of engineering skill. I've hired people for Python projects who were outstanding Go or Java programmers who never touched Python commercially.
My point is the language isn't relevant to your arguments.
That's why you're wrong.
There's also plenty of Python developers two years in (that I've interviewed and rejected) who couldn't write me a decorator or explain MRO.
There's plenty of 2-year Go programmers who can't deal with goroutines well.
First off both MRO and decorators can be learned in 1 week max by anyone. And one week is REALLY forgiving. Literally. You have to be mentally deficient not to be able to learn it. They simply didn't encounter the python feature in their experience. You would just reject them for not knowing about those features?
Second off decorators are syntactical tricks. You can get around python without ever using them. If you encounter them in libraries you just need to know what they do at a high level, you don't need to know how to implement them. If you ever do need to implement one just look it up. I don't judge people for not knowing syntactic tricks.
Third, MRO is something that should be not heavily used at all. You should avoid inheritance as much as possible. Additionally you should avoid double inheritance all together. The MRO/inheritance concept is a left over thing from an outdated programming style. At most you should know inheritance, and at most have one level of it if you must and try to use interfaces instead. Nowadays I expect only to see inheritance in existing libraries/tech debt and not newly written code from senior programmers. If someone encounters MRO issues, again, I just expect them to look it up.
I'll actually judge someone who expects others to know MRO given how outdated it is. I won't think they're stupid, or I won't not hire them or anything like that. I just know they aren't up to date with the current methodology but they can easily learn it if needed.
Overall, you're just setting a high bar artificially. It's like hiring janitors who only have phds in chemistry to know what's in the cleaning chemicals.
> Yes but the same timeline can be done for C, C#, Java or anything else.
No Java and C# languages are complex enough that it can be done in a 2 year timeline but these languages are hard enough that they are in a different class then python. C with memory management is harder then both java and C#. Memory management simply isn't intuitive.
Isn't all programming just syntactical tricks?
We have a fundamentally different view of these things. Mine is serving me well. Yours isn't challenging mine.
Let's agree to disagree.
No. The decorator is really just a syntactic shortcut. There are other facilities in python to do the same thing. The decorator is just a convenient way of doing it. The concept at hand is a function that takes a function and returns a new function. Nothing crazy here.
decorator: Callable[[Callable[[Any]. Any]], Callable[[Any], Any]] = lambda x: (lambda y: x(y)) #does nothing
g: Callable[[Any], Any] = lambda x: x #identity func
decorated_g: Callable[[Any], Any] = decorator(g) #decorator that does nothing to identity returns identity func
>We have a fundamentally different view of these things. Mine is serving me well. Yours isn't challenging mine.
Exactly see. Just because my view is "better" or more "modern" you still function fine within your role which is my point. Someone could have knowledge far superior to a person with 2 years of experience, functionally speaking, it doesn't matter too much. You still do "fine" at your role. Your view serves you well in the capacity of a "senior" engineer" even though your view points are ultimately wrong and inferior they still work well enough.
Also it isn't a viewpoint. Two of the newest languages to hit the mainstream have eschewed inheritance completely from their syntax. Neither Golang or Rust have the concept. Both use interfaces exclusively to promote the concept of similar types. No inheritance anywhere. I have tons of evidence on this even papers, quotations from prominent people. It's a well known fact inheritance is outdated.
We can agree to disagree, but it's like agreeing to disagree with a child who doesn't know any better. Sure.
This is indeed what is happening right now.
I really don't worry about this stuff until it starts looking like the dot-com bomb again. I survived that, I'll survive this.
As other have said: is there such a high demand right now ? And if you know and feel that you are an "A" player; and so far you have seen "C" players getting laid off, you might actually feel that the average level of the people you interact with increases which makes you want to stay more.
So while FB certainly intended to fire underperformers and increase average performance, I doubt they were able to identify the right people for that.
Not to mention that the remaining "A" players may each be saddled with the work of ten laid-off "C" players because, as far as management is concerned, programmers are fungible. Why not have their 10x programmer take care of it?
Or maybe you're not as good of a judge of these things as you think?
Don't know much about Meta's HR department, maybe they're really good at that. But in the end we're all humans and never unbiased when we make those decisions.
a) the technical challenges at these large tech companies are probably way more interesting
b) compensation is very likely better
c) you are working with many many more peers who are super talented
Not really, if I come up with a novel algorithm or a different architecture to do a task better at Google then they will give me the chance to implement it even if it takes months or years. Small companies doesn't care about your ideas, they just want a cog that can give them a basic website because that is all they need, novel things doesn't help them.
If you mean "novel product ideas" then sure, but we aren't product managers we are programmers so our ideas would mostly be related to architecture or algorithms.
Yes, just not challenges that requires ideas to solve. They are mostly just following the same path every other tech company went, re implementing the same systems. To them it doesn't matter if the system is better or worse, they just want a system since going from 0 to 1 is huge, meaning that they wont give you time or resources to implement your idea, they just want a cheap idea.
This is a very strange point-of-view.
I've worked in "small" (~100 employees or fewer) business my entire career, and not once was it strictly CRUD stuff in C#.
The freedom is debatable, I guess, since I have no experience at larger companies, but I certainly never found that my freedom is confined. Most often there is opportunity to contribute anywhere and everywhere, and management is happy to have the help.
Similarly, most of the devs I've worked with that are obsessed with "exciting" work still turn out pretty questionable stuff, and their careers would probably be better served if the built out a "simple" CRUD app, took it really seriously, and then examined the effects of their design on other teams.
Vast majority won't find jobs that are as well paying as facebook. FB is a leader in tech salaries which gives them the leverage to announce such a thing without losing people. People don't want to take paycuts and go somewhere thats also doing layoffs.
And changing your availability and answering a call or chat from time to time does not cost much. It is not like there is any downside to it.
And if an A player starts looking around great things sometimes happen. He may get hired at much higher position that would justify the salary. Or he may have already earned a lot at FB and may decide this is the time to invest in building a startup, etc.
At my previous company I got in an argument with my boss and just changed my availability on LI. Just out of spite. This led me to an offer that changed my life. And there is a lot of people so much better at their job than I am.
There is always a chance you can lose your job. There has never been a day since I started working over 25 years ago (well actually I spent my first year saving so it would have hurt then) that I haven’t been ready to change jobs at the drop of a dime.
> And changing your availability and answering a call or chat from time to time does not cost much. It is not like there is any downside to it
You should be doing that all the time regardless.
> And if an A player starts looking around great things sometimes happen. He may get hired at much higher position
That happens most of the time anyway because of salary compression and inversion even if you are just a journeyman “full stack developer”.
If you joined from 9/2020 to 1/2022, you’ve taken a serious pay cut versus your nominal offer.
Unless there have been adjustments that I haven’t read about?
So yes, it's a serious pay cut, but it's still amazing pay. Now, if they were bullish on the market, then it might make sense to try to move to another company that can come up with a 7-figure joining bonus and ride that appreciation to new stock heights.
Just wanted to clarify that it’s not quite what it was. Thanks for adding numbers.
Letter 1: Blame previous management.
Letter 2: Announce a reorg/layoffs.
Letter 3: Tell your successor to write three letters...
Employees ask for transparency. This is what transparency looks like...
You are wrong. During the last round of layoffs, employees asked to hear about upcoming plans before they happen. Mark Zuckerberg is literally responding to that request.
I was so happy when that company got acquired and the new company CEO showed up and announced that first level managers and below were all safe from layoffs, everyone above that was on a case by case basis, and "all executive staff were let go this morning, I saw no reason to keep those jokers around".
He was so right. Scored a lot of points there, never heard an executive of a large company say that so bluntly before.
Needless to say that didn't go over well.
A year later they were all gone. And him as well.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ahh, no. As I mentioned it didn't go over well. They had been mobbing me before and it intensified after. They were also blissfully unaware of what is legal and what is not, so pushing me out proved to be rather expensive.
Didn't the executives employ any anti-takeover measures?
Makes me wonder if the opposite could become fashionable: "I trust myself to fly without the golden parachute, you might want to make that part of your consideration". At first glance that sounds quite compelling to me, but on the other hand, would I feel safer or would I feel less safe with a Taxi driver who does not bother putting on the seat belt? I think my answer would be less safe, event though a part of me wishes to be one who'd feel safer.
So over a period (FB has been around for like 15 years now) an org accumulates extremely risk averse execs.
if the execs are pilots, and the employees are passengers, then having parachutes for the pilots but not the employees constitutes a moral hazard.
They don't, and they aren't. They work for, and answer to the owners.
(you are right though, the term "moral hazard" is surprisingly well defined and basically has nothing to do at all with the sum of its parts)
Or if they want to keep pissing away their money, they can keep hiring clowns that ruin their company, and then pull the ripcord.
I think more likely the new CEO's comment stemmed from that fact that 1. The old executive staff were in fact horrible at face value. 2. In between the time of the offer to buy the company and the closing the old CEO visited several locations presumably under the idea that he was there to keep everyone around / soothe the typical nerves about being acquired. But something else happened:
Instead he took snide shots at the acquiring CEO. He noted that he was surprised the new CEO hadn't visited our site yet.... when at that point the deal hadn't closed, they were still technically competitors. New CEO straight up couldn't visit.
I think old CEO was just a horrible person and salty he lost (mostly due to his own missteps) to his competitor.
But that was par for the course with old company executives. They seemed to operate thinking they were so smart and really were as transparent as could be, almost childish.
I generally feel disconnected / suspicious of executive staff... but these guys, they were human garbage as far as I was concerned, and I don't use that term lightly.
My Fav examples:
HR at one point sent out a series of long emails about a big change upcoming, but they didn't / would not say what the change was, it put a lot of people on edge. Then finally after the 5th or so email they announced that after HR spent thousands of hours in meetings and off site meetings ... they were renaming HR... that was it... it was like a joke, but they were serious. CEO and all the other executives of course had to reply all to congratulate them.
One of the last meetings with the OLD CEO had an open forum where people could ask questions about the acquisition. Old CEO seemed to give the impression he had some idea what he combined company would look like / could do. Someone asked where he saw the new company in six months/ what it might look like. He responded "I'll be in Banff sking." That was it, that was his response....
Sounds like something else was planned, and they pulled out last minute.
Or they were trying to spook 5% into leaving -- and did -- so they make some trivial change that means nothing and can be undone later.
New CEO was Australian?
It was funny as when I met him a few times he responded the same way.
"You're Minnesota? Can I talk to you about hunting? They told me I shouldn't do that in CA..."
I didn't hunt but I let the man tell his story ;)
I usually feel pretty disconnected from executive types and so on but I liked that guy.
Sometimes there are actually great leaders in the sea of self-serving assholes that populate the business world.
Or you can do the opposite, like Boeing did: import all the managers of the firm you acquired (McDonnell-Douglas) into your own organization.
If the emails are succinctly composed then people would complain that the announcements were too curt and don't try to assuage people enough.
So they might as well write what they want.
Ive never heard that and I’ve seen short emails and nothing at all.
I have been told that one FANG which recently underwent a firing round barely took a break from their hiring rounds, and already started sending emails asking for volunteers for interviews even to teams which have just been decimated.
One more story for the absurdity bucket.
It's not that way everywhere but man when you run into it, crazy.
It's a failure of management to hire correctly and/or manage and develop people. Management is broken and incompetent and relentlessly scapegoats those below them.
Yeah, hire and then show actual managerial skill. If you still can't get the performance you need, then fire them. Tech hiring culture has become completely bananas and it wastes insane amounts of resources.
Tech management in the US 1) can't hire competently, 2) can't lead, 3) can't develop those under them and 4) can't man up and fire the employees they mistakenly hired and failed to lead.
It's _really_ hard to hire good people consistently.
Hire them and if you can't get the performance you need, then you due them. Alternatively, hire them as contract-to-hire if your head of HR has conditioned you to be terrified of doing what you're allowed to do in the US.
People are rarely ever dead weight. Products and services most certainly are. Products/Projects etc fail for a variety of reasons, and it can often be hard to anticipate if they will. When you are building them you need the top people to build it for you. If the product fails, you now have people you have to pay for running the product that doesn't earn you money. Now you make a loss.
While you did hire the top people, the product failed and now you don't need them. Keeping them around costs lots of money and, their work, even if high quality hasn't given much profits.
It is then you have to let go people.
Sounds like capitalism to me. Better get to work developing new projects and products to stem that loss.
Yes.
The road to progress in any system involves being known as someone who initiates new order of things. And always remember this. Its the new projects, and initiatives that get most of the resources because people want to see them win.
That wasn't my experience with the current layoffs at big tech. There was no effort to find positions for the engineers who performed well in the previous year(s). They just cut some orgs by the hundreds (I was in a call with 350+ other devs, many of whom are far smarter and more experienced devs than myself).
They just started cutting "weight" at some point, the "dead" adjective was dropped during the previous rounds of layoffs.
Say you’ve been working somewhere for 5 years and have the opportunity to move to a company - and you know both companies are laying people off at some point soon.
In your current company, maintaining your position requires no training and negligible HR resource. The question of your capability to perform the job you’re given would hopefully not be under question (otherwise good going for keeping that gig up for 5 years). Your team is not a blue sky project (otherwise shame on management for keeping that gig up for 5 years). Making you redundant will cost the company severance, and if it’s a structural issue you could be moved into another team. Dropping you would be a genuinely hard decision.
The new company barely know you and have to expend resources just to integrate you, and expend nothing to drop you.
I know which one I’d pick.
Granted, it’s a false premise: perhaps the new company is more resilient than your current company, for example. However, if the odds are unknown - and in most cases they aren’t known in any reliable way - then I may as well treat them as if the odds are balanced.
Nothing absurd here.
Maybe top paid management is simpler to replace?
I wonder if the managers who will become individual contributors again, will be paid the same or less
You are being manipulated. No. The previous executives are not "jokers" - they made massive profits selling shares. They are being let go because, after taking their massive profits, the new company will soon fire the rest of staff - and that is hard.
I didn't call them jokers, someone else did.
I called them human garbage.
The market isn't good right now. Not many places that are hiring can give an offer that matches a FAANG
HN seems to think it is the birthright of a good dev to get a $450k salary...just "because"
look at it from the other side of the table...you have 300 great resumes for a position...why do you have to offer a premium salary?
counterpoint: these salaries were a blip and will never return in nominal form (let alone inflation adjusted) for many devs ever again
I think most would choose a).
Everyone who still has a job with them is still getting 'megabucks'.
They, for the most part, aren't hiring, though.
I imagine the vast majority of their ultra top-tier talent has left already unless Meta gave them gigantic bonuses.
The stock is down ~40% from where a lot of their RSUs were granted - more than 50% of their pay comes from those grants.
They've had a year of time to go somewhere else and make way more money - most of them probably took that unless Meta gave them a gigantic bonus to keep them whole.
But other FAANGS are not hiring. So where it's somewhere unless they planned to start their own businesses?
They are if you’re talented enough.
If you define talent as the criteria by which FAANG selects from a pool of employees - then you're by definition correct.
If you don't - then you disagree.
If FAANG is paying top dollar and selecting for trash - you have to wonder why, though.
> Yet, one of these people have a fast pass to FAANG.
Citation? I haven't seen anything like that in the industry at all.
I worked at FB and Amazon for six years total and the vast majority of my fellow engineers were from random mediocre schools (including myself, from the U. of Arizona).
If the stock tanks that vaporizes really quickly.
You're right in that language doesn't matter. Hell even the delivery of the message doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the severance or layoff package. That's the real meat. There should be a mandatory law that publishes all layoff packages so that everyone can see if they're getting a fair deal or not.
It is not that rare for critical employees to get grants as part of the layoff execution in a pre-emotive action, and now that I’m older I will note that I’ve been on the planning side of layoffs and this is fairly commonplace.
When I was younger I was shocked to learn that during an LR companies would “over” cut in order to fund retention for critical people. You’re laying off 7%? This is a good time to free up some additional opex, so just add a few heads above target in order to free opex to comp important people. You won’t get that 7% back but overage you do, usually.
These companies could take a more twitter like "print out your code" or global stack ranking to lay people off but i don't think it dodge the problem people describe. The "A Player" could still be mad that all their coworkers got fired and/or the "pointless project" they enjoyed working on got axed and still leave. You just get the add cost, drama, and blow-back (see twitter) that a performance based firing would entail and probably open yourself up to lawsuits (IANAL) if you don't have an adequate paper trail for those performance based filings.
Part of the plan is that lots of people leave on their own along with the 10k. For me, the real question is, how many of the A players can afford to leave? Salaries have to be declining many of the top payers have hiring freezes. It seems like even though they're in high demand will they be able to demand the same pay? And if they can't how many are willing to take the jump and leave for less money? They're called golden handcuffs for a reason.
I really don't believe that it's a given that Meta still needs them: the entire org was designed for "innovation", and that has certainly been the right call back in the day. E.g. back when they were still on the edge between buying and competing with whatsapp and instagramm on the product level.
But Meta products have been beyond "salvation by innovation" for almost a decade now, what they need to maximize shareholder value is the cheapest setup to keep value extraction up and running for as long as the brands still do their thing. The innovation game is over for them, because the same brand effect that saves the platforms from dying immediately also taints anything Meta buys or starts. Even if Meta had a "Toktik" that had feature equivalency with Tiktok without even a microsecond latency, it would still be stillborn because people just don't want yet another Meta product in their lives (even to the point where they'd rather have a CCP product in their lives, brand awareness isn't exactly a field where logic applies).
These days Meta is in the position comparable to that of a single-field oil extraction company that has no hope for getting claims on any other fields and that has its existing field already fully prospected and tapped. That field is far from empty yet, but they only need people to keep the pumps running, no prospectors, no drillers, no acquisition strategists. Those Meta employees that have been traditionally considered "A players" they wouldn't want to lose and that might actually have been paid absurd sums only to keep them from innovating for the competition are all in the "prospectors, drillers, strategists" group and those have exactly zero value for the janitorial task of keeping the pumps running (edit: more likely negative value, not zero).
(I know, this almost sounds as if I was saying that Musk's Twitter strategy of burning down the house and then trying to macguyver something useful from the rubble was smart, I'm a bit surprised myself. I guess I do think that the aggressive downsizing would have been the rational thing for Twitter to do, but certainly not as a "step 2" after "step 1: throw 44 billion at previous owners". In hindsight, waiting for 44 billion to show up has certainly been much better for previous Twitter owners than doing the downsizing themselves)
Specifically the sections "Leaner is better", and "Flatter is faster". Other sections are quite relevant and well written IMO.
Also, reading between the lines, Metaverse gets mentioned just twice. I guess they are going to go slow on that? And Oh, "In-person time helps build relationships and get more done" tells me WFH at Meta will be a thing of the past.
Edit: More content.
If you're ever in a situation where you need to lay off or otherwise end your relationship with employees, contractors, etc., avoid using terms like "garbage collect[ion]" in the press release, even if you think it's in a section that's not directly about the people you're letting go.
* People who have built companies from 0 to $Trillion (making a lot of employees incredibly wealthy)
* ^^ People who give free advice on the internet ^^
I mean we also hear the traditional rationale for why you can't announce layoffs in advance but it doesn't seem absurd to try it since there seems to be remarkably little data on the subject. Further, if you're considering letting 10k people go, I don't see how it's bad to have the loose ones leave of their own volition. I actually liked the tone and detail of this post. It certainly seems Meta is preparing to fix more than "100% a management failure"...
That may be the plan. There are two benefits of this: more than 10000 people leave your company, but you don’t have to pay severance to them. And second, A players are compensated well and a layoff forces you to pay them hefty severances. If you think your A players do not contribute as much as they are getting paid, this is a way to push them out without paying that extra cash.
Something similar happened when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. He cancelled ~70% of the product roadmap and the engineers were thrilled that the company finally returned to a coherent vision.
You don't need to write a novel with these. Also, writing an email about how you're going to can a bunch of people over the coming year and then droning on about how the results of that are going to be so much better (and insinuate that the current setup, which is 100% a management failure, was a poor setup) is insulting.
Also, this is a 2nd round barely 6 months after the first and it's going to happen over months. This will be great for morale and will likely only cause your A players (who are probably still very much in demand) to look elsewhere.