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.
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.