In most big companies I've worked at, I thought I could identify the people who made everyone slower and were a net negative to productivity. However, they never seemed to be the ones threatened to be fired. Often they were really good at playing corporate games so that it was really hard to justify firing them, while the ones fired were junior employees who had great potential but weren't as good at politics yet.

So while FB certainly intended to fire underperformers and increase average performance, I doubt they were able to identify the right people for that.

Indeed. While one should always look to check on other biases in play, in my experience "F" players survive layoffs almost as often as "A" players, and it's those in the middle that get hit. (Sometimes this may be because the "F" players aren't getting paid as much, and are therefore cheap.)

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?

>I thought I could identify the people who made everyone slower and were a net negative to productivity. However, they never seemed to be the ones threatened to be fired.

Or maybe you're not as good of a judge of these things as you think?

Could very well be. Especially in large companies, it's very hard to judge the importance of some roles and people. That's why there are always complains about how promotions work, no one has figured out how to value the work of an employee.

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.

It's not white hot like it was 1-3 years ago, but if you're qualified and experienced, yes there very much is still demand from non-FAANG companies.

While that might be true:

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

Aren't technical challenges at smaller companies usually much more interesting? Pay is worse, but smaller companies usually offer much more freedom to implement your ideas and shape the company.

> smaller companies usually offer much more freedom to implement your ideas

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.

Then you've been at different small companies than I have. Obviously if you're the only person in tech at that company it's hard to do groundbreaking stuff. But small tech companies solve challenges everyday. And being able to directly convince the CEO (who is often technical at these companies) can make decisions much quicker than at large companies.

> small tech companies solve challenges everyday

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.

It depends on what you mean by "smaller." At the majority of smaller companies, it's just CRUD app stuff, probably in C#, with significantly less freedom (often beholden to very non technical middle management).

Is that bad? You can solve interesting challenges in C# with CRUD stuff. Nothing that scales to millions of users, but there are challenges other than scaling.

>At the majority of smaller companies, it's just CRUD app stuff, probably in C#, with significantly less freedom

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.

I'm not a dev but still highly technical, and devs turning their noses up at "CRUD stuff" always makes me laugh. It reminds me of the musicians I know who won't play in certain styles because it's not "meaningful" or "true to their artistic vision". Bud I was at your last gig, you don't sound that great even when you're playing "meaningful" music.

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.

I'm the sole developer at a non-tech company, and I have near-complete freedom because management is non-technical (and humble enough to admit that). I really, really enjoy my current job. Not saying that's the norm, of course -- just adding a data point to the convo.

The technical challenges may be interesting, but are the strategic ones? I.e., do you think most people would choose to work on problems that optimize ad spend vs. something like, say, healthcare if all else was equal?

Why work on ad optimization when you can work on insurance billing optimization?

haha point taken. I would argue "insurance" isn't "healthcare". But this somewhat underscores my larger point. The SV mindset is almost solely focused on maximizing revenue, whether that's ads or insurance billing. My point is that there are other, possibly more interesting, problems to work on if you relax that constrained viewpoint.

None of these are really factual points. Big Shops are place where you just get stuck being a YAML jockey and bantering in RFCs.

taking 50% paycut isn't easy.

The way FAANG stocks have performed, you've already taken that if you work for one considering how much of their total comp tended to be RSUs (with the exception of apple).

Facebook gave out refreshers and bonuses even this review cycle.

Very good point. There is a big difference between random layoffs and laying off the bottom 20%.

Yeah, but you now have to pick up all the work they were doing.