1. stockpiling fuel for when you may need it

2. starving your competitors of fuel

With money cheap and valuations absurd, idle or overpriced talent was a much lesser problem than somebody else hoovering up all the good stuff.

So you recruit aggressively using mechanical filters like leetcode/whiteboard tests, then let internal processes figure out who’s actually worth using on meaningful projects. The rest you can sit on, just in case.

The strategy comes straight from the top, and it makes perfect sense. Even if they are not fully utilized, even a FAANG salary is small potatoes compared to what top-tier talent can bring to a company. Think of it as the HR version of what VC do, invest in many people knowing 90% will fail to live up to their potential, because the 10% that do more than make up for it.

As for (2), that's as true as fairy tales.

I've worked as a TL on several teams before where we didn't assign any implementation work to me specifically, but I was there to jump in and help paddle the boat when folks got stuck.

This worked great, because usually the sticky places were integration points between subsystems, which can be especially tough for junior engineers to navigate. As someone with the big picture I could jump in and save them tons of time.

In the meantime, if I had spare cycles I'd work on tooling, test automation (and especially stubbing out and deflaking integration tests).

Projects where I did this tended to have fewer bugs and hit their deadlines.

What I referring to is a team of 50 people, say, with 10 of them that are "on rotation" sitting on the bench and wait for new assignments. What happens is that 2 of them get used to the "vacation" and are not much motivated to get on a new project when the time comes, 2 disappear, 1 takes advantage of the R&R to work on tools and do some self-study, and 6 start interviewing for other companies. Horses want to run.

I don't think they'd ever claim this because these companies do way more than "maintain a single app".

If companies don't attempt to innovate, even big ones, they lose in the marketplace. Meta for example has multiple apps to support, each serving hundreds of millions of users. On top of mere maintenance, they experiment and add new features. On top of that, what about the occasional greenfield/skunkworks type projects?

It's a shame your friend worked on three consecutive projects that got axed, but that's a separate problem from him being able to coast without getting fired for it.

I don’t think you can directly compare an app like the ones a small team can build to the apps that larger more established companies have to maintain and evolve. I mean sure you could just do a full app rewrite and start from scratch but that’s hugely risky and certainly fails more often than it succeeds.

Nor do we need to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a gigantic new building[1], on the roof of which we will put a 12.6-acre park and live animals, including foxes, so all of those thousands and thousands of people can maintain that single app (well, in reality, apps), ever again.

I will forever be blown away by the excess I witnessed every time I visited that campus, and I'm sure it's similar elsewhere.

[1]https://www.builtinsf.com/2020/02/25/facebook-headquarters-m...

Meta while unsurprisingly not very efficient, does need a lot of employees to maintain what they've built.

I know people directly who have been affected by the layoffs. They did work. It's just work that has been deprioritized.

Stop trying to demonize the workers who are victims of mismanagement.

Meta is one of the most revenue efficient companies in the history of the world. Each employee generates $1.929 million in revenue, and they have an 79.63% gross profit margin vs a sector median of 49%. That's each employee including the recruiters, EMs, etc.

Part of the reason these employees had to "fight" for work is intentional - if they had more people than they needed and no forcing function (i.e. perf cycle) then these people wouldn't fight for their work, they'd just sit there getting paid and not complaining about it. The company would then be dramatically less efficient.

I disagree with their model in a lot of ways, but this is a completely unfair characterization of how their org actually works.

They hired as though the COVID trajectory would continue, and saw less attrition than expected as people stuck to their jobs due to uncertainty. So they're trimming a little and re-focusing. That's all.

> "I mean, like, we were just sitting there. We had to basically fight to find work."

To put a very fine point on it, the reason they had to fight (like everyone else there) is because if they didn't come up with something to do that was quantifiable and impactful in line with org goals, they'd be terminated within the year. It was their job to find a way to be useful. The system culls those who do not. It can be harsh and impersonal, yes, ruthless even - but it is very effective.

> I had an indirect friend who loved to tell the story of how, after his third project at Google got killed before launch, he just stopped working and realized there were little, if any, actual consequences for doing nothing ;P--never seemed to hold any weight.

That was at Google. This is Meta. They are very different companies. Each FAANG is completely different internally and it would be a mistake to assume that experience translates.

Again, their system is designed to be ruthlessly efficient. They probably over-hired like 10-15%. I'd strongly suggest listening to the Odd Lots episode with Patrick McKenzie titled roughly 'what happens to tech workers in the age of layoffs.'

I get it's fun to speculate from the outside but there's no reason to look at it and go 'yep should be 5X higher' simply because they have a lot of staff. They have a lot of staff because they have billions of monthly active users and optimizing every aspect of their business is something they can do, and something that yields more profit than cost.

A lot of this armchair quarterbacking comes from folks who never worked there. Find someone who works at Meta and ask them about PSC.

I don’t totally disagree with you. People at Meta work hard and they optimize everything and psc for better or worse definitely encourages performance. But I don’t know where numbers like “overhired by 10-15%” come from. I don’t think things were falling through the cracks and not being optimized before the company doubled in size.

Towards the end this started to change for me, but it happened a bunch earlier in engineering/product. Fundamentally, the standard way to grow headcount was revenue per head, and while that works for sales and ops it's a terrible, terrible idea for engineering because you end up fighting for work.

In fact, I'm part of an ex Facebook group, and all of the old timers are incredibly shocked that this was allowed to happen, and a bunch of newer people are confirming it did.

Some would argue that management's sole goal is to effectively measure which direction the wind is blowing and predict course accordingly. The fact that so many did so poorly may make some question why management gets reimbursed as well as they do.

Do you have a source for this? Does this include contractors, as well?

You're saying the approach "one of the most efficient companies in the history of the world" takes to producing value is: let's just hire people and let them figure out the value they can provide, otherwise we'll fire them.

Am I getting that right?

Before I've even hired someone I've already scoped and quantified the impact I need them to have. I then go find someone that is qualified to do that, and then I motivate them to do more. It is _extremely_ inefficient from an _everything_ perspective to do so in reverse. Not harsh. Not impersonal. Not even ruthless. It's objectively n. e. fish. ent.

For example this is how every tech "body shop" hires. The value is just out there in the ether of modern enterprise.

Bring in 20% more people year over year. Keep attrition rate for them and existing hires around 10%. Go knock hat in hand at every Fortune 1000 company and wrangle whatever buzzwords Gartner has thrown at them into a project or managed service you can slip as many billable hours as possible into.

It's the same with Meta, they can try literally about anything so when GPT or crypto or Web3 or AR or whatever comes along they just want to be able to throw a bunch of people at it to figure out how to socialize, advertise, and monetize it at massive scale.

I'm not even convinced that antitrust would fix it at this point. Someone might need to invent "therapy but for corporations" so big orgs can rid themselves of dysfunction (as if).

That is what leveraged buyouts and activist investors are supposed to do. Emphasis on supposed

The situation in the article sounds more like a bureaucratic snafu, where the company is hiring but the teams either aren't given open headcount to use, or they don't want to use it on the new hires for some reason.

Isn't that weird? Wouldn't you like to know how that happened?

I doubt it generalizes, but it's interesting.

I think you have misinterpreted my comment.

The phrase "symbols of blue state bloat and waste" is in no way an assertion that they are bloated and wasteful.

It's an assertion that nearly everyone (regardless of politics) stereotypes them as such, and believes in the negative characterization of government employees, which is what I was challenging, in context.

Not only may they be more efficient than some other states, but more so than some major tech companies too.

At one point, they've got some major deadline coming up and they ask for help a/ borrowed some folks from our team, but after a week or so our teammates started showing up to our stand-up. I asked how it was going "over there" and the response was, "They don't have anything for us to do."