Doesn't “Turning up the heat” at Meta accomplish the opposite of intentions?

From an outsider perspective, I think Meta has been overhiring, meaning they have too many people for the economic downturn and for the product(s) downturn. Old school Microsoft was limited in staff because they insisted on giving everyone an office. Meta was really only limited by money, and even that wasn't a major limit.

There's likely a bunch of people who CTCI-ed their way into Meta. They're not competent and not motivated. They might as well be bank robbers, in it for the money and free lunches.

These people would be a burden on their team and other high competence staff. I think turning up the heat might weed them out. It's possible it'll have collateral damage, but it could well be that Zuckerberg realizes they should be getting down to their roots. If he doesn't act, the company will likely be synonymous with Yahoo. High performers will leave a company on its way down anyway.

Manglers don't know about that; they think that everyone feels lucky to be there.

Of course.

Facebook is in real bad shape (don't call it Meta, that's just a scheme to distract people from Facebook being in real bad shape.)

They've quit subsidizing VR headsets which is a sign they've given up on "the metaverse", the current ambition is to catch up with Tik Tok.

I'd say so, yes. Arguably all strokes of employee could consider leaving as they'll have their experience and it probably looks just fine on a resume. I think it'd look better to leave than be booted at this time too.

More broadly, I'm not sure this really is a strategy per-se. If Mark had a true grand vision for Facebook and Meta I think we would have seen it by now. I think this was just some money-man's recommendation made by looking at numbers on a spreadsheet.

Mark is assuming that "turning up the heat" selects poor-performers for resignation. This could be the case, but I don't have any reason to believe that "turning up the heat" couldn't just as well make working conditions intolerable for the high-performers who don't want to and don't have to put up with crap workplaces.

I've been thinking about this and I think this is a problem all companies face. The best employees are confident and know they can get a job anywhere anytime so they leave. The worst are less confident and never leave. How do you keep the former and get rid of the latter?

Well one way is by cutting based on seniority and tenure since survival ought to correlate with value. Before you say it, that’s obviously not always the case but in a not-degenerate organisation it should be mostly the case.

You could also cut based on sparsity —- ie cut positions which are least costly to rehire.

Or cut based on dependence — cut positions which are least critical.

Or cut positions that are most dependent on near future revenue.

In all one can see how a multi criteria cut could be reasonably argued — in the end it only needs to mostly succeed.

React is kind of neat.

no wonder Z looks pale. he must have kept the heat off all these years!