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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Letter 1: Blame previous management.
Letter 2: Announce a reorg/layoffs.
Letter 3: Tell your successor to write three letters...
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.
Employees ask for transparency. This is what transparency looks like...
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.
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).
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)
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"...
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.
The market isn't good right now. Not many places that are hiring can give an offer that matches a FAANG
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.
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.
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.
* People who have built companies from 0 to $Trillion (making a lot of employees incredibly wealthy)
* ^^ People who give free advice on the internet ^^
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.
If Facebook can turn things around then that would be truly impressive. Right now it’s on a slow march to the sidelines of has-been tech. I don’t think anyone is buying the whole metaverse thing, which just smells like someone missed the memo on Second Life. Facebook bet the farm there and the crops and livestock are looking rather ill.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-...
Ironically apple entering AR/VR may be the best thing to happen to Meta if it helps bolster the ecosystem. Meta may not be #1 in the space for a long time, if ever, but they may be able to ride the wave to a strong #2
-- Zuck probably.
I feel like 10K people are taking a hit because Zuck ruined VR for another decade with his very boomer like imagination and monetization strategy.
Anyway, it's rough out there.
how is that any different than most of Silicon Valley?
Silicon Valley is what people thought the future looked like in 1994
It has taken Silicon Valley a long time to realize there is a limit to what you can do with websites and computers
Once again, Meta's death has been greatly exaggerated on this site.
I just can't tell a story in which I would end up being a person who does that. It's too alien.
I chuckled a bit. This is coming from a Social Media Company whose product is about connecting online. What does it say about the trust between users of its platforms?
That actually makes perfect sense to me from a practical perspective.
Nothing builds trust like callously laying off tens of thousands of people over multiple rounds of layoffs! Want a trustworthy environment? Earn it. Really though when he says "build trust" what he means is that he (Zuck) does not trust his employees unless he can see them.
So Zuckerberg, to prevent this, has the right strategy - the pirates inside the organisation strategy. Jobs did this with the Mac project. The question mark really is whether the Metaverse can deliver to take over from the Social Media platforms it has. Even if you accept the promise of Metaverse, according to Carmack the execution has been poor. Normally you just buy your way out with promising startups when execution is poor but the regulators will be heavy with Meta nowadays.
Meta has star power with AI/ML. But on Metaverse there isn't much consumer data to process (yet). So its innovation vector can't be realised.
This effectively means the stars of AI/ML won't help Meta into the future. If they leave, it could be a good thing (if we are taking the value-fuelled hypothesis as their future).
Meta I think will switch to a MBA-led approach to maximise existing value, shed its research aspirations, and switch to hiring the best mechanical/devices/hardware talent it can to improve execution on Metaverse.
Under this appraisal of Meta, broad and wide layoffs, letting the superstars go is the right thing for the company. Unlocked from Meta, those engineers will forge the next great wave of tech companies. The future will be made over the next few months as those start-up fevered ideas will actually get a footing. So I am most hopeful despite the bitter pill of current economic realities. In the short term there is real pain, particularly those relying on visas or the generous healthcare provisions from the company.
I worked at Nokia through their transition from being the largest smart phone manufacturer in the world to shortly before they sold off what remained of their phone unit to MS, who shut it down completely less than two years later. Basically, that probably affected many tens of thousands of people. I heard all the cliches and was on the receiving end of them. Two points here: 1) this is not personal even if it deeply effects you. 2) if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. The last point here doesn't mean you are the problem, or the cause of the problem. But simply that your presence is no longer part of any solution to whatever the problem is. Whether you agree with that or not is beside the point. The fact is that, once companies get to this stage, there is only one way forward: let go of a lot of people.
IMHO, Facebook is being to cautious here. They need to cut much more deeply than this and re-focus on their core products and modernize those. Facebook has been dead in the water for years. Whatsapp has an aging user group as well. Instagram seems past its glory. Messenger seems like a failed product at this point. Time to take it out the back and kill that. Revitalizing Facebook and Instagram will require some drastic changes. It's not going to magically start turning around without that. It's either continued gradual decline or finding some way to become relevant again.
The trouble here though, is very few VC's have an appetite to fund now, especially seed / series A. They are too busy dealing with the overpriced and soon to fail cohort from 2020/2021
I spoke with a VC just last week from one if the top five, they are yet to fund anyone new this year.
So here's the thing. Who is doing better at this than Meta? Who could they buy? Regulation is a secondary issue.
At this point, the Quests are pretty good gaming machines. Its the software that's lacking. MMAAAN has traditionally struggled with content creation. It took a long time for the streaming studios to get any decent shows. Apple, Google, Netflix and Amazon don't really have a good game portfolio to this day.
They could possibly buy or spin up a bunch of game studios to crank out content but on the hardware side I think they actually are best in class here.
"In 2020, Meta added over 13,000 employees, a 30% increase, and the biggest year of hiring in the company’s history. In 2021, it added another 13,000 workers. By total worker numbers, it was the two biggest years of expansion in Facebook’s short history."
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/apple-had-slower-headcount-g...
FB stock in 2020: 234 Today: 190
FB revenue in 2020: $86 billion 2022: $117 billion
Back then interest rates were low and money was cheap. It was growth over profit and when money is cheap you can afford to run in the red as long as you're getting bigger. The minute interest rates went up companies had to rethink how they're going to spend money. We haven't seen the type of corp consolidation yet that we saw back then but it's still early days.
These are not the words of someone who has learned lessons or who is interested in telling the truth.
So here's a hypothesis: Facebook is not a "technology company," it's an advertising company. And spending on advertising has cratered as businesses everywhere have pulled in their horns in response to their own falling revenues. Facebook lived large during the fake boom. It hired way too many people and a built a bloated, middle-heavy organization that is poorly-suited to the task ahead: taking back territory it's lost to smaller, nimbler competitors. Facebook management bought the economic lies being told hook, line, and sinker.
The party's now over and Facebook faces major headwinds, including savage competition, declining revenue, and the aftermath of a hiring orgy gone wrong.
I think you need to RTFA ... it covers all those areas in great detail ... it's is one of the most detailed such posts I've ever seen like this.
There was also a lot of duplicative and overlapping work, which is mentioned as well.
Hypothesis? They've been an ad company for a long time.
"The author" is a bit of a strange way to refer to Mark Zuckerberg himself.
The 'efficiency' here is slashing operational expenses to boost earnings per share. That is a temporary boost, but one that can be repeated a few times.
When your team got spun up to work on this project, interest rates were low and it was a sound investment to try this project out. If it was successful, it might have made/saved a moderate amount of money. It made sense to invest in it, compared to all the other options available at the time.
But alas, inflation soared and interest rates rose faster than predicted, so now the bonds are a better bet than you and your team doing whatever it was you were doing. According to this spreadsheet, it wasn't nearly as profitable as the bonds.
Increased interest rates suck up this money because now there is something better to do with that money. Why "Do Stuff" when the returns on doing stuff is less than the ultra high savings yield you are now being offered.
It's virtuous when the stuff being done actually is destructive due to easy access to capital (e.g. 100 Ramen shops driving each other into further and further debt) but it's also a ham-fisted solution. It disrupts long term planning, even relatively conservative ones like "buy government bonds", and also just punts the problem b/c it's reducing demand by... promising more money in the future.
Meta is supposed to be a Tech company and invest the capital they have in technology plays
Also, FB isn't buying treasuries...
Focusing on Metaverse while TikTok is continuing to increase user engagement is senseless. If I were Zuck, I would do three things:
0) Wind down Metaverse investment. Throw it back into research. Kill the product. Take the loss. He has controlling interest in the stock so he probably gets a few mulligans. So long as he presents a competent forward looking strategy, I think the investor base will still give him a few more chances.
1) Narcissism 2.0 or really, Instagram 2.0 - Merge Instagram with Reels. This is hard. The experience/monetization/product has to be just right to not cannibalize existing instagram advertising revenue or user traction. It would be easy to fall down the multiple message app mess at Google. The benefit of merging is to own the best global platform for every narcissistic creator on the planet - from movie stars to your dog. Advertisers want eyeballs. Narcissists want eyeballs, some want money. Truly understand why creators are on TikTok and entice them back to a better Facebook property.
2) Lobby to get TikTok banned. If Zuck can't defeat TikTok on product development then he can get it banned. Spend dollars lobbying politicians and demand results.
I think Zuck still has a number of winning plays available to him.
That's their only realistic hope of seeing out the next five years. Get TikTok banned in the States, Europe and parts of Asia, then clone their app and launch in those markets to capture market share.
It's an underhand business tactic, but there's nothing too low for Zuck I guess.
"Year of Efficiency" immediately following "Year of Metaverse" succinctly captures how things went lol
This happened in India, though it is not clear if it was Meta who lobbied or combination of other factors.
Are reels not already integrated into instagram?
3/14: Zuck posts that they're making their orgs "flatter", in other words laying off a bunch of managers & directors
"In person work is more effective"
> Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely
"To remain a company that values tech we must lower the influence of people who don't value it"
> As we’ve grown, we’ve hired many leading experts in areas outside engineering. This helps us build better products, but with many new teams it takes intentional focus to make sure our company remains primarily technologists.
It seems like the real issue may be the hiring process between remote and in-person engineers, or biases in evaluating in-person vs. remote engineers.
So even though people aren't willing to strap bricks to their faces now, once they understand there's no other Next Big Thing coming, they'll shrug and pick up a VR headset.
Then after a month of ChatGPT hype he wakes up and fires everybody. What a clown.
Changing course when you realize you were wrong has nothing to do with being a clown. Not defending Zuckerberg or the lay off, but for large companies it's always been one of the hardest tasks to predict trends. And many that go under do so because they hold on to old technologies and refuse to admit the world has changed.
If Zuckerberg really changed the whole strategy because he saw VR won't go anywhere and ChatGPT has such potential, changing course drastically would be much better than holding on to old projects due to sunk costs.
They've been developing LLaMA for some time now presumably. Seems odd to imply they somehow missed this.
Despite appearances, if the metaverse gambit in the current episode made any sense it was mostly as a defensive move: To obtain control over a device so that you can datamine at will and perpetuate your business model irrespective of what other major actors might come up with.
Think about it. If stars (you have little control over) align, device owners can flip a privacy switch here, introduce a policy there and annihilate your business.
To paraphrase Ballmer: Devices, devices, devices
Elon: Satellite phones
Samsung: The Moon
Apple: Sat + VR
Microsoft: GPT
Is how I see it.
> Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively.
> As part of our Year of Efficiency, we’re focusing on understanding this further and finding ways to make sure people build the necessary connections to work effectively. In the meantime, I encourage all of you to find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person.
It seems like that's what Facebook employees wanted, so that's what they get. I'm no fan of Facebook in general, but at least it seems like the guy is listening to the employees on something.
From the press release:
> I recognize that sharing plans for restructuring and layoffs months in advance creates a challenging period. But last fall, we heard feedback that you wanted more transparency sooner into any restructuring plans, so that’s what I’m trying to provide here.
Their employees wanted that
Do you take those claims as seriously as you do "Meta is building the future of human connection", "Year of Efficiency", and "Meta builds new ways for people to feel closer"?
This is a PR fluff message about layoffs. I wouldn't take any claims in it at raw face value.
1. Work at Meta
2. Be top performer
3. Get promoted to manager
4. Manage <5 people as a newbie manager
5. Get fired because you don't manage enough people
1. Work at Meta
2. Be top performer
3. Never get promoted
I’ve worked at a few places that thought they were lean and flat as well, but they aren’t. Someone in leadership likes the idea and goes on and on about it, but the actual structure and legacy of past structures creates a complete mess. The only thing that gets done is talking about how great the team is and how much awesome stuff is getting done. Then everyone gets laid off again.
I may be wrong and he may be actually referring to optimizing garbage collection on their servers, but this sounds like a callous and heartless way to refer to firing 10k people.
Hmmm, wonder what the next step of "threads" will look like? ;)
I've had to make some hard decisions, to fire ten thousand of you. But don't worry I take full responsibility for this failure.
All the tools in the world but you can't have a quiet office
He has lost the trust of his users and someone new needs to focus on restoring that as a precondition for anything else they do being successful. Facebook isn't Civ 5 (one of his favorite games) but he operates it like it is, and if he keeps treating FB like a video game full of NPCs he'll have plenty of time for the next Civ game.
Flagged of course, "no way this is true" etc
(Strongly reminiscent of the Cortex podcast’s “yearly themes”. Which I like! But… I’m not running one of the world’s largest companies, am I?)
Where? Just FAANGS are giving that level of salary and FAANGS are not hiring.
Mr Zuckerberg, what is the future of social connection?
Thing is, I don't think that people trust FB/"meta" with the concept. Most of the feedback I've heard from people IRL has been to the effect of, "it could be cool, but not if Facebook is behind it."
Looks like the age of pure remote work is done for big corporates!
> I encourage all of you to find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person
...I wonder if these layoffs will be an opportunity for managers to get rid of some of those pesky employees who insist on working remotely - with the welcome side effect of "encouraging" the remaining ones to "embrace" the return to old ways of working with more enthusiasm?
How should this be interpreted? They're getting rid of all the Agile Coaches?
The whole in office is better thing is a farce, but how can you buy into a 'vision' when they don't believe it themselves.
Realizing that this is an unpopular opinion, in person work is better for the business. Business decisions are being made around encouraging in person work, because relationships help at work.
I'm not sure if anyone at Meta understand that very few humans, outside of Meta stakeholders, want this company to continue to exist.
Is it total reduction now of 21K of 86K approximately? 24.4%
It's just not clear how the metaverse becomes something at the scale meta needs it to be to justify the R&D or to make an impact on its business.
To me it looks like a technology really takes off when it gives people a lighter-weight way to communicate and connect. The telephone takes off compared to writing letters because it is a much easier, more immediate way to tell people about things. Messaging takes off relative to calling people on the telephone because it's an easier, more immediate way to tell people about things. Social media, including Facebook take off relative to hanging out because it an easier more immediate way to tell people about things.
The new thing doesn't necessarily need to replace the old thing, it just needs to open up a new, easier, more immediate way for people to tell people about things.
The best I see is if meta can make itself the gatekeeper of the de facto standard platform for VR games/entertainment. That's potentially a pretty big business -- because maybe VR can take over AAA content and shows. But is it really big enough to sustain meta? (It seems far from certain they would end up in such an advantageous position, but Oculus is a good start.)
Wow, I would not have guessed that Buck2 would be mentioned by name, and the only project done so.
The moment they find a way to replace you and cut costs they will.
This means, don't bother working more than you have to, after all you are not working towards your own private jet, but you are building wealth of people who don't have your best interest in mind.
I don't even have a FB account but every second line here is full of the type of gaslighting and bizspeak BS that absolutely nobody appreciates.
> We do this with AI to help you creatively express yourself and discover new content.
You mean destroy adolescent growing minds with more and more addictive short burst content from advertisers.
> but with many new teams it takes intentional focus to make sure our company remains primarily technologists.
So goodbye ethics councils, any semblance of internal discussion over our impact on the world.
> Profitability enables innovation.
Because investors LOVE taking risks on `innovation` during a downturn. /s
More like they will push harder the methods which make their bonus'.
Facebook/Meta has provided nothing beneficial long term, to the world. Let it burn.
While today everybody wants to integrate GPT-4 into a customer facing app to increase community interaction and value to the customer, the company famous for its social graph has nothing to offer to foster integration or community building.
Even bing, the somewhat competitor now finally is the new shiny object and a direct thread to Google.
While Meta still wants to build its Metaverse, people immerse into everything that gets connected to GPT-4. GPT-4 is the real metaverse.
Ironic. Somewhat.
Great title.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/macroeconomic-changes-ha...
"Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week."
So in total this means about 16% reduction from what Facebook was aiming to scale to in December 2022 (86k staff). I wish the investors had put Zuck in his place and killed the Metaverse concept early, but it looks like these cuts are across the board and not impacting any particular project.
So basically more rounds of layoffs to come?
> This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week.
Sounds like they pulling the plug on remote work
Has Meta been found out as a company?
Wow, that's a pretty long timeline from announcement to execution. Being told you might be laid off some time in the next 10 months. I guess they're hoping people quit?
We always used to joke that layoffs always come in threes. The first one never cuts deep enough. People do the bare minimum.
The second one comes when everyone realises that the business actually is in trouble and does need saving.
The third one is needed as the business has been so badly damaged by the layoffs and is now bleeding cash.
I found this interesting, I wonder what the optimal ratio is. If the ratio is too high then eng is going to be hit hard, if it is too low then other roles are going to be hit hard.
https://1fish2.github.io/buzzword-bingo/corp-bingo.html
and still nothing! I think we need a new set of buzzwords.
I do believe problems about their talent pipeline or how they utilise it lays deeper than these hiring/firing sprees can solve.
Maybe we can start a discussion on the content rather than our emotions from the headline?
Some of the best parts here:
> Today many of our managers have only a few direct reports. That made sense to optimize for ramping up new managers and maintaining buffer capacity when we were growing our organization faster, but now that we don’t expect to grow headcount as quickly, it makes more sense to fully utilize each manager’s capacity and defragment layers as much as possible.
> A leaner org will execute its highest priorities faster.
> we’re focusing on returning to a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles.
> I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years. Higher interest rates lead to the economy running leaner, more geopolitical instability leads to more volatility, and increased regulation leads to slower growth and increased costs of innovation.
Wait so does that mean they'll end up with 10K less after hiring 5K folks? Which might imply that they'll be firing 15K people.
> The blog post does not explicitly state that Mark Zuckerberg takes full responsibility for the layoffs.
That's either a lie, or Mark has a serious misunderstanding of what "better" means.
But how do you manage to have so many people that you can fire 10k ?! If I googled well, they appear to have 72k employees. Where did you find the management that thought having 72k employees is reasonable to operate a bunch of websites and apps ?!
Only the best managers will survive this.
And many will be happy for the opportunity
Translation: We weren't efficient at all
They're IBM now.
I am curious what people think about this.
What kind of sociopath one has to be not to realize there's something very wrong about writing a piece like this?
It's almost like Mark or whoever put it together enjoyed doing it.
What do any of these people even do? Facebook hasn't changed in the last 10 years. Instagram etc are all finished products. How can you have hundreds of thousands of people in a company when you don't make anything?
You have to give them something to do so you get them to make a new UI because everyone always needs a new UI. But then oh no we need new servers for development so we need a new server team. And then we need a testing team for testing the UI and then we need HR for managing the new teams and accountants for managing the expanded payroll... And yet none of them actually achieve anything because it's a made-up project.
Confirms my theory that most companies are just bloat 80:20 rule.
Get rid of everyones whos not a nerd or directly sells product.
She's still employed there though. I can't imagine she'll ever be fired, too much legal risk.