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.
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.
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"
> 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.
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.
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.
I'm an AI research engineer who was recently laid off and this was my 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.
Skillset is almost identical, biggest difference is having research experience.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Are they going to sully themselves and work as “enterprise developers” (note sarcasm)?
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.
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.
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.
