- Replacing their global policy chief with the company's highest ranking Republican.
- Appointing Dana White to the company's board.
- Changing content policies to be aligned with the incoming administration.
- Elimination of DEI programs in hiring.
- Removing tampons from men's restrooms.
- Defending all this in a 3 hour Joe Rogan interview. Ranting about the lack of "masculine energy" at the company.
- 5% layoff of low performers. Company needs to get "intense".
Is this history's most bizarre midlife crisis? What is going on with this man?
It's so transparent, perhaps part of the point is how nakedly self-serving and obvious it is.
What Meta actually wants to do is hoover up the world's data and sell it, get the world hooked on constant engagement, and erode their privacy until they have none left. To be the middleman getting paid in the entire world's engagement.
The left/right culture war stuff is just so the alien in the human suit can keep getting away with what he actually wants to do.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/07/texas-meta-content-m...
He is a snake. I also live on Kauai and most of the locals don't want him here, he is trying to turn his image around but most people aren't really buying it or haven't really thought about it too deeply.
He, in my view, is desperate to hang onto 'his throne' but all it takes is the right person, with the right vision, at the right time...with enough support.
To imagine that, "the mask is off" is absurd.
None of those bullets points are crises.
Was it as excruciatingly cringeworthy as it sounds? I don’t want to give them the view or spend three hours of my time on that, but I’d take a highlight of the weirdest moments.
> Is this history's most bizarre midlife crisis? What is going on with this man?
It feels like he suddenly became a Musk fanboy and wants to mimic him. Maybe because Zuckerberg completely failed at going into politics when he dipped his toes in it in the past and Musk just got his candidate elected.
Thank you for the link, I did watch it.
> To me "ranting" is not true.
Agreed. That didn’t feel at all like a rant. Though from the little I watched I do disagree with him and think he doesn’t have a good understanding of the zeitgeist. He claims that culture has swung in the direction that “masculinity is bad” and “masculinity is toxic” when that’s not at the argument. The term “toxic masculinity” refers to specific traits of masculinity which promote destructive facets, it doesn’t mean that all masculinity is toxic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_masculinity
Note I’m not implying you yourself don’t understand the concept, I’m merely taking this opportunity to add my own comments on the segment, and the reply to the post where you graciously provided a link seems like a good place.
Thank you again for adding the context.
It reads as though that's somehow where it came from or is an authoritative source required to use or interpret it. In this case, the phrase vaguely associates toxicity with masculinity, and whether it's intended or not, if a more specific nuanced meaning is intended, then it should be articulated concisely with a different choice of language that probably should have been chosen in the first place; the intuitive interpretation is the one that takes hold.
In different contexts in real life, I've had people be outwardly racist, sexist, or otherwise prejudiced toward me, and when responded to in a very calm manner, they scoffed that "oh here's a book to read on why actually that's impossible" when actually nah we're all just using language, and if there's a progressive, genuine intention to create a space that's as equitable and as conflict-free as possible for all, than shit like that isn't going to fly.
His whole era of big name tech founders seems to be going through it.
This one in particular feels very midlife crisis coded; weird insecure masculinity stuff. But, y'know, most men who have issues with that get by with an ill-advised car or something.
Facebook's precursor was a HotOrNot clone that used female classmates' photographs without permission. It takes a certain type of person to build something like that.
https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a19746346/mark-zuck...
The all in podcast has four high net worth people with a similar vibe.
Something disturbing is going on in the ranks of the "elite". I get these people are narcissistic, but the overt displays of contempt combined with authoritarian cowtowing is a bit frightening.
A trade war with China combined with other increasing consequences conflicts seems to be bringing the age of global free trade to an end, or at least a very different one.
The Ukrainian success with naval drones may mean the end of secure seas as well. Drones are cheap, anonymous, and effective.
That implies an disruption to the multinational corporate order, and an emphasis on domestic or near domestic production, and less of the government independence / arbitrage that the super rich have gotten used to.
But the ultras all seem to be going into these maniacal bond villain molds. Is Musk a symptom or a torchleader?
Unless you mean masculine == bad, which would be a very bigoted take.
I can understand that he had to compromise with Trump in order to protect his wealth and company. But it's clearly more than that. I wonder, does he even have values on his owns? will he reinstate the tampons if democrats win in 4 years?
My guess is that he's slowing been adhering to the Trump/Musk ideology (like a lot of people) and now is one of them.
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...
* https://hbr.org/2013/07/mens-arm-strength-affects-thei
* https://www.psypost.org/strong-men-come-across-as-more-conse...
Aka don't ignore the social side of fitness.
He's the definition of a perpetual beta trying to be alpha.
I would love to spar with him in BJJ sometime. After you train for awhile you can lock up with someone and immediately feel who they are. An alpha stays calm and relaxed, never panicking even as they are being put to sleep [1]. He went into BJJ hoping to become alpha and it just highlighted even further he's not.
[1] BTW, this isn't a bullshit masculine/man/woman thing. I roll with plenty of women and many of them are more alpha than many men I know.
Lower than 5% at scale would be a red flag, not necessarily wrong, you don't want to "stack rank" with a quota and force managers to fire people who shouldn't want to be fired, but if you have 100 engineers in a department and only one of them gets fired in a year, probably the director is making a mistake.
So, I'm sure this won't be the only firing for the year at Meta. But this doesn't really seem like it's very far away from normal practices.
This smells like the Welchian nonsense that drove GE into the ground.
if you only messed up 5% of your hires you'd be a goddamn genius and every company in the world would want to put you in charge of their hiring process
the "standard" is more like 20% of hires end up being bad hires
Maybe we should stop with the gut feel managerial apologies and think about what we’re doing and how it affects company morale, no?
Think of a hypothetical organization with 10,000 software engineers. You're the head of engineering. You have ten divisions, each with a VP managing 1000 engineers. Each VP has ten directors, each managing 100 engineers, and each line manager has 10 engineers on the team.
The engineering team reviews the past year. You notice, overall we fired 500 people last year. Okay, so on average that was 5% of staff. Seems reasonable just as a sanity check. (You ask your buddies at other large tech companies, and the other heads of engineering are reporting similar numbers.)
Now you look through the individual teams. A lot of 10-person teams don't fire anyone. That makes sense. But would you expect a director to fire nobody from their org? From 100 people... well, maybe. I'd be a little suspicious. I'd ask some other directors, does this person have a reputation of a very high quality team, or is it more likely that this director is lax, and their org doesn't manage out its underperformers?
Now imagine a VP fired nobody. 1000 people and they all were high performers. Yeah, that doesn't seem right. That VP is probably letting their team get away with low standards. If you were the head of engineering meeting with your VPs, I think the group would be able to come to a consensus of, there's a problem here. It's based on the 5% target but it's not a hard and fast rule.
In the long run, having a high-performing team is better for morale than firing nobody. It's the difference between working at Meta and working at the DMV.
You could end up performing way better firing half of your teams. And what about your managers? How is an underperforming manager in the higher positions ever fired?
I get that measuring performance is incredibly difficult, but dressing it up as if 5-10% of people are underperformers anyway is just so tantamount to how baseless and incompetent most businesses are run these days. Especially in software.
Maybe you can devise a methodology that reduces bad hiring to below 5% across the entire S&P 500 and then share it with us?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo...
^But let's say you messed up hiring 20% of your company, and then you corrected that (layoffs for the past 2 years). You haven't hired enough people to justify perma-cutting 5%. And the number of functioning employees who stop working in a role isn't going to be as high as 5%.
The reality is that most hires are probably fine in the role they're in. And you don't actually need to be this aggressive in cost-cutting.
You shouldn't think of all firing as a "mistaken hire". Sometimes you hire someone, and they work effectively for years, and then they kind of "check out" and don't do much work any more. It can be a good decision to hire someone, and then later a good decision to fire them.
It's also not a cost-cutting measure per se. Typically when you fire someone you get to replace the headcount with another hire or internal transfer. The point of firing people is to get rid of low performers and replace them with high performers.
If a construction site was sending formerly qualified people away no longer able to work we would definitely investigate their practices. Tech deserves the same scrutiny.
corporations exist to make money, or maximize shareholder returns, depending on how you look at it. corporations don't exist to make people happy or solve the fundamental societal issues with capitalism. there's merit to discussing that as a separate topic, but in the context of "capitalism exists and you are operating a business within it", you want to fire low performers and replace them with high performers
But it feels like your take is: "Guess all there is to do is just sit and feel righteous indignation while companies have their way with us, and the world crumbles around us."
A band of criminals has no protection over their enterprise. They all go to jail.
And why we have these conversations: to build consensus over these rules.
and no i didn't make up 20%, Gartner did a study on it. and most people with management/hiring experience report the same.
"Ratings, although an important way to measure performance during a specific period, are not predictive of future performance and should not be used to gauge readiness for a future role or qualify an internal candidate for a different team. (They can, however, be used to evaluate whether an employee is properly or improperly slotted on their current team; therefore, they can provide an opportunity to evaluate how to better support an internal candidate moving forward.)"
[0] https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch04.html#challeng...
Essentially the individual incentives for managers are naturally to avoid making the tough decision, the idea is to put some more pressure to make the right call.
Your value of X% will vary but you hope it’s tuned by some research within the org.
A person, individually, indeed must always be judged by themselves objectively. But people, in aggregate, can generally be understood stochastically. And in any group of people there will always be the obvious slackers who everyone knows aren't pulling their weight. Good management clears these people out rather than allowing them to fester and lower morale. It doesn't matter if it's high paid SWEs or minimum wage workers, the dynamic is the same.
At the last place I worked I was managing people and we were given a set of "standards" to rate employees on, used to determine raises, promotions, and so on. I tried my best fairly evaluate my reports, but obviously the standards are inherently imprecise and so the evaluations are mostly qualitative. I found that other managers, wanting to do well by their reports, more leniently interpreted the standards and their reports were promoted more and treated better than my own.
So, wanting to do well by my reports, I re-calibrated my own evaluations to be more lenient. The other managers responded in kind. This arms race continued until upper management found it to have essentially broken the whole system. So then we were asked to rank the performance of reports on our team. I liked everyone on my team and wanted the best for all of them, but also had no difficulty putting them in order from most productive to least productive, with maybe the occasional tie here or there.
Anyway, the whole experience kind of highlighted to me some of the issues with "objective" standards and some of the benefits of relative standards.
The idea that some fixed percentage of people always underperform is possibly Jack Welch's most toxic contribution to management, and with all the BS he spewed over the years, that's saying something. It makes people compete against each other Hunger Games-style as opposed to working as a team.
There is also the more philosophical question of where that standard would come from in the first place. And what if the business finds that the average applicant meets a much higher standard than the current firing standard of the company? It would seem to then make sense to raise the company's own firing standard.
Businesses are people but business is cogs. (In both senses of the word)
To be a manager in a large org, you need to constantly be refocusing the team on the goal. Drift happens. When you have 100 brains, you get 100 ideas.
This "rule of thumb" reason is to make sure leaders are not languishing. It's very easy to see the people, and lose sight of the business goal.
Are all 100 people aligned and driving towards the goal? (If so, amazing and you should fight to keep all of them.)
Note that they also routinely fire perfectly capable people, who exceeded expectations for many years in a row and just had one bad year (sometimes after a team change or a promotion).
Could this lead to a manager that tries to have the best team for himself will always include average employees that they can easily fire?
Interview process at Meta isn't that hard. Mostly medium leetcode questions (in front of single interviewer), not particularly tricky. With enough preparation, it's doable by any reasonably good undergrad. Google was slightly harder though. Similarly, system design can be prepared.
The hardest part is to get the interview in the first place. But if you do, it's just a matter of preparation. You want to be able to nail these questions.
That's quite the qualifier. I could not regularly pass these interviews when I had done 200+ LC problems. It's only when I got to 1000+ LC problems and had done hundreds of technical interviews that I was able to regularly pass a lot of these interviews. Even now, it still requires me to prepare a lot because how often am I really thinking about suffix tries? It's an arms race. It has happened in universities as well. An arms race between the professors trying to make sure a lot of students still fail their classes while every student needs a 4.0 to get an internship/job now.
It will get higher and higher as time goes on because we're mostly focused on H1B candidates who come from a similarly culture of grinding for exams. You can see this lifestyle is very normalized on the LC, 1point3acres, etc. Cheating is also seen as completely fine too. At this point, I feel like it's almost unfair to not be cheating due to how many people are. Your competition doesn't care about some sense of ethics (nor does the hiring manager - they cheated to get in too!).
I've met with multiple folks at FAANG and such where these practices of grinding + a little "magic" get you in. You talk to someone and they'll say, "oh yeah, I have like three guys I went to high school with in [country] in my house. Once one of us got accepted, it was easy for the rest of us."
Also, the follow ups are designed to eventually lock the candidate, since is not enough to pass the low bar, they want to know what your high bar is too.
It's setting a bar that when evaluated on a curve a certain percentage of your employees wind up being below that bar. You derive the ratio from how aggressive you expect your bar to be.
But no one is saying you need to fire people. They're saying they expect a certain amount of lower performers and if they don't see it, they want to know reason. But it also only manifests at much higher populations than an individual team. Totally possible a small enough team has everyone >= meeting expectations.
My assumption based on some interview experience articles[1][2] is that there's an internal arms race between the recruiting and engineering at Meta where candidates are not forwarded for the interview process until they feel sufficiently prepared, often giving them months (in any other company, I feel this would be a big red flag), and interviewers expecting the equivalent of Djikstra or Knuth to join their team, regardless of what the team actually does. (I assume not everyone writes distributed system or database implementations from scratch at Meta.)
[1] https://medium.com/@rohitverma_87831/my-interview-experience...
[2] https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/5132569/Me...
If the company is growing 10% a year and firing 5% a year you're still growing significantly.
So I think it's pretty important to look at the rate of hiring, not just the rate of firing.
Wouldn’t be every coworker a competitor? How do you plan your life or start a family if you are every year 10% likely of being fired or backstabbed?
Sounds like a good way to turn a functioning team into Survivor Island.
On the other hand, do you really want to be stuck working with someone who's not very competent? I think we've all had that experience and it's miserable.
We assume there would probably be PIP for those individuals in this hypothetical scenario. However even then, saying "10 percent of our workforce will guaranteed be subject to PIP and or firing as a matter of our staffing methodology" instantly turns much of your working time into fluffing your work and backstabbing colleagues.
OR running away at great speed.
OR telling investorts "We do not grow, we abritrarilly trim regardless of market forces."
AKA, GE.
I’ve rarely seen anyone let go and thought the person was a low performer. Most of the time the person was fired because they questioned authority.
oh you sweet summer child. No, in many cases they absolutely do not.
Speaking as someone who works at Meta, I certainly don't plan my life as if I'll always be employed by Meta, always earning this high of a wage. The ride could end at any minute, and I plan accordingly.
10% is an overestimate, of being fired or backstabbed in any given year, fwiw. The people getting laid off in any given cycle tend to be heavily skewed towards newcomers in my experience.
If 5% is every coworker is a competitor, unions are your coworker doesn't even have to deliver any value at all yet is treated the same as you.
Before, Zuckerberg rhetorically accepted responsibility for lay-offs, but now he's making clear that the people he's firing are entirely to blame. He's deliberately talking up the firings, bringing them closer, making them feel more personal and making it a bit harder for the people fired to get replacement jobs, all for the purpose of cratering his own employees' morale.
He's making Facebook a pro-MAGA company and has decided that the way to make the workers get with the program is to intimidate them.
I think the difference is that they'll get rid of the PIP and fire people straight away.
What I have seen in the past was engineers that were performing completely fine being put on PIP-equivalents because there must be a few being PIPped on every department, based off on some bullshit percentage.
In reality, low perforers should be culled, no need to enforce percentages department-wide. That would require managers doing their job properly of course.
So if you aren’t getting a promotion, you are eventually getting fired. This meat grinder probably has some perverse incentives for employees and makes sure you are always churning through folk who you don’t need to pay QoL raises to
https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-layoff-mes...
And if that wasn't enough: https://www.itpro.com/business/business-strategy/mark-zucker...
Besides, all those Associate Directors of Nonengineering Engineers of Developer Conference Swag Acquisition need to eat too.
The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.
The current pivot, I think, is mostly that culture warriors have managed to describe their interest in liberal terms (freedom of speech), and social media companies are buying it (gets them out of moderation duty and lets them reduce headcount).
These are ad delivery networks that want to do the bare minimum required to avoid scaring people away, they’ve discovered that the bare minimum can go lower. They don’t have any principles, so why would they do anything else? They are exploring downwards in terms of effort, eventually they’ll bounce off the floor.
Also, they wouldn't care about atheists so much. Liberals may not be atheists themselves but they would be very detached from religion and "who whorships who". People wouldn't take religion so seriously.
The US is more like a bunch of conservatives trying to be liberal until their own beliefs trump liberal theory.
These labels dont matter when your jobs are going away though.
And if there's a country capable of the same productivity with cheaper salaries, then it's expected for the company to expand overseas.
The side that has the largest gap between stated goals and actual policies then proceeds to lose the election.
Getting more specific, I don't buy the argument that we're getting more conservative. Instead, I'm inclined to think that a narrow election victory will lead to extreme measures that will create a significant backlash in the coming years. If you're in a position to exploit a system with little repercussions for four years and all it costs is a little bit of dignity and some public image, most corporate leaders would take that opportunity for the money, prestige, power, etc.
I'm willing to bet sizeable amounts of money that most voters do not support rolling back employee protections, or removing the debt ceiling, or buying/bullying [insert random country], or any of the other wildly regressionist statements thrown around by un/elected folks. Conflating the complexities involved in how a person votes with a general mandate for one specific reason people vote is not a good idea. Extrapolate that to over 100 million voters as some unified stance and it starts to feel like propaganda.
People often vote against their interests. They may not understand that alternatives are possible or even exist, and they can be brainwashed into thinking the other candidate is dangerous and so on... Also, the decline in quality of education isn't helping. So I don't know if there will be a backlash. Even worse, as a European, I'm afraid Musk's propaganda crosses the Atlantic and that we'll get the same fate and will vote to give up our social benefits.
We are getting more culturally conservative though - you can see that in the polls that ask people to self-identify politically.
Support for which specific policies that translates to obviously varies, but I think that's a separate question from the overall zeitgeist.
I don't trust these because I don't think most people can self-identify in away that accurately describes their beliefs. It usually just boils down to a binary "left vs right".
There are many people who identify as "conservative", express their disdain for "leftists" over some rage-bait culture war topic of the week, but demand better workers' rights, support unionization, single payer healthcare, and other very leftist ideas.
You lost me here, because the debt ceiling is a recent political construct with the only outcome being to add friction to an already high friction process and to threaten the faith and credit of the United States.
It is neither conservative nor liberal, but obstructionist
Agreed. I'm pretty sure normal folks never actually shifted left, not as much as the far-left ideology people imagined. Folks would use any plausible excuse to end the insanity progressive politics has caused. Mind you the reverse is also true of ultra conservative politics. The world is elastic in this sense, and we see corrections from time to time.
We've never known a country where the wealthy had this much capability. Owning just one of Facebook, Amazon, Palantir, X, etc makes a person incredibly powerful, but the fact that they've all seemingly combined forces makes me think we are in for an era that makes Cyberpunk novels look like a Disney flick.
It reminds me like when crime rose in 2020 and 2021. It had been falling for something like 25 years. Then it was rising briefly, because of COVID. Many people treated this as a new normal, and a reason to make lasting and dramatic political changes. Then crime fell again in 2023 and 2024, without those substantive changes. The truth is that the short term trend didn't really have to do with criminal justice policy.
Yabushige: “How does it feel to shape the wind to your will?”
Toranaga: “I don’t control the wind. I only study it.”
Roy Cohn was Don's business mentor.
They abandoned the movement during bush senior and the Clinton years.
1930-1980 were marked by much higher levels of taxation and wealth redistribution than we have today.
1980-Present are the neo-liberal experiment resulting in massive income inequality.
Was the 19th century a time of utopian equality?
Liberals are most fired up when conservatives like Trump are in office. Where I am, I expect to see more local elections fall to far lefties, I expect more BLM-like protests (which really could only have occurred under Trump), more activism and not less. It is a bit sad because I thought we were making some progress like electing moderates (who I really prefer and think are better for the community) rather than far lefties (who really can only get elected when someone like Trump is in charge).
> The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.
No, things are way too conservative now for that. We haven't had a politician as liberal as Ronald Reagan since Bill Clinton, America definitely lurched right since after the 1990s.
This is already in progress, they're closing UK offices extremely quickly.
As an aside from that though, recent & planned changes in UK regulation are trying to put more onus on social media companies to police their dungeons, and they don't like that. I'm sure this aggravation has a causal relationship with Musk getting very anti-UK-government ATM (spreading “facts” about them that range from somewhat dubious down to outright lies & calls for vigilantism) – trying to push attention away from SM and its role in various problems. Pulling out of the UK will reduce their legal (and financial) risk exposure with regard to these regulation changes.
How much of Meta's staff is H1B?
Imported workers are just fine, even though that is not something you'd derive from many a campaign speech, particularly for specialist workers as vaguely defined by the H1B system which have an indirect benefit of adding a bit of brain-drain friction to potentially competing companies in other economies, as well as shoring up the effect of temporary local skills deficiencies.
But work being done in non-American jurisdictions where the regulatory demands of other governments might affect how an American company can gouge out a profit is what causes upset. That and other regulatory demands suggesting SM companies make effort to crack down on some of the “free to speak hate” problems, which the current powers-that-be that side of the pond don't actually see as problems. Or simply that work being done elsewhere is money going into someone else's economy ‑ while many H1B workers will be sending some money back to family elsewhere, they won't be sending most of it as they need to clothe themselves, eat, pay rent, have a few luxuries, etc.
I and others did interpret this, and recalled what they said about that matter.
Wasn't part of the campaign directly but Trump and Elon both made this very apparent.
Moving jobs back to the US (or appearing to), cancelling DEI programmes which are not approved of by the incoming administration, etc all lines up with this.
The more difficult question is whether Meta is the chicken or the egg. OP suggests Meta are courting Trump’s approval. I’m not so sure that Meta didn’t help put him there in the first place.
It’ll absolutely work, too. The new President loves to hear how good his ideas are.
He’s been speaking lately (on JRE just a few days back too if I’m not mistaken) about the responsibility of the US government to protect US companies abroad rather than hurting them at home. This was targeted specifically at Trump, and trying to encourage him to get on Meta’s side with regulators.
He also said on JRE that the Biden administration would yell down the phone at his staff for not censoring facts, this is to rile up the GOP in Congress to pressure Trump to be seen doing the opposite and standing up for free speech (as Meta defines it).
And to be clear I'm not sure a UK employee is that much cheaper than a US one. The salary is not THAT far off between the two, especially when converting from GBP to USD, and employers have a lot more social charges to pay on top of salaries in the UK and Europe.
If you add the cost of collaborating across very spread timezones, I really don't think hiring outside of the US is that much cheaper.
> Meta is set to cut about 5% of its workforce, focusing on the company’s lowest-performing workers, CNBC confirmed Tuesday. > Another 5% of the 2024 employee base “who have been with the company long enough to receive a performance rating” will also be cut, Bloomberg reported, citing an internal memo.
And a direct quote from Zucky:
> I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low performers faster. We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle, with the intention of back filling these roles in 2025.
Taken together, one could read it as getting rid of people those programs had been protecting?
Setting the expectation that you can be canned quickly if you aren't a good backfill will probably be a useful filter. It's not like they can get rid of all the dead weight, but every 5% helps.
My point stands. Meta is suppressing speech while embracing it. It just happens that the suppression is welcomed by the group whose speech is being embraced.
Meta is working on building some of the most important technologies of the world. AI, glasses as the next computing platform and the future of social media.
About six months into my own daily beating regimen, I found I was sleeping longer and deeper, I had more energy and focus, and my libido had returned to a state not unlike my early 20s. My morale was fantastic. Only after having been repatriated and thus no longer subject to daily beatings did my morale return to lower levels.
Why doesn’t Huberman talk about this?
Now - if the mean is higher, variance is low, and the distribution isn't symmetric, that's when things start to become harder.
Worst case, you start firing people that are "low-performers" on paper, but in reality might be very close to the "meets expectation" workers. Which creates a very toxic environment, as your average workers will be walking on eggshells.
And we know from history that this isn't some outlandish scenario in tech. There have been companies that have had(still have) a strict stacked ranking system - and come hell or high water, someone has to go.
I don't say this to bash your statement, I agree with you in principle. Just useful to keep in mind that the context matters. Sometimes, the people complaining about having to compensate for the low performer, are the actual low performers.
I am sure there are some people getting laid off who genuinely don't do any work, though not 5% of the company - and certainly not the bottom 5% according to Meta's metrics! A lot of "mid-range" performers probably get by with pure schmoozing and mooching. And in more general sense, I don't think it's okay - either morally or strategically - to lay people off simply because you want to roll the dice on hiring more productive workers. (For a company of Meta's size this doesn't even make sense; clearly this move is about cracking the whip for the remaining 95%.)
Performance is only adequate if it’s at least as good as the engineers of the other players in your industry. Otherwise, you’re losing ground. As long as anyone in your market space is actively trying to manage their engineering talent (recruiting your top performers, releasing low performers, being more selective in hiring) so must you just to keep pace. An “adequate” engineer may make the company money, but the opportunity cost of not hiring someone better who could make even more money can be higher still.
Of course, some people are obviously great in any context and some are obviously useless (or worse) in any context, but those folks should already be handled appropriately even without the "cut 5%" mandate.
The migration of US TikTok users to Xiaohongshu this week, to the point where it is #1 on the US app store while still having half of its UI in Mandarin has been particularly eye opening.
This reaction is very rushed and I don't think it's going to be very lasting, I'd expect people to go to reels/shorts until maybe another (western, american probably but could be european) alternative appears.
These people are up for grabs, they're not going to stay in Xiaohongshu.
It's very hard to go back to an app with a poor FYP algorithm (ie. Reels, Shorts) after using an app with a good FYP algorithm, and this, along with a knee-jerk reaction against Meta for its perceived role in lobbying for the "TikTok ban" will make capturing ex-TikTok users an uphill struggle for Meta's products.
You can say it's not fair or cruel but this isn't a layoff. They want to churn (maybe for cheaper talent? Maybe for H1-Bs?)
Meta is already filled with H1Bs. They are probably the model utilizer of H1B visas. They pay them all really well and the employee base is truly global, not just all from one country.
Also those two countries make up half the world population so if you're truly hiring global talent they should make up half that group
( Adding legs will make it easier at least )
But this thread has become quite interesting.
I'd like to see 5% of engineering managers get cut every year, since they're either selecting for, or I suspect creating, disengaged employees.
The story of Sun Tzu using the emperor's concubines to demonstrate military discipline is one of the most famous anecdotes from The Art of War.
When Sun Tzu was summoned by King Helü of Wu to prove his military theories, the king challenged him to demonstrate his strategies using the palace concubines as soldiers. Sun Tzu divided the concubines into two groups and appointed the king's two favorite concubines as their leaders. He then explained the orders clearly and ensured they were understood.
When the exercise began, the concubines laughed and did not follow the orders. Sun Tzu stopped the exercise and said that if instructions are not clear, it is the fault of the commander. He repeated the instructions, ensuring they were understood again. However, when the concubines laughed and failed to obey a second time, Sun Tzu stated that if orders are clear and not followed, it is the fault of the leaders.
He then executed the two leaders, despite them being the king's favorites. This shocked the king, but Sun Tzu insisted that discipline was essential in any army. After the execution, the remaining concubines obeyed his commands with perfect discipline, demonstrating the effectiveness of his methods.
I am very very skeptical of this idea - what do you all think?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/22/mark-zuckerberg-envisions-1-...
GB, with the Box 3 Gavin Belson Signature Edition?
Or Russ Hanneman, with... everything?
(Or was it Jared, with Russ being right about him?)
Shareholders like "we're cutting labor because of AI adoption" much more than "we're cutting labor to save costs and cull some deadend r&d". While both are fiscally positive, one gives off vibes of growth and innovation while the other doesn't.
Doesn't this beg the question of why the bar wasn't higher the whole time?
Maybe if they replaced every 5th comment with an ad (like how every 5th or so post/story/reel on Instagram is an ad).
As more of the world came online, the population of the internet has become made up of mostly passive and mediocre people. The MySpace to Facebook type of migration won't happen anymore. Too many people aren't aware or don't care.
you should put freespeech above of a lot of things, weigh it much higher than you think and i'm sad to see liberal friends ignorant to US history.
on top of that, your premise suggests billionaires should be recalcitrant forces and billionaires should go along with the masses. most of the them made their money1 seeing opportunities no one else did and executing on them. they are more likely to have an 'edge' in seeing the future even if we removed their fortunes.
to be in the top 5% of global income you need to make more 30k a year. you are likely part of the rich. eat the rich etc. should i listen to you?
1. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-self-made
Are they effectively saying that anyone terminated this year is probably for poor performance?
Usually there's more ambiguity, like changing business priorities.
Over time some cracks might show. Bugs that take longer to fix, issues that take longer to figure out, delayed releases, etc.
New features being implemented would be severely impacted, especially if those need integration from multiple teams.
Does this mean that there's fat? Maybe. Any company I worked for has a level of fat - and that might be a good thing, as demand quite often is not stable over time, you may need to ramp up initiatives without necessarily hiring/training new employees.
Maybe? Companies of all shapes and size do poor decisions. On the other hand, the nature of some projects require some time of R&D to find out whether something is worthwhile or not.
> Ideal working environment is when there are a lot of worthwhile projects and not enough people. That's when you get a choice of what to work on, that's when the company really values the employees, etc.
I am not sure I agree with this. Ideally you have resources to pursue all projects considered worthwhile.
> That is absolutely not how it is now, at any of these companies. There are way too many people and not enough work. The less ambitious employees deal with this by hiding and doing next to nothing. The more ambitious ones fight each other for scraps of meaningful work that are not yet being done by someone they can't fight. It's not a dignified place to be either way.
That was really not my experience there, although I did not work for Google specifically (perhaps reality there was different). There was actually a lot of work to be done, although a plenty of that work was, in my opinion, overhead due to how things were structured and how decisions were made, many times from the top down.
I left because of it. I felt like it was the place I worked the hardest and I was at the same time the least productive.
This is pure fantasy, except maybe if you work on a startup environment where engineers have a lot of autonomy.
In any sufficiently large organization, you will be assigned to a team, and the scope of work will be sort of defined in some level of hierarchy above you as an individual engineer.
You may have some autonomy to pick up some initiative here and there, but that will be somewhat limited. You may also try to switch to different teams where work may be more attractive to you.
Several kinds of performance management system such as mandatory percentages for each rating level ARE bullshit, but without performance management of some sort any organization with more than 3 people will fail.
I think we need to embrace the idea that whether you are given raises, promotions, continued employment, etc is largely a function of whether your manager likes you, likes having you on their team, and wants to reward you. And if they don't like you, it doesn't matter how good your numbers are now they will find a way to get rid of you sooner or later. It's better to just get it over with, give the employee a generous severance package, and part ways (or transfer them to another team that's interested in them).
Also, a well built subjective review process is better than no process, for instance, using peers and customer opinions as input.
However, if the company’s priorities change, significant on-call issues arise, the design team experiences a layoff, the front-end team undergoes an exodus, and the product team abandons the project, you will not meet your objective. Any one of these, or more could happen.
Consequently, you will be considered a low performer. You could have kept the ship afloat, kept the trains running on time, and deployed your part of the project on time and under budget, but still be a low performer on paper.
But what I think most of us have experienced, in most companies, is that instead of driving compensation and promotion/firing the middle-management decisions around those things are made and then post-hoc justified via the performance system.
Which is another symptom of HR not having real power and instead simply being used to implement decisions made by other leadership.
Keep that in mind when anyone talks about how vital performance evaluations are. Management can’t even figure out non-bullshit ways to evaluate their own work.
This isn't how it ever, ever plays out.
Also, most companies implementing this clearly are doing so out of some sort of compliance, whether it be SOC or otherwise. So yea, lots of times it actually is total performative bullshit. Congrats on finding the .000000000001% of cases where it isn't, if you are being serious here.
There’s a kind of tradeoff here, where on one end you have the most useful performance measurements, and on the other end you have the most objective performance measurements. When you’re doing things well, the best you can do is fall somewhere on that line. The entire line is bullshit, you just get to choose what kind of bullshit you have.
Large orgs tend to skew towards objectivity because it minimizes liability, and large orgs are full of people trying to avoid being liable for mistakes.
But performance reviews are still bullshit. You could replace them with 'vote off the island' style votes every quarter instead and we wouldn't be any worse off.
It also democratizes making AI content to get eyeballs to sell ads.
And lastly Llama breakthroughs help ads ML
Actual GDP data would be a good first start, no?
I think many got use to the most incredible labor market of a generation or two and we are just now back to something more historically normal.
Average people are struggling to make ends meet and racking up debt. The gap between pay and the cost of goods has only grown in recent years. How is that good for anyone?
Which ones? The ones they released or the ones they re-released after overstating the numbers several times?
Were we in a recession in the 90s, as the rust belt was hollowed out and earning its name, and Wall street reaped the once in a generation windfall of outsourcing an entire country's manufacturing base overseas? Many would say those were the good times. White collar professionals had their time in the sun for those couple of decades, and GDP exploded. But the working class folks were wiped out.
Now it's our turn at the high end of technology. Once top paid SWEs are being reduced to the understanding that their careers are probably over. The economy today is chugging along just fine, but our little niche of high earning specialty labor is over, just as it was for the auto workers 30 years ago. The capitalists have almost fully completed their capture of the last remaining means of production out of their control; intellectual labor.
Tech became tighter to join 2 years ago and for the next years are going to play music chairs on the open seats as lay offs continue, executives think that AI can replace anyone and younger generation (with lower wages) joins the tech workforce.
It's not recession per se, these companies will continue to be crazy profitable, it's just a change in mindset. See also the famous "founder-mode" that came up recently for startups and scaleups.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gross-national-in...
This is a great time to be wealthy. All that juicy human labor is ripe for the taking.
People just want to be able to afford to live and affluent people keep pointing to the chart and saying it's not a problem, but it is a problem. We probably need a new name for it.
Personally I prefer to use the US case shiller housing index as a good indication of long term inflation. Housing prices are so high, it is the basket of goods that matters the most.
GPD growth is good, personal consumption is up, and businesses are continuing their extremely large investments in durable goods. The economy is, by the numbers, doing extremely well. Inflation is down to normal.
Even economic sentiment is okay. People rate their personal financial situation as roughly as good as it was pre-pandemic as well.
Also Microsoft was the first large domino to announce cutting "underperforming" staff and now Meta is doing the same. [1]
Unfortunately, there will be copycats taking notes to use "AI" as an excuse to accelerate more layoffs for AI or cheaper labor.
Senior engineers can now get answers in seconds to questions it might have taken a junior a couple days to figure out ... agents are starting to do comparable workflows to low/mid-skilled ops/support teams in some verticals at a fraction of cost
If Meta, and others pushing on AI, are not reducing heads in 2025 -- it would kind of undermine the value of the massive investments they are making
HN commentariat coupling this to anything else is a bit disingenuous as most engineers I know are talking about this a lot right now as nobody really knows where it leads -- with some discussion about whether it is comparable to horses being replaced by cars in 1920s and employment redeploying elsewhere over time
If we take Zuckerberg at face value, then they aren’t cutting headcount, but instead replacing ‘low performers’ with new blood.
Big tech has problems, but lets not exaggerate - that undermines progress.
Especially in companies like Meta with dual class shareholders though, I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to say the CEOs are essentially kings.
That doesn't mean the work environment or lifestyle you get working at these places is good or bad, people just need to have a realistic expectations about the governance behind these things though.
Slavery is still slavery no matter how nice you arrange their conditions. Serfs are still serfs if they sit in bean bag chairs.