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 worked at a company where the VPs loved to write long company wide emails. One time HR wrote "Why working at <insert this company name> is great Part 1". (If you write part 1 and part 2 corporate emails you're already doing email wrong.) They did a layoff between the time Part 1 was sent and Part 2 was sent. The scale of absurdity was difficult to measure with that one.
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.
> The scale of absurdity was difficult to measure with that one.
I have been told that one FANG which recently underwent a firing round barely took a break from their hiring rounds, and already started sending emails asking for volunteers for interviews even to teams which have just been decimated.
They did that to me themselves. They have festered the "hiring industrial complex" to outcompete for talent. Now this whole thing has to stay alive. They have to fire. Maybe the news about it will be enough, cause we also plan on hiring back.
Can you just be on “fired leave”? Seems unnecessary to deprovision all the systems. I’m sure SAP can create a workflow for that and upsell it to the hiring industrial complex.
Last week, I was contacted by recruiters from two separate high-profile companies that have recently fired people. Like I would even entertain joining them only to be first in line to the chopping block.
Say you’ve been working somewhere for 5 years and have the opportunity to move to a company - and you know both companies are laying people off at some point soon.
In your current company, maintaining your position requires no training and negligible HR resource. The question of your capability to perform the job you’re given would hopefully not be under question (otherwise good going for keeping that gig up for 5 years). Your team is not a blue sky project (otherwise shame on management for keeping that gig up for 5 years). Making you redundant will cost the company severance, and if it’s a structural issue you could be moved into another team. Dropping you would be a genuinely hard decision.
The new company barely know you and have to expend resources just to integrate you, and expend nothing to drop you.
I know which one I’d pick.
Granted, it’s a false premise: perhaps the new company is more resilient than your current company, for example. However, if the odds are unknown - and in most cases they aren’t known in any reliable way - then I may as well treat them as if the odds are balanced.
It makes sense if you think of this as pruning dead weight while also getting in fresh inflow of talented people (some of whom will inevitably not work out later).
Why is management hiring people who turn out to be "dead weight"? Particularly with the ludicrous interview cycle employed by big tech companies these days?
It's a failure of management to hire correctly and/or manage and develop people. Management is broken and incompetent and relentlessly scapegoats those below them.
If you have a method for hiring exactly the right people, that those people will put up with (ie a process that filters out "dead weight" but does not filter out high performers), then that is a startup right there. But overall, no one has magical hiring process that doesn't involve finding out actual performance after they start.
Yep, google published a bunch of research about their hiring processes and it basically said "we've tried everything and nothing works... anybody else have any ideas?"
If you have a method for hiring exactly the right people, that those people will put up with
Yeah, hire and then show actual managerial skill. If you still can't get the performance you need, then fire them. Tech hiring culture has become completely bananas and it wastes insane amounts of resources.
Tech management in the US 1) can't hire competently, 2) can't lead, 3) can't develop those under them and 4) can't man up and fire the employees they mistakenly hired and failed to lead.
So fire them. It's bizarre that companies appear to think that you should do cargo cult interviewing, sometimes multiple rounds with months of waiting around, then hire people, fail to lead or develop them, then just dump them en masse.
Hire them and if you can't get the performance you need, then you due them. Alternatively, hire them as contract-to-hire if your head of HR has conditioned you to be terrified of doing what you're allowed to do in the US.
Hiring is really hard. I try to be very selective, use work-like assessments and wait until it's painful to add headcount, but I also need to go fast enough to keep devs interested and not waste their time, and interviews at best are only a very rough proxy-indicator of what the future looks like. Firing is even harder.
>>Why is management hiring people who turn out to be "dead weight"?
People are rarely ever dead weight. Products and services most certainly are. Products/Projects etc fail for a variety of reasons, and it can often be hard to anticipate if they will. When you are building them you need the top people to build it for you. If the product fails, you now have people you have to pay for running the product that doesn't earn you money. Now you make a loss.
While you did hire the top people, the product failed and now you don't need them. Keeping them around costs lots of money and, their work, even if high quality hasn't given much profits.
>>Better get to work developing new projects and products to stem that loss.
Yes.
The road to progress in any system involves being known as someone who initiates new order of things. And always remember this. Its the new projects, and initiatives that get most of the resources because people want to see them win.
Hiring is not a perfectly solved problem, so you should cut whoever you're accusing some slack. Also, making the relationship work is a two-way responsibility, not just that of the management.
That wasn't my experience with the current layoffs at big tech. There was no effort to find positions for the engineers who performed well in the previous year(s). They just cut some orgs by the hundreds (I was in a call with 350+ other devs, many of whom are far smarter and more experienced devs than myself).
They just started cutting "weight" at some point, the "dead" adjective was dropped during the previous rounds of layoffs.
If the firing was on the basis of cutting out top paid employees, it absolutely makes sense to now fill those positions with newer ones whom you can pay less.
Ahh, no. As I mentioned it didn't go over well. They had been mobbing me before and it intensified after. They were also blissfully unaware of what is legal and what is not, so pushing me out proved to be rather expensive.
To be fair, unless the execs are also forgoing salary or bonuses, like Nintendo execs a few years ago for example, you can't really win with these layoff emails.
If the emails are succinctly composed then people would complain that the announcements were too curt and don't try to assuage people enough.
Shocker that management taking away the livelihood of tens of thousands of individuals due to management failures can not be reduced to a positive email.
even this one hints to this "people wanted more visibility and notice". You'll never make everyone happy, so it's a mistake to seek the "perfect communique"
>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".
Didn't the executives employ any anti-takeover measures?
"If they are good at being ruthlessly selfish for themselves they might be good at being ruthlessly selfish for the company as well."
Makes me wonder if the opposite could become fashionable: "I trust myself to fly without the golden parachute, you might want to make that part of your consideration". At first glance that sounds quite compelling to me, but on the other hand, would I feel safer or would I feel less safe with a Taxi driver who does not bother putting on the seat belt? I think my answer would be less safe, event though a part of me wishes to be one who'd feel safer.
Speaking from personal experience, execs (most of them) are anything but risk takers. They are good wheeler-dealers, know how to navigate the land-mine filled org-chart to get things done. Not too different from civil servants. Those who develop risk appetite won't stay at such big orgs, they either go work at a startup or start on their own.
So over a period (FB has been around for like 15 years now) an org accumulates extremely risk averse execs.
Yeah, but that's a problem for the owners. Who are big boys, and can probably navigate this conflict of interest out without us.
Or if they want to keep pissing away their money, they can keep hiring clowns that ruin their companies, and then pull the ripcord. It's their money on the line, not mine.
I believe they all got paid good. I was a bit surprised at the animosity but the old CEO certainly seemed to burn bridges (I note how in another post) and I also suspect the old CEO took it really personal that he got beat by our main competitor.
I assumed something like that happened behind the scenes but I never knew any facts. It was a publicly traded company and it was a good offer based on the stock price so I doubt any efforts to resist the purchase would have succeeded.
I think more likely the new CEO's comment stemmed from that fact that 1. The old executive staff were in fact horrible at face value. 2. In between the time of the offer to buy the company and the closing the old CEO visited several locations presumably under the idea that he was there to keep everyone around / soothe the typical nerves about being acquired. But something else happened:
Instead he took snide shots at the acquiring CEO. He noted that he was surprised the new CEO hadn't visited our site yet.... when at that point the deal hadn't closed, they were still technically competitors. New CEO straight up couldn't visit.
I think old CEO was just a horrible person and salty he lost (mostly due to his own missteps) to his competitor.
But that was par for the course with old company executives. They seemed to operate thinking they were so smart and really were as transparent as could be, almost childish.
I generally feel disconnected / suspicious of executive staff... but these guys, they were human garbage as far as I was concerned, and I don't use that term lightly.
My Fav examples:
HR at one point sent out a series of long emails about a big change upcoming, but they didn't / would not say what the change was, it put a lot of people on edge. Then finally after the 5th or so email they announced that after HR spent thousands of hours in meetings and off site meetings ... they were renaming HR... that was it... it was like a joke, but they were serious. CEO and all the other executives of course had to reply all to congratulate them.
One of the last meetings with the OLD CEO had an open forum where people could ask questions about the acquisition. Old CEO seemed to give the impression he had some idea what he combined company would look like / could do. Someone asked where he saw the new company in six months/ what it might look like. He responded "I'll be in Banff sking." That was it, that was his response....
> HR at one point sent out a series of long emails about a big change upcoming, but they didn't / would not say what the change was, it put a lot of people on edge. Then finally after the 5th or so email they announced that after HR spent thousands of hours in meetings and off site meetings ... they were renaming HR... that was it... it was like a joke, but they were serious. CEO and all the other executives of course had to reply all to congratulate them.
Sounds like something else was planned, and they pulled out last minute.
Or they were trying to spook 5% into leaving -- and did -- so they make some trivial change that means nothing and can be undone later.
I've heard aerospace companies have standing checks in place to ensure that they never go above being composed of more than Y% ex-Boeing employees be it management/design/floor workers so that they don't end up with the Boeing 'culture' creeping in.
I had a CEO like that. He came in, hired media people to interview him in 4k things to send to the employees. He kept trying to host talks to talk about his great vision. Did a lot of shake ups, and tried to force product changes. Ultimately his vision lost a lot of money, the product he tried to will in to existance got canceled, and they had nothing but layoffs after layoffs.
Nope, US, based out of CA, but he was from the Midwest.
It was funny as when I met him a few times he responded the same way.
"You're from Minnesota? Can I talk to you about hunting? They told me I shouldn't do that in California ..."
I didn't hunt but I let the man tell his story ;)
I usually feel pretty disconnected from executive types and so on but I liked that guy. I liked him so much I was suspicious all over again as that's not how I feel about those guys usually. He was actually fun to be around.
I had an exec at my last job that came in like that. He was so transparent and likable that I immediately became suspicious. He had tons of stories so I assumed he was a bullshitter, but nope, it seems he had just been there and done that. I basically owe my career to that dude, he took a chance on me (I was about as low on the org chart as it gets) and it was the break I needed to show what I could do.
Sometimes there are actually great leaders in the sea of self-serving assholes that populate the business world.
As someone in tech from the rural Midwest who loves hunting, I can appreciate this little fact a lot. In my 10 year career I've worked for some well known larger tech companies and meeting people with this interest is somewhat rare.
"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"."
You are being manipulated. No. The previous executives are not "jokers" - they made massive profits selling shares. They are being let go because, after taking their massive profits, the new company will soon fire the rest of staff - and that is hard.
That’s the thing; the A players are still in demand (even Z players like me are still getting contacted for roles), and I wonder if sending this message out like this is a huge gamble on Meta’s part.
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.
> This seems like a bad move for Meta, just leaving the axe up in the air ready to strike like this.
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.
I could see a scenario where voluntary attrition helps them get reduce size more organically and with lower cost than a layoff
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.
> 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
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"
I'm not making any comments or judgements whatsoever on employees there, but doesn't Meta use the same terrible hiring practices that values so-called "leet" code style interviews? Such interviewing practices are bound to produce poor results, especially at the scale that Meta, Amazon, etc. do them at. (This is also not a comment in support of the layoffs. I think layoffs are a failure of management and executives.)
> but doesn't Meta use the same terrible hiring practices that values so-called "leet" code style interviews? Such interviewing practices are bound to produce poor results, especially at the scale that Meta, Amazon, etc. do them at.
These two statements do not follow, why would "such interviewing practices [be] bound to produce poor results, especially at the scale that Meta, Amazon, etc. do them at?"
By poor results I really meant a wide variance in hiring fits. If you are hiring based upon these "leet" style trivia interviews and for somewhat arbitrary team placement, then you are greatly constraining your hiring process to only filter on effectively a single vector of background and experience. So the high bar commented above only applies to that particular vector in that many may be great at a particular niche of coding but effectively randomized in other vectors of software development or other employee skills.
Thus, it is only natural that you may have many people in the organization and on teams who are poor fits, either technically, culturally, etc., because almost all of the "leet" code stuff is irrelevant to most real-world work. If it is relevant, then it is usually only a small portion of the job. This isn't a judgement on anything other than the hiring practice.
But like I said, I don't really know much about Meta's hiring process. It's possible that I'm misapplying this style of interview to them and misunderstood about if they actually use it. Amazon does, and I can confirm it was a miserable interview experience.
People who want to leave and have options, will consider those options either way. There is no way for meta to force them to stay. Even if meta announced layoffs with all the list of names, following months many who want will leave. Pretty much every layoff is followed by people leaving voluntary. Some over bad feelings of what happened, some because their friends are away so why not and some dont like new position. But they will be leaving.
> 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.
Does the management, or the quantitative performance of the company, agree with you here? I'm somewhat dubious given how frequently this occurs, but ideally I think you'd want some really long-term study that looks at both the layoff(s), attrition, and later progress (or growth if it occurs).
You want to know if companies stop growing for a decade or so after a mass-layoff?
If so, yes, they do. But it's incredibly hard to decide on causality there, because companies are only expected to do mass-layoffs when the management believes it can't grow anymore.
I'd bet that this is the difference between having good middle managers and not. If you have confidence in your directors and middle managers, you can target the C players. If not, then you can't and you'll wind up shedding B players anyways.
>>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.
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.
This was posted the week after all management should have communicated AE to A players. I know for senior directors last day of performance review comms was Friday.
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.
While some people do get 1M/yr, it's hardly every E7+. I don't know the exact % obviously, but anecdotally it's <30% (though more get the smaller grants--around 250k or 500k).
Yes, 1000%. Especially when it comes to AI. Meta has an excellent team of ML engineers, many of whom are in exceptionally high demand right now. If I were a ML engineer at Facebook, _especially_ if I was working remotely, I'd be sending out a ton of applications right now. I bet they end up getting an easier, more meaningful, higher paying job.
I'm an AI research engineer who was recently laid off and this was my experience.
Is this comment speaking from personal experience? Meta pays much more than any other FAANG. E.g. Know someone who's openai offer (2x Google) was matched by meta.
It's hard to see how anyone has thought FB/Meta would be a great place to work for a long time.
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.
I worked there, the compensation was best in the industry, I worked on infrastructure that billions of people depended on, and in a very small way increased security and privacy. I'm proud of that work, and the people I worked with were awesome.
Once I had a manager justify his employment at Palantir by saying he helped troops detect and avoid landmines. Well cool, they still murdered people after getting past the minefield though.
Yeah they are. The Russian soldiers most likely didn't ask to be there either. Obviously a rock and a hard place for Ukrainians.
That being said, Palantir's business with the US government dwarfs any they might have with the Ukrainian army. And last I checked the US is in the business of murdering brown people.
I think you’re missing the point of my deliberately terse reply.
All of the replies you are getting are trying to tell you that there’s no deep thinking involved. There’s no “hey I considered it and the comp overcame my concerns”
etc. Most of the leetcode-into-fang people are not doing a moral calculus or even spending thirty seconds thinking about the ethical aspects.
There are no concerns. There are no ethics for most of the people in our industry. It is an employer who pays well so they work there.
Your comment implies that, yes, it came down to comp, but also implies that for Facebook employees, on average, there is any thought process beyond economic maximization. There isn’t.
I know a ton of facebook and ex-facebook engineers. They also worked for famously ethical companies like Zynga and Uber. Now and then they’ll do the pretend performative handwringing or whatever but their decisions are consistent.
It is a very tricky philosophical question you’re asking: should you consider the broadest impact of what you’re doing OR should you ensure you’re doing good work and leave the ramifications to higher up decision makers?
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.
Engineers in Meta have advanced technology in so many ways (buck / react / so many contributions to distributed software / leveldb …). I think it is very reductionist to discount all that work.
There’s nothing about salary depending on it here: there’s a ton about your work contributing to the global good irrespective of who’s funding it (and whatever ways they end up utilizing it).
And that software was also written to further the concerns and profits of an adTech company. Facebook may have allowed open sourcing non critical parts of its software - every major tech company does.
Yes, and if you check my posting history, I never tried to justify my doing so was for any other reason than “trading labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter”.
I’m not judging anyone for making an outsized salary for working at Facebook. Just be honest that you’re there for the money and not some high minded ideals.
> It's hard to see how anyone has thought FB/Meta would be a great place to work for a long time.
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.
It’s almost as if that was already said if you had kept reading past the first sentence.
> 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?
Its a post-communication world. While before only a title was read and comments made based on assuming what the content is, now we assume what the comment is and reply based on that.
> 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.
That didn’t help. It’s like saying “I don’t know why the guy died. Maybe it’s because he got shot in the head at point blank range”?
Of course people work at Meta because of the money. No one works for Meta to make the world a better place
Do you understand the concept of rhetorical questions?
Because your comment indicates that you clearly don’t understand that people sometimes ask questions not because they want an answer but for emphasis or dramatic effect.
Digging down on your snark when you’re called out is a bold play that doesn’t generally work. Most people have this thing called humbleness but I guess you left it with the rhetorical questions.
So exactly where are you going to find this “less volatile environment”? Other BigTech companies that are also doing layoffs? Unprofitable startups or other money losing recently public companies?
Are they going to sully themselves and work as “enterprise developers” (note sarcasm)?
A players always in demand, no matter whatever the economic situation. They have the freedom to choose wherever they want to work.
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 wonder if sending this message out like this is a huge gamble on Meta’s part.
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.
There has to be plenty of demand at the lower tiers. There is a ton of work to do everywhere. It's just that they don't pay the same as top tier. FANGs are holding a lot of talent to keep them from competitors, as has been pointed out.
The guy lucked into a money making machine that was nigh impossible to screw up. Hasn’t done much since except do the obvious when you have a mountain of cash — buy competitors.
Lol.. such a foolish comment. He didn't luck into anything. He stole it and made it into what it is today. Remember the login to your email and we'll send invites to everyone? Facebook invented that. Keep it restricted to .edu and rolling out school by school was a strategy. Identify companies who are a threat and buy them.. facebook was very successful at that.
Luck had very little to do with facebook's success.
Every time there is a layoff announcement, I feel like half the comments are nitpicking over the language. It was too long, it was too short, language was too conciliatory, not conciliatory enough, yada yada. We get it. Managers are people too, they're not perfect. At this point, as an employee, I'd just ignore everything that was said (I know it's probably been wordsmithed to death anyway trying to find the right balance for all the various stakeholders), and only focus on the actions: are people treated fairly and with respect, both for those leaving and those remaining.
Layoffs are not something any employees can control. It's gonna happen or it's not. That's it. Without proper collective power, the only thing we can do is worry.
You're right in that language doesn't matter. Hell even the delivery of the message doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the severance or layoff package. That's the real meat. There should be a mandatory law that publishes all layoff packages so that everyone can see if they're getting a fair deal or not.
“The medium is the message.” Yes, the nitpicking over language is silly. In some cases, actually sort of pathetic.
It is true that these messages can be overwrought and whatever else, but it literally doesn’t matter what the content is besides the fact that a layoff is happening. If you tell me I’m laid off with a smile or with a middle finger makes no difference, I’m still laid off.
After sharing it internally. Probably posted on fb.com as they know it would just leak otherwise, and the memo is written with the mindset of it being public regardless.
Every time a layoff is discussed, people talk about how the A players are going to leave. Seemingly, people do not understand that the A players could have easily left the whole time but are taken care of - already - so they haven’t.
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.
So "A Player" is on a pointless project not providing value to the company gets axed. The value to the company is losing with that "A Player" is nothing because the project they're working on is pointless.
These companies could take a more twitter like "print out your code" or global stack ranking to lay people off but i don't think it dodge the problem people describe. The "A Player" could still be mad that all their coworkers got fired and/or the "pointless project" they enjoyed working on got axed and still leave. You just get the add cost, drama, and blow-back (see twitter) that a performance based firing would entail and probably open yourself up to lawsuits (IANAL) if you don't have an adequate paper trail for those performance based filings.
+1, there are some quite juvenile sentiments about employment evident in this thread. If a company wants someone to stay they'll try very hard to make that happen. Not every employee is treated equally.
When I was younger I was shocked to learn that during an LR companies would “over” cut in order to fund retention for critical people. You’re laying off 7%? This is a good time to free up some additional opex, so just add a few heads above target in order to free opex to comp important people. You won’t get that 7% back but overage you do, usually.
Not sure if it's true in Meta's case (and almost certainly not Twitter's), but from what I've heard, they usually tell the key people that they are safe a day before.
> 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 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.
>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.
But other FAANGS are not hiring. So where it's somewhere unless they planned to start their own businesses?
The odd, perhaps not entirely coincidental, relationship between ivy league pedigree and job at FAANG. While there's a correlation between talent and ivy league the relationship is often tenuous. In my experience the difference between a new grad from MIT and a new grad from state school is almost zero in the professional world. Yet, one of these people have a fast pass to FAANG. This is not unusual. Look at Finance. However, to assert that "talent" plays a bigger role than pedigree is simply a falsehood refuted by the evidence.
I mean yes a lot of sub par metrics and proxies are used because people get really up in arms about using IQ tests; the best indicator Google ever found.
> Yet, one of these people have a fast pass to FAANG.
Citation? I haven't seen anything like that in the industry at all.
I worked at FB and Amazon for six years total and the vast majority of my fellow engineers were from random mediocre schools (including myself, from the U. of Arizona).
This is a huge factor! In my experience having a whole bunch of stock can be a really powerful anchor to keep you in place at your job even if you're not 100% happy.
> cause your A players (who are probably still very much in demand) to look elsewhere.
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.
It is a good point. But people still can be "looking elsewhere" as in searching if they can find another job. It is exactly the thing I would do if I had any chance that I would loose my job. I know my manager would never do it but with layoffs there are greater forces that he may not be able to save me from.
And changing your availability and answering a call or chat from time to time does not cost much. It is not like there is any downside to it.
And if an A player starts looking around great things sometimes happen. He may get hired at much higher position that would justify the salary. Or he may have already earned a lot at FB and may decide this is the time to invest in building a startup, etc.
At my previous company I got in an argument with my boss and just changed my availability on LI. Just out of spite. This led me to an offer that changed my life. And there is a lot of people so much better at their job than I am.
> It is exactly the thing I would do if I had any chance that I would loose my job
There is always a chance you can lose your job. There has never been a day since I started working over 25 years ago (well actually I spent my first year saving so it would have hurt then) that I haven’t been ready to change jobs at the drop of a dime.
> And changing your availability and answering a call or chat from time to time does not cost much. It is not like there is any downside to it
You should be doing that all the time regardless.
> And if an A player starts looking around great things sometimes happen. He may get hired at much higher position
That happens most of the time anyway because of salary compression and inversion even if you are just a journeyman “full stack developer”.
For someone who joined at the peak of September 2021, let's assume an L6 offer of $240k + 20% bonus + $1.1M in joining stock over four years. With no stock movement and meeting expectations, they'd make $298k cash + $275k stock, for a total of $563k. Now, with that stock down by 50% (ish) as of today, they're total compensation would be $436k. That's still a serious chunk of change, and while a $138k drop in compensation is nothing to sneeze at, they'll also be getting a new grant of $220k/4 years this month(ish), and every year hereafter, bringing their 2023 compensation almost back to $500k if the stock market doesn't move.
So yes, it's a serious pay cut, but it's still amazing pay. Now, if they were bullish on the market, then it might make sense to try to move to another company that can come up with a 7-figure joining bonus and ride that appreciation to new stock heights.
Yes, I agree with the GP’s main point that FB is still near or at top of market and that matters quite a bit more than HN sometimes gives it credit for.
Just wanted to clarify that it’s not quite what it was. Thanks for adding numbers.
> 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.
Employees ask for transparency. This is what transparency looks like...
> Its not transparency, it’s marketing and guessing the future.
You are wrong. During the last round of layoffs, employees asked to hear about upcoming plans before they happen. Mark Zuckerberg is literally responding to that request.
For once, as someone with 0 stake in this whole affair, I quite like he's explicitly spelt out the details he has.
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.
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).
No. Only niche skills. Python and basic web dev is becoming common place. Supply given boot camps and lack of credentialism and the ease of learning software dev has increased by a lot.
These layoffs don't happen in a really hot market.
The grandparent is clearly not talking about people fresh out of boot camp or doing basic web dev. The job market for junior devs has been cold for ages, with thousands people applying even for low-paying positions.
As much as people like to think that developers are just cogs on wheels, companies still want experienced devs (experienced senior and above), and they are still difficult to hire.
Many senior devs over the last decade have been created by boot camps. With the recent lay offs the over supply is becoming more apparent. It is now really easy to hire senior python devs.
Arguably python is so easy that junior devs aren't that far off from senior devs.
Sorry but this is nonsense. Juniors can absolutely make a huge mess in python if let to their own devices. You seem to confuse the knowledge of syntax and language features with actual experience in designing software.
If we're just talking about the python stack arguably there's not much else on top of it. You get the extra stuff through osmosis in the same 1 - 2 years. The applications for python aren't wide ranging enough to include much else unless you're thinking about data science and ML stuff.
I guess it depends on your definition of "senior", but I don't see why language choice should affect it this much, given that much of what makes seniors senior is not knowledge of specific tech, but experience with software engineering as a process.
This^ is true. Arguably though the majority of web development doesn't involve the stuff you mention. Developers simply work within a framework. This Linux stuff is relegated to specialists... devops or security engineers.
> As someone who runs a team of Python developers, and has been a professional Python developer for 15+ years, you sound like you don't know what you're talking about.
As someone who's done 20 years of professional C++ development along with 15 years of professional python development, as well as 10 years of professional javascript/react development on a systems that go across the stack from the lowest level of sensors and embedded systems to the browser front end I know what I'm talking about.
I've also done rust, go, erlang, java, and I've also done a ton of haskell as well as lisp. I've been all over the place likely more than you.
>The difference between a junior and senior developer has nothing to do with the language. Regardless of the language the engineering fundamentals are the same.
This is beyond wrong. You've done C, you've done rust, then you must know that the fundamentals of systems programming is much more wider ranging then python. What's a pointer? What's a unique pointer or shared pointer? What's move semantics? What's the difference between stack allocation and heap allocation? What's an R value vs. L value? What's a borrowed value? What's virtual memory? What's an interface (arguably with the advent of annotations types are not more relevant in python but there is huge class of senior python programmers who don't use types)
The above are programming fundamentals that a python programmer never needs to know. A python programmer can go from junior to principal and not need to KNOW any of the above simply because python abstracts these concepts away from the user. The fact that a python programmer doesn't need to know any of these things makes it significantly easier. For web apps a company is most efficient if they hire a mid level python developer over some principle python developer with 10 years of experience.
C might have pointers, Python has efficiency gotchas.
It might have heap allocation, Python has numpy.
Rust might ...
Even so, while there _may_ be more technical scope in some languages, or more immediate surface area, this should be true:
A senior developer primarily in language Y should be technically capable enough to be senior in language Z with some degree of work.
The language isn't relevant. Data structures, engineering mindset, pragmatism, intuition, maths reasoning, abstract thinking, ...
These are things that make a senior developer.
If I find a Python dev without this skillset at a high level they're not being put in a senior position because they'll add technical debt, cost and risk without even knowing it. They're a liability.
Your "senior" Python developers don't sound senior to me.
If you think you can promote anyone to senior or principal without the above, you're a liability too. Good job.
I think the point you're missing is that senior engs in Meta do not just write code. Some of the senior engs almost do not write code at all. They design systems and move complex projects forward. So that's more of like a TPM/PM/mgmt skill there, in addition to excellent technical ability to write the code itself. In certain projects, especially in infra, writing code is usually the last part (and often the least complex one) of your avg large project driven by senior ICs; and often the code is written by engs across teams/orgs, not necessarily the senior eng themselves.
So yea, deep language knowledge, while an excellent skill, is not something that defines a senior eng (at least in Meta and I presume in similar FAANG companies).
>I think the point you're missing is that senior engs in Meta do not just write code. Some of the senior engs almost do not write code at all. They design systems and move complex projects forward
I think your getting off on a different topic. Those guys aren't engineers anymore right? They're more technical managers; or architects.
>So yea, deep language knowledge, while an excellent skill, is not something that defines a senior eng (at least in Meta and I presume in similar FAANG companies).
I agree with this, but this is not what the others are talking about. The topic right now is about python developers. The more wider range role you're talking about here isn't a person with the title "Senior python software developer." Meta likely doesn't have that title.
Additionally, if a company works purely within the python ecosystem of web development, the "architecture" actually doesn't get too complex. Most of this stuff is trivial too, I give it an additional year to learn it.
If you're doing stuff with shared memory and utlra low latency applications then it's a completely different scenario, but you wouldn't be working in python if you had that requirement.
They do qualify. Boot camps generate a lot of noise but there is no doubt that out of that noise there are a lot of good candidates that significantly increase supply by a non trivial margin. Not seeing this is denying reality.
People who can actually engineer in python is becoming more and more common place.
> I hire 10+ Python developers per year. You're wrong.
I've been hiring roughly the same amount for 10 years. I'm actually really extremely good at modern python. My skills with python syntax are so good that I can do in 1 line exclusively with generators what a junior programmer probably needs 10 lines and twice as much mutating state to pull off. My code is also likely more modular and neater then a junior but you have to realize none of this matters that much. My skill level with python is beyond the curve of what is necessary and so is any other developer that goes beyond 2 years with python.
In the end every programmer I ever hired exclusively for python will hit this tier within 1 or 2 years, very few exceptions. Roughly half of the junior programmers I hire are actually already within this tier upon getting hired. Literally before hitting there first job. After two years the only thing left to pick up are some more unique patterns and tricks but that's it.
Yes but the same timeline can be done for C, C#, Java or anything else.
It isn't unique to Python.
"Of what is necessary" is subjective. Regardless of the language or framework I'm hiring within they must have the same level of engineering skill. I've hired people for Python projects who were outstanding Go or Java programmers who never touched Python commercially.
My point is the language isn't relevant to your arguments.
That's why you're wrong.
There's also plenty of Python developers two years in (that I've interviewed and rejected) who couldn't write me a decorator or explain MRO.
There's plenty of 2-year Go programmers who can't deal with goroutines well.
>There's also plenty of Python developers two years in (that I've interviewed and rejected) who couldn't write me a decorator or explain MRO.
First off both MRO and decorators can be learned in 1 week max by anyone. And one week is REALLY forgiving. Literally. You have to be mentally deficient not to be able to learn it. They simply didn't encounter the python feature in their experience. You would just reject them for not knowing about those features?
Second off decorators are syntactical tricks. You can get around python without ever using them. If you encounter them in libraries you just need to know what they do at a high level, you don't need to know how to implement them. If you ever do need to implement one just look it up. I don't judge people for not knowing syntactic tricks.
Third, MRO is something that should be not heavily used at all. You should avoid inheritance as much as possible. Additionally you should avoid double inheritance all together. The MRO/inheritance concept is a left over thing from an outdated programming style. At most you should know inheritance, and at most have one level of it if you must and try to use interfaces instead. Nowadays I expect only to see inheritance in existing libraries/tech debt and not newly written code from senior programmers. If someone encounters MRO issues, again, I just expect them to look it up.
I'll actually judge someone who expects others to know MRO given how outdated it is. I won't think they're stupid, or I won't not hire them or anything like that. I just know they aren't up to date with the current methodology but they can easily learn it if needed.
Overall, you're just setting a high bar artificially. It's like hiring janitors who only have phds in chemistry to know what's in the cleaning chemicals.
> Yes but the same timeline can be done for C, C#, Java or anything else.
No Java and C# languages are complex enough that it can be done in a 2 year timeline but these languages are hard enough that they are in a different class then python. C with memory management is harder then both java and C#. Memory management simply isn't intuitive.
No. The decorator is really just a syntactic shortcut. There are other facilities in python to do the same thing. The decorator is just a convenient way of doing it. The concept at hand is a function that takes a function and returns a new function. Nothing crazy here.
decorator: Callable[[Callable[[Any]. Any]], Callable[[Any], Any]] = lambda x: (lambda y: x(y)) #does nothing
g: Callable[[Any], Any] = lambda x: x #identity func
decorated_g: Callable[[Any], Any] = decorator(g) #decorator that does nothing to identity returns identity func
You see? You can just call the function and assign the result to a var and that var is a decorated function. The facility exists, the @ symbol is simply a convenience so you can execute it in the declaration step.
>We have a fundamentally different view of these things. Mine is serving me well. Yours isn't challenging mine.
Exactly see. Just because my view is "better" or more "modern" you still function fine within your role which is my point. Someone could have knowledge far superior to a person with 2 years of experience, functionally speaking, it doesn't matter too much. You still do "fine" at your role. Your view serves you well in the capacity of a "senior" engineer" even though your view points are ultimately wrong and inferior they still work well enough.
Also it isn't a viewpoint. Two of the newest languages to hit the mainstream have eschewed inheritance completely from their syntax. Neither Golang or Rust have the concept. Both use interfaces exclusively to promote the concept of similar types. No inheritance anywhere. I have tons of evidence on this even papers, quotations from prominent people. It's a well known fact inheritance is outdated.
We can agree to disagree, but it's like agreeing to disagree with a child who doesn't know any better. Sure.
>But to your point, there is a flood of bad candidates.
How would you know did you hire these candidates to find out? Or did you dismiss them as bad because they didn't pass some brain teaser algorithm interview?
Those candidates go on to get hired at companies with a lower bar for lower salaries and those lower salaries do influence the market.
Hold on. Of course you want to avoid terrible candidates. But brain teaser questions and asking gotcha questions about obscure python syntax or something like that isn't a good correlative indicator. You get a bunch of false negatives this way... people who are good but not good at interviews.
You have to give them some take home exercise. That's the best way to determine if they're not a false negative. Unfortunately many good devs just don't have the time to do a takehome.
Did you hire a candidate who say... didn't know what MRO was, but created a stellar result for a take home project?
What I'm saying is that the market is flooded with these false negatives.
>But brain teaser questions and asking gotcha questions about obscure python syntax or something like that isn't a good correlative indicator.
Agreed, but that's not how we interview.
>Did you hire a candidate who say... didn't know what MRO was, but created a stellar result for a take home project?
Do you have me confused with the other guy?
>What I'm saying is that the market is flooded with these false negatives.
Understood. The market is also flooded with incompetent devs, capable of talking at length about Python syntax (and sometimes even the computational model, e.g. MRO, etc.), but who aren't actually able to put that knowledge to use in engineering systems. These are systematically catastrophic hires, by which I mean, the engineering team is significantly better off hiring no-one, than hiring them.
May I ask, why does this seem to matter so much to you? If you are a bootcamp graduate yourself, that doesn't preclude you from being a good engineer. I am more than happy to believe you are the one-in-a-thousand counter-example.
>May I ask, why does this seem to matter so much to you? If you are a bootcamp graduate yourself, that doesn't preclude you from being a good engineer. I am more than happy to believe you are the one-in-a-thousand counter-example.
I'm not a bootcamp graduate engineer. I'm actually quite good at what I do, interviewing (from both sides) and engineering. This topic matters to me because I like to argue online and I have strong opinions.
It's common for people to manipulate their perception of reality to justify their own situation, I assure you I am not doing that here, however I think you are doing this.
>>What I'm saying is that the market is flooded with these false negatives.
>Understood.
A false negative is someone who is GOOD, but appears bad. He is a negative but that assignment is false. I am saying the market is flooded with capable engineers that are good but appear bad due to interview processes and biases. Hence the term false negative.
>Do you have me confused with the other guy?
Nope you guys touched on similar points. You never mentioned syntax, but you're likely testing on algorithms so it's the same result. You get a ton of false negatives. You pay a premium for the guy who does better at the interview when you can get someone who's just as capable at a much lower cost.
The point is someone will hire those false negatives at a cheaper price and that effects the whole market. Companies hire the best they can get.
>Agreed, but that's not how we interview.
That's why a certain segment of the market looks like there's a dearth of people. It's because the interview clouds your perception. You interview the wrong way, you agree. The contradiction here is that although most people like you agree, you still reject people based off the SAME results as the WRONG interview AND you think the rejection is accurate.
That's how the psychology works. Everyone I talk to agrees interviewing is wrong overall but when they use it to judge on individual candidates they think it's accurate.
The contradiction exists even in your own reply. You agree the interview process you use is screwed yet you're really confident about your judgement of the market even though your measurement methodology is SELF admitted to be wrong. It renders your entire argument into question.
> and will likely only cause your A players (who are probably still very much in demand) to look elsewhere
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)
Why is the immediate response to criticize? Every single time I've seen layoffs discussed people always ask why it can't feel like more of a conversation and less like a bandaid getting ripped off (because it sucks to be part of the bandaid). Employees want to be included in the conversation. It seems that's exactly what is being done here. How is that insulting?!
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"...
Conversely, if you're an A player you may be ecstatic in believing the company is finally getting back on track, and therefore want to stay.
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.
Right. But the point is, if you're already at a FAANG earning a huge salary, and you don't know if you're going to get laid off, you can either a) wait and hope for the best, or b) leave and get a job at a lower salary.
> 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.
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.
From what I've heard attrition is very low right now. Which makes sense... why leave when you might get paid four months of salary if you are laid off instead.
Exactly. My first thought was how dystopian it is to start an email about layoffs during the "year of efficiency" with how your company is "building the future of human connection".
I agree that the press release is way too long. I'd add one more specific recommendation for anyone who ends up in a leadership role:
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.
> 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.
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.
The fault of this lies in upper management. They're getting paid a lot of money to foresee these sorts of things and to plan for them. Hiring like crazy isn't planning, its just doing bare minimum to make it look like you're doing something. But this is also endemic to the Meta org: you can only rise up if you hire enough people below you. And the fault for that ridiculous requirement lies in Zuckerberg. Why are none of the upper management accepting that THEY failed? They should be laid off along with the workers. Including Zuckerberg.
This isn't just an internal email, it's a press release. Everyone knows that if it was just an internal email someone would leak it, so they are writing it knowing that the public will see it.
I'm sure Zuck really appreciates the advice of a random HN commenter. It's not like he has experience running one of the world's largest companies or anything.
> will likely only cause your A players (who are probably still very much in demand) to look elsewhere.
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.
In most big companies I've worked at, I thought I could identify the people who made everyone slower and were a net negative to productivity. However, they never seemed to be the ones threatened to be fired. Often they were really good at playing corporate games so that it was really hard to justify firing them, while the ones fired were junior employees who had great potential but weren't as good at politics yet.
So while FB certainly intended to fire underperformers and increase average performance, I doubt they were able to identify the right people for that.
>I thought I could identify the people who made everyone slower and were a net negative to productivity. However, they never seemed to be the ones threatened to be fired.
Or maybe you're not as good of a judge of these things as you think?
Could very well be. Especially in large companies, it's very hard to judge the importance of some roles and people. That's why there are always complains about how promotions work, no one has figured out how to value the work of an employee.
Don't know much about Meta's HR department, maybe they're really good at that. But in the end we're all humans and never unbiased when we make those decisions.
Indeed. While one should always look to check on other biases in play, in my experience "F" players survive layoffs almost as often as "A" players, and it's those in the middle that get hit. (Sometimes this may be because the "F" players aren't getting paid as much, and are therefore cheap.)
Not to mention that the remaining "A" players may each be saddled with the work of ten laid-off "C" players because, as far as management is concerned, programmers are fungible. Why not have their 10x programmer take care of it?
Aren't technical challenges at smaller companies usually much more interesting? Pay is worse, but smaller companies usually offer much more freedom to implement your ideas and shape the company.
> smaller companies usually offer much more freedom to implement your ideas
Not really, if I come up with a novel algorithm or a different architecture to do a task better at Google then they will give me the chance to implement it even if it takes months or years. Small companies doesn't care about your ideas, they just want a cog that can give them a basic website because that is all they need, novel things doesn't help them.
If you mean "novel product ideas" then sure, but we aren't product managers we are programmers so our ideas would mostly be related to architecture or algorithms.
Then you've been at different small companies than I have. Obviously if you're the only person in tech at that company it's hard to do groundbreaking stuff. But small tech companies solve challenges everyday. And being able to directly convince the CEO (who is often technical at these companies) can make decisions much quicker than at large companies.
Yes, just not challenges that requires ideas to solve. They are mostly just following the same path every other tech company went, re implementing the same systems. To them it doesn't matter if the system is better or worse, they just want a system since going from 0 to 1 is huge, meaning that they wont give you time or resources to implement your idea, they just want a cheap idea.
It depends on what you mean by "smaller." At the majority of smaller companies, it's just CRUD app stuff, probably in C#, with significantly less freedom (often beholden to very non technical middle management).
>At the majority of smaller companies, it's just CRUD app stuff, probably in C#, with significantly less freedom
This is a very strange point-of-view.
I've worked in "small" (~100 employees or fewer) business my entire career, and not once was it strictly CRUD stuff in C#.
The freedom is debatable, I guess, since I have no experience at larger companies, but I certainly never found that my freedom is confined. Most often there is opportunity to contribute anywhere and everywhere, and management is happy to have the help.
I'm not a dev but still highly technical, and devs turning their noses up at "CRUD stuff" always makes me laugh. It reminds me of the musicians I know who won't play in certain styles because it's not "meaningful" or "true to their artistic vision". Bud I was at your last gig, you don't sound that great even when you're playing "meaningful" music.
Similarly, most of the devs I've worked with that are obsessed with "exciting" work still turn out pretty questionable stuff, and their careers would probably be better served if the built out a "simple" CRUD app, took it really seriously, and then examined the effects of their design on other teams.
Is that bad? You can solve interesting challenges in C# with CRUD stuff. Nothing that scales to millions of users, but there are challenges other than scaling.
I'm the sole developer at a non-tech company, and I have near-complete freedom because management is non-technical (and humble enough to admit that). I really, really enjoy my current job. Not saying that's the norm, of course -- just adding a data point to the convo.
The technical challenges may be interesting, but are the strategic ones? I.e., do you think most people would choose to work on problems that optimize ad spend vs. something like, say, healthcare if all else was equal?
haha point taken. I would argue "insurance" isn't "healthcare". But this somewhat underscores my larger point. The SV mindset is almost solely focused on maximizing revenue, whether that's ads or insurance billing. My point is that there are other, possibly more interesting, problems to work on if you relax that constrained viewpoint.
The way FAANG stocks have performed, you've already taken that if you work for one considering how much of their total comp tended to be RSUs (with the exception of apple).
Managers write novels because employees complain about lack of transparency and communication. I promise you no manager wants to write some novel about how layoffs are good for company, but they just or they get skewered for not communicating.
Saying more words isn’t communicating. In this situation, employees would like to be able to prepare for the layoffs ahead of time, know their jobs are safe (or not), and see what they can change. Saying a bunch of stuff about the future outlook of the company being bright feels like a lie when that’s the same email that got sent after the last round, three months ago
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.