Meta Plans To Cut Thousands of Jobs (washingtonpost.com) 45
Facebook parent company Meta is preparing for a fresh round of job cuts, deputizing human resources, lawyers, financial experts and top executives to draw up plans to deflate the company's hierarchy, in a reorganization and downsizing effort that could affect thousands of workers. From a report: Meta plans to push some leaders into lower-level roles without direct reports, flattening the layers of management between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the company's interns, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on about internal matters. Other managers may end up overseeing a higher number of employees as their teams grow bigger. Some inside Meta expect employees whose jobs have been converted to eventually quit, trimming the company's workforce by default. In addition to targeting managers, the company is also considering more traditional cuts, including slashing some projects and jobs, the person said. These efforts, which are targeted at divisions across the company and around the world, may not happen on a single day, but will likely roll out across the company in the coming months.
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Honor (Score:4, Insightful)
Whenever a company has mass layoffs, executive leadership should resign too as they're the ones who caused it. They're the ones who couldn't find anything for the people being laid off to do.
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If you are going to use the term "woke" repeatedly to denigrate unseen people that apparently you have deep political division with, you should probably define "woke" so that we even know what the hell you are accusing people of.
Or, just admit you're a partisan hack that looks to blame everything you don't like on "woke" much like 90s conservatives blamed everything on "liberals" and "socialism" even though a whole lot of it had nothing to do with liberalism and / or socialism at all.
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Woke: Definition -- whatever hobgoblins frighten right-wingers this week.
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Are you completely mad?
oh, of course you are.
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It's silly to blame the people making the correction (unless they're the same people who unnecessarily hired them).
It usually is.
At a minimum, I'd think that when some fraction X of workers are cut, an equal fraction F of managers should be cut. And that means high-level managers, not first-line supervisors.
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Okay, let's take several slices out of Zuck's ass. I'll bet he loses interest in cutting workers if that would keep happening.
The King doesn't resign (Score:2)
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Some mistakes aren't worth resigning for. Executives must always speculate about what the market will look like and what RnD projects will be profitable and what kind of resources will be needed to hit those goals. Sometimes such speculation is wrong. That mistake is not automatically disastrous enough to justify an immediate resignation.
If some of these executives become too redundant as a result of the downsizing, that might be a reason to lay them off. Or if there was some kind of outright incompeten
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Are you insane? People do something so simple to show their displeasure?
The next thing you'll tell us is making your own meals will save people money over going out every night.
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Or, if they end up doing a second round of layoffs 3 months after the last one where the CEO publicly predicting there wouldn't be any more layoffs, then perhaps the CEO deserves to get a boot in the ass for not taking care of the problem the first time around, pulverizing morale among the remaining employees again, and overloading the wifi as everyone starts updating LinkedIn because they all figure a third round is on the way due to the woefully incompetent management that couldn't get it right the first
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Whenever a company has mass layoffs, executive leadership should resign too as they're the ones who caused it. They're the ones who couldn't find anything for the people being laid off to do.
You're mistaken. They are the ones who couldn't find anything for the employed people to do. Meta cut 11000 jobs last year and yet even with that take into account they still had 14500 more employees than the year before. Let that sink in for a second. Despite cutting 13% of the company they still had the largest recorded y-y growth in the number of employees.
The reality is management here employed too many people and are now course correcting. Nothing more. They didn't cause people to loose their jobs, the
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You don't see inability to utilize resources as a failing? They couldn't invent things for those workers to do? The idea that there are no profitable things for somebody to do doesn't make any sense.
Management Nightmare (Score:5, Interesting)
As a manager myself, I strongly disagree with anyone having more than about 5-6 direct reports. Any more than that and even a good manager becomes just some useless paper pusher. Part of being a good people manager is understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your employees, setting them up for success in their projects and activities, and helping them manage their career development. Once you get beyond 5-6 direct reports (IMHO) you lose the ability to do this effectively.
Flattening an organization appears to just be giving up on having good management practices in a company. If you resign yourself to only having crappy managers, you might as well remove most of them.
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I'd venture that most tech director-level people are expected to be both a manager and a tech something.
I agree tech roles are a bit different, as I have had roles where managing just 2-3 people would be the max possible because of the level of individual contributor responsibilities I still had. And in tech you will often see people with director titles that only have a few individual contributors under them, which is very uncommon outside of tech management. My wife is in operations as a Sr. Manager, and has 6x the number of people under her as I do even though I'm a Sr. Director in a company twice the size
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I think it highly depends on how many unique units that actually means you have to deal with. If you have 8 people in 2 teams of 4 members each, each team working on one project, you probably have a far more relaxed time than if only 5 people report to you but every single one of them working on a single project.
Bob: I have eight different bosses right now. (Score:4)
“Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
Bob Porter: Don't... don't care?
Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?
Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.
Bob Slydell: Eight?
Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired. ”
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Office Space is not a comedy. It's a documentary masking as a tragedy.
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You are assuming the company actually wants to set people up for success and help them manage their career development. Most places I've worked at take a 'sink or swim' approach, you are on your own from day one.
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It's more a "we set you up for failure, so we can justify to not ever giving you a raise" approach.
When you notice that, get out of there. It's not worth your time.
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I think it depends on your reports. In my experience junior engineers take up significantly more time than senior for example.
I have had the opposite experience. My senior people get so much more work done that I spend more time getting projects approved and funded for them than I spend mentoring junior employees. Although I guess that is because there are non-management roles like architects, tech leads and sr. developers who do more of the hand holding for juniors than their people manager (in my experience). My time is spent keeping track of their development and putting the right people around them than actually training them
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In my experience, it depends on your team structure and how people "match".
A mix of experienced and new people is fine, as long as you can offload some of the management work on the experienced people. And I don't mean brush it off on them and dump it on them, but give them the tools and ability to self-manage themselves. Trust your seniors. That's why they're seniors.
A while ago, when I was still pretending I could be management (I'm a techie, don't try to squeeze me in a suit), I had 12 people to manage a
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When I started with my current company about 20 years ago, it was quite a flat organizational structure. It was an enjoyable environment where everyone felt important. Over the next 10-15 years 2 additional layers of management were introduced. It became toxic as information had to flow through the "proper" channels. What ended up happening is somewhere in the chain
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Extremes on both ends are quite detrimental, you have to find that sweet spot between not enough and too much management red tape. What you describe here is the epitome of too much, but there can also be too little, when suddenly you have managers that are responsible for 6-7 completely different teams with completely different tasks that only get lumped together because some pencil-pusher in process management thought their jobs sound alike, when suddenly managers have to handle 60+ people and don't even k
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Pretty much this. Our company just recently rolled back the "agile" bullshit where you're responsible for everything you need yourself, with managers who have 60+ people reporting to them who can't get shit done, with you having ZERO clout to get anyone to do anything that he doesn't want to do and nobody to escalate to because, well, ponder for a moment how much a single person can get accomplished that has to take care of 60+ people escalating.
Escalation can't be that bad you say? Well, ponder this if you
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Flattening an organization appears to just be giving up on having good management practices in a company.
That depends on the organisation. Your idea of a manager is not what a lot of organisations need. Many people don't need "management", they need "administration". A paper pusher is exactly the right thing for them. I'm doing perfectly fine in my company, performing well, getting relevant things done and in my team there are 10 people. My boss is a paper pusher, he admits that is his primary role. Beyond that he's no more senior in the work he does than the rest of us and we work very well autonomously. In f
Shocking....not really (Score:2)
Meta claims 2 billion daily users. I suspect if that number was real and they were "still growing" they wouldn't be contracting their workforce.
And "flattening the org" is just code for stretching out leadership by bouncing a bunch of mid-tier managers/directors. Nothing will change at the top.
Best,
Not sure the headline is correct (Score:1)
They should also cancel the metaverse (Score:3)
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That thing still on?
The the last person leaving forget to turn it off?
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The metaverse is dying, no one uses it and no one will use it.
The metaverse wasn't alive to begin with. It's a stillbirth.
Advertising isn't going to dig them out of the hole they are in.
What hole? Facebook posted 41 straight quarters of profit. Even with blowing $13 billion on the Metaverse stillbirth they still had a year end profit of $23billion
People see a big number on stories about how much Facebook is spending on the Metaverse and completely loose all perspective on how this large tech companies function. $13billion is a fraction of what Facebook's peers spend on R&D for new products.
The fish rots from the head (Score:2)
You know what they say - "the fish rots from the head." But what do you do when you chop off the head to stop the rot? If the critter's still kickin', you end up with a headless chicken running around like a crazed maniac, spreading chaos and panic everywhere it goes - And not just in the Metaverse!
something else free and worse will take over soon. (Score:1)
Bad move (Score:2)
Re: Bad move (Score:2)
Not particularly. Meta was the first mega tech to do the layoff. They waited to see if others would follow suit or not. When everybody followed suit, Meta is now certain that the employees have no other place to go and will suck it up. So Meta can now do another and another round without fear of exodus. The layoffs will continue until morale improves.