Meta's 'Efficiency' Layoffs Take a Toll on Employee Productivity (bloomberg.com) 49
Meta employees received news Wednesday of the final round of previously announced job cuts, which affected thousands of workers in the company's business departments. Now, remaining staff are hoping an uncomfortable limbo at the company can end. From a report: The layoffs complete the bulk of the restructuring Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced in March to eliminate 10,000 positions. Initial reductions affected the company's recruiting and human resources departments, and in late April jobs in Meta's tech groups were slashed. Zuckerberg has said further cuts will come in only a "small number of cases" for the rest of the year, giving those people left a cold sense of relief.
The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said the layoffs were necessary to improve efficiency, after over-hiring during the pandemic. Meta promised faster product development and decision-making that sent its shares up more than 100% so far this year. But employees said some important work and planning has been at a standstill. Notably, Meta is still deciding on its product roadmap for the rest of the year, while it sorts out resources following cuts in the tech group, a person familiar with the matter said. During the limbo, employees have been unsure who to collaborate with, how to shift responsibilities on their teams or who would be cut next, according to current and recently let-go employees, who asked not to be named discussing internal issues.
The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said the layoffs were necessary to improve efficiency, after over-hiring during the pandemic. Meta promised faster product development and decision-making that sent its shares up more than 100% so far this year. But employees said some important work and planning has been at a standstill. Notably, Meta is still deciding on its product roadmap for the rest of the year, while it sorts out resources following cuts in the tech group, a person familiar with the matter said. During the limbo, employees have been unsure who to collaborate with, how to shift responsibilities on their teams or who would be cut next, according to current and recently let-go employees, who asked not to be named discussing internal issues.
File this under NO SHIT!? (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, less people to do work means less work gets done? Fear of getting cut any second leads to lower employee moral, which leads to less productivity? Didn't see that one coming a universe away!!
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This seems to be a universal thing that the management never can wrap their head around. Same thing happened at Gateway. They literally sent henchmen in black suits out onto the floor. They'd walk around with clipboards, tap you on the back, and you were marched out ten minutes later by security (time to clean your desk of personal belongings, to be humane, natch). Then they wondered why morale was in the toilet and people spent more time watching the henchmen than doing their work.
I'm sure plenty of other
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This seems to be a universal thing that the management never can wrap their head around. Same thing happened at Gateway. They literally sent henchmen in black suits out onto the floor. They'd walk around with clipboards, tap you on the back, and you were marched out ten minutes later by security (time to clean your desk of personal belongings, to be humane, natch). Then they wondered why morale was in the toilet and people spent more time watching the henchmen than doing their work.
I'm sure plenty of other people have similar stories from across the years.
When you're a certain size, layoffs gets increasingly difficult. I notice you pointed out a problem, but didn't supply a solution. How did you handle layoffs elegantly at your company?
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This seems to be a universal thing that the management never can wrap their head around. Same thing happened at Gateway. They literally sent henchmen in black suits out onto the floor. They'd walk around with clipboards, tap you on the back, and you were marched out ten minutes later by security (time to clean your desk of personal belongings, to be humane, natch). Then they wondered why morale was in the toilet and people spent more time watching the henchmen than doing their work.
I'm sure plenty of other people have similar stories from across the years.
When you're a certain size, layoffs gets increasingly difficult. I notice you pointed out a problem, but didn't supply a solution. How did you handle layoffs elegantly at your company?
By treating employees like human beings, not like disposable items. These companies massively hired people to boost the company's profits when the situation was conducive to such a thing. Now that it is not, those employees are just tossed aside. Yes, business is business, and fucking bastards take advantage of that.
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This seems to be a universal thing that the management never can wrap their head around. Same thing happened at Gateway. They literally sent henchmen in black suits out onto the floor. They'd walk around with clipboards, tap you on the back, and you were marched out ten minutes later by security (time to clean your desk of personal belongings, to be humane, natch). Then they wondered why morale was in the toilet and people spent more time watching the henchmen than doing their work.
I'm sure plenty of other people have similar stories from across the years.
When you're a certain size, layoffs gets increasingly difficult. I notice you pointed out a problem, but didn't supply a solution. How did you handle layoffs elegantly at your company?
By treating employees like human beings, not like disposable items. These companies massively hired people to boost the company's profits when the situation was conducive to such a thing. Now that it is not, those employees are just tossed aside. Yes, business is business, and fucking bastards take advantage of that.
I'm not disagreeing with you. When you treat employees like "human beings" you often get all sorts of unfortunate human-like reactions, such as the employee next to you leaving a wake in his/her path, or the one where you wonder whether you're next. Neither are 100% avoidable, even if the one getting fired is getting the better deal...
However, you didn't offer a practical solution to how you would let go of lots of employees... err, I mean "human beings".
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Wait, less people to do work means less work gets done? Fear of getting cut any second leads to lower employee moral, which leads to less productivity? Didn't see that one coming a universe away!!
Don't worry...AI can do all of that undone busy work that those laid off people used to do. /s
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In my experience, and what is taught in MBA classes, morale doesn't mean jack. People are going to work at Meta, because it is that or flip burgers. Same with other companies. Phone companies have had people with bad morale for decade, but they are still highly successful.
It isn't like it matters anyway. In this economy, there are 200+ people banging on the door for any tech job, and you can always offshore for cheap, so people who are at Meta should be happy they are at least drawing a paycheck as oppo
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In my experience, and what is taught in MBA classes, morale doesn't mean jack. People are going to work at Meta, because it is that or flip burgers. Same with other companies. Phone companies have had people with bad morale for decade, but they are still highly successful.
It isn't like it matters anyway. In this economy, there are 200+ people banging on the door for any tech job, and you can always offshore for cheap, so people who are at Meta should be happy they are at least drawing a paycheck as opposed to trying to complete with hundreds of others for a job with a big pay cut.
Not only can you offshore for cheap, but most of the bean-counters in these companies are convinced at this point that the bots are going to replace most desk positions, so we'll soon be competing there whether the bots are ready to run the show or not. Gonna be a fun next decade or so.
Re:File this under NO SHIT!? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are not 200+ qualified people banging on the door for any tech job. For boring non-glamorous jobs developing business software for niche markets, it is quite difficult to fill software development positions, and also difficult to retain talent. Competition for tech talent, in these domains, is pretty high.
Sometimes it is possible to bring in low-skilled greenies who can't do the job, but that doesn't do any good since they can't do the job. The same goes for outsourcing: they are there and eager to compete against each other for your business, but they can't actually deliver where it matters most.
Your mileage may vary.
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I highly recommend you take a look at SRE-tier postings at Indeed, you will find hundreds of applications for that one position. Even for L1 phone techs for $17/hour, some of those positions have 100+ people applying to those.
Developers are developers, and are not too hard to replace. As for deliverables, once a project is done and all that is needed is people to maintain it, why bother with the "rockstar" devs. After buying a bunch of airplanes, one doesn't need the engineers who made the engines on the
Re: File this under NO SHIT!? (Score:2)
It also does not help that a lot of the entry-level positions for these jobs are so damn high as to effectively gate-keep new talent from joining.
Lots of postings asking for at least 2-3 years of experience professionally working in a certain language, framework, etc. For most graduates, unless they interned specifically at these places they are applying to, they may have at best 6-9 months as an intern.
And companies wonder why they are short on talent as the HR department casually cycles hundreds of applic
Re: File this under NO SHIT!? (Score:2)
*applications
Eh, might as well be the same thing in this context.
Re: File this under NO SHIT!? (Score:2)
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Well, at least now I understand how everything is just going down the drain. Quality, usability, support... It seems you actually believe what you're saying and you're probably not the only one.
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I wish that was true.
I was also affected by layoffs (another company), and jobs literally have hundreds, if not thousands of applicants. At least 60-80 of them senior level with good experience. And at least 4-5 of them pass all interviews for a single role.
Yes, this came shocking, but I have received many times something like:
"You did really great in all the interviews, but we decided to go with another candidate".
And the reason could
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In my experience, and what is taught in MBA classes, morale doesn't mean jack. People are going to work at Meta, because it is that or flip burgers.
Or retire. You can't assume that all of the long-term employees still need a job. When morale suffers enough, the older workers who still remember why things were done in a particular way retire, and suddenly you have a loss of institutional knowledge.
It isn't like it matters anyway. In this economy, there are 200+ people banging on the door for any tech job, and you can always offshore for cheap, so people who are at Meta should be happy they are at least drawing a paycheck as opposed to trying to complete with hundreds of others for a job with a big pay cut.
There aren't 200 qualified people, typically, except maybe in the extremely short term because of all the recent layoffs. But once those folks are all working somewhere, you'll be lucky to find more than a handful of qualified people for non-entry-level job
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It’s amusing to see Slashdotters arguing against their own paychecks.
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This is tech. This is a social media company. The amount of useless labor dollars spent is astronomical. I don't doubt they could fire at least 60% of those left without any real impact to productivity.
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and the beatings will continue until moral improve (Score:1)
nice accounting buzzwords like improving efficiency, productivity, just sizing... at the end of the day, the people you laid off they were doing something, especially if they have been there for a while.
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at the end of the day, the people you laid off they were doing something, especially if they have been there for a while.
Well, that's not always true. We've all seen cases where people in large companies do something but nobody would notice if they got hit by a bus.
Is that true for MetaBook? I don't know...
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That strongly suggests the managers should improve their oversight skills. Perhaps certain individual contributors should be let go, but that is the symptom, not the root problem.
These large job cuts in very profitable companies indicate the top level decisionmakers are making big decisions based on emotions. They overhired in the past because of emotions, and now they decided to do something drastic based on their emotions about perceptions of the stock market. Two wrongs might well be right, but I do n
Meta flipped the switch (Score:4, Interesting)
"Meta promised faster product development and decision-making that sent its shares up more than 100% so far this year."
Meta is going to do more with fewer people. That implies that Meta knew exactly which employees were extraneous and could be laid off. However, Meta also acknowledged that it previously didn't know which employees were extraneous, which lead to the overhiring. Going through this process of layoffs has allowed Meta to suddenly acquire the ability to switch from not knowing who was expendable to knowing exactly who was unnecessary.
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> Going through this process of layoffs has allowed Meta to suddenly acquire the ability to switch from not knowing who was expendable to knowing exactly who was unnecessary.
The hard way: yank a random wire and see what breaks.
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the hard way? that's just a fun friday!
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In other words Oh we couldn't tell good people from bad last month but we TOTALLY can now. :rolleyes:
How do you actually measure productivity? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:How do you actually measure productivity? (Score:5, Interesting)
You are spot on. This has been a significant issue that I have seen come up again and again in my career. Management really, really wants a simple metric to measure productivity. And they are completely convinced this is possible. But every single thing they try winds up being a terrible measure of productivity and their development process is harmed by them using it.
Anything that can be measured directly is both a poor indicator of productivity AND something that can be gamed to produce a false sense of high productivity. Lines of code? Code bloat is an obvious antipattern. Number of functions? Same deal. Number of features completed? Even worse: some features are naturally much more expensive than others and hastily-written features bring with them a very harmful number of bugs.
How about "points?" As in, you know, those airy and abstract things that agile shops spend so much time obsessing over? Well, points are entirely made-up numbers that mean nothing! Their one and only purpose is to give the product owner a sense of what features are cheap, and what features are expensive, for priority-making decisions. In supremely educated and disciplined shops they can also be used to produce delivery estimates. But in no case does it even make logical sense to track them as a productivity metric (the only thing such attempts actually track, in the best of cases, is estimate accuracy). Points as productivity metric are so easy to game that developers cannot even help themselves from doing so the moment they realize that they are being judged by the size of those numbers.
That last one bugs me because agile shops seem to be full of managers who cannot understand this. "Points" look so much like a productivity metric to them that their capacity to reason simply shuts down when you try to explain why productivity is simply not something this number can measure.
The bottom line is: software developer productivity is too slippery to measure in any precise, metrics-based way. You are better off putting developers in teams and hoping that the bright and honest team members will hold-accountable any other team members that start slacking off. THAT actually works, and saves you a fortune in wasted efforts at gathering misleading metrics.
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Exactly: any metric can be gamed.
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Good old Goodhart's Law
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You just summed up where I work now to a T with the story points bit.
My company literally has a contract that gets paid by story points and since story points are used for capacity then capacity equals days and there you go, it makes it on a chart... despite story points being set by the team. And if someone "puts their foot down" about high story points, then all of a sudden, the project management people just start making easier stories... pointed the same.
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Don't they look at revenue per employee? I realise that's not necessarily the same as productivity in a micro sense, but in a macro sense it's what the stock market cares about.
If you could make a billion dollars with just one person, the stock market would be falling over itself to invest. If it takes you 100,000 employees, then you're no longer remarkable. If you can do it with 50,000 employees instead, then they'll take notice again.
I haven't checked the facts, but ultimately, their revenue per employee
Staff changes always (Score:2)
Staff changes of any significance always mean a productivity drop in the sort term at least.
0) Its a morale hit ... now. Frank is gone, Bob used to need Frank to sign off on ... can Bob sign off now or does it need to go all the way up to Ted or Alice?
1) Its scares people, people want to actually leave are going spend a little time calling friends and making sure they HAVE prospects if they are dismissed next
2) it creates confusion - who is in charge of
everyone stop we need to have a meeting to create new o
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It is *never* better in the long term. If you have good people you can change what the company does overnight and will be fine, but getting rid of the people while maintaining the status quo with the product is just a path to death.
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Which probably explains why you can hack drive safe and save in a week
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IBM is doing fine
A share price that’s been in decline for a decade and a p/e ratio of 62. Yep IBM is doing great,
Been there, done that (Score:5, Interesting)
It is called: fear driven development :-) (Score:1)
Morale was so bad, I was hoping for a layoff (Score:1)
Prayers answered.
I barely knew anyone, and they weren't exactly the types you could have a beer with.
The frontline management layer were BMW SUV-driving a-holes.
I don't see Meta ever coming back because there's too much spending ($40 B on servers in 2 years without a product need), not enough growth, the wrong products, and mismanaged sales.
I await more efficiency (Score:1)
No need for further layoffs (Score:3)
"Ok, lemme get this straight. You fired half of my team, you're not hiring anyone else and we also don't get more money. In other words, I do twice the work now for the same pay?
Let's see where I put that resume..."
I don't know about you or the rest of the US, but over here in Europe, we're still DESPERATELY looking for good personnel. In pretty much any and all fields of IT. Yes, even HR. You fired the duds, which is of course par for the course, but realize that unless you're firing managers, you're still firing someone who did at least SOME of the work that now has to be picked up by someone else. Unless that someone now gets more money or you're hiring better personnel, that someone is now worse off than before the layoff.
This is also what doubles as "survivor guilt". There is no guilt whatsoever. It's just being pissed that now they have to do twice the work for no extra pay. And guess what the result of this is in an economy where it's fairly easy to find something new if you're qualified for your job: You're firing the duds and a few weeks later you also lose the best and brightest because they already have offers up the ass from other companies trying to get talent.
What you'll be stuck with in the long run is the mediocre. Which is, incidentally, what happens at all large companies sooner or later.
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You're firing the duds and a few weeks later
That's a very common management myth: somehow they think they're smart enough to only fire the low-performers.
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They're only firing the low performers. The others leave on their own when they realize that they're supposed to work two jobs for one paycheck.
And nothing of value was lost... (Score:3)
Come on, we were all thinking it.