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Meta To Cut 3,600 Jobs, Targeting Lowest Performers (msn.com) 93

Posted by msmash from the no-mercy dept.
Meta is cutting roughly 5% of its staff through performance-based eliminations and plans to hire new people to fill their roles this year, according to a company memo. From a report: As of September, Meta employed about 72,000 people, so a 5% reduction could affect roughly 3,600 jobs. "I've decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster," Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in the note posted to an internal message board and reviewed by Bloomberg News. "We typically manage out people who aren't meeting expectations over the course of a year," he said, "but now we're going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle."

Meta To Cut 3,600 Jobs, Targeting Lowest Performers More | Reply

Meta To Cut 3,600 Jobs, Targeting Lowest Performers

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  • Great idea in theory (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @11:27AM (#65087839)

    In practice, there are problems
    Accurately and honestly assessing performance is hard, and there is a lot of room for skullduggery and politics.
    Anyone who criticizes the boss, the company practices or advocates for a union can easily be marked as "underperforming".

    • Re:Great idea in theory (Score:4, Insightful)

      by aaarrrgggh ( 9205 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @11:59AM (#65087951)

      Moreover, underperforming departments and managers are rarely emphasized enough in the allocation of cuts.

      To effectively eliminate the bottom 5%, you likely need to cut 15-20% of staff. You get to a point where it seems much more like financial engineering than anything actually effective at improving company performance.

    • Re:Great idea in theory (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sodul ( 833177 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @12:05PM (#65087963) Homepage

      It works fine to help prop up the stock temporarily. It is not like Wall Street reads through each and every individual performance reviews.

      There are other issues which is that some managers will game the system and ask for 15 team members when they only need 10, or even 5. This is done because it is very slow and hard to hire good people, and it allows managers to easily have expandable team members when layoffs happen. HR does not account for this and the teams that are already right sized, or sometimes understaffed, get hit harder by these layoffs.

      Next time your see useless contributors on your team, remember that they might just be there as protection for the folks actually doing the work. The manager can't make this too obvious and will make sure that the performance of these individuals does not look too bad. The other thing is that unless the company is actively growing, a manager that lets go of a poor performer is not guaranteed to get a backfill, so they will prefer to pretend that the work done is ok rather than not have a spare employee to toss once comes the automatic layoffs.

      Yes this sucks, and is one of the many reasons why I prefer working at startups.

    • Any company that can't even manage to be roughly correct when it comes to evaluating performance or fires capable employees for reasons unrelated to performance will eventually be replaced by some company that is. For an organization as large as Meta it's practically a certainty that they have 5% of a total workforce that either contributes nothing or are a drag on the productive employees. Perfect assessment simple isn't possible, but that doesn't mean that assessment methods won't be better than random ch

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        Any company that can't even manage to be roughly correct when it comes to evaluating performance or fires capable employees for reasons unrelated to performance will eventually be replaced by some company that is. For an organization as large as Meta it's practically a certainty that they have 5% of a total workforce that either contributes nothing or are a drag on the productive employees. Perfect assessment simple isn't possible, but that doesn't mean that assessment methods won't be better than random chance.

        Assessment methods that depend on a single performance review are, in fact, highly skewed by random chance.

        • Everybody has cycles where they are distracted every now and then. Life happens.
        • Everybody has cycles where management priorities shift and the result is that all of their effort was wasted. Shift happens.
        • Everybody has cycles where some big project doesn't get finished and they can't show that they completed any big projects. Slip happens.
        • Everybody has cycles where something unpredictable goes wrong
        • Evaluations are affected by random chance, but the point is as long as they are still better on average than random chance, then it makes sense to use them to make decisions.

    • hire to fire as well!
      Say you have an good team all doing good but you need cut X from each team so you hire someone just to fire them so you don't lose your good team.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by CasaDelGato ( 701438 )
      Depends on the definition of "Low Performers". At the company I recently left - The definition seems to have been "Any engineer that is paid more". They were laying off US Engineers, and hiring Indian ones to replace them. (I should note that most of the India hires were grossly incompetent - and that was my managers opinion as well.)

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by DewDude ( 537374 )

        That's treason. Outright treason. Any company that fires it's staff to outsource them is not an American country and should not be allowed to operate here.

        The time for being nice is over. Hire American or GTFO.

        • That's treason. Outright treason. Any company that fires it's staff to outsource them is not an American country and should not be allowed to operate here.

          The time for being nice is over. Hire American or GTFO.

          Tell that to Elon Musk, an immigrant from South Africa who illegally overstayed his visa while starting his first company here [salon.com], who's advocating for more H-1B visas, and he'll reply [x.com]:

          The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B.

          Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.

        • That's treason. Outright treason. Any company that fires it's staff to outsource them is not an American country and should not be allowed to operate here.

          The time for being nice is over. Hire American or GTFO.

          All they are doing is being good capitalists by lowering costs and increasing profits and dividend payments to owners, shareholders and investors. If that is treason then capitalism is treason.

          • I agree with what you are saying ... treason is freedom. Luckily Trump understands this, and is a brilliant man who will force everyone to understand that the selfish pursuit of profit is the only thing that can save us all from ourselves, who are clearly anti-freedom.
      • A US engineer that is high paid = kiss of death.
        I guarantee, somebody from India or the Philippines will be brought in at 1/10th the salary, regardless of how good an engineer they may be.

    • Anyone who criticizes the boss, the company practices or advocates for a union can easily be marked as "underperforming".

      Which is exactly why Facebook is doing this right now, on the cusp of the second Trump administration.

      People fired for reasons such as you list basically have only one recourse - the courts. Zuckerberg is counting on Trump further stacking the courts with ultra-conservative judges that aren't particularly amenable to a lowly worker's point of view. And it's not as if the Senate or the House is going to pick up the banner, at least during the next two years...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      The way economic theory suggests this should be done is that you let people go when their marginal contribution to revenues is less than their cost. So if employing Alice costs you $100,000 and she brings in $100,000.01, she gets to day. Bob who is paid exactly the same but brings in $99,999.99 gets the axe.

      The problem is that this calculation, so simple in principle, is impossible to carry out in practice. While you may be pretty sure that someone is contributing to the bottom line, you can almost never

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        The way economic theory suggests this should be done is that you let people go when their marginal contribution to revenues is less than their cost. So if employing Alice costs you $100,000 and she brings in $100,000.01, she gets to day. Bob who is paid exactly the same but brings in $99,999.99 gets the axe.

        And so you fire the HR and corporate security teams, the cafeteria staff, and all the other teams that exist only to hire, protect, or feed the people who contribute to revenue. That way of thinking doesn't end well.

        Or you fire the legal compliance team, because they only take away from revenue.

        The reality is that in any company, there are things you have to do, and they don't make the company money, but you still have to do them, because if you don't, bad things happen. Those are really hard to account f

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gtall ( 79522 )

          Not when the bad management figures out they themselves are the source of the problems. You can usually spot bad management by when they always point to other factors or people rather than take any responsibility themselves.

    • Also this is illegal to do in many countries.

  • Nice lottery (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @11:32AM (#65087853)

    "Come work for us, 1:20 odds we fire you a year later".

    Normal churn can be around 10% - people retire, move away, find better opportunities, and yes, some get fired.

    "Just fire the bottom 5%" is a horrible policy. But we already knew Zuck was an awful human being, didn't we?

    • Re:Nice lottery (Score:5, Insightful)

      by wyHunter ( 4241347 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @11:41AM (#65087873)
      I worked at a company in the early 2000s that did that, yearly or twice yearly. Stuck it out for 4 more years - they stopped doing it, but the morale damage was so done I moved across the country and did something different. It's miserable. My boss kept telling me over and over, please don't leave I was in no danger - but who wants to play musical chairs all the time?

    • Vitality Curve and Stacked Ranking (Score:4, Informative)

      by will4 ( 7250692 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @11:58AM (#65087945)

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      Jack Welch General Electric leader ....

      According to Welch, "A" players had the following characteristics:

              Filled with passion
              Committed to "making things happen"
              Open to ideas from anywhere
              Blessed with much "runway" ahead of them
              Possess charisma, the ability to energize themselves and others
              Can make business productive and enjoyable at the same time
              Exhibit the "four Es" of leadership:
                      Very high Energy levels
                      Can Energize others around common goals
                      The "Edge" to make difficult decisions
                      The ability to consistently Execute

      • "Vampire Capitalism" (Score:5, Informative)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @12:10PM (#65087981) Journal

        And Jack Welch ruined GE. Milked it for short-term cash and tossing around Dilbertian buzzwords to dazzle investors, and then let the corpse shrivel and blow away.

        • Re:"Vampire Capitalism" (Score:5, Insightful)

          by rabun_bike ( 905430 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @01:28PM (#65088273)
          Don't forget that he was not satisfied with just wrecking one company. He then sold his amazingly bad ideas including stack ranking to other companies. Sold lots of books and consulting along the way including a for profit school named Jack Welch Management Institute. It was all based on the falsehood that he had not only saved GE but doubled the worth - which was very short lived. I worked for a company that believed in the Jack Welsh philosophy of cutting people annually via stack ranking. The safest place was on a mediocre team where other people would get the cut. Working on a high performing team was dangerous as they didn't care if everyone was high or even extraordinarily high performing. Someone had to go each year. The damage was immense. I was not sad when he finally departed.
      • That's me! Or it was, until inflexible RTO policies forced em to change teams. Now I'm struggling to figure out which way is up. I'll get back there.....eventually. But it feels like a waste right now.

      • Can anyone find a study if this rank and rating organization method results in a shift in the number of people by personality type?

        Can anyone also find out if this works better for certain professions versus others? For example, does this work for sales but not for creative work?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          Can anyone find a study if this rank and rating organization method results in a shift in the number of people by personality type?

          Can anyone also find out if this works better for certain professions versus others? For example, does this work for sales but not for creative work?

          It doesn't work for any organization that isn't full of sociopaths. Normal people care about their coworkers, and are unhappy when they leave. The more people are forced to leave involuntarily, the more it hurts everyone.

        • From what I remember stacked ranking works in the short term for companies that need to cut staff quickly like a company going through a major shift (merger, bankruptcy, etc.). It should not be used as the default every single year because of the effects. It creates a culture which rewards politics instead of merit. One person I know that worked at a company with stacked ranking saw talented engineers were given terrible rankings. Not because their work was bad. It was because only their direct managers kne

      • Reminds me of horoscopes in that it could apply to anyone(except cynics)

    • I thought amazon has been doing this for years. So much so I thought people were ganging up on each other almost like the survivor game. The goal was to get the manager to fire someone else other than someone in "the group".
    • Completely agree - if 5% of your employees are not performing well, to the point where your company would be better off without them, then this points to a systematic failure of management and the company's structures and processes. I have no idea why investors seem to think this makes the company more valuable?
      • The market loves it when companies fire people because they can immediate calculate the short term savings. Wall Street is short term focused so they don't really care about the long term.

    • Intel used to do this, at least in the places where I had friends working 30 years ago. It made for a really cut-throat work environment that no one really liked.

      But at least the pay was good. I don't imagine that's the case at Meta.

      I keep hoping Meta will implode but Twitter is still in business, so the dream of morally vacant billionaires getting their comeuppance from bad management remains a dream.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      1:20 odds we fire you a year later

      5% per year? That's a pretty odds! Sign me up!

  • Failing company (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Comboman ( 895500 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @11:38AM (#65087861)

    In September, Facebook ordered employees back to the office [cnbc.com], likely hoping some would not want to. Last week they eliminated the fact-checking department, replacing it with user-generated notes [cbsnews.com]. Zuckerberg also went on Joe Rogan to complain about Apple taking his lunch money. Now he's cutting 5% of employees. Sounds like a company in rapid decline to me.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by r1348 ( 2567295 )

      Tends to happen when your product is hot air.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Sounds like a company in rapid decline to me.

      Probably more that growth is flat, and their VR shit didn't pay off and thus their cash is short.

      They should have bought Second Life and worked on a "flat screen" version of virtual worlds. The 3D effect quickly loses its Wow Factor and is not very comfortable nor affordable.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You should be a CEO. "Bring out VR chat but make it flatscreen" is genius.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Tablizer ( 95088 )

          Second Life is relatively popular. If users could use it or something like it without paying and installing software it could really spread. (Would be paid for by in-content ads and product placements, like virtual sodas when you're having virtual lunch.)

          • Are you posting from 15 years ago or something?

            Second life is pretty dead, VR chat is much more active, but nowhere near sustaining something like Facebook would demand.

    • Last week they eliminated the fact-checking department, replacing it with user-generated notes [cbsnews.com].

      They did that to suck up to the Trump administration. It's going to great be fun to watch Facebook devolve into a right wing fever swamp like Twitter. It's going to be even more fun to watch Zuckerberg flounder as he and Meta are kicked around by the EU and major national governments whose societies don't thrive on conspiracy theories for suspending fact checking .

  • The article says 5% from 2024, and another 5% from the current rating cycle bringing the reductions to 10%. So the fired fact checkers are in addition to these cuts? https://www.npr.org/2025/01/12... [npr.org]
    somethings going on....

    • Fact checkers are not Meta employees. They are a network of external partners, mostly press agencies and professional journalists, who are contracted to check if viral posts are factually accurate. The fact checkers are not allowed to tag, edit or block posts directly, they simply enter the result of the check in an internal Facebook tool; the final decision stays with Facebook. Meta will not extend their contracts as their expire during 2025.

  • Oracle is using this practice of firing low-performers for decades. That's great for HR, because they do not have to think about anything. When you fire the lowest performing person, the second lowest performing person will automatically become the new lowest performing person that you can fire if necessary.

    • Fear will keep the outlying employees in line, fear of this HR station.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        Fear will keep the outlying employees in line, fear of this HR station.

        Fear will keep the smart employees away, not working for this HR station.

  • What's going on with ads on Slashdot? (Score:5, Informative)

    by blahbooboo2 ( 602610 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @11:49AM (#65087905)

    Why did Slashdot remove the disable ads checkbox as a way of thanking long time subscribers?
    Guess the AI soon replacing the "editors" came up with this idea to drive up revenue and simultaneously drive out the last remaining participants?

    I used to allow ads but now they are so obnoxious the page looks like a spam site. Slashdot also added obnoxious anti-ad blocking tech compounding it.

    I found these custom rules which kinda fixed the issue (hopefully helps a few folks here): https://github.com/uBlockOrigi... [github.com]

    It's a shame Slashdot is being obnoxious with ads, one more nail in the coffin i guess...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Teun ( 17872 )
      Weird, default uBlock still works here (Kubuntu with Firefox)

      • Ublock filters could have updated. Cat and mouse continues.

      • ublock crashes certain slashdot screens now (or at least it does with firefox on ubuntu, never did before).

        • ublock crashes certain slashdot screens now (or at least it does with firefox on ubuntu, never did before).

          I believe it is caused by the slashdot anti-ad blocking tech

    • Re:What's going on with ads on Slashdot? (Score:4, Informative)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @12:30PM (#65088041)

      Why did Slashdot remove the disable ads checkbox as a way of thanking long time subscribers? ... I used to allow ads but now they are so obnoxious the page looks like a spam site. Slashdot also added obnoxious anti-ad blocking tech compounding it.

      Yup, me too. Historically I whitelisted Slashdot in uBlock Origin (and my previous ad blockers)... but they seem determined to make the default site as actively annoying as possible. Nowadays I can't stomach this site without uO enabled.

      Looks like there's a parallel between Slashdot and this particular story - they're both trying to get rid of the older, more expensive ("don't show ads" folks, in Slashdot's case) members.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      It hasn't been a functional checkbox for a number of years now.

      They also broke it so if it can't access the ad server some pages are just broken

    • What advertising? I have nothing denied from slashdot and fsdn domains in eMatrix (on Pale Moon) but I see no advertising. Disabling uBlock doesn't change it either.
      You sure you don't have some malware doing old-fashioned code injection on pages? Or maybe it's some Google forced spy advertsing crap in Chrome if you happen to use that browser?

      • Nope its on several different computers and browsers. You must have something blocked somewhere cause others reporting similar issues with ads on slashdot.

    • Why did Slashdot remove the disable ads checkbox as a way of thanking long time subscribers?

      They say the word "enshitification" pop up so often in replies that they felt it imperative that they move toward it as fast as they possibly could.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      Thanks for that linked. Worked great. I also blocked the following urls: html-load.com, css-load.com, content-loader.com, 07c225f3.online, and error-report.com.

      Pretty pernicious stuff that acts like malware. It uses CSS and javascript to actively monitor and insert ads into an iframe. Company is called ad-shield. Their stuff has been getting trickier and trickier over the last few years. I consider them a malware and spyware company based on how devious they've designed their code to be.

      • Thanks for that linked. Worked great. I also blocked the following urls: html-load.com, css-load.com, content-loader.com, 07c225f3.online, and error-report.com.

        Pretty pernicious stuff that acts like malware. It uses CSS and javascript to actively monitor and insert ads into an iframe. Company is called ad-shield. Their stuff has been getting trickier and trickier over the last few years. I consider them a malware and spyware company based on how devious they've designed their code to be.

        Great additions thanks!

    • On the first day, it was so bad I closed the tab and went elsewhere. Careful slashdot, or you'll drive the rest of your remaining userbase away.
    • Slashdot will be around after Keith Richards is dead, and Keith has a lot more talent than Slashdot.

  • In the first place? Can you imagine what the world would look like if these 72000 people did actual work?
    Most of this office work is seat-warming.

  • It doesn't sound like a company you want to be associated with.

  • I'm curious how they measure productivity. What's a typical scenario? If they are doing something that's easy to measure, usually it means the task needs automation.

    • I'm curious how they measure productivity. What's a typical scenario? If they are doing something that's easy to measure, usually it means the task needs automation.

      If it's a typical corporate layoff, it'd be something like $salary / hours worked = performance rating. Higher salary goes first. Basically, a seniority shedding that stops short of management.

  • Facebook blatantly does nothing to protect elderly people from being targeted by scammers, and a public-facing platform like Facebook is only going to become more dangerous for your folks as they get older, even if they just lurk to keep in touch with their children. There are better solutions for a "digital family photobook" that don't have the rest of the bullshit and danger that Facebook poses for the elderly and digitally illiterate. With AI gen and bot posts flooding the site, it's become a direct met

  • How many H1-B? (Score:3)

    by Ogive17 ( 691899 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @12:20PM (#65088007)
    Wonder how many H1-Bs they will let go?

  • For Every Job Outsourced.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DewDude ( 537374 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @12:26PM (#65088029) Homepage

    Charge a 1000% tax penalty. You want to kick Americans to the side and give your money to another economy? Then you should have to pay dearly.

    Not actually headquartered in the US? Good. Pay additional corporate tax penalties or cease operation in the US.

    If we made these pieces of shit pay for doing shit like this; it wouldn't happen. But Zuck, like every other CEO, is just sucking dick to save themselves so they can continue to treat us like trash.

  • Problematic (Score:3)

    by akw0088 ( 7073305 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @01:05PM (#65088173)
    The issue with removing the bottom 5% of your workforce is that managers will tell you the people they like are doing great and the people they don't like are the under performers. Then you may end up in a position where the people who actually did the work were removed because they didn't say hello to right people in the morning

  • Work at a place you're appreciated as individuals (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @01:18PM (#65088219) Homepage

    I graduated around 2000, right around the dot-com crash. In my first job (small company of about 24 people) the owner would rank all the engineers every year during their performance reviews, tell you what your rank was, give the highest rank engineers significant performance bonuses, and let the bottom couple engineers go. That's just how it was, and it surprisingly improved morale because you knew none of the people you were working with were dead weight. But that was also a company that paid engineers overtime, and did stuff for their employees like taking them out to lunch, throwing big Christmas parties, etc.

    By the 2008 crash I'd moved to a bigger company (maybe 120 people). If you were brilliant you spent your time cleaning up the messes created by the not-so-brilliant engineers, and those people just got shuffled around to other departments. I started on overtime but they forcibly switched me to a base plus bonus structure. In 2008 nobody got bonuses because revenues were down, except the HR manager who got a huge bonus for getting the company involved in a government subsidized work-share program that cut some engineers' hours down to 30 minutes per week. I didn't stay past 2009.

    Now I work at a small family-run business that's grown from under 50 people to over 200 in the decade I've been here, and the owners still get out there and flip burgers for the employees at the summer BBQ, and make a point of trying to know the employees by name.

    My point is that you want to find a place where they don't treat everyone as interchangeable, and where they recognize that some employees are worth a lot more than others, and they treat you differently based on your contribution. Get some talent and then find the company that recognizes talent, and fights to keep you there. And don't stick around a place that keeps dead weight on staff.

  • Wasn't Zuck on Rogan espousing that AI is already good enough to replace mid-level engineers just last week? So which is it? We're going to hire replacements because AI isn't good enough yet, or were going to use AI to do those jobs because it's good enough?

  • They're going to Target Americans. Donald Trump has already said it's open season for as many H-1Bs as any company wants as long as they suck up to him. They're going to be firing Americans as fast as they can and hiring people on work visas.

    Ironically I think you're more secure if you're here on a work visa then if you're an actual citizen now.

  • Does this stuff really work? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I remember when one PC company started having a policy of letting to its "worst" 5% each year. Other than the usual "I got axe, I swing axe, tee hee, gimme street cred for the pink slips", in my experience, this does nothing for a company.

    If someone is poorly performing, any MBA who graduated from an accredited college has taken management, and there are many steps and levers one has before firing people. A word to the wise, a quick taken aside, a quick off-the-record meeting, a semi formal meeting, a mee

  • "Lowest performers" is a euphemism (Score:3)

    by BishopBerkeley ( 734647 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @02:24PM (#65088515) Journal
    for people who disagree with Zuck or are openly anti-trump enough for Zuck to consider them a threat. This is more corporate censorship.

  • Personally, I like living in a country where employees have rights.

  • You have that guy who gets lots of tickets done but always works on the piddly shit so that he looks better for his bosses.

    Then you have that crazy mofo that never appears to get anything done because he's taking on the impossible regularly.

    From a level high up, who do you think is considered the low performer?

    Who is the one who should be let go?

  • They think they can cut costs by laying off their lowest performers? Imagine the bigger savings if they just lay off their highest paid employees instead! Give everyone else in the company a chance to step up to a new challenge. Plus, if the laid off employees are REALLY worth what they were paid, surely they will start a new genius venture, and that creates a healthier marketplace of ideas that benefits everyone!

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