Meta To Cut 3,600 Jobs, Targeting Lowest Performers (msn.com) 96
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."
Great idea in theory (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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)
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.
understaffed team now need to have all pull 60 hou (Score:2)
understaffed team now need to have all pull 60 hour weeks + on call to fill the gap.
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Another nice summary of how good management skills can lead to a team being overworked to the point of having the morale drained right out of them. Competent manager = screwed team.
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Re:Great idea in theory (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
And when some of those things just happen to occur right at the end of a performance review cycle, they get far more weight than they do if they happen at the beginning of the cycle. That part is 100% random chance. So random chance plays a statistically significant role in everyone's ranking in a given cycle.
And none of that is necessarily under the control of the employee, and none of it necessarily represents an actual performance problem, but rather, is a reflection of the fact that nobody is perfect and life isn't perfect.
As a result, yes, in any given cycle, you might have 5% who didn't contribute meaningfully to the bottom line, but it won't usually be the same 5% in the next cycle. If you fire the 5% each cycle, all you're doing is making more work for the employees that stay while paying them the same amount, and eventually you'll reach a point of maximum burnout where quality falls through the floor and nothing gets done.
Put another way, that approach to managing is exactly why Facebook sucks as badly as it does. The people they should want to hire take one look at stories like this and say, "I don't want to work at a company where if I have a bad quarter, they're going to fire me," and they don't even bother to apply for jobs.
I'm not saying that it isn't possible to tell the difference on an individual case-by-case basis, but when management is pushing you to identify a specific quota of people to be fired, that ship has sailed, and the only thing those sorts of quotas do is make people over the age of 30 say, "H*** no, I'm not ever going to work for you." So you end up with a bunch of junior talent that can't project-manage their way out of a paper bag, chase new features instead of fixing bugs, don't provide enough test coverage to avoid introducing the same bugs over and over again, etc.
Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.
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hire to fire as well! (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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.
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So, literally quoting Elon is marked "troll" -- (*sigh*)
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Yup, just like literally quoting the convicted felon is "fake" news.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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
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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
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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.
Re: Great idea in theory (Score:1)
Also this is illegal to do in many countries.
Nice lottery (Score:5, Insightful)
"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)
Re:Nice lottery (Score:5, Insightful)
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Vitality Curve and Stacked Ranking (Score:4, Informative)
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)
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)
Re: Vitality Curve and Stacked Ranking (Score:2)
Personality types and percentages (Score:2)
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?
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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.
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Reminds me of horoscopes in that it could apply to anyone(except cynics)
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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.
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5% per year? That's a pretty odds! Sign me up!
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Correction: "pretty good odds".
It's 10% for pour proof-reeders.
Failing company (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Tends to happen when your product is hot air.
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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.
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You should be a CEO. "Bring out VR chat but make it flatscreen" is genius.
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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.)
Re: Failing company (Score:3)
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.
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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 .
in addition to the fact checkers? (Score:2)
somethings going on....
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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.
Dumb Facebook HR (Score:1)
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.
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Fear will keep the outlying employees in line, fear of this HR station.
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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)
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...
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Ublock filters could have updated. Cat and mouse continues.
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ublock crashes certain slashdot screens now (or at least it does with firefox on ubuntu, never did before).
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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)
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.
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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
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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?
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Nope its on several different computers and browsers. You must have something blocked somewhere cause others reporting similar issues with ads on slashdot.
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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.
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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.
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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!
Re: What's going on with ads on Slashdot? (Score:2)
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Why does Meta need 72000 employees (Score:2)
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.
Meta who? (Score:2)
"Targeting lowest performers" (Score:1)
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.
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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.
If your parents are on Facebook, get them off (Score:1)
How many H1-B? (Score:3)
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To quote Dean Wormer from Animal House:
Zero... point... zero...
For Every Job Outsourced.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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Work at a place you're appreciated as individuals (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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"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. "
You don't actually know that. If you had 50% dead weight, most of them are still there. If there was 0% dead weight, you just fired people who were actually productive.
If you're on a team with 19 people that just won a Nobel Prize and some decided the bottom 5% must go, you're out of a job whether or not you're "dead weight".
If your cri
Hire new people??? (Score:2)
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?
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AI / H1B? AI / H1B? AI / H1B?
Americans (Score:1)
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)
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)
America, land of the free to fire you (Score:2)
Personally, I like living in a country where employees have rights.
Tell me if you heard this one before (Score:2)
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?
I know how to save Meta even MORE money! (Score:2)
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!