Engineers vocally advocated for hiring more people because they have “too much work”. Engineers are on the interview panels and so are also responsible for hiring standards to drop (if, in fact, that is true).
Facebook went through some really massive, traumatic growth and the amount of work increased far faster than hiring or engineering could keep up. This left scars on the organization—better to have too many engineers than too few, the wisdom went.
During this period of growth, the “more work” that needed to be done really was critical. It just isn’t critical any more.
Most of the engineers I worked with (non-tech industry) never seemed to have a clue about the business situation of the company. They could just see there were lots of requirements and assumed the future was bright.
Edit: Yes, I see this contradicts my original post. I was hoping the employees in big tech would be a bit smarter.
> Hiring standards must have fallen if they added people so rapidly
I have been hearing this about Meta / FB for the last 10 years. This line of thinking is overly simplistic. If a company like FB wants to ramp up hiring, they have many tools at their disposal. Hiring bar isn't the only tool, or even a very important one. Things they can do:
1. They can really jack up the compensation package and signing bonuses
2. Open offices in places where they didn't have any presence
3. Open up to remote work
4. Allow flexible hours
5. Increase retention through outstanding perks and benefits
6. Scale hiring efforts - expand the recruiting org, train more employees to conduct interview, reward employees for referrals and conduct interviews
7. Expand outreach into communities from where we historically didn't get much applicants
Meta tried everything above, and possibly more. Hiring bar doesn't matter when you have boatload of money.
Ok maybe you're right (I have no experience of trying to integrate huge numbers of people coming from outside big tech in a way that doesn't devalue their skills), but I would feel a bit concerned for my future compensation regarding #2, #3 and #4 in your list if I wasn't extremely bullish about the future of the business (especially #3).
“Meta did not immediately to Engadget’s comment request.”
I don’t really see much value to the numerous hurried regurgitations of the original story (from the Financial Times), though I guess this link is a form of that.
What do you mean? It's added because that's what happened. You'll also find lots of articles if you google "company spokesperson said". It's far from meaningless when there's no response.
How much time passed between reaching out and publishing the article? Who decides how much time is "enough"? You could technically send out an email, and then immediately publish the article. After all a few seconds passed with no reply...
Because of this the line is meaningless (to me at least).
> How much time passed between reaching out and publishing the article?
Presumably the normal amount of time? Do you think journalists just go publishing things haphazardly? I get the feeling you have no experience in the world of reporting.
It really depends where you are. On one hand side, Matt Levine is a journalist. On the other, so are people in the Daily Mail. Yet, there's a massive difference there.
Having been on both side of press like this “immediately” means a couple of hours at most. Sometimes it means “I spoke to someone, they said they’d come back to me, but I didn’t want to wait”.
I’ve seen cases where emails are sent outside of work hours on a Friday/Weekend so the journalist can claim that the subject “did not respond to repeated requests for comment” on Monday morning.
Journalists often have a story they want to tell. They intentionally arrange things to support their story.
Last time they did a big layoff the stock went up.. so I guess keep firing people as long as the stock keeps going up is the plan for say people who own lots of the stock.. I wonder who might benefit?
The shareholders, for whose purpose the business exists, are the ones who will benefit, and they deserve to.
Don't forget that most of the employees are also shareholders and most of them make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the stock.
It sucks that people get laid off, but a large portion of the employees were lucky to be hired in the first place, because of the crazy growth that was enabled and rewarded by the market in the last few years. They made a lot of money and now they have to look for work again. It's not like laying off factory workers.
shareholders benefit when a company streamlines its operations. seeing as most meta employees are shareholders, they would benefit. a company cannot grow infinitely. any temporary bump in share price will only matter and sustain if the cuts actually help the company. getting laid off is hard, no doubt, but as long as the severance packages are fair I don't see any ethical issue here.
Board members who are at the whims of the holders of their stonks will ebb and flow with the wishes of those who need more ROI during an oncoming recession. Another way to put it: a lot more people will be laid off and that will continue until the underlying product is harmed. But what is the underlying product? Besides sharing photos on Instagram, I don't personally hear or know about any mass adoption of Meta wares.
This is quite a cynical take. The logic probably isn't as simple as, "if we fire people, our stock will go up".
A lower stock price for a company like Facebook actually impacts its ability to operate. For one, Facebook as a technology company depends on being able to compensate their employees competitively with other tech companies and part of that involves stock based comp. If their stock price is constantly falling and trading at compressed levels then they have to give away increasingly larger percentages of the company to attract top talent. This obviously isn't sustainable.
The second problem is that a lower stock price impacts Facebook's ability to offer its stock in acquisitions. This means that they will either have to pay cash or take on debt as an alternative. And that's hard to do when you're pushing a large chunk of your free cashflow into projects like Reality Labs and investors are already concerned about cashflows.
My understanding is that the employees are the largest shareholder of Facebook – so naturally they would be the largest beneficiary of any stock buy back.
But this was exactly my point in regards to the importance of the stock price for securing talent. The company is owned in large part by its employees and they will jump ship if they don't believe in the company's future.
> My understanding is that the employees are the largest shareholder of Facebook
The employees are not a shareholder, largest or otherwise. If you counted them as one, though, sure, they’d be the largest, trivially, since as CEO Zuck is an employee, and he, considered alone, is already the largest single (individual or institutional) shareholder by a very large margin, Vanguard and BlackRock are #2 and #3, and together have less than Zuck does.
I don't believe there is more up to date information on the breakdown of the shareholders.
Obviously Zuck is the largest single shareholder – he is the founder – but at time of IPO at least, the employees own more than him in total.
This isn't that uncommon for tech companies either. It's quite typical for companies like Facebook to give away a few percent of the company each year to employees in the form of stock based comp. I thought people on HN generally work for tech companies and were aware of this? A large part of your total compensation if you work at a company like Google or Amazon comes in the form of stock. Employees (especially the early employees) generally own a very significant amount of companies like Facebook and Google.
I'm the only one providing explanations here. I'm the only one who bothered to try to provide a source for the claims I was making. I explained that I don't believe there's more recent data, so yes, I am supporting my "thesis" with an article from 2012. Everyone is just making baseless comments here anyway, "ree, Zuck bad", so whatever, believe what you like for all I care.
The point I was originally trying to make was that technology companies (including Facebook) compensate their employees with billions of dollars of stock every year[1] ($12b last year in the case of META). This means the employees of technology companies are generally significant shareholders of the company – whether they're the largest, second largest or third largest owner is frankly irrelevant to my point – employees benefit massively when the share price goes up because in many cases most of the wealth of those employees is tied to the company stock.
None of what I'm saying here should be controversial and is widely understood by tech workers at companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon.
I have no idea what Zuck or BlackRock being a large individual holder of META stock has to do with anything. Do you guys think that the thousands of employees at Facebook should (or could) have 10% of the company each or something? Obviously Zuck owns more than any individual holder – it's his company. And yes, obviously, there are large institutions that hold Facebook on behalf of their clients – most of whom by the way are just average people who have money invested with companies like BlackRock for their retirement. Are you guys also surprised to hear that 89 year old Doris doesn't manage her retirement portfolio on Robinhood or something?
If you're honestly unhappy that companies like Facebook don't give enough of their stock away to employees then I don't know what to say to you. You'll find one of the main complaints institutional share holders will cite when it comes to owning the stock of tech companies is that they give away far too much stock to their employees. This dilutes investors like BlackRock at the benefit of employees receiving SBC.
In my opinion the reality here is completely opposite to what this community is trying to paint. But I know, I know. Zuck is rich and therefore he must be a bad boy who doesn't care about any one or anything other than his own wealth.
> Excluding Zuck, at IPO the "employees" in aggregate were the largest group of shareholders.
No, just because an article arbitrarily treats them as a group and every other entity as an individual entity doesn’t make them ”the biggest group”, and the immediate pre-IPO distribution (when comp was more heavily weighted to equity and there was no practical way for most employees to exit their equity position pre-IPO) is likely not refleftive of current distribution more than a decade post-IPO distribution.
And “employees excluding Zuckerberg” aren’t a coherent, interest-aligned group abyhow.
As a common Software Engineer, I see my type of position as transient, whereas those database guys, the ones who make sure all the guts run, all that crazy shit, they're needed night and day. They can fire me and hire a version of me the next day, but the people next to the bare metal seem to have a lot more stored in their brain than can be easily replicated with the next recruit.
I worked closely enough with the people maintaining custom database software at $COMPANY. They were damn smart and had lots of good experience. BigTable at Google was created by an all-star team and they raised a generation of amazing programmers and SREs under them. There’s a lot of cross-pollination, staff moving between Google and Facebook, and Facebook has its own teams of amazing programmers working on database problems.
Maybe the work “isn’t so different” but it is more difficult, on a technical level, than most projects. Some real interesting, ground-breaking work was done in the past 20 years or so and a lot of the people who did that work are still around.
In our large company, we often had a consulting firm that advised us in difficult times. Bottom line, they said that they think the company needs to deeply breath out and then breathe in again. After the severance payments, we were always urgently looking for people.
For me, that was always proof that the managers had failed. But a disproportionately small number of managers had to leave the company.
I have no idea what will happen, but it sort of sounded like (from the limited reporting that's been done) they'll focus a bit more on managers / non-ICs this time -- if it happens at all.
It is kind of nasty to think about the timing though. If true, they kept those managers around to do the very undesirable and time-consuming performance cycle (yearly review) work and will be letting them go now that the process has concluded.
Official perf reviews recently switched to yearly, but there's a "touchpoint" every three months, which is just a very light perf review with no ratings/direct outcomes until the annual one
The people leave, but the culture of failure stays. Its a long way down, until in some run down office park, the last flickering neon light goes dark.
Whats more interesting though is how the let go workers venture within there cultural spheres. Meta workers are more likely to go to places, that have adapted similar cultures, with AB Tests.
I witnessed this firsthand. I worked for a decent sized public company but large gov contractor in DC. Super smart people, I was learning a ton.
Then the layoffs started. In honesty, mostly OK decisions but a few really bad key ones. Then I watched the super smart people see the writing on the wall and leave, mostly to Google.
Then I felt stupid, if all the smart people left what did that make me? Well, it made me a big fish in a small pond, and I probably learned little of value over the next couple years, until I inevitably left too.
The company now is a sad shell of what it once was. I guess this type of story is all too common.
I think a big factor in these layoffs is to signal the market that the companies are "cutting fat". The market gets the signal, stock price goes up and the board of directors eases the pressure on the CEO. After this the company can resume business as usual, which will require quietly hiring to fill the needed positions.
At least in the case of Meta / Facebook, I don't think there is any pressure on the CEO.
Zuckerberg owns controlling interest over the company to the point where the board of directors are essentially advisory. I believe I read that he owns over 75% of Class B shares, for which he gets 10 votes for every 1 vote that a regular Class A voter gets.
That's a lot of power. This has allowed the company to ignore Wall Street in the past, which makes me think he's not suddenly concerned about Wall Street now. Whatever Zuck does is really his choice and responsibility.
Sounds like your company had no idea why they were doing the lay offs so just go rid of workers lower down the chain while keeping their friends.
I've seen the same thing happen in a large corp I've worked for directed by the advice of McKinsey.
The funny thing in this case though was that it was Accenture which advised them to hire the engineering department two years prior to help with innovation. Then after a couple of years of building out the team they advised them fire the whole department and outsource it to cut costs. The only people who remained were managers.
Just out of curiosity: who is deciding where the cuts need to be made? I mean does the consulting firm prepare a detailed proposal or is it all decided by management in-house?
"Deeply breath out and then breathe in" It's hard to breathe in vacuum and I doubt that current layoffs will fill it (unless we are in a long recession). Next breath in can be very expensive.
This is familiar to those of us who went through the dot com bubble burst. We're not at the same scale of industry specific recession but there are similarities with an economic slow down, more cautious spending, reduction in VC money and shareholders seeking returns. Wave after wave of redundancies to try and reach a stable cashflow, each one "right sizing" until they realise that their calculations where wrong and there is even less free flowing money/debt than they thought. It becomes incredibly demoralising, which constant suspicions of what meetings are about, wondering when the next round will be and if you'll in the next batch.
Just before the last round of layoffs, Zuck said some of you "shouldn't be here" and a memo circulating in management-only groups was laying blame on "coaster" ICs (it leaked and they got called out, and tried to walk it back). I don't wish any ill will towards anyone there, but it's flavors of schadenfreude that management (probably mostly M1/M2) is now instead the target of the layoff machine.
With all these layoffs though, it's perverse because the people being laid off are practically never the people responsible for the problems. Laying aside Mark Zuckerberg's personal responsibility for lighting billions of dollars on fire for nothing, the reason there's a massive swathe of middle management in Meta is because that's what Meta's management team decided to reward. If you were a good IC, you got made a manager. Now they've got tonnes of managers doing nothing and instead of saying "Ok, let's take a look at senior leadership and figure out where the weak leadership is that led to this situation", the answer is to fire a load of top performers (that's why they got made managers!) and let the people who made the mistakes continue to coast. The exact same problems are going to happen again, because whilst they'll do a detailed post-mortem for 5 minutes of downtime, no one is interested in a post-morterm for 5,000 fired engineers.
I’ve been here for 8 years, and never known that to be true. At most, higher IC levels are expected to do more “direction setting” work (ie, writing a technical design doc for your team to follow, rather than writing all the code by yourself), but that’s still distinct from “management”
Meta is one of the few companies where the job cuts really make sense. I mean, they have not a single product which is basically not on a steep dying path. Facebook will be gone as soon as the boomer generation will fall like dominoes. Instagram is slowly dying amongst millennials and the Metaverse has already been largely rejected by users before it even took off. If Meta didn't own WhatsApp then I think most people would even forget that this company still exists.
2.96 billion people remember that the company exists on a daily basis. Meta did more than three times TikTok's reported total 2022 revenue in Q4 alone.
> Facebook will be gone as soon as the boomer generation will fall like dominoes.
Mr. Soapbox, freaking Yahoo isn't dead and you think Facebook will be gone :-) Heck, Borland IDEs are still around.
Facebook (the social media network) will be around in some form or another long after my kids are gone.
You don't go from having several billion users to 0 in anything less than a lifetime, because you know what, that network is probably profitable even with 10-50 million people and if Meta doesn't want it, someone will ask them to spin it off and sell it to them.
Successful software rarely dies, successful networked dies even harder and slower.
92 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadHiring standards must have fallen if they added people so rapidly.
During this period of growth, the “more work” that needed to be done really was critical. It just isn’t critical any more.
Edit: Yes, I see this contradicts my original post. I was hoping the employees in big tech would be a bit smarter.
I have been hearing this about Meta / FB for the last 10 years. This line of thinking is overly simplistic. If a company like FB wants to ramp up hiring, they have many tools at their disposal. Hiring bar isn't the only tool, or even a very important one. Things they can do:
1. They can really jack up the compensation package and signing bonuses 2. Open offices in places where they didn't have any presence 3. Open up to remote work 4. Allow flexible hours 5. Increase retention through outstanding perks and benefits 6. Scale hiring efforts - expand the recruiting org, train more employees to conduct interview, reward employees for referrals and conduct interviews 7. Expand outreach into communities from where we historically didn't get much applicants
Meta tried everything above, and possibly more. Hiring bar doesn't matter when you have boatload of money.
I don’t really see much value to the numerous hurried regurgitations of the original story (from the Financial Times), though I guess this link is a form of that.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Because of this the line is meaningless (to me at least).
Presumably the normal amount of time? Do you think journalists just go publishing things haphazardly? I get the feeling you have no experience in the world of reporting.
I’ve seen cases where emails are sent outside of work hours on a Friday/Weekend so the journalist can claim that the subject “did not respond to repeated requests for comment” on Monday morning.
Journalists often have a story they want to tell. They intentionally arrange things to support their story.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/371325/origin-of...
The saying "the beatings will continue until morale improves" is supposed to be a joke, not a guide for management.
FTFY
The shareholders, for whose purpose the business exists, are the ones who will benefit, and they deserve to.
Don't forget that most of the employees are also shareholders and most of them make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the stock.
It sucks that people get laid off, but a large portion of the employees were lucky to be hired in the first place, because of the crazy growth that was enabled and rewarded by the market in the last few years. They made a lot of money and now they have to look for work again. It's not like laying off factory workers.
A lower stock price for a company like Facebook actually impacts its ability to operate. For one, Facebook as a technology company depends on being able to compensate their employees competitively with other tech companies and part of that involves stock based comp. If their stock price is constantly falling and trading at compressed levels then they have to give away increasingly larger percentages of the company to attract top talent. This obviously isn't sustainable.
The second problem is that a lower stock price impacts Facebook's ability to offer its stock in acquisitions. This means that they will either have to pay cash or take on debt as an alternative. And that's hard to do when you're pushing a large chunk of your free cashflow into projects like Reality Labs and investors are already concerned about cashflows.
But this was exactly my point in regards to the importance of the stock price for securing talent. The company is owned in large part by its employees and they will jump ship if they don't believe in the company's future.
i would be surprised if that is really the case. I expect institutional holders followed by founders to be larger.
The employees are not a shareholder, largest or otherwise. If you counted them as one, though, sure, they’d be the largest, trivially, since as CEO Zuck is an employee, and he, considered alone, is already the largest single (individual or institutional) shareholder by a very large margin, Vanguard and BlackRock are #2 and #3, and together have less than Zuck does.
I don't believe there is more up to date information on the breakdown of the shareholders.
Obviously Zuck is the largest single shareholder – he is the founder – but at time of IPO at least, the employees own more than him in total.
This isn't that uncommon for tech companies either. It's quite typical for companies like Facebook to give away a few percent of the company each year to employees in the form of stock based comp. I thought people on HN generally work for tech companies and were aware of this? A large part of your total compensation if you work at a company like Google or Amazon comes in the form of stock. Employees (especially the early employees) generally own a very significant amount of companies like Facebook and Google.
I'm the only one providing explanations here. I'm the only one who bothered to try to provide a source for the claims I was making. I explained that I don't believe there's more recent data, so yes, I am supporting my "thesis" with an article from 2012. Everyone is just making baseless comments here anyway, "ree, Zuck bad", so whatever, believe what you like for all I care.
The point I was originally trying to make was that technology companies (including Facebook) compensate their employees with billions of dollars of stock every year[1] ($12b last year in the case of META). This means the employees of technology companies are generally significant shareholders of the company – whether they're the largest, second largest or third largest owner is frankly irrelevant to my point – employees benefit massively when the share price goes up because in many cases most of the wealth of those employees is tied to the company stock.
None of what I'm saying here should be controversial and is widely understood by tech workers at companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon.
I have no idea what Zuck or BlackRock being a large individual holder of META stock has to do with anything. Do you guys think that the thousands of employees at Facebook should (or could) have 10% of the company each or something? Obviously Zuck owns more than any individual holder – it's his company. And yes, obviously, there are large institutions that hold Facebook on behalf of their clients – most of whom by the way are just average people who have money invested with companies like BlackRock for their retirement. Are you guys also surprised to hear that 89 year old Doris doesn't manage her retirement portfolio on Robinhood or something?
If you're honestly unhappy that companies like Facebook don't give enough of their stock away to employees then I don't know what to say to you. You'll find one of the main complaints institutional share holders will cite when it comes to owning the stock of tech companies is that they give away far too much stock to their employees. This dilutes investors like BlackRock at the benefit of employees receiving SBC.
In my opinion the reality here is completely opposite to what this community is trying to paint. But I know, I know. Zuck is rich and therefore he must be a bad boy who doesn't care about any one or anything other than his own wealth.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...
No, just because an article arbitrarily treats them as a group and every other entity as an individual entity doesn’t make them ”the biggest group”, and the immediate pre-IPO distribution (when comp was more heavily weighted to equity and there was no practical way for most employees to exit their equity position pre-IPO) is likely not refleftive of current distribution more than a decade post-IPO distribution.
And “employees excluding Zuckerberg” aren’t a coherent, interest-aligned group abyhow.
Maybe the work “isn’t so different” but it is more difficult, on a technical level, than most projects. Some real interesting, ground-breaking work was done in the past 20 years or so and a lot of the people who did that work are still around.
It is kind of nasty to think about the timing though. If true, they kept those managers around to do the very undesirable and time-consuming performance cycle (yearly review) work and will be letting them go now that the process has concluded.
Whats more interesting though is how the let go workers venture within there cultural spheres. Meta workers are more likely to go to places, that have adapted similar cultures, with AB Tests.
Then the layoffs started. In honesty, mostly OK decisions but a few really bad key ones. Then I watched the super smart people see the writing on the wall and leave, mostly to Google.
Then I felt stupid, if all the smart people left what did that make me? Well, it made me a big fish in a small pond, and I probably learned little of value over the next couple years, until I inevitably left too.
The company now is a sad shell of what it once was. I guess this type of story is all too common.
Zuckerberg owns controlling interest over the company to the point where the board of directors are essentially advisory. I believe I read that he owns over 75% of Class B shares, for which he gets 10 votes for every 1 vote that a regular Class A voter gets.
That's a lot of power. This has allowed the company to ignore Wall Street in the past, which makes me think he's not suddenly concerned about Wall Street now. Whatever Zuck does is really his choice and responsibility.
I've seen the same thing happen in a large corp I've worked for directed by the advice of McKinsey.
The funny thing in this case though was that it was Accenture which advised them to hire the engineering department two years prior to help with innovation. Then after a couple of years of building out the team they advised them fire the whole department and outsource it to cut costs. The only people who remained were managers.
I’ve been here for 8 years, and never known that to be true. At most, higher IC levels are expected to do more “direction setting” work (ie, writing a technical design doc for your team to follow, rather than writing all the code by yourself), but that’s still distinct from “management”
Is it?
I thought it was still the premiere place for virtually all segments of product and lifestyle influencing.
Rough thesis:
The kids on TikTok don’t have money to buy $fancy thing.
But the adults on Instagram do.
https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2022/q4...
Mr. Soapbox, freaking Yahoo isn't dead and you think Facebook will be gone :-) Heck, Borland IDEs are still around.
Facebook (the social media network) will be around in some form or another long after my kids are gone.
You don't go from having several billion users to 0 in anything less than a lifetime, because you know what, that network is probably profitable even with 10-50 million people and if Meta doesn't want it, someone will ask them to spin it off and sell it to them.
Successful software rarely dies, successful networked dies even harder and slower.
Please follow me on MySpace and make a cool post on digg ;-)
However, I agree with you that Facebook will be around for a long time.