The concept of FAANG hoarding workers to deprive competitors of talent is an idea that has been bandied about on HN for quite some time. Finally, some solid substantiation of this practice.
I don't think so. She describes her experience of not getting any work, but she merely speculates that she was hired so other companies couldn't have here. This isn't any more solid that any speculation on this subject on HN.
+1, I am really glad to see actual proof of this anti-competitive practice. The sole purpose of which is to "starve" out smaller competitors and startups of talent so there is less competition for meta and other larger incumbents. My guess is here is wall street forced Zuck's hand to offload this excess headcount by driving the stock down, but given FB's share structure(Zuckerberg has almost complete control over the company due to his share structure ownership) he could have kept along his pre-2022 path without much consequence except a battered share price.
Yes. Meta is on a mission to starve startups and smaller competitors from people who do DEI work. What would competitor do without diverse talent in recruiting?
>Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry.
> Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry.
It doesn't really sound like she was hired to hoard talent though. From the article it sounds like she was hired as a diversity token. She probably wasn't put on anything significant because if you put a token on something valuable and they're lackluster you can't fire them without losing your token which means you're stuck with them dragging the project down. Nothing-work was a safe middle ground that solved the dillema.
She mentions other employees experiencing the same. Perhaps this is the first whistleblower who will pave the way for more corroborating with their own respective stories.
She also sounds a bit like a clout goblin from just what I've seen. Clout goblins are infamously known for - you'll be surprised to hear this - making shit up.
> “Everyone else that I worked with got to work on stuff but I didn’t. So I am one of those employees that was hired into a really strange position where they immediately put me into a group of individuals that was not working.
> “I mean, like, we were just sitting there. We had to basically fight to find work. It was a very strange environment and it kind of seemed that Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us and they were just hoarding us like Pokémon cards.”
People claim they want autonomy, they accept a position at a company that famously has a bottoms-up hacker ethos.
Then they complain that they weren't immediately "assigned" work on Day 1.
I think this depends on the seniority of the hire. A junior employee needs more mentoring and "assigning" under they get enough contextual understanding to know what's important and what isn't. Someone brand-new to an organization isn't likely to understand what problems their time is best spent on solving.
Is there any justifiable explanation for this hiring strategy? "Keep us from working for others" seems like flawed reasoning. If they went to work for others, then wage pressure should drop, but by hoarding developers on fake projects wage pressure increases. A strategy that raises median wages doesn't seem like it would come from a FAANG.
She was hired in April ( https://wapo.st/3lmVr6w ) with promises that it would be fully funded for the entire duration of the 12 months (appears to be the standard for a recruiter).
Before the NCAA started limiting scholarships in 1973, teams could stock up on workhorses -- Bear Bryant's Alabama teams would bring in blue-chippers by the shipload, not so his Tide could use them, so other schools couldn't.
It's been done before. If Google hired the guys who made ChatGPT and put them on production support or anything, they wouldn't be scared for their existence right now. In tech, it only takes a handful of people to put you out of business in a few years, and you'd never see it coming. The corpses of once great tech companies are many: MySpace, Yahoo, Sun, etc.
I would argue the tech giants aren't so much afraid of each other, but upstarts out of nowhere that makes their business obsolete.
It doesn't make much sense. A more likely explanation is just that Facebook wants self directed people, and doesn't have much of a system in place for people who need to be hand held.
> Brit Levy, 35, was eager to join Meta’s paid training program for aspiring human resources managers last year because she wanted to gain a foothold in the recruiting field and help other military families find jobs in the lucrative tech sector.
> Levy, who is Mexican American, agreed to start the 12-month gig in April after she checked with Meta that her position would be secure for the duration of the program despite the company’s financial challenges. She was told that the program, which aimed to improve the pipeline of recruiters who focus on diversity, was fully funded for the year.
> About six months later, Meta laid off Levy and most of the other participants in her program, along with 13 percent of its full-time workers, amid falling revenue growth from a sluggish economy and more competition in the social media market.
---
This is a training program - Meta should expect that it will require some mentoring.
She was hired in April. This isn't a "just hired before the hiring freeze".
The contract would have been finished in 4 months. Ending it early when it was said to be fully funded means the original statement was bald faced lie.
This isn't a "she was the only one laid off" - but rather "most of the other participants in her program."
I'm curious how this works. Did you continually remind management that you didn't have the tools to do your job and they ignored you or were you quietly satisfied that this gave you a plausible excuse to do nothing?
I told them, 30 days trial is over and asked to buy. Then I asked if it was ordered. Nope it wasn’t. After 4 months it was bought, but I left. During these 4 months I did 2 bug fixes in other departments.
This is one of these memories to understand, that I am only a row in excel in payroll department.
Please take this in the spirit it is intended, but maybe it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you act like just "a row in excel payroll" (i.e., you aren't meaningfully and consistently engaged in solving problems, even those unexpected ones), you will likely be treated as such.
Hello, thanks for warm advice. My luck in corporate setting is really bad. I am still analyzing why it’s happening. Being hired for a design of Ethernet camera in a company where Ethernet traffic analysis tools are forbidden does not happen to everybody.
Do you honestly don't see the problem in your own behaviour? Your manager is as busy as you, and also a human - communicating your needs is your responsibility. I had a similar expreience with one piece of software that is expensive, notoriously hard to buy, but used by everyone in my industry.
- In one company, I complained to managers immediately, but at the same time used a strictly worse (but free) alternative, became good with it, while still raising the issue up to two levels above me (unfortunately my managers were as powerless as me - just big corporation things).
- In another company, I just took ownership of the issue, talked to sales myself, worked out an acceptable solution and got the deal sealed (this was a much smaller company though).
Unless you're a junior or early mid-level you're expected to show some initiative.
I was junior back then and leased from a body shop for a project for a year. And I showed initiative and fixed ugly bugs in other departments. I am not proud how I left, but I was as productive as I could be.
> It was a very strange environment and it kind of seemed that Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us and they were just hoarding us like Pokémon cards.”
honestly the first month I worked at Google they knew they needed bodies but didn't have offices for us, we doubled up on desks and split into two shifts had zero policy for the work they wanted done and some days had no available work load for our teams and then would have us do busy work that no one was trained on for other depts who would them throw out all our work. (this was 2010 to 2012) my NDA is expired yo. Second shift got Pizza every night for meals as the kitchen wouldn't stay open late enough for us.
> Rabois ... told a banking event earlier this month that Big Tech companies like Meta and Google had hired thousands of people ... and to stop them working for rivals.
I got an informal offer like this over dinner once, when I was trying to get a startup off the ground: "Come work for us; you can do your startup or find something else interesting. Just send me an email and I'll hire you". They told me explicitly that they were hiring certain people to keep those folks from working for the competition.
I stress informal because, though I continue talking/emailing with this person (whom I already knew), and still do, I didn't ask to follow up. So sure, they could have been bullshitting, but why volunteer something like that unless it was real?
She was recruiter hired right at about time when Meta announced hiring freeze. The only lesson here is not that FAANG hires people to do nothing but that Meta was way too slow to layoff 90% of recruiting org probably because it hoped economy/revenues improve and company will resume hiring.
Ok sorry. Then it was a misunderstanding of my side as non native speaker. I always assumed it means recruiter since I’ve so far never seen the word used in another context
No worries :-). To be fair, it does sound, "staff-er", like someone who produces "staff". I've never it used as a reference to recruitment, but perhaps in some contexts it is used that way.
This may also mean "someone who finds staff" aka a sourcer. The person in the article seems to be talking about the placement of others that were sourced through the program they were in.
In recent years, "sourcers" are the ones who email / call engineers on behalf of the recruiters. They are part of the recruiting department.
Article says:
"Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry."
It could make sense. I'm assuming they will be doing actual work during that time. A paid 12 month long apprenticeship would be good for both parties. It's enough time for Meta to decide if they want to hire an employee full time, and a year would give sourcers a decent amount of experience if they wanted to leave.
I don't know that this is the case for the lady in the article, but usually recruiters/sourcers at these companies are on contract for 12 months max, due to the hiring company not wanting them to appear as employees and thus not get full benefits.
Yeah, and that she joined just as the internal demand was probably going down. She was hired in anticipation of a need that didn’t materialize. Kudos to her for “fighting” for work. Most people would be tempted to slack off.
> Levy, who is Mexican American, agreed to start the 12-month gig in April after she checked with Meta that her position would be secure for the duration of the program despite the company’s financial challenges. She was told that the program, which aimed to improve the pipeline of recruiters who focus on diversity, was fully funded for the year.
I always thought that when revenues are too high these companies need to raise expenses so they could have places to trim for rough quarters up ahead. Therefore the hiring strategy in 2020 was sound.
I've also seen the reverse, Netflix not curbing on shared accounts and Microsoft having really limited anti piracy tooling early on, allowing them to keep revenue reserves for the future
I thought the lack of anti piracy for Windows and Abode products was a way of getting people into the ecosystem which helps later. Not sure if this was ever confirmed
Yeah at one of my old jobs in IT, Microsoft would perform software license audits just after a new release of Office. They would find that we were in deficit and then force us to buy licenses but the only licenses we could buy were the new versions of Office. Of course then we would have to upgrade all the other ones that had the licenses. This happens every few years. Obviously it was our fault for not doing better license allocation but I feel like Microsoft knew this is common and took advantage of it.
Back in the Zortech days, we didn't install any copy protection mechanism for just this reason. (Also, copy protection annoys people, and annoying our customers was not something we wished to do.)
That also meant we had no idea how many copies were pirated.
Microsoft still doesn’t really care that much about piracy for some products. You can run Windows 11 Pro with 99% of the features in tact without activating it.
Haven't used windows 11, but there were times when 999999999 was a valid cdkey and there were times when you had to activate the OS with Microsoft servers
Yea microsoft mostly cares about the enterprise market now. They prefer people pirating windows over using other operating systems because it ensures their enterprise productivity software monopoly.
I just installed Windows 10 on a laptop using the official USB creation tool. You just gotta leave it disconnected from the internet and you can make a local account with no restrictions.
I've had a similar overall thought – as a CEO/CFO seems that you'd want a relatively in-line growth/margin/whatever target each quarter, and so if you get a windfall you'd be incentivized to somehow spread that out or create slack for yourself in future quarters instead of milking it for all it's worth.
Very weird, but that's what the current public capital markets incentivize...
This sounds really bizarre to me. A company hiring to hoard talent is just mind-blowing. If they have surplus money, they should just acquire smaller companies and find talent. I really hope this is not a company wide culture promoted by the upper management and that some middle level manager who wants to feel important started hiring to expand their team. If there is one thing I want clarity on it's this. I really hope Mark and Sundar talk about this at some point and explain what is going on
Nearly every tech job I've had there was the potential to do very little to nothing and stay employed.
What I've gathered from her quotes in the Fortune article is that this person failed to take advantage of her opportunity to be paid highly with total autonomy while surrounded by Smart People.
It's long been an established practice to hire talented engineers and let them make interesting things. Give them as much autonomy as you can afford to. If they're smart and driven they'll produce value.
Otherwise you're herding cats to do things you may not even understand nearly as well as the supposed geniuses you've hired. It's not a good use of your time and you'll probably fail at it.
Just look at the history of UNIX and Plan9 FFS. These guys were messing around with what interested them! Management didn't know what to tell them to work on... and we're all better for it with these wonderful innovations.
This former Meta staffer just put a big fat DO NOT HIRE sign on her forehead as far as I'm concerned.
> It's long been an established practice to hire talented engineers and let them make interesting things.
She wasn't an engineer. "Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry."
The Insider article has a better representation of her complaints:
"There were other people in our program that were nurses, teachers, and firefighters. They left their jobs, their entire career and Meta didn't even let them get one year of experience."
"We were trying to pivot into a career. If you have anything less than a year, you have to basically start from scratch again. You have to start at the bottom."
Basically, these were people trying to break into tech, so they were in need of both guidance and experience, not at all like hiring experienced engineers and letting them run wild.
BS. 90% of people aren’t “self-starters”. That’s fine. Further, the vast majority of “self guided” software engineers work on nonsense that scratches an intellectual itch, not something that moves the business forward.
you're wrong. The issue at Meta is that you might not be able to find the right combination of work that will get you a positive evaluation come performance review time.
Let's say you get hired in an org where the opportunity for impact are limited (mature area, blocked by dependencies in other teams etc...) then doing nothing or doing stuff that doesn't matter means you will get a poor performance review unless you're politically savvy enough to get a LOT of people to essentially overlook that the work you've done is meaningless.
After the negative perf, you will get piped and then fired. It's incredibly stressful to be in that situation and breeds all kinds of bad behaviors that make Meta a bad place to work at times (very often).
I think this is too harsh a take, at least without knowing more. There are some managers and shops where "find something useful to do" is encouraged, or at least accepted. I was shocked to discover later in my career that there are plenty of shops that are _not_ like that. High-paying shops, even, or perhaps especially.
Why? For starters, some companies are rich, and they can afford to waste a lot of money. Think of all of those interviews you've been on that waste your time and that of the interview loop, even though it's clear that they have never intended to hire. Or maybe just 1 in 500. (One company I was hired at boasted to me about the "500". Ugh.)
Or, at least in the trading world, things can be very secretive. You might have the skills to contribute, but no one will even talk to you, for fear that you'll steal the secret sauce.
Mostly it's just simple managerial incompetence.
The employer/employee match is sort of like a key and lock. In order for it to work, _all_ of the pins have to align. It's not enough to be a skilled, team-player, etc., employee. Your employer also has to bring several things to the table. Sometimes they just don't.
I find myself in a situation similar to the one described by "Meta staffer" in the article. I was hired a few years ago in a biotech company and, after some months of mostly uneventful work -- but I was doing something -- for the past two years I have done almost nothing.
I tried to propose new ideas and projects, offered my expertise to other groups, but my attempts were met with benign indifference. After realizing that looking for work meant to others that I had nothing better to do at work (or nothing to do, basically, at work), I have decided to put the proverbial feet on the desk and milk the money until I can find a job -- elsewhere -- that I like better. The challenge I see is that I am getting paid very well -- exceptionally well considering I do very little -- and very much enjoying the mental and physical freedom that my current nonexistent workload is giving me.
I do. But it is one of the situations that converge in a kind of mutually beneficial indifference. It is no different in spirit from that of a husband and wife who live under the same roof but seek intimacy elsewhere, or who have repressed their desires for so long that they no longer even remember how to make a baby.
My first job out of college was like this. My manager knew I had no work and had no particular interest in letting me take on anything I proposed or found. I ended up quitting a few months in because (on top of a few other issues) I found it way too soul-destroying to have nothing to do.
If you speak up too much, you wind up with bullshit work. Example: "refactoring" code for a project/dependency that isn't even used, writing tests just to hit that 99% coverage level, updating wiki articles that nobody reads. This is arguably worse than doing nothing.
This is what happened and would happen again. It is much better to say that you are busy with some vague project or initiative and actually taking a nap.
Yep. I know guys who'd take off for half the day, every day. Long lunches. Workouts. Walks around the city. Even naps. Eventually they got laid off but it was easy living for a while.
It's also funny that if you just straight up tell them you're not doing anything and need work, they're indifferent.
And if you ask them if you're SUPPOSED to do NOTHING, they get defensive. I'd rather work with people who at least have the ability to admit you're just hired to pad out the roster.
I wfh almost all the time. I could find another remote job, but I don't feel like it. My life is full of interests: I love reading, writing, exercising, making long phone calls, foreign languages (I am currently learning Japanese). And I make very good money.
One drawback of this whole situation is that it will be difficult to return to a normal job once this honeymoon ends. But giving the current situation up would be like giving up love because I might one day get hurt.
How can it be a rude awakening when I write: "One drawback of this whole situation is that it will be difficult to return to a normal job once this honeymoon ends".
In an earlier comment, I made an adventurous analogy with love stories: you fall in love with Robert, you know it might end, and friends tell you "be careful, my friend, it will be a rude awakening when he dumps you. Robert is handsome, but unreliable -- Jim, instead, sure is boring, but looks more reliable".
And you think it might end, sure, it is not your first flight, but maybe it will continue for a while, and he will be handsome, and lovely, and passionate, and it might even happen that you fall in love with someone else before he does. Or maybe you die, or he dies, who knows.
The way I see it as a worker you are making your abilities available and are entitled absolutely to the wages they give you. Kind of feels like robbing them sure, but they're robbing themselves. More of an indictment of capitalism and corporate structure than anything else. Pay it forward if you can and their loss is everyone else's gain.
It is a situation that psychologically does not suit everyone. Many people fear being "found out" or think they are stealing from their employer. I must say that for a short time I harbored such thoughts, but now I think I have nothing to be ashamed of. I offer my expertise and competence, and they pay me for that.
or because they bought up companies to prevent competition, but couldn't just shut them down because doing so isn't quite legal
or because they have enough work for all that people, but fail to manage the work load distribution because it's really hard and for many core projects having more people isn't always good beyond a certain point
I have been in what feels like a ridiculous number of arguments over the years with people who will defend to the hilt the idea that these companies all need as many workers as they do, insisting that the very idea that they might have a ton of people hired doing effectively nothing is some combination of insulating and naive. Of course, the fact that some of us actually know such people--my favorite example: I had an indirect friend who loved to tell the story of how, after his third project at Google got killed before launch, he just stopped working and realized there were little, if any, actual consequences for doing nothing ;P--never seemed to hold any weight.
I'm really hoping that, if nothing else comes out of 202[23], it is a realization that the size and scope of these teams was, in fact, madness, and no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever again (but, sadly, I know that this isn't the case, as about three months from now no one will remember any of this happened and none of this has ever come to light and if you try to casually mention it as if it were common knowledge you'll get flooded with "citation needed" as we live in the land of Eternal September where somehow no one ever thinks it is useful to study even recent history).
The FAANG team sizes and TC packages were never about fueling the production engine. They were about:
1. stockpiling fuel for when you may need it
2. starving your competitors of fuel
With money cheap and valuations absurd, idle or overpriced talent was a much lesser problem than somebody else hoovering up all the good stuff.
So you recruit aggressively using mechanical filters like leetcode/whiteboard tests, then let internal processes figure out who’s actually worth using on meaningful projects. The rest you can sit on, just in case.
I hear this a lot but I think it's bullshit. Neither of those are goals that anyone would realistically pursue. It was almost certainly middle managers wanting to demonstrate impact by leading a larger team.
Probably exactly this. Each tier of management hired a fair bit more than they should have. Managers are generally incentivized to do so. The behavior was normalized and no one really noticed while money was cheap and all seemed well with the world.
No. There was a data science conference in the Western US a decade ago. Mark Zuckerberg showed up unannounced, with a job offer for every single attendee.
The strategy comes straight from the top, and it makes perfect sense. Even if they are not fully utilized, even a FAANG salary is small potatoes compared to what top-tier talent can bring to a company. Think of it as the HR version of what VC do, invest in many people knowing 90% will fail to live up to their potential, because the 10% that do more than make up for it.
For a new team that was set up in my company, there was this idea that we should have had some slack in the system, that is, a certain number of people should be rotating on a sort of "bench", ready to get into action when new work came up: an absurd view of intellectual work, which I very much doubt is viable in a top company like Facebook.
I'm not sure it's so absurd. There's always unexpected tasks that show up which can throw off a schedule. Or sick leave, vacation, etc. Things happen.
I've worked as a TL on several teams before where we didn't assign any implementation work to me specifically, but I was there to jump in and help paddle the boat when folks got stuck.
This worked great, because usually the sticky places were integration points between subsystems, which can be especially tough for junior engineers to navigate. As someone with the big picture I could jump in and save them tons of time.
In the meantime, if I had spare cycles I'd work on tooling, test automation (and especially stubbing out and deflaking integration tests).
Projects where I did this tended to have fewer bugs and hit their deadlines.
What I referring to is a team of 50 people, say, with 10 of them that are "on rotation" sitting on the bench and wait for new assignments. What happens is that 2 of them get used to the "vacation" and are not much motivated to get on a new project when the time comes, 2 disappear, 1 takes advantage of the R&R to work on tools and do some self-study, and 6 start interviewing for other companies. Horses want to run.
> no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever again
I don't think they'd ever claim this because these companies do way more than "maintain a single app".
If companies don't attempt to innovate, even big ones, they lose in the marketplace. Meta for example has multiple apps to support, each serving hundreds of millions of users. On top of mere maintenance, they experiment and add new features. On top of that, what about the occasional greenfield/skunkworks type projects?
It's a shame your friend worked on three consecutive projects that got axed, but that's a separate problem from him being able to coast without getting fired for it.
I work at Meta on compiler support for all kinds of apps. We regularly write and use some pretty aggressive compiler optimizations and we often experiment and evolve lots of compiler and programming language features that are really experimental for use in our apps and services.
I don’t think you can directly compare an app like the ones a small team can build to the apps that larger more established companies have to maintain and evolve. I mean sure you could just do a full app rewrite and start from scratch but that’s hugely risky and certainly fails more often than it succeeds.
> ... no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever again...
Nor do we need to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a gigantic new building[1], on the roof of which we will put a 12.6-acre park and live animals, including foxes, so all of those thousands and thousands of people can maintain that single app (well, in reality, apps), ever again.
I will forever be blown away by the excess I witnessed every time I visited that campus, and I'm sure it's similar elsewhere.
You should read their 10-Q reports to figure out how they're violating their fiduciary duty with your claims here. You'd win millions of dollars in that suit.
Meta is one of the most revenue efficient companies in the history of the world. Each employee generates $1.929 million in revenue, and they have an 79.63% gross profit margin vs a sector median of 49%. That's each employee including the recruiters, EMs, etc.
Part of the reason these employees had to "fight" for work is intentional - if they had more people than they needed and no forcing function (i.e. perf cycle) then these people wouldn't fight for their work, they'd just sit there getting paid and not complaining about it. The company would then be dramatically less efficient.
I disagree with their model in a lot of ways, but this is a completely unfair characterization of how their org actually works.
They hired as though the COVID trajectory would continue, and saw less attrition than expected as people stuck to their jobs due to uncertainty. So they're trimming a little and re-focusing. That's all.
> "I mean, like, we were just sitting there. We had to basically fight to find work."
To put a very fine point on it, the reason they had to fight (like everyone else there) is because if they didn't come up with something to do that was quantifiable and impactful in line with org goals, they'd be terminated within the year. It was their job to find a way to be useful. The system culls those who do not. It can be harsh and impersonal, yes, ruthless even - but it is very effective.
> I had an indirect friend who loved to tell the story of how, after his third project at Google got killed before launch, he just stopped working and realized there were little, if any, actual consequences for doing nothing ;P--never seemed to hold any weight.
That was at Google. This is Meta. They are very different companies. Each FAANG is completely different internally and it would be a mistake to assume that experience translates.
Just because Meta is pretty revenue efficient already doesn't mean it couldn't be more revenue efficient. Why is $2M per employee good? It's actually quite bad if Meta should be generating $10M per employee.
I would say an 80% margin is objectively good, and that moving it really doesn't make much difference even if you can make the number feel bigger.
Again, their system is designed to be ruthlessly efficient. They probably over-hired like 10-15%. I'd strongly suggest listening to the Odd Lots episode with Patrick McKenzie titled roughly 'what happens to tech workers in the age of layoffs.'
I get it's fun to speculate from the outside but there's no reason to look at it and go 'yep should be 5X higher' simply because they have a lot of staff. They have a lot of staff because they have billions of monthly active users and optimizing every aspect of their business is something they can do, and something that yields more profit than cost.
A lot of this armchair quarterbacking comes from folks who never worked there. Find someone who works at Meta and ask them about PSC.
I work at Meta :) The growth I watched in headcount over the last 4 years has been pretty amazing. Before Meta I worked at Reddit. More people were in my bootcamp class at Meta than the entirety of Reddit at the time. And they did bootcamps like that every week for years.
I don’t totally disagree with you. People at Meta work hard and they optimize everything and psc for better or worse definitely encourages performance. But I don’t know where numbers like “overhired by 10-15%” come from. I don’t think things were falling through the cracks and not being optimized before the company doubled in size.
I worked at Meta for five years, and fighting for work was never, ever my experience. When I started there was far too much to do and you were basically forced to ruthlessly prioritize in order to be successful.
Towards the end this started to change for me, but it happened a bunch earlier in engineering/product. Fundamentally, the standard way to grow headcount was revenue per head, and while that works for sales and ops it's a terrible, terrible idea for engineering because you end up fighting for work.
In fact, I'm part of an ex Facebook group, and all of the old timers are incredibly shocked that this was allowed to happen, and a bunch of newer people are confirming it did.
>They hired as though the COVID trajectory would continue
Some would argue that management's sole goal is to effectively measure which direction the wind is blowing and predict course accordingly. The fact that so many did so poorly may make some question why management gets reimbursed as well as they do.
>Meta is one of the most revenue efficient companies in the history of the world. Each employee generates $1.929 million in revenue, and they have an 79.63% gross profit margin vs a sector median of 49%. That's each employee including the recruiters, EMs, etc.
Do you have a source for this? Does this include contractors, as well?
> To put a very fine point on it, the reason they had to fight (like everyone else there) is because if they didn't come up with something to do that was quantifiable and impactful in line with org goals, they'd be terminated within the year. It was their job to find a way to be useful. The system culls those who do not.
You're saying the approach "one of the most efficient companies in the history of the world" takes to producing value is: let's just hire people and let them figure out the value they can provide, otherwise we'll fire them.
Am I getting that right?
Before I've even hired someone I've already scoped and quantified the impact I need them to have. I then go find someone that is qualified to do that, and then I motivate them to do more. It is _extremely_ inefficient from an _everything_ perspective to do so in reverse. Not harsh. Not impersonal. Not even ruthless. It's objectively n. e. fish. ent.
I mean .. you are correct to do so when adding 1 or 3 employees, and basically completely wrong at the scale of hires we're talking about.
For example this is how every tech "body shop" hires. The value is just out there in the ether of modern enterprise.
Bring in 20% more people year over year. Keep attrition rate for them and existing hires around 10%. Go knock hat in hand at every Fortune 1000 company and wrangle whatever buzzwords Gartner has thrown at them into a project or managed service you can slip as many billable hours as possible into.
It's the same with Meta, they can try literally about anything so when GPT or crypto or Web3 or AR or whatever comes along they just want to be able to throw a bunch of people at it to figure out how to socialize, advertise, and monetize it at massive scale.
The traditional way for companies to learn this lesson are all gone (antitrust breakups, or Innovator's Dilemma-style disruption) since M&A is at an all-time high, antitrust isn't enforced, and companies can just acquire innovative startups.
I'm not even convinced that antitrust would fix it at this point. Someone might need to invent "therapy but for corporations" so big orgs can rid themselves of dysfunction (as if).
It seems like both you and the people you're arguing with are generalizing wildly and lack curiosity.
The situation in the article sounds more like a bureaucratic snafu, where the company is hiring but the teams either aren't given open headcount to use, or they don't want to use it on the new hires for some reason.
Isn't that weird? Wouldn't you like to know how that happened?
State governments that are absolutely the symbols of blue state bloat and waste run applications to serve millions of people with a couple of hundred employees.
That is far a better use of resources than to actively promote hate against transgender, gay, women, and other marginalized groups, and now doctors and nurses too - a sad trend in some of the other parts of the country
The phrase "symbols of blue state bloat and waste" is in no way an assertion that they are bloated and wasteful.
It's an assertion that nearly everyone (regardless of politics) stereotypes them as such, and believes in the negative characterization of government employees, which is what I was challenging, in context.
Not only may they be more efficient than some other states, but more so than some major tech companies too.
I once worked adjacent to a team with ~700 people. I honestly couldn't comprehend what they were all doing.
At one point, they've got some major deadline coming up and they ask for help / borrowed some folks from our team, but after a week or so our teammates started showing back up to our stand-up. I asked how it was going "over there" and the response was, "They don't have anything for us to do."
I interviewed with them a long time ago and basically couldn't pass the interview. Had lots of ideas on what I wanted to work on, and things I think would have made the platform better. Didn't matter.
Why do they put up hugely difficult entrance exams, employ the "best" and then... not put them to work? What's the point of burning so much time and capital?
When I worked for Facebook, this was more or less accepted as common knowledge amongst the employees.
It's a pretty sweet deal if you get your fulfillment from other (worse-paid) pursuits.
I wfh'd a lot and dramatically improved my cooking skills!
If they hired you, you'd be competing with existing staff who are already doing the practical day-to-day work that they need done.
These kind of hires that the interviewee represents are about keeping people away from competitors. These companies - Facebook aren't the only one - are so rich that they can afford to hire people simply to reduce the chance that competitors will emerge; rather than waiting until you have to pay big money for Instagram or Whatsapp, you identify the kind of people who have the skills to build competitors, hire them, and lock them in a basement somewhere.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] thread>Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry.
> it kind of seemed that Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us and they were just hoarding us like Pokémon cards
Sounds like it was just speculation
> Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry.
> “I mean, like, we were just sitting there. We had to basically fight to find work. It was a very strange environment and it kind of seemed that Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us and they were just hoarding us like Pokémon cards.”
People claim they want autonomy, they accept a position at a company that famously has a bottoms-up hacker ethos.
Then they complain that they weren't immediately "assigned" work on Day 1.
WTF.
yes. but you can only obliquely hint at it.
She was hired in April ( https://wapo.st/3lmVr6w ) with promises that it would be fully funded for the entire duration of the 12 months (appears to be the standard for a recruiter).
It's been done before. If Google hired the guys who made ChatGPT and put them on production support or anything, they wouldn't be scared for their existence right now. In tech, it only takes a handful of people to put you out of business in a few years, and you'd never see it coming. The corpses of once great tech companies are many: MySpace, Yahoo, Sun, etc.
I would argue the tech giants aren't so much afraid of each other, but upstarts out of nowhere that makes their business obsolete.
> Brit Levy, 35, was eager to join Meta’s paid training program for aspiring human resources managers last year because she wanted to gain a foothold in the recruiting field and help other military families find jobs in the lucrative tech sector.
> Levy, who is Mexican American, agreed to start the 12-month gig in April after she checked with Meta that her position would be secure for the duration of the program despite the company’s financial challenges. She was told that the program, which aimed to improve the pipeline of recruiters who focus on diversity, was fully funded for the year.
> About six months later, Meta laid off Levy and most of the other participants in her program, along with 13 percent of its full-time workers, amid falling revenue growth from a sluggish economy and more competition in the social media market.
---
This is a training program - Meta should expect that it will require some mentoring.
She was hired in April. This isn't a "just hired before the hiring freeze".
Recruiters are frequently on a 12 month contract. This appears to be industry standard (I've seen it when looking at jobs at other companies too - a quick search shows https://careers.ey.com/ey/job/Toronto-Recruiter-12-Month-Con... https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/NielsenIQ/743999750237276-r... https://careers.edrington.com/job/New-York-Contract-Recruite... )
The contract would have been finished in 4 months. Ending it early when it was said to be fully funded means the original statement was bald faced lie.
This isn't a "she was the only one laid off" - but rather "most of the other participants in her program."
I had also a job where I was reading Wikipedia all day. Management forgot to buy me a software license and I had nothing to do. I silently quit.
This is one of these memories to understand, that I am only a row in excel in payroll department.
- In one company, I complained to managers immediately, but at the same time used a strictly worse (but free) alternative, became good with it, while still raising the issue up to two levels above me (unfortunately my managers were as powerless as me - just big corporation things).
- In another company, I just took ownership of the issue, talked to sales myself, worked out an acceptable solution and got the deal sealed (this was a much smaller company though).
Unless you're a junior or early mid-level you're expected to show some initiative.
Really????
I got an informal offer like this over dinner once, when I was trying to get a startup off the ground: "Come work for us; you can do your startup or find something else interesting. Just send me an email and I'll hire you". They told me explicitly that they were hiring certain people to keep those folks from working for the competition.
I stress informal because, though I continue talking/emailing with this person (whom I already knew), and still do, I didn't ask to follow up. So sure, they could have been bullshitting, but why volunteer something like that unless it was real?
Article says:
"Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry."
From a different article ( https://wapo.st/3lmVr6w ):
> Levy, who is Mexican American, agreed to start the 12-month gig in April after she checked with Meta that her position would be secure for the duration of the program despite the company’s financial challenges. She was told that the program, which aimed to improve the pipeline of recruiters who focus on diversity, was fully funded for the year.
Examples of its use:
https://www.ncsc.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/87432/23-23...
https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/limited-term-employee-...
https://velocityglobal.com/blog/limited-term-employment-what...
https://greshamoregon.gov/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=128...
I've also seen the reverse, Netflix not curbing on shared accounts and Microsoft having really limited anti piracy tooling early on, allowing them to keep revenue reserves for the future
That also meant we had no idea how many copies were pirated.
So as long as Windows 11 shows "HACKED BY GONZO, TOTALLY NOT LEGIT" they're fine with it.
Very weird, but that's what the current public capital markets incentivize...
Nearly every tech job I've had there was the potential to do very little to nothing and stay employed.
What I've gathered from her quotes in the Fortune article is that this person failed to take advantage of her opportunity to be paid highly with total autonomy while surrounded by Smart People.
It's long been an established practice to hire talented engineers and let them make interesting things. Give them as much autonomy as you can afford to. If they're smart and driven they'll produce value.
Otherwise you're herding cats to do things you may not even understand nearly as well as the supposed geniuses you've hired. It's not a good use of your time and you'll probably fail at it.
Just look at the history of UNIX and Plan9 FFS. These guys were messing around with what interested them! Management didn't know what to tell them to work on... and we're all better for it with these wonderful innovations.
This former Meta staffer just put a big fat DO NOT HIRE sign on her forehead as far as I'm concerned.
She wasn't an engineer. "Levy previously told Insider she was hired on Meta’s Sourcer Development Program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry."
The Insider article has a better representation of her complaints:
"There were other people in our program that were nurses, teachers, and firefighters. They left their jobs, their entire career and Meta didn't even let them get one year of experience."
"We were trying to pivot into a career. If you have anything less than a year, you have to basically start from scratch again. You have to start at the bottom."
Basically, these were people trying to break into tech, so they were in need of both guidance and experience, not at all like hiring experienced engineers and letting them run wild.
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-facebook-worker-tech-la...
Let's say you get hired in an org where the opportunity for impact are limited (mature area, blocked by dependencies in other teams etc...) then doing nothing or doing stuff that doesn't matter means you will get a poor performance review unless you're politically savvy enough to get a LOT of people to essentially overlook that the work you've done is meaningless.
After the negative perf, you will get piped and then fired. It's incredibly stressful to be in that situation and breeds all kinds of bad behaviors that make Meta a bad place to work at times (very often).
Why? For starters, some companies are rich, and they can afford to waste a lot of money. Think of all of those interviews you've been on that waste your time and that of the interview loop, even though it's clear that they have never intended to hire. Or maybe just 1 in 500. (One company I was hired at boasted to me about the "500". Ugh.)
Or, at least in the trading world, things can be very secretive. You might have the skills to contribute, but no one will even talk to you, for fear that you'll steal the secret sauce.
Mostly it's just simple managerial incompetence.
The employer/employee match is sort of like a key and lock. In order for it to work, _all_ of the pins have to align. It's not enough to be a skilled, team-player, etc., employee. Your employer also has to bring several things to the table. Sometimes they just don't.
Basically, a recruiter.
I tried to propose new ideas and projects, offered my expertise to other groups, but my attempts were met with benign indifference. After realizing that looking for work meant to others that I had nothing better to do at work (or nothing to do, basically, at work), I have decided to put the proverbial feet on the desk and milk the money until I can find a job -- elsewhere -- that I like better. The challenge I see is that I am getting paid very well -- exceptionally well considering I do very little -- and very much enjoying the mental and physical freedom that my current nonexistent workload is giving me.
From that angle its easy to understand why a manager would like to do little, as long as their manager has a similar relationship with them.
And if you ask them if you're SUPPOSED to do NOTHING, they get defensive. I'd rather work with people who at least have the ability to admit you're just hired to pad out the roster.
In an earlier comment, I made an adventurous analogy with love stories: you fall in love with Robert, you know it might end, and friends tell you "be careful, my friend, it will be a rude awakening when he dumps you. Robert is handsome, but unreliable -- Jim, instead, sure is boring, but looks more reliable".
And you think it might end, sure, it is not your first flight, but maybe it will continue for a while, and he will be handsome, and lovely, and passionate, and it might even happen that you fall in love with someone else before he does. Or maybe you die, or he dies, who knows.
or because they bought up companies to prevent competition, but couldn't just shut them down because doing so isn't quite legal
or because they have enough work for all that people, but fail to manage the work load distribution because it's really hard and for many core projects having more people isn't always good beyond a certain point
I wonder what is in store for tomorrow?
You may not owe companies better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
After layoffs, Meta, tech companies face uphill battle to boost diversity - https://wapo.st/3lmVr6w
I'm really hoping that, if nothing else comes out of 202[23], it is a realization that the size and scope of these teams was, in fact, madness, and no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever again (but, sadly, I know that this isn't the case, as about three months from now no one will remember any of this happened and none of this has ever come to light and if you try to casually mention it as if it were common knowledge you'll get flooded with "citation needed" as we live in the land of Eternal September where somehow no one ever thinks it is useful to study even recent history).
1. stockpiling fuel for when you may need it
2. starving your competitors of fuel
With money cheap and valuations absurd, idle or overpriced talent was a much lesser problem than somebody else hoovering up all the good stuff.
So you recruit aggressively using mechanical filters like leetcode/whiteboard tests, then let internal processes figure out who’s actually worth using on meaningful projects. The rest you can sit on, just in case.
The strategy comes straight from the top, and it makes perfect sense. Even if they are not fully utilized, even a FAANG salary is small potatoes compared to what top-tier talent can bring to a company. Think of it as the HR version of what VC do, invest in many people knowing 90% will fail to live up to their potential, because the 10% that do more than make up for it.
As for (2), that's as true as fairy tales.
I've worked as a TL on several teams before where we didn't assign any implementation work to me specifically, but I was there to jump in and help paddle the boat when folks got stuck.
This worked great, because usually the sticky places were integration points between subsystems, which can be especially tough for junior engineers to navigate. As someone with the big picture I could jump in and save them tons of time.
In the meantime, if I had spare cycles I'd work on tooling, test automation (and especially stubbing out and deflaking integration tests).
Projects where I did this tended to have fewer bugs and hit their deadlines.
What I referring to is a team of 50 people, say, with 10 of them that are "on rotation" sitting on the bench and wait for new assignments. What happens is that 2 of them get used to the "vacation" and are not much motivated to get on a new project when the time comes, 2 disappear, 1 takes advantage of the R&R to work on tools and do some self-study, and 6 start interviewing for other companies. Horses want to run.
I don't think they'd ever claim this because these companies do way more than "maintain a single app".
If companies don't attempt to innovate, even big ones, they lose in the marketplace. Meta for example has multiple apps to support, each serving hundreds of millions of users. On top of mere maintenance, they experiment and add new features. On top of that, what about the occasional greenfield/skunkworks type projects?
It's a shame your friend worked on three consecutive projects that got axed, but that's a separate problem from him being able to coast without getting fired for it.
I don’t think you can directly compare an app like the ones a small team can build to the apps that larger more established companies have to maintain and evolve. I mean sure you could just do a full app rewrite and start from scratch but that’s hugely risky and certainly fails more often than it succeeds.
Nor do we need to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a gigantic new building[1], on the roof of which we will put a 12.6-acre park and live animals, including foxes, so all of those thousands and thousands of people can maintain that single app (well, in reality, apps), ever again.
I will forever be blown away by the excess I witnessed every time I visited that campus, and I'm sure it's similar elsewhere.
[1]https://www.builtinsf.com/2020/02/25/facebook-headquarters-m...
Meta while unsurprisingly not very efficient, does need a lot of employees to maintain what they've built.
I know people directly who have been affected by the layoffs. They did work. It's just work that has been deprioritized.
Stop trying to demonize the workers who are victims of mismanagement.
Meta is one of the most revenue efficient companies in the history of the world. Each employee generates $1.929 million in revenue, and they have an 79.63% gross profit margin vs a sector median of 49%. That's each employee including the recruiters, EMs, etc.
Part of the reason these employees had to "fight" for work is intentional - if they had more people than they needed and no forcing function (i.e. perf cycle) then these people wouldn't fight for their work, they'd just sit there getting paid and not complaining about it. The company would then be dramatically less efficient.
I disagree with their model in a lot of ways, but this is a completely unfair characterization of how their org actually works.
They hired as though the COVID trajectory would continue, and saw less attrition than expected as people stuck to their jobs due to uncertainty. So they're trimming a little and re-focusing. That's all.
> "I mean, like, we were just sitting there. We had to basically fight to find work."
To put a very fine point on it, the reason they had to fight (like everyone else there) is because if they didn't come up with something to do that was quantifiable and impactful in line with org goals, they'd be terminated within the year. It was their job to find a way to be useful. The system culls those who do not. It can be harsh and impersonal, yes, ruthless even - but it is very effective.
> I had an indirect friend who loved to tell the story of how, after his third project at Google got killed before launch, he just stopped working and realized there were little, if any, actual consequences for doing nothing ;P--never seemed to hold any weight.
That was at Google. This is Meta. They are very different companies. Each FAANG is completely different internally and it would be a mistake to assume that experience translates.
Again, their system is designed to be ruthlessly efficient. They probably over-hired like 10-15%. I'd strongly suggest listening to the Odd Lots episode with Patrick McKenzie titled roughly 'what happens to tech workers in the age of layoffs.'
I get it's fun to speculate from the outside but there's no reason to look at it and go 'yep should be 5X higher' simply because they have a lot of staff. They have a lot of staff because they have billions of monthly active users and optimizing every aspect of their business is something they can do, and something that yields more profit than cost.
A lot of this armchair quarterbacking comes from folks who never worked there. Find someone who works at Meta and ask them about PSC.
I don’t totally disagree with you. People at Meta work hard and they optimize everything and psc for better or worse definitely encourages performance. But I don’t know where numbers like “overhired by 10-15%” come from. I don’t think things were falling through the cracks and not being optimized before the company doubled in size.
Towards the end this started to change for me, but it happened a bunch earlier in engineering/product. Fundamentally, the standard way to grow headcount was revenue per head, and while that works for sales and ops it's a terrible, terrible idea for engineering because you end up fighting for work.
In fact, I'm part of an ex Facebook group, and all of the old timers are incredibly shocked that this was allowed to happen, and a bunch of newer people are confirming it did.
Some would argue that management's sole goal is to effectively measure which direction the wind is blowing and predict course accordingly. The fact that so many did so poorly may make some question why management gets reimbursed as well as they do.
Do you have a source for this? Does this include contractors, as well?
You're saying the approach "one of the most efficient companies in the history of the world" takes to producing value is: let's just hire people and let them figure out the value they can provide, otherwise we'll fire them.
Am I getting that right?
Before I've even hired someone I've already scoped and quantified the impact I need them to have. I then go find someone that is qualified to do that, and then I motivate them to do more. It is _extremely_ inefficient from an _everything_ perspective to do so in reverse. Not harsh. Not impersonal. Not even ruthless. It's objectively n. e. fish. ent.
For example this is how every tech "body shop" hires. The value is just out there in the ether of modern enterprise.
Bring in 20% more people year over year. Keep attrition rate for them and existing hires around 10%. Go knock hat in hand at every Fortune 1000 company and wrangle whatever buzzwords Gartner has thrown at them into a project or managed service you can slip as many billable hours as possible into.
It's the same with Meta, they can try literally about anything so when GPT or crypto or Web3 or AR or whatever comes along they just want to be able to throw a bunch of people at it to figure out how to socialize, advertise, and monetize it at massive scale.
I'm not even convinced that antitrust would fix it at this point. Someone might need to invent "therapy but for corporations" so big orgs can rid themselves of dysfunction (as if).
That is what leveraged buyouts and activist investors are supposed to do. Emphasis on supposed
The situation in the article sounds more like a bureaucratic snafu, where the company is hiring but the teams either aren't given open headcount to use, or they don't want to use it on the new hires for some reason.
Isn't that weird? Wouldn't you like to know how that happened?
I doubt it generalizes, but it's interesting.
I think you have misinterpreted my comment.
The phrase "symbols of blue state bloat and waste" is in no way an assertion that they are bloated and wasteful.
It's an assertion that nearly everyone (regardless of politics) stereotypes them as such, and believes in the negative characterization of government employees, which is what I was challenging, in context.
Not only may they be more efficient than some other states, but more so than some major tech companies too.
At one point, they've got some major deadline coming up and they ask for help / borrowed some folks from our team, but after a week or so our teammates started showing back up to our stand-up. I asked how it was going "over there" and the response was, "They don't have anything for us to do."
I interviewed with them a long time ago and basically couldn't pass the interview. Had lots of ideas on what I wanted to work on, and things I think would have made the platform better. Didn't matter.
Why do they put up hugely difficult entrance exams, employ the "best" and then... not put them to work? What's the point of burning so much time and capital?
Difficult to prove, but arguably, denying resources and skills to the competition (or any other company in general).
I wfh'd a lot and dramatically improved my cooking skills!
These kind of hires that the interviewee represents are about keeping people away from competitors. These companies - Facebook aren't the only one - are so rich that they can afford to hire people simply to reduce the chance that competitors will emerge; rather than waiting until you have to pay big money for Instagram or Whatsapp, you identify the kind of people who have the skills to build competitors, hire them, and lock them in a basement somewhere.
ICs can do whatever they want. Performance is based on impact, so you have to pick the right things to work on yourself.
There are very few non-performers because the calibration process is brutal and efficient.
Maybe there are non-technical realms of empire building like any megacorp, but that would be nothing new.