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.
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.
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?
> 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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
87 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 171 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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!
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.