Should make all those people complaining about the DEI change shut up, the timing of the announcement is so close it is hard not to think they're related.
That's paid speech. Speaking about Meta at large while being paid by it. However if they leave Meta and then speak about Meta I think that would be free speech.
You miss a very important point. In the U.S. freedom of speech specifically refers to limits that the government can impose on stifling speech. It does not apply to Facebook, Meta, Twitter or any other such platform.
My point stands. Meta is suppressing speech while embracing it. It just happens that the suppression is welcomed by the group whose speech is being embraced.
Performance reviews aren't bullshit - it's crucial to have an objective (as objective as possible) system for measuring performance both to reward your high performers and to understand your low performers whether to provide support or to document reasons for firing them.
Several kinds of performance management system such as mandatory percentages for each rating level ARE bullshit, but without performance management of some sort any organization with more than 3 people will fail.
You failed the moment you said objective. Any such system needs to acknowledge right off the bat that these assessments are subjective, subject to human error and re-enforcing bias etc. Otherwise you're just high on your own supply.
This is a strawman. While a fully objective evaluation is hard or impossible in most cases, it doesn't mean that it can't be somewhat objective. The extremes are pretty easy to identify - amazing performers who implement lots of features with few bugs and who are easy to work with vs the asshole who gets nothing done. The difficulty is in the middle, and while subjectivity is unavoidable, you can use objective metrics as data points.
Also, a well built subjective review process is better than no process, for instance, using peers and customer opinions as input.
> it's crucial to have an objective (as objective as possible) system for measuring performance both to reward your high performers and to understand your low performers whether to provide support or to document reasons for firing them.
This isn't how it ever, ever plays out.
Also, most companies implementing this clearly are doing so out of some sort of compliance, whether it be SOC or otherwise. So yea, lots of times it actually is total performative bullshit. Congrats on finding the .000000000001% of cases where it isn't, if you are being serious here.
The alternative of not having a performance review problem involves having all of those problems with even more confusion, less visibility, and people trying to guess what will get them rewarded and usually guessing wrong.
In reality, "objective" could be a fairly subjective target that depends on your relationship with your manager in a company with bad culture. Just spend 10 minutes browsing on Blind.
There isn't any real objective way to measure performance though - there are things you can quantify (lines of code written, code reviews performed, etc) but those don't encompass the entire job, and once it becomes clear the metrics you use people will work to optimize their numbers at the expense of the other aspects of the job that are harder to quantify/measure. Who has time to mentor junior colleagues when you gotta bump your LoC count for the quarter?
I think we need to embrace the idea that whether you are given raises, promotions, continued employment, etc is largely a function of whether your manager likes you, likes having you on their team, and wants to reward you. And if they don't like you, it doesn't matter how good your numbers are now they will find a way to get rid of you sooner or later. It's better to just get it over with, give the employee a generous severance package, and part ways (or transfer them to another team that's interested in them).
But what I think most of us have experienced, in most companies, is that instead of driving compensation and promotion/firing the middle-management decisions around those things are made and then post-hoc justified via the performance system.
Which is another symptom of HR not having real power and instead simply being used to implement decisions made by other leadership.
You’ve articulated, correctly, a need for performance reviews. We have a need to measure performance, but we don’t have reasonably objective ways to do it that simultaneously measure what we actually care about.
There’s a kind of tradeoff here, where on one end you have the most useful performance measurements, and on the other end you have the most objective performance measurements. When you’re doing things well, the best you can do is fall somewhere on that line. The entire line is bullshit, you just get to choose what kind of bullshit you have.
Large orgs tend to skew towards objectivity because it minimizes liability, and large orgs are full of people trying to avoid being liable for mistakes.
Indeed, the objective from your manager is to launch X feature (as designed by the design and product teams and in collaboration with three other teams) and achieve Y% usage within the quarter of Z.
However, if the company’s priorities change, significant on-call issues arise, the design team experiences a layoff, the front-end team undergoes an exodus, and the product team abandons the project, you will not meet your objective. Any one of these, or more could happen.
Consequently, you will be considered a low performer. You could have kept the ship afloat, kept the trains running on time, and deployed your part of the project on time and under budget, but still be a low performer on paper.
We have no idea how to measure management performance at scale, at basically any level, in any kind of reliable way. It takes PhDs and rare datasets to even start to make any kind of serious data-backed statements about what works and what doesn’t in management, and how to hire, train, and promote effectively. It’s basically all a black box that’s so hard to measure that the most any company does is pretend they’re using objective and relevant data for it, when in reality they’re mostly looking at noise.
Keep that in mind when anyone talks about how vital performance evaluations are. Management can’t even figure out non-bullshit ways to evaluate their own work.
The underlying goal behind performance reviews is noble and admirable.
But performance reviews are still bullshit. You could replace them with 'vote off the island' style votes every quarter instead and we wouldn't be any worse off.
Underperforming relative to what? If they're doing their job in good faith and overall making money for the company, is it "underperforming" if they're less productive than 95% of their peers? This notion of underperformance leaves no room for adequate performance.
I am sure there are some people getting laid off who genuinely don't do any work, though not 5% of the company - and certainly not the bottom 5% according to Meta's metrics! A lot of "mid-range" performers probably get by with pure schmoozing and mooching. And in more general sense, I don't think it's okay - either morally or strategically - to lay people off simply because you want to roll the dice on hiring more productive workers. (For a company of Meta's size this doesn't even make sense; clearly this move is about cracking the whip for the remaining 95%.)
Performance is only adequate if it’s at least as good as the engineers of the other players in your industry. Otherwise, you’re losing ground. As long as anyone in your market space is actively trying to manage their engineering talent (recruiting your top performers, releasing low performers, being more selective in hiring) so must you just to keep pace. An “adequate” engineer may make the company money, but the opportunity cost of not hiring someone better who could make even more money can be higher still.
The sorts of decisions and results that make a company the size of Meta succeed or fail happen above the levels of the folks who will get cut. Most of the net value produced by individual engineers is determined by which projects they're on, rather than whether they're good at their job. A savy entrepreneur with a few engineers worth of openai credits can create more value in a week than a median FAANG middle management career maxxer with 10-100 engineers in their subtree of the org creates in a month.
Personally, I think it’s both. Yes, the strategy is important but it’s nothing without the ability to execute. And we’ve all worked with the god-tier engineer who creates never-ending boondoggles because they can. And, yes, the larger the org the harder it is to get both strategy and execution aligned at once.
My point was that the scope/impact/value/etc of the contributions made by individual engineers will be determined more by the projects they're working on than by their inherent ability to contribute. So, if we go through the org and cut the bottom 5% of engineers by how much value they added to the company, most cuts will be determined by the context in which an individual was operating rather than their inherent ability to contribute. Ie, the cuts will mostly just punish people for getting stuck with bad managers or lackluster projects.
Of course, some people are obviously great in any context and some are obviously useless (or worse) in any context, but those folks should already be handled appropriately even without the "cut 5%" mandate.
It is all relative though. If the team average performance is 50%, one can easily identify the very low and very high performers. The very low performers will barely deliver anything at all, while the very high performers will deliver multiples of the average.
Now - if the mean is higher, variance is low, and the distribution isn't symmetric, that's when things start to become harder.
Worst case, you start firing people that are "low-performers" on paper, but in reality might be very close to the "meets expectation" workers. Which creates a very toxic environment, as your average workers will be walking on eggshells.
And we know from history that this isn't some outlandish scenario in tech. There have been companies that have had(still have) a strict stacked ranking system - and come hell or high water, someone has to go.
This is true in theory. In practice, most managers either do not understand what "performing well" for an engineer means, or willfully go against what they know to be true due to internal incentive structures. For example, favoring those whose contributions are more visible in the short-term, even if net negative over time. Through such a lens, someone who is competent at executing a longer term vision, or refuses to do only those tasks that are visible, is a low performer.
I don't say this to bash your statement, I agree with you in principle. Just useful to keep in mind that the context matters. Sometimes, the people complaining about having to compensate for the low performer, are the actual low performers.
People joke about this, but when I was in a POW camp this actually DID work.
About six months into my own daily beating regimen, I found I was sleeping longer and deeper, I had more energy and focus, and my libido had returned to a state not unlike my early 20s. My morale was fantastic. Only after having been repatriated and thus no longer subject to daily beatings did my morale return to lower levels.
Thankfully, big tech hiring whims have very little to do with the 'real' economy. Job growth remains strong, GDP is still very much positive, inflation is low..
I remember when we were in a recession post 9/11 prices were dropping left and right, but right now prices continue to increase and people seem to be paying them. Can we really say that's a notable decline in economic activity?
My experience is that prices are increasing in required goods (food, housing, healthcare, education) so some people can't decrease spending. I know a lot of people who have cut spending for non-essential things but it's just that the cost of essential things have increased to keep their spending constant
This is the reason for the disparity. Low income people will swear on their life that we are in a recession, because they literally can't buy as much food as they used to be able to. But Middle-class -> rich people just point to the stock market and tell them they are wrong.
This is a great time to be wealthy. All that juicy human labor is ripe for the taking.
The word 'recession' means something though, and it's neutral on whether or not any particular humans have more income or cheaper goods. If you get a raise at work, it doesn't mean we're not in an economic recession as a country, and if you get fired or the price of gas goes up, it doesn't mean we are.
Yeah I understand recession is a technical term. I'm just trying to explain why we keep hearing people say we are in a recession. Most people don't care what the term technically means. They just know their buying power is decreasing while wealthy people are doubling their net worth.
People just want to be able to afford to live and affluent people keep pointing to the chart and saying it's not a problem, but it is a problem. We probably need a new name for it.
Someone I was talking to made up the term "targeted recession" to describe it as some communities are definitely experiencing negative growth while overall metrics seem positive.
After the made up AI revolution we now have the made up recession, I can't keep track anymore. Actually did the AI revolution end yet? I still see the grifters out there.
...has never been the rule (at least for the US), just a layman rule-of-thumb that kind of sort of works a lot of the time. It's actually determined by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). They started relying on NBER back in the 80s, IIRC.
Not sure why you're being downvoted for saying something correct. Most of the "jobs reports" seem to be revised after the fact. I fully do not trust any government (Dem or Rep) to tell us the actual truth about the economy. Why would they tell us if things are bad? It doesn't benefit them politically.
I don't understand the confidence behind this. Is a good economy only based on having a job?
Average people are struggling to make ends meet and racking up debt. The gap between pay and the cost of goods has only grown in recent years. How is that good for anyone?
if you use a more reasonable calculation of inflation and calculate real GDP according to that, you'll see we've been in recession almost half of the years for the last 25 years.
Personally I prefer to use the US case shiller housing index as a good indication of long term inflation. Housing prices are so high, it is the basket of goods that matters the most.
You might be confused by the CPI. The GDP is actually adjusted using a different measure of inflation (the "GDP deflator"), which looks at the actual purchases made in the country over that period. There's not really any "reasonable" alternative calculations to be made there.
Recession has a clear cut, metric-based formal definition. Governments acknowledge them when they happen because it's a black and white situation.
GPD growth is good, personal consumption is up, and businesses are continuing their extremely large investments in durable goods. The economy is, by the numbers, doing extremely well. Inflation is down to normal.
Even economic sentiment is okay. People rate their personal financial situation as roughly as good as it was pre-pandemic as well.
Your points are orthogonal to my original point. We live in a world where the governments will never acknowledge bad news because of how our media environment operates. The NBRE even basically changed their own definition of a recession two years ago when we clearly had two negative consecutive quarters of economic growth yet somehow we miraculously we not in a recession.
>how much more confirmation do we need that we are in a recession?
Were we in a recession in the 90s, as the rust belt was hollowed out and earning its name, and Wall street reaped the once in a generation windfall of outsourcing an entire country's manufacturing base overseas? Many would say those were the good times. White collar professionals had their time in the sun for those couple of decades, and GDP exploded. But the working class folks were wiped out.
Now it's our turn at the high end of technology. Once top paid SWEs are being reduced to the understanding that their careers are probably over. The economy today is chugging along just fine, but our little niche of high earning specialty labor is over, just as it was for the auto workers 30 years ago. The capitalists have almost fully completed their capture of the last remaining means of production out of their control; intellectual labor.
Tech became tighter to join 2 years ago and for the next years are going to play music chairs on the open seats as lay offs continue, executives think that AI can replace anyone and younger generation (with lower wages) joins the tech workforce.
It's not recession per se, these companies will continue to be crazy profitable, it's just a change in mindset. See also the famous "founder-mode" that came up recently for startups and scaleups.
I dont think we're heading for the 30's and arguably the 1910-40s were probably more progressive than the mid-century both artistically and culturally compared to their preceding years. I think a lot of people don't remember how conservative the US was between the 50s and 90s. A lot of the stuff we consider acceptable or OK today was really not tolerated at all in public. See, for example, LGBTQ acceptance, minorities and women in positions of power, welfare state etc.
I wouldn't call it a cultural reset. It's more of a revolution.
We've never known a country where the wealthy had this much capability. Owning just one of Facebook, Amazon, Palantir, X, etc makes a person incredibly powerful, but the fact that they've all seemingly combined forces makes me think we are in for an era that makes Cyberpunk novels look like a Disney flick.
In a way it's only power that we're giving them. Stop using Facebook, Twitter, stop buying teslas and shopping on Amazon and these people become slowly irrelevant when the companies do bad at earnings
This feels a little off. I think those who stand to financially benefit the most are taking advantage of the opportunity to do so while they can.
Getting more specific, I don't buy the argument that we're getting more conservative. Instead, I'm inclined to think that a narrow election victory will lead to extreme measures that will create a significant backlash in the coming years. If you're in a position to exploit a system with little repercussions for four years and all it costs is a little bit of dignity and some public image, most corporate leaders would take that opportunity for the money, prestige, power, etc.
I'm willing to bet sizeable amounts of money that most voters do not support rolling back employee protections, or removing the debt ceiling, or buying/bullying [insert random country], or any of the other wildly regressionist statements thrown around by un/elected folks. Conflating the complexities involved in how a person votes with a general mandate for one specific reason people vote is not a good idea. Extrapolate that to over 100 million voters as some unified stance and it starts to feel like propaganda.
> Getting more specific, I don't buy the argument that we're getting more conservative.
Agreed. I'm pretty sure normal folks never actually shifted left, not as much as the far-left ideology people imagined. Folks would use any plausible excuse to end the insanity progressive politics has caused. Mind you the reverse is also true of ultra conservative politics. The world is elastic in this sense, and we see corrections from time to time.
> I'm willing to bet sizeable amounts of money that most voters do not support rolling back employee protections
People often vote against their interests. They may not understand that alternatives are possible or even exist, and they can be brainwashed into thinking the other candidate is dangerous and so on... Also, the decline in quality of education isn't helping. So I don't know if there will be a backlash. Even worse, as a European, I'm afraid Musk's propaganda crosses the Atlantic and that we'll get the same fate and will vote to give up our social benefits.
> I'm willing to bet sizeable amounts of money that most voters do not support rolling .... the debt ceiling ...
You lost me here, because the debt ceiling is a recent political construct with the only outcome being to add friction to an already high friction process and to threaten the faith and credit of the United States.
It is neither conservative nor liberal, but obstructionist
> you can see that in the polls that ask people to self-identify politically
I don't trust these because I don't think most people can self-identify in away that accurately describes their beliefs. It usually just boils down to a binary "left vs right".
There are many people who identify as "conservative", express their disdain for "leftists" over some rage-bait culture war topic of the week, but demand better workers' rights, support unionization, single payer healthcare, and other very leftist ideas.
That's not contradictory, though - such people are cultural conservatives, not economic ones, but cultural conservatism is precisely what people are talking about when they say that it's becoming more popular.
I think this is actually a misread of long term trends. Not sure when it will be, but there will be backlash to the reset.
It reminds me like when crime rose in 2020 and 2021. It had been falling for something like 25 years. Then it was rising briefly, because of COVID. Many people treated this as a new normal, and a reason to make lasting and dramatic political changes. Then crime fell again in 2023 and 2024, without those substantive changes. The truth is that the short term trend didn't really have to do with criminal justice policy.
I know people love to describe future events in terms of past events but am afraid America is heading in a direction entirely orthogonal to its history.
Freedom of speech is a liberal concept, the application of “liberal” as a derogatory term for one side of the political spectrum was a propaganda move. Don’t give in to it.
The current pivot, I think, is mostly that culture warriors have managed to describe their interest in liberal terms (freedom of speech), and social media companies are buying it (gets them out of moderation duty and lets them reduce headcount).
These are ad delivery networks that want to do the bare minimum required to avoid scaring people away, they’ve discovered that the bare minimum can go lower. They don’t have any principles, so why would they do anything else? They are exploring downwards in terms of effort, eventually they’ll bounce off the floor.
Exactly, and expecting every position needs to be clubbed together as left or right wing is also a big issue. eg I am politically liberal on most of the issues, but if I mention one thing for which I am not on their camp I suddenly become far right.
Every time I see someone mention this sort of enlightened centrism online, that everyone assumes they’re far right all of a sudden for that one unmentionable idea they had, they always just leave it at “trust me bro.”
Actual liberals aren't really a prominent political force at this point. The culture war is between conservatives and progressives, and, contrary to popular opinion, the latter is not synonymous with liberalism - indeed, on some issues (freedom of speech being a prominent one) they are in opposition.
I think most people in the US are, on some practical level, actual liberals. We can’t see it in the way a fish doesn’t see water. But I think mostly people think of themselves as accepting of others (while not wanting their own freedom of association impinged on). I think a lot of political disagreement shows up where liberal principles collide, like two people’s freedom of expression bumping into each other. Then it becomes a wrestling match for each side to get their position seen as the liberal one.
If people on the US were really liberal (in the original "capitalism of the free" sense), racism wouldn't even be an issue. People wouldn't care so much about race, and your genetics would be more as a "fun fact" rather than some central piece of your identity.
Also, they wouldn't care about atheists so much. Liberals may not be atheists themselves but they would be very detached from religion and "who whorships who". People wouldn't take religion so seriously.
The US is more like a bunch of conservatives trying to be liberal until their own beliefs trump liberal theory.
Which is why we say that we hope you get everything you voted for. Because it will back fire on you first. It always has, and it always will, not our fault you can't learn from your mistakes.
As opposed to say the former who are on a book banning spree and openly threatening the media for simply making fun of their dear leader? This idea that those shouting loudest about “free speech” actually give a shit about it is really one of the most nakedly disingenuous things I’ve seen in a long time.
I think it's a false dichotomy: both sides pretend to care about free speech and other "classic liberal" values, and both sides' actions usually aren't aligned with this at all.
The side that has the largest gap between stated goals and actual policies then proceeds to lose the election.
In terms of a cultural moment it feels like the 80s. Millions of his voters weren’t ideological conservatives but didn’t fully disagree and like the strength Reagan projected after the turmoil of the mid 60s through the 70s.
They abandoned the movement during bush senior and the Clinton years.
The 80s were a reaction to the "liberal" 70s. It's just the natural cycle of history, the majority of people are in the center so when culture shifts too far to one side they start pushing it back.
There’s definitely an element of rubber banding and I think this time some of it is built up resentment about how liberals dominated big cultural institutions like TV and movies. That said I don’t think everyone who voted for trump cares about this, but the malaise of the Biden presidency was a powerful proximate factor
Sounds like the increase in the amount of information people have access to and the speed of the news cycle, the speed at which the pendulum swings may just be accelerating.
> Everyone who is smart see's which way the winds are blowing and it isn't in the direction of "more liberal".
Liberals are most fired up when conservatives like Trump are in office. Where I am, I expect to see more local elections fall to far lefties, I expect more BLM-like protests (which really could only have occurred under Trump), more activism and not less. It is a bit sad because I thought we were making some progress like electing moderates (who I really prefer and think are better for the community) rather than far lefties (who really can only get elected when someone like Trump is in charge).
> The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.
No, things are way too conservative now for that. We haven't had a politician as liberal as Ronald Reagan since Bill Clinton, America definitely lurched right since after the 1990s.
The next president will have significant sway over decisions that will likely impact the tech sector’s direction. If the pendulum swings the “wrong” way, companies like Meta will face increased scrutiny, anti-trust investigations, regulatory oversight, and the like. If the pendulum swings the “right” way, companies will continue to enjoy free rein over their business practices.
Moving jobs back to the US (or appearing to), cancelling DEI programmes which are not approved of by the incoming administration, etc all lines up with this.
The more difficult question is whether Meta is the chicken or the egg. OP suggests Meta are courting Trump’s approval. I’m not so sure that Meta didn’t help put him there in the first place.
Making a display to signal one’s willingness to mate and intended to impress a target audience, in this case the incoming administration.
It’ll absolutely work, too. The new President loves to hear how good his ideas are.
He’s been speaking lately (on JRE just a few days back too if I’m not mistaken) about the responsibility of the US government to protect US companies abroad rather than hurting them at home. This was targeted specifically at Trump, and trying to encourage him to get on Meta’s side with regulators.
He also said on JRE that the Biden administration would yell down the phone at his staff for not censoring facts, this is to rile up the GOP in Congress to pressure Trump to be seen doing the opposite and standing up for free speech (as Meta defines it).
Basically pulling jobs out of other territories and concentrating on being all-American where possible is going to sell to President Shart & chums more than the multinational aspect.
As an aside from that though, recent & planned changes in UK regulation are trying to put more onus on social media companies to police their dungeons, and they don't like that. I'm sure this aggravation has a causal relationship with Musk getting very anti-UK-government ATM (spreading “facts” about them that range from somewhat dubious down to outright lies & calls for vigilantism) – trying to push attention away from SM and its role in various problems. Pulling out of the UK will reduce their legal (and financial) risk exposure with regard to these regulation changes.
I should have been a bit more specific: as all-GOP-American as possible.
Imported workers are just fine, even though that is not something you'd derive from many a campaign speech, particularly for specialist workers as vaguely defined by the H1B system which have an indirect benefit of adding a bit of brain-drain friction to potentially competing companies in other economies, as well as shoring up the effect of temporary local skills deficiencies.
But work being done in non-American jurisdictions where the regulatory demands of other governments might affect how an American company can gouge out a profit is what causes upset. That and other regulatory demands suggesting SM companies make effort to crack down on some of the “free to speak hate” problems, which the current powers-that-be that side of the pond don't actually see as problems. Or simply that work being done elsewhere is money going into someone else's economy ‑ while many H1B workers will be sending some money back to family elsewhere, they won't be sending most of it as they need to clothe themselves, eat, pay rent, have a few luxuries, etc.
> Imported workers are just fine, even though that is not something you'd derive from many a campaign speech, particularly for specialist workers as vaguely defined by the H1B system which have an indirect benefit of adding a bit of brain-drain friction to potentially competing companies in other economies, as well as shoring up the effect of temporary local skills deficiencies.
I and others did interpret this, and recalled what they said about that matter.
Wasn't part of the campaign directly but Trump and Elon both made this very apparent.
Do you happen to know why? The other replies are all providing a narrative that it is related to the new US administration, but as you say it wasn't very clear who would win until the results were counted. So if it's been happening for a year it couldn't be related to that.
I only have second hand accounts but I've heard the Instagram CEO just hated having employees in London (/ outside of the US) and therefore started with closing Instagram positions there. Then the rest is following.
And to be clear I'm not sure a UK employee is that much cheaper than a US one. The salary is not THAT far off between the two, especially when converting from GBP to USD, and employers have a lot more social charges to pay on top of salaries in the UK and Europe.
If you add the cost of collaborating across very spread timezones, I really don't think hiring outside of the US is that much cheaper.
Speculation. Brexit (one of the greatest self-owns in political history, though the US is trying to top it) and the UK continue to tighten general travel/immigration rules. London used to be a great spot to have a companies EU presence. Brexit has only amplified London as primarily a bank for world criminals. Companies eventually wonder what's the point of being in the UK when they still need EU presence anyway.
Yup. That sort of grandstanding is exactly what will be needed to thrive in comming years. Rules-based decisionmaking is out. We now enter the domain of meme-based corporate decisions.
Trump's publicly proposed policies will have huge detrimental short-term economic impacts, so it's wise to prepare for a difficult time, IMO. If that's what's motivating the cuts, I think that's pretty rational.
Zuck is cosplaying as Logan Paul and adopting more conservative rhetoric because he saw which way the political winds were blowing, just like everyone else who needs the help of our former and next president.
Elon had a great year.Him weaponizing Twitter to go all-in on Trump has earned him so much political capital that those perky 50billion he paid for it look like a still now. I bet Zuck is feeling the heat, now with the government gunning for TikTok and looking at monopolies
Imagine if avatar Gavin Belson had done the "metaverse legs" product reveal, with the animation running at 10 frames/second and a few legless avatars in the audience throwing up confetti. It would be almost too ridiculous to put in the show because the show itself would look like it was being cheap with the effects. But Meta had spent $36 billion on the metaverse at this point.
It's 100% absolute bullshit. We've seen the tests, it can barely replace a low skilled job. Who's going to prompt these AI tools to do stuff and who's going to correct the bugs AI introduces? Zuck is high on steroids.
I assume that it's just the standard line that is fed to shareholders.
Shareholders like "we're cutting labor because of AI adoption" much more than "we're cutting labor to save costs and cull some deadend r&d". While both are fiscally positive, one gives off vibes of growth and innovation while the other doesn't.
I think that if they truly go through with this (and others follow suit), consulting is going to be eating good for the next 5-10 years. So much slop to be called in to clean up.
Just when I thought maybe I could give Meta kudos for some respectable VR/game engineering and some open AI research, they seem to bend over backwards to keep a terrible reputation.
Ah yes, the peasants who are free to leave at any time, get nice salaries and a nice severance at the end, plus a ton of benefits. Oh and at FB many can still WFH.
Big tech has problems, but lets not exaggerate - that undermines progress.
Sure, I'd rather be a peasant in big tech than a king in almost any other era.
Especially in companies like Meta with dual class shareholders though, I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to say the CEOs are essentially kings.
That doesn't mean the work environment or lifestyle you get working at these places is good or bad, people just need to have a realistic expectations about the governance behind these things though.
This argument was used by southern slave holders to argue their system treated people better than the north. That their workers were treated better because they were property while the north could cast people aside and replace them once they were done with them.
Slavery is still slavery no matter how nice you arrange their conditions. Serfs are still serfs if they sit in bean bag chairs.
This is reminder only for those who thought berating employer, questioning policies above their remit all while keeping employment at that pure evil employer is just how the world works.
Why do people still have accounts on Twitter and Facebook already? Those reactionary billionaires are clearly offensive to humans and we should collectively tell them to f*ck off
The internet was once made up of curious, ambitious, discerning types. Early adopters. We have to put that mental model behind us.
As more of the world came online, the population of the internet has become made up of mostly passive and mediocre people. The MySpace to Facebook type of migration won't happen anymore. Too many people aren't aware or don't care.
without freespeech we wouldn't have had the gay movement when we did.
you should put freespeech above of a lot of things, weigh it much higher than you think and i'm sad to see liberal friends ignorant to US history.
on top of that, your premise suggests billionaires should be recalcitrant forces and billionaires should go along with the masses. most of the them made their money1 seeing opportunities no one else did and executing on them. they are more likely to have an 'edge' in seeing the future even if we removed their fortunes.
to be in the top 5% of global income you need to make more 30k a year. you are likely part of the rich. eat the rich etc. should i listen to you?
Who spoke of having a problem with free speech? I just think they are obvious a*holes and don't want to have anything to do with them, and I'm just wondering why people are still tolerating them when they don't really have to.
Why do people still visit a dealer for their next hit? Those reactionary pushers are clearly offensive to humans and we should collectively tell them to fuck off.
It sounds like they're laying off 5% of the company, but are also firing the lowest 5% of employees without eliminating the role.
> Meta is set to cut about 5% of its workforce, focusing on the company’s lowest-performing workers, CNBC confirmed Tuesday.
> Another 5% of the 2024 employee base “who have been with the company long enough to receive a performance rating” will also be cut, Bloomberg reported, citing an internal memo.
And a direct quote from Zucky:
> I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low performers faster. We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle, with the intention of back filling these roles in 2025.
last quote is the key point and tracks with the other Vibe Shift press releases Mark has been on about. i read this as, there was a fear that laying off underperformers without very long PIP processes would be dangerous to the company, now he thinks it's less likely given the political landscape, so let's fire them ASAP rather than drawing it out.
I'm not really clear on how the "Vibe Shift" thing is going to make this easier, but doesn't it seem like now is a great time to be doing "backfills" if you pay FAANG money?
Setting the expectation that you can be canned quickly if you aren't a good backfill will probably be a useful filter. It's not like they can get rid of all the dead weight, but every 5% helps.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] threadMy point stands. Meta is suppressing speech while embracing it. It just happens that the suppression is welcomed by the group whose speech is being embraced.
Several kinds of performance management system such as mandatory percentages for each rating level ARE bullshit, but without performance management of some sort any organization with more than 3 people will fail.
Also, a well built subjective review process is better than no process, for instance, using peers and customer opinions as input.
This isn't how it ever, ever plays out.
Also, most companies implementing this clearly are doing so out of some sort of compliance, whether it be SOC or otherwise. So yea, lots of times it actually is total performative bullshit. Congrats on finding the .000000000001% of cases where it isn't, if you are being serious here.
I think we need to embrace the idea that whether you are given raises, promotions, continued employment, etc is largely a function of whether your manager likes you, likes having you on their team, and wants to reward you. And if they don't like you, it doesn't matter how good your numbers are now they will find a way to get rid of you sooner or later. It's better to just get it over with, give the employee a generous severance package, and part ways (or transfer them to another team that's interested in them).
But what I think most of us have experienced, in most companies, is that instead of driving compensation and promotion/firing the middle-management decisions around those things are made and then post-hoc justified via the performance system.
Which is another symptom of HR not having real power and instead simply being used to implement decisions made by other leadership.
There’s a kind of tradeoff here, where on one end you have the most useful performance measurements, and on the other end you have the most objective performance measurements. When you’re doing things well, the best you can do is fall somewhere on that line. The entire line is bullshit, you just get to choose what kind of bullshit you have.
Large orgs tend to skew towards objectivity because it minimizes liability, and large orgs are full of people trying to avoid being liable for mistakes.
However, if the company’s priorities change, significant on-call issues arise, the design team experiences a layoff, the front-end team undergoes an exodus, and the product team abandons the project, you will not meet your objective. Any one of these, or more could happen.
Consequently, you will be considered a low performer. You could have kept the ship afloat, kept the trains running on time, and deployed your part of the project on time and under budget, but still be a low performer on paper.
Keep that in mind when anyone talks about how vital performance evaluations are. Management can’t even figure out non-bullshit ways to evaluate their own work.
But performance reviews are still bullshit. You could replace them with 'vote off the island' style votes every quarter instead and we wouldn't be any worse off.
( Adding legs will make it easier at least )
But this thread has become quite interesting.
I am sure there are some people getting laid off who genuinely don't do any work, though not 5% of the company - and certainly not the bottom 5% according to Meta's metrics! A lot of "mid-range" performers probably get by with pure schmoozing and mooching. And in more general sense, I don't think it's okay - either morally or strategically - to lay people off simply because you want to roll the dice on hiring more productive workers. (For a company of Meta's size this doesn't even make sense; clearly this move is about cracking the whip for the remaining 95%.)
Performance is only adequate if it’s at least as good as the engineers of the other players in your industry. Otherwise, you’re losing ground. As long as anyone in your market space is actively trying to manage their engineering talent (recruiting your top performers, releasing low performers, being more selective in hiring) so must you just to keep pace. An “adequate” engineer may make the company money, but the opportunity cost of not hiring someone better who could make even more money can be higher still.
Of course, some people are obviously great in any context and some are obviously useless (or worse) in any context, but those folks should already be handled appropriately even without the "cut 5%" mandate.
Now - if the mean is higher, variance is low, and the distribution isn't symmetric, that's when things start to become harder.
Worst case, you start firing people that are "low-performers" on paper, but in reality might be very close to the "meets expectation" workers. Which creates a very toxic environment, as your average workers will be walking on eggshells.
And we know from history that this isn't some outlandish scenario in tech. There have been companies that have had(still have) a strict stacked ranking system - and come hell or high water, someone has to go.
I don't say this to bash your statement, I agree with you in principle. Just useful to keep in mind that the context matters. Sometimes, the people complaining about having to compensate for the low performer, are the actual low performers.
About six months into my own daily beating regimen, I found I was sleeping longer and deeper, I had more energy and focus, and my libido had returned to a state not unlike my early 20s. My morale was fantastic. Only after having been repatriated and thus no longer subject to daily beatings did my morale return to lower levels.
Why doesn’t Huberman talk about this?
This is a great time to be wealthy. All that juicy human labor is ripe for the taking.
People just want to be able to afford to live and affluent people keep pointing to the chart and saying it's not a problem, but it is a problem. We probably need a new name for it.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gross-national-in...
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth
Actual GDP data would be a good first start, no?
I think many got use to the most incredible labor market of a generation or two and we are just now back to something more historically normal.
Which ones? The ones they released or the ones they re-released after overstating the numbers several times?
Average people are struggling to make ends meet and racking up debt. The gap between pay and the cost of goods has only grown in recent years. How is that good for anyone?
Personally I prefer to use the US case shiller housing index as a good indication of long term inflation. Housing prices are so high, it is the basket of goods that matters the most.
GPD growth is good, personal consumption is up, and businesses are continuing their extremely large investments in durable goods. The economy is, by the numbers, doing extremely well. Inflation is down to normal.
Even economic sentiment is okay. People rate their personal financial situation as roughly as good as it was pre-pandemic as well.
Were we in a recession in the 90s, as the rust belt was hollowed out and earning its name, and Wall street reaped the once in a generation windfall of outsourcing an entire country's manufacturing base overseas? Many would say those were the good times. White collar professionals had their time in the sun for those couple of decades, and GDP exploded. But the working class folks were wiped out.
Now it's our turn at the high end of technology. Once top paid SWEs are being reduced to the understanding that their careers are probably over. The economy today is chugging along just fine, but our little niche of high earning specialty labor is over, just as it was for the auto workers 30 years ago. The capitalists have almost fully completed their capture of the last remaining means of production out of their control; intellectual labor.
Tech became tighter to join 2 years ago and for the next years are going to play music chairs on the open seats as lay offs continue, executives think that AI can replace anyone and younger generation (with lower wages) joins the tech workforce.
It's not recession per se, these companies will continue to be crazy profitable, it's just a change in mindset. See also the famous "founder-mode" that came up recently for startups and scaleups.
The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.
We've never known a country where the wealthy had this much capability. Owning just one of Facebook, Amazon, Palantir, X, etc makes a person incredibly powerful, but the fact that they've all seemingly combined forces makes me think we are in for an era that makes Cyberpunk novels look like a Disney flick.
Getting more specific, I don't buy the argument that we're getting more conservative. Instead, I'm inclined to think that a narrow election victory will lead to extreme measures that will create a significant backlash in the coming years. If you're in a position to exploit a system with little repercussions for four years and all it costs is a little bit of dignity and some public image, most corporate leaders would take that opportunity for the money, prestige, power, etc.
I'm willing to bet sizeable amounts of money that most voters do not support rolling back employee protections, or removing the debt ceiling, or buying/bullying [insert random country], or any of the other wildly regressionist statements thrown around by un/elected folks. Conflating the complexities involved in how a person votes with a general mandate for one specific reason people vote is not a good idea. Extrapolate that to over 100 million voters as some unified stance and it starts to feel like propaganda.
Agreed. I'm pretty sure normal folks never actually shifted left, not as much as the far-left ideology people imagined. Folks would use any plausible excuse to end the insanity progressive politics has caused. Mind you the reverse is also true of ultra conservative politics. The world is elastic in this sense, and we see corrections from time to time.
People often vote against their interests. They may not understand that alternatives are possible or even exist, and they can be brainwashed into thinking the other candidate is dangerous and so on... Also, the decline in quality of education isn't helping. So I don't know if there will be a backlash. Even worse, as a European, I'm afraid Musk's propaganda crosses the Atlantic and that we'll get the same fate and will vote to give up our social benefits.
You lost me here, because the debt ceiling is a recent political construct with the only outcome being to add friction to an already high friction process and to threaten the faith and credit of the United States.
It is neither conservative nor liberal, but obstructionist
We are getting more culturally conservative though - you can see that in the polls that ask people to self-identify politically.
Support for which specific policies that translates to obviously varies, but I think that's a separate question from the overall zeitgeist.
I don't trust these because I don't think most people can self-identify in away that accurately describes their beliefs. It usually just boils down to a binary "left vs right".
There are many people who identify as "conservative", express their disdain for "leftists" over some rage-bait culture war topic of the week, but demand better workers' rights, support unionization, single payer healthcare, and other very leftist ideas.
It reminds me like when crime rose in 2020 and 2021. It had been falling for something like 25 years. Then it was rising briefly, because of COVID. Many people treated this as a new normal, and a reason to make lasting and dramatic political changes. Then crime fell again in 2023 and 2024, without those substantive changes. The truth is that the short term trend didn't really have to do with criminal justice policy.
Yabushige: “How does it feel to shape the wind to your will?”
Toranaga: “I don’t control the wind. I only study it.”
Roy Cohn was Don's business mentor.
The current pivot, I think, is mostly that culture warriors have managed to describe their interest in liberal terms (freedom of speech), and social media companies are buying it (gets them out of moderation duty and lets them reduce headcount).
These are ad delivery networks that want to do the bare minimum required to avoid scaring people away, they’ve discovered that the bare minimum can go lower. They don’t have any principles, so why would they do anything else? They are exploring downwards in terms of effort, eventually they’ll bounce off the floor.
Also, they wouldn't care about atheists so much. Liberals may not be atheists themselves but they would be very detached from religion and "who whorships who". People wouldn't take religion so seriously.
The US is more like a bunch of conservatives trying to be liberal until their own beliefs trump liberal theory.
These labels dont matter when your jobs are going away though.
And if there's a country capable of the same productivity with cheaper salaries, then it's expected for the company to expand overseas.
The side that has the largest gap between stated goals and actual policies then proceeds to lose the election.
They abandoned the movement during bush senior and the Clinton years.
Liberals are most fired up when conservatives like Trump are in office. Where I am, I expect to see more local elections fall to far lefties, I expect more BLM-like protests (which really could only have occurred under Trump), more activism and not less. It is a bit sad because I thought we were making some progress like electing moderates (who I really prefer and think are better for the community) rather than far lefties (who really can only get elected when someone like Trump is in charge).
> The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.
No, things are way too conservative now for that. We haven't had a politician as liberal as Ronald Reagan since Bill Clinton, America definitely lurched right since after the 1990s.
1930-1980 were marked by much higher levels of taxation and wealth redistribution than we have today.
1980-Present are the neo-liberal experiment resulting in massive income inequality.
Was the 19th century a time of utopian equality?
This is already in progress, they're closing UK offices extremely quickly.
Moving jobs back to the US (or appearing to), cancelling DEI programmes which are not approved of by the incoming administration, etc all lines up with this.
The more difficult question is whether Meta is the chicken or the egg. OP suggests Meta are courting Trump’s approval. I’m not so sure that Meta didn’t help put him there in the first place.
It’ll absolutely work, too. The new President loves to hear how good his ideas are.
He’s been speaking lately (on JRE just a few days back too if I’m not mistaken) about the responsibility of the US government to protect US companies abroad rather than hurting them at home. This was targeted specifically at Trump, and trying to encourage him to get on Meta’s side with regulators.
He also said on JRE that the Biden administration would yell down the phone at his staff for not censoring facts, this is to rile up the GOP in Congress to pressure Trump to be seen doing the opposite and standing up for free speech (as Meta defines it).
As an aside from that though, recent & planned changes in UK regulation are trying to put more onus on social media companies to police their dungeons, and they don't like that. I'm sure this aggravation has a causal relationship with Musk getting very anti-UK-government ATM (spreading “facts” about them that range from somewhat dubious down to outright lies & calls for vigilantism) – trying to push attention away from SM and its role in various problems. Pulling out of the UK will reduce their legal (and financial) risk exposure with regard to these regulation changes.
How much of Meta's staff is H1B?
Imported workers are just fine, even though that is not something you'd derive from many a campaign speech, particularly for specialist workers as vaguely defined by the H1B system which have an indirect benefit of adding a bit of brain-drain friction to potentially competing companies in other economies, as well as shoring up the effect of temporary local skills deficiencies.
But work being done in non-American jurisdictions where the regulatory demands of other governments might affect how an American company can gouge out a profit is what causes upset. That and other regulatory demands suggesting SM companies make effort to crack down on some of the “free to speak hate” problems, which the current powers-that-be that side of the pond don't actually see as problems. Or simply that work being done elsewhere is money going into someone else's economy ‑ while many H1B workers will be sending some money back to family elsewhere, they won't be sending most of it as they need to clothe themselves, eat, pay rent, have a few luxuries, etc.
I and others did interpret this, and recalled what they said about that matter.
Wasn't part of the campaign directly but Trump and Elon both made this very apparent.
And to be clear I'm not sure a UK employee is that much cheaper than a US one. The salary is not THAT far off between the two, especially when converting from GBP to USD, and employers have a lot more social charges to pay on top of salaries in the UK and Europe.
If you add the cost of collaborating across very spread timezones, I really don't think hiring outside of the US is that much cheaper.
I am very very skeptical of this idea - what do you all think?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/22/mark-zuckerberg-envisions-1-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njvp-E8gzqA
GB, with the Box 3 Gavin Belson Signature Edition?
Or Russ Hanneman, with... everything?
(Or was it Jared, with Russ being right about him?)
Shareholders like "we're cutting labor because of AI adoption" much more than "we're cutting labor to save costs and cull some deadend r&d". While both are fiscally positive, one gives off vibes of growth and innovation while the other doesn't.
/s
Big tech has problems, but lets not exaggerate - that undermines progress.
Especially in companies like Meta with dual class shareholders though, I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to say the CEOs are essentially kings.
That doesn't mean the work environment or lifestyle you get working at these places is good or bad, people just need to have a realistic expectations about the governance behind these things though.
Slavery is still slavery no matter how nice you arrange their conditions. Serfs are still serfs if they sit in bean bag chairs.
As more of the world came online, the population of the internet has become made up of mostly passive and mediocre people. The MySpace to Facebook type of migration won't happen anymore. Too many people aren't aware or don't care.
you should put freespeech above of a lot of things, weigh it much higher than you think and i'm sad to see liberal friends ignorant to US history.
on top of that, your premise suggests billionaires should be recalcitrant forces and billionaires should go along with the masses. most of the them made their money1 seeing opportunities no one else did and executing on them. they are more likely to have an 'edge' in seeing the future even if we removed their fortunes.
to be in the top 5% of global income you need to make more 30k a year. you are likely part of the rich. eat the rich etc. should i listen to you?
1. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-self-made
> Meta is set to cut about 5% of its workforce, focusing on the company’s lowest-performing workers, CNBC confirmed Tuesday. > Another 5% of the 2024 employee base “who have been with the company long enough to receive a performance rating” will also be cut, Bloomberg reported, citing an internal memo.
And a direct quote from Zucky:
> I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low performers faster. We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle, with the intention of back filling these roles in 2025.
Taken together, one could read it as getting rid of people those programs had been protecting?
Setting the expectation that you can be canned quickly if you aren't a good backfill will probably be a useful filter. It's not like they can get rid of all the dead weight, but every 5% helps.