Comment by throwaway25251
1 day ago
The recent layoffs at Meta were really brutal, even more so than the previous ones because they unfairly put the blame on the employees. Several people in my (extended) team were fired. None deserved to be in my opinion. They were all very capable. They got "meet most" rating mostly due to external circumstances which weren't their fault.
As a consequence, we need to backfill these roles, it'll take months to find replacements and ramp up the new persons. This is without a doubt a net negative for our team. Maybe the goal is to kick every remaining employee in the butt so they work harder, not sure if it'll work.
All of this happened when the company makes huge profit and is hiring a lot. I'm still not able to make sense of this. And it's not only the layoffs, there's more and more hostility towards employees.
I don't know if Zuck is forced to appear tough to please Trump and Musk and perhaps save his company, or if he drank the kool aid, or if he's just trying to save cost to build new AI infrastructure, or taking advantage from bad market conditions for SWE. Probably a bit of everything...
> Maybe the goal is to kick every remaining employee in the butt so they work harder, not sure if it'll work.
Being too heavy handed with this ends up with employees acting greedy to protect themselves, creating more friction and reducing cooperation. If you depend on another team you have to spend your time and political capital escalating and fighting to get your requirements onto their roadmap.
You end up needing to have the skillset to play politics and get senior leadership on your side, which is very different than the skills needed to complete good work (they aren't exclusive, but you'll lose good people who have one and not the other). There are situations where adversarial processes are good, but too much kills progress.
I think about Office Space a lot lately (specifically Peter having tons of bosses and the whole TPS report cover bit).
I think the pendulum has swung too far into low trust management.
And now those people are labeled "poor performers" in the worst job market since GFC.
Won't be long until working for Meta will have the same bad rep as Amazon.